unmistakably American as were his clothes and posture. Rogan wondered why he hadn’t noticed him at the gas station.
Bailey smiled gently at him. “We think the Freislings are East German agents, just as a sideline. They are hustlers. So when you showed up there and got friendly we checked you out. Called Washington, checked your visas and all that. Then I sat down and read your file. Something else clicked, and I went to the back files of the daily papers. And finally I figured it all out. You managed to track down those seven men in Munich, and now you’ve come back to knock them off. There was Moltke in Vienna and Pfann in Hamburg. The Freisling brothers are next on your list-right?”
“I’m here to sell computers,” Rogan said warily. “That’s all.”
Bailey shrugged. “I don’t care what you do; I’m not responsible for law enforcement in this country. But I’m telling you now: Hands off the Freisling brothers. I’ve put in a lot of time to get the goods on them, and when I do I’ll bust up a whole East German spy setup. I don’t want you knocking them off and leaving me with a blind trail.”
Suddenly it was clear to Rogan why the Freisling brothers had been so friendly to him. “Are they after my data on the new computers?” he asked Bailey.
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” he said. “Computers-the new ones-are on the embargo list to Red countries. But I’m not worried about that; I know what you want to give them. And I’m warning you: You do, and you have me for an enemy.”
Rogan stared at him coldly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but let me give you some advice: Don’t get in my way or I’ll run right over you. And there isn’t a damn thing you can do to me. I’ve got pipelines right into the Pentagon. My new computers are more important to them than any crap you can drag up with a two-bit spy apparatus.”
Bailey gave him a thoughtful look, then said, “OK, we can’t touch you, but how about the girlfriend?” He jerked his head toward Rosalie sitting on the sofa. “We can sure as hell cause her a little trouble. In fact, one phone call and you’ll never see her again.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Bailey’s lean, angular face took on an expression of mock surprise. “Didn’t she tell you? Six months ago she escaped from a mental hospital on the Nordsee. She was committed in 1950 for schizophrenia. The authorities are still looking for her-not very hard, but looking. One phone call and the police pick her up. Just remember that.” Bailey paused, and then said slowly, “When we don’t need those two guys anymore I’ll tell you. Why don’t you skip them and go after the others that are still left?”
“Because I don’t know who the other three are. I’m counting on the Freisling brothers to tell me.”
Bailey shook his head. “They’ll never talk unless you make it worth their while, and they’re tough. You’d better leave it to us.”
“No,” Rogan said. “I have a surefire method. I’ll make them talk. Then I’ll leave them to you.”
“Don’t lie, Mr. Rogan. I know how you’ll leave them.” He put out his hand to shake Rogan’s. “I’ve done my official duty, but after reading your file I have to wish you luck. Watch out for those Freisling brothers; they’re a pair of sly bastards.”
When Bailey and his silent partner had closed the door behind them Rogan turned to Rosalie. “Is it true what they said about you?”
Rosalie sat up straight, her hands folded in her lap. Her eyes gazed steadily into Rogan’s. “Yes,” she said.
They didn’t go out that evening. Rogan ordered food and champagne to be sent up to their room, and after they finished they went to bed. Rosalie cradled her golden head in his arm and took puffs from his cigarette. “Shall I tell you about it?” she asked.
“If you want to,” Rogan said. “It doesn’t really make any difference, you know-your being sick.”
“I’m all right now,” she said.
Rogan kissed her gently. “I know.”
“I want to tell you,” she said. “Maybe you won’t love me afterward, but I want to tell you.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Rogan insisted. “It really doesn’t.”
Rosalie reached out and turned off the bedside table lamp. She could speak more freely in the dark.
CHAPTER 6
How she had wept that terrible day in the spring of 1945. The world had come to an end when she was a daydreaming fourteen-year-old maiden. The great dragon of war had carried her away.
She left her home early that morning to work on the family’s rented garden plot on the outskirts of her home- town of Bublingshausen in Hesse. Later, she was digging the dark earth when a great shadow fell across the land. She looked up and saw a vast armada of planes blotting out the sun, and she heard the thunder of their bombs dropping on the optical works of Wetzlar. Then the bombs, overflowing as water overflows a glass, spilled into her own harmless medieval village. The badly frightened girl buried her face in the soft wormy earth as the ground trembled violently. When the sky no longer roared with thunder and the shadow had lifted from the sun, she made her way back to the heart of Bublingshausen.
It was burning. The gingerbread houses, like toys torched by a wanton child, were melting down into ashes. Rosalie ran down the flowered streets she had known all her life, picking her way through smoldering rubble. It was a dream, she thought; how could all the houses she had known since childhood vanish so quickly?
And then she turned into the street that approached her home in the
Rosalie moved toward the entrance, but it was blocked by a hill of rubble. Sticking out of the vast pile of pulverized brick she saw the brown-booted feet and checked trouser legs that were her father’s. She saw other bodies covered with red and white dust; and then she saw the one solitary arm pointing with mute agony toward the sky, on one gray finger the plaited gold band that was her mother’s wedding ring.
Dazed, Rosalie sank down into the rubble. She felt no pain, no grief-only a peculiar numbness. The hours passed. Dusk was beginning to fall when she heard the continuous rumble of steel on crumbled stone. Looking up, she saw a long line of American tanks snaking through what had been Bublingshausen. They passed through the town and there was silence. Then a small Army truck with a canvas canopy came by. It stopped, and a young American soldier jumped down out of the driver’s seat. He was blond and fresh-faced. He stood over her and said in rough German, “Hey,
Since there was nothing else to do, and since everyone she knew was dead, and since the garden she had planted that morning would not bear fruit for months, Rosalie went with the soldier in his canopied truck.
They drove until dark. Then the blond soldier took her into the back of the truck and made her lie down on a pile of army blankets. He knelt beside her. He broke open a bright green box and gave her a piece of hard round cheese and some chocolate. Then he stretched out beside her.
He was warm, and Rosalie knew that as long as she felt this warmth she could never die, never lie beneath the smoldering pile of rubbled brick where her mother and father now were. When the young soldier pressed against her and she felt the hard column of flesh against her thigh, she let him do whatever he wanted. Finally he left her huddled in the pile of blankets, and he went to the front and started to drive again.
During the night the truck stopped and other soldiers came into the back of it to lie on the blankets with her. She pretended to be asleep and let them, too, do as they wished. In the morning the truck continued on, then stopped in the heart of a great ruined city.
The air was sharper and colder. Rosalie recognized the dampness of the north, but though she had often read about Bremen in her schoolbooks she did not recognize this vast wasteland of bombed-out ruins as the famous
