He saw the way I was looking at him and blew smoke my way. “That’s the God’s honest truth, too. You can kiss my ass if you don’t believe me.”
I believed him.
I tried to flick my cigarette out the back of the truck like Hauser had, but was too weak to make it. The butt fell short of the tailgate and rolled back toward Tessmer’s face. The captive squirmed. Hauser left the cigarette where it was.
I coughed as I laughed. “So Carmichael not only planned on blackmailing the Fairfax widow for covering up for her husband’s death, but your Nazi playmates for murdering Fairfax and Blythe.”
Hauser looked away. “Probably, if we’d gotten evidence that they were homicides. And now that we have it, look what happened. The countess is dead, Otto here is bleeding out.” He rubbed Tessmer’s head. “And this sorry bastard’s in no shape to pay anyone.”
“Cheer up,” I said. “Maybe your friend with the sniper rifle can pass the hat for you. What did you say his name was again?”
“Burnitz,” Hauser said. “And he won’t be helping anyone. I found out he’s the one who shot at you on the street that day. He had one of the kids from the camp help him. He had the kid trail you afterwards, too.”
I remembered. Blondie. “He was with you when you tried to get me at Fairfax’s office the night I opened the safe.”
“That wasn’t me,” Hauser said. “That was Tessmer, the kid, and another guy.”
“Where’s the kid now?”
Hauser shook his head. “Burnitz doesn’t like failure. The kid failed him three times in one day. He won’t have a chance for a fourth screw up.”
Dr. Otto surprised me by laughing. “Burnitz is a patriot, you curs. He is a brilliant man and he is free. Free! He will finish what we have started here. He will avenge us and Alexandra. Your lives are worthless.”
Hauser lurched forward and slammed his right hand into Otto’s wounded shoulder. The doctor screamed and passed out.
Hauser sat back down. “That hump was always running his mouth with some kind of nonsense.”
“Carmichael know about this Burnitz guy?”
“No,” Hauser said, “because I don’t know much about him. He spent most of his time at the camp. Every week since winter broke, he’d have a small crew working on something. That clearing you saw was all woods when Fairfax donated that land to them. Looks like it’s been a field since the flood, doesn’t it? He built the tower and bunk house, too. He was at some of the meetings I attended, but not many. He spoke to small crowds instead and helped drum up money from donors. Always said he was a tough guy, but I never saw him in action until today. I wasn’t as impressed as I thought I’d be. Maybe he’s like the rest of these guys: all talk and no action.”
Hauser might not have been impressed by Burnitz, but I was. I’d seen the man hold the attention of over a hundred teenagers. I saw the way he’d gotten them to obey his commands, even when some of them got shot. Maybe he wasn’t the sniper he claimed to be, but he wasn’t just some lunatic mouthing off in the woods, either.
He was running something bigger than just the countess and Otto and Tessmer. Something even bigger than the deaths of Fairfax and Dr. Blythe.
This was something new.
And we still had a long ride to Delaware.
Chapter 21
For the second time that day hours turned into seconds, because at some point on the ride to Delaware I passed out. I must’ve had a fever because my world blurred into a hellish dream of Walter Fairfax and Dr. Blythe wandering through Belleau Wood, begging for my help. Carmichael and Hauser had me on the ground at gunpoint, helpless as Tessmer fired at Fairfax and Blythe from behind sandbags while Dr. Otto laughed. Mrs. Fairfax kept yelling at me to do something, but I couldn’t move.
Alexandra and Miss Swenson were nowhere in sight, but I could feel them close by, maybe behind me. But as hard as I struggled, I couldn’t find the strength to help them. I couldn’t get to my feet and rescue them. I had failed these men for a second time.
They say there’s often truth in dreams. Maybe there was some truth in mine.
When I finally woke up, it took me a bit to figure out I wasn’t dreaming anymore. There was no sign of the others, and the sound of gunfire had faded as quickly as my nightmare.
The forest was gone, too, as I found myself looking up at a bright, white ceiling. I felt my side and realized the bandages had been changed. They were flatter than the patch job Hauser had done in the truck.
“Welcome back, Charlie,” came a familiar voice to my right. I picked up my head and saw Mr. Van Dorn sitting beside my bed. Father Mullins was next to him.
I tried to speak, but my mouth was dry and all I could manage was a raspy gurgle. A nurse raised my head to help me sip some water.
She propped a pillow behind my head so I could comfortably see my visitors, then promptly left the room.
The pain in my side was there, but not as bad as I had remembered. “How bad am I?”
Father Mullins raised his Bible. “Not bad enough for me to read this over you, but bad enough for you to need a hospital.”
“Don’t know how much good it would do, anyway. Where am I?”
“You’re in Delaware and you’re safe,” Mr. Van Dorn said. “Once upon a time this place served as a foundling hospital, then an infirmary for the indigent.”
“Guess you put me in the right place.”
I laughed at my own bad joke and paid for it. A sudden, deep pain webbed out from my side and coursed through my body. The pain in the truck had been a paper cut compared to this.
Mr. Van Dorn eased me back down on the pillow. “Careful, Charlie. The bullet went clean through you, but you had a fair amount of internal bleeding that required extensive surgery.”
I could damn near feel all of the places where they’d sewn me up. “How long have I been out?”
“Off and on for three days.”
Three days? A long time for Mr. Van Dorn to go without hearing about what had happened. I rushed the words as fast as I could say them. “The land Fairfax donated to the Friends of New Germany in Suffolk. It’s not just land, sir. It’s a camp where they’re training kids, sir. It’s a goddamn military camp.”
“Rest, Charles,” Father Mullins said. “Detective Hauser has already told us all about it. About Chief Carmichael’s peripheral involvement, too. He’s been very cooperative.”
Maybe it was the medication, but that didn’t sound like the Hauser I knew. “He did?”
Mr. Van Dorn explained, “He knows he’s in quite a bit of trouble, so he cut a deal. In exchange for his cooperation, we have promised to protect him from prosecution. And from Chief Carmichael if it comes to that.”
Knowing Carmichael as well as I did, I knew it would come to that. “Did you send anyone to the camp?”
“We had people at the site the morning you got here. Except for the house and the tower Hauser told us about, the place was completely abandoned. My people went over every inch of the property with a fine-toothed comb. They didn’t even find any spent cartridges, except for your .38 bullet from the wall. No sign of casualties, either. Whoever cleaned up did an incredibly thorough job.”
I wondered if the drugs they had given me for the operation were playing with my hearing. No one could’ve cleaned up the place that fast. “But Alexandra was killed. The same bullet that went through me killed her. And there were kids who’d been shot, too.”
“We don’t know that she’s dead,” Mr. Van Dorn said. “Hauser saw her go down, but we don’t know that the wound was fatal. He also told us other people were shot, but so far not one doctor in the area admits to treating any gunshot wounds. Given the number of people in the camp, the community may be working to hide something from us, so we’re watching them closely.”
If Alexandra was still alive, she was probably in worse shape than I w
as. “There’s something else, sir. The camp was run by a guy named Burnitz. We didn’t know about him before.” Despite my haziness, I remembered how much Mr. Van Dorn and Father Mullins had kept from me. “Or did we?”
“Hauser told us about him, too,” Mr. Van Dorn said. “We had heard rumors of a fourth member of Alexandra’s group, but we didn’t know much about him. Not even Hauser knew the role he played. Alexandra and the others didn’t talk about him around Hauser. Burnitz is most likely an alias, but it’s the only name we have. We’re looking through our files to see if he connects with any of the other operations we’re watching in the country.”
Then I remembered the car. “Christ, your car is still out there. They probably checked the registration and know you’re mixed up in all of this. Your family—”
Mr. Van Dorn eased me back down. “Calm, Charlie, calm. I’ve got the car, and my people saw only one set of footprints leading away from it. Your footprints.” He patted my chest. “You hid it well, my friend. It’s highly unlikely they ever found it. They were in such a hurry to clear out the camp, I doubt they had enough time to wonder how you had gotten there.”
I was glad Mr. Van Dorn was in the clear, but there were still a lot of things that had gone sideways.
I lay my head back against the pillows. I had driven out to the property to see what it was. I’d thought it might be some kind of farmhouse where Alexandra and the others stashed people or money. I hadn’t expected to find a goddamn Nazi army camp in the middle of Long Island. The whole Fairfax incident fractured into a million shards of glass the second I’d gotten out of Mr. Van Dorn’s car and crawled through that wood. The camp. Hauser. Burnitz. Carmichael’s double cross.
“What about Dr. Otto and Tessmer?”
“We have them,” Mr. Van Dorn said.
I looked at him when he didn’t say more. “Are they cooperating?”
“Reluctantly.”
I noticed a dark smear on Mr. Van Dorn’s lapel and another one on his tie. I’d seen smears like that before, usually in a mirror following one of Carmichael’s interrogation sessions. “Hope it was worth it, sir. Blood stains more than your clothes and doesn’t always wash off.”
“It’s not supposed to.” Mr. Van Dorn didn’t look at his clothes. He must’ve already known the stains were there. “Tessmer is a tough one. He appears to have received significant training in ways to resist questioning, but we’ll break him eventually. Fortunately, Otto is in a weaker condition. Our information on him was wrong, by the way. He’s not really a doctor. He’s actually a chemist who worked for a big company in Germany for years before he joined the Nazi party. He admitted to crafting the cyanide they used to poison Fairfax and Blythe.”
One mystery may have been solved, but another one had sprung up. “I know you’re looking for Burnitz, sir, but you have to look harder. I saw how he had those kids wrapped around his finger. It was like they were in some kind of trance. A guy like that is worse than Alexandra, sir.”
Mr. Van Dorn and Father Mullins looked at each other. The Jesuit asked, “How do you mean, Charles?”
“Meaning she can seduce a wealthy guy to give her money,” I said, “or maybe even talk some sap into killing someone for her. But Burnitz can get hundreds to do his dirty work for him, and I’m not just talking about the camp. I’m talking about other places, maybe with people who can hurt us quietly. Like you talked about in the war, sir.”
Mr. Van Dorn smiled. “You have a knack for this kind of work, Charlie. There may be a future in it for you.”
“I know how crooks work, sir, and Burnitz is a crook. Set aside all the flags and uniforms and speeches, and he’s still looking to use people to get what he wants. The sooner we find him, the better off we’ll be.”
“We’re working on a plan to flush him out into the open,” Mr. Van Dorn said. “We’ll tell you all about it when you’re better. The doctor tells me you should be ready to go home in a few days. I’ll send a car to take you back to Manhattan.”
“Manhattan? But the chief put out a bulletin on me.”
“Which has since been rescinded,” Mr. Van Dorn said. “I don’t think we’ll have much interference from Chief Carmichael any further. When he learned Alexandra was a German agent, he turned the color of the ceiling above your bed. I wish you had been there to see it.”
Andrew Carmichael brought to his knees? I must still be dreaming. “I would’ve loved to have been a fly on the wall for that one.”
“I’ll tell you all about it when you’re home. But I wouldn’t count him out totally. The chief is an enterprising man.” Mr. Van Dorn slapped me on the leg as he stood to leave. “Kind of like someone else I know.”
I wasn’t as sure. “We still need to be careful, sir.”
“And you need to get better so we can find him all that much sooner,” Father Mullins said. “We need you now more than ever, Charles. We never would have learned so much so soon without your hard work.”
But I didn’t care about praise. “What about my family, sir? If these bastards tried to kill me, there’s no telling what they might do to them.”
“They’re safe, I promise you,” Mr. Van Dorn said. “Besides, now that we have two of the main players in all of this, they’ll be too busy covering up their tracks to indulge in a luxury like revenge.”
I hoped he was right, though I wasn’t so sure.
Chapter 22
The nurses insisted on getting me up and walking around the hospital grounds the day after Mr. Van Dorn left. I didn’t agree, but I didn’t get a vote.
The hospital was settled somewhere among the green hills of Delaware. I wasn’t sure exactly where I was, but I’d been too focused on getting back on my feet to care.
The hospital was one of those severe Victorian buildings they liked to build back in the last century. Plenty of red bricks, high peaks, and steep roof lines to keep the snow from piling up in winter and the rain from pooling at other times. The round turrets at each corner and steel bars covering the narrow windows made it look more like a castle than a place for sick people.
At some point in the building’s history, someone had decided to try to soften the building’s appearance by adding intricate gingerbread features here and there. It didn’t work.
I didn’t know what Mr. Van Dorn or his friends used this place for, but it had a hell of a lot of security to just be a hospital. There was only one road in and out of the campus. No back gates and no other ways in except through the main road, either. A tall iron fence had been built around the place, with barbed wire strung along the top for good measure. Guards with Thompsons slung on their shoulders patrolled the grounds regularly, often waving at me as I limped along with a nurse on my daily walks. I didn’t know if the guards and the guns and the gates were meant to keep people out or in. I decided not to find out.
The staff was careful about keeping me away from the others, too. They wouldn’t let me see Otto or Tessmer, or talk to whoever was questioning them. I guessed they were afraid I might try to kill one of the sons of bitches. Couldn’t say I blamed them for that one.
When I asked to see Hauser, they said he, Danny, and Jack were in another part of the hospital. I couldn’t see them, even at meal times. I didn’t like it, but there wasn’t much I could do about it.
About a week after I’d gotten there, Mr. Van Dorn sent a driver to pick me up and bring me home. I told him I preferred to wait until I was strong enough to do the driving myself, but he insisted. The driver was a tall, lanky kid named Coleman, who showed up in my room while I was sleeping and shook me awake.
“It’s a quarter to twelve,” Coleman told me as he began to stuff the few things I had with me into a bag. “We need to be on the road by one at the latest.”
I’d been there for a week, but now I suddenly had a deadline. “Why the rush, Junior?”
“The name’s Coleman, sir.
And the rush is due to Mr. Van Dorn’s orders. He wants you back in Manhattan as soon as possible.” He nodded toward my bathroom door. “I’ve hung some of your clothing in there. The sooner you get dressed, the sooner we can be on the road.”
I went into the bathroom and got dressed. At first, I wondered how he’d been able to get my clothes from my place. Then I remembered Mr. Van Dorn had a key. Father Mullins had one, too. He’d said they had used the apartment as a base of operations for years. Hell, I bet several dozen people had a key. Goddamned place would probably look like Grand Central by the time I got back home.
It reminded me about just how much Mr. Van Dorn had kept from me since I’d begun working for him, especially about the Fairfax case. I hadn’t liked it then and I didn’t like it now. He may have sent Coleman to bring me back for some kind of a meeting, but I decided we were going to hash out a few things first before our talk. I knew he had his reasons for keeping me in the dark, but he was going to tell me what they were or I’d walk. I’d worry about the fact that I didn’t have a place to go later.
I finished dressing and came out of the bathroom, to find Coleman confronting Steve Hauser in the hallway outside my room.
“Get back to your side of the hospital,” Coleman told him. “Mr. Doherty will contact you later.”
“Up yours,” Hauser said. “He’s standing right there and I’m going to talk to him now. It’s important.”
Coleman squared up and filled the doorway. “I said no.”
Hauser drew back his hand for a punch, but before he could throw it, Coleman pinned it behind Hauser’s head and threw him against the wall. Hauser screamed as Coleman began to twist the wrist. The kid was tougher than he looked. I’d never seen anyone beat Hauser to the punch before.
“Leave him alone,” I said. “We’ve got a few minutes. We’ll be on the road by one, I promise.”
Coleman released Hauser’s wrist and shoved him back against the wall. “You have three minutes, sir, then we have to leave.”
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