-When garlic is almost golden~30 secs, turn the heat to high and add scallops.
-When the scallops are done~1–2 mins. and before the garlic turns brown, remove from heat and divide the entire contents among the preheated pailas*. Serve immediately with crusty bread and chilled white wine.
*Pailas are small pans with two handles which do double-duty as plates, going directly from the stove to the table.
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
Casa Fischer Guesthouse, Calle Mirador 20, Puerto Varas, Chile, the same morning
The eleven members of the Project Save the Generals had spent the day walking the streets of Puerto Varas one by one and, in some instances, two by two, looking for any Nazi fugitive that was still alive and in action. They got a few promising leads—promising enough to spur them on to the opinion that the SS officers were more likely than not still in the town. The Mossad agents knew they were living on borrowed time; either they had to find one or more of their quarries; or they would have to leave the area as the Argentine secret police—who were notoriously pro-Nazi—would learn about them and close in, even in Chile.
The meeting they were about to have would determine whether they would be able to push their luck a little further or if they would give up and try the southern towns of Puerto Montt or one of the smaller towns like Valdivia, or Cochamó to the east and southeast, Calbuco to the southwest, and Maullín and Los Muermos to the west.
They were sitting in the outdoor café of the bright, fairly new Casa Fischer Guesthouse. The views were beautiful and soporific; they were only 160 or so feet from the tranquil blue Lake Llanquihue, and three city blocks from the town’s Plaza de Armas. The place was small; so, only five of the Israelis had taken lodging in the container studios with their terraces. None of them wanted to draw attention to themselves; so, they had cheaper rooms without private bathrooms. Pretending to be tourists, they pumped the owners for tourist information and learned all about local markets, restaurants, Calbuco and Osorno volcanoes, and about the nearby towns.
The casino was 650 feet away and several of the agents spent time in it losing money but gaining some useful information. Moises had been able to bring up the topic of Germans living in Puerto Varas and learned—without seeming to be overly nosy—that the center of German life in the city was the Club Aleman and its outstanding restaurant a few blocks away just off Av. San Francisco, near Gramado Street.
“Either they are hiding out in the club, or the Nazi sympathizing members have helped them to escape,” Moises said quietly. “I propose that we leave two men to surveil the club night and day for say … three days … while the rest of us head down south. If we fail to locate them there, we will just have to admit that we lost yet another battle against the fugitive Nazis; and we will have to go back home and wait until something new shows up.”
There was reluctant agreement with the alteration in plans. With a certain level of resignation, they all ate their succulent portions of red Chilean King Crab and a course of Congrio Frito [deep-fried conger eel] washed down with Almaviva, a Chilean blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Camenere, and Cabernet Franc produced in Chile’s Maipo valley.
“I know in my gut that ODESSA is hiding them either here or in Puerto Montt,” said Lev. “It will give me an ulcer to leave here without them, knowing full well that they will laugh at our backs.”
All of the team except for two of the INTERPOL agents—who drew the black bean and had to sit through a mind-numbing stakeout of the Pte Varas Club Aleman—caught train or bus rides to Puerto Montt and began the tedious and tiring secret canvassing of the city and its neighboring communes. Egan and Micah had watched the arrivals and departures at El Tepual Airport; Eliot, Enos, and Gavriel came to know every street and alley in Valdivia; the rest of the INTERPOL contingent exhausted the potential of Cochamó and learned nothing in Calbuco, Maullín, and Los Muermos. After a fruitless three-day search—which included around-the-clock surveillance of the Pte Montt Club Aleman by Ezra, Haggai, Yachin, and Enos and a useless tour of the rural countryside by Moises, Manny, and Aaron—Moises decided it was time for the team to fold its figurative tents and get back to their desert before they were caught up in a futile international incident.
Lev muttered that the place lived up to what the locals called it, “Muerto Montt”[‘Dead Montt’] and expressed his frustrated description of the deadly boring Puerto Montt unpolished working-class and the complete lack of worldly charm of this pocket of the Chilean atmosphere.
§§§§§§
Club Aleman, 264 Ave. Antonio Varas, Puerto Montt, September 29, 1963, midnight
“There are always two of them. I’m not sure if it is always the same two; and I can’t be certain that there are not any others hidden around the area; but I have not seen any sign of anyone else,” said Christof Weishuhn, who had been chosen to provide security for the fugitive Gebirgsjägers.
“How do we get past them?” Antoine asked.
“We send out four delivery trucks in fairly close succession, Mein General,” said Christof. “One to the airport, one to the metro bus station, one to the railroad station, and then, a last one to the port.”
“The theory being that two men cannot possibly keep track of four trucks, any one or none of which could be carrying anyone of us,” Antoine said.
“That’s the idea. The escapees will go out in the third truck, and the fourth will wait longer than the rest then drive very rapidly and directly for the airport. We will have a gurney waiting at the airport and will lift a man out and cover him with blankets after he lies on the gurney.”
“And, the boat is waiting?”
“All preparations are ready and onboard. The captain and crew have been paid enough to render them deaf, blind, and mute until long after you men are well out of Chilean waters and to keep them amnesiac afterwards.”
It was a night devoid of stars or the light of the moon. Ezra and Haggai had the night watch while Yachin and Enos went to bed in the guesthouse. All four were certain they might as well be pounding sand down a rat hole for all the good they were doing. The case was dead, at least this phase of it. It was time to head back to Tel Aviv and to wait until another bit of evidence presented a new location and a new direction.
Ezra yawned again, and Haggai said, “Go ahead and sleep. I’ll watch for the next four hours, then, I’ll wake you up; and you can let me get a little rest. I think Moises will send us out of Chile tomorrow. It won’t be a moment too soon.”
“Moises and Lev would kill us or at least get us thrown out of the Institute if either of them got wind that we had a nap on the job, you know that, AHKH [Heb.—Brother].”
Boredom and weariness got the best of them. In a little over an hour, both of them were sound asleep. It was midnight. Christof Weishuhn changed into a Puerto Montt police constable’s uniform and made one more walk-around outside to be sure that there was nothing stirring and that there was no one watching. At the end of the block, near the intersection with Ave. Diego Portales, he walked past a florist’s lorry. Ordinarily, he would not have paid any attention to a parked business truck; but this one had a feature that drew his attention: two men were sitting in the front seat sound asleep. He checked to see if there were any other potential watchers along the front and the back of the club, then hurried back to where his men and the three Gebirgsjägers were anxiously waiting.
“Gerhardt, go up towards Diego Portales. There’s a florist’s truck parked almost on the corner with two men sitting asleep in the front seat. Plant yourself in front of the truck and watch to see if they do anything that makes them seem to be awake. If they are awake, kill them.”
Gerhardt slipped out the front door and took up his position. The four clubcatering lorries drove out of the rear garage and into the alley behind the club in the planned order and turned in opposite directions and with different destinations. Antoine, Hugues, and Serge lay on the floor in the back of the third lorry clutching lugers which Christof had provided t
hem. They each had a small canvas seaman’s bag containing all of their belongings to last them for the next two or three weeks. Antoine soothed himself with the memory that he was carrying more than he owned during the prison and fugitive years. The three men shared a still warm batch of kuchen—a German fruit flan—and three bottles of the local Kuntsmann beer during the short ride to the harbor.
Puerto Montt was a small city set into a deep, almost V-shaped cut in a mountain at the northern end of Reloncaví Sound. It was a town seemingly plucked out of Bavaria and set down in the picturesque Patagonian Andes. Prior to World War II, Puerto Montt was a small, ramshackle seaport perched on a ledge between an inland Patagonian fjord and the dramatic volcanoes of the southern Andes. Because of its deep waters and strategic commercial location, the harbor became the main seaport at the lower end of Chile’s western continental land mass. The harbor made Puerto Montt the principal commercial, services, and financial hub of Chilean Northern Patagonia—the Zona Austral—and the de facto capital of Chilean Patagonia. The city was becoming the hub of one of the largest salmon aquaculture industries in the world. Hatcheries, fisheries, and packing plants were mostly located south of Puerto Montt. From the port, fresh salmon was being flown daily to world markets; and frozen salmon was shipped by ocean to all five continents. The region was beginning to see tremendous growth due to the salmon industry, the rapid expansion of forestry, cattle, and burgeoning tourism. The main advantage of that commercial activity for the Gebirgsjägers was that the hum of activity—even at night—made one more lorry on the dock and one more boat in the water nothing to attract attention. As it was, there were no watchers; the Israelis and INTERPOL searchers had already called it quits and were getting a good night’s sleep before returning to their headquarters empty-handed.
The night was dark and misty with visibility down to less than a hundred yards when the ship’s tender delivered Antoine, Serge, and Hugues alongside the seventy-yard-long German super seiner, the Port of Emden 220, a factory freezer trawler. The Gebirgsjägers reported aboard as seagoing factory workers with contracts to work all the way to Hong Kong. With an initial period of trawling for salmon, the entire trip was expected to take between six and eight weeks. The ship, its crew, and the rapid, strenuous, and tedious work requirements made for nearly perfect anonymity. The men were taken below decks and showed to their assigned bunks. Then the factory crew chief led them to the purser’s office where they presented their papers.
The ODESSA and Club Aleman forgers had done an expert job preparing passports, seaman’s contracts, work histories, and medical documentations for the three new men about to begin their first time on the Port of Emden 220, although—according to their papers—not their first time on a factory ship. They were hired through a ship worker contracting company called JobMonkey with a base pay of $3,000 USD per month plus a small percentage of the vessel’s earnings. Although it was well past midnight when they finished being processed aboard, the three new men were expected to be on the factory line at first bell of the morning watch—0430—and to work until four bells of the first dog watch [1800 hours] seven days a week. The three men knew they were too old for this kind of backbreaking labor, but they also knew they had no choice but to keep their eyes down and never to complain and draw attention to themselves.
Antoine, Serge, and Hugues stood side-by-side in the production line most days since they were unskilled and novices to the ship. They were usually employed as “slimers” [low-level factory workers]. The monotony was occasionally broken by being reassigned as cooks helpers or even quality control jobs. They were all smart enough and good enough workers to have days when they worked as “combies” [combination factory worker and deckhand], which meant they could have a little time on deck occasionally to work at hand-hauling nets, making repairs, or clearing fish off the vast stretches of hook-laden nets. Deckhand work took place in fresh air performing less monotonous work than when they were entombed below decks in the factory. On good days there were remarkably beautiful and fascinating sights that lifted their spirits.
For the first three weeks, the catching process dominated everything. The Gebirgsjägers joined the frenetic action on deck as the fish poured onto the decks from the massive nets. They worked as sorters pulling nontargeted fish—by-catch—from the salmon being processed. The pace was grueling because at all times everyone had to work very quickly to ensure the rest of the factory never ran out of fish to process. Because he was big and strong, Serge worked in the early days as a fillet machine operator. As the fish were sorted, they moved on a conveyor belt to a table in front of the driver. The operators had to grab the fish off the belt and pass them into the filleting machine which was able to fillet 135 to 145 fish per minute—two fish per second—and the operator had to fill the trays uniformly without missing any one of them.
Another job for the former senior SS officers was to be flippers or candlers. The fillets moved from the filleting machine to a table belt that is lit from underneath. The job of the processor, or the “flipper,” was to straighten all the fillets very quickly. “Candlers” inspected the fillets for bones or worms then–after passing inspection–the fillets that passed were placed in trays to be frozen. These positions were only on those boats that freeze whole fillets as a final product, called a “block” or “shatter-pack.” Among the worst jobs was to move the guts, heads, and offal into vats to be processed into fish meal and fertilizer.
Hugues seemed to draw the black bean more often than chance would have it and have to join the freezer crew. The freezer crew was divided into different positions. The “loader” took the pans of finished product and placed them in plate freezers. After freezing, the “freezer breaker” took the pans back out of the freezer and sent them to the “pan breaker,” who broke the product out of the pans. The product—still wrapped in plastic—then went to “case-up,” where it was put into boxes stamped with the product grade and date. These boxes were glued or taped shut, and sent to the “stacker,” who stacked the product in the freezer hold—day after monotonous and freezing day. The only thing standing between the three men and insanity was the knowledge that they were safe and obscure and that at the end of the exhausting voyage, they would start new lives in the Orient—lives as rich men who were not being hunted.
Having picked up a little Japanese during his POW time in Siberia, Antoine was able to communicate on a crude level with the very exacting Japanese surimi expert—the surimi master. Because of that, he spent time assisting the factory boss in charge of making the important Japanese delicacy. It was hardly a lofty job. Surimi was made by filleting the fish, mincing the fillets, washing the mince many times, then squeezing out the water, which produced a doughy paste that could be shaped and flavored to make artificial crab, scallops, and other artificial seafood products. Most of the time he worked as an extruder—a processor at the end of the surimi line—who mixed sugar with the finished surimi paste, then placed the mixed surimi in bags and pans to be frozen. His intelligence and capable bearing gave Antoine some respite from the drudgery when he was called upon to work under the surimi master as inspector, a job he found surprisingly easy to learn for all of its complexity and finicky exactness.
The Port of Emden 220 was two days out from Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbor when the Gebirgsjägers first ran into trouble. Hugues Beauchamp had been keeping his head down and his hands busy at the grueling factory workload for the six-and-a-half weeks of the voyage from Puerto Montt to the British Crown Colony. His strict obedience, reliability, and careful work ethics were almost his undoing. He came to the notice of the surimi master, Junji Hirokatsu Shimazaki.
Mr. Shimazaki regularly went headhunting in the factory to find men with the skill, intelligence, and quickness to be able to comply with his exacting requirements. Hugues stood out. Mr. Shimazaki had begun to think his previous favorite, a German Chilean named Adolf Ramirez-Böhler, was showing his age and was not quite up to the rigors of the Japanese way. He wal
ked up behind Hugues and tapped him on the shoulder.
Shimizaki was diminutive, even by Japanese standards. As a result he was an arrogant martinet who paid slavish attention to his coiffure, his trim pencil mustache, and his olive drab clothing that harked back to the era of Japanese power in their East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. His hands were as clean as a surgeon’s from frequent washings and application of lotions to get rid of the smell of fish. His nails were manicured twice a month by one of his subservient assistants. He had coal-black squinting eyes with unusually prominent medial epicanthial folds. In strong light his lids covered all but a thin slit through which he saw everything. He carried a clipboard and pen in one hand and a long, thin skinning knife in the other.
“Mr. Resseguie,” he said, “come with me to my surimi production area. I am in need of a new man, one with fresh energy.”
He turned imperiously away and walked up the three flights of ships ladders, through the hatch on the second deck and down the passageway to the pristine laboratory/factory—which he operated like an antiquarian Bushi [Samurai] daimyo of the Tokugawa shogunate—without so much as glancing behind him to see of Hugues was trotting along behind him at a respectful distance. Antoine watched the two men leave the hot, smelly factory deck with mixed feelings. Mostly he was concerned about Hugues’ hair-trigger temper and how he would react to being treated like a Burakumin [outcast group at the bottom of the Japanese social order that was historically victimized by the higher-ranking members of the feudal society]. Master Shimazaki certainly treated Antoine like a subhuman, and the former SS general was not likely ever to forget or forgive those slights. However, he continuously reminded himself what the real goal was for himself and his men—to be affluent, safe, and anonymous, beyond the reach of Western law enforcement. He was not so sure how well Hugues would control himself.
The Charlemagne Murders Page 58