Time of Reckoning

by Walter Wager

  Merlin stood up abruptly. “Thanks for your hospitality, friend. Let’s go, Angie.”

  “I am your friend, Merlin—so be careful,” the Israeli advised. “Something about this whole my-seh doesn’t add up right.”

  “My view precisely. Shalom, podner.”

  The piano player was pounding away loudly and the “dance hall girls” were kicking as high as they could, exposing patches of flesh and ruffled panties to guffawing “cowboys.” Both CIA agents shook hands with Tex, who insisted that Cavaliere keep the rest of the aspirin in case the headache persisted. The raucous customers were singing loudly as the Americans made their way out, but Merlin didn’t seem to notice. He was concentrating on something or somewhere else, and he didn’t say a word until they were almost back to the autobahn.

  “Goddam.”

  “Merl, you didn’t answer his question. I thought it was a very good question.”

  The man behind the wheel didn’t respond.

  “Merlin,” Cavaliere finally challenged forty seconds later, “what the hell will you do when you identify the killers?”

  More silence.

  “If the Israelis didn’t do it,” he wondered aloud, “who did?”

  Angelo Cavaliere suddenly realized why the twice-asked question remained unanswered. Merlin didn’t want to face it—not yet. Right now all Merlin cared about was finding out who’d make a fool of him, and he’d focus on that until he’d evened the score. Logical or not, Merlin was tracking.

  No one could stop him.

  Even after he returned to West Berlin, even after he drank half a bottle of chilled Traminer and went to bed with the woman whom he cared for more than he’d admit, the obsession continued. He awoke at a quarter to three in the morning, wandered into the living room to stand by the French windows and stare out at the city.

  It wasn’t the Martians.

  It wasn’t the Israelis.

  Who was it?

  At 4:20 he glanced up to find her, sleepy-eyed and very beautiful in her ebony nakedness, watching him from the bedroom doorway.

  “Go back to bed,” he advised.

  “It can’t be sexual frustration, thank God, so what is it?” “Dandruff. Go to sleep.”

  Her body seemed even more perfect than when they first fell in love, even more vulnerable and appealing.

  “You’re a very good-looking woman,” he said.

  “Then what the hell are you doing out here?”

  She’d always excelled at relevant questions.

  “Who do you figure did it?” he blurted.

  She flopped onto the couch, shrugged. “I thought you’d never ask. I’ve been thinking about it—a lot. It wasn’t the Sovs either. They don’t give anything away, and they wouldn’t go to all this bother because—if you get down to the nitty-gritty—they had nothing to gain.”

  “Check,” he agreed.

  “Run down all the governments—including Ecuador and those loonies in Libya—and you won’t find one that would profit from killing those old Nazis.”

  “Check. Want a drink?”

  “Club soda.”

  He brought two glasses of the bubbling water, sat beside her. She smelled good. It was the perfume he’d given her on their honeymoon. Christ, the woman was ruthless.

  “Now let’s try the terrorist groups. Left, Right, East, West, African, Asian, European, South American.”

  “Don’t forget the Eskimos,” Merlin reminded. “Angie thinks it could be the Eskimos, and he was Phi Beta Kappa.”

  “Screw the Eskimos. You want to feel sorry for yourself, or you want to make some sense out of this?”

  A great mind as well as swell boobs.

  Terrific at problem solving and contraception.

  “Okay, we’ll forget the Eskimos,” he yielded and closed his eyes. He reached out for her.

  “Just a second. That’s nice, but let me finish the checklist. There isn’t a single damn terrorist outfit in the world that—in your poetic terms—gives a crap about these war criminals. Everybody’s forgotten about them, right?”

  Merlin stroked her shoulder, and she shivered and purred. “You’re distracting me,” she whispered.

  “I like to.”

  “Please. Please—we’re almost done.”

  He stopped, but his hand still held her shoulder. “No, you’re wrong. Everyone hasn’t forgotten them,” he announced.

  “Right on. Every government and terrorist organization has written them off, but someone remembers. Maybe a couple of survivors of those death camps—a few individuals.”

  Merlin computed.

  “Too old—unless they were kids. No government, no terrorist mob—okay. Private individuals? They’d have to be very good. Goddam very good. This was high-class work.”

  “Keep talking. You’re doing fine.”

  He sipped at the soda. “What have we got? Somebody who speaks excellent German—with several different accents. Maybe an actor?”

  She nodded, yawned. “Male?” she asked.

  “All male. Hamburg, Frankfurt, Nürnberg—all the rest. Always one male, alone. Forged papers. Someone between five-nine and six-one, according to the witnesses—Hey, this is impossible.”

  “What is?”

  “One man did all this—by himself? He’d have to be the superstar of homicide.”

  Merlin reached to the coffee table, picked up the Asbach Uralt bottle and poured an inch into his glass.

  “Nobody’s that good,” he reasoned.

  “He isn’t nobody. He’s somebody—with a special motive.”

  “And access to a lot of fancy stuff. Digitalis, curare compounds—you don’t get that at Woolworth’s…Wait a second. A chemist or a doctor?”

  “You’re doing even better. A highly motivated man—with a lot of nerve—who’s a chemist or doctor or something like that, speaks German and plays different parts like an actor. Sometimes he’s thirty-five, sometimes fifty. Pour me some.”

  Merlin did, and she sipped and snuggled closer.

  “German?” she asked.

  “Whoever he is, he knows how to kill. He’s no mere hit man or soldier. German? Maybe not. Why did he wait until now? If he was German, he could have chopped them up years ago.”

  “Unless he was in a prison or mental institution himself,” she reckoned. “German or a top linguist, and a fanatic. Totally obsessed, willing to risk his own life again and again. Avenging sword. Think he’s Jewish? Maybe some ex-Israeli officer or Mossad grad they retired as a psycho?”

  “Chemist or doctor,” Merlin reminded. “Well, we’ve reduced the number of suspects from two billion to a lousy two hundred thousand or so. That’s some progress, I suppose.”

  She stood up and stretched, marvelously. “In the morning,” she said, “you can call the BND and tell them everything we’ve figured out. Let them try these facts on their computers, their lists of doctors and chemists and survivors of the Nazi camps.”

  “They won’t want to listen,” Merlin predicted. “They’d like to write the whole thing off as Lietzen-Stoller stuff. A lot cleaner that way.”

  He was still stubborn.

  “You tell them, dear,” she cajoled, “and you’ll feel better. Let’s go to bed.”

  That part went nicely, with lots of warmth and mutual respect and squeezing and lust. In the morning, however, Merlin’s prediction came true.

  “Grad advised me to stop making up fairy stories and to start minding my own business,” he reported to his favorite ex-wife sourly.

  “You tried. Don’t feel bad,” she consoled.

  “I feel awful.”

  She understood immediately. “Don’t be foolish!” she enjoined.

  “I may be feeling even worse,” Merlin speculated.

  “Leave it alone. Come back to Washington with me next week,” she pleaded.

  He shook his head. “Not well enough to travel, hon. Think I’d better find myself a doctor.”

  The stubborn bastard hadn’t changed a bit.
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  He probably never would.

  41

  It was a love affair.

  What else could you call it?

  They held hands as they walked together, both in Freuden-stadt and up on some of the 125 miles of “nature trails and footpaths” featured in the Chamber of Commerce brochures. The cool woods and the sunny green fields, the singing birds and the serene vistas were even more splendid than in the four-color photos of the Tourist Office leaflet—the one with the snapshot of the golf course and the picture of the two naked women in the wood-lined sauna.

  They swam together, bicycled and rode horses.

  They went to concerts, listened to her records and sang as they hiked and picnicked. They ate together, drank together, went to bed together and awoke happy—together. It wasn’t supposed to be like that, and yet it was supposed to be like that because that’s what young—and not so young—men and women dream will happen. If they believe in true romance and Hollywood, they expect that love will come along without warning and sweep them into the arms of some wonderful stranger.

  But it wasn’t supposed to happen to Ernest Beller, not now and not here and not with a German woman. The idea that he could become seriously attached to the granddaughter of a Nazi sadist—one of the savages he’d come to slay—was preposterous. Even though he knew that Anna Griese herself loathed the fascists and was one of the great number of young Germans born after the violent death of the Third Reich, he wasn’t that comfortable with citizens of the new Federal Republic—except this one.

  There was something unique and appealing about this young woman, and it wasn’t her blonde hair or fawn-eyes or female contours. It was Anna herself, the interior Anna. He couldn’t understand it or explain it, and even as it was happening during those first days he couldn’t believe it. He told himself that he merely felt sorry for her, that it was simply compassion for somebody who had no one else. Even at the funeral, there had been only Anna Griese, the priest and the avenger who’d come nearly four thousand miles and more than three decades to kill the man being buried.

  Now, eleven days after that last shovelful of earth was tossed, the doctor still marveled at what had happened. It had grown slowly and gently, but irresistibly. He hadn’t even held her hand for three days, and the rest had followed so peacefully and logically that they’d hardly noticed the journey. He looked at her as she unpacked the picnic basket, seeming even younger than her twenty-four years in the summer dress.

  “It’s a wonder,” he said as he ran his hands across the mountain grass.

  “No, it’s a miracle—and miracles don’t have to be explained. Please open the wine.”

  He kissed her instead, several times, but then he put the corkscrew to work.

  “It would have been unbearable without you,” she said truthfully. “I was always so ashamed of him. Not everyone was. Some people said that the stories of the camps were lies.”

  “They were true.”

  He hesitated, tried to stop himself—and failed.

  “My parents died in one of those camps.”

  He knew that he could trust her. She caught him in her arms, and she wept again. He was startled to find himself consoling her, for it should have been the other way around. She stopped, looked him squarely in the eye.

  “That wasn’t guilt, darling. There’s plenty of hidden guilt and suppressed rage in this country. That was shame,” she spoke softly, “and shared pain. My parents’ dying in that auto accident wasn’t comparable to the camps, but I know what it’s like to grow up without a mother or father.”

  “I don’t blame you for what happened, Anna. There were others—whom I cannot forget.”

  She squeezed his hand like a high-school girl. “Can you forgive them? I couldn’t. I know the Bible says good Christians should, but I’m not that good a Christian,” she admitted.

  “No, I can’t forgive them,” he said slowly.

  She started to put out the food. “They tell us that we should be saints, Kurt,” she thought aloud, “but I don’t know how.”

  “No, you could be a saint—but I couldn’t. Being near you is probably the closest I’ll ever come to sainthood.”

  She kissed him again, looked up lovingly. “You could be anything, Kurt. You’re kind, generous and very wise. I feel so safe with you.”

  He stroked her hair gently. “I’ll do my best for you, Anna, but don’t expect perfection. You don’t know everything about me.”

  “For me, you’re perfect!”

  His smile seemed sad.

  “Anna, it’s too late. I’ll never be a saint.”

  He was suffering, and she wanted to help him—somehow.

  “Then be an angel and pour the wine,” she urged with a smile that was much gayer than her feelings. They drank the whole bottle as they ate and sunned, and they were both careful not to talk about anything serious for the rest of the afternoon. Each of them worked very hard to avoid anything that might pierce the other’s happiness, and finally the wine and the sun and the love prevailed and the tension eased. It would be back and they both knew it, but now they enjoyed the miracle.

  Merlin wasn’t enjoying anything.

  The BND had checked out every German physician and chemist who’d been in the murder camps, reluctantly but thoroughly. Half a dozen agents had worked for four days. The list of survivors wasn’t that long, for almost all the doctors and chemists who hadn’t died in Hitler’s slaughter centers had migrated to other countries. Every single survivor—even the women—had been investigated, and all could account for their activities during the days when the war criminals were slain.

  “Dead end. It’s over. That’s what Grad said,” Merlin told Diane McGhee bitterly as he entered her apartment. She went to the kitchen, poured two large steins of cold beer and returned to the living room to thrust one at him.

  “Thanks…That’s what he said. Dead end. That’s what he wants, of course.”

  He didn’t even notice the see-through blouse.

  He was that furious.

  “You think he really checked?” she asked.

  “Yeah. I went over the whole list with him. Ninety-two people, including a woman in a wheelchair in Töbingen, and a blind man in Lübeck.”

  “You curse him out?”

  Merlin gulped the good light brew, shrugged. “I couldn’t. The bastard had done what I asked. The one who really got me pissed was Fat George.”

  “You didn’t get into a fight with Lomas, did you?”

  Merlin drank more beer, unbuttoned his collar and threw his tie on the floor. It was all very familiar to his ex-wife, who remembered so many similar scenes.

  “He wouldn’t fight. Bureaucrats don’t sink to such cheap emotion. That porky turd told me he was sorry my theory hadn’t worked out. Theory? I should’ve belted him.”

  The difficult aspect of the situation was that she sensed that Merlin was probably right. Headquarters executives such as Lomas had always resented Merlin’s extraordinary gut instincts and illogical logic, largely because it was correct more often than their computer analyses.

  “Then Lomas told me to go home,” Merlin announced and finished the beer.

  “I’m going home in six days,” she reminded.

  She wanted him to return with her so much, but she knew that he had to make that choice without obvious prompting.

  “I told him to stick it—sideways. I don’t work for Lomas. He’s probably on the Teletype now, getting some deputy director to order me back. Those desk farts all hang together.”

  She handed him her half-filled glass, and he drank deeply.

  It had never been easy to calm Merlin. Sometimes even going to bed had only a temporary effect.

  “Don’t be discouraged, hon,” she advised. “Maybe it wasn’t a German at all. Lots of people were in those camps. Angie could have been right.”

  “He’s going back day after tomorrow too… Right about what?”

  “The Eskimos,” she reminded brightly.
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br />   Why the hell wouldn’t this ridiculous man come home? Suddenly he looked thoughtful, and she knew that he was computing.

  “Yeah, the Eskimos. Thanks. That could be it.”

  He was impossible.

  “What could be it?” she demanded.

  He didn’t respond for ten or fifteen seconds.

  “Di,” he asked with an earnest smile, “do we have any more cold beer?”

  42

  Grad could have been angry—at least annoyed.

  Transient foreign agents such as Merlin—violent field operatives who attracted attention—weren’t supposed to know that this stockbrokerage firm was the cover for the BND in West Berlin, and they certainly weren’t supposed to show up uninvited and walk in off the street without warning.

  It was rude.

  Just the sort of thing one might expect from an undisciplined and inconsiderate American gangster like Merlin, who always mocked the amenities.

  But Karl Grad wasn’t angry; he was surprised. In contrast to the CIA man’s previous behavior, Merlin was actually trying to be polite. With the stock tickers clattering away in the big clients’ room outside Grad’s office, the BND executive studied Merlin warily.

  “I can’t believe it,” Grad announced.

  “Karl, believe it. Be reasonable. I’m asking you for a favor, please.”

  Grad had never heard him say please before, and it made the German nervous. There might be a trick in this. An aide rapped on the door, walked in and handed Grad a strip of paper torn from the Teletype.

  “Nothing serious?” Merlin asked.

  “No, the usual. Another coup attempt in Ethiopia, and somebody blew up a Syrian airliner with a hundred and three people aboard. Nobody you know.”

  “Thank God,” Merlin replied. “Listen, Karl, I need your help—as an old friend.”

  “What’s this all about?”

  “The Eskimos. I think some of the Eskimos did it—not any decent, law-abiding Germans.”

  Was he insane, or just teasing again?

  “The Eskimos?” Grad asked incredulously.