Time of Reckoning

by Walter Wager

  “Moths?”

  “Not according to the polizei. They have witnesses who saw a tallish man—about your size—blast him on the Ku-damm just after that bank was hit. The dead man was Egon Lietzen, Willi’s brother.”

  Willi Lietzen was one of the senior terrorists, high on “wanted” lists all across Western Europe.

  “You heard this on the news, huh?”

  “It hasn’t been broadcast yet. The bullet that killed Egon came from a large handgun.”

  Merlin flipped open his jacket. “Like this one?”

  Bernard smiled appreciatively. It was a pleasure doing business with honest professionals. “I’ll ask around. If I hear anything—”

  “The Hilton. Room nine twenty-seven. Frank Wasserman.”

  “Danke, I have such a bad memory for names.”

  Merlin puffed on the corona. “Excellent cigar. There are two more small matters…”

  “That’s what old friends are for,” Bernard assured him again.

  “I’d like to pass a message to a Soviet officer at the Komman-datura. It’s important that no one else get it—only Andrei Duslov. I’d bet that he lives in East Berlin, spends his days on this side of the wall. He’s likely to be wearing a lieutenant’s or captain’s uniform—Red Army.”

  “But he’s KGB? I’ve heard of him—a hard man.”

  Bernard shouted for more mud in German, turned back to his guest. Merlin had saved his life—or at least eleven years of it—when he helped Bernard avoid a jail term on some serious criminal charges back in 1970.

  “What is the message?”

  “I want to meet him tomorrow at four P.M. in the Dahlem Museum—in front of the Dürer portrait of Jerome Holzschuher.”

  “Shall I say Frank Wasserman?”

  “Say the man who didn’t kill him in Rio last year. He’ll remember. No tricks. Please emphasize that—nicely.”

  Bernard bristled. “Have I ever spoken rudely to anyone? Now what about the final item?”

  “I hate to impose,” Merlin apologized.

  “Please.”

  It was time to talk money.

  “It is just possible that I might need some help for a few hours—in a week or two. Men such as those you have guarding the door.”

  “No problem.”

  “With automatic weapons,” Merlin added. “There is a distinct possibility that automatic weapons might be required.”

  “They’re familiar with several types of submachine guns. Do you have any preferences?”

  They could have been selecting swatches of cloth at a Saville Row custom tailor’s.

  “I’m not fussy. I’ll pay for them, of course.”

  “Preposterous,” Bernard replied indignantly.

  “A thousand marks a man.”

  “Two thousand—no charge for the ammo.”

  Merlin succeeded in stifling a chuckle, relit his cigar. One of the ponderous wrestlers was groaning as the elegant bald man walked his visitor to the door, and Bernard shook his head sadly. “Recommended by Fellini—both of them,” he said.

  “Federico Fellini?”

  “His cousin, Murray. Does all his casting. I met him in a whip store in Milan last Christmas.”

  They shook hands, and Merlin thanked him again. “I’m not really sure that I’ll need those fellows,” he said as he handed over one thousand marks as a deposit, “but you never can tell.”

  The filmmaker stuffed the money into his pocket without counting it, his mind obviously on other things. Sincere concern dominated his face as he looked up at Merlin, put his hand on the American’s shoulder. “Take it from me,” he said earnestly, “the way things are today, two men with submachine guns can always come in handy.”

  Merlin took it—all the way to the Hilton, where he began to laugh as he entered the lobby. It was encouraging to know that half the tarts, thugs and criminals in Berlin would be looking for the terrorists. Unlike Murray Fellini, Blue Bernard and his people delivered.

  So did the Canadian woman, the brunette who taught at McGill. Ernest Beller took her to dinner at a “rustic” Westphalian restaurant named Heckers Deele, and then to the Wertmüller film she’d missed in Montreal. It was called Seven Beauties, focused on how far a man will go to survive. Beller found the concentration-camp scenes troubling, especially when the male star said, “How did the world get like this? We all get killed and nobody says anything.”

  Beller was still thinking about this when he awoke beside the still-sleeping Canadian the next morning. He looked at his wristwatch, saw that it was only ten minutes to seven.

  Too early to telephone the prison in Hamburg.

  There was a man named Otto Kretschman in a cell there, and in four days Ernest Beller was going to kill him.

  11

  There was absolutely nothing new in the newspaper that called itself the International Tribune. Merlin was appalled as he read about another ferry sinking, drowning 204 people in the Ganges, another crippling strike by British manicurists, another terrible fire in a Chicago nursing home, another corruption scandal in Japan and another awful attack by Moluccan “freedom fighters” who had blown up Amsterdam’s main sewage plant. Commandos wearing gas masks and hip boots were ready to fight their way in if the guerrillas didn’t accept the government’s final offer of three pounds of chocolate each and a month at the best hotel in Aruba—Modified American Plan.

  “We recognize the sincerity of these misguided young men,” the Dutch prime minister had told the press, “but we cannot compromise on basic moral principles. They’ll have to pay for their own lunches. On the laundry—we’re willing to negotiate.”

  The Dutch had guts, Merlin reflected as he finished dismembering half a grapefruit at the table that room service had brought. The West German authorities—fine chaps who offered great pension programs and top burial benefits—would have caved in on both the lunches and the laundry. They’d given that last group of hyperactive Palestinians six-packs of Löwenbräu, four different kinds of wurst and cuckoo clocks from the Black Forest Merlin sipped at his second cup of good coffee, looked at the telephone. The whole idea behind breakfast in his room was not to miss the call. Duslov would—compulsively—make some change in the rendezvous, but it was unlikely that he could resist the temptation to meet once more.

  The goddam phone didn’t ring until ten to twelve.

  The crap is three feet deep in Amsterdam,” a familiar voice blurted.

  “Good morning, Bernard.”

  “Just got a phone call. Toilets backing up all over town there. Hippies blame the whole thing on the CIA, of course. No offense.”

  “Bernard—please—what about the appointment?”

  “An hour earlier, three o’clock, same place. He said the same thing you did.”

  Merlin tried to remember, but it was still too early in the day.

  “What?”

  “No tricks.”

  Taking no chances, Merlin entered the handsome Dahlem Museum on Arnimalle at 2:30 to scout the building for traps. He wasn’t the least bit surprised to find Duslov, only a few yards from their meeting place.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting, Andrei,” the American said with the slightest trace of sarcasm.

  “I got here at two,” the Russian replied in a tony BBC accent. “Had to check out the place for hanky-panky, and I wasn’t going to waste the opportunity to enjoy all this glorious art. Just look at that Dürer!”

  Merlin recognized the celebrated painting immediately. “Portrait of Jacob Muffel—that’s the one on the hundred-mark note.”

  Duslov winced in his splendidly tailored blazer. “Only a capitalist-materialist such as you would equate art with money,” he said scornfully.

  Duslov was high enough in the KGB so they overlooked his exotic passion for non-Russian art. If he had a weakness, this was it.

  “Magnificent,” he judged warmly. “A treasure house, that’s what this is. Only an asshole like you would set a meeting for our dirty business in such a place
of beauty!”

  “I only did it because I figured this was one of the few places you wouldn’t be enough of an asshole to kill me,” Merlin answered truthfully.

  “Bang on,” Duslov agreed. He was a trim, sandy-haired, blue-eyed man who might be forty but was surely professional Light on the Red rhetoric and heavy on the logic, he was among the best of the “illegals” operating abroad for the Committee for State Security. He’d actually gone to Oxford for two years when his mother was assistant agricultural attaché at the Soviet Embassy in London, and still took a keen interest in The Race. (See boat race: Oxford v. Cambridge.)

  “I don’t think much of your principles,” Duslov confided, “but your analysis is bloody sound. Shall we go on to the Titian in the next gallery? There’s a rather nice Raphael madonna too.”

  “I don’t have any principles, Duslov,” the American said as they walked, “but I’ve got a proposition for you. It is dirty, tricky and likely to cause several deaths.”

  “Naturally. I didn’t think you’d waste my time with anything else,” the Russian answered. He paused, took a long look at a Holbein the Younger portrait and sighed in satisfaction.

  “It will be in our mutual interest.”

  “I should certainly hope so, old chap. Whom are we doing? I certainly hope it isn’t another of those dreary Nazi conspiracies. I’ve had it right up to here with those, some time ago.”

  “Would I waste your time on one of those tired Nazi revival schemes? I’m not talking about a bunch of old slobs in trusses. I’m talking about a brand-new line, the latest thing on the market. How’re you fixed for Maoist crazies?”

  “Lietzen-Stoller?”

  Merlin nodded.

  “Why?”

  “They’re bad for real-estate values. I hear they blew up one of your bookstores downtown here last month. Hooked up with your Chinese chums, aren’t they?”

  “Your Chinese chums. What have you got in mind?”

  Merlin shrugged.

  “Nothing fancy. Let’s find ’em and kill ’em.”

  Duslov wasn’t ready to commit himself. “Would you like to see the Ravensburg Virgin in the sculpture gallery?” he fenced. “Fifteenth century, quite good.”

  Merlin shrugged again. “If you like. There hasn’t been a virgin in Ravensburg in five hundred years, or at least I never found one. Say, do you know the story about the seven-hundred-pound lady gorilla in heat in the Central Park Zoo?”

  “Don’t be vulgar. Tell me, how would you suggest the work be divided—if.”

  “If Yuri likes the idea,” Merlin completed.

  Yuri V. Andropov was a bespectacled middle-aged man whose very name often inspired migraine headaches, coughing fits and sweaty palms. He was a top member of the Politburo with two keys to the executive toilet, and head of the KGB.

  “He’ll love it,” assured the American. “Since your operation in West Germany is covert and you’d rather not have your illegals burned, I assume that you’d want to keep contact to a minimum. The same would go for all the clowns being run by the East German Democratic People’s Lovable Marxist Eat-Your-Prunes-and-Shut-Up Republic.”

  Duslov looked up at the ceiling, wondered whether this could be the result of watching too many talk shows or was it excessive exposure to situation comedies?

  “Please…please go on…simply,” he appealed.

  “We’ll handle the killing. You wouldn’t want to get involved in that anyway. Be lousy for your image with the student revolutionaries. Your crowd can help find them, and we’ll finish the job.”

  “Only one connection: you and me.”

  “Deal?”

  The Russian flicked an imaginary bit of lint off his lapel. “I’ll let you know—day after tomorrow, two o’clock.”

  “Up by the Rembrandts on the first floor.”

  Duslov’s eyes gleamed in anticipation of the two dozen Rembrandts, and he wondered whether the American might be more civilized than he’d suspected. Prevailing opinion at both Oxford and KGB headquarters was that the Yankees were oafs, but how could you be sure? The fact that they’d embraced the dribblings of Jackson Pollock and tinned veg—they’d call it soup cans—of Warhol wasn’t entirely convincing. One visit to the Met on Fifth Avenue in New York had alerted Duslov that these capitalist dummies weren’t such dummies.

  “Take care of yourself,” he advised Merlin as they parted. “Berlin can be just as dangerous for Americans as Istanbul.”

  Good old Andrei always had to have the last word, and the CIA man smiled pleasantly to show that he didn’t mind this all-too-human imperfection. It was amusing, but not surprising, that Duslov knew about the incident in Turkey.

  “I’ll be careful,” Merlin promised.

  And he was. He checked several times to see whether the Mercedes taxi bringing him back to the Hilton was being followed, and when he entered his room he made another sweep with the scanner that looked like an electric razor. He slid open the plastic face, flicked the switch. The red bulb glowed, confirming that the detector was working. Then the dial swung, and he knew that there was a tiny FM transmitter somewhere within twenty feet of where he stood. It was well concealed, but Merlin had considerable experience, and finding was what he did best. It took eight minutes to find it, only seconds to decide to leave it alone. The model was a standard Japanese device sold to a number of intelligence services, so common that private detectives and industrial spies in a dozen countries used these regularly.

  There was no way of immediately determining whose “bug” this was, but Merlin was in no hurry. Knowing that it was here would let him manipulate the listeners until he didn’t need them anymore, and then he would destroy them and their toy with the dazzling efficiency that had earned him his name. He prowled the room searching and sniffing for other hostile hardware, assumed that there was some device in the phone and walked to a nearby post office to make the call to Frankfurt. The brief, noncommittal conversation with “Frau Braun” about shipping the “Italian typewriter” took less than ninety seconds. The “Italian typewriter” would be very useful, Merlin reflected as he wandered out into the warm afternoon sun.

  The sun was still shining strongly when Duslov made his call fifty minutes later, but he didn’t feel it. There was no air conditioning in the KGB’s East Berlin headquarters, but everything about this place was chilly. The old building itself, the armed men at every floor and the damp cellar all radiated cold. There was no choice, however. This massive basement housed the Russian communications center that offered “secure” lines to Moscow, and Duslov certainly wasn’t going to talk about this on a phone likely to be tapped.

  “That is what he proposes, general,” Duslov concluded.

  There was a long pause. General Zimchenko was never on for quick decisions, a major reason he’d survived this long.

  “What do you think, Duslov?”

  Some senior commanders might have said “recommend,” but Zimchenko was neither that polite nor that hypocritical. He didn’t give a crap about what policy a subordinate might favor, since he made all the decisions. He was wary, but no phony. Unlike many other KGB chiefs, he’d never bothered with those new “management and personnel” courses.

  “I’m inclined to view the project favorably, general.”

  The noise from Moscow was definitely a growl. “View the project favorably? Can’t you talk straight? You sound like one of those damn toe dancers in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I think that overexposure to all those decadent paintings is rotting your mind!”

  “Please, general,” Duslov said as he watched the whirring scrambler attachment beside the phone.

  “Socialist realism isn’t good enough for you, huh?”

  “We’ve been through this several times, general. Why don’t we decide on the American’s proposal?”

  There was another odd sound—definitely rude. “I’ve decided. We’ll go along—very carefully. If anything goes wrong, we’ll blame them. Should be no problem with that. Even the
ir own press blames the CIA for everything from clap to earthquakes.”

  “That’s true.”

  “And if it works, we’ll be rid of those Chink-loving lice who’ve been sabotaging proletarian solidarity.”

  Duslov recognized the quote from last week’s Pravda, guessed that the skirmishes on the Manchurian border were getting worse.

  “Keep me informed, Duslov. Watch your step. This is the same bastard who took out my wife’s nephew in Turkey. When the job’s finished, let me know where you do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “Bury him,” the general snapped impatiently and slammed down the phone.

  Why did generals always want to kill people, Duslov wondered. He sighed, thought about the odd American whom he almost liked. Well, he wasn’t going to worry about the CIA operative or any other Yankee. Duslov certainly wasn’t worrying about Dr. Ernest Beller, for—like Merlin—he didn’t know that there was such a person who would be flying to Hamburg to commit an act of violence.

  On Pan American Airways flight 615.

  Taxiing down the runway for takeoff right now.

  12

  The loud, insistent noise of the Teletype dominated the small room, making Beller frown as he tried to concentrate on the news reports unreeling before his narrowed eyes.

  “What’s up, frenn?” demanded the bulky man who loomed oppressively half a step behind the doctor’s right shoulder.

  “Urban guerrillas hit a police station near Buenos Aires this morning. Bazookas and explosives.”

  “Anybody kilt?” The accent was definitely deep Dixie. Like the speaker, whose heavy presence and booming voice made the room even more crowded, it could hardly be ignored.

  “Nine police and seventeen guerrillas.”

  The Teletype seemed to stutter ever more loudly.

  “Use’ to be good country—cattle country, an’ now it’s assdeep in Reds. Worse’n New Yawk.”