Time of Reckoning

by Walter Wager

  The attendant had merely paused for breath. There was more.

  “Spinal ailments, neurovegetative metabolic irregularities, rehabilitation from infarct effects, nervous and physical exhaustion, postaccident and postoperative and orthopedic rehabilitation,” the man singsonged proudly.

  Dr. Beller didn’t laugh. It sounded ridiculous, but it actually wasn’t all that bizarre. The tradition of spas that tried to cope with an extraordinary variety of diseases and afflictions was an old one, and it wasn’t limited to Germany. The Germans, of course, had always been particularly vulnerable to odd theories of pseudoscience. Beller wasn’t about to judge the merits of this particular establishment, largely because he didn’t give a damn.

  “If you have any further questions, mein herr, you may telephone for further information,” the attendant invited.

  There was the answer.

  Simple, logical, obvious.

  Beller thanked the helpful man in the white jacket, hummed as he walked back to the hotel to call the prison. Thanks to the efficiency of the Federal Republic’s modern telephone system, he was speaking to the secretary of the warden at Kuppenheim within ninety seconds. Fraulein Kluger sat bolt upright in her chair when she learned that she was speaking to the deputy director of Penal Research at the Ministry of Social Services, who was plainly furious.

  “If you people can’t fill these reports out properly,” Beller snapped in the petulant tones of the outraged bureaucrat, “you cause other departments a great deal of trouble.”

  “I’m terribly sorry,” she apologized. “I’ll put another copy in the pouch today…Yes, here it is—Hugo R. Dolken—diagnosis: terminal cancer…released on compassionate grounds on the ninth to his granddaughter, Anna Griese…107 Mullerstrasse in Freudenstadt… I can assure you that another copy of the full medical report—”

  “I can assure you, fraulein,” Beller roared, “that you people at Kuppenheim will hear more about this.”

  He slammed down the phone, smiled and reached for his weapons.

  The house was the third in a block of typical Black Forest houses, all four stories with beamed fronts in the architectural style so popular in the region forty or fifty years earlier. Beller prowled the quiet residential neighborhood, decided from its cars and small shops that it was lower-middle-class and finally entered the street-floor foyer of 107.

  Griese—2B.

  The implacable boy from Dachau took a deep breath and nodded. Dolken might fool or bribe those prison doctors, but he would not escape the vengeance of Ernst Beller. For a moment the nameplate over the buzzer blurred, and suddenly the pit—that pit with the heaped corpses—filled his vision. It was over in three or four seconds, and Beller was calm as he rang the bell.

  “She’s not here.”

  Beller turned to face a thin, crafty-looking old man with a cane.

  “I’ve come to see her grandfather.”

  The gray-haired man grunted, pointed to the right. “You”ll find them both at Hofschuster’s—Gruning Terrasse. Eighty or ninety Gruning,” he replied with a grin that was somehow unpleasant. He jabbed with the weathered stick again. “That way. Two blocks, then right two more—no, three. They’re both there.”

  Beller couldn’t quite make out what the old man muttered after he’d thanked him, so he circled the senior citizen and set off for Hofschuster’s. He’d have to be careful, alert for traps.

  Just as Dolken would be.

  A man who’d been clever enough to trick his way out of prison was no fool, no dozing graybeard worn down by the boredom and confinement of years behind walls. No, Dolken would be more dangerous than the others.

  It was exciting. The doctor recognized and labeled the thrill a moment after the adrenaline flushed into his bloodstream, and he stopped dead in his tracks. It was embarrassing. Uncle Martin would have other words, none of them pleasant. The medical terms themselves would be flat and diagnostic, but they would all add up to some kind of mental illness.

  “No,” Beller said aloud as he turned onto Gruning Terrasse. It wasn’t true. He was no homicidal psychotic, no vicious hunter seeking the thrill of the kill. He wasn’t doing any of this for personal pleasure or even vengeance. It wasn’t that at all. It was that the time of reckoning had come. The legal system had failed to deal with these butchers adequately, and he was merely correcting things. He was doing what thousands—probably millions—of people all around the world dreamed of doing. He was settling the account—at last.

  After all those victims.

  After all those years.

  It was time.

  It was time, and it was just—and no one else would do it, so Ernst Beller had to take the responsibility.

  Hofschuster—a small brass plaque set in the brick wall of a large three-story building. The sign beside the dark wooden door gave no clue as to what sort of business this structure housed, but there were no police in sight and no unaccounted-for men lingering in nearby cars. The doctor strolled by to the next corner, noted no menace and returned to enter. Wood-paneled walls, a marble floor, lights a bit dimmer than Beller liked. It all added up to something heavy. The atmosphere was almost thick, and Beller found it oppressive. There was a wooden table and a chair, unoccupied.

  What sort of place was this?

  At the far end of this foyer were two large doors, but there was no one to ask where Fraulein Griese might be. Beller scanned the lobby, walked forward warily to open one of the big swinging doors. He was in a chapel, a large room with rows of pews on either side of a carpeted aisle and a simple crucifix on a pedestal at the far end. There was only one person in the room, a pretty young woman in a simple dark dress and shoulder-length blonde hair. She might have been twenty-three or twenty-five. She was surely in pain. You didn’t have to be an analyst to read the suffering in her face.

  “Fraulein Griese?”

  She looked up, stared at Beller with large sad eyes that seemed to peer right through him.

  “Fraulein Anna Griese?” he tested cautiously.

  She nodded as if speech might hurt her throat.

  “Kurt Nessel,” the executioner lied as he glanced around for his target. “I was told that you were here with your grandfather.”

  She nodded again, abstractedly brushed back a loose strand of that fine gold hair. “I can’t cry,” she said in numb-choked tones.

  It didn’t make any sense, and Beller wondered whether she might be deranged.

  “I don’t mind that nobody came,” she continued in that cramped voice, “but I hoped that one or two might…Do I know you?”

  “No. I came to Freudenstadt to see your grandfather.”

  She was more than pretty.

  She was nearly beautiful, and haunted.

  “Here he is,” she said.

  She pointed at a coffin almost obscured by the pews, and Beller stepped forward to look at the corpse of Hugo Dolken. Was it a deception? Could they have prepared another body—one with a similar face?

  No, it was the sadist dentist all right. There was the malformed left earlobe he’d had from birth, and the right pinkie crushed in a 1953 escape attempt merely confirmed the identification. The son of a bitch was dead. He’d cheated Beller, and all the victims.

  “I can’t cry because I didn’t really like him, Herr—I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.”

  “Nessel.”

  “He was my grandfather, but we were all ashamed. He did terrible things for the Nazis—unspeakable things.” She shook her head.

  Was it anger or pity?

  “Was he a friend of yours, Herr—Nessel?”

  “We never met. I’m doing research for a book, and I hoped he might help.”

  She sat down, clearly exhausted. “He had no friends, and he never helped anyone. Maybe some of those other Hitler gangsters were his—I don’t know. I don’t know anything about my terrible grandfather, except that he’s dead and no one has come to mourn him and even I can’t cry.”

  “Fraulein Griese—�
�� Beller began.

  “I can’t cry!”

  Beller stepped forward and put his arm around her.

  It was quite extraordinary.

  He didn’t understand it, but he felt sorry for the monster’s granddaughter. He held her firmly but tenderly, and after a few moments he felt the sobs battling deep within her. Muffled gasps and spasms tore at her, but it took longer before he heard her cry. Two or three minutes later the weeping subsided, and Beller offered her his handkerchief.

  Even puffy and tearstained, she was lovely.

  “Fraulein,” he heard himself say, “may I see you home?”

  28

  It was a hot afternoon and the rented blue Audi moved slowly through the heavy Ku-damm traffic. Cavaliere was pleased to be back in civilian clothes again. He was also puzzled.

  “Merl,” he asked politely as he saw the bulk of the Hilton ahead, “why are we in Berlin?”

  “We’re here because they’re here. I know they are,” the man behind the wheel replied confidently.

  “I’m sure you’re right, but what makes you sure?”

  The light changed, and Merlin smiled, nicely. “My left nut,” he explained. “My left nut tells me the Martians are here in West Berlin.”

  It was going to be one of those crazy Merlin conversations, the migraine specials.

  “Well, your left nut’s never been wrong,” Angelo Cavaliere agreed with a shrug. “Best left nut in the agency, they say.”

  “My left nut and the fact that they’ve pulled twice as many jobs here as anywhere else during the past year. They’ve got a burrow here somewhere,” Merlin said as he neatly avoided creasing a passing police car, “so all we’ve got to do is find it.”

  The entrance to the Hilton garage was only ninety yards ahead, and Merlin said nothing as he maneuvered through the traffic.

  “Big city…Martians know it cold…thousands of German cops and security pros couldn’t find them…only two of us…goddam mess,” he summarized after a brief silence.

  The son of a bitch could read minds too.

  “I know you hate to bother people, Merl,” his partner began hopefully, “but Diane’s a pretty sharp station officer and she’s got a whole gang of experienced troops here, so I wonder whether you think this might be the time to use her—”

  Merlin broke right into the thought, at full speed. “No, I think it’s time we—you and me—stopped farting around and took the initiative ourselves. It’s time to kick some ass,” he announced, and he explained his plan. Typical goddam Merlin plan—simple, brutal and practical.

  “Do I have time for an aspirin? I’m getting a headache,” Cavaliere said truthfully.

  Merlin shook his head, turned the Audi into the garage driveway and parked the car. Then it all happened very quickly, exactly as Cavaliere had dreaded. Merlin went up to his room to collect two concussion grenades and a silencer for his handgun. He exposed the hidden “bug,” picked up the telephone.

  “Operator, this is Mr. Wasserman in nine twenty-seven. I’d like to call Frankfurt. The number is two…four…one…”

  He didn’t say the next four digits. Instead he tapped the eavesdropping device several times with his ballpoint pen and hung up abruptly. Next he jammed the tip of the pen into the radio-microphone, put the “bug” back where it had been and started for the door. He didn’t slow down to answer the ringing phone, for he knew that it was the diligent operator calling for the rest of the imaginary Frankfurt number.

  Merlin was smiling as he left. He’d been angry for weeks about being followed and “bugged,” and now he was going to eliminate the source of irritation. He would remind them that such disrespect for a veteran of his stature would not be tolerated. Someone was going to get hurt.

  Four minutes after Frank Wasserman stepped out of the hotel onto the chic Budapester Strasse, a man in German sports clothes stepped out of Room 933 into the corridor. The watcher in the lobby had reported Merlin’s exit, so it was safe to check on what had happened to the “bug.” The door of 927 yielded to the man’s skeleton key, and it took him less than fifty seconds to place a new “bug” and depart with the damaged model in his left fist.

  He didn’t see Cavaliere hiding up at the turn in the corridor.

  He wasn’t supposed to.

  “Maybe twenty-six or twenty-eight, blonde hair—almost white—about five-nine or ten,” Cavaliere told Merlin in the garage a few minutes later.

  “Only one?”

  “All I saw.”

  “There’ll be more in the room,” Merlin computed.

  “Nine thirty-three, just up the hall.”

  Merlin visualized the location, nodded. “Anything else?” he asked.

  “He was sort of bouncy.”

  “Bouncy?”

  “Walked on the balls of his feet—like an athlete.”

  “In five minutes he’ll be on the balls of his ass,” Merlin promised harshly.

  It wasn’t standard operating procedure at all, and Cavaliere wanted to point out that there was no certainty that the listeners were Martians. They could very well be Sovs, probably were. Maybe even West German operatives. Shit, it would be a waste of time to argue, Cavaliere brooded as they entered the elevator. Merlin had been simmering since news of the gas attack on the jailed woman in Stuttgart and the destruction of the Beckum petrochemical plant. Now he’d come to a boil. He wanted to smash back, and now that he’d found a foe to hit there was no way that Cavaliere or anyone else could talk him out of it.

  Concussion grenades?

  Terrible.

  “Let’s go,” Merlin said as they walked out of the elevator on the tenth floor and headed for the fire stairs. The crazy bastard was grinning like some enthusiastic high-school football player. Merlin stepped out onto the ninth floor first, looked around and signaled Cavaliere to join him. When they reached Room 933, Merlin handed his partner one of grenades and then screwed the silencer onto the .22-caliber assassin’s gun.

  “Don’t want to wreck the furniture,” he whispered.

  He didn’t give a damn what the grenades would do to the poor bastards inside Room 933. No, not poor bastards, dumb bastards, Cavaliere told himself. If they were smarter they’d have seen him.

  Jesus Christ. He was starting to think like Merlin.

  “Ready?” Merlin mouthed silently.

  When Cavaliere nodded, Merlin rapped on the door.

  He said that it was “room service”—in a perfect Berlin accent—and a moment later someone warily opened the door, just two inches. Merlin kicked it in instantly, and even as it flew back he hurled in the first concussion grenade. As planned, Angelo Cavaliere threw in the second only a moment later. The two CIA men leaped to either side of the doorway in the hall, dodging the shock waves that would smash the people in the room.

  Two explosions—loud.

  The first sent the two men inside the room flying, hurling one head first into the plate-glass window with such terrific force that it shattered and cut his scalp open in four places. The other man was literally blasted through the bathroom door, which hung crazily on one hinge. Metal and plastic remnants of a tape recorder and an FM radio transmitter were sprayed around the room like souvenirs of some dead civilization. Dozens of bits of glass from what had been a large mirror littered every surface, and the empty frame of the mirror over the bathroom sink testified that the shock waves had battered the entire suite.

  Blood pouring down over his face and ears, the man by the ruined window tried to get up—but fell. The scarlet gush looked weird in that white-blond hair, but Merlin paid no attention to the man’s injuries. He walked over, jerked the automatic from the bleeding man’s belly holster and put it in his own belt.

  “Three minutes,” he announced as he turned and walked to close the door to the corridor.

  “That guy may bleed to death!” Cavaliere protested.

  “We should have brought Band-Aids. Listen, Angie, wrap a sheet around his head while I talk to his friend in the can
. If Blondie gets funny, just kick him in the face.”

  Merlin picked the other dazed man off the bathroom floor, noted that he was bleeding from his ears, nostrils and mouth. His shirt was blown half off, and only his right shoe remained. Merlin dragged him to the sink, turned on the cold water.

  “You look disgusting,” Merlin said, and shoved the man’s face into the water. It only took seconds for the shock of the water—on his face and in his nose and mouth—to jerk him back to reality. His body convulsed in some primeval spasm as it fought to avoid drowning, and he choked and gagged before Merlin pulled him from the bowl.

  “You still look terrible. You always dress in rags?” Merlin baited. He dropped the man onto the toilet, still gasping and bleeding.

  “We’ve got about two and a third minutes before somebody shows up to find out what happened here, chum,” Merlin explained, “so you’ve got one minute—maybe eighty seconds—to tell us who you work for and your mother’s maiden name.”

  The pudgy choking man looked up, coughed. “You mother!” he said venomously.

  Merlin picked him up, threw him out into the bedroom like a toy. He crashed into an end table, which broke.

  “Seventy seconds—and counting,” Merlin noted.

  “I think this one needs an ambulance,” Cavaliere appealed.

  “Merlin, you bastard!”

  It wasn’t Cavaliere who spoke. It was the half-drowned man sprawled on the floor.

  “She said you were crazy, and she was—right,” he croaked before the coughs swept all words away again.

  “Who said?” Merlin demanded.

  The man on the floor wiped the blood from his mouth, gagged again before he spoke. “Same side…same side.”

  Merlin ignored the crude diversion. “Who said? You’d better answer, or I’ll drop your cousin here right out the window,” he threatened.

  The man stared up, furious and defiant. “Station officer.”

  “Oh, my God,” groaned Cavaliere.

  “Horse shit. What station officer?” challenged Merlin.

  “Merlin—”

  “Shut up, Angie. What station officer?”