The Boys From Brazil

by Ira Levin

  Dream! If only such an organization existed!

  People in the plane fastened their seat belts and made comments to one another; the sign had lit up.

  Liebermann sat frowning at the window.

  After a refreshing hour’s nap, Mengele washed and shaved, put on the wig and mustache, and got into his dark suit. He laid everything out on the bed—white jacket, gloves, knife in sheath, tray with basket of fruit and Do Not Disturb sign—so that as soon as he saw Liebermann check in and learned his room number, he could zip up and assume his waiter role with no delay.

  When he left the room he tried the knob and hung the other Do Not Disturb sign on it.

  At 6:45 he was seated in the lobby, leafing through a copy of Time and keeping an eye on the revolving door. The occasional suitcase-bearing new arrivals who went to the registration desk across the lobby were almost all unaccompanied men, a veritable textbook of inferior racial types; not only Blacks and Semites, but a pair of Orientals as well. One fine-looking young Aryan checked in, but a few minutes later, as if to compensate for an error, a black dwarf appeared, striding along beside a suitcase in a wheeled metal frame.

  At twenty past seven Liebermann came in—tall, round-shouldered, dark-mustached, in a tan cap and belted tan overcoat. Or was this Liebermann? A Jew, yes, but too young-looking and with not quite the Liebermann beak.

  He got up and strolled across the lobby, took a This Week in Washington from a stack of them on the cracked marble counter.

  “You’re staying through Friday night?” the clerk asked the possible Liebermann at his back.

  “Yes.”

  A bell pinged. “Would you take Mr. Morris to seven-seventeen?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He strolled back across the lobby. A Lebanese or some such had taken his seat—fat and greasy-looking, rings on every finger.

  He found another seat.

  The beak of all beaks came in, but it was attached to the face of a young man holding the elbow of a gray-haired woman.

  At eight o’clock he stepped into a phone booth and called the hotel. He asked—taking care not to let his lips touch the mouthpiece, laden with God knew what germs—if Mr. Yakov Liebermann was expected.

  “Just a moment.” A click, and ringing. The clerk across the lobby picked up a phone and said in Mengele’s ear, “Front desk.”

  “Have you a room reserved for Mr. Yakov Liebermann?”

  “For this evening?”

  “Yes.”

  The clerk looked down as if reading. “Yes, we do. Is this Mr. Liebermann speaking?”

  “No.”

  “Would you like to leave a message for him?”

  “No, thank you. I shall call later.”

  He could keep watch just as well from inside the booth, so he put another ten-cent coin into the phone and asked the operator how he could get the number of someone in New Providence, Pennsylvania. She gave him a long number to call; he wrote it down on Time’s red border, took the coin from the receptacle at the bottom of the phone, put it in at the top again, dialed.

  There was a Henry Wheelock in New Providence. He wrote the number down below the other one. The woman gave him the address too, Old Buck Road, no house number.

  A Latin with a suitcase and a leashed poodle went to the registration desk.

  He thought for a moment, then called the operator and got instructions. He examined his array of coins on the booth’s small shelf, picked out the right ones.

  It was only when the phone at the other end gave its first ring that he realized that if this was the Henry Wheelock he wanted, the boy himself might answer. In another instant he could actually be speaking with his Führer reborn! A dizzying joy swept his breath away, tipped him against the side of the booth as the phone rang again. Oh please, dear Boy, come and answer your telephone!

  “Hello.” A woman.

  He drew in breath, sighed it out.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello.” He straightened up. “Is Mr. Henry Wheelock there?”

  “He’s here, but he’s out in back.”

  “Is this Mrs. Wheelock?”

  “It is, yes.”

  “My name is Franklin, madam. I believe you have a son approaching the age of fourteen?”

  “We do…”

  Praise God. “I conduct tours for boys of that age. Would you be interested in sending him to Europe this summer?”

  A laugh. “Oh no, I don’t think so.”

  “May I send you a brochure?”

  “You may, but it’s not going to do you much good.”

  “Old Buck Road is the address?”

  “Really, he’s staying right here this summer.”

  “Good night, then. I’m sorry to have troubled you.”

  He took a pamphlet from the unattended car-rental booth and sat studying it, glancing up whenever the revolving door whisked.

  Tomorrow he would rent a car and drive to New Providence. When Wheelock was taken care of he would drive on up to New York, turn in the car, sell a diamond, and fly to Chicago. If Robert K. Davis was still in Kankakee.

  But where the hell was Liebermann?

  At nine o’clock he went into the coffee shop and took a counter seat from which he could see the revolving door through the glass shop-door. He ate scrambled eggs and toast, drank the world’s worst coffee.

  He got a dollar’s worth of change when he left, went into the phone booth again, and called the hotel. Maybe Liebermann had come in through the side entrance.

  He hadn’t. They were still expecting him.

  He called both airports, hoping—it was possible, wasn’t it?—that there had been a crash.

  No such luck. And all incoming flights were on schedule.

  The son of a bitch must have stayed on in Mannheim. But for how long? It was too late to call Vienna and find out from that Fräulein Zimmer. Too early, rather; not quite four in the morning there.

  He began to worry about someone remembering him sitting in the lobby all evening watching the door.

  Where are you, you goddamned Jew-bastard? Come let me kill you!

  On Wednesday afternoon, at a few minutes after two o’clock, Liebermann got out of a traffic-locked taxi in the middle of Manhattan’s garment center and took to the sidewalk despite the freezing rain. His umbrella, borrowed from the people he had stayed the night with, Marvin and Rita Farb, was another bold color in each of its panels (it’s an umbrella, he told himself; be glad you’ve got it).

  He splatted briskly down the west side of Broadway, weaving past other umbrellas (black) and men pushing plastic-covered racks of dresses. He looked at the numbers of the office buildings he passed; walked faster.

  He walked seven or eight blocks, crossed a street and looked at the building there—an Off-Track Betting office, a lamp showroom, twenty or so stories of grimy stonework and narrow windows—and went to its arched entrance and backed open a heavy glass swing-door, pulling the multicolored umbrella closed.

  He crossed the black-matted lobby—small, a magazine-and-candy-stand taking up most of it—and joined the half-dozen people waiting for the elevators; stamped his sodden shoes, tapped the umbrella’s tip against the wet rubber matting, making rain on it.

  On the twelfth floor—dingy, paint peeling—he followed the numbers on pebbled doorpanes: 1202, Aaron Goldman, Artificial Flowers; 1203, C. & M. Roth, Imported Glassware; 1204, Youthcraft Dolls, B. Rosenzweig. Room 1205 had YJD on the pane, stick-on metallic letters, the D a little higher than the Y and the J. He knuckled the glass.

  A flesh-and-white blur came to the pane. “Yes?” A young woman’s voice.

  “It’s Yakov Liebermann.”

  The mail slot below the pane clinked and gave light. “Would you put your I.D. through?”

  He got out his passport and put it into the slot; it was taken from his fingers.

  He waited. The door had two locks, one that looked like the original, and beneath it, a bright-brassed new-looking one.

 
A bolt clicked and the door opened.

  He went in. A fat girl of sixteen or so with pulled-back red hair smiled at him and said, “Shalom,” offering him his passport.

  He took it and said, “Shalom.”

  “We have to be careful,” the girl apologized. She closed the door and turned its bolt. She wore a white sweatshirt and blue swollen-tight jeans; her hair hung down her back, a glistening orange-red horsetail.

  They were in a tiny cluttered anteroom: a desk, a mimeograph machine on a table with stacks of white and pink paper; raw wood shelves piled with handbills and newspaper reprints; in the wall opposite, an almost-closed door with a Young Jewish Defenders poster taped to it, a hand brandishing a dagger in front of a blue Jewish star.

  The girl reached for the umbrella; Liebermann gave it to her and she put it in a metal wastebasket with two others, black, wet.

  Liebermann, taking his hat and coat off, said, “Are you the young lady who was on the phone?”

  She nodded.

  “You handled things very efficiently. Is the Rabbi here?”

  “He just came in.” She took the hat and coat from Liebermann.

  “Thank you. How’s his son?”

  “They don’t know yet. His condition is stable.”

  “Mm.” Liebermann shook his head sympathetically.

  The girl found places for the hat and coat on a full coat-tree. Liebermann, straightening his jacket, smoothing his hair, glanced at piles of handbills on a shelf beside him: The New Jew; KISSinger OF DEATH: No Compromise—Ever!

  The girl excused herself past Liebermann and knocked at the postered door; opened it farther and looked in. “Reb? Mr. Liebermann’s here.”

  She pushed the door all the way open, and smiling at Liebermann, stepped aside.

  A stocky blond-bearded man glared grimly at Liebermann as he came into an overheated office of men and desks and clutter; and coming out from behind the corner desk, Rabbi Moshe Gorin, handsome, dark-haired, compact, smiling, blue-jawed; in a tweed jacket and an open-necked yellow shirt. He took Liebermann’s hand, gripped it in both his own, and looked at him with magnetic brown eyes weighted with shadows. “I’ve wanted to meet you ever since I was a kid,” he said in a soft but intense voice. “You’re one of the few men in this world I really admire, not only because of what you’ve done, but because you did it without any help from the establishment. The Jewish establishment, I’m talking about.”

  Liebermann, embarrassed but pleased, said, “Thank you. I wanted to meet you too, Rabbi. I appreciate your coming in this way.”

  Gorin introduced the other men. The blond-bearded one, hawk-nosed, with a crushing handshake, was his second-in-command, Phil Greenspan. A tall balding one with glasses was Elliot Bachrach. Another, big, a black beard: Paul Stern. The youngest—twenty-five or so—a thick black mustache, green eyes, another crushing handshake: Jay Rabinowitz. All were in shirtsleeves, and like Gorin, skullcapped.

  They brought chairs from the other desks and put them around the end of Gorin’s desk; seated themselves. The tall one with glasses, Bachrach, sat against a windowsill behind Gorin, his arms folded, the buff shade all the way down behind him. Liebermann, across from Gorin, looked at the sober strong-looking men and the shabby cluttered office with its wall maps of the city and the world, a blackboard easel, stacks of books and papers, cartons. “Don’t look at this place.” Gorin waved it away.

  “It’s not so different from my office,” Liebermann said, smiling. “A little bigger, maybe.”

  “I’m sorry for you.”

  “How is your son doing?”

  “I think he’ll be all right,” Gorin said. “His condition is stable.”

  “I appreciate your coming in.”

  Gorin shrugged. “His mother is with him. I did my praying.” He smiled.

  Liebermann tried to get comfortable in the armless chair. “Whenever I speak,” he said, “in public, I mean—they ask me what I think of you. I always say ‘I never met him personally, so I have no opinion.’” He smiled at Gorin. “Now I’ll have to make a new answer.”

  “A favorable one, I hope,” Gorin said. The phone on the desk rang. “Nobody’s here, Sandy!” Gorin shouted toward the door. “Unless it’s my wife!” To Liebermann he said, “You’re not expecting any calls, are you?”

  Liebermann shook his head. “Nobody knows I’m here. I’m supposed to be in Washington.” He cleared his throat, sat with his hands on his knees. “I was on my way there yesterday afternoon,” he said. “To go to the F.B.I, about some killings I’m investigating. Here and in Europe. By former SS men.”

  “Recent killings?” Gorin looked concerned.

  “Still going on,” Liebermann said. “Arranged for by the Kameradenwerk in South America and Dr. Mengele.”

  Gorin said, “That son of a bitch…” The other men stirred. The blond-bearded one, Greenspan, said to Liebermann, “We have a new chapter in Rio de Janeiro. As soon as it’s big enough we’re going to set up a commando team and get him.”

  “I wish you luck,” Liebermann said. “He’s still alive all right, running this whole business. He killed a young fellow there, a Jewish boy from Evanston, Illinoise, in September. The boy was on the phone to me, telling me about this, when it happened. My problem now is, it’s going to take time for me to convince the F.B.I. I know what I’m talking about.”

  “Why did you wait so long?” Gorin asked. “If you knew in September…”

  “I didn’t know,” Liebermann said. “It was all…ifs and maybes, uncertainty. I only now have the whole thing put together.” He shook his head and sighed. “So it dawned on me on the plane,” he said to Gorin, “that maybe you, the Y.J.D.”—he looked at all of them—“could help out in this thing while I go on to Washington.”

  “Whatever we can do,” Gorin said, “just ask, you’ve got it.” The others agreed.

  “Thank you,” Liebermann said, “that’s what I was hoping. It’s a job of guarding someone, a man in Pennsylvania. In a town there, New Providence, a dot on the map near the city Lancaster.”

  “Pennsylvania—Dutch country,” the man with the black beard said. “I know it.”

  “This man is the next one to be killed in this country,” Liebermann said. “On the twenty-second of this month, but maybe sooner. Maybe only a few days from now. So he has to be guarded. But the man who comes to kill him mustn’t be scared away or killed himself; he has to be captured, so he can be questioned.” He looked at Gorin. “Do you have people who could do a job like that? Guard someone, capture someone?”

  Gorin nodded. Greenspan said, “You’re looking at them,” and to Gorin, “Let Jay take over the demonstration. I’ll manage this.”

  Gorin smiled, tilted his head toward Greenspan and said to Liebermann, “This one’s main regret is he missed World War Two. He runs our combat classes.”

  “It will only be for a week or so, I hope,” Liebermann said. “Just till the F.B.I. comes in.”

  “What do you want them for?” the young one with the mustache asked, and Greenspan said to Liebermann, “We’ll get him for you, and get more information out of him, quicker, than they will. I guarantee it.” The phone rang.

  Liebermann shook his head. “I have to use them,” he said, “because from them it has to go to Interpol. Other countries are involved. There are five other men besides this one.”

  Gorin was looking toward the door; he looked at Liebermann. “How many killings have there been?” he asked.

  “Eight that I know of.”

  Gorin looked pained. Someone whistled.

  “Seven that I know of,” Liebermann corrected himself. “One very probable. Maybe others.”

  “Jews?” Gorin asked.

  Liebermann shook his head. “Goyim.”

  “Why?” Bachrach at the window asked. “What’s it for?”

  “Yes,” Gorin said. “Who are they? Why does Mengele want them killed?”

  Liebermann drew a breath, blew it out. He leaned forward. “If
I tell you it’s very, very important,” he said, “more important in the long run than Russian anti-Semitism and the pressure on Israel—would that be enough for now? I promise you I’m not exaggerating.”

  In silence, Gorin frowned at the desk before him. He looked up at Liebermann, shook his head, and smiled apologetically. “No,” he said. “You’re asking Moshe Gorin to lend you three or four of his best men, maybe more. Men, not boys. At a time when we’re spread thin already and when the government’s breathing down my neck because I’m lousing up their precious détente. No, Yakov”—he shook his head—“I’ll give you all the help I can, but what kind of a leader would I be if I committed my men blindly, even to Yakov Liebermann?”

  Liebermann nodded. “I figured you’d at least want to know,” he said. “But don’t ask me for proof, Rabbi. Just listen and trust me. Or else I wasted my time.” He looked at all of them, looked at Gorin, cleared his throat. “By any chance,” he said, “did you ever study a little biology?”

  “God!” the one with the mustache said.

  Bachrach said, “The English word for it is ‘cloning.’ There was an article about it in the Times a few years ago.”

  Gorin smiled faintly, winding a loose thread around a cuff-button. “This morning,” he said, “by my son’s bedside, I said ‘What next, oh Lord?’” He smiled at Liebermann, gestured ruefully at him. “Ninety-four Hitlers.”

  “Ninety-four boys with Hitler’s genes,” Liebermann said.

  “To me,” Gorin said, “that’s ninety-four Hitlers.”

  Greenspan said to Liebermann, “Are you sure this man Wheelock hasn’t been killed already?”

  “I am.”

  “And that he hasn’t moved away?”—the black-bearded one.

  “I got his phone number,” Liebermann said. “I didn’t want to talk to him myself yet, until I knew you would do what I wanted you to”—he looked at Gorin—“but I had the woman from the couple I’m staying with call him this morning. She said she wanted to buy a dog and heard he raised them. It’s him. She got directions how to get there.”

  Gorin said to Greenspan, “We’re going to have to work this out of Philadelphia.” And to Liebermann: “The one thing we won’t do is take guns across a state border. The F.B.I. would love to get us along with the Nazi.”