by Robert Brown
Purity Pursuit
Robert Brown
© Robert Brown 2018 All Rights Reserved.
This is a work of fiction, any names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are purely from the imagination of the author or used for fictitious and entertainment purposes only. Any resemblance to real people living or dead and actual events is purely coincidental.
No parts of this book may be reproduced. Reviewers may quote small passages in the book for reviewing purposes.
Dedication
This is for my wife and children without whom this book and my first would never have been written. This is also dedicated to all the writers who are working away on their first work, keep writing.
✽ ✽ ✽
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
Small plea from the author
Preview of “Deadly Illusions” the first book from Robert Brown
CHAPTER ONE
Heinrich Müller did not like the sound of this assignment.
The widow sitting in front of him, with her frail voice scratchy and warbling as if it came from an old 78 record, was telling him the most remarkable things, none of them good.
The decor matched the widow. They sat in her stuffy drawing room—she was old enough to call it a drawing room—drinking weak tea from fine china while surrounded by oaken bookshelves, oil paintings, and glass cases filled with knickknacks.
All typical decor for a wealthy senior citizen, except that the bookshelves were crammed with titles in German set in Gothic typeface circa 1940, the oil paintings showed Aryan heroes in full military regalia smiting caricatures of Russians and Americans, and the knickknacks were all Iron Cross medals and rusty Lugers.
Heinrich Müller had never punched a woman in his life, and he had never punched a senior citizen, but he felt like breaking both rules today.
What the widow told him kept him from doing it.
“My husband’s case has been closed. A routine mugging, they said. I know that’s not true. I know it was them. I know it was the Purity League.”
Those two final words hit him like a beer bottle smashed across his face. He’d heard of the Purity League. Its so-called purity had sullied the one pure thing in his life. He decided to give her a second chance. The enemy of my enemy is my friend as Genghis Khan once said.
“So your husband dealt in this trash,” Heinrich said, nodding at a bust of Hitler on a side table. “And you’re surprised that some neo-Nazis came after him for it?”
The widow shook her head with a disdainful air. She’d had a disdainful air ever since he’d stopped by. He was the hired help, and she made sure he knew it. He might as well have been cleaning the pool out back.
“The Purity League has the funds to buy my late husband’s entire collection, if they didn’t have many of the items already. No, they wanted the one thing they couldn’t buy.”
“And what’s that?” Heinrich asked.
“First, I need to know if you will take the case.”
“Investigate the murder of a dealer in Nazi antiques? No thanks, lady. But thanks for the tea.”
Heinrich rose to leave.
“Where are you going?” the widow asked in a tone that made her sound like a schoolteacher telling a student they hadn’t been dismissed.
“Anywhere but here. I don’t work for neo-Nazis.”
“Aaron and I are not neo-Nazis,” the widow said.
Heinrich raised his hands to show all the items on display.
“This is just business,” the widow said. “It sells very well.”
“Business you used to decorate your living room? Yeah, I’m sure it sells well, lady, but you ain’t selling to me.”
Heinrich started to leave.
“Fifty million dollars.”
Heinrich stopped. Turned.
“Excuse me?”
“Fifty million dollars in gold and gems. That’s what at stake.”
Heinrich shook his head. “I don’t believe for a minute you’re offering me fifty million to find who murdered your husband.”
The widow straightened up, looking insulted.
“Of course not. You’ll only get one percent, that’s still half a million dollars. The rest will go to charities that benefit gypsies and homosexuals.”
Heinrich paused. This had gotten just weird enough to catch his interest.
“Back up. You got my attention with the gold and gems, but lost me on the gypsies and homosexuals.”
“They’re the forgotten victims of the Third Reich. The Nazis killed millions of them. As far as I know there’s only one monument to homosexuals killed in the concentration camps, and that’s in Amsterdam. There is no monument to the gypsies.”
“So you’re not earmarking any money for the Jews, eh?”
The widow looked like she had bitten something sour. “The Jews have plenty of money.”
“Somehow I knew you’d say that.”
“Young man, what you think of me and my late husband Aaron is irrelevant. You do not know us and cannot judge us.”
Young man? Well, compared to you I guess I am. And yes, I can judge you, Heinrich thought. The widow, Amethyst Briggs, went on.
“We have made a good living selling these items, that is true, but most of our sales have been to museums and amateur historians. We have never sought out members of the far right.”
“I’m sure they’ve sought you out. I checked your online catalog. It’s one thing to sell World War Two memorabilia, it’s another thing to sell only Nazi memorabilia.”
Her eyes misted over.
“It was one of the great epochs of world history.”
“Yeah, real great.”
“By great I mean important, powerful.”
“So tell me about all these gold and gems.” Heinrich’s finances were in such a state that an offer of big money almost balanced out the bitter taste in his mouth. Almost.
“Have you heard of the Nazi gold train in Poland?”
“Vaguely. I’m a private detective, not a historian.”
Although history keeps blindsiding me, Heinrich added to himself.
“It was a train filled with treasure hidden by the Nazis in January of 1945, when the Russian hordes were sweeping in from the East to rape and pillage the Reich. The treasure was mostly jewelry and gold taken from the conquered territories. A German general was entrusted with bringing the train back to Berlin but all the bombing and partisan activity kept the train from making the journey. Fearing he would be surrounded, and the treasure taken, he decided to hide it in the southeastern part of the Reich, in a region that has since been taken by Poland. There are several tunnels there dating from the war, used by the Germans as air raid shelters and storage depots. Some of them even had railroad tracks so that entire trains could be hidden in them during the daytime to avoid Russian dive bombers.”
“O
K, I remember now,” Heinrich said. “They thought they’d found the tunnel a couple of years back and there was a big deal in the media. They didn’t find a thing. The train is a myth.”
“The train is not a myth. They were digging in the wrong place.”
“Of course they were, but you know where it really is because you have a treasure map.”
“Sarcasm is the last refuge of the scoundrel, young man.”
“I thought that was patriotism.”
“Patriotism may have become a bad word to your generation, but in earlier times it was the noblest trait someone could have.”
“Yeah, worked out well for the Germans.”
The widow clucked her tongue and looked away. To her credit, she had held up well to this relentless abuse. Try as he might, Heinrich couldn’t really get a rise from her.
There was a pause. Heinrich broke it.
“Look, I used to love stories of buried treasure when I was a kid. But that’s all they are, stories. That treasure map is a fake. Probably a good fake if it fooled you and your husband, but there’s no treasure.”
“It’s not a treasure map,” Amethyst Briggs said, looking at him again.
“What is it, then?”
“An official top secret field report from the general responsible for the train.”
“Historical documents can be faked too.”
“This isn’t a fake. My husband and I are experts.”
Why does she keep referring to her husband in the present tense? It’s freaking me out.
“Even experts can be fooled.”
“They can. We could take the Metro North line into New York City right now and I could point out half a dozen forgeries hanging in the Met. But this document wasn’t faked.”
“And how do you know that?”
“The document is written in code, and not the regular codes used by the SS, but a more obscure, local code devised in Breslau late in the war. The only surviving code book was captured by the Soviets when they took Breslau and was kept in the Kremlin archives until those archives were opened to the public after the fall of the Soviet Union.”
Heinrich shrugged. “So some historian who went to Moscow faked it.”
“No. My husband purchased the communique back in 1986, well before the public had access to the Kremlin archives. He didn’t even know it had anything to do with the treasure train. The Purity League sent agents several times to buy it from him, and he refused. His curiosity was piqued. Aaron was an avid researcher, and it intrigued him that the neo-Nazis were so eager to buy an unreadable document. Only after the Kremlin archives were opened, and he went there himself did he unlock the secret.”
“So why didn’t he find the treasure himself?”
“He planned to. He only came back from his research trip to Moscow on March 15 and was killed a little over a month ago on March 26. They stole the document from him.”
“So why haven’t the murderers grabbed the treasure?” Heinrich asked. At this point he wasn’t sure if he was humoring the old bag or if he was believing in this stuff himself.
“Because they only got the original coded message. My husband was taking it to a safety deposit box when he was attacked. He did not have the photocopies of the code book he had made in Moscow.”
“Do you have those?”
“No. I burned them so that if they came after me they wouldn’t find the secret. But these people know what they’re doing. They found out somehow what my husband had and its significance.”
“How could they have known the document revealed the location of the treasure train if it had never been decoded before?”
The widow sighed and stared at a painting of a column of Hitler Youth marching through a verdant Bavarian countryside.
“I don’t know, but I am sure they are researching all the known code books from the Third Reich. It is only a matter of time before they think to look in Moscow.”
Heinrich was still standing at the doorway. He hesitated between leaving and sitting down. The Purity League had ties to far right parties all over Europe. With the way some elections hung in the balance these days if they got their hands on that money they could tip the scales.
“Shit,” he muttered.
“Young man, I do not abide profanity!”
Heinrich patted the bust of Adolph Hitler. “Don’t talk to me about profanity, bitch.”
Amethyst Briggs rose from her armchair and pointed a shaky finger at him.
“Get out of my house this instant! I’ll find another private detective.”
“No you won’t. I know why you called me and not someone else. And yeah, I’ll take the job. My fee is two hundred dollars a day plus expenses, and no complaining about how I spend it. And I’ll take two percent, not one. That’s got to go in writing. And I will get out of this house this instant. I feel like punching something and if I don’t get out of here quick, it will be you.”
Heinrich strolled out the front door as the old woman sputtered behind him in incoherent rage.
Heinrich grimaced. If she only knew that she wasn’t as angry with him as he was with himself.
The train back to Manhattan took an hour, and he cursed himself the entire way.
CHAPTER TWO
Roxy’s Gym was a relic of the New York City Heinrich had grown up in, the New York of the Eighties when the city was run down, tough, exciting, and regular people could still afford to live there. It had been a great place to be a teen, but now he was forty-five and the city had become a vast unrecognizable shopping mall for hipsters, corporate trash, and tourists.
If Roxy, the bull dyke with the killer left hook who ran the place, had rented instead of bought back when she and her partner had opened the boxing gym in 1989, she would have been out of business years ago. But she owned it and had held on even after her partner’s death, kicking out an endless stream of property “developers” who showed up with offers to buy her place and turn it into high-rent housing for plastic people in business suits.
The gym stood on the edge of the Bronx, a no-go area back in the Eighties that was now being strangled by the tentacles of gentrification. When he had went here twenty years ago, the gym stood between a dive bar and a porn shop. Now the dive bar served craft beer and the porn shop sold cell phones. The gay sauna down the street had become a Starbucks.
As he pushed open the front door to Roxy’s Gym, he took a deep breath of sweat, mildew, and body odor. The interior was grungy and dark. The bare concrete walls were covered with old fight posters and photos of a few graduates who had made it somewhere close the big time. A ring stood in the center, and around it were arrayed punching bags and open areas for exercise. In one corner was a weights area. None of those fancy machines like in the chain gyms, just free weights. Weights for people who more interested in being stronger than looking better. Two dozen amateur and semipro boxers were skipping rope, smacking bags, or pumping iron. Besides Roxy, he was the oldest person in here by a decade.
Heinrich smiled. In an increasingly fake city, this was one of the few real spots left.
“Hey Heinie,” said the squat woman with the salt-and-pepper buzz cut folding towels behind the counter.
“Hey Roxy. I want to fight tonight. Got anyone who deserves to get knocked out?”
Roxy’s eyes lit up. “Oh yeah, I got just your type.”
She jabbed a thumb towards one of the punching bags where a guy in his mid twenties was slamming away with some strength and little technique. He had a good build, but one of those square beards that marked him out as a hipster.
“Oh Jesus Christ. You’re letting neck beards in here now? Don’t tell me, let me guess—private school, Ivy League, daddy’s company, been going to one of those white collar chain boxing gyms and came here for the authenticity, right?”
“Yup.”
“He’s mine.”
Roxy laughed. “Ah, crap. I was going to floor him myself.”
Heinrich loved Roxy. If she had been straight,
he would have married her for the kicks. Older than him, tougher than him, and she hated rich people even more than he did.
“Next time,” Heinrich said. “His cherry is mine. It’s been a bad day.”
Roxy chuckled and came out from behind the counter. “Ooooh. This is gonna be good.”
Heinrich sauntered over to the rich kid. “You, newbie. Stop jacking off that punching bag and get into the ring. We’re going toe to toe.”
The hipster looked him up and down.
“Dude, you’re old enough to be my father.”
“You think I’d knock up a chick to add to your worthless generation? There are enough entitled, whiney, avocado toast eating, safe space hiding special snowflakes in the world already.”
Heinrich was already taking off his shirt. Neckbeard took a second look.
“Well you sure are built to be a boxer, but there’s no need to be insulting.”
“There’s no need to come slumming to our gym, bitch. Get in there,” Heinrich said, pulling off his sweatpants to reveal a pair of red boxing shorts.
Neckbeard bit on the Velcro strap of one of his gloves, pulling it open and then jamming the glove in his armpit to yank his hand out.
“You want to bare knuckle?” Heinrich asked. His estimation of the guy went up a notch.
“That’s illegal.”
Heinrich’s estimation of him went down two notches.
The hipster went over to the wall where a towel and an Evian bottle sat on a shelf. He took a big drink of water.
“Mineral water?” Heinrich asked. “Seriously? We live in the First fucking World. We can drink the tap water here, or isn’t that good enough for your delicate sensibilities?”
“Mineral water is healthier. Tap water has numerous trace chemicals such as—”
“Oh yeah, drinking water that’s been stuck in a plastic bottle for God knows how many months is real healthy. Dipshit. Most of these mineral waters are just filtered tap water anyway.”
“Evian isn’t—”
