The Boys From Brazil

by Ira Levin

  He gave no response, and she sat back in her chair and examined her fingernails. “I went to all the places,” she said. “There were no openings. But after the summer Rush-Gaddis called me in, and they hired me. As a file clerk.” She smiled musingly. “My husband thought I was crazy, taking a job in Manhattan. I was working then at a high school only eleven blocks from home. I told him that they promised me at Rush-Gaddis that in a—”

  “Just the essentials, yes?” Fassler said.

  Frieda Maloney frowned, nodded. “So. Rush-Gaddis.” She looked at Liebermann. “What I did there was go through the mail and the files looking for applications where the husband was born between 1908 and 1912 and the wife between 1931 and 1935. The husband had to have a job in the civil service, and both of them had to be white Christians with a Nordic background. This was what Alois told me. Whenever I found one, and that was only once or twice a month, I copied it on the machine there along with all the letters between the couple and Rush-Gaddis. These were only people who hadn’t been given babies, of course. Two sets I made, one for Alois and one for me. The ones for him I mailed to a box-number he gave me.”

  “Where?” Liebermann asked.

  “Right there in Manhattan. The Planetarium Station, on the West Side. I kept doing that, looking for the right kind of applications and mailing them, the whole time I was there. After a year or so it got even harder to find them, because I’d been through the files by then and only had the new applications to look at. The civil-service part was changed then; as long as the job was like civil service it was all right. Something where the man was with a big organization and had some authority; an insurance company claim adjuster, for instance. So I had to go through the files again. Altogether I must have mailed off forty or forty-five applications in the three years. Copies of applications.”

  She leaned forward and took one of the paper-wrapped glasses from the tray, turned it in her hands. “Between…oh, Christmas 1960 and the end of summer 1963, which is when it ended and I left, this is what would happen. Alois or another man, Willi, would call me. Usually Willi. He’d say, ‘See if…“the Smiths” in California want one in March.’ Or whatever month, usually two months away. ‘Ask “the Browns” in New Jersey too.’ Maybe he’d give me three names.” She looked at Liebermann, explained: “People whose applications I mailed before.”

  He nodded.

  “So. I would call the Smiths and the Browns.” She picked the wrapper-top out of the mouth of the glass. “A former neighbor of theirs told me they wanted a baby, I would say. Were they still interested? Almost always they were.” She looked challengingly at Liebermann. “Not just interested. Overjoyed. The women especially.” She gathered the wrapper into her hand, pushing the glass out bit by bit. “I told them I could get them one, a healthy white infant a few weeks old, in March or whenever. With New York State adoption papers. But first they had to send me as soon as possible complete medical reports—I gave them Alois’s box-number—and they’d also have to agree never to tell the child it was adopted. The mother insisted on that, I said. And of course they’d have to pay me something when they came and got the baby, if they got it. A thousand usually, sometimes more if they could afford it. I could tell from the application. Enough so it would seem like an ordinary black-market arrangement.”

  She put the crushed wrapper on the tray and lifted the stopper from the carafe. “A few weeks later I’d get another call. ‘Smith is no good. Brown can have it on March fifteenth.’ Or maybe—” She tipped the carafe over the glass, tipped it farther; nothing came out. “Typical,” she said, turning the black carafe upside down. “Typical of the way this whole damn place is run! Wrapped glasses but no water in the damn bottle! God!” She slammed the carafe down onto the tray; wrapped glasses jumped.

  Fassler stood up. “I’ll get some,” he said, taking the carafe. “You go on.” He went away toward the door.

  Frieda Maloney said to Liebermann, “I could tell you things about the gross ineptness here…God! So. Yes. He tells me who gets the baby and when. Or maybe both couples are good, so he tells me to call the second and tell them it’s too late for this one but I know another girl who’s expecting in June.” She rolled the glass between her palms, her lips pursed. “On the night a baby was given,” she said, “everything was worked out very carefully in advance. By Alois or Willi and me, and by me and the couple. I would be in a room at the Howard Johnson Motel at the airport, Kennedy now—it was Idlewild then—using the name Elizabeth Gregory. The baby was brought to me, by a young couple or a woman alone or sometimes a stewardess. Some of them brought more than one—at different times, I mean—but usually it was someone new each time. They brought the papers too. Exactly like real ones, with the couple’s names filled in. An hour or two later the couple would come and get the baby. Joyously. Grateful to me.” She looked at Liebermann. “Nice people who would be good parents. They would pay me, and promise—I made them swear on the Bible there—never to tell the boy he was adopted. They were always boys. Darlings. And they would take them and go.”

  Liebermann said, “Don’t you know where they came from? Originally, I mean?”

  “The boys? From Brazil.” Frieda Maloney looked away. “The people who brought them were Brazilian,” she said, holding out her hand, “and the stewardesses were from the Brazilian airline, Varig.” She took the carafe from Fassler, brought it to her glass, poured water. Fassler went around the table and sat down.

  “From Brazil…” Liebermann said.

  Frieda Maloney drank, putting the carafe on the tray. She drank, lowered the glass, licked her lips. “Almost always everything went like clockwork,” she said. “One time the couple didn’t show up. I called and they said they changed their mind. So I took the baby home with me and arranged for the next couple to come. Also new papers. I told my husband there was a mix-up at Rush-Gaddis and nobody else had room for the baby. He didn’t know anything about anything. To this day he doesn’t know. And that’s it. Altogether there must have been about twenty babies; a few close together at the beginning, and after that, one every two or three months.” She raised the glass and sipped.

  “Twelve of,” Fassler said, looking at his watch. He smiled at Liebermann. “You see? You have seventeen minutes left.”

  Liebermann looked at Frieda Maloney. “How did the babies look?” he asked her.

  “Beautiful,” she said. “Blue eyes, dark hair. They were all alike, even more alike than babies usually are. They looked European, not Brazilian; they had light skin, and the blue eyes.”

  “Were you told they were from Brazil or did you base that just on…?”

  “I wasn’t told anything about them. Only what night they would be brought to the motel, and what time.”

  “Whose babies did you think they were?”

  “Her opinion,” Fassler said, “certainly doesn’t have any bearing on anything.”

  Frieda Maloney waved a hand. “What difference does it make?” she asked, and said to Liebermann, “I thought they were the children of Germans in South America. The illegitimate children, maybe, of German girls and South American boys. As to why the Organization was putting them into North America, and choosing the families so carefully—that I couldn’t figure out at all.”

  “You didn’t ask?”

  “At the very beginning,” she said, “when Alois first told me what kind of applications to look for, I asked him what it was all about. He told me not to ask questions, just to do what I was told. For the Fatherland.”

  “And I’m sure you were aware,” Fassler reminded her, “that if you didn’t cooperate, he could have exposed you to the kind of harassment that finally came years later.”

  “Yes, of course,” Frieda Maloney said. “I was aware of that. Naturally.”

  Liebermann said, “The twenty couples you gave the babies to—”

  “About twenty,” Frieda Maloney said. “Maybe a few less. No more than twenty.”

  “They were all American?”<
br />
  “Do you mean from the United States? No, some were Canadian. Five or six. The rest were from the States.”

  “No Europeans.”

  “No.”

  Liebermann sat silently, rubbing his earlobe.

  Fassler glanced at his watch.

  Liebermann said, “Do you remember their names?”

  Frieda Maloney smiled. “It was thirteen, fourteen years ago,” she said. “I remember one, Wheelock, because they gave me my dog and I called them for advice sometimes. They raised them, Dobermans. The Henry Wheelocks, in New Providence, Pennsylvania. I mentioned we were thinking of getting one, so they brought Sally, just ten weeks old then, when they came for the baby. A beautiful dog. We still have her. My husband still has her.”

  Liebermann said, “Guthrie?”

  Frieda Maloney looked at him, and nodded. “Yes,” she said. “The first one was Guthrie; that’s right.”

  “From Tucson.”

  “No. In Ohio. No, Iowa. Yes, Ames, Iowa.”

  “They moved to Tucson,” Liebermann said. “He died in an accident this past October.”

  “Ohh…” Frieda Maloney bit her lip regretfully.

  “Who was next, after the Guthries?”

  She shook her head. “This is when there were a few close together, only two weeks apart.”

  “Curry?”

  She looked at Liebermann. “Yes,” she said. “From Massachusetts. But not right after the Guthries. Wait a minute now. The Guthries were at the end of February; and then another couple, from someplace in the South—Macon, I think; and then the Currys. And then the Wheelocks.”

  “Two weeks after the Currys?”

  “No, two or three months. After the first three they were spread out.”

  Liebermann asked Fassler, “Would it kill you if I wrote this down? It’s not going to hurt her, in America so long ago.”

  Fassler scowled and sighed. “All right,” he said.

  “Why is it important?” Frieda Maloney asked.

  Liebermann got out his pen and found a piece of paper in his pocket. “How is ‘Wheelock’ spelled?” he asked.

  She spelled it for him.

  “New Providence, Pennsylvania?”

  “Yes.”

  “Try to remember: exactly how long after the Currys did they get their baby?”

  “I can’t remember exactly. Two or three months; it wasn’t a regular schedule.”

  “Was it closer to two months or to three?”

  “She can’t remember,” Fassler said.

  “All right,” Liebermann said. “Who came after the Wheelocks?”

  Frieda Maloney sighed. “I can’t remember who came when,” she said. “There were twenty, over two and a half years. There was a Truman, not related to Truman the President. I think they were one of the Canadian couples. And there was…‘Corwin’ or ‘Corbin,’ something like that. Corbett.”

  She remembered three more names, and six cities. Liebermann wrote them down.

  “Time,” Fassler said. “Would you mind waiting for me outside?”

  Liebermann put his pen and paper away. He looked at Frieda Maloney, nodded.

  She nodded back.

  He got up and went to the coatrack; put his coat over his arm and took his hat and briefcase from the shelf. He went to the door, and stopped and stood motionless; turned. “I’d like to ask one more question,” he said.

  They looked at him. Fassler nodded.

  He looked at Frieda Maloney and said, “When is your dog’s birthday?”

  She looked blankly at him.

  “Do you know?” he asked her.

  “Yes,” she said. “April twenty-sixth.”

  “Thank you,” he said; and to Fassler: “Please don’t be too long; I want to get this over with.” He turned and opened the door and went out into the corridor.

  He sat on a bench doing some figuring with his pen and a pocket calendar. The matron, sitting on the other side of his folded coat, said, “Do you think you’ll get her off?”

  “I’m not a lawyer,” he said.

  Fassler, nudging his car restlessly against stalled traffic, said, “I’m totally mystified. Would you tell me, please, what the Organization was doing in the baby business?”

  “I’m sorry,” Liebermann said, “but that’s not in our agreement.”

  As if he knew.

  He went back to Vienna. Where, in the face of a court order, the desks and file cabinets were being moved to an office Max had found, two small rooms in a run-down building in the Fifteenth District. And where he, therefore, had to move at once—Lili was already looking—to a smaller and cheaper apartment (good-by, Glanzer, you bastard). And where, what with one thing and another—two months’ advance on the office, legal fees, moving costs, the phone bill—there was hardly enough left in the kitty to buy a ticket to Salzburg, let alone Washington.

  Which was where he had to go the week after next, February 4th or 5th.

  He explained to Max and Esther while they made the new office look more like the War Crimes Information Center and less like H. Haupt & Son, Advertising Specialties. “The Guthries and the Currys,” he said, scraping the second H from the doorpane with a paper-pinched razor blade, “got their babies about four weeks apart, at the end of February and the end of March, 1961. And Guthrie and Curry were killed four weeks apart, one day over, in the same order. The Wheelocks got their baby around July fifth—this I know because they gave Frieda Maloney a ten-week-old puppy that was born on April twenty-sixth—”

  “What?” Esther turned and looked at him. She held a map to the wall while Max pushed thumbtacks in.

  “—and from the end of March to July fifth,” Liebermann said, scraping, “is roughly fourteen weeks. So it’s a good bet that Wheelock is supposed to be killed around February twenty-second, fourteen weeks after Curry. And I want to be in Washington two or three weeks before.”

  Esther said, “I think I follow you,” and Max said, “What’s not to follow? They’re being killed in the same order they got the babies, and the same time apart. The question is—why?”

  The question, Liebermann felt, would have to wait. Stopping the killings, whatever their reason, was what mattered, and his best chance of doing that was through the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation. They could confirm easily enough that two men who had died in “accidents” were the fathers of illicitly adopted look-alike sons, and that Henry Wheelock was a third (or fourth, if they turned up the one in Macon-maybe). On February 22nd, give or take a few days, they could capture Wheelock’s intended killer, and learn from him the identities, and maybe even the schedules, of the other five. (Liebermann believed now that the six killers were working singly, not in pairs, because of the closeness in time of the murders of Döring, Guthrie, Horve, and Runsten—all in different countries.)

  He might also, more easily, go to the Federal Criminal Investigation Department in Bonn, since he was certain that a German adoption agency (and an English and three Scandinavian ones) had had a Frieda Maloney searching its files and distributing babies. Klaus had found the boy in Freiburg identical to the one in Trittau, and Liebermann himself, while in Düsseldorf, had called the Frauen Döring, Rausenberger, and Schreiber, getting, in response to “Tell me, please, is your son adopted?,” two surprised and wary yesses, one furious no, and three orders to mind his own business.

  But in Bonn he would have no next victim to offer, and the explanation of how he had got Frieda Maloney to talk wouldn’t be well received. He himself wouldn’t be well received either, as he hoped he might be in Washington. Besides, in his Jewish heart of hearts, he didn’t trust German authorities as much as American where Nazi matters were concerned.

  So, Washington and the F.B.I.

  He sat at the phone in the new office calling old contributors. “I don’t like to buttonhole you this way, but believe me, it’s important. Something that’s going on now, with six SS men and Mengele.” Inflation, they told him. Recession. Business was awful. He
began bringing in dead parents, the Six Million—which he hated doing, using guilt as a fundraiser. He got a few promises. “Please, right away,” he said. “It’s important.”

  “But it’s not possible,” Lili said, spooning a second deadly portion of potato kugel onto his plate. “How can there be so many boys who look alike?”

  “Darling,” Max said to her across their table, “don’t say it’s not possible. Yakov saw. His friend from Heidelberg saw.”

  “Frieda Maloney saw,” Liebermann said. “The babies were all alike, more than babies usually are.”

  Lili made a spit-sound at the floor beside her. “She should die.”

  “The name she used,” Liebermann said, “was Elizabeth Gregory. I meant to ask her if it was given to her or if she picked it herself, but I forgot.”

  “What’s the difference?” Max asked, chewing.

  Lili said, “Gregory. The name Mengele used in Argentina.”

  “Oh, of course.”

  “It must have come from him,” Liebermann said. “Everything must have come from him, the whole operation. He was signing it, even if he didn’t mean to.”

  Some money came in—from Sweden and the States—and he booked a ticket to Washington via Frankfurt and New York, for Tuesday, February 4th.

  On Friday evening, January 31st, Mengele was using the name Mengele. He had flown with his bodyguards to Florianópolis on the island of Santa Catarina, roughly midway between São Paulo and Pôrto Alegre, where in the ballroom of the Hotel Novo Hamburgo, decorated for the occasion with swastikas and red and black streamers, the Sons of National Socialism were holding a hundred-cruzeiros-ahead dinner dance. What excitement when Mengele made his appearance! Big Nazis, the ones who had played stellar roles in the Third Reich and were known throughout the world, tended to be snobbish toward the Sons, declining their invitations on grounds of ill health and making testy comments about their leader, Hans Stroop (who even the Sons would admit sometimes overdid his Hitler act). But here was Herr Doktor Mengele himself, in the flesh and white dinner jacket, shaking hands, kissing cheeks, beaming, laughing, repeating new names. How kind of him to come! And how healthy and happy he looked!