The introduction on the back cover informs us that Mario Puzo wrote this book in 1967, a year or so before he wrote his all-time best-seller The Godfather. We are also told it was written under the pseudonym Mario Cleri and was only recently brought to light. The reader is not, however, given an explanation for this secrecy.
Either way, perhaps the policy of omerta was a good idea all these years. The Godfather trilogy was rescued from mediocrity by the brilliance of Francis Ford Coppola’s direction and, first, Marlon Brando and then Al Pacino’s memorable acting. It would have taken a lot more to salvage Six Graves to Munich.
The novel is set in post-war Europe and centres on the revenge of a young American intelligence officer, Michael Rogan, who was tortured by the Gestapo, which also murdered his beautiful French wife.
Shot in the head and left for dead as the Americans stormed into Germany, Rogan miraculously survives thanks to multiple operations and a steel plate inserted into his skull. This leaves Rogan prone to violent headaches and an equally ferocious desire for revenge against his former tormentors.
Like many war veterans Rogan drifts from one job to another and slips into alcoholism. His war-time injury leaves him with a chronic inability to concentrate for long periods and he finally finds his vocation as a programmer in a computer firm. His super-whiz head for math and super-retentive memory makes him the firm’s resident genius and he grows rich on its soaring stock price.
So now the scene is set for Rogan to extract his revenge — he has the money and the time. The book begins in a sleazy Hamburg night club where he takes out one of his Gestapo torturers Karl Pfann. This deadly act of vengeance is prefaced by dialogue that would do credit to an Amitabh Bachchan hit.
“The German said quietly, menacingly, ‘Micheal Rogan is dead. What do you want from me?’
‘Your life,’ Rogan said. He swung the Walther pistol out from under the table and pressed it into Pfann’s belly. He pulled the trigger.”
You can almost hear the clapping and cheering in the cheaper seats.
Amazingly, Rogan is able to track every one of his torturers. Anyone with a passing knowledge of what went on in post-war Europe would know that Rogan is unbelievably lucky.
First, the ease with which he slips across the Iron Curtain is incredible. Second, hundreds of major and minor war criminals escaped Germany after the war — Adolf Eichman, among the most famous of them, was eventually run to ground in Argentina by Israel’s Mossad in 1960. Many escaped with vast amounts of loot to acquire new identities and new lives in South America, often with the help of either the Catholic church or the Americans and British who were hoping to protect assets that could provide information on their emerging Cold War enemy Communist Russia. Many are only just beginning to surface 64 years after the war ended. For Rogan to have found all seven of his torturers in situ — including one in Italy — can only be described as amazing coincidence.
But then, coincidences are the grist of novel writing and Cleri/Puzo cheerfully stretches fictional liberties to the limit. At any rate, no one can fault him for lacking the thriller-writer’s nous. So, he faithfully reproduces scenes of graphic violence and a full complement of sex interspersed with sundry villains and good guys.
Rogan, who has decided his life’s mission for revenge precludes marriage, nevertheless retains a healthy appetite for women. Although the doctors advise him against too much alcohol and sex, he is undeterred and unscathed by regular over-indulgence. In Hamburg, he acquires a beautiful companion, Rosalie, a woman who is forced into prostitution after she loses her family and worldly goods when the Allies bombed her home during the war.
Unlike Rogan, she harbours no grudges against the people who were responsible for her predicament. Instead, she develops, in the course of one night of steamy sex, so much affection for Rogan that she decides to accompany him on his quest for the other five war criminals. Her role is not unlike that of a gangster’s moll. Rogan reciprocates her affection but is not averse to some variety when he is co-opted to have sex with the wife of the lone Italian who formed part of Rogan’s torture team — by the Italian himself, now a Mafia boss, for reasons too complex to explain in a short review.
As the novel romps its way to its predictable end, it is a far cry from bearing “the hallmarks of this master storyteller”, as the breathless introduction promises. At best, it’s a page-turner that would fulfil its function admirably in an airport lounge or the bathroom.
SIX GRAVES TO MUNICH
Mario Puzo/Mario Cleri
Penguin India
200pp; Rs 399
