“Come up here, will you?”
He nodded and ran up the stairs two at a time.
Percy waited on the small platform outside the office.
“So what’s Teresa doing down there?”
“I ask her to move the candy on the belt. It stick when in one place too long. That no good.”
“And then what?”
“When workers come, we start the moving machine --”
“The what?”
“The candy, she is coated with chocolate and put in the boxes.”
“Where’s the chocolate to pour on the candy? I thought there wasn’t any.”
“No, always is some - how you say - extra. Howie always make the extra and is stored.”
“I see.”
“Si. In refrigerator. Each day. But not for tomorrow. No more since...” He broke off speaking and shrugged.
“And that’s different from making chocolate. You’re just heating it up?”
“Si.”
“You know how to heat the chocolate up?”
“Is simple. This I do many times,” Vinnie said eagerly. “The flame, she is low and...”
“Let me cut you off at the pass, Vinnie. Go get cracking. Heat up the building, heat up the chocolate. Howie should be back this afternoon and maybe he can make a new batch. Meanwhile, the workers can start the assembly line and this place can stay in business. Your niece going off to school soon?”
“Si, si. She leave soon. She good girl, like you say.” He blushed at his admission.
“Glad to hear it. Go on now, get to work.”
Percy turned to Rendell once Vinnie closed the door on his way out.
“Rendell, I’m leaving you in charge. Under no circumstances tell anyone Bogdanovitch has met his maker. Tell them he’s sick or something.”
He nodded. She went on.
“Take this list. I want you to tick off the workers who come in. I also want the approximate age of each female worker. Don’t worry about the men. You’re to keep everyone here until I get back. Tell them they’re getting paid, even if they do nothing but stand around. Pop will probably call with a few answers for me. Get a phone number of where I can reach him. I’ll call you from Queens to see who doesn’t show besides Helga Appelman.”
“You know she won’t be here, ma’am?”
“If what I suspect is true, she’s about to head off for greener pastures with a little blue book, but hopefully delayed by the storm.”
Rendell raised an eyebrow at Percy, but she said no more.
* * * *
Aside from an elderly woman and three sailors, Percy had been on the train by herself. She exited the subway at Queens Plaza and labored up the slippery, ice-covered steps to street level.
Not much of winter’s wrath had been cleared yet, but then it was only eight-thirty Monday morning. School had been cancelled and many businesses remained closed, encouraged by a mayor who wanted the public to stay home until the city got back on its feet. Now the sole person on a residential Queens street, the detective stood and surveyed the white mess quickly graying under the inherent dirt of the city.
Percy’s attention was drawn to a lone, clanking truck traveling precariously on black ice down the street. Going no faster than five-miles an hour, it suddenly slid almost in slow motion, side-swiping a snow-covered car. With a muted crunch, the truck came to a halt, intertwined with car, snow, and ice.
After watching the accident and the cursing truck driver for a moment, Percy moved to cross the street. Patches of ice and clumps of frozen snow hampered her footing. In order to make any headway, she had to push through piled-up snow in the gutter, the lowest two-feet high.
With great care, she stepped into the slick street. Along both sides, buried cars made the road look more like a toboggan run. Once across, Percy struggled over another heap of guttered snow and onto the sidewalk.
After two attempts, she found the six-story building, address obscured behind years of dirt and the storm’s rage. On the nearby sidewalk and stoop, the snow was still pristine and clear of footprints. No one had left or entered the building since the night before. Percy was relieved.
She climbed the two floors to the apartment, and knocked on the door with authority. According to Appelman’s file, the girl was born in 1920 and raised in Belgium. But records have been known to be falsified and she could be an American playing a part. Like Pop had said, some people are good at accents.
If Helga Appelman aka Schatzi, was genuinely from Belgium, everything Percy had read about the culture meant the people were used to oppressive authority. Percy was counting on it.
The door opened a crack and a young woman with dishwater blond hair and a washed out complexion leaned her face into the narrow space.
“Ya?” Even on the one word, the woman had a heavy German accent.
“You Helga Appelman, better known as Schatzi? My name is Persephone Cole and I’m a private detective.”
“What is it you want? Go away. Go away.”
She started to close the door in Percy’s face. Percy gave it a good shove. The girl was thrown off balance, and pushed backward. Percy strode inside, tall and authoritative.
“First of all, get yourself a chain so nobody can do that again. And second, I’m not going away until you and I talk.”
“What about? I call the police if you do not go.”
“Save that threat for someone who doesn’t know you stole a book containing a chocolate formula worth big bucks. I want it back.”
Schatzi reacted as if she’d been struck. She wheeled around and headed for a small kitchen at the other end of the square bedsitter. Percy, taking large strides, was by her side in a flash.
But not fast enough. The girl turned brandishing a potato peeler, its small metal blade reflecting the sun from the only window in the pathetic one-room apartment.
“You really don’t have the hang of this, do you?”
Percy reached out, grabbed the girl’s wrist, and twisted it. The peeler fell to the linoleum floor with a clink.
“To get away with that, honey, you need to come at a person with at least a butcher knife. Of course, in that case, I would have had to shoot you.”
The girl grabbed her wrist and burst into tears.
“Ow! You hurt me. You hurt me.”
“You were going to peel me like a potato. Now let’s talk. Chocolate. Formula. Theft.”
Schatzi covered her face with her hands. She leaned her shaking body on the claw-foot tub standing against the back wall of the kitchen, its top covered with cracked wood. Her voice was child-like and plaintive.
“I am no thief. They steal from me. She steal from me. Don’t hurt me, please.”
Percy studied Schatzi and decided to try a different tact. She wrapped a strong arm around the sobbing girl, and guided her to the small kitchen table near the lone window.
“Come on, kid. I’m not going to hurt you. Come on. It’s going to be all right. You sit down, you tell me what I want to know, and it’s going to be fine.”
Sobs wracking her youthful body, the girl slid down into a chair. Percy sat in the chair opposite the small table and let her be. When the sobbing subsided, Percy’s voice was gentle.
“You want some coffee? Something stronger, if you got it?”
The girl shook her head and looked up. Tears still streaming down her face, she muttered in her native tongue.
“Schatzi, I don’t speak German, so let’s conduct this conversation in English. You speak English, right?”
“I speak English because I must not speak German here in America. People will think I am not Belgian, but a Nazi!”
Her attitude changed, becoming more belligerent. She slapped at tears on her face and sat up straight in the chair. Percy smiled encouragingly.
“I can believe that. A lot of Americans don’t know the difference between Germany and Belgium. It’s all the same to them. But I do. Your English is pretty good.”
“Ya, I study. I also
speak Spanish. Italian, too, but the French, not so good.”
“You’re an educated gal. Good for you. But let’s talk about your family’s stolen chocolate formula.”
“How you know that? But is true. It is ours.”
“Carlotta kept pretty good notes. According to her, your grandfather created the formula for the chocolate she was getting rich on, not her own grandfather.”
Schatzi leaned forward, self righteousness filling her being from head to toe. “Her family make the money that should be ours. Then she change the formula six-months ago.”
“The hazelnut concoction to stretch it out? All due to the war.”
“Fa! So there is a war. That is no reason.” The girl’s face was covered with a sense of outrage. “She is bad, bad, but she is also trottel.”
“What’s that?”
“What is the word in English?” Schatzi sought inside herself for a moment. “Moron. Ya, moron. You steal it and then you do it wrong? But until recently she is not so moron.”
“Moronic.”
Percy’s correction of the girl’s English was automatic, as she would have with her son. Despite everything, she’d taken a liking to the Belgian girl and smiled at her. Schatzi smiled back and shrugged.
“Moronic,” she repeated shyly.
“Seems to me it bothers you more that she altered the formula than she stole it.”
Schatzi’s vigor returned. “Ya. What she stole was good. The chocolate my family make.”
“How’d it get stolen?”
“Thirty-years ago Carlotta Mendez’ lehrling, ah, grandpapa apprenticed for my grandpapa in Belgium. He steal the formula and start chocolate shop in Spain. Then Carlotta come here to America with it. He was bad man. She is bad woman. The family, they are bad, bad, bad. “
“So if your grandfather developed this high and mighty formula, how come your family didn’t have a copy of it?”
“My grandpapa was dumm.”
“Dumb?”
“Ya.”
“You seem to have something against everybody, sister.”
“My grandpapa was dumm not to leave a written copy before he die.”
“When was that?”
“Five years he is dead now. But because it was stolen all those years ago, he would not tell us or write down the formula. Always is in his head. He say never again on paper.“
“Once burned, twice shy.” Schatzi gave Percy a puzzled look. “Go on.”
“Fa! Chocolatiers always keep the secret formulas to themselves; it is worth much money. But when grandpapa die in the night, as do many old people, we have nothing.”
“So then what?”
“I know the story and the chocolate. I come to America a year ago. I taste the chocolate I ate all my life at home. I go to Carlotta in Brooklyn. I tell her I want the formula, to have back what is rightfully ours.“ Schatzi jutted out her chin like a rebellious five-year old.
“I’ll bet that went over big.”
“She say no. But she offer me job, which I take, because I know how to do this work and I want to be near my chocolate. It is my life, my family’s life. I take the job even though I am working for a thief. I should be the one in the office, with all the money.”
“How did you wind up with the formula? You kill her for it?”
Schatzi looked stunned. “Nein, nein. I hear she is dead, drowned in the chocolate, the bad chocolate, the fake chocolate. I know the book with my family’s formula, the real chocolate, is in the safe. I go there in the night. I know that man, Bogdanovitch, is there, the leech.”
“Letch. But you could say he was a leech, too.”
“Ya. I know he will be there. I dress pretty. Put flowers in my hair, wear the last of my perfume. I know what he does to women, what he likes to do. I know if I do what he wants he may give me the formula. It means nothing to him and everything to me. I would be the hot.”
“You planned to seduce him.”
“I seduce him, ya.”
“Said the fly to the spider. What happened?”
“He was not there.”
“While you were being hot, he was freezing. What happened when you got to the office?”
“The safe, it is open. Lots of things on the floor. And the blue book, the formula, was lying there, like God had saved it for me.”
“Oh, yeah, let’s bring God into this. Then what?”
“That is all.” She shrugged. “I take the book, but I will give it back if you go away.”
“Sure. After you’ve copied the formula down, of course. Don’t look so innocent. I see the ink stains on the side of your hand and inside your two fingers. You’ve been writing plenty.”
The girl leapt up, knocking the chair over, staring down at Percy. “It is mine. I only take what is mine!”
“Easy, girl, easy.” Percy rose to her full height and looked down at the girl a good six or seven inches shorter than she. She up-righted the chair never taking her eyes off Schatzi. Her voice became stern.
“Sit down.”
The girl complied, albeit unwillingly, then leaned forward in her chair. “How do you know it was me? How do you know?”
The chin jutted out again, defiant. Only the quivering lower lip revealed the fear she was feeling.
“I smelled your perfume downstairs in the outer office, where you work, and in Bogdanovitch’s office the day the safe got broken into. Then I read your file. It wasn’t hard to add two and two. Let me give you a tip, if you’re planning a life of crime, nix the Chantilly.”
“I like the perfume. Now maybe I can afford to buy more. Ya.”
“You going to go somewhere and start your own chocolate business, now that you have your family’s formula back?”
“I stay here in Queens. Soon my mother will join me. The Secret Army is helping her out of Belgium. She is at the top of the list.”
“Just your mother?”
“My father and younger brother, they are dead in the war.” Tears sprang to her eyes. “Now it is just my mother and I. I will sell to New York stores, like Carlotta did. Only I will use the real formula, not what she did to it now. Verfälschen is what she did.”
“You’re on a roll, sister. What’s that word mean?”
“Bastard; not right. It is better to have three pure pieces of chocolate than thirty bastards, only to make the money. She was a bad woman.”
“I’m sure there are others who agree with you, but not because she bastardized chocolate during wartime.” Percy rose. “Okay, kid, give me back the blue book and we’re done. I’ll keep you out of this, if I can.”
Schatzi rose warily. “That is it? You go and do not come back?”
“I go and don’t come back.” She reached out a hand for the book. “Only don’t you come back to Brooklyn unless you’re invited. Don’t push your luck with me.”
Chapter Thirty-five
Dear Diary,
Time to take care of Percy Cole.
Chapter Thirty-six
Percy dialed a number from inside the wooden phone booth at the bottom of the stairs of the Elmhurst station. The token booth had a ‘closed’ sign in the window, but several hardy souls were going in and out of the turnstiles. Probably like Percy, they carried a supply of nickel tokens, good for the subways and busses.
If you didn’t have nickel tokens and the booths were closed, you couldn’t ride the subway, unless you hopped over the turnstile. She watched a young man, who looked around him before doing just that.
Percy smiled. She used to do the same thing in her oh-so-distant youth. But that was then and this was now. She heard the rumble of the train arriving at the station and hoped the hopper made it to the platform in time.
Rendell answered on the first ring, like he’d been hanging around the chocolate factory’s office waiting for her call.
“Hey, Rendell. Got anything for me?”
“Yes, ma’am, but first your father phoned and he’s waiting for you to call him. I got a number for you.”
“Shoot.”
“Eldorado 5-9674.”
She scribbled the number down in her notepad. “Got it. Anything else? Talk fast.”
“Your brother called to say Goldberg should be out around one-thirty, two this afternoon. And he said for me to tell you, you were right on both counts. Hope you know what that means.”
“I do. The workers earning their keep?”
“Yes, ma’am. Everybody but the Appelman woman showed up for work. None of the eight female workers are young, except for Regina Mason.”
“She came to work?”
“Yes, ma’am. One cold fish. Most of the other women are in their late thirties, early forties, two older. The production line is going, but they expect to run out of chocolate by this afternoon.”
Percy looked at her watch. “It’s ten-thirty. You got the keys to the storage room, fridge, and freezer?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Don’t give them to anybody unless you go with them and watch what they’re doing. I’ll call you back in an hour or two.” She hung up and dialed the number for her father.
He, too, answered on the first ring. “Persephone?”
“Hi, Pop. Where are you?”
“Drugstore phone booth across from the Hall of Records.”
“Keeping warm?”
“Better than laying under the Boardwalk at Atlantic City.”
“I’ll bet. Whatcha got for me?”
“I found her. Easy as one, two, three.”
“I thought it would be. Where is she?”
“Would you believe it, over in Staten Island?”
“I believe it. What’s her last name now?”
“Christensen. The orphanage is right across the street from the hospital, so I went there. I spoke with a nun, Sister Mary Margaret, who remembered Marianna Christensen well and tried to keep up with her. The child was adopted at six-years old by a Scandinavian couple who made boats over on Staten Island. Didn’t have too happy a life. The sister thinks they only took her in to have someone to do housework. In any event, the father was a drunk and used to beat up the wife and kid. He died in a brawl when Marianna was eleven. The mother took in washing after that.”
The Chocolate Kiss-Off Page 15