He glanced at his watch. The muscles in his arms and shoulders flexed with the slight movement against the fabric of his pullover. Like his father, who had been forced into manual labor by the Soviets, Udo had the powerful frame of a bricklayer. He had a thick neck, a large square head, and a broad torso. A heavily-boned forehead sloped under short black hair combed forward. He dressed in a typical German outfit his father or grandfather might have worn. Black South American leather covered a thin wool pullover and dark pants.
“It is cold tonight, Ja?” he remarked. Early March was frigid in Germany, especially in the evenings, and according to his watch it was five o’clock and time to be sitting in a warm bierstube.
“Bloody cold,” Higgs agreed. He was an older man with flesh that hung pale and sallow on his face, as if he lived in a cave. He was outfitted in some ridiculous English riding coat fashioned out of a brown tweed material.
Udo snorted. Did he think he was riding with the hounds?
Higgs pulled an ugly brown cigarette from a gold case. The small engraved box had been taken from a dead man, and Udo had witnessed that killing: two safe shots to the back of the head. His own preference was to see a man’s face when he ended a life. There was satisfaction, a sense of consummation during the last few seconds when the realization dawned. All of that would be somehow lessened with shots to the back of the head. But then, the Englishman was a coward.
The man struck a match to the tobacco and blew a sticky plume of smoke in his direction. The English in general acted as though they were so much better than everyone else. They had their rock stars and their slutty royalty, and they all thought that they still ruled the world. This arrogant Schwein was one of the worst and Udo despised him. Higgs spoke fluent Russian, courtesy of Ukranian parents who had settled in London during the war. That was the only reason for his presence, as far as Udo could tell. However, since Herr Schoenfeld hardly used him anymore as an interpreter, Higgs no longer seemed that important.
Udo stood and moved a few paces away from the smoke. On more than one occasion he’d been tempted to slide a knife into the man’s gut. Tonight might just be the night.
Heavy footfalls echoed from a higher landing. Someone was descending the stairs.
A fat man stepped slowly down the curving arc of white, marble treads from the mezzanine level. He halted at intervals and wiped blood away from his face. The fact that he was alone held significance far beyond his understanding.
“English? Speak English?” the Columbian called out. He reached the entrance to the portico and turned to them with sickly pallor.
“I’m British,” Higgs sniffed. “Of course I speak English.”
“Can you tell me, is there a pharmacia, a drug store around here? I must have a bandage.”
“There’s a Kaufhauf not far from here old chap. It’s kind of a department store. I’m sure they’ll have what you need.” He ran a tongue over brown teeth.
Udo rubbed at a growth of black stubble and stepped toward his partner. “Was sagt er?” he asked. Higgs was always slow to translate and Udo’s command of English was poor.
Higgs addressed him in German. “The fat man wants a bandage before he dies tonight, although naturally, he doesn’t know that yet. And remember, Herr Schoenfeld has put me in charge.”
Udo sat square in the leather seat of the large black Mercedes and gave the accelerator a small nudge. The car shot forward and closed to several car lengths behind an almost identical car. Black on black they moved as one outward from the city center.
“You are driving too bloody fast,” Higgs said. He flicked a thin, irritating finger in front of the German’s face and pointed at the road ahead. “He will see us if we stay this close. Understand?”
“Ja...yes, I can see.” He blinked his eyes and shot a glance at the man. Again the prick was trying to tell him what to do.
The Columbian stopped at a corner pizzeria where he picked up a young girl. Several blocks later he turned into the department store lot and parked some distance away from the brightly lit entrance of the store. The area was bordered on the rear by the face of a shuttered apartment building.
“The whores,” Higgs remarked. “Always the whores.”
Udo positioned his sedan into a space behind and to the left side of the Columbian’s. Rain had begun and shoppers scurried toward the revolving doors with umbrellas spread. His car became almost invisible.
After a long delay the fat man opened the door, slid out of the vehicle and stood bareheaded on the pavement. He fumbled with an umbrella.
At a nudge from Higgs, Udo exited the car and approached the Columbian quietly from behind. He held a short length of lead pipe. One end had been fashioned with the rubber handlebar grip from a bicycle, and the ridges and flanges gave him a tight grip.
The Columbian looked up. An uncertain and strangled cry came from his lips as he reached into his coat pocket. Udo slashed down with the pipe and hit the man in the temple. The Columbian fell back but stayed on his feet, still trying to reach his pocket.
The girl screamed. “Papa! Que esta pasando! Que nos estan haciendo, papa!”
Udo grabbed a shoulder, turned him around, and snapped the bare end of the weapon into the man’s medulla. The Columbian stepped backwards and sagged almost gracefully to the pavement. He remained on his knees for a second, his blank eyes possibly seeing nothing, and then toppled face down onto the asphalt.
Higgs opened the passenger door and pulled the girl outside. He clamped a hand over her mouth. A few minutes later, the Columbian’s corpse went into the trunk.
Udo flicked the high beams of the big Mercedes once, twice, three times into the rearview mirror of the fool in front of him. "Gott in Himmel, was für ein Dummkopf. Scheiss!" he cursed as he slapped the horn.
Higgs thumbed a cigarette from his case and tapped it against the gold filigree. “Very sloppy, my friend. He heard you coming. I should have done the job myself.” He lit the tobacco in a swirl of heavy smoke and indicated the taped and bound girl on the backseat floor. “She called him ‘papa’. Did you hear? She must be his bloody daughter.” He laughed. “Not a whore after all. Verstand? Sie ist seine Tochter.”
“Do not call me friend,” Udo said. He pushed the recessed switch for the driver’s side window. A quiet motor hummed the dark glass halfway down. They were blasted by a surge of damp, frigid air that swirled through the car and scattered the noxious smoke into billions of fragmented atoms. “Ja...yes, I know. Daughter,” Udo said. “He was stupid man to bring daughter.”
They were traveling in the fast lane on the long, straight autobahn just outside the city limits of Weimar, an area still clogged with slow, leftover autos from the former East German Republic. The one blocking the left side of the thoroughfare was a Trabant. Udo snorted. One hardly saw them anymore. The small vehicle was a marvel of the former East German State. The car was shoddy, made almost entirely of plastic, and unable to go ten kilometers without falling apart. It was almost always full of poor, unemployed East Germans.
Udo yelled through the half-opened window, a word lost in the wind as they thundered past on the right side. He checked the rear-view mirror and smiled. Two dim headlights were bobbing on the road behind them, like a rowboat left in the wake of a battleship.
“Are we close to the bleeding turnoff yet?”
“Nein. We have little to go,” Udo replied, and thumbed the window back up. He drummed his thick fingers on the steering wheel of the big car and surveyed the road ahead. A Wagnerian aria drifted in from a well-worn crease in his mind and he hummed unhurriedly for a few minutes as he drove. Classical music had been deeply ingrained from his childhood, courtesy of the Russians who used the music, he was certain now, to counter the sordid influences of Western pop rhythms. The solemn and beautiful Liebestod prelude, which at present ran through his head, gave death a dark drama and appeal that only Germans could comprehend. The Englishman could not understand death and was afraid of it. For that reason he was a co
ward.
A snow flurry began and ended just as quickly, but it left the autobahn slick in places. Udo slowed the vehicle and peered through the headlight beams as they stabbed into nothingness. Towns in the former East German Republic did not have the wealthy, urban sprawl of the West. The civic boundaries were clean and organized, and where the cities stopped they simply ended and farmland began. The landscape held few village lights and almost no industrial activity even years after the unification of Germany. He knew this section of the country well. During his escape to the West years before he’d hidden for several days in this area.
A short time later Udo slowed the car and exited the autobahn onto the wet, high-speed ramp. He stopped the sedan at the bottom and allowed the big machine to idle for a few minutes. The narrow artery running perpendicular in front of them was an older, two-lane road built during the war. It was not a major traffic thoroughfare and therefore had not been maintained by the East Germans. The original sections of seamless pavement that the Nazis had laid down years ago were now uneven slabs of concrete. Udo nodded to himself with satisfaction. It would not be a problem for the suspension of the Mercedes.
The dumping ground for bodies was the always the same, a small, isolated summer cottage, a Gartenhaus located on the edge of an apple orchard. Local villagers used it during the summer months, sweating in nearby vegetable plots during the day and falling down comatose in the evenings from homemade beer. The one-room shed was planked top to bottom with rough-hewn boards. A table, chairs, and a cot were the only furnishings. There were no windows, but the small structure had heavy, wooden shutters that could be opened for the summer breezes. A porch ran the length of one side. Adjacent to the shed and sloping down the back of the hill were grape trellises. The view in all directions was unobstructed, and it was an ideal place for interrogation, torture and murder.
The bare outline of the turnoff lane came into view, and Udo slowed the sedan and exited the hard pavement onto the soft earth of the dirt road. He eased the car forward and worked his way slowly over the uneven surface. The terrain began to rise and Higgs began to curse as the rear wheels lost traction in several places. What did he expect on a night like this? Udo reached a decision just at that moment, and he vowed that Higgs would not be going back down the hill.
When they reached the crest he nosed the car between two apple trees behind the Gartenhaus and cut the ignition. The drizzle had stopped and the sky was clearing. A rising moon lightened the surrounding landscape, and scattered lights of rural dwellings appeared in the distance.
For a long moment neither of them spoke. The body of the Columbian would be easy to deal with. The young girl was the problem.
Udo was mystified. How could anyone be so stupid as to involve one’s own flesh and blood in a dangerous enterprise? He scratched his neck, grunted, and heaved himself out of the car.
The entrance to the shed was not locked. Udo pulled on the stout, wooden door and stepped into a damp, musty interior. The interior dimensions measured only slightly less than the vacation cottages on the Black Sea that he recalled staying in as a boy. Entire families camped out in those primitive huts and congratulated themselves on being favored members of the modern and civilized Soviet society. The sweat and odor caused by the living, breathing, cooking and fornicating of those thousands of vacationing families permeated the wood planks and beams of those cottages. Even now he could remember the sheen of oil on the walls and the fetid smells inside those one-room hovels.
This shed was barely lived in by comparison. It had clean garden smells of apples and damp burlap sacks, old dirt and tomatoes. He flamed a match to the wick of a kerosene lantern and set it on the solitary plank table. A small Astra 380 automatic was in his coat pocket and he fingered the steel frame of the weapon. The pistol was the size of his hand and unusual in its double-action ability. As long as a bullet was in the chamber one did not have to cock the weapon. It fired with a pull of the trigger. The ninety-five grain slug was light, but he could put six on the target in a fraction of a second.
He stepped out of the shed and swung the heavy door closed with a bang. Higgs was leaning against the car.
“You help me with man,” Udo said, as he moved toward the trunk of the Mercedes.
“Something you bloody well could do yourself,” the Englishman shot back. He slouched a minute before stepping around to the rear of the car.
His partner closed to a frontal position and Udo briefly considered his next move. This was the moment. He could end the man’s miserable life now and doubtless Herr Conductor would scarcely give it a thought.
He whirled into the Englishman, brought his knee hard up into the man’s soft, unprotected groin. Higgs bellowed and twisted away. Udo had to smile. Even in blinding pain the man was covering an attempt to reach his weapon. He would never get to it in time. The Astra was ready, the barrel aimed at the center of the man’s torso. The weapon recoiled three times with a loud clap of detonations.
The Englishman momentarily disappeared in the bright discharge of flashes. A low, sustained moan indicated he was still alive, if only for a few minutes longer. Udo squinted at the fallen man as his night vision slowly returned. Higgs lay in a heap, one leg under his body, the other sticking straight out. He was on his back, eyes open and staring, his mouth working back and forth. Udo bent near. Blood pooled in a black and shiny puddle above his belt. A feeble smile formed on a face dull with puzzlement. His eyebrows were arched and his forehead furrowed, as if he was wrestling with some indefinable concept in his last moments.
Udo knelt beside his partner and put an ear close to his mouth. Was he trying to communicate something, pass some word from the near beyond, or possibly admit that he was a prick?
“Help me, please,” the dying man whispered in a labored breath.
Udo absorbed this twist for a moment and sat back on his heels. A low rumble of amusement began deep in his chest. Snuffing a human life was such an effortless process. He had taken two in the space of as many hours. He would take another shortly. Gott in Himmel, was there an easier job on earth?
The Englishman opened his mouth and crossed his eyes. He turned his head toward the laughter.
Udo gazed at his comrade and smiled as he cupped his hand over the man’s nose and mouth. The victim’s body stiffened and he jerked his head from side to side and pushed back with weak thrusts of his arms. “So,” Udo said into the man’s wide-eyed stare after a moment. “No more of Mr. Higgs.”
He stood, shoved the pistol back into the pocket of his leather coat, and stepped over the dead man. He rubbed a hand over his face and glanced into the back seat of the car. The girl was still there and he focused on the dark shape. He shook his head and thought for a moment. She had to be dealt with, of course, but perhaps not exactly like the others. The slow fuse of a base, primal instinct began to burn and he found himself swelling and hardening into an erection. This was an opportunity presented entirely by chance, and one that did not appear very often. She was young and firm and put up quite a struggle in the aftermath of her father’s death. He ran finger over his cheek where she’d scratched him. Because of this his pleasure would therefore be doubled when she accommodated his various needs. If he took his time with the girl and savored the experience, she might last until the morning light. Or perhaps not.
7
O’Brien held a bottle of beer in his hand. He’d been in local taverns, canteens and bistros the world over and rarely did he drink out of a glass. Today wasn’t going to be the exception. The empty tumbler in front of him sat in a sticky ring of grime on a worn countertop of scratched and dented tin. He chugged a couple of cold swallows from the bottle and rotated the filthy glass with his thumb and forefinger. The brown stain in the bottom could double for a Petri dish full of germs and microorganisms, all waiting to connect with that special someone.
Lucy was already a special someone. She was closed up in their hotel several blocks away. For the past twenty-four hours she’d been a
ble to take in only bottled water, and the last time he saw her she did not look good. According to her latest and most delicate report she was squeezing out effluent from the other end like a Slurpy machine. He grinned. Lucy did not mince words.
However, that meant the day’s work on the airplane had been up to him, not that there’d been that much. He’d supervised the fueling, but hydraulic fluid was unobtainable in Monrovia and it was being flown in from London with a technician. He had no idea when it would arrive. The phones had gone out shortly after his initial call, just as the doctor had predicted.
From his stool at the bar O’Brien let his eyes wander corner to corner around the establishment. The place was a shamble of rickety tables and frayed rattan chairs thrown together inside two standing walls. The remainder of the building was open to the street and the weather. Birds fluttered in and out and perched occasionally in the rafters. Earthenware pots containing the brown, lifeless stalks of plants had been pushed into corners behind mop handles and cases of empty bottles.
The beer was European and it was sold at a fraction of the price of the nearby hotels, which did much to explain the packed tables and the noisy crowd. A group of ethnically diverse human beings sat cheek by jowl rubbing sweat against each other. This was Africa, he reminded himself, and the acrid, fecund odor of human musk whacked at his nostrils.
He took the last, foamy swallows from the bottle in quick time and tapped it on the countertop. A bartender with bad teeth and numerous scars etched into his black skin exchanged a fresh bottle with his empty one, no questions asked.
O’Brien picked up a wave from the outside edge of the bar and was amazed to recognize the doctor from the plane. Starr and some others were wedged around a small table screened by a group of tall Africans. He sidestepped around the crush of people and headed to their table.
Errand of Mercy: How far do you run, and where do you hide? Page 5