by Nina Berry
“Yes, Papa,” Emma said dully.
Emma made dinner, and cleaned the house, and shopped for groceries, while Dieter started fights with people he didn’t like. Emma was more of the adult in the house than either of these men, as far as Pagan was concerned. She wanted to blurt that out to this disgusting creature beside her, wanted to grab Emma’s hand and take her far from this terrible house.
But none of that could happen. Not yet, anyway. She had to get out of there, and soon, before she blew her cover and started screaming.
“Dinnertime, is it not?” Von Albrecht’s narrow jowls shook as he gave Pagan a tight smile. “Shall we?”
“I’m so sorry,” Pagan said, squinting up at Emma as if through a haze of pain. “But as I told your father, I feel a migraine coming on, so I’d better head back to the hotel.”
“Oh, no, I’m so sorry!” Emma walked up to take Pagan’s hands and peer with concern into her face.
“No, it’s I who am sorry to miss your pot roast. But when these things come over me, I don’t much feel like eating.” Pagan gave Emma a quick kiss on the cheek. “I’ll go up and get my purse.”
“No, no, you stay here. I’ll get it.” Emma gave her hands a squeeze and ran up the stairs.
Pagan was alone once more with Rolf Von Albrecht. He was eyeing her with much more approval now. “Emma knows nothing of our previous acquaintance, I take it,” he said. His English, aside from his accent, was perfect.
“Of course not,” Pagan said, rubbing her temple, but giving him a faint smile. “Nobody knows that now but you and me.”
“You’ve inherited your mother’s discretion as well as her beauty,” he said. “Good.” He lifted his voice. “Dieter, come say goodbye to Fräulein Jones.”
Pagan lifted her hand, about to ask him not to bother, but stopped herself. She might as well stay in Von Albrecht’s good graces, in case she ever needed to enter the house again. But she never wanted to cross this threshold again. The desire to get out of this house was growing inside her like a balloon inflating with air. Any minute now it would pop.
Dieter clomped down the hallway as his sister ran back down the stairs and handed Pagan her purse.
Emma looked with concern at Pagan’s furrowed face. “Are you all right? Should we have Dieter drive you home, perhaps?”
“We can call her a cab,” Dieter interposed. Such a gentleman.
A drive with Dieter was the last thing she needed. “No, thank you. It’s not far, and I find a brisk walk can sometimes stop the pain in its tracks.”
“Gets more blood to the head,” Von Albrecht said with a nauseating approximation of what a doctor would say to a patient. “Which may ease the tension.”
“Exactly.” Pagan gave them all a pained smile and faded toward the door, her escape hatch. “Thank you so much, all of you. This has been a wonderful evening.”
Emma walked with her to the door. Leaving Von Albrecht behind was like dropping a fifty-pound weight. Not much farther now and she’d be free. She couldn’t wait to walk, to run, to leave the stench of this place.
“Auf Wiedersehen, Fräulein Jones,” Von Albrecht said. “Hope to see you again soon.”
“Yes, goodbye,” Dieter added abruptly.
Thank God, they were at the front door. Only a few steps now.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to call you a cab?” Emma asked as she opened the door, her voice low. “I can understand not wanting to be around Dieter, but it’s getting dark, and you’re new to the city.”
“I’m quite sure,” Pagan said. Out, out, out. She needed out. “But you’re so kind, and I had such a lovely time.”
Emma blushed, smiling, and gave her a shy kiss on the cheek. “It was wonderful. Would it be all right if I called you at the hotel tomorrow?” She backed away, the red in her cheeks going scarlet. “To see how you’re feeling.”
“That would be nice.” Pagan set foot outside the house and took a deep breath. Almost there. “Sorry to cut it short. Goodbye.”
Emma’s expression was wistful. “Auf Wiedersehen.”
Pagan made her way carefully down the front steps, as if in pain, until the door shut behind her. She took it slow, turning right up the street, back toward her hotel. Emma would likely watch her go for as long as she was in sight, or until one of her nasty relatives barked at her to serve them dinner.
She turned right at the corner and made it a few more steps before she had to lean against the gray stone of the building beside her.
She didn’t have a migraine. That had been a lie. But her head had decided it now weighed eight hundred pounds.
Breathe. She’d faced worse. No one had shot at her or slapped her tonight the way the Communists had in East Berlin. The Von Albrechts liked her, except for Dieter, and he wasn’t hostile. Just apathetic.
She’d drunk their grape Nehi and smiled and lied—to become friends with a Nazi war criminal. Thank the gods of movie stars and liars that he hadn’t shaken her hand. She felt slimy enough.
She’d gone so far as to tell Von Albrecht he was an important remnant of the godforsaken Fatherland.
As her mother probably had done.
Mama had helped that man. How was Pagan supposed to feel about her now that she knew it for sure?
Was it possible to love your mother and to hate her at the same time? And how could Pagan be a good person if she loved a woman like her mother?
The others, Von Albrecht had said. Others like him, maybe. How many others had there been? The more she dug into her mother’s secret life, the deeper the pit became. The walls might cave in and bury her there.
Maybe Mama hadn’t known what Von Albrecht’s crimes were when she housed him in secret and got him on a boat to South America. Maybe she’d found the truth out later and that’s why she’d hanged herself. Pagan could almost imagine it. Her own revulsion penetrated her flesh like an X-ray.
She gradually became aware of cold bleeding through the thin cotton of her shirt from the stone wall she was leaning against. Her shoulder prickled with goose bumps. She looked around.
Twilight was deepening into night, and the air was chilly and thick with purplish gray fog. A woman in a fur stole clicked past on high heels, one gloved hand floofing her carefully curled hair.
Fur. Pagan had never thought about it before, but that was some animal’s skin. An animal not that different from the nearly furless dog she’d seen in Von Albrecht’s basement. How could Pagan ever wear fur now? She’d better stop doing jobs like this for Devin or she’d have nothing left to wear. Nothing left to believe in.
Don’t think about that dog now. Concentrate on getting back to the hotel. Devin was probably there, waiting for her report. And she had something to tell him.
Something other than those three awkward words she’d blurted out to him last night. Maybe if she pretended it had never happened, so would he.
The woman in the fur stole slowed down. Her walk changed. Her hips swayed further, and her shoulders straightened, head high.
And coming from the other direction, Devin Black. He nodded at the woman, but sailed past her, his eyes lighting on Pagan with that appreciative smile.
The woman in the fur stole turned to watch him go, her red lips slightly parted.
Pagan didn’t blame her. The sight of him lifted Pagan away from the wall and sent a flush of warmth through her chilled frame. All she wanted was right here, walking toward her.
Too bad she couldn’t have him. Nice as it was to see him, she made herself settle back onto her heels, pushing the bangs from her eyes.
“Hi,” she said.
His face altered as he took her in. She knew him so well now. The faint crease of worry between his eyebrows told her that he knew something was wrong.
“Come with me,” he said, putting his hands
on her shoulders to turn her around and sweep her across the street. “And tell me everything.”
She couldn’t help leaning toward his warmth. He lifted his arm, as if about to put it around her, but he shoved that hand into his pocket instead.
Damn him and his self-control.
“It’s him,” Pagan said, keeping her voice low. The vapor twisting around them deadened every noise and gave the impression they were alone in a damp pillowed world of gray. “Von Albrecht. I remember his face, his voice. Everything.”
He slowed as they reached the sidewalk, took her upper arms in his hands and turned her to face him. His eyes were shining with triumph. “You’re sure.”
It wasn’t a question, but she nodded.
“You did it,” he said, his fingers tightening around her arms. “You can relax now. And thank you.”
She squelched down the desire to lean into him, to feel his strength wrapped around her. But she couldn’t relax yet. She said, “There’s more.”
He peered into her face. “Are you all right?”
“He’s got a secret laboratory in his basement, and I broke into it.”
“You—what?” He glared at her. “Is your own safety not a priority? Did he see you?”
She shook her head. Her throat was almost too tight to speak.
“Tell me,” he said. “Everything.”
She schooled her voice to stay level. “He’s conducting experiments. On animals. There are cats and dogs in terrible shape down there. Awful. Horrible.” She swallowed down more words like that. They were all she could think about.
His face was carefully blank, his eyes focused on hers to help her get through this. “Go on.”
“I saw a big metal box with the radiation symbol on it,” she said. “It looked like it was made from lead. And I tried to read his notes. It was mostly math formulas way beyond me, but I did read a thing that said in German 30 January, 1962. Twenty-nine years to the day. With an exclamation mark.”
He let go of her, his eyes shifting in calculation. “January 30, 1933. What’s he commemorating?”
“And is he marking the occasion with radiation?”
Their eyes met. Neither of them said the words nuclear war, or atomic bomb, but during the war Rudolf Von Alt had worked on the Nazi attempt to build the bomb. They hadn’t succeeded, but he’d had nearly twenty years to continue his research.
“Okay,” Devin said, and looping her arm through his, he began to walk her steadily down the sidewalk. “You did a bang-up job, my bonny.”
Her hand tightened on his arm at the Scottish endearment. Maybe it would be all right between them in spite of the three little words she’d said to him last night. If she couldn’t have him the way she wanted, at least she could have this collaboration, this friendship, of equals.
Devin flicked his eyes back behind them and altered the rhythm of his steps briefly.
“What is it?” she said. Some instinct told her to keep her voice down.
He leaned his head down to her, like a lover whispering to his paramour. “We’re being followed.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Recoleta, Buenos Aires
Evening of January 11, 1962
CONTACT TANGO
A version of the dance in which dancing partners may change roles, from leader to follower, and back again.
“How can you tell?” Pagan forced herself not to look over her shoulder. She probably wouldn’t be able to see the man following them, anyway, given the fat puffs of fog clotting up the streets. “It has to be the same guy who’s been after me all this time.”
“Never a dull moment with you, is there?” Devin grinned down at her. “I was going to take you out to a celebratory dinner, but now...” He cut across the street between cars with her still on his arm.
“Now we have to find out who it is,” Pagan said, matching him stride for stride. “I’ll be damned how you spotted him.”
“Heard him,” Devin said as they sprang onto the sidewalk. “Listen.”
Pagan lowered her eyes to stare at her own sneakers and pushed her hearing past Devin’s steady breathing and their footsteps.
A car engine rumbled off down the street as the high whine of a motorbike whizzed in the opposite direction. A door slammed, a song on a radio cut to a commercial and two female voices argued, their words tumbling down from a window above.
Beyond that, softened by the fog, came a faint echo of their own footsteps, as if the light tap from Devin’s boot heels had bounced off a building. It was so exactly in time with his rhythm that she threw Devin a quizzical look.
“Watch,” he whispered, and abruptly slowed his walk, pulling her up short beside him.
The echo kept going for two clicks, then it, too, decelerated.
“And he’s listening to us!” Pagan whispered.
“Which will make it hard to lose him. Not that we want to.”
“We could turn around and, you know, confront him,” Pagan said.
“He’d run,” Devin said, steering to the right down a smaller street strewn with the tiny purple jacaranda blossoms. The street must have been lined with jacaranda trees, but the fog was so thick you couldn’t see the branches overhead. “So we turn the tables.”
Pagan’s pulse accelerated with excitement. The Von Albrechts, the radiation, the horrible lab, all vanished into the fog at the prospect of an adventure with Devin. “We follow him?”
He looked down at her, one eyebrow raised. “Only if you’re up to it. You’ve had a long day, and...”
“Shut up and show me,” she said.
A sly smile spread across his face. He slid his hand down her arm to clasp her hand. “Come, my bonny wee Pagan. We’ll turn this man around so fast he’ll think he’s died and gone to the great merry-go-round in the sky.”
They ducked left, following a sleeve of fog that lingered in a narrow trough between buildings. Shoe-sized shapes scuttled away from their feet as they moved away from the streetlights.
But Pagan didn’t care. Bring on the rats. She was running through the streets of a strange city with a Scottish spy who would use any excuse to hold her hand.
“Hope our friend doesn’t mind rodents,” she whispered.
Devin’s shrug was barely visible. “Hope he’s not a vampire, because we’re going to church.”
“We’re going...where?” She peered ahead. Faint light signaled the end of the alley.
Devin slowed, and the echoing footsteps followed suit.
“Perhaps he’ll think we’re on a date,” Devin said, flashing a grin back at her. “Since we just passed your hotel.”
“We did?” She looked back down the alley. Was that a man-shaped form skulking after them?
Then the sense of Devin’s words sank in. “Are we on a date?”
“A date only possible with the intrepid Pagan Jones,” he said, and pulled her out of the mouth of the alley, and across a wide street to an expanse of greenery empty of all but a few dog walkers and couples, strolling very close together.
“Plaza San Martin.” Devin pulled her nearer to him, slowing so they looked more like lovers enjoying the evening. If it hadn’t been for their invisible companion twenty yards back, they might have been.
Something large reached toward them through the haze. Pagan cringed closer to Devin until the shape resolved into a vast tree, seated on a staircase of roots like a king on his throne.
“Strange ghosts they have in Buenos Aires,” she whispered, unnerved. “Are we sure our follower isn’t one?”
“I don’t mean to frighten you, but our ghost probably has friends.” He shifted direction and they darted across the lawn, the grass damp and gray in the fog. “Let’s find out.”
They crossed a wide avenue and entered a more formal garde
n, heading for a brightly lit white church with a five-story bell tower and locked iron gates. It reminded Pagan of the missions she’d seen in Santa Barbara and San Juan Capistrano.
“Buenos noches, Nuestra Señora del Pilar,” Devin said, walking right up to the gate, and pulling two narrow metal bars out of his jacket pocket. “Welcome to our lady of the pillars. Will you be my pillar tonight, Pagan? Here.”
He put his hands firmly on her waist and pressed her back against the metal door of the gate, his body close. He then slid his hands around her and fumbled for only a moment before she heard a metal click behind her.
He was picking the lock to the front gate of the church, using her as cover. She put her arms up around his neck and looked over his shoulder, waiting for the form of their follower to coalesce out of the fog.
Devin fumbled for a moment, brushing his fingers against her lower back and even lower. Pagan never wore a girdle under pants and was all the more grateful for it now. She shimmied in closer to his hands.
“Pagan,” he said in a warning tone.
“We need to make this look real,” she said, putting her lips up to his ear. Her eyelashes brushed his cheekbone. “Don’t mind me.”
“Didn’t say I minded.” He leaned into her, his chin over her shoulder to see what he was doing. The rise and fall of his chest quickened.
“Out of curiosity,” Pagan murmured, her lips against Devin’s neck. “Why are we breaking into a church?”
“Because after hours it’s the best way into the cemetery,” he said, and the gate clicked open.
Whoever was following them must be lurking out of sight, watching their every move. It was unnerving. “Do you take all your dates to the cemetery?”
“It is one of the emptier spots on earth at this hour. If you don’t count the ghosts.” He disengaged and swept her through the gate, which he closed but did not lock, and over to a side door into the starkly white church. “There’ll be no question that anyone else in there is our follower. And if we do it right, you’ll get a good look at him.”
“Right, then. I’ll keep an eye out now, too,” Pagan said, moving to cover Devin’s back and hoping to catch a glimpse of their pursuer.