When Señor Pablo Alvarez, the Reverend Francisco Silva, S.J., and Señor Otto Körtig arrived at the hotel about fifteen minutes later, after a full and exhausting day of examining the Hotel Lago Vista in detail, they parked the 1940 Ford Fordor from Casa Montagna in the parking lot behind the hotel, as they would have no further need for it until the morning.
Then they started to enter the hotel from the parking lot. But as they did, they came to sort of an adjunct of the hotel bar, a glass-roofed area outside the more formal inside bar. It had a dozen or so cast-iron tables with umbrellas, six or seven of which were occupied by people having a drink and munching on cheese and salami.
“Am I the only one who’s tempted?” Señor Alvarez asked.
“How’s the beer in Argentina?” Señor Körtig inquired. “I haven’t had a decent glass of beer in months.”
“I think you will be pleased, Otto,” Father Silva said.
“Are you a beer drinker, Father?”
“On occasion,” the priest confessed.
Three liters of Quilmes lager later, Señor Körtig excused himself to visit the gentlemen’s rest facility.
“It’s right inside the lobby to the right, Otto,” Father Silva said.
“Thank you. Order another liter of the Quilmes while I’m gone, will you?”
“It will be my pleasure,” Señor Alvarez said.
In the main bar, Señor Schenck looked up from stuffing his copy of the just executed change-of-owner documentation for Estancia Puesta de Sol into his briefcase.
That Johnnie Walker is getting to me. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear I just saw Oberstleutnant Otto Niedermeyer walk past.
Ridiculous!
He works for Canaris in Abwehr Ost. What could he possibly be doing here in the Andes mountains of Argentina?
And if you do something foolish, like chase some strange man into a men’s room and . . .
“Excuse me, please,” Schenck said, and got up from the table and followed a strange man toward the men’s room.
Rather than porcelain urinals mounted to a wall, the urinal in the Hotel Edelweiss lobby men’s room was the wall itself. Below waist height, the wall was tiled. A copper pipe just above the tiles fed a never-ending stream of water gently down the white tiles toward a sort of trough at the bottom.
When Señor Schenck entered the men’s room, the strange man was facing the wall.
Schenck waited until the man turned, and he had a chance for a good look.
“Wie geht’s, Otto?” he asked cordially, smiling.
“Ach, Gott!” Oberstleutnant Otto Niedermeyer, visibly surprised, said.
“What in the world are you doing here?”
Niedermeyer put his index finger before his lips and looked quickly at the water closet stalls—all of which were empty.
He threw out his arm in the Nazi salute.
“Heil Hitler!” he said, and then, “May the oberstleutnant respectfully suggest that the SS-brigadeführer attend to his personal business first?”
Von Deitzberg smiled.
“Good idea,” he said.
He stepped to the urinal wall, unzipped his trousers, and started to attend to his personal business.
SS-Brigadeführer Ritter Manfred von Deitzberg turned his head to look at Oberstleutnant Niedermeyer just in time to see the muzzle of the barrel of Niedermeyer’s Ballester-Molina Pistola Automatica Calibre .45 before it fired.