“How many cases have you had?”
“This is my fifth.”
“You’ve solved four cases?”
Bruno’s blush was visible, even in the crimson glow of the Budweiser sign. “Just the last one, actually. I didn’t solve the others in time.”
“Okay. So why the deadline? What if you’re close to figuring something out?”
He thoughtfully spun his empty glass. “The whole reason I started this was to stop obsessing. The deadline is the deal I made with myself, so I stick to it.”
He was clearly holding something back, but for the moment Francine let it go. “And people pay you for this?”
“I should’ve emphasized the ‘free’ in freelance. Can’t exactly point to my track record and ask for money, so it’s all been pro bono so far.”
Francine’s head was starting to spin from the alcohol, the cold of the peas, and the fact that her initial, trusting opinion of Bruno might have been on-target after all. But before she let herself get carried away…
“Did you like me when we met? Or did I imagine that? Are you even single?”
His brow furrowed on a pretty simple yes or no question. “Kind of.”
“Kind of? Jesus, Bruno. Don’t be slimy.”
“I’m not single.”
“Are you married?”
“I’m…not single.”
Incomplete, but enough. Romance wasn’t in the cards. Francine was more disappointed than she wanted to admit, but maybe they could thrive in a different way.
“All right,” she said. “I just needed to know how to handle myself in our partnership.”
“Partnership?”
“I’m going to help you with your case.”
“Oh, no.” Bruno shook his head fervently. “I only told you all this so you wouldn’t hate me, not because—”
“You don’t have a monopoly on amateur sleuthing. I’ve been investigating this spooky little neighborhood, too. The Mad Russian. The dead goat. The bloody backpack.”
“Bloody backpack?”
“Belongs to Eric Banderwalt, the kid who lives down the street from you, Mr. Shut-In. I know a bit about everyone on the block, because I snoop around, and I talk to people.”
“I’m not so good at that part.”
“Yeah, no kidding. That’s why you need me.” Francine drained the remaining bit of scotch in her glass. “I’m social concentrate.”
Bruno frowned. “I don’t think—”
“You know what hairdressers have to do? Talk to people. A lot. All while using scissors a centimeter from eyes and ears. And if you get an angle wrong, it’s tears from kids or angry housewives demanding to see the manager. Some people want to be flattered and some don’t want to talk at all. And you have to instinctively know who wants what, or the tip suffers. The humble beautician is therapist, artist, and flawless actor, all while keeping hair out of the shirt collar.”
“So being a hairdresser makes you a good detective?”
She shrugged. “Does being a history teacher?”
“Fair point.” He swirled the green and yellow bottle of scotch between his fingers for a moment. “What would you get out of helping me?”
“What do you care?”
“Let’s say I do.”
Francine evaluated his face. He’d been honest with her…
“Three reasons. One, I have a lifelong obsession with Nancy Drew that partially informed who I am. As of late, that part of me has been in limbo.” She shook her glass for another hit of booze and Bruno gave her a splash.
“How come?”
“For reasons we don’t need to get into just yet, if ever.”
“Okay. Two?”
“Two, I think there’s a natural detective gene in everyone that yearns to carve a tiny slice out of chaos and try to make sense of it. The scenery is nice around here, but some of these folks are hiding bad things, I can feel it. There are guns in garages, and petty rivalries, and I think maybe a good deal more.”
“And three?”
Francine exhaled. “Three is, I could really use a win right now. You either understand that or you don’t. No explanation available.”
For a moment, she thought she recognized a simmering romantic flair in his eyes. But he blinked it away, possibly out of consideration for whatever girlfriend or wife waited for him back in New York.
He extended his hand across the bar. “A professional partnership, even though neither of us is a professional.”
Francine smiled and shook the offered hand, feeling a little anchor lift inside of her.
“Okay,” she said. “I showed you my case. Now show me yours.”
Bruno’s expression sobered.
“What do you think of Roland Gerber?”
✶ ✶ ✶ ✶
For a moment, Francine didn’t say anything. Then she burst out laughing.
“Roland? What’d he do? Steal the Lindbergh baby?”
“He’s a man of a certain age, from a certain part of the globe.”
“Switzerland?”
“So he says. I think Germany. He arrived in the US around 1950. As for his activities in the forties and thirties…I have some theories.”
Francine clued into the implication and almost slipped off her bar stool.
“You think he’s a fucking Nazi?”
“My client thinks he’s a fucking Nazi,” Bruno corrected. “But I think she might be right.”
Francine paused, then laughed again, so hard she dropped the bag of peas from her ear. The brittle bag burst on the bar, spilling wrinkled green orbs onto the Barbicide carpet.
“Bruno, maybe you should be a writer, ’cause that is creative. Have you met Roland Gerber? I have afternoon tea and cookies with the guy. He’s an old softie. Totally harmless.”
“And what about fifty years ago? What if everything—the frail movements, the genteel attitude, the Swiss upbringing—what if it’s all an act? If he’s the guy I’m looking for, he’s been hiding for half a century. The routine’s probably pretty seamless by now.”
A sharp corner of the cracked-leather barstool dug into Francine’s thigh. Her amused doubt was wearing off. “Why do you think he’s…that?”
“I’m working for a woman named Ida Nussbaum. A Holocaust survivor.”
“Holy shit.” The amused part of Francine’s disbelief evaporated completely.
“She’s looking for a Brigadeführer, an SS commander. Nasty guy, even for a Nazi. No death certificate, no trial at Nuremberg, no indication he stayed in Europe. But there are a few suggesting he left. Possibly came to America. Possibly to Hawthorn Woods.”
“Holy shit,” Francine said again. A long silence followed. “What’s his name? The SS guy.”
“Oskar Lischka.”
The mysteries in Hawthorn Woods kept leapfrogging one another in magnitude, but this felt like the big one at last. Of course it would involve someone who’d been quickly becoming one of Francine’s favorite people on the planet. How could she go after Roland?
But there was always the chance that Bruno’s suspicion was incorrect. Maybe it was nothing more than a simple misunderstanding. If that was the case, she might be able to help prove a friend’s innocence.
“I don’t want my nephew around any of this stuff,” she said. “Can we work here at your place?”
“I’ve been working out of the kitchen. All the research and Oreos you could ever want.”
“Okay. Nine o’clock tomorrow morning.” She swallowed the last of her scotch. “And you’d better not be lying about those Oreos.”
Chapter 18
I would certainly enjoy beating criminals at their own game.
[ x ] TRUE [ ] FALSE
Francine passed under the willow at an enthusiastic pace, her arms full of books and a Welcome-to-Hawthorn-Woods coffee cake Laura Jean had left on her doorstep. It was Day One of her and Bruno’s official joint investigation. So far this morning, she’d been nervous, excited, then nervous again.
Would her hobbyist detective skills make the grade? Would Bruno be a rigid taskmaster or an encouraging teammate? Would there be an air of forbidden romance hanging in the room? She knocked on the front door to start Francine Haddix and the Case of the Fugitive Nazi.
Bruno opened the door and smiled. “C’mon in.”
Francine walked into a house that had the empirical requirements of floors, walls, ceiling…and practically nothing else. “Haven’t unpacked the chandelier yet, huh?”
“It’s pathetic, I know,” Bruno admitted. “My bed is a wonderfully uncomfortable sectional.”
“Ah, the bachelor aesthetic.”
Bruno only grunted, neither confirming nor denying his bachelorhood as they moved into a kitchen with a strikingly singular motif. The wallpaper, drapes, tablecloth, dishtowels, cookie jar, and even a little radio on top of the fridge had the pattern or shape of a teddy bear.
“I tried to warn you,” Bruno said.
“It’s cute. In a terrifying sort of way.”
She set her books and coffee cake on the table, gawking at the amount of research in the room. South American newspaper clippings covered the backsplash, while tomes about the Third Reich rested on the stovetop and a booklet on extradition law poked out of a toaster slot. Francine relocated the last two items to mitigate the worst of the fire hazards, adding them to the esoterically organized manila folders, legal pads, photographs, and maps on the table.
Bruno grabbed a piece of coffee cake and took a bite.
“Holy cow, this is really good. You made this?”
“Uh, sure. If Laura Jean tries to take credit, don’t believe a word she says,” Francine said, still taking in the skyscrapers of research around her.
She flipped through books on the Maginot Line, blitzkrieg warfare, and the Red Ball Express, each of the subjects vaguely familiar to her. “Since I haven’t been in a history class for a decade or two, can I get a quick refresher on the war? Any relevant broad strokes, I mean.”
Bruno took another bite of cake. “Sure. 1939, German army invades Poland, does army things like kill enemy combatants and commandeer strategic locations. Standard warfare type stuff.” He brushed some crumbs from his purple plaid tie. “But the Nazis also had a plan called The Final Solution, their answer to ‘The Jewish Question.’ Since the military was a little busy, they established the Einsatzgruppen—SS Death Squads tasked with killing political leaders, nobility, and of course Jews. Some Jews were sent to the ghettos before being deported to labor or extermination camps. Some were killed on the spot. My client, Ida, lived in a town called Trnów that was too rural for the ghettos. But eventually, an Einsatzgruppen battalion showed up. That battalion was commanded by Oskar Lischka.”
“Okay, I gotta ask. If Lischka is such a bad dude, how come there aren’t more people chasing him?”
“You mean, why does it fall to a history teacher to try to crack the case?”
She returned his grin. “No, ass, that’s not what I asked.”
“Lischka was still alive at the end of the war,” Bruno explained. “That much is documented. So in early spring of ’45, when the cracks start to show in the roof of Hitler’s Berlin bunker, Lischka exits stage left to South America. There were escape routes called ratlines that got some of the Nazi brass out of Europe. I think Lischka took the one that went from Germany to Spain to Argentina.” He dropped a finger onto a folder. “In 1951, a man believed to be Lischka is tracked down in Puerto Lobos, a tiny fishing village on the coast. By the time agents from the freshly formed Mossad arrive to investigate the tip, it’s too late. The small home on the edge of the town where Lischka is suspected to have lived is burned out.”
“Was there a body?”
Bruno nodded. “But because of the skeleton’s condition, and the fact that rural Argentinian autopsies in the fifties were less than perfect, the corpse’s identity could only be guessed. But an immolated Nazi was a satisfactory end to one of many active threads, so Lischka was pronounced dead and apprehension efforts were shifted to other fugitives.”
“So whose body was it?”
Bruno shrugged. “Probably a merchant fisherman or a vagrant. Someone who wouldn’t be missed. Lischka lures them into his little casa, and—” Bruno clucked his tongue. “Knocks them on the head with something heavy, starts the fire, and skedaddles.”
Francine tried to imagine Roland assaulting an unsuspecting Argentinian drifter. She couldn’t even form the mental picture.
“Okay, then what?”
Bruno opened the fridge and pulled a few folders from the vegetable crisper.
“Several residents of Puerto Lobos positively identified a photo of Lischka. So we definitely have him outside of Europe.” He waved a spreadsheet filled with German writing. “Lischka’s name pops up on this tax credit form from a Berlin law firm in 1966. A lot of his major assets were still frozen in bureaucratic purgatory, even twenty years after the war. Lischka thought he could get some of the money from his disputed estate, and he did, but the withdrawal showed up in some end-of-year accounting.”
“You found this?”
Bruno shrugged, but she could tell he was proud. “Like I said, I’m not terrible at the research part. Anyway, that blip on the radar tells us Lischka was alive in ’66.”
He pulled a stack of papers from the top shelf of the fridge.
“Is all this research best kept refrigerated?” Francine asked.
“A refrigerator is basically an air-conditioned filing cabinet.” He slapped the chilled papers onto the table. “This is a record of testimony at Nuremberg from an SS soldier in Lischka’s brigade. He says Lischka often talked about going to America, specifically ‘in the west or middle’ because the southern states were too black and the East Coast was too Jewish. Nice guy, huh? He said he liked the sound of the Midwest, and mentioned Indiana, Ohio, and especially Illinois by name. Apparently he had a great uncle who’d visited Chicago and liked it.”
“So what’s the play here? We hope he wears his uniform outside by accident?”
“You’d be surprised,” Bruno said. “I mean, almost every time one of these guys get lassoed, they’re holding onto something they shouldn’t. A pin. A pistol. Whatever. Something they just couldn’t let go of, because in their mind those were their glory days, the ‘greatest’ thing they’d ever do in their lives. They hold onto their past, even when it ruins them.”
Well, that sounded familiar.
“What kinds of things do you guys talk about?” Bruno asked.
“Me and Roland?” Francine stalled, in no hurry to share her scattershot attempts at divorce therapy. “Nothing in particular. Nothing that would make me think he’s anyone other than who he says he is, anyway. He did mention survival once or twice, but he also said that’s the kind of stuff eighty-year-olds think about. Which makes sense to me.”
Bruno studied her. “You’re hoping it’s not him, aren’t you?”
Francine nodded. “Does that make me a bad detective?”
“No. Everyone’s got their biases. I probably want it to be him just as bad as you don’t.”
“When I try to imagine it, I can’t. I can hardly imagine him swearing, or I don’t know, cheating at cards.”
Bruno stood and stretched, touching the tips of his fingers to his nose. “If the Swiss thing is a ruse, it’s a good one.”
“Uh, what the hell are you doing?”
“Calisthenics. I sit all day, every day. Gotta keep the blood flowing. Wanna join?”
Francine rolled her eyes. “I’m good, thanks. You were saying, about the Swiss ruse?”
“He can’t hide his accent entirely, so he explains it away with a European country. And even if someone realizes his accent is German, well, they speak German in Switzerland. Not the same German, but I doubt the residents of Hawthorn Woods are terribly discerning when it comes to the subtle variations.” He switched to a windmill stretch. “Plus, Americans love Switzerland. Mountains. Chocolate. Cute little pocketknives. And the na
me Gerber might be the smartest bit of all. It’s verifiably Swiss, and you can’t get much farther away from mass extermination than baby food. He’s done a clever job with his new identity, I’ll give him that.” He switched to a calf stretch. “Okay, so how about the goat?”
Francine felt a little embarrassed stacking Brownie the goat up against the Holocaust. “You really want to talk about that?”
“Hey, that was the deal,” Bruno said cheerily. “When we merged agencies, we merged all our cases. And, there’s always the possibility Gerber did it.”
“It’s possible. But if he’s this Lischka guy, I can’t see why he’d want to bring attention to himself.”
“I’ll admit I don’t see an immediate connection, but it’s probably hard to live like a saint for the rest of your life, even if you know what’s at stake.”
Francine cracked open one of Ellie and Pete’s encyclopedia volumes, which she’d riddled with bookmarks. “Pagans had some weird animal sacrifice rituals and a goat has certain significance for Satanists, but the Nazis didn’t do anything like that. I checked. And none of the groups used any significant triangle iconography. But here’s what I got on triangles.” She flipped to a tabbed page. “First, we have a constellation called Triangulum.”
“Really broke a sweat naming it, didn’t they?”
“Hey, I like that one. Constellations are hard to remember.” She flipped to the next bookmark. “The Boy Scouts have a few triangular patches, but Eric Banderwalt doesn’t strike me as the merit badge type.”
“That’s the bloody backpack kid?”
Francine nodded. “I know they say the guilty party is usually the person you suspect least—”
“I thought it was the person you suspect most.”
“Damn, I knew I had that backwards.” She flipped to the next bookmark. “‘Triangles are commonly associated with the Holy Trinity of Christianity and the phases of the moon. Less specific interpretations include mind, body, spirit, and past, present, future. A triangle may also represent the Eye of Providence, the Norse Valknut, or the Greek delta of change.’ So basically, it could mean anything. My only other triangle lead is Del Merlin.”
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