by Robert Brown
“It stopped him from sniffing glue.”
“What?”
Heinrich shook his head. “Never mind.”
Leaving Man Mountain trussed up and still down for the count, they headed out. Google Maps told them it wasn’t a far walk.
“What’s the plan?” Gabriela asked as they emerged from the hotel. It was barely past eight and Heinrich saw far too many people on the street for his liking.
“Plan? Oh yeah, I guess I should have one of those. Basically we go over there and beat a confession out of him. Plus, we’ll try to get the old German codes and the original document. If Mikolaj was the one to go through the old Soviet archives, he’ll have the original document they stole from Aaron Briggs.”
“What if Mikolaj isn’t alone? What if he has a wife and children?”
Heinrich stopped. “Crap, I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Men never do.”
“Now’s not the time for a gender politics lecture. Actually, with me it’s never time. What the hell do we do?”
Gabriela thought for a moment, then shook her head. “I don’t know. If this man is associated with a murder, his family is in for a shock in any case. Just let’s try to avoid any gunplay.”
“Glad to. You think I get in fights for fun?”
“Yes, I think you do.”
They continued through town, quickly moving out of the old section at the center and onto quiet residential streets. The houses got further apart and empty lots began to appear between them. To their left stood several apartment blocks from the Soviet days, ugly concrete rectangles ten stories high that looked like they hadn’t been maintained for decades, if ever.
No prizes for guessing where Jan lives, Heinrich thought.
The road branched, one way leading to the apartment blocks, the other to a little cluster of houses surrounded by trees. Google Maps led them there.
Mikolaj Symaski’s house stood at the end of a little cul-de-sac within sight of three other houses. It was a single-story, modest home. No one was on the street.
Heinrich and Gabriela moved to the shade of a tree to get out of the light of the nearby streetlamp and studied the house from the sidewalk. The lights were on but the curtains drawn. A pickup truck was parked in the driveway. They couldn’t see or hear anything from within.
“What do we do, just knock on the door and grab him?” Heinrich asked.
“I don’t know. This was your idea. Maybe wait until they go to sleep and surprise them?”
Heinrich glanced at his watch.
“It’s not even nine. They could be up for hours. We don’t have the time. Man Mountain might have broken free already.”
Gabriela bit her lip. “I guess we don’t have any choice but to take the direct route.”
“What are you doing here?” a voice behind them demanded.
Heinrich whipped around, pulling out his gun.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“Jesus Christ, Jan, you nearly gave me a fucking heart attack!”
“Cool!” Jan said, staring at the gun. He didn’t seem to mind that it was pointed at him. Heinrich put it away.
“Keep your voices down,” Gabriela said.
Jan looked at her, grinned, and elbowed Heinrich in the ribs. “You get her this time, yes?”
Gabriela glared at him.
“Go home,” Heinrich told him.
Jan’s face darkened, and he realized he had said the wrong thing.
“It sucks there. I want to hang out with you and Mikolaj. Why you hide here?”
“I’ll explain tomorrow. Go.”
“But—”
“Go,” Heinrich gave him a little shove.
Jan’s face fell, then turned to anger.
“Fuck you!” He flipped them off.
Jan stormed away.
“I’ll call you,” Heinrich called after him. “We’ll box tomorrow.”
“Fuck you and fuck your Communist bitch too.”
Jan rounded the street corner and disappeared.
“You have a way with children,” Gabriela said. “Perhaps you should be a schoolteacher.”
“Shut up and let’s get this done,” Heinrich grumbled.
They walked across the street.
“Break in or knock on the door pretending to be friends?” Gabriela asked.
“Knock. He’s probably got a gun too. We start climbing through windows we’re liable to get plugged.”
Heinrich glanced down the street where Jan had disappeared.
Damn, I fucked that one up.
“I’ll knock and you keep out of sight,” Gabriela offered. “They already know you.”
“They know you too, by now.”
“Perhaps only by name and not face. You told me Hans had seen your phone. That’s how they found me in the hotel. Now stay out of sight.”
They were at the door. Heinrich ducked to the side to stay away from the peephole, while Gabriela knocked on the door, her pepper spray in her other hand and hidden behind her back.
They heard the sound of movement within. The little pinpoint of light from the peephole darkened.
“Who is it?” a female voice called in Polish.
Oh, great.
“My car has broken down,” Gabriela said. “Can you help?”
The door opened, and a pretty woman well into the third trimester of pregnancy stood on the other side.
Oh, even better.
The woman noticed Heinrich and gave him a dubious look. Gabriela took the initiative.
“Oh thank you,” she said, taking a step across the threshold to keep the woman from closing the door in her face. “Our car broke down and—”
“Who is it, honey?” Mikolaj appeared in the front hall.
As soon as he caught sight of Heinrich, he bolted for the next room.
Heinrich pushed by the women and ran after him.
Mikolaj’s wife tried to scream but her voice was cut short and only came out as a muffled grunt. Gabriela must have clamped her hand on her mouth.
Heinrich rounded the corner into the living room in time to see Mikolaj disappear into a bedroom. He made it to the neo-Nazi leader just as he was opening the drawer to the bedside table.
A right hook knocked him onto the bed. Heinrich reached into the drawer and pulled out a .38 revolver.
Pocketing it, he turned to Mikolaj.
“You speak German?” Heinrich didn’t want to interrogate this guy in a language he didn’t fully understand.
Despite lying on the bed with a red welt on the side of his face, Mikolaj managed to look arrogant.
“Of course I do,” he replied in German.
“Anyone else in this house?”
“No. If you hurt my wife, I’ll—”
“It’s you that you should be worried about. Hand over the documents.”
“What documents?”
Heinrich punched him in the stomach, knelt on him, and shoved the muzzle of the revolver in Mikolaj’s mouth.
Footsteps sounded down the hall.
“Keep her out of here,” Heinrich called.
Another muffled shout came from the corridor.
Heinrich removed the barrel of the pistol from Mikolaj’s mouth.
“Tell her you’re OK.”
“Everything’s all right, honey!”
His voice did not sound convincing in a quavering falsetto.
The footsteps receded.
Heinrich gave him a little jab to the stomach to get his attention.
“All right. Documents. Now.”
Mikolaj smirked. “They won’t help you.”
“And why’s that?”
Shit, don’t tell me the treasure train isn’t real.
“Because it does not give the exact location. We had to figure—”
Mikolaj stopped himself, but it was already too late.
“What was that? You had to figure out the location based on the description in the documents? All right, spill it.”
Mikolaj s
aid nothing. Another jab to the stomach got nothing out of his mouth but a grunt.
“Tell me.”
Mikolaj shook his head. “Do your worst. I’m no coward.”
Heinrich cocked the revolver and put it back in his mouth.
Please don’t call my bluff because beyond this I got nothing.
A sudden stink told Heinrich that Mikolaj was a coward after all.
“Oh hell.” Heinrich got off him and checked none had gotten on his pants. No, he was clean. The same couldn’t be said for Mikolaj.
Heinrich got his poise back.
“Tell me. Now. If you do, I won’t hurt your wife and the worst you’ll get is an accessory to murder.”
Mikolaj wouldn’t look at him. He only nodded.
“It’s hard to describe if you aren’t there. I have to show you.”
“Show me then.”
“I need to change.”
“You do that.” Heinrich didn’t want him stinking up the car.
As the neo-Nazi leader changed, Heinrich noticed that he had been wearing canvas work pants and boots.
“You were planning to head out in a minute, weren’t you?”
“Yes. They are digging now.”
“Perfect,” Heinrich said. “We’ll have the whole gang together.”
Mikolaj gave him a hard look, some of his spirit returning now that he had changed his trousers.
“They’ll kill you.”
“We’ll see about that,” Heinrich said. “Give me the documents and the keys to your truck.”
Mikolaj opened a drawer and handed him a file folder. Inside was a thick stack of photocopies showing a series of five-digit numbers and their corresponding words in German. There was also a typewritten manuscript in German and a sheaf of handwritten notes.
Heinrich tucked them under his arm. It looked like hours of reading material and he was eager to get moving.
They returned to the living room. Mikolaj rushed over to his wife, who sat on the sofa, and gave her a hug. Gabriela stood nearby with the pepper spray in her hand.
“She claims she doesn’t know what her husband is up to in the woods,” Gabriela said.
“Good, then she can’t tell the cops where we’ve gone.”
Gabriela looked relieved. “For a minute there I thought you were going to bring her with us.”
“Not in her condition. The cops will need to be called eventually anyway.”
Gabriela smiled. “But not before you’ve taken a peek at the train yourself.”
“Of course,” Heinrich said with a grin.
They reassured the wife that if she didn’t call the police her husband would be safe and headed out. Heinrich figured she would call anyway, but the warning might buy them some time.
Heinrich handed the keys to Gabriela.
“You drive while I keep an eye on asshole here.”
Heinrich glanced in the bed of the truck. A tarpaulin covered something lumpy.
“What you got in there?”
“Tools. I’m a builder,” Mikolaj replied.
“Well, you won’t be building the Fourth Reich.”
They got in the cab of the truck, Heinrich sitting between Gabriela and Mikolaj and sticking the gun against the neo-Nazi’s ribs.
“Damn, you still stink a bit,” Heinrich said, sliding open the rear window of the cab.
They headed out, Mikolaj giving directions to get on a two-lane road heading north out of town and into the woods.
“So tell me about the murders,” Heinrich said.
“I killed no one.”
“So who did?”
“I was in Russia.”
“We know that. Who killed Aaron Briggs in New York?”
Mikolaj sighed, glanced at the gun, and asked, “Are you Interpol?”
“No, but I got friends in Interpol. You cooperate and they might go easy on you.”
After a pause, Mikolaj said, “Hans and Piotr did it.”
“Piotr was the guy sitting next to you at the memorial service?”
Mikolaj nodded.
“And Dieter?”
“Piotr killed him too.”
“Why?”
“Because Dieter had been researching the train for years and had found some good information.”
“And he didn’t want to share it?”
Mikolaj sneered. “He was a fool, an uneducated man. He couldn’t see the bigger picture. He insisted that the money go to local projects. He didn’t want to make a global fund to help groups all over the world like we do. He couldn’t see that so much money could change everything. The idiot wanted to build youth centers and monuments as if statues and ping pong tables are more important than the movement!”
“In other words, he cared about the Volk and you care about power. So you killed him and took the documents he had.”
“He is no loss,” Mikolaj scoffed.
“You’re a real model citizen. Why not just steal them?”
“Because he would know who did it and he would have talked. He was no friend of the Purity League. He was too loyal to National Revival, a useless organization that has been around for years and has achieved nothing. Dieter is far more useful as a martyr than he ever was when he was alive.”
“What were these documents you took?”
“Some files in a small town archive most researchers missed. It was a typewritten manuscript by someone who claimed to have been in the SS unit that hid the train. The story differed from the one usually told. It said the treasure was gold and jewels, but no art like most writers put in their books. Plus, the amount was a tenth of what the popular stories say.”
Heinrich nodded. That all fit. Mikolaj was wrong about one thing though. Someone else had come across that information—Aaron and Amethyst Briggs.
They left the town behind them and plunged into the near darkness of a moonlit night. Woods closed in on the road on either side, broken occasionally by a farmer’s field. A train moaned in the distance.
Heinrich’s excitement must have been visible on his face because Mikolaj nodded. “Yes, we are nearing the tracks, and those tracks have been there since the war.”
After another mile they came to a railway crossing and had to stop. The gate was down and a long freight train was clattering by. Mikolaj pointed to a dirt access road and said “Go left.”
Gabriela turned off and followed the dirt road as the train passed by just a few feet to their right. The forest on their left opened up to a lower patch of field. Moonlight shone off puddles and muddy areas in the field. Heinrich noticed that beyond the field, the edge of the forest had thinner, younger trees.
“Here!” he shouted.
“Yes,” Mikolaj said.
Heinrich marveled. “I see what they did. There was a branch line going into the woods. To hide it, they didn’t just remove the tracks, they carved out this whole space so the bare patch through the woods wouldn’t be obvious.”
“Yes, and the woods have been slow to reclaim it because this field is all waterlogged,” Gabriela said. She took the precaution of turning the headlights off. Heinrich felt relieved that the sound of their engine was drowned out by the train. He peered forward and saw no end to it. It would be passing for some minutes still.
“What did they do with all the spoil and trees?” Gabriela asked.
“They used it for earthworks to protect the train line close to here,” Mikolaj replied.
Heinrich remembered the book he had been reading.
“That cluster of bunkers is nowhere close to here.”
“No,” Mikolaj replied. “The treasure hunters were misled. Those were built to protect the approach to the castle from the northwest. There are no bunkers close to the hidden train depot. They did not want to call attention to it.”
Mikolaj instructed her to pass the field. The woods closed in again and a minute later they found a small cleared area. Two cars and a pickup truck were parked there.
“The site is a few hundred meters away fr
om this spot,” Mikolaj said. “We have to walk from here.”
Heinrich tensed. Had Mikolaj led them into a trap?
But he saw no guard. The treasure hunters were confident of their privacy in this remote spot. Gabriela parked, and they got out.
“So where do we…” Heinrich’s voice trailed off when he heard a sound.
It sounded like crying, and it came from the bed of Mikolaj’s pickup truck.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Heinrich whipped off the tarpaulin.
“Jan!”
The skinhead lay curled up among the tools, sobbing.
Suddenly he leaped out of the truck bed and threw himself on Mikolaj.
“You piece of shit! You traitor!”
The fury of the kid’s attack pushed Mikolaj back, and he took a couple of good hits before he knocked Jan down. The kid lay on the ground, still crying.
“He kill my uncle.”
“Quiet,” Heinrich whispered. “If they hear us, they’ll kill us next.”
Jan slowly got to his feet, wiping his eyes. He spat at Mikolaj and turned to Heinrich.
“So you’re not one of us?”
“No, I’m a private detective. They murdered a man in New York, just like they murdered your uncle. His wife hired me.”
“You lie to me.”
“I’m sorry. I had to.”
Jan frowned at Mikolaj, who was holding the side of his head where the kid had slugged him. “They all lied to me. They say Purity League care about people.”
“They don’t give a shit about you.”
It was a hard thing to say to a kid who had spent his whole life around people who didn’t give a shit about him, but he had to hear it.
All things considered, he took it remarkably well. He wiped his eyes and set his face in the hard scowl Heinrich had first seen on the march.
“Fuck him. We go get the treasure and I leave this shit town.”
“No, you’re staying here. Get back in the truck.”
“I want to go,” Jan whined, sounding about five years younger than he already was.
“These people are dangerous. Get back in the truck and hide.”
“But—”
“Now.”
“All right,” Jan moped.
Heinrich pulled the automatic out of his pocket and handed Gabriela the revolver.
