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betrayed you eight years ago and cost you a career. I’m assuming you came here to kill him.”
    “You know a lot about me.”
    “You did your job, and you did it well. You asked little besides loyalty and respect. Those I understand. You, of course, received neither from Combs.”
    The pieces were beginning to fit. “Combs came here and started asking questions. He located Isabel and the book dealer. He was probing into something that you wanted to remain secret.”
    “Not just me. There is another. You asked me a moment ago if I killed Isabel and the book dealer. I killed neither. But the book dealer, Gamero, was going to sell Combs certain documents, like the one you hold. I tried to dissuade him, but he was far too greedy. Isabel. God bless her. She was bitter and angry and talked too much. Unfortunately, my brother was not as patient as I.”
    “He killed them?”
    “He is a difficult man. He attacks our common problem in a different manner. Killing is easy for him. He is much like his father.”
    “And who is that?”
    “Martin Bormann. He was the child born while they lived in Africa.”
    He had another question but held it for the moment.
    “My brother became heir to the family fortune. During the war, Bormann controlled the Adolf Hitler Endowment Fund of German Industry. Or, as history as labeled it, Hitler’s Bounty. The moneys came from German industrialists. Some paid willingly, others required encouragement. It was the price the wealthy paid for the privilege of profiting from the Reich. Bormann ruled that fund, and many believed that he diverted much of those assets into foreign accounts. They were right. Gamero’s file cabinets contained records of those transfers.”
    “A bit stupid, wasn’t it? Keeping records.”
    Schüb smiled. “Such was their fallacy. Nazis loved to write things down. Like that memo you hold. It records the transfer of much wealth at a time when it would have been far better to say nothing.”
    He could not argue with that.
    “Gamero was the son of a German immigrant. His father, along with countless others, filtered into Chile after the war. Some had relatives in the area, descendants of the original German émigrés who came, with the encouragement of the government, into central Chile during the 19th century. Gamero’s father had been a high-level diplomat in the foreign service, blessed with living abroad during the war, capable afterward of denying, with impunity, any involvement with war crimes.”
    “Who are you?” he asked, truly wanting to know.
    Schüb stared at the fire, still sitting slouched in the chair. “I am a man who bears a heavy burden. I think you can understand that, can’t you?”
    “I came here to right a personal wrong. I don’t care about your problems.”
    “I wish mine were as simple as yours.”
    Silence passed between them.
    “My brother is dead,” Schüb said. “I killed him myself a little while ago.”
    “Why am I still alive?”
    “I want to show you something.”

    He followed Schüb across the grass, back into the woods, and onto a wide path. After ten minutes of walking, during which his host said nothing, he spied the citadel, the long ponderous edifice clinging to the mount of a sharply rising slope, its gray walls splashed with a sodium vapor glow.
    They found a paved lane and followed the incline up to the main entrance. A solitary guard stood outside the wall, armed with a rifle.
    “My brother’s castle,” Schüb said. “My guard.”
    “Where do you live?”
    “Not here.”
    He surveyed the burg and its assortment of buildings, the walls dotted with mullion, dormer, and oriel windows. They walked into an inner courtyard. Several cars sat idle. Some of the windows above glowed with light, but most loomed dark and silent.
    A lighted entrance seemed the way in. They started across the cobbles, passing the dark cars.
    Inside was opulent, German, and medieval. Exactly what he would have expected.
    “My brother clung