The Baltimore Bitch

Josette spent the next few years honing her tradecraft in preparation for becoming part of our family business. Just as a note - it wasn't a delicatessen. Our new line of work was along the lines of bringing to justice some of the worst human beings to have ever roamed the earth.

In some ways it was a logical next step. I had a wealth of contacts in the intelligence community and Suzy had the determination, drive, and the money to create and run an organization. Then there was Josette. By age twenty-three my dear little tiger cub had developed into a full-blown apex predator. She was expert in covert surveillance, and she had an instructor's black belt in Krav Maga, which is the Jewish science of street fighting. As a field agent, Josette was the consummate Nazi hunter.

Our special project was Klaus Barbie, commonly known as, "The Butcher of Lyon." The nickname should give you some idea what kind of psychopath Barbie was. More importantly, he was the fellow who had led the raid on Izieu. Suzy, Josette, and I wanted nothing more than to find the man and see him hang.

The French had sentenced Barbie to death in absentia. But to my eternal shame, the U.S. had let him scuttle down one of its ratlines right after the war. The price of Barbie providing us valuable intel, was for us to ship him to a nice anonymous place. There he could await his next destination, which was hell.

We discovered where Barbie'd landed in 1962. It was thanks to sheer persistence on my part. I had learned in my boyhood, way back in Wisconsin, that the essence of good hunting is to regularly check your traps. So, I routinely, if not a bit obsessively, met with my old CIA, MI-6, and Israeli Shin Bet contacts.

In this case, the cost of the information was a good meal at the Rattlesnake Club, which is in Munich by-the-way, not Houston. My contacts all knew about my little business and they'd seen the handiwork of creatures like Barbie. So, they sympathized with my goals. Plus, my dinner companion was with the Israeli Shin Bet. So, he had a dog in the fight.

It seems that the Shin Bet had been paying a guy in the West German Bundesnachrichtendienst. Well, perhaps the proper term is "blackmailing." But not to put too fine a point on things, the Shin Bet was looking at everything that their asset could tell them about the mass roundup of Dutch Jews and Freemasons in 1940. That little project marked one of Adolph Eichmann's earliest "successes."

The Shin Bet and their Mossad counterparts had just recently acquired Eichmann, in the dark-of-night, and somewhat unwillingly, from his residence in Buenos Aires and then smuggled him out of Argentina in the diplomatic equivalent of a burlap bag. Once they had Eichmann back in Israel, they were building the case for his inevitable hanging.

One of the asset's anonymous sources was a man named Altmann. Altmann was a typical former Nazi functionaries who "knew nothing" after the war. But he had ostensibly worked for Eichmann. The item that piqued my interest was that Altmann knew things that only Barbie would know.

The problem was that the man who called himself Altmann was presently residing in Cochabamba Bolivia. And of course, he insisted that he had never heard of this "Barbie" fellow. The only way to pry him out of the hands of the Bolivians' was to prove who he actually was. Unfortunately for him, there were two eye-witnesses and they were willing to travel.

*****

The balding fifty-two year old man took his customary seat at the table in the coffee shop on the Avenue de Libertador Simon Bolivar. He looked out over the vista of the beautiful University district. It was the customary bright, clear Andean day in Cochabamba as he sipped his first cup. The sun burns very hot at almost 9,000 feet above sea level.

Two gorgeous women, obviously tourists, sat down at the table next to him. The oldest was an exquisitely feminine woman in her early forties. She was, beautiful, and obviously very wealthy. The youngest was a stunning blond in her early twenties. She was no-doubt the older woman's daughter.

Barbie surreptitiously checked out both women. He had never seen such perfection. The older one was small, but she had an ideal feminine shape, a delightfully proportioned little lady. The younger one was bigger and stronger. She had the body of a movie star and she moved with the superb pantherish grace of a natural athlete. That one was dangerously feral.

Barbie had just gone back to reading his copy of that morning's La Razon when the daughter, without warning, turned and stared directly at him. Her eyes were so deep blue they were almost lapis-lazuli. She said in French, "You look familiar Monsieur. Have I met you before?"

Barbie was irritated. He replied in French, "I don't believe so. I have lived in Cochabamba for a long time." He had spent most of it torturing the Bolivian Dictator Hugo Banzer's political enemies and building up the cocaine trade with Pablo Escobar - all-in-all ... good times.

The older of the two women looked at him amused. It was like she was a cat playing with a mouse. She said, "No! I'm absolutely certain I've seen you someplace before."

Barbie was getting annoyed with these two foolish women. He said, anger creeping into his voice, "I've never met you before in my life Madame. Now please leave me alone." Then he turned back to his paper in a huff.

The older woman got an oddly beatific look, it was like she had achieved some sort of personal life goal. She turned to her gorgeous daughter and said, just loud enough for Barbie to hear, "Don't you remember Josette? He was the leader of the Gestapo unit that raided Izieu We watched him take away our friends in trucks.!!"

Josette said, contempt in her voice, "That's right Mama. I believe his name is Barbie. He hasn't changed a bit." Then she gave a vicious laugh and added mockingly, "I'll bet a lot of people would like to know where this guy's been hiding out."

Klaus Barbie died in a French jail on September 25th, 1991. The children of Izieu were avenged.