Six Graves to Munich - Mario Cleri [14]
Now lying beside her in his Hamburg hotel room, Rogan ran his hands lightly over her body. He had told her everything, sure that she would not betray him—or perhaps in the hope that she would, and so end his murdering quest. “Still like me?” he asked.
Rosalie nodded. She held his hand to her breast. “Let me help you,” she said. “I don’t care about anyone. I don’t care if they die. But I care about you—a little bit. Take me to Berlin and I’ll do anything you want me to.”
Rogan knew she meant every word. He looked into her eyes and was troubled by the childlike innocence he saw there, and the emotional blankness, as if murdering and making love were, to her, equally permissible.
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 Kurfürstendamm 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