Mario Puzo - Six Graves To Munich

Since there was nothing else to do, and since everyone she knew was dead, and since the garden she had planted that morning would not bear fruit for months, Rosalie went with the soldier in his canopied truck.

They drove until dark. Then the blond soldier took her into the back of the truck and made her lie down on a pile of army blankets. He knelt beside her. He broke open a bright green box and gave her a piece of hard round cheese and some chocolate. Then he stretched out beside her.

He was warm, and Rosalie knew that as long as she felt this warmth she could never die, never lie beneath the smoldering pile of rubbled brick where her mother and father now were. When the young soldier pressed against her and she felt the hard column of flesh against her thigh, she let him do whatever he wanted. Finally he left her huddled in the pile of blankets, and he went to the front and started to drive again.

During the night the truck stopped and other soldiers came into the back of it to lie on the blankets with her. She pretended to be asleep and let them, too, do as they wished. In the morning the truck continued on, then stopped in the heart of a great ruined city.

The air was sharper and colder. Rosalie recognized the dampness of the north, but though she had often read about Bremen in her schoolbooks she did not recognize this vast wasteland of bombed-out ruins as the famous merchant city.

The blond soldier helped her out of the truck and into a building whose lower floor was still intact. He took her into a huge dining room crammed with military gear and containing a black stove with a roaring fire. In the corner of the room was a bed with brown blankets. The blond soldier led her to the bed and told her to lie down on it. “My name is Roy,” he said. And then he lowered himself upon her.

Rosalie spent the next three weeks in that bed. Roy curtained it with blankets so that it became a small private chamber. There Rosalie received an endless procession of faceless men who pushed themselves inside her. She didn’t care. She was alive and warm. She was not cold beneath the rubble.

On the other side of the blanket curtain she could hear a great many male voices laughing; she could hear the shuffling of cards and the clink of bottles against glass. When one soldier left and another took his place, she always welcomed the new man with a smile and open arms. On one occasion a soldier peeped around the curtain and whistled with admiration when he saw her. She was already fully developed at fourteen, already a woman.

The soldiers treated her like a queen. They brought her heaped plates of food she had not tasted since before the war. The food seemed to stoke her body with unslakeable passion. She was a treasure of love, and they pampered her as they used her body. Once, the blond Roy who had picked her up in his truck said with concern, “Hey, baby, you wanta get some sleep? I’ll chase everybody out.” But she shook her head. For as long as her faceless lovers came through the curtain of blankets, she could believe it was all a dream-the hard flesh, her father’s checked legs sticking out of the rubble, the wedding-banded hand pointing toward the sky. It could never come true.

But one day some other soldiers came, pistols on their hips, white helmets on their heads. They made her dress, then took her down to a truck loaded with other young girls, some joking, some crying. Rosalie must have fainted in the truck, for the next thing she knew she was lying in a hospital bed. Very dimly and from far away she saw a doctor looking at her intently. He had on a white jacket, but beneath it was an American uniform.

Lying on the cool white bed she heard the doctor say, “So this is the babe who has everything. Pregnant, too. We’ll have to abort her. All that penicillin and fever killed the fetus. Such a beautiful kid, too.”

Rosalie laughed. She knew she was dreaming beside her garden patch outside Bublingshausen, waiting to walk home to her father and mother. Perhaps there would be a letter from her older brother who was fighting in the East against Russia. But her dream was taking so long to end. She was frightened now, the dream was too terrible. She began to cry, and finally she was truly awake…

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.”

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 all time, was now a grassy mound in the middle of a children’s playground.