Time of Reckoning

by Walter Wager

  “Good afternoon, Frau Gehferlach,” he said politely to the visitor.

  His aunt beamed, proud of both his memory and manners. He excused himself, and ninety seconds later the two women heard the first notes of Mozart’s Piano Sonata no. 7 in C Major, the one they say he wrote for the daughter of Mannheim orchestra conductor Cannabich in 1777.

  “That’s rather good,” Frau Gehferlach complimented as she reached for another strawberry jam torte.

  His aunt looked at him at the piano that was framed in the doorway at the other end of the living room.

  “Yes, Ernest is a good boy,” she ratified in a low confidential voice.

  She didn’t want to speak too loudly. Ernest was so cheery and unselfconscious, and she didn’t want to do anything that might disturb him.

  5

  John F. Kennedy and Ernie Beller both did pretty well in 1960. The American people told the senator from Massachusetts that he could move into the White House in Washington, and Harvard told the boy from Dachau that he could share a suite in Lowell House in Cambridge. Beller entered Harvard at seventeen. You could, too, if you had S.A.T. scores above 730, averaged twenty points a game for the basketball team of a fine private school and had a nationally known psychoanalyst as your adoptive father.

  Lowell House, with its bells and blue dome, is one of Harvard’s most attractive dormitories. All right, nobody’s knocking Dunster or any of the others. Such petty rivalries certainly didn’t afflict any of the members of the class of ’64, who were united in their quiet pride in the new U.S. president—class of ’39—and their conviction that plenty of Radcliffe girls put out, even if they were all high-school valedictorians. Whatever history may say about JFK, Ernie Beller discovered at least two intelligent young women at the sister school who confirmed this estimate. One was a nineteen-year-old blonde from Dallas who knew a great deal about Henry James, Herman Melville and contraception.

  That was 1960, the year that Johnny Mathis and the Kingston Trio each had three “gold” albums and almost nobody cared about Vietnam. Ernie Beller and his lanky WASP roommate—a bright and modest lad whose family owned something like one-ninth of downtown Baltimore—wore Levi’s and tweed jackets and spoke earnestly about the civil-rights movement. Nineteen sixty-one proved to be a startling wipe-out for Mathis and the Kingston Trio, and the civil-rights movement didn’t fare that well either. Would you believe that the heavy hitter that year was Mantovani? No joke—five smash LPs on London. Beller was working his way through the Kama Sutra with a passionate Brecht-Ionesco-Dürrenmatt-Beckett fan named Linda. She was the avant-garde theater buff who got Beller involved with the Harvard Drama Club, a connection that became so intense that he seriously considered a stage career.

  Uncle Martin talked him out of it.

  “I hear you’re a splendid actor, Ernest,” he congratulated genially, “and I hope you’ll continue as long as you’re at college. Acting out is healthy—but not always commercial.”

  “I haven’t really made up my mind, uncle.”

  “No reason to rush it. I’m just telling you—man to man—that I’ve had some top actors and directors on my couch, and they all agree that it’s a hard way to make an unreliable living. Think about it.”

  Ernie Beller nodded, reflected sensibly through the middle of 1962, when Johnny Mathis came back strong with four successful albums and merry middle Americans were singing along with five lilting Mitch Miller platters. The Beatles were still working Liverpool delicatessens when Uncle Martin heard the wonderful news that Ernest was going to apply to medical school.

  “Do you think he’ll be an analyst?” Greta Beller asked her husband hopefully.

  “I think he’ll be a first-year medical student—if he gets admitted,” Dr. Beller replied with a chuckle.

  Three medical schools accepted Ernest Beller, and in September of 1964—a dynamite year for the Beatles, Harry Belafonte, Andy Williams and Lyndon Baines Johnson—he began at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University. He could have commuted each day to the massive medical complex overlooking the Hudson, for the school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan was only twenty-five minutes from home. Rather than waste even this time, he chose to share an apartment on 170th Street off Broadway with two other students. Beller worked hard, got grades that put him in the upper fifth of his class—and rarely spoke unless questioned. Very few people at P&S even noticed him until the incident in the anatomy class.

  “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” Professor Fiske said with his usual sly grin. “Welcome to Anatomy One. We’re going to be working with human bodies.”

  Everyone knew that Fiske was a prurient prick, so nobody was surprised that he picked on the buxom brunette from California. With Eden Morris’s prominent contours, it was difficult not to notice her.

  “Have you had much experience with human bodies?” he teased, “Dead human bodies?”

  “None at all.”

  His glittering eyes danced up to the next row, and he furtively checked the seating plan. “How about you, Mr.—Beller? Have you ever seen a human corpse?”

  “Thousands,” Ernest Beller answered flatly.

  The class laughed.

  “I’m not talking about war movies,” Fiske snapped angrily.

  “I’m not either.”

  Nobody chuckled this time. They stared.

  “And just where did you see all these corpses, Mr. Beller?”

  For a moment—a bright lurid instant—his mind’s eye filled with a dazzling, terrifying view of that pit. It was very real, even to the point of the American tank crew standing beside him.

  “In a hole at Dachau—a big hole with two thousand corpses.”

  The entire class gasped, gaped.

  Fiske wouldn’t yield.

  “Come, come, Mr. Beller,” he chided patronizingly. “You’re much too young to have served in the army unit that liberated Dachau.”

  “You’re right, professor. I was only three years old, but I remember the bodies quite clearly.”

  There was another collective gasp, and a young woman somewhere at the rear of the room began to weep softly. Fiske shook his balding head twice, swallowed his embarrassment and—surprisingly—his compassion. No one knew that he had it.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Beller,” he said truthfully.

  “So am I,” Beller replied.

  The anatomy class went on smoothly, and so did Ernie Beller. It wasn’t just that he never spoke of his awful wartime experiences after that, but rather the warm and friendly way he related to the other students. By the end of that first term, he was relating very nicely, too, with Eden Morris at least twice a week.

  Nineteen sixty-five was a swell year for Ernie Beller, the investors in Fiddler on the Roof and the Rolling Stones, who hit it big on both sides of the Atlantic—and the Pacific—with “Satisfaction” and “Out of Our Heads.” Large crowds of smallish girls gave Herman’s Hermits no privacy at all, but this hardly affected Dr. Beller’s nephew, whose taste ran to the Juilliard String Quartet, Jean-Pierre Rampal and almost anything Ella Fitzgerald ever recorded, especially Gershwin and Arlen. Other students smoked grass and marched to protest all kinds of things, but Ernest Beller had his hair cut every six weeks and did his own thing. He had neither the time nor the desire to change society, since his third-year studies and the work in the clinic kept him very busy.

  To put it bluntly, he wasn’t that lively.

  Pleasant and intelligent? Yes. He was almost as smart as Eden Morris. The slight gap in their grades wasn’t the reason that she left him for the husky intern from Oklahoma. Ernest Beller was a bit too low-key, a trifle too introverted for her. Leo Durocher may not have been exactly right when he told the sportswriters that nice guys finish last, but Ernie Beller came in second and that wasn’t nearly good enough. He found a bright-as-a-button and cute-as-a-kitten laboratory technician named Sally Anne who was emancipated, very clean and deeply concerned about the global threat of overpopulation. She
was easy to love—in more ways than one.

  It wasn’t easy to leave her when he got his M.D. that bright June day in 1968, and their intimacy continued during the first months of his internship at Bellevue Hospital. That’s why she possessed a key to his East 29th Street apartment that steamy August night. She knew that Ernie would be on time for their 7 P.M. dinner date, for he was as punctual and organized as a man could be without being unpleasant. She was somewhat surprised when no one answered her ringing, but she shrugged and let herself in to wait. She was even more surprised to find Ernest Beller seated before the television set, completely focused on the news broadcast.

  “…believed to have crossed the frontier from Syria,” Walter Cronkite reported in that sincere and magical singsong. “The raiders were armed with automatic weapons, explosives and axes, and damage to the kibbutz was considerable.”

  You could see that clearly. The film of the blasted homes and the ruined school was a tribute to the skilled cameraman attached to the CBS News bureau in Jerusalem. Of course, he’d had a lot of experience shooting this sort of story, and that surely helped.

  Now he panned neatly to the screaming women.

  Great sound.

  “Thirteen of the fatalities are said to have been women and children,” Cronkite announced while an engineer seated twenty yards away from him in the building on West 57th Street in Manhattan prepared to run the Esso commercial. The agency that handled Esso’s advertising could get very nasty if the tape wasn’t rolled exactly on time.

  They were loading bodies into ambulances, and the women were still screaming.

  “Israeli authorities report that four of the terrorists were slain, but an estimated eight or nine others got away in the darkness.”

  Then they rolled the Esso tape—right on the button.

  “Awful, awful,” Sally Anne Lennard said, and he nodded as he turned to face her in the doorway.

  “More dead Jews,” he replied.

  “The men who did this will be punished!” she said.

  He looked at his watch, rose and reached for his tie on the doorknob.

  “Someone will make them pay, Ernie!” she insisted emotionally.

  He considered this notion soberly, for six or eight seconds. “Whom did you have in mind?” he asked as the sincere voice from the box explained the great care that Esso took to avoid screwing up the environment.

  She didn’t know how to answer.

  There were times when it was hard to tell whether Ernie was joking or serious, and this was one of them.

  6

  Almost everyone figured that when Ernest Beller completed his rotating medical internship he’d go on to a residency in pediatrics, and marry Sally Anne. They were all wrong. His aunt still hoped that he’d take advanced training in psychiatry and wed some wealthy Jewish girl whose family had a good collection of pre-Columbian art. She was wrong too. He was actually fond of pre-Columbian, but his plan didn’t call for him to marry anyone right now. When he told this to Sally Anne, she cried a bit and took a higher-paying job at a fine new medical center in Los Angeles, where the weather was a lot better and the street-crime rate significantly lower.

  On the face of things, it was logical for Ernest Beller to go into pediatrics because he had an obvious and extraordinary gift for treating children. He was not only exceptionally skilled in diagnosing and coping with their medical problems, but the kids trusted him. All the kids—Irish or Italian, Chinese, black or Hispanic, poor or middle-class—loved Dr. Ernie. Why they called him that or why they were so crazy about him didn’t really matter, but he was a hero to the younger girls and boys and he would have made one helluva pediatrician.

  He chose pathology instead.

  His plan required it.

  The dictionary definition of “pathologist” is “one who makes postmortem examinations, diagnoses morbid changes in tissues removed at operation, et cetera.” The root lies in the Greek word pathos, which Webster’s New Collegiate views as “a combining form meaning suffering, disease, passion.” That fit Ernest Beller precisely, although no one knew it.

  “What does it mean, Martin?” Greta Beller asked her husband, whom she respected deeply—especially his mind.

  “What do you think it means?” responded the psychoanalyst automatically.

  “Death. He’s choosing death over life! Don’t laugh, Martin.”

  Dr. Beller didn’t laugh, which was a good thing, for his wife was, as usual, intuitively correct. He told her that he’d speak to Ernest about it, and he did when his nephew came uptown for Sunday brunch less than forty-eight hours later.

  “I’m afraid your aunt’s a bit disappointed you didn’t choose psychiatry,” the analyst said with a chuckle that was only half-true. “I’ve heard you’re very good with children, and that’s a growing area for therapists.”

  Ernest Beller smeared more cream cheese on the thin dark bread, covered it with two slices of smoked salmon.

  “I love kids all right,” he admitted, “but I’ve discovered I find the lab more challenging. You could say that by working on some dead people I’ll be helping keep other people—including kids—alive.”

  You could also say that Ernie Beller had become a top-notch liar. Watching his warm smile as he chewed, it was impossible to discern the plan that was slowly evolving behind those big bright eyes. Neither his uncle nor his aunt nor Sharon—the trim brunette who taught Puerto Ricans and Haitians “English as a second language” by day and spent nights and weekends with Ernie Beller—had any idea that he was getting ready for something extraordinary. Sharon Gresham, who was extremely fond of dry white wines, Italian movies and carnal contact with Ernie Beller at least seven or eight times a week, was terribly disappointed when he told her that he was joining the army and going overseas.

  Three years.

  He didn’t have to serve, for the Vietnam War was almost over. He also didn’t have to explain his reasons, and he didn’t. The army was glad to cooperate with such a well-trained and competent pathologist, so Captain E. Beller’s request for assignment to the U.S. ground forces in West Germany was approved without question.

  It was all going well.

  He’d been studying German for a year, and he’d polish his language skills further in the Federal Republic—the Fourth Reich. During the last weeks before reporting to the military hospital in Virginia, he spent many hours completing his research on West 43rd Street. He checked and rechecked the annual news indexes at the New York Times, then studied the microfilms very carefully for the detailed information he needed. He seemed to be in excellent spirits, and even the murder of a dozen Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Village didn’t appear to depress him.

  It was a question of numbers.

  He couldn’t afford to mourn for the twelve.

  His duty was to avenge the six million.

  Neither his preparations nor his plan were quite complete, and when they were he would have to move with the greatest care and precision. He would have to be efficient—just like the monsters who’d run the death camps. When he boarded the air force transport for Frankfurt that crisp October morning, Captain Beller (E) was cheerful and confident.

  He had every reason to be.

  After all, he’d been preparing for this for twenty-seven years.

  Three hours after Ernest Beller’s jet took off—at 11 A.M. on October 28, 1972, according to the CIA security entry log—a stocky pink-faced man named William Harper passed through the outer gates of the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters compound in Langley, Virginia. He was driving a 1971 Chrysler with D.C. plates and he was frowning. Nine minutes later he entered his office on the fourth floor of the huge drab building, and he was still frowning.

  “Colonel Shulman,” he growled as he strode past his secretary, “and get Parks too.”

  “What?” she asked.

  “Shulman and Parks. You deaf?”

  “Would it help?” she wondered hopefully.

  She knew that it
wouldn’t. Nothing ever did when he was in a mood like this, and he was almost always in this kind of seething rage when he returned from those weekly meetings of Working Group Six at the Pentagon. Parks and Shulman arrived, and she buzzed them in immediately.

  “Hobbits!” the shirtsleeved man behind the desk swore.

  “What did he say, Alan?” Parks asked the marine corps colonel who’d entered with him.

  “He said hobbits,” reported Shulman, who was known for his memory as well as his expertise in jungle warfare.

  “Fuckin’ hobbits. The whole damn Pentagon is overrun with hobbits. It’s Tolkien territory!” Harper raged.

  Richard Parks, who had the curliest hair and the sharpest mind in the class of 1961 at Duke, nodded in recognition. “He’s saying that they’re living in a fantasy world,” Parks translated with a still boyish grin. “You ever read any of the Tolkien books, Alan?”

  “The only fiction I read is the Congressional Record,” answered the colonel. “Hey, Bill, you want to tell us what the hell’s wrong—please?”

  Harper put on a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, took them off and placed them on the desk.

  “The masterminds of the intelligence community have decided to go along with our friends at State on that business in Khartoum, so we’re not going to do anything about those bastards who took out the ambassador,” he said.

  “Chicken, huh?” demanded the marine veteran.

  “The whole room was full of feathers,” Harper confirmed.

  Then he smiled slyly.

  “There’s more?” Parks guessed.

  “A little. Officially, we’re going along. I had a drink with the director last night, and he had an idea we might do something unofficial. Something quiet, if you know what I mean.”