Hour of the Assassins Read online

  It’s always bad, Caine thought. Our generation grew up with it. You’d have thought we’d have gotten used to it by now, that we’d have heard the worst by now. But it’s always bad.

  Wasserman’s eyes were brimming wet, but he shook his head and went on.

  “I don’t understand how we survived that trip, standing crushed against the dead, the insane, and the dying for six days without food or water. But we did.

  “When we arrived at Auschwitz, the kapos threw those of us who were still alive out of the boxcars and the guards marched us to the Birkenau railroad camp for our first selection. Hanna was clutching Dieter when they separated us. It was then that I caught my first glimpse of a short, swarthy SS officer. He was the camp doctor, SS Hauptstürmführer Josef Mengele. That was what the guards called him. We inmates had another name for him. We called him malachos mavet, in Hebrew it means the Angel of Death.

  “Mengele selected those who were healthy enough to work for the labor barracks. All the others, and almost always the children, were sent to the gas chambers. Once, while standing in front of the crematorium, he stood with his hands on his hips and bragged, ‘Here the Jews enter through the gate and leave through the chimney.’ And all the while a small orchestra made up of inmates played Strauss waltzes. He wanted to make it gemütlich, don’t you see?

  “I never saw my son again. But Hanna I saw one more time, and God help me, I see her again now every night.”

  Wasserman rubbed his hands over his sweaty face, then he regained control and continued more calmly.

  “Of all the Nazi criminals, Mengele was perhaps the most infamous. There is an open warrant for his arrest in West Germany and a fifteen-thousand-dollar reward. He is also wanted by Interpol, the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, and of course, the Israelis. He sentenced millions of people to death.

  “I personally know of one instance when he threw a crying baby into an open fire before the horrified eyes of the mother. I once saw him bury a bayonet in a young girl’s head. He would inject phenolic acid into children’s eyes. You see, this monster was obsessed with breeding twins with blue eyes.

  “But that isn’t what I dream about, or why you are here. Because he did something much worse than all that to my Hanna.”

  Wasserman stared bleakly through Caine, as though he were seeing her face once more. It was coming now, Caine thought. In a reflex action Caine took out’ a cigarette and lit it. As he inhaled, he looked at Wasserman’s empty blue eyes, lost in the dark night that never quite ends for survivors. But mixed with his pity was a sense of uneasiness. Something didn’t fit, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it.

  Wasserman took a deep breath and went on in a strangled, hoarse monotone, as the sweat poured down his face.

  “Every night it starts the same way. The kapos come to rouse us and they march us through the fence into the women’s compound for the first time. At first I don’t recognize Hanna standing in front of the other women. Her head is shaved and she is so thin and ragged. But then she looks up for a moment and I see those gentle blue eyes filled with fear and courage and loathing and things I will never know. And then Mengele comes and stands on a platform to address us. As always, his black SS uniform is neatly pressed. He was, like most vain men, a sharp dresser. I remember that he always wore clean white gloves.

  “‘Dogs,’ he shouts. They always used to call the prisoners dogs and they called the guard dogs men. ‘This Jewess has been elected by the other bitches in her barracks to bring a medical problem to my attention. It seems that the bitches in these barracks, like all bitches, are suffering from an infestation of lice. I want to thank this Jewess for bringing this medical problem to my attention and I’ve brought you all here to see that the New Order knows how to deal with lice. The barracks will be fumigated.’ And then he smiled. A few of the women cheered and his smile grew broader. You see, he was no ordinary sadist.

  “Then he marched the women, including Hanna, into the barracks. He ordered the doors sealed and then had the barracks fumigated—with mustard gas.… The women’s screams seemed to go on for hours.”

  Wasserman slumped down in his chair, then after a time he looked up at Caine, as though seeing him from far away, from long ago.

  “You want me to waste Mengele?” Caine asked.

  “I’ll pay you half a million dollars, if you can locate and kill Mengele within six months,” said Wasserman.

  “That’s a lot of money.”

  “I need you, Caine. Ordinary hit men don’t know how to work outside the country. Mercenaries don’t have the brains or the resources to track him down and, even if they could, probably couldn’t get close to him. Government agents and Israeli spies have tried and failed. I’ve gone over it from every angle. You’re the man for the job. And I’ll provide you with all the money and resources at my disposal to help you to do it.”

  Caine got up and walked over to the painting. He submitted himself to that pretty nineteenth-century scene as if to a baptism. Things were different then, he thought. They believed in things and fought for causes as if it mattered. The whole thing is crazy. Why had Wasserman waited thirty years for his revenge? Besides, he had come to Los Angeles to escape the past. He’d had enough of ghosts. Let the dead bury the dead, he decided, as he walked back to the chair and sat down.

  “It won’t wash, Wasserman,” Caine said quietly. For a long moment the two men sat silently, then Wasserman shrugged helplessly.

  “I can think of a dozen reasons why your story won’t work,” Caine continued. “For instance, you want me to believe that you want to pay me half a million to waste some old Nazi. That’s all ancient history. Nobody cares about that crap anymore, including you. You go off and forget about this Mengele for thirty years, wake up one morning after a bad dream and say, My, my, I’ve waited long enough for my revenge, so I’ll find some Company type, looking for a quick buck, to do in six months what half-a-dozen governments have been unable to accomplish in thirty years. And why, all of a sudden, are you having nightmares about the bad old days, after thirty years of pimping and indifference? Tell you what, why don’t you wait a few years and the kraut bastard will drop dead from old age? And why me, Wasserman, why me?”

  Wasserman slumped back in his chair, his eyes bleak and defeated. Then he sniffed, straightened up, and took out a cigar and lit it. In a way his gesture touched Caine more than anything he had said. In spite of everything, he had never quite given up. He puffed a few times and, exhaling the smoke, played his trump.

  “All right, Caine, if I give you a satisfactory explanation, will you agree to consider my offer? Come with me to my beach house in Malibu. I have a dossier in my safe there that I’ve compiled on Mengele. I want you to see it and think it over. In the morning, if you still don’t want the assignment, I’ll pay you another thousand dollars for your trouble. Agreed?”

  Despite himself, Caine was intrigued. Wasserman was no fool and he had clearly thought the whole thing out. Besides, it was an easy $1,000.

  “Agreed,” he replied.

  “First of all, as to why I chose you,” Wasserman began. “You know there’s an ancient Afghani saying, that the Afghan wolf is hunted with an Afghan hound. I’ve bribed a lot of people to find out about you. There were favors exchanged through friends I have in the Syndicate. And money. I know you, Caine. You’re a hunter. You’re the Afghan hound I’m setting to kill the wolf.”

  “That won’t do it,” Caine said. “Why the six-month deadline, the thirty-year wait?”

  “That’s easy. I pushed it out of my mind. After the camp, nothing meant anything. Love, hate, joy, grief, these were only words. Morality had no meaning, so why not sell garbage to the swine? I was past caring. All I wanted was money, pleasure, power, so that I need never remember, never look back.”

  Listening to the story, Caine was reminded of something Yoshua had said the night they hit Abu Daud in Paris. That was back in the days when he was only a year out of training. Before Laos and Nam
. Before it all fell apart. He was one of the Company’s bright young men in those days. Then, it all went down the tubes in Asia and he spent a year shuffling paper in Langley, while heads rolled after the Chile fiasco and he knew he had to get out. Remembering that night in Paris was like eavesdropping on another era. He remembered that they were drinking in some nameless café off the Boulevard Saint-Michel and Yoshua, who was only a courier with the Mossad and had never done any wet work before, had pronounced in a drunken, maudlin tone:

  “Which of us is not a Nazi in the end?”

  “But you’re a Jew,” Caine had replied.

  “Do you think that makes us any better? Listen, I come from a country where maybe a quarter of the population came from the camps. So I know. A few, a very few of the survivors were purified by their suffering and became true saints. But most of them are bastards. Do you understand? To survive they became just like the Nazis. Worse. They care for nothing.”

  So in a curious way, the fact that Wasserman was a tough son of a bitch made the whole thing believable.

  “What happened three months ago?” Caine asked seriously. The job was starting to become real for him.

  “I went to my doctor. I have an inoperable cancer of the lymph nodes.” Wasserman nodded and smiled ironically. “You see, Caine, I have barely ten months left to live.”

  CHAPTER 2

  The seagull hovered a few feet above the waves, his gray wings outstretched, unmoving. He seemed caught for eternity in the pool of light cast by the floodlights mounted on the restaurant’s outside deck. Beyond the light there was only the immense blackness of the Pacific Ocean at night. With a quick movement the gull folded his wings and plummeted into a rising swell. Almost immediately he began to fly back up into the light, a slender silvery fish wiggling in his beak. Suddenly three loudly squawking gulls erupted out of the darkness and attacked the first gull, attempting to steal the fish. The first gull managed to swallow almost half the fish before the rest was stolen by one of the others. The gulls wheeled and shrieked and then they were gone. The floodlights lit only the incoming surf that shook the pilings on which the restaurant stood.

  The Moonglow was one of those glass and wood restaurants, liberally sprinkled with hanging ferns and authentic-looking papier-mâché beams, that dot the California coast. On either side of the restaurant stretched a line of expensive beach houses that sold for upwards of $300,000 to buyers who wanted to live like beachcombers. A small group of rubberneckers stood on the restaurant’s outside deck, sipping margaritas and congratulating each other on the view.

  Roused by a change in the girl’s tone of voice, Caine turned back to her, once more conscious of the undertone of conversation at the other tables. It seemed to him that he was looking at her from far away, as if through the wrong end of a telescope. Not that she was hard to look at. Her long blond hair was beautifully set off by her deep California tan, which made a striking contrast against her white T-shirt. She was braless and he could see her nipples clearly outlined against a fabric that bore the motto FOXY LADY. She had the healthy, scrubbed appearance of a surf bunny, the kind of long-legged blonde that they seemed to turn out on an assembly line down in Orange County. But it was her eyes that continually surprised him. They were incredibly blue, as blue as the Mediterranean, as blue as a turbulent Van Gogh sky. Of course, Caine had seen more of her than that. He had seen her star in Wasserman’s hard-core epic just before Freddie had taken him into Wasserman’s office. C.J. smiled and repeated her question.

  “How do you like Malibu?”

  At the next table an attractive Beverly Hills woman wearing French jeans and dripping Gucci accessories wondered aloud about whether she should get a Jag or a Mercedes this year, raising her voice in case there was anyone in the restaurant who hadn’t heard her.

  “I like it fine,” he said.

  “The steaks are good here, aren’t they,” she said, dipping the meat into the teriyaki sauce.

  “Terrific,” he replied, chewing on his feedlot-raised beef, thinking it was pumped full of so many female hormones that it was no wonder America was turning into an androgynous culture.

  The Gucci lady raised her voice again. It seemed that the quality of merchandise at Bullock’s Westwood was deteriorating. Caine looked at C.J. and shook his head.

  “Does everybody out here talk like that?”

  “Like what?” she asked.

  “Like they’ve all seen too much television,” he replied. But then, everything that had happened to him since he arrived in L.A. seemed unreal. You have to remember that you’re in Hollywood, the land of bumper-to-bumper freeways and plastic palm trees, he reminded himself.

  After leaving Washington for good months ago, he had gone to New York to deposit a few things in the safety deposit box and to check out a line on a civilian job. The New York personnel manager referred him to their Los Angeles office and he had taken the red-eye flight to L.A., arriving just that morning. He had come to Los Angeles to start again, in a sunny world where everything is new and everyone is more interested in telling you their lies than in listening to your own. Instead he had received Wasserman’s message and wound up spending the day rummaging in the past. But the job was real enough. It bothered him. Perhaps because Wasserman had too many reasons, had thought it out too well. Something smelled wrong, but it was just beyond him, the way you recognize the scent of a perfume you’ve smelled before, but can’t quite remember which of the women in your past used to wear it.

  Wasserman had laid it out for him during the drive down to the beach. Wasserman drove a new beige Mercedes 450 SE, with enough dials on the dashboard to do everything but cook your breakfast, taking the curves along Sunset Boulevard in a nervous, jerky manner. They drove down the Strip and past the manicured estates of Beverly Hills and Bel-Air.

  “I assume you’ll want to put the money into a Swiss account,” Wasserman remarked, adjusting his sunglasses. Caine automatically checked the mirrors, wondering why he still felt the need, but there was only the normal afternoon traffic behind them.

  “You’re also assuming I’ll take the job,” Caine replied.

  “Oh, yes,” Wasserman smiled. “You’ll think about the money and you’ll take the job.”

  “You know, you’ve been doing an awful lot of talking about money, but I haven’t seen much besides talk, so far.”

  Wasserman reached into his jacket pocket, barely missing sideswiping a VW convertible as he did so. Two blond boys in the convertible, their surfboards sticking up in the air, gave Caine the finger as they swerved to avoid the Mercedes. Caine smiled broadly and nodded his head yes. Wasserman missed the entire episode and handed Caine a bulky envelope, addressed in an old-fashioned handwriting to a certain Thos. Jessom, Esq., care of the Bombay Auxiliary Bible Society, the Esplanade, Bombay. Caine counted fifty $500 bills inside the envelope.

  “This is nowhere near the kind of money you’ve been talking about,” Caine said.

  “There’s a lot more money there than you, or any customs agent in the world, will ever see. Look again,” Wasserman said.

  Caine reexamined the envelope, but there was nothing else in it but the money. He was about to hand it back to Wasserman and tell him that he was getting tired of his games, but something about the address bothered him. Why a Bible society in India and no return address? He looked at the stamp to see where it came from and then he saw it. He knew then that Wasserman was deadly serious. All at once he knew that he was holding the one chance everyone dreams about and that Wasserman was right, that he was going to do it. He was going to kill Mengele because one day in 1847, a missionary on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean had sent a letter to the secretary of a Bombay Bible Society, thanking him for sending copies of the scriptures to help the mission. What made the letter so valuable were the two one-penny stamps issued by the post office at Port Louis, each bearing the profile of the young Queen Victoria.

  “How many of them are there in the world?” Caine asked.<
br />
  “There are fourteen known, but these two are the best. I purchased them at a New York auction in 1968 for three hundred eighty thousand dollars. They’re worth well over half a million today,” Wasserman replied.

  They drove down the last curves of Pacific Palisades and Wasserman turned north, heading up the Pacific Coast Highway to Malibu. Caine glanced out at the ocean and then at the stamps again, knowing that he was going to take the job. This was what he’d been waiting for, without even knowing that he was waiting for it. It wasn’t just the money, or the excitement. It wasn’t because Mengele deserved to die. It was because Wasserman had been right about him. He was the Afghan hound, the hunter. That was who he was.

  “I work alone,” he said.

  “Harris told me,” Wasserman replied. He turned into the driveway of a large glass-and-redwood beach house and shut off the engine.

  “That means alone,” Caine repeated. “Mengele has stayed alive all these years, so he must have friends. I’ll need deep cover for when his friends come looking.” He didn’t mention the real cover he had in mind once the job was over, since it was the most important secret in his life. He had a safety-deposit box in a New York bank that contained a completely untraceable set of forged documents, as well as a few other interesting items that he retained from his Company days.

  “How will I know what progress you’re making?” Wasserman asked.

  “I’ll telex you every third or fourth day, more often when there’s something to report. It’ll be in standard commercial code.”

  “Suppose I have to get hold of you?”

  “Don’t call me, I’ll call you,” Caine said, trying out a casting director’s tone of voice.