Boys from Brazil (22 page)

He stood with his back to his bolted door, hung the
Do Not Disturb
sign on air and let it fall, knocked at air. “Compliments of the management, sir.” He carried the tray across the room, set it on the dresser, drew the knife from the sheath in his belt; turned, keeping the knife behind him; walked, stopped, put out his left hand. “Sank you, sir.” Grabbed with his left hand, stabbed with his right.

“Thank you, sir.
Thank
you.
Th, th, th
.” Grab with the left hand, stab with the right.

Do Jews tip?

He worked out some alternative movements.

 

The sunlit plateau of clouds ended abruptly; blue-black ocean lay below, wrinkled and white-flecked, immobile. Liebermann gazed down at it, his chin in his hand.

Ei.

He had lain awake all night, sat awake all day, thinking of a full-grown Hitler hurling his demonic speeches at mobs too discontented to care about history. Two or
three
Hitlers even, maneuvering to power in different places, recognized by their followers and themselves as the first human beings bred by what in 1990 or so would be a widely known, maybe widely practiced, procedure. More alike than brothers, the same man multiplied, wouldn't they join forces and wage again (with 1990 weapons!) their first one's racial war? Certainly that was Mengele's hope; Barry had said so: “It's supposed to lead to the triumph of the Aryan race, for God's sake!” Words to that effect.

A lovely package to bring to an F.B.I. that's had an almost hundred-percent turnover since Hoover died in '72. He could hear the puzzled question: “Yakov
who?
”

It had been easy enough last night to tell Klaus he would manage, would break down doors; and in truth he wasn't wholly without contacts. There were senators he had met who were still in office; one of them, surely, would unlock the right doors for him. But now, having weighed the horror, he was afraid that even with unlocked doors too much time might be lost. Guthrie's and Curry's deaths would have to be investigated, their widows questioned, the Wheelocks questioned…Now it was the utmost necessity to capture Wheelock's would-be killer and find through him the five others. The rest of the ninety-four men had to stay alive; the knobs of the safes, to follow Lena's comparison (a good one to remember and use in the days ahead), must not be allowed to be turned to what was maybe the last and most crucial number in the combination.

And making matters even worse, the 22nd was only an approximation of Wheelock's death date. What if the real date was earlier? What if—laughable, the small thing future history might hinge on—Frieda Maloney had been wrong about the puppy being ten weeks old? What if it had been nine weeks old, or eight weeks old, when the Wheelocks got their baby? The killer might kill and be gone a few days from now.

He looked at his watch: 10:28. Which was wrong; he hadn't set it back yet. He did it now—spun the hands and gave himself six extra hours, at least as far as watches were concerned: 4:28. New York in half an hour, customs, and the short hop to Washington. He'd get some sleep tonight, he hoped—he was a little punchy already—and in the morning he would call the senators' offices; call Shettles too, some others on Nürnberger's list.

If only he could arrange
now
to have Wheelock's killer watched for, without any waiting, explaining, checking, questioning. He should have come sooner; would have, of course, if he had known the full enormity…

Ei.

What he needed, really, was a Jewish F.B.I. Or a U.S. branch of Israel's Mossad. Someplace where he could go in tomorrow and say, “A Nazi is coming to kill a man named Wheelock in New Providence, Pennsylvania. Guard him; capture the Nazi. Don't ask me questions, I'll explain later. I'm Yakov Liebermann—would I steer you wrong?” And they would go ahead and do it.

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.”