by Robert Brown
“And real good job on all the plastic you’re wasting. Oh right, your generation doesn’t care about little things like the environment or wars or shit like that. It’s all identity politics and personal pronouns with you.”
Neckbeard turned to him.
“What’s your problem, anyway?”
Heinrich looked him in the eye. “Because you’re a privileged coward and you have no right to be here.”
Finally, he saw a spark of anger in the kid. Heinrich wasn’t sure if Neckbeard had enough residual testosterone to get angry at being called a coward or his sense of entitlement had been injured by being told he wasn’t welcome somewhere. Whatever it was, Neckbeard put his glove back on.
“It’s your funeral,” Neckbeard scoffed.
Heinrich put on his wraps and gloves plus the mouthpiece and padded helmet the law required amateur fighters to wear. He sauntered over to the ring, loosening up his shoulders and throwing a few punches at the air. Heinrich and Neckbeard climbed into the ring from opposite corners. When the rest of the gym saw there was going to be a match, they all gathered around, the newbies curious, the regulars smiling.
“You’re not going to warm up?” Neckbeard asked, meeting him at the center.
“You are my warm up,” Heinrich replied.
Roxy got in the ring, checked both fighters were protected, and announced. “All right, gentlemen and lady,” she bowed and winked to the lone female fighter in the crowd, no doubt earmarked as Roxy’s next conquest. “We’re going to have three rounds of three minutes each. Either fighter can throw in the towel whenever they want. No hitting below the belt and no being a pussy. You square up and do your thing. I’m the referee and if either of you little princesses cross me, it’s me you’ll be fighting next.”
Heinrich grinned as much as his mouthpiece would allow. Roxy was one of the few fighters he feared in here.
“Now go to your corners and when the bell rings, come out fighting.”
Heinrich had already gauged his opponent when the kid had been slugging the punching bag. Neckbeard had the intense energy of a younger man and was equal to Heinrich in strength, but had a fraction less reach and not as much experience. He was also a bit stiff, probably from a lifetime spent posing.
“May the best man win,” Neckbeard said, his voice coming out muffled around his mouthpiece.
“Only one man in here, snowflake.”
The bell rang. Heinrich rushed him.
He figured Neckbeard’s main weakness was a lack of aggression, and he was right.
A couple of quick jabs that the hipster blocked, then a good solid connection to the kid’s ribs. Heinrich ducked back and Neckbeard’s late counterpunch hit nothing but air. Heinrich popped him a jab in the face that was too close to the end of his reach to do more than sting and ducked to the right, thinking Neckbeard would come for him. Instead the kid slid to the side to put more distance between them.
Wimp.
Heinrich moved in, gloves up to stop a right hook that came half a second too late. This guy kept hesitating.
Heinrich didn’t hesitate. He gave his signature combination—a right hook that Neckbeard blocked, followed by a left jab that connected, and a heaving uppercut with his right that landed beautifully.
Neckbeard stumbled back, his fall broken by the ropes.
And Heinrich was on him. Three jabs in quick succession to get the kid hunkering behind both gloves, then a hard hit to the side to surprise him and get his guard to shift down, then a right cross that made Neckbeard’s knees buckle.
The watching fighters ooohed in appreciation. Heinrich backed off as Roxy got between them.
She began to count.
Neckbeard was still on his knees at three, one arm leaning against the ropes. At four he rose. By five he was on his feet.
“Give up, cherry,” Roxy said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “You’re outmatched.”
Neckbeard shook her off. Heinrich laughed around his mouthpiece.
“Tut tut, Neckbeard, dismissing a woman, and a lesbian at that. What would all your liberal friends on Facebook think?”
Neckbeard rushed him.
Finally, I get a rise from this kid.
Heinrich blocked a strong right hook and replied with a left straight to the stomach, but Neckbeard was too angry to be stopped by that. Heinrich backed off, blocked and dodged a series of jabs and swings, letting the kid think he was turning the tables on him, letting the kid get cocky and angry. Heinrich saw several halfway decent openings, the kid was too stiff and too eager, but Heinrich was patient and waited for a good opening.
It came when Heinrich backed off half a step more than usual and Neckbeard’s right cross overextended his stance and left him wide open.
Heinrich landed a left hook on the jaw. Neckbeard stumbled, keeping on his feet from adrenaline alone. Heinrich shifted to the right and hit him with a right uppercut that the kid managed to half block, but in the process leaving him with open for the one-two punch that followed.
Neckbeard went down like a sack of peat moss. The fighters cheered.
Roxy leaned over him. “One, two…”
Heinrich studied the kid. Had he gone too far? No, the guy was down for the count but he didn’t look damaged, if you didn’t count the glazed eyes, the split lip, and the beginnings of what was going to be a beautiful shiner.
Neckbeard stirred when Roxy got to eight, but didn’t even get a knee bent before she made it to ten.
✽ ✽ ✽
Heinrich came home to his Manhattan apartment feeling much better. Seeing all that stuff in Briggs’s place had shaken him and even the fight hadn’t fully exorcized the ghosts. The sound of that hipster hitting the mat sure helped though. It rang in his ears like a beautiful melody.
As he opened his front door, he wrinkled his nose at the sight of the flaking paint and cracked tiles. He had inherited this apartment from his grandfather, the only way he could have ever afforded to live in New York these days. Unfortunately, with property taxes and the high cost of just about everything, his earnings as a private detective barely made ends meet. He had nothing left over for remodeling.
Not that he had many women over. The ones who stopped by were so trashed they didn’t care.
Heinrich spent the evening researching the gold train, sifting through a mass of newspaper articles and wide-eyed treasure hunting sites. There was a lot of contradictory information out there but they all told the same basic story. In January 1945, when the Eastern Front was collapsing in the face of a superior Soviet army, a German train filled with treasure left the fortress city of Breslau. The city had become a salient in the front, one of the many spots where Hitler had sworn never to give an inch. It wasn’t much later that the city got surrounded and a bitter siege began. Breslau held out, however, not surrendering until after Berlin had fallen in May.
The train was filled with 300 tons of gold, jewels, and rare masterpieces of art stolen from Jewish families. Briggs hadn’t mentioned the looted art, which was probably the only thing on the train that could be traced. Convenient that she had left that out. Her estimate of the loot’s worth was way low if there were 300 tons. These inconsistencies made him wonder where she got her information.
She had also added the odd detail that the train was supposed to go to Berlin. None of the accounts said that. The train’s supposed destination was the Owl Mountains near the city of Wałbrzych, now in Poland but then in Germany.
The mountains were honeycombed with tunnels dug by the Germans as part of Project Riese. Heinrich had found little solid information about this top secret Nazi project. The documents seemed to have gotten destroyed during the war and the project had never been completed anyway. It had involved extensive networks of tunnels in seven different locations, all built by forced labor coming from Auschwitz. One network lay under a castle. The others were scattered in remote areas of the mountains. There were rumors of even more tunnels, sophisticated underground cities that had been comp
leted and fully fitted. Even academic historians took these rumors seriously. What nobody knew for sure was what the Nazis planned to use all these tunnels for.
That hadn’t stopped people from coming up with many theories. Some said the tunnels would be a hideout for the Führer and his inner circle. Others said they’d serve as a base for the Werewolf resistance group after the area had been taken over. A few crackpots said they were going to be labs to analyze crashed UFOs.
Legends of the treasure train had circulated around Poland ever since the war. No one had ever found it despite the occasional flare up of interest when some new “clue” was uncovered. These clues turned out to be duds, just like the Oak Island Money Pit and the Lost Dutchman Mine and all those other stories he had loved as a kid.
The most recent media feeding frenzy came in 2015 when two treasure hunters claimed they had used ground-penetrating radar to look through a hill and find a hundred-meter-long train inside a tunnel. The pictures looked convincing, a fuzzy image that kind of looked like a train with tanks or turrets on board. It sure didn’t look natural.
Except that it was. It turned out they had found nothing but some ice formations. No tunnel. No train. No treasure. Once again people had seen what they had wanted to see instead of what was there.
Heinrich knew all about that, so he wasn’t one to judge.
CHAPTER THREE
“I might need to go to Poland for this.”
Heinrich had taken the Metro North line up to prosperous Westchester County where the widow lived. From there, public transport ended, and he had to take a cab to the house, set amid two acres of perfect lawn and a fringe of trees.
The widow nodded as she poured tea. “I know. The men who murdered my husband have no more need to stay here. I have already arranged a translator to go with you.”
“I work alone.”
Mrs. Briggs set the teapot down and sat back. “Do you speak Polish, Mr. Müller?”
“No, but I can learn.”
“I hardly think we have the time.”
“A couple of days for the basics. Two weeks on the outside to get a good working knowledge, less if I’m in the country.”
“You have a rather high opinion of yourself, Mr. Müller.”
“Not at all. I’m a hyper-polyglot. It’s my one true talent. I’m a good boxer and a good private eye, but I learned those skills like most people can. Languages just come naturally to me. I already speak German, Italian, French, Spanish, Latin, and ancient Greek. I have a few hundred words and basic grammar in several more languages. Living in the city helps, at least it did before gentrification got rid of most of the interesting people.”
“Eu cred cã iesti o gramadã de cãcat de cal mincinos,” Briggs said. Heinrich repeated the sentence back to her pitch perfect.
“That sounded like Romanian,” Heinrich added.
“It is Romanian. My maiden name is Golescu.”
“What did I just say?”
“It means, ‘I think you are a lying pile of horse manure.’”
“Tut tut, Mrs. Briggs.”
“Albastru means blue, subtire means thin, picant means spicy, leftin means inexpensive, moale means soft, and cuptor means oven.”
Heinrich repeated them and got them all correct.
“I’m beginning to believe you, Mr. Müller.”
“Give me a few days before I go to Poland. I’ll look into things here and get intense on the language. Aren’t you worried the murderers will come after you for the code?”
“No. This house is registered to a third party. There is nothing to tie it to us. A sensible precaution considering our business. Our apartment in the city was ransacked after my husband’s murder. Other than the theft of some money and a few minor antiques, they got nothing.”
“And they probably took those things just out of spite. I’ll get started on Polish.”
“Very well. I’ll be most interested in watching your progress. I’m looking forward to seeing you again.”
“I think you are a lying pile of horse manure,” Heinrich said in Romanian.
✽ ✽ ✽
The next day he got to work. In the morning he downloaded an app with speech identification software to teach him the basics of Polish. By mid-afternoon he had gotten to the intermediate level. Next he called the New York Polish-American Club, found a teacher, and booked a lesson for the next day. In between lessons on the app he went to the district attorney’s office and looked up the murder of Aaron Briggs.
On the surface it looked like your typical mugging, something still all too common even in the cleaned-up, boring city New York had become.
Aaron Briggs had been walking down 33rd St., heading for his bank when a white man in his early twenties wearing a hooded sweatshirt had come up behind him and hit him over the head with a short length of metal pipe. No threats, no altercation, just nailed him. Aaron had fallen to the ground at the first blow, but the assailant hit him three more times, to make sure he was dead. Aaron had been 68, small, and no physical threat. The man had then taken his briefcase and wallet and fled around the corner. Several witnesses had seen the attack and called 911 but, this being New York, no one pursued the assailant and no one could give a good description of him. Some jerky phone video from one of the witnesses showed a broad-shouldered man with a grey hood hiding his features running away from the camera. Sweatpants, green sneakers of unknown make with a white stripe on the back, athletic gait, that’s all. He had tucked the pipe in his pocket. The guy had known what he was doing. A maniac or a nervous amateur would have probably tossed it, leaving key evidence behind.
The statement given by Amethyst Briggs did not mention any World War Two German military communique and did not mention her suspicions he had been killed by the Purity League. She didn’t want the authorities to know. Why not? Wouldn’t an investigation give her the chance of getting the document back? She wouldn’t even need to tell them what it was. It wasn’t like the NYPD went around cracking 70-year-old codes.
The paper trail, Heinrich realized a moment later. She doesn’t want a paper trail.
But she was willing to hire me even after I called her a neo-Nazi bitch. She must be desperate. She could have gotten someone else. It’s me she wants.
And why does she have a secret hideout? Has she been in danger before?
Questions, questions, questions.
He did a bit of research on the Purity League. There wasn’t much on the Internet, just a rather plain website that spoke in euphemisms like “maintaining national integrity” and “ensuring that any new citizens will fit in the dominant culture.” He suspected that there would be more on the Dark Web. He called Biniam, a programmer he sometimes hired, to check into that.
While he waited for Biniam to do his magic, Heinrich scrolled through news articles about the Purity League in all the languages he knew. He found little. A feature from La Repubblica from two years ago showed convincing evidence of ties to Forza Nuova, a small Italian political party that was anti-immigrant and pro-Catholic like the Partido Falange in Spain, while the Süddeutsche Zeitung told how the organization funded various skinhead groups in Germany. A few scattered articles in other papers filled out the picture that the Purity League was well funded although no one could say where their funds came from. They made donations to many small, struggling parties and groups in Europe’s far right.
Beyond that he could find little. The Purity League liked to operate behind the scenes and did not call attention to itself. That anodyne website and the fact that they never gave interviews to the press showed they were careful about security. Since most neo-fascists made lots of noise and got off by marching through immigrant neighborhoods and Jewish cemeteries, this relative anonymity made Heinrich wonder.
His cell phone rang. Biniam.
“Selam, Biniam,” Heinrich said. “Kemey ‘aleka?”
“Kemey Wu’elka, Heinrich.”
Basic greetings were the limit of Heinrich’s Tigrinya, but he�
�d learned long ago that the more obscure the language, the more its speakers appreciated you learning a bit of it.
Biniam was a refugee from Eritrea who worked for an Internet security company and moonlighted as a political activist trying to overthrow the oppressive regime back home. Like other political activists fighting against dictatorships, he did most of his work on the Dark Web where the government couldn’t trace him. Biniam spouted a lot of babble about the Tor browser and onion sites and Virtual Private Networks that Heinrich didn’t understand. What he understood was that for a modest price Biniam could find out all sorts of information quickly.
“What’s up, my man?” Biniam said in English, his accent laced with that strange lilt that the people of the Horn of Africa have.
“Sitting here reading about the scum of the earth,” Heinrich replied. “Got anything for me?”
“Yep. A representative from the Purity League is giving a speech the day after tomorrow to the White Patriots Society here in New York.”
“Really?” he had expected some background information, not the guys landing right in his lap. Why were they giving speeches right after killing somebody? Biniam went on.
“It’s members only. 11 East 45th St., Apartment A, 8 p.m. Your user name is NorseWarrior23 and the password to get through the door is ‘John Birch didn’t go far enough.’”
“Lovely. How did you manage all of this so quickly? Does anyone know this NorseWarrior asshole by sight?”
“NorseWarrior23. Got to get that right, man. No, it’s an online group. Actually I’m NorseWarrior23.”
“Yeah, you look it.”
Biniam laughed. “I’ve been trolling the far right for months. It’s sort of a hobby of mine.”
“Collect old music, it’s safer.”
“You’re the one who needs to stay safe. Be careful out there.”
Biniam hung up.
✽ ✽ ✽
Pavel Balcerzak was a portly senior citizen who hung around the New York Polish-American Club because he had nothing better to do. A retired plumber, he had started giving Polish lessons to bored children who would rather play video games on their iPads. He was delighted to have an eager student for a change.
