“At the Ruprechtskirche, in Vienna,” he said, “there’s a priest who performs a similarly charitable function for old comrades like you. He’s an Italian. Father Lajolo. He remembers Warzok only too well. It seems he turned up with a rail ticket for Güssing just after Christmas 1946. Lajolo got him to a safe house in Ebensee while they waited for a new passport and visa.”

“A passport from whom?” I asked, out of curiosity.

“The Red Cross. The Vatican. I don’t know for sure. One of the two, you can bet on that. The visa was for Argentina. Lajolo or one of his people went to Ebensee, handed over the papers, some money, and a rail ticket to Genoa. That was where Warzok was supposed to get on the boat for South America. Warzok and another old comrade. Only they never showed up. No one knows what happened to Warzok, but the other guy was found dead in the woods near Thalgau, a few months later.”

“What was his name? His real name.”

“SS Hauptsturmführer Willy Hintze. He was the former deputy chief of the Gestapo in a Polish town called Thorn. Hintze was in a shallow grave. Naked. He’d been shot through the back of the skull while kneeling on the edge of his grave. His clothes were tossed in on top of him. He’d been executed.”

“Were Warzok and Hintze in the same safe house?”

“No.”

“Did they know each other from before?”

“No. The first time they ever met would have been on the boat to Argentina. Lajolo figured both safe houses had been blown and closed them down. It was decided that what happened to Hintze had been what happened to Warzok. The Nakam had got them.”

“The Nakam?”

“After 1945, the Jewish Brigade—volunteers from Palestine who had joined a special unit of the British army—was ordered by the fledgling Jewish army, the Haganah, to form a secret group of assassins. One group of assassins, based in Lublin, took the name of Nakam, a Hebrew word meaning ‘vengeance.’ Their sworn purpose was to avenge the deaths of six million Jews.”

Father Gotovina pulled the cigarette from his lips as if to more effectively give them up to a curling sneer that ended by including his nostrils and his eyes. I daresay if there had been any muscle groups to control the ears, he would have brought them into it, too. The Croatian priest’s sneer had Conrad Veidt beat into a poor second, and Bela Lugosi a sly, broken-necked third.

“No good thing cometh out of Israel,” he said, sulfurously. “Least of all the Nakam. An early plan of the Nakam was to poison the reservoirs of Munich, Berlin, Nuremberg, and Frankfurt and murder several million Germans. You look disbelieving, Herr Gunther.”

“It’s just that there have been stories about Jews poisoning Christian wells since the Middle Ages,” I said.