“It was in New York, yes. But not a New York any tourist ever sees. I taught in a place called East New York. About five square miles of some of the worst-off people in the whole city. You’ve got some auto shops, and bodegas, places that’ll sell you cigarettes and booze, and places that’ll cash your checks. The Seventy-fifth Precinct—what the cops call the Seven-Five, those unfortunate enough to be assigned to it. When I was teaching, there were more than a hundred homicides in the Seven-Five. Some nights, it sounded like Beirut. You’d go to sleep to the sound of Saturday Night Specials. A desperate place. Pretty much written off by the rest of society.”

  “And that’s where you taught.”

  “I thought it was obscene that in America, the wealthiest nation in the world, this sort of desolation was still tolerable. Here was a place that made Soweto look like Scarsdale. Sure, there were the usual ineffectual poverty programs, but there was also the unspoken conviction of futility. ‘The poor will always be with us’—nobody used those words anymore, but that’s what they meant. They used other code words, talked about ‘structural’ this and ‘behavioral’ that, and, hey, the middle class was doing just fine, wasn’t it? So I stuck it out. I wasn’t going to save the world, I wasn’t naive. But I told myself that if I could save one kid, maybe two, maybe three, my efforts wouldn’t have been wasted.”

  “And did you?”

  “Possibly,” Ben said, suddenly tired. “Possibly. I wasn’t around any longer to find out, was I?” He spat out the words with distaste: “I was ordering truffled timbales at Aureole, quaffing Cristal with clients.”

  “Sounds like a terrible shock to the system, that kind of change,” Liesl said gently. She attended to his words carefully, perhaps in need of distraction from her own pain.

  “It was deadening, I think. The hell of it was, I was actually good at it. I had a knack for the game, the rituals of client courtship. If you wanted someone who could order at the city’s most expensive restaurants without glancing at the menu, I was your man. And then, as often as I could, I’d go risk my neck—recreationally, of course. I was an extreme-sport junkie. I’d go climb the Vermillion Cliffs, in Arizona. Sail solo to Bermuda. Go para-skiing in Cameron Pass. Courtney—an old girlfriend of mine—used to insist I had a death wish, but that wasn’t it at all. I did those things to feel alive.” He shook his head. “It sounds silly now, doesn’t it? The idle diversions of a pampered rich kid, someone who hadn’t figured out a reason for getting dressed in the morning.”

  “Maybe it was because you’d been taken from your natural element,” Liesl said.

  “And what was that? I’m not sure that saving souls in East New York was going to be a lifelong calling, either. Anyway, I never got the chance to find out.”

  “I think you were a sail, like Peter. You just needed to find your wind.” She smiled sadly.

  “The wind found me, it would seem. And it’s a goddamn monsoon. Some conspiracy that was launched half a century ago and is still claiming lives. Specializing in the people I love. Maybe you’ve never been in a small boat during a storm, Liesl, but I have. And the first thing you do is drop the sail.”

  “Is that really an option now?” She poured him a small quantity of brandy in a water glass.

  “I don’t even know what the options are. You and Peter have spent a lot more time thinking about it than I have. What conclusions did you come to?”

  “Just the ones I told you. A great deal of conjecture for the most part. Peter did a lot of research into the period. He was disheartened by what he found out. The Second World War was a conflict that had clear rights and wrongs, and yet many of those involved were utterly indifferent to what was at stake. There were numerous corporations whose only concern was to maintain their operating margin. Some, alas, even viewed the war as an opportunity to be exploited—an opportunity to increase their profits. The victors never adequately came to grips with this legacy of corporate double-dealing. It was never convenient to do so.” Her sardonic half-smile reminded Ben of his brother’s banked sense of outrage, his smoldering anger.

  “Why not?”

  “Too many American and British industries might have had to be seized for trading with the enemy, for collaboration. Better to sweep the problem under the carpet. The Dulles brothers, you know, made sure of it. Tracking down the real collaborators—it wouldn’t have looked good. It would have blurred the lines between good and evil, interfered with the myth of Allied innocence. Forgive me if I don’t explain myself very well—these are stories I have heard many times. There was a young attorney in the Justice Department who dared make a speech about collaborations between American businessmen and the Nazis. He was immediately fired. After the war, German officials were called to task, some of them. And yet the citadel of Axis industrialists was never probed, never disturbed. Why prosecute German industrialists who had done business with Hitler—who had, really, made Hitler possible—given that they were just as happy now to do business with America? When overzealous officials at Nuremberg had a few of them convicted, your John J. McCloy, the American High Commissioner, had their sentences commuted. The ‘excesses’ of fascism were regrettable, but industrialists had to look after each other, right?”

  Once again, he could almost detect Peter’s passionate voice in her recountings. Dully, he said, “I still have a hard time getting my mind around it—financial partnerships when the two sides were at war?”

  “Things aren’t always as they seem. Hitler’s senior-most intelligence officer, Reinhard Gehlen, had already begun planning his own surrender in 1944. The high command knew which way the wind was blowing, they knew Hitler was mad, irrational. So they bartered. They microfilmed their files on the U.S.S.R., buried them in watertight drums in the mountain meadows of the Alps, not a hundred miles from here, and presented themselves to the American Counterintelligence Corps to make a deal. After the war, you Americans put Gehlen in charge of the ‘South German Industrial Development Organization.’”

  Ben shook his head blearily. “It sounds like you both got pretty immersed in this stuff. And it sounds like I’m way out of my depths.” He knocked back the rest of the brandy.

  “Yes, I suppose we did get rather deep into all of this. We had to. I remember something Peter told me. He said the real question isn’t where they are. It’s where they aren’t. That the real question isn’t who can’t be trusted, but who can be. Once it sounded like paranoia.”

  “But no longer.”

  “No,” Liesl agreed, her voice trembling slightly. “And now they have arrayed their forces against you, through both official and unofficial channels.” She hesitated. “There is something else I must give you.”

  Once more, she disappeared into the bedroom, and then came back with a plain cardboard box, the sort a dry cleaner might package a shirt in. She opened it on the rough-hewn table in front of them. Papers. Laminated ID cards. Passports. The folding currency of modern bureaucracy.

  “They were Peter’s,” Liesl said. “The fruits of four years in hiding.”

  Ben’s fingers quickly sorted through the identity papers as if they were playing cards. Three different names, all appended to the same face. Peter’s face. And, for all practical intents, his own. “‘Robert Simon.’ Smart. There must be thousands of people with that name in North America. ‘Michael Johnson.’ Likewise. ‘John Freedman.’ These look like good work, professional work, if I’m any judge.”

  “Peter was a perfectionist,” Liesl said. “I’m sure they are flawless.”

  Ben continued to go through the documents and saw that the passports came with matching credit cards. In addition, there were documents for “Paula Simon” and other spousal identities: if Robert Simon needed to travel with his “wife,” he’d be prepared. Ben marveled, but his admiration was shadowed by a deep sadness. Peter’s precautions were meticulous, obsessive, exhaustive—and yet they could not save him.

  “I’ve got to ask, Liesl: Can we be sure that Peter’s pursuers—the Sigma group or whoever they are—aren’t on to them? Any of these could be flagged.”

  “Possibilities are not likelihoods.”

  “When was the last time he used ‘Robert Simon’? And under what circumstances?”

  Liesl closed her eyes in concentration, retrieving the details with remarkable precision. After twenty minutes, Ben had satisfied himself that at least two of Peter’s aliases, unused in the last twenty-four months, were unlikely to have been detected. He tucked the papers into the capacious inside pockets of his leather coat.

  He placed a hand on Liesl’s and looked into her clear blue eyes. “Thank you, Liesl,” he said. What an astonishing woman she was, he thought once more, and how lucky his brother was to have found her.

  “The shoulder wound will scab over and heal in a matter of days,” she said. “You will find it considerably harder to shed your identity, though these documents will help.”

  Liesl opened a bottle of red wine and poured each of them a glass. The wine was excellent, deep and rich and tannic, and Ben soon began to relax.

  For a few moments the two of them silently watched the fire. Ben thought: If Peter had hidden the document here, where could it be? And if not here, where? He’d said it was hidden away safely. Had he left it with Matthias Deschner? But that made no sense: Why would he go to such lengths to open a bank account because of the vault that came with it, and then not put the incorporation document in the vault?

  Why hadn’t any document been in the vault?

  He wondered about Deschner. What was his role, if any, in what had happened at the bank? Had he secretly alerted the banker that Ben was in the country illegally? If so, the timing didn’t track: Deschner could have done so before Ben had been admitted to the vault. Was it possible that Deschner had gotten into the vault—as he easily could have despite his claim that he could not—months or years before, taken the document, then given it to his brother’s pursuers? Yet Liesl had said she trusted her cousin … Contradictory thoughts swirled around in his brain, warring with one another until Ben couldn’t think clearly anymore.

  Liesl spoke at last, interrupting his troubled ruminations. “The fact that you could so easily follow me here worries me,” she said. “No offense, please, but again, you’re an amateur. Think of how much easier it would have been for a professional.”

  Whether or not she was right, it was crucial to reassure her, Ben sensed. “But keep in mind, Liesl, that Peter had told me you two lived in a cabin in the woods, near a lake. Once I figured out which hospital it was, that narrowed things down considerably. If I didn’t know as much, I’d probably have lost you pretty early on.”

  She said nothing, just stared with unease at the fire.

  “You know how to use that thing?” Ben asked, glancing toward the revolver she’d left on a table by the door.

  “My brother was in the army. Every Swiss boy knows how to fire a gun. There’s even a national holiday where Swiss boys go off to shoot. My father just happened to believe that a girl is every bit the equal of a boy and should learn to use a gun too. So I’m prepared for this life.” She rose. “Well, I’m famished, and I’m going to make some dinner.” Ben followed her to the kitchen.

  She lit the gas oven, then took a whole chicken from the tiny refrigerator, buttered it and sprinkled it with dried herbs, and put it in the oven to roast. While she boiled some potatoes and sautéed some greens, they made idle conversation about her work and his, about Peter.

  After a while, Ben retrieved the photograph from his jacket pocket. He’d verified, en route, that the wax envelope had protected it from water damage. Now he showed it to her. “Do you have any idea who these men might be?” he asked.

  Her eyes suddenly registered alarm. “Oh, my God, that has to be your father! He looks so much like you two. What a handsome man he was!”

  “And these others?”

  She hesitated, shook her head, clearly troubled. “They look like important men, but then they all did in those heavy business suits. I’m sorry, I don’t know. Peter never showed this to me. He just told me about it.”

  “And the document I mentioned—the articles of incorporation—did he ever mention hiding it somewhere here?”

  She stopped stirring the greens. “Never.” She said it with absolute certainty.

  “You’re sure? It wasn’t in the vault.”

  “He would have told me if he’d hidden it here.”

  “Not necessarily. He didn’t show you this photograph. He may have wanted to protect you, or maybe keep you from worrying.”

  “Well, then your guess is as good as mine.”

  “Would you mind if I looked around?”

  “Be my guest.”

  While she finished making dinner, he searched the cabin methodically, trying to put himself into his brother’s head. Where would Peter have hidden it? He ruled out any place that Liesl would have regularly cleaned or had any reason to look. Liesl and Peter’s bedroom was one of two small rooms off the living room area, the other being Peter’s study. But both rooms were spartanly furnished and yielded nothing.

  He checked the floor all over for any loose planks, then inspected the log-and-plaster walls, but nothing.

  “Do you have a flashlight?” Ben asked, returning to the kitchen area. “I want to look outside.”

  “Of course. There’s a flashlight in every room—the lights go out often. There’s one on the table by the door. But we’ll be ready to eat in just a few minutes.”

  “I’ll make it quick.” He took the flashlight and stepped outside, where it was cold and completely dark. He made a cursory tour of the grassy area surrounding the cabin. There was a scorched place where they obviously cooked outdoors, and a large log pile covered with a tarpaulin. The document might have been hidden in a container beneath a rock, but that would have to wait until the light of morning. He beamed the flashlight on the exterior of the cabin, made his way slowly around the walls, poking around a propane tank, but again turned up nothing.

  When he went back inside, Liesl had already set out two plates and silverware on a red-and-white-checked tablecloth over a small round table against a window.

  “Smells delicious,” Ben said.

  “Please, sit.”

  She poured two more glasses of wine and served both of them. The food was wonderfully flavored, and Ben devoured it. They both concentrated on eating, and only began to talk after they’d satisfied their hunger. The second glass of wine made Liesl melancholy. As she spoke about Peter and how they met, she cried. She recalled how Peter had taken such pride in furnishing their cabin, their home, building the bookcases and much of the furniture himself.

  The bookcases, Ben thought. Peter had built the bookcases …

  He got up suddenly. “Would you mind if I looked at little closer at the shelves?”

  “Why not,” she said with a tired wave.

  The bookcases appeared to have been built as several separate units and assembled in place. They weren’t open shelves; you could not see the log-and-plaster walls behind them. Instead, Peter had built a backing of wood.

  Shelf by shelf, Ben removed all of the books and looked behind them.

  “What are you doing?” Liesl called out in vexation.

  “I’ll put them all back, don’t worry,” Ben said.

  Half an hour later, he hadn’t found anything. Liesl had finished doing the dishes and announced that she was exhausted. But Ben kept at it, removing each shelf of books, looking behind them, becoming more and more frustrated. When he came to the row of novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald, he smiled sadly. The Great Gatsby had been Peter’s favorite.

  Then, behind the Fitzgeralds, he found a small compartment that had been flush-mounted, almost invisibly, into the wooden shelf backing.

  Peter had done an impeccable job of carpentry: even with all the books off the shelf, you could barely see the faint rectangular outline of the compartment. He pried at it with his fingernails, but it didn’t yield. He poked at it, pressed in, and then it popped open. A neat piece of craftsmanship. Peter the perfectionist.

  The document was carefully rolled up. A rubber band held the roll together. Ben pulled it out, removed the rubber band, unrolled it.

  It was a fragile, yellowed sheet of paper covered with mimeographed lettering. Just one page. Merely the front page of a corporate filing.

  It was headed SIGMA AG. There was a date: April 6, 1945.

  Then a list of what had to be the company’s officers and directors.

  Dear God, he thought, thunderstruck. Peter had been right: there were names he recognized. Names of corporations that still existed, that made automobiles and weapons and consumer goods. Names of moguls and corporate chairmen. In addition to the figures he’d recognized from the photograph, there was the fabled magnate Cyrus Weston, whose steel empire had exceeded even that of Andrew Carnegie’s, and Avery Henderson, who was regarded by business historians as the twentieth century’s most important financier after John Pierpont Morgan. There were the chief executive officers of the major automotive companies; of early-generation technology firms that had taken the lead in developing radar, microwave, and refrigeration technologies—technologies whose full potential wouldn’t be realized for years, decades, to come. The heads of the three largest petroleum companies, based in America, Britain, and the Netherlands. Telecommunication giants, before they were called that. The mammoth corporations of the time, some as intact and as vast as ever, some of them now subsumed into corporate entities even greater than themselves. Industrialists from America, Western Europe, and, yes, even a few from wartime Germany. And toward the very top of the list was the name of the treasurer: MAX HARTMAN (OBERSTURMFÜHRER, SS).

  His heart was hammering away crazily. Max Hartman, a lieutenant in Hitler’s SS. If this was a forgery … it was certainly well done. He had seen documents of incorporation many times before, and this looked very much like a page from such a document.

  Liesl emerged from the kitchen. “You have found something?”

  The fire was dying, and the room was beginning to get cold.