Free The Seventh Secret by Irving Wallace

between the window and the bed. She realized that Shertok was showing someone out, a dumpy man in overalls carrying a kit.
    She looked at Shertok questioningly, as he seated himself before the lunch cart. "Just a colleague," he explained. "He debugged the room. It's clean." Shertok began sampling the wine between sucks on his cigar. Tovah sought her purse, extracted a notebook, opened it, and laid it on the table as she sat opposite Shertok.
    "If you haven't much time, I should start right in," she said, cutting into her first dumpling, chewing it, washing it down with the dry wine.
    "How was the trip?" he asked.
    "By my standards, a bust I'd say. I never caught up with a solid lead to the whereabouts of Josef Mengele."
    "Is he here in this country?"
    "Everyone says so, but I'm not sure, Ben. It has become a sort of chic thing to say—I'm speaking of the locals—that they have seen or met the 'renowned' Mengele himself. A great conversation piece, and kind of prestigious, if you understand."
    "I understand very well."
    Tovah consulted her notebook as she ate. "The locals all know that after the Allies overran Germany and Austria, Mengele used one of the Nazi escape networks to make his way to Rome, hid out in a monastery in the Via Sicilia, obtained a false passport in Spain, then entered Argentina in 1951. It's no news to anyone here that when Mengele realized pursuers were closing in, he crossed over to Paraguay, somehow became a Paraguayan, and lived quite openly and safely in Asunción."
    Shertok nodded. "We leaned on the American president Carter to do something about it," he said. "Carter put pressure on President Stroessner here, and Stroessner reluctantly revoked Mengele's citizenship. After that Mengele vanished, slipped out of the capital and has lived in the back country ever since."
    Briefly, she reviewed her notes.
    "Then the director got this new lead," Tovah resumed. "He felt—"
    "There have been plenty of leads lately," Shertok interrupted, "now that we've been joined by the West German government and a group of Americans in offering almost four million dollars in rewards for Mengele's capture. There was the lead, in June, that Mengele had gone to Brazil, lived under the name of Wolfgang Ger-hard, had drowned and been buried in 1979."
    "Well, as you know, Mossad never accepted the idea that Mengele had died and been buried in Brazil. They considered that the forensic report was based on a contrived plant. All a perfect ploy to put off' further investigation, and allow the living Mengele to remain safely alive in Paraguay. Anyway, the director felt that Mengele was still very much alive. In fact, according to the director, Mengele had recently been seen hale and hearty in a Paraguayan town called Nueva Germania, a ratty little colony of German settlers founded by a German teacher and Jew-hater back in the last century. Mengele went there to treat some ailing leftover Nazis. In appreciation he was given the protection of the town, and I was sent to find out if he was still there."
    Shertok sipped his coffee. "Did you know it was dangerous, Tovah?"
    "Oh, I knew it was dangerous."
    "Did you know how dangerous? Two of your predecessors, not Mossad agents, got too close to Mengele and paid for their curiosity."
    "No, I didn't know that," said Tovah slowly. "What do you mean?"
    "In 1961 an attractive Jewish lady named Nora Eldoe, who had been sterilized by Mengele at Auschwitz, traced him to a resort here. She became acquainted with him. Before she could act, Mengele learned who she was. They found her corpse a short time later in Brazil.
    Next, Herbert Cukur, a rehabilitated Nazi, located Mengele in an Argentine hideout. Cukur's body was found in a car trunk in Uruguay."
    "Anyway, when I reached Nueva Germania, he was already gone. Had left a week before. I tried to find out where he had gone, and got a number of leads. So I just tramped around the back country pretending to be a travel writer. I went