Ira Levin - Boys from Brazil

Liebermann said, “Guthrie?”

Frieda Maloney looked at him, and nodded. “Yes,” she said. “The first one was Guthrie; that’s right.”

“From Tucson.”

“No. In Ohio. No, Iowa. Yes, Ames, Iowa.”

“They moved to Tucson,” Liebermann said. “He died in an accident this past October.”

“Ohh…” Frieda Maloney bit her lip regretfully.

“Who was next, after the Guthries?”

She shook her head. “This is when there were a few close together, only two weeks apart.”

“Curry?”

She looked at Liebermann. “Yes,” she said. “From Massachusetts. But not right after the Guthries. Wait a minute now. The Guthries were at the end of February; and then another couple, from someplace in the South—Macon, I think; and then the Currys. And then the Wheelocks.”

“Two weeks after the Currys?”

“No, two or three months. After the first three they were spread out.”

Liebermann asked Fassler, “Would it kill you if I wrote this down? It’s not going to hurt her, in America so long ago.”

Fassler scowled and sighed. “All right,” he said.

“Why is it important?” Frieda Maloney asked.

Liebermann got out his pen and found a piece of paper in his pocket. “How is ‘Wheelock’ spelled?” he asked.

She spelled it for him.

“New Providence, Pennsylvania?”

“Yes.”

“Try to remember: exactly how long after the Currys did they get their baby?”

“I can’t remember exactly. Two or three months; it wasn’t a regular schedule.”

“Was it closer to two months or to three?”

“She can’t remember,” Fassler said.

“All right,” Liebermann said. “Who came after the Wheelocks?”

Frieda Maloney sighed. “I can’t remember who came when,” she said. “There were twenty, over two and a half years. There was a Truman, not related to Truman the President. I think they were one of the Canadian couples. And there was…‘Corwin’ or ‘Corbin,’ something like that. Cor bett .”

She remembered three more names, and six cities. Liebermann wrote them down.

“Time,” Fassler said. “Would you mind waiting for me outside?”

Liebermann put his pen and paper away. He looked at Frieda Maloney, nodded.

She nodded back.

He got up and went to the coatrack; put his coat over his arm and took his hat and briefcase from the shelf. He went to the door, and stopped and stood motionless; turned. “I’d like to ask one more question,” he said.

They looked at him. Fassler nodded.

He looked at Frieda Maloney and said, “When is your dog’s birthday?”

She looked blankly at him.

“Do you know?” he asked her.

“Yes,” she said. “April twenty-sixth.”

“Thank you,” he said; and to Fassler: “Please don’t be too long; I want to get this over with.” He turned and opened the door and went out into the corridor.

He sat on a bench doing some figuring with his pen and a pocket calendar. The matron, sitting on the other side of his folded coat, said, “Do you think you’ll get her off?”

“I’m not a lawyer,” he said.

Fassler, nudging his car restlessly against stalled traffic, said, “I’m totally mystified. Would you tell me, please, what the Organization was doing in the baby business?”

“I’m sorry,” Liebermann said, “but that’s not in our agreement.”

As if he knew.

He went back to Vienna. Where, in the face of a court order, the desks and file cabinets were being moved to an office Max had found, two small rooms in a run-down building in the Fifteenth District. And where he , therefore, had to move at once—Lili was already looking—to a smaller and cheaper apartment (good-by, Glanzer, you bastard). And where, what with one thing and another—two months’ advance on the office, legal fees, moving costs, the phone bill—there was hardly enough left in the kitty to buy a ticket to Salzburg, let alone Washington.

Which was where he had to go the week after next, February 4th or 5th.

He explained to Max and Esther while they made the new office look more like the War Crimes Information Center and less like H. Haupt & Son, Advertising Specialties. “The Guthries and the Currys,” he said, scraping the second H from the doorpane with a paper-pinched razor blade, “got their babies about four weeks apart, at the end of February and the end of March, 1961. And Guthrie and Curry were killed four weeks apart, one day over, in the same order. The Wheelocks got their baby around July fifth—this I know because they gave Frieda Maloney a ten-week-old puppy that was born on April twenty-sixth—”

“What?” Esther turned and looked at him. She held a map to the wall while Max pushed thumbtacks in.

“—and from the end of March to July fifth,” Liebermann said, scraping, “is roughly fourteen weeks. So it’s a good bet that Wheelock is supposed to be killed around February twenty-second, fourteen weeks after Curry. And I want to be in Washington two or three weeks before.”

Esther said, “I think I follow you,” and Max said, “What’s not to follow? They’re being killed in the same order they got the babies, and the same time apart. The question is—why?”

The question, Liebermann felt, would have to wait. Stopping the killings, whatever their reason, was what mattered, and his best chance of doing that was through the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation. They could confirm easily enough that two men who had died in “accidents” were the fathers of illicitly adopted look-alike sons, and that Henry Wheelock was a third (or fourth, if they turned up the one in Macon-maybe). On February 22nd, give or take a few days, they could capture Wheelock’s intended killer, and learn from him the identities, and maybe even the schedules, of the other five. (Liebermann believed now that the six killers were working singly, not in pairs, because of the closeness in time of the murders of Döring, Guthrie, Horve, and Runsten—all in different countries.)

He might also, more easily, go to the Federal Criminal Investigation Department in Bonn, since he was certain that a German adoption agency (and an English and three Scandinavian ones) had had a Frieda Maloney searching its files and distributing babies. Klaus had found the boy in Freiburg identical to the one in Trittau, and Liebermann himself, while in Düsseldorf, had called the Frauen Döring, Rausenberger, and Schreiber, getting, in response to “Tell me, please, is your son adopted?,” two surprised and wary yesses, one furious no, and three orders to mind his own business.

But in Bonn he would have no next victim to offer, and the explanation of how he had got Frieda Maloney to talk wouldn’t be well received. He himself wouldn’t be well received either, as he hoped he might be in Washington. Besides, in his Jewish heart of hearts, he didn’t trust German authorities as much as American where Nazi matters were concerned.

So, Washington and the F.B.I.

He sat at the phone in the new office calling old contributors. “I don’t like to buttonhole you this way, but believe me, it’s important. Something that’s going on now , with six SS men and Mengele.” Inflation, they told him. Recession. Business was awful. He began bringing in dead parents, the Six Million—which he hated doing, using guilt as a fundraiser. He got a few promises. “Please, right away,” he said. “It’s important.”

“But it’s not possible ,” Lili said, spooning a second deadly portion of potato kugel onto his plate. “How can there be so many boys who look alike?”

“Darling,” Max said to her across their table, “don’t say it’s not possible. Yakov saw . His friend from Heidelberg saw.”