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There was a great deal of blood. At least three of the bodies had suffered head wounds.
Stein got out of the Ford.
Suboficial Mayor Enrico Rodríguez was kneeling by one of the bodies. Stein waited for him to get out of the picture.
Rodríguez walked over to him and handed him a stapled-together document.
“Identity document?” he asked. “I just took it off that one.”
Stein took it. He flipped through it. He was surprised at the wave of emotion that suddenly came over him. His hand was shaking.
“This is the SS ausweis—identity card—of Wilhelm Heitz,” he read softly, “who was an obersturmführer—lieutenant—in the headquarters company of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler of the Schutzstaffeln of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.”
“You think we ought to keep it?” Rodríguez asked.
“I think we ought to do more than that with it,” Stein said. He walked to the corpse. The eyes were open.
He laid the identity card on the blood-soaked chest.
Click. Click.
He picked up the ausweis, now dripping blood, shook as much off it as he could, then held it somewhat delicately with his thumb and index fingers.
Rodríguez took it from him and placed it in a canvas bag.
“And then I think we should do the same with the other bodies. And then, I respectfully suggest, Sergeant Major, that we get the hell out of here.”
[TWO]
4730 Avenida Libertador
Buenos Aires, Argentina
1605 5 August 1943 (six days previously)
The black Mercedes-Benz with Corps Diplomatique license plates drove north on Avenida Libertador, passed the Ejército Argentino polo field on the left, then, on the right, started to drive past the Hipódromo until the Mercedes and all the cars behind it were stopped by a traffic policeman.
The passenger, Karl Cranz—a well-dressed, blond, fair-skinned, thirty-five-year-old who was accredited to the Republic of Argentina as “commercial attaché” of the embassy of the German Reich—looked out the window and saw on his left his destination, a four-story mansion behind a tall, cast-iron fence and gate.
“There it is, Günther,” he said to the driver. “Make a U-turn.”
Making a U-turn across the heavy traffic on the eight-lane Avenida Libertador was illegal. But if one had diplomatic status, and one was being driven in a vehicle with diplomatic license plates, one was immune to traffic regulations.
“Jawohl, Mein Herr,” Günther Loche said. He put his arm out the window, signaling that he was about to turn.
Loche was twenty-four years old, tall, muscular, and handsome. Cranz often joked that he was going to send Loche’s photograph to Germany, where it could be used on recruiting posters enticing young men to apply for the Schutzstaffel. He was a perfect example of the “Nordic Type.”
Loche, however, was not eligible for the SS, as membership in it was understandably limited to German citizens. He was an Argentine citizen, an “ethnic German” born in Argentina to German parents who had immigrated to Argentina after the First World War and prospered in the sausage business. He was a civilian employee of the German Embassy, known as a “local hire.” He originally had been taken on as a driver, but now, under Cranz, had been given other, more “responsible” duties.
Like his parents, Loche believed that National Socialism was God’s answer to godless Communism, and that Adolf Hitler was God’s latter-day prophet—if not quite at the level of Jesus Christ, then not far below it.
“Let me out in front of the house,” Cranz ordered. “I’ll have someone open the gate for you so that you can park in the basement. Then go upstairs and wait for me in the foyer. I may need you.”
“Jawohl, Mein Herr.”
El Coronel Juan Domingo Perón, a large, tall man with a full head of shiny black hair, who was the secretary of state for labor and welfare in the government of General Arturo Rawson, received Cranz in the mansion library.
He was in civilian clothing, but Cranz nevertheless greeted him in almost a military manner.
