Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [251]
Farago might have posed for the portrait of “the Hungarian on the make,” with his soft, heavily accented voice, his gestures, his charm, his endless fund of anecdotes, his hypnotic self-confidence, and his total imperviousness to abuse, insults, or refusals. It was a waste of breath saying no to Farago—he simply bounced back like an inflated rubber beach toy and came at you from another direction. Once, later in our relationship, when I had learned to be cautious, Farago appeared in my office in distress, tears in his eyes, to ask for a further advance of $5,000 against the book he had been writing for many months, none of which I had as yet seen because it was “too secret and dangerous” to show me. He had spent so much money on research, Farago said, that he was broke. His house was about to be taken away from him, his beloved, patient wife was prostrate with fear and distress, he was a ruined man if I said no. Nothing less than $5,000 could save him. He would go down on his knees before me, if necessary. I said no anyway—after several such pleas, Dick Snyder had warned me to turn off the money tap until we saw some manuscript—but Laci, far from breaking down or getting angry, kept right on smiling. “Well,” he said, “if not five thousand, how about five hundred as a personal loan, from one Hungarian to another?”
It was Farago’s thesis that the Fourth Reich was in existence and flourishing in South America and that an active Nazi underground was thriving there. He had set out to document this, and in the course of his researches had come upon proof that Martin Bormann was alive and well and living in prosperity as one of the leaders of this movement. Of course, there was a grain of truth to all this, as everybody knew, particularly since the Israeli capture of Adolf Eichmann. Farago documented a whole subculture of escaped Nazis, with their social clubs, their own German villages painstakingly re-created in the Andes and on the rolling plains of Argentina. He even produced photographs of an annual beauty contest in which “Miss Teenage Nazi South America” was chosen in a beer hall draped in swastikas that looked alarmingly like the one in Munich from which the Führer had launched his movement.
All this was interesting, but what was sensational was the claim that Farago had found Bormann, not only alive and well but in control of a vast fortune in Nazi funds smuggled to South America in the last years of the war. Bormann, Farago alleged, had fled to Argentina with the help of the Vatican, paid over a substantial part of his fortune to Eva Perón in exchange for protection, then moved among half a dozen South American countries, and ended up in a convent-hospital in the windswept Bolivian Andes run by Redemptorist nuns, where “between freshly laundered sheets,” he recovered from injections designed to prolong his life and awaited the return to power of Juan Perón. Farago had not only actually seen the ailing Reichsleiter, but in a complicated transaction, for which we had paid him another emergency transfusion of money to travel to South America again, had acquired a beer bottle that bore Bormann’s fingerprints, as well as a photograph of Bormann taken as he crossed the Bolivian frontier on his way to the convent.
It was Farago’s way to declare his own documentation “beyond dispute,” without showing it, usually on the grounds that it was far too dangerous and explosive to let out of his hands. On those occasions when I insisted on seeing some proof, Farago went to the opposite extreme and produced cartons of documents, all of them in Spanish, German, or Portuguese, either in the form of blurred photocopies or retypings of the originals. Either way, there was nothing to be gained by plunging into them. Seldom has the truth that the publisher is at the mercy of the author been proven more amply. Farago could prove anything, given his hoard of documents, so in the end you either had to believe him or not. But where I was cautious, Peter Mayer, who bought the mass-market rights from us for Avon