Buried Strangers (23 page)
“CAN YOU SPARE ME ten minutes, Director?”
Sampaio put down his pen, motioned Silva forward, and smiled. “Well, finally,” he said. “What have you got on the bastard?”
Silva crossed the threshold carrying a briefcase. “It’s not about the minister’s press secretary,” Silva said. “It’s about that organ-theft business.”
Sampaio stopped smiling and picked up his pen.
“
Five
minutes. Five minutes tops, not ten.”
Silva waited for his boss to look up again, but Sampaio didn’t. The director circled an item on the page in front of him and appended a few words. The words ended in an exclamation point.
“I could come back later, Director.”
Sampaio tossed the document into his out-box, picked up another one, and made an impatient gesture with the hand holding the pen.
“No, no,” he said, “just get on with it.”
“The anesthesiologist and that swine, Ribeiro, are being most forthcoming, trying to outdo each other to see who gets the best deal from the prosecutors. Turns out, there were three cemeteries in all, another even larger one in the Serra da Cantareira and a slightly smaller one near the reservoir in the hills above Cotia. There were false names on all the deeds and tax records, but in the end, they all turned out to be properties purchased by Bittler for the express purpose of burying his victims.”
Sampaio kept writing.
“The victims were all strangers to Bittler and his friends. It’s unlikely we’ll ever be able to identify them all.”
Sampaio didn’t reply, didn’t bother to look up.
“With the cooperation of Gretchen Furtwangler, Bittler’s former secretary, we managed to track the Argentinian who ran the travel agency. He was lying low in Buenos Aires. The Argentinian federal police took him into custody about an hour ago.”
Sampaio capped his pen and put it into the inside pocket of his jacket.
“And the woman? Any leads on her whereabouts?”
“No.”
The director expelled a breath, removed his reading glasses, and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
“Too bad for you. Because I’m telling you right now, the press is all over this, and I don’t intend to take the blame for allowing that woman to escape.”
“No, of course you don’t,” Silva said.
Sampaio gave him a sharp look.
“And what do you mean by that?”
“You’ve delegated the task of capturing her to me. Only that.”
The director chose to accept Silva’s explanation rather than prolong the interview. He replaced his reading glasses. “Just as long as we understand each other,” he said, “Now, if you’re finished . . .”
“Not quite,” Silva said. “Bittler owned that clinic of his for more than thirty years. I have reason to believe that he might have been experimenting with heart transplants before there was any chance of them being a long-term solu-tion for anyone’s health problem.”
Sampaio glanced at Silva over the top of his half-moon lenses.
“That’s ancient history. No one cares about ancient history.
Before you jump to that conclusion,” Silva said, “you might want to take a look at this.” He opened the briefcase, extracted a photo, and slid it across Sampaio’s desk.
“First,” he said, “check out the inscription on the back.”
Sampaio flipped the photo over and studied it.
“German?” he asked.
“German,” Silva agreed. “It says, ‘Beppo and I. Opening Day.’ The handwriting is Bittler’s. Now look at the image.”
When Sampaio did, he was looking at two smiling men in white coats, arms on each other’s shoulders.
“That’s Bittler’s clinic in the background,” Silva said, “Bittler is the one on the left.”
“Who’s the guy standing next to him?”
“I got the photo when I searched Bittler’s office. It was in a silver frame on the mantelpiece.”
“I didn’t ask you where you got it. I asked you—”
“Back in 1985, when I was working out of the São Paulo field office, we got a call from the West German federal police. I say West German because the Berlin Wall was still up in those days.”
“You don’t have to be so damned precise. Stop wasting my time and get on with the story.”
“They’d searched the home of a guy named Sedlmeier, a lifelong friend of Josef Mengele’s”
“Mengele? That Nazi doctor? The one they called the Angel of Death?
“Him.”
“What did Mengele have to do with—”
“Bear with me. The West German cops found letters in Mengele’s handwriting. Recent letters. They squeezed Sedlmeier. He claimed Mengele was dead. They didn’t believe him. They squeezed a little more. He said Mengele was buried in Embu under a false name.”
Embu was a small town about thirty kilometers from São Paulo, known to Paulistas for the art fair held there every Sunday afternoon.
Sampaio put the photo aside. “Okay, this is getting inter-esting. Maybe you’d better sit down,” he said.
Silva sat and continued, “Sedlmeier claimed Mengele had been buried under the name Wolfgang Gerhard. The Germans asked us to check it out. We went to the cemetery, and there
was
a grave for a Wolfgang Gerhard. We got a court order and exhumed the body.”
“And?”
“The guy in the grave wasn’t Gerhard. The real Gerhard, the one who’d been issued a permanent resident visa, was a taller man, and younger. Next thing we knew, a whole raft of foreigners descended on us: Israelis, Americans, West Germans, pathologists, forensic anthropologists, security services, the whole lot. Some of them said the body was Mengele’s, some of them said it wasn’t. They would have kept arguing for years if the West Germans hadn’t talked Mengele’s son into contributing a sample of his DNA.”
“Mengele had a son?”
Silva nodded. “Rolf. He admitted that the old bastard had been living here for years. Came over to visit him once, said they didn’t get along, but we could hardly expect him to turn in his own father.”
“And the body? Was it Mengele’s?”
“It was. Turned out he died of a stroke while swimming in the sea off Bertioga.”
Silva took another photo out of his briefcase. It was a black-and-white head shot of a smiling young man wearing an old-fashioned necktie and what appeared to be a black jacket. “Mengele,” he said. “A photo taken in 1940. We got it from the West German police, and they got it from his war records. See that little growth on his face and the big gap between his front teeth?”
Sampaio nodded.
“Distinctive,” he said.
“Now look at the first photo again.”
The director put both photos side by side, looked from one to the other.
“Sure as hell looks like the same guy,” Sampaio said. He started to rub his chin.
“Here’s the clincher,” Silva said. “Mengele had a nick-name. The story is that he was a bit of a prankster in his youth. A circus passed through his town. They had an Italian clown.”
“Beppo?”
“Beppo. The townsfolk gave Mengele the nickname, and the nickname stuck. He used it all of his life.”
“I’ll be damned,” Sampaio said. “So Gerhard was Mengele, and Beppo was Mengele, and Mengele and Bittler were buddies?”
“Buddies, I don’t know. Colleagues, certainly. Look at the white coats, the inscription.”
Sampaio left off studying the photographs and cast a sus-picious eye on Silva.
“And how come you just happened to recognize Mengele?
Because I saw his photos hundreds of times. The case made a major impression on me. Nazi in our own backyard and all that.”
“Okay. Hold on. Let’s go back a bit. You figure Mengele helped Bittler to put this whole thing together, the clinic, the organ thefts, all of that?”
“We looked into Bittler’s background. He would
never
have had the money to go into business on his own. But Mengele did. Mengele’s family owned a big company that made agricultural machinery. Still does. They’re loaded. The son admitted they sent the old man money. Not so much until 1978, and then, all of a sudden, a lot of it, more than two million deutschmarks in 1978, another eight hundred and fifty thousand in early 1979.”
“What’s that in dollars, or euros?”
“I don’t remember, but, like I said, it’s a lot, and we were never able to find out what he did with it.”
“But now you figure—”
“According to the people we interviewed, the people that knew him, the old man wasn’t into money. What turned him on was using human beings as guinea pigs. He would have needed a front man, a partner, someone who could give the patina of legitimacy to a clinic. Or maybe I should say a lab-oratory. He had kidney problems in his youth. Was fascinated with the idea of transplants.”
Instead of looking shocked or somber, Sampaio broke into a broad smile. “Christ, what a story. The greedy young punk who’s in it for the money and the world-class war criminal who likes to cut people up for fun. It’s gonna be front-page news in the whole damned—”
He brought himself up short. The smile faded. “Who else knows about this?” he asked.
“My nephew and four other cops in São Paulo.”
“Federal cops? People who ultimately report to me?”
“Yes.”
The smile came back. “Get onto all five of them right now,” Sampaio said. “Tell them they’re to say nothing about this to anyone. I want to break this story myself.”
“I rather thought you might,” Silva said.
The second half of Josef Mengele’s life is shrouded in mys-tery, but he did, indeed, suffer a fatal stroke while bathing in the ocean off the Brazilian seaside town of Bertioga and his sobriquet
was
Beppo. It is equally true that he suffered from kidney problems in his youth, was fascinated by the idea of organ transplants, and was buried in Embu under the name Wolfgang Gerhard. The roles attributed to his friend, Sedlmeier, and his son, Rolf, are also part of the historical record. As of this writing, his remains are still lying in a drawer at the Instituto Médico Legal in São Paulo.
The first Portuguese explorers landed in Brazil in 1500, and the indigenous inhabitants of the country have been ex-ploited, in one way or another, ever since. There were ap-proximately five million native Brazilians at the time of the European conquest. Today, their numbers don’t exceed three hundred fifty thousand, of which as many as forty thousand have had little or no contact with modern society.
Brazil is a place of many religions and many cults, with mil-lions of people who actively practice more than one belief at the same time. Candomblé, for example, the Brazilian form of what is called Santeria in Cuba and Vodou in Haiti, often attracts the same people who frequent Sunday mass at the local Catholic church. Despite the condemnation of the Vatican, the two religions persist and intermingle, existing side by side in perfect harmony.
Wicca, much rarer in Brazil and much maligned as a form of witchcraft, is an earth-based religion in which the main belief is to do harm to none.
But Brazil harbors evil cults, as well. A case in point was the Superior Universal Alignment Sect, members of which were charged with kidnapping boys, cutting off their geni-tals, and sacrificially killing them. The cult’s members included two doctors and the son of a prominent business-man, all well-to-do and all with political connections. It took eleven years, and intervention by the governor of the Amazonian state of Pará, to force a change of venue and bring the perpetrators to justice.
According to recent research, 79 percent of all Brazilians (the figure is higher for urban dwellers) live in fear that they or someone close to them might be a victim of violent crime. They have good reason. The murder rate in São Paulo is six-teen times higher than in Tokyo.
Countrywide, at least one million people live in shanty-towns where the police are loathe to go.
The Comando Vermelho and the Primeiro Comando Capital (PCC) exist and are currently at war with the gov-ernments of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. They do, indeed, kill hundreds of policemen.
Rumors of murder for the purpose of organ theft persist.
None have been confirmed.
São Paulo
February, 2007