Time of Reckoning

by Walter Wager

  “And you always hit people too hard,” Merlin continued as if the telephone conversation hadn’t been interrupted.

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Didn’t I say thanks? Okay, let’s get him off the street.”

  They dragged the unconscious stranger into an alley, searched his wallet. According to his papers, this man was a thirty-eight-year-old television repairman named Manfred Hassel, owner of a 1974 Opel and a resident of the Charlottenburg section of town.

  “What do you think, Angie?”

  Angelo Cavaliere, who had learned most of the ways of the world during three years in U.S. Army Military Intelligence and nine in the agency, shook his head contemptuously.

  “TV repairmen never carry nine-millimeter Walthers,” he said. “They all pack Smith and Wesson thirty-eight Specials like the Japanese police. This guy’s a phony. He’s not bad on tailing, though.”

  Merlin paused in his rifling of the wallet. “We work for the same company. You can trust me,” he appealed.

  “I saw him pick you up outside the hotel at four. He’s got some good moves, must be a pro.”

  It was nice to know that Angelo Cavaliere—sometimes referred to as the Italian Typewriter—was covering the flanks. Cavaliere, a dark-haired man who combined substantial shrewdness with the reflexes of a cobra and a huge collection of still photos from horror movies, was a skillful and unobtrusive colleague who knew how to operate in Germany. His family had wanted him to become a doctor, but Angie hadn’t enjoyed the sight of blood—so now he was earning $24,000 a year as a secret agent.

  He was not cruel.

  Some employees of certain cloak-and-dagger organizations might have been angered by the failure of the wallet search, and when the man with the bleeding face moaned they might have done something intemperate—such as kick him in the belly or left ear. Angelo Cavaliere wasn’t that sort of barbarian. The good Jesuits hadn’t brought him up that way at all. When the stranger who wasn’t a TV repairman named Manfred Hassel groaned a second time, Mr. Cavaliere suggested that they put him in a large trash can, and they did. Then they pushed the lid on, and headed for the street. Merlin spoke when they reached the end of the alley.

  “Angie—”

  “Yeah?”

  “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”

  “It wasn’t my idea,” Cavaliere said defensively.

  Then Merlin walked out onto the street and turned back toward the Hilton—with his protective shadow not far behind. As Merlin picked up speed, he checked his watch again and began to walk even faster. Fraulein Freda Cassel, who worked at the Amerika Haus and served great breakfasts, was waiting in her bed—and Fraulein Cassel didn’t enjoy waiting.

  16

  Everybody gets born, but there are a million ways you can do it. Some are born rich, others premature, quite a few as Chinese, and a few theatrical types check in as Siamese twins—on the cusp between Libra and Scorpio. It is better to be born in the summer because you’ll have a bigger chance of survival.

  Merlin was born American, lucky and optimistic—a trifle too optimistic. Freda Cassel was not in bed when he reached her small but pleasantly furnished apartment. It was a good eleven or twelve minutes before she got into bed, but when she put her head on that flowered pillowcase she surely did her best to make up for lost time. Uninhibited, strong and joyfully physical, she celebrated their new intimacy with an exultant enthusiasm that was also tender. She was more than qualified to work at the U.S. cultural center, but the history of American jazz and musical theater wasn’t all that she knew very well, Merlin judged as he finally slid off into deep sleep shortly before two in the morning.

  He didn’t dream at all.

  He was that contented, that sated.

  The smile was still on his face when the smell of coffee and the softness of her warm lips awakened him at five after eight. She wriggled easily out of his sleepy efforts to embrace her, announced the time and suggested that he could just squeeze in a shower before breakfast. Neither the lavender-scented soap nor the almost wholly transparent shower curtain surprised him, for they fit this splendid and sensual young woman. He was thinking about her unabashed animality while toweling himself dry.

  “Wow!” she said.

  Merlin looked up at her in the doorway.

  “What a body!” she admired.

  “I get a lot of compliments on my tits,” he admitted.

  “It’s your boyish legs. For a man of your age—”

  “I’m twenty-three—and a half.”

  “You’re crazy,” she said happily, “and breakfast’s ready.”

  Orange juice, sausages and eggs, rolls and coffee.

  “Just like home,” he approved between chews.

  “You can take the girl out of Chicago, but you can’t take the Chicago out of the girl. More coffee?”

  “No, thanks. Freddy, you’re a wonderful woman.”

  He’d almost said “girl,” but remembered that some contemporary females found the usage inflammatory and/or patronizing. He didn’t know that much about this lady yet. Lady? Christ, that was another word that got young women pissed.

  “I hope you haven’t got the wrong idea about me,” she said as she rose from the table.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just because we made it on the second night—”

  “Perish forbid,” Merlin assured her. “Freddy, I think you’re a person of class and distinction.”

  “I’m no easy lay,” she said en route to the sink with the dishes.

  “I am.”

  She shook her head. “I’m twenty-six, and I have no social diseases—and I’m no saint.”

  Merlin looked impressed. “How’d you like to run for vice-president?” he asked.

  “And I don’t lie!”

  “There goes your political career. Are you sore about something, honey?”

  The way she was charging back to the table was definitely menacing, but she didn’t hit him. She picked up the coffee cups, glared at him from about two feet away. “I don’t tell people phony stories about doing research for a TV documentary about the Joe Louis-Max Schmeling fight!”

  “The second fight. We’re going to dramatize it. Diana Ross is playing Louis,” Merlin said amiably.

  “And Barbra Streisand’s doing Schmeling, I suppose?”

  “Dynamite idea. Can I help with the dishes?”

  She replied from the kitchen. “You can tell me why the hell you’re wearing some kind of bulletproof vest and why you carry a gun, you son of a bitch!”

  “For a moment there you sounded just like my ex-wife,” Merlin noted truthfully. “You go to Yale?”

  “You go screw yourself, Frank Wasserman—or whatever your name is. Is it really Frank Wasserman?”

  “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. That’s Shakespeare, hon,” he volunteered.

  The clatter of dishes announced that she was still furious.

  “I’m an insurance investigator,” he “confessed” abruptly. “New Haven Mutual wants me to bring home a man who heisted nearly six hundred thousand in diamonds and jelly beans from a triplex on Park Avenue. I’ve traced the gent here, and he’s got some rough friends. That’s why I go heavy.”

  She stood in the doorway again. “Is that the truth?”

  “Honest Injun,” he swore effortlessly.

  “And your name is Frank Wasserman?”

  “On my mother’s grave.”

  He didn’t tell her that his mother’s grave was empty because the old lady was in such terrific shape that she’d just won a trophy as the best female tennis player over sixty in the entire state of Florida. Freddy Cassel hadn’t asked, and it didn’t matter that much anyway. What counted was mutual trust and respect, and a lot of good clean sex never hurt either. As a matter of fact, the idea occurred to Merlin a moment later when they embraced, but she had to get to work.

  He could wait until evening.

  So long as she believed his story everythin
g would be all right.

  The hot June sun and Lady Luck were both smiling when the intelligence agent and Freddy Cassel reached the street, for a taxi appeared at once, a nice surprise in this quiet neighborhood with light traffic. The Hilton was on the route to the Amerika Haus, so they had barely completed plans for the evening when he kissed her and stepped out into the glare. He watched the cab roll off into the herd of vehicles that thundered through the heart of the city.

  “Well?” asked the cabdriver as the taxi pulled away from the Hilton.

  “It’s going well,” Freddy Cassel said with a smile.

  “He doesn’t suspect?”

  “Not a thing,” she guaranteed as the cab turned off the Ku-damm toward 21-24 Hardenbergstrasse, where she had to be at that receptionist’s desk in seventeen minutes. She was, as usual. The director of the Amerika Haus liked Freddy Cassel, who was always on time and did her work so well and so cheerfully. If only all the staff were like her his life would be so much simpler.

  17

  “Eins…zwei…drei…vier, eins…zwei…drei…vier,” the tall bald man chanted as he jumped and clapped his powerful hands over his head rhythmically.

  Sigmund Falkenhausen did an hour of exercises every morning, and another hour each night. In between he tossed in some of those Canadian Air Force routines pitting muscle against muscle, tension techniques designed to keep him fit. Some people might call him a physical-fitness nut. He had been called much worse by the judge who sentenced him in 1952, and the epithets uttered by the racially impure “mongrels” who testified against him certainly couldn’t be published in either the London or the Nippon Times. Those hysterical outbursts by vengeful non-Aryans hadn’t really touched him, and today the jokes of the guards about his rigorous regimen of calisthenics didn’t reach him either.

  Colonel Falkenhausen knew that he was right.

  He always had been, and always would be.

  He was stronger, smarter, better in every way—for he was a member of the Master Race. History would surely confirm him and his actions, and now it was only a matter of time until the weakness and stupidity of the current German government and the mongrelized Americans and Britons brought the whole tottering structure crashing down in disaster. Another war with the Slavic swine—perhaps a nuclear holocaust—might be necessary to prove that Der Führer was correct in every detail, but it would come. There was, after all, nothing wrong with purification by fire. Der Führer himself had spoken of this; and if the fire was the ball of heat produced by a hydrogen bomb, that didn’t matter. Sigmund Falkenhausen didn’t believe in the tooth fairy or Father Nicholas, but he was confident that a marvelous new Nazi world was coming.

  Men such as Brigadeführer Oskar Dirlewanger were still free, working and planning for that great day. They’d never captured him. The major general was too wily, too sly an old poacher to be trapped in the nets of the fools who’d been hunting him since the collapse in 1945. Even Himmler had called Dirlewanger “an original.” What if he had spent 1935–37 prison for some “offenses against a minor,” and what if his later units consisted of convicted thieves, poachers and petty criminals drafted from a dozen German prisons? They’d served the Reich well, butchered more than twenty-five thousand Red guerrillas and sympathizers—lots of civilian sympathizers—in White Russia. The Dirlewanger Brigade had proved its toughness in the final cleanout of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1944, killing so well that the command was increased to a full division—a Waffen S.S. division—and Oskar got the Knight’s Cross.

  Then he’d vanished like smoke.

  There had been rumors a few years back that he was training “shock units” for the Egyptian Army, and other stories that he was in Spain or Argentina. Wherever he was, one could be sure that shrewd old Oskar was preparing men and weapons for the next offensive. He wasn’t sitting around getting fat and sloppy. He was staying fit, mentally and physically. You could bet on that.

  “Eins…zwei…drei…vier,” he repeated, enjoying the trickle of sweat running down his back. This was good, healthy Aryan perspiration, reminding him of the hard work and victories of the past. All the lies the vermin had told the scummy International Military Tribunal at Nürnberg couldn’t change that truth, that glory.

  The other prisoners in the gymnasium looked at Falkenhausen, said nothing. Like most of the guards, they thought that the former colonel was probably dangerous and surely mad. They were common criminals, unable to comprehend Sigmund Falkenhausen’s profound commitment and philosophy. They could be taught. Dirlewanger had started with jailbirds, welded them into a crack security outfit feared by millions. Many lies and slanders had been spread about the brigade, Falkenhausen brooded without missing a beat, but his pride in the unit’s achievements was much too strong to be shaken by the filthy innuendos of dirty little men.

  Nothings such as Kraus.

  The ex-colonel eyed him contemptuously, staring furiously at the prison guard who derided the Dirlewanger division as “rabble who could only murder women and children.” Rolf Kraus delighted in repeating the ugly lies of his father, a stupid man who’d been an artillery Feldwebel with one of the Wehrmacht units chewed up in the Ukraine. It was no wonder that Germany had lost the war, Falkenhausen told himself, with lousy sergeants in howitzer batteries mocking the contributions of glorious S.S. detachments.

  “Eins…zwei…drei…vier.”

  “What’s the matter, colonel? Can’t you count any higher than that?” Kraus challenged.

  The other prisoners laughed. They didn’t fully understand why Kraus despised Falkenhausen and everything he represented, for the guard had never spoken to them of the shame. His father had returned with one arm and the bitter conviction that the horrors committed by the “elite” Nazi “security” outfits had dishonored the German Army, had degraded the Wehrmacht’s tradition by making it an accomplice in evil. The armor of those teutonic knights that stood in a dozen museums now “stink of the criminals who tainted Germany’s place in military history,” the artilleryman had told his son again and again, and it would not be easy to erase the stain. It could not be glossed over or ignored, and until it was faced squarely the shame could not be expunged.

  That’s why Rolf Kraus hated Sigmund Falkenhausen.

  Shame.

  “Time to knock it off, old fella,” the guard said a moment later.

  That wasn’t true. Colonel Falkenhausen had a mental clock that told him he still had a full two minutes, and he was fed up with this nasty harassment. Falkenhausen had been doing his exercises day after day—month after month—year after year—and he knew his rights. He had a full hour. That was in the official regulations, the written rules.

  “Eins…zwei…drei…vier,” he called out in righteous defiance.

  The other inmates scattered, sensing what was to come. They all realized that Falkenhausen was some sort of haughty fanatic, a seething compulsive ready to explode at any time. They’d heard about the horrible deeds, how Dirlewanger had injected Jewish women with strychnine so his staff officers—including Falkenhausen—could enjoy watching their death throes as an appetizer before dinner. That’s why he was a leper among these burglars, swindlers and street brawlers, even more of an outcast than the child molesters.

  “Move your butt, stupid.”

  That was when Falkenhausen went crazy.

  In a single wild leap he was upon the guard, and before Kraus could raise his hands the screaming ex-colonel began to beat him savagely. He knew how to hurt with his hands and feet, and he was in top physical condition, like a man a quarter of a century younger. He punched, kicked, smashed and battered Rolf Kraus to the ground, enjoying the release of the hostility that had been pent up for so many years. He heard the shouting somewhere nearby, but ignored the noise to concentrate on his enemy. Yes, it was good to hit and hurt the enemy again. Let them all see what a fit and trained S.S. officer could do, even at this age. Sigmund Falkenhausen moved in for the kill.

  Blackness.

  It
was as if someone had pulled the plug on the only lamp in the room.

  The “someone” was a pair of guards named Hegel and Sprenger, who produced the instant darkness by hitting Falkenhausen with clubs. Hegel struck him in the pit of the stomach with the traditional MP’s thrust to the solar plexus, and Sprenger slammed him across the back of the head—twice.

  Total blackness.

  Tuesday, 4:58 P.M.

  Bright sunshine.

  Thursday, 11:10 A.M.

  Same location: the bulky Franconian castle known as Schloss Gillenstein, set on the edge of a green forest overlooking Nürnberg. A prison for “difficult cases” since the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm, this turreted redoubt wasn’t nearly as historic as Schloss Rosenau near Coburg or the tenth-century castle at Pottenstein. It was at least four centuries younger than the great fortress at Lauenstein. Nürnberg’s most famous castle is the twelfth-century Kaiserburg, and Gillenstein’s only claim to fame outside this region of northern Bavaria is that this is where some of the Nazi war criminals were kept during their 1946 trials before the International Military Tribunal.

  Sigmund Falkenhausen knew Nürnberg well, and not because of its fine medieval structures or its reputation as the toy capital of Germany. He had been here several times for those fantastic mass rallies the führer would address in the vast Zeppelin Wiese, and he had roared with the others—thousands of others—when the deranged spellbinder had promised them that they would rule the world. It wasn’t going to happen today, or tomorrow either.

  Unless Dirlewanger helped him to escape.

  Even after all these years, Falkenhausen couldn’t believe that the general had abandoned him. His commander would inevitably return to break him out, to free him to join the new and surely successful crusade to conquer the planet for the Aryan race. Even now in this cramped cell, his gut and head still hurting, Colonel Sigmund Falkenhausen lived on his faith that the S.S. comrades would come.

  Let the prison psychiatrist laugh or doubt.

  The others had not forgotten Sigmund Falkenhausen.