Instantly Erich is towering over him, bobbing on the toes of his feet, kicking; left foot, right foot, dancing in a tiny circle, the toes of his sharp black boots striking Lou’s thighs, arms, back.
With each kick Lou grunts, a deep low growl. Erich swings his left foot forward and Lou swivels on his side, grabs the ankle as it goes by and twists.
Off balance, Erich spins and falls face down on the floor next to Lou who rolls onto him, straddling the large bare chest.
Lou sees the death head skull tattoo by the armpit and starts slamming his fist down on it, over and over until the spot is a bloody bruise of purpled muscle.
Erich howls in pain, in German, picks up the leg of the shattered table and slams it against Lou’s skull.
“Lou,” Monk yells from somewhere. “Need help?”
“No!” Lou’s half under the bed, his head aching and the smell of his own blood mixing with the dry dust bunnies on the floor. He feels an enormous pressure to sneeze, rolls to his back and starts kicking, figuring anything he hits will be the damn Nazi.
The bed is one of the raised kind that hotels like to think of as luxurious and maids think of another place to dust, but it’s high enough for even a pudgy PI to slither under. He’s just gotten out and risen to his feet when Erich leaps across the bed, crashing into him with hands clawing at his throat.
Both men fall backwards, this time on top of Monk who hasn’t managed to get out of the way in time. Monk squawks in alarm and the Queen Anne chair becomes pieces of red leather and black wood. Lou grabs Monk’s cigar from the ruins and shoves it into Erich’s cheek, below his eye.
Another howl and Erich’s body is off Lou. He staggers to his feet, hand to his burned cheek, cursing and raging and Lou uses Monk’s long body to pull himself up.
Lou’s shirt is torn and he’s lost a shoe somewhere. He has a long bleeding cut on the side of his head, bruises and cuts everywhere. Erich isn’t in better shape. His upper chest is a mass of color, red and purple and black, where Lou tried to obliterate his death head tattoo. His shirt’s gone, his face is bleeding and burned.
For a long moment both men face each other, breathing like chain smokers after a marathon race. Then they both leap at each other, lock hands and wrestle.
There’s no finesse, and no strategy. Each man is trying to hurt the other as much as possible. This could be World War Two in miniature, the American and the Nazi in a death match. As they struggle, Erich uses his greater size and strength to slowly bend the short detective back. He feels his enemy weaken and presses harder, now towering over Lou, forcing him down... down... Erich grins through his pain as he senses victory.
Lou stomps his foot on Erich’s instep twice. Overbalanced and shocked by the unexpected assault on his foot, Erich falls face forward on the floor, chin first. He feels teeth break and tastes blood. One arm is bent behind him, propped up on the bed.
Lou pulls the leg of the Queen Anne chair, still attached to the flopping red leather seat. He raises it like a club and slams it down on Erich’s arm.
A bone breaks and Erich screams.
Lou drops the chair leg and steps back, waiting. Monk’s moved over to the opposite corner near the windows, keeping away from the most intense violence he’s ever seen from his friend.
“Lou? Are you...” the words don’t seem adequate. “All right?”
“Fine,” says Lou. His eyes have never left Erich who has managed to get shakily to his feet. The big Nazi looks dazed as he sways, head down, exhausted. His left arm cradles his broken right one.
“Is it over?” Monk says.
“Hardly.”
Lou steps in and punches Erich in the ribs. He does it again and again as Erich tries feebly to block him, too tired to hit back.
“Damn you,” says Lou, throwing a left hook into Erich’s chest. “You God...” Punch. “Damned...” Punch. “Bastard.”
Lou is throwing punches like he’s back in the gym at Graziano’s, down on the south side where he first learned to box. He feels the sweat on his body, the aching weariness in his arms, the blood now gluing his left eye closed.
“You think you can do anything because you’re bigger and meaner. That people will bow down because you’re so willing...” Another hard left to the body, the sound like a board hitting a bag of sand, a dull thud. Erich inhales with each blow, huge sucking breaths.
“...Eager... to hurt people.”
A short blow to Erich’s kidney gets a gasp of agony.
“The war,” says Lou, and hits the same spot.
“The camps,” says Lou, hitting it again. Erich’s body is as stiff as if he’s being electrocuted. He raises his head and calls to Monk.
“Please. Make him stop. No... no more. Please.”
“Irina,” Lou whispers.
He hammers his fist twice directly into Erich’s sternum.
The Nazi falls to his knees and throws up, gasping to get air.
Lou squats low to get in his last words. “You said I should have brought a gun.” He grabs a handful of Erich’s short hair and pulls his face up. “I didn’t need to.”
Erich’s weaving, almost unconscious, but he raises his eyes to Lou.
Who says, “I brought a guy.”
Lou stands up and walks away. A moment later Erich sees a pair of legs and he follows them up to a small man in a brown suit looking down at him.
Erich stares at him, confused. Who?
Through the fog of pain, he hears Monk’s voice.
“Meet Haim Vakim, Erich. A Mossad agent.”
Erich has a single moment to feel absolute horror at being caught by the Israelis before he, in his tattered Nazi uniform, passes out.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
It's All So Clear Now
Two beds, four people, few clothes, many, many questions.
“I don’t get it, Dion.” Upstairs, in Monk’s apartment, Bonnie and Monk lying face-to- face in bed. She’s wearing a perfume called Desire and a necklace of gold with a heart locket. She’s been trying out Monk’s real name, finding it doesn’t fit and resolves to find something better. “Who’s Elie...?
“Wiesel,” says Lou, trying unsuccessfully to keep his focus on the subject at hand rather than the view of his wife, naked, straddling him. They’re also in bed, in their own bedroom. There’s a standing floor length mirror over by window and Lou’s eyes are going back and forth from one view to another like one of those novelty clocks, a cat or an owl, with a demented smile and eyes that move back and forth... back and forth. “He’s a writer...”
“Wrote a book called The Night,” says Monk. New to this relationship, he’s wearing the bottoms of a pair of light blue flannel pajamas, no top. Bonnie’s running her finger through his chest hair and the lamps are off, leaving them in the shadow of a full moon.
“It’s about the Holocaust and the Jews and it’s recently been republished. It’s making quite... a... stir in certain places. Bonnie, I can’t think when you do that.”
“I know.” Bonnie’s grin is like the Cheshire Cat, ghostly and insubstantial and wicked. And she doesn’t stop.
“Don’t stop.” All the lights are on in the Fleener/Adams bedroom, the better for Lou to see and Cassidy to be seen. She’s moved from above to below and Lou is doing things with his hands that match what he can do on the dance floor and Cassidy is barely holding on.
“You want to hear this?” Lou says.
“Later,” says Cassidy.
It’s also later in the Monkton bedroom when Monk, smoking, one arm under Bonnie’s neck, the other idly holding a cigarette, says, “You want to hear the rest now?”
Sated, he’s got conflicting emotions big time. He’s tired and so at ease he feels he could melt and just ooze off the bed, boneless. But he’s Monk and he’s just foiled a major Nazi threat and he’s desperate to tell all.
Bonnie deciding to listen, takes the cigarette from his lax fingers, takes a deep drag—why does smoking feel so right after sex? —says, “Tell
me.”
“Oh good,” says Monk, letting out a lot of the air he’s been holding in.
“It’s like this...”
“Erich got hired by this guy,” says Lou, “From Argentina, named...um...”
“Ricardo Klement,” says Monk, “He was actually a top-level Nazi; one of Hitler’s inner circle named Adolph...”
“Eichmann, something like that, supposed to have been like Nazi number three.” Now Lou and Cassidy are laying face to face. Their lights are now low because the show’s over, nothing more to see.
“They caught a lot of the other ones and tried them at Nuremburg and hung some but some others got away.”
“Adolph Eichmann was one of them,” says Monk. “He slipped out of Portugal, to Brazil, finally found work in Buenos Aires. There’s another one they think is down there, too; guy named Bormann, Martin Bormann.”
“Who’s they?” asks Bonnie.
“The Israelis. They take it very seriously. Their talk of “Never Again.” They got a guy named...”
“Simon Wiesenthal,” says Lou, “lost his family in the camps like a bunch of other people, he’s become a Nazi hunter full time. Evidently he’s caught a bunch of lesser Germans but lately things have slowed down and the Nazi hunting has been cooling off.”
“So,” says Monk, and Bonnie jerks a little, coming back from sleep. She loves listening to Dion—Monk; whatever—and maybe, it’s possible, she’s falling in love with him, but after sex is after sex and not the best time for telling long stories.
But she can tell he’s dying to tell her so she leans back on one arm and says, “So...?”
“So, this is where the book— The Night—makes a difference. By speaking out the way it did, it’s bringing the Nazi criminals back into the spotlight. And one of them...”
“This Eichmann guy, goes by the name Ricardo Klement, he gets worried, see, and decides to do something about it. Enter our own Erich Klaussner, an ex-camp guard. Eichmann, Klement, he gets ahold of Erich somehow and hires him to kill...”
“Not Simon Wiesenthal,” says Monk, “But Elie Wiesel.”
“How come?” says Bonnie. She yawns behind her palm, hoping he won’t notice.
He doesn’t. At this point, it’s possible Monk wouldn’t notice those seventy-six trombones from the Music Man parading through their bedroom.
“If he kills Wiesenthal, he creates a martyr. Wiesenthal is way too well known to get murdered by a Nazi or sympathizer. So Klement gets this idea.”
“It sounds crazy to me,” says Lou, “but Monk swears this is the goods. Erich’s hired to put together a group of losers—American losers—to become Nazis. Not German guys, but home grown American boys. He gets them all lathered up and sends them to downtown Chicago to have a demonstration. Gets all the papers and TV to cover it, make it National news. Maybe have a riot...”
“There was a riot,” says Bonnie. “I saw the pictures on Channel Nine. The crowd almost killed those boys.”
“That was the plan,” says Monk, smiling at the memory. Twenty-seven people hospitalized, banners shredded, in a demonstration of American intolerance about intolerance.
“Meanwhile, he sends somebody else with a bomb to kill Ben-Gurian.”
“That guy,” says Lou, “Nobody knows anything at all about. Seems there wasn’t enough of him to do an ID.”
Cassidy, now yawning too, says softly, “So what happened to what’s his name, Wiesel?”
Monk says, “We shoved him out of his room and down the hall. Barely made it back when Erich came in with the gun. I gotta hand it to Lou; the idea of bringing the Mossad guard in was brilliant.”
“I gotta hand it to Monk.” Says Lou. “Figuring out the Wiesel was the target all along.”
“What’s gonna happen to Erich?” Cassidy, at this moment, doesn’t care. She’s more asleep than awake when Lou says, “The Israelis are going to turn him inside out.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
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Epilogue
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Erich Klaussner, as expected, doesn’t hold back. Faced with the full attention of many very serious Mossad agents, he talks for hours, days, until his throat burns from telling everything he knows, many times, to many people.
After the interrogation, he’s given a cell and an attorney with little interest in him who pleads his case down to fourteen years in prison.
One month later, on May 11th, at 14 Garibaldi street in Buenos Aires, Several Mossad agents’ kidnap Ricardo Klement as he walks home from the bus.
Confirming his identity as Adolph Eichmann, he is tried and convicted of war crimes.
He is sentenced to death by hanging and executed on June 1, 1962.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
––––––––
But Wait, There's More!
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“My God, this is wonderful.”
Riding the Super Chief from Chicago to Los Angeles, a 2,200 mile ‘get to know each other’ trip on the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway.
Bonnie Lieberman, hating to call him Monk and not finding Dion any better, has taken to not calling him by his name at all. It’s not convenient, but a smattering of ‘Baby’ and ‘Honey,’ seems to be working.
They’re in a stateroom suite that’s tiny but extravagant and surprisingly luxurious. It’s been two days alone, mostly in bed, rarely going out, rarely even getting dressed.
Monk is in a special area of Heaven reserved for those good people who haven’t been there much.
Being with Bonnie is better than when he took down Duke Braddock, better than the money they stole, nearly reaching the height of emotion he’d felt when they told him, a frantic young man pacing the waiting room at Engalls Memorial Hospital, that his daughter Corrie was born.
Bonnie’s leaning toward the window, watching the Arizona desert drift by, all browns and blue sky so bright it hurts the eyes as the sun turns molten and orange, setting behind the long low mesas to the west.
Monk leans over her shoulder and watches with her.
“I love you,” he says.
“I...” she says and her voice trails away.
“It’s all right,” says Monk. “It’s early and I’m pushing it.”
“I’m not saying,” she says, and for several long, long minutes she doesn’t. “But... maybe... soon...”
“It’s ok,” Monk says again, and they watch the scenery until the sun goes down. The sky turns interesting shades of deeper and deeper blues until the sky becomes indigo, deepens to purple and black. Tiny white stars flicker above and the train clacks and rattles.
They fall asleep wrapped around each other.
Late that night Bonnie wakes up and sees his shadow in the glow of the full moon. She imagines his features, feels his breath on her bare shoulder and she whispers, “I love you, too.”
The train gets in to Union Station at nine and they wander hand in hand through the art-deco lobby, wait for luggage and take a cab to a hotel on the beach.
Monk, grinning like a teenager, is bouncing around the huge echoing room, playfully nudging her shoulder, patting her back and smiling, smiling, smiling.
“What is with you?” she asks, trying hard to hold back laughter.
“Nothing. Just, you know... happy.”
“Yeah? Well, tone it down a bit, will you? People are staring.”
“Lou says,” imitating his friend’s mocking tone. “They will anyway.”
“They’re not here.” Lou and Cassidy bought the train tickets and booked the Mediterranean Hotel, a coral pink five story luxury palace that the travel agent gushed over. They gave the tickets and a fruit basket and Lou wagged his eyebrows in what he said was, “A perfect Groucho Marx,” leer.
“But we are.” Bonnie wraps her arm through Monk’s and they take the half-hour long cab ride to the hotel not hearing a single word as the cab driver points out several homes of the stars.
The h
otel is amazing, the room a suite with a balcony overlooking the Pacific.
They have three days before the magical week ends and they take a Pan-Am flight back home.
They almost make it.
Monk says, “Where?”
“Shopping. I’ll be back soon.”
“But it’s late.” He checks his watch. “Almost eight.”
“Stores stay open late out here. I need to get gifts for Lou and Cassidy. Thank them for this wonderful trip.”
“Fine.” Monk pretends to sulk, his movie-star face sagging into an exaggerated pout. He’s wearing a thick terry-cloth hotel robe, holds the pout for almost three seconds before grinning again. “I’ll stay here—all alone, did I mention that? —and somehow get by.”
Hand on the door she grins back. “Maybe you can give yourself a hand while I’m gone.”
It’s eleven-fifteen and Monk’s on the balcony, leaning on the railing. He can hear the restless waves of the ocean slapping endlessly against America and he looks at his watch for the tenth time.
Where is she? The stores must be closed by now.
Down five stories he can see the shadows of couples walking on the beach, and hear the ghostly murmur of voices, as well as taste the salt water tang on his tongue.
Where is she?
At eleven-thirty he finds out.
The sound of knuckles in the door.
“Yeah, yeah. I’m coming.” Monk hurries from the balcony, across the long living room. The knocking continues. Must be Bonnie, forgot her key, he’s thinking as he opens the door and a very large man hits him in the face.
Monk is knocked backwards by the blow and the surprise and two more large men come in followed by a shorter, stouter man with a cigar.
“Sal?” says Monk, thoroughly confused.
“Monk,” says Salvatore Leon, the gangster. He points with the cigar. “Hit him, boys. Hit him a lot.”
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