Time of Reckoning Page 7

  A thin man in expensive German business clothes and gold-rimmed spectacles entered the room, silently joined Beller in absorbing news of the latest Mexican earthquake as the machine hammered on mindlessly.

  “’Course New Yawk’s dirty too,” the hearty southerner volunteered cheerily. “One thing you gotta say ’bout Hamburg—clean streets and plenny a tail. Know what Ah mean?” He had the chuckle of a lewd Santa Claus.

  “The Reeperbahn area’s famous for that sort of thing,” the pathologist acknowledged. He started for the door.

  “Nothin’ beats a creep on the Reep. Strippuhs by the yard, bare-ass nekked right to their toes. Every damn kinda hooker you can ’magine. Over hunred of ’em in a great big cat house licensed by the gummint. Call it Err-ozz Centuh.”

  “Not Err-ozz. Ear-oss,” Beller corrected as he tried to circle the beefy barrier.

  “Been there too, huh?” smirked the fat man. “Found me a dandy club called Madame Pomp-a-door. Two real big blondes with gallon jugs, best Ah evuh saw. Five, six littul chicks from Tie-land. Only tongue they spoke was French, know what Ah mean?”

  Beller half-smiled politely.

  “We shooah don’t have all this wall-to-wall pussy in Austin!” the other American declared.

  “And we don’t have snipers at our university here in Hamburg!” the patriotic German executive broke in icily.

  Beller took advantage of the confrontation to slide out into the hotel lobby. The Atlantic was Hamburg’s finest, where sophisticated film tycoons such as Otto Preminger and obscenely rich oil sheiks’ horny sons would stay when visiting the historic Baltic port that was West Germany’s second largest city. Everything about the ornate lobby—from the lofty ceiling to the gleaming shoes of the green-jacketed bellboys—was posh. The stately-stolid exterior of the pre-World War II hotel didn’t pretend to be contemporary, but the bathrooms were dazzlingly modern in their hardware, and Beller enjoyed the view of the Aussen-Alster lakefront. Water and the feel of the sea were basic ingredients in Hamburg’s special charm. Dr. Beller liked the Elbe River, the two Alster “lakes” and the huge bustling port. He enjoyed the three hundred thousand buildings that survived the Allied bombing and respected the rather dashing new architecture, and he certainly had nothing against the two million residents of this prosperous metropolis.

  Except Otto Kretschman.

  Actually, Kretschman was an involuntary resident housed in a cell on the third floor of the massive old Kaiserwald Prison. The pathologist couldn’t remember why they’d named a penal institution within the city limits as if it were in a king’s wood, but he knew what Kretschman had done and where. The former S.S. officer had been in charge of the gas chamber that Hitler’s regime had used to slaughter so many thousands—at Dachau.

  That’s why he was going to be first.

  Hitler? Nobody mentioned Hitler, the doctor mused as he strolled out to look at the pleasure craft only two hundred yards away. The small boats made a pretty scene, and when he turned the other way he saw the impressive spires of Saint Jacobi, Saint Katherinen and Saint Petri thrusting skyward. There was the pierced neo-Gothic tower of Saint Nicolai, tallest of all. Dr. Beller appreciated beauty in churches, music, women and other natural wonders—but he wondered why no one in Germany ever mentioned Hitler.

  Were they trying to pretend that he’d never existed?

  Were they so fearful of guilt that they couldn’t even speak his awful name?

  Why did that word—those two syllables—choke in the throats of so many who hadn’t even been born when those terrible deeds were done?

  These were the thoughts that zigzagged through Ernest Beller’s mind as he walked away from the hotel, swinging the brown leather briefcase in the breeze. Hamburg was more than sixty-five miles up the Elbe from the Baltic, but there was still a taste of sea in the air. He walked for a long time until he came to a restaurant with a view of the port, and he was careful to order the local specialty—eel soup with ham bone and five kinds of fruit. The pathologist didn’t mean to eat another meal in this city, and it would be a shame to miss the eel soup for which Hamburg was justly famous.

  After he paid his check, he went to the men’s room to put on horn-rimmed spectacles of clear glass and a false mustache. Checking his disguise in the mirror, the Dachau survivor was surprised to find that the mustache resembled Hitler’s. He shrugged at the irony, went out to flag down the taxi that took him to Kaiserwald. Surrounded by twenty-eight-foot walls topped with guard towers, this big gray building looked exactly like what it was—a German penal institution built in 1912—though it had been modernized slightly in 1956.

  The chief warden was waiting for him.

  “Everything is ready, Herr Doktor,” he announced in German when Beller was ushered into his office.

  He spoke German because the forged letter from the Ministry of Justice about Dr. Frohlich’s research was written in German, and “Frohlich” was supposed to be an official from the health service in Berlin.

  “There are only seven inmates here who meet your specifications,” the chief warden apologized.

  “They’ve all been here at least fifteen years?”

  “Correct. One of them’s been inside since nineteen forty-nine. You probably never heard of him—Otto Kretschman. Before your time, eh?”

  “A bit,” Ernst Beller lied.

  He was Ernst Beller now, not Ernest.

  Dachau, not Harvard.

  “Interesting project,” judged the chief warden. “Psychometric testing of long-term inmates to study the effects of prolonged incarceration.”

  The technical jargon flowed easily from this husky browneyed man’s mouth. He was one of the new breed of administrators who’d replaced old-fashioned jailers in the progressive new Germany. He wore a sport jacket and a snappy tie, and there was no doubt that he had a master’s degree in penology or sociology.

  “Not study,” Beller corrected. “Measure. That’s why it must be done in each man’s cell without any distraction.”

  “Of course.”

  The first was a narcotics trafficker who’d slain a customs inspector in a shoot-out down at the port, wounded two policemen before he was subdued.

  The second was a sardonic pimp who’d disfigured one whore, crippled another in a Reeperbahn row that scared the hell out of the Spanish consul, who just happened to be busy in the next room.

  The third was a bank robber who’d used too much explosive on a vault door, setting off a building collapse and inferno that claimed the lives of three firemen.

  Kretschman was the fourth.

  “I wish to protest,” he said angrily.

  What little hair he had left was graying, and he was fat and sulky after years of too little exercise and too much starchy prison food. The wide blue eyes were still the same and Ernst Beller recognized them immediately. Without warning, it was Dachau again and a little child was looking at a younger Otto Kretschman in boots and black Schutzstaffel uniform ordering prisoners into that gas chamber.

  It was terrifying.

  “I am an S.S. officer, and I demand to be treated with the respect to which a captain is entitled.”

  It was weird, hearing today’s Kretschman speak but seeing the other one—a bizarre “voice-over” that resembled a poorly dubbed foreign film.

  “I am an S.S. officer,” he repeated—and Beller wasn’t afraid anymore. The flashback ended.

  “Of course, captain,” he agreed easily. He told a series of well-rehearsed lies about the purpose of the “tests,” assured Kretschman that the results would inspire the authorities to improve the living conditions of long-term inmates. It was fascinating to see how Kretschman still responded—after all these years—to reference to “the authorities.”

  The doctor asked several questions, took notes on the answers and went through a couple of rigmarole exercises that simulated measuring alertness, eyesight, reflexes and muscular tension. Then he told Kretschman to roll up his sleeves, lie down and touch his left e
ar with his right index finger—at the count of ten. As the S.S. man counted aloud, Beller opened the briefcase and removed the hypodermic he’d concealed in the hollowed-out memo book. It was a very small model made for research on children, but it held more than ten cubic centimeters of Pavulon.

  “Six…seven…eight…”

  At nine the pathologist plunged the needle into the S.S. man’s arm, and Kretschman winced—but he didn’t stop counting. He obeyed orders. “Ten,” he said. After he’d touched his left ear with his right index finger, he opened his eyes.

  “What was that test with the needle, doctor?” he asked respectfully.

  It was now seven or eight seconds after the curare compound had entered his bloodstream. In twenty-two seconds he would be paralyzed, and in less than an hour he wouldn’t be at all.

  “Ability to cope with surprise and pain,” Beller said. “No problem for a trained officer, I see. Would you now touch your right ear with your left index finger, please?”

  The ex-S.S. man obeyed, and Beller glanced at the watch on the prisoner’s wrist. Nine seconds to go.

  “Captain Kretschman, I have something confidential to tell you. Your contributions to the Third Reich have not been forgotten. There are people who remember, and I am one of them.”

  The Nazi began to smile, but that changed as the curare hit his central nervous system. He tried to sit up, failed.

  “You are dying, captain. You have lost the power to move or speak, and in something less than an hour your breathing mechanism will fail. Curare does that. Actually this is a synthetic curare developed as a muscle relaxer, and it’s going to relax you right into your grave.”

  The wide blue eyes radiated bewilderment.

  “My name is Ernst Beller. My parents were among those butchered at Dachau. I was there too.”

  The executioner recited his number, the building in which he’d been quartered and the date his parents perished.

  “I know that you won’t tell anybody, captain. Just think about it. You’re the first. I have others on my list, but I’m honoring you because of my special feeling for Dachau. Goodbye, captain.”

  Beller left the cell, asked that Kretschman be allowed to rest for an hour—as he had with the first three. Then the doctor went through his charade with another inmate, and left thanking the chief warden for his cooperation. At 5 P.M. Dr. Beller was on a train heading south, somewhat disappointed that he’d be missing this evening’s Lohengrin at the Hamburg State Opera. He wondered which fine tenor would sing the title role of the knight of the grail, and whether it would be as easy to kill the others.

  Then he thought about his uncle back on Central Park West, and made a mental note to send a postcard from Frankfurt. Sick people and shut-ins always appreciated such gestures, and Ernest Beller knew that his aunt and uncle would be glad to hear how well the conference had gone. He certainly didn’t want them to worry. That would be inconsiderate.

  13

  “He’ll see you now,” Miss Rasmussen said crisply.

  Donna Rasmussen was a person to be treated with respect. She was not only the executive secretary to the deputy director for operations of one of the largest and sneakiest organizations in the world, but she was also the best female bowler on the entire CIA headquarters staff. Penny Levine had beaten her in 1974, but had been out of competition since being transferred to Buenos Aires.

  Miss Rasmussen shook her head of blonde Minnesota curls toward the steel door, and Harper and Parks went in to face the deputy director. John Smith—people made jokes about his name—sat in a high-backed swivel chair behind a large desk that was ostentatiously devoid of papers. A standard General Services Administration pen stand, two multiple-button phones and a yellow legal pad stood out on the gray plastic top like blocks of color in a Mondrian print. There was nothing on the walls but a Friends of the Earth calendar. Smith cared about the environment, his daughter’s chances of getting into Vassar and a great many things he couldn’t discuss with his wife or his dentist. He was one of the first to have the new windows installed—the glass panes with the fine metal grids that blocked laser eavesdropping.

  “Jackpot?” he guessed.

  “No, Crash Dive,” Harper said. “Merlin wants a Cyclops run.”

  Cyclops was the special computer programmed to handle all the terrorist groups, deeds, methods and relationships around the world. Everything about Cyclops was top secret.

  “What kind of run?”

  “Full scan on the Martians, including film and still photos. He says he needs it right away—urgent.”

  “He always wants everything right away, doesn’t he?” Smith grumbled. “He’s barely toilet-trained.”

  Harper shrugged, accepting the fact that Merlin’s style annoyed a lot of headquarters executives.

  “What’s he going to do with it?”

  “Something crazy,” Harper said, irked by the fencing and enjoying the opportunity to lay it right on the line with the fussy deputy director.

  “That’s for sure,” Smith agreed. “He never does anything like anyone else. Hasn’t he seen all this stuff?”

  “Twice,” Parks offered with barely concealed hostility, hoping the deputy director would veto the run.

  Smith looked at him, shook his head. It was tough enough to run agents like Merlin without coping with righteous types like Parks.

  “Anything else, Bill?”

  “Our audiovisual lady in West Berlin wants to know what the hell he’s doing in her backyard. Very steamy Telex.”

  Smith leaned back, intermeshed his fingers thoughtfully. “What’re you going to tell her?”

  “I’ll say he’s taking a leak. After all, he’s barely toilet-trained.”

  The deputy director solemnly chose to ignore this provocation. “She’s a very capable person,” he thought aloud, “and she’s doing an outstanding job running a very difficult station.”

  Harper was about to reach for his pipe, looked around and saw no ashtrays. “She’s the Eiffel Tower,” he declared archly.

  “That’s a Cole Porter lyric. You’re the tops, you’re the Eiffel Tower!” Parks volunteered.

  These bright young men were hard to take.

  “What are you saying, Bill?” Smith asked patiently.

  “She’s doing such a terrific job that we had to send in Merlin. If you don’t want to bruise her feelings, let him finish this mess—his way—and he can get the hell out of there!”

  Harper wasn’t the sort you could let talk to one of those goddam committees on The Hill, the deputy director reflected, but he was good at problem solving and thought clearly. Merlin had always done things—Very difficult things—his way, and it was unrealistic to expect him to change. The Berlin unit and the other teams in West Germany had been unable to stop the Martians their ways—all the usual ways.

  “Give him the Cyclops run—in the burn canister.”

  Harper would have sent the material in the special container anyway, for it was standard procedure to ship such highly classified information in the cans that would incinerate all contents if tampered with or improperly opened.

  “You know she isn’t going to take this?” Smith asked almost casually. “What do you think she’ll do?”

  “Something crazy,” Harper judged.

  The deputy director didn’t conceal his puzzlement.

  “Well, she was married to him for three years, wasn’t she?” Harper reminded.

  “Not as crazy as Merlin,” calculated Smith. “I’ll bet on that.”

  Harper believed in humoring top management, but he certainly wasn’t going to take that kind of a sucker bet. “I’ll get back to you on Jackpot tomorrow,” he promised, and hustled out before the nervous deputy director could change his mind.

  The two canisters left Andrews Air Force Base on the regular Monday-night courier flight, and Tuesday afternoon Merlin found the message slip asking that he call Mr. Siegenthaler. He didn’t have to look very hard, for the clerk at the Hilton handed him
the envelope. It is/was a credit to the fine CIA training at The Farm—that special educational facility tucked away in a corner of Camp Peary, Virginia—that he didn’t call. Only a schmuck would use a nonsecure line in a city as “hot” as Berlin.

  He went.

  “These came in from Bonn for you,” the station officer announced as she pointed to the two packages wrapped in heavy green plastic. She was making a genuine effort to stay cool, and Merlin was impressed. It would be interesting to know what she really felt, and even more interesting to hear how she knew he was at the Hilton since he hadn’t told her.

  “Thanks. Sorry to bother you.”

  He wondered whether she knew that there actually was a man named John Siegenthaler, a hip and influential newspaper publisher who might not enjoy having his name used for agency cover. She probably knew. She was terribly well read, and dynamite on both crossword puzzles and double-crostics. Steve Sondheim used to call her for help with words, people said.

  “No bother.”

  What the hell was Crash Dive?

  He looked at his watch, thought how beautiful and desirable she still was to him.

  “Five o’clock,” he reported. “Buy you a drink?”

  What was he up to with that damn Duslov? She hadn’t passed that on to Washington yet, and the thought that she might still care about this wild man was disturbing.

  “Some other time. Keep in touch, Mr. Wasserman.”

  “I will.”

  He wouldn’t.

  He never had. That wasn’t the way Merlin did things. Nobody ever knew where the hell he was or what this son of a bitch was doing, but he got things done in his own mysterious and private way and they all accepted him as Merlin the Magician.

  Fraulein Cassel was leaving her receptionist’s desk as Merlin walked out, and he gallantly held open the street door for the healthy young blonde. Healthy—she was built like a brick…library. That sounded nicer, Merlin thought as he appreciated her substantial physical endowments. He decided to stroll along with her, and within two blocks discovered that she’d completed high school in Evanston, Illinois, and returned to Germany with her mother four years ago when her American father died.