Six Graves to Munich

  “No,” he said. “I’ll leave tomorrow. Forget about me. Forget you ever saw those envelopes. OK?”

  “OK,” Rosalie said, “I’ll forget about you.” She paused, and for a moment that curious emptiness left her and she asked, “Will you forget about me?”

  “No,” Rogan said.

  CHAPTER 3

  Mike Rogan never forgot a thing. At the age of five he told his mother in detail what had happened to him three years earlier when, at the age of two, he’d been seriously ill with pneumonia. He told her the name of the hospital, which his mother no longer remembered; he described the hospital pediatrician, an extraordinarily ugly man who had a marvelous way with children. The pediatrician would even let youngsters play with the star-shaped disfiguring wen on his chin so that they would not be afraid of it. Michael Rogan remembered trying to pull the wen off and the pediatrician letting out a comical “ouch!”

  His mother was astounded by and a little fearful of Michael’s memory feat, but his father was overjoyed. Joseph Rogan was a hardworking accountant, and he had visions of his son becoming a CPA before he was twenty-one and earning a good living. His thoughts went no further, until little Michael Rogan came home from kindergarten with a note from his teacher. The note informed the Rogans that parents and son should appear at the school principal’s office the next day to discuss Michael’s academic future.

  The interview was short and to the point. Michael could not be permitted to attend kindergarten with the rest of the children. He was a disruptive influence. He corrected the teacher when she left some little detail out of a story. He already knew how to read and write. He would have to be sent to a special school, or take his chances in the higher grades immediately. His parents decided to send him to a special school.

  At the age of nine, when the other boys were running into the street with baseball gloves or footballs, Michael Rogan would leave his house carrying a genuine leather briefcase that had his initials and address stamped on it in gold. Inside the briefcase was the text of whatever subject he was studying that particular week. It rarely took him more than a week to master a subject that normally required a year’s study. He would simply memorize all the texts by reading them once. And it was only natural that such a boy was considered a freak in his neighborhood.

  One day a group of kids his own age surrounded Michael Rogan. One of them, a chunky blond boy, said to him, “Don’t you ever play?” Rogan didn’t answer. The blond boy said, “You can play on my side. We’re gonna play football.”

  “All right,” Michael said. “I’ll play.”

  That day was a glorious day for him. He found out that he had good physical coordination and that he could hold his own playing football or fighting with other boys. He came home for supper with his expensive leather briefcase smeared with mud. He also had a black eye and puffy, bloody lips. But he was so proud and so happy that he ran to his mother shouting, “I’m going to be on the football team! They picked me to be on the football team!”

  Alice Rogan took one look at his battered face and burst into tears.

  She tried to be reasonable. She explained to her young son that his brain was valuable, that he should never expose it to any danger. “You have an extraordinary mind, Michael,” she said. “Your mind may someday help humanity. You can’t be like other boys. What if you should hurt your head playing football? Or fighting with another boy?”

  Michael listened and understood. When his father came home that evening he said almost the same thing. So Michael gave up all thoughts of being like ordinary boys. He had a precious treasure to guard for humanity. Had he been older he would have realized that his parents were being pompous and a bit ridiculous about this treasure, but he had not yet acquired that kind of adult judgment.

  When he was thirteen the other boys started to humiliate him, taunt him, knock his briefcase from his hands. Michael Rogan, obeying his parents, refused to fight and suffered humiliation. It was his father who began to have doubts about how his son was being brought up.

  One day Joseph Rogan brought home huge, puffy boxing gloves and taught his son the art of self-defense. Joseph told him to stick up for himself, to fight if necessary. “It’s more important that you grow up to be a man,” he said, “than to be a genius.”

  It was during his thirteenth year that Michael Rogan discovered he was different from ordinary boys in another way. His parents had always taught him to dress neatly and in an adult fashion, because he spent so much of his time studying with adults. One day a group of boys surrounded Rogan and told him they were going to take off his pants and hang them from a lamppost, a routine humiliation most of the boys had undergone.

  Rogan went berserk when they put their hands on him. He sank his teeth into one boy’s ear and ripped it partly from the boy’s head. He got his hand around the ringleader ’s throat and throttled him, despite other boys kicking and punching him to make him let go. When some grown-ups finally broke up the fight, three of the group and Rogan had to be hospitalized.

  But nobody ever bothered him again. He was shunned not only as a freak but as a violent freak.

  Michael Rogan was intelligent enough to know that his rage was not natural, that it sprang from some deeper source. And he came to understand what it was. He was enjoying the fruits of his extraordinary memory, his intellectual powers, without having done anything to deserve them, and he felt guilty about it. He talked of his feelings with his father, who understood and started to make plans for Michael to lead a more normal life. Unhappily, Joseph Rogan died of a heart attack before he could help his son.

  Michael Rogan, going on fifteen, was tall, strong, and well coordinated. He was absorbing knowledge on the advanced levels now; and under the complete dominance of his mother, he really believed that his mind was a sacred trust to be guarded for its future use to humanity. By this time he had his MA and was studying for his MS. His mother treated him like a reigning king. That year Michael Rogan discovered girls.

  In this he was perfectly normal. But he discovered to his chagrin that girls were afraid of him and treated him with giggling teenage cruelty. He was so intellectually mature that once again he was regarded as a freak by those his age. This drove him back to his studies with renewed fury.

  At eighteen he found himself accepted as an equal by the seniors and graduate students at the Ivy League school where he was completing studies for his PhD in mathematics. The girls, too, seemed to be attracted to him now. Big for his age, he was broad through the shoulders, and could easily pass for twenty-two or twenty-three. He learned to disguise his brilliance so that it would not be too frightening, and at last he got into bed with a girl.

  Marian Hawkins was a blonde who was dedicated to her studies, but she was also dedicated to all-night parties. She was his steady sex partner for a year. Rogan neglected his studies, drank a great deal of beer, and committed all the natural stupidities of a normal growing boy. His mother was distressed at this turn of events, but Rogan did not let her distress bother him at all. Though he would never admit it to himself, he disliked his mother.

  The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on the day Rogan was assured of his doctorate. By now Rogan had tired of Marian Hawkins and was looking for a graceful way out. He was tired of training his mind and tired also of his mother. He was hungry for excitement and adventure. On the day after Pearl Harbor he sat down and wrote a long letter to the chief of Army Intelligence. He made a list of his academic awards and achievements and enclosed them with the letter. Less than a week later he received a telegram from Washington, asking him to report for an interview.

  The interview was one of the bright moments of his life. He was interrogated by a crew-cut Intelligence captain who looked over the list Rogan had sent with a bored expression. He seemed unimpressed, especially when he learned that Rogan had no background of athletic activity.

  Captain Alexander pushed Rogan’s papers back into a manila folder and took it into the inner office. He was gone for a whil
e, and when he came back he had a mimeographed sheet in his hand. He put it on the desk in front of him and tapped it with his pencil. “This sheet is covered with a coded message. It’s an old, outdated code we no longer use. But I want to see if you can figure it out. Don’t be surprised if you find it too difficult; after all you’ve had no training.” He handed the sheet to Rogan.

  Rogan looked it over. It appeared to be a standard cryptographic letter substitution, relatively simple. Rogan had studied cryptography and the theory of codes when he was eleven years old, for mental kicks. He picked up a pencil and got to work, and in five minutes he read the translated message to Captain Alexander.

  The captain disappeared into the other room and returned with a manila folder from which he took a sheet of paper containing only two paragraphs. This was a more difficult code, and its brevity made it that much harder to decode. It took Rogan almost an hour to break it. Captain Alexander looked at his translation and disappeared again into the inner office. The next time he came out he was accompanied by a gray-haired colonel, who sat in a corner of the reception room and studied Rogan intently.

  Now Captain Alexander handed Rogan three sheets of paper covered with symbols. He smiled a little this time. Rogan recognized that smile; he had seen it on the faces of teachers and specialists who thought they had Rogan in a spot. So he was very careful with the code, and it took him three hours to break it. He was so concentrated on his task that he didn’t notice the room filling up with officers, all watching him intently. When Rogan finished he handed his yellow work sheets to the captain. Captain Alexander scanned the translation swiftly and without a word handed it to the gray-haired colonel. The colonel ran his eyes down the paper and then said curtly to the captain, “Bring him to my office.”

  To Rogan, the whole thing had been an enjoyable exercise, and he was startled to see the colonel looked worried. The first thing he said to Rogan was, “You’ve made this a bad day for me, young man.”

  “I’m sorry,” Rogan said politely. He didn’t really give a damn. Captain Alexander had irritated him.

  “It’s not your fault,” the colonel growled. “None of us thought you could break that last code. It’s one of our best, and now that you know it we’ll have to change over. After we screen you and accept you in the services maybe we can use the code again.”

  Rogan said incredulously, “You mean all the codes are that easy?”

  The colonel said drily, “To you they are, obviously. To anybody else they are all that hard. Are you prepared to enter the service immediately?”

  Rogan nodded. “This very minute.”

  The colonel frowned. “It doesn’t work that way. You have to be screened for security. And until you are cleared, we’ll have to keep you under arrest. You already know too much to be running around loose. But that’s just a formality.”

  The formality proved to be an Intelligence department prison that made Alcatraz seem like a summer camp. But it did not occur to Rogan that this treatment was typical of all Intelligence attitudes. A week later he was sworn into the service as a second lieutenant. Three months later he was in charge of the section responsible for breaking all European codes, except for Russia’s. The Russian code was part of the Asian section.

  He was happy. For the first time in his life he was doing something dramatic and exciting. His memory, his fabulously brilliant mind, was helping his country to win a great war. He had his pick of young girls in Washington. And soon he was promoted. Life couldn’t be better. But in 1943 he had begun to feel guilty again. He felt that he was using his mental ability to avoid front-line action, and he volunteered for the field intelligence section. His offer was rejected; he was too valuable to be risked.

  It was then that he came up with the idea of himself as a walking code switchboard to coordinate the invasion of France from inside that country. He prepared the plan in detail; it was brilliant, and the chiefs of staff approved. And so the brilliant Captain Rogan was parachuted into France.

  He was proud of himself, and he knew that his father, too, would have been proud of what he was doing now. But his mother wept because he was endangering his brain, that fabulous brain they had sheltered and nurtured for so long. Rogan shrugged it off. He hadn’t yet done anything so marvelous with his brain. Perhaps after the war he would find his real interest and establish his true genius. But he had learned enough to know that raw brilliance needs long years of hard work to develop properly. He would have time after the war. On New Year’s Day, 1944, Captain Michael Rogan was parachuted into Occupied France as chief Allied communications officer with the French Underground. He had trained with Britain’s SOE Agents, had learned how to operate a secret radio transmitter-receiver, and was carrying a tiny suicide capsule surgically embedded in the palm of his left hand.

  His billet hideout was in the house of a French family named Charney in the town of Vitry-sur-Seine, just south of Paris. There Rogan set up his network of couriers and informers and radioed coded information to England. On occasion he received radioed requests for certain details needed for the coming invasion of Europe.

  It proved to be a quiet, peaceful life. On fine Sunday afternoons he went on picnics with the daughter of the house, Christine Charney, a long-limbed, sweet-looking girl with chestnut hair. Christine studied music at the local university. She and Michael Rogan became lovers, and then she became pregnant.

  Wearing his beret and flashing his false ID papers, Rogan married Christine Charney at the town hall and they returned to her parents’ house to carry out the work of the Underground together.

  When the Allies invaded Normandy on June 6, 1944, Rogan had so much communication traffic on his radio that he became careless. Two weeks later the Gestapo swooped down on the Charney house and arrested everyone inside it. They waited for exactly the right moment. Not only did they arrest the Charney family and Mike Rogan; they also arrested six Underground couriers waiting for messages. Within a month all were interrogated, tried, and executed. All except Michael Rogan and his wife, Christine. From the interrogation of the other prisoners the Germans had learned about Rogan’s ability to memorize intricate codes, and they wanted to give him special attention. His wife was kept alive, Rogan was smilingly told, “as a special courtesy.” She was then five months pregnant.

  Six weeks after their capture, Michael Rogan and his wife were put in separate Gestapo staff cars and driven to Munich. In that city’s busy central square stood the Munich Palace of Justice, and in one of those court buildings, Michael Rogan’s final and most terrible interrogation began. It lasted for endless days, more days than he could count. But in the years afterward his fabulous memory spared him nothing. It repeated his agony second by second, over and over again. He suffered a thousand separate nightmares. And it always began with the seven-man interrogation team waiting for him in the high-domed room of the Munich Palace of Justice—waiting patiently and with good humor, for the sport that would give them pleasure.

  All seven wore swastika armbands, but two men wore tunics of different shades. From this and the collar insignia, Rogan knew that one of them was with the Hungarian armed forces and the other was with the Italian army. These two took no part in the interrogation at first; they were official observers.

  The chief of the interrogation team was a tall, aristocratic officer with deep-set eyes. He assured Rogan that all they wanted was the codes stored in his head, and then Rogan and his wife and the unborn child would live. They hammered at him all that first day, and Rogan stood mute. He refused to answer any questions. Then on the night of the second day he heard Christine’s voice screaming for help in the next room. She kept calling his name, screaming, “Michel! Michel!” over and over. She was in agony. Rogan looked at the burning eyes of the chief interrogator and whispered, “Stop that. Stop. I’ll tell you everything.”

  For the next five days he gave them old, discarded code combinations. In some way, perhaps by comparing them with intercepted messages, they learned what
he was doing. The next day they seated him in the chair and stood around in a circle. They did not question him; they did not touch him. The man in the Italian uniform disappeared into the other room. A few moments later Rogan heard his wife screaming in agony again. The pain in her voice was beyond belief. Rogan started to whisper that he would tell them everything, anything they wanted to know, but the chief interrogator shook his head. They all sat in silence as the screams pierced the walls and their brains, until Rogan slipped from his chair to the floor, weeping, almost unconscious with grief. Then they dragged him across the floor of the high-domed room and into the next chamber. The interrogator in the Italian uniform was sitting beside a phonograph. The twirling black record sent Christine’s screams shrieking through the Palace of Justice.

  “You never tricked us,” the chief interrogator said contemptuously. “We outwitted you. Your wife died under torture the very first day.” Rogan studied their faces carefully. If they let him live, he would kill them all someday.

  He realized only later that this was exactly the reaction they wanted. They promised to let him live if he would give them the correct codes. And in his desire for vengeance, he did so. For the next two weeks he gave them the codes and explained how they worked. He was sent back to his solitary cell for what seemed many more months. Once a week he would be escorted to the high-domed room and interrogated by the seven men in what he came to realize was a purely routine procedure. There was no way for Rogan to know that during these months the Allied armies had swept across France and into Germany and were now at the gates of Munich. When he was summoned for his final interrogation he could not know that the seven interrogators were about to flee and disguise their identities, disappear into the mass of Germans in a desperate effort to escape punishment for their crimes.

  “We are going to set you free; we are going to keep our promise,” the aristocratic chief interrogator with the deep-set eyes said to Rogan. That voice rang with sincerity. It was an actor’s voice, or an orator’s. One of the other men pointed to some civilian clothes lying over the back of a chair. “Take off your rags and change into these.”