Cry in the Night

by Hart, Carolyn G.

  After the war, long after the war, when one thing and another was sorted out, when this survivor’s reflections and that one’s memories were added together, a good deal was known about the bunker beneath the zoo and its last days before it was destroyed in the rain of bombs that washed over Berlin.

  It was known for a fact that the Treasure of Priam had at one time been moved to the bunker for safekeeping. The Treasure of Priam, Heinrich Schliemann’s triumphant proof that Homer’s Troy was historic and rich. It didn’t matter that the golden baubles were later attributed to an earlier age than Priam’s—the treasure bore his name, for this jewelry was fit for a king.

  There was no more stirring account in all of archeology than Schliemann’s discovery of the Treasure of Priam. Schliemann always believed that Homer wrote the truth about Helen and Menelaus, about Priam and Hector. No one else believed the stories to be true. Scholars deemed the Iliad a pretty story, an exercise in classic Greek, nothing more. But a German grocer’s assistant heard the stories as a boy and determined that one day he would go to Troy. By Zeus, he did. With extraordinary talents, he learned five languages fluently and secured the wealth he felt he needed to pursue his dream. He set out to find Troy. At a huge mound in Turkey called Hissarlik, he excavated and found proof of many settlements there.

  He didn’t find gold.

  Schliemann had a good many frustrations as an excavator, including almost continual harassment by Turkish authorities. He was nearing the end of excavation and there were only a few days left to dig before the ruin would be closed. He and his young Greek wife, Sophia, were in one of the excavation’s deepest cuts when Schliemann spied the soft gleam of gold in one of the walls. Quickly, he told his wife to call a rest for the workmen, though it was only midmorning.

  When they were alone in the ruins, he hacked at the wall with his knife, every moment fearing that the great stones hanging above him would dislodge and tumble down to crush them. But he had not come so far and toiled so long to lose his treasure now. Later he claimed his wife Sophia wrapped pieces of the golden hoard in her red shawl.

  I crouched by that cheap suitcase and shared in Schliemann’s delight across the span of a century. In my hand I held a pin that a Trojan queen must have worn. It was three inches wide and absolutely exquisite. As the newsprint fell away, there was no longer any doubt in my mind what treasure I had found. I had seen too many pictures of this particular pin to be wrong. The head of the pin, an ornamented rectangular plate, was framed between two slender strips of gold. The bottom strip ended in curling upswept spirals. Six tiny golden jugs were attached to the top strip, perfect little jugs.

  “Tony, come and look.”

  I had forgotten he was bound, but he managed to struggle and roll close enough to see. Lorenzo still rested against the wine rack, but he leaned forward, listening.

  I held up the pin. “Do you know what this is?”

  Tony looked and surprise flickered in his face. Aztec gold had never looked like this.

  Before he could answer, I was telling Tony and Lorenzo, my voice wobbling with excitement, that we were looking at the most fantastic treasure imaginable. “. . . and the bunker at the zoo was demolished. Someone escaped with the treasure, smuggled it out before that last day.”

  Running steps clattered across the earth floor of the cellar. Gerda came at me like a wild thing, snatching at the pin, crying and shouting, clawing and pulling. Every word that spewed from the perfect mouth was in German so I was the only one in the cellar who understood.

  “How did you know?” she screamed. “You have no right. This is mine. All mine.” She had the pin now and I saw the metal bend in her clawlike grasp. “All mine, do you hear? My father saved the gold from the Russians. You have no right.”

  It was hard to catch every word. Her husky voice cracked as she screamed at me. She seemed oblivious to Tony and Lorenzo. She never once looked past me and back into the shadows that held Juan. She couldn’t see beyond the gleam of the gold.

  Her story came out in bits and pieces. A young German private assigned to guard duty at the bunker saw the end coming. He knew what would happen when the Russians reached Berlin. He was young and tough and clever. He and his new bride, a nurse, smuggled the treasure out among the refuse of amputated limbs from the air force hospital in the bunker. Their clever plan was discovered by a fellow soldier, Hans, who became a part of the effort. The three of them fled Berlin and took the treasure to Portugal and finally reached the New World. It was hard to follow Gerda here for she railed on about Hans, and I wasn’t quite sure who Hans was or what he had done or how he was involved, but the three of them reached Mexico with the treasure.

  Why the gold remained hidden all these years and why Gerda began her search so recently wasn’t clear.

  She paused and opened her purse. She pulled out a small black notebook. “It is all here,” she cried. “My proof. This all belongs to me.”

  I didn’t think Schliemann’s Treasure of Priam qualified as war booty, but at this point what did it matter what I or anyone else thought?

  She was quiet suddenly. She stood there, breathing hard, the small gold pin clasped tightly in her hand. Her eyes flicked back and forth, from me to the suitcase, from me to Tony, from Tony to Lorenzo.

  “Juan?” she cried.

  I think that was the first moment she had realized he was not there.

  “Juan?”

  Her cry chilled all of us.

  Her face, already haggard and strained, blanched an icy gray. “Juan.”

  No one moved. There was no sound in that huge, dim room but her ragged breathing.

  She took a step nearer, another. Her eyes moved past us, swept the shadows. Then she saw him. Her lips parted and she gave a deep moan, the bereft cry of a broken spirit. She moved slowly toward him, one beaten step dragging after another. She had cared. Juan had been more to her, much more, than just a handsome young man.

  She moved into the shadow thrown by the wine racks, dropped to her knees, and pulled his poor lolling head up onto her lap. Her hands held him and once again came that stricken cry. Her face, old and ravaged, turned toward us. “¿Por qué?”

  Lorenzo stood a little straighter. “I told Juan. I warned him.” His face was hard. “He killed Raúl.”

  She was on her feet, flinging herself at him, one arm upraised. She had Juan’s knife. She said nothing. There was nothing left in her but fury. The knife began its downward sweep.

  I watched, paralyzed with shock.

  Her hand faltered. The knife fell from nerveless fingers.

  I closed my eyes but I had already seen too much, the great gaping wound, the welling blood on her white silk blouse. Lorenzo had been quicker. She crumpled at his feet.

  I lost all hope. It didn’t matter that he was wounded. He still survived, clung tenaciously to life. Why should he spare us? Too many had died this night for us to survive.

  I pushed the suitcase out of my way. I didn’t care what the shabby old suitcase held, what might be damaged now. I wanted in these last moments to be near Tony, to touch warm hands and to kiss, for the first and last time, loving lips. Nothing mattered to me but Tony. I was so set in my purpose, so determined in my course that I paid no attention to a commanding whisper behind us.

  Tony frowned. “Sheila, wait. Listen.”

  A harsh whisper sounded. I heard my name and stood still. The circle was complete now, the final evil link in place.

  “Don’t turn around, Sheila Ramsay. Not if you want to live.”

  The whisper was deliberately hoarse and uninflected so I wouldn’t recognize a voice. Someone I knew whispered my name. If I turned I would see a familiar face. I understood that I must not turn.

  Lorenzo moved away from the support of the wine rack, straightening to meet one more challenge. I heard him speak sharply in Spanish.

  I knew the answer even if I couldn’t translate the questions.

  “It’s all right, Lorenzo,” I said bitterly. “This
is the man you wanted in the first place. This is the man from the museum. The man with much money. Gerda must have brought him here tonight.”

  Lorenzo crossed the floor behind us, moving in a heavy, tired shuffle. “Is it true,” he was asking, “are you the man who has come to buy the treasure?”

  Whoever it was must have nodded without speaking. I wondered what he thought, the man from my museum, as he looked across that huge, dim room at Gerda’s body. Did he see Juan lying there, too? Why should he care? He had sent me, defenseless, to shield him from view, to protect him from interlopers such as Lorenzo. Everything had worked out for him. Juan was dead and Gerda, too, but why should it matter to him? The treasure was within his reach.

  Who stood there, watching to be sure I did not turn? Was it my contemporary, Timothy Simmons, clever Timothy? Was it small, dark, careful Michael Taylor? Could the whisperer be Karl Freidheim? Had he, years ago, been a soldier with Gerda’s father? Was he Hans? Could the shadowy figure be plump-faced Dr. Rodriguez?

  I tried to swallow and couldn’t. Would he order me to stay turned away if he intended to kill me? I stood still and tried to hear what the man was telling Lorenzo, but they spoke so softly I couldn’t make out a word.

  A flicker of movement in front of me caught my eye. Tony was edging imperceptibly nearer Gerda. I saw his determined eyes on the knife that lay near Gerda’s hand.

  “No,” I breathed, “no.”

  He looked at me and I read his eyes so well. If a man must die, he must die well, his implacable gaze said.

  “Wait,” I whispered. “Please, Tony, for my sake, wait.”

  He hesitated and the moment was past because Lorenzo was shuffling slowly, heavily back toward us. He came up behind me. “Now, miss, everything is going to be all right.”

  Tony yelled as pain exploded on the back of my head—fiery, unendurable pain—and then there was nothing at all.

  Chapter 17

  They found Lorenzo’s body early the next morning, on Reforma, slumped in the backseat of Gerda’s car. He had bled to death. There was no trace of the car’s driver. Or of an outsized, shabby cardboard suitcase.

  It was some days later before I knew this. Much of what had happened was pieced together by Tony and the police.

  Tony spent most of his time at the hospital with me. “I’ve never been so scared,” he told me later. “One minute you would open those misty green eyes and smile and then you would just fade away. I kept calling to you.”

  Later I remembered some of that, remembered Tony’s dark worried eyes, the soft voice of the nurse, and, of course, bell clear in my mind was the last time I saw Jerry Elliot. He was furious. He bent over the hospital bed, his bony face red with anger. He even shook his fist at me. “Dammit, why didn’t you call me that night? You could have. If you’d been at all concerned about saving the treasure, if you’d thought about anything but the Ortegas, we could have saved the gold. Now who knows where it is? The world may never see any of it again.”

  The irascible voice faded away. I slipped free of that angry, quarrelsome spirit. I wondered, even as I swept down into unconsciousness, how I ever could have thought him attractive. I had not only thought him handsome, but I had crossed a continent to see him again—but my last thought was quick and grateful for he brought me to Mexico and to Tony.

  I was conscious, awake and weak, when the funerals were held. Tony came to the hospital when they were done, still in his stark black suit, his face weary. He sat by the bed and held my hand.

  “How is your father?”

  “It is a heavy burden,” Tony said quietly, “but he doesn’t know, he’ll never know about Gerda and Juan.”

  I touched his lips with one finger. “Of course not.”

  He nodded, glad I understood. “We told him that Gerda was so grief stricken at Juan’s death that she attacked Lorenzo before we could stop her. The truth, you see, but not all the truth.”

  “It is better that way.”

  We were both quiet for a moment. I couldn’t fault Gerda altogether. True, she had started a fateful chain of events when she came to Tlaxcala. But she had felt within her rights. Who of us could be sure that she hadn’t cared for Tony’s father? She had yet to meet Juan.

  Tony had searched Gerda’s papers and probed back to her days in Puebla, where she was raised by the Reinhardts. Mrs. Reinhardt, a dour, thin-lipped sixty, had little to say. No, she had not known Gerda’s parents, had only heard by word of mouth of the little German left an orphan when her parents were killed in an accident in the mountains.

  What kind of accident?

  Their car skidded off a mountain road late one night. Near Tlaxcala. There was a baby left alone. The Reinhardts had taken the baby and swept into a box the miscellaneous papers Gerda’s parents left behind. There wasn’t much. Nothing of value. It wasn’t until Mrs. Reinhardt was leaving her own house many years later, to live with a married son, that she sorted through that small box of clutter and found a leather diary. She thumbed the first few pages and realized it was Gerda’s father’s record of his war years. The old lady thought Gerda might be pleased to see the journal and had mailed it to her. Gerda received the diary in the spring. She had read it and come straight to Tlaxcala and hiked in the hills. It was then that she fell and twisted her ankle and was found by Señor Ortega. She had married him and who knew what was her strongest motivation. He was kindly and rich and she was alone. Too, the marriage made it easy to keep on hunting in the hills. She couldn’t have known when she married him that she was going to fall in love with Juan.

  Tony brought the diary to me because it was written in German. I read the letter, too, from Mrs. Reinhardt and wondered at the workings of fate. If the diary had been thrown away years before or if it had never been written so much grief could have been avoided.

  Everything was recorded in the diary, incluing those last fateful days in Berlin.

  Gerhardt Prosser’s duty was to guard the Treasure of Priam. He knew the gold would be taken by the Russians when they came. He decided to smuggle out the treasure and try to escape Berlin. Another solider caught him at it and, of necessity, became a conspirator, too. The diary told how Gerhardt and his pregnant wife and the sergeant, Hans Rieger, traveled over war-convulsed Germany, fleeing all the armies. Their trip almost ended in disaster a dozen times—when a stolen staff car wrecked, when the Americans blockaded the best road south, when other deserters cornered Gerda’s father and Hans in a burned-out farmhouse. Her mother had gone for water and came up quietly from the back and shot the deserters dead.

  They stole food and fresh clothes in Lisbon and sold two golden earrings to get money enough to book passage on a rotten old freighter to Buenos Aires. The trip took four months and Gerda was born on the ship. They had hoped to settle in Argentina but they were too frightened to try to sell the treasure, and they became increasingly afraid of Hans. Late one January night, they crept out of their rooming house and began the long run that would end in death on a mountainside in Mexico.

  The last few pages of the diary were the happiest. They were in Puebla and Gerda’s father had found a job with a wool broker. It was on a buying trip to Tlaxcala that Gerda’s father found the cave. The directions to it were on the next to the last page. With the treasure hidden until a good opportunity came to sell it, with a good steady job, with Hans left far behind in Argentina, the two refugees began to feel safe, began to look forward to the future.

  I closed the little leather volume with a snap and wondered if the gold had caused as many deaths, as much misery, millenniums ago when it first was hammered into beauty by a Trojan goldsmith.

  Probably. And the trail of death and tears had not yet ended. The husky whisperer from my museum was still unknown, still uncaught.

  It should have been easy. As first everyone was sure it would be a simple matter to catch him, even though Tony couldn’t describe him. All Tony had seen was dark trousers and black shoes. The man had stood well back in the shadows of t
he tunnel. Tony never saw his face.

  After Lorenzo struck me down, he slammed shut the suitcase and struggled across the broad room to the waiting man. Lorenzo and the whisperer left together. Tony didn’t care what happened to them or to the treasure. He was terrified I was dead. There he was, tied hand and foot, Juan dead, Gerda dead, and, more than likely, I was dead, too. He rolled close enough to Gerda to get the knife and managed to saw through the belt around his wrists.

  He hurried to me. “You were lying facedown. All I could see was the blood on the back of your head.”

  But I was breathing. He had run then, run down the nearest tunnel, the one that led underground to the main house. There he roused Francisco, the old servant who stayed at the hacienda year round. Francisco heard thunderous pounding on the cellar door and opened it, a candle flickering in one hand, a shotgun ready in the other.

  It had not been long before an ambulance arrived and then the police. Minutes after that, the alert was sounded, the border warned, a description of Gerda’s car broadcast.

  By the time I was able to hear about it, a week had passed and we realized we had been outwitted.

  “But surely,” I protested to Tony, “all they have to do is find out which of the four men from the museum was in Mexico.”

  That sounded easy. It wasn’t.

  Not one of the men had been in New York that week.

  Michael Taylor was in Chicago, attending a seminar.

  Karl Freidheim, a bachelor, was home, ill with the flu.