by Nina Berry
Bam! Bam! Bam!
Pagan whirled, scanning the room wildly. The metallic thumping was loud as cannon fire in the utter silence of the laboratory.
Something rustled, and then barked. Over by the wall to her right.
Barked?
More rustling, and that rhythmic thud.
Pagan sucked in air, hoping it wasn’t too horribly radioactive. There was no one in the room. No people, that is.
The banging sound came from inside the large cage. The other sounds—from other, smaller cages lining the wall.
Whatever was in those cages...was alive.
One hand pressed to her heart, Pagan forced herself to walk toward the large cage. Around some kind of cabinet, past the central metal table covered with paraphernalia, she turned that corner and saw that the large cage didn’t contain a pile of rancid garbage, after all.
Two eyes stared up at her. A large gray-and-red body now up on all fours swayed as its tail waved.
She almost didn’t recognize what it was at first. The furless skin was covered with terrible, oozing sores. A large patch of pinkish flesh seemed to have been stitched onto its shoulder. One ear was gone, and one eye was white as a blind man’s, the other brown. The paws were scaly when they should have been furry, the nails ripped, gone or bloody. The tall body was emaciated to the point where it resembled a skeleton more than a creature.
But the tail was wagging, banging against the metal back of the cage. The one good eye gleamed up hopefully at Pagan. A small whine escaped the scarred throat.
A dog.
A small, disbelieving sob rose up Pagan’s throat. She gulped, kneeling by the cage, and put her hand up to the mesh.
The dog licked her hand.
“No,” she breathed. “Please, no.”
She stood up slowly, turning toward the other cages. More than a dozen of them lined up against the wall, filled with smaller animals. Dogs, cats, rats. All ravaged as sunken ships, their eyes shining at her in the dark.
Pagan now knew without a doubt who Rolf Von Albrecht was. He had to be the man once known as Rudolf Von Alt, Nazi war criminal. And he was continuing his odious experiments here in Buenos Aires, on animals.
Dieter had said something about moving the animals. These poor creatures must be the ones he’d been talking about. Was Von Albrecht done with his horrific trials? And if so, what came next?
She put her hand on the lock of the dog’s cage, reaching for her hairpins, but the cold metal on her skin shocked her out of her fugue.
She couldn’t save them.
Something in her chest was cracking, breaking apart. More than anything in her life since the accident she wanted this—to open the cages and take these animals home, all of them.
Von Albrecht had once done the same thing to human beings.
Don’t! Don’t think about that now. The nausea from seeing the dog’s condition alone was making her dizzy.
People would’ve been... She couldn’t think about that or she’d scream. She’d give herself away. She’d march upstairs and kill Von Albrecht here and now with her own bare hands.
And more likely get killed.
Think, think, Pagan. You can’t let the animals go or he’ll know you were here. If she tried to get out with them, he’d hurt her, or kill her, and the animals. There could be no doubt now of what he was capable.
She had to get out of here.
Praying that Dieter had kept Emma occupied all this time, Pagan ran over to a half-open bag of dog food. She grabbed it at the bottom and tipped it over the open tops of the cages lining the wall, jogging up and down so that the kibbles sprinkled down into the cages. She had no time to differentiate between cat, rat and dog now. And they needed water more than food. But they gobbled down the bits of food so fast she knew there’d be no trace of her visit for Von Albrecht to find.
She knelt by the large cage with a handful of food and shoved it through the mesh. The dog licked at her hand as she did it, gulping the dried chunks down, tail wagging like mad.
“I won’t forget you,” she whispered.
Her hair was sticking to the back of her neck. Her mouth was dry. She tore herself away from the dog and returned the nearly empty bag of dog food to its spot in a dark corner. It almost slipped from her shaking hands, but she hoisted it up on top of its stack of crates and ran back up the stairs, not looking back at the animals.
If she did, she’d never leave without them. Her feet kept going, but the compulsion to turn back, to somehow gather them in her arms forever, nearly overcame her.
She couldn’t. Not now. But she or someone else would come back.
And Von Albrecht would pay.
Icy certainty stiffened her spine and pushed her farther up the stairs. She would tell Devin, and he’d tell his contacts. They would swiftly deal with Von Albrecht. The US government had brought her here to find him, and she’d done that. Now they could punish him.
“I promise,” she whispered. The words cloaked her with the calming weight of a solemn vow.
She slowed as she neared the door, taking the hairpins down with fingers that no longer trembled. The promise of vengeance was powerful indeed.
She saw now that the back of the door was covered in some kind of black foam, the same kind she’d seen in sound studios when she recorded extra dialogue for her movies. Soundproofing.
The acting job of her life now lay ahead of her. She needed to seem not only calm, but frivolous. Happy. As if she’d never seen what she had seen. For a little while, she could not know what she knew.
So Pagan took everything she’d seen in the basement and locked it all up in the little box in the back of her brain. She kept her memories of the night of the car accident, when Daddy and Ava had been killed, in the same place. Sometimes traumatic moments escaped. But if she didn’t keep them prisoner most of the time, they would run riot and take over everything.
She turned off the light and stepped through the door, turning swiftly to use the hairpins to relock it behind her. Her hands were shockingly steady. In less than half the time it had taken her to unlock, she’d turned it back with a quiet thunk.
Up the stairs again, cautiously, taking deep, tranquilizing breaths. She made sure her collar was straight, dusted the crumbs of dog food from her hands and pressed her lips together to smooth out whatever was left of her lipstick. As far as she knew, the Von Albrecht basement did not exist. Right now, she was a silly, privileged girl with nothing more on her mind than which song to play next on the record player.
Emma’s voice said something sharply from the kitchen, which meant she was still occupied with Dieter. Hallelujah. It couldn’t have been more than fifteen minutes since she left Emma’s bedroom, but it weighed on her like a lifetime.
She made it to the top of the basement stairs safely.
“I’m out of milk,” Dieter was saying.
“Get it yourself,” Emma replied.
How sweet the sound of their discord was now. It meant she was safe. She could go back up to Emma’s room as if none of this had ever happened.
A door clicked behind her. The office door.
A man’s voice spoke in German: “Who are you?”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Von Albrecht House, Buenos Aires
January 11, 1962
AMAGUE
Fake, or feint. A move that begins in one direction that suddenly changes direction at the last moment.
That voice.
Nasal. High-pitched with a whine to it, even when speaking the harsh consonants of German. Pagan hadn’t heard that voice since she was eight, but she would have known it anywhere.
She turned to face him in one smooth move, one hand lightly on the railing. And she made herself smile, wide, right at Dr. Someone, aka Rolf Von Albr
echt, aka Rudolf Von Alt, Nazi war criminal.
As soon as she saw him, she remembered. His pointed, crafty face could take on the look of a rat, or a wolf, depending on his mood. He stood an inch under six feet, skinny through the chest, with a shoulder stoop that was new to Pagan. His belly pooched out farther, too, but he wore the same glasses with heavy black frames perched over his long, disdainful nose. The thick lenses made his squinting eyes seem smaller. His thinning brown hair receded farther than she recalled, emphasizing his high, lined forehead. Deep creases on either side of his nose curved down to the flat line of his mouth.
For a man who had created so much evil, he looked harmless, almost pathetic. To anyone else, in his burgundy cardigan and stained baggy pants, he would seem like nothing more than a cranky old college professor. Only his hands, large, veined and habitually clenched, spoke of his strong will.
Dr. Someone. He’d had no plastic surgery, only eight years of aging. She was taller now than she had been when she last saw him, so he seemed smaller, shrunken in on himself. But the glare from his pale blue eyes was as sharp as ever.
“Is that...Pagan Jones?” he said, eyes flaring open in astonishment, and switched to English. “What are you doing here?”
That was the question. Fortunately, she’d prepared herself for it.
“Dr. Von Albrecht.” Pagan stepped forward, hand extended. “Didn’t Emma tell you I was coming? How nice to see you again.”
The “again” was the key. He’d recognized her, so if she claimed not to know his connection to her family, her presence in his house would be too ridiculous of a coincidence. His suspicions would be triggered. Better to admit the connection up front, and then show herself to be his ally.
He didn’t take her hand. He wasn’t buying it. Yet. “I asked—what are you doing here?”
“Visiting.” Pagan stretched her smile to its most blinding, and empty-headed, proportions. “I’m in town shooting a movie and ran into Emma last night. She invited me over and I had to say yes. I had to know if she was related to the same Von Albrecht I remembered from when I was little.”
Von Albrecht cast a glance down the hall toward his children’s voices. “You remember me?” It came out flat, disbelieving.
“Of course!” Pagan lowered her voice to a conspiratorial level. “Mama and I had many talks about you. I know how important it was for her to help you.”
“Really.” He drew his head back like a turtle, creating a triple chin wattle. “Tell me, then, why was it so important?”
It was like doing the tango, this question and answer. But ten times more dangerous. He was the leader, the man in the dance, asking her the questions. She was the follower, trying to keep up. Except he didn’t realize how her answers were quietly impelling him to dance in the direction she desired, as the woman’s ability to follow the man in tango could drive him to lead a certain way.
She shrugged. “All Mama said was that the dream of our Fatherland would never die as long as men like you were around.”
She must’ve answered correctly, because his shoulders slumped farther, relaxing. “Your mother is a remarkable woman. How is she?”
Pagan had to stomp down on her astonishment so that she could manifest the requisite look of sadness.
Von Albrecht had no idea her mother was dead. But really, why would he? It’s not like they would’ve stayed in touch. That would endanger them both. And a professor and physicist living in Buenos Aires with a penchant for torture had other matters to concentrate on. He wasn’t the type to go see Beach Bound Beverly with his daughter or read the tabloid stories about the daughter of the woman who saved him. There was nuclear material to fuss with down in the basement, after all.
If he didn’t know about her mother’s death, he probably had no idea about her alcoholism, or the car crash where she’d killed Daddy and Ava. If she wanted him to trust her, to like her, that was just as well.
It wasn’t hard to look sad. Her feeling about Mama’s death were right beneath the surface. “You didn’t know? She passed away when I was twelve.” No need for gory details.
His graying eyebrows drew together, more in surprise than sorrow. “That’s too bad. A strong, intelligent woman, your mother. A true believer.”
“She taught me everything I know,” Pagan said, and didn’t like how close to reality that statement was. Only her father’s distracted kindness kept it from being completely true. She could only hope Daddy had rubbed off on her, too. “I still have the painting you gave her. Such a beautiful gift.”
“She deserved all that and more after what she did for me,” he said. “And the others.”
Pagan forced herself to remain very still.
The others?
“But what are you doing here, in the hallway?” His small eyes shot a sidelong glance down the stairs toward the basement door and then narrowed at her, suspicious. “Didn’t Emma tell you I don’t like to be disturbed?”
Gather your wits, Pagan. You’re still in the spotlight, and it exposes every flaw. “I was coming down from her room to tell her that I think I need to go back to the hotel.”
Yes, that was it. She needed to get out of here, before the fury she’d locked away came raging forth and got her killed. She continued. “I can feel one of my migraines coming on, so I should go lie down somewhere dark before it gets too bad. I’m sorry that I won’t be joining you for dinner, after all.” She fluttered her eyelids against imaginary pain. “Perhaps another time.”
“Perhaps.” His lips quirked up slightly at the corners. “I’m heartened to meet a girl of good German stock who values her Fatherland. Have you met my son, Dieter?”
Dear God, he had a glint in his eye. She knew all too well what it meant. She was “good German stock” he could breed with his son. Yuck.
“Yes,” she said, adding a happy lilt to her voice as best she could. “I’ve met Dieter. He’s very....tall.” She couldn’t quite manage a blush, but she lowered her eyes as if suddenly shy. Imagine his expression if she told him that Dieter preferred anything but “good German stock,” and that it was Von Albrecht’s daughter who’d taken a liking to her.
“If I want a second sandwich, you’ll damned well make me a second sandwich, you stupid bitch!” Dieter’s voice echoed down the hall.
“Leave me alone!” Emma sounded as if she was crying from anger. “That’s all I want—just leave me alone!”
“Dieter!”
Von Albrecht had only to raise his voice slightly for silence to fall in the kitchen. It was the voice of a man used to being obeyed.
“Komm her,” Von Albrecht said. “Both of you.” To Pagan, he said, “I apologize for my children.”
Pagan shook her head, but said nothing as slow footsteps clomped through the dining room toward them. Dieter came first, his tan cheeks spotted with red, then Emma, her shoulders slumped. Dieter glanced up at his father, then over at Pagan, and down at the floor. His shoulders were hunched, his hands balled into fists. He could not look his father in the eye.
“Papa?” Emma said, wiping wetness from her cheeks. “I’m so sorry if we disturbed you.”
“I will speak to you shortly, daughter,” Von Albrecht said, and Emma shut down, withdrawing a step, her lips trembling. “My son. What was that name you called your sister?”
“Name?” Dieter cleared his throat, shot a look at Pagan, then stared at his boots again. “Her name is Emma, Papa. I am sorry if I raised my voice and disturbed you.”
“Are you?” Von Albrecht raised one gray eyebrow over the top of his thick black-rimmed glasses. “To me you seem angry, at your sister, at me. Is this how a real man conducts himself?”
Dieter swallowed hard, as if trying to gulp his feelings down, and straightened. “No, Papa. I just...”
“You offer me excuses?” His father cut him off. “Is there
any excuse for so much unseemly emotion, or for calling your sister, a good Aryan woman, such a terrible name?”
Pagan couldn’t help noticing: it was only good Aryan women who didn’t get called names. Everyone else was probably fair game.
“No,” Dieter mumbled.
“No, what?” Von Albrecht said, his voice growing harsh.
A muscle in Dieter’s jaw twitched. The ever-present violence that simmered beneath his skin was still there. But for this man, he controlled it. “No, Papa, there is no excuse for such emotion or for calling a good Aryan woman like Emma such a name. Emma, I apologize.”
He didn’t look at his sister when he said it. He looked only at his father.
Von Albrecht nodded slowly, pleased.
Emma shook her head and wiped angrily at her eyes. When she spoke, the words were flat, as if she’d said them many meaningless times before. “Thank you, Dieter.”
“Well done, my boy.” Von Albrecht moved forward and formally shook his son’s hand. To Pagan, who had been hugged by her father every day until he died, it looked stiff and odd.
But at his father’s touch, Dieter visibly relaxed. He smiled for the first time since Pagan had met him, and his square-jawed, wary face lit up. “I’m sorry, Papa. You know I want to make you proud, to be a good representative of the Fatherland.”
“And so you are, my boy.” Von Albrecht’s washed-out eyes narrowed in his own closemouthed version of a smile. “You know that to me you are indispensable.”
Dieter’s eyes were shining with a fanatical gleam. “Thank you, Papa. I’ll go get the pot roast out of the oven for dinner.”
As Dieter clomped down the hall, Von Albrecht narrowed his squinty eyes at his daughter. “Emma, my dear, you must understand that your brother is under considerable strain. He is the man of the house while I am busy with my research. And I ask a lot of him.”