Six Graves to Munich - Mario Cleri [17]
“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 Hintergasse, and she saw a row of naked rooms, tier on tier. And it was magic that she could see the houses of her neighbors and friends without any shielding walls—the bedrooms, the dining rooms, all set before her like a play on the stage. And there was her mother’s bedroom and her own kitchen that she had known all the fourteen years of her life.
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