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Kamis, 07 November 2013

The Candlesticks of Bogota







THE GREEN KING (part 102 + 1)


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The Candlesticks of Bogota

At 8:10 A.M., at tall man, rather corpulent but still cutting a pleasing figure, came out of private house on Zeppelinstrasse, in Munich, near the Isar. He raised the fox collar of his coat, adjusted his smart suede gloves, and opened the door of his garage. The Mercedes, his pride, was there, sparkling clean. He sat down behind the wheel and reveled in hearing the engine purr softly. He put the car in gear.

‘Don’t move please.’

The voice was so soft and so courteous that he felt no fright. Then turning, he recognize the eyes, and a blazing terror overtook him.

‘It can’t be!’

‘I’m afraid so,’ answered Reb. ‘I know that your children are going to come out and that you have to take them to school. There will be no change in the program. There better not be. I would be forced to kill your children, also, and I would rather not. Now drive normally, please.’

‘Michael…’

‘Drive please.’

The Mercedes backed out of the garage and pulled up slowly in front of the house. The two children walked out, bundled up in red and blue wool scarves. They showed some surprise at seeing a stranger next to their father, but Reb smiled and said to them; ‘Your father and I are old friends. He took care of me almost like a father for twenty months. Come, get in; we are going to drop you at school.’

The children smiled at him and asked questions. He told them his name was Michael, or, rather, that their father called him that because he did not like his other name. And what was this name? Oh, he said, something very foreign and strange, and they could ask their father what is was.






THE GREEN KING (part 104)


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The Candlesticks of Bogota

They arrived at the school, and Reb said to the driver of the Mercedes: ‘You should kiss your children. They are charming.’

The children went into the school, and the car pulled away.

‘Michael, my God…’

‘We are going to Dachau,’ said Reb. ‘Please. Mauthausen is too far and we would have to cross the border. Dachau will do.’

‘Michaael…’

‘My name is Reb,’ said Reb, smiling. ‘Slow down a little, please. I wouldn’t wabt us to have an accident. And I would like you be quite. To hear you speak … only increases that great anger I feel. Do you understand?’

They drove in silence. The camp appeared, still intact after twebty-three months.

‘We are not going inside. It’s not necessary. Just follow the wall until you can see the crematoriums.’

Two minutes went by.

‘There. Stop now, please. And get out of the car.’

Reb also get out. He was holding a can in his left hand and a weapon in his right.

The former Obersturmbannfuhrer asked in hollow voice: ‘Would you really have killed my children?’

‘I think so,’ said Reb. ‘But I’m not sure. I am very angry but I don’t know whether I would have gone as far as to kill them.’

He handed him the can.

‘Open it and drink, please.’




THE GREEN KING (part 105)


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The Candlesticks of Bogota

The former Oberstrurmbannfuhrer unscrewed the cap and immediately recognized the smell. He said in a strangled voice: ‘It’s gasoline.’

‘Yes,’ said Reb. ‘I remembered a young Frenchman you forced to drink, three years and four days ago, at about the same time. For him, it was sludge. Probably because you didn’t have enough gasoline. He was ten years old. He was born on July 23 in Bordeaux. I remember him very well. It took him ten hours to die. I think you will drink this gasoline because you will hope until the very end that I will not kill you. And it’s true that you have a change. Not a big one, but you have one. But, before you drink…’

From the pocked of his jacket, he took a small object wrapped in paper.

‘A present,’ he said.

The man removed the paper. He found a lipstick.

‘I would very much like you to put some on your face, on your lips especially…’

Time went by.

‘There. The cheeks, also, please… very good. Now you can drink the gasoline.. The can is yours, in case you didn’t recognize it. And this latter will be found in your pocket. It was written by a young Lithuanian named Zaccharius. Youl’ll tell me he’s dead. But is that reason enough? He describes in it what you did to the children, of which I was one …. Drink a little more, please…’

He shot from very close, under the right cheekbone. Then he placed the weapon in the still-warm hand of former Oberstrumbannfuhrer Wilhelm Hochreiner and, with the dead man’s own fingers, pulled the trigger once again, this time shooting into a bush.

He waited until he was far away before throwing up. In fact, Dov Lazarus had to stop his car two more times so that he could throw up again.




THE GREEN KING (part 106)


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The Candlesticks of Bogota

‘Watch it,’ whispered Dov

The woman had just reappeared, this time with two men.

‘Don’t you recognize one of them, kid?’

Reb nodded. The smaller of the two men was German, and three weeks earlier, right after Hochreiner’s execution near the crematoriums of Dachau, ha and Dov had seen him driving one of the trucks that delivered Stars and Stripes between Salzburg and Munich. The military police never searched those trucks, other than to take a few copies with a smile, so that during almost ever trip Nazi fugitives travelled, hidden behind stacks a news papers. As for the women, with short grey hair and cold expression, she was the one who, on July, 3, 1945, in Salzburg, had told Reb he could find the photographer named Lothar at his laboratory near the bell tower and had in this way sent him into the trap laid by Epke.



The women had been the first step In the hunt under taken by Reb Klimrod. (The search for Hochreiner had been easy, because the former Obersturmbannfuhrer had simply, at the beginning of 1946, returned to running his textile mill.) Reb had found her less than a hundred hours after he returned to Austria from Munich, and on this day, March 23, 1947, he and Lazarus, together or separately, had been on her tail for forty-three days.

‘There are other guys in the chalet, kid. At least three men.’

‘Four,’ said Reb.

It was about 10:00 p.m. and it was going to be a cold night. Below the small wood where they were lying in wait, they could see the lights of Althoussee. It was in the heart of the Dead Mountains, and the lakes there are deep and dark, set between high, often almost vertical cliffs. Sixty thousand civilians loaded with loot from all of Europe had sought refuge there during the last months of the war.




THE GREEN KING (part 107)


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‘Four men and another women,’ said Reb. He had started with the hypothesis that, working with Epke, she might had been at the house near the Bohemian Chancellory. He was right: Gerda Huber, as described by Reb, had been identified by two shopkeepers in the neighbourhood. They had also revealed her name and her origin. She came from Graz, Erich Steyr’s hometown. The rest had been easy. The women worked for the Austrian Red Cross, helping displeaced people. As such, she had access to all short of passes.

‘Something’s up.’

A third man came out of the chalet, and Dov as well as Reb recognized him.

‘Arni Schaide,’ said Dov, ‘my old pal Arni, who likes so much to visit the Franciscan monasteries between here and Rome.’

On two occasion already, Dov had tracked Schaide, who each time had let him to Rome, to the very door of the Vatican. From there, each time, Schaide had come out alone, having obviously entrusted to the Roman Curia the fugitive he had escorted. Schaide also worked for the Red Cross.

‘Dov?’

For a long time, Reb had focused his binoculars down towards the first curves of the little road leading to the chalet.

‘Two automobiles, Dov. But they have stopped, both of them, and they have just shut off their headlights. There are three hundred yards away.’

In the dark, they looked at each other.

‘Cops?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Reb.

The two large Mercedes-Benzes certainly didn’t belong to the Austrian police, or two any of the occupation authorites. No, it was something else, and Dov must have thought the same thing. He left his post, retread, and also focused his binoculars.




THE GREEN KING (part 108)


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After half a minute, he said: ‘Ten days ago, when I returned from Italy for the second time, right behind Arni, I saw an identical Mercedes. With the same back left door handle broken. It was Innsbruck. Three men inside looking like crack shots. Arni got in with them. I remember the licence plate number… Wait for me, kid.’

He slipped down, disappeared.

Less than the minute later, the phone in the chalet rang and was immediately picked up. Three more minutes, after which there was some commission around the chalet. Reb saw the men who until now had been talking leisurely jump up. One of them rushed outside, two other spread out, weapon in hand. They’ve just been alerted, he thought.

After a pause there was an almost imperceptible sound. Reb hid behind a tree, his finger on the trigger.

A whisper: ‘Kid? Don’t shoot me, please.’ Dov appeared about fifteen away, out of breath.

‘Same car and same guys. Except there are eight or ten of them. And more coming. It looks like Stalingrad all over again, my boy. And I’ll bet you a rabbi for a doughnut that it’s us they’re after.

He smiled.

‘And I wonder who  the hell is in that fucking chalet. Are you sure it’s not Adolf Hitler?’

A quarter of an hour later, they had proof that it was, in fact, a round up: all around them, in a semicircle of which they were almost the centre, flashlights were turned on.

‘But they ended up losing, in Stalingrad,’ said Dov.




THE GREEN KING (part 109)


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He and Reb were moving along the eastern bank of the little lake of Althausssee, and were already more than a thousand yards from the chalet. They were not running, yet. They went along under the trees, not really worried. Their intention, since the descent towards Althoussee was cut off, was to reach another little village, more to the east, called Grundlsee. From there, they intend to go either to bad Aussee or for help, even to the police. But Reb, who was walking ahead, suddenly stopped. Another line of flashlights had appeared, to their right. The circle was closing in, or almost.

They had no choice but to continue straight ahead, tripping halfway down an increasingly abrupt slope.

They increased their speed, and in the clear night they could see before them the snowy peaks of the Dead Mountains. ‘We’ll never get through,’ said Dov. ‘At least not me. I don’t have your legs, kid.’ He was ready to mount a counteroffensive, which was in his nature, but Reb pressed him to keep going. The concentric line of flashlights was now one hundred yards from them as they moved on. They had to pass to the northeast of Grundlsee, and for an instant they saw automobiles, with their headlights on, stationed along the little road that leaves Grundlsee and ends in a-cul-de-sac two and a half or three miles farther on. There were men line up there, also, in the light of the headlights, all armed, some with rifles, their faces turned in their direction. ‘all the survivors of the Third Reich are here,’ remarked Dove, laughing.

He had already fallen twice and had lost his glasses. In the dark, he could hardly see at all. Reb must certainly have helped him. The flashlight carriers were on their heels and closing in.

More lights appeared to their light, those of Gossl. They had now been running for two hours. They were in sight of Toplitz lake. Dov could go no farther. He screamed, addressing himself to those chasing them, that he was Dov Lazarus in person and that he was ready to fight them…




THE GREEN KING (part 110)


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They answered with six or seven shots, the dry, light clicking of 22 Mausers, entrusted during the war to the sharpshooters of the Wehrmacht. Neither Dov and Reb was hit. Again they were climbing, a more and more abrupt cliff, and soon Dov refused to go any farther or any higher. The lake was beneath them, almost vertically down. Dov said he was going to stay right there, in this hollowed-out rock on a kid of platform ‘from which you have a magnificent view,’ and he shook his head quietly, probably smiling in the dark. He was going to remain there, he said, and the intended, even without his glasses, to prevent this Nazi army from coming too close. ‘Think, kid. And, anyway, I’m sure you thought of it before me, with that head yours: we won’t make it this way, buy running. They run faster than we do. So you stay calm, kid, you stay sharp. And listen to that fucking brain of yours that is so extraordinary and is telling you that’s our only change…’  He would hold up enough for Reb, with his young goat’s legs, to climb through the Dead Mountains and maybe get some help.


‘I won’t move, Reb. What are you going to do? Carry me? I weigh a good one nine-eight, from all that beer. Beat it, kid, please. Find that guy you’re .’looking for and put me on his bill.’

… And, of course, when Reb Klimrod agreed to leave him behind and began his climb, he heard, a few minutes after his departure, the first shots. He also heard Dov singing as loudly as he could – ‘My bonnie lies over the ocean, my bonnie lies over the sea.’

He was two hundred yards farther up, after a mad climb in the night, when he heard the thudding sound of a mass tumbling down the mountainside and falling into the icy black water of the lake. He thought Dov was already dead. But shortly after, he could near the sound of the two 45s firing calmly and the Irish-accented voice singing again.




THE GREEN KING (part 111)


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But it was finally interrupted, by one ultimate round of fire.

At around 3:00 A.M. he was back in sight of the chalet. There were no guards visible, but he could see a light. He climbed to the balcony, and at the sound of his footsteps someone asked in German: ;Did you get them?’

‘Only one,’ answered Reb.

The guard appeared at the threshold with a double barreled shotgun under his arm. As soon as he saw Reb, he started to reach for the gun. Reb’s bullet pierced his throat.

He went into the chalet, where he found another man, unarmed, and one of the women, not Gerda Huber.

‘Don’t move, please,’ he said to the terrified couple.

With the barrel of his gun towards the floor, he checked to see that the other rooms were empty. The man who was looking at him fixedly; he had a thin face and a hooked nose and was balding.

He asked: ‘Who are you looking for?’

‘Erich Steyr.’

‘I knew an Erich Steyr who was an attorney in Vienna.’

‘That’s the one.’

‘I have no idea where he might be. He may even be dead.’ His shiny black eyes gave him a somewhat Jewish appearance.

‘Who are you?’ asked Reb.

Just then, he heard, through the door he had left ajar on purpose, the sound of the engines of at least two automobiles.

‘Who are you and why are you being so protected?’

‘You are mistaken,’ said the man. ‘The one who was being protected left this very evening. I’m only the owner of this chalet. And I never knew the name of man who was hiding here.’




THE GREEN KING (part 112)


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Klimrod took the papers the man had on him. At that time, he had neverheard the name Adolf Eichmann.

Yoel Bainish saw Reb Klimrod in Rome around April 10, 1947. Luck had nothing to do with the meeting of the two young men, who had not seen each other for almost eighteen months. Bainish was in Italy on behalf of Haganah, to handle emigration channels. (Three months later, he was to play an active part in the embarkation of four thousand five hundred and fifteen people, on an old American cargo ship, the President Garfield, which became the Exodus).

He and Klimrod met in front of the Castel Sant’ Angelo, at the end of the morning.

‘How in the world did you know that I was in Italy? I found your message at Bertchick’s just in time. I’m leaving Rome tomorrow.’

Klimrod explained that he had gone to Bertchick’s ‘to talk to someone about Mossad or Haganah’ and that, in order to make himself known, he had to give the names of men who would answer for him.

‘Yours was one. And Bertchick told me that you were in Rome. Do you have two hours to spare? I would like to show you something.’

He took Bainish into a little street leading to the Via Crescenzio, right next to Saint Peter’s square, and showed him a plaque, in Italian and German.





THE GREEN KING (part 113)


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‘The escape route leads to this place. They leave Germany through Lindau and Bregenz on Lake Constance, or by the Reschen Pass, which you and I took, two years ago. They travel by car, sometime by bus, and spend their nights in Franciscan monasteries. I have made a list for you. One of the men who arranges the convoys is named Arni Scaide. There is also a woman, Gerda Huber. There’s also a list of them. In Rome, they are taken in charge by Monsignor Heidemann, a German, who runs an official organ of the Vatican. Heidemann furnishes them with passports from the Red Cross. Some of them are even given cassocks and false papers belonging Jesuits. They leave Italy through Bari or, mostly, Genoa. Some of them go to Spain, Syria, or Ethiopia, but many embark for South America. Hundreds have already escaped this way.

Bainish was stunned.

‘Why this sudden avalanche of information?’

‘I found out about all this while looking for something else. I had to tell someone about it.’

That last sentence implied that he had no superiors or organization to whom he had to answer. Bainish (whose career was progressing: it had finally been recognized that he was too intelligent to be dynamiter and he was being assigned more delicate missions) knew that his former road companion had severed all ties with the Zionist organizations. Someone had spoken to him about a certain Klimrod who was working  for ‘those crazies in Nakam.’

He asked: ‘Are you still with them, Reb?’

‘No. Not for a long time.’

‘And Lazarus?’

‘Dead.’

Nothing else. They were walking along the Tiber. Bainish examined Klimrod and found him changed. Not so much in size or weight, though he might have grown a little more and gained a few pounds. But he still had the silhouette of a daddy longlegs, that same apparent slowness of step, and the same depthless gaze. The change was elsewhere: there was a greater hardness and an apparent certainty of a destiny.

‘Did you find what are you looking for, Reb?’

‘Almost.’

Silence.




THE GREEN KING (part 114)


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Then Bainish said suddenly: ‘I’ve always felt a great friendship for you. Really. If there is anything…’

‘Thank you nothing.’

And again silence.

To fill it, Bainish began to talk about this country that was being born on the banks of the Tiberias and the Jordan, where they would finally have their place, he and Reb and so many others who had come or were coming. He was getting excited talking about the great adventure to be lived, even in the Negev desert, which they were beginning to conquer.

The answer came, slowly but definite.

‘Without me,’ said Reb.

‘You are almost as Jewish as I am. To be Jewish can also be a choice.’

‘I am nothing. Nothing.’

Bainish took down the list, needing almost twenty pages, even with his small handwriting, the names, the monasteries, the relay stations, all the information Reb had gathered while ‘looking for something else.’

Strangely uncomfortable, Bainish started to laugh.

‘It’s as if you were giving us a farewell gift.’

‘In a way,’ said Reb.

And then a warm, friendly look came into his eyes, and he began to smile. He wrapped his large hand around Bainish’s shoulder. ‘Thank you, thank you for everything.’ He left and crossed the Tiber.

In Tangiers, Henri Haardt also saw Klimrod again, around this same time, ‘mid-April, I think.’

‘He came to see me as if he had seen me the night before, asked me if I would agree to carry out a few operations with him. He had some money, about six thousand US dollars, and wanted to invest it all in a single trip, in a sort of double or nothing.




THE GREEN KING (part 115)


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‘He looked about twenty-two or twenty-three years old. His second stay in Tangiers lasted four months, and during this period we made four trips together, all successful. Not counting expenses, that left us with a profit of a little more than fifty dollars per case. One hundred and twenty cases were his during the first trip, and after that he had two hundred each time. The calculation are simple: he netted close to thirty five thousand dollars.

     ‘As for his departure from Tangiers, it was simple as his arrival. He merely told me that our collaboration had been “both extremely pleasant and agreeable”- he really spoke like that, slowly and softly, with an almost old-fashioned courtesy – but that the time had come for him to leave. I told him of my regret and that I had a great feeling of friendship towards him, almost affection. And I also told him that we could have made a fortune together. He smiled at me and told me that didn’t interest him.

‘I don’t know where he got it, but under his arm he was carrying a small painting, unwrapped, which he showed me, asking me whether I liked it. I have never been an authority on painting and all I could see were spots of colour. I told him so, and he started laughing, but the laughter never reached his eyes, which wined ever so slightly.

“The signature belongs to a man named Kandisky, who died three years ago,”  he said. “A very great painter. One can kill for a painting, Henri, but one can also be killed by it….”

‘On Boulevard Pasteur, he bought a cloth bag the exact size of the painting. And, as far as I know, that was the only baggage he took with him when he left Tangiers, at the beginning of August 1947, for a destination unknown to me. That painting and those two books that he was always dragging around with him….’




THE GREEN KING (part 116)


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At the time, Arcadio Almeiras was fifty-six years old. He had dreaded becoming a painter, but had been one for five or six  years in the early nineteen-twenties with Emilio Pettoruti. He had gone as far as Berlin to meet Klee. As for Kandinsky, he remembered very well the three or four times he had visited him in Weimar. That was when he hoped to have a little, a very little, bit of talent. ‘Not even a little bit. The Gobi desert.’

He asked: ‘And whose is it, in your opinion?’

The tall young man shrugged his shoulders.

‘A name like Kandinsky. But it’s worth a lot of money, I’m sure. At least a thousand dollars.’

His Spanish was perfect correct, although he spoke hesitantly.

‘French?’

‘Belgian,’  said the young man.

Almeiras took the painting to the door to his shop and held it up to the pale daylight of the argentine winter. He examined it closely. As often happened, the s in Kandinsky had been made by the painter to look like a j. He smiled at very pretty young woman who was walking by his gallery in Buenos Aires, then turned around.

‘It’s a Kandisky, a Russian painter who died recently in Paris. And you are right; it is worth a great deal. More than a thousand dollars, at any rate. You are really interested in selling it?’

‘I need money. And I didn’t steal it.’

He presented some documents, which it turned out, were not worth much, establishing that the painting had been legally purchased in Madrid a year earlier, from a man named Maurer, and legally taken from Madrid to Buenos Aires.




THE GREEN KING (part 117)


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Almeiras said: ‘There is mention of other paintings…’

‘Four others,’ said the young man. He took a little notebook from his pocked, opened it, showed the page to Almeiras, who read: ‘July 3, 1946, Madrid. Five paintings bought from Gunther Maurer, of Berlin. Klee, F. Marc, Kondinjky, F. Marc, A. Marcke. 1200 US dollars.’

‘You really paid twelve hundred dollars for these five paintings?’

‘He wanted five thousand, but he was in rush.’

Almeiras closed his eyes. ‘Twelve hundred dollars for a Klee, two Marcs, one Kandinsky, and an August Macke! These Europeans have really gone crazy! And are you considering selling all of them?’

‘I don’t think so,’ answered the young man quietly. ‘Or maybe later..’

‘Or if you are made an interesting offer.’

The young man’s thin face, rather impressive with those light eyes that pierced it, softened noticeably when he smiled.

‘I guess.’

They decided that Almeiras would keep Kandisky for a few days. He would have liked to see the four other paintings, if only for his personal pleasure, nut the young man told him he didn’t have them with him, that they were not in Buenos Aires, not even in Argentina. He have left them with his brother, in Bogota. Yes, he had family, his father, his mother, and three brothers in Bogota. And he would be going back there shortly.

‘Do you speak German?’ asked Almeiras.

Just the usual words, he said, ‘Jawohl’ and ‘Kommen Sie mit mir’ and so on. He laughed, very pleasantly.

‘Der Blaue Reiter,’ said Almeiras. ‘The Blue Rider. That was the name of a group of painters before the Great War of 1914. Kandisky, Marc, Macke, and Klee were part of it. A collector would certainly be interested in the purchase of your five paintings at the same time. It’s already a collection in itself. You understand?’

‘I understand,’ said the young man.




THE GREEN KING (part 118)


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‘Especially Argentines of German origin. We have many Germans in Argentina, especially of late. Franz Marc and August Macke both die during the 1914-18 war. Their painting are much in demand by collectors. They died and didn’t have time to paint very much. And for people German origin, to buy these paintings is almost like – how shall I put it? – like making a patriotic gesture.

‘I understand,’ repeated the young man. ‘I am agreeable to a complete sale, then, if the price is interesting. And thank you for your honesty. I will not forget it.’

No, he couldn’t furnish an address in Buenos Aires, but he would return to the gallery. His name was Henri Haardt, he said, in answer to the question put to him by Almeiras.

After a seventeen-day watch, Erich Steyr appeared.

Diego Haas was an Argentine, born in that country of a father Carinthia and a mother whose name was – and she never failed to point it out – de Carbajal and a Thousand Other Things. He was a chubby blond young man whose small size was inversely proportioned to his cynicism, which was considerable, and he exhibited an insolent cheerfulness that bordered on pure folly. Speaking German and English, besides Spanish, he had studied law for a while and had recently been engaged as secretary to an extremely rich German immigrant named Erich Steyr. It was not September, and five months of employment had already taught him the essential facts concerning his employer: Steyr, Erich Joachim, was quite rich, quite intelligent, quite handsome, quite learned, quite elegant and refined, but if he wasn’t the world’s most despicable worm, he wasn’t far from it.




THE GREEN KING (part 119)


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Diego smiled graciously at Steyr.

‘I never heard of this Kandisky, senor. But I am prepared to find him admirable.’ He glanced casually at the painting and exclaimed: ‘Admirable!.’

After that he left the gallery and went outside to ogle the senoritas. Nearby were Steyr ‘s car, Steyr’s chauffeur, and Steyr’s bodyguard. Steyr didn’t live in Buenos Aires. As soon as he arrived in Argentina, he had acquired, through Diego, a beautiful estancia near Cordoba, and less than a week after the purchase, the crates had arrived, innumerable, concealing the treasures of Golconda. Even Diego, who prided himself on his lack of culture, had marveled upon seeing such treasures. At the same time, Steyr was setting uphis Argentine, even South American, future: he was going to establish himself as an investment counselor, especially to those unfortunate compatriots of his who had been chased from their native country by the forces of international Jewry. ‘Jawohl,’ Diego had said, imperturbable, unaffected by this false exaltation. Steyr, he thought, was far too intelligent to take this nonsense seriously; he was a piece of garbage and that was that. They had travelled through Argentina and neighbouring countries, as far as Venezuela and Chile, and had already been to Bogota, in Colombia.


In truth -  and he recognized it himself when he spoke to Georges Tarras – Diego Haas had no particular recollection of that day in September 1947. From the start, he was aware of Steyr’s passion for the arts, painting especially. The Almeiras Gallery was therefore an almost compulsory stop; it was the finest in Argentina, and thus the visit to the Kandisky was not of an usual nature. It was not until Diego’s own meeting with the King and particularly, the hallucinatory scene in Bogota two months later that he made the connection…




THE GREEN KING (part 120)


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For it took several weeks for the ‘Kandisky Affair’ to achieve real proportions. During that period, Steyr returned many times to the gallery, apparently conducting a slow negotiation.

On November 5, Almeiras informed Steyr that the owner of the five paintings he wanted to acquire had finally decided to say yes.

Steyr left for the Colombia with Diego, using a business meeting as a pretext, and hoping to kill two birds with one stone.

They arrived in Bogota on November 6, 1947.

‘I hate Bogota,’ said Diego Haas. ‘What’s more, I also despise Santiago, in Chile. And lima. And Lapaz and Quito. I barely tolerate Buenos Aires. Not to mention Asuncion, which I abhor, and Caracas , which I positively loathe. In fact, besides Rio, although they don’t speak Spanish there…’


‘Would you be kind enogh to shut your big mouth,’ said Steyr, as always without raising his voice. Seated in the back of the car, he was reading, deeply engrossed in some business matter. A Colombian driver who looked like a turtle was at the wheel, with the bodyguard to his right, a man named Gruber, whom Diego judged to be a little less astute than a cow, and he didn’t think much of cows. Diego was seated in the back, next to the lawyer.

‘I don’t know Europe very well,’ continued Diego, completely unaffected by the re buff. ‘Except for a few petticoats here and there. I had almost convinced Mamita – that’s my mother – to offer me one or two years in Paris when you Nazi guys started your own excursions there. In my own way, I am a victim of the Third Reich.’

On hour earlier, the plane of Caracas had brought the three men to Bogota.

‘Haas, one more of your stupid jokes and I will ask Gruber to beat you up. Which he will be delighted to do.’




THE GREEN KING (part 121)


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The Candlesticks of Bogota
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They were approaching the centre of the city, which they reached a little after 4:00 P.M. It was raining, a very find cold rain, explained probably by the very high altitude. They went directly to their hotel, near San Carlos Palace, where Bolivar had lived. At the reception desk, a message was waiting for Steyr. It was written in Spanish and signed by Henri Haardt. Diego translated.

‘He writes that if you want to buy his paintings, you can find him every day after six in the evening at Carrera de Bacata, 8, in the Chapinero section. Ole! The “Ole” is mine.

Steyr decided to put it off until the following day. But then, driven by what Diego though was his feverish haste to see these paintings he had been waiting for two months, he decided to go that vey evening. Diego sets the time as 8:15 when they arrived at 8 Carrera de Bacata. They found a brand new building, which looked as if it wasn’t yet live in, but as soon as they reached the door, a man appeared and told them that one apartment, on the fifth floor, was occupied. By senor Henry Haardt, precisely, and that Senor Haardt had just come in; therefore he was at home.

After entering, there was a narrow hallway, through which there was access to the cellar and the caretaker’s rooms. It led to a straight staircase, whose first flight ended on a landing. To the left, five or six steps led to a second hallway, where they were two elevators and the service stairway.

As always, it was Gruber who opened the door, and thus arrived first at the elevators. He preceded Steyr by two or three yards and Diego Haas by much more, because Diego had stopped to have a few words with the caretaker, whom he thought rather ‘bizarre’.




THE GREEN KING (part 122)


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The Candlesticks of Bogota
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Diego heard three shots, but, at the moment, didn’t know who was shooting. He had just reached the top of the first flight of stairs and was about to step on to the landing. He hesitated, not knowing what he wanted to do; go see what was happening or ‘get the hell out as quickly as possible while pretending that I had gone for help.’ Events didn’t give him the choice. A very tall figure appeared above him and calmly gave him an order in Spanish.

‘Call the caretakers, and tell him to come here. There has been an accident.’

Diego didn’t have to call; the caretaker had also heard the shots. (But not the Colombian driver who had brought Steyr and his two companions, because the door of building had been closed.) Diego, in a way reassured by the calmness of the stranger, climbed the last steps.

He reached the second hallway. Gruber was lying crouched against the metal door of one of the elevators, as if he were listening through the door, with his cheek pressed against it. But blood was beginning to run down his neck.

Erich Steyr was a few feet away, unharmed, hands above his head, with a look of terror on his face.

‘On your stomach,’ Diego was told. He complied immediately, as did the caretaker, who had just arrived, breathless. A large hand appeared in diego’s field of vision and proceeded to search him.

‘No tickling, please. I can’t stand it. And I’m not armed, thank God. Handy as I’m, I could maim myself with nail scissors.’

‘It’s not you I am after,’ said the deep voice of the stranger. ‘Nothing will happen to you if you remain quite.

‘I’ll be as quite as a mouse,’ answered Diego with as much conviction as he could muster. ‘I had actually intended to spend the evening on my stomach.’




THE GREEN KING (part 124)


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The Candlesticks of Bogota
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The man also search the caretaker, without result. There was a moment of silence, and when the stranger spoke again, it was in German.

‘Do you recognize me, Erich?’

‘Reb Klimrod,’ said Steyr. ‘You have grown a lot.’

Silence.

‘She died in Belzec, erich. Just like Mina and Kati. Did you specifically request Belzec, or did you leave it up to the SS in Lyvov?’

‘I didn’t have any particular camp in mind. Reb, that young blond man you had lie down understands everything we are saying. In order words, you will have to kill him also.

‘And I went to Hartheim castle.’

‘I asked Epke to show you the pictures, if he could fine them, before killing you. Did he?’

‘Yes.’

Silence again.

‘I’m not afraid, Reb. No matter what you do to me.’

‘Good.’

‘How did you find me?’

‘The post cards you sent to your wife from Buenos Aires, to tell her you had arrived safely. I searched her house one night. I almost missed it. And then I remembered that play you had written, the one that look place in Venice. One of the players was named Tarantello, like the signer of the card.’

‘That’s the price one pays for having literary aspirations. Do you really have a Klee, a Marc, and a Macke?’

‘No. anyway, not silence you robbed us. Go into the elevator , Erich. The one of the right.’

‘Everything is in Cordoba, Reb. Absolutely everything. Given time, I could arrange it so that it would call come back to you legally.’

‘Get in.’

‘If I die, you’ll lose everything, Reb. All the thing that belonged to you father you loved so much’.




THE GREEN KING (part 124)


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The Candlesticks of Bogota
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The fourth shot made Diego Haas look up. He saw Steyr grimacing from pain and standing on only his left leg; the bullet had mangled his right knee.

‘Don’t try to force me to kill you this way, Erich. You won’t succeed. Go into the elevator.’

Steyr moved, hoping on his good leg and leaning against the wall for support.

‘Do you really speak German?’

For a few seconds, Diego didn’t understand that the question was being asked him. He didn’t even think of lying. ‘Fluently,’ he said. ‘But the only reason I went to Europe was to look under women’s skirts there.’ For the first time, he saw the face of the man Steyr had called ‘Reb Klimrod.’ His features were frozen in a terrible grimace of hatred and disgust. But the voice remained fantastically calm.

‘Please get up and go look.’

Diego did. He discovered an elevator that seemed perfectly ordinary. Then he realized that the sides were made of sheets of shining steel, as if someone had forgotten to finish them.

And there were three photographs line up at eye level, all three showing the same man crawling on the floor of what appeared to be a cave, mouth open, at the height of suffering.

‘My father, Johann Klimrod. Look at him well, Erich. Youl’ll have plenty of time to do so.’

Steyr had collapsed in a corner of the elevator. He tried to say something, but the steel panel closed shut and the noise of the lock muffled the sound of his voice. In the door that had just shut, there was a little window, not longer than two hands placed side by side. Quickly, Steyr’s face appeared behind it. Diego could see the lips moving but there wasn’t the slightest sound.




THE GREEN KING (part 125)


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‘What is your name?’

‘Haas. Diego Haas.’

‘Move back. I don’t want you to get hurt. Go sit back there, with the other man. He is not a caretaker and not responsible for anything. He had no idea what I was going to do. Don’t move, either of you.’

With that, Klimrod got to work. From the stairwell, he brought a cloth bag and an entire network of electric wires. For one second, he seemed to hesitate; his pale eyes had wined and his lips were quivering, as if he were about to cry. But he plugged in all the connections. Only then did Diego notice the blood running down the back of his right hand, and the bloody tear in his jacked, ebave the elbow: one of the Grubber’s shots must have hit him.

Nothing seemed to be happening since he had plugged in the wires. There were no sparks, or anything else visible. Klimrod took a step back, staring into the little window. After a few minutes, he brushed the steel door lightly with his fingers. A gesture that he repeated many time during the following minutes, in total silence.

Until the moment when he said to Diego without even turning his head, in German: ‘Come feel this.’

Once again, Diego obeyed. He put out his hand, which was trembling, and pulled it back immediately. The steel was very hot.

‘And that’s nothing,’ said Klimrod in a distant, almost dreamy voice. ‘In one minute the metal will start turning red…’

The only did hr press the bUtton. There was that hollow noise characteristic of elevators beginning to function, but the steel cabin started to rise with infinite slowness, almost imperceptibly, maybe one inch per minute.

From the cloth bag, Klimrod took eight silver candle stick and as many candles. He lined them up in front of the elevator, the steel of which was actually beginning to redden slightly. Diego didn’t dare look through the little window.
‘Eight candlesticks, eight lights,’ said Klimrod. ‘Two for each member of my family….’




THE GREEN KING (part 126)


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He lit the candles one by one. Through the window, Steyr’s face seemed to be melting in pain; his eyes looked as if they were burning. Diego though that maybe, at that moment, he should say something. Klimrod took step back and, in a language Diego didn’t immediately recognize, began to recite something.

When he was finished, above the yellow flames of the candles, below the elevator, which was now red, there was an empty space. The elevator was still rising, the steel more and more incandescent. Diego was chilled with horror, and looked away.

‘Please get up. Both of you.’

The other had been given in Sanish.

He made them go down the short flight of stairs, then the full staircase. They were halfway down it when the Colombian driver saw them.

The two shots fired by Reb Klimrod went high over the man’s head, but the nonetheless felt like a target and disappeared from the doorway.

‘This way.’

They went into the quarters of the caretaker, two rooms in a row.

‘Come in here, please,’ Klimrod ordered the caretaker. He closed the closet door on him and locked it. Deigo Haas, on the other hand, he pushed ahead of him. They reached a door, to which Klimrod had they key, and found themselves in a little street where a Volkswagen was parked.

‘Please drive. My wound would encumber me. I hope you know how to drive.’







THE GREEN KING (part 127)


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The Candlesticks of Bogota
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They heard footsteps behind them: the driver was running towards them. One of his bullets crashed through the rear window and hit the right edge of the wildshield. Klimrod answered with two shots, apparently not wanting to hit his target.

‘Let’s go, please.’

The car was hit two more time, but one sharp turn taken at full speed by Diego put them out of reach. They quickly got to Aveida Caracas.

Diego asked: ‘And we are going to?’

‘The airport.’

‘Straight ahead.’

He was pulling himself together, recovering some of his friskiness, even if he was still horrified by the scene he had just witnessed.

He asked: ‘What was that you were reciting, in front of those candlesticks?’

‘The Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead.’

‘Because you are Jewish?’

‘Not any more, but I was, a little, at one time,’ said Klimrod…

….. who suddenly yelled, ‘STOP!’

The Volkwagen had just reached the vast esplanade of the Campo Eucharistique, and two military police vehicles were about to close in on them.

‘Turn around. Quickly, please.’

‘Call me Nuvolary,’ said Diego.

But the turned at furious speed, as if his life depended on it. And it probably does, you big fool! He thought. If this big guy with the soft, the policia military certainly will; they shoot anything that moves. He went full speed towards the Techo race track. He was living the most exciting hours of his life.






THE GREEN KING (part 128)


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Because other car appeared, from the left and the right, and from behind, he now was really involved, and with an incomprehensible cheerfulness, he did his best to avoid them, going into a wild saraband….

….. until the moment when, at an order given by Klimrod, he stepped on the brake to stop. He didn’t even have time to understand (‘Everything was ready and waiting, I assure you’), but fund himself at the wheel of a truck this time, driving west, driving by the same police cars that were  chasing the Volkswagen.

A short time after, the road began to descent vertiginously; it became a path, one of the muddiest, hardly visible through pouring rain. The headlights, t each turn, lit either the wall of a forest-covered mountain or the frightening gap of a precipice. At least a dozen times, having clumsily used the brakes, Diego felt the truck, carried by its own inert force, begin to slide in the yellow mud, directly towards the abyss. Each time, miraculously, he had managed to pull out of it. I couldn’t stop even if I wanted to, he said to himself. This is the final fall, Dieguito!.

It was only after several hours of this mad descent that they came in sight of a tiny esplanade. Diego hit the brake with all his strength, standing on the pedal, which didn’t stop the truck from crashing into a rock.

But they had finally stopped.

They both stepped out at the same time. In a corner of the rock, there was a niche, and in it stood a light-blue-and-hold Virgin, at whose feet some flowers had been left in a can, as well as votive offerings, thanking the Madonna for watching over truck and car drivers through their harrowing descent.







THE GREEN KING (part 129)


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‘Ah, that explains it,’ Diego said cheerfully. ‘I’m not such a bad driver after all…’

He turned around and saw Reb Klimrod, his forehead pressed against the rock, crying.

After this stop, and one more that they made to get some gasoline, they had to drive four more hours to reach the little town of Villavicencio, which is, in altitude, not a distance, a bit more than a mile lower than Bogota. By this time, a rather strange accord had developed between Klimrod and Haas.

After they left Villavicencio, going east, Klimrod asked Diego where they were, and what was ahead of them. Diego burst out laughing.

‘I was never very good at geography. No more than at history, Spanish, foreign languages, physics and chemistry, and mathematics. And I was always excused from gymnastics with the help of Mamita. That, under those circumstances, I was able almost to complete a law degree is, certainly, one of the most nauseating scandals of worldwide university history. Anyway, to put it simply, to the right, there is nothing; to the left. It’s completely empty. As for straight ahead, it’s even worse.’

‘Which means what, exactly?’

Diego pointed, thinking. This smacks of being a historical moment, what you are about to do, my chubby little Diego.

He said: ‘You walk straight ahead for fifteen hundred or two thousand miles and, at one point, you turn right. That will be the Amazon. There you start rowing and, theoretically, after another six hundred or so miles, give or take a month, you reach the Atlantic. From there you can go back to Austria.

He looked up and was chilled by the incredible emotion he could see on that thin face.






THE GREEN KING (part 130)


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‘They will be after you,’ he said, suddenly regretting his lightheartedness. ‘Just in my country, in Argentina , they have invested more than one hundred million dollar. They are men like Steyr everywhere, throughout the continent, and I heard talk about a network that is going to send even more of them over here. They can’t let something like what you have done to Steyr go by; it could give other ideas. The caretaker of the building.

‘He wasn’t the real caretaker. I paid him to play the part, but he knew nothing else. He though it was a joke. Please exonerate him.’

‘Did he speak German?’

‘No.’

‘Therefore, he couldn’t have understood anything you and Steyr were saying.’ He smiled, his yellow eyes sparkling. ‘I’m actually the only witness, the only one to know your name.


He took Klimrod hand, forced it to take the 45 from his belt, and pressed the barrel of against his own temple.

‘Boom!’ he said gaily. ‘But I don’t mind telling you that would annoy me.’

They drove by a place called Puerlo Lopez, and there, because a small plane flew over them twice, they suddenly changed direction, in the ocean of Ilano grass in a silence that was buzzing in the heat. They went south, for no other reason that they had stumbled on a to a new road that was hardly visible and obviously old. They had been gone from Bogota for more than forty hours when they went through San Carlos de Guaroa, and they reached the Chaffuray rancho on the morning of the ninth. Beyond that, there was one more registered rancho, and that was La Horqueta, which they reached after one last stretch that lasted fourteen hours of driving time. After that, the road ended.

Although Diego tried to go farther in the truck, he finally had to capitulate before a river where there was no bridge, and where, after a long search, they could find no ford.






THE GREEN KING (part 131)


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‘That’s it,’ said Diego, worn out.

When he shut off the engine, the silence bounced back at him, overwhelming in its force. Moreover, he had the feeling that an irreparable folly was about to occure. That wild descent from Bogota, for hours, on that winding road where they should have been killed twenty times, had nothing premeditated about it; it was simply the continuation of their escape from the Chapinero. Then, the trip east, going deeper and deeper into a world that was less human, had been a kind of game, like moving on inch by inch to the edge of a bottomless pit…

‘Now, we have come to the final pint…’

He climbed on to the running board and from there to the roof of the truck. It was not so much what we saw jungle run along a yellow river and sometimes obscured it completely – as what he imagined beyond it: an absolute immensity, unknown, glaucous and gluey, for hundreds of thousands of square miles, swarming with beasts and.. It gave him goose bumps.

‘Listen, he said suddenly, with a seriousness that surprised even him, ‘this is madness. You can’t possibly be thinking of going on , alone, straight ahead…’

‘There is one think I would like you to do,’ said Klimrod softly. ‘This truck we have been using – I rented it from someone who didn’t know what I was going to do with it. This man, whose name and address you will find inside the truck, might some problems because of me. Try to convince the police of his innocence as well. And compensate him, please.

He had on the boots, pants, and cotton shirt he had bought in Villavicencio five day earlier. He pulled the Cold 45 from his belt and put in on the hood.

‘Take that, too, or throw it away. As for money…’






THE GREEN KING (part 132)


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He turned the cloth bag from which he had taken the candlesticks and candles in Bogota upside down. Out came two books, three passport, and a bundle of bills. He took only the books, which he put back into the bag, and swung it over his shoulder.

‘And thank you. I will remember you, Diego.’

The next minute, he had walked away.

Diego Haas remembers yelling after him two or three times, imploring him to comeback, torn by an inexplicable despair. But at no time did Klimrod seem to hear. He went straight into the jungle, which rapidly, avidly, engulfed him.

Two days later, on November 11, 1947, having returned to civilization, Diego Haas was arrested by soldiers, who hit him a little on the head, as well as on other parts of his body. He was taken back to Villavicencio and from there from Bogota, where he was questioned with a meritorious determination. He nevertheless stuck to his own story: he had been an innocent victim, forced by the madman, threatened by a huge gun and twelve grenades, to drive a car, then a truck, to the very ends of the Illano, to which, had been alone, he would never have thought of going. No, the madman said nothing about his name or the reasons that had made him burn Senor Steyr alive, ‘My-dear-boss-whose-tragic-death-has-overwhelmed-me-with-grief. Ole.’ (The final ‘Ole‘ had been in petto.) Of Senor Steyr, after the elevator had been opened by a blowtorch, there was left only a rather repugnant mass of well-done meat.

What did the madman look like?

‘He is about thirty-five,’ said Diego. ‘I would estimate his height as five feet six, black hair and very dark eyes, a scar on the left cheek. And he is missing part of the little finger of his left hand. Oh, and I almost forgot: he limps. Yes, he speaks German, but with a  heavy Russian accent.

No, no, not Polish, Russian. I know some Russians, you see! There is no way he could be a real German. At one point, he spoke of Caracas and Venezuela. But my guess is that he is headed towards the border to the south.

They hit him a few more times, because his description of the madman didn’t agree too well with the one given them by the caretaker, who was not even the real caretaker but a change substitute. Diego said that was not surprising, because the substitute caretaker was clearly myopic and an alcoholic (which was true).

After that, his mamita, in Buenos Aires, who had high connections and big means, was able to intervene and explain that her only, and crazy, son was anything (a loser in particular) but a criminal who might serve as an accomplice to a ‘Polish Jew or a Russian Communist.’ As soon as he was set free, Diego found the owner of the truck, who had not been too worried (they had knocked out only a few of his teeth); he was compensated for his misfortune with part of the twelve thousand six hundred and twenty-who-was-not-the real-caretaker was given the rest, after he got out of prison with no greater damage than the loss of three fingers.

Stirred by a textile magnet from Medellin, who was offering a twenty-thousand-dollar reward for the madman’s capture, the search went on four weeks, covering a wide area stretching from Nunchia in the north to the border in the south.

To the east, two columns of soldiers and three planes took part in the search. They even found the last spot the truck had reached, and there they searched through the Illano for dozens miles. Without much conviction, for, as crazy as he might be, the madman couldn’t be crazy enough to have gone straight ahead.

The King, in the meantime, was on his way to his future kingdom.







PAUL-LOUP SULITZER



The Green King



Translated from the French by Denise Raab Jacobs

First publishing in Great Britain by Granada publishing 1985



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I LOVE YOU…
I LOVE YOU…
I LOVE YOU…
I LOVE YOU…
I LOVE YOU…
I LOVE YOU…











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