resort living,” he said. “The summer sun down here is relentless.”
“Where does Von Albrecht live?”
The astonishment in his face was gratifying. “How did you know his name? I never told you he goes by that name. Did I?”
“No, but in a way, my mother did.” She got up and went to the fancy mirrored desk in the suite’s living room, where she’d laid one of her smaller suitcases and pulled out an accordion file. She tossed it to Devin, who caught it easily. “Rolf Von Albrecht wrote to my mother in coded letters in the summer of ’52, a few months before Dr. Someone came to visit us. I assume they’re one and the same person. I found the letters in my father’s safe last August. I broke the code in Berlin.”
He looked up at her from the file. “In Berlin? When?”
“The night before I went to Walter Ulbricht’s little garden party, the night I saw Nicky with his wife and had a couple of drinks. You remember.” She paused, recalling it well herself. As Nicky had started playing on Pagan’s sympathy, trying to win her back, Devin had literally shoved him away and told him to go back to his wife.
Devin’s mouth curled at the memory, too. She continued. “It was something you’d said about Hitler’s birthday before that which helped me break the code. Take a look at the letter on top.”
Devin pulled Von Albrecht’s letters out of the file and untied the string holding them together. His eyes swept over the first letter, taking in all its innocuous phrases, until he came upon a notation in different handwriting. “Twenty, four, eighteen eighty-nine,” he read. “April 20, 1889. Hitler’s birthday.”
“That’s the code, in my father’s handwriting. I don’t know how he figured it out, but it worked. I used those numbers—twenty, four and the numbers in eighteen eighty-nine—and found the real message. In them, Von Albrecht says Mama was a ‘sympathizer.’ He asks her to help him—specifically to give him a place to stay and arrange to get him on a ship leaving the country.”
“Did he say anything about coming to Argentina?”
Pagan shook her head. “No destination is mentioned, and nothing concrete about exactly who he is, why he needs to leave or what my mother was a ‘sympathizer’ to, but given that the code is Hitler’s birthday...”
She trailed off. Director Bennie Wexler had made it clear Eva Jones was anti-Semitic. He’d experienced her bigotry personally. That was bad enough. But if this Dr. Someone aka Von Albrecht was the type of person Pagan feared him to be, her mother was something worse.
“Who is this man you want me to identify?” she asked, coming back to sit on the sofa. “What did he do?”
Devin set the letters and file aside. “Early in 1952, a Nazi war criminal named Rudolf Von Alt escaped detention in the United States and fled the country. We believe that he changed his name to Rolf Von Albrecht, keeping the two names similar to make it easier to respond to, and that he found help from sympathizers all over the country. A sort of evil Underground Railroad. They housed him, kept him safe, funded his journey across the country. The evidence indicates that he stayed at your house in the summer of ’52.”
Pagan inhaled sharply and nodded as Devin threw her a look. It was exactly what she’d feared after decoding the letters. Her mother wasn’t only a woman who hated Jews. She’d helped a Nazi war criminal escape justice.
“It’s okay,” she said, although it was far from okay. “But I feel a little sick.”
He got up and poured her a glass of water. “After his stay with your family, Von Alt left on a ship from the port of Long Beach. We don’t know his exact route from there, but we think we’ve tracked him down here, to Buenos Aires.”
“Tracked him—how?” She took the glass from him. Although none of this was a surprise, it was unsettling to hear the story coming from Devin, who was as close to an official government source as she could get.
“I don’t know all the details, but during the war, the FBI knew that your mother was a Nazi sympathizer and kept a file on her. They didn’t think she was dangerous and weren’t actively watching her in ’52, so Von Alt was able to get away. Later, I don’t know how, they learned that she had helped a man who resembled Von Alt. Meanwhile, I learned that Walter Ulbricht’s daughter was a fan of yours.”
She sipped her water. How could the FBI have known about Mama during the war when Pagan herself had just found out? Mama had been an excellent actress in her own right. “And you got me to Berlin, using my desire to learn more about Mama to get me there,” she said. “You knew by then she had helped the Nazis.”
He nodded, eyes on her as if braced for a bad reaction. “I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you.”
She raised her hand briefly, waving off his apology. She’d forgiven him long ago. He’d been doing his job, and they’d had no connection then, no relationship, if that was the right word for whatever lay between them now. But could she trust him?
“Do you know anything else about my mother or father now that I don’t know?” she asked. She held her breath, not knowing if she would believe the answer, whatever it was.
“No.”
He looked right at her, brows steepled sadly, his eyes concerned, and warmth spread through her chest, like hot tears, melting away her uncertainty.
“All right,” she said. “I had to ask.”
He gave her a small smile. “Keep in mind, the CIA does know more. I can tell that the file they gave me on your mother was only part of the story they have on her. I knew she was the daughter of your grandmother Ursula, and that Ursula claimed to have married Emil Murnau and said he was the father of her baby.”
“But Emil Murnau wasn’t my grandfather,” she said. “He probably never knew Grandmama. He’s someone who died at the right time so she could cover up the fact she had a baby out of wedlock.”
“I wonder if your mother knew.”
Pagan considered this. “Grandmama would never have told her. She was too proud. And Mama was so sure of herself, of her place in the world...” She trailed off.
“Until the end.” Devin’s eyes were fixed on her, steadying her as the bleak, heavy thoughts about Mama’s death came over her. It was always like this, a smothering weight pressing the breath out of her. She’d started drinking to erase that weight, and it still made her long for the icy bite of vodka sliding over her tongue. She concentrated on breathing and pushed through it all.
“That’s not enough,” Pagan said, thinking out loud. “Mama wouldn’t have been happy if she learned that she was born out of wedlock, but it wouldn’t be enough to make her leave us. I know she wasn’t the best person in the world, that she helped this Nazi escape, that she pushed us hard. But she loved us. She loved me and Ava more than anything in the world. She wouldn’t have left us for that.”
She still couldn’t quite bring herself to say that Eva Jones had been a bad person. But maybe she had been. Loving your children didn’t absolve you of everything.
Devin was nodding, accepting her verdict. “So, if the Rolf Von Albrecht living and working here is the man you knew as Dr. Someone when you were a child, the same man who wrote those letters, then we can confirm we’ve found Rudolf Von Alt, Nazi war criminal, in Buenos Aires.”
“And I’m the only person who can connect the man living here to the one who wrote these letters?” she asked.
“We think so. I hope it won’t be too dangerous or difficult for you. Seeing him may not be enough to identify him because he may have had plastic surgery. And he will have aged since you saw him last.”
“I remember his voice better than his face,” Pagan said. “If you get me close enough to overhear him, I’ll know.”
“We’re hoping that won’t take very long. Once that’s done,