Time of Reckoning

by Walter Wager

  “Good-day,” said the bespectacled man behind the counter, who recognized Wasserman’s clothes as American.

  “Good-day. I’ve come for a suitcase left for repair,” Wasserman answered as he automatically eye-swept the shop.

  “Herr Prinz?”

  “No, King.”

  For a moment Wasserman wondered whether this man was Alexander, but he brushed the question aside and handed over the claim check.

  “You weren’t due in until tomorrow,” grumbled the man who might be Alexander as he pulled the canvas-and-leather bag from under the counter. It was the junior version of the two suitcases that sat in Room 927 at the Hilton, an exact kid brother.

  “You speak Russian?” Wasserman asked as he picked up the bag. The weight of it was encouraging, suggesting that they had kept their promise—for a change.

  “Naturlich.”

  “Then you remember Chekhov’s great line in War and Peace—”

  “What?”

  “Piss off, sonny!”

  “Chekhov didn’t write War and Peace!”

  Wasserman swung the bag, looked around the shop. “He would have if he had the time,” he told the man behind the counter. “Say, Alex, where’s the back room?”

  “Tolstoi wrote War and Peace!”

  Wasserman nodded agreeably. “You know, you’re beautiful when you’re angry. Now where the hell’s the back room?”

  There was a hard edge in his voice that the clerk with the Hamburg accent couldn’t ignore, so he nodded toward the curtain behind him.

  There was a sturdy wooden table in the back room. The man who’d just arrived in Berlin—his fourth trip here in seven years—put down the suitcase, opened it.

  Close-up: big smile.

  Close-up: contents of the bag. One .357 Magnum. One long-barreled .22 assassin’s gun. Two screw-on silencers. One sniper’s rifle, with scope—to be assembled. Incendiary, explosive, gas and concussion grenades—four of each. One 9-millimeter Uzi submachine gun, the wooden-butt model, 25.2 inches long, six hundred and fifty rounds a minute. Fourteen of the thirty-two-round staggered box magazines. Chopped liver wasn’t all that the Israelis made well, Wasserman thought. He’d ordered this gun because it was a standard infantry weapon of the West German Army, which would make it easy to get/steal more ammo. There were also extra clips and shells for the other guns, shoulder holster and belly holster and a fiberglass bulletproof vest. He took off his jacket, tie and shirt and put on the bulletproof vest. He buttoned the shirt over it, knotted the tie and strapped the shoulder holster into place. The Magnum barely fit, and he drew it three or four times before he was sufficiently satisfied to slip on the jacket.

  “Tolstoi also wrote Anna Karenina!” the man behind the counter announced triumphantly when Wasserman returned to the front of the shop.

  “I just came for a suitcase—not a goddam lecture on Russian literature.”

  “Which brings up another point, mein herr. You owe me two hundred and thirty-two deutschmarks for the suitcase.”

  One glance showed that the argumentative man in the glasses wasn’t kidding.

  “You’ve gotta be crazy. I don’t need your suitcase. We both work for the same people, and you know the only reason I’m picking up this bag—”

  “I don’t know why you’re taking the suitcase, and I don’t want to know,” interrupted the Tolstoi scholar. “All I know is that I paid a hundred and forty-four—all right, a hundred and forty—marks for that item myself, and I expect a fair profit. How’m I going to pay the rent and the taxes? You pistols come in here, and you don’t give a damn about me at all.”

  “You’re right—and you’re crazy.”

  “I’m a businessman. Do you know how many months behind our company is in paying my expense accounts? Do you realize—”

  “Shut up. Here’s your two hundred and thirty-two marks,” Wasserman said irritably and slammed the money on the counter.

  The businessman counted it as Wasserman headed for the door.

  “There’s tax!” he cried out shrilly.

  The man with the .357 under his left arm ignored this hysterical appeal, marched out and headed back toward the Hilton. He was on the Ku-damm four minutes later, when he heard the unpleasantly familiar sound.

  It wasn’t a pneumatic drill or jackhammer.

  Some son of a bitch was working an automatic weapon. Right in the commercial center of Berlin.

  Unless the “Kojak” series was shooting on location, Wasserman thought as he peered toward the noise, the Tourist Office and the Chamber of Commerce were going to be furious. There was another burst of firing—louder and nearer. Sensible folk on the street dodged into doorways or dropped behind cars, but Wasserman was professionally curious. The battering sounded like one of the British short-barreled Sterlings, and he wondered who in hell would be gunning up a main shopping street in the middle of the day.

  He saw the black Audi sedan tearing through the traffic, the bright June sun glinting on something metallic jutting from the right front window. The person who was holding that something was squirting off bursts at storefronts and other vehicles—including a luxurious green Mercedes 450SL that erupted into flames when bullets ripped its fuel tank. Now the mobile machine gunner spotted Wasserman, swung his weapon and poured bullets that barely missed.

  Wasserman didn’t.

  He dropped into the shooter’s crouch and drew the Magnum, all in one choreographed motion. The .357 boomed twice. It was almost mechanical, but not quite. There was a lot of reflex in it, but some hatred too. His first round missed the racing car. His second destroyed about one-quarter of the machine gunner’s face.

  There was another face staring ferociously from the rear seat behind the recently deceased gunman. It was that of an attractive young brunette woman. Click. Wasserman’s mind photographed it, just as it had been trained to do. Five years from now—if he was alive—he’d retain that image along with the silhouettes of Sov tanks and Red Chinese jets and those torpedo boats the French sold to the Egyptians. Not given to philosophizing, Wasserman didn’t think about this but simply fired another shot that gouged a hole in the trunk of the receding Audi a moment before it spun around a corner.

  Good idea. Wasserman jammed the Magnum back into the shoulder holster and did the same thing. He hurried around the corner—another corner—to flee the area before the capable Berlin police might arrive to ask questions. The evening news broadcasts would surely say something about who the homicidal maniacs in the Audi were, and there’d be an account in both the International Tribune and the U.S. Army paper on the stands in the morning.

  It was nearly noon by the time he’d left the bag in his room, but he wasn’t ready for lunch yet. Putting on a pair of tinted sunglasses, he took a taxi to the Amerika Haus at 21-24 Harden-bergstrasse. It was one of the best U.S. cultural centers in Europe, and the blonde at the information desk near the door wasn’t bad either. She was Fraulein Cassel, according to the nameplate that didn’t quite mask her healthy physique—not to mention her alert and intelligent demeanor.

  “Mr. John Siegenthaler,” he said politely.

  “The music collection?” she tested in a voice that carried a lot of Chicago.

  “No, audiovisual,” he replied with the approved countersign.

  “May I tell him who’s calling?”

  She had a very nice smile, and her swell posture did a lot for her.

  “Frank Wasserman.”

  She dialed a number, passed on the name and invited him to enter the second door on the left. It was not marked “audiovisual” but “film research” was close enough. There were some charming Laurel & Hardy and Bogart posters on the wall of the inner office, and a mirror that had to mask the closed-circuit TV camera. The person behind this desk was a sturdy-looking chap in his late twenties, and he scanned Wasserman’s passport before pressing the buzzer that opened the door behind him.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” demanded the woman behind the large p
lastic-and-metal desk. She was black, very pretty, in her thirties and mad enough to spit. If she didn’t, it was only because she was a lady with an M.A. from Yale.

  “Hello, baby,” he replied pleasantly. He was determined to be pleasant, and he knew that it wasn’t going to be easy. She was full of questions, and they would all be hostile. “Wasserman. Frank Wasserman. Says so right here on my passport,” he answered and waved the green plastic folder.

  “Don’t crap me, mister,” she ordered bitterly. “I want to know what you’re doing here. This is a delicate station, and I can’t afford to have some cowboy come in and shoot the whole town up.”

  She’d be annoyed when she heard about the man he’d killed on the Ku-damm. It had never taken much to ignite her temper.

  “You’re looking great, Diane. Where’s Siegenthaler?”

  “I’m Siegenthaler, you bastard. Now let’s get two things straight, mister. We don’t want you here, and we don’t need you here!”

  Maybe there was something in the air that made everybody crazy here, the man whose passport said Frank Wasserman thought. It could be some kind of air pollution. What else would explain all the hostility?

  “Don’t holler,” he advised.

  “I’m the station officer, and I’ll do what I goddam please,” she practically screamed back. She’d put on five or six pounds, without any harm.

  “Just checking in. Right, you’re the station officer and I’m touching base the way I’m supposed to.”

  She glared, jammed a filter-tipped cigarette in a holder that contained another filter and reached for a match. Before she found the pack, the man with the Magnum flicked his gold Dunhill and lit her cigarette.

  “What are you doing here? Why wasn’t I notified till this morning that you were coming?”

  “Crash Dive,” he answered. He pulled a small Canary Island cigar from his pocket, bit off the end.

  “Crash Dive? What’s that?”

  There was no way that he could tell her. “You can ask the deputy director for Ops,” he replied evasively and lit the cigar. “It’s his deal, Di.”

  “I should have guessed that you’d show up. Last week that creep Duslov checked into town. He’s as violent as you are.”

  The man who wasn’t Frank Wasserman puffed.

  “Andrei Duslov?”

  “The same. He’s attached to their part of the Allied Kommandatura over on Kaiserwerther Strasse. As if that isn’t enough, those Maoist crazies in the Lietzen-Stoller gang have been shooting up the town. They ripped off a bank on the Ku-damm about an hour ago.”

  Now that was interesting.

  “I thought you gave up smoking, Di.”

  “Screw you!”

  “You did for three years while we were married—very nicely, too. You were a wonderful wife.”

  She stood up, and he thought she was going to throw something.

  “I’m not your wife anymore. That was all over twenty-six months ago. I’m the station officer, and this is my turf. I expect some respect.”

  He nodded, puffed again on the dark Don Diego. “You want me to salute, Di?”

  Ms. Diane McGhee pointed at the door, jabbing her right index finger like a dagger.

  Throwing me out again?” he asked.

  “I never threw you out, you bastard. I should have.”

  He nodded in assent, started for the door.

  “Level with me, are you going to make waves?” she questioned somewhat less stridently.

  “Do my best not to,” he promised.

  He always did his best not to, she reflected after the door closed behind him—but he always made waves.

  Crash Dive?

  What the hell was that? He wouldn’t tell her, of course. He still had the same arrogance, the same determination to go it alone and do it his way. Just because they’d code-named him Merlin, the son of a bitch thought he could do anything.

  10

  If you’d boogie over to Fasanenstrasse 7-8, almost anyone at the Berlin Tourist Information Office there would tell you that the city has some dandy “meeting and congress” halls—great for conventions or really big bar mitzvahs. There’s the Deutsch-landhalle with sixteen thousand seats, the Sportpalast that can handle up to eight thousand and the Neue Welt that’s real neat for groups no bigger than eighteen hundred. Smallest of the lot is the modern-modern Kongresshalle, designed by an American architect named Stubbins, who penciled in a 1260-chair hall but also provided lecture rooms, conference halls, closed-circuit TV and simultaneous-translation gear for five languages—plus several bars, restaurants, urinals and a lot of parking space. All these made it irresistible to the World Pathology Conference, and that’s why Dr. Ernest Beller spent the afternoon there.

  For the record, the building is kind of funny-looking—strange, anyway. The structure peers out from beneath a concrete slab with an odd double slope, which is why some jocular Berliners refer to it as “the pregnant oyster.” Of course, Berliners have a wonderful sense of humor and are nice to visitors, which is a terrific help if you’re surrounded by Communists armed to the eyeballs and aren’t too sure exactly what U.S. foreign policy might be next year—or what British foreign policy is this year. France doesn’t have any, which makes it simpler. Since there were more than seventy delegates from Marxist countries and no trouble was likely, Beller and the other pathologists from the West could ignore the ignoble political realities and concentrate on tissue sections and similar juicy delights until the day’s session adjourned for a big welcoming 6 P.M. reception tossed by the local medical association.

  Dynamite hors d’oeuvres.

  Cocktails only so-so.

  The man whom the CIA called Merlin was already several drinks ahead—on the other side of town. He’d been cruising carefully selected bars and strip joints since three in the afternoon, checking out hookers and hustlers and hipsters who might know where to find Bernard.

  Blue Bernard.

  He’d earned the name as one of the pioneers in Berlin’s dirty-film business, having produced more obscene movies than almost anyone else in Western Europe during the previous decade. His “blue pictures” had earned him much more than a great deal of money. Blue Bernard was no hack porno prince, he was an “auteur,” a creator. He also did some pimping and dope wholesaling on the side, just to keep in practice. According to the word around town, he shunned heroin as vulgar and supplied cocaine for the more affluent. At least that’s what Merlin was told by the gay procurer with dyed red hair who suggested that Blue Bernard might be filming in a certain warehouse near Checkpoint Charlie, transit point to East Berlin.

  “A class operation, that’s what he said,” Merlin told Bernard after the two burly guards had admitted him to the “studio.”

  “That’s the only way I know,” Bernard admitted with a shrug. “Go first cabin, or don’t go at all.”

  It was a lie, of course. Bernard had done a big bunch of grubby things since he got his start as a seventeen-year-old back in 1945, stealing food from military depots. Bernard had always lied a lot, but with charm.

  “Move it, Helga,” he ordered as he offered Merlin a splendid Cuban cigar.

  It was hard to tell which one was Helga. There were two very large women—perhaps two hundred and fifty pounds apiece—wrestling under bright lights in the middle of the “studio.” They were covered with mud, and nothing else.

  “Cinéma vérité,” Bernard explained seriously. “With everybody and his uncle doing porno pictures these days, I had to get into something different. Can’t just run with the pack.”

  “It’s never easy for the true creator,” Merlin confirmed.

  Bernard puffed on his own large cigar, gestured invitingly toward the cut-glass decanter filled with Asbach Uralt. Merlin poured himself an inch of the fiery German brandy.

  “You see what those weird Swedes did to Bergman?” Bernard demanded. “Just over some lousy taxes. If someone could do that to a genius like Ingmar Bergman, you think I’m safe?”


  Helga—or was it the other one—grunted loudly.

  “Keep it down, will you?” Bernard snapped. He was a small, sharp-featured man, quite bald and rather vain about his hands, which he waved around considerably. “This is only a run-through, dammit.”

  “You in town for the Jerry Lewis Festival?” he asked as the American enjoyed the cognac.

  “Among other things.”

  “Can’t understand why his own countrymen don’t recognize what a genius that man is—another Buster Keaton,” Bernard said. Then he leaned closer to Merlin, spoke confidentially.

  “You probably think those two are lesbians, nicht wahr? They’re not. Helga can be very affectionate. She was a math teacher in Goslar. Eats practically nothing. It’s a pituitary problem, they tell me.”

  Merlin finished his Asbach Uralt, decided against another.

  “Now the other one—she’s kinky. Well, my friend, it’s good to see you back in Berlin. Despite those goddam terrorists, it’s still a great city, isn’t it?”

  “Unique. Listen, I can see that you want to get back to the creative process. I just stopped by to say hello, and to ask whether you might help me with a little matter.”

  Bernard blew a sensational smoke ring. “What are friends for?” he asked grandly.

  “Those terrorists—”

  “Animals!” Bernard judged scornfully. Blue Bernard still believed in the old-fashioned German virtues of discipline, thrift and respect for private property. Unlike a number of people whom he was too decent to mention, he never ripped off other narcotics dealers’ stashes or beat up their female employees.

  “I’m—interested—in those people,” Merlin said.

  “A-ha!” The bald man’s clever, nervous eyes flashed and skittered around like a schoolboy’s hand-held camera.

  “You might hear something, Bernard. You have many friends and admirers, and they might hear something,” the American pressed cautiously in an insinuating tone.

  “Possibly. I heard something just before you arrived,” Bernard acknowledged. “A black Audi was found out in Charlot-tenburg early this afternoon. It had been stolen last night. There was a dead man in the front seat, with a large piece of his face missing.”