Alex Glauberman Mysteries Vol 1-3

by Dick Cluster

  “Jud! Keine Bewegung! Schweig!” Like a train barreling out of a tunnel, the meaning of the hiss loomed up at Alex, big and loud. “Jew! Don’t move! Shut up!” It might have been another dream, but Alex opened his eyes into a blinding light surrounded by darkness.

  “Das ist ein Messer!” the hiss said. Alex swallowed and nodded a millimeter to show he understood. A knife.

  “Passport!”

  Alex slowly doubled his left arm back, hand toward his ear, to pluck his passport loose. The light— a flashlight— disappeared from his eyes, but before he could adjust to the change, the blinding circle came back. Alex listened hard to the sounds of breathing. Only one breath was close by, and only that one sounded awake: a lone assailant, with both hands busy.

  “American Jew!” the hiss came again. “Where is Meyer? When do you meet?”

  “Wer?” Alex whispered. He whispered the question so as not to alarm. He kept his left arm doubled back and ready.

  “Der Mischling,” the urgent voice said. The mongrel, that meant. There was not going to be any reasoning with this man. There were not going to be any guessing games, either.

  “Fuck you,” Alex answered, in English. His left hand snapped over onto the knife-holder’s wrist. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to drive the blade away from his jugular. When he wasn’t dead, he slammed his hand backward against where the source of the hiss ought to be. Then he rolled off the bed, against something. He butted. His head hit something that was solid at first, and then gave.

  The attacker slipped and landed on the sleeping man, then regained his feet and withdrew into the corridor. The sleeper, no longer sleeping, snapped on the light by his head and said something in French that Alex didn’t understand. In the dim glow, Alex saw what he was looking for: a switchblade, maybe five inches long. A wet dark red was smeared along one of the sharp, symmetrical, converging edges. Alex scooped the knife up with one hand. He explored with the other through a tear in his shirt.

  Blood welled over his collarbone. It was a steady flow, but it did not spurt. Alex pulled himself up and stepped into the corridor in time to see a figure disappear toward the front of the train. He sliced off enough of the bottom of his shirt to make a decent compress. Pressing it tight against the cut, he stumbled the way the figure had gone. At the end of the car he flipped the door handle down with the hand that gripped the knife. He hoped to hell his platelets were in good shape. If he needed two hands, the clotting action was going to be up to them.

  The door swung open onto the darkened, jouncing platform where the two cars met. It swung open, and then it tried to swing shut. Alex threw his left shoulder into the door, turning to brace his right hip against the frame. His bruised ribs complained. Through the opening, he slashed at cold air with his blade. That was stupid. The man had to be behind the door. Alex twisted into the empty space, letting the door shut.

  Under his socks the coupled cars shifted, but the footing was not bad. The ends of the cars were covered by a sort of floor, and the rushing world outside was cordoned off with steel and glass. The force that had swung the door back was now a shadowy silhouette against the moonlit window. It became a mustached man in a leather jacket, lunging forward with outstretched hands. Alex swiped again with the blade. This time he connected. The man landed at his feet. Alex dropped on him and swiveled around, riding him like a horse. An exhilaration— a rodeo cowboy’s rush— came with ending up on top. A thrill of being in action pounded through his veins, even as he could feel blood dripping out. He pressed the point of the knife to the back of the prone man’s neck.

  “Dass ist ein Messer,” he said. “Wer ist dein Chef?”

  Chef— the word came out of its own accord. Alex had always enjoyed calling Hans Heidenfelter Chef. He had relished the idea of a mechanic as cook— tuning an engine the way a chef might taste and season a soup. In German it meant chief. Boss.

  “Who’s your boss?” he demanded now. “Who pays you?” He kept all his weight on the man’s back, the point of the blade against the short hair below the base of the skull. The man held still.

  “Verstehe nicht.”

  “Bullshit,” Alex retorted. “Du verstehst.” With his free hand he tried to limit the flow of his own blood. But the hand that held the knife was beginning to shake. He forgot about clotting and he gripped the knife harder, with two hands. If the man under him was another messenger from Jack Moselle, Alex wanted to know it. Moselle’s tentacles might be many and slippery, but for the moment this one was caught.

  “You understand me. Who pays you? Then you can go.”

  “Gespenst des Hitlers,” the man spat out. Hitler’s ghost. He heaved upward, leaving Alex a split second to plunge the knife in or get out of the way.

  A split second was long enough. A quick plunge, a hard plunge between the vertebrae and into the spinal cord, would sever the nerves. It would slit the wires that made the machine work. No more current to the pump, no further instructions to the lungs. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men could never put little Nazi together again. It would be so clear, so simple, so fairy-tale bright— to kill an evil thing and to leave it behind him, dead in his path. But Alex stood up, the knife extended like a cross to ward off ghosts. In that split second he was both glad and sorry to find that it was one thing to fight, to draw blood, but another to kill for the pure power of it.

  The man on the floor wriggled back, his spinal cord intact. He rose warily, one hand gripping the other wrist. As the man got up, Alex felt the train begin to slow.

  “Raus,” he commanded. He pointed the knife at the far door. Power was still his, but not so much. “Get out. That way. Now.”

  When the man stood framed in the doorway, Alex took one hand from the knife to reach behind him for the handle of the door to his own car. He steadied himself, then flipped it down. For another second they eyed each other warily. Alex saw the suspended conflict of hate and fear on the man’s face. He was shocked to think that it must mirror what showed on his own. Then the train braked more sharply, the cars shifting heavily underfoot. The attacker turned his leather back and vanished. Alex looked at the blade in his hand and slowly folded it shut against his leg. A conductor called out “Hannover, absteigen. Für Hamburg, bitte hier umsteigen. Für Frankfurt, umsteigen.”

  Get off for Hannover, change for Hamburg and Frankfurt. Get off, or stay on board through to Berlin. Alex tossed the knife and the bloody cloth into a corner and hurried back to his compartment. The other occupants were wide awake now, and staring, but Alex only reached in to grab shoes, coat, ticket, and passport from the bed. The windbreaker covered his wound. In the corridor, he kept one hand inside, bunching his shirt against the slash as best he could. The train had braked to a slow glide. Station lights showed through the corridor windows. A few departing passengers lined up behind Alex, rubbing their eyes and talking in whispers.

  When the train stopped, the conductor opened the door to reveal oncoming passengers waiting below. Only one of them interested Alex— a big woman in loose purple pants under a green, army-surplus-type field jacket. She carried a brown canvas duffel bag slung by a strap over one shoulder. To the strap of the bag was pinned a wilted white blossom on a long stem.

  Alex jumped down and took her arm. Her hair was blond, as he’d imagined, though wilder. Her eyes, taking him in, were neither sad nor dark, but frank and blue. He noticed he was holding her arm tightly for support. The one word that came from his mouth sounded more pleading than he meant:

  “Cynthia?”

  “Alex Glauberman?”

  “Yes.” He answered quickly but quietly. “Couchette number one-oh-four, halfway down. Please. I’ve got a soft navy-blue bag, just the one. Get it for me, and come right back. Watch yourself. I met a man with a knife, looking for you. I ought to get to a hospital fairly quick.”

  17. More to Do with Freud

  The matter-of-fact men and women in white cleaned the caked blood from the right side of Alex’s chest and to
ok two tubes of fresh blood from his left arm. Then they sewed him up, eight stitches, and told him in German to keep lying down. A while later, a uniformed policeman came in. Cynthia Meyer was with him.

  Under the fluorescent surgical lighting, Cynthia’s round, pink face revealed its share of wrinkles. Her hands, in fists, rested on wide hips. Her mouth was framed by her father’s pale, translucent lips, but she parted them in an inviting, crooked smile that, despite the circumstances, did not appear sad. Alex wanted to ask how the man with the switchblade had known to ask for her, and why.

  “I am to translate,” she said, in her ironic, American-accented English. “If I give you any advice while I translate, please take it.”

  The policeman handed Alex back his passport. Cynthia had presented this item to the graveyard-shift admitting clerk when she had bullied their way through red tape earlier. Alex hadn’t been able to follow the rapid-fire interchange, but he’d been thankful for the bullying. Before that, on the quick trip to the hospital, there had been just time enough for him to give her his medical data and a quick summary of events on the Ost-West Express. In return she’d told him that, if anyone asked, they had never before met or planned to meet. She was a random Good Samaritan, that was all.

  “How did you get this wound?” the policeman asked.

  He didn’t sound particularly curious.

  “On the train. Somebody called me a Jew— which I am— and stuck a knife at my throat. I tried to get away, and he cut me. I did get away, but I decided I better get fixed up.”

  I cut him too, Alex thought, but for the moment, anyway, it seemed best to leave that part out. Alex’s own prints would be on the handle of the knife, which someone, sooner or later, would find. A Jew’s word against a German’s— who had started what? Where did paranoia end, and caution begin?

  “Why didn’t you call a conductor to help you?”

  “I don’t know. I wanted a hospital more. I’ve been taking medications that can have serious side effects on my blood.”

  As Cynthia translated, the policeman nodded. Presumably the doctor who’d done the sewing would have certified the existence of Alex’s extenuating tumors. A man in Alex’s condition might be expected to show a few lapses of judgment. Maybe that would explain the bruises on his face, too.

  “And you were traveling to?” Cynthia translated that as, “And where was the next stop on your vacation?”

  “West Berlin. I’m planning to spend a few days looking around, then make a few more stops on my way back to London. Or I was. Does this kind of thing happen very often?”

  The cop shook his head emphatically. “Nein. Never, in my experience. Can you describe this person?”

  “A man with a mustache— early thirties, I’d guess— brown leather jacket, leather collar. Short hair, kind of light brown.”

  The description rated a few notes on a pad. “And if the police in Berlin succeed in finding this man when the train arrives, would you be able to identify him?”

  “Yes.”

  “When you leave the hospital, where will you go?”

  “If he is not continuing on to Berlin,” Cynthia said, “I will help him to find a hotel.” She said it as if she had staked a claim that she was daring the policeman to challenge.

  The cop looked her up and down. “Here or in Berlin,” he told her to say to Alex, “please keep the police informed of your address. Your inconveniencing makes me sorry. It is very unusual. I really do not think anything like this will happen again.”

  With that, he turned on his heel and left. Cynthia made a face at him, for Alex’s benefit, before she followed. A doctor appeared, introducing himself as Dr. Bazargan, a resident specializing in oncology. The cancer doctor wore thick, heavy-rimmed glasses and a heavily burdened air. His skin was faintly brown, and his accent British.

  “I’ve been summoned from my bed to reassure you,” he said. “We won’t have laboratory results until tomorrow. But any depressive effect of cyclophosphamide on blood factors usually takes at least another week. It can vary with the kinetics of the patient, or course, but the first effect is on the production of stem cells. Only after a period of differentiation will this result in a depressed white count or subnormal production of platelets.”

  Alex nodded wearily at the jargon. Dr. Bazargan did not appear interested in conversation. Alex knew the physiology, having absorbed it in doses over the past months. He knew he could possibly have gotten himself stitched up, reasonably safely, without copping to his malady at all. But he feared asking his body to take too much, feared asking for too many favorable rolls of the dice from fate, from change, from God.

  “Nonetheless, we want you to remain here until your counts come back from the lab. If you were to show any lowering of clotting or immune function, then we would want to keep you here while you heal. There would be a possibility of internal bleeding and infection. We would want to monitor you for that.”

  Alex nodded again. That was what he’d come for. Waiting, monitoring, observing— these were all ceremonies in a ritual he’d grudgingly accepted. In this ritual, one did not rush into the ring with cape and spear to do battle with the bull. One led the bull, or followed it, keeping one’s distance, by means of a long stick and a ring through the nose. One kept a sharp, doubting eye on oneself, as well as on the bull.

  “Well, if you have no questions,” the resident went on, “you’ll be moved into a regular room for what’s left of the night. I’ll stop by tomorrow late in the morning, I would guess. Most likely I’ll have good news, and say good-bye.”

  “Oh— and my, uh, new friend?” Alex asked. “The lady who brought me here?”

  The doctor— Iranian, Alex decided— delayed going back to bed for long enough to leer conspiratorially.

  “I wish I were so lucky in the ladies I met. If you’d like, I will inform her you aren’t in any danger. I’ll tell her she may come again to see you in the morning, if she desires.”

  * * *

  In the morning Alex stared into a bright, unflattering bathroom mirror. His bruised cheek was much improved, but his face as a whole had a pale, haggard look. His hair was full of knots and his beard entangled with bits of lint and some remnants of dried blood. He supposed he must have wiped his hand on it, the night before. All around, he looked like a medieval woodcut of a tattered ghetto Jew. He got back into bed to await developments.

  A nurse arrived and pulled back the green plastic room divider to reveal a silent old man attached to too many bottles in the other bed. She rearranged the bottles with a perfunctory greeting. She closed the curtain and told Alex in German that the doctor would be in to see him before too long. Soon afterward, Cynthia arrived without escort by the police.

  She had on the same loose deep purple drawstring pants she’d worn the night before. In place of the olive drab coat, she wore a black vinyl jacket zipped halfway up. Under the jacket was a T-shirt with a silk-screened slogan or pattern, Alex couldn’t see what. She watched Alex watching her and said, “Luckily I have at least one acquaintance in Hannover, so I managed to beg a bed for the night. Now let’s see the damage.”

  Alex unsnapped his hospital gown at the shoulder. “Eight stitches,” he said. The stray hairs below his collarbone had been shaved to sanitize the repair job. His skin looked red, raw, until the black hair began again. Did German men have this much hair on their solid pink chests? he wondered. He wondered whose bed Cynthia had begged for the night.

  She patted his shoulder and said it appeared he would live. She remained standing next to the bed, loose fists on her hips like the night before.

  “Are you experienced at such combats?” she asked.

  Alex laughed at the phrasing. His own musings had given him a ready answer.

  “I was pretty scrappy growing up, but the last switchblade I handled was the one my friend Tony used to carry on his nighttime adventures into Manhattan. We were fifteen, I think. I never used it. I don’t think he did, either. Not then, anyway. I don’
t know what’s happened to him since. Any word on the fellow I tangled with last night?”

  Cynthia reached into the purse she’d dropped on the visitors’ chair, a patterned woolen bag of what looked like Middle Eastern design. She rummaged as she talked, finally pulling out a small bundle wrapped in white waxed paper.

  “Our stalwart police didn’t find your alleged Nazi stepping off the train in Berlin. Either he got off there undetected, or he continued eastward out of their reach. So they say you might as well go on your way. And if I know what’s good for me, I’ll get out of their hair. They don’t say that, but by now their computers will have told them something about me. I brought you some pastries. Here.”

  Alex accepted two sweet, sticky rolls. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be mothered, or distracted from his line of questioning. But he was hungry, and there was no indication anyone was planning to serve him breakfast. He doubted that his roommate received any solid food at all.

  “There’s literally no place he could have got out between here and Berlin?”

  “Practically speaking, no. One travels on a sealed train, like Lenin.” She smiled the crooked smile again, lips parted over white teeth. Alex took the comment for a test, to see how poorly educated was this American she had been thrown in with.

  “The Kaiser allowed Lenin to pass through Germany to Russia,” he recited between bites of sweet roll. “The German general staff hoped the revolution would pull Russia’s troops out of the war. But they wanted to make sure the Bolshevik leader wouldn’t get a chance to infect the Kaiser’s army during his passage. By the way, I think it was probably your Nazi, not mine. He seemed pretty sure of the fact that I was on my way to meet you.”