by Lee Goldberg
“I know,” Monk whined. “Let me go back.”
“You take a step towards that house and I will shoot you,” Stottlemeyer said.
“I could be so happy there,” Monk said.
“You’re fired,” Stottlemeyer said.
“What?” Monk said.
“You heard me. You’re humiliating yourself and the department. You’re a mess.”
“Yes, I am.”
“You hate messes. So clean this one up,” Stottlemeyer told him. “That’s what you do best, isn’t it?”
I had to admire the logic of Stottlemeyer’s approach. I’m pretty convinced that no one understood Monk, or handled him better, than the captain did. He just lacked the patience for it.
“I need help,” Monk said.
“Then get it,” Stottlemeyer said. “Do whatever you have to do, but do it now, before it’s too late.”
“What about this case?” Monk said.
“We’ll just have to muddle on without you,” Stottlemeyer said. “You weren’t exactly a big help today anyway, were you?”
The captain and Disher got into their car and drove off. I regarded Monk.
“He’s right,” Monk said, watching them go.
“So what are you going to do?”
“The only thing I can do,” Monk said and rolled his shoulders. “Pack your bags, Natalie.”
“Where are we going?”
“I have an appointment tomorrow at four p.m. with Dr. Kroger,” he said, “and I am going to keep it.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Mr. Monk Takes Flight
A better person than me would have stopped Monk from chasing his shrink all the way to Germany. What Monk was proposing was an extreme and disturbing case of stalking. The sensible thing to do would have been to stop him for his own good.
Maybe.
And maybe not.
There was another way to look at the situation. Monk started to fall apart the instant Dr. Kroger announced his trip, and it was getting worse with each passing hour. I was convinced that the only thing that would stop his inevitable slide into total madness, and mine along with it, was Dr. Kroger’s wisdom, compassion, and guidance.
And yet it was Dr. Kroger’s unavailability that was causing all of Monk’s misery.
So in a twisted way, going to Germany was the only logical solution for Monk.
I know I was right because as soon as Monk decided to go to Germany he became more focused and, for the first time in twenty-four hours, almost relaxed.
I wasn’t fooling myself, though, about the obstacles in front of us.
It was a twelve-hour flight to Germany, which would be no easy feat for a man who was afraid of flying and anything foreign to him—that included, among other things, kiwi fruit, French films, polyester, the Beatles, zebras, and anything labeled “Made in China.”
Yet Monk was ready to travel immediately to Germany despite his raging fears and phobias, and so was I, which should tell you how desperate we both were to resolve his plight. I also took his determination as a sign that we were doing the right thing.
The way I saw it, Monk was so determined to restore his mental health that he was overcoming one of his biggest fears to get the help he needed.
That had to be significant progress in his therapy, right?
Okay, maybe I was deluding myself, but who could blame me?
Dr. Kroger, maybe. But besides him, nobody.
I also had a couple of very good reasons of my own for not stopping Monk. Payback, for one. I was convinced that Dr. Kroger had encouraged Monk to intrude on my vacation to Hawaii, so I figured turnabout was fair play. I wanted to see the look on Dr. Kroger’s face when Monk showed up in Lohr.
Does that sound petty to you?
Me, too, but I’ve never held myself up as any kind of saint, which brings me to my truly selfish reason for not talking Monk out of chasing Dr. Kroger to Germany.
I deserved this trip.
The perks of this job are few and far between. In fact, they are nonexistent. But now Monk was willing to pay my way to Germany and, while it was hardly going to be a vacation for me, at least it would be an exciting change of scenery.
Was I taking advantage of a bad situation?
Probably, but I was sure that once we got there I’d suffer dearly for it and would regret going on the trip.
Did that stop me? Nope.
I quickly booked the tickets, arranged for Julie to stay with friends, bought some Germany guidebooks, and packed my bags.
The spur-of-the-moment plan was for Monk and me to catch the soonest, and cheapest, economy-class flight out of San Francisco to Frankfurt. Once we arrived, we’d rent a car and drive to Lohr, which according to the guidebooks was about an hour from the airport, on the river Main.
We didn’t know where Dr. Kroger was staying, but from what I could tell, Lohr was a small town at the edge of the Spessart Forest. I figured it wouldn’t take much detecting skill to find the conference he was attending. We’d worry about where we’d be staying once we got there.
Ordinarily, this lack of careful planning would have presented an intolerable level of uncertainty for Monk. But this was an unusual situation and he was willing to accept the unacceptable. I saw it as yet another encouraging sign of personal growth for Monk that was miraculously and ironically occurring in the midst of one of his worst psychological and emotional crises.
I hoped Dr. Kroger would see it the same way.
Under normal circumstances, just the prospect of packing for the trip would have been an insurmountable obstacle for Monk. He would have wanted to bring six months’ worth of food, water, eating utensils, dishes, and bed linens in addition to his clothes and toiletries. It would have taken a week of careful planning, another week of packing, and then he would have needed a freighter to transport everything to Germany.
So the only way that Monk could even contemplate this trip, much less actually embark on it, was if he was drugged up to his eyeballs. He knew it and I knew it.
As soon as I dropped him off at his place, he took Dioxynl, the wonderful experimental drug that relieved his obsessive-compulsive disorder and subdued his phobias. He was able to pack everything he needed into one suitcase and was ready to go when I picked him up an hour later.
But this Monk was a different man than the man I’d dropped off. He was sitting on his suitcase eating potato chips out of a big bag. His shirt was open at the collar and untucked.
I pulled up to the curb in front of him. He threw his suitcase into the back of the car and hopped into the passenger seat beside me.
“Ready to fly, babe?” he said with a big smile. Obviously, the drugs had kicked in.
“I wish you wouldn’t call me ‘babe,’ Mr. Monk.”
“You can call me ‘babe’ if you want to,” he said.
“I don’t,” I said.
“How about ‘boychick’?”
“How about ‘Mr. Monk’?”
He shook his head. “Why so formal? I’m not your geometry teacher. It’s me, the Monkster.”
“The Monkster?”
“Aka the Funster,” he said.
“Since when do you have an ‘aka’?”
“You really have to loosen up. If you were any stiffer, you’d be a sculpture. Want a chip?”
He offered me the bag. I stared at him in amazement.
Monk actually wanted me to stick my dirty hand inside the bag he was eating from and take a chip.
“Sour cream and onion,” he said. “They’re yummy. It’s like they are pre-dipped.”
“No thanks,” I said.
He shrugged, wiped his greasy hand on his pants, and set the bag between us.
“It’s right here if you change your mind,” he said and started whistling.
The only thing more horrifying than spending twelve hours imprisoned in an airplane with Monk was spending it with the Monkster.
That was why I’d brought sleeping pills. I intended to spend as much of t
he flight unconscious as I possibly could, blissfully unaware of whatever Monk was doing.
It was a sad commentary on the two of us that the only way we could travel together was if we were completely drugged, but it could have been worse.
Monk could have been himself.
Without the drugs, he would almost certainly flip out on the plane and, with the heightened airline security these days, he’d either be gunned down by an air marshal or imprisoned for endangering the passengers with his disorderly conduct.
So relying on pharmaceuticals was clearly the best way to go for us, for the other passengers, and for humanity.
We got through the security checkpoint at the airport and boarded the plane without incident. Our airline was Air Brahmaputra, the cheapest flight into Frankfurt that I could find.
Monk is a cheapskate, whether he’s drugged or not.
We were traveling on an old Air Canada plane. The only reason I knew that was because Air Brahmaputra hadn’t even bothered to re-cover the seats or the worn carpets adorned with the previous airline’s name and maple-leaf logo.
The stewardesses were dressed in colorful saris with bare midriffs and spoke with heavy Indian accents. Indian music played on the sound system. I could see that the flight would be like spending twelve hours on hold with Dell customer support. Now I was doubly glad that I’d brought sleeping pills.
Our two seats were in an odd-numbered row in the middle of the plane. Monk didn’t even notice the numerical incongruity, or if he did, he didn’t care.
I took the seat by the window so I could rest against the bulkhead when I passed out.
Monk took the aisle seat so he could get up and wander around the plane, as he’d done on the way to Hawaii.
The seats were narrow and stiff and there was no legroom at all. If the passenger in front of me reclined his seat, we’d be sleeping together. I sat up to get a peek at him. He wasn’t bad-looking. If I was lucky, he was also charming, single, and loved kids.
I stayed awake until the beverage service began. Monk had a Coke and talked the stewardess into giving him a dozen bags of peanuts to go with it.
I washed down my pill with a glass of water, and within a few minutes I was asleep.
When I awoke eight hours later, the seat beside me was empty, my bladder was ready to burst, and everybody was singing Wayne Newton’s “Danke Schoen.”
I squeezed out of my seat and saw Monk. He was wearing lederhosen—Bavarian leather shorts with wide suspenders— and leading a parade of singing passengers down the aisle. He looked ridiculous.
My bladder wouldn’t wait for them to pass, so I jumped out in front of him and hurried down the aisle to the rest-room. While I was inside, I wondered about how Monk had gotten the lederhosen and where he’d changed into them. He was going to be in for a shock if he was still wearing the outfit when the drugs wore off.
When I emerged from the bathroom, Monk was heading down the opposite aisle towards the back of the plane. He waved at me. I waved back.
I was pretty certain that what he and the passengers were doing violated all kinds of in-flight regulations, but the stewardesses didn’t seem to mind. They sat in the galley reading magazines and munching on snacks.
I asked one of them for a bag of peanuts and a bottle of water and went back to my seat. The Monkster joined me a few minutes later. He was drenched with sweat. It was an amazing sight. Until that moment, I don’t think I’d ever seen a bead of perspiration on his skin.
He wiped his brow with his sleeve. “Wow. Don’t you just love to travel?”
“Haven’t you slept at all?”
“How can you sleep when there is so much to do?” he said.
I’d never thought of a flight that way.
“Nice outfit,” I said. “Where did you get it?”
“A couple of German guys up in row thirteen gave it to me,” Monk said. “I want to fit into German society as effortlessly as I do into our own.”
“And they just happened to have a pair of lederhosen in their carry-on bag?”
“It’s what they were wearing in Frisco,” he said.
That must have been an interesting sight to see.
“Have they been cleaned since they were worn?”
Monk shrugged. “They passed the smell test.”
“You sniffed the shorts?”
“You know what they say—if you can’t smell it, it isn’t there.”
Who are these people and why do they keep saying such stupid things?
“What did you do with your slacks?” I asked.
“I shoved them into your bag,” Monk said.
“They are going to be a wrinkled mess,” I told him.
He gave me a playful punch on the shoulder. “Loosen up, babe. We’re on vacation.”
That’s when a little boy, who looked no older than six or eight, came up to Monk. His nose was running. He wiped it on his sleeve.
“Can I have a balloon doggie, too?” the boy asked.
“Of course.” Monk turned to me. “Tissue, please.”
This was more like the Monk I knew. Perhaps the drugs were beginning to wear off. I reached into my purse and handed him a tissue.
He wiped the kid’s nose with it, then held it against his nose and said, “Blow.”
The kid did.
“One more time,” Monk said.
The kid did.
“Isn’t that better?” Monk pinched the tissue closed and shoved it into his pocket.
He reached into another pocket and came out with a slim balloon, which he blew up and twisted into the shape of a French poodle.
Monk handed the dog to the delighted child. “Be sure to take him out for walks.”
The kid ran back to his seat. Monk smiled. “Wasn’t he adorable?”
“You wiped his runny nose and put the dirty tissue in your pocket.”
“What was I supposed to do with it?”
“Put it in the seat pocket in front of you,” I said. “Or drop it on the floor.”
“That would be littering,” he said. “I’m not a litterbug.”
“But you put it in your pocket,” I said.
“It’s snot,” he said, “not nuclear waste.”
“Where did you get those balloons?”
“The stewardesses had them,” Monk said. “But they aren’t very good at making them into things. So I stepped into the breach. Pretty soon all the kids wanted one.”