by David Stukas
“I called her late yesterday, so it was early in the morning New York time.”
“Monette, while you’re waiting for Taucher to get back to you with answers to those questions you posed to him yesterday, why not go with Michael and me to see psychic Madame Lola Klingle?”
“I’d rather have a colonoscopy,” she said bluntly.
“Oh, c’mon, Monette. We can both make fun of the zany stuff she says. Please, pretty please?”
“Oh, all right. But I’m not going to let her read the bumps on my head!”
We made a perfunctory attempt to get Julia to go with us, but she planned to spend the entire day shopping and taking advantage of the strong U.S. dollar. The three of us piled into a cab and were driven to a butt-ugly postwar building built in the old East German section of the city. It had all the charm of an electrical transformer station. We battled waves of delinquent teenagers to get from the street to the storefront that held Madame Lola’s business, and were greeted by a barking Chihuahua who nipped at my shoelaces ceaselessly. Eventually, a man who wore a stained T-shirt (stained from World World II) and had great tufts of hair sprouting from his ears picked up the offensive canine and tried muzzling it with his hand, but the muffled barks continued from the ill-tempered rat. He quickly, but nonchalantly, ascertained that we spoke English and replied in a voice that reminded me of Boris Badinoff from Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons that Madame Lola would be “shortly out.” He then pulled Michael aside so the psychic’s world-renowned powers could be amply compensated.
Shortly, a curtain parted in another doorway and out stepped Madame Lola. She looked like a reject from the cast of the Hungarian Golddiggers of 1923. She tottered out unsteadily, her carcass desperately grabbing on to any piece of furniture that happened to be within a fourteen-mile radius. She wore mystical robes that looked suspiciously like bed sheets that had been drawn on with magic markers, a turban made from gold lame, and she had on at least forty pounds of jewelry. I worried that at any minute, I would hear her bones cracking under the enormous weight of her suspect jewels. Even more worrisome than her wardrobe was the stunned look on her face.
“Sit down,” Madame Lola’s husband instructed us.
“Tell Marlene Dietrich she smells like a fish,” Lola uttered as she was carefully lowered into a fold-up chair that had seen both the construction and demolition of the Berlin Wall.
Michael looked at the psychic with rapt attention, but Monette and I looked at each other with a mixture of horror, humor, and complete bafflement.
Her husband sensed that instead of giving the impression of being in touch with the other world, Lola clearly showed she had taken up residence there.
He disappeared behind a curtain and quickly reappeared with a strange-looking drinking glass filled with a clear liquid. He explained that the liquid was a magic potion that would help Madame Lola get in touch with the forces of the psychic world, but from my close proximity to her, it smelled amazingly like peppermint schnapps.
The surprising thing was, the drink seemed to focus Madame Lola’s mind so that the more she spoke, the more sense she made—to a point.
“Let us begin,” Lola announced.
Her husband, ever the moderator, told Lola Michael was here to have a curse removed from him.
“A curse, a curse, who, who?” she asked.
“This Lithuanian here put it on me,” Michael said, pointing in my direction.
“I did not!”
“Someone did,” Michael said, always wanting to point the finger of blame in any direction but his own. “I used to have sex all the time and now every guy I drag home is a loser.”
I was about to doubt whether Madame Lola would be able to understand—or sympathize with—Michael’s predicament, when she spoke up and put my doubts to rest.
“A curse ... a curse ... no good. Lithuanians, no good!”
“Hey, wait a minute ...” I started to say, but was cut off.
“The curse, the curse, gone ... you must cut, cut, cut, an onion into four pieces, four, four, four, put in the four corners of the building and cover with honey, honey honey.”
“Wouldn’t that draw ants?” I wondered out loud—a little too out loud.
Lola ignored my comment and proceeded. “Then ... three eggs, eggs, eggs . . . put in three glasses of water, water, water ... in one windowsill, windowsill, windowsill ... in the room where you have sex, sex, sex ...”
“Is she kidding?” Monette whispered to me. “Where are we going to get truckloads of eggs delivered to the palace this late in the morning! And what’s this about just the eggs? She forgot to add the flour and the salt. Otherwise your popovers won’t rise.”
This comment caused me to snicker so loudly I had to burst into a coughing fit to disguise my laughter.
“... after five days,” Lola intoned, “pour all out into water far, far, far away from you, you, you.”
“Well, I guess that’s it!” Michael announced loudly, certain Lola’s recipe for bad karma would do the trick. “Robert, since I paid for an hour of psychic time, why don’t you ask Madame Lola who killed the count ... or at least tell her about that dream you told me about, the one with the count dressed as a bishop or something.”
“Oh, Michael, I don’t think so. I mean, I don’t know about that!” I protested.
“You, who mock me last night, calling into air ... Lola, Lola, wherever you are ... you mock me ... you are a bad child!” Lola intoned.
I turned whiter than the Queen of England. How did this woman, who seemed to be oblivious of events in this world, know I was making fun of her last night? Michael must have told her, I reasoned, then crossed myself just to be sure. It couldn’t hurt.
“Madame Lola, I’m sorry if I made fun of your ... awesome powers! Yes, amazing powers. I am but a poor infidel, a skeptic who finds it hard to believe anyone, being raised Catholic. But I am finding out how wrong I am. Please use your powers to tell me,” I said, grasping for straws, “what my dream means.”
Madame Lola nodded her head, signaling for me to continue.
I told her my dream about finding the count in bed, dressed as a Catholic cardinal and adding great drama to the part where the count chased me through the palace. The only part I left out was the part where Russell Crowe and I made passionate love.
“The count, the count, the count . . .” Lola started. “No cardinal, no cardinal, no cardinal! Not even bishop! No bishop, no bishop, no bishop!”
“If she doesn’t stop stuttering in threes, I’m think I’m going to strangle her, strangle her, strangle her,” Monette whispered in my ear.
“Costumes, costumes, costumes! All masks, masks, masks. Too much masquerade, masquerade, masquerade! No more about dream, dream, dream! Next?”
“I was in love with a count. Tell me about him, Madame Lola.”
I looked at Monette for approval on my line of questioning. She shrugged her shoulders, figuring why not?
Lola began to moan and weave back and forth in her chair so violently, I worried she was having an epileptic fit.
“You!” She pointed accusingly at me. “Must beware! Beware, beware, beware! Oh, danger, much danger. I feel pain, pain, pain,” she chanted.
Pain. The woman feels pain, I thought. I’m surprised the woman isn’t on a morphine drip at her age. A second thought: maybe she did have an intravenous tube shoved into her arm underneath those robes. That might explain the look on her face.
“I feel a pain in my back, my back, my back! Sharp, sharp, sharp! Cold, cold, cold! Metal, metal, metal. A man, man, man. Near water, water, water. The pain in his back, his back, his back! Drowned, drowned, drowned! I also see a circle of metal, metal, metal! On his head, head, head! Wearing the metal, metal, metal. Ahhhhhhhhhh!” Lola screamed and went limp, her head coming to rest on the velvet tablecloth in front of her.
No one spoke for a while. I looked over at Monette, who, oddly enough, seemed to be in the same trance as the one Lola spent her life in. I tri
ed to shake her awake, but she merely put her arm on mine to stop me and simply said, “Not now. I’m thinking.”
Lola’s husband, who was waiting in a nearby room, came forth and told us Madame Lola was tired now. Enough.
The three of us got up to go back to the mortal world, yet Monette still looked like we had left her behind in the other.
“What’s the matter, Monette? You didn’t drink from Lola’s glass, did you?” I asked, seriously concerned.
“I don’t know—something Madame Lola said. I just can’t put my finger on it right now.”
“You don’t believe there’s anything to what she said, do you? She could have read all those details about the count’s death in the paper.”
“Oh Goddess, no. But she did get me thinking,” Monette answered.
“Wasn’t she great?” Michael exclaimed. “She knew about the count being stabbed and being found in the toilet, because she said that the man wore metal on his head, a crown obviously and water, drowned,” Michael said proudly. “Plus, she kept talking about the masquerade party. The only thing I can’t figure out is what she meant about your dream ... that the cardinal wasn’t a cardinal or even a bishop. Maybe she means the count really was a priest after all. There was that latex priest outfit!”
“Michael,” I responded, “there’s one part of your body that those steroids you’re taking isn’t helping: your brain. Like your testicles, I think it’s shrinking, too.”
“Listen, you two,” Monette said, breaking her trancelike silence, “I need a little peace and quiet. I’m trying to think.”
“Monette, you’re not going to take what Lola said seriously, are you? I mean, she could have read all those details in the paper about the count’s death.”
“Robert, I can’t believe you still doubt Madame Lola,” Michael interjected. “I would think that she would have made a believer out of you by now. She’s one of the world’s greatest psychics!”
“How do you know that, Michael? Did that Chihuahua of hers send you telepathic messages?”
“No, it says right here in this guide,” he said presenting exhibit A in what Michael figured was an open-and-shut case.
I looked at the guide that Michael thrust in my face. “Michael, this is one of those free, schlocky tour guides they put out to trap unsuspecting Americans into bad restaurants and trashy freak museums. Look at this! Torture museum! Now who in their right mind would go to something like that?” I questioned.
“Hey, I was thinking about checking it out later on this week.”
“Michael, I don’t think this museum is featuring the kind of stuff you like.”
“You never know,” Michael replied.
“So you read an ad and believe everything it says?” I continued.
“I do when an advertisement says that Madame Lola predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall and that the former East German communist government did everything they could to suppress her and her psychic powers. They were afraid of her!”
“Michael, I’d be afraid of someone like that running around loose, too.”
“Would you two be quiet?” Monette implored us. “I think I’m on the verge of something ... or maybe it’s just a migraine coming on.”
So we rode in silence all the way back to the palace, with me looking out the windows of the cab at all of the buildings of Berlin and Michael looking at all the men of Berlin getting away.
When we arrived back within the gates of the palace, Monette went straight to Siegfreid’s music room and sat there, staring at where a surveillance camera had previously been placed. Michael came and sat with us, thumbing through another stack of German magazines, “to see if he was making headlines in Germany” as he told us.
“What was the count trying to get on videotape?” Monette wondered aloud. Her face then lit up like a Christmas tree. “Maybe I’ve been looking at this the wrong way around! Yes! That’s it! Someone else was taping the count, trying to catch him doing something illegal ... to blackmail him.”
Two could play at this detective game. “Ludwig and an accomplice?” I suggested. “Remember, I overheard him begging the count for more money and Siegfreid wouldn’t give it to him. So he got a friend inside the palace working as a servant who then put the secret videotaping equipment in place to catch Siegfreid doing something or meeting with someone that could be used to blackmail the count into forking over more money.”
“The same scenario could have been used by the customs inspector, Ralf,” Monette ventured. “Well, I guess that’s less possible. I think that Ralf already had something on the count from something he put in Siegfreid’s luggage, so why try and blackmail him further with videotapes? The list of suspects keeps getting longer the more we find out.”
“Considering so many guys in the leather bar hated Siegfreid’s guts, it could have been any number of them who wanted to kill the count,” I added. “And I’ll bet that a lot of other people around town didn’t care too much for him, either.”
“Wait a minute!” she said, her eyes opening wide with discovery.
“What is it?”
“Oh, nothing. I thought I was on to something, but it slipped away. Where were we? Oh yes, Ralf, the customs guy. Well, just because people hated Siegfreid doesn’t explain why the customs guy ended up frozen in the basement. It looks like the count, or he and a friend, killed the customs guy, and then someone killed the count in retribution. Maybe that’s what happened, and the count’s accomplice turned on Siegfreid and killed him because he didn’t want to split the take.”
“The take? What take?” I asked.
“Money, I suppose. Money is the main reason most people commit murder. The second is for revenge. The third reason is family.”
“Family?” I asked.
“It’s a good reason if you have a family like mine,” Monette answered with brutal honesty. She looked lost in thought for a moment. Then her face brightened. “You know what we need?”
“What?”
“We need someone who knew Siegfreid.”
“But who could we talk to? We could ask Herr Taucher, I suppose,” I suggested.
“No,” Monette said, steering in another direction. “We need someone who knew all the dirt.”
“I still don’t know who we can ask. Siegfreid didn’t exactly introduce me to all his friends. Plus, it didn’t look like he had a lot of friends.”
“Judging from the buzz around town, I’m not sure that he had any. No, we need someone who not only had a lot of dirt on Siegfreid, but is willing to tell all.”
“Willing?” I asked.
“OK, busting to tell.”
“What about bitchy?”
“Certainly. Bitchy helps,” she said.
“Needy?”
“Oh yes, needy goes without saying,” Monette answered, finally catching on to where I was going.
“Outrageous?”
“The more the better.”
“Desperate?”
“Absolutely.”
“Mad?”
“Ludwig!” Monette exclaimed.
While Monette and I smiled at the ingenuity of our plan, Michael looked up from his magazine as if something was haunting him. In this case, it was about to be what happened the previous night in the downstairs of a certain leather bar.
15
I Won’t Speak Ill of the Dead, But . . .
Monette called Herr Taucher to invite him to listen in on Ludwig’s testimony and get an update on what his department had turned up. Fortunately, there was plenty. Taucher reported that they didn’t find anything unusual about Siegfreid’s trip to New York—the hotels where he stayed and the restaurants where he ate reported nothing out of the ordinary. But there was one interesting discovery: Siegfreid’s former lover, Hans Sattler, had been in New York about the same time the count was.
Siegfreid’s business here in Germany was anything but ordinary. Taucher wouldn’t give any specific details, but he did reveal Siegfreid’s shipping line was
under heavy surveillance for smuggling. Of what, Taucher wouldn’t say. Even more interesting was the fact that Heino, Siegfreid’s business partner (and heir to half of Siegfreid’s fortune), was up to his pretty little neck in illegal shipments of some sort.
Many of the former servants had been contacted, and they reported nothing out of the ordinary as far as visitors to the palace were concerned: Heino, Ludwig, Uli the art dealer, and a host of tricks he paraded into the palace and barely escorted out the next morning. The majority of them said they were surprised when they were fired and even more surprised when he gave them all good letters of reference.
As far as Ludwig went, it was impossible to ascertain the state of his personal finances because of strict privacy laws, but no financial connection could be found between Count Siegfreid von Schmidt and Ludwig Buxtehude.
Manfred Weber, the servant who lived in the room where the videotapes were found, still couldn’t be located, but did have one interesting characteristic about him: he had a criminal record. No serious crimes, but fraud and trafficking in stolen goods. And Uli, the count’s art dealer? Taucher and his staff couldn’t find anyone by that name connected to Siegfreid. Finally, several people at Ludwig’s ball noticed that a man dressed like the count was seen staggering into the bathroom, helped by another unidentified person.
“Don’t you worry your pretty little head, Robert,” Monette reassured me. “I think Ludwig will tell more than I think he knows. That’s what I’m counting on.” She nodded to Inspector Taucher, who was seated quietly in a overstuffed chair near the windows.
“I hope that what he knows is the truth. If he’s as mad as they say he is, I don’t know how we’re going to rely on what he tells us. Someone at his ball told me that three months ago he rode a horse naked down the Friedrichstrasse in Berlin, claiming he was Frau Godiva.”
“Well, we’re about to find out,” Monette reported as she looked out the window toward the front courtyard. “A car just pulled into the drive ... and ... and ... oh shit, I don’t believe this!” Monette said, erupting in a storm of laughter.