Time of Reckoning

by Walter Wager

  “They met when my dad was stationed here in forty-nine,” she explained, “and I was born here. As President Kennedy said, Ich bin ein Berliner.”

  His trained eyes automatically swept the shopping street ahead as they turned the corner, registered the young man cruising toward them on the motor scooter.

  “That was fourteen or fifteen years ago,” she added. “I guess the city’s changed quite a bit. They’ve done a wonderful job of rebuilding, and that’s certainly helped the tourist business.”

  She didn’t ask him what he was doing in Berlin.

  Merlin liked that.

  “I’m told there’s more crime in the past year or two,” he replied.

  “Not just here,” she defended.

  The fellow on the scooter was picking up speed.

  “Everywhere,” Merlin ratified. “That bothers me. One thing I can’t stand is a breakdown in law and order—any kind of violence.”

  The man on the scooter ripped a purse from the arm of an elderly woman, roared toward them at top speed.

  “It has to be stamped out,” Merlin insisted sincerely.

  As the scooter passed them, Merlin thrust the two packages into her hands, picked up a trash can and hurled it at the rider. The thief was sent flying into the plate-glass window of a delicatessen, and lay—unconscious and badly cut—sprawled among the assorted wursts and beer bottles. People were screaming. Merlin took back the packages without breaking his stride.

  “That’s what we have police for. It’s up to them to protect us from thugs,” he said coolly—and then he invited Fraulein Cassel to join him for dinner. She glanced at the shattered window, shrugged and suggested a pastry at the Hillbrich instead because she had an appointment for seven o’clock.

  The atmosphere at the chic konditorei on Rankestrasse was excellent, and so was the sacher torte.

  Her name was Freda.

  She lived alone, and she was free for dinner tomorrow night, at half-past seven. It would be a great dinner, Merlin thought as Freda Cassel stepped into the taxi he’d flagged, and there was a definite possibility of a dandy breakfast too. He was humming as he returned to his hotel.

  Some thirty-five hundred miles or so west—about fifteen minutes by ICBM—Greta Beller was also in good spirits. Not that good, but better anyway. Her husband’s health was improving. Dr. Esserman had said that it would be a positive sign if Martin showed some symptoms of recovery—any kind of recovery—within the first three weeks after the stroke. It was nineteen days now, and Martin had just articulated—barely—his first word.

  Ernst.

  One word, with tremendous effort.

  Ernst—a beginning.

  “What about Ernst?” she’d asked, but her husband hadn’t been able to say anything more.

  He probably would in a week, or a month. There was no way to predict when, or what he might say.

  14

  While the city may not quite compare with such cultural centers as Paris or Florence or Leonard Bernstein, there are plenty of nice things to say about Frankfurt am Main. For two things, it was never invaded by Genghis Khan, and Elizabeth Taylor never got married there. Third, it was in a local research institute that Dr. Paul Ehrlich discovered the arsenic “wonder drug” arsephenamine, for which he got the Nobel Prize in 1908, and a lot of free drinks and sandwiches. Arsephenamine was good for syphilis, and Ehrlich was great for Edward G. Robinson, who did the role on the silver screen.

  What’s more, Frankfurt’s on a river and that’s dandy if you like sailing boats or watching barges. The Main runs into the bigger and splashier Rhine farther west, and the Main is also the reason for Frankfurt’s name. Legend and travel writers concur that this spot is the easiest place to cross the river, a view apparently confirmed by the fact that the Romans built a bridge and a fort here about two thousand years ago. Before they could collect much in the way of tolls, the legions had the stuffing kicked out of them by the Celts—the horde, not the Boston basketball team. Then the Alemanni—a rough crowd with pagan gods, fur shirts and no barbers—whooped out of the tall timber to eject the Celts. This was obviously not too great a combination, because the Franks stomped the Alemanni and grabbed the river ford. That made it the Franks’ Ford, or Frankfurt.

  Scout’s honor.

  It really happened that way, about A.D. 500.

  Ernest Beller had learned all about that and the eleventh-century customs house and the twelfth-century imperial mint and the first Frankfurt trade fair, in the thirteenth century, during his earlier visit in 1974. That had been a reconnaissance mission. He had scouted the terrain and the enemy’s defenses, as had his ancestors who’d sent men to spy out the land. It was somewhere in the Old Testament. Beller remembered the quotation from his readings of Jerry Jeff Atkins’s worn Bible, but couldn’t quite place it this sunny day as he prepared to go into battle again.

  Combat ready.

  That was one of the proud expressions of the tough Special Forces troopers. Beller didn’t have a heavily armed “A” team of Green Berets with him to take this objective, but he had no doubt that he could do the job alone. It was a demolition mission. The target to be destroyed was Dr. Egon Berchtold. Beller had done a good deal of research about the Nazi movement and era, and he suddenly recalled that a Josef Berchtold had edited the Voelkischer Beobachter and commanded the S.S. back in 1925. Perhaps they were related.

  It didn’t matter, Beller thought as he enjoyed the hot lather on his face. He finished shaving, carefully rinsed and dried the straight razor and washed his face of the last traces of soap. The bathrooms in the old section of the Parkhotel were bigger than those in the new annex added in 1970, and Beller preferred the old-fashioned space and comfort to the razzle-dazzle of the “modern” building. Both had floor-heated bathrooms and three-band radios and TV sets, the German businessman’s notion of “international luxury standard.” This was still the commercial heart of Germany, still the business and banking center of the nation. The first Rothschild bank had been launched here in 1798.

  There were no Rothschilds here anymore.

  There were practically no Jews of any sort in Germany, Beller reflected grimly as he buttoned his shirt. Berchtold had helped see to that. The room seemed to close in, and for a moment the pathologist felt a wave of dizzying fury. He had to get out—out of the room, out of the hotel itself. He quickly knotted his tie, slipped on a light jacket and picked up his slim black attaché case. He felt a bit better when he stepped out onto the Wiesenhuttenplatz three minutes later, but he didn’t really escape that hemmed-in sensation until he reached the green and open area that was Frankfurt’s famous Zoologischer Garten. It was only a mile—perhaps less—from the hotel, but the zoo seemed much farther than that from the bustling center of town.

  “Exotarium, bitte?” asked the ticket vendor.

  Still not focused, Beller hesitated.

  “You wish just the zoo, mein herr, or also our wonderful Exotarium?”

  The man had recognized Beller as an American.

  “Two marks—zoo. One and half more for Exotarium. Animals not in cages in Exotarium. Very modern.”

  Beller paid the higher price, wandered in and walked through the main section of the zoo until he found himself facing a tiger. He sat down on a bench, watched the huge cat pacing for a while and then unlocked his attaché case. He took out the top file, relocked the leather box and flipped open the manila folder.

  The face in the first photo hit him like a club.

  Egon Berchtold—monster.

  The pathologist hated all the murderers in all the files in his case, but he felt a special enmity toward this degenerate. Yes, this man was a physician—like Beller—who had betrayed his ancient oath to serve humanity and committed unspeakable experiments and atrocities upon prisoners at Ravens-brück. He’d been the right hand of Professor Karl Gebhardt, Himmler’s boyhood friend who rose to lieutenant general in the S.S. and directed the horrors committed by obedient Nazi physicians at a dozen camp
s. Dr. Gebhardt had been hanged by the neck until dead on 2 June 1948, the photostat of the New York Times clipping said, but Berchtold had gotten off with a sentence of life imprisonment.

  There was another clipping on Berchtold, an item in the U.S. Army’s Stars and Stripes. Gas-gangrene wounds. That’s what he’d done to young Polish girls, let them fester and swell up with poison—and die. Berchtold had killed so many Polish girls that the S.S. had promoted him to the rank of major, Sturm-bannfuhrer. Now it was Sturmbannführer Berchtold’s turn to die.

  How could a fellow doctor do these things?

  Ernest Beller studied the photo of the hawk-faced man in that terrible uniform, flipped to the picture of the Barbarossa Prison. The Holy Roman emperors had been crowned in and ruled from Frankfurt for centuries, and this penal institution had been named for one whose memory still warmed German historians and patriots. Charlemagne had once governed from this city, but it was Barbarossa, more warlike, for whom the jail was named in 1935. That was the Hitler era, and Hitler had designated the attack on Russia “Operation Barbarossa.” Perhaps that explained it.

  But how could a physician commit these atrocities?

  Beller looked at the photo of the sturmbannfuhrer again, wondering so intently that he didn’t notice the guide approach with the group of tourists. “The Frankfurt Zoo is one of the finest in Europe,” the guide announced. “There are many excellent zoos in Germany. We are interested in such educational projects, and you have probably heard of the big one in Berlin. We believe that ours is better, and I think you’ll agree after I’ve shown it to you. Please follow.”

  They did, leaving Beller alone in the hot morning sun. He thought about what the guide had said. It was true. The cities of Germany had more first-class zoos than those in other European centers. Why? Did that explain why this civilized nation had been so efficient at caging millions of people, at building those human zoos?

  “Who knows?” the bitter boy from Dachau said aloud.

  He shook his head, aware that talking to oneself was not a good sign. He locked his papers away, stared at the tiger. Beller decided that he didn’t like zoos. It wasn’t that he disliked Germans, for he was, or had been, German himself, but he disliked zoos. Uncle Martin would probably attribute it to childhood trauma, he thought as he walked aimlessly and unseeing past the animals, and Uncle Martin was probably right. Whatever the reason, Ernest Beller knew that he’d never visit another zoo again.

  He bought a small box of dark chocolates on the way back to the hotel, and when he was alone in his room he opened the box and—quite deliberately—ate three of the dark rich candies. Then he took a small bottle from his toilet kit, drew the hypodermic from its hiding place and injected the Digilanid—very carefully—into the bottoms of nine pieces on the left side of the box. Digilanid was a water-soluble digitalis compound that in this dosage would be fatal for a person with heart problems.

  Berchtold had survived two minor heart attacks in 1969 and 1972.

  And he loved chocolate.

  Ernest Beller had done his homework well, had cultivated a medical assistant from Barbarossa back in 1974. He’d met several of the prison staff at a bar near the jail, loosened their tongues with drinks and encouraged them to gossip. He knew the Digilanid ought to work, but he had to check on one more detail first.

  The Hauptbahnhof, Frankfurt’s central railroad station, was only three blocks from the hotel. Frankfurt itself was a major communications hub, and this station handled trains from scores of cities in Western Europe. That traffic explained why the Hauptbahnhof news kiosk carried papers from many places—including Hamburg. Making his way through the streams of travelers, Beller bought two Hamburg dailies and returned to his room to examine them.

  There it was.

  A little item on page twenty-two, down at the bottom.

  Otto Kretschman had died in his sleep at the age of fifty-eight of natural causes, less than a year before he would have been released.

  They didn’t suspect a thing. It was safe to go ahead, and Ernest Beller went—to Barbarossa Prison.

  It looked like a warehouse for people, a large box—rectangular and four floors high—that filled an entire block. Beller could see where they’d repaired the damage caused by a couple of errant U.S. Army Air Force thousand-pounders. While Frankfurt hadn’t been pounded nearly as badly as Hamburg or Berlin, some sections of the city had sustained plenty of damage. The quaint old Sachsenhausen area on the other side of the river and the neighborhood around the vast I. G. Farben headquarters building were barely touched, but the streets around the Goethe-Haus und Museum on Grosser Hirsch-graben near the main square and the area where the prison stood weren’t that lucky. The repairs were still visible if you looked for them, especially on the north face of the jail.

  “The exterior may not be too impressive, Herr Holstein,” admitted the assistant warden, “but we’ve spent—excuse me—you people in Bonn have spent more than three million marks in the past four years to reequip our educational and athletic facilities. That’s why we’re always so glad to welcome anyone from your department. Would you like to see our woodworking shop?”

  Herr Holstein, who looked twenty-five years older than Ernest Beller in his gray wig, smiled politely with an expression that suggested chronic constipation. It was a great part, and the would-be actor enjoyed playing it.

  “You are too kind,” he replied. “We only do our job. That’s what we dull bureaucrats are supposed to do, nicht wahr?”

  His slight accent suggesting Westphalia was nearly perfect.

  “I wish that I had time to inspect,” he continued, “but I only have an hour or so before my train. As I wrote, I’m here on the Detweiler matter. The investigators in the Office of the Special Prosecutor believe that this old doctor you have may know something. You’re familiar with the Detweiler business, of course.”

  “Only via the television news,” lied the assistant warden with an apologetic chuckle. “Terrible, isn’t it?”

  There was no Detweiler affair. The letter on the forged stationery of the Ministry of Justice had transmitted a yarn about charges that a biology professor at the University of Cologne had committed war crimes in Ravensbrück; Herr Holstein—legal assistant to the deputy minister—would arrive to question this Berchtold, who’d worked at that camp.

  “It’s the times,” soothed the pathologist. “My own grandchildren hardly read at all. How is this Berchtold? He’s had heart sickness, I understand.”

  “He seems all right now. We’ve got him assigned to helping in the infirmary. Does quite well, they say. Hard to believe he did those things.”

  This man and so many others didn’t want to believe it, and that angered Ernst Beller. The anger helped with the role.

  “I trust that you’re not questioning German justice,” Beller demanded harshly.

  “Oh, no. Not at all. I’m certain that the trial was entirely correct— and so was the judgment,” the prison official blurted.

  Two guards brought Berchtold into the room, and the assistant warden left hastily so that the important functionary from the federal government could proceed.

  “Sit down, Dr. Berchtold. My name is Holstein. I’m from the Ministry of Justice in Bonn.”

  The monster sat down.

  “We’re conducting an investigation into the wartime activities of a Dr. Wilhelm Detweiler, and I’m sure that you’ll cooperate with the authorities.”

  “Of course.”

  Beller opened his attaché case, took out a folder—and the box of candy. He ate one—from the right side.

  “Terrible habit,” he confessed. “I’m trying to lose weight. Here—you have some.”

  The former sturmbaniührer hesitated.

  “You’ll be doing me a favor. You can eat them all, if you like. My wife would be delighted,” Beller said heartily.

  Then he began the questions about the nonexistent Detweiler, stretching out the inquiries until the monster had consumed eight of the
nine treated pieces. Beller counted carefully as he “took notes” on a large pad.

  “So you never saw this man at Ravensbrück”

  “Never. Of course, it was a large installation.”

  “Did you ever hear of him—anything at all?”

  “Not before today, Herr Holstein. I give you my word.”

  Beller managed not to laugh at this obscenity, thanked him and watched the guards take him away.

  The pathologist was back in the Parkhotel within thirty minutes, and as he tipped the bellboy who’d carried his luggage to the front door he glanced at his watch.

  The digitalis would be working by now. It would start blocking the normal electrical conduction in the heart, and the monster would begin to feel nausea.

  Would he recognize the first symptoms?

  Would he taste the fear?

  The bellboy loaded the two suitcases into the rented car, and Beller put the attaché case on the front seat. The gray BMW was a well-built car, a standard model that wouldn’t stand out too much in anyone’s memory. The last of the poisoned candy had been flushed down the toilet, and the burned ashes of the box were swirling in the same sewer. It was time to go.

  Dr. Beller drove carefully, sorry that he hadn’t had the opportunity to enjoy Frankfurt’s famous Palm Garden. Ernie Beller appreciated—no, enjoyed—flowers, and this one of the most splendid displays in all Europe.

  Traffic slowed to a crawl near the former I. G. Farben headquarters, currently the HQ of the U.S. Army’s V Corps. The Americans had renamed it to honor a dead general named Creighton Abrams, but that wasn’t on Beller’s mind as he drove.

  He was thinking of the sturmbannführer.

  In a few more minutes the bastard would be vomiting, and then he’d know. He was a doctor. Even if he hadn’t practiced in years, Berchtold could not help but identify the chilling signs.

  Heart attack!

  He’d be screaming for help—just as those Polish girls had.