Six Graves to Munich - Mario Cleri [19]
Two doctors stood beside her hospital bed; one German, one American. The American smiled. “So you’re back with us, young lady. That was close. Can you talk now?”
Rosalie nodded.
The American doctor said, “Do you know you put fifty American soldiers in the hospital with VD? You did more damage than a whole German regiment. Now—have you been with soldiers anywhere else?”
The German doctor leaned over to translate. Rosalie raised herself up on one arm, covers clutched modestly to her breast. She asked him gravely, “Then it’s not a dream?” She saw his bewildered look. She started to weep. “I want to go home to my mother,” she said. “I want to go home to Bublingshausen.”
Four days later she was committed to the insane asylum at Nordsee.
In the darkness of their Berlin hotel room, Rogan pulled her close to him. He understood now about her emotional blankness, her apparent lack of any moral values. “Are you all right now?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Now I am.”
CHAPTER 7
Rogan drove the Mercedes to the Freislings’ gas station the next day and asked them to make some modifications on its body. Specifically he wanted the huge trunk in the rear to be made airtight. While the work was being done he became very chummy with the brothers, told them about his computer work and how his company was looking for an opportunity to sell their ideas to the countries behind the Iron Curtain. “Legally, of course, only legally,” Rogan said in a tone of voice that implied he was just saying it for the record but that he would welcome a profitable crooked deal.
The two brothers smiled slyly. They understood. They questioned him more closely about his work. They asked him if he would be interested in making a tourist visit to East Berlin in their company. Rogan was delighted. “Of course,” he said eagerly, and pressed them for a specific date. But they smiled and said, “Langsam, langsam. Slowly, slowly.”
Several times they had seen Rosalie with him, and they had drooled over her beauty. Once when Rogan had gone into the office to pay a bill, he had come out to find Eric Freisling, with his head inside the Mercedes, talking earnestly to Rosalie. As they drove away Rogan asked Rosalie, “What did he say to you?”
Rosalie answered impassively, “He wanted me to sleep with him and spy on you.”
Rogan didn’t say anything. As he parked in front of the hotel Rosalie asked, “Which brother was it that talked to me? What is his name?”
“Eric,” Rogan said.
Rosalie smiled at him sweetly. “When you kill them let me help you kill Eric.”
The next day Rogan was busy making his own personal modifications on the Mercedes. He spent the rest of the week driving around Berlin and thinking out his plans. How would he make the Freisling brothers give him the names of the last three men? One day he went past the huge parking area of Berlin’s main railway station. Thousands of cars were parked there. Rogan grinned. A perfect cemetery.
To build an image of being a big spender who had crude tastes—which in turn might suggest a moral corruptness—Rogan took Rosalie to the more expensive and disreputable nightclubs, night after night. He knew that the Freisling brothers, perhaps even the East German counterintelligence apparatus, would be checking him out.
When the Freislings arranged an East Berlin tourist visa for him and Rosalie, he expected the contact to be made then. He had in his pocket a sheaf of computer blueprints for sale. But no contact was made. They saw the concrete Headquarters Bunker in which Hitler had died. The Russians had tried to blow it up, but the concrete walls were so thick, so solid with cement and steel, that it had proved impossible to destroy. So this historic bomb shelter, which had witnessed the suicide of the most feared madman of