City of Spies by Nina Berry Page A

enough,” Pagan said, thinking out loud. “Mama wouldn’t have been happy if she learned that she was born out of wedlock, but it wouldn’t be enough to make her leave us. I know she wasn’t the best person in the world, that she helped this Nazi escape, that she pushed us hard. But she loved us. She loved me and Ava more than anything in the world. She wouldn’t have left us for that.”
    She still couldn’t quite bring herself to say that Eva Jones had been a bad person. But maybe she had been. Loving your children didn’t absolve you of everything.
    Devin was nodding, accepting her verdict. “So, if the Rolf Von Albrecht living and working here is the man you knew as Dr. Someone when you were a child, the same man who wrote those letters, then we can confirm we’ve found Rudolf Von Alt, Nazi war criminal, in Buenos Aires.”
    â€œAnd I’m the only person who can connect the man living here to the one who wrote these letters?” she asked.
    â€œWe think so. I hope it won’t be too dangerous or difficult for you. Seeing him may not be enough to identify him because he may have had plastic surgery. And he will have aged since you saw him last.”
    â€œI remember his voice better than his face,” Pagan said. “If you get me close enough to overhear him, I’ll know.”
    â€œWe’re hoping that won’t take very long. Once that’s done, you can wrap up your movie and go home.”
    â€œBut the US can’t prosecute him here in Argentina. If it’s the right man, do they plan to kidnap him like the Israelis did with Eichmann? Take him back to the US and put him on trial?”
    Devin shook his head very slightly. “They haven’t told me what the long-term plan is, and they have to be careful. After the Israelis took Eichmann, there was a wave of anti-Semitic violence. The fascist gangs haven’t forgotten and are always looking for an excuse to lash out at the local Jewish population. But if this man is indeed Rudolf Von Alt, then he deserves whatever they have planned for him.”
    â€œWhat did he do?” Pagan said, her voice quavering ever so slightly.
    Devin hesitated. “He’s a doctor. A medical doctor with a second degree in physics. He started off working on the German version of the atomic bomb, but when that program collapsed, he started...experimenting. On the prisoners in the camps.”
    Pagan pressed the palms of her hands against her closed eyes, trying to keep the images those words conjured from appearing in her mind. It didn’t help. She swallowed hard against her rising nausea. “He experimented on people.”
    â€œWith doses and implants of radiation, used without anesthetic, often combined with other typical Nazi experiments like limb transplants, using twins and pregnant women and anyone else he could get his hands on. Hundreds of them,” Devin said.
    She swallowed the bile that rose in her throat. “A doctor,” she said stupidly. “Dr. Someone. My mother’s friend.”
    â€œYour mother may not have known his crimes,” Devin said.
    â€œMaybe,” Pagan said, remembering how her strong, stylish mother had laughed over dinner with the angular, balding Dr. Someone while her father sat stony-faced. Ava had been there, too, only four years old, piling her peas into the center of her mashed potatoes, seated on a booster next to a man who had done the unspeakable.
    Pagan’s skin was going to shudder right off her body. She jumped to her feet, pacing over to the suite’s bar. It hadn’t been stocked with the usual welcoming bottles of Scotch, vodka and rum, and she was grateful. Nothing like Nazi atrocities involving your mother to make you want a good stiff drink.
    â€œI’m sorry,” Devin said, getting to his feet. “I almost didn’t tell you.”
    She leaned on the bar with shaking hands. “I don’t want to