The Never War

by D. J. MacHale

  “Hey, spaceman!” barked Rose. “You done or what?”

  “Yes sir, Mr. Rose,” I said, and stood at attention.

  Max Rose walked toward me, digging into the pocket of his bathrobe. Uh-oh. Did I hear too much? Did he have a gun? Was I about to get filled full of lead?

  No. He pulled out some dollar bills and jammed them into my hand. It was my tip.

  “Now blast off,” he said.

  “Thank you, sir. Enjoy your lunch,” I said, and beat it for the door. I had already gotten more information than I could have hoped for. So while Rose and Zell sat down for their stupid-huge lunch, I closed the door and made a beeline for the front door. I couldn’t wait to tell Spader and Gunny what I had learned.

  I was halfway to the door when I saw something that made me stop. It was the door to Max Rose’s office.

  It was open and the office was empty.

  I knew instantly that I was faced with a huge opportunity. Sitting on that desk could have been more information about the business that Rose and Zell were in. All I had to do was duck in, take a quick look, and get out. Of course, I could also get caught, and rather than leaving through the front door, I could be exiting the penthouse through a window. Next stop: pavement. I had to make a decision, fast. Every second counted.

  I did it. After a quick look around to make sure none of Rose’s goons were close, I shot into the office. It was crazy, but I had to.

  As soon as I got inside, I closed the door. If somebody happened to walk by, it would be better if they didn’t see a sweaty bellboy flipping through Max Rose’s personal papers. That would hurt. Once the door was closed, I turned my attention to the desk. I wanted to be in and out fast, so I moved quickly behind the desk and looked down at the mass of papers.

  I had no idea what to look for. It was just a bunch of business papers, contracts, and lists of figures like an accountant would use. My heart sank. Saint Dane’s plan on First Earth could have been sitting right in front of me and I wouldn’t know it.

  I was about to give up and run out when something caught my eye. It couldn’t have stood out more from the rest of the pages if it had a flashing red light on it. First off, it looked nothing like any of the other pages. It was a single sheet with a bold logo on top. That alone would have made my eye go to it, but there was one other thing. It was the logo itself. It was something I had seen before, many times. I’d seen it in movies and in books and on TV. But seeing it now, this way, made my stomach do a flip. I knew what this logo represented. And this wasn’t a movie.

  It was a swastika, the crooked cross that was the symbol of the Nazi party. It was surrounded by a wreath, upon which an angry eagle was perched with its wings spread wide. As I already told you, I’m no expert on World War II history, but I knew for sure that this was a letter from Germany and the Nazi party. The big question was, what was it doing on Max Rose’s desk? I did my best to calm down and read the letter. It was short and straight to the point.

  April 9, 1937

  Dear Mr. Rose:

  This letter is to confirm our agreement that the initial payments due to you for services rendered will be arriving in the U.S. via LZ-129 on May 6 of this year and will be available to you immediately. Form and amount of payment is as previously agreed upon. I trust this will be satisfactory and look forward to a long and successful partnership.

  Sincerely,

  Ludwig Zell

  Now I knew what party Ludwig Zell was talking about. The Nazi Party. I couldn’t take my eyes off the paper. It was an actual letter from the Nazis to Max Rose, proof they were doing business together. The frustrating thing was that it didn’t say what kind of business. All it said was that payment was going to be made on May 6 and it was coming via LZ-129…whatever that was.

  LZ. Ludwig Zell? Were there 129 Ludwig Zells? Whatever it was, it proved that my suspicions about him were correct. He was not only a German dude, he was working for the big bad guys over in Europe. He was a Nazi.

  But the most important thing was that I had found hard evidence of a connection between the Nazis in Germany and these gangsters in New York. Suddenly Gunny’s far-fetched theory wasn’t looking so far-fetched. Up until then we only suspected that the turning point on First Earth was about World War II. This piece of paper confirmed it. We already knew there was a link between Saint Dane and the gangsters. Now we had a link between the gangsters and the Nazis. Connect the dots. We were getting closer.

  There was no way I could take this paper out of here, so I committed it to memory. No problem. It was short enough that I could remember the most important facts: LZ-129; May 6; payment from the Nazis to Max Rose. Got it.

  Now I had to bolt out of there. I snuck back to the door and put my ear to it, listening for sounds of anyone hanging around outside. I didn’t hear a thing, so I grabbed the doorknob and gently gave it a turn. What happened next was so impossible, my mind wouldn’t accept it at first.

  The door was locked. I turned harder, but that didn’t make it any less locked. My heart started to race. Maybe it was just stuck. I gave it a jiggle and a twist and a push. But no amount of jiggling or twisting or pushing helped. Nope, the door was locked all right…and I was on the wrong side. I looked to see if there was a locking lever that I could flip. There wasn’t. There was only an old-fashioned keyhole. But seeing as I didn’t have an old-fashioned key, that wasn’t any help.

  I wanted to scream. How could I have been so dumb as to pull the door closed without checking it first? This was totally my fault. I had snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. It would only be a matter of time before I was discovered, and then any hope of untangling the mystery of May 6 and LZ-129 would die right along with me.

  Bobby Pendragon, Dead Undercover Traveler.

  JOURNAL #10

  FIRST EARTH

  Things couldn’t be worse. I was locked in the private office of a vicious mobster who was going to eat me for dessert. Max Rose had a lot of goons on the payroll. One of them was bound to come by any second. I had to think fast and figure out some other way out of there.

  I spun around and scanned the office. Yes! There was another door behind his desk. Why hadn’t I seen that before? I ran for it and twisted the knob. It was locked.

  Ahhhh! What was it with this guy and locked doors? You’d think he was a crook or something. I had to come up with a Plan B. Fast. Uncle Press always had a Plan B. I really wished he were there to give it to me, because I was coming up empty.

  Then I saw the telephone. Of course! Max Rose had slammed down this very phone a few minutes ago. How could I forget? I could call Gunny for help. I wasn’t exactly sure of what Gunny could do, but right now, this was my only hope. So I dove for the old (okay, new for 1937) black phone, yanked the receiver off the cradle, and dialed. It was a rotary dial thing, and my hands were shaking as I stuck my finger in the “9” hole. Number 99 was the bell captain’s desk. Dialing 9-9 would bring Gunny to me, and hopefully Gunny would bring me to safety. I dialed the first nine and winced as it made a loud, raspy sound like a saw cutting through wood. But I couldn’t stop now.

  I was just about to dial the second nine when I heard something. It was a quiet sound, but it might just as well have been a nuclear explosion, because I was sure it was going to be just as bad for me.

  Someone was opening the door behind the desk.

  It was too late to run and there was no place to hide. I was busted. As scared as I was, I made sure not to dial the second nine. I didn’t want them to know I was calling Gunny. No sense in getting us all killed. So I slowly returned the receiver to its cradle and waited for a gun muzzle to be jammed into my back.

  “I don’t think you’re supposed to be in here,” came a voice from behind me.

  Yeah, right. You think?

  But the sound of this voice gave me a flicker of hope. For one, it was the voice of a woman. She didn’t sound angry, either. Maybe I could talk my way out of this. After all, I had the Traveler power of persuasion, right? W
ithout turning around I said, “I just brought lunch up to Mr. Rose. The hotel wanted to make it special, but somebody forgot to put champagne on the cart. It was supposed to be a gift, on the house. So I came in here to call down for somebody to bring it up and the door locked behind me.”

  It was a total bluff, but all I could think of. Would she buy it? Or would she scream for Rose’s goons to come in here and toss me out the window? The next few seconds felt like a lifetime.

  Finally she said, “Here, take this.”

  Uh-oh. Was it a bullet?

  “Turn around,” she said with a laugh. “I won’t bite.”

  I slowly turned around to see who I was dealing with.

  Wow. Standing in the doorway was a beautiful woman who looked like some kind of old-time movie star. She was dressed in a long, ivory nightgown that looked as slick as silk. It wasn’t embarrassing or anything because she had a silky robe over it. Her hair was dark and done in a perfect do. She wore perfect makeup, too. This wasn’t somebody who had just fallen out of bed. She looked ready for a photo shoot. I couldn’t tell how old she was, not with all the elegant makeup and all, but I’m guessing she was in her twenties. She had a little smile that told me she knew exactly how scared I was.

  Once I got over the shock of seeing her, I saw something else that made my heart leap. She was holding out an old-fashioned brass key on a ring.

  “I don’t know why he makes all the doors lock that way,” she said softly. “Maybe to catch people who go into places they shouldn’t.” She said this with a smile, like she was needling me. I think she liked to see me squirm. Good for her, because I was definitely squirming. I reached out and took the key.

  “Thanks,” I said. “It was a big mistake. I never should have come in here.”

  I went back to the main door and used the key to unlock it. When I opened the door, I was relieved to see that nobody villainous was lurking around in the entryway. I was beginning to think I had a chance of getting out of here alive. Quickly I returned the key to the woman, saying, “I’m very embarrassed.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” said the woman. “I’ll never tell.” She put her finger to her lips to emphasize her promise to “shush.” It all seemed kind of flirty. Oh yeah, this was going to work out. I gave her a sincerely grateful smile, then turned for the door and freedom.

  “Hey!” she shouted after me. I froze. I was seconds away from a clean escape. What had gone wrong? I turned back to her sheepishly.

  “What about the champagne? Aren’t you going to make that call?”

  Oops. I hadn’t followed through with the bluff. I was such a bad liar. Was this going to bite me in the butt? I had to think fast, again. “Uh…I really shouldn’t be in here,” I said. “I’ll go downstairs and bring it back up myself.”

  “Good idea,” she said. “You’re a smart kid.” With that, she left through the door behind the desk..

  Ding Dong! The doorbell rang. In a few seconds one of Rose’s thugs would appear to answer it, and I was still in the office! I quickly dashed out and across the entryway toward the front door.

  “Hey, you still here?” somebody bellowed. It was the guy who first opened the door for me when I arrived.

  “Just leaving,” I said. The thug pushed past me and opened the door. Standing outside was Gunny, with a bottle of champagne chilling in a bucket of ice.

  “For Mr. Rose,” he said. “Compliments of the Manhattan Tower Hotel.”

  I glanced back over my shoulder and saw that the movie-star lady was watching from the corridor. It was perfect. Gunny had cemented my bluff without even knowing it. I was home free.

  The thug took the champagne, then pushed me out the door and closed it behind us. Gunny and I made brief eye contact, but didn’t say a word. We walked quickly past the two security guards in the corridor, stopped at the elevator, and rang for Dewey. The elevator arrived seconds later and we rode silently down to the lobby. Dewey looked at me the whole way down, dying to know what had happened. But he wasn’t going to ask with Gunny there, and I sure as heck wasn’t going to tell him anything. When we got to the lobby, Gunny and I stepped out of the elevator and kept walking until Dewey was out of earshot.

  Finally Gunny said under his breath, “You were up there too long, shorty. I was getting nervous. I had to make up an excuse to go up.”

  “It was perfect,” I added. “And totally worth it. Wait’ll you hear.” The two of us parted and went about our business for the rest of the day as if nothing scary had happened.

  That night Spader, Gunny, and I met in our room, and I told them everything that had happened in Max Rose’s penthouse.

  “So these Nazi wogglies,” Spader said, “they’re pretty nasty characters?”

  “Yes,” was my simple answer.

  “As bad as the gangster boys around here?” he asked.

  “Worse,” I answered. “These guys aren’t just criminals. The Nazis are about taking over the whole territory and murdering millions of people along the way.”

  “So they’re like, Saint Dane–bad,” was Spader’s conclusion.

  “Yeah, they’re Saint Dane–bad,” I agreed.

  “So then, what are they planning together?” Spader asked with frustration.

  “That is the big question, isn’t it?” Gunny said.

  What was Saint Dane trying to do here? Aside from the murderous mission of two gangsters at the flume in the subway, the demon hadn’t made his presence known.

  “The Nazis are going to pay Max Rose for his services on May sixth,” I said while pacing. “I think if we figure out what Max Rose is doing for the Nazis, we’ll know what Saint Dane’s plan is.”

  “And what is Ludwig Zell-one-twenty-nine?” asked Spader. “Sounds like some kind of code.”

  “We don’t know if it’s Ludwig Zell-one-twenty-nine,” I said. “Only L-Z-one-two-nine.”

  I looked to Gunny, but Gunny only shrugged. LZ-129 might be the key to this whole thing, or mean absolutely nothing.

  “I’ll keep snooping around,” said Gunny.

  We ended the meeting by saying we had to keep a closer eye on Max Rose and his band of merry men. We decided to read every newspaper we could get, every day, to see if there was any mention of LZ-129 or Ludwig Zell. You never knew. For the first time since I had gotten to First Earth, I had the feeling that we were on our way to figuring out what Saint Dane had in mind to disrupt this territory.

  I was absolutely, totally wrong.

  What really happened after that meeting was nothing. I’m serious, absolutely nothing. The trail went stone freakin’ cold. Max Rose never left the penthouse. Ludwig Zell didn’t come by the hotel again. We didn’t have any trouble with Winn Farrow and his gang of killers. We read every newspaper from New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, but didn’t find a single reference to Ludwig Zell or LZ-129. Remember, this was long before the Internet. It’s not like we could sign on to a search engine, input “Ludwig Zell, evil Nazi mobster plan” and get a complete history of the guy and what he was up to.

  This was way frustrating.

  Gunny even went to some government offices to look for any documents that showed the kinds of businesses Max Rose was involved in. Good idea, except for one thing. This was 1937. An African American guy walking into government offices looking for information wasn’t exactly common. This was long before the civil rights movement. Guys like Jackie Robinson, Martin Luther King Jr., Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas from the Supreme Court, and Nelson Mandela hadn’t broken down any barriers yet. They didn’t even have very many black movie stars like Will Smith or Eddie Murphy.

  So Gunny pretty much walked into a bunch of brick walls.

  It would have been a totally depressing situation, if Spader and I hadn’t tried to have a little fun along the way. He showed me a good time on his home territory of Cloral, so I wanted to do the same for him on First Earth.

  I took him to see a lot of movies. He had never seen anything like a movie before, and it was fu
n to watch his reaction. He was freaked at first, kind of like when we saw the holograms on Veelox. But after a while he got with the program. The admission price was only twenty-five cents. Can you believe it? I took him to see lots of Marx Brothers movies, my favorite being A Night at the Opera. We saw some Westerns with a guy named Tom Mix, and even saw the original King Kong. It was fun to see these movies on a big screen instead of television.

  We toured all over New York. I took him to the top of the Empire State Building, which was cool because we had just seen King Kong climb the thing. We went to the Statue of Liberty and Grand Central Station and even took a subway out to Coney Island to ride the rides and eat hot dogs.

  I think my favorite day was when we went up to the Bronx. No, not to the flume. We went to a Yankees game. I couldn’t believe it, but I saw both Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio play! How cool is that? Spader didn’t understand the game and it was hard to explain, but it didn’t matter. I was in hog heaven.

  And speaking of heaven, we also played a lot of basketball.

  When it comes to athletic stuff, I have to admit that Spader is better than I am in everything. He’s a little older and bigger, which helps. (At least, that’s what I tell myself.) But when it comes to basketball, well, that’s my game.

  At the risk of sounding crude, I kicked his ass. We set up a hoop in an alley behind the hotel and snuck out every chance we got. Gunny found us a crusty old leather ball. The rim was all bent and rusty with no net, but it didn’t matter. I recruited some of the other bellhops, and we played two on two. We even got Dewey to play, but he was worse than Spader. Poor guy.

  Our games were like minivacations away from Traveler worries. They put my mind back to a time and place when things were a whole lot easier, and the biggest concern I had was whether or not Courtney liked me as much as I liked her. (Yes, Courtney, I used to think about that a lot. I admit it.)

  Though our adventures exploring First Earth were excellent, there was always the big old sword of worry hanging over our heads. The longer we went without finding out anything about Max Rose and the Nazis, the more anxious I became. May 6 was drawing closer. It was beginning to look as if nothing would happen until then.