She shrugged. “I reported Klaus’s whereabouts to my superiors when I discovered him—thanks to your investigation.” I recoiled inwardly at this, recalling the tail I’d scented the night I talked to Klaus and realizing Elsa probably never would have found the old man if I hadn’t led her to him. He was dead because of me. If Elsa noticed signs of guilt darkening my face, she managed to play dumb, saying, “The decision to kill him was not mine. He was an enemy of the state. An enemy of the people.”
“You can’t say that about Mercy.”
She gave me a cold look now. “No. No, Mr. Strait, I cannot say that about Mercy. She was…collateral damage.”
“Because she uncovered the truth about your boys?”
“Not exactly. The benighted thing never figured it out. She just had the bad luck to be in the same place where Bruno was one night.”
“At the Rose Room.”
“Yes. And then again this past Friday night, or was it Saturday morning? I’m not sure. Either way, Hans was in a club and she walked in and saw him. He said she made a ridiculous spectacle.”
After she got tossed from the High Note, I thought.
“So, you had one of them kill her.”
She gave me a long, icy stare. Then she nodded, just a little.
If my hands had been free, I’d have slugged her in the jaw. It would have been the second time I’d ever hit a woman, and both times it would have been Elsa Schwartz whom I’d punched. The thought of Mercy Attentater dying at the hands of the man she thought was her lost husband was almost more than I could stand. The confusion she must have felt…the terror and sadness all coming at her at once.
But my hands weren’t free, and when I pulled at the restraints, I felt the wire dig more deeply into my skin, imagining cuts opening and blood running onto the dusty old wooden floor.
“Is the secret so valuable?” was what I managed to say instead of calling her every name I could think of.
“You think small, Mr. Strait. Do you believe I have my assassins here in Los Angeles to enjoy the weather? The beaches?”
I puzzled over this for a moment. And then I said, “Nixon.”
She smiled. “The war may be over, but the fighting hasn’t stopped.”
“You brought your boys here to kill the President.”
She nodded, the smile still in place. “A mission that has been aborted, I fear. I tried to keep things contained by having Hans finish off the stupid widow. But I still had to make my report. The threat of exposure was too great. And shortly thereafter, we discovered Mercy’s connection to Klaus, so we got a new mission.”
“Killing an enemy of the state.”
“Precisely.”
“And Nixon?”
“Safe for now. We’ll find another way to take care of him, I’m sure.”
I couldn’t believe it. Mercy Attentater had inadvertently saved the President from assassination and had lost her life in the process. She should be a national hero, I thought. Then I knitted my brows as another thought occurred to me.
“What is it?” Elsa asked.
“The burlesque houses. If security was so important to you, why were your boys visiting all those places where they might get seen?”
Her expression changed, as though a cloud had just passed over her, and in a bitter tone she said, “Because they are terrible in every way. If these monsters are exact copies of Klaus Lang, then he must have been a terrible lecher in his youth. The man must have been an animal. I practically have to sleep with a gun in my hand to keep these beasts from trying to abuse me. And as for discipline…I’ve had the devil’s own time keeping them under control. They sneak off at every opportunity and visit those places even though I’ve ordered them not to. Why do you think I’ve dragged them out to this hole in the ground to await our extraction? I had them in a hotel at first and then an apartment in the city, but they are impossibly fixated on chasing women. Something in their training must have been neglected.” She shook her head, and it was the expression of a mother who’s reached the final limit of her child’s bad behavior. “Honestly, Mr. Strait, I sometimes wish they’d all died during the war and this whole operation had died with them.”
“Untie me, and I’ll help make your wish come true,” I said.
She smiled at this, and for a moment I thought there might be a way in, a possibility that I could exploit her frustration at the assassins’ incorrigible nature and get her to turn on them. But then she said, “There. I’ve given you what you wanted. Now give me this Carmelita. I need her here by dawn. I’d go into the city myself and bring her back, but I’m afraid of the nightmare I’d return to if I left these cretins on their own.”
I sighed and said, “All right. I don’t know if what you’ve given me is going to be enough to keep me out of trouble, though.”
“Would you rather I just shoot you now?”
“What do you want with Carmelita, anyway?”
She shrugged. “I want to know what she is. I want to know if there is a way her strengths can be harnessed in a way that makes up for the deficiencies in our current crop of operatives.”
“Your boys outside,” I said.
Although Elsa didn’t respond, I understood then. She’d already let on that she knew Carmelita wasn’t entirely human. Now I saw that Guillermo’s creation offered the possibility of a more tractable version of the super assassins the Germans had been training for years. This didn’t sit well with me, but neither did getting a bullet in my brain.
“Go ahead and dial that thing,” I said.
I explained how the phone worked and gave her the number to our kitchen phone. It could have been any number, as I knew the phone wouldn’t work correctly without the antenna attached. I toyed with the idea of telling Elsa that the wire she’d used to bind me was necessary for the phone to function, but I didn’t think she’d be willing to untie me just to find out. If I did anything to further frustrate her at this point, I figured I was likely to get shot for my efforts.
Elsa stood and brought the microphone and speaker pieces to me, holding one up to my ear and the other to my mouth after she finished dialing.
All I heard was static. And then, as though from an incredible distance, a faint ringing. This was not something I’d been counting on.
“Carmelita?” I said even though the ringing had not stopped, knowing there was no way for Elsa to verify that I had anyone on the other end of the line. “Can you hear me?”
I paused for effect and then said, “I need you to come out here. Yes, to Gold Rush Gulch.” It was impossible to tell for sure, but I thought the ringing had stopped, and I worried that Carmelita might have picked up the phone in our kitchen. Too late, I realized I should have had Elsa dial the office phone. There, the bell would have rung and rung with no one there to answer it, and I could have faked the call in a virtuoso performance without the possibility of failure. Now, I had to continue and hope for the best. “It’s on Paradise Road, up in the hills.”
“She has to be here by six in the morning,” Elsa said. “If not, you die.”
She seemed to enjoy saying that, almost as much as I didn’t enjoy hearing it.
“I need you out here as soon as possible. But no later than six in the morning. Do you understand?”
I paused long enough to fake hearing someone answer in the affirmative.
“All right. Good. I’ll see you then.”
Elsa took the speaker away from my ear then and held it to her own. She appeared to listen to the static, a dubious look on her face. Then, one eyebrow raised, she set the whole apparatus on the table.
“There is an airship arriving here at 6:15, departing as soon as my charges and I can get on board. If your Carmelita isn’t getting on when it’s time to leave, that’s how long you have to live. Understood?”
“Understood,” I said.
“Knowing this, do you need to try contacting her again? Or did the call actually go through?”
“It went through,” I sai
d. “And, no, I don’t need to try again. Carmelita’s very obedient.”
“That will be a relief.”
I let myself relax a little and tested the strength of the bonds that held my wrists together. Then I said, “Flying all the way back to the Fatherland?”
She gave me a cold stare. “To Mexico first, if you must know. And then onto a bigger airship to cross the Atlantic. We’ll make Carmelita very comfortable.”
“I’m sure you will. Do your best to keep those boys off her, though. They might not like the way she plays.”
“I expect the feeling will be mutual.”
Outside the little room, I could hear the assassins speaking in German. Their voices rose quickly, like they were excited about something.
“Scheiss,” Elsa said. “What now?”
She turned and walked to the door, swinging it open just as the three younger versions of Klaus Lang came barreling into the room. All three were speaking in German. I’d picked up a fair share during the war, but these boys were speaking rapid fire, far too much information for me to process at that speed. I did pick up the words for “lights” and “car,” however.
O’Neal, I thought, praising Carmelita. I had no idea what time it was, but if a car was coming along the narrow, rutted path that was Paradise Road, it had to be O’Neal coming to the rescue. If she was as on top of things as I figured she would be, she wouldn’t be alone in her car, and there’d probably be a few more coming as well. She’d need a good showing of numbers to get the assassins to come in quietly, but I figured that would be the way O’Neal would operate.
Elsa turned from the killers and gave me a venomous look. “A car is coming!” she barked. “Who is it?”
“I don’t know, Elsa. Maybe it’s a Hollywood agent coming to arrange a screentest for you. I hear that Universal is doing The Creature’s Bride next year. You’d be perfect.”
She advanced on me, her jaw set firmly. I figured she was going to smack me across the face, and I was ready for it. She stopped a few feet away from me, though, and just stood there, breathing hard.
“Close the lights!” she barked to her minions, and two of the men stepped around her to turn down the fuel on the kerosene lamps. In moments, we were in complete darkness.
I felt rather than saw Elsa lean close to me. I smelled her powdered cheeks inches from my face, and then I got the feeling that she shifted positions. The next thing I knew, she was whispering harshly in my ear. “If shooting starts, the first bullet is for you,” she said. “It looks like you’re not going to make it to six o’clock after all, Mr. Strait.”
This did not sound good to me at all, but I kept my unhappiness to myself. “Let’s hope that doesn’t happen then. Maybe it’s just a groundskeeper. Beadle owns this land, right? He’s got to have someone who comes out here to check on it.”
“Then that someone is going to die tonight,” she said.
“Not very neighborly of you,” I said.
And then I felt her move away as the sound of an approaching engine grew loud enough to be heard clearly inside the old movie set.
“Quiet,” Elsa said in the darkness. “Everyone.”
I decided to oblige, not being in much of a position to challenge her and get away with it.
The engine grew louder, and though I strained to listen for the sound of others behind it, I could detect only one vehicle. This didn’t seem right, and it left me wondering what O’Neal had in mind as her strategy for dealing with Elsa and her assassins.
The vehicle in the darkness approached slowly, and it sounded like it drove right past the building where we hid. Then it stopped not far away. I listened to a car door close.
Only one? I thought. Where were the reinforcements? Surely O’Neal hadn’t come alone. It was starting to sound like that, though.
Then we all heard a voice, and I felt my heart take the elevator to the basement.
“Strait?” the voice called from outside.
It wasn’t O’Neal. Rather, it was a man’s voice, one I recognized but couldn’t quite place.
I could hear footsteps outside. Then the sound of a door opening in one of the other buildings.
“Strait?” came the repeated summons.
More footsteps, approaching. Then the door to the fake miner’s cabin opened, and I saw a figure silhouetted against the poor light of the moon outside.
“Strait?” said the voice one more time, and then the intruder shone a flashlight into the room. The beam passed over one of the assassins first, and I heard the man at the door say, “Who the hell are you?”
That was when another of the young Klauses stepped forward and wrenched the light from the intruder’s hand. Commotion followed, along with a few shouts. Then Elsa had the flashlight in her hand and had turned its beam toward the door, revealing the surprised face of Cosmo Beadle’s driver, Edward Ross.
Chapter Eighteen
“Call O’Neal,” I had said into the lousy little speaker on the portable phone.
“Call Neal,” I’d heard Carmelita repeat back to me.
What she’d heard and what she’d said, however, had been “Call Beadle.”
It made sense, too.
I’d had her looking up Beadle’s property. And she’d found Gold Rush Gulch. Carmelita had known it was Beadle’s land. When the staticky message came through and needed deciphering, her mechanical mind had leaped to Beadle rather than O’Neal. I couldn’t blame the whole thing on her, though. My own very organic mind had heard what it wanted to hear in her reply, after all, and I had lost the opportunity to correct her and ensure the outcome I’d wanted. And now here I was—bound to a chair with Uncle Cosmo’s chauffeur standing in the doorway and no hope that anyone with a gun was going to show up and rescue me.
“Edward!” I heard Elsa say in the darkness, her tone suggesting she was as surprised as I was, if not more.
“Elsa?” came the shocked reply as the tall man squinted his eyes and craned his neck to peer into the darkness.
I felt terrible. Although I didn’t know the man at all, we were brothers in arms, both veterans of the war, both having given up large chunks of our lives and our well-being to put an end to people like Elsa Schwartz. The man had been decent to me when we’d first met, and I had repaid him first by taking advantage of his kindness and camaraderie and later by knocking him cold and giving him a concussion when he’d unintentionally forced me into a tight spot. And now I’d inadvertently put him in even greater danger, probably the worst spot he’d been in since hanging up his uniform for good, and there was nothing I could do to get him out of it.
“What are you doing here?” Elsa asked.
“Mr. Beadle’s going to want to know the same about you,” Edward replied.
“Yes, but right now I’m doing the asking.” Her voice had taken on a hard, cold edge, and it made me nervous.
“Uncle Cosmo called me from the island and told me to head up here. You remember that fellow from the Masterson situation, Jed Strait?”
“Yes,” said Elsa, and she put an arm on my shoulder, squeezing to remind me of the promised bullet that would be all mine if things went badly here. It was her way of telling me to stay quiet in the darkness if I wanted to live. “What about him?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Just that he’s supposed to be up here and that he got himself into some kind of trouble.”
“Did you come alone?” Elsa asked.
“Well…yes. What does that matter? And what the hell is going on, anyway?”
She didn’t answer him. All she said was, “Heinrich.” She said it quietly, deliberately, without anger or desperation, without any of the things you’d imagine would color the language of someone ordering the death of another human being. It sounded about as forceful and full of life as telling an ordinarily obedient dog to sit or stay.
And that was why it was such a surprise to me when a dark shape moved toward Beadle’s driver, hands rising up out of the darkness to find the man’s throat
in the beam of the flashlight. It was a surprise to Edward, too, as he made no move to defend himself until it was too late.
Elsa turned the flashlight away from the spectacle, and probably not because she didn’t want to see the murder carried out. For myself, I couldn’t pull my eyes away, shocked at what I was seeing as the dark figures grappled in the doorway, one sinking to its knees after a few seconds.
And then the light was in my eyes, Elsa’s voice venomously hissing, “This is your doing, Mr. Strait. Yours! You see what your meddling has caused!”
I did. And I didn’t like it. Not for the first time, I wondered what would have happened if I had missed my gig at the High Note. How many people would still be alive? Another question immediately followed this one in my mind, thanks to what I’d learned from Elsa: would the President be dead? There was no way to know. For a moment, I thought of those alternate worlds where things worked out differently. In another universe, the assassination plot may have succeeded; Mercy and Klaus and Edward would still be alive. I decided that was good enough. It had to be.
“Don’t try to blame this on me, Elsa,” I said as Edward fell the rest of the way to the floor. He made no sound as he died. I felt terrible, not just for my part in his death but also at the thought of how senseless it was, the poor man stumbling so blindly into this nightmare that was none of his doing, and I promised myself that I would do everything I could to keep Elsa from getting away with it.
“This changes nothing,” Elsa said. “If your Carmelita sent this man in exchange for herself, or if you somehow told her in code not to come in the morning, then you will die, Mr. Strait. Get used to that idea now, eh?”
Then she turned the light away from me and went to one of the kerosene lamps. Moments later, she was flicking a match and lighting the wick. Then the lamp’s feeble light revealed the murder scene before me: Edward Ross dressed in a dark suit, lying dead on the floor, a horrified expression frozen on his face, and the killer named Heinrich rising from the body, a satisfied smile on his lips. He looked to Elsa for approval, and she must have nodded, as Heinrich then gave her a nod and stepped away from his kill. Again, it was hard not to compare them to a hound and its mistress.
The Double-Time Slide: A Dieselpunk Adventure (The Crossover Case Files Book 2) Page 20