The QE2 Is Missing

Diaz spread his hands wide. “I have nothing against your country, please understand that. I am just speaking the truth. It was sources in America who revealed the CIA involvement.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Please don’t be. We are not here to trade insults but to uncover some facts — perhaps to our mutual satisfaction. I personally am a friend of your country. I am a businessman, or rather I was until I went into politics. I ran for the state election as a member of the PLR, the Partido Liberal Radical. The party is quite conservative, I assure you. My mistake was in winning the election — so I, of course, went to jail. I eventually managed to make my way here to London where I am a member of a group of Paraguayans in exile. We do very little, really. Aid other refugees, write letters of protest to the newspapers. For the most part we just wait for that wonderful day that may come when we can return to our country. We are well known among the expatriates, so people bring us information. Which brings my long story up to the present. Something is stirring in official circles in Paraguay, something big — but we don’t know what. Plenty of coming and going and troop movements. We recently connected all of this activity to a cruise of the QE2 and to certain passenger accommodation aboard this ship. The two best suites. It appears that these suites were empty until a few days ago, when five men boarded the ship in Cape Town…. “

The five in these photographs!”

“Precisely. So now you know as much as we do. We have reached a dead end. Except that we had some slight reason to suspect that at least one of the men was a German. Which is why we approached the Israelis. Hoping they might be able to make the identification that we could not.”

“They’ve been identified all right.” Hank Greenstein slid the photographs out onto the desk and pointed to the man with the scar on his face.

“This is Colonel Manfred Hartig, former supervisor of the Polish extermination camps, He disappeared right after the war — the Poles tried him in absentia and he has a death sentence hanging over his head. He surfaced for a while in Argentina, but vanished completely about ten years ago. At the same time as this one, in the other photograph. Karl-Heinz Eitmann. Eitmann was a great organizer, the liaison man between the camps and the factories. He saw to it that there was a steady flow of slave labor at all times.”

“Two nice guys.”

“Yes. Aren’t they. But the best is yet to come. There is no hard evidence, but it is pretty certain that there is a central committee of escaped Nazis who handle large sums of money. The Germans are a very organized people. Even when they become mass murderers they maintain their love of routine. And remember, immense sums were looted from the occupied countries. Millions, perhaps billions of dollars. You don’t keep money like that buried in your back yard. Of course, a lot of them do, individuals who escaped with a bundle of their own. But we’re talking about the big money now. And these two, Hartig and Eitmann, are reported to be right at the top of the money circle. In fact it is rumored that they are next in the pecking order right under the infamous Dr. Joachim Wielgus himself.”

“Wielgus? I don’t think I know the name.”

“Very few people do. Wielgus was the right-hand man of Albrecht Spier, the so-called economic genius who arranged the financing of the Third Reich. In the beginning this was easy enough to do since the big corporations like Krupp were interested only in maximizing their profits. They had no trouble looking the other way when slave labor was needed to keep the factories operational. But as the war went on, more and more funds were needed as the bombing raids knocked out German production. That is where the good Herr Doktor Wielgus came into the picture. He was the one who took care of the nasty part of the financing. Arranging for the gold teeth to be knocked out of the corpses’ heads in the concentration camps, shaving these heads as well for the hair for mattress-stuffing, actually making soap from human fat — and all of this always for a good profit.”

“That’s… disgusting,” Diaz said. “I had no idea that people could sink that low. In my country torture and murder are commonplace but this… this is commercialization of evil.”

“People forget,” Hank said, the lines of his face set into a pattern of dark memory. “Or they are too young, born after the war. It is just part of history to them, like Ghenghis Khan and Napoleon. But it’s not that, not yet. People are still alive today with numbers on their arms and endless dreams of those concentration camps. And millions are dead who might be alive if the Germans had not been so determined to found their thousand-year Reich. Your South American dictators are very good at torture and execution but thank God they’ll never be able to match the scale of the Nazis.”

There was just silence between them for a moment before Diaz spoke.