Time of Reckoning

by Walter Wager

  Beller finally reached the autobahn heading east, slid the BMW into the swift stream of cars. He turned on the radio and heard the latest single of an emphatic German rock group named Kraftwerk, a driving “heavy metal” sound probably meant for younger ears. After the Caterina Valente ballad that followed, the announcer noted that it was 6 P.M.

  Egon Berchtold would be hallucinating by now, and the orderlies in the prison infirmary would be struggling to hold him down. Who had held down the victims of those grisly medical experiments in Ravensbrück? the pathologist wondered. Who had responded to their fear and agony?

  Beller found himself driving faster. It was easy on this fine road. Everybody was cruising along at seventy-five and the pace was hypnotic. Mile after mile, record after record, the avenging doctor raced through the growing darkness. Nearly two hours slipped away—somehow—before he broke the spell and pulled off at a gas station to refuel. As the attendant gave him his change, Beller checked his watch again and nodded.

  The heart palpitations were reaching their peak, and the pump in the sturmbannführer’s chest was bucking and twisting wildly. Berchtold would be terrified, sweating, chalky, scared frantic. Within a matter of minutes the monster would be dead.

  “Good,” Beller thought aloud.

  “What?” asked the attendant.

  “Nothing. It doesn’t matter.”

  The pathologist was smiling as he drove off into the night. He’d found a station broadcasting the Bach Partita in B-flat Major, the Wanda Landowska recording made in 1936. The road was straight, the night was cool, the music was lovely, and the monster was dead. Egon Berchtold? He was a doctor—like Ernest Beller—and he had the same initials. For one moment the pathologist wondered whether they might have anything else in common, whether he himself might harbor some deeply buried demon such as the one that let/made the other physician do those hideous things.

  No, it was just a coincidence about the initials.

  It was merely an interesting coincidence.

  15

  “Meet Heidi,” Blue Bernard said.

  “Pleasure to meet you, ma’am.”

  “Charmed,” Heidi answered.

  Some people might have considered Heidi a freak, for a 195-pound transvestite in a parody of a Courrèges gown is a bit unusual and certainly stands out in a crowd.

  Not this crowd.

  Merlin looked around the screening room at the bizarre group Bernard had assembled, decided that it resembled the mob you’d get at a wedding between Dracula’s dentist and one of those ladies who run the enema-and-flogging ads in porno publications. There was a large Danish blonde in a black leather suit, carrying a riding crop that she swung with casual expertise. There were a couple of Asian hookers—probably from Malaysia or Indonesia—pretty creatures with serene dimpled smiles. Three or four gay young men—or was one a woman?—and a cluster of hard-faced types who might be enforcers for some narcotics tycoon trailed an elegant sixty-year-old grande dame—who herself trailed the expensive scent of something that cost $80 an ounce.

  “How good of you to come,” Bernard said politely.

  “I hope this will be amusing,” answered the madam of two of the most expensive brothels in Berlin.

  “Her late husband was an admiral,” Bernard confided a moment later. “Supply department. Left her a piss pot of money. She’s only in business to avoid ennui, if you know what I mean.”

  Before Merlin could answer, a Persian or Lebanese gentleman wearing about $1200 of the best clothes Roman tailors and bootmakers can offer slid into the room. He glanced at a scarfaced Greek and a husky Bavarian, blinked and forced out a thin smile.

  “They’re armed,” Merlin observed.

  “You’d be, too, in their business. The import trade is quite competitive,” explained the porno prince. “As a matter of fact, their organizations had some active disagreements only last Easter.”

  “Nice funerals?”

  “The best. I myself sent over four hundred marks’ worth of flowers in ten days. Ah, here’s Sandor and his talented daughter.”

  More pleasantries.

  “What does she do best?” Merlin asked when they were out of earshot.

  “Women, I think—but that’s not what I meant. Did you notice their hands? No? Pity. They’re the best pickpockets in the country. They have twenty or thirty people out on the streets working for them—all good craftsmen. It’s a quality operation.”

  A brunette beauty with a rhinestoned eye patch arrived with a fat man who had a Doberman on a leash, striding haughtily past three blank-faced types who wore the impersonal expressions of taxi drivers but were actually car thieves. A dozen other raffish folk sauntered in, and when they were all seated Blue Bernard addressed the meeting.

  “I want to thank all of you for coming on such short notice, and I assure you that we won’t keep you too long. You’re all busy, hard-working people, executives with many responsibilities of your own. I appreciate your willingness to help, and I celebrate the generous aid of old and good friends.”

  The admiral’s widow inserted a three-inch joint in a jeweled cigarette holder, lit it and drew deeply on the best Thai stick money could buy. She eyed Merlin appraisingly as if he were a prize bull, making no effort to conceal her carnal evaluation. The CIA man smiled, turned his attention back to Blue Bernard as a tall albino slipped in and dropped into a seat in the last row.

  “Better late than never, Erwin,” Bernard said archly. “Well, I’ll turn the floor over to my friend, Frank.”

  “We’re going to show you some film,” Merlin declared.

  “Something interesting?” said the madam in tones that a Marlene Dietrich might use to seduce a Greek shipping millionaire.

  “I hope so. If you’re not entirely immune to money, it should be interesting. I myself would not find fifty thousand marks boring.”

  She blew the smoke out, nodded benignly like a gracious countess—who moonlighted as a nymphomaniac.

  “I wish to find these people, and they do not wish to be found.”

  “Is it a game?” asked the brunette with the eye patch.

  Merlin shook his head. “Not the way they do it,” he said. “These people kill. Roll the film.”

  The room went dark, and the face of a towheaded young man abruptly flickered onto the screen.

  “Willi Lietzen…age twenty-nine…height about five feet ten…weight one-sixty…born in Düsseldorf.”

  Fast dissolve.

  Medium shot. Daylight. Exterior. Pan with Willi Lietzen in a crowd of students, first marching…then shouting…then throwing rocks at the police.

  “Active in communist youth groups at University of Bremen, and then started his own Maoist unit at law school here in Berlin four years ago. Clever, tough, knows three languages, believes in random violence to shake up the government and the system. He’s the planner, and he’s killed at least seven people in the last two years.”

  Jump cut.

  Close-up. Female face.

  “Marta Falkenhausen…twenty-six…top student in political science at Humbolt University…daughter of Colonel Sigmund Falkenhausen, who worked with Oskar Dirlewanger in Poland…reported to be Willi Lietzen’s girl friend…known to be an excellent shot. Bagged three policemen in Munich just after Christmas.”

  It was the face Merlin had seen staring hatefully from the back of a black Audi on the Ku-damm. Now the camera pulled back to show Marta Falkenhausen waving her arms as she addressed some rally. She didn’t enjoy being photographed. The sequence ended with her making an obscene gesture at the cameraman.

  Merlin heard the tinkle of an airy laugh in the dark room, and he knew that it came from the admiral’s widow.

  Jump cut.

  Long shot. Night. Exterior.

  Runners carrying torches charging over a hill in some track-and-field competition.

  Tighten and freeze focus on a heavy racer with thick legs and shoulders.

  “Werner Buerckel…age twenty-seven…star
athlete at high school in the Saar…son of a miner…very strong but not exactly a mental giant…worked in the mines for six years…killed one man with his bare hands and more than a dozen with explosives. He’s their demolition man, bank vaults or buildings or people. Said to carry explosives with him all the time—like a security blanket.”

  “How disgusting!” Heidi, wheezed hoarsely from somewhere on the right side of the audience.

  “Is he crazy?” asked a Hungarian-flavored voice as the film changed to show Buerckel in a street fight between two hostile groups of young demonstrators.

  “He looks very strong,” someone noted shrilly, almost hopefully.

  “He is strong, and some doctors might call him crazy. I’d say he’s completely loyal to Willi Lietzen, and dangerous. This is the man who bombed the Soviet Friendship Bookstore in the middle of the afternoon, not at night, when it would be empty.”

  The next face was almost swarthy, wide.

  “The late Paul Stoller. Political assassination was his bag. You may remember that several schoolkids were maimed the day he tossed the grenade at the mayor. His politics were so extreme that he considered Stalin a Nazi—and Mao too. Great chess player, they say.”

  Now the screen blossomed with the face of the machine gunner Merlin had slain.

  “He’s dead too, shot escaping from that bank robbery a week or so ago. Willi Lietzen’s kid brother, full of cheap slogans and free-floating hostility. Hated everything from ice cream to ballpoint pens and sunny afternoons—a creep.”

  Someone in the back of the little theater yawned loudly, but Merlin—and the film—continued.

  Paul Grawitz, who stole and drove cars.

  Fritz Kammler, an army deserter who knew how to handle and repair the basic infantry weapons used by the West German ground forces.

  Karla Lange, who had an advanced degree in electrical engineering and was rumored to be connected with an Arab terrorist organization in Vienna.

  “Terrible hair,” a woman’s voice said.

  Karla Lange was very plain, to put it generously.

  “She has several scars on her body,” Merlin continued. “She was burned in a fire when she was only nine.”

  “Fabulous!”

  This was not a healthy group, Merlin told himself, and hardly representative of the sensible new breed of decent post-Hitler Germans who believe in generous health insurance and pension programs and free trade unions. He told himself that twice, and then he called for the lights.

  Blue Bernard thanked everyone, touched lightly on the fifty thousand marks again and blew the audience a big kiss of appreciation. The admiral’s widow blew one back—at Merlin, flashing a look that guaranteed a visit to her place would surely be interesting. Merlin waved airily, wondering what the folks in the deputy director’s office would say when they heard he’d committed fifty thousand DM—sixty-five thousand if you included Bernard’s commission.

  The admiral’s wife had a pink tongue, Merlin thought as he left the screening room—a little pink tongue like a cat. Well, she was probably no stranger than some of the people who taught school in northern California or served on the London County Council last year. Merlin rarely wasted time with words like “strange,” for they were subjective—like rich, virginal or anthropomorphic. “Prunes”—now that was a word Merlin could handle. “Shoe” was another.

  All right, she was strange.

  Merlin didn’t care.

  Would you call those college-trained executives in button-down shirts and discreet ties—the dedicated public servants who told him whom to track and destroy—normal? They were so spaced out on patriotism and official procedures and forms in quadruplicate that they probably considered Merlin odd, he thought as he watched the eye-patched brunette wiggle out with her escort.

  Marvelous wiggle.

  “When will you have the stills?” Bernard asked.

  “I was hoping that you might know someone who could run them off—without too many questions.”

  The last phrase struck Blue Bernard as funny, so he smiled. “I know such a person. He printed those splendid photos of the Danish blonde and the three men in chains, the ones they sell outside the big hotels for twenty marks a pack. He never asks questions, and he’s fast.”

  “Has his lab in the back of a truck,” Merlin joked.

  “How did you know? We’ll get the pictures of these thugs out within twenty-four hours… Mario, stop that!”

  One of the departing moviegoers was fingering a .32 in his belt eying a business rival with obvious hostility.

  “Don’t be an idiot Mario. Must you embarrass me every time I invite you anywhere?”

  Mario left scowling, and Bernard shook his head. “You see the sort of animals with whom I have to deal? Is it any wonder that I’ve got to kick ass a lot?” he grumbled to the American.

  “Can’t get good help anywhere,” Merlin agreed and handed over eight hundred marks “for expenses.” Blue Bernard would take a commission on the still pictures, of course, but he’d probably charged his own mother for his baby photos. Merlin wasn’t going to fret about such minor details, for his mind was already focused on the 10 P.M. rendezvous. The imminent delivery of the Italian typewriter was reassuring.

  So was walking out into the street, for it reminded Merlin of the hundreds of thousands of law-abiding Berliners who constituted more than ninety-five percent of the city. They might violate a traffic regulation or cheat just a bit on their taxes, but they didn’t sell dope or make obscene films or kill people. It was unfortunate that Merlin could walk among these proper burghers and still be so far from them, and someday he’d have to think about that more. He might even consider doing something about it, as his former wife had so often suggested.

  Someday.

  Not tonight.

  He walked into the Ballhaus Resi at 9:51, just a trifle early, as always. He couldn’t help it; they’d trained him to take this precaution and it had saved his life at least twice. Situated at Hasenheide 32 at the corner of Grafenstrasse, the Resi is a Berlin institution like the Brandenburg Gate or Spandau Prison. The Resi is a dance hall, one of the best-known in the city. The Walterchens Ballhaus over on Bulowstrasse is known as “the widow’s ball” because its patrons are “mature” and the women here ask the men to dance—sedately. The Resi is known as “that telephone place.” It offers a water show with colored lights and a stage show locals consider quite lively, but what makes the Resi’s repute are the telephones and message chutes on each table.

  Especially the telephones.

  The place seats some eight hundred at numbered tables. One or three walk in, check out the tables that each seat five and select someone who looks attractive. You can then send a written invitation to dance to “the short lady in the blue dress” at table 46, or you can direct-dial her via the phone on your table. It’s simple, but clean—and it works. Berliners and visitors come here to find dancing partners, drink beer and develop meaningful relationships of all sorts—even respectable. The tone is wholesome and cheery, honest.

  Merlin sauntered in, let his eyes adjust and then scanned the tables just as if he were seeking a trim young woman whose skills included the fox-trot. There seemed to be quite a few already dancing to the fourteen-piece band, and many others, in twos and threes, sitting and waiting. There—over at table 19—was his “contact,” drinking beer and smiling and chatting with a buxom Swabian nurse who was simply crazy about “swinging Berlin.” Now they were dancing.

  Merlin found an empty chair at table 37, mumbled something to the two computer programmers already seated and pretended to listen to their bawdy jokes about the rumps of the women at the next table. A waiter took his order, delivered a large stein of dark beer. Merlin checked table 19 again. The son of a bitch was still dancing. Now the phone on his own table rang, and a female voice invited him to join the fun.

  “Table thirty-four—I’m in pink.”

  The woman looked pleasant, about thirty and probably non-homicida
l. Clean breath and good disposition were important, but the nonhomicidal part was decisive for Merlin these days. He hung up the phone, began to rise—and then it rang again. One of the computer team answered it eagerly, then handed the instrument to the American.

  “Who is this?” asked a voice he knew well.

  “Merlin. When did you get in?”

  “It’s a charming place, isn’t it?”

  The CIA man glanced across at table 19, saw his “contact” grinning.

  “It’s a noisy goddam tourist trap,” Merlin said, “and you picked it. You always pick lousy places with crowds of people—always.”

  “There’s one too many now.”

  Merlin got the message immediately, finished his beer and left—with the woman in pink at table 34 glaring at his back. He walked two blocks down Grafenstrasse, turned right and stepped into a doorway. He listened tensely, heard nothing.

  Rubber-soled shoes.

  The man who was following him had to be wearing them. He would be quiet, and he’d be armed.

  He was.

  At that instant a husky man in his thirties seemed to step out of nowhere, a frown on his face and a 9-millimeter P-1 handgun in his fist. The weapon was only half-drawn, but that gave Merlin little comfort. He felt even more distress three seconds later when the man pointed the pistol right at his stomach.

  Who the hell was he?

  Russian?

  One of his ex-wife’s loyal troops?

  Maoist crazy?

  Commercial mugger?

  Merlin never got to ask. He didn’t get shot in the gut either. Another man—who’d been sitting at table 19 less than four minutes earlier—stepped out of the darkness. Like most of the people Merlin knew, he too had a handgun. It wasn’t one of the West German weapons made at the new Walther plant at Ulm, it was an American-manufactured .357 Magnum, good for punching holes in walls or disemboweling people.

  The man with the .357 Magnum hit the man with the 9-mm. Walther on the back of the head, hard.

  The man with the Walther fell forward, breaking his nose bloodily on the sidewalk.

  It was fast and ugly, and almost silent.