After dialing the numbers, she heard the recorded message. She touched zero. Another message came on. She touched zero again. A different ring.
“Hallo,” a man answered. He sounded out of breath, as if he’d run to catch the phone.
“Hi,” Monica said cheerfully. “I know you’re closed, but can you help me?”
“Well, I don’t know yet. What do you want?” His voice was helpful, flirty. His accent sounded like he might be from England, or perhaps Scotland.
“I just called, trying to locate someone displaced by the Holocaust. The woman I spoke with was…well, let’s just call her less than helpful.”
The man chortled. “That would have been Angela. She’s not known for her personal warmth, or her phone skills.”
Monika agreed with him, laughing extra hard. She quieted. “May I ask your name?”
“Sure. It’s Liam. And yours?”
“Monika.”
“Well, Monika, how can I help you?”
“I need you to break a silly little rule for me. It’s extremely urgent, Liam. I’m leaving tomorrow, and I have something of great value, an inheritance, to give to someone, assuming she’s still alive.”
“Let me guess…you’re hoping I’ll give you a name and address.”
“You got it.”
A pause. “I can’t do that.”
“Liam…” her tone was still good-humored. “You can’t, or you won’t?”
He chuckled again. “Won’t.”
“So you could?”
“I have no way of knowing that…yet.”
Monika retrieved the diary. “So if you could, just theoretically, would you start with a computer search?”
“Theoretically, yes.”
“And are you at your computer?”
“I am.”
She stared at the diary. “Heinrich Morgenstern, taken away by the…well…you know the whole back-story. He was taken from here in Frankfurt, in thirty-eight, killed the same year. He was a grocer, if that helps.”
Monika could hear his breathing over the phone line. Other than that, he was silent for a half a minute. She matched his silence. Come on Liam, damn it! Live a little! Then she heard keystrokes. Thank you, Liam! If I was there I would kiss you on your cheek.
“A grocer, you say?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Okay,” Liam answered. “Theoretically, he could have existed.”
“With a wife named Greta?”
“In theory, yes.”
“She was murdered a short time later. I know all this, Liam, so you’re not helping me yet.”
Liam was silent.
Monika took a deep breath. “Here’s where I need your help, Liam, theoretically.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Greta had a child. She wasn’t Heinrich’s, but kind man he was, he took her and the child in. The Stolpersteine in front of their home in the West End shows them being killed, but says nothing else about the family.” Monika gripped the receiver tightly. “Liam, do you have anything on your screen about that child?”
Liam cleared his throat. “Monika, assuming I did, compromising this person’s identity, this person’s privacy, would be a horrid, gross abuse of ethics. It would go against everything our center was created for.”
Monika added an edge to her voice. “Liam, thanks for your help thus far, but please, hear my little plea. I’m not Jewish, I’m German. That being said, I think what some of our forebears did is despicable and without comparison. And while you don’t know me, I’m trying to do something potentially life-altering here.” She realized she was nearly yelling. She calmed her voice. “My intent isn’t malicious, but if you don’t help me right now, things are going to happen which will prevent me from ever setting this situation right.”
Liam listened silently, following Monika’s entreaty with a series of personal curses. She could hear him moaning, groaning, letting out long breaths. Finally, when she knew she had him, she heard him, in English, whisper the phrase “fuck it.”
Eyes wide, brown hotel pen in hand, Monica furiously scribbled the brief amount of information Liam relayed to her. After promising him a few beers in the very near future, she hung up the phone, staring at the notes she’d made.
She held the sheet of paper in one hand, the beer in the other, doing a quick dance around the room. Gage was going to be so surprised!
***
The early evening streets were dark and rainy, the wet sidewalks reflecting the hard lights of a city well into an unusually frigid autumn. Pockets of snow still clung to corners and patches of dead grass, vanishing slowly from the rain. What few people that were on the street kept their eyes down and their jackets pulled tight; evenings such as this weren’t made for dallying. Gage stood under the covered bus stop two blocks away trying to flag a taxi, keeping his face downcast on the off chance that someone might see him. Had he left the hotel a half-hour later, he might have been able to avert what was soon to occur.
Not long after Gage’s taxi pulled away from the train station, a large four-door Opel parked two blocks away in a deserted alley. Its plates were German, stolen an hour before from a business vehicle whose owner wouldn’t notice until the next morning. The driver and another man exited the vehicle, walking back the way they had just driven and then turning onto Niddastrasse, headed in the general vicinity of the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof.
One of the men limped slightly. He was Bruno Florence, his forehead stitched poorly by one of the Glaives’ on-the-take doctors. His head still ached from the vicious blows to the head courtesy of a blackjack and a nickel-plated pistol. “Just two cuts and a nasty bruise,” the South African doctor had told him, silently considering Bruno a pussy for the way he had nearly fainted as he had added six stitches to his forehead without the benefit of any anesthetic.
Bruno and the other man, Luc, his roommate, brother, and a ranking lieutenant in the Les Glaives du Peuple, had spent the past hour on the phone listening to instructions from Marcel, along with occasional profane outbursts from Nicky. Marcel’s asset had tracked the couple to a hotel and, after making several calls to people who owed Nicky favors, they were eventually able to find a polizei vice cop who was dirty. He stopped by the hotel an hour before, shaking the clerk down and making him tell him what room it was that had been checked into by the blond man and the olive-skinned beauty.
The two goons had been twenty minutes outside of Frankfurt, stealing the license plate, when they had gotten word. Third floor, room F.
“Don’t kill them,” Marcel commanded when Nicky had stepped away from the phone. “Nicky wants revenge on the man only. Just let the girl go and take him, you got that?”
Stopping outside the hotel, the two men pulled gloves onto their hands and glanced into the small, poorly appointed lobby; no one was visible. They entered, Luc pushing his gloves through his black hair, squeezing the rain backward as the remainder trickled down his face. They used the stairs to climb to the third floor. Once there, the two men crept down the hall, headed toward room F, located at the end.
***
Gage exited the taxi near the storage space, this time well west of the Leipziger Strasse U-bahn stop. His location was out of view of the cameras, although not by his own design. He stepped into a small store, knowing it was set to close in minutes, purchasing two types of hair-dye and a pair of shearing scissors. A red-head and a platinum blonde: he would let Monika choose the one she wanted.
As he came out of the store, his mind was already going over their route out of Germany. After the Metz incident, the mobsters had obviously covered up what had happened from the authorities. But in this instance—especially after what Gage did to Jean earlier in the day—he wasn’t so sure that a large-scale search wasn’t now laid on. Crucial intelligence, if it were indeed the case, that he would need to successfully navigate himself and Monika out of the country.
There was one way to find out, and it hadn’t come back to haunt him from the first time
. It would be lunchtime in Fayetteville, and Hunter told him to call if he needed him again. Gage leaned into the phone booth on the outer edge of the store and removed the calling card from his wallet.
After going through the motions with all the digits, Hunter answered.
“Sir?” Gage asked.
“Holy shit, son. What’s your location?”
Gage’s heart jumped. He knew the tone. Something was wrong. Bad wrong. “What’s up, sir?”
Hunter’s voice was a sharp razor. “Your girl, is she with you?”
“What?” The pressure in Gage’s head nearly blinded him as one of his headaches attacked with a vengeance.
“Listen carefully, son. I’ve been trying like hell to find you. Yesterday, my asset called me and said, after he’d done his initial check on you, that he discovered an undercurrent search going down in Germany and France, and that the telecom companies were trying like hell to ping you and someone named Monika Brink. The two requests came in at the same time, so he assumed she was with you. They were laid on by someone in the DGSE and told to keep quiet, but my guy is on the inside and was able to hear about it.”
Gage exhaled, relieved beyond measure that it wasn’t something worse. The phone companies were trying to triangulate their cell phones. “Okay…okay…we’re green on that, sir. No signals emanating from here.”
“Listen closely, son. I’ve been hoping like hell to talk to you because six hours ago, Brink’s phone went live and they pegged her location to the meter. Apparently she was moving for a bit but her location has now gone static. Is—she—with—you?”
The entire block—the store, the street, the people walking—were spinning in Gage’s vision as he gripped the pay phone for support. He took deep breaths, commanding his brain to focus. It had to be a mistake. “Are you sure, sir?” he managed to stammer.
“My guy is one-hundred percent. Said they triangulated her next to the Frankfurt main train station.”
Gage swallowed his sudden nausea back, jammed the phone into the receiver and sprinted east, his toes barely touching the wet sidewalk.
***
Monika had just finished brushing her teeth after her celebratory beer and another cigarette. Her mind was still racing over her discovery. Tonight they would travel, and tomorrow they could determine what to do about reaching out to the woman, the now seventy-something offspring of an abused Jewish servant and Adolf Hitler himself. Monika had spent the last few minutes pondering what she’d be like, finally deciding, unless psychosis was passed on in the genes, that she was probably as normal as anyone else.
Gage would be back soon. The reality of running away, while liberating, also contained drawbacks. Monika knew she should take a few moments to scrutinize the facets of her day-to-day life to make certain there was nothing that couldn’t be left safely undone. While she thought about her monthly rent and her job, she held her lips open, staring at her teeth and deciding to bleach them once they finally reached wherever it was they were going. Coffee, strong and dark, was just not what the pearly whites needed. As soon as they found a new city, she would call and make an appointment with a—
Call.
Phone!
Monika panicked as she remembered her cell phone. Running across the room, she retrieved it from her bag, holding down the green button to power it off. Hand over her mouth, she dropped it back into the bag.
There had been no calls to her phone. It was just sitting there idly. She didn’t know if anyone could have tracked it that way.
Doubtful, she thought, trying to convince herself. Still, Monika stared at the now dark phone nestled in the folds of her purse. Pushing her worry aside, she moved back into the bathroom, retrieving a long piece of floss from the dispenser. Just as she began at the back of her top teeth, she heard the old hotel’s floor creak—outside the door.
Frozen for a few seconds, she made herself move, leaning outside of the bathroom and listening. For a long moment, she heard nothing, her heart returning to normal. Gage, and all his talk about guns, had put her on edge. The floss went back into her teeth and, just as she began to think about which shade of white would look best, she heard the creak again.
The sound was definitely coming from just outside the door. Someone. Creeping. Coming.
Monika stopped what she was doing, her mind racing. Again, she heard another noise—a scraping, on the door—at the lock. Monika glanced around the brown hotel room. The pistol was exactly where she had left it, nearly covered by the sheet of the bed up around the pillow. Face quivering with fear, she turned back to the door. It opened, and in a flash a large man slipped inside, his pistol sweeping the room until he saw her, training it on her head.
The floss fluttered to the floor from her hands. Monika was wearing only a towel around her waist and one in her hair. Instinctively she covered her breasts and, just as she was about to scream, the man cut the sound off—or at least muffled it—by lurching toward her and jamming a smelly leather glove over her mouth.
What Monika saw next confirmed her worst fears. Through the door lurched the soaked man she remembered from her cousin’s shop. He was large and lumbering and hideous. She remembered the beady eyes and the baseless expression, much like one might see in a great white shark. Emotionless eyes. Killer’s eyes. Monika struggled to get free, but the man holding her was too strong. He moved behind her, pressing the gun into her neck, knocking the towel from her hair. His grating voice shushed into her ear, rancid garlic breath. His gloved hand remained clamped over her mouth until she stopped trying to scream. He spoke French, asking where her man was.
She shook her head.
The other man, the one from Metz, stepped before her. “Look,” he said to the man holding her. From the dresser he picked up the diary, opening it, staring at the words as blankly as if they were composed of an undiscovered language.
Monika’s notes were folded over, in the center of the book. He didn’t see them.
The man flipped the pages, shrugging. “How the fuck is this valuable?”
“Just put it in your bag and shut up,” the one with the mildewy glove over her mouth growled. He placed his mouth to Monika’s ear again.
“Where is Gage Hartline?” he rasped in German.
Monika again shook her head.
“You don’t want to answer?” he asked.
Monika was strangely unafraid, feeling an unknown rage coursing through her. The man’s fingers opened slightly so she could speak. Calmly, defiantly, she whispered a German insult. “Fickst dich, Schwein.”
The big one grinned at the insult, his sunflower-like teeth making him even more ghastly. “As much as I’d like to do her, Marcel said to leave her alone.”
Monika, fluent, understood their French perfectly.
“Yeah?” the one who held her asked. “Fuck Marcel.”
Now the one with the scar eyed her like he might stare at a prime steak, taking in both breasts before coming back to her face, which he studied. “You serious?”
He readjusted his grip, moving the pistol to the back of her neck and holding her wrists behind her back with his free hand. “Like I said, fuck Marcel. I’m not driving halfway across Europe for nothing.”
The one with the stitches chuckled and began to unbuckle his pants, removing his trousers and his shoes. She saw him pull his arm back. The punch from his massive hand didn’t knock her out, but it did bewilder her enough that she almost didn’t see the pistol wedge itself between the top of the headboard and the mattress when the heavier man jerked the sheet from the bed. He didn’t see the pistol because he was too busy ripping the light brown sheet into a thick strip of cloth, which he tied very tightly around her head and mouth. Then he turned to the man that was holding her.
“Me first, because of my head. You watch the door.” As she tried to understand their argument, the blood from her broken nose began to soak through the gag, filling her mouth with the copper-tasting liquid and making her feel faint. Monika’s head was spin
ning when she realized with horror that she was about to be raped by both men. The one who punched her must have won the argument because he jerked the towel from her waist and pushed her onto the bed. She struggled to get away as he stroked her leg, his stubby penis pointing skyward. Monika glanced at the other man, leaning against the door with a flushed face as he watched his partner fighting to have his way with her.
The pistol…
She reached with her hand, temporarily allowing the man on top of her to at least get partially into position. As she felt his disgusting organ touching her, she moved her hand laterally in the space between the mattress and the headboard, trying to feel the weapon but not finding it.
Monika squeezed her eyes shut, smelling the man’s sour odor as he pressed against her, unable to begin the act. She moved her hand to his chest, pushing him backward slightly. He froze, seemingly unsure of what she was doing. She shifted her body slightly, toward the headboard. Then, disgusting her to her very core, she tried to appear at least somewhat complicit. As she opened her legs just a bit, she worked the far end of the headboard, coming back until—she felt something.
Got it!
She slid the pistol from its hiding place, getting it positioned in her hand under a pillow where neither man could see. The smaller man was now peeking out the door. As the large man still thrust unsuccessfully on top of her, Monika wasn’t thinking clearly and she aimed the pistol at the one by the door. At the very last moment she changed her mind. She needed to kill her rapist first and, as she adjusted her aim, she was shocked when she unleashed a bullet with what she thought was very little pressure on the trigger. The blast from the .357 sounded like a cannon in the small room.
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