Time of Reckoning

by Walter Wager

  Merlin’s chuckle was a masterpiece of macho joviality.

  “Not the real Eskimos. You knew that, you old fox. Just using the word to describe all the different kinds of foreigners. Foreign doctors or chemists, who entered the Federal Republic between, say, May first and the day that person was killed in the Hamburg prison. Male, Caucasian, between thirty and forty.”

  Now this was interesting.

  Perhaps some insane group of homicidal foreigners had conspired to commit these murders. Grad had a certain fondness for conspiracies, although nothing to compare with U.S. journalists and free-lance social critics of both Left and Right who saw conspiracies under every gooseberry bush and dog dropping. Some of them were still gathering evidence to expose the bastards who stole that apple and framed Eve for the sin.

  “There can’t be that many,” Merlin pressed.

  “I don’t know. It’s the beginning of the tourist season.”

  “Forget the psychiatrists, chiropodists, brain surgeons, dermatologists and nutrition experts. Just the kind of guys who might have the skills for these fancy hits. You can do it!”

  Grad considered, nodded. “Maybe the Tourist Office keeps records. Perhaps there were some conventions,” he speculated.

  “There were! One was swinging in Berlin the day after I arrived in June. Can we check on this? Please?”

  Grad weighed the request, and hesitated. “We are not friends, Herr Wasserman, we are colleagues. I respect your work, and our governments are allies, but we are not friends.”

  Merlin shifted his attack instantly. “You’re right, but I’m not asking this out of goodwill. Strictly business. Do this and I’ll owe you one—a big one. No sentiment. It’ll be in your account, like a bank.”

  The Tourist Office and the passport-control people would do all the work, and not an hour of BND time would be invested. Two or three phone calls ought to do it. With a little luck, Grad could avoid putting anything in writing—leaving an escape route from blame if anything went wrong.

  “This is an official request from your agency?”

  “Absolutely,” Merlin lied briskly.

  That was another piece of insurance—the kind that capable survivors like Grad always assembled.

  “Sehr gut. I will do what I can, Herr Wasserman. Strictly business. I should tell you,” he said as Merlin stood up, “that—if I may be blunt—I have always found you and your methods somewhat disturbing.”

  Merlin’s expression of hurt surprise was only a trifle overdone, but rather good considering his closest connection with the Actors Studio was a blonde TV starlet who’d proven her sincerity during a wild weekend in Honolulu.

  “I don’t blame you, Karl. It’s big of you to do this, and I won’t forget it,” he improvised creatively.

  Brando could have done better, but no spy service in the world would meet his price. Merlin left and Grad made two telephone calls, and a lot of clerks and data-processing technicians in Bonn and Berlin were working on the matter less than two hours later. In the great tradition of bureaucracies and office management everywhere, no one told them what this “job” was all about—and they didn’t care.

  Ernest Beller cared a great deal. Alone in the apartment while she was out buying milk, he looked at the pictures again—and he hated. But it wasn’t the same, for now there was another feeling that had come with his love for Anna. He knew that it was his duty to punish these murderers, but the nine more on his list seemed like strangers, more like ghosts than devils. There could be no doubt that this was the time of reckoning, but he wondered what might happen to Anna if he continued his dangerous crusade.

  Would he be caught or slain, leaving her alone?

  Would the dead forgive him if he stopped?

  He heard her key in the door, relocked his attaché case and faced her in the doorway. Just seeing her was a delight, and the anger began to fade. By the time they went to bed that night, the bitterness was changing to something less fiery—a heavy burden of obligation. Long after she put out the table lamp and slid off into sleep, he lay awake in the darkness beside her warmth—wondering.

  He made up his mind as he was shaving the next morning. He couldn’t put it off any longer. He would have to go to that place, to confront the horror face-to-face. He had dreaded it so long, feared the reality that might tear him to pieces. He told her while she refilled his coffee cup twenty minutes later.

  “I have to go away for a couple of days,” he said as calmly as he could.

  “I’ll come with you,” she volunteered.

  “No, it’s business. My book. I’ll be back on Saturday night.”

  She accepted, smiled and lit up the whole man.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Munich.”

  It wasn’t entirely untrue. He’d have to pass through Munich on his way to a quaint old Bavarian town twelve miles to the north, described as a “gay-hearted place” in the Fodor guidebook, which noted that it was “much frequented by landscape painters for the beauty of its scenery.”

  Dachau.

  43

  It was half-past one when Beller parked his car near Munich’s gabled “new” City Hall, but he wasn’t the least bit hungry. His mind, not his stomach, told him that he should eat. He walked across the Weinstrasse to the Donisl, recalling that it was the oldest beer hall in the Bavarian metropolis. After that, his attention drifted and he was barely aware that he was chewing as he mechanically cut and ingested two mustard-covered veal sausages and a dense dumpling. He didn’t taste the draft Löwenbräu either, for he was half-numb with the apprehension that had been growing and hardening within him for so many hours.

  When he wandered out into the August afternoon, he paused to focus on the flow of cars and trucks that could kill him. It wasn’t easy, for the fear affected his sight and his senses—even his depth perception. Concentrating very hard, he forced his way through the streets to the railway station. He had made up his mind even before he left Freudenstadt. His parents had come to the camp in rail cars—cattle cars crammed with human fuel for that giant incinerator—and he, too, would go by train. He didn’t know why, but the ritual was important.

  His train was the number 2 S-Bahn, the commuter run out in the direction of Petershausen. Fare, one dollar. The other passengers were local people, for almost all the tourists who came to look in awe at the murder factory—not that many after all these years—traveled by bus with sincere guides who could talk calmly of the massacres in several languages. Beller heard only German in the modern and comfortable train.

  After twenty-five minutes he got out and found a Dachau city bus. He boarded a number 6, paid his thirty cents and wondered whether he would faint before he got there.

  He didn’t.

  Somehow, as he got nearer he grew stronger.

  He forced himself to be stronger, to prepare for the impact of facing the nightmares he had never let himself dream. Even so, he wasn’t ready for the shock of that small white sign.

  KZ-Gedenkstatte.

  KZ—that meant Konzentrationlager.

  Concentration camp.

  He literally gasped, and the other people who got off the bus with him turned at the sound. There were five of them—a pair of college boys in UCLA T-shirts, a middle-aged French couple, and a thin old man in black who walked with a cane.

  “You speak German, mister?” the taller of the students asked.

  Beller nodded.

  “Gedenkstatte? What’s that?”

  “Memorial,” the doctor translated.

  They thanked him, walked toward the gate.

  From the outside, the camp seemed unchanged. The big compound—990 feet wide and 1980 feet long—was still ringed by that barbed-wire-and-concrete barrier, and over there, outside the perimeter, stood four of those ovens where the bodies had been burned up so efficiently. One thing had changed. There were no armed guards at the gate. Instead of S.S. sadists, a polite young woman—a civil servant, no doubt—was selling guidebooks
at fifteen cents. He saw the Californians buy one, stroll slowly into the “memorial.”

  “You’ve just missed the film,” the woman at the gate said.

  “Film?” Beller wondered numbly.

  “In both English and German—twenty-five minutes long. We show it every day at eleven and three. Every day except December twenty-fourth, the afternoon before New Year’s and Shrove Tuesday. That’s when we’re closed. It’s free.”

  The stunned survivor walked past her, and saw that almost all the buildings were gone. The avenging Americans—or was it the embarrassed German authorities?—had leveled the barracks years ago, but two duplicates had been built so that visitors could see what the quarters had been like. Beller walked slowly to one, entered and stared at the empty silent chamber.

  Something happened.

  The room was filled with gaunt prisoners in that familiar uniform—for just a moment.

  Then they were gone.

  He turned, started across the compound to the museum, originally the headquarters for the camp’s administration. A weird wind was blowing from somewhere, making a moaning sound like the voices of a thousand men and women in agony. And children.

  Just like that.

  There he was, a little three-year-old boy knotted up with terror. Gunfire. Tank cannon, machine guns, bazookas, shouting, screaming, engines roaring—the sounds of war.

  The sounds of that awful-wonderful-unbelievable and fiercely unforgettable day when the Shermans smashed in and broke the murder machine. The noise was terribly loud and confusing, and the little boy turned his head.

  He was looking into that pit, the one with all the emaciated corpses. There—that face belonged to his mother, and that hand sticking up out of the heap of human debris had once been part of his father. The clatter of the tanks drowned out everything—even the screaming—and now a metal monster appeared. The soldiers who manned it were oddly familiar too, even if he couldn’t remember their names. The child pointed at a nearby barracks, and one of the Americans shot a sniper out of an upper window.

  It all stopped.

  Just like that.

  Dr. Beller was walking toward the museum, saw the tourists and their guide—and turned away. He didn’t have to look at the pictures and other “memorabilia,” so he turned to stare at the open tower, the Catholic expiatory chapel named Christ in Agony. The Protestant commemorative chapel flanked it on one side, the Jewish memorial on the other. The Nazis had killed men and women of all faiths and nationalities.

  And children.

  Hundreds of children.

  Tons of children, slaughtered for the incinerators.

  Now people were emerging from the Catholic chapel, real-today people following a sober-faced guide. They couldn’t hear the screams and noises that filled Ernst Beller’s head, but they were plainly affected. They trailed the guide in total silence, and one woman—a nun—was weeping without making a sound. Beller saw her dab at her eyes with a handkerchief, and thought of his Anna.

  His eyes closed, and he was looking at those American soldiers climbing back onto their tank. The young one—the man who’d shot the S.S. sniper—gave a book to a small boy, and then an older man handed the child several packs of cigarettes. The engine noise swelled to a roar, and the soldiers waved as their armored machine moved away—leaving the child all alone.

  Alone.

  The doctor must have blacked out, for he remembered nothing until he found himself in a bus entering the city of Dachau. He’d ridden too far, or had he? No, the train station was just ahead. The two American college students got out with him.

  “Going to the festival?” one asked.

  “Festival?”

  “Starts tonight. Big celebration. It’s an annual thing in Dachau. Traditional costumes, feasting, beer and ox races.”

  Beller looked back toward the camp, and even though it was miles away and impossible to see he saw the pit again—and he knew what he had to do. He hoped that Anna would understand.

  One more.

  “Ox races?” he asked. “No, I’ve got an appointment in Berlin.”

  One more, and then he’d be able to rejoin Anna and live in peace—at last. He’d have paid his debt. He’d call her from Munich to explain the brief delay, and then he’d go on to Berlin for The Big One. It had to be The Big One, he thought as he boarded the train. When that was done, he’d stop. The people in the pit would understand. He was tired of killing, and he wanted to live safely and warmly with Anna.

  He smiled in anticipation, unaware that bored civil servants and mindless machines were hunting him hundreds of miles away. The threat was no longer the guards at all those German prisons, or the BND that had alerted them. No, it was the computers that were closing in—minute by minute.

  The net was tightening.

  44

  “I won’t do it,” Diane McGhee repeated as they walked through the air-terminal crowd toward Gate 4.

  “I’m not asking you to do it. I just want you to phone Bill Frost at State and tell him what I need,” Merlin cajoled.

  “Bill Frost hates you.”

  “No, he dislikes me, but he doesn’t hate me. He’ll do it. Look, Grad doesn’t like me either, and he cooperated. Very nicely. Found out one thousand, two hundred and eighty-four foreign doctors entered West Germany in the five weeks before the first hit, eliminated the women and shrinks and golden-age crowd, found all but six had left the country before the last job in Düsseldorf. Now I’m going to check on the two Englishmen, the South African tropical-disease expert and those French immunologists. All I want you to do—”

  “Is one American. Dr. Ernest Beller, New York City. You told me, seven times. It isn’t my business, your business or company business.”

  “You’ve said that—seventeen times. Please, phone Frost when you get to Kennedy—and try Rudin in the Pentagon. Maybe this guy was in the Army.”

  “Rudin doesn’t like you either, and he says so.”

  Merlin relit his cigar.

  “That’s just his manner. Really a sweetie-pie, and he loves to help people. Bill Frost at State, and Rudin at DOD, okay?”

  “Never. I’ll never do it, and you’ll never change. It’s hopeless.”

  “Honey, it’s going to be okay. I’m crazy about you.”

  “No, just crazy. I must be crazy, too, to get involved with you again. You’re a great lover, but—well—hopeless.”

  Merlin looked at her with visible admiration.

  Of course, it could have been a sham.

  “When I get back, baby,” he said, “let’s see if we can put it back together—the way it was.”

  That was when she raised her purse to hit him. The argument raged right up to the minute when she left him to head for the plane, which took off at noon—exactly sixty-one hours after Beller reached West Berlin.

  The phone call from New York awakened Merlin at the Hilton shortly before 2 A.M.

  “We were both right,” she said.

  “Where are you?”

  “Central Park West—the apartment of Dr. Beller’s uncle and aunt. Frost hates you—just as I said.”

  “Did he do it?”

  “Yes. That’s how I got here. The uncle and aunt are listed on the who-to-call-in-emergency-next-of-kin part of the passport because Dr. Ernest Beller’s parents are deceased. You want to guess where they died?”

  “Auschwitz?”

  “Dachau. Class of forty-five. He was there too. He was three years old when our tanks broke in—it’s in his immigration file.”

  Merlin shook his head, surprised to find more pity than triumph within himself.

  “You there?” she asked.

  “Keep talking. Three years old. Jesus Christ!”

  “Jesus Christ!” she agreed. “He was in the U.S. Army—in Germany. Assigned to a Special Forces outfit. Took the damn hand-to-hand-combat and demolition courses just for laughs.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  Merlin didn’t know what else to sa
y.

  “There’s more. His uncle—he’s an analyst—had a stroke in May. Can’t talk. Been trying to communicate something for weeks—in writing.”

  “What the hell is he writing, Di?”

  “Three weeks ago—‘Stop Ernest.’ His wife couldn’t make any sense out of it. Yesterday he wrote something else. ‘Ernest kills—police.’ She was wondering whom to tell when I arrived.”

  “How much did you tell her?”

  “Very little.”

  “Good. She might have a stroke too. Who’d you tell her you worked for?”

  “State—Hang on a second… Listen, Mrs. Beller just remembered they got a card from him three days ago. It’s postmarked—let’s see—F-r-e-u-d-e-n—Freudenstadt.”

  “I’ll find it. Freudenstadt, right.”

  “You’ve got to find him,” she appealed.

  “What?”

  “You were right. It’s our business. I’m putting a picture and bio on the wire to you tonight.”

  There was no immediate reply.

  “Maybe you were right,” Merlin finally answered. “This guy’s a goddam genius. He’s doing what we’d all like to do.”

  “Not me. Don’t be crazy.”

  “Those murdering bastards should have been wiped out years ago, Di.”

  “Please—please, don’t play God. Send him home before someone gets hurt. I beg you.”

  Before Ernest Beller gets hurt.

  Or killed by some prison guard.

  She didn’t say it, but Merlin could hear it in her voice.

  “I’m counting on you,” she pleaded.

  She still knew exactly what worked, Merlin thought admiringly.

  “Okay, I’ll do it—but I think this guy ought to get a medal.”

  “For me.”

  “I said I’d do it. Anything else?”

  “When are you coming back?”

  He tried to compute how long it might take to find one brilliant avenging angel in the middle of 62,000,000 West Germans and perhaps 750,000 summer visitors—somewhere in a nation covering 96,000 square miles.

  “Two, three weeks. Soon as I can. I’ll give you enough notice so you can change the sheets.”