A Room Full of Night

by TR Kenneth

  “Yeah, I got it, but why don’t you—” Gerde’s chins went slack again, this time in fear.

  4EVER took out his gun.

  He shot him, and casually stepped away as if he’d just waved goodbye.

  Gerde screamed and watched him walk away, his eyes popped with abject terror.

  CHAPTER SIX

  STAG HEARD HARRY’S screams and instinctively bolted for the front door. He was expecting to find him fallen on the ice. Maybe a broken arm. It was unnerving to see him upright, just standing and screaming for no apparent reason. Screaming at the dirty drifts of snow edging the parking lot.

  “What the fuck, man?” Stag shouted over him. “What the fuck?”

  “He shot me! He shot me!” Harry screamed, his features screwed up with fear. “I’ve been shot!”

  Several other tenants rushed to their balconies to assess the situation. Sliding along the ice, Stag raced to Harry. “Where?”

  “Call 911!” someone shouted around them.

  “Lean on me,” Stag ordered, pulling and half-carrying Harry across the parking lot to his front door. “Can you walk? Think I can get you inside?”

  “I’ll get there. I can get there,” Harry stammered, his face ghost white.

  Stag left the front door open and pulled Harry to the futon. He then ran for a towel.

  “What the fuck happened!” he shouted, pulling open Harry’s parka.

  He was braced for the sight of blood, but there was nothing. He couldn’t find anything, and yet, Harry was still whimpering like a baby.

  “Where’d you get hurt, buddy?” he coaxed.

  “In the chest. He got me in the chest.” Harry looked down dumbly at his polar fleece. No blood in sight.

  “Where?” Stag demanded frantically.

  “Right here,” Harry whimpered, patting his chest. “He took out this black handgun and shot me. I can still feel it going in!”

  Stag pulled up the shirt and polar fleece. There was nothing. Just rolls of pasty belly flesh and a galaxy of freckles.

  “The police are coming,” announced the old hippy that lived upstairs. He stood in the doorway like an aging Jesus, his face lined with concern. “They’re sending an ambulance. What the hell happened?”

  “Checking him now,” Stag said. “Look, Harry, you saw the gun and maybe just thought—”

  “He shot me, I’m telling you! I can still feel it! Right here!” He pointed to a reddish freckle. It pretty much looked like all the rest.

  Stag nodded and stood. He could hear the faint beginnings of sirens. “Not long now,” he offered. “Did the guy steal your wallet?”

  Harry had begun to sweat. “He said they wanted to talk to you. Ask you some questions, then he pulled out this gun! This really strange gun!” Harry looked to be panicking all over again. “He left this card. Man, if he wanted to scare me, he sure as fuck did!”

  “Calm down. They’re almost here. Just hold on.” Stag ground his teeth. He didn’t know what to make of this. It was bizarre.

  “I think he’s killed me somehow, man. I really do,” Harry shot out.

  “You’ll be fine as soon as the paramedics check you out,” Stag said, but for some strange reason, even he wasn’t sure about that.

  “I’m telling you, the black guy shot me,” Harry said once the paramedics were gone.

  The police had questioned them and filed a report. Stag didn’t mention to Harry the cop who’d taken him aside and asked if his friend had been popping any hallucinogens.

  “The gun must’ve misfired, thank God.” Stag stared at him, his face filled with concern. The whole episode was crazy. Wearily, he took a long pull on his Beck’s. It had been another long, long day.

  “He fucking pulled out this really strange gun and just shot me.” Harry stared down at his bare chest. “You going to call?”

  Stag looked down at the card. He’d given the police the information but he bet they didn’t even write it down. Harry looked like just another drug-crazed loser wasting the authorities’ time with paranoid delusions. He’d bet that the number on the card was linked by the internet to another number, this one probably overseas. A sickening feeling overtook him. The phone might even be in Berlin, where that apartment was.

  Harry got up and began pacing. He rubbed his chest. “Man, they got me. Maybe I’m being poisoned. Should probably get some blood work.”

  “Then let’s run you to the emergency room.”

  “What do they want? You better call them first.”

  “Let’s head to the emergency room first for the blood work.”

  “No, call them—then they can tell you what the hell they did to me!”

  Hesitantly, Stag punched the number into his phone. It took a while for the connection to be made. It only rang once before the phone was answered.

  “Allo.”

  “What the fuck did you do to my friend?” Stag didn’t bother to hide his animosity. Behind him, Harry paced, his face getting paler.

  “What is your interest in apartment 12A?” The voice had an accent, but Stag couldn’t place it. He didn’t know if it was German, French, or Swedish.

  “First you tell me my friend’s okay.”

  “Your friend will die.”

  Stag barely comprehended the words.

  “That is not a warning. That is a fact. You will die too if you don’t tell us your interest.”

  Stag felt the blood run backward in his veins. After the first wave of shock hit him, he wanted to punch something, but with nothing but a voice on the other end of the phone, he was fighting a shadow.

  Slowly, he said in a low rumble to not freak out Harry anymore, “What’s this all about?”

  “We need to know what is your interest?”

  “We found a note.”

  “Who gave it to you?”

  “Reinhard Heydrich.” The silence at the end of the line didn’t surprise Stag. The shock was palpable. “So you think you can tell me what’s going on here?”

  “You are a journalist, are you not, Mr. Maguire? You wrote quite a reputable series about corrupt politicians taking money from the NRA.”

  He was stunned at hearing his name. It made the breath go tight in his chest. “I was a journalist.”

  “We don’t want attention.”

  “Well, you got it now, you motherfucker. I want to know what you did to my friend.”

  “He has perhaps fifteen minutes to live. You may go to the authorities, but his death will be from a heart attack. He is an overweight man, is he not? You Americans and your constant desire to feed—”

  “What the hell did you do?”

  “We do not like inquiries. We have your cell number and your name. Now as you watch your friend die, you see we are serious. We want the information you have. How did you find out about 12A?”

  “Heydrich told us, you fucktard. And I’m going to goddamn make something of this! You tell me what to do for my friend!” Stag’s anger became rage.

  “Heydrich has been dead since ’42.”

  “Maybe,” Stag baited. “But he sent the note anyway.”

  “What did the note say?”

  “It talks about diamonds.” He snorted. “And you’ll never fucking see any of them if anything happens to Harry.”

  “We will pay for your information. Any amount you require.”

  “Go fuck yourself.” He lowered his voice to a growl. “Now tell me what you did to my friend—”

  He felt the connection terminate before he heard the click.

  “Whh … what-the-fuck?” Harry stammered, paler still than a moment ago.

  “Let’s get you to a hospital.” Stag stabbed through his jeans pockets for the car keys.

  “What did he say? What did they do to me?” There was real fear edging Harry’s voice. Stag had a hard time meeting his eye.

  “I don’t know. Let’s go get you tested. Now.”

  “Yeah.” Harry’s hand shook when he ran it through his hair. His face was drained of col
or, but he was sweating profusely as if he was overheated. He unconsciously rubbed his chest.

  “C’mon.” Stag held the door.

  Harry nodded, took a step, and then paused, as if surprised. He gasped.

  “What is it?” Stag demanded.

  “I swear, I think I’m having a heart attack. “

  “Look, let’s get you—”

  Harry doubled over, groaning.

  Stag instinctively punched 911 into his phone. “Get me an ambulance,” he barked into the phone.

  The furniture shook when Harry slumped to the floor. Stag bit out the remaining information for the ambulance, then went over to him.

  “They’re coming, bud. Hang in there,” he said softly.

  “I think I’m having a heart—” Harry began vomiting copious amounts of beer and pizza. It ran down his chin and puddled on the front of his polar fleece. “Fuck.”

  “It’s cool. It’s cool.” Stag ran for another towel. When he came back from the bathroom, Harry was nearly unconscious. The whine of a siren began in the distance like a refrain. “Hold on. Here they are,” he said, bending down to him.

  “Tell Julie and the kids … love ’em …” Harry took Stag’s hand. He squeezed it weakly. “Tell them I’m sorry about being a shitty husband and father.”

  “Chill, man. Relax. You weren’t.”

  “Don’t tell them about the Sicherheitsdienst.”

  “Don’t worry about that now. Seriously, the ambulance is almost here.”

  “I don’t want them to know about Heydrich.”

  “Fuck Heydrich.” The anger in Stag’s voice even surprised him.

  “No, man. You don’t understand.”

  “It’s okay, Harry. Don’t worry about that now.”

  “I … I just figured it out. I keep thinking of all those gatherings my dad held at Gerde’s. I mean—”

  “Really, don’t worry about that now, man. The ambulance is almost here. Everything’s gonna be all right.”

  Harry clutched at Stag’s shirt. “No. There was always talk. You understand? Talk. I never paid much attention because when my dad died, Gerde’s fell on me, and I was too crazy trying to make a living out of it to wonder what all those meetings were about.”

  “Hang on there, man. You don’t need to be worrying about this.” Stag was relieved to hear the siren get closer.

  “Don’t you understand?” Harry insisted. “Don’t you see? We’re all Heydrich. That’s the problem. We’ve been Heydrich all the time.”

  “You are from the best people I know, Harry. No way you’re from a bunch of Nazis.” Every nerve in Stag’s body was taut, waiting for that ambulance.

  “But my grandfather … I mean, I didn’t understand at the time. My grandfather talked about it, and. my God, my father too … He and my father had these strange meetings with strange characters. Then when Dad died, a bunch of men came to get his files. And Mom just let them in and they took everything. After the war, you see? After the war—” He moaned loudly and squeezed his eyes shut. Tears streamed down his round cheeks. Gritting his teeth through the pain, he ground out the words, “That’s how they kept Gerde’s going, during the down times, see? That’s why I couldn’t make it. When the wolf came knocking, I didn’t feed it like they told me to. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want anything to do with them.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Stag commanded, kneeling in the vomit to support his flagging body. “That’s long over.”

  “But it does. It does matter, don’t you see?” Harry whispered. He doubled over once more. “The Sicherheitsdienst, the SD. It’s still out there. It still exists. And if you don’t feed the wolf, the wolf feeds on you.”

  Then he collapsed. Dead.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  NUMB, STAG LET Harry’s body slip to the ground. The useless siren grew louder in the distance. The shock of Harry’s last words repeated over and over through his brain, but it was eclipsed by the horrific reality of Harry’s dead eyes, staring out at him.

  For a long moment, Stag stood paralyzed. Unsure. Terror and rage began to build, slowly at first, then gaining traction with every whine of the siren. The phone call to Berlin had been on Harry’s number, but Stag had been the one to talk to them. They’d killed Harry because they’d identified him from his phone. They’d killed him solely to get Stag to talk about what he knew. Now the horrific possibilities that some entity was around, and focused on him, began to ignite the fight or flight instinct. It didn’t seem real that Harry was lying dead right in front of him, but fear told him only one thing right now: whoever had gotten Harry was outside somewhere waiting for him.

  He stood clutching the towel stained with Harry’s vomit and tears. He looked down at his dead friend, his insides balled up in knots. Yeah, people thought of Harry as a loser and a drunk. But the guy had extended more kindness to Stag than he could ever repay. Harry was his last friend on earth. Now everyone was dead that he’d ever had a connection to. All of them now. Gone. And he was left behind in an acid bath of grief.

  He glanced up at his apartment, seeing it no longer familiar, now finding the cardboard boxes, the ugly futon, hostile and foreign.

  Almost against his will, he walked up to the portrait. The cold, unsympathetic eyes still followed him. A surge of anger welled up, and with it, a strange momentary clarity. He opened the front door wide for the ambulance team just pulling into the parking lot. With a deliberation he didn’t quite comprehend, he picked up the white silk note and old-fashioned key laid out next to the portrait. He gingerly placed the business card the black man had given Harry into a Ziploc bag on the slim chance they might get a fingerprint off of it. Then he took his wallet and his shabby pile of personal documents and stuffed them into his parka.

  He felt the portrait’s frigid eyes on him as he went to the back of his apartment. Then, pure instinct kicked in. He crawled out his bathroom window, limping quickly through the garbage-blackened snow of the service alley.

  And disappeared.

  A couple days ago, Stag was retrieving Harry from the empty shell of Gerde’s Biergarten. Now he was pulling a rental car up to the Investigations Division in Green Bay, hunted and on the run. From what or whom, he didn’t quite have a grip yet.

  Sitting in the hotel room by the interstate, he’d recalled a Detective Bruce James. He’d done an article on Green Bay’s spectacularly low homicide rate as compared to Milwaukee’s, and James was the point man. He didn’t know if Detective James would be able to help him, but he was going to give it a try.

  It was also a big plus that Green Bay was an entirely different jurisdiction as Milwaukee. Just as a precaution.

  He was shown into the office while the detective was still on the phone. James waved him forward and motioned to a chair in front of his desk.

  “I don’t know why she doesn’t listen. Maybe it’s because she’s fifteen.” He nodded to Stag and made a jabbering motion with his hand. “Yeah. Maybe. But maybe she just thinks you’re a bitch. I mean, I don’t think you’re one, but she—”

  He paused to listen. “Yeah. Okay. Tell her I said so. I’m okay with being the bad guy.”

  While the detective talked on the phone, Stag was struck with the normalcy of the conversation. Particularly amid the strange backdrop of lurid color photos of a recent murder-suicide that formed one wall of the office.

  Just regular people doing extraordinarily awful jobs. For better, as in this case, or for worse, as in the case of the guard in Harry’s paper on Birkenau. It was crazy how easy it was to make insane look normal.

  “Thanks for seeing me,” Stag said when James hung up.

  “Hey, any time. Your article was great. The Captain’s still crowing about it and it’s been three years.” James took a sip from a stained Starbucks cup. “You doing a sequel?”

  Stag shook his head. Unsure how to begin, he said, “I’ve got a strange situation. My friend in Wuttke, well, he died unexpectedly. I was hoping you might have the autopsy results in
and could give them to me.”

  “Oh geez, sorry about that. His name?”

  “Harold Gerde.”

  James began typing in his computer. “Yep. Here it is. Didn’t take long. SCD. Sudden Cardiac Death.” He kept reading. “Due to … pulmonary embolism.” He looked up at Stag.

  “Anything else?” Stag prompted.

  James scrolled down a bit. “No. Cut and dried. Looks like he was pretty overweight, huh?”

  “Yeah.” Stag ruminated, unsure how to approach the questions, let alone the answers.

  “Ah …” James continued to read the screen, his expression growing sad. “Says here there’s no investigation opened but they’d like to talk to you. It seems you abandoned the body.” The detective looked at Stag. “I know you had a hard knock with your wife. It was all over the papers here. If you’d like, I’d be happy to go with you down to Wuttke to talk to them. I mean, it’s understandable you’d freak out with your buddy dropping dead in front of you.”

  Stag just nodded slowly.

  “You’re not under arrest or anything. They’d just like to talk to you about the circumstances.”

  “The circumstances, yes,” Stag offered, his mind whirling.

  “You okay?”

  There was that question again. But why wouldn’t he be okay? Why? The eternal why.

  “There’s a building in Berlin. Harry and I, we called about it, you see. They wanted to talk to me. To ask me what I knew about the message in the painting …”

  The detective only looked at Stag with pity and concern seeping into his eyes.

  “I’ve begun some research into the building,” Stag continued. “The building’s owned by an international corporation with a thousand entities. I don’t know how to figure which one got Harry—”

  “Got Harry? There’s no foul play here. He had a heart attack. Like fat guys do.”

  “No. They shot him. With something, I think. Maybe a poison—”

  “No bullets, no poison mentioned in the lab reports. Hey, can I get you some coffee or something?” The detective was beginning to look worried.