Cold Vengeance - Lincoln Child [92]
As they made their way down the fairway and around the dogleg, their balls came into view: Weiss’s lined up nicely for a shot to the green, Pendergast’s in a sand trap beside the fringe.
Weiss shook his head again. “Your honor.”
Pendergast took a calculating stroll around the bunker, then knelt beside the ball, estimating the trajectory to the pin. He waited for Weiss to issue his recommendation.
“If I were you, I’d choose the lob wedge,” Weiss said after a moment. “It’s more forgiving than the pitching wedge.”
Pendergast rummaged through the set of Pings, took out the wedge, lined himself up gingerly, took a few practice swings, and then—with a huge spray of sand—hit the ball. The ball moved about two feet up the side of the bunker.
Weiss tut-tutted. “Don’t think about it too much. Try to imagine the feel of the shot physically before you swing.”
Pendergast lined himself up again. This time, he hit a more controlled chip shot that seemed to go long but, with heavy backspin, landed with barely a roll on the back side of the green.
“Mazel tov!” Weiss cried, beaming.
“Pure luck, I’m afraid,” said Pendergast.
“Ah, but you said you didn’t believe in luck. No—you followed my suggestion and now you see the excellent result.” Selecting a seven iron, Weiss chipped his ball to within ten feet of the pin. Pendergast, at twenty feet, missed his first two putts, then holed out for a bogey. Weiss one-putted for a final eagle.
Pendergast marked it and handed the scorecard to Weiss. “You shot a sixty-nine. My congratulations.”
“It’s my home course. And I’m sure if you follow some of those tips I mentioned, you’d improve quickly. You have a natural golfer’s physique. Now let us talk.”
The formality of the game completed, they repaired to his house, just off the tee box of the fifteenth hole. The two men sat on the patio while Heidi, Weiss’s wife, brought them a pitcher of mint juleps.
“And so to business,” Weiss said, in a rare mood, pouring out the drinks and raising his glass. “So you have come to me about Wolfgang Faust.”
Pendergast nodded.
“Then you have come to the right man, Mr. Pendergast. I made it my life’s work to track down the Dachau Doctor. I was only stopped by these.” And he gestured at the legs under the blanket. Putting down the drink, he reached for a thick folder that sat at one edge of the patio table. “A lifetime of work, Mr. Pendergast,” he said, patting the folder. “Distilled between these covers. And I know it by heart.” He took a deep sip of his julep. “Wolfgang Faust was born in Ravensbrück, Germany, in 1908 and attended the University of Munich, where he met and became the protégé of Josef Mengele, three years his senior. He worked as Mengele’s assistant at the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt. In 1940, he received his medical degree and joined the Waffen-SS. Later, at Mengele’s recommendation, he worked for Mengele in the clinic block at Auschwitz. You know the kind of ‘work’ Mengele was involved with?”
“I have an idea.”
“Brutal, cruel, and inhuman surgeries—frequently done without anesthesia.” Weiss’s open and cheerful countenance had undergone a transformation into something hard, implacable. “Unnecessary amputations. Hideously painful and disfiguring medical ‘experiments’ performed on little children. Shock treatment. Sterilization. Brain surgery to alter one’s perception of time. Injecting subjects with various poisons and diseases. Freezing people to death. Mengele was fascinated by anything unusual or abnormal: heterochromia, dwarfism, identical twins, polydactyly. Romas—Gypsies—were a favorite target. He infected a hundred of them with leprosy in an attempt to create a biological weapon. And when his fiendish experiments were complete, he would kill the sufferer—often with an injection of chloroform into the heart, to finish up with an autopsy to