Pandora's curse m-4

by Jack Du Brul

  The strain on her hair vanished, and Anika would have dropped to the ground had the gunman not propped her up with one hand while keeping the weapon screwed into her kidney. He forced her forward with a savage prod.

  The walled garden was overrun with weeds and the uneven flagstones were slick with moss. There were a rusted iron table and a couple of mismatched chairs next to the door that led to the house. Otto Schroeder lay on a chipped concrete bench with two men standing over him. One of them must have been Karl, the one who’d grabbed her. A fourth figure stood back in the shadows. Anika guessed that he was the leader of the group. She couldn’t see his features, but somehow he seemed older than the others.

  She focused her attention on Schroeder, and when she realized what they had done to him, hot vomit shot into her mouth. Fear had stripped away her ability to remain clinical. One of Schroeder’s legs had been flayed open, and a large slab of tissue had been carved away. Blood pooled in the gruesome wound and spilled over onto the patio. Anika looked into the old man’s gray face and was amazed to see defiance in his watery eyes. At some point in his torture, he’d bitten into his lip or tongue because more blood dripped from his face.

  “Who are you?” the man who had grabbed her, Karl, asked. He was a near copy of the one with the gun, big and blond with shoulders like an executioner’s gallows. His partner was holding a long knife. In the fading light Anika saw crimson on the blade.

  Her silence was from fright, not resistance. She knew that since she’d seen their faces, they would never let her live. The man with the knife had a container of salt in his free hand, and he poured a measure into the long gash in Schroeder’s thigh. The old soldier tried to fight the pain and failed. His scream echoed in Anika’s head. All the trauma experience in the world couldn’t inure her to this kind of human suffering. She prayed unconsciousness would spare him the agony.

  “Who are you? Or do I dump the rest of this into his leg?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” the man in the shadows said so quietly that Anika almost didn’t hear him. “Kill her.”

  Karl had taken one step toward her when suddenly he flew back as if jerked on a string. Fragments of gore exploded from the side of his head. The sound of a shot came at the same instant. The man holding Anika pushed her away and wheeled toward where he thought the gunfire had originated. She fell heavily and tried to scramble under the bench, Schroeder’s blood smearing against her skin and clothes. Another shot rang out and a piece of stone above the bench exploded. The torturer who’d poured the salt into Schroeder’s leg had been at that spot a fraction of a second earlier. He had drawn his own weapon, a small machine pistol that had been under his dark jacket. He fired a long burst over the wall, the gun buzzing like a saw. Hot brass arced from the weapon in a tight necklace.

  Anika pressed her hands to her ears as more shots rang out: high whipcracks of rifles, the deeper boom of handguns, and the staccato ratchet of the machine pistol. Chips of stone filled the air, carving visible streaks through the thickening gunpowder smoke. A fresh spray of blood landed on her, and she knew Schroeder had just been hit. Yet the former soldier hadn’t reacted. It was either a fatal shot or his body was now beyond pain. She peered into the smoky gloom and saw the leader of the torturers. He was backed against the house, a weapon in his hand. He spotted Anika and the pistol’s aim dropped to her position. Closing her eyes was a reflex.

  She never heard the shot. A frantic burst of rifle fire covered all other sounds. She did feel the impact, a razor slash of fire that tore along her outer thigh. The fusillade pouring into the garden had distracted the leader and thrown off his aim. Crying out and clamping a hand over the long wound, she wriggled deeper under the bench. Her body was drenched in sweat. She was sobbing and didn’t care. A bullet ricocheted against a metal chair, and a burned ember of steel fell into the blood, sizzling obscenely as it cooled.

  Out of the gloom, the torturer lurched toward her, his body spasming as the rifles found their mark. He took half a dozen hits before falling to his knees and then collapsing to the ground. His eyes were fixed in death. Anika noticed that his knife had fallen just out of her reach. She twisted to see if the leader was still there and saw two silhouettes running through the haze, racing toward the open farmhouse door. Bullets pounded into the building after them, sparking more shrapnel from the stone. An instant later, a car’s engine rumbled to life and the big Mercedes pulled from the house.

  Just as quickly as the firefight had started, it was over. The echoes of gunfire faded even as Anika’s hearing returned.

  She spat the taste of gunpowder from her mouth, not knowing if she should move from her hiding place. She wanted to lie there forever. Then she heard Schroeder moan above her and knew she had to tend to him. It was instinctive.

  Okay, AK, move. Painfully, she rolled from under the bench, clutching at the oozing wound in her leg. Nothing happened when she raised her head, no gunfire, no shouts.

  The bullet had caught Otto Schroeder in the lower chest. The blood bubbling from the neat hole appeared carbonated. A lung shot. Fatal if he didn’t get attention immediately. She looked into his face. Schroeder stared at her with the certainty of his own death.

  “Help!” Anika shouted into the twilight, hoping to draw the attention of whoever had fired into the garden with rifles, the people who’d just saved her life. “Help us please!”

  There was no response from beyond the garden walls. A minute might have passed — she didn’t know. Whoever had just saved her by killing two of Schroeder’s torturers and chasing off the others was not coming. Anika was on her own. Ignoring the throb radiating from the gash in her thigh, she turned to the old man. Schroeder’s breathing became more shallow, and less blood was coming from his injuries. Even if she called an ambulance right now, she doubted it would arrive before he died.

  She knelt gingerly next to his head, taking one of his big farmer’s hands into hers. All she could offer was comfort.

  “You’ll be okay, Mr. Schroeder.” Her sympathy felt flat. Both knew it was an empty platitude.

  “I was told someone would come for me,” Schroeder breathed through bleeding lips. “But I beat them. They didn’t get what they wanted.”

  “Who were they?” Despite everything that happened, Anika wanted to know.

  “I don’t know. A call one week ago said people were coming to question me. It was a warning I ignored. Then I got two more calls, but nothing was ever said.” Anika thought that one of those calls must have been Opa Jacob. It was a favorite trick of his to make sure his quarry was around: just ring and hang up at hello. The other call could have been the torturers doing the exact same thing.

  “But who are they?” She pressed, fearful that he would die before she understood what had just happened.

  “My past.” Schroeder coughed up a clot of blood that Anika wiped away with her sleeve. “I was warned a week ago that it wouldn’t end with me. I thought I was the last to know.”

  “Know what, Mr. Schroeder?”

  “The truth.” Even with death rapidly approaching, he wouldn’t reveal why he had been tortured.

  Inspiration struck her. “About the gold? They wanted to know about the gold, didn’t they?”

  Pain had pulled his face in on itself, but he managed to open his eyes wide and stare at her. His voice quavered. “How do you know about that? Are you with the people who warned me?”

  Anika ignored his questions. “The men who did this to you knew about the gold and wanted to know what happened to it. Is that right?”

  “The gold is only a small part of it,” he dismissed and then fell silent. For a moment Anika thought he’d died, but then he squeezed her hand. “They wanted to know if I’ve told anyone about the rest of it.”

  “Have you?”

  “I always knew the secret was worth killing for.” He smiled a bloody smile. “I just never imagined I would have to die for it.”

  “What secret?” Anika asked frantically. He wasn’t mak
ing sense. She had another minute or two before he was gone. “What secret, Mr. Schroeder?”

  “Pandora’s Curse. I have prayed my entire life that the nightmare would end with me. But now I know it won’t. It’s going to continue.”

  “What is Pandora’s Curse?”

  Schroeder closed his eyes tightly, fighting death by force of will. “They told me there is a man who can help…”

  “The people who warned you about these… torturers? They told you someone can help?” The old man nodded vaguely. “Who? Who can help?”

  Schroeder’s chest rattled and he coughed another, larger mass of blood. “An American. Philip Mercer,” he wheezed, the words no more than a whisper. His grip on Anika’s hand relaxed. His arm fell off the bench and into the pool of their mingled blood. He was dead.

  Anika wasn’t surprised to feel tears on her cheeks. Somehow this old soldier had kept a horrible secret, and at the end of his life, his silence had killed him. She slumped next to the body. The smoke had cleared, and the full horror of what had just happened was splashed against the garden walls and leached into the dirt between the flagstones.

  With an effort, she firmed her jaw and forced herself to separate herself from what had just taken place. Anika had to think like a doctor and not a victim.

  Okay, AK, get to work. There were three dead from multiple gunshot wounds and one injured. Her wounded leg was the first priority. The pain was something she could work through, but she would need stitches to close the gash. That meant a hospital. She knew that calling an ambulance would put her in the middle of a police investigation and that was out of the question. Once she explained her presence here, it was only a matter of time before Schroeder’s torturers learned her identity, and judging by their savagery, she would be killed long before they were apprehended. The nurse with the apartment next to hers could suture the wound, and Anika herself could get the drugs she needed for infection and pain if necessary.

  Using the rough stone wall as a crutch to gain her feet, Anika swayed until her head cleared. It wasn’t blood loss accounting for the dizziness, she thought. It was the shock of Schroeder’s death and the others. She had to get out of here. Pausing at the gate, she considered the possibility of driving all the way home and knew she wouldn’t make it. Once she reached Ismaning, she would call her neighbor to come get her. She had to get her car away from the scene and knew that was something she could handle.

  Anika was panting by the time she got to her car. She grabbed a towel from the backseat and tied a rough bandage around the foot-long slash with the strap from her backpack. The last of the water was like a flash flood on a dry desert when it reached her throat, cooling and nourishing and desperately needed. She used another towel to wipe the worst of the blood from her face, arms, and legs. In the rear-view mirror, her eyes shone with equal measures of fear and resolve.

  Anika took one last look at the house, a single lamp in a front room casting a feeble glow into the night. She was certain her being here at the same time as the torturers wasn’t a coincidence. She dialed her opa’s number but cut the connection when she heard his gruff “Hello.” Anika sagged. He was all right. She’d feared that the gunmen had learned about Schroeder through Jacob Eisenstadt, using the same techniques they’d employed against the former soldier.

  If the information hadn’t come from Opa, it had come from another source. When she was up to it, she’d talk to him about it. But not tonight. And that was only one of the mysteries that needed to be solved — that she needed to solve. Who had tipped off Schroeder’s killers? Who had saved her life by chasing them away? She felt they had to be the same people who warned Schroeder a week ago but she didn’t know how they knew to be here tonight. Who was this person he mentioned? Mercer? And how could he help? Finally and possibly most tantalizing, what was Pandora’s Curse?

  She put her car into gear and pulled away, needing all of her concentration to keep the vehicle on the narrow road. One other question worked into the back of her mind. What could possibly be so valuable that Schroeder had dismissed an enormous shipment of gold as only “a small part of it”?

  ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA

  Because his overnight stay in Manhattan wasn’t really planned, the airline had held Mercer’s luggage from Pennsylvania for him at Reagan National. He presented his identification and baggage claim checks when he deplaned from the New York flight, and a skycap retrieved his bags from storage. He had little trouble finding a cab to take him home. The flight to Washington had lasted an hour and it felt good to sit again. His legs were sore from hours of wandering the Natural History Museum.

  It was nearing ten o’clock at night and traffic was light as the taxi threaded around Arlington Cemetery and hooked up with I-66. He’d lived in Arlington for a little over seven years, and the amount of growth near his neighborhood was astonishing. It was only a matter of time before the ten blocks of row houses around his brownstone were replaced with high-rises and strip malls.

  From the outside, his building was similar to all the others on the quiet street. It stood three stories tall and was faced with ruddy stone that was corbeled over the windows and the front door. The entry steps were cement flanked by wrought iron railings.

  Under the streetlights, he recognized two of the cars parked behind his black Jaguar. The battered Plymouth Fury belonged to Paul Gordon, a retired jockey and the owner of a neighborhood bar called Tiny’s, and the Ford Taurus was Mike O’Reilly’s, one of Tiny’s regulars. Mercer left his bags on the sidewalk and fished his car keys from his pocket, chirping open the locks as he approached the sleek English convertible. He peered in to check the odometer. The last three numbers were 823, exactly as they should be, and the tenth’s wheel was between the six and seven.

  “I’ll be damned,” Mercer said aloud. He was certain Harry White would have taken the car for a spin while he was in Pennsylvania, which is why he’d memorized the mileage before leaving.

  Then he noticed that the odometer had rolled over a complete thousand miles, right down to the last hundred yards. “Oh, you sneaky old bastard.” He chuckled without malice.

  Mercer grabbed up his matching bags and mounted the stairs. The front door was unlocked. While the outside of the brownstone was conventional, the inside was something else entirely. The whole structure had been gutted and rebuilt according to plans Mercer himself had drawn up. The front third of the building was a marble-floored atrium that soared up to the roof, with balconies overlooking it from the second-floor library and the third floor, where the master suite was located. Connecting the levels and partially blocking the view of the kitchen was a spiral staircase. The railings on the balconies had been custom made to match the antique stairs.

  On the ground floor behind the kitchen and the laundry area were his home office and the dining room he used for a red-topped pool table. The unused dining table sat in a corner of the entry foyer in what should have been the living room. He heard a roar of laughter from the second floor. This was where he had his version of a family room. Only it was closer to an English pub with wainscoting on the walls, an oak wet bar fronted by six stools, a couple of couches and chairs, and his entertainment center.

  He left his bags at the base of the spiral stairs and climbed up to the library. The cigar smoke wafting from the bar through the connecting French doors was as thick as a fire on a tobacco plantation. The couches had been pushed aside to make room for a folding table, and seated around it were Harry, Tiny, Mike O’Reilly and Mike’s brother-in-law, John Pigeon. The table was littered with ashtrays, half-empty glasses, and poker chips. The forest-green carpet beneath the table looked pale from all the spilled ash. They’d been here for hours. Maybe days, for all Mercer knew.

  “You’re pushing it, Harry. You’re really pushing it.” Mercer tried to put some anger in his voice but failed. He didn’t care that Harry had let someone chauffeur him around in the Jag or had the guys over for cards. He’d expected no less.

  “Hey, Mercer
, welcome back,” Harry boomed. He might be eighty, but his voice carried the power of a train wreck, with half the charm. “Got any cash on you? Mike’s cheating and I think I’ll figure out how if you lend me a hundred.”

  “You mind telling me how you managed to put a thousand miles on my car in two weeks?” Mercer noticed that Paul “Tiny” Gordon had two encyclopedia volumes on his chair so he could sit at the same height as the others.

  “Oh, that. Well, Tiny and I decided to go to Atlantic City for the weekend.”

  “That’s only four hundred miles round-trip.”

  “Twice.” Harry’s attempt to look contrite appeared more self-satisfied than anything.

  “And the other two hundred miles?”

  “Errands.”

  Tiny cut in, shouldering some of the blame. “I wanted to catch a few races at Belmont,” the former jockey said. “Besides, we needed to roll your car over to an even grand.”

  “I hope to God you drove, Paul.”

  When the diminutive Gordon laughed, he looked and sounded like a gnome. “I had blocks installed on the pedals of my car so I can drive it. To reach the gas in your Jag, I’d have to crawl on the floor and use my hands.”

  Mercer looked back to Harry, horrified that the octogenarian would drive that far. “You?”

  “You need to have the tires rebalanced,” Harry suggested mildly. “It started to shimmy at a hundred miles an hour.”

  “Oh, Christ.” Mercer rubbed his forehead. He went behind the bar to get a beer from the rebuilt lock-lever refrigerator next to the ornate back bar.

  “While you’re back there,” Harry called jovially, “mind making me another Jack and ginger?”

  “Yeah, grab me another beer,” Mike O’Reilly added.

  “Might as well mix up another margarita.” This from John Pigeon.

  Before answering, Mercer slid his wallet from his pants pocket and counted his cash, which totaled nearly three hundred dollars. Despite the late hour and his exhaustion, his decision was an easy one. “Get an extra chair, Pidge, and I’ll make it a pitcher.”