Time of Reckoning

by Walter Wager

  The ex-colonel wasn’t entirely wrong. There were several people in West Germany—and a few in Israel, Argentina, Britain and the United States—who remembered him quite clearly. One of these was a man who’d checked into Nürnberg’s Crest Hotel—near the entrance to the autobahn—a day earlier. He carried a tape recorder, a letter from the features editor of the Manchester Guardian, a handlebar mustache and the faintly tired clothes of a working but not too well-paid journalist. His speech confirmed that he was a British journalist with a college degree from some lesser university, not Oxford or Cambridge.

  “One of those red brick places,” guessed the manager of the ninety-room hotel on Münchenerstrasse.

  He, too, wasn’t entirely wrong.

  There was some red brick up at Harvard, plenty in surrounding Cambridge.

  At 11:10 A.M. on this warm June morning, Geoffrey Donald Cuthbert parked a hired gray BMW sedan just below the eighty-four-foot-high walls of Schloss Gillenstein. The prison might not be the biggest castle in Franconia, but its walls were impressively lofty and it had a great moat. A moat is almost useless without a drawbridge, and Gillenstein had a fine metal-studded and -striped model that still worked. Walls made of huge blocks of stone and a functioning drawbridge were two things about this place that Ernest Beller would remember.

  “We pull it up every night and lower it in the morning,” the warden said as they sipped coffee in his office. “Damn thing makes a lot of noise. We grease it, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  Why was the warden looking so uncomfortable?

  Did they suspect?

  “Even with a grease, it makes one terrible clatter,” the man behind the desk rambled on, his eyes darting about uneasily.

  Why was he stalling?

  Was it a trap?

  “God’s will, I suppose,” he told the pathologist. “It may seem old-fashioned, but I’m a religious man. I take my God seriously. Brought up that way. Solid Catholic education.”

  Beller nodded, thought about his own upbringing. His uncle and aunt had leaned over backward not to “impose” any formal religious beliefs on the orphan, fearful lest anything resembling dogma or rigid rules might “inhibit” his “free and natural development.”

  “I never had much religious training,” Beller said. “My—my father was a doctor, and I suspect that religion seemed a bit antiscientific to him. No, unscientific—almost medieval.”

  “God will forgive him,” the warden predicted benevolently. “Now about this Falkenhausen whom you want to interview…”

  “Yes?”

  The warden shifted in his chair, blinked twice. “You know that modern penology tells us that there’s no such thing as a prisoner beyond redemption, Mr. Cuthbert?”

  The avenger nodded.

  “Well—this Falkenhausen—he’s difficult. I can’t remember another case quite so complex in my career.”

  What the hell was he saying?

  “I don’t believe in capital punishment, you understand, but this inmate really strains my progressive thinking. I try to view him with Christian charity. The best I can do is to wish that he were in a mental facility, some institution for the criminal insane.”

  Beller wasn’t sure about what was happening, but it wasn’t supposed to happen like this.

  “When can I see him?”

  “He’s violent,” continued the warden. “Violent and dangerous. He attacked one of the guards two days ago, without warning. Beat him badly. He might have killed him if two other correction officers hadn’t intervened.”

  “Yes?”

  “He’s vicious, Mr. Cuthbert.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

  The warden cleared his throat. “You can’t see him. He’s in an isolation cell. No visitors for at least a month. That’s my decision, and nothing will make me change it. I’m sorry.”

  “But I’ve come all the way from Bonn. You promised—”

  The warden stood up, signaling his desire to end the discussion. “I must apologize. You’ll have your interview—in August or September. There’s nothing that urgent about this, is there? He’s not going anywhere, you know.”

  “I could be dead by then,” Beller pleaded, “or he could.”

  “Not him. He’s as healthy as a young ox, and a lot more trouble. I’m asking that he be transferred. Well, that’s it. I regret the inconvenience.”

  The prison official spoke as he was walking—no, herding—Beller to the door. The words were courteous enough, but the tone had become perfunctory and the doctor sensed that further talk would be useless.

  “Keep in touch, as they say in American films,” the warden told him in his best public-relations manner.

  He’d failed.

  Beller wasn’t discouraged, of course.

  There was always Plan B.

  18

  It was all a matter of timing.

  He’d learned that from the Special Forces men, the experts in demolition and guerrilla. If you found that the dèfenses ringing the target had changed, the assault team had to change the plan of attack. If the weapons weren’t right for this situation, the commander of the strike force had to select and acquire new weapons.

  Improvise.

  Then hit the target at the precise moment when the foe was weakest, was least ready to cope.

  Beller had a number of weapons and identities and plans, so now it was a question of using one of his alternative schemes. The conversation with the warden at Gillenstein had suggested which to select—the one he’d originally scheduled for The Bitch.

  Now it was a question of timing.

  Within forty minutes after Beller returned to his hotel, he’d checked out the various Catholic churches in this city of 510,000. The most beautiful and impressive Catholic house of worship was Saint Lorenz across the Pegnitz River, a Gothic structure begun in the thirteenth century and adorned by a splendid rosette window and a superb wood-carving by the great Veit Stoss—both famous throughout Germany. Damaged in the Allied bombing and rebuilt with funds donated by an American whose ancestors left Nürnberg more than two centuries ago, Saint Lorenz would surely—almost surely—be where the warden would be on Sunday morning for the noon mass.

  It had to work. Beller enjoyed a satisfying lunch of Nürnberger bratwurstel—the grilled local sausages—and sauerkraut with dark beer at a restaurant appropriately named Brat wurst-Hausle on the town square, then wandered out to enjoy the city. He had nothing to do until Sunday morning, and there was no point in wasting his time. The former home of celebrated painter Albrecht Dürer was interesting, but Beller enjoyed the toy and doll museum on Karlstrasse just as much. He’d always had a special fondness for toys. The Nürnberger Philharmoniker was giving an all-Haydn concert in the ultramodern Meistersingerhalle “dedicated to victims of fascism” that evening, and performed so well that Beller got a particularly good night’s sleep. Some might prefer Bruno Walter’s interpretation of the Allegretto movement in the “Military” Symphony no. 100, but this one seemed sound and left Beller quite satisfied.

  After breakfast he found himself thinking about the toys again. It was childish, of course, but he smiled just thinking of them and headed downtown to the city’s well-known toy shops. Mechanical toys—along with the pocket watch, the clarinet, gun casting and the first geographical globe—were invented in this nine-hundred-year-old trading center, and the local toy shops were still among the best-stocked in Europe. No one knew Ernest Beller here, so the doctor spent fifty happy minutes, without the least embarrassment, enjoying the diverse and complicated delights of the big Spielwarenhaus Virnich on Luitpoldstrasse. For some reason that he didn’t remember, he hungered for toys the way some little boys lust for candy. It was an appetite that could hardly be sated, one almost surely linked to the nightmare of his early years. The exact origins of the obsession could probably be identified by six or seven thousand dollars’ worth of psychotherapy, if one wanted to make the investment.


  Ernest Beller didn’t. All he wanted was to kill certain people, and to enjoy the simple pleasures of the toys.

  When he’d watched or touched or tested almost every item in the store, he walked on to the shop named Herbst at 17 Gibitzenhofstrasse.

  Trains.

  That was the specialty here. His eyes gleamed as he entered the store and saw the first wonderful display. Sensing a possible sale, a clerk threw a switch and the freight began to move. It was five minutes to eleven.

  At four minutes before eleven, another freight train rolled into sight. Beller couldn’t see it, for it was more than three hundred miles west of Nürnberg, near a large industrial city. Others watched it slow down for a curve. They wore the coveralls of track workers, three men who didn’t belong to any of Germany’s powerful unions but rather to a group that Merlin and his CIA colleagues called the Martians.

  Willi Lietzen.

  Paul Grawitz, who stole cars.

  Werner Buerckel, explosives expert.

  Lietzen held a small walkie-talkie to his ear, nodded. “Here they come,” he said.

  The train that swung around the curve was headed by two diesels, hauling some nineteen flatcars loaded with brand new Volkswagen sedans, a multicolored mix of Rabbits and Dashers. There was another car, a green Opel that sat motionless on the track. As soon as the train engineer saw it, he slammed on the brakes. The freight lurched and shuddered to a grinding halt less than ten yards from the sedan. Son of a bitch! The scared and sweating railroader stared at the Opel, swallowed the last of his shock and fear and stuck his head out of the cab to get a better look. He saw the trackmen.

  “What the hell’s going on?” he asked angrily.

  “It’s a revolution!” Willi Lietzen explained as he produced his gun. “Get down immediately and you’ll be all right.”

  The engineer hesitated for several seconds, not realizing that Willi Lietzen spoke literally. Since the railroader didn’t climb down immediately, he wasn’t all right.

  He was dead.

  Lietzen shot him between the eyes with a 9-millimeter automatic. The leader of the Martians wasn’t that great a marksman; it was just a lucky shot. A moment after the corpse fell out, the assistant engineer scrambled down hastily. Buerckel and Grawitz climbed up, moved quickly through the automobiles. Each VW had one window open a bit because of the summer heat. The terrorists slipped their brown-paper-wrapped packages inside the sedans, racing against time.

  “Fifty-two,” Buerckel reported when he climbed down from the train.

  “I told you to prepare at least a hundred,” grumbled Lietzen.

  “Ran out of stuff.”

  Lietzen shook his head. Ran out of brains was more like it. Surely Che and Mao had had better helpers than these simpletons.

  “Then get some more—please. Okay, Paul, let her roll.”

  After Buerckel had moved the Opel off the tracks, Grawitz set the train in motion—leaped off just as it got under way. Even as he jumped, the chief of the Martians was busy with his walkie-talkie. Two cars pulled up less than ninety seconds later. Karla Lange was at the wheel of the black Fiat, Marta Falkenhausen in the station wagon. Lietzen looked at his watch.

  “Everything all right?” Karla Lange asked.

  “We’ll know in about twenty seconds. Cover this moron, will you?”

  While the women pointed submachine guns at the dazed assistant engineer, the three men stripped off their coveralls and stuffed them into canvas airline bags.

  “Five seconds,” Marta Falkenhausen announced in expectant tones.

  “What do we do about him?” Buerckel wondered.

  “I told you, Werner. Handcuffs. Remember?”

  At that instant the first bomb went off with a flash of noise and fire. The other incendiary weapons blew up in swift succession, wrecking the cars on the train, charring shiny new VWs into twisted hulks. It was all right, Werner thought, for Willi had explained that much of the VW stock was owned by the corrupt and exploitative West German government.

  “Wünderbar!”

  Whatever people might say about Marta Falkenhausen, she was no anal-retentive. She was always generous in complimenting others’ good work, whether it was blowing up a building or shooting a policeman. That was one of the main reasons that Werner Buerckel liked her so much. She knew just as much political theory as Lietzen did, and yet she didn’t have to put comrades down all the time. Well, almost all the time. Even Willi Lietzen was smiling now as he watched the train recede, trailing smoke from the burning autos.

  The train kept rolling.

  “May I help you?”

  Beller looked up from the moving toy freight, saw the sales clerk hovering politely. The pathologist checked his watch. Eleven minutes. He’d been enjoying this countertop exhibit for eleven minutes, and now they were getting just a tiny bit impatient. The clerks at Herbst were used to adult males who were fascinated by the toy trains, and they certainly never crowded these “children of all ages.” This particular employee really thought that the man in English clothes might be ready to buy.

  “No, thank you,” Beller said. “You’ve got some very fine trains here.”

  “Best assortment in Bavaria, people tell us. I can see you’re a train buff, sir. Why don’t you look around? We don’t pressure people to buy at Herbst, you know.”

  “I’ll be back.”

  The truth was that Ernest Beller was a little embarrassed as he stepped out into the street. His mind knew that there were many men on both sides of the Atlantic—probably on both sides of the Pacific, too—who were still fascinated by toy trains. Their wives probably kidded them about it, wondered why they spent so much money on those elaborate model railroad setups in the spare room or cellar. Still, the very phrase “toy trains”—a misnomer—made Beller feel childish.

  He felt better a minute later. He found a Bible in the bookstore across the street, thought with his eyes closed about the quotation that had been bothering him since Frankfurt. Spying out the land? There it was. Right, the land was Canaan. Book of Numbers, of course. Chapter 13, verse 17.

  Ernest Beller didn’t waste the time to look up the Old Testament admonition about “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.”

  He knew that one by heart.

  19

  Something was happening to Ernest Beller.

  He wasn’t clear in his mind as to just what it was, but something was fermenting—down deep. It didn’t have a name yet. Perhaps his uncle could identify it or give it a label. Uncle Martin was a well-trained analyst who had both a great deal of experience and considerable intuitive skills. He rarely spoke of this intuition because his colleagues were so sure and so proud that their work was scientific, that their way was as precise and orderly and measurable as the methods of other physicians who dealt with infections or tumors. It had taken them decades to win the acceptance and respect of the others who had X rays and laboratory tests to detect their enemies, who could count things and prove things.

  The pathologist thought about this as he walked through the streets of the old section of Nürnberg that Saturday morning. He remembered the few occasions when his uncle had spoken about the intuition—the “trained intuition.” All kinds of doctors came to use it sooner or later, he’d confided. Not wildly, but shrewdly and intelligently. Even though they didn’t talk about it with lay people, it was understood in the profession and was nothing to be ashamed of really.

  Poor Uncle Martin.

  Now he couldn’t talk at all.

  If he could, he’d surely do something to interfere with Ernie’s vengeance. No, it wasn’t vengeance but rather punishment. Uncle Martin wasn’t the least bit religious and took the Bible as interesting folk myth, and if you spoke of “an eye for an eye” he’d likely say something about hating your father. So far as Ernie knew, he didn’t hate either of his parents, whom he’d last seen in that pit—just the beasts who’d put them there. Yes, that summarized the Third Reich. The beasts had put the people in the pi
ts—a weird reversal.

  Something was happening to Ernest Beller, and whatever it was, it was bothering him. He could feel it, like the menace in a house your stomach senses is really haunted. Something was making him walk faster than he wanted to or needed to, and something was pushing him into a part of the city that he’d already explored. Pausing to avoid being pulped by a Würtzberger beer truck, he thought carefully and wondered why this thing seemed murky. He was still confident that logical step-by-step analysis would produce the correct answer.

  It had something to do with the warden.

  The man who ran the prison at Schloss Gillenstein had made some remark, planted some seed that was now putting out roots. Beller could feel them sprouting and growing in his unconscious, growing stronger by the second. Religion. Yes, that was it. The warden had spoken of his strong religious training and convictions, and now Ernest Beller wondered why he himself had been given neither. What had he missed? Was this the reason that he felt alone and outside, unable to enjoy the communal warmth shared by those who had religious identities?

  He was sweating now.

  His throat was dry.

  The pathologist hurried on, caught himself just before he would have collided with an elderly woman turning the corner. The dark glasses and cane said that she was blind. Goddammit, Beller thought, I could have knocked her sprawling into the traffic.

  She sensed his nearness, coughed. “Would you accompany me across the street?” she asked in matter-of-fact tones devoid of self-pity.

  “Of course.”

  He tried not to ask the question, failed.

  “Was it the war? Who did this?”

  The white-haired woman smiled. “I lost my sight only nine years ago, long after the war. No, it wasn’t American or British bombers, young man. It was God.”

  God, again.

  God and some odd quest for guilt were a strange combination, Beller brooded after he left her. No, he didn’t feel guilty. They had asked for the bombing. They had blasted the cities of other nations first, and he certainly had no doubts that the aerial punishment was justified. God—any god—would sanction such just retribution. The tribunal that had called those gory official deeds of the German government “crimes against humanity” was right, but Beller was strangely relieved that this woman in her seventies hadn’t been blinded by Allied airmen. As a rational person, Ernest Beller realized that it would be less than fair to blame all Germans for the horrors.