Monday, October 14th, was a cool and overcast day, but four Reuters people came to the Garten anyway; they settled themselves on a bench, unwrapped sandwiches, and poured white wine into paper cups. One of the four, the wine-pourer, was Sydney Beynon, Reuters’ senior Vienna correspondent. A forty-four-year-old ex-Liverpudlian with two Viennese ex-wives, Beynon looks very much like an abdicating King Edward in horn-rimmed glasses. At he stood the bottle on the bench beside him and sipped judgmentally from his cup, he saw with a sudden down-press of guilt Yakov Liebermann shambling toward him, in a brown hat and an open black raincoat. During the preceding week or so, Beynon had received word several times that Liebermann had called and wanted him to call back. He hadn’t yet done so, though a punctilious call-returner; and confronted now with his clear though unintended avoidance of the man, he felt doubly guilty: once because Liebermann in his peak years, the time of the Eichmann and Stangl captures, had been the source of some of his best and most rewarding copy; and once because the Nazihunter made everyone feel guilty, always.
