Ernst shifted in his chair, took a swallow of his coffee, then rose, and walked towards the wide windows of his office, which looked out on the snow-covered city.
“I asked Casalo for his best recommendation because I am reasonably sure that one or more parties questioned in the case are not telling the truth and I need someone to break through that veneer and get some answers. If there is a cover up, I need to know it.”
“Any good detective should be able to do that,” Groff said, “especially since your daughter is an outstandingly attractive young woman. She’s been on TV and on enough fashion magazine covers to be recognizable. It is very hard to believe that no one saw her before she disappeared. But why do you need me?”
“Until you walked in here, Frau Groff, it had not occurred to me that a woman would be assigned. I confess that the option had not presented itself to me, but surely you might be able to uncover more than a man in this case,” Ernst said quickly. “Your training with Casalo’s people is also an asset which may, given the nature of my suspicions, be useful here.”
“Do you have any reason to think that Lucy is still alive?”
“I have no reason to think otherwise. There was no ransom request, no threats, no suicide note, no body recovered. Until we have something of that nature, my wife and I must continue to believe that she lives, perhaps under duress, but lives.”
“If you had to guess, what do you think happened to Lucy?”
“Such unsupported speculation is probably not useful, but I suspect that she met someone, perhaps while she was at Gstaad last year, and that this led to further assignations with unsavory people. Unfortunately, there is also, as you know, a flourishing slavery business and that cannot be discounted either.”
“Why the Gstaad trip?”
“Because she made considerable effort to try to make sure that her mother and I knew nothing about it. Had it not been for an old friend who saw her on the ski lift one afternoon, I would never have found out. Curt, that’s the old friend, called me to wish me a Happy Saint Sylvester and mentioned casually that he’d seen Lucy and spoken briefly with her as they boarded a lift.”
“Was she with someone?” Groff asked, writing in her notebook.
“Curt said it looked like she was alone, but he didn’t see her again.”
“What hotel?”
“The Grand, of course,” said von Holt, as though there was no other place to stay in the popular resort town.
“Was this followed up by the police? I saw no reference to it in any reports.”
“Perhaps not,” said von Holt slowly, still gazing out the window. “That is my fault. I didn’t want to get Curt involved. He has had several unpleasant brushes with the police in his lifetime and I didn’t want to precipitate another. In hindsight, I should have mentioned it.”
“What kind of brushes?” Groff asked, looking up from her notebook. “Could he have been involved in Lucy’s disappearance?”
“No. I don’t see how. Curt has a propensity for jewel theft. He was caught once, quite by accident, but the charges did not stick and he was released. But every time there is a jewel robbery, especially in places like Gstaad during the holidays, Curt is hauled in by the cops and interrogated.”
“I understand,” Groff said. “Okay. I’ll take the job.”
Von Holt turned from the window and stared intently at her.
“Why the change? What did I say that altered your refusal?”
“The Gstaad lead is worth checking out and I have some very good contacts there. If it comes to naught, I’ll reassess my position. But for now, if you agree, we have a deal.”
“Excellent. What else do we need to discuss?”
“To begin, I will need an open bank account that I can draw upon independently. You may set any reasonable limit you want, but the daily tab will be thirty-five hundred Euro with a ten thousand Euro weekly bond from you to cover any contingencies. I have here, two letters of bank references showing that I too am well bonded and insured, so you have no need to worry about me taking your money and running to Brazil.”
“That’s fine. But what sort of ‘contingencies’, if I might ask?” queried von Holt, a bit suspicious.
“This kind of investigation will require that I hire and use professionals and or their equipment in several areas. Surveillance for example. I don’t want to have to ask you for money each time, so this should cover it. Such services are not cheap. Also, I will need transportation, perhaps internationally, and it will not come from common rental car agencies, so special vehicles or aircraft will be chartered or leased as appropriate. In addition, pilots, drivers and insurance must be obtained. Weapons, if needed, must be available, (beyond those which I furnish myself), et cetera, et cetera. None of this should be traceable to you or your family or business. If this is more than you have in mind, Herr von Holt, simply say so and I’ll go back to Berlin.”
“No, no, of course this makes sense. I will open an account for you this afternoon and the amount you will have access to will have no limit. If you find yourself needing more than one hundred thousand Euros at one time, let me or Lisle know. Otherwise, spend whatever is necessary. I just want to know, whenever you can do so, what progress you are making and where you are. If something happens to you, I will bring whatever additional forces are needed to bear. As my agent in this, I want to protect you as much as possible.”
“Thank you, Sir,” Groff said. “I’ll begin immediately. Please have your admin contact me when the accounts are set up. Here is a list of phone numbers for me. When this is expired, I will provide a new one. For better security, only one call can be made on each number.”
“Throw away handies?” von Holt asked, raising his eyebrows.
“One of my precautions. It may seem excessive, but until we figure out what happened to Lucy, I think it’s wise.”
“Of course.”
“And here,” she added, “is an outline of protocols we can use, at least initially, for contact and other needs. For your information, I have left a duplicate set in my office and with Casalo as well. Should I disappear, these are procedures and transponder codes with indicators that might help you. For example, this one,” Groff pointed to an entry on the paper, “is the blind transponder in the handle of my shoulder bag.”
“Excellent,” said von Holt, once again finding that he had underestimated Groff. “So you really did plan to accept the job, didn’t you?”
Chapter Eight
Pony
The narrow, deeply rutted mountain road turned steeper as she came around the curve, the strain on her shoulders and waist increased with the degree of the slope and Lucy had to lean further forward into the harness to keep the wagon moving. She knew from bitter, former experience that once the large wheels of the wagon behind her stopped turning, it was much harder to get it moving again and there was the risk of the entire rig reversing and rolling back down the mountain, dragging her with it. The U-shaped steel horseshoes, spot welded to her heavy boots, had carbide mini spikes on them for additional traction, but the road was dangerously icy and made any footing difficult. Pulling the loaded wagon was a job for a thousand pound draft horse, not a one hundred and thirty pound young woman. More than once, when the pulling pony on the cart ahead of her had stumbled and fallen, the cart stopped and slid precariously backward before the driver set the brakes, having been more interested in applying his whip than in stopping the inevitable backward slide of the heavy two-wheeled cart.
Lucy wore a specially designed, well-insulated rubber body suit that incorporated various features designed to facilitate the hard labor she was performing. It looked like a horse’s hide on the outside and mated with the complex leather pulling harness and bridle she wore. The long horsetail, alert, pointed ears and the enhanced display of breasts and sex provided for a combination of practical cart hauling and what often proved to be interesting spectacles to observers. For example, the suit kept her reasonably warm despite the freezing weath
er, but carefully designed vents and porous, one-way panels that allowed her body to breathe also allowed her to perform this difficult, exhausting work without having to shed the suit. Various openings in the suit provided overt views of her breasts with their ringed nipples and partly obscured sex. The heavy boots encapsulating her hands and feet had cuffs over the tops of the boots and these were linked to each other with about two feet of slack and a center chain that rose to her waist, which was also encircled with a chain. Making balance more difficult were the links from her wrist cuffs which had a center chain linked to the wide, padded and permanent metal collar on her slim neck.
They had been on the road since daybreak, hauling an assortment of supplies and materials up the winding road to the mine. There was a paved road paralleling this one, but the labor pony slaves and their carts were restricted to this older and more circuitous route. It was a treacherous track and several ponies and their loads had, in the recent bad weather, been lost as they and their wheeled carts slipped over the edge of the track and plunged to the slopes far below. Lucy knew the route well enough so that she could almost walk it blindfolded. Although the blinders on her bridle functioned almost like a blindfold, providing only a narrow field of vision, she knew the trek by heart. The bridle and wide collar also held her head so that her eyes were focused only on what was directly ahead. With this and the chain restrictions, plus virtually no peripheral vision, the ponies had to rely on their experience with the route and the handlers being attentive enough to prevent accidents. Too often, the drivers were drunk to the point of just setting the ponies in the track and drifting off to sleep in the high cart pedestal and wagon seats. When jostled into consciousness, their first inclination was to use their whips, so Lucy learned quickly that keeping on track and moving forward evenly was the best way to survive and avoid an undeserved and hurtful thrashing.
What Lucy von Holt was doing hitched to a cart on a freezing December day somewhere in the mountains of Central Asia was the question she herself could not answer. She recalled all too easily the astonishingly well-planned and successful abduction on the train in Germany months before. She remembered the hours of bondage and torment as the abductors played with her in the sleeping car compartment while the train made its way north towards Amsterdam where she had planned to meet with her boyfriend of the time, Fabian Moumakis, a Dutchman, born in The Netherlands of wealthy Greek parents.
Secretly removed from the train in a traveling container designed to hold an ompah band’s tuba, she was later rebound, stuffed into a coffin-like container and shipped to The States where she was again held in extreme restraint and trained as a silent and unwilling pony captive. Eventually, she ended up in a horse stall at the famous Summer School for young women, a new recruit for the head mistress’s growing pool of pony girls and women who were destined to fulfill the role of slave animals in one form or another. From the time she was unloaded from her crate and chained in the stall, Lucy was forcefully trained and manipulated with one goal: she would be prepared and sold to a high bidder from anywhere on the globe and shipped to them for whatever purpose they desired. For all purposes, when she left the train in the tuba box, Lucy von Holt disappeared from the face of the earth, a fate that her bored and frustrated Dutch boyfriend orchestrated carefully after deciding that he had had more than enough of her annoyingly conservative and insulting ways while taking advantage of his wealth and offering him no sex whatsoever.
Her arrival at the mine was a blurred series of events. The cloister nuns initially packed her up in a special shipping container that was kept for just such a purpose. This large box appearing to contain, if you read the Russian lettering on the exterior, fragile electronic parts. Sister Angel and two of her cohorts loaded the crate onto an ox cart and eased the heavy load down the hill from the cloister and a short distance to an old dirt landing strip with a tattered windsock that was blowing straight out, pointing east, as though defining the direction that Lucy would travel. There, they waited, and waited for the plane. They remained through the noon hour and then it began to rain. Dark clouds rolled in, blanketing the valley. Just when it was clear that no sane pilot would try to land in such weather, they heard an engine noise in the distance. A few minutes later they saw the large, single-engine biplane pop out from under the overcast, kill its engine and plop onto the far end of the short runway, rolling up to a stop right in front of the three nuns and their shipping crate. The double side doors were flung open and a young man in a sheepskin flying suit jumped down, walked quickly over to Sister Angel and said that they had to hurry before the weather closed in.
“I think, Sir,” Sister Angel said in a rough voice that had not been used in some time, “that your weather has already closed in. Surely you are not going to try to fly in this,” and she waved her hands over her head and aimed one finger at the dark sky, as if she were calling down a bolt of lightning to illustrate her point.
The pilot, who Angel immediately decided was Russian, ignored the divine warning from Angel and looked at Lucy’s crate, frowning.
“What sort of airplane is this anyway,” Angel pressed, surveying the beat-up metal craft that had oil dripping out of the engine cowling and paint peeling from wings and fuselage. “It doesn’t look very sturdy.”
“Sister,” said the pilot, gritting his white teeth and showing conscious restraint with the moronic nun. “This is a Russian Antonov AN-2. It has been used and abused more than the contents of your crate and it will get us where we are going. But,” he added quickly, “I don’t think that is going to fit,” he said, looking from crate to door and from door to crate.
“Try it,” said Sister Angel. “God helps those who trust in Him.”
“Yeah. Sure, Sister, But this airplane is older than you are and the comrades who made it didn’t make the door holes to stretch. Whatever you got in there has got to come out and we’ll tie it down inside.”
“That’s not possible,” said Angel, backing up and spreading her arms protectively over the surface of the crate. “This is a sacred cargo. Not for your eyes.”
“Okay. Then I guess we’ll just get the heck out of here and you find another transport to Eastern Crapsburg,” the pilot said, starting to climb back into the aircraft.
“Wait,” shouted Angel. “You and your partner get back in and sit up front. Close the cockpit door and we’ll load your cargo. Then you can leave.”
“Fine, but you’d better hurry,” the pilot said, getting aboard and walking forward up the steeply inclined cabin floor. “By the way, sister,” he shouted back from the open cockpit window. “This isn’t any 747 and there’s no door to our cockpit. We’ll just look straight ahead and do our preflight.” He began to talk through his checklist while Angel and her associates conferred.
“I assume,” the young pilot called down through the dirty side window of the cockpit, “that you’ve got some sort of religious prisoner in that crate, so just get him out and put him on the plane quickly. There’s tie down rings all over the deck, but put the weight as far forward as you can. Close the doors, rap on the side when you’re done and then get away from the airplane.”
The three nuns quickly opened the crate, unstrapped Lucy, lifted her out and thrust her up through the door, into the plane. Blind, cold and cramped, Lucy did as they indicated. Then they climbed in and tied her spread-eagle on her back to the heavy rings in the floor. They tightened the leather hood on her head, made sure that the built in gag was well up inside her mouth and got back out of the craft, slamming the double doors and walking around to the side so that the men in the cockpit could see them.
The starter motor in the ancient craft groaned, the four-bladed propeller turned weakly. The huge radial engine fired once and then ran erratically with smoke and a bit of blue flame coming out of the exhaust stacks. The nuns backed away. The pilot gave them a mock salute, closed his cracked window and, without any further exchange of pleasantries, the AN-2 rumbled away to the end of the strip. The engine
ran up to full power and the beast lurched down the pot-holed runway, suddenly leaping into the air after what seemed to be only a few feet of takeoff roll. All three nuns made the sign of the cross as the plane entered the overcast and was gone.
In spite of having the nun’s blessing, the trip was not pleasant for the three mortals on board. The co-pilot looked back at the naked young woman bound in the shape of a cross on the cabin floor, whistled and went back to trying to keep the rattling aircraft in the air and climbing high enough to get over the next mountain ridge. Fog and rain further hampered their efforts and they were often making steep banking turns away from peaks that suddenly leapt out of the clouds while they looked for a way through the storm. The plane leaked badly. As was common in such aircraft, water from the rainstorm surged through the engine and into the cockpit through the minimal instrument panel, soaking the two pilots and running down the deck, giving Lucy a freezing shower. Lucy twisted and moaned into the gag and hood as the aircraft was battered and tossed about. After three horrible hours of turbulence, hammering icy rain and sudden updrafts, the craft descended into a small valley between towering mountains, dropped like a rock and flared at the last moment onto another terribly short, muddy strip.
The two flyers, who throughout the flight were greatly preoccupied with staying alive, had briefly inspected their cargo visually the moment they were at cruise altitude and then ignored her. They now untied Lucy, gave her a thin blanket, a drink of vodka, and told her they were sorry about whatever was happening to her. Then they passed the nearly naked, shivering girl out the doors to a man who looked like a common street bum. He wore an old felt hat without a brim, a ragged coat and high rubber boots. On his hands were fingerless cotton gloves. Without a word, he grabbed Lucy roughly, threw her down on the muddy ground, retied her hands and feet in a mild hogtie and rolled her up in a rug that he then tossed into the bed of an ancient Isuzu pick-up truck. He started the engine and roared away, leaving the pilots to contemplate the seemingly remote possibility of getting their craft airborne from this hellishly short and crummy runway.
Summer School & After School: The Ponygirl Omnibus Edition Page 23