Time of Reckoning

by Walter Wager

  “He left in a gray car?”

  “I’m not sure. I think so. It wasn’t a big car—and it might have been gray.”

  “What did he look like? Tall? Fat? Old?”

  The guard shrugged. “I didn’t notice, sir. There was nothing special about him, so I guess he was just—sort of ordinary.”

  Merlin thanked him, and the two impostors drove off in the khaki Ford with the fake U.S. Army markings.

  “A journalist who didn’t get near him and a priest nobody knows—that’s some combo,” Cavaliere judged.

  “I was right. It wasn’t an accident!”

  “Doesn’t prove a goddam thing, major… Say, are you listening to me?”

  “He was hit!” Merlin exulted.

  “You’re getting kind of bloodthirsty in your old age—sir.” The “lieutenant” behind the wheel was still not convinced that the Martians had any connection with this death.

  “He was hit!”

  There was nothing you could do with Merlin when he got into one of these states—except wait for it to pass. Cavaliere had been through these scenes nearly a dozen times, enduring the exuberance that came when Merlin sensed that his gut-hunch might be correct. The happy smile he wore right now confirmed that he was in such an irrationally joyous mood.

  “All right, he was hit. Whoopee.”

  “Whoopee!” Merlin agreed.

  “And hurrah for our side and God Bless America. Once again your fantastic intuition has prevailed over lesser minds, and I am profoundly honored to work with you, major. Now what the hell do we do, sing?”

  Merlin turned to face him, still beaming. “Angie?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you know any Harold Arlen?”

  “I know the one from Wizard of Oz. Yeah, ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow.’ Will that do?”

  It did just fine, and the Irving Berlin medley that followed as they swung onto the autobahn was just as dandy.

  23

  Frankfurt.

  That’s what the sign over the air terminal said.

  “Don’t worry.”

  That’s what Cavaliere said as the two CIA agents walked from the plane toward the building.

  “I’m not sure they took me seriously,” Merlin brooded aloud.

  “What did you tell them?”

  “I told them to alert all U.S. and West German military bases that the Martians may pull a raid to grab the explosives they need for their next operation. They ran short during that train job, so they’ll move fast to steal more—somewhere.”

  “Take it easy,” advised the lieutenant as they neared the entrance to the building. “You’re Merlin, a heavy hitter. People respect you, Merlin. You’re no bullshit artist.”

  “I hope they alerted the Germans… You think people respect me, Angie?”

  “They love you. You’re adorable.”

  “Don’t get fresh.”

  A British couple in tweeds, utterly indifferent to the eighty-degree weather, looked at them curiously.

  “It’s all right. We’re engaged,” Merlin assured them—and the uneasy English hurried away.

  “I think your wife still cares, Merl,” Cavaliere said while they waited for their bags. “She asked about you when I checked in last week.”

  “Ex-wife. No, she cares about Crash Dive. Her ass is burning because she doesn’t know what we’re doing.”

  Cavaliere lit a cigarette. “What the hell are we doing, Merlin?”

  “We’re going to jail,” the man in the major’s uniform said as he saw his suitcase.

  “This sounds like Monopoly.”

  “That’s capitalism for you. Let’s go.”

  Some seventy minutes later they were in the office of the warden at Barbarossa Prison. He reported that the demise of Egon Berchtold had come after a heart attack, and the cause of death had been certified by the institution’s physician.

  “Berchtold had been suffering from cardiac problems for several years,” he explained, “and there was nothing suspicious about this final incident.”

  “I’m suspicious about everything. You get that way in my business, warden, so please humor me.”

  Warden Schnapp didn’t want any trouble. He had dedicated his life to this highly functional principle, winning promotions over a number of less canny civil servants in the process. Still, he was a bit defensive about this foreigner doubting the ability and expertise of his staff.

  “Are you questioning our doctor?” he asked stiffly.

  “No, but I’d like to.”

  Dr. Wessler was a plump man with very little hair, a white jacket-and only six years to his pension.

  “My examination indicated all the classic symptoms of cardiac failure, major. I’ve dealt with many such cases in my career, and I can assure you—”

  “Doctor,” Merlin broke in as “sincerely” as he could, “I’m not doubting your skill or experience. I don’t know much about these matters—my business is criminal investigation. That’s my profession. As one professional to another, I wonder whether anything could simulate those classic symptoms.”

  The physician and the warden exchanged puzzled glances.

  “Did Berchtold have any visitors just before he died? A priest, perhaps?”

  Warden Schnapp’s laugh was almost contemptuous. “In all the years that man was here, he never attended services once. He sneered at religion as weakness.”

  The physician nodded, explained that Berchtold had often expressed these views while working as an aide in the infirmary.

  “Anyone else?” Cavaliere wondered.

  “Very good, lieutenant. As my assistant said, were there any visitors at all?”

  Trouble? After all these years?

  “Is there something wrong? I have a feeling that you’re not being entirely…candid, major.”

  Merlin sensed the weakness, moved in for the kill.

  “You’re damn right I’m not, warden,” he said in blunt soldier’s tones. “This is a joint U.S. and German investigation—and it’s classified. You aren’t going to be difficult, are you?”

  Schnapp stammered, babbled and stopped just short of cringing. He wasn’t afraid of these Americans, but if they were working with the security services of the Federal Republic and if they complained to those intolerant and officious bastards in Bonn, there might be an official inquiry. The warden called for the log book of visitors.

  Nothing suspicious, thank God.

  “Just a civil servant named Holstein down to check on the Detweiler matter.”

  “What Detweiler matter?”

  The impudence of this foreigner might have outraged some men, but Schnapp controlled himself and telephoned the assistant warden who’d been on duty. He explained that it was something to do with a man who’d allegedly committed crimes at Ravensbrück.

  “Crimes?”

  “War crimes…I think,” mumbled the assistant warden.

  Merlin’s gut sent him another message.

  “Call Bonn—please.”

  That was when the argument—no, the difference of opinion—erupted. It was amputated a few minutes later when Schnapp’s broad-bottomed secretary announced the telephone call for Major Knowlton. “It’s Hamburg, major. Kaiserwald Prison.”

  Schnapp couldn’t make out much from the terse conversation, but the CIA operative laid it all out, rather unpleasantly, as soon as he hung up the phone.

  “Curare. There was a prisoner named Otto Kretschman doing time up at Kaiserwald. Long time. He died just a couple of days before Berchtold, and the doctor up there thought it was ‘natural causes’—just like you did here. It was curare.”

  “I don’t see the connection, major,” Schnapp said.

  “Hear it. That son of a bitch up in Kaiserwald was an S.S. murderer who ran the ovens at Dachau. Ever hear of Dachau?”

  The warden’s face froze.

  “It’s near Munich,” Merlin hammered. “They used to kill people there.”

  “I know about Dachau.”r />
  Merlin shook his head. “No, you don’t—but that’s not the point. They did an autopsy on Kretschman, and they found curare. Now I’m asking you to consider—very seriously—doing an autopsy on this animal Berchtold.”

  The doctor was rubbing his hands together. “He’s been buried, major.”

  “What the hell do you think they did to Kretschman, candied him in preserves?”

  The warden was visibly intimidated. Merlin’s brutal manner had prevailed.

  “We’ll need a court order to dig up—”

  “Get it. If you can’t, I’ll phone Bonn.”

  For a moment Cavaliere thought that Warden Schnapp might throw something, or burst into tears. It was a toss-up.

  “We’re staying at the Frankfurter Hof over at Bethmannstrasse,” Merlin announced as he rose to leave.

  “A fine hotel,” volunteered the physician. He was trying to be helpful, really. He was a decent person who’d never committed any war crimes or other offenses, and he was also a bit nervous about this startling situation. “They serve excellent rippchen in the Stubb in the cellar,” he added.

  “Thank you, doctor,” Angelo Cavaliere said briskly before Merlin could turn even nastier.

  The pork ribs were as good as the physician promised, and the buxom waitresses in nineteenth-century dress went well with the historic decor. The sauerkraut and the local Henninger beer—stein after stein—helped pass the time, and when the spies were finished with dinner they drank fiery Steinhager till midnight.

  The first phone call, the one that awoke them, came at twenty minutes to nine. There was a Manchester Guardian and there was a features editor named Mervyn Nashby, but there was no Geoffrey Donald Cuthbert—not anymore. He’d been dead for nearly two years.

  “Whoopee!”

  The second phone call reached them at five after eleven.

  “We have secured the order to exhume the remains, major,” Schnapp reported. “Would you like to be present when the coffin is opened?”

  “No, thanks, I’ve seen enough corpses.”

  He put down the phone, saw Cavaliere eying him appraisingly.

  “Too many, Angie—and this number isn’t over yet.”

  “You’re figuring on more stiffs?”

  “I think the Martians are.”

  They read several newspapers, discussed relative merits and tastes of the Munich weisswurst versus the Westphalian blut-wurst or the spleen sausage named milzwurst popular along the Danube. They soberly debated whether to order Hanoverian bouilonwurst or the juicy saiten sausages of Stuttgart, finally settled on Frankfurt’s popular zeppelinwurst. Despite all their efforts, they were acutely bored by half past two.

  “We won’t hear anything for a couple of hours,” Cavaliere declared suddenly, “so I’m going out. Want to come along?”

  “Where?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I’m going bananas locked up in this suite.”

  “It’s the cigar smoke, isn’t it? Admit it. You hate it.”

  The “lieutenant” waved away a cloud of Canary Island tobacco, made up his mind not to renew this discussion they’d had so many times. “Merlin, I just want out. See you in an hour.”

  There was no reply until he reached the door.

  “What are you going to do—walk around like some jerk tourist?” challenged the shirtsleeved “major.”

  “Maybe I’ll get laid. You coming?”

  “No, I’ve been laid.”

  It was impossible to maintain a friendly conversation with Merlin when he was in one of these tense-compulsive moods, so Cavaliere left with the hope that things would be different when he returned.

  It was almost 4:30 when he reentered the suite. Merlin was sitting up in bed, pointing his gun at the doorway.

  “Any calls?” Cavaliere asked casually.

  “No.”

  “Mind aiming that piece somewhere else? I’m your friend, good ol’ Angie—remember?”

  Merlin put down the gun, smiled pleasantly. “Where’d you go?”

  “Natural History Museum. Saw a terrific sixty-six-foot skeleton of a prehistoric diplodocus.”

  Merlin digested this exciting news slowly. “That’s necrophilia, Angie. You go to jail for that.”

  “What’s necrophilia?”

  “Laying the dead.”

  Cavaliere threw his jacket on a chair. “I didn’t lay anybody—or anything.”

  Merlin reached to refill his glass with beer. “Better luck next time,” he consoled.

  Maybe it was getting to Merlin—the pressure and the violence and the crazy passion of the pursuit.

  No, he’d talked like this before when there was nothing to do but wait.

  They drank and watched television until five minutes to seven, when the telephone rang. A very stiff Warden Schnapp reported that laboratory tests indicated that the corpse of the late Egon Berchtold contained strong traces of some digitalis compound, and digitalis was a substance that could both simulate and stimulate a heart attack.

  “How much digitalis? Enough to kill him?”

  “Probably. I must say, major, that this came as a surprise to—”

  “It’s okay,” Merlin said happily.

  “We have no idea yet how this digitalis—”

  “Holstein.”

  It took several seconds for the warden to understand. “Are you suggesting that a government official—”

  “There is no Holstein, sonny. No Detweiler affair either. You’ve been had. But don’t feel bad—you were had by experts. It isn’t your fault.”

  Now that was a decent thing to say, even if it was a goddam lie. It might help the warden steal an hour or two of sleep during the long hours until the offices opened in Bonn the next morning. Merlin didn’t particularly like Schnapp, but the warden probably had a wife and children whom suicide might leave destitute.

  “These people are professionals, warden. They’ve pulled the same kinds of stunts at other prisons. Let me know what you hear from Bonn tomorrow.”

  Merlin wasn’t smiling when he hung up the phone.

  He was grinning—totally.

  “Digitalis?” Cavaliere asked.

  “Right.”

  “Curare up in Hamburg?”

  “That’s it, Angie. Digitalis, curare, and a trick rope in Nürnberg.”

  Cavaliere whistled softly. “Jeezus K-rist.”

  “I don’t think so, Angie. I don’t think he makes house calls anymore… Sorry, Angie. Didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

  “I don’t bad-mouth your Lord.”

  Sister Cecilia had warned him about the shallow faith of all those Protestants, but Merlin said a lot of things in jest that he didn’t mean. Still, he ought to respect the beliefs of others.

  “I apologize—won’t do it again. Give you my goddam word. Dinner’s on me.”

  Cavaliere didn’t ask the question until they reached the elevator.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Any restaurant in town.”

  “No, tomorrow. You think the Martians are knocking off war criminals in prisons, right?”

  “I know it.”

  “There are dozens of war criminals, maybe hundreds, still doing time all across Germany.”

  “I know that too.”

  The signal indicated that the elevator was nearing their floor.

  “So where do we go next, Merl?”

  The elevator door opened, and they faced a very attractive person in a very short skirt and a sweet smile.

  “That’s what I don’t know,” Merlin responded—and he smiled back.

  24

  “Thirty kilometers to Bonn,” Cavaliere read from the road sign as the Ford rolled north the next morning.

  Merlin didn’t reply. He was enjoying driving for a change, and his mind was on the traffic. He found it relaxing to tune out the Byzantine barbarism of the espionage-and-terror world, to concentrate on a skill that combined mechanical and macho without hurting anyone. There was some risk in a car
, but it could be minimized if you drove defensively. Then Merlin realized that he’d grown to do almost everything defensively, and he laughed.

  “What’s so funny, Merl?”

  “I am. Getting funny in the head.”

  “I thought you were swell back there,” Cavaliere said supportively. “When the warden phoned to say that there was no trace of anybody named Holstein at the ministry, you didn’t say ‘I told you so’—not even once. I was proud of you, Merl.”

  “You’re just saying that so I won’t light a cigar.”

  Cavaliere shook his head emphatically, and semi-truthfully. “Smoke all you want I know you’ll stop if it bothers me. I trust you, Merl.”

  Merlin laughed again. “You’re a member of an elite group—a gang of one,” he said, and he pulled out a dark Don Diego.

  “They trust you back at Langley. You’re Merlin, The Best.”

  The man behind the wheel bit off the end of the petitcorona, groped for his Dunhill. “Nah, they don’t trust anybody, not even themselves. That’s the kind of people who get to run big outfits. That’s the nature of the beast. They’re always second-guessing and third-guessing, and they’re always sure that somebody is screwing up.” He paused to suck in some smoke.

  “I didn’t know you were running for office,” said Cavaliere.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Sounds like you’re giving a speech, Merl.”

  “You heard it before?”

  “Not this one. Go right ahead.”

  “Did I mention that the scared people who run big outfits are usually scared that someone will screw up because they don’t have that much confidence in themselves?”

  Cavaliere shook his head. “No, Merl—but you will.”

  “I just did…Listen, what about the Taunus?”

  Cavaliere’s eyes flicked to the mirror. “You mean the green one that picked us up about forty kilometers back? Yeah, still tailing us.”

  Merlin flicked some ash out the window. “I don’t like it,” he said after several seconds.

  “You didn’t complain about the blue van that tailed us the first thirty or forty kilometers out of Frankfurt, Merl.”

  Obviously busy thinking, the man behind the wheel didn’t answer immediately. “I’m getting tired of being tailed,” he announced.