He decided to take her along. He liked having her around, and she would be a real help. Besides, there didn’t seem to be anything or anyone else she cared about. And he would never involve her in the actual executions.
The next day he took her shopping on the Esplanade and in the arcade of the Baseler Hospitz. He bought her two new outfits that set off the pale rose skin, the blue of her eyes. They went back to the hotel and packed, and after supper they caught the night flight to Berlin.
CHAPTER 4
Several months after the war ended, Rogan had been flown from his VA hospital in the United States to U.S. Intelligence headquarters in Berlin. There he had been asked to look at a number of suspected war criminals to see if any of them were men who had tortured him in the Munich Palace of Justice. His case was now file number A23,486 in the archives of the Allied War Crimes Commission. Among the suspects were none of the men he remembered so clearly. He could not identify a single one, so he was flown back to the VA hospital. But he had spent a few days wandering around the city, the rubble of countless homes giving him a measure of savage satisfaction.
The great city had changed in the years since then. The West Berlin authorities had given up trying to clear away the seventy million tons of ruins which the Allied bombers had created during the war. They had pushed the rubble into small artificial hills, then had planted flowers and small shrubs over them. They had used the rubble to fill foundations for towering new apartment houses, built in the most modern space-conserving style. Berlin was now a huge steel gray rat warren of stone, and at night that warren showed the most vicious nests of vice spawned by ravaged postwar Europe.
With Rosalie, Rogan checked into the Kempinski Hotel on the Kurfurstendamm and Fasanenstrasse, perhaps the most elegant hotel in West Germany. Then he made a few telephone calls to some of the firms with which his company did business, and he set up an appointment with the private detective agency that had been on his payroll for the past five years.
For their first lunch together in Berlin, he took Rosalie to a restaurant called the Ritz that served the finest Oriental food. He noticed with amusement that Rosalie ate a huge amount of food with huge enjoyment. They ordered bird’s nest soup, which looked like a tangle of vegetable brains stained with black blood. Her favorite dish was a combination of red lobster pieces, white pork chunks, and brown shards of nutmegged beef, but she found the barbecued spare ribs and the chicken with tender snow peas delicious. She sampled his shrimp with black bean sauce and nodded her approval. All of it was accompanied by several helpings of fried rice and innumerable cups of hot tea. It was an enormous lunch, but Rosalie put it away without any effort. She had just discovered that there was other food in the world besides bread, meat, and potatoes. Rogan, smiling at her pleasure, watched her finish off what was left on the silver-covered platters.
In the afternoon they went shopping along the Kurfurstendamm, whose brightly lit store windows trailed off into gray, empty storefronts as the boulevard approached the Berlin Wall. Rogan bought Rosalie an expensive gold wristwatch with a clever roof of precious stones that slid back when its owner wanted to know the time. Rosalie squealed with delight, and Rogan thought wryly that if the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach, then the way to a woman’s heart was paved with gifts. But when she leaned over to kiss him, when he felt her soft, fluttering mouth on his own, his cynicism vanished.
That evening he took her to the Eldorado Club, where the waiters dressed as girls and the girls dressed as men. Then on to the Cherchelle Femme, where pretty girls on the stage stripped as casually as if they were in their own private bedrooms, with intimate wriggles and vulgar scratches. Finally the girls danced before huge mirrors wearing only long black hose and saucy red caps on their heads. Rogan and Rosalie ended up at the Badewanne in Nurnburg Strasse. They drank champagne and ate small, thick white sausages from large platters, using their fingers and wiping their hands on the tablecloth, like everyone else.
By the time they got back to their hotel suite Rogan was almost sick with sexual desire. He wanted to make love immediately, but Rosalie, laughing, pushed him away and disappeared into the bedroom. Frustrated, Rogan took off his jacket and tie and started to mix a drink at the little bar that was part of every suite. In a few minutes he heard Rosalie call, “Michael,” in her soft, almost adolescent-sweet voice. He turned toward her.
On her blond head was a new hat he had bought her in Hamburg, a lovely creation of green ribbon. On her legs were long black net stockings that reached almost to the tops of her thighs. Between the green hat and black stockings was Rosalie-in the flesh. She came toward him slowly, smiling that intently happy smile of a woman roused to passion.
Rogan reached for her. She eluded his grasp, and he followed her into the bedroom, hastily pulling off the rest of his clothes on the way. When he reached for her this time, she did not move away. And then they were on the king-size bed, and he could smell the rose fragrance of her body, feel the petal-velvet skin as together they sank into an act of love that blotted out the hoarse night noises of Berlin, the plaintive cries of the animals imprisoned in the Tiergarten just below their windows, and the ghostly images of murder and revenge that haunted Rogan’s vulnerable brain.
CHAPTER 5
Rogan wanted his first contact with the Freisling brothers to be casual. The next day he rented a Mercedes, drove it to the brothers’ gas station, and had the car checked. He was attended to by Hans Freisling, and when Rogan went to the office to pay his bill, Eric was there, in a leather chair, checking oil-storage accounts.
The brothers had both aged well, perhaps because they had been unattractive to begin with. Age had tightened their loose, sly mouths; their lips were not so thick. They had become smarter in their dress and less vulgar in their speech. But they had not changed in their treachery, though it was now petty larceny instead of murder.
The Mercedes had been checked out that day by the rental agency and was in perfect condition. But Hans Freisling was charging him twenty marks for some minor mechanical adjustments and telling him his fan belt would have to be replaced. Rogan smiled and asked him to replace it. While this was being done he chatted with Eric, and mentioned that he was in the computer manufacturing business and would be staying in Berlin for some time. He pretended not to see the sly, greedy interest on Eric Freisling’s face. When Hans came in to tell him that the fan belt had been changed, Rogan tipped him generously and drove away. After he parked the Mercedes in front of his hotel he checked under the hood. The fan belt had not been changed.
Rogan made it a point to visit the gas station every few days in the Mercedes. The two Freislings, other than chiseling him on gas and oil, were showing an extraordinary friendliness. They had some other angle to work on him, Rogan knew, and wondered what it was. Certainly they had him pegged for a pigeon. But then he had plans for them too, he thought. Before he killed them, however, he would have to get from them the identity and whereabouts of the other three, especially the chief interrogator. Meanwhile he did not want to appear anxious and scare them off. He threw his money around as bait and waited for the Freislings to make their move.
The next weekend the hotel desk called early on Sunday evening to inform him that two men wished to come to his room. Rogan grinned at Rosalie. The brothers had taken the bait. But it was Rogan who was surprised. The two men were strangers. Or rather, one was a stranger. The taller of the two Rogan recognized almost immediately as Arthur Bailey, the American Intelligence agent who had interrogated Rogan about his “execution” and had asked him to identify suspects in Berlin more than nine years before. Bailey was studying Rogan with impassive eyes as he showed his identification.
“I just read up on your file, Mr. Rogan,” Bailey said. “You don’t look anything like your photographs anymore. I didn’t recognize you at all when I first saw you again.”
“When was that?” Rogan asked.
“At the Freisling gas station a week ago,” Bailey said. He was a lanky midwestern type, his drawl as
