Lost Kin

by Anderson, Steve

  “What if I told you something? Slaipe has an office in my building.”

  Max’s gut squeezed. “He what?”

  “It’s on my floor in fact. It’s not him by name. It’s some kind of cover. A trade representative.”

  “Have you been there? Tell me that you have not been there.”

  “I have not. I don’t think he wanted me to be, or even to know he was there.”

  The oil filled Max’s lungs again, boiling hot from an overworked engine. He lowered himself back down, feeling for the sofa, and sat. “So he was watching you too,” he muttered.

  “It’s likely.” Harry didn’t sit with Max. He stood over him. “Maybe that’s why this Slaipe wants us to continue the way we are, or so it seems? His people or new agency can’t touch what we’re doing, not officially.”

  “If that were the case, then all the more reason not to go to him. We can’t know what his true aims are. What he or his agency will do. We must keep this isolated.”

  “We might not be able to.”

  “No! He might sell out Irina’s clan. We dare not let him …”

  “Just what is it with him and you? Huh? Tell me that.”

  Max glared up at Harry, who only glared back at him. Max had kept things bottled up. He couldn’t tell Harry that he had abandoned Slaipe. They still had choices. They had each other. Max shook his head.

  “He might also say that you have been performing quite well on your own,” Harry said.

  Max slapped at the sofa and bolted up. “How do you know that? How can you?” he choked and spat, “he may claim just as well that I’ve been doing more damage, and we don’t even know to whom. And then he has me in his clutches even tighter. You can understand that, can’t you? I know you can.”

  Harry left a pause where he might have nodded. He turned back to the fire and stared into it a while. “I just thought I should offer the possibility,” he said.

  “I know. I understand.”

  “So, it’s me and you. We’re going to take care of this,” Harry said. “I’m talking about Irina’s killer now.”

  “Yes. I am too.”

  “We do it for her. We do it for young Alex.”

  “We do it for all of them.”

  “We’ll have to act fast.”

  “Of course,” Max said.

  “We do it right before we go.”

  “But we don’t know who it is. We haven’t a clue.”

  “Don’t we? Don’t we?” Harry turned to Max, a snarl spreading on his face, the flames turning it grotesque.

  “You know? You know who it is?”

  “Yes. I’m afraid that I do know. And so do you.”

  Twenty-Nine

  LATE AFTERNOON, TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 6. The light was thinning over Old Town as Harry and Max locked up the mansion with a note for Gerlinde to take a few more days off because Herr Harry was going on a trip. He left money to cover her lost hours and added a little more in case she’d need something to get by on. He only hoped that she wouldn’t sense the death in his house, since Germans had become so accustomed to such keen perception.

  Harry had told Max the reasons why Irina’s killer could only be one person, and Max, calmly, agreed with his assessment. They had cared for Irina’s body. Harry suggested he clean her up himself and wrap her in a blanket, spare Max the heartbreak, but Max said, “No, no, I must do it.” Harry helped Max carry the body into the bathtub, and then he shut the door behind him on the way out of the bathroom so Max could be alone with her. From his bedroom, as he changed into a warm union suit, Harry heard the water running, and Max was speaking to her in the hushed tones of promises, but there was no wailing, no crying. When Max was ready, they would carry her down to the cold cellar where she could lie hidden and undisturbed.

  Harry wore a watch cap, a leather overcoat with a thick black scarf, and wool trousers tucked into double-buckle combat boots, looking nothing like the privileged American official, while Max in his wool cloak, buckskin car coat, high boots, sable hat, and green cashmere scarf tied ascot-style might well have been, on another quest in another era, something like the successful actor he’d always wanted to be.

  Yet neither was playing a role, not anymore, not today. Harry felt natural like this and he could tell Max did too, just by his defiant posture.

  They had called the Polizeipräsidium and asked for Detective Dietz and, after being made to wait three times and transferred twice, were told that Kriminalkommissar Dietz was out and they would simply have to try back. Now they cased the street outside police headquarters, working the corners with hand signals to each other, eyeing the officials coming and going.

  They found Dietz in the front courtyard out by the scorched statue of a general. A man in a long coat had just hurried off after meeting him, hobbling along, and Dietz watched him while smoking, blowing out a long barrel of the blue vapor like a mistress after good sex.

  Harry and Max came up from behind Dietz, from around the statue.

  “Dietz,” Harry said.

  Dietz whipped around. “Ah, meine Herren. How goes it? So the good brother’s here too.” Dietz was holding his cigarette straight up, between two fingers. “What? What’s the matter?”

  Ten minutes later Harry and Max were leading Dietz north, away from Old Town. Dietz had protested that he couldn’t come along because he was on his way home to his family, but Max had stated, “We need your help with something,” and Dietz complied. He happened to be wearing warm gear much like Harry’s, a bulky wool cap for his head. “Going mountain climbing, Detective?” Max said to him, to which Dietz emitted a thin, squeaky laugh.

  It turned dark as Harry led them through the ruins of the university, ducking in and out of doorways, arches, rubble piles. “Where the devil we heading?” Dietz said.

  “It’s in case we’re tailed,” Harry said.

  They came out again and crossed the Ludwigstrasse heading northeast.

  “Sabine Lieser? That where we’re going?” Dietz said. “The Standkaserne’s this way but it’s a good walk from here. Why don’t we hail a lift, eh? One of your GI taxis.”

  Harry said nothing. “No,” Max grunted.

  Max led them into the English Garden and on through the woods, well north of Harry’s mansion now. Max had picked a stretch of dirt trail that made no sound under their feet.

  Dietz set a Lucky Strike butt on his lips—Harry snatched it, shoved it into Dietz’s pocket.

  “No light,” Harry said.

  “We shouldn’t be rushing into anything. I can see something’s eating you, but—”

  “But what?” Max said.

  “Nothing.” Dietz shrugged, peering back over his shoulders into the darkness.

  They came out of the woods and the cold hit them, stinging Harry’s cheeks. He liked it. It kept him fresh. He was getting that old feeling back, surging through his legs and making them lighter, stronger. As they hiked he felt the paratrooper knife in his breast pocket, against his heart.

  They reached the bank of a calm lake—the small Kleinhesseloher See, no bigger than a couple football fields in any direction they could see. Max crouched at the gently lapping water a moment, cocking his head one way, and then the other. He headed off along the bank, leaving Harry and Dietz to follow.

  A little rowboat was tied off at a crop of water shrubs, the boat camouflaged with branches like a sniper’s helmet.

  Dietz peered at a darker patch out in the middle of the water. Out there was a little island, about 200 feet long by 150 at its widest. “I don’t really care for boats,” Dietz said.

  Harry said, “You were in the Navy. Weren’t you? That’s what you said.”

  “Hah! Yes, the irony,” Dietz said. “You know I’ve never been on this lake? Homegrown Municher and I’ve never been on it.”

  “Well, I have,” Max said.

  The three were crouched in the shrubs around the rowboat, the calm water washing up against it like a giant smacking his lips.

  “Get
in,” Max added.

  “Why don’t I stay here? Keep watch,” Dietz said. “There’s a plan.”

  Max shook his head.

  “No? At least let me piss. This cold, this water—”

  “No. Get in.”

  The three stepped in and Max pushed off, Dietz in the middle, Harry up front and Max in the back paddling, all so close their knees could touch each other. Harry faced Dietz and Max, his back to the bow. He never cared for black water of unknown depth either but suddenly he welcomed it, loved the things it could do to a person. He and Dietz rode bolt upright, keeping their balance centered, lean either way and the little boat could pitch over. Steam pulsed from Max as he rowed, his eyes boring into Dietz’s back.

  About halfway to the island, Max stopped rowing and let them coast toward its bank. A wind had picked up, stirring the waves. Patches of ice floated by. Dietz had hunched over shaking, hugging himself from chill. The detective’s face showed nothing.

  All was on ice here. Just like Felix Menning in the morgue. Just like Max, in jail. Harry, all this time.

  “Irina is dead,” Max said.

  Dietz’s head popped up. He showed a frown, a sorrowful raise of eyebrows. “No …”

  “Someone killed her.”

  “Oh, dear. I’m sorry for your loss. I really am.”

  Max only grunted. Harry pulled his stubby Mauser HSc pistol from his coat and trained it on Dietz.

  Dietz seemed to fight a snicker. “Harry? What in the devil are you doing? You know that’s a German cop’s pistol? Come on now.”

  The safety was already off, Harry made sure of that. He cocked it.

  Max said, “Irina, she must have found you in Harry’s mansion.”

  “What? Me? No.” Dietz whipped his head around. The boat rocked and he grabbed at the edges, all white knuckles. “Now you two listen. You got this wrong! Someone’s been feeding you a line.”

  “Yes, they have,” Harry said. “When I came for those prints? I didn’t tell you that Max was sitting in a jail cell, not exactly. I only said someone had fingered him to the cops. Never said they kept him or what for exactly. Yet you already seemed to know. I can see that now in hindsight. Sure, you’re a cop, but you’re in a different section. So how could you know—unless you tipped them off yourself?”

  “It was a tactic to keep me frozen, until you devised a way to serve up the Cossacks,” Max added.

  Dietz formed a broad smile. His teeth and eyes glistened from some unknown, faraway light. He held up a hand. “Please, gentlemen—”

  Harry grabbed at the boat’s edges and rocked it violently, splashing water onto their shins, feet. Let them pitch into the black, icy water, he only wanted Dietz to shut the hell up.

  Dietz glared at Harry.

  Harry said, “You were glad to put a corpse on ice for me because it kept you in the know. On the scent. Do anything to help, wouldn’t you? You were always there at the ready. Take the day I stepped out of that Konditorei after meeting Sabine Lieser. You just happened to run into me.”

  Max said, “You were dealing with Felix Menning. He was a contact of yours. But then I happened to off the little bastard, didn’t I? Mine was a necessary ploy, but it was none too splendid for you because it was only a matter of time before he gave up the Cossacks to you—and to the Soviets.”

  Dietz shook his head.

  “Irina, she went back to the mansion for something, who knows. Maybe her coat wasn’t long enough for those two sabers. Something. Any case, she found you there. Looking for those negatives. But you didn’t find it, did you? No. Because I had them safe.”

  “Now you listen to me one moment.”

  “Someone—your controllers, whatever you call it—needed all copies, all the negatives,” Harry said. “Who are they? Our friends at the Soviet Repatriation Mission? The ones who like to court Sabine Lieser? But she wasn’t the marrying type, was she? Wouldn’t give them a thing. Or is it some other Soviet patron who uses you, but less polite, same old thugs but with a new playbook? Someone who knows more about you than we Americans do?”

  Dietz held up a hand with his arm at a right angle, like a man taking an oath or, not so long ago, giving the Hitler Salute. “Hold on. Gents, listen. I understand your pain. Your girl bought it, Max, and that’s a rough thing to bear, but—”

  “You didn’t even ask how she bought it,” Max said. He leaned into Dietz, the steam of his breath swirling around Dietz’s face. “She was strangled, from behind her back.”

  Dietz’s eyes twitched.

  “You were doing all right,” Harry said. “Especially after I was stupid enough to tell you about the Cossacks, where they were even. I almost, unwittingly, sold them all down the river, all those people my brother works so hard to save. Irina, and … You were going to let me.”

  A grimace spread across Dietz’s face. His arm had lowered, and he added a sigh. “Well, I can see that explaining is pointless. So. Let’s just get ashore and off this icy water, shall we?”

  Thirty

  HARRY AND MAX CALCULATED THAT holding Dietz captive on the island would force him to confess his vicious game. He would tell them he killed Irina. He would tell them if he’d yet betrayed the Cossacks’ hideout to anyone. The tiny isle had a dim gray bank ringed with skinny black birch trees that trickled from the wetness, combining with the lapping of the waves to sound a menacing peal like the percolation of a steam locomotive. This wasn’t exactly reassuring, but they had chosen it for inaccessibility: Even if they were followed, Dietz’s accomplices would have to find a boat somehow.

  Their rowboat eased onto the bank with a little thud and shifted sideways in the soggy earth. Here the snow survived only as wet clumps soon to be mud.

  Max had Harry’s service Colt pistol. It extended from his fist. Once it would’ve stunned Harry to see his brother the actor wielding a gun, but now it was probably stranger to see Max in stage makeup or reading a script.

  They frisked Dietz, which produced a pack of various American cigarette butts, his wallet, and a tarnished metal German pocketknife in his sock. They tossed the knife far out into the water. They walked Dietz to the center of the island, Dietz with his head up, peering around.

  Harry said, “That man with you at the statue? In the long coat? Probably hobbling from two sabers in his coat. Do I have it right? Sabers that you sold him?”

  Dietz snorted, shaking his head.

  It was tough to tell where the far bank of the island ended—it was so dark there. In the middle of the island, a clearing held a trench half-covered with tent cloth and camouflaged with grass and shrubbery. The T-shaped trench had a fire pit branching off the main dugout. More tent material had been laid out as a barrier to the mud. Down inside were crates and boxes and bedrolls.

  Seeing it, Max sighed from deep in his chest. This trench, he’d told Harry, was where he and Irina first holed up in Munich when the weather was still fair. Irina hated it here, as had Felix Menning, so Max scored the three of them that cellar hovel where Harry met the corpse of Felix.

  Max shoved Dietz down into the trench. Dietz stumbled, the groundcover shifting under his feet. The detective climbed onto a crate, sat on it, and looked up at Harry and Max standing side by side and staring down on him from the edge.

  Dietz snickered. “So, what is it now? Torture me? If that is your game, then, oh sure, I confess everything—I killed your girl for a couple swords. But listen to me first. Make sense of this. Please. Why would you find me in plain sight if I just killed someone? I would hide out, would I not?”

  “You don’t have to,” Harry said. “You’re a plainclothes cop. Know everyone. We’re the ones underground.”

  Dietz stared at Harry. He seemed to take in Harry’s darkly utilitarian outfit for the first time. Something appeared to click in him, as if he realized he was misjudging the American Harry. “Harry, listen to me,” he said. “I have a family.”

  Max cleared his throat and spat.

  “You saw them,” Dietz
continued to Harry. “My wife. Why would I do this? Why?” he clasped his hands together.

  “That’s exactly what we want to know,” Harry said. “We’re going to hold you here until you tell us all of it. If you don’t, we bring in someone who will help your memory.”

  Harry didn’t tell Dietz who. The truth was, they had no one. Aubrey Slaipe was not an option. Max could have found a thug on the black market. Harry might have tried getting Warren Joyner onboard for this. Like a Nazi-turned-Red opportunist all to yourself, Major? We got one for you, and he’s a killer to boot. They had lots of rope here and a rag for Dietz’s mouth, not to mention Dietz’s handcuffs. They could keep him here for days. Harry knew that he or Max would gladly get Dietz talking. They didn’t even have to discuss it. Each had done far worse.

  “I’m telling you all I know,” Dietz said.

  Max jumped down into the trench. He heaved Dietz off the crate, Dietz landing on his back. Dietz tried to scramble away. Max was sizes bigger than Dietz or Harry and had broader shoulders, yet Harry had never seen Max move like he was now—like a linebacker after a backpedaling quarterback. Dietz’s arms and feet flailed in defense as Max pounced on the cop. Max roughed him up and good. Harry heard grunts, smacks and thwacks, pleading. Max finished by patting Dietz down. He climbed back out of the pit huffing, scowling. His green cashmere scarf hung off a shoulder, and he used it to wipe the mud from his face.

  “Careful of your ribs,” Harry said.

  “They’re no worse. No handcuffs, but look what I found.” Max held up a compact Sauer 38H.

  They heard a bleating sound from the trench. Dietz might have been sobbing, if a snake like that was capable of it, Harry thought. They gave Dietz a moment, only so Max could catch his breath.

  They looked down to find Dietz huddled against a crate, his face a patchwork of bleeding and bulges. He spat blood, and again, and the whimpers subsided.

  “I am not a spy,” Dietz said, “and that is the sad part about this whole affair.” He spat more blood. “It was an accident, all of it. She had a compulsive, irrational suspicion that I was a spy. She was going to report me to the Amis. And when she saw me at your billet, well, one could just imagine—”