Six Graves to Munich, Page 3

  Unbelieving, Rogan changed his clothes before their eyes. There was even a wide-brimmed fedora, which one of the men jammed on his head. They all grinned at him in a friendly way. The aristocratic officer said in his sincere, bell-toned voice, “Isn’t it good to know that you will be free? That you will live?”

  But suddenly Rogan knew he was lying. There was something wrong. Only six men were in the room with him, and they were smiling secret, evil smiles. At that moment Rogan felt the cold metal of the gun touch the back of his head. His hat tilted forward as the gun barrel pushed up against its brim, and Rogan felt the sickening terror of a man about to be killed. It was all a cruel charade and they were killing him as they would kill an animal, as a joke. And then a great roar filled his brain, as if he had fallen under water, and his body was torn out of the space it filled, exploded into a black, endless void. . . .

  That Rogan lived was a miracle. He had been shot in the back of the head, and his body was thrown on a pile of corpses, other prisoners executed in the courtyard of the Munich Palace of Justice. Six hours later, advance elements of the U.S. Third Army entered Munich, and its medical units found the great pile of bodies. When they came to Rogan they found him still alive. The bullet had deflected off the skull bone, tearing a hole in, but not penetrating, the brain—a type of wound not uncommon with shell fragments but rarely made by small arms.

  Rogan was operated on in a forward field hospital and sent back to the United States. He spent another two years in various army hospitals for special treatment. The wound had impaired his sight; he could see only straight ahead, with very little lateral vision. With training, his vision improved enough for him to get a driver’s license and live an ordinary life. But he had come to rely on his hearing more than his sight, whenever possible. At the end of the two years the silver plate put in his skull to hold the shattered bones together seemed a natural part of him. Except in moments of stress. Then it felt as if all the blood in his brain pounded against it.

  When he was released the doctors told Rogan that drinking liquor would be bad for him, that sexual intercourse to excess would do him harm, that it would be better if he did not smoke. He was assured that his intellectual capacities had not been damaged, but that he would need more rest than the average man. He was also given medication for the intermittent headaches. Internal cranial pressure would build up as a result of the damaged condition of his skull and the silver plate.

  In brief, his brain was terribly vulnerable to any kind of physical or emotional stress. With care he could live to be fifty, even sixty. He was to follow instructions, take his medication regularly—which included tranquilizers—and report to a VA hospital every month for check-ups and changes in medication. His fabulous memory, Rogan was assured, was not impaired in the slightest. And that had proved to be the final irony.

  In the ten years that followed, he obeyed instructions, he took his medication, he reported to the VA hospital every month. But what finally proved his undoing was his magic memory. At night when he went to bed it was as if a movie unreeled before his eyes. He saw the seven men in the high-domed room of the Munich Palace of Justice in minute detail. He felt his hat brim tilt forward, the gun cold against his neck. The black roaring void swallowed him up. And when he closed his eyes he heard Christine’s terrible screams from the next room.

  The ten years were a continuous nightmare. When he was released from the hospital he decided to make his home in New York City. His mother had died after he had been reported missing in action, so there was no sense in returning to his home town. And he thought that in New York he might find the proper use for his abilities.

  He got a job with one of the mammoth insurance companies. The work was one of simple statistical analysis, but to his amazement he found it was beyond him; he could not concentrate. He was discharged for incompetence, a humiliation that set him back physically as well as mentally. It also increased his distrust of his fellow human beings. Where the hell did they come off, firing him after he had had his head blown apart protecting their skins during the war?

  He took a job as a government clerk in the Veterans Administration building in New York. He was given a GS-3 grade, which paid him sixty dollars a week, and asked to do only the simplest of tasks in filing and sorting. Millions of new files were being set up on the new veterans of World War II, and it was this that started him thinking about computers. But it was to be two years later before his brain could really work out the complicated mathematical formulae that such computer systems needed.

  He lived a drab existence in the great city. His $60 a week was barely enough to cover necessary expenses, such as the little efficiency apartment on the outskirts of Greenwich Village, frozen foods, and whiskey. He needed the whiskey to get drunk enough so that he would not dream when he slept.

  Spending every working day filing dreary documents, he would come home to the shabby apartment and cook frozen foods to warm, tasteless pulp. Then he would drink half of a bottle of whiskey and sink into a sodden slumber on his rumpled bed, sometimes without taking his clothes off. And still the nightmares came. But the nightmares were not much worse than the reality had been.

  In the Munich Palace of Justice they had stripped him of his dignity. They had done what the boys had threatened to do to him when he was thirteen years old, the harsh adult equivalent of taking off his trousers and hanging them on the lamppost. They had mixed laxatives with this food and that, along with the fear and the thin gruel that was called oatmeal at breakfast and stew at night, made his bowels uncontrollable; the food ran through him. When he was dragged out of his cell for the daily interrogation at the long table he could feel the seat of his pants sticky against his buttocks. He could smell the stench. But worse, he could see the cruel grins on the faces of his interrogators, and he would feel ashamed as a little boy feels ashamed. And yet in some way it made him feel closer to the seven men who were torturing him.

  Now, years later, alone in his apartment, he would relive the physical indignities. He was shy and would not go out of the apartment to meet people, nor would he accept invitations to parties. He met a girl who worked as a clerk in the VA building, and with a tremendous effort of will made himself respond to her obvious interest. She came to his apartment for a drink and dinner and made it plain that she was willing to stay the night. But when Rogan went to bed with her, he was impotent.

  It was a few weeks after this that his supervisor called him into the personnel office. The supervisor was a World War II veteran who thought that his job of supervising thirty file clerks proved he was mentally superior to the men under him. Trying to be kind to Rogan, he said, “Maybe this work is just a little too hard for you right now; maybe you should do some kind of physical work, like running the elevator. You know what I mean?”

  The very fact that it was well intentioned made it more galling to Rogan. As a disabled veteran he had a right to appeal his discharge. The personnel officer at the conference advised him not to do so. “We can prove that you’re just not bright enough to do this job,” he told Rogan. “We have your Civil Service exam marks, and they just barely qualify you. So I think you’d be wise to take the medical discharge from government service. Then maybe if you go to night school you can do a little better.”

  Rogan was so astonished that he burst out laughing. He reasoned that part of his file must be missing, or that these people thought he had filled out his forms falsely. That was it, he thought, as he saw them smiling at him. They thought he had faked everything in his educational files. Rogan laughed again and walked out of the personnel office, out of the building, out of the insultingly drab job that he could not even perform properly. He never went back, and one month later he received his employment discharge in the post. He was reduced to living on his disability pension, which he had previously never touched.

  With more time on his hands, he drank more. He took a room near the Bowery and became one of the countless derelicts who spent the day drinking cheap w
ine until they became unconscious. Two months later he was back in the Veterans Administration as a patient. But not for his head wound. He was suffering from malnutrition and so dangerously debilitated that a common cold might finish him off.

  It was while he was in the hospital that he ran into one of his childhood friends, Philip Houke, who was being treated for an ulcer. It was Houke, now a lawyer, who got Rogan his first job with computers. It was Houke who brought Rogan into some contact with humanity again, by reminding him of his former brilliance.

  But it was a long, hard road coming back. Rogan stayed in the hospital for six months, the first three to “dry out.” The final three months he underwent new tests on his skull injury, plus special mental-fatigue tests. For the first time a complete and correct diagnosis was made: Michael Rogan’s brain retained its almost superhuman memory capacity and some of its creative brilliance. But it could not stand up to long uninterrupted use or extended stress without blurring with fatigue. He would never be able to put in the long hard hours of concentration that creative research demanded. Even simple tasks requiring long consecutive hours of work were now out of the question.

  Instead of this news dismaying him, Michael Rogan was pleased that finally he knew exactly where he stood. He was also relieved of his guilt, for he was no longer responsible for a “treasure to humanity.” When Philip Houke arranged for him to work with one of the new computer firms, Rogan found that unconsciously his mind had been working on computer construction problems ever since he had been a file clerk for the VA. So in less than a year he solved many of the technical construction problems with his knowledge of math. Houke demanded a partnership in the firm for Rogan, and became his financial advisor. In the next few years Rogan’s computer firm became one of the top ten in the country. Then it went public, and its shares tripled in value within a year. Rogan became known as the genius in the field, and was asked to advise on administrative procedures when the separate service departments were consolidated into the Defense Department. He also became a millionaire. Ten years after the war he was a success, despite the fact that he could not work more than an hour a day.

  Philip Houke took care of all his business affairs and became his best friend. Houke’s wife tried to get Rogan interested in her unmarried girlfriends, but none of the affairs ever became serious. His fabulous memory still worked against him. On bad nights he still heard Christine screaming in the Munich Palace of Justice. And he felt again the wet stickiness on his buttocks as the seven interrogators watched him with their contemptuous grins. He could never start a new life, he thought, not with another woman.

  During those years Rogan kept track of every trial of war criminals in postwar Germany. He subscribed to a European newspaper clipping service, and when he started to collect patent royalties he retained a German private detective agency in Berlin to send him photographs of all accused war criminals no matter how low their rank. It seemed a hopeless task to find seven men whose names he did not know and who were surely making every effort to stay hidden among Europe’s millions.

  His first break came when the private detective agency sent him a photograph of a dignified-looking Austrian city official, with the caption “Albert Moltke acquitted. Retains electoral position despite former Nazi ties.” The face was the face of one of the seven men he sought.

  Rogan had never forgiven himself for his carelessness in transmitting radio messages on D-day, the carelessness that had led to the discovery and the destruction of his Underground group. But he had learned from it. Now he proceeded cautiously and with the utmost precision. He increased his retainer to the detective firm in Germany and instructed them to keep Albert Moltke under close surveillance for a year. At the end of that time he had three more photographs, with names and addresses, three more dossiers of the men who had murdered his wife and tortured him in the Munich Palace of Justice. One was Karl Pfann, in the export-import business in Hamburg. The other two were brothers, Eric and Hans Freisling, who owned a mechanic’s shop and gas station in West Berlin. Rogan decided that the time had come.

  He made his preparations very carefully. He had his company appoint him as its European sales representative, with letters of introduction to computer firms in Germany and Austria. He had no fear of being recognized. His terrible wound and his years of suffering had changed his appearance a great deal; and besides, he was a dead man. So far as his interrogators knew, they had killed Captain Michael Rogan.

  Rogan took a plane to Vienna and set up his business headquarters there. He checked into the Sacher Hotel, had a fine dinner, with the renowned Sachertorte for dessert, and sipped brandy in the hotel’s famous Red Bar. Later he took a walk through the twilit streets, listening to the zither music emanating from the cafés. He walked for a long time, until he was relaxed enough to return to his room and sleep.

  During the next two weeks, through friendly Austrians he met at two computer firms, Rogan got himself invited to the important parties in Vienna. Finally, at a municipal ball, which the city bureaucrats had to attend, he met Albert Moltke. He was surprised that the man had changed so much. The face had mellowed with good living and good food. The hair was silver gray. The whole attitude of his body suggested the politician’s surface politeness. And on his arm was his wife, a slender, cheerful-looking woman, obviously much younger than he was and obviously much in love with him. When he noticed Rogan staring at him, Moltke bowed politely, as if to say, “Yes, thank you for voting for me. I remember you very well, of course. Come and see me any time in my office.” It was the bow of an expert politician. No wonder he beat the rap when he’d been tried as a war criminal, Rogan thought. And he took some pleasure in knowing that it was the acquittal and the resultant photograph in the newspapers that had sentenced Albert Moltke to death.

  Albert Moltke had bowed to the stranger, though his feet were killing him and he was wishing with all his heart that he was back home beside his own fireplace drinking black coffee and eating Sachertorte. These fêtes were a bore, but after all the Partei had to raise election funds somehow. And he owed it to his colleagues after they had supported him so loyally during the late troubled times. Moltke felt his wife, Ursula, press his arm, and he bowed again to the stranger, feeling vaguely that it was someone important, someone he should remember more clearly.

  Yes, the Partei and his dear Ursula had rallied around when he had been accused as a war criminal. And after he had been acquitted the trial turned out to be his best piece of luck. He had won election to one of the local councils, and his political future, though limited, was assured. It would be a good living. But then the disturbing thought came as it always came: What if the Partei and Ursula found out the charges were true? Would his wife still love him? Would she leave him if she knew the truth? No, she could never believe him capable of such crimes, no matter what the proof. He could hardly believe it himself. He had been a different man then—harder, colder, stronger. In those times one had to be like that to survive. And yet . . . and yet . . . how could it be? When he tucked his two young children in bed his hands sometimes hesitated in the act of touching them. Such hands could not touch such innocence. But the jury had freed him. They had acquitted him after weighing all the evidence, and he could not be tried again. He, Albert Moltke, was forever innocent, according to law. And yet . . . and yet . . .

  The stranger was coming toward him. A tall, powerfully built man, with an oddly shaped head. Handsome, in a dark German way. But then Albert Moltke noticed the well-tailored suit. No, this man was an American, obviously. Moltke had met many of them since the war, in the transaction of business. He smiled his welcome and turned to introduce his wife, but she had wandered off a few steps and was talking to someone else. And then the American was introducing himself. His name sounded something like Rogan and this, too, was vaguely familiar to Moltke. “Congratulations on your promotion to the Recordat. And congratulations on your acquittal some time ago.”

  Moltke gave him a polite smile. He recited hi
s standard speech. “A patriotic jury did its duty and decided, fortunately for me, for an innocent fellow German.”

  They chatted awhile. The American suggested that he could use some legal help on setting up his computer business. Moltke became interested. He knew that the American really meant he wanted to bypass a few city taxes. Moltke, knowing from past experience that this could make him rich, took the American by the arm and said, “Why don’t we get a little bit of fresh air, take a little stroll?” The American smiled and nodded. Moltke’s wife did not see them leave.

  As they walked through the city streets the American asked casually, “Don’t you remember my face?”

  Moltke grimaced and said, “My dear sir, you do seem familiar, but I meet a lot of people, after all.” He was a little impatient; he wished the American would get down to business.

  With a slight sense of uneasiness, Moltke realized that now they were walking in a deserted alley. Then the American leaned close to Moltke’s ear and whispered something that almost made his heart stop beating: “Do you remember Rosenmontag, 1945? In Munich? In the Palace of Justice?”

  And then Moltke remembered the face; and he was not surprised when the American said, “My name is Rogan.” With the fear that flooded through him there was overwhelming shame, as if for the first time he truly believed in his own guilt.

  Rogan saw the recognition in Moltke’s eyes. He steered the little man deeper into the alley, feeling Moltke’s body trembling, trembling under his arm. “I won’t hurt you,” he said. “I only want some information about the other men, your comrades. I know Karl Pfann and the Freisling brothers. What were the names of the other three men, and where can I find them?”