Time of Reckoning

by Walter Wager

  “What do you mean, Bill?” Shulman wondered.

  Harper swiveled in his big leather chair, looked out the window for several seconds before he replied.

  “Where’s Merlin?”

  “Jeezus Christ! Merlin?” Parks exclaimed. “You said something quiet.”

  The colonel nodded twice. “Great idea,” he approved.

  “Quiet? Merlin’s quiet like Mack the Knife!” Parks protested.

  “You didn’t read that either, Al,” Harper told the colonel. “Threepenny Opera. Now where’s Merlin?”

  “Hong Kong. If you send him after that bunch that hit the ambassador—”

  “Not the whole bunch,” Harper soothed. “Just the Number One Pistol—as a lesson.”

  “Last word was they were all in Cairo,” the colonel volunteered helpfully.

  Parks stood there shaking his head in frustration.

  “No sweat,” judged the man behind the desk. “Wherever he is, Merlin will find him. Merlin’s real good at finding people.”

  He was right.

  Merlin found the man three weeks later, and the entire matter was settled quietly. As a matter of fact, the only noise generated was a single scream uttered just before the man who had slain the American ambassador to the Sudan disappeared below the surface of the River Nile.

  7

  Everything changes, but not necessarily for the worse. By the end of 1972 the Recording Industry Association of America had certified as “gold” two Aretha Franklin albums, two each by Elton John and Joan Baez, a pair of Tom Jones LPs and three featuring the rich voice of Roberta Flack. John Denver was just starting to get some attention, which is more than Ernie Beller could say. Captain Beller didn’t want any attention, however, so he didn’t have any promotion men or public-relations crew out hyping his efforts. Stationed at a U.S. Army base near Munich, he was seeking anonymity.

  His efforts were not entirely successful. The other physicians didn’t practice nearly as much on the rifle and pistol ranges, and they didn’t spend any of their spare time taking hand-to-hand combat or “silent killing” courses with the Special Forces detachment. The energetic Green Berets of the Second Special Forces Group were delighted to teach him how to garrote with a piece of wire and kill with a single knife thrust, and they were impressed with how quickly he mastered booby traps and high explosives in the demolition training. They were no dummies, and they knew that the other doctors viewed them as embarrassingly gung-ho and violent jocks. Captain Beller respected their dedication and their skills, and they liked him for that.

  The other doctors at the hospital thought he was a bit odd—especially the Jewish ones. They recognized his fine work as a pathologist, but they wondered about his unusual attitudes toward Germany and the Germans. Some of his colleagues put aside the past, mixed casually with the local population and took local girls as bowling partners, mistresses or wives. Others were coldly aloof, and a number were openly bitter. Beller wasn’t any of these things, as far as anyone could see. He appeared to be completely neutral and dispassionate, almost uninterested in either the past or the present of this place and its people.

  “My old outfit liberated the camp, you know,” Phil Feldman blurted angrily across the lunch table one August afternoon.

  Beller looked at the mustachioed surgeon, blinked. “What?”

  “The outfit I was with back in the States—the Forty-fifth Infantry. It was the Third Battalion of the Forty-fifth that busted in back in forty-five, you know.”

  There were some people who found Feldman’s habit of ending sentences with “you know” irksome, but Beller wasn’t one of them. He respected the Californian’s gifts as a surgeon.

  “Broke in where?” Beller asked.

  Major Feldman scowled impatiently. “The camp near Dachau, where they butchered two hundred and eighty-eight thousand people. What kind of a Jew are you, Beller? Doesn’t it interest you?”

  The pathologist sipped his coffee, and nodded. “It certainly does, Phil,” he replied truthfully.

  “It’s less than twenty miles away, goddammit. What the hell’s the matter with you? Why don’t you go over and face a little reality?”

  “I’ll go—when I’m ready,” Ernest Beller pledged.

  He went to many places in Germany between August 24, 1973, and October 5, 1975, when he boarded the plane that took him home for discharge. He visited Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Dusseldorf, Bonn and other cities—but never the haunted Konzentrationslager just east of the old city of Dachau. He spent several days in each of the urban centers, shunning the usual sights and tourist attractions and spending hours instead in local libraries and municipal offices and certain bars. These were always near the town prison, and Beller never wore his uniform in these establishments.

  It was all part of his plan.

  He also wrote an extraordinary number of letters to various branches of the federal government in Bonn, and kept all the replies in a locked metal box.

  That was also part of his plan.

  So was his decision to join the staff of the Office of the Medical Examiner in New York City when he returned to civilian life. On the afternoon of the November Monday that Dr. Ernest Beller performed his first autopsy for Manhattan’s harried taxpayers, Colonel Shulman dropped by Harper’s office at CIA headquarters to say farewell. He was glad to be returning to regular duty with the marine corps, and he wasn’t hiding it one bit.

  “We’ll miss you, Alan,” Harper assured him.

  “Miss you boys too. Not the paper pushers, but you’ve got some damn fine troopers out in the field—men who won’t let you down.”

  Colonel Shulman had a tendency to make brief, inspiring speeches, some of which had earned him excellent ratings in “leadership.”

  “You mean agents such as Merlin,” Harper guessed accurately. “Just got a message from Istanbul. He’s in the hospital there.”

  “And what about the Bad Guys?” Shulman had great gut instincts.

  “He blew two of them away,” Harper reported, “and there’s another one who left at least a fifth of blood in the alley.”

  “See what I mean?” the marine asked. “You can count on guys like Merlin to get it done.”

  A lot of people at the agency did.

  Merlin was violent, but he did get things done.

  Special things.

  “You gotta hand it to Merlin,” the colonel said with a macho chuckle, “and if you don’t, he’ll take it.”

  A veteran dissembler whose skills had improved steadily since he first seduced the freshman homecoming queen at Stanford, Harper forced out a laugh and wondered what to say to this hearty combat commander.

  “Bet your ass,” he volunteered hopefully.

  It worked, and Colonel Shulman was smiling toothily as he left the office. Harper returned to the photos of the African general and the affectionate Swedish blonde who was charging the CIA $1000 a week to keep him happy. Perhaps congressmen and journalists might nit-pick about the morality of the operation, but there was one thing no one could argue: The pictures were excellent.

  8

  Was it Kafka, Telly Savalas’s agent or Richard M. Nixon who said that you can’t trust anybody? Well, you can’t. Your own mother could sell your letters to the L.A. Times or the Daily Mail. Less than sixty days after Harper studied those expensive pictures of the expensive blonde, the African general screwed everybody—the woman, the CIA and himself. He went on a malt scotch bender, and while he was bombed out of his head he was bombed out of his palace. An air force colonel dropped a couple of five-hundred-pounders on the presidential compound, and before you could recite the number of the general’s Swiss account there was a brand-new Numero Uno in the People’s Democratic Republic and the Swedish Embassy gave the yellow-haired lady political asylum. Harper took it philosophically, recognizing the fact that giving political asylum is the national sport of Sweden, where there isn’t much else to do most of the year.

  The whole number didn’t bother
Ernest Beller one bit, and he was just as cool when Elizabeth Taylor split with Richard Burton again in late February. He was busy with his own thing—doing autopsies, stealing chemicals and official stationery and polishing his German. The plan was shaping up nicely, and he was so pleased that he decided to tell his uncle about it.

  No, Ernie Beller wasn’t crazy.

  Well, not that crazy.

  He was actually a lot loonier, but not that loony. Unlike a lot of criminals, he didn’t want to get caught—yet. One—or even three if the BBC had a panel show going—could debate whether he wanted to be caught at all, but that probably wouldn’t be nearly as much fun as those swell documentaries on bird watching in the Orkneys.

  It was all a matter of timing, and he could wait. Ernest Beller was as good at waiting as Merlin was at finding, and the right moment finally came on a Sunday in May. The Yankees had won their first doubleheader all season the previous evening, and the Times reported that the Wolverhampton Wanderers had upset Tottenham Hotspur—leaving them in a dead tie with the Birmingham Armpits in the First Division (English League) of British football. Encouraged by these omens and goaded by the fact that he had almost no time left, the shrewd pathologist went to visit his uncle.

  Close-up: Ernest Beller.

  Very earnest Beller, speaking sincerely.

  “I’ve got a plan, uncle. I’ve been working on it for a long time,” he confided. “It’s the murderers, the men who killed all our people in those camps. Not just our people, millions of others too. Someone has to punish them—the war criminals.”

  His uncle stared at him intently.

  “I’ve given it a great deal of thought,” explained the Dachau survivor, “and I accept the fact that I can’t go searching for them. If the Israelis and the other intelligence agencies haven’t been able to find Martin Bormann and the rest, I’ll have to settle for the ones who’ve already been caught and put in prison in Germany. There’s no death penalty in the new Germany, uncle. Isn’t that progressive?”

  The elderly analyst didn’t answer.

  Ernest Beller reached into his jacket pocket, took out Jerry Jeff Atkins’s battered Bible. “A soldier gave me this at the camp. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” he continued grimly. “I’m going to Germany next week for the international pathology conference, and I’m going to break into those prisons. I know exactly which war criminals are in which prisons, and I’ve planned carefully how to get in. I have all the equipment, everything.”

  Martin Beller looked horrified. He plainly understood the plan.

  “I’m going to kill them, uncle. I’m going to avenge the six million!”

  At that moment Greta Beller entered the room.

  Close-up: Martin Beller, desperate.

  “How is he?” she asked.

  “I’ve just been talking to him about my plan to go to Germany,” Ernest told her.

  She shook her head. “He wants to say something. It’s tragic. Since the stroke he can’t speak or write or even move his arms,” she lamented.

  Ernest Beller looked at the man in the bed, sighed. “Tragic,” he agreed. “Will he ever speak again?”

  “Nobody knows. He’s a prisoner in his own body, seeing and hearing but completely unable to communicate. Look at him. He wants so much to say something.”

  The older man’s face was contorted with effort, and he was breathing heavily as he tried—so hard. He failed, and a tear trickled from his left eye.

  “Martin, Martin liebschen,” she called out sympathetically. “He’s crying,” she sighed as she turned to her nephew. “I haven’t seen him cry in thirty years.”

  “Thirty-one.”

  It just slipped out. The thirty-first anniversary of the American liberation of the camp had passed a month earlier, and Ernst Beller hadn’t said a word about it to anyone—till now.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Nothing.”

  She shook her head again, and accepted.

  “Ernest, when are you leaving and how long will you be gone?”

  “Friday. The conference runs for a week, but I may drive down into Italy later with a friend who teaches at Johns Hopkins. She has relatives in Florence.”

  His aunt nodded tolerantly, as he knew she would. It was so easy to fool these emancipated liberals with casual reference to a sexual jaunt, for everything they believed pressed them to accept such a yarn as a normal “healthy” explanation.

  The lips of the man in the bed quivered, but only a crude Cro-Magnon grunt emerged. It was a pitiful sound for a man who spoke four languages, knew the works of all the great philosophers and social scientists and writers of Western civilization right back to Aristotle.

  “Good-bye, uncle. Please try to rest.”

  “We’ll watch a little television this evening—the educational station, of course,” Greta Beller said softly as her nephew reached for the doorknob. “He can’t stand all the violence on the commercial stations.”

  “Who could?” Ernest Beller asked piously a moment before he kissed his aunt good-bye.

  When he’d gone, she turned to her stricken husband. Tears were seeping from both eyes now, orbs swollen larger than she’d ever seen them before. Something was bothering or hurting poor Martin, but there was no way to determine what it might be. Whatever it was, it was terrible.

  9

  Latitude 13 degrees 25 minutes east.

  Longitude 52 degrees 31 minutes north.

  There is a great and famous city on the green bank of the Spree River, a metropolis divided by a wall and an ideology. South of the Baltic, east of the Elbe and west of the Oder, it was a strategic location even before it became a major cultural and business center. Born as a Hanseatic trading town in 1237, it grew into the industrial center of Prussia under Frederick the Great five centuries later and nearly died on the night of February 3,1945, when the U.S. Army Air Force burned out a thousand acres in the gut of the city.

  It’s all different now.

  The whole place has been rebuilt into a sleek and jazzy modern city, and the planes that fly in are DC-8s and Boeing 727s instead of General Jimmy Doolittle’s B-17S or the Royal Air Force’s heavies. The aircraft that land don’t even touch down at the same field now, for Tempelhof has given way to the newer Tegel Flugplatz on the other side of town.

  The city is Berlin—East and West and full of eye-catching contemporary buildings and groovy shops and assorted overt and covert employees of at least half a dozen powers cool-warring it up neatly. The western section of the sprawling metropolis is sealed off from the Marxist acreage by twenty-eight miles of concrete wall, land mines and armed East German guards who have AK-47S and bad posture—either of which can kill you. The setup is ridiculous, something only a cloak-and-dagger writer or Vanessa Redgrave could love.

  Ernest Beller didn’t love it and didn’t hate it either as he looked down at the city from six thousand feet. It is one of the many ironies of the second half of this wacked-out century that West Germany’s efficient airline, Lufthansa, is barred from flying into Berlin by Moscow’s merry minions. The Pan Am jet bringing Dr. Beller and half a dozen other pathologists into Tegel kissed the runway exactly on time. It was a fine morning in early June, and Ernest Beller noticed the splendid legs of the short-skirted “ground hostess” who guided the disembarking passengers to the baggage-claim area.

  Beller didn’t notice the overhead camera, however.

  Frank Wasserman did.

  Mr. Wasserman had an advantage, of course. He was trained to spot cameras and photoelectric cells, assorted “bugs” and electronic eavesdropping devices and all types of people who might be following him—up to size 48 long. Mr. Wasserman’s other advantages included looking the way Robert Redford would if he were five inches taller, and shooting the way Clint Eastwood would love to shoot. None of this was obvious, and Mr. Wasserman looked like another pleasant U.S. tourist as he walked past Dr. Beller and the other medical types.

  Mr. Wasserman was almos
t never obvious.

  It didn’t go with either his self-image or his line of work. Mr. Wasserman was leaving the baggage pickup as the pathologists arrived, having flown in on Air France sixteen minutes earlier. Following the porter who was carrying his matching tan canvas-and-leather suitcases, Mr. Wasserman paid no attention to Beller strolling along in conversation with a Canadian woman on the staff at McGill. Just for the record, the Man with the Plan wasn’t aware of Wasserman either.

  Neither of these clever, good-looking and ruthless men knew that the other was alive.

  Not yet.

  With lots of parks and greenery, Berlin is much more attractive than most cities, but Wasserman hardly noticed the scenery as the taxi wove through the Mercedeses, Opels and VWs flowing steadily toward the center of the city. He wouldn’t be able to enjoy anything fully until he’d picked up the kit, and he felt naked and defenseless all the way to the Hilton on Budapesterstrasse.

  If Watergate broke your heart, the Berlin Hilton should revive your faith because it’s exactly what a Hilton should be. Tall, mindless modern architecture, great elevator service, dandy ice cubes, three restaurants and three bars and a roof garden and a cafe and The Starlight Room on the top floor combine in an utterly standard skyscraper hotel. For those who look out, it offers interesting vistas of East Berlin across The Wall and/or West Berlin’s chic Kurfurstendamm, dazzlingly lit at night.

  But it wasn’t night and Wasserman had seen the Ku-damm at least a hundred and forty-two times (not counting legal holidays). He knew its banks, boutiques, antique shops, art galleries and fashionable clothing stores and, if so inclined, could recall that the street was two and a quarter miles long and one hundred and seventy-seven feet wide. Having just hung up his clothes in Room 927, he took only a single long look out at the view before he left to make the pickup at the leather-goods shop nine blocks away. He wasn’t interested in the leather suits in the nearby Berliner Ledermoden or the alligator bags at Croco on the Ku-damm. The store he sought was a small one on a side street. The sign in the window said Alexander.