The boys from Brazil door Ira Levin

Summary A man, dressed in white, accompanied by two other men arrives in Brazil. He goes to a Japanese restaurant for a ‘dinner party’ that he organised. This man has a German accent. Other men arrive for dinner and the men are having a good time. When they’ve finished eating they close the door and the man in white tells the other men about a plan ‘the organisation’ wants them to carry out. The men in the room are ordered to kill 94 men, in 2,5 years time. All of these men are 65 years old. These men aren’t supposed to ask questions, but they’re told they have the faith of the Aryan race in their hands. The whole conversation that is supposed to be secret was recorded by a paid waitress. The man that gets the tape calls Yakov Liebermann to tell him about the plan, just when he wants to play the tape for Yakov, he gets killed. Liebermann doesn’t really know if the story he was told on the phone is true but he has a bad feeling about it. He calls a reporter and tells him he’s after Mengele, one of the doctors of Auschwitz who experimented on people. He escaped to South America after the war and is still there. After he tells the reporter about his phone-call he asks him to monitor the killings of men between the age of 64 and 66. Meanwhile the killing of the men has begun. Liebermann speaks at a university and asks the students for help with his problem, a ‘hypothetical’ problem naturally. The reporter Liebermann contacted has send him an envelope with all the articles he spotted about unnatural deaths of 64 to 66 year old men. Liebermann goes to investigate some of these cases, a student from the university where Liebermann has spoken: Klaus Palmer, helps him with this. But Liebermann doesn’t really see that these men where killed by Nazis. Meanwhile Mengele is setting up headquarters. When Liebermann has examined 13 out of 17 possible nazi-murders he gives up, the phone-call must have been a joke. Still he can’t let go of the idea that all these men are being killed and why. When Liebermann comes to America to give another speech, he is close to another address of one of the men he found in the papers. He decides he wants to investigate this maybe murder, when he does he finds out that the son of this murdered man looks exactly liked the son of one of the other cases he investigated. When he asks Klaus Palmer and the other people who helped him investigating this case what the sons of these men looked like, he finds out that there are 6 boys who match the same description. Some of the boys were adopted thru the same adoption agency: Rush Gaddis, but this agency normally wouldn’t let people older than 45 adopt a child, a woman named Frieda Maloney was a clerk at this agency. Liebermann speaks to Frieda Maloney, who is in prison because she was a nazi in the war and did some terrible things. Frieda tells she worked for the ‘organisation’ at that time. She had to look in the files of Rush Gaddis and report when she had found a couple that matched a certain description: people of a certain age, etc. If such a couple would be find suitable she would have to tell them a baby was available for them. She would bring the baby to its future parents and let them promise they would never tell the boy that he was adopted. Frieda has some names of people she gave a baby to. Meanwhile Mengele is at a nazi-party, he gets really angry when he finds out that the organisation has called all the men that are supposed to kill the fathers of the boys back. Back to Liebermann: he receives a phone-call from Klaus Palmer: he claims he knows what happened, a professor that teaches his girlfriend has found the solution, but he does not wish to discuss it over the phone. Megele has left his headquarters, he calls Liebermann, pretending to be the father of the boy that recorded the meeting in the very beginning of the book. Now he, Mengele, knows where Liebermann will stay when he visits America. The biology teacher, a contact of Klaus Palmer, tells Liebermann that Mengele must have used cloning to ‘make’ these exact genetic copies of one boy. The boys must be clones of one person and Mengel is probably trying to copy the living circumstances of this person also: the father of this person must have died when he was 13 years old and so must the fathers of his copies. Then Liebermann finds out this person must have been Hitler! Mengele is planning on killing Liebermann in the hotel he will stay in when he’s in America, but Liebermann stays with friends overnight. With the information Frieda gave Liebermann, Liebermann knows that the next man who is supposed to be killed is named Henry Wheelock. Liebermann calls this man and makes an appointment with him. While Mengele is waiting for Liebermann to arrive at the hotel, he finds out that Liebermann is going to talk to Wheelock. Mengele then goes to Wheelocks house, he tells Wheelock his name is Yakov Liebermann. He kills Wheelock and then prepares himself to pretend to be Wheelock so he can trap and kill Liebermann. When Liebermann arrives at Wheelocks house and meets ‘Wheelock’ he gets a bad feeling: this man is smiling on the outside but he’s also sending out some sort of hate-vibe. Liebermann also notices that ‘Wheelock’ has a German accent. Mengele reveals himself, Liebermann sets the dogs free, hoping they will attack Mengele. While he tries to open the door to set these dogs free, Mengele shoots him, over and over again, he is badly wounded. Then Wheelocks ‘son’ comes in. Mengele tries to get the boy on his side, eventually he even tells the boy the truth, that he was adopted an that he is an exact duplicate of Hitler. The boy thinks he’s a fool and sets the dogs on him, they kill Mengele. The boy films Liebermann when he gets carried in to the ambulance and also his father and Mengele when their bodies are carried outside. He wants to be a movie director. The Young Jewish Defenders, a group of Jews that also hunt down Nazis, want to look up all the boys and kill them. This is possible because Liebermann has obtained the list with the names of the ‘fathers’ of the boys from Mengele. But Liebermann tears the list in pieces and flushes it down the toilet. He doesn’t want those boys to be killed, they’re only genetic duplicates of Hitler, not Hitlers themselves.