Black Balloon

Epilogue

Somewhere in the Brazilian rainforest, on the outskirts of a village called Varjão, an excavator sinks its teeth into the rich jungle soil. The operator skillfully cuts a neat rectangle into the earth, careful not to dig too deep and damage what he's searching for. Several locals have gathered to witness the spectacle. This scene, the most eventful thing to happen in Varjão in a long while, is taking place behind the Inmaculado Corazón de María, on the southern end of town. A few hundred meters from the church, near the edge of the thick forest, sits a gravestone that at first glance appears to be no different than the others. The only thing that might cause a casual visitor to take notice is the name, assuming they took the time to scrape away the moss and read it. It is a foreign name, unusual around here:

1890 to 1975.

The stone is tall and narrow, humble and plain, as was the person whose final resting place it now marks, a quiet man known to his community as Gus. Four decades after his death, there are few people left to visit. The stone lies lonely and unnoticed. The only family Gus had, had moved away long ago, and one by one his few friends joined him beneath the churchyard. The last embers of Gus's existence slowly grow cold, as each year fewer and fewer people are left that knew him.

He was well-liked in Varjão but poorly understood. He was quiet and kind, well-educated but never condescending. He attended the town's only church three times a week and was an active member in its various outreach programs and charitable efforts. Gus and his son Roland arrived in Varjão in 1958, seemingly out of the clear blue sky. They stepped off a bus, briefcases in hand, and inquired about work and housing. Townsfolk initially regarded them with skepticism but ultimately grew to appreciate the strange Germans who, for whatever reason, had chosen to live in the Amazon among a couple hundred Portuguese-speaking farmers.

Gustaff, who spoke the language well, found work as a clerk in the town's records office. He, with his wide range of knowledge, began counseling his fellow citizens, providing everything from legal advice to tips on improving crop yields, never charging for his services. They wouldn't have been able to pay if he had tried. He was highly intelligent, this much was clear.

Roland, who lived with his father for several years, eventually found a wife and moved to São Paulo, earning his law degree. The elder man, although courted by several local widows, never married and died peacefully in his home in 1975. Roland returned for the funeral, the last time he would visit the town.

What the locals didn't know, was that before arriving in Varjão almost twenty years earlier, Roland and Gustaff had first crossed through Rio de Janeiro. They came to Rio via Casablanca, Casablanca via Rome, and Rome via Porto de Ostia, where they'd arrived by cargo ship. A few days before that, under the cover of darkness, they'd climbed into a two-passenger plane that was already occupied by corpses of men whose names were unknown. One corpse was old, the other young. Both were gifts of a local mortician with whom the elder man was acquainted. Two grieving families would scatter their loved one's remains unaware they were spreading nothing but fireplace ash. It wasn't comfortable, sitting there with two cold bodies squeezed between them, but they managed to get the plane, extra cargo weight included, off the ground and flew towards the Italian border. From an altitude of 2000 feet the men bailed out and watched the plane crash hard into the water while they floated slowly down. The parachutes were cut loose and they swam to shore, where a car was waiting for them. It was parked in a field beside the forest where it had been sitting for a week. Fortunately, it cranked right up.

They arrived at the airport, flew to Milan, rented a car and drove to Genoa where they'd boarded the ship. Somewhere in the Mediterranean, a few miles off the Italian coast, a school of fish might have nibbled on the discarded passports of men who never existed; the watery graves of Curt, Heinrich, Rudolf, and Wilhelm. All along their journey, the men's main goal had been to obscure their path, obfuscate the facts, and befuddle their pursuers...to disappear in a cloud of smoke. Poof. By the time they'd made it to Varjão, five-thousand miles away and several identity changes later, Sherlock Holmes and a thousand bloodhounds would not have been able to sniff out their trail. Curt and Heinrich disappeared over the Alps, Rudolf and Wilhelm evaporated in Genoa, Theodore and Fidus dissipated into the crowds of Rome, Gerhard and Konstantine vanished into the jungles of Brazil. When Gustaff and Roland Reinhardt arrived in town, they might as well have been conjured by the Universe in a flash of light and dumped from the heavens.

But Stephen Hawking taught us that even a blackhole, a thing from which light itself cannot escape, leaves a trace. Sixty-one years after Lukas Schneider and Victor Northrup vanished, a team of Swiss and American investigators are digging up the rainforest hoping to unearth their bones. The operator, strategically positioning his equipment between the rows of graves so as not to disturb the neighboring dead or offend the living, swings the excavator's arm to and fro, placing dirt in a neat pile. It is critical that the operation be done with the utmost respect. Several townspeople have already expressed dissatisfaction with what they consider an unnecessary desecration of remains, but their concerns were succinctly overruled. The work is made more difficult by the increasingly heavy rain that threatens to fill the hole with mud. But within a few minutes the metal bucket hits its target. It lands with a dull thud. There is a slight cracking of wood as the bucket scrapes the casket. The operator makes a few more scoops and then moves his equipment out of the way so that a more surgical strategy may be employed to complete the exhumation. Men with hand-shovels clear the mud from the casket's handles and attach straps. The heavy canvas straps are secured to the excavator's arm and the box is lifted from the hole and placed gently on the ground beside.

With a giddiness that threatens to bely the solemn nature of their work, detectives pry open the casket, eager to see what lies inside. They find exactly what one would expect; a skeleton dressed in a suit. It's not fair to call it a skeleton, really. It still has hair and strips of dried flesh draped over his bones, the color and texture of a dog's rawhide chew toy. The men make a quick comparison between the corpse and photos of Gustaff Reinhardt and verify that the suit matches, other than now being a little worse for wear. In the Polaroid, taken at a church function a few years before his death, Reinhardt is pictured wearing an identical brown blazer to what the corpse wears now. The other features are unrecognizable. The bones will be carefully collected and shipped to Zurich for DNA identification. If the DNA is a positive match, and there's little doubt it will be, the real search will begin. Hermann Auerbach—alias Gustaff Reinhardt, alias Lukas Schneider, alias Frank Gendelman—possessed knowledge very valuable to the United States government, and if it still exists, powerful men will move Heaven and Earth to find it. Upon completion of the DNA test, his body will be returned to the nation of his birth and laid to rest beside his dear sweet Inger. Seventy-five years later, Hermann Auerbach is finally going home.