Cold Vengeance - Lincoln Child [93]
He took another slug of his drink. “Faust so distinguished himself at Auschwitz that he was sent to Dachau to set up his own facility. Not a great deal is known of the nature of his Dachau experiments—Faust was far more successful than Mengele at destroying his records and killing witnesses—but what we do know is as disturbing as Mengele’s atrocities, if not more so. I will not speak of those details here; they are in this folder if you really want to know the true depths to which a man’s depravity can lower him. Let us talk instead of what happened after the war. After the fall of Berlin, Faust went underground in Germany with the help of Nazi sympathizers, hidden in an attic—ironically, not that different from what happened to Anne Frank. These sympathizers were well connected or well funded, or perhaps both.”
“How do you know?”
“They had the ability to create—or procure—forged documents of a very high quality. Marriage licenses, identity papers, the like. These sympathizers gave Faust a phony passport in the name of Wolfgang Lanser. Sometime in the late 1940s—it is not known precisely when—he was smuggled out of the country and shipped off to South America. His first port of call was Uruguay. All this—what I have told you so far—took me ten years of work to uncover.”
Pendergast inclined his head.
“He settled in a series of remote towns, earning money from doctoring the peasants, but it appears he was not long welcome in any one place; apparently his prices were extortionate, and at times he displayed a propensity for trying out various, ah, cures that often ended up killing instead.”
“The inveterate experimenter,” Pendergast murmured.
“By 1958, I had tracked him to Uruguay. Somehow, he learned I was on his trail. He changed identities again—this time to Willy Linden—had a facial operation, and moved to Brazil. But that’s where the trail ends. Because around 1960, he vanished completely. I could turn up nothing, absolutely nothing further, on his whereabouts or his activities. In fact, it was only twenty-five years later, in 1985, that I came upon his grave site—and that itself was almost a coincidence, more a lucky break than the result of careful investigation. The remains were identified from dental, and later from DNA, records.”
“When did he die?” Pendergast asked.
“As near as could be established, sometime in the late 1970s, 1978 or ’79.”
“And you have no idea what he was doing those last twenty years?”
Weiss shrugged. “I tried to find out. God knows, I tried.” He finished the drink with one quick movement, his hand now trembling slightly.
For a few minutes, the two men remained in silence. Then Weiss looked over at Pendergast.
“Now tell me, Mr. Pendergast: what is your interest in Wolfgang Faust?”
“I have reason to believe he may have been… connected in some way to a death in my family.”
“Ah, yes. Naturally. He ‘touched’ thousands of families in that way.” Weiss paused. “After I came upon the remains, the case was basically closed. Other Nazi-hunters had little interest in filling in the gaps of Faust’s life. The man was dead: why bother? But finding a body, or bringing someone to justice, just isn’t enough. I believe we must know all there is to know about these monsters. It is our responsibility and our duty to understand. And there are so many unanswered questions about Faust. Why was he buried in the middle of nowhere in a plain pine box? Why did nobody in the area have any idea of who he was? Nobody I questioned in a twelve-mile radius of the grave site had ever seen or heard of the man named Willy Linden before. But after my accident… there was no one to take over for me. Meier, they said to me, the man is dead. You found the man’s grave. What more do you want? I try not to be bitter.”
Weiss suddenly put down the empty glass and pushed the file toward Pendergast. “You want to know more about the man, what he was doing in those last twenty years of his life? Then you do it. You carry on my work.” He seized Pendergast’s wrist. The man might have been