From the moment the SS-Obersturmbannführer had picked him up at his apartment to take him to the airfield, von Gradny-Sawz had been convinced they were all en route to Sachsenhausen or Dachau.
But it hadn’t turned out that way. After four days of thorough questioning, he and von Tresmarck had been returned to Buenos Aires. Von Wachtstein had stayed in Germany, not because he was suspected of treason but because he had gone to Augsburg to learn how to fly the new Me-262 jet-propelled fighter.
In the end, he, too, was returned to Argentina. It came out that the young fighter pilot had caused Alicia, the youngest daughter of Señora Claudia de Carzino-Cormano, to be with child. It had been decided that young von Wachtstein would be of greater value to National Socialism married to the daughter of the richest woman in Argentina than he would be flying, and he was sent back to Argentina under orders to “do the right thing.”
Von Gradny-Sawz had not forgotten his terror on being ordered to Berlin, and had vowed then that it would never happen again. He had established—in addition to what he’d talked about with el Coronel Martín—three different places to which he could disappear with reasonable safety should his presence again be demanded in Berlin.
As he walked ahead of von Deitzberg up the stairway to the apartment he had rented for Señor Jorge Schenck, von Gradny-Sawz seriously considered the possibility that the tall, slim, blond Westphalian had gone out of his mind. Rapid mood changes were almost a sure sign of schizophrenia.
And there seemed to be more indications that the war was going to be lost. The newspapers that day carried the story of the bombing on Hamburg of the night of 27 July—it had taken that long to get the story out. According to the correspondent of the Stockholm Dagens Nyheter, who had no reason to lie, the bombing had created so much heat that a “firestorm” had been created, a monstrous inferno with winds of more than 240 kilometers per hour and temperatures so high that asphalt streets began to burn. More than twenty-one square kilometers of the city had been incinerated and more than 35,000 people had been burned to death. The Dagens Nyheter report said the British had name
d the raids “Operation Gomorrah.”
The Italians had surrendered, although most of northern Italy—including Rome—was under German control. Von Gradny-Sawz thought that Mussolini’s declaration of a new Fascist state that was going to drive the English and the Americans from the Italian peninsula was what sailors called “pissing into the wind.”
Since the war was almost surely lost, the question to von Gradny-Sawz then became: What would he have to do to protect himself from what was going to happen when that actually happened?
He had no intention of going back to Europe, which would be not much more than a pile of rubble. Going “home” was absolutely out of the question. The Russians were going to seize Hungary, and the first thing they were going to do was confiscate all the property of the nobility. And then, presuming they didn’t hang them first, the nobility would be shipped off to a Siberian labor camp.
He was going to have to find refuge in Argentina, just as Bormann, Himmler, and the others intended to. The difference there was that they had access to money—mind-boggling amounts of money—and he didn’t. He had managed to get some money out of Hungary, and there were some family jewels. But if he had to buy refuge in Argentina—which seemed likely—that wasn’t going to be cheap, and he wasn’t going to have much to live on until he could, so to speak, come out of hiding and get a job.
He thought that after a while he could get a job as a professor at the University of Buenos Aires—or perhaps at the Catholic University—teaching history or political science. He had a degree in history from the University of Vienna. He had already begun to cultivate academics from both institutions.
But right now the problem was SS-Brigadeführer Ritter Manfred von Deitzberg, and von Gradny-Sawz really had no idea how he was going to deal with that.
The moment they were in the apartment, von Deitzberg went to his chest of drawers, picked up the bottle of brandy that von Gradny-Sawz had brought him as his home remedy for von Deitzberg’s “cold,” poured some into two water glasses, and handed one to von Gradny-Sawz.
“It’s absolutely true, Anton,” von Deitzberg said, smiling charmingly, “that Winston Churchill begins his day with a glass of cognac. ‘Know thy enemy,’ right? Maybe he’s onto something.”
Von Gradny-Sawz thought: Good God, he’s insane and now he’s going to get drunk?
“Final Victory,” von Deitzberg said as he tapped their glasses.
“Our Führer,” von Gradny-Sawz responded, and took a small sip of the cognac.
“You don’t really believe in the Final Victory, do you, Anton?” von Deitzberg asked. “Or, for that matter, in the Führer?”
Von Gradny-Sawz felt a chill. He had no idea how to respond.
“The Führer is, as Churchill would say, ‘as mad as a March hare,’” von Deitzberg said. “And the war is lost. And we both know it.”
Von Gradny-Sawz felt faint.
“Let’s clear the air between us, Anton,” von Deitzberg said, looking into von Gradny-Sawz’s eyes. “I have studied your dossier carefully and made certain inquiries.” He let that sink in for a long moment, and then went on. “I know, for example, that your own deviation from the sexual norm is that you like to take two—or three—women into your bed.”
Jesus Christ!
“Which frankly sounds rather interesting,” von Deitzberg continued. “And I also know that you have violated the law by illegally exporting from the Fatherland some $106,000 plus some gold and diamond jewelry—family jewelry. How much is $106,000 worth in pesos, Anton?”
After a moment, von Gradny-Sawz said, “With the peso at about four to the dollar, a bit more than 400,000 pesos.”
I have just confessed my guilt!
What the hell is going on here?
“And how far do you think that will take you when you try to find a new life here? You’ll have to buy an apartment or a house, and buy groceries, in addition to what it’s going to cost you to grease the necessary Argentine palms.”
Von Gradny-Sawz did not reply.