Boys from Brazil (11 page)

Farnbach was astonished. “Oh my God!” he gasped. “I thought of you just a second ago! I guess I—My
God!
Captain Hartung!”

The two shook hands enthusiastically, and the captain, laughing, embraced Farnbach and clapped him on the back; then jammed his hat back on and grasped Farnbach's shoulders with both hands and grinned at him. “What joy to see one of the old faces again!” he exclaimed. “I'm liable to cry, God damn it!”

“But…how can this be?” Farnbach asked, thoroughly confused now. “I'm…astounded!”

The captain laughed. “You can be Busch,” he said; “why can't I be Löfquist? My God, I've got an accent! Listen to me; I'm really a fucking Swede now!”

“And you
are
a detective?”

“That I am.”

“Christ, you threw a scare into me, sir.”

The captain nodded regretfully, patting Farnbach's shoulder. “Yes, we still worry that the ax might fall, eh, Farnstein? Even after all these years. That's why I keep an eye out for foreigners. I still dream once in a while that I'm hauled up on trial!”

“I can't believe it's you!” Farnbach said, not yet composed. “I don't think I've ever been so surprised!”

They walked on up the path.

“I never forget a face, I never forget a name.” The captain laid an arm over Farnbach's shoulders. “I spotted you standing by your car, at the gas station on Krondikesvägen. ‘That's Corporal Farnstein in that elegant coat,' I said; ‘I'll bet a hundred kronor.'”

“It's Farn
bach
, sir, not ‘stein.'”

“Oh? Well, ‘stein' is close enough, isn't it, after thirty years? With all the men I commanded? Of course, I had to be absolutely certain before I could speak. It was your voice that clinched it; it hasn't changed at all. And drop the ‘sir,' will you? Though I have to admit it's nice hearing it again.”

“How in the world did you wind up here?” Farnbach asked. “And a detective, of all things!”

“It's no great story,” the captain said, taking his arm from Farnbach's shoulders. “I had a sister who was married to a Swede, on a farm down in SkÃ¥ne. After I was captured I escaped from the internment camp and got over by ship—Lübeck to Trelleborg; that was the sailing I mentioned—and hid out with them. He wasn't too keen on it. Lars Löfquist. A real s.o.b.; he mistreated poor Eri something awful. After a year or so he and I had a big row and I accidentally finished him. Well, I simply buried him good and deep and took his place! We were the same type physically, so his papers suited me, and Eri was glad to be rid of him. When someone who knew him came by I bandaged my face and she told them a lamp had exploded and I couldn't talk too much. After a couple of months we sold the farm and came up north here. To Sundsvall first, where we worked in a cannery, which was awful; and three years later, here to Storlien, where there were openings on the force and jobs for Eri in shops. And that's it. I liked police work, and what better way to get wind if anyone was looking for me? That roaring you hear is the fall; it's just around the bend. Now what about you, Farnstein? Farn
bach!
How did you become Herr Busch the affluent salesman? That coat must have cost you more than I make in a year!”

“I'm not ‘Herr Busch,'” Farnbach said sourly. “I'm ‘Senhor Paz' of Pôrto Alegre, Brazil. Busch is a cover. I'm up here on a job for the Comrades Organization, and a damned crazy job it is too.”

Now it was the captain's turn to stop and stare, astonished. “You mean…it's real? The Organization exists? It's not just…newspaper stories?”

“It's real, all right,” Farnbach said. “They helped me get settled there, found me a good job…”

“And they're
here
now? In Sweden?”

“
I'm
here now;
they're
still down there, working with Dr. Mengele to ‘fulfill the Aryan destiny.' At least that's what they tell me.”

“But…this is marvelous, Farnstein! My God, it's the most exciting news I've—We aren't done! We
won't
be beaten! What's going on? Can you tell me? Would it violate orders to tell an SS officer?”

“
Fuck
orders, I'm
sick
of orders,” Farnbach said. He looked for a moment at the startled captain, then said, “I'm here in Storlien to kill a schoolteacher. An old man who's not our enemy and who can't possibly affect the course of history by so much as a hair. But killing him, and a lot of others, is a ‘holy operation' that's going to bring us back to power somehow. So says Dr. Mengele.” He turned and strode away up the path.

The captain, confused, watched him go, then hurried angrily after him. “Damn it, what's the idea?” he demanded. “If you can't tell me, say so! Don't give me—Was it
all
shit? That's a lousy trick to pull on me, Farn
BACH!
”

Farnbach, breathing hard through his nostrils, came out onto a small balcony of jutting rock, and grasping its iron railing with both hands, gazed bitterly at a broad sheet of shining water that sheared down torrentially at his left. He followed the gleaming water-sheet down and down into its thundering foaming basin, and spat at it.

The captain yanked him around. “That's a
lousy
trick to pull,” he cried, close and loud against the fall's thunder. “I really believed you!”

“It wasn't a trick,” Farnbach insisted. “It's the truth, every word of it! I killed a man in Göteborg two weeks ago—a teacher too, Anders Runsten. Did you ever hear of him? Neither did I. Neither did anyone. A complete nonentity, retired, sixty-five. A
beer-bottle
collector, for God's sake!
Bragged
to me about his eight hundred and thirty
beer bottles!
I…shot him in the head and emptied his wallet.”

“Göteborg,” the captain said. “Yes, I remember the report!”

Farnbach turned to the railing, held it, and stared at rock wall across the thundering twilit chasm. “And Saturday, I'm to do another one,” he said. “It's senseless! Insane! How could it possibly…accomplish anything?”

“There's a definite date?”

“Everything is extremely precise!”

The captain stepped close to Farnbach's side. “And your orders were given to you by a ranking officer?”

“By Mengele, with the Organization's endorsement. Colonel Seibert shook our hands the morning we left Brazil.”

“It's not only you?”

“There are other men, in other countries.”

Grasping Farnbach's arm, the captain said angrily, “Then don't let me hear you say again ‘Fuck orders'! You're a corporal who's been assigned a
duty
, and if your superiors have chosen not to tell you the reason for it, then they have a reason for
that
too. Good Christ, you're an SS man; behave like one! ‘My Honor Is Loyalty.' Those words were supposed to be engraved on your soul!”

Turning, facing the captain, Farnbach said, “The war is
over
, sir.”

“No!” the captain cried. “Not if the Organization is real and working! Don't you think your colonel knows what he's doing? My God, man, if there's a chance in a hundred of the Reich being restored, how can you
not
do everything in your power to help make it happen? Think of it, Farnbach! The Reich restored! We could go home again! As heroes! To a Germany of order and discipline in this fucked-up undisciplined world!”

“But how can the killing of harmless old men—”

“Who is this teacher? I'll bet he's not as harmless as you think! Who is he? Lundberg? Olafsson? Who?”

“Lundberg.”

The captain was silent for a moment. “Well, I'll admit he
seems
harmless,” he said, “but how do we know what he's really up to, eh? And how do we know what your colonel knows? And the doctor! Come on, man; stiffen your spine and do your duty! ‘An order is an order.'”

“Even when it makes no sense?”

The captain closed his eyes, breathed deeply; opened his eyes, glared at Farnbach. “Yes,” he said. “Even when it makes no sense. It makes sense to your superiors or they wouldn't have given it to you. My God, there's hope again, Farnbach; will it come to nothing because of your weakness?”

Frowning uneasily, Farnbach moved to the captain's side.

The captain turned to stay facing him. “You won't have any trouble at all,” he said. “I'll point Lundberg out to you. I can even tell you his habits. My son had him for two years; I know him very well.”

Farnbach snugged his cap down. He smiled quizzically and said, “The Löfquists…have a son?”

“Yes, why not?” The captain looked at him, and flushed. “Oh,” he said; and coldly: “My sister died in '57. And then I married. You have a dirty mind.”

“Forgive me,” Farnbach said. “I'm sorry.”

The captain thrust his hands into his pockets. “Well!” he said, still flushed. “I hope I've managed to put some starch back into you.”

Farnbach nodded. “‘The Reich restored,'” he said; “that's what I have to keep thinking of.”

“And your officers and fellow soldiers,” the captain said. “They're depending on you to do your job; you're not going to leave them out on a limb, are you? I'll give you a hand with Lundberg. I'm on duty Saturday but I'll switch with one of the other men; no problem.”

Farnbach shook his head. “It isn't Lundberg,” he said. He lunged; gloved hands pushed black-leathered chest.

The captain, one eye gaping from under his hat, fell backward over the railing, pulled his hands free of his coat and scooped armfuls of air. Turning feet-over-head, he dropped away toward the foaming basin far below.

Farnbach leaned over the railing and looked down unhappily. “And it doesn't have to be Saturday,” he said.

 

Getting off the Frankfurt-to-Essen plane at the Essen-Mülheim Airport, Liebermann was surprised to find that he felt pretty good. Not great, no, but not rotten either, and rotten was the way he had felt the other two times he had set foot in the Ruhr. This was where everything had come from: the guns, the tanks, the planes, the submarines. Hitler's armory this place had been, and its pall of smog had seemed to Liebermann (in '59 and again in '66) like a mark, not of peacetime industry but of wartime guilt; a sun-blocking shroud laid down from above rather than raised up from below. Going into it he had felt depressed and disheartened, reached for by the past. Rotten.

He had braced himself for the same reaction this time, but no, he felt pretty good; the smog was only smog, no different from Manchester's or Pittsburgh's, and nothing was reaching for him. On the contrary, it was he—in a smooth-speeding new Mercedes taxi—who was doing the reaching. And about time. Almost two months ago he had listened to Barry Koehler's wild story from São Paulo and felt Mengele's hatred assailing him; and now, finally, he was taking action, was going into Gladbeck to ask questions about Emil Döring, sixty-five, “until recently on the staff of the Essen Public Transport Commission.” Had he been murdered? Was he linked in any way to men in other countries? Was there a reason why Mengele and the Comrades Organization should have wanted him dead? If ninety-four men really were to die, there was a one-in-three chance that Döring had been the first of them. By tonight he might
know
.

But ei…what if Reuters had missed some of the October 16th possibles? The chance might really be one in four or five. Or six. Or ten. Don't think about it; stay feeling good.

“He went into the passageway to relieve himself,” Chief Inspector Haas said in his guttural North German accent. “Bad luck; the wrong place at the wrong time.” He was a hard-looking man in his late forties, his face ruddy and pitted with pockmarks, his blue eyes close-set, his fair hair almost gone. His clothes were neat, his desk was neat, his office was neat. His manner to Liebermann was courteous. “It was a whole section of third-floor wall that came down on him. The foreman of the job said later that someone must have worked at it with a crowbar, but of course he
would
say that, wouldn't he? It couldn't be proved, because the first thing we did, naturally, after getting Döring out from under the rubble, was to use crowbars ourselves, to knock down everything that still threatened to fall. We felt we were dealing with a straightforward accident. Which we were; that's what it's been declared. The wrecker's insurers have already reached an agreement with the widow; if there were any suspicion of murder, you can be sure they wouldn't have been in such a hurry.”

“But still,” Liebermann said, “it
could
have been murder, conceivably.”

“It depends what kind you mean,” Haas said. “Some tramps or hoodlums might have been scavenging around in the building, yes. They see a man go into the passageway and decide to have themselves some sick excitement. Yes, that's conceivable. Slightly. But murder with a more normal motive, aimed specifically at Herr Döring? No, that's
not
conceivable. How could anyone who was following him have got up to the third floor and pried loose a whole section of wall in the short time he was in the passageway? He was in the act of urinating when he died, and he'd had
two
beers, not two hundred.” Haas smiled.

Liebermann said, “The prying could have been done in advance. One man is waiting, ready to give the final shove, and another,
with
Döring, induces him somehow to…go to the right place.”

“How? ‘Why don't you stop and piss, my friend? Right over there on that X someone's painted'? And he left the bar alone. No, Herr Liebermann”—Haas spoke with finality—“I've been through this before; you can be sure it was an accident. Murderers don't go to such lengths. They choose the simple ways: shoot, stab, strike. You know that.”