by A W Hartoin
“Claudia,” I said. “So nice to see you.”
Claudia was confused, but she went with it, not that she had any choice. Grandma cornered her and grabbed me. “Mercy, give an update on our progress. It’s only right since she’s essential to our work.”
“Essential?” Claudia asked.
“Absolutely,” I said, feeling a little boozy myself. “You are part of the investigation, a crucial part.”
“I am?”
“You have to know all the particulars in case that Nachtnebel comes around,” I said. “You don’t want to look like you’re holding out on him.”
“No, of course not,” said Claudia.
“I will get more Glühwein,” said Marta.
“I’ll go, too,” said Grandma.
“Not for me,” said Claudia.
Marta acted like she didn’t hear her daughter and they melted into the crowd. I turned to Claudia and did what I never did. I told her what I had, even though I’d have liked to have kept it close to the vest.
“I know about SCPs,” she said. “My brother watches them.”
“Excellent. Tell me what you know. It’s a huge help.”
Claudia knew quite a bit and the trip wasn’t a waste of time at all. Her brother was a talker and Claudia told me that SCP stories tended to fit into some loose categories, Safe, Euclid, Keter, Thaumiel, and Apollyon. Basically, the easiest to contain anomalies were in Safe all the way up to the most dangerous in Apollyon that were a constant threat to human life. Claudia’s favorite was some Play-Doh soldiers that could form into just about anything but were harmless because their ammunition was also Play-Doh.
“So you watch these things?” I asked.
“Sometimes, but not the hardcore ones. They’ll give you nightmares. Do you know which one the boy was watching?” she asked.
“I will.”
“Pay attention to that. It says a lot about him if he only likes the scariest stuff, I mean,” said Claudia. “I met someone a while ago and he liked the most violent of the SCPs. He wasn’t very nice.”
“Good to know.”
Grandma and Marta came back with multiple mugs, smiling Cheshire Cat smiles. What a couple of old schemers.
“Mutti,” complained Claudia. “I said no. I have to drive.”
“We are having fun. Don’t be so serious. We will take the train home.”
“Our car is here.”
Marta pushed the mug into her daughter’s hands and Claudia was more confused than ever. She sipped her Glühwein and told me more about SCPs. I was getting a decent picture of our guy, if it was him.
“He’s a creative then,” I said.
“Oh, yes. Certainly,” she said. “He might be a writer. You could find him that way.”
I nodded. “Yes, through the high school. The counselors might know. Brilliant, Claudia.”
She gave me a shy smile and that’s when I spotted Viktor Koch coming into the square between a hut selling Lángos, a fried flatbread covered in cheese, and another selling Spätzle. He cleaned up well and was wearing a typically European black wool jacket, a red scarf, and a fedora tilted at just the right angle. Marta would be pleased.
“Oh, my God,” I said. “You won’t believe who’s here.”
“Is it him?” Claudia spun around, looking for the boy.
“The Polizei that’s helping us.” I waved frantically. “I was hoping he’d come.”
Claudia shrunk back as if she could melt into the wood of the nearest hut. “Why is he here?”
“I asked him to come. He’s so nice to help us, even when his boss isn’t happy with me. Viktor!”
Koch came over, predictably oblivious to Claudia’s distress, and focused on me. “Do you have news?”
“I do and even more than I came with,” I said. “Claudia has been a huge help.”
“Claudia?” he asked.
I turned and Claudia had gotten herself five feet away. Marta was barely retaining her motherly urge to kick her daughter over to the handsome officer. Since she looked like she might do a runner, I took Koch’s arm and we cornered her against the hut.
“Claudia. Viktor. Viktor. Claudia,” I said happily.
“Oh yes,” he said. “You work at the Café Goethe.”
She nodded and was mute.
“Viktor is the Polizei that interviewed you, remember?” I asked.
Another nod. This was going to be harder than I thought.
“Okay. Here’s what’s happening.” I told him about the boy and gave him a copy of the picture we had.
“How did you get this?” he asked.
“Do you really want to know?”
“No.”
“Good answer.” I told him about the Wi-Fi access and narrowing it down to a few people being in the café at the right time.
“It’s illegal to access Wi-Fi networks other than your own,” he said.
“Imagine that,” I said. “It’s a good thing you don’t know anything about those kinds of activities.”
“Is this how you solve crimes?” Koch asked. “By doing illegal activities?”
“How many leads did you have before I showed up? None? That’s what I thought,” I said. “Now a café with a Wi-Fi password of CaféGoetheFrühstück is hardly worried about security. Half their building is poaching it. More than half actually.”
He gave me that hard German look I was so familiar with from my days of traveling with The Girls. They got it quite a lot when someone didn’t want to give them entrance to a library or archives. It didn’t stop them and it didn’t stop me.
“So do you want to give me the stink eye or do you want to learn about SCPs?”
“I…uh…what?”
“SCPs,” I said. “We’ve got a solid lead and Claudia knows all about it.”
He looked at Claudia. She was terrified and I sighed.
“Claudia, please explain SCPs,” I said. “They’re kinda a sci-fi thing, right?”
“Oh, sci-fi,” said Koch. “I love sci-fi.”
“Really?” Claudia asked.
Thank you, God. I appreciate it. ’Cause I have to pee.
“Tell him about the Play-Doh,” I said. “And the types. Our guy could be a psycho.”
“Well,” she said quietly, “there are different levels. SCP stands for—”
“I’m going to find a bathroom. Be right back.” I left them bent over Claudia’s phone and went to the matchmakers.
“Very good,” said Marta. “I knew it would be right.”
“He’s into sci-fi,” I said.
“Claudia reads that.”
“Another thing in common.”
“Who has something in common?” Isolda swept in, wearing a different fur with a matching hat and carrying two baskets full of wrapped presents.
“Our scheme is working,” said Grandma and she pointed to Koch and Claudia.
“You are a genius, Janine,” said Isolda.
“Has anyone seen a sign for bathrooms?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Isolda. “This way.”
Isolda hooked arms with Grandma and said, “So how mad are you at Ace? A six or a seven?”
“I give it an eight point two,” said Grandma.
“Ooh that beats the great unretirement of 1995.”
“Consider it compound interest.”
I glanced over at Moe who was scanning the crowd for threats and smiling a tiny bit like the Grinch when he was plotting to ruin Christmas. I took his arm and said, “No.”
“I don’t know to what you refer,” said Moe.
“Uh-huh. Sure.”
“Hurry. We’re going to lose them.”
We weren’t going to lose them. Our progress to a much-needed toilet was snail-like. We stopped at a stage performance with musicians playing what I assumed were medieval instruments, including some weird guitar thing that had strings, keys like a piano, and a crank on the end. It sounded like the music from The Last of the Mohicans, one of my mom’s favorite comfort movies
. We watched it three times when she was in rehab.
I had to push Isolda and Grandma to get them moving because just giving me directions wasn’t going to do it. We had to stay together. They thought I’d get lost. I would, but I was willing to risk it for a toilet, a hole in the ground, or a flipping bush. Things were reaching critical mass.
Isolda led us to the medieval town wall and pointed up an alley to a sort of trailer toilet set up. I dashed up and handed the lady manning the pay to pee table a euro. Paying for toilets was one of those things that was hard to get used to, but I’d long since learned to have change at all times.
“All better?” Grandma asked when I came out.
“Yes. Thank you,” I said. “Where to now?”
“The Kinder area,” said Isolda. “I love the Kinder.”
She and Grandma headed through an arch in the wall and we entered the children’s delight. There were merry-go-rounds that were half modern and half medieval with wooden buckets for the kids to sit in, a Ferris wheel all in wood and run by a guy with a crank, a petting zoo, and more food. Grandma decided to split a waffle with Isolda and they waited in line while Moe and I hung back to watch the Kinder walk by dressed like they were in twenty below blizzard weather when it was actually not that bad out at about forty-two degrees. In Germany, it wasn’t unusual to see parkas and puffer coats in sixty-degree weather.
Marta jogged up and hugged me. “They are still talking. I could not get a word in.”
“Congratulations,” I said.
“Where is Janine? I must tell her.”
“Waiting for waffles.”
Marta joined them in line, joyfully telling the ladies about the success. I could practically see the thoughts of grandchildren spinning around in her head.
Moe did a quick turnaround to check the passing crowd and then said, “Did you know that Isolda doesn’t know who her father is?”
“Of course, it’s kind of a family mystery,” I said.
“I thought that kind of thing only happened to the lower classes, not people like the Bleds.”
“The Bleds are people, just like everyone else.”
Moe looked at Isolda with her furs and dangling diamond earrings. “No, they aren’t.”
“How did you find out?” I asked. “Did she tell you?”
“She’s not ashamed,” he said with admiration. “She was very upfront about it.”
“Why in the world did it come up? She’s never mentioned it to me and I’ve known her my whole life.”
“Well,” Moe marked a pair of men coming through the crowd that looked a little out of place and watched them until they’d passed through without a glance in my direction and then continued, “it’s why she’s here in Germany, so she told me.”
“What’s Germany got to do with it?” I asked.
“She thinks he’s German.”
It took me a second to process that. I’d never heard anyone in the family give any hints as to who Isolda’s father might be. As far as I knew, The Girls had no clues to who he was and they weren’t particularly concerned and neither was anyone else. I couldn’t blame them. Isolda’s mother’s mysterious pregnancy had happened so long ago and she wouldn’t say a thing about the father, which wasn’t surprising considering her mental state.
Imelda was mentally ill her whole life. She was diagnosed with everything from garden variety insanity to schizophrenia to female hysteria. It sounded to me like she had bipolar disorder from the frantic elation and deep sadness The Girls described. Imelda was in and out of mental hospitals, but the Bleds refused the harsh treatments the doctors wanted to do, like a lobotomy and hydrotherapy. The Girls still got mad when they talked about it. One doctor thought immersing Imelda in ice water for hours would shock her into normalcy. When he wouldn’t leave Imelda’s father alone on the subject, he ended up chasing him out of the office with a cane. It made the papers.
In the end, the Bleds decided to keep Imelda at home instead of institutionalizing her. She went from house to house, family member to family member, only in the hospital when absolutely necessary. She was at the Bled Mansion being looked after by The Girls’ mother Florence when in 1943 Imelda disappeared. She always had a companion with her, a woman named Rose, but there was a flu epidemic going around that winter. Myrtle and Millicent got it and were terribly sick, so was Florence, and most of the staff, including Rose, who ended up in the hospital.
During the sickness, Imelda Bled walked out the front door and disappeared for three months. The family did everything they could to find her, but the police and private detectives found no trace of her, until she had what the family described as an episode in New York City where she ended up at Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital and was recognized. She had Isolda seven months later and was by all accounts a wonderful mother when she was stable. The family decided Nicolai and Florence would take responsibility for raising Isolda and she lived in the Bled Mansion, even when Imelda was in another house. It wasn’t an ideal solution, but I don’t know what else they could have done.
“He can’t be German,” I said.
“Why not?” Moe asked.
“It happened in 1943. We were at war. There weren’t a whole lot of free-range Germans running around.”
“She sounds pretty sure and it’s not like the cops had a clue about what happened to her mother,” said Moe. “They were useless and caused trouble instead of finding Imelda.”
“Isolda told you that?” I asked.
“I already knew.”
“How? Nobody talks about Imelda’s disappearance anymore. The family barely does.”
“I got briefed when Fats did,” he said.
“What in the world are you talking about?” I asked.
“Families have long memories. Calpurnia and Cosmo thought there might be an issue when they put Fats on you.”
I’m so freaking confused.
“You mean my dad might have an issue?”
“We knew he would. Tommy Watts was always going to have a problem with us,” said Moe. “But then he didn’t. Go figure. What did you do to handle that?”
“Nothing. He just never did anything,” I said.
“He knows.”
“I know he knows, but he just got over it.”
Moe’s eyes left the crowd to look at me. “Since when does Tommy Watts get over anything?”
“Good point, but I still don’t get it. Calpurnia briefed you on Imelda Bled because my dad might freak out about Fats bodyguarding me?” I asked.
“Of course not,” Moe said. “She was concerned about how your godmothers might react and she wanted Fats to have a response if they did.”
“Millicent and Myrtle? Why would they care?”
“Because the Fibonaccis were accused of kidnapping Imelda.”
“Are you serious?” I asked. “Why would the Fibonaccis kidnap a mentally ill woman in broad daylight in the middle of a flu epidemic?”
“They wouldn’t, but the cops had nothing else. They figured it was a ransom-type situation and we might have knowledge of who did it, even if we didn’t do it ourselves.”
“That sounds like a stretch,” I said.
Grandma got her waffle and pointed at a sign for the petting zoo. The ladies took off and we followed much slower.
“When the cops have nothing, they go fishing,” said Moe. “My grandfather got pulled in three times and smacked around pretty good. He wasn’t the only one. They yanked in the O’Reilly gang. To be fair, kidnapping was more their style. They used to grab up working girls from other cities and put them to work downtown.”
“That’s fairly horrible,” I said. “But was there a ransom note or something?”
“As a matter of fact, there was,” he said. “Some dingus mailed one to the brewery, trying for a quick score. Grandpa used to talk about that. The cops yanking people off the streets, trying to find that idiot.”
“They just picked up random people?”
“It was the good old days. Cops
could do what they wanted. Grandpa came home with a broken nose and cigarette burns. He was seventeen.”
“Oh, my God.”
“Yeah, well, he gave as good as he got. He beat the crap out of two of those cops a year later. Put them in intensive care. No charges. Cops knew when to step back.”
“It sounds like the Wild West,” I said.
“There was a missing Bled and the papers kept saying it might happen again to the little girls.”
“Millicent and Myrtle?”
“That was the fear. Let’s just say the cops were motivated to get something and they didn’t care how. Grandpa thought it was all BS. You know the Bleds got a history of topping themselves and that Imelda, we knew she was nuts. Everyone knew. They just didn’t say it because it was the Bleds.”
“The Fibonaccis thought Imelda killed herself?” I asked.
“Sure. It made sense, but the cops were all over the kidnapping idea. The way I heard it, they had people on every Bled house, sleeping in the hallways, trying to catch someone doing something. Hey, is that how your family met them?”
My head was spinning. The Watts were cops forever. One of us could’ve been on that investigation. “No…Grandad met them during an investigation. There was a break-in at the mansion.”
“You don’t sound so sure,” said Moe.
“I’m sure that’s how Grandad met them,” I said.
“But he might not be the first?”
“Maybe not. I never asked about earlier investigations. I didn’t really know there were any,” I said. “What happened with the ransom note?”
“Delivery driver for the brewery,” said Moe. “Nothing to do with it.”
“I bet it didn’t go well for that guy,” I said.
“It did not.”
Isolda waved me over with a big smile and I nodded before asking, “She really thinks her father is German?”
“She’s convinced, but she didn’t say why. Maybe her mother told her something.” He took my arm and we walked over to the petting zoo.
“Aren’t they adorable?” Grandma was scratching a donkey, who was trying to get the waffle.
“Adorable,” I said.
“Are you alright, Mercy?” Isolda asked.
“I’m fine. I just…need some more Glühwein.”