Leventhal, still smiling, held up his hands in mock defense. “Please, one question at a time. First, let me deal with your personal danger. It is true we have observed a van on the local roads that appears to be the one that carried the would-be assassins. There is also a Cadillac sedan that travels with it. These two vehicles are now parked about a quarter of a mile from the main entrance to this property, and Natan is observing them. They have automatic weapons and shotguns. We think it is possible they will attempt to assault this house, perhaps this evening. It will be quite dark by six.”
“How many guys do they have?”
“Natan says ten.”
“Ten! For chrissakes, Leventhal, how you going to hold off ten guys with machine guns? You got three people and a girl.”
Leventhal smiled and shrugged. “They’re Cuban gangsters, Mr. Karp, and we’re Israeli soldiers. You remember the Bay of Pigs? You remember Entebbe? I think we will do all right. Besides, we don’t intend to hold them off. We will attack.”
“Now I know you’re crazy,” Karp snapped. Leventhal’s beaming confidence was beginning to get on his nerves. “OK, before you get killed, just tell me, why not bring in the cops? Just let me make a couple of calls, I guarantee you, you won’t have to be involved.”
“Well, I’m afraid we are involved, and the presence of the police at this time would complicate matters in a way that would be inconvenient to our mission.”
“What are you talking, inconvenient? Stop these riddles, Leventhal. Tell me who you are, what you’re doing here, and most of all, what the fuck you want with me.”
Leventhal gave him a long look. His smile faded and was replaced by an expression that was both sad and angry. “All right, fine. You want information, I give you information. I notice there’s no ‘Thank you, Ben, you saved my life, you’re risking your lives to keep on saving it.’”
“You could just call the cops; nobody’s asking you—”
“The cops? Don’t you know anything yet? What cops? The New York police? The FBI? Don’t you know when you’ve been set up? How do you think those gentlemen out there in those cars found us so fast? Believe me, Mr. Karp, you want me to bring cops, I’ll give you a gun first, you could blow your own brains out.”
Karp looked at the floor and said nothing. He felt an odd shame about how plausible this was to him, that he could so easily credit the corruption of his country’s and his city’s police forces. After a moment Leventhal went on.
“Now, you are correct in thinking that I have a proposition for you. Simply, it is this. I am determined to capture and bring to justice in Israel an infamous war criminal whom you have in custody. I wish your help and cooperation in doing this.”
“You mean Karavitch?”
“The man you know as Karavitch, the man you are holding now on a kidnap and murder charge, is not Djordje Karavitch. He is Josef Karl Dreb. Hauptsturmfuehrer Dreb of the Prinz Eugen Division of the Waffen-SS and before that a junior officer in the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, Eichmann’s organization. Dreb was among the most promising officers in Amt IV B4, the organization responsible for the final solution to the Jewish problem. Accordingly, he was given a sensitive and important mission, which was mobilizing the forces of the Croatian puppet state and helping them round up all the forty thousand Jews in that country and dispose of them. Now, you understand that this was no easy task—”
“Wait a minute, Leventhal. How do you know Karavitch is what’s-his-name, Dreb? He looks like Karavitch, he talks like Karavitch, also the Croatians accept him as Karavitch, and he entered the country as Karavitch. On top of that, if there was a Nazi who wanted to cover his tracks, why would he use Karavitch as a cover? Apparently Karavitch wasn’t any sweetheart in the war either. It’s like Jesse James trying to pass as Billy the Kid.”
“No, it is not. Karavitch was a typical Croat fascist. He backed the wrong side in the war, maybe he shot the odd Jew, the odd Serb, but what’s a massacre or two or three against a good anticommunist Catholic background? No, Mr. Karp, Karavitch is small beer compared to Dreb. A Karavitch could get into the Croatian nationalist escape routes, could enter the United States, a poor refugee, everybody very sympathetic, you understand? Start a new life, bygones are bygones, no?
“But not Dreb. Mr. Karp, do you know what an einsatzgruppe was?”
“Yeah, as a matter of fact, I do. They were SS murder squads that followed the army and killed people the Nazis didn’t like.”
Leventhal raised his eyebrows. “Very good. Very interesting that you should have such knowledge. You have a special interest in the Holocaust perhaps?”
“No. But I was born Jewish in New York in 1943. Eat your soup, children are starving in Europe—that generation. My mother was a big-time Zionist, regional Hadassah officer for years, and for two hours every Sunday for six years I had Jewish history and culture pounded into my head, along with a load of Zionist propaganda. Mostly by Israelis, as a matter of fact. They had a lot of cachet in Brooklyn at that time. For years we had this book on our coffee table. Other people had, I don’t know, horses of the world, flowers, Picasso; we had Auschwitz snaps—piles of human hair, the guys, the skeletons in striped pajamas, the room with a hundred thousand eyeglasses on the floor.
“Which is how come I know what einsatzgruppen are. I also know the names of all the concentration camps, their years of operation, and approximately how many people died in each one. Also their commandants, and the particular or unusual atrocities associated with particular camps: the human skin lampshades at Bergen-Belsen, the rock quarry at Majdenek, the medical experiments at Ravensbrucke. I remember there was one guy who liked to kill little children one by one with a hammer, in front of their parents—”
“Scharfuehrer Schmidt.”
“Right, Sergeant Schmidt. They caught him and gave him eight years in the slammer. Apparently slept like a baby every night. Funny how that kind of stuff sticks in your head. Anyway, I’m just telling you this so you don’t think that raising my Jewish guilt or conscience with a bunch of Holocaust stories will make me help you move Karavitch illegally out of the jurisdiction of the County of New York. Sorry.”
Leventhal looked at Karp for several long minutes without saying anything. He was no longer smiling. Instead his large, liquid eyes glowed in their dark pouches with sadness, disappointment, a hint of contempt. It was high-intensity Jewish guilt-generating radiation, and Karp knew it well from countless cringing moments of his childhood. Despite himself he began to feel generalized shame and discomfort.
“It’s not going to work, Leventhal,” said Karp, feigning more confidence than he felt at that moment. “Get my grandmother in here, maybe you got a shot, but otherwise I can’t help you.”
“Yes, I see that,” said the other man. “And I’m sorry too. For you. It must be sad to be so cut off from your own people. Funny, we don’t learn. United we stand.” He clenched his fist. “Divided we fall.” He wiggled his fingers.
“I’m an American, Leventhal. We invented that.”
“Yes, and they thought they were Germans and French and Poles, but in the end, all that counted was, they were Jews.”
“True, but it turns out the Nazis aren’t on the ballot this year. Not in New York anyway. If they ever come to power again, I’m going to go with the Remington autoloader twelve-gauge, modified with the drum magazine. I ought to be able to take out most of a sturmbann before they get me.”
Leventhal looked sad again and cluck-clucked like an old lady. “What a shame we should be having a conversation like this, two Jews. A shame and a disgrace. Forgive me, Mr. Karp, if I must bore you with one more little tale from that time. You can add it to your coffee table collection, heh?
“In Zagreb in 1941, there were many Jews, refugees from Austria and Germany. The Yugoslavs were generous with visas at that time; perhaps they wanted Croatia salted with people who had some reason to be grateful to the Belgrade regime. And we were, we were.
“In April the Nazis came
in. The war lasted ten days. Yugoslavia was broken up and Croatia became a German puppet, run by Pavelic and the ustashi. The pogroms started very soon. Of course, with so many Serbs to kill, it was hard for the ustashi to make room for the Jews, but they tried. These were, you understand, old-fashioned pogroms, with priests. The Jews were being beaten and killed because they weren’t goyim.
“But this was too sluggish for the Final Solution. So in March 1942 an einsatzkommando was detailed from Einsatzgruppe C and sent to Zagreb to inspire the multitudes by a special action, as they called it. Now, there was in Zagreb at that time a large kosher slaughterhouse, because of the big Jewish community there. In 1942, of course, it had been shut down for some time. There was no meat for anyone by then, much less for Jews.
“This particular sonderaktion began with a riot, which started in the evening of Good Friday, an Eastern European specialty, as I’m sure you know. The torches came out and soon virtually the whole of the Jewish quarter was engulfed. By dawn there were perhaps ten thousand homeless people on the street, and slowly they began to gravitate for shelter to the old slaughterhouse, which anyone could see was a good choice: it was large, strongly built, dry, and it had, of course, adequate water and sewage.
“Therefore, when the einsatzkommando and its Croat allies set out on its task, the remnants of the Jewish community of Zagreb were conveniently at hand in, of all places, a kosher slaughterhouse. Naturally, the humor of this did not escape the SS. The Jews were herded into the pens formerly used for the animals, the children and the good-looking women were separated out, and the remainder were divided by sex and stripped. Then the machinery, the hoists and sluices and so forth, was started up, and the Jews were, literally, slaughtered. They were knocked on the head, a hook was driven through their heels, they were jerked upside down by the moving hoist, and their throats were slashed.
“The children were killed in different ways according to the whim of the murderers and the availability of equipment. Some were beheaded like chickens. They had skinning equipment, of course, so some were skinned, alive, dead, who knows? Some were flung into the boiling vats used to remove feathers from fowl. The little corpses were hung neatly on hooks, twenty-three hundred and fifty-two of them, aged four months through twelve years.
“Of course, in the main room there was a great deal more fun, because the SS and the ustashi were pretending to observe the rituals involved in kosher butchering: the draining of the blood, the salt rubbed into the flesh, and so on. There was a catwalk in the koshering room so that the supervising rabbi and his assistants could have a good view that the rituals were being followed. Now this catwalk was occupied by the leader of the einsatzkommando. He had there with him, bound and watching in the most extreme horror, the religious leaders of the Jewish community, with whom he would mockingly consult from time to time about fine points of slaughtering ritual. Every victim was marked with a red-hot electric brand that said ‘kosher meat.’ We can imagine what was going on in their minds. This commander, I don’t need to tell you, was SS-Hauptsturmfuehrer Josef Karl Dreb.
“As you would expect, this event made his reputation. He was promoted and given the post of liaison officer between the SS and the Croatian police authorities. Did I tell you he was a native of Zagreb? Yes, indeed, a local boy, the son of an Austro-Hungarian imperial official and a Croat mother. In 1918, of course, they had to go back to Austria in disgrace.
“Not to psychologize, Mr. Karp, but you couldn’t ask for a better breeding ground for a Nazi. The ruined authoritarian father, impotent, enraged; the mother, a fanatic Catholic, tyrannized by the man, both of them anti-Semites and Slav haters. Of course, the mother is a Slav, but that just spices the pot, you see. And of course, in their intimate moments together, Momma teaches her first-born son perfect idiomatic Serbo-Croat, even with the Zagreb dialect. Of course, it is only German in public: the father insists.
“Well, Karl does well in school, mechanical engineering, joins the Nazis in 1934, and after Anschluss is admitted into the SS, very squeaky that is, because the Momma is not perfectly Aryan. However, he gets in, has a good record, a brave fighter and imaginative murderer, not like Eichmann, afraid to get dirty hands, not a paper pusher at all, a head breaker instead. Ideal for sonderaktionen. We see him in 1943, at the height of his powers, a very important young Sturmbannfuehrer now, working closely with the Croat allies to crush the partisans and the Serbs and other under-people.
“Of course, he had an opposite number on the Croat side, with whom he liaisoned, didn’t he? And how marvelously he got on with this other young man! They were the same age, they shared the same ideals, they had similar backgrounds. Also, strange to say, they even resembled each other, both tall, sturdy, blue eyes, long skull, straight blond hair, and the rest. Now, Mr. Karp, you are a clever man. What do you suppose the name of this other fellow was?”
Karp had to clear his throat. “Djordje Karavitch,” he answered hoarsely.
Leventhal seemed delighted with the reply. “Yes! Yes, Djordje Karavitch, a Croat patriot, reviving an ancient nation in the glow of the New Order. Well, they were thick as thieves for the next year or so, until things started to go badly for the Germans. The Russians were coming, the partisans were getting stronger. Dreb was detailed to a Waffen-SS division, the Prinz Eugen, where he was one of those responsible for reprisals against villages that were supposed to have helped the partisans. Dreb was able to get his good friend Karavitch the command of a company of ustashi attached to the German unit. Thus they were together when in the winter of 1945, their small column was ambushed by a reinforced battalion of partisans. From this attack only three men escaped alive. One was Dreb, one was Karavitch, and the other was, can you guess? No? It was Macek, whom I think you know, and who was then little more than a boy. They were scraping the barrel in 1945.
“So they escape and have many merry adventures, and at last in 1946 they find themselves in the city of Trieste. Karavitch and Macek are making contact with an organization that arranges the transportation of Croat fascists—I’m sorry, now it is Catholic nationalist anticommunists—to the United States.
“But Dreb? No, he is in much deeper trouble. He has to hide while his good friends bring him food. Because, you see, Dreb has made in the war a serious error. Oh, not the atrocities. People who were worse even than Dreb were at that moment being recruited by your government, Mr. Karp, to spy against the Russians. But in 1944 the American air force was conducting heavy raids from Foggia airbase against the industries of Central Europe. Many of these aircraft were forced down in Yugoslavia, and of course the partisans wished to help the crews escape as much as the Germans wished to capture them.
“To this game, Dreb brought his peculiar imagination. When he was able to capture an American crew he would send the healthy crew members to the stalags, to keep Luftwaffe intelligence off his back, but the wounded ones, these he would use as bait to catch partisans. His favorite trick was to stick a bunch of them in a barn or house and then have the partisans tipped off. The place would be heavily booby-trapped with the delayed-action devices he loved to use. He liked to observe the ‘rescue’ at long distance through his field glasses. Smiles, relief, cheers, then boom! Interesting, don’t you think?”
“Fascinating. So if that was known, nobody would have him, not even our intelligence guys. What happened then?”
“Ah, yes, the denouement. On August 14, 1946, a corpse was found in a cheap lodging house in Trieste. The throat had been cut. This was not an unusual occurrence at the time, of course, but what attracted attention to this particular corpse was that it had an SS identification number tattooed in the armpit. On checking, it was found to be the number of Josef Karl Dreb, SS-Sturmbannfuehrer. Imagine that! Shortly thereafter, Djordje Karavitch and Pavle Macek entered the employment of the U.S. Army’s Counter-intelligence Corps, and a year later, that of the Central Intelligence Agency.”
“And you think this was really Dreb?”
“We know it.”<
br />
“What’s your proof?”
“We have informants.”
“Yeah? Who?”
Leventhal smiled. “They are reliable. It is the man.”
“If you say so. But there’s something funny about this operation, boss. I mean, you’re not making a public fuss, not going through DOJ in Washington. Shit, they got a whole unit there does nothing but kick old Nazis out of the country. We got an election year here, you think maybe Begin could shake out a war criminal or two for the Jewish vote? Are you joking? President Ford goes, ‘Hey, Betty, guy says he saw you chalking swastikas in Bucharest in ’43. Sorry, kid, write when you get to Jerusalem.’
“Especially, you got a mutt who aced a bunch of our wounded guys in the war, hey, piece of cake. So why the hanky-panky, Leventhal? Maybe this isn’t an official operation, huh? Where you from, Leventhal? I don’t mean Tel Aviv, I mean before. Maybe Yugoslavia? Maybe Zagreb? You got a special interest in this one, a personal interest? Maybe your boy isn’t heading for a glass cage in Jerusalem. Maybe someplace a lot closer, like a car trunk in LaGuardia, how about that?”
“How about justice?” shouted Leventhal, his face darkening. He rose to his feet and glared down at Karp. “Justice is what’s at stake here, not somebody’s bureaucratic skirts getting dirty. He’s protected, as you well know. And you know why, too. Because the CIA people who hired him knew very well who he was, and that he had murdered American airmen in cold blood. So do you think we will be allowed to just take him away, thank you very much, so he can tell all that to the world?”
“Right,” Karp said wearily. “You got justice mixed up with revenge, Leventhal. Not the same thing at all.”
It had grown dark in the room. Light was no longer coming in through the drapes, and no one had turned on any lights. There was a scuffling noise in the hallway and a shadowy form entered the living room. Karp saw that it was Natan, his face blackened, dressed in baggy coveralls and a wool watchcap. He wore a belt from which hung various items of equipment and a large knife. Slung on his shoulder was an Uzi submachine gun. He conversed briefly with Leventhal and left.
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