Murphy shook his head, then hesitated, “There is a rumor that the Catholic Church is funneling ex-Nazis into South America. But, those are war criminals and, as far as we know, Heinze is not a war criminal.”
“Would he go to South America anyway?” Slim asked, “Even if he was not wanted?”
“Juan Perón, the president of Argentina, is actively recruiting ex-Nazis as advisors. He is offering them full citizenship and employment,” Pasha said. “South America is going to be riddled with these scum.”
“Why do they want ex-Nazis so badly?” Franks asked.
“The skill set of an ex-Nazi is both highly specialized and very limited. They know how to torture and how to follow orders. Who better to build up a nascent military dictatorship than members of the Waffen SS?” Pasha said.
“Don’t you think Heinze would already have gone to Argentina?” Slim asked.
“There’s only one way to find out,” Pasha said. “We’ll go to the consulate in Munich.”
“How long have you been looking for this boy?” Franks asked.
“A couple of weeks now, but I am running out of time,” Slim said. “Why do you ask?”
“The longer you look, the more dangerous it will be for him. You have to be careful that you don’t leave a trail. He is one of the last people to see Hitler alive. If his ‘father’ — and I say that term loosely — finds out his ‘son’ is half Jewish, he will kill him,” Franks said.
Slim looked at the boy shaking Hitler’s hand. Of all the ironies Slim had been confronted with in this job of hers, this was one of the cruelest.
“Take the picture — take it,” Murphy said. “Things go missing all the time. There are thousands of documents down there.” He shut the folder and handed it to her. “Go and find that boy.”
Chapter Thirteen
1950 — Munich
They drove into Munich on the first day of Oktoberfest. Pasha convinced Slim to go to the enormous Hofbräuhaus to have dinner. They sat communally and when they tried to pay for their beers with dollars, a finger was waved at them by a buxom smiling waitress spilling out of a dirndl.
“She says we have to buy tokens,” Pasha explained. An older man in lederhosen and a green felt hat slapped two tokens on the table for the waitress.
“Danke,” Slim said, smiling. Then she whispered, “I just wonder how many of them were Nazis.”
“Since you had to join the party, probably all of them. Munich, in particular, was called ‘Hauptstadt der Bewegung’, the capital of the movement. All we need now is for that table to sing Horst Wessel,” Pasha said.
The waitress came back with ceramic tankards and a plate of radishes.
“Crunch up,” Pasha said, handing her a radish, “these apparently make you thirsty.”
“So, any news on my husband?” Slim asked.
“Slim, I am trying to get him out,” Pasha said.
“Pasha, where is he?” Slim asked tiredly.
“They moved him and I don’t know where,” Pasha said.
“Is he alive?” Slim asked.
“As far as we know, he is,” Pasha responded.
“Why does Klaus Barbie want him?” she said, staring into an abyss of a beer. “Daniel does not have any connections in Soviet Russia. He cannot help him.”
“Look, Slim, I just heard that they’re moving Barbie to South America sooner rather than later. Once that happens, I will try everything in my power to get Daniel back to you.” Pasha reached over and squeezed Slim’s hand. “I know you love him more than me,” he smiled bittersweetly, “but I love you, Slim. I do not think I’ve ever been more in love.”
“Oh, that is not true,” Slim said as his touch set off an electric tingle through her body.
“Why do you think I am on this jaunt?” he asked.
Slim thought about it and smiled. “Because you love me.”
“Because I find you entrancing,” he said, kissing her fingers and setting off more shock waves.
“Okay, I’ll give you twenty minutes to get us a hotel room,” Slim said before she took a long swig of beer.
“Is that a challenge?” Pasha asked as Slim nodded. He jumped up. “I shall be back, my darling Slim, with a magic key.”
“I bet you will. The wonderful thing about being with someone rich and royal is that everyone says yes to you.”
“Yes, behold the magic of majesty,” Pasha said with a bow. Then he left.
Slim smiled and looked around. All about her were smiling faces of men and women in lederhosen and dirndls. She was feeling out of place in her black wool suit. As she pulled on her pearls, a habit she acquired at Trinity College where it seemed that everyone wore pearls, she found herself swaying a bit to the band playing ‘Ein Prosit.’ She wondered what Tiny was doing. Now that she was in a major city again, she could place a call to her grandmother’s home and get an update. She scanned the hall. Everyone seemed so jovial; it was as if the last twenty years had never happened. Suddenly, someone caught her eye from across the room. It was Hans Müller from the International Tracing Service. He was standing up singing along, staring straight at her. She had to leave. He had seen her. How did he find her? She stood up quickly and began to make her way through the singing crowds.
In her jet black suit, she was easy to find in the sea of white shirts and green hats. Some of the people she pushed past were a bit stunned. One grabbed her with a worried expression. “Geht es dir gut?” she heard him say.
Slim was about to say nein when she ran smack into the arms of Hans Müller. The man who was helping Slim looked with uncertainty at Müller who, laughing, said, “Bier. Mein frau.” The man laughed and handed her off to Hans.
Slim was about to yell when she heard Müller say, “I have a gun and I will kill you if you do anything.” Slim could feel the metal barrel of a gun press into her ribcage. He would shoot her, she was sure of it, so there was no use trying to break free. He led her through the hall. She kept scanning the room for Pasha, but he was nowhere to be found.
Müller pushed open a door onto a winding cobblestone street. With a firm grip on her elbow, he led her into an alley.
“Hans? I don’t understand why you are doing this.” Slim said, trying to play dumb. After all, Müller didn’t know that she knew he had attacked her and stolen Felice Scott’s journal.
“Slim, we have been colleagues for a long time,” Müller said, releasing her elbow and slamming her against the wall. Slim dropped to her knees. She felt the back of her head. Her hand came back bloody and her knees started buckling.
“You need to stop looking for the boy,” Müller said.
“He belongs with his mother, not with some Nazi,” Slim said with as much defiance as she could muster.
Müller smacked her across the face with the flat of his pistol and said, “Here is what is going to happen. You are going to come with me and after 48 hours, you will be released. You will be free to go.”
“What do you mean I will be free to go?” Slim asked.
“I mean in 48 hours, Ernst Heinze and his son, Karl, will be on their way to Argentina, where they will disappear forever.”
A man peeked around the corner to take a piss, but when he saw Slim on her knees, he left abruptly. Dizzy, she tried to get her bearings. When Pasha came back and realized she was gone, surely he would somehow figure out how to rescue her. Müller reached down and roughly pulled her to her feet. The stark reality of the situation hit her. The only person who could save her was herself. Although she was shaking and frightened, a steely resolve came over her. She was not a damsel in distress waiting for a prince to rescue her. She was Slim Moran and, goddammit, she was going to get herself out of this situation if it was the last thing she ever did. The Nazis had lost the war. They were not going to win one with Slim Moran. She would make Müller pay for what he had done to her and then she would take down Ernst Heinze. As her father once said to her, “No one messes with a Moran and sees the light of day.”
Müller
hit her again, hard. As Slim slowly lost consciousness, she swore to herself that she would make sure that none of these idiots would come out unscathed.
✽✽✽
When Slim awoke, she was not sure where she was or how many hours she had been knocked out. Her head was pounding. This concussion was her second in a matter of weeks. She felt the back of her head, expecting to find it caked with blood. Instead, she found stitches and the stubble of her shaved head.
She sat up slowly and looked down. She was in a soft flannel nightgown. She looked up and saw that she was lying in a four-poster bed surrounded by silk tapestries.
The door opened, and a nurse in a white uniform came in holding a tray of food.
“Guten morgen, Fräulein Moran.” The woman did not seem unpleasant, she seemed almost warm.
“Wo bin ich?” Slim asked, trying not to panic.
“Schloss Neuschwanstein, Bavaria. Mein Name ist Fraulein Jansky,” the woman said as she placed the tray on the bed. She picked up a bottle of pills, pointed to her head and said, “Das ist für deinen Kopf”
Jansky? Jansky? Where had she heard that name before?
The woman handed Slim two white tablets and a glass of water.
Slim took the tablets willingly. Anything to stop the pain. Her throat was parched; she drank the water. The woman pointed to Slim’s freshly pressed clothes on the chair, then pointed to a door and said, “Bad.”
Slim nodded. She needed a bath. Before the woman left, she pointed to the door and held up a key and said, “Verboten.”
Slim stifled a giggle. She felt like she was in one of her father’s early B movies for Warner Brothers. In the early thirties, he had been cast as a series of small-time gangsters who were always trying to escape the ‘big house.’ It wasn’t until the mid-thirties when Tyrone Moran hit his stride as a romantic lead that he stopped making those kinds of movies.
Fräulein Jansky picked up a brass bell beside the bed and motioned ringing it. Slim nodded. She would ring the bell if she needed anything.
Slim poured herself a cup of coffee out of a silver pitcher, added cream and took a sip. The coffee was hot enough to be enjoyable, but not scalding. She pulled off the silver cloche and revealed a steaming plate of eggs and white sausage. Slim did not realize how hungry she was until she picked up her fork. Everything was delicious, most especially the hot coffee. The pain tablets Fräulein Jansky had given her were making the headache subside. After breakfast, she got up and took a hot bath in an ornate, circular, marble bath. She was careful not to get the stitches on the back of her head wet.
Afterward, in her clean black suit, she felt like a new person. Fräulein Jansky showed up precisely sixty minutes after she left and looked Slim up and down approvingly.
“Folgen sie mir,” Fräulein Jansky said, beckoning her to follow.
As Slim walked through the corridors of the castle, she could not help but notice how every surface was either painted, carved or encrusted in some priceless jewel or metal. Slim knew that the castle had been designed in the last century by King Ludwig who had bankrupted his kingdom to finance his dream. Succumbing to madness, Ludwig had committed suicide. He drowned in the surrounding lake, leaving his dream unfinished.
They walked through several more halls of intricately painted, arched columns until they came to two large, gold-encrusted doors. Frau Jansky knocked and then pushed open the doors, which led into a room the likes of which Slim had never seen before. The walls were covered in scenes from the bible. From the arched ceiling hung an enormous jewel-encrusted solid gold chandelier. On a small rectangular platform at the end of the room, framed by candelabras rising from the floor, was a gold desk. The man working there, looked up as he saw Slim enter. He stood up. Slim surmised he must be over six feet tall. The man’s blonde hair was thinning but shone as the sun hit it through the window. Dressed in a black sweater and black slacks, he looked like an elegant priest.
“Fräulein Moran, I have been expecting you.” He held his hand towards a seat.
“Have you? I am afraid that I do not know who you are,” Slim said.
“I believe you are looking for me,” he said with a tight-lipped grin. “I am Ernst Heinze.”
Slim looked at the man before her. He was handsome, fit, and in his early fifties. She searched his face for evidence of cruelty but could find none.
“I understand you have been looking for a boy named Karl Heinze,” he said, offering her a seat, which she took.
“I am looking for a boy named Karol Machak. His name was changed to Karl Heinze,” Slim said, correcting him. “He was kidnapped from Poland.”
“The children were not kidnapped. I saved them,” Heinze said. “If I had not culled the children…”
“Culled the children? What do you mean culled the children?” Slim asked, outraged.
“Settle down. Do you think I wanted us to go to war?” Do you think that is why I joined the Nazi party? Do you think I wanted this nasty business with the Jews? That I wanted my country destroyed?” Heinze asked.
“What did you want?” Slim answered back.
“I wanted a prosperous Germany…” he said.
“Free of the Jews,” Slim added.
“Yes, I wanted Germany free of the Jews — but war? I did not want war,” he said.
“Yet, war is what happened,” Slim said.
“And when it did, I tried to save as many children as I could,” Heinze said.
Slim tried to contain her growing outrage. This man in front of her was trying to present himself as a hero, a saver of children, when in reality he was responsible for kidnapping children from their homes and sending their parents to concentration camps.
“The children sent to the Lebensborn homes received plentiful food, top-rate medical care and were adopted into good German homes,” he continued.
“Like Karl,” Slim said. “I heard your wife wanted to adopt a girl, a baby girl, and you made your wife take the child back.”
“I did not want an infant. My late wife was not well. She drank and was prone to blackouts. She was always walking into walls, drunk. I could not have her drop a baby. If she had been well, I would have allowed it. I figured with an older boy there was less chance of something terrible happening. This woman who says she is the mother of Karl, what does she have to offer him?” Heinze asked.
“What does she have to offer him? She is his mother. Rightfully, the boy belongs to her,” Slim said, almost shouting.
“The boy cannot remember a word of Polish. I am sure he does not remember his mother,” Heinze said. “As far as he knows, he is German, and he is my son.”
“I would like to meet the boy and decide for myself,” Slim said. “Is that possible?”
“Anything is possible. It is a matter of whether I will allow such a thing to happen.” Heinze said.
“If you let me see the boy and if I judge him to be happy and well-looked after, I will leave and never bother you again,” Slim said, lying through her teeth in the hopes of at least catching a glimpse of the child.
“I will think about it, but for now our conversation has ended.” He stood up, waiting for Slim to do the same. “Good day to you, Fräulein Moran, I hope you enjoy the luncheon my staff has prepared for you.”
Slim stood and turned to leave, but then she stopped.
“I heard Karl was one of the last to see Hitler. Is that true?”
“Who told you that?” Heinze asked, thrown by the question.
“Someone showed me a photo of Hitler awarding the Iron Cross to a group of Hitlerjugend boys on his birthday. Apparently, it is the last known photo of Hitler alive.” Slim was revealing one card at a time in hopes of seeing the boy.
She saw Heinze weighing a response in his mind.
“You must have been very proud of Karl for receiving the Iron Cross, especially from the Führer,” Slim added.
Again, he looked at her. She could see he wanted to brag a bit about his son. Slim decided to stoke the pa
rental ego a bit more.
“For someone who was or is for that matter, a Golden Party member, it must have been quite an honor for your son to meet Hitler,” Slim said.
“How do you know that?” Heinze asked, growing suddenly suspicious.
Slim had overplayed her hand. She looked around and then noticed a small pin on the lapel of his Bavarian Trachten jacket. “Isn’t that the Golden Party pin?”
She pointed to the swastika outlined in red writing and gold leaves.
Heinze reached for his pin almost unconsciously and smiled, “I am number 4,254. Yes, as hard as it was to see the Führer in his final moments, it was indeed an honor for Karl.”
“If it is possible, I would like to meet Karl. If not, I understand,” she smiled and then left, knowing she had made a positive impression on Heinze.
Tired, she was led back to her rooms by the same woman who brought her there.
“Bitte Folgen Sie mir.”
“Ja, Fräulein Jansky,” Sim said and then she remembered where she had heard the name before. Anneliese Jansky was the secretary from Lebensborn. How could Slim not have recognized the name immediately? She was still working for Heinze after all these years. Slim wondered if she was accompanying him to Argentina, too.
With the stitches in the back of her head beginning to itch and her head pounding, Slim took two more white tablets to relieve her pain, then crawled back into bed. When she awoke it was night outside. Slim looked at the clock on the wall. It was 6 pm. She had slept the day away. The throbbing in her head was quieting. She reached for the bottle of white tablets, then she put the bottle down. The tablets were making her sleep. If she had any chance of rescuing Karol, she needed to be awake.
There was a knock on the door. Anneliese Jansky entered with a note and handed it to Slim to open. It said in English: Please join us this evening for dinner. 7’o clock.
Jansky waited for a response. Slim handed the note back and said, “Ich werde kommen.”
As Jansky reached for the card, Slim saw a gold watch on Jansky's wrist.
The Lost Boy Page 19