When Peter spoke after a moment, he seemed distracted, his words disjointed. “I was afraid you’d come to Switzerland. I’ve always had to be so careful. I think they were never really convinced I was dead.”
“Will you please tell me what the hell is going on?” Ben exploded.
Peter looked straight ahead at the road. “I know it was a terrible thing to do, but I had no choice.”
“Dad’s never been the same since, you bastard, and Mom…”
Peter drove for a moment in silence. “I know about Mom. Don’t…” His voice turned steely. “I really don’t give a damn what happens to Max.”
Surprised, Ben looked at his brother’s face. “Well, you proved that, all right.”
“It’s you and Mom I felt… sick about. What I knew it would do to you two. You have no idea how much I wanted to contact you, tell you the truth. Tell you I was alive.”
“Now do you want to tell me why?”
“I was trying to protect you, Benno. I would never have done it otherwise. If I thought they’d just kill me and that would be the end of it, I’d have gladly let them do it. But I knew they’d go after my family, too. Meaning you and Mom. Dad—as far as I’m concerned, Dad died to me four years ago.”
Ben was at once thrilled to see Peter and furious at the deception, and he was finding it hard to think logically. “What are you talking about? Will you tell me a straight story already?”
Peter glanced over at what looked like a lodge set back from the road, a halogen light flooding its front entrance.
“What is it, five in the morning? But it looks like maybe someone’s awake here.” A light was on above the inn’s front door.
He pulled the truck into a hidden clearing in the trees near the auberge and shut off the engine. The two men got out. The predawn morning was cold and quiet, with just the faint rustle of a small animal or bird from the woods behind the inn. Peter opened the front door, and they entered a small lobby. A reception desk was lit by a flickering fluorescent light, but no one was there. “The light’s on, but nobody’s home,” Peter said. Ben smiled in appreciation: that was one of their father’s favorite insults. He reached out to tap the small metal bell on the counter, but stopped when a door behind the counter opened, and a rotund woman emerged, cinching a bathrobe around her belly. She was scowling, blinking in the light, angry at being awakened. “Ja?”
Peter spoke quickly, fluidly in German. “Es tut mir sehr leid Sie zu stören, aber wir hätten gerne Kaffee.” He was sorry to disturb her, but they wanted some coffee.
“Kaffee?” the old woman scowled. “Sie haben mich geweckt, weil Sie Kaffee wollen?” They’d woken her because they wanted coffee?
“Wir werden Sie für ihre Bemühungen bezahlen, Madame. Zwei Kaffee bitte. Wir werden uns einfach da, in Ihrem Esszimmer, hinsetzen.” They would pay her for her trouble, Peter assured her. Two coffees. They’d simply like to sit in her dining room.
The disgruntled innkeeper shook her head as she hobbled over to a nook next to a small dark dining room, switched on the lights, and turned on a large red metal coffeemaker.
The dining room was small but comfortable. Several large curtainless windows, which in the daytime probably gave diners a beautiful view of the forest in which the auberge was nestled, were utterly black. Five or six round tables were covered with starched white tablecloths and already set for breakfast, with juice glasses and coffee cups and metal trays heaped with brown sugar cubes. Peter sat down at a table for two against the wall, near the window. Ben sat across from him. The innkeeper, foaming a pitcher of milk in her nook, was staring at the two of them, as people so often stared at identical twins.
Peter moved aside the plate and the silverware to make room for his elbows. “You remember when that whole thing erupted over the Swiss banks and Nazi gold?”
“I sure do.” So that’s what this was about.
“That was just before I moved here from Africa. I followed it pretty closely in the newspapers there—I guess I was particularly interested because of Dad’s time in Dachau.” There was a sardonic twist to his mouth now. “Anyway, a whole cottage industry suddenly sprang up. Lawyers and other shysters who got the bright idea to take advantage of elderly Holocaust survivors who were trying to track down their families’ missing assets. I think I told you I read somewhere about an old woman in France, a survivor of the concentration camps. Turned out she’d been bilked of her entire life’s savings by some French scumbag lawyer who said he had information about a dormant Swiss bank account belonging to her father. The lawyer needed money, though, up front, to do the investigative work, take on the Swiss bank, all that bullshit. Of course the old lady paid—an amount like twenty-five thousand dollars, her entire savings, money she needed to live on. The lawyer vanished, along with the twenty-five thousand. That got me worked up—I couldn’t stand hearing about a defenseless old lady being taken advantage of that way—and I contacted her, offered to look for her father’s Swiss account for free. She was understandably suspicious, having just been ripped off, but after we talked awhile she gave me permission to go ahead and look. I had to convince her I had no interest in her money.”
Peter, who had been staring at the tablecloth as he spoke, now looked up directly at Ben. “Understand, these survivors weren’t motivated by greed. They were seeking closure, justice, a connection to their dead parents, to the past. Money to get by on.” He turned to glance at one of the windows. “Even as a legal representative of the old lady, I had all kinds of trouble dealing with the Swiss bank. They said they had no records of any such account. The usual story. These goddamned Swiss bankers—it’s amazing, they’re such anal-retentive record keepers, they keep every damned scrap of paper since time began, but now they’re saying, Oops, they happened to lose a bank account. Uh huh, right. But then I heard about this security guard at the bank where the lady’s father opened his account. The guard had gotten fired because he stumbled onto a shredding party—bank employees destroying heaps of documents from the forties in the middle of the night—and he rescued a pile of documents and ledgers from the shredder.”
“I vaguely remember that,” Ben said. The innkeeper came over with a tray and sullenly set down a metal pitcher of espresso and another one of steamed milk, then left the dining room.
“The Swiss authorities didn’t like that. Violation of bank privacy, all kinds of sanctimonious bullshit. Never mind the shredding of documents. I tracked the guy down, outside of Geneva. He’d kept all the documents, even though the bank was trying to get them back, and he let me go through them to see if there was any record of the father’s account.”
“And?” Ben was tracing patterns on the white tablecloth with the tines of a fork.
“And nothing. I didn’t find anything on it. Never did, by the way. But in one of the ledgers I found a piece of paper. Pretty eye-opening. It was a fully executed, legally valid, notarized and certified Gründungsvertrag—articles of incorporation.”
Ben said nothing.
“In the waning years of the Second World War, some sort of corporation was established.”
“Some sort of Nazi thing?”
“No. There were a few Nazis involved in it, but the majority of the principals weren’t even German. We’re talking about a board comprising some of the most powerful industrialists of the era. We’re talking Italy, France, Germany, England, Spain, the U.S., Canada. Names you’ve heard of, even you, Benno. Some of the real big shots of world capitalism.”
Ben tried to concentrate. “You said before the end of the war, right?”
“That’s right. Early in 1945.”
“German industrialists were founders of this corporation as well?”
Peter nodded. “It was a business partnership that cut clear across enemy lines. Does that surprise you?”
“But we were at war…”
“What do you mean ‘we,’ Kemosabe? The business of America is business, didn’t anybody tell you?” Peter leaned back, his eye
s bright. “I mean, let’s just talk about what’s on the public record. You had Standard Oil of New Jersey basically carving up the map with I. G. Farben, figuring out who’d get which oil and chemical monopolies, doing patent sharing, the whole thing. For God’s sake, the entire war effort ran on juice from Standard Oil—it wasn’t as if anyone in the military could afford to interfere. What if the company started having ‘production problems’? Besides, John Foster Dulles himself had been a board member of Farben. Then there’s the Ford Motor Company. All those five-ton military trucks that were the mainstay of German military transportation? Ford built those. The Hollerith machines that enabled Hitler to round up ‘undesirables’ with such incredible efficiency? All manufactured and serviced by Big Blue, good ol’ IBM—hats off to Tom Watson. Oh, then there’s ITT—a big stakeholder in Focke-Wulf, the company that made most of the German bombers. Want to hear something sweet? After the war was over, it sued the U.S. government for monetary compensation, given that Allied bombers had damaged those Focke-Wulf factories. I could go on and on. But that’s just the stuff we know about, obviously a tiny fraction of what really went on. None of these characters gave a damn about Hitler. They owed their allegiance to a higher ideology: profit. To them, the war was like a Harvard-Yale football game—a momentary distraction from more serious matters, like the pursuit of the almighty dollar.”
Ben shook his head slowly. “Sorry, bro’. Just listen to yourself. It all sounds like the usual counterculture rap: property is theft, never trust anyone over thirty—all that overheated, dated conspiracy crap. Next you’re going to tell me they were responsible for Love Canal.” He set his cup of coffee down sharply, and it clanked loudly against the saucer. “Funny, there was a time when anything having to do with business bored you stiff. I guess you really have changed.”
“I don’t expect you to take it in all at once,” Peter said. “I’m just giving you the background. Context.”
“Then tell me something real. Something concrete.”
“There were twenty-three names on this list,” his brother said, suddenly quiet. “For the most part, captains of industry, as they used to be called. A few blue-blooded statesmen, back when people thought there was such a thing. We’re talking about people who shouldn’t even have known each other—people any historian would swear never even met. And here they are, all linked together in some sort of business partnership.”
“There’s a step missing,” Ben said, half to himself. “Obviously something drew your attention to this document. Something made you pull it out. What are you leaving out?”
Peter smiled mordantly, and the haunted look returned. “A name jumped out at me, Ben. The name of the treasurer.”
Ben’s scalp began to prickle, as if ants were swarming over it. “Who was it?”
“The treasurer of the corporation was a young financial whiz kid. An Obersturmführer in Hitler’s SS, to boot. You may be familiar with the name: Max Hartman.”
“Dad.” Ben had to remember to breathe.
“He was no Holocaust survivor, Ben. Our father was a goddamned Nazi.”
Chapter Eight
Ben closed his eyes, inhaled deeply, and shook his head. “That’s preposterous. Jews weren’t members of the SS. The document’s obviously a forgery.”
“Believe me,” Peter said quietly. “I’ve had plenty of time to study this document. It’s no forgery.”
“But then…”
“In April of 1945, our father was supposedly in Dachau, remember? Liberated by the U.S. Seventh Army at the end of April ’45?”
“I don’t remember the exact timing—is that right?”
“You were never very curious about Dad’s background, were you?”
“Not really, no,” Ben admitted.
Peter smiled grimly. “That’s probably the way he preferred it. And lucky for you that you weren’t. It’s nice to live in a state of innocence. Believing all the lies. The story, the legend Dad created about the Holocaust survivor who came to America with ten bucks in his pocket and built a financial empire. Became a great philanthropist.” He shook his head, snorted. “What a fraud he is. What a myth he created.” With a sneer he added: “The great man.”
Ben’s heart began to pound slowly. Dad was difficult to get along with; his enemies called him ruthless. But a fraud?
“Max Hartman was a member of the Schutzstaffel,” Peter repeated. “The SS, okay? File it under ‘strange but true.’” Peter was so damned earnest, so convincing, and Ben never knew him to lie to his face. But this was so patently false! He wanted to scream, Stop it!
“What kind of corporation was it?”
Peter shook his head. “Possibly a front, a sort of dummy corporation, established with millions and millions of dollars in assets pooled by the principals.”
“For what? To what end?”
“That I don’t know, and the document doesn’t specify.”
“Where is this document?”
“I’ve got it hidden away safely, don’t worry. This corporation, headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland, in early April 1945, was called Sigma AG.”
“And did you tell Dad you’d found this?”
Peter nodded and took his first sip of coffee. “I called him, read it aloud to him, asked him about it. He blew up, as I knew he would. Claimed the thing was a fake, like you did—as I knew he would. Got angry, defensive. Started shouting, screaming. How could I believe such slander? With all he’d been through, blah blah blah, how could I possibly believe such a lie? That sort of thing. I never expected to get anything out of him, but I wanted to gauge his reaction. So I started asking around. Looking into corporate records in Geneva, in Zurich. Trying to find out whatever happened to this firm. And then I was almost killed. Twice. The first time it was a ‘car accident,’ a near miss. A car swerving onto the pavement on the Limmatquai, where I was walking. The second time it was a ‘mugging’ on Niederdorfstrasse that was no mugging. I managed to escape both times, but then I was warned. If I persisted in digging around in things that were none of my business, next time I’d be killed. No more near misses. I was to hand over all pertinent documents. And if any of the details about this corporation got out, I’d be dead, along with everyone in our family. So don’t think about phoning in a tip to the newspapers, they said. Dad I didn’t care about, obviously. It was you and Mom I was protecting.”
That sounded so much like Peter—he was no less fierce a protector of their mother than Ben had been. And he was levelheaded, not at all prone to paranoia. He had to be telling the truth.
“But why were they so concerned about what you knew?” Ben persisted. “Look at it objectively. A corporation was set up more than half a century ago. So what? Why the secrecy now?”
“We’re talking about a joint partnership across enemy lines. We’re talking about the risk of public exposure, and thus public disgrace, of some of the most powerful, revered figures of our time. But that’s the least of it. Consider the nature of the enterprise. Mammoth corporations, Allied and Axis alike, establishing a joint entity in order to enrich all of them. Germany was blockaded at the time, but then, capital doesn’t respect national boundaries, does it? Some people would call it trading with the enemy. Who knows what international laws might have been violated? What if there was some chance that the assets could be frozen or confiscated? There’s no way of gauging the magnitude of those assets. A lot can happen in half a century. We could be talking about staggering sums of money. And even the Swiss have been known to waive the secrecy laws under international pressure. Obviously, some people came to the conclusion that I might just know enough to jeopardize their cozy arrangement.”
“‘Some people’? Who was it who threatened you?”
Peter sighed. “Again, I wish I knew.”
“Come on, Peter, if there’s anyone else alive who was involved in setting up this corporation, they’d have to be ancient.”
“Sure, most of the ones who were in high positions are gone. But som
e are still around, believe me. And some aren’t all that old—in their seventies, even. If only two or three guys on the board of this company are still alive, they may be sitting on a fortune. And who knows who their successors might be? It’s obvious they’ve got enough money to keep their secret buried, you know? By any means necessary.”
“So you decided to disappear.”
“They knew way too much about me. My daily schedule, the places I went, my unlisted home phone number, names and locations of family members. Financial, credit information. They were making a point, loud and clear, that they had extensive resources. So I made a decision, Benno. I had to die. They’d left me no other choice.”
“No other choice? You could have given them their stupid document, agreed to their demands—moved on as if you’d never found the thing.”
Peter grunted. “That’s like trying to unring a bell, put the toothpaste back in the tube—can’t be done. They were never going to let me live, now that I knew what I knew.”
“So what was the purpose of the warning?”
“Keep me quiet while they determined how much I knew, whether I’d told anyone. Until they got rid of me.”
Ben could hear the old woman moving about in the other room, the floorboards squeaking. After a while, he said, “How’d you do it, Peter? The death, I mean. It can’t have been easy.”
“It wasn’t.” Peter leaned back in his chair, resting the back of his head against the window. “I couldn’t have done it without Liesl.”
“Your girlfriend.”
“Liesl’s a wonderful, remarkable woman. My lover, my best friend. Ah, Ben, I never thought I’d be so lucky as to find someone like this. I hope someday you find someone even half as terrific as her. It was her idea, really. I’d have never been able to put the plan together. She agreed I had to disappear, and she insisted it had to be done right.”