Sam Harris Adventure Box Set Page 2

They hugged each other on parting, despite the argument, one in a long line on the same subject. Hannah disapproved of her being back with Simon, and for good reason, but so did her parents. It was a case of joining the crowd. They were right but now there was a complication she hadn’t counted on. She had to get away, as far away as possible to give her thinking room. Gloria would know what to do.

  CHAPTER II

  Calderon August 1988

  Alfredo Vargas had been working in his study when the telephone rang. Despite the loud and persistent nature of the tone, it was difficult to locate it in the sea of documents and open books layered on his desk like a giant piece of filo pastry. He put his ear to the pile and felt in the dust with his hand for the vibration that would give its position away. Finding the handset, he untangled the cord from a dead pot plant.

  Whoever was ringing him was persistent and determined. Most people gave up sooner. He held it to his ear with some trepidation as he was not convinced he wanted to answer. Perhaps it was someone to whom he owed money? Or his mother demanding an update?

  ‘Hello, can I speak to Alfredo Vargas please?’

  American accented Spanish. Nasal and whiny with a touch of Brooklyn.

  ‘Who’s speaking please?’

  ‘Ah, you speak English. My name is Saul Rosen. I’m a journalist.’ Alfredo noticed that English was not his mother tongue either. It was a weird mix of Brooklyn and some European accent. French?

  ‘I still don’t know who you are. What do you want?’

  ‘I’m looking for Alfredo Vargas, the historian. I’ve a proposition for him.’

  ‘What sort of proposition? I’m busy right now.’

  ‘Are you Dr Vargas? That’s a piece of luck. You’ve no idea how difficult it is to get hold of you.’

  Alfredo made concerted efforts to avoid most human contact, which he found mundane and trying, so he knew how tricky it was to get hold of him.

  ‘How did you get my number?’

  ‘From Dr Gallagher in New York.’

  ‘Ah, Dick Gallagher, that explains it. You’ve got work for me? What does it involve?’

  ‘I need help with an assignment in Sierramar. It’s confidential and may even be dangerous. I want you to research something for me.’

  ‘What’s the subject of this investigation?’

  He tried to control his excitement. Alfredo was self-sufficient in funds, being the product of a wealthy family with money to burn, but he needed something to engage his mind. His drinking had spiralled out of control again despite the efforts of his girlfriend, Gloria. He wanted to make her proud and to get her father to accept their relationship but being underemployed only made drink more appealing.

  ‘I’m working as a consultant for the Simon Wiesenthal Centre doing research into Nazi war criminals who fled to South America after the end of the second world war. The War Crimes Commission is keen on finding and arresting them. I’ve been following several lines of inquiry that lead to Sierramar.’

  ‘Sierramar? Are you positive?’

  Several notorious war criminals had been found in Argentina, Chile and Brazil but he had never heard of any in his country. Sierramar was one of the few democracies in South America without a fascist regime in its past.

  ‘Yes. It’s not something I was expecting. I guess as a historian you would expect to be informed about it, but that’s the point. The government of Sierramar colluded with the Germans to let war criminals escape justice. The collaboration has been hushed up and the evidence hidden.’

  ‘So how can I help?’

  ‘I thought you might have access to the files in the National Archives which could back this story up. I doubt they would let an American access them, but I presume that you wouldn’t experience any problem getting the information I need.’

  ‘I go there often. I don’t see why I can’t help you with this. It seems straight forward enough. How much would you pay me?’

  ‘I can offer you one hundred dollars a day with an upfront payment of five hundred. Does that suit you?’

  ‘That sounds about right,’ said Alfredo, covering his surprise at the generous offer, most gringos were rich. ‘Do you have a pen with you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Okay, my fax number is 02687865. You’ll need to put the country code for Sierramar in front of it and you may need to eliminate the zero. Why don’t you fax me a proposal and I will get back to you with my decision and, if necessary, my bank details, in due course.’

  ‘I’ll do that today.’

  ‘Excellent.’

  ‘Thank you, Dr Vargas.’

  ‘Alfredo, please. Can I call you Saul?’

  ‘Sure. Okay, goodbye for now.’

  Alfredo hung up the receiver and sat back in his large leather armchair. He was a bit suspicious that Saul was willing to pay so much for some simple research but he wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. It was a proper job. He couldn’t wait to tell Gloria. How difficult could it be?

  ***

  Saul was ecstatic. He couldn’t believe his luck in finding Alfredo, who seemed to be the perfect candidate for the job. He owed Dick Gallagher a bottle of whisky. There was no need to tell anyone the real reason he was researching the Nazi presence in Sierramar. It was unlikely that Alfredo would come up with anything concrete if he had never even heard of his government’s collaboration with the Third Reich. Were the incriminating documents sitting on the shelves of the National Archives, waiting to be discovered? It had taken years for him to follow the trail of Dr Kurt Becker from Brussels to Calderon. It might be a long time before Alfredo would come up with anything of substance. He could wait. Revenge is a dish best served cold, and this had mould on it. He folded the piece of paper with Alfredo’s number and put it in a zipped compartment of his wallet. Then he went into his study and looked for a document he could use as a template for Alfredo’s contract. Money was no object in this case. His search was coming to a climax and he hoped it would finish with a bang.

  ***

  Alfredo was almost as excited. He loved a new project and couldn’t wait to get started. It was impossible to wait for Saul to formalise their relationship before starting his research. The suggestion that there were Nazi war criminals hiding in Sierramar had mystified him. His status as a historian had been challenged. At thirty-five years’ old, his colleagues considered him to be one of the most knowledgeable men in his field, but his studies tended to the esoteric side and were concentrated on the study of the Valdivia and Inca cultures of South America. The Second World War wasn’t worthy of his interest; it was only yesterday, for heaven’s sake. Hardly history. He couldn’t imagine his little country with its mountains, beaches and jungles being anything other than a democratic paradise. Despite the revolutions and fascist regimes that plagued the rest of Latin America, Sierramar had never had a civil war or a dictator. It had dodgy governments, with the usual bribery and corruption that accompanied real poverty, but the suggestion that it was harbouring Nazi fugitives was shocking for him. And yet, there was something about the story which rang true.

  Intrigued, he racked his brains for clues. There were people of German descent in Calderon, many of them his age, who hung out with the wealthy local families similar to his. He had met their mothers, but he couldn’t remember their fathers. Rarely anyway. It had never occurred to him before because he didn’t place much importance on family relationships. The history of the German community in Calderon was a mystery to him but he now determined to trace its origins. He started at the source of most of his local gossip, Gloria, his girlfriend and daughter of the nouveaux-riche Hernan Sanchez, a government contractor.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hi, mi amour, what’s up?’

  ‘Do you want to meet me for lunch today? It’s short notice but I need to see you.’

  ‘I can be at the Banana Verde in an hour.’

  ‘Great, I’ll wait for you outside.’

  He
drove into the centre of town, buying a newspaper from the street vendor who was breastfeeding her child at the traffic light in a cloud of exhaust fumes. Various little children sat on the divider in the middle of the road, under a tree with shrivelled leaves poisoned by lead particles, their dirty faces pictures of boredom and misery. He tried not to notice and refused his change with a wave of the hand. Calderon was a prosperous town but the indigenous population formed a large part of the begging and jobless in the capital. There seemed to be a family at every junction.

  He sat on a bench outside the restaurant and read his newspaper in the shade of an ugly tower block. Some dusty birds pecked at the dry earth in the flower bed which held only painted stones and lumps of chewing gum. Gloria arrived half an hour later than promised, doing what looked like a handbrake turn into a parking spot, leaving a fresh arc of rubber in the road. She jumped out of the car in her skin-tight jeans and cowboy boots, her bright shirt straining at the buttons. Her hair was painted in the multi-coloured stripes that passed for highlights in Calderon. She was sucking on a cigarette and glancing around, her eyes screwed up against the bright rays of the noon-day sun.

  ‘Ah, mi amour! There you are. Let’s go inside.’

  ‘How are you, darling? You look wonderful. I love your hair.’

  ‘Thank you, it’s all the rage.’

  She did a flirtatious twirl in front of him and his heart skipped in his chest. He was a man besotted. Until they got together, he had considered Gloria so out of his league he had never dared to talk to her.

  They pushed through the door into the cool interior and the manager showed them to the best table as befitted the daughter of Hernan Sanchez. A waiter gave them menus.

  ‘Do you want to hear the specials?’ he said.

  ‘No, thank you. Can you bring me some potato soup with an extra portion of avocado, please? Alfredo?’

  ‘Raise the dead soup please, although it would be a miracle if it worked this time.’

  ‘Can you bring us a jug of fresh lemonade, too, please?’

  ‘Certainly, Senorita Sanchez.’

  The waiter withdrew leaving them in the relative privacy of their corner table.

  ‘What’s so important that you couldn’t tell me on the phone?’ said Gloria, ‘and why do you look so exhausted? Have you been drinking?’

  ‘Drinking? Oh, not really, that is, not much, only thinking amounts.’

  ‘Thinking amounts? Thinking about what?’

  ‘I’ve got a job.’

  Gloria’s jaw dropped so far that he could see her fillings.

  ‘A job? You?’

  She blurted out ‘How wonderful!’ before an embarrassing silence occurred. Alfredo didn’t notice because she leaned forward resting her bosom on the table, a manoeuvre which distracted him.

  ‘Yes, it’s wonderful,’ he said.

  ‘Oi, concentrate. So, what’s the job?’

  ‘A journalist called Saul Rosen has rung me from New York. He asked me to research the German community in Calderon. My social contacts aren’t as good as yours, and I’m not convinced this isn’t a red herring so I wanted to pick your brains. I don’t want to waste my time if there’s nothing to find. I need your advice before I get started with searching in the National Archives.’

  ‘How mysterious you are today. I’d love to help you if I can. Tell me all about it.’

  ‘Okay, but I need you to please listen and not comment or fly off the handle until I finish. It’s not an easy subject and its implications may upset you.’

  Gloria lit a cigarette.

  ‘Okay, I promise to listen first and shout later.’

  ‘Well, believe it or not, this journalist claims he’s found evidence that some important Nazi war criminals are hiding in Sierramar. He wants me to research the story to see if we can verify it. His research indicates that our government are aware of their presence and colluded with the Third Reich.’

  Gloria looked as if she wanted to interject but Alfredo held his hand up to stop her. ‘I am aware you will defend our country to the death rather than accept this but please consider the possibility first. I have been doing a lot of thinking and it rings true in some aspects. I wish it didn’t.’

  ‘Hence the drinking.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry. It helped soften the blow when it became clear that there was some substance to the story. There are lots of wealthy German families in Calderon. Where did they came from and where did they get their wealth? The older men have disappeared or were never there. Why do so many families have a matriarch but no patriarch?’

  He paused. Gloria looked as if she was struggling to contain an outburst. She lit another cigarette and smoked it, tapping it hard on the ash tray. The soup arrived. They both attacked their bowls without speaking. Gloria’s brow furrowed in concentration. She pushed back her empty bowl and gulped down a glass of lemonade.

  ‘You’re right,’ she said at last. ‘There’s been something odd happening in the German community in Calderon.’

  Alfredo let out the breath he had been holding as surreptitiously as he could. Gloria paused, shutting her eyes as if to focus on her recollection of a half-remembered episode.

  ‘There were some weird goings on among my German friends at school,’ she said. ‘There were two sisters who had blonde hair, but they had dark eyebrows. We know what that means.’

  And here she looked at Alfredo for affirmation but he was flummoxed.

  ‘Ay, but men are so stupid sometimes. It means they are dyeing their hair. Blonde women have blonde eyebrows.’ She sighed.

  ‘So? How is that weird?’

  ‘One of these sisters was in my class, and she was a friend of mine, so we used to have sleepovers. Sometimes we had a glass of wine stolen from my father’s drinks cabinet. One night, she had too much wine and I asked her why she dyed her hair blonde. She was only fourteen then.’

  ‘What did she tell you?’

  ‘When the girls were little, they both had blonde hair and their father doted on them. Their hair began to turn brown as they got older and their father got furious because he wanted them to look more Aryan. He told them that the Aryans were the master race and that anyone else would be enslaved or eliminated when the Fourth Reich came into being. He had a violent temper so their mother protected them from his rages by dyeing their hair.’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘I don’t know. I remember that he often left them alone for weeks without telling them where he was going. He disappeared for good with several of his friends when we were about eighteen. There were rumours that they left the country for Argentina.’

  Alfredo was transfixed.

  ‘Oh God,’ he said, ‘I’d no idea that Nazi fugitives were living here. I must find out more.’

  ‘Be careful. If the government helped the Third Reich to hide some of their war criminals from justice, they won’t be happy being exposed as collaborators. They’d be in their late sixties and seventies now so a lot of them are still alive.’

  But Alfredo was no longer listening.

  CHAPTER III

  Berlin, April 1945

  Dr Becker removed the severed finger from his pocket and unwrapped it from the greased proof paper in which he had concealed it. Dropping it into sterilised saline in a glass vial, he sealed it with hot wax. Then he put the vial into a metal tube and screwed on the top. With trembling hands, he placed the tube into a large canister of dry ice. Removing it from the corpse had been straightforward despite his trepidation. No-one wanted to enter the room while the smell of almonds hung in the air.

  Death had been instantaneous. Hitler’s head was on the coffee table with blood dripping from his right temple. The automatic, a Walther PPK, was lying on the floor below the dead hand that had dropped it. Becker strode over to the body. The state of the Führer’s hands shocked him. Drug abuse had blackened by the nails on the end of his thin, grey fingers. They were not the hands of a wel
l man. No wonder the Führer had stayed hidden in the bunker for so long.

  The finger had come away without a struggle. The enormity of the sacrilege was hard to ignore but Becker kept telling himself that he was doing this for posterity. He wrapped the body in a blanket and went for help. It was taken out of the bunker for cremation with that of his mistress, Eva Braun. Nobody noticed that the Führer’s left hand was missing a finger.

  It had been easy to get permission to leave Berlin with the impending arrival of the Russians and the consequent breakdown of normal procedure. Nobody cared any more. People were trying to get away and many were taking what they could and abandoning Berlin. He requisitioned a truck and half a dozen young soldiers, who looked as if they hadn’t started shaving yet, for a mission of utmost national importance, a phrase guaranteed to make people jump to attention and ask few questions. The soldiers were grateful to get out of Berlin and head for the relative safety of the coast with no questions asked. He packed his own trunks full of booty from the sacked Jewish houses in Belgium. Gold chains and watches, delicate porcelain wrapped in mink coats, portraits of plump eighteenth-century matrons. Confident he could buy anything he wanted in South America, he left most of his clothes behind. It would also make him less easy to spot when he started his new life in Sierramar.

  Directing his driver to follow the truck, they started off down the road. His identification papers as a member of the Führer’s household got him through the checkpoints with no delays. No one dared to question his right to travel wherever he wanted. Despite the chaos of troops and civilians streaming in both directions on the main roads, they made good progress and arrived at the Port of Hamburg with plenty of time to catch the tramp liner to Sierramar before it left.

  Becker and a group of thirty other SS and Gestapo officers had hired the steamer under a neutral flag for making their escape from Europe when they realised that the war was lost. Everything from cars to containers of furniture and paintings looted from conquered towns, to gold bars, diamonds and jewellery was loaded aboard the liner by the dockworkers, who were ignorant of the valuable cargo that they handled. The cranes lifted the pallets from the dockside and lowered them into the bowels of the ship while the passengers waited on the shore and confirmed that their belongings went on board. Most of the men had brought their families with them. They stood on the quay drinking coffee in their fur coats as if waiting to go on a cruise.