Six Graves to Munich - Mario Cleri [47]
As he stood there looking at their smiling faces he realized one of them was missing. Then he felt the cold muzzle of the gun against the back of his neck and the hat tilted forward over his eyes. In that one-millionth of a second he understood everything and sent a last despairing look at von Osteen, crying out in his mind, “Father, Father, I believed. Father, I forgave all your torture, your treachery. I forgive you for murdering my wife and giving me hope. Save me now. Save me now.” And the last thing he saw before the back of his skull exploded was von Osteen’s gentle face contorting into a devil’s mocking laugh.
Now lying in bed beside Rosalie, Rogan knew that killing von Osteen just once would not be enough to satisfy him. There should be a way of bringing him back to life and killing him over and over again. For von Osteen had searched out the very essence of the humanity in both of them, and for no more than a joke, betrayed it.
When Rogan awoke the next morning Rosalie already had breakfast waiting for him. The room had no kitchen, but she used a hot plate to make coffee and had brought some rolls. While they ate she told him that Klaus von Osteen was not sitting in court that day but would be sentencing a convicted prisoner the next morning. They reviewed everything she knew about von Osteen—what she’d told Rogan before he’d gone to Sicily and what she’d learned later. Von Osteen was a powerful political figure in Munich and had the backing of the U.S. State Department for a higher climb to power. As a judge, von Osteen had a twenty-four- hour guard at his home and when he went outside. He was without personal guards only in the Munich Palace of Justice, which swarmed with its own complement of security police. Rosalie also told Rogan about her job as a nurse’s aide in the Munich Palace of Justice.
Rogan smiled at her. “Can you get me in there without my being seen?”
Rosalie nodded. “If you must go there,” she said.
Rogan didn’t answer for a moment. Then he said, “Tomorrow morning.”
After she had gone off to work, Rogan went out to do his own errands. He bought the gun-cleaning packet he needed to disassemble and oil the Walther pistol. Then he rented a Mercedes and parked it a block away from the pension. He went back up to the room and wrote some letters, one to his lawyer in the States, another to his business partners. He put the letters in his pocket to post after Rosalie came home from work. Then he took apart the Walther pistol, cleaned it thoroughly, and put it back together again. He put the silencer in a bureau drawer. He wanted to be absolutely accurate this last time, and he was not sure he could get close enough to compensate for the loss of accuracy the silencer caused.
When Rosalie came home he asked, “Is von Osteen sitting tomorrow for sure?”
“Yes.” She paused a moment, then asked, “Shall we go out to eat, or do you want me to bring something into the room?”
“Let’s go out,” Rogan said. He dropped his letters into the first post box they passed.
They had dinner at the famous Brauhaus, where the beer steins never held less than a quart and twenty kinds of sausages were served as appetizers. The evening paper, Tagenblatt, had a story about the killing of Wenta Pajerski in Budapest. The democratic underground believed responsible for the murder had been smashed by a series of secret police raids, the paper reported. Fortunately, the bomb had injured no one but the intended