Page 197

As Jimmy wondered how the hell the general was going to get up the stairway on his crutches, the general hobbled to the left of the staircase. When Jimmy got there, he saw what he thought of as an old-fashioned elevator.

First, what looked like an ordinary closet door had been pulled open. Exposed was the elevator door itself, sort of a fence that opened and closed like an accordion.

Clete reached around General Martín and folded open the accordion fence door.

General Martín carefully hobbled inside the elevator.

Clete literally bowed Dorotea into the elevator, then got on himself.

There was barely room for all of them on the elevator.

“I’m surprised you don’t know this, Jimmy,” Frade announced. “Generals and field grade officers, plus of course beautiful women, get to ride. Second lieutenants climb the stairs. Three flights up. Good luck, Lieutenant, and Godspeed!”

Dorotea and the general laughed. Clete closed the door, there came a clank, and the elevator began to rise.

[THREE]

Apartment 4-C

1044 Calle Talcahuano

Buenos Aires, Argentina

1405 20 October 1945

Konrad Fassbinder answered the telephone on the second ring.

“Hola?” he said, listened, and then said, “Wait there.”

Then he put the handset in the cradle and turned to Ludwig Mannhoffer.

“The messenger is at the opera, Herr Mannhoffer. At the ticket booth.”

“That being the case, I suggest you go get the message,” Mannhoffer said. “Richter, you go with him and make sure that he’s not being followed.”

“Jawohl, Herr Mannhoffer,” Erich Richter said, and gestured for Fassbinder to go to the door.

—

Fassbinder returned five minutes later. And a minute after that Richter came into the apartment.

“He was not followed,” Richter announced.

“As far as you could tell,” Mannhoffer said. “Well, let me have it, Fassbinder.”

Fassbinder handed him a large sealed envelope. Mannhoffer put it on the kitchen table and opened it. When he did so, there came a harsh odor of chemicals.

“I hate that smell,” Mannhoffer said.

The envelope contained a sheaf of what photographers called “immediate proofs.” They were photographic prints made as quickly as possible—as soon as the developed film was out of the tank, dried, and fed to an automatic advancing device in an enlarger. The prints most times were not “fixed” well, or at all, which caused them to fade more quickly than those properly processed.

But they did provide a quick view of what the photographer had caught on film, and that was what Mannhoffer wanted as soon as possible—and had paid a great deal of money to get.

These immediate proofs showed passengers disembarking the South American Airways Constellation La Ciudad de Mar del Plata after its arrival a little more than two hours earlier at Aeropuerto El Coronel Jorge G. Frade at the conclusion of its final leg from Berlin.

Mannhoffer didn’t know of course where the photographer had been when he took the pictures. But he had been in the Sicherheitsdienst of the SS long enough to make a good guess. He had somehow managed to set up his cameras—almost certainly Leica CIIs—on tripods on the roof of Hangar Two. The Leicas had spring-driven film-advance mechanisms and film magazines that held 120 35mm frames, rather than the normal magazine that contained twenty-four.

Once the cameras had been focused on the stairways leading to the passenger and cockpit doors, all the photographer had to do was push their shutter release button and he had his series of images being snapped.