by Roy Chaney
The first thing that Hagen concluded from reviewing the documents was that the three subjects of the training reports were most definitely “individuals of interest.” The nature of their training—weapons, explosives, escape and evasion, target identification and surveillance—indicated clearly that the three operatives were members of a Stasi-sponsored terrorist cell. Just the sort of training that might be sold for a high price on the open market after the fall of East Germany. These were exactly the sort of people that Blau Licht was designed to identify.
The second thing that Hagen concluded was that the Totenkopf documents were workable. The field reports on the meetings in Hamburg included the address of an apartment presumably used by agent Natzweiler. It should be a simple matter to find out who resided at that address at that time.
Hagen and a young BND agent named Johannes Vogel drove to Hamburg to look into the matter. The current landlord hadn’t owned the building in 1986, but the records kept by the previous landlord were boxed up in the basement. After an hour of searching through moldy boxes of records, Hagen and Vogel identified the individual who had rented the apartment at 29 Charlottenstrasse in the spring of 1986 as Heinrich Kress. The name meant nothing to Hagen but Vogel recognized it immediately—Heinrich Kress had been found guilty of planting a bomb in a Hamburg nightclub in 1988 that killed three off-duty British soldiers and a Turkish guest worker.
Heinrich Kress was Natzweiler. Now they could use Natzweiler to identify agents Totenkopf and Hohle. But an additional piece of information was soon received from the German Bundeskriminalamt—Heinrich Kress hanged himself in Stammheim Prison in Stuttgart in 1995.
Vogel thought that was the end of it. Agent Natzweiler was dead and the identities of Totenkopf and Hohle would remain a secret. But Vogel was wrong. This was just the beginning. . . .
Totenkopf—
The death’s head. The skull and crossed bones.
The insignia of Adolf Hitler’s Schutzstaffel—the SS.
Hagen saw the totenkopf everywhere. Five, ten, twelve of them, all in a row. Lights blinking around them, bells clanging, wheels spinning. The empty mouths of the skulls hanging open in a silent shriek. Then suddenly the rattle of coins—
Slot machines. Long rows of them. All advertising Pirate Treasure at twenty-five cents a play. The slot machine players mingled around the machines watching one another play, all of them carrying plastic cups full of coins, like an army of street beggars.
Hagen walked past the banks of slot machines. The action at the blackjack tables was thin this afternoon and the nearby baccarat tables were empty. At a craps table a young woman in blue jeans and sandals was shaking her bottom and waving her arms in the air, trying to put some english on the pair of dice in her hand while her boyfriend motioned to a cocktail waitress with long legs clad in fishnet stockings to bring another round of free drinks. Hagen thought of Peach, how she used to look in a cocktail outfit. Strolling across this same casino floor, all legs and cleavage and big eyelashes. Working the room like she owned the joint. She knew how to turn a few heads back then.
She still knew how.
Diamond Jim’s hadn’t changed much. It still looked to Hagen like what it was—a sawdust joint with pretensions. Like the El Cortez, the Las Vegas Club and the Golden Nugget, Diamond Jim’s was one of the older casinos in town, built in the 1940s when Fremont Street was still the center of the gambling action and the Strip was only a long dusty stretch of highway on the way to Los Angeles. But times changed and Diamond Jim’s was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy when the Ray brothers bought it in the 1970s for a song. They sunk quite a bit of capital into the operation, tried hard to give Diamond Jim’s a little class. But there was one thing they couldn’t change and that was the clientele—and the clientele at Diamond Jim’s was strictly sawdust joint.
Low rollers. Grinds. Stiff s.
Hagen walked up to the cashier’s cage, told the cashier that he wanted to speak to Marty Ray. The cashier called over a manager who eyed Hagen with suspicion. A phone call was made and presently a barrel-chested young man who moved uncomfortably in his pin-striped Brooks Brothers suit escorted Hagen to the private elevator that took them upstairs to Marty Ray’s office.
On the fifth floor the elevator doors slid open to reveal a short white corridor. The zebra-striped carpeting was new but the two security cameras hanging from the ceiling at the end of the corridor weren’t. Hagen followed Pinstripes to the door. As the young man reached for the doorknob Hagen heard a low buzzing and a metallic click—the automatic lock on the door being released.
Hagen followed him inside.
The office was large, with a low ceiling and track lighting. One wall was covered with bookcases and filing cabinets. The opposite wall was bare except for a wide rectangular painting of a desert sunset, the modernist shapes of the rock formations and cacti all done up in burnt sienna and dusty rose, the sky several shades of orange. At the far end of the room was an enormous oaken desk. Behind the desk sat Marty Ray, with a plate of food and a glass of red wine in front of him.
“Hello, Sauerkraut,” Marty Ray said. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
Sauerkraut—the name the Ray brothers had always called him. It hadn’t bothered him ten years ago. But now the nickname rankled Hagen. It spoke of a familiarity that Hagen no longer wanted with Marty Ray.
Marty Ray daubed at his mouth with a white linen napkin as he looked up at Hagen, one eyebrow raised. Marty Ray was sixty years old now but he still dyed his gray hair jet-black. Still combed it back onto his head in a pompadour. Still wore his shirts unbuttoned halfway to his waist. Still shaved his chest so the gray chest hairs wouldn’t give him away.
He even dyed his eyebrows black now. But his skin was pale and slack and his eyes looked dull.
Marty Ray looked like a badly primped corpse.
Hagen said, “What made you think I’d be here?”
Marty Ray waved a hand in the air as though brushing aside a slow housefly. “Your brother gets it the hard way, I figure you’ll turn up. Who else is going to bury him? And since you’re in town already, I figure you’ll drop by to see Marty. Maybe talk about old times. Maybe talk about new times.”
“So now I’m here.”
“So now we talk.”
Off to the right a tall bald-headed man with a crooked nose sat in a swivel chair in front of a bank of video monitors that showed split-screen images of the hallway outside the office, the interior of the elevator that had brought Hagen up here, the elevator doors at the casino level, a back elevator and stairway, several different views of the casino cashier cages. The tall man rose from his chair and stepped forward. Motioned with his hands for Hagen to raise his arms for a pat down.
Hagen turned full around to face the tall man. Hagen took one step back, planted his feet apart. Held his hands out at his sides. Ready to make a fight of it if the tall man moved closer.
The tall man stopped, looked at Marty Ray. Waiting for orders. Pinstripes, still standing by the door, looked nervously at the tall man, at Hagen, at Marty Ray.
Marty Ray picked up his silver dinner fork and waved the tall man back to his chair. Then Marty Ray pointed the fork at Pinstripes and he departed quickly.
Now the tines of the fork were pointed at Hagen.
“You’ll have to excuse Cleveland, Sauerkraut. He just wants to do his job. I don’t like guns in here. I’m allergic to guns. My doctor says I should avoid them. Unless I want to break out in a rash of blood. But you didn’t come here to shoot me, did you, Sauerkraut? No, I don’t think you did. So we’ll skip the pleasantries. Have a seat.” Marty Ray returned his fork to his plate of food—green peas, mashed potatoes and gravy, a large half chicken covered in thick red barbecue sauce. “Cleveland is a good man. As good as you were, Sauerkraut. Maybe better.”
Before sitting down Hagen pushed the red leather-cushioned chair in front of Marty Ray’s desk to one side, so that he could keep Cleveland in sight.
Mar
ty Ray pushed a fork load of mashed potatoes into his mouth, pushed the potatoes from one cheek to the other and back, then swallowed. Marty Ray had once told Hagen that he ate one item on his plate at a time because he didn’t like to mix up the flavors. It had always struck Hagen as a childish predilection. But Marty Ray was prone to odd tangents of the mind. Once, back when Hagen worked for him, Marty read in a magazine that the singer Sammy Davis Jr. added a mixture of Lactopine, Hermès and Au Savage colognes to his bathwater in order to rejuvenate himself during his evening ablutions. Marty immediately sent Hagen out to procure the three ingredients so that Marty could bask in the same bathwater that Sammy used. Hagen had felt distinctly like a fool searching Las Vegas for the items. The next morning Marty was visibly disappointed that the bath mixture hadn’t done a thing for him except make him smell like the bargain shelf of an all-night drugstore.
Jimmy Ray had been the brains behind the business. He’d had a cool head and a quick mind. If business was going well for Marty Ray, Hagen was sure that someone else was pulling the strings.
“What do you hear about what happened to Ronnie?” Hagen said.
“What do I hear?” Marty Ray said. “Let me turn that question around. What have you heard about what happened to my brother, Sauerkraut?”
“Not a thing. Why don’t you tell me about it.”
“You’re being flip. I don’t like flip.” Marty Ray rolled his tongue over his front teeth, took a sip of wine. He held the wineglass with his fat pinkie extended straight out from the side of the glass, like a bishop sipping tea at a garden party. Hagen noticed that his fingernails were ragged and broken. Marty Ray still chewed his nails.
“What happened to Jimmy, Marty?”
“Somebody took him out. Right in his own house. Can you imagine that, Sauerkraut? They robbed him and took him out in his own damned house. Jimmy didn’t usually keep large at his house, but he had a couple of hundred thousand that night. Big coincidence, right? Bullshit. Whoever took him out knew he was holding. That’s what I say.”
“So how come the police didn’t find your man?”
“Who said it was a man?”
“Have it your way. How come the police didn’t find your woman?”
“I didn’t say it was a man or a woman. All I say is that whoever killed him knew he had cash in the house that night. And they knew a few other things. Like the surveillance cameras—they knew about those. After they killed Jimmy they took the tapes from the surveillance cameras with them. It was no small-time job. Whoever did that job, they did some planning.”
“That doesn’t mean it was an inside job.”
“You’re thinking the way the police thought. That’s why they never got anywhere. That’s why they never found out who murdered my sainted brother Jimmy.” Marty Ray waved his fork at Hagen. “But I’ll find them, Sauerkraut. I’m still looking. It’s been five years but I’m still looking.”
“Maybe the police didn’t get anywhere because you didn’t tell them where the money came from or who knew about it. Is that the way it was, Marty?”
Hagen smiled. Marty Ray shot him an angry look, then glanced at Cleveland across the room. Cleveland sat with his eyes glued to the video monitors, trying hard to look like he wasn’t paying attention to the conversation. Years ago Hagen had spent many nights sitting where Cleveland was sitting now, staring at those same monitors. Hagen had known about the skim operation back then, but what the Ray brothers did with their money after the skim went down Hagen never knew. They’d had some scheme in place for getting the cash off their hands and laundering it, and it must have been a good scheme too, because the gaming commission and the feds never caught wind of the skim action at Diamond Jim’s, or if they did they could never prove it. It would’ve meant jail time for Jimmy and Marty Ray if they had. Hagen had often wondered if the Ray brothers had the mob behind them and that was why the skim operation was successful. He wondered about it again now.
“Get your head out of your ass, Sauerkraut,” Marty Ray said. “The money meant nothing. Jimmy’s death destroyed me. It tore me all up inside. So when the police didn’t do anything I put my own boys on it. I told them to work like Christmas—I wanted to know who was naughty and who was nice. But they let me down. Someone inside the casino was a rat but my boys couldn’t shake the rat out. And I wasn’t going to start busting caps on people’s asses because maybe they knew something and maybe they didn’t. I had to know for sure. I’m a reasonable man. I’ve got morals.”
“So what did the boys tell you about Ronnie?”
“You worried?”
“It’s what you’re working up to.”
Marty Ray leaned back, wiped his mouth with his napkin. “Ronnie seemed like a good kid. Jimmy liked him too. Ronnie had a future with this organization. But then about a month after Jimmy got it, Ronnie quits his job and leaves town”—Marty Ray snapped his fingers. Across the room Cleveland turned in his chair, then realized that the snap wasn’t for him—“just like that. And he doesn’t just leave town. He doesn’t just drive up to Reno for a weekend. He leaves the fucking country, Sauerkraut. He goes to the other side of the world. That raised some eyebrows, I don’t mind telling you. We were shaking our noggins trying to figure that out. Why did Ronnie want to disappear like that? Maybe he’s scared about something. Maybe the heat’s getting too hot in Vegas.
“And then the police come around. They wanted to know where Ronnie was too. Suddenly they’re real interested in talking to him. So I say, ‘What’ve you got on him? What’s the action on that kid?’ They didn’t want to tell me. They acted cagey. But I could read between the lines.
“So then I want to talk to Ronnie again too. If the cops want him, then I want him. And I want to talk to him first. But where is he? He’s gone. He fell off the edge of the earth. I put out a line on him but I couldn’t find his ass. He went into that Foreign Legion bullshit and disappeared. Swallowed him right up. But I said, that’s okay. I’ll keep a marker out. He’ll turn up again and I’ll be here waiting for him. And then he’ll tell me what it was the police had on him because maybe it’s something I ought to know about.”
It had become warm in the room. Hagen wanted to take off his sport coat but didn’t. Why had the police wanted to talk to Ronnie? Then another thought came to him. Hagen didn’t like it. He didn’t know exactly why, but he didn’t like it.
Hagen said, “Who were the cops who worked the case?”
Marty Ray grimaced, as though the act of trying to remember caused him a sharp shooting pain. “The usual fucks.”
“McGrath?”
“Might’ve been. What’s it to you?”
“He was a friend of my old man’s, that’s all.”
“Your old man had a lot of friends. He had a lot of enemies. Sometimes they’re the same people. You might think McGrath is a friend but he’s a cop too. He had business with your brother. He had a bone to pick. He was most displeased to hear that Ronnie disappeared. Most displeased.”
Hagen wondered why McGrath hadn’t mentioned this. Had it slipped his mind? Jimmy Ray was murdered five years ago. It was probably a dusty folder in a cold case drawer by now. But no, cops had long memories. McGrath had a long memory. What did the police have on Ronnie? Hagen would have to talk to McGrath again. Hagen wanted to know all the pieces of the puzzle, not just the ones that McGrath felt like giving him.
Marty Ray prodded the half chicken into the center of his plate with his finger. “Sauerkraut, I wondered about you too.”
“How’s that?”
“It wasn’t so long after you left town that Jimmy got whacked.”
“It was five years.”
“Five years is nothing. Five years is yesterday. Ten years is last week. When you left town, you disappeared too. You went to the other side of the world. Then Jimmy got it and then your brother disappears just like you did. It made me think. Maybe you weren’t so far away as you said. Maybe you came back to town and didn’t want anybody to know. Maybe yo
u and your brother decided to work some kind of angle.” Marty Ray took hold of the chicken wing with the tips of his fingers. With a quick tug he ripped the wing free of the half chicken and held it up. Red droplets of barbecue sauce landed on the desk around his plate like blood spatter at a crime scene. “If I thought you had anything to do with what happened to Jimmy, Sauerkraut, your bright sunny future wouldn’t be worth a turd in a pot.”
“You’re reaching now, Marty.”
“Am I? I wonder.”
“While you’re wondering, why don’t you tell me what happened when you saw Ronnie last week. I didn’t come here to watch you play in your food.”
Marty Ray kept his eyes on Hagen as he raised the chicken wing to his mouth, pulled a large piece of skin and meat off the bone with his teeth. He chewed the bite of chicken slowly, swallowed. Then, “Nothing happened. Nothing happened because I didn’t see him.”
“He came here.”
“That’s right. He was here. But I wasn’t. I wish I was, but I wasn’t. I was out of town. When I got back I put out feelers. I sent people out to find him and bring him here. But before they could do that little thing he shows up on the news, dead. I was upset, Sauerkraut. I don’t mind telling you. I was distressed. I wait all this time to talk to him, and then as soon as he shows up in Vegas he gets himself whacked. Your brother had an all-around shitty sense of timing.”
“What have you heard about it?”
An indifferent look crossed Marty Ray’s face. “Not a thing.”
“You sure?”
Marty Ray found an enticing spot on the wing and took another bite. He didn’t respond. Hagen sensed that Marty Ray was telling the truth. And it jibed with what Gubbs had told him. Not that that counted for much. Hagen was sure that Gubbs had already talked to Marty Ray. Probably called him the second Hagen walked out of Gubbs’s apartment.
Hagen said, “What did Ronnie do when he was here?”
Marty Ray shrugged. Through his mouthful of food he said, “Damn little, from what my people tell me. He showed up with a squeeze on his arm—nice girl too, I’ve seen her around. So he hangs out for a couple of drinks and then he takes his squeeze and he leaves. One thing though—he asked to see me, you know that? He wanted to look me up like I was an old friend. How about that? But I wasn’t here, so I didn’t see him. The next thing I hear is that he’s taken up residence inside a body bag. Too bad for him. Too bad for me. Too bad for you. End of story.”