by Andrew Pyper
* * *
SHE LETS HIM IN FIRST before closing the door behind her and kissing him in the narrow entrance. He tastes as good as she hoped. And now his hands are sliding up her back, one holding her firm against him and the other dropping to her ass.
Instead of the bed he directs her toward the club chair in the corner, undresses her, then lets Lily do the same to him. The seat of the chair is set so low that when he sits his mouth is even with her belly. That’s where he begins. His tongue traveling down, strong and warm.
“Come here,” he says when she finally pulls away. His hands on her narrow hips, lifting her onto him. “Like that. Yes. Like that.”
She thinks about Michael as she straddles the man in the chair. Her hands cover his face. With her fingers she sculpts Michael into existence, and once he’s there, once it’s him, she can’t resist. She takes all of him.
* * *
AFTER, LILY IS THIRSTY.
The two of them lie naked on the bed, cooling the sweat from their skin. It’s not water she wants, it’s more vodka.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” she tells Cal.
She pulls on her shirt and pants and makes her way down to the bar. On the way she catches a red-cheeked glimpse of herself in a hallway mirror. She looks like Lily Dominick, but not like herself. An actor whose performance has demolished her reserve, leaving her at once sly and reckless.
That’s not an actor, her inner voice counters. That’s you.
At the bar she orders two vodkas then brings them back upstairs. The door to her room clicks shut behind her. That’s when she notices the lights are off. She’s sure they were on when she left.
“Cal?”
Lily steps through the little hallway and into the wider space of the room. There’s a new smell that wasn’t here before. The faint musk of horse hide.
The bedside lamp clicks on. It reveals two things to Lily in the same instant.
The first is Michael, an outline of blood around his lips. The second is Cal, spread out on the bed, his mouth lockjawed open in a silent scream.
Lily gags. It’s what prevents a scream of her own from being voiced.
“May I?” Michael asks. He points his chin at the drink in her right hand. “Your friend won’t need it.”
He takes the glass from her hand, gulping the liquor down and running his tongue around his lips when he’s finished.
Lily is trembling now, the sly and reckless actor abandoning her. It leaves her sickened by the dead body on the bed and terrified of his murderer, now standing almost within arm’s reach in her room. More than anything what turns her stomach is how she’d imagined it was Michael she’d made love to in her mind, his body she’d brought into hers.
“You killed him!”
“You need to be more careful.”
“Careful?”
“He was one of them.”
Lily pulls her eyes from the dead man’s body. “You’re wrong,” she says. “You’re fucking insane.”
“He was going to slit your throat.” Michael bends and pulls a switchblade from the man’s jacket pocket. Presses the release and the blade flicks out.
Lily backs away from him, putting her glass down on the bureau. Moments ago she was floating, a new power blooming within her. Now she’s shaking and she can’t stop.
“I’m finished,” she says. “I’m going home.”
“No. You’re not.”
“Because you won’t let me?”
“Because you’re halfway to learning an astonishing truth.”
Lily feels like she’s going to collapse. But she doesn’t.
“You didn’t come here for the knife. That’s the rational thing you’ve told yourself, but it’s not the real reason. You hope that, if you get some answers to fill the spaces within you, you’ll be able to see yourself as whole for the first time in your life. To see if it works you need me to tell you about your mother, what I alone can impart to you. And I will, Lily. I promise I will. But first, you must understand who I am.”
His words weaken and galvanize her at the same time. The same feeling she had when he’d recognized the inner absence within her when she’d stood before him in the stable in Szilvásvárad. How do you reconcile your incapacity to love? The disorientation that comes with hearing something about you, the truest thing, that until that moment has been kept hidden from yourself.
“What do I do?” she asks.
“You get away from here.” Michael places the empty glass on the pillow next to the dead man’s head. She watches it gently roll against his ear. “Before they find out you did this.”
“But I didn’t! You—”
“It’s your room. Your image on the cameras in the bar. It’s you. Because I was never here.”
Lily wants only to disappear, but doesn’t know how. “Where do I go?”
Michael rubs his eyes as if from a profound fatigue, but when he pulls his fingers away she sees the traces of blood he’d wiped from his lashes.
“I’ve left an address in your bag,” he says. “There you’ll find a man. His name is Eric Green. He will put to rest any remaining doubts you have about me.”
It goes against reason—she’s aware of this, tags it as such in her mind—but buried in her compulsion to escape is a desire to hold him. But then he speaks again and she catches the glint in his mouth.
“Don’t disappoint me, Lily. We are on a path and we must keep to it or risk everything. Do as I say. Go now,” he says, the metal teeth glowing. “Go!”
18
* * *
She has come here to retrieve some part of her mother. It’s worth so much to her the threat of death hasn’t stopped her, the meetings with a mass murderer, the voice within her reminding her what a fool she is. But is compulsion alone enough to explain why she’s made these decisions?
What does mother mean to Lily?
It’s a Dr. Lily sort of question. One she puts to herself.
She remembers her hair. More precisely, Lily remembers her mother brushing her hair, the long brushstrokes she counted out in the evenings no matter the shabby room they found themselves in or the absence of any witness to their dishevelment.
She remembers the singing. They must have been made-up songs, because Lily has never heard anything on the radio that she connected to the melodies her mother voiced. Ballads, lullabies. Music that Lily found comfort in, but also something unsettling, as if her mother’s voice provided the soundtrack to her dreams, which invariably took unexpectedly frightening turns.
She remembers her mother’s awful cooking.
It may have been the limitations of living on the road, grabbing whatever they could from convenience stores and truck stops, then the canned goods and gamey moose meat that sustained them at the cabin. Lily’s body reacts to the very idea of the meals her mother made her eat. The steaming soups, always too spicy, too heavy with oil and flavors that tasted to her like weird mushrooms and pinecones. And the teas too. Homemade brews flavored with anise seeds and menthol and other powders and twigs that burned Lily’s nose.
“Drink it,” her mother would say, not forcing her but not letting her leave the cup full either. “It’s good for you, honeysweet.”
“It stings.”
“That means it’s doing what it’s supposed to do.”
“What’s it supposed to do?”
Lily remembers her mother’s arms pulling her close, the smoky smell of her sweater, the warm skin of her freckled throat.
* * *
COMPARED TO BUDAPEST, GENEVA IS a tidily organized city of pretty squares and identically sensible low-rise façades. Europe without the old bullet holes in the bricks.
5 Quai du Mont-Blanc. Geneva. Green.
This is the address Michael left in her knapsack. Where she didn’t have to go but feels he would have punished her, or worse, if she hadn’t. But her fear of him isn’t the overriding reason she travels to Switzerland. She knows he’s right: if she wants to learn what he can tea
ch her about herself, she must keep to the path.
Before she walks the short distance to the address from the Hotel d’Angleterre she decides to change herself. There’s an undeniable thrill that comes with using the scissors she bought at the pharmacy to turn her pageboy into a spiky punk cut. She also calls down to the concierge and sends someone out to buy her a high-collared coat, makeup, sunglasses. Her intent is to discourage Black Parka or the police or anyone else from identifying her, but the truth is there’s a pleasure in altering her appearance that has little to do with these practical concerns. There’s power in changing yourself, and Lily feels it travel through her like the first tinglings of fever.
She approaches 5 Quai du Mont-Blanc by way of an alley. Once inside, she buzzes the name GREEN—606 on the tenants’ list.
“Yes?” an older man’s voice crackles at her from the speaker.
“My name is Lily Dominick. I’ve come to talk to you about Michael Eszes?”
“Those names mean nothing to me.”
“What about the man who never ages. Does that ring a bell?”
There’s a pause so long Lily is certain he will simply click off and leave her here. But then the inside door is buzzing and she pushes it open and starts up the stairs to the sixth floor.
She knocks and it takes some time for the man on the other side of the door to unlock it. When he finally opens it he scans Lily from head to toe and looks behind her to confirm she’s alone before stepping to the side.
“Come in,” he says. “Sit.”
It’s not easy. The whole apartment is stacked with record books, documents, binders, filing cabinets. A warren of paths lead from the door to the kitchen, the bathroom, a desk. Green is no taller than Lily, so that when he moves between the towers of printed material it makes her think of a child working through a labyrinth.
He props himself on the arm of a chair and Lily finds a stool stacked with old magazines. She moves them to the floor and sits.
Green looks at her intently through glasses in serious need of cleaning. “Who sent you?”
“I told you his name.”
“Who are you working for?”
“No one. I’m a forensic psychiatrist with an unnamed client who escaped the facility where we were holding him. For reasons known only to him, he directed me here.”
Green leans back and his chair yips at the strain. “What did he do?”
“Do?”
“If he was in a forensic psychiatric facility, I’m guessing he committed a crime.”
“An assault.”
“Details, please.”
“He ripped the ears off a man.”
“No one he knew?”
“A stranger.”
Green looks around his desk for something and, when he finds a stained coffee mug, takes a sip of the dregs.
“Do you know who I am, Dr. Dominick? My vocation?”
“No.”
“I’m a criminal investigator. A specialized one. In journalistic shorthand, I’m a Nazi hunter.”
Lily crosses her arms. Uncrosses them. “I’m not sure I know why I’m here,” she says.
“I do,” he says. “The one who directed you here wants me to show you something.”
“And will you show me?”
He ponders this a moment before rising. “I suppose you’ll be safer if I do than if I don’t. Either way, I hope you appreciate the danger you’re in. Not to mention the danger you’ve brought upon me by being here.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t—”
Green raises a hand to cut her off. He opens the drawers of one of the filing cabinets next to the window behind her, pulling out what look to be photo albums. Lands them on Lily’s knees.
“The better part of my life’s work has been spent finding war criminals and bringing them to trial,” he says, sweeping a hand around the apartment to show the physical evidence of his labors. “Almost all the men and women we’ve identified have either been captured, imprisoned, or have died of natural causes. There is one, however, who is at large and remains something of a mystery to me.”
“Because you haven’t found him yet?”
“Not exactly,” he says, and pauses, searching for the words. “Because I don’t know what he is.”
Green opens the top album on Lily’s knee to a page marked a quarter way through. Taped to the paper is a photo, slightly blurred and poorly lit, as if taken in haste. A group of men in civilian trenchcoats and tweed jackets, most smoking, none smiling, about a dozen in all, and flanking them a pair of German officers in uniform. The men are arranged in two rows, none looking particularly pleased to have their picture taken. The room they stand in is mostly bare except for detailed maps on the wall and, through a window to the side, the spire of a church.
“What’s this?” Lily asks.
“The only known photograph of a special unit assembled in Leipzig in April 1942. The German advancement had slowed and the Allied Forces, for the first time, were seeing genuine opportunities for counterattack. One of Berlin’s responses was the creation of unorthodox approaches. Saboteurs, the bombing of nonmilitary targets. And these men in the photo. Men who weren’t recruited from the existing military ranks. Instead, they came from prisons, asylums. They were given language training as required—French mostly, though some were intended to make their way to English soil—and put into the field.”
“What was their assignment?”
“Demoralization. In some instances, they were tasked with the assassination of specific individuals, but others were left to their own inclination. Their job was to give another face to Nazi power. Not just superior military might as shown by their tanks and armies, but a capacity to strike innocents in their own homes.”
As he speaks, Lily notices that Green is considerably older than she first thought. She’d guessed seventy at first, but would now add another decade. And along with his wrinkles, she can also see the rage in him. A darkening that builds behind the smudged lenses of his spectacles.
“So how does this relate to the man who sent me?”
Green taps the photo. Lily looks down and studies it again. And then she spots him. Michael. Standing in the second row, his face averted.
“It looks like him,” Lily says. “But that isn’t possible. This picture is over seventy years old. But the man I know . . . he looks exactly the same.”
“Keep looking.”
Lily flips the page and finds three other photos. All of them taken with a telephoto lens so that, again, the images are less than crystal clear. But it appears to be him. Coming out of an office building, entering the Paris Métro, walking down a busy Tokyo street. Judging by the cars and cell phones, all the photos were taken in recent years.
“Franz Bachmeier. That was his name when he enlisted,” Green says. “Of course, the name is meaningless, considering how many he’s adopted over his life. My colleagues and I have been in pursuit of him for some time.”
“Bachmeier,” Lily says, trying the name out for herself. “Do you know what happened to him in the war?”
“We think he was deployed to Poland. But soon afterward, his record comes to an end.”
“Then he must have been killed. And these other photos—they’re another person. They must be.”
“No. There is evidence that he was imprisoned soon after war broke out. Three years later he took the opportunity for freedom when it was offered to him. And then he did what he’s best at. He disappeared.”
“You say he might have been in prison. For what crime?”
“What do you think, Doctor?” Green says, closing the album and lifting it into his arms.
“Murder?” She says it tentatively, and he nods, then returns the album to the file drawer he got it from. He remains at a distance from Lily, the wan light from the window making him appear more blurred than the man in the photos.
“I have done what he wanted me to,” he says. “And now I’m wondering why.”
“I don’t have th
e answer to that. He’s obviously done a lot of work to support the fiction he’s now unspooling for me. Some of that work involves committing terrible crimes. But people don’t live to be two hundred years old, Mr. Green.”
He combs the white wisps of his remaining hair with his fingers, a tic that might have been necessary when he was younger but now looks like a strange way of scratching his scalp.
“The Nazis enlisted some of the finest scientists of the age in pursuing experiments that wouldn’t be permitted previously,” Green says. “Many of them obscene. The pursuit of the supernatural. Immortality. Perhaps in this man they succeeded and didn’t see it before he slipped out of their grasp.”
“I don’t doubt your authority in your area of expertise, Mr. Green. But my expertise would suggest a far more likely explanation. The man I’ve encountered is an extremely disturbed person who has built a world, an elaborate stage set, to fit his own mythology. As far as I know, he’s compensated you—or perhaps threatened you—to show me these doctored photos as a way of supporting his tale. He’s an extraordinary man, no question. But he can’t be what he says he is.”
Green is so still that Lily thinks his mind has wandered elsewhere. Then he takes a single step toward her before stopping, as if he can’t stomach the very smell of her.
“This is not a practical joke, Dr. Dominick. I will forgive the offensiveness of your suggestion on the grounds that you are struggling with accepting what is plainly before you. But while I cannot explain what Bachmeier is, I know he exists, just as I know that evil exists. Do I need to present evidence of the latter to you as well?” He gestures both arms at all the stacked records and papers.
“I meant no offense. But you have to—”
“I would like you to go now, please.”
He’s already making his way to the door, unlocking the bolts and chains. Lily follows him and when the door is just wide enough for her to slip through he gestures for her to exit.
“I’m truly sorry,” she says.
“Maybe you are. Maybe not. But I fear you will be soon.”