Six Graves to Munich - Mario Cleri [1]
He went past the obsequiously bowing doorman into the club. Inside it was dark except for the “blue” movie flickering on a small rectangular screen. Rogan threaded his way through the crowded tables, the noisy, alcohol-stinking crowd. Suddenly the house lights came on and framed him against the stage, with naked blond girls dancing above his head. Rogan’s eyes searched the faces of those seated at ringside tables. A waitress touched his arm. She said coquettishly in German, “Is the Herr Amerikaner looking for something special?”
Rogan brushed past her, annoyed at being so easily spotted as an American. He could feel the blood pounding against the silver plate that held his skull together—a danger signal. He would have to do this job quickly and get back to his hotel. He moved on through the club, checking the dark corners, where patrons drank beer from huge steins and impersonally grabbed at the nearest waitress. He glanced into the curtained booths, where men sprawled on leather sofas and studied the girls on stage before picking up the phone to summon their favorite to join them.
Rogan was becoming impatient now. He didn’t have much more time. He turned and faced the stage. Behind the nude dancing girls there was a transparent panel in the curtain. Through the panel the patrons could see the next line of girls getting ready to go on stage, and they applauded every time one of the girls took off a bra or a stocking. A voice called out drunkenly, “You darlings, ah, you darlings—I can love you all.”
Rogan turned toward the voice and smiled in the darkness. He remembered that voice. Ten years had not changed it. It was a fatty, choking Bavarian voice, thick with false friendliness. Rogan moved swiftly toward it. He opened his jacket and slipped off a leather button that gripped the Walther pistol securely in its shoulder holster. With his other hand he took the silencer out of his jacket pocket and held it as if it were a pipe.
And then he was before the table, before the face of the man he had never forgotten, whose memory had kept him alive the last ten years.
The voice had not deceived him; it was Karl Pfann. The German must have gained fifty pounds and he had lost nearly all his hair—only a few blond strands crisscrossed his greasy pate—but the mouth was as tiny and almost as cruel as Rogan remembered it. Rogan sat down at the next table and ordered a drink. When the house lights went out and the blue movie came on again he slipped the Walther pistol out of its holster and, keeping his hands under the table, fitted the silencer onto the pistol barrel. The weapon sagged out of balance; it would not be accurate beyond five yards. Rogan leaned to his right and tapped Karl Pfann on the shoulder.
The gross head turned, the shiny pate inclined, and the false-friendly voice Rogan had been hearing in his dreams for ten years said, “Yes, mein Freund, what do you wish?”
Rogan said in a hoarse voice, “I am an old comrade of yours. We made a business deal on Rosenmontag, Carnival Monday, 1945, in the Munich Palace of Justice.”
The movie distracted Karl Pfann, and his eyes turned toward the bright screen. “No, no, it cannot be,” he said impatiently. “In 1945 I was serving the Fatherland. I became a businessman after the war.”
“When you were a Nazi,” Rogan said. “When you were a torturer . . . When you were a murderer.” The silver plate in his skull was throbbing. “My name is Michael Rogan. I was in American Intelligence. Do you remember me now?”
There was the smash of glass as Karl Pfann’s huge body swiveled around and he peered through the darkness at Rogan. The German said quietly, menacingly, “Michael Rogan is dead. What do you want from me?”
“Your life,” Rogan said. He swung the Walther pistol out from under the table and pressed it into Pfann’s belly. He pulled the trigger. The German’s body shuddered with the force of the bullet. Rogan reset the silencer and fired again. Pfann’s choking death cry was drowned out by