by Gary Jonas
Carl, Curtis, and Cole each had a separate seat staggered from the back to the middle of the bus, and Maria sat toward the front. There were plenty of open seats.
The driver was a middle-aged man with dark black hair. He wore a yellow Tommy Bahama linen shirt decorated with bright green bamboo leaves and multi-colored birds. His brown shorts went to his knees. He wore brown sandals on his feet, and a braided friendship bracelet on his right wrist.
“Welcome aboard, sir,” he said. He had sunglasses perched on his head. His black hair hung to his shoulders, and he gave me a grin before tapping the side of his sunglasses so they dropped into place on the bridge of his nose. “The adventure begins now.”
He shoved the bus into gear and tromped on the accelerator before I took my seat. I staggered a step down the center of the bus. The bottom was so rusted out that I could see pavement through the small holes in the floor.
“You should hang on, sir,” he said, lowering his glasses to look at me in the mirror above him. “My driving skills are, how you say, off the charts.”
Maria patted the empty seat beside her, and I sat down.
“If I didn’t know better,” I said, “I’d think he was trying to kill me.”
“I hear you, good sir,” the driver said. “I aim not to kill, but to surprise, and my aim is true.”
Maria smiled. “He’s got your number, Mr. Shade.”
“Jonathan,” I said.
“We’re not friends, Mr. Shade. We’re business associates.”
“Then why did you want me to sit next to you?”
“So you wouldn’t fall down.”
“There are plenty of seats.”
“True,” she said, “but I have a request.”
“Be still my heart.”
She fixed her gaze on me like I was a rowdy student and she was the teacher.
“Sorry,” I said. “What is your request?”
“When we reach the hotel, if it is open, my men and your woman will go on the tour. While they do the tourist routine, I want to borrow you and your ghost.”
“For?”
“I want us to sneak off and find the spirits. The hotel is haunted, so there will be ghosts there. You can see them, and so can your ghost friend.”
“Her name is Esther. I think she’ll be happy to help, but you’ll have to ask her.”
“That’s a new one,” she said, gazing out the window as we turned a corner.
The driver took the corner so fast, I fell against Maria. “Sorry,” I said. “What’s a new one?”
“Asking a ghost for help,” she said. “Normally, I command the dead to do things for me. To tell me things.”
“You seem to do that with the living, too.”
She chuckled. “I suppose I do. It’s been many years since someone told me what to do.”
I studied the corners of her eyes. “Were you a child queen?” I asked. “Because you’re not old enough to say it’s been many years.”
“Many is relative,” she said.
The driver punched the horn and several people jumped out of the street as he rumbled along toward the outskirts of town.
He shouted something out the window. Then he laughed and started singing in Spanish.
“What did he shout at those people?” I asked.
“Sal de la carretera,” she said. “It means ‘Get out of the road.’”
The driver swerved, and kept singing.
“Is he safe?” I asked.
She shrugged. “We’re alive so far.”
He swerved again, darting around another car.
“I think the wheels left the road on that one,” I said.
He slammed on the brakes and I put a hand on the back of the seat in front of me, and put my arm out to keep Maria from flying forward.
“Dude,” I said.
He turned and smiled at me, then pointed through the cracked windshield at the streetlight. The red light strobed quickly.
“Luz roja,” he said. “Red light. So sorry, so sorry.” And he went back to singing. I watched him dancing in his seat, and realized he was singing the Luis Fonsi song, “Despacito.”
The light changed from a strobing red to a solid green, and the driver floored the accelerator. Each time he shifted gears, we were thrown forward, then when he stomped on the accelerator, we were hurtled backward.
“I might want to walk back,” I said. “What were we talking about?”
“Ghosts,” she said, and successfully pivoted away from my question about her age. I guess she’d hit the point where she didn’t like talking about it, so maybe she missed being in her twenties, but hadn’t reached the I’ve earned these wrinkles stage. She didn’t have crow’s feet except when she smiled, and the way her skin crinkled then was adorable, so she didn’t need to worry about any of that.
“Right,” I said. “We can ask Esther to help when we reach the hotel.”
The driver swerved around another car, and horns blared.
“If we make it to the hotel,” I said, amending my statement.
“We can ask her now,” Maria said. “I find it amusing that you don’t think I’d tell my bodyguards about your ghost.”
“Sorry, what?” I said.
“You’ve carefully avoided talking to her or looking at her when my men are in sight, but I told them about her after we met in the Library of Congress.”
Of course she did. I felt like an idiot for not thinking about that. She’d been waiting for the right time to make me feel stupid, and she certainly found it.
She turned around in her seat. “Esther, can you please join us up front?”
Esther pulled her head back into the bus. “Me?” she asked.
“Yes, you.”
Esther looked at me. I nodded.
Kelly grinned.
She clearly suspected what I hadn’t considered.
Maria put a hand on my arm and smiled at me. “I told Kelly not to say anything to you about it because it was just so cute.”
Esther willed herself visible. “Here I am,” she said.
The driver screamed and slammed on the brakes. The bus skidded sideways, smashed into a guard wall, then screeched to a halt on the side of the road, barely missing a large tree.
He was out the door before the rest of us recovered from being thrown around in our seats.
“Jeez,” Esther said. “You’d think he’d never seen a ghost before.”
CHAPTER NINE
It took a while to get the bus driver back on board, and he drove slower and safer than ever before. I confess that I told him Esther was the ghost of someone who haunted bus drivers who drove like maniacs.
The Eden Hotel looked abandoned when we pulled up. We were a bit early for the tours, and no other vehicles were there yet. There was no reason to split up our team. The hotel stood alone a ways back from tall wrought iron gates.
There were trees in the yard before it, and a row of parking spots in front of the long white building.
We got off the bus, and I opened the gates. The driver didn’t waste any time getting the hell away from us. I guess he was afraid of ghosts. The rest of us stepped onto the grounds leading to the hotel.
“So Hitler stayed here,” I said.
“So did Albert Einstein,” Cole said. “Not at the same time, of course.”
“Good to know,” I said.
When we neared the building, Maria stopped, held her hands out, and closed her eyes.
“Hold me,” she said.
My first thought was, she wants me to embrace her? I didn’t get the chance to embarrass myself by wrapping my arms around her, because her bodyguards stepped up, blocking my path without realizing it.
Curtis and Carl each took one of her arms to steady her.
She opened her eyes and her pupils rolled back. Again, I think her drama got the best of her. We weren’t here for a show. If she had psychic powers or the ability to communicate with the spirits who no longer resided here, she didn’t need to r
esort to all the silly showmanship.
But whatever.
She spoke in German again. First in her regular voice, then in the same deep voice she’d used in the library.
Esther glided toward her again, like a moth to a flame, or maybe more like a ghost to a medium.
After a few exchanges in German, Maria’s eyes returned to normal and she gave her head a vigorous shake.
Her bodyguards released her arms.
“The reports were wrong. Hitler didn’t stay here,” she said. “He took a few meetings with fellow Nazis here, but he stayed over there.” She pointed at an angle toward some trees in the back.
“He had a treehouse?”
“There’s another house back there.”
“Pretty sure there’s a whole neighborhood back there,” I said.
“I’m speaking of one house in particular. Hitler used a tunnel to get to and from the house.”
I looked at Kelly. She shrugged. “Someone did some research before coming here,” she whispered.
“She’s legit,” I said. “Look at Esther.”
Esther fawned over Maria.
“You’re the bee’s knees,” Esther said. “I feel warm when you reach out with your mind. I love the warmth.”
“You really think she can just reach back across the years and find Hitler’s spirit here?”
Maria turned toward us. “I connected with him from Washington, so I will be able to instantly draw his spirit if he is connected to a place.”
Kelly regarded her and said, “Then maybe you can just ask where he’s buried. We can mosey on over and dig his ass up.”
“I wish it was that easy,” she said. “The problem is that when I reach his soul or consciousness. I just reach reflections of who he was at the time, and what he knew then.”
“How inconvenient,” Kelly said.
“Can’t you reach him in the Underworld?” I asked.
“I can’t go there,” Maria said.
“I thought you reached him there before.”
“No, I called upon a reflection which lingers in this world, not the Underworld.”
“Then call him from there now.”
“No.”
“Can’t you reach the Underworld?” Kelly asked.
“I can, but it would be too risky. I’m what you’d call persona non grata there.”
“Charon is a guy named Bob these days,” I said. “I don’t think he’d pitch a fit if you talked to someone.”
She shook her head. “Your problem, Mr. Shade, is that you think that because you know something about one level of the Underworld, that you know how all of it works.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Charon ferries souls across the Acheron. He doesn’t admit mediums to the deeper levels of the Underworld. Hitler is in Tartarus.”
“Then how does he communicate with you at all?”
“I reached out to residual spirits like the one I just spoke with.”
So the Hitler she spoke to at the Library of Congress was like the shadow of a ghost. Wonderful.
“Problem?” she asked.
“We’re on a wild goose chase here,” I said.
“We’re on an investigation,” she said. “That’s why you’re here. You are an investigator.”
“I was under the impression you were going to lead us to the skull.”
“We have to follow the path. We will find him.”
“Your way could take months. We could find out Hitler was here, but then he moved on. If he was in Argentina, he’d need supporters. He’d need places to hide. And he’d need people he could trust. After Operation Valkyrie, I don’t see him being all that trusting. His own people tried to kill him. And based on the FBI reports I read, J. Edgar Hoover had intelligence that he was here, which means people could have turned him in for a reward. I don’t think he’d stay here.”
“We work with the tools we have,” she said.
I thought about those FBI reports, and realized I’d need to make time to get through more of them. Meanwhile, we were here, so we needed to make the best of it.
“Fine,” I said. “This hotel was owned by a Nazi sympathizer. She and her husband lived nearby, and if I’m not confusing the reports I read, there was a tunnel going from the hotel to her house.”
“If the tunnel was built in a hurry,” Cole said, “it’s likely caved in over the last seventy-some-odd years.”
“If it was part of the original plan, it might still be here,” Kelly said. “The Nazis built a lot of underground facilities around the world, and they were well-constructed.”
“My impression,” I said, “is that the hotel was already here, so they probably added the tunnel. More important than that will be where Hitler stayed.”
“I can try to locate the house. His spiritual presence will be stronger if he spent any time there.”
I looked around. There were too many trees to get a good view of any nearby houses. “Yeah, do your mystical thing,” I said.
She held out her arms, rolled her eyes back into her head, and did a slow turn. Her eyes returned to normal and she shook her head. “Let’s try again on the back side of the hotel.”
We walked around to the back. The area was more open, and beyond a few trees, I could see gravel roads leading in several directions. Through the trees, I saw a few houses.
Maria repeated her slow spin with her eyes all whitened up, then pointed toward a road. “There,” she said.
We walked over, slipped through a wire fence and moved down a road.
There was a large house, damn near a mansion, hidden in the trees.
“He stayed there.”
“Can you contact him from here, or do we need to go knock on the door and try to get access?”
“I can check to see if anyone’s home,” Esther said.
“We’re being watched,” Kelly said.
Cole looked up and down the street, trying to spot anyone observing us. “I don’t see anyone.”
“I feel them,” Kelly said. “I trust my instincts.”
“Now I feel them, too,” Cole said, “but it’s possible I’m imagining it because you put it in my head.”
“The feeling is real, and you’ll know it in five, four, three, two, one,” Kelly said.
As she finished her countdown, two large men stepped out of the trees from the property, and approached us. They wore black pants and shirts. They also wore black boots. And while it wasn’t quite a Nazi uniform look, it was close, and they both had blond hair and blue eyes. Their looks of contempt as they studied Kelly clinched it. Only Nazi boys could look at her beauty and be repulsed by it.
They spoke in Spanish.
Maria answered them in German.
They eyed us suspiciously, then conversed with Maria in German.
She turned to me. “They say this is private property and we’re not welcome here.”
“They think they’re the Master Race?” I asked.
One of the men glared at me. “I am of true Aryan blood,” he said in English.
“Color me impressed from the soles of my shoes to the tippy top of my head.”
“You will leave now or we will call the police.”
“No you won’t,” I said.
“You would prefer a more permanent action?” he asked, pulling a Luger from his holster.
I held out a hand to stop Kelly from killing him.
“We’re on the same side,” I said. “I’m going to take out my identification.”
“Slowly,” he said.
I slowly pulled out the magic permit the woman gave me back at Dulles. It looked like a brown leather badge case with a blank golden coin in it to me, but it would look like something else to him. When I opened the billfold and held it out, the man’s eyes fastened on the gold coin.
His partner approached and looked at it, too.
“You should have identified yourself up front, sir,” the first man said.
“We’re not really here,�
�� I said and winked at him.
“Very good, sir.”
“We need to go inside the house,” I said.
“I’m sorry, sir, no one goes into the house. Our orders are clear on that. You could be the Führer himself, and we couldn’t allow access.”
“I’ll take a look,” Esther said so I could hear, but they couldn’t, and she zipped off toward the house.
“By whose orders?” I asked.
“Mrs. Eichorn,” he said.
“Is she home?”
He looked at me like I was insane. “She is with the Führer.”
I nodded thinking that meant she was dead.
“They will return, but we don’t know when,” he added. “The Reichsführer told us to be ready.”
Esther popped back into view. “I can’t get into the house,” she said. “Strong magic.”
“Carry on with your duties, Fritz,” I said.
“My name is Franz.”
“Good work, Franz.”
He threw his right arm straight out. “Heil Hitler,” he said.
“Heil Hitler,” I said with a return salute. It felt weird and wrong to follow suit, but it satisfied him, and he and his partner folded back into the trees and out of sight.
“Try making contact from here,” I whispered to Maria.
She rolled her eyes into her head. Then she opened them and stepped backward, putting a hand to her mouth.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Hitler was definitely here,” she said. “I also sensed someone more dead than alive here.”
“I don’t know what that means,” I said.
“I don’t either. It’s the feeling I get. There will be proof inside that house.”
I turned to Kelly. “You want to do the honors with the Nazi creeps?”
She smiled.
“Not permanent,” I said.
She frowned, disappointed. “Fine.”
I turned toward the trees. “Hey, Franz, come back over here,” I called. “I want you to give Mrs. Eichorn a message for me.”
Franz and his partner stepped out of the trees.
Kelly darted forward, and before either man could react, she throat-punched them, then smacked their heads together.