by Robert Brown
Everyone bowed their heads. Heinrich did the same, thinking about how he now had two murders to solve, one committed by the Purity League and one against or perhaps even within the Purity League. He didn’t think for a second that some Polish Communists had done it. The timing was too close to be a coincidence, and the fact that Freytag came from the “German” part of Poland, the same region where the train was supposedly hidden, set off a big alarm in Heinrich’s head.
Things were happening in Poland, and he needed to get there now. When the meeting broke up, he left as soon as courtesy allowed, telling himself that it was the right thing to do and that he wasn’t chickening out of meeting Bowers face to face.
He made it a block from the meeting before he threw up.
CHAPTER FIVE
The night before he flew to Warsaw, Heinrich hosted a meeting of the Old Farts Who Love Old Tunes group at his house as a going away party. The Old Farts got started in Philly many years ago as a way for men to get away from their wives, drink whiskey, smoke cigars, and listen to old music. Really old music. Anyone shows up to a meeting with one of those new-fangled 33 rpm records would get laughed out of the house. The older 78s were the rule although some members even had Edison cylinder players from as early as the 1880s.
Grandpa Otto had raised him on old music from the Old Country—marches and folksongs, opera and Classical. It was a longshot trying that with a teenager who had a massive chip on his shoulder and who thought Black Flag was the highest in musical achievement, but something in the music resonated with him, especially the albums with lyrics. Something about those crackly voices calling down the decades from another era moved him. When he had been clearing out Grandpa Otto’s things, tossing the gramophone, and the 78s was the hardest thing.
It wasn’t long before he started to rebuild the collection, saving money for a 1910 Columbia gramophone with a beautiful pressed brass horn and building up a good library of jazz, blues, and some European folk singers and bands. He told himself it had nothing to do with remembering his grandfather and made sure never to buy an album Otto had owned.
“Joe Turner Blues” by Wilbur Sweatman, a hit in 1917, was playing when the guys showed up.
“Still playing this new shit?” Jordan Carter joked as he came through the door, a bottle of 16-year-old Scapa in one hand and a large box tucked under his arm. He was a beefy African-American with a ready smile and hair turning to grey.
“Holy crap,” Heinrich said, indicating to the box. “You actually brought it here?”
“The Edison?” Jordan said. “Don’t worry, I packed it well. We got to give you a big send off. Also I found a great deal down at Minnie’s on cylinders. She bought a major lot from some old storage container. Tons of stuff. Kiara would kill me if she knew how much I spent.”
“Sell more light bulbs,” Heinrich advised. Jordan owned a light bulb factory and was by far the richest guy in the group. If Kiara really would get mad at knowing the price tag for those cylinders, then he had laid down some serious cash.
The cylinder was the first music format before the more familiar disc record was developed, and Jordan was one of a few hardcore collectors in the country with a good library of cylinders for them. He even had some of the earliest soft wax recordings before the Edison company switched to hardened wax and later celluloid.
Heinrich cleared a side table of a lamp and a few empty Chinese takeaway cartons while Jordan chuckled.
“I won’t tell Kiara you’re still a slob,” he said, setting down the box in the cleared space.
“Good. I won’t tell her how much you spent at Minnie’s. I got some good sides there last week. One’s playing now.”
Jordan glanced at the gramophone. “Yeah, I thought that was new.”
“Ain’t nothing new in this club.”
Jordan laughed. There was another knock at the door so Heinrich left him unpacking the Edison cylinder player while he answered it.
Neil, Thornton, and Avram had all come together. Neil Balfort was a lawyer at some high-flying office. He did contract law and so his and Heinrich’s professional paths never crossed. Thornton Bell was a violinist with the New York Philharmonic who had crazy inside connections for vintage Classical and opera 78s. He snapped up the best stuff even before it got listed online. Avram was the newest member, a forty-something paper pusher at some municipal office, a job so boring he groaned any time someone asked him what he did for a living. He’d gotten bitten by the collecting bug hard and the other members were teaching him how not to get ripped off.
“Make yourself at home, guys,” Heinrich said, indicating to the worn sofa and a pair of aging armchairs. The table was already supplied with chips, cheese, a bottle of 10-year-old Talisker, and a box of real Cuban cigars courtesy of a previous client.
Neil spotted the Cubans instantly. Setting his pile of early ethnographic recordings on the coffee table, he picked one up and smelled it.
“Ah, the rich bouquet of illegality.”
“They go well with a good single malt,” Heinrich said.
Thornton plunked a bottle of 10-year-old Laphroaig on the table. “For a good cigar you need something peaty.”
“All for you,” Avram said. “Laphroaig is too peaty for me.”
“The peatiest,” Jordan said, making some final adjustments to his beautiful 1892 Edison Cylinder Player with a fine polished mahogany box as a base. On top was the rotor on which the cylinder would be placed and the brass horn and a needle that was set on the turning cylinder to play it, a bit like the later arm of a record player.
Heinrich grabbed the Laphroaig and poured himself a healthy measure. “Too peaty? You’re a pussy, Avram. Scotch can never be too peaty.”
The bureaucrat only laughed as he lit a cigar. “Who’s the pussy? You’re only pouring yourself a double!”
“Nothing makes jetlag worse than a hangover.”
“Yeah, guess you got a long flight tomorrow,” Avram said, pouring himself a triple of Scapa, a fine single malt from Orkney that had been making waves in recent years after a long time out of the business.
“Sure do, and a hell of a case at the other end of it,” Heinrich said, taking a slug of whiskey to ease away a sudden spike of tension. That secret meeting had really taken it out of him. “I don’t want to talk about work tonight.”
“Well I hope you get some time off to search for tunes,” Thornton said. “Warsaw has probably been picked clean, but I bet there’s some gold hidden in those smaller towns. When we played in the Czech Republic a few years ago, I extended my stay to go collecting. Prague was a washout, but I found wonderful recordings in Brno. Take a look.”
The Old Farts had an unspoken rule that whenever a member was travelling, they kept an eye out for records and cylinders the other members might like. Trading records was a big part of the fun.
“I’ll make time,” Heinrich promised. “Who here’s got an adaptable gramophone?”
Thornton and Jordan both said they did.
“What do you mean?” Avram asked.
Jordan turned to the new guy. “American records run at 78.26 rpm. Everywhere else they run at 77.92 rpm. It’s because the cycle frequency for the electric current was a little different, and that affected the recording equipment.”
“Oh,” Avram said, hiding his embarrassment behind his glass of whiskey. It was a newbie question for sure, but Heinrich didn’t mind newbies who could hold their whiskey and had a killer collection of early Vocalion and OKeh blues sides. Avram wasn’t slumming like that hipster he buried. He was real people.
Heinrich’s 78 finished its last track, and he walked through a cloud of cigar smoke and Scotch fumes to turn off the gramophone. Jordan got up and pulled a cylinder out of its box. Everyone oohed and aahed. It was bright pink, meaning it dated before 1903, a real rarity. Why the Edison company produced the earliest commercial cylinders in such a garish color was a bit of a mystery.
“Gentlemen, this is Sherman Houston Dudley’s “Oh! Oh!
Miss Phoebe”, first written sometime in the 1890s, although I’m sad to say this recording dates to 1901. I’d love to get some more nineteenth century recordings for my collection. Heinrich, if you find any while sleeping with those Polish chicks, I’d definitely be interested. Now you’ve all heard of Dudley, but you probably didn’t know that he used to play up and down the Mississippi River with my very own great-grandfather, “Blind” Cash Carter. Wish my ancestor had recorded some cylinders or disks but as far as I know he didn’t. This is the next best thing.”
He slipped the cylinder onto the player, flipped the switch to start it turning, and set the needle and horn on top of the cylinder.
The player crackled to life, and from beneath the hisses and pops came the sound of a lively band and an old-style voice singing of his true love.
Heinrich closed his eyes, took a sip of whiskey, took a puff from his Cuban cigar, and savored the moment. He knew this was the last bit of peace he would have until the murders were solved.
CHAPTER SIX
Heinrich spent the flight to Warsaw with his Polish vocabulary tutorial, pissing off some suit sitting next to him who wanted to sleep. When the suit complained, blustering like he was talking to some secretary straight from the temp agency, Heinrich repeated the vocabulary words louder. If the suit wanted silence, he should have coughed up for first class.
Once in Warsaw, he checked into a three-star hotel in the Old Town tourist quarter. The central part of the city had a medieval wall that surrounded a cluster of historic buildings, or at least the imitation of historic buildings. The whole place had been wrecked by the Nazis during the Warsaw Uprising, the brave but doomed attempt by the Polish Jews to resist final annihilation.
He had to admit the reconstruction would have fooled him if he didn’t know the city’s history. The narrow cobblestone streets wound their way between fine old stone buildings that looked like something out of Georgian England, and little squares had cozy cafés next to burbling fountains or statues of historic figures. One even had a mermaid, an odd choice for this landlocked city. There was a glorious red palace with Russian-style onion-shaped towers, and fine old churches with spires that soared above the historic quarter. It all looked like it had been preserved from the 18th century. In fact, it had all been rebuilt in the last fifty years from rubble.
Heinrich felt tempted to splash out on a five-star place and let the old bag pay for it, but he’d learned the hard way that anonymity was the better option. People noticed the guests in five-star hotels. No one cared about the middle class tourists and unimportant businessmen at the cheaper places.
All in all, the hotel wasn’t bad, a converted historic home with a small room, a tiny bathroom, WIFI, and satellite TV. The old woman who ran it spoke horrible English, but that only gave him a chance to practice his Polish.
“Ah, you know our language!” the woman said, her eyes lighting up. “Are you Polish-American?”
“Yes,” Heinrich lied, then decided to feel her out, “I’m from Wałbrzych.”
Suddenly the landlady put on a poker face. “Oh… and when did your ancestors moved to America?”
“Oh, way back in 1902. They always talked about the old country. My grandfather Pavel always talked about his parents, who came from Wałbrzych. He taught me my Polish although I should have learned more. It’s my first time getting back to Poland.”
The lady’s smile crept back. Apparently he had said enough to convince her he was Polish, not German, but a certain doubt remained thanks to his name. He took some tourist brochures from the display by the counter, thanked her, and went up to his room.
An email from Biniam was waiting for him when he fired up his laptop. All it said was “Skype”.
He didn’t mean Skype when he said Skype. He meant AnonChat, a more secure encrypted video calling service that had a slow connection because the signal got scattered through various servers like communications on the Dark Web. The connection made Heinrich feel like he was back in the days of dial-up, but Biniam didn’t turn on his camera anyway. He conceded to a microphone, but Heinrich got the impression that was on a secondary computer he only used when it was necessary. Plus he used one of those speech modifiers that made him sound like a serial killer in a cheap movie.
If it had been anyone else, Heinrich would have given him shit for being part of the tin foil hat brigade, but considering what the guy had lived through, and what waited for him if his government ever got its hands on him, Biniam was probably not being cautious enough.
“The entire world had accepted cameras and microphones into their homes, even into their beds. Everyone is stupid!” That’s what he always said.
Biniam was super paranoid and for him that made perfect sense. Eritrea vied with North Korea for the Most Oppressive Regime Award. There was no free press, no free speech, the jails were overflowing, and when you were eighteen, they sent you to the army and kept you there as long as they liked. Sometimes that could last ten years. Of course they didn’t pay you. You were lucky if they fed you.
Biniam had gotten away from all that by sheer determination and a huge amount of luck. After his fifth year sitting in a squalid bunker on the border with Ethiopia being whipped by an insane commander and surviving off meager rations he supplemented with roots and leaves, he decided that a ten percent chance of survival was better than living his current life and he bolted for the border.
He crossed the border into Ethiopia in the dead of a moonless night, the sound of the hyenas laughing out of the darkness sending tremors through his body that ten years on had never gone away. Much of the border was mined. None of the minefields were marked. He walked for hours and took his chances.
The next day dawned and Biniam was in Ethiopia. The nation was happy to take refugees from its breakaway province, but didn’t bother providing them with anything. He ended up in a Doctors Without Borders refugee camp, sharing a tent with ten other people and getting two meals a day, twice what he got in the Eritrean army.
Biniam used his natural talent with electronics, learned in his dad’s radio repair shop, to make himself useful to the NGO. He fixed their generator. He fixed their shortwave. Eventually they taught him to use their computers and introduced him to something called the Internet, which people like him had never seen before.
From there he moved to the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, a sprawling metropolis full of opportunity and squalor. He chose opportunity. Squalor chose him. For three years he lived in a tin shack scavenging electronic parts that he sold to various shops before he landed a job in an Internet cafe. From there he worked his way up to being an assistant sysop for the local university.
From that point, Biniam always got vague with his story. He claimed to have “lucked into a connection” that helped him a receive a student visa to the United States, even though there was no way he could have afforded the flight, let alone the tuition. Once in the U.S., he got a “special preferment” to obtain a Green Card. Heinrich didn’t ask. It was none of his business and Biniam wouldn’t have been straight with him anyway. He’d take one Eritrean semi-legal refugee over a hundred latte-sipping hipsters any day.
He knew Biniam would be straight with him on this video call though. Biniam considered this service more secure than encrypted email.
“So what’s going on, bud?” Heinrich asked.
“Something interesting coming up. A neo-Nazi named Dieter Freytag got murdered. The Purity League says it was the Communists but no one really knows.”
“Yeah, I heard at that meeting you sent me to.”
“There’s going to be a funeral and a demonstration in Warsaw tomorrow, that’s why I called you.”
“Interesting. I’ll go.”
“You know what day that is, don’t you?”
“May 1, May Day. Yeah, so they’ll be spoiling for a fight with the Commies and the Commies will be spoiling for a fight with the world. Should be loads of fun. Two sets of assholes beating the shit out of each other. I’ll
take some photos for you.”
“I’ll treasure them, my friend.”
Eritrea’s government was supposedly communist, although in reality, like with all communist countries, it was ruled by a small elite that gave even less of a damn about the working class than the average American billionaire. Biniam hated Commies just as much as Heinrich hated Nazis.
“So where does the demo kick off?” Heinrich asked.
“Michał Grabowski Square for the neo-Nazis. The Reds are marching from Liberation Square about a mile away and going along Gabriel Narutowicz Street. That’s where the Nazis plan to meet them. I managed to hack a website for the English branch of the Purity League. Some of their representatives will be there. They will use this as a big rallying cry. There will be representatives from a few other countries too, and cities from all over Poland.”
“This guy was from Wałbrzych. Will there be a group from there?” Heinrich asked.
“Yeah, now that you mention it. Apparently his grandfather is going to show up. Some old veteran of a Polish division in the Third Reich. Imagine that, Poles joining the Nazis! Dumbasses.”
Heinrich felt a queasiness in his stomach.
There was a pause, and Heinrich could tell that Biniam was biting his tongue. Biniam knew about Heinrich’s family. He researched all his clients and found out a scary amount of detail.
Heinrich had once asked him about the family he had left behind in Eritrea. Biniam never talked about them but he figured Biniam wouldn’t mind since Heinrich sure wasn’t one to judge.
Biniam had been cagey anyway.
“My family wanted the best for me,” Biniam had told him, “but knew they couldn’t provide anything but the worst. Where I’m from we don’t have the luxury of sentimentality. If you see a chance, you go for it. I couldn’t even tell my family I was going to flee because the officers read all the mail. But when I fell silent they knew. I have heard little news about them since.”