Time of Reckoning

by Walter Wager

  She complied, caught the smell of the cigar.

  She’d missed that familiar Merlin scent for a long time.

  “I couldn’t help hearing part of your phone call. What was that all about?”

  “Sex,” Merlin improvised instantly.

  Lying was one of the things he did best, she thought affectionately.

  “Scout’s honor. Sex,” he insisted.

  “You know,” she replied, “that’s a terrific idea.”

  They didn’t get to drink their coffee until half-past three.

  Several thousand miles west, Greta Beller was sipping her tea and smiling hopefully at her husband. His progress toward recovery was encouraging, and the doctors all agreed that he’d probably be able to get around without the walker in another seven or ten weeks. Speech was still a problem. After all this time, the only word he could say was “Ernest.” Still, dear Martin wasn’t discouraged. In recent days he’d been struggling with a child’s school pad and a pencil, fighting to communicate in writing. Dr. Esserman had said that the ability to write might return first, and Martin obviously had something—something choked up in him—that was important. His handwriting was awful, but it was getting better as he worked at it.

  All of a sudden he handed her the ruled pad, pointed urgently. She studied the dreadful scrawl, finally deciphered the primitive kindergarten letters.

  “Yes, dear. Yes, I will,” she promised.

  He pointed at the pad, jabbed it with his finger emphatically.

  “Absolutely, Martin,” she assured him.

  She walked out to the living room, looked across Central Park at the lights of the apartment houses on Fifth Avenue. It was all so puzzling. Had the stroke affected his splendid intelligence?

  Stop Ernest.

  Now what could that mean?

  39

  Obscenity?

  You never heard such language.

  Even Merlin—who had heard plenty of such language—had never heard such language.

  Marta Falkenhausen had what your mother would call a dirty mouth, and a big one too. She poured out a gush of filth that would bedazzle a marine sergeant, spicing the flow with political epithets, Maoist slogans and insolent idiocies by the yard.

  “Why don’t you throw her down the stairs?” Merlin suggested.

  “We don’t do such things in Germany,” Grad answered starchily.

  “Funny. You used to.”

  It was appalling that this American, who was only a “guest observer” at the interrogation, should be so provocative.

  “That was rude,” Grad said.

  “No, dumb,” the black woman corrected. “Behave yourself,” she told her lover.

  “I’ll try. I still think we should throw her down the stairs.”

  Fraulein Falkenhausen went on screaming what she thought—about Merlin, the Federal Republic, capitalism and many other subjects that were definitely peripheral. She didn’t get to the world food problem, the Stuttgart Ballet, the state of the British pound or whether homosexuals should be ordained, but she covered almost everything else, in filth. She waxed especially lyrical on Merlin’s parenthood and the subservience of the West German government to American imperialist fascism.

  After spewing a good half-hour of blue material you or I could never try out on either the Johnny Carson show or the BBC, she paused briefly for station identification—and then denounced the Soviets with equal vigor.

  “Maybe she could work Las Vegas, but only as a lounge act,” Merlin speculated.

  “Too dirty,” Diane McGhee translated for Grad.

  “She was worse yesterday.”

  “Sorry I missed it. How about throwing her up the stairs?” Merlin suggested.

  She began cursing again, not as loudly but just as sincerely.

  “Have you tried an enema?”

  Grad wouldn’t even answer that.

  She resumed her litany, swearing and denouncing until she ran out of breath.

  “Doesn’t surprise me,” Merlin said. “Any broad who’d ice her own father’ll do anything.”

  She stopped the barrage.

  “What?”

  “You heard what I said, lady. A woman who’ll kill her own daddy is strictly the pits in my book.”

  “That’s a lie!”

  “The pits! Tarantulas don’t do that, baby.”

  Marta Falkenhausen turned her attention to Diane McGhee. “I have done many things you bourgeois call criminal,” she admitted slowly. “I have destroyed banks and factories, attacked army camps, liberated large sums of money to finance the revolution. I have shot people—for my cause.”

  “Balls,” Merlin commented.

  “But I did not kill my father. I despised him, but I did not kill him. I did not kill my father.”

  She spoke with great intensity. Then, after a pause, she asked, “When did he die?”

  She hadn’t known. Her face, her voice said that clearly.

  Merlin told her where and when, still unconvinced and studying her carefully. The news seemed to sober her, and the loud semihysterical diatribes ended. She still recited chapter and verse of the Lietzen-Stoller bible, but now and then she answered the questions—usually indirectly and always incompletely. Bit by bit, a picture of the terrorists’ movements and activities during the previous six months began to emerge. It was like a half-done jigsaw, just enough to give an image of the general subject.

  “What do you think?” Merlin asked as they walked out of the police station into the early-afternoon sun.

  “About what?”

  She’d been a great wife with many excellent qualities, but one of her few irritating habits was answering questions with questions. Merlin had often accused her of talking like a goddam psychoanalyst, and here she was doing the shrink bit again.

  “About whether her father’s death really was news to her.”

  Merlin looked up and down the street, routinely checking on whether anyone was lying in wait to kill him.

  “Hard to say for sure, but—don’t laugh—my woman’s instinct tells me she was telling the truth.”

  “I’m not laughing.”

  Her instincts had been right so often.

  What if the Frankenhausen woman wasn’t lying?

  “What do you think?” Diane McGhee asked.

  “I think we’d better go see Fritz Kammler.”

  The terrorist whom Merlin had shot four times was in the criminal ward of a large public hospital a mile and a half away. He was a lucky man, even if he’d never have full use of his right arm again and would be breathing with one lung for the rest of his life. Most of the people Merlin shot weren’t breathing at all two days later.

  Grad wasn’t too eager to authorize the visit. “What do you want to see him about?” he probed.

  “About fifteen minutes,” Merlin replied with his customary charm.

  The tired BND executive told himself that it just wasn’t worth arguing about, and the guards at the criminal ward let them in as soon as Merlin showed his Wasserman passport.

  There were bars on the windows, whose thick panes were plainly bulletproof. A BND agent in civilian clothes sat reading a sex magazine in an armchair, glancing up from the nude photos every twenty or thirty seconds at the pale man in the bed.

  “Fifteen minutes,” the security man quoted.

  It didn’t take that long.

  Merlin told Kammler that he might get him a reduced sentence if the terrorist answered questions about a few details of the attack on the trainload of VWs, the demolition of the petrochemical plant and the shooting of industrialist Heinrich Hessicher in the Frankfurt toilet.

  “That was Willi’s personal project,” recalled the battered driver. Then he talked about the planning and execution of the rail and factory raids, minimizing his own role.

  “You were there?”

  “I won’t deny it. I was with them on every job.”

  “Did you drive when they killed that Nazi up in the Hamburg prison, and w
hen they gassed the woman?”

  “The rich slob in the toilet? Sure, but I never heard of those others. You can’t blame those two on us. The group wiped out a lot of imperialists and fascists, but don’t try to stick us with every killing on the books.”

  “Maybe Willi did them alone?” Merlin pried.

  “No way—we were always together—and he talked a lot. He was a good talker, a good leader.”

  “And a great corpse. One of the best stiffs I’ve seen in years.”

  Kammler stared at him, remembered.

  “You’re the bastard who shot me!”

  “Right. And you’re the bastard who tried to shoot me! Listen, Speedy, I’m going to check on what you said.”

  The wounded terrorist then suggested something else that Merlin could do, closed his eyes and yawned.

  “So long, Karl,” Merlin said for the concealed microphone just before the two Americans left the room, “and send me a copy of the tape.”

  “You know,” he said at the elevator, “I may have been wrong.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she assured.

  “If those two are telling the truth, I’ve been dead wrong—and that matters. Matters to me. I’m going to go over all the transcripts, check every detail. If they didn’t burn those Nazis, who did?”

  An orderly wheeled by a pretty blonde woman in a chair, and a nurse with a remarkable rump rippled past—and Merlin didn’t even notice. It was extraordinary.

  “Darling, it isn’t any of your business,” Diane insisted. “You came for Crash Dive, and you did it. You did what no one else could. Isn’t that enough? It’s over.”

  She probably loved him, Merlin thought, but she still didn’t understand him completely. He shook his head, cupped his hand affectionately under her chin.

  “No. No, it isn’t over,” he said patiently. “It isn’t over at all.”

  40

  “You sound like Hitler,” Cavaliere said.

  “All I said was that the Jews probably did it.”

  “That’s what he always said, Merl.”

  They’d been driving for five hours, and Cavaliere felt a headache growing.

  “To be accurate,” Merlin corrected himself, “the Israelis. I checked out every point, and those goddam Martians couldn’t have done it.”

  “What am I doing here?”

  “You’re helping your old friend.”

  “Merlin, this isn’t any of our business. We are in the glamorous world of high international intrigue—trench coats and spy-in-the-sky satellites. Local hits are beneath us.”

  That’s what she said—two days ago,” Merlin remembered as he swung into the fast lane of the autobahn to pass a little Renault.

  “You’re just sore at her because she wouldn’t listen to your joke about the gorilla in heat.”

  The effort to change the subject was too obvious.

  “Nice try, Angie, but no cigar. Angie, these Nazis were totaled by experts—people who cut ’em down like surgeons. It had to be the Israelis.”

  “How about the Eskimos? Why the Israelis?”

  Merlin flipped down the sun visor, sighed tolerantly. “They have the motive and the high-class manpower. The Mossad’s one of the toughest little intelligence outfit in the business.”

  That was true. The Israeli Secret Service was slick, daring and ruthless. Jerusalem’s Mossad had earned the respect of its big brothers, again and again. Cavaliere felt depressed as he faced the fact that the Mossad could mount such a large and lethal operation.

  “They’ve got the nerve,” he admitted reluctantly as Merlin turned off onto the ramp off the superhighway.

  “And the imagination. Check the map again, will you?” the man behind the wheel asked.

  They found the road, and they reached their destination twenty-five minutes later. Barbed-wire fences, cattle grazing and three men in cowboy outfits right out of the old western films—an odd vista for central Germany in the 1970s. The burnt-wood lettering on the crude sign—Cheyenne Ranch—was the final touch.

  “Weird,” Cavaliere judged.

  “Out-a-sight,” Merlin disagreed admiringly.

  The beefy man in sombrero, chaps, denim shirt, six-gun and boots looked out from the shack at the gate, waved them down.

  “Got a reservation?”

  “We’re expected. Tell Tex it’s his friend Doug from Nairobi.”

  The guard spoke into an incongruous walkie-talkie briefly, gestured for them to enter. “Some imagination,” Merlin celebrated as they drove the half-mile to the clump of low wooden buildings. “Who but the Israelis would run their German intelligence operation from a phony dude ranch?”

  “Why not? It’s West Germany.”

  “Not bad, Angie. Here we are, pardner.”

  He parked the car, and they entered the “saloon” just in time for the regular 3 P.M. shoot-out. The bar was filled with German “cowboys”—many of them businessmen who paid cheerfully for this fantasy trip—and the decor was strictly early John Wayne. Precisely on schedule, two of the “cowboys” insulted each other, the other customers scattered, and the antagonists pulled their six-shooters.

  The Colt .44s roared, and a splotch of red dye blossomed on the plaid shirt of one of the gunfighters. Friends of the other man congratulated him as the loser in this fast-draw ritual wiped the stain from his chest and the victor sang out in the grand old tradition. “Red-eye for everyone!”

  “It’s bourbon.”

  The Americans turned to face a curly-haired man in the ceremonial attire of the 1880s gambler. He wore a thin mustache, gold watch and chain and a gun that—unlike all the others in the room—was loaded with real bullets. He reached out with a grin, shook Merlin’s hand.

  “Beautiful. That job you did on those mothers in the street ambush was just beautiful,” he said as he held up three fingers to order drinks.

  “Not as beautiful as Entebbe.”

  The Mossad executive shook his head. “You always say the right thing, Merlin. You’re a mensch. Okay, not exactly like Entebbe—but beautiful.”

  Cavaliere’s eyes wandered to a busty barmaid who amply filled—almost overflowed—a low-cut dress. She kissed a portly Swabian sausage tycoon right on his bald spot—just like in the movies.

  “Entebbe’s a classic,” Merlin responded. “That’s a textbook operation. Going to be studied in fifty different countries for years. A model—don’t deny it.”

  “Merlin, enough is enough. That bit you did with the TV cameras? You think that’ll be forgotten? That was first-class, amigo.”

  Now the barmaid came swinging her hips through the crowd, holding the tray of drinks aloft with her left hand and fending off assorted “slap and tickle” enthusiasts with the other.

  “Aha, those must be the original Doberman pinchers. Tex, let me introduce my partner—John Bonomi.”

  “Pleasure. Can I call you John?”

  “Angie. You wouldn’t have an aspirin, would you?”

  The voluptuous waitress arrived, bent low to put the drinks on the table. The view was impressive, and intentional.

  “Got any aspirin for these dudes, Rosie?” the Israeli asked.

  She reached into the cleavage, came up with a lukewarm tin of the tablets. “Take two before you go to sleep,” she advised, “and if you can’t sleep, call me.” She winked, swivel-hipped away with a rolling gait that might make sensitive types seasick.

  “Head of the Drama Club at the University of Haifa?” Merlin wondered.

  “How’d you guess? Here’s to the good guys, Merlin—that’s us.”

  They raised their glasses, sipped some adequate bourbon that wasn’t ever going to make the Jack Daniels firm nervous.

  “Can you stay a bit? We’ve got a nice little gunfight scheduled at a quarter to five down at the corral.”

  “The OK Corral?”

  “What else? Merlin, you ol’ varmint, tell me, what’s on your mind?”

  Merlin swallowed the rest of the bourbon, wiped his
mouth with the back of his hand and pulled two of Blue Bernard’s Havanas from his shirt pocket. He handed one to his host.

  “When Merlin gives away good cigars, look out! Let’s have it.”

  “I just want to ask you something. It’s not official, and it’s only for my personal information. If you don’t want to answer, don’t—and there’s no hard feelings.”

  “That bad, huh? What’s the big question?” Tex demanded as he puffed on the corona.

  Merlin told him about all the prison murders, and then asked whether he knew anything about them.

  “You’re so refined, Merlin. It’s a pleasure to talk with you. You don’t come right out and ask whether we killed those momsers. No, you wonder if I know anything about them.”

  He signaled for more drinks.

  “Merlin, if we had executed those monsters I wouldn’t tell you, even though I’m sort of fond of you. I wouldn’t tell anybody. However, we didn’t kill these degenerates. We have better things to do. Hey, if you stay overnight you can get laid and watch our terrific cattle stampede in the morning.” The Mossad supervisor nodded toward the “dance hall girls” in very short red skirts who were mounting the stage. A white-haired piano player sat down, began to thump.

  “The truth?” Merlin pressed. “I won’t tell anyone.”

  “Tell everyone. Not our job. Is it yours?”

  “Not really,” Cavaliere interrupted.

  “Shut up, Angie.”

  The Israeli blew a smoke ring.

  “Mr. Bonomi, you got rough friends. You know, I didn’t realize so many of those Nazis had been killed in the past five or six weeks. If you find out who did it, let me hear.”

  “You’ll give them all medals, I suppose?” Merlin speculated.

  “And a free weekend here—with all meals. Now I’m entitled to one question. If it’s not official and maybe none of your business altogether, Merlin, what the hell will you do if you do find out who hit them?”

  “Not if—when.”

  “I’ll pray for you. Right, when. When, what?”

  The young woman with the eye-catching chest returned with the second round, each glass sitting on a cork coaster marked Deadeye Dick’s. Merlin grabbed his, drank it all in one gulp. She put the other glasses on the table, winked again and twitched her tail skillfully back to the bar.