Pandora's Curse

VIENNA, AUSTRIA THE PRESENT

When the weather was nice, the old man and his little dachshund were a fixture along Karntnerstrasse. The trendy shopping street that passed next to the inner city’s celebrated Opera House was regularly jammed with gaping tourists and hustling locals, yet many of the shop owners recognized the shuffling man and his sausage-shaped dog. He had walked this route for years. Many called him Herr Doktor, though no one knew he truly deserved such a title. It did fit him, however. His eyes were bright despite his years and his voice was captivating and learned.

It was late July, and the air was warm and filled with the smells of pastry and traffic. The Doktor was affected by the pains of age, so he wore a thin jacket over his buttoned shirt and cardigan and a homburg on his head. In winter, Handel, his dachshund, sported a tartan sweater that made her look like a small piece of luggage, but today her sleek black fur glistened like anthracite.

He strode with a special purpose this morning and many who recognized him were surprised to see him walking so early. Usually he wouldn’t pass the wedding cake-like Baroque Staatsoper until ten or ten thirty. Handel seemed to sense his urgency and she trotted at his side obediently. Beyond the looming Finance Ministry building, the 444-foot spire of Stephansdom Cathedral shot into the air. The massive Gothic church with its mosaic-tiled roof was the symbol for Vienna the way Paris was defined by the Eiffel Tower.

Before reaching Johannesgasse, the old man guided his dog to the right, waiting at the curb for several red trams and a string of cars and trucks to thunder past. The exhaust of so many vehicles had darkened the lower floors of many of the buildings so that architectural details were lost under countless years of grime. In the warren of small streets near St. Anne’s Church, Handel began to get excited. She knew they were approaching their destination.

The house, like all the others on the narrow lane, was two stories tall and fronted with white stucco. There was a tiny courtyard garden behind it and decorative wrought ironwork over the windows and at the eave of the steep roof. Affixed next to the heavy door was a discreet bronze plaque that read INSTITUTE FOR APPLIED RESEARCH.

The men who ran the Institute allowed their care-taker, Frau Goetz, to live in the two-room apartment tucked into the back corner of the house. Though it was only nine, she already had the front door unlocked, and when the Doktor stepped into the entry, he could smell coffee and a freshly made torte. He reached down to unclip Handel’s leash, and she ran off to her favorite spot in the back of the house, where the morning sun had warmed her blankets.

“Guten Morgen, Herr Doktor,” Frau Goetz said, coming out of the kitchen to help the elderly history professor off with his jacket.

“Guten Morgen, Frau Goetz,” replied Doktor Jacob Eisenstadt.

The two had known each other for forty years, and yet they had never uttered the other’s given name. Only a few years junior to her employer, Frau Goetz shared his deep respect for the more formal traditions from before the war. He was no more likely to call her Ingrid than she was to wear slacks. This in no way diminished the care she showed Eisenstadt and his partner in the Institute, Professor Theodor Weitzmann. Both men had been widowers for so long that without her influence they would have reverted to a bachelor’s slovenliness. She made sure the clothes they wore had the proper number of buttons and the lunch she prepared for them would be at least one wholesome meal they ate each day.

“Professor Weitzmann is already upstairs,” Frau Goetz informed him. “He beat you here by an hour.”

“We agreed not to come in before ten. The old fool couldn’t wait, eh?”

“Apparently not, Herr Doktor.” The housekeeper knew what these men did and believed strongly in their cause, but she just couldn’t get caught up in one more batch of musty papers the way they did. At times they were like young boys. “I will bring aspirin for his eyestrain when I bring up your lunch.”

“Danke,” Eisenstadt said absently. He had already turned toward the stairs.

The Institute was cluttered beyond reason, and no amount of straightening by Frau Goetz could help. She dusted regularly but so many old books and papers arrived at the quiet house that she could never seem to keep up. Bookcases lined every wall in the front rooms, stacked floor to ceiling and interrupted only by the small windows that overlooked the street. There were even shelves above the doors for little-used manuscripts and documents. There were books in the bathroom, piles of loose papers atop the toilet tank, and since Frau Goetz had her own shower in the apartment, the claw-footed tub was also mounded with binders of material. The stairs to the second floor were narrow and made more so by piles of books on one side of each tread.

Every book and binder and loose file of documents ran to a single theme and Doktor Eisenstadt had read all of it. This had been his life for forty years: accumulating information, sifting through it carefully to find the one thread he could pull to get answers and retribution.

On the wall at the top of the stairs was a narrow space between two more bookcases. In a simple frame was a picture of Eisenstadt’s inspiration, Simon Weisenthal, and below it was a epitaph etched in a piece of wood and signed by the great man himself: NEVER AGAIN. Eisenstadt didn’t need to see the engraving as a reminder. His own memories and the numbers tattooed on his forearm would never let him forget.

Like Weisenthal, Eisenstadt and Weitzmann were Camp survivors turned Nazi hunters. More accurately, these two were hunters for the gold and other precious commodities stolen from the Jews by the Nazi regime.

At the head of the stairs, Eisenstadt turned to his left and stepped into the office. “Theodor, we promised not to come in early today,” he said, though he wasn’t really upset.

“You are here an hour before your normal arrival too.” Theodor Weitzmann was shorter than his partner and not as round in the middle. His hair was a wild mane of white, and his eyebrows were huge bushes above his dark eyes.

The office overlooked the garden and smelled of pipe tobacco, for both men indulged despite doctor’s warnings. Two desks butted against each other in the center of the room, their scarred tops littered with papers and pipe ash. Each man had several framed photographs on his desk, the two largest being their long-dead wives.

“Have you started going through the new material?” Eisenstadt eased himself into his antique chair, the wood creaking as loudly as his joints.

“Of course. Why do you think I got here two hours before I promised I would?”

“And what have you learned?”

“Jacob, I won’t draw your conclusions for you.” The two had the abrasive relationship of friends who knew they could never hurt the other.

Jacob took the mild rebuke in silence and lit his first bowl of the day. Finally he had to say some sort of rejoinder. “Stop overfeeding Handel. I think she is constipated.”

“Who isn’t?”

Frau Goetz came up with a silver tray laden with coffee and two slices of Sacher torte. As was a Viennese tradition dating back centuries, she also brought two small glasses of water. Theo had told her countless times to dispense with the water since neither man drank it, but she continued the custom.

“So tell me, what has you two so excited this morning?” She placed the coffee service on the only open area of the joined desks. “I assume it has to do with the courier delivery just before you left yesterday.”

“You know we have been cultivating a source in Stalingrad,” Weitzmann said. Like Jacob, he used the wartime names for many of the cities in the former USSR.

“Yes, he started sending you recently declassified archive material.”

“Rather mysteriously too. We don’t know who this man is or how he’s getting the documents, but we are more than grateful for them. Aren’t we, Jacob?”

“Highly irregular,” Eisenstadt said from around a mouthful of cake. “But it is first-rate material, mostly originals of German documents captured by the Soviet Army when they took Berlin in 1945. The Soviets have held on to this information for decades.”

“And now someone is sending it to you?” Frau Goetz asked with a trace of mockery.

“The Institute has a good reputation,” Theo defended automatically but he knew what the housekeeper meant. They were not as well known or as well funded as other organizations involved in the same work. “Two months ago it started, just a trickle if you recall: two small envelopes in a week and then nothing for another ten days and then that large parcel that the deliveryman had to help us drag up here. For the past three weeks we’ve been receiving more small envelopes through the regular mail. They tell an amazing story, one we hope will conclude with the special delivery we received yesterday.”

“I see.” Frau Goetz knew enough not to ask the men to divulge their tale until they were ready. “Then I shall leave you to your work. Lunch will be promptly at twelve. Herr Doktor, I will walk Handel for you at eleven if you wish.”

“Thank you, Frau Goetz.” Eisenstadt was already absorbed in a loose collection of papers emblazoned with the Wehrmacht eagle that Theo had passed across to him.

At noon, Frau Goetz brought their lunch but the two hardly noticed. They were lost in another world, one of evil and corruption where the existence of men and women had been reduced to numbers on bills of lading: six thousand to Dachau on November 10, two hundred for labor use at Peenemunde. Such was their preoccupation, Theo Weitzmann didn’t bother with the aspirin she had brought, though his weak eyes watered painfully.

The delivery yesterday consisted of five hundred pages of documents, and they scoured each one, talking only when they had a question about a specific reference. Much of this was not new to them. They knew the names of many of the SS officers and guards mentioned within the material. By four in the afternoon, they had each read everything word for word. Not one detail had been overlooked. They sat in silence, lighting their pipes to distract them from the inevitable conclusion.

“Nothing new,” Theo said sadly. “We still don’t know the shipment’s final destination.”

“Have patience, my friend. The Nazis were fanatical record keepers. They tracked everything. We could follow the life of one particular paper clip if we wanted. Do you seriously think that they didn’t maintain detailed reports on the transport of twenty-eight tons of gold looted from Russia?”

“I know the records exist. I just wonder if our enigmatic benefactor has them and if he will send them to us.”

“He’s sent us everything else to this point. Remember, until he first contacted us, we didn’t even know this consignment existed. I’m sure he will tell us everything when it becomes available to him.” Eisenstadt’s eyes narrowed in the particular scowl that had terrified hundreds of students he had taught at the University. “Besides which, there was something new here that you overlooked.”

“Where?” Theodor leaned forward, offended.

“Look here.” Eisenstadt leafed through papers until he found the one and handed it to Professor Weitzmann. “At the bottom, see it? The name?”

“Ah, I am sorry, old friend, you are right. A Major Otto Schroeder was present when the gold arrived in Hamburg on 29 June 1943. This is the first time I’ve seen his name.”

“At least connected to the gold,” Jacob agreed. “We need to check our files to see if he’s in anything else we have. I must say, though, I don’t recognize his name at all.”

Weitzmann was thoughtful. “No, neither do I. It doesn’t appear he was with the SS or with an Unterseeboot squadron. Major is an army rank, not naval.”

The biggest fear they shared was that, since Hamburg was a port city, the gold had been loaded onto a U-boat and spirited out of Europe. If that was the case, they doubted they would be able to track it themselves. They would have no choice but to turn over their findings to a larger and better endowed agency.

“We have a new lead, it seems. We need to learn about this Major Schroeder. It is possible he’s still alive and can tell us what happened once the gold reached Hamburg. Or maybe one of his children knows something.”

“Are you suggesting that we will not receive more documents from Russia?”

“I am making sure,” Eisenstadt snapped, “that we are pursuing every possible avenue. We know the gold was stolen from Russian Jews by the German Army as they rolled into the country. We also know that it has never been recovered. This represents almost a billion U.S. dollars. I will not rest until that money is returned to its rightful owners!”

“Calmly, Jacob,” Theodor soothed his agitated friend. “Neither of us will rest.”

Eisenstadt looked contrite but he did not apologize for his outburst. His passion to restore stolen property was something for which he would never apologize. With his head wreathed in aromatic smoke he added conspiratorially, “If we are lucky, we will find Schroeder alive and we can send our top operative to interview him.”

Frau Goetz had come into the room and stood in front of the closed window, her broad body all but blocking the light streaming through. She had heard this last comment, and on this one subject, she would voice her concerns. “You two should leave her alone. You pressure her too much. She has her own life to live.”

“Frau Goetz, Anika is my granddaughter and she helps us because she wants to, not because of any pressure.” Eisenstadt and Frau Goetz had had this debate every time he’d asked his granddaughter to assist them. He would never set foot in his native Germany again. Austria’s complicity in the Holocaust was almost as reprehensible, but in his line of work, he needed to be in the center of things. Anika, who lived in Munich, had become an unpaid assistant whenever they needed something from there. Deep down, he knew her aid was more out of loyalty than conviction but he took help wherever he could get it.

“She would be married with children by now if she wasn’t helping you two every time you wanted something.”

“There is where you are wrong,” Theodor said quickly, for he loved Anika as much as her grandfather. “Anika would be climbing every mountain between Antarctica and Spitzbergen if it wasn’t for us. We are helping her find her focus.”

“You are helping her find your focus, not hers,” Frau Goetz stated and crossed her arms over her breasts. She would say no more. “Herr Doktor, you must go walk Handel. It will be past her suppertime by the time you get home.”

Eisenstadt fumbled a pocket watch from his cardigan sweater and noted the time. “Yes, thank you. Theo, I will see you tomorrow and maybe we’ll get something new from the mail.”

“I am going to work late tonight. Maybe we already have something on Major Schroeder in our files.”

“Very well. I will see you tomorrow.”

A few blocks from the Institute was a high-rise building that rose from the heart of a quaint neighborhood. It was an eyesore of modern architecture filled with subsidized apartments for low-income families. From the top two floors, there was an unobstructed view into the walled yard behind the Institute. At that height and distance, the garden was a small grassy speck amid the city’s asphalt and stone. In one apartment on the very top floor, a remote recording device that used a laser to measure sound vibrations against glass had been installed, its beam fired at the window in Jacob and Theodor’s office. Unknown to the two Nazi hunters, an enemy they thought vanquished sixty years before was recording every word they said.