Ira Levin - Boys from Brazil

“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.”

Thoughtfully Liebermann said, “Unless they have many murders to do, and want them all…not to be similar…”

Haas squinted his close-set eyes at him. “Many murders?” he asked.

Liebermann said, “What did you mean just now, you’ve ‘been through this before’?”

“Döring’s sister was in here the next day, screaming at me to arrest Frau Döring and a man named Springer. Is this…someone you’re interested in? Wilhelm Springer?”

“Possibly,” Liebermann said. “Who is he?”

“A musician. Frau Döring’s lover, according to the sister. The Frau is much younger than Döring was. Good-looking too.”

“How old is Springer?”

“Thirty-eight, thirty-nine. The night of the accident he was filling in with the orchestra at the Essen opera. I think that lets him out, don’t you?”

“Can you tell me anything about Döring?” Liebermann asked. “Who his friends were? What organizations he belonged to?”

Haas shook his head. “I only have the vital statistics.” He turned a paper in the folder lying open before him. “I saw him a few times but I never met him; they moved here just a year ago. Here we are: sixty-five years old, one hundred and seventy centimeters, eighty-six kilos…” He looked at Liebermann. “Oh, one thing that might interest you; he was carrying a gun.”

“He was?”

Haas smiled. “A museum piece, a Mauser ‘Bolo.’ It hadn’t been fired, or cleaned and oiled, in God knows how many years.”

“Was it loaded?”

“Yes, but he probably would have blown his hand off if he’d fired it.”

Liebermann said, “Could you give me Frau Döring’s address and phone number? And the sister’s? And the address of the bar? Then I’ll be on my way.” He sat forward and put a hand down to his briefcase.