The Case

by Sean May

1

  Nina saw her reflection in the floor-to-ceiling window. Her skimpy black leather dress cinched way too close to her body and kept her from taking an honest breath. She'd poured herself into it three hours earlier in preparation for this job, having to slather herself with lotion just to make it begin to fit. She knew the tightness of the dress was going to be a huge problem in a few minutes but there wasn't a lot she could do about it right now, so she dealt with it. Right now, she had to fit in. She had to blend into the background.

  She looked at herself reflected in the glass some more and wondered how she'd taken this path. She was twenty-eight, had at least three-quarters of her life in front of her, but here she was, standing in a tight black leather dress organizing cigars. She could only see this as demeaning.

  Beyond her reflection, Berlin sprawled to the east. Thousands of lights pulsed slowly and wavered in the night, illuminating millions of lives, millions of stories Nina couldn't bother herself with right now. She had enough on her plate.

  She wasn’t here to be a tourist, but Berlin wasn't what Nina expected. Then again, most of her memories of the city involve watching the wall come down when she was a kid, being upset that it interrupted her favorite cartoons. The city was indifferent to Nina's ignorance, and it had changed a lot since the end of the Cold War, but it still bore the identifying marks of its tortured past. Amongst the modern glass and metal buildings that dominated the city these days, a good number of drab, stoic Soviet-designed structures shot up from the ground, marring the city like dead teeth in an otherwise impeccable maw. The buildings were ghosts, reminders of what the city, the country, was going through just twenty years ago. The memories of hell, marginalized, trying to be forgotten.

  Boats, most of them late-night tourists checking out the sights of the city, made their lazy journey down the Spree, the river that wound its way through the heart of Berlin. On the far bank of the river, clubgoers waited in front of blocked doors, adjusting their hair, their clothes, making sure they looked their best, or at least good enough to warrant enough attention to guarantee that someone would be taking them home later that night. Nina wished she could be one of them, with the uncomplicated life full of late nights where the only danger was a vicious hangover the next morning and a stranger in your bed next to you. The stuff Nina was facing down, sometimes you didn't wake up at all.

  Nina couldn't bother herself with existential crises at the time, couldn’t worry about what might have been if she’d chosen differently in life. This was a job, she needed focus, enough of it to get her through the night. Without that focus, she was sure to fail, and she hadn't traveled from New York on a red eye just to lose everything at the last second.

  Back to work, then, she thought. Nina blocked the rest of Berlin out of her mind. As beautiful and as whimsical she imagined it to be, it wasn't important to her right now. She prepped her tray full of cigars and lighters and turned back toward the main room and toward the chattering din of conversation. The poker game she was supposed to be serving was ahead of her, but she was sort of dreading making her way back into the room. Once she began to move, she had to be careful not to tear her dress down the seam...not that the men she was going to serve would have had any opposition to that happening, as a matter of fact she'd probably get better tips. But right now, tips didn’t matter.

  She walked past Seth, who was mixing up a couple of cocktails. She gave him a nod and a slight wink. Not a wink of flirtation, a wink of knowing. The wheels were set in motion, and it was all downhill from here, for better or worse.

  Nina approached the table. At first none of the men even acknowledged her presence, as they were wrapped up in their game, eyes focused intensely on the cards in their hands and the cards on the table. She was more decor than another person in the room, but such is the life of a cigar girl.

  Even though they didn't know who she was, she knew exactly who they were. She’d briefed herself on them while she was flying over the Atlantic. Surrounding the table were six of the most influential men in the entirety of Eastern Europe's criminal underground. The number of lives these men were responsible for ending, both personally and by proxy, were staggering.

  Immediately in front of Nina was Yuri Belikov, a Russian Mafiya head with a penchant for driving his rivals ten miles into Siberia, stripping them naked, and seeing if they could make it back to Moscow. None of the men that Belikov put out there had ever come back to the city, most of them probably fearing that the fate that awaited them back in Moscow was much, much worse than freezing to death. To Belikov's right was Nikolas Gikas, broker of high-price escorts all over the Mediterranean. Gikas liked to make sure people remembered his name, hence why so many unfortunate men in the Greek underground had the name Gikas branded into their chests, a permanent mark of the man they wronged. Considering the current company, Gikas' antics seemed quaint, especially with what Jacques Okafor was known for. Okafor was sitting right next to him, a son of poor Nigerian immigrants, Okafor decided to turn to a life of crime and really took to it. He quickly rose in the ranks of the Unione Corse, all the way to the point where he was now more or less in charge of the entirety of France’s underground. Rumors had spread in the underground that he idolized the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin so much that it had been whispered for years that, much like Amin, Okafor was given to cannibalism with the irrational belief that it made him stronger to feast on the bodies of his fallen foes. Whether this was based on fact or a ghost of the latent racism that pervaded Europe's underground was always a question, but since Okafor hadn't said anything to deny it and everyone was too scared to ask him about it, people assumed that there was at least a bit of truth to it.

  Two other guys, Robert Eddings from England and Giovanni Molinari from Italy were also seated at the table. Nina was familiar with them, but their exploits hadn't been infamous enough for her to care about them. Right now, she had her eyes fixed on the head of the table.

  At the head of the table was Aldo Braun, the leader of Berlin's Die Hunde, a syndicate known for their particularly brutal, particularly public executions of rivals, allies and people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Die Hunde were messy, careless and completely out of control, a kind of group that wouldn't survive for long in the United States once the FBI got their claws into them, but in the still recovering Germany, they flourished.

  Despite his reputation, Braun himself was an unassuming man, one who didn't draw attention to himself with his physicality alone. The way his shoulders slouched in his suit, his pallid skin and vacant, watery eyes didn't exactly instill confidence or bloodthirstiness, but that was part of the danger of Aldo Braun. People assumed he was harmless up until the moment he had their head smashed down onto the metal base of a drill press, the hum of the efficient German-engineered motor being the last thing they ever heard as Aldo drove his point home, quite literally.

  Aldo had organized this game, a game with a hell of a lot more than money on the line. The bits of the world these six guys carved up over hands of cards, over simple games of chance, anyone would marvel at. Truckloads of illegal drugs and weapons would shift their paths based on how this game turned out, and the fates so many hung in the balance. Poker games like this in the past had sparked massive international gang wars, hundreds of people dying over the fact that one man had simply bluffed about a non-existent pair of kings he was holding. Blood spilled over cards...it was absurd, but it was reality.

  "Hey, hey, cigar girl!" Belikov’s voice cracked over the chatter. His hand reached out for her. Nina went over to him, trying to put on the guise that she wanted to be there.

  "Yes?"

  Belikov didn't say anything, he just took one of the cigars out of the box and snatched up a lighter, then shooed her
away, deliberately brushing her ass in the process. Not that she needed the money, but the asshole didn't even leave a tip in her still-empty cup.

  The six men sitting around the table all spoke in English, even though it was all their second language, save for Eddings. They did it out of courtesy for each other, and also because they probably assumed Nina didn't speak more than a few perfunctory words of it. Guys like Braun loved to bring girls straight from Japan, China and Vietnam, squeeze them into tight dresses to do these menial tasks like passing out cigars. The benefit was twofold, as it allowed them to speak freely without worrying about the girls understanding anything, and it let them ogle the bewildered yet beautiful girls that were just happy to have a job.

  Nina was only half-Japanese, but most of that side of her genetics came out in her face, with her wide-set, angled eyes and her jet black hair. Her generous helping of freckles betrayed her heritage a bit, but she didn't think any of these guys would be able to make the distinction, especially after a couple of strongly-mixed drinks.

  The girl that was supposed to be at the game was exactly what Braun wanted. Her comprehension of English was limited to "yes" and "no", and when Nina talked to her, she discovered she didn't even speak Japanese all that well. It took Nina six times to explain to her, in Japanese, that she was going to give her eight hundred Euros, twice what she'd earn while actually working at the game, to give Nina her dress and point her toward where the poker game was being played. Seth had had an easier time subbing for the bartender, though his methods were a little less nuanced. Nina hoped that the guy's arm would heal eventually, but the prognosis on compound fractures never looked good.

  "You, come over here." Braun said, motioning more than talking since, again, the assumed not being able to speak English thing. Nina walked to him. "You're very pretty, you know that?" He said, very slowly. He rubbed her thigh as he said it, and it took everything in Nina's power not to give a fuck about this whole charade and put his teeth into the back of his throat. But killing Braun wasn't what she was here for. Not now at least.

  No, what she was here for was sitting right next to Braun's left leg. On the outside, nobody would give the briefcase a second look. It was a black polycarbonate briefcase with durable latches, and while it looked a bit ominous to the average person, it didn't stand out in the crowd too much to raise alarm. The contents of the case, though, was the whole reason Nina was here, the whole reason Seth broke that guy's arm. She'd been told what was inside the case, priceless art, yeah, yeah...whatever. What Nina saw sitting next to Braun was a huge fucking payday, a $500,000 payday to be exact.

  "Would you...make love to that man over there?" Braun said, wrapping his arm around Nina's ass, digging his fingertips into the hollow of her hips, and pointing to Gikas. Nina looked at him inquisitively, trying to make it seem like she didn't understand him. But Braun wasn't going to just let it die that easily. "You don't understand, do you...would you..." he made formed one hand into a circle and poked a finger from his other hand into it. He was so subtle. "You know..."

  Nina decided to keep up the facade a little bit longer and giggled into her hand, pretending to blush while turning away from Braun. Her face was flushed, all right, but it certainly wasn't from shyness, it was from pure white-hot rage boiling up inside her.

  "Oh, come on, I know she would. Girls never turn down a big Greek cock." Gikas said, standing up from the table and grasping his crotch while looking at Nina.

  The men at the table groaned and chattered amongst themselves, going on about their respective manhood. For as masculine and macho these guys purported to be, they spent a hell of a lot of time comparing and contrasting the finer points of their genitals. Nina giggled and smiled through the whole thing as they pantomimed the things they wanted to do with her, with any willing girl...and even some unwilling for that matter. Her giggling covered up the rage she was feeling for these six assholes, and she knew she wouldn't have a very hard time doing what she needed to do when the time came for it to happen.

  Nina eyed the bodyguards that stood around the room. Some of them wore their guns in holsters strapped to their legs while others had them stuffed into the back or front waistbands of their pants. She examined the guns a little closer. For guarding six of the most powerful underground figures in Europe, these guys weren't packing much heat...the biggest gun she saw was a .45 caliber Colt M1911 stuffed into a holster on the leg of one of Eddings' bodyguards. The other guys were carrying 9mms and .32s, and none of them were carrying anything automatic. These guys took a lot of security for granted, they left a lot of holes, mainly because they thought that nobody else in the world knew of this meet-up. Nina had her prized Desert Eagle and three clips of .357 ammunition waiting for her at the bottom of the cigar box, and she was itching to put the gun to use.

  While Nina was thinking about her gun, Seth was walking over to the table carrying a tray full of drinks. He had his hand placed underneath the tray with a towel draping down, hiding the Glock 20 he was holding in the hand. As he put down the first drink, double bourbon for Braun, he nodded to Nina and he saw the murderous intent flash in her eyes.

  "Ci..ci..ga..ru, Mistu Bra-nu?" Nina said in her best terrible Japanese accent. Braun looked up at her, at first annoyed that she would speak out of turn, but when he saw the sweet, attentive look on her face, he softened. For a split second there, Nina saw a flash of humanity in Braun, but it wasn't going to save him at this point.

  Braun nodded his head "Yes, yes I think that sounds very good." Braun said, and Nina reached into the cigar box. "Let me get you...best one..." She fished around in the box, putting on the show, and the men at the table were laughing so hard as she did this that none of them noticed her pull the gun from the bottom of the box and place it against Braun's head.

  2

  The room erupted into chaos as the men came down from their laughing fits and the bodyguards realized that Nina hadn't pulled a cigar cutter or lighter out of her box, but rather the very thing they were there to protect against.

  "How does this one work for you?" Her accent now dropped, her tone deadly serious.

  Braun turned his head against the barrel of the gun. All of the sudden, his cold exterior fell apart. He began to sputter "Do you have fucking any idea--?"

  "--Oh I have a very, very good idea what I'm doing."

  Nina looked around the room to make sure none of the bodyguards were stupid or bold enough to try anything. They were just as shocked as Braun was, so nobody was acting yet, other than Seth, who had taken out his own gun to join the party. He kept it sweeping over the guards, ready to put a couple into the next guy who twitched the wrong way.

  "Your case. Give it to me and I'll let you live."

  "But there's nothing--"

  "Don't fucking play with me, Braun. I know exactly what's in that case. Now come on, hand it over or I'll paint this room red. Now, reach down there slowly, and if I see you move an inch in the wrong direction, it's over."

  Braun, his hand shaking, reached down toward his ankle and pulled up the case. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, then slid it across his lap and put the handle of the case into Nina's hand.

  Everything with the exchange was going just fine, but then Nina noticed Braun trying to make a quick move to the inside pocket of his jacket. A bit of light reflected off of the pistol Braun had inside the jacket. Maybe he would go for it, maybe he wouldn’t, but Nina wasn't going to give him time to change the situation.

  Nina pulled the trigger. The gun went off an inch from his head and all of the sudden the most feared man in Germany was a pile of meat slumping over in his seat. The force of the bullet sent what was left of him tilting in his chair, the body thudding on the floor. Nina fired a couple of shots into the descending flock of bodyguards while Seth laid down covering fire so that he and Nina could dash away behind something solid like the bar. Nina saw what he was doing and took his cue, doing a crouched run toward the bar while Seth followed
her. With the bodyguards now returning fire, Nina and Seth slid on the marble tiled floor behind the solidly built bar. Bottles and highball glasses shattered as the hail of bullets peppered the back wall.

  "Nice shot..." Seth said

  "I try my best."

  "You know it wasn't in our orders to kill Braun, right?"

  "Yeah, but there's no fun in that."

  “It makes things a hell of a lot more complicated” Seth motioned toward the pinging bullets with his gun “as you see.”

  “You think they wouldn’t have started firing once we had the case? At least we got the opening shot.”

  “Good point...”

  Nina smirked. It was at that point that Seth became worried that she was the kind of person who loved to put herself into this kind of trouble. Trouble he didn't like to be in. He popped up from behind the bar and fired off a couple of shots, hitting a bodyguard in the side of the neck, sending him to the ground. He heard a couple of bullets whisper threats in his ear as they sailed by. Seth ducked back down behind the bar, dropped his empty clip out and slapped a new one into the handle of the gun.

  "So they're going to keep shooting, and we only have so many bullets. Any bright ideas as to how we're getting out of here?" Seth said, bracing himself against the bar to get ready to pop up again.

  "Give me some cover fire, I'll show you." Nina smirked again. This being the first firefight Seth had been in with Nina, he imagined that smirk came up pretty frequently, and the chaos that followed those smirks was what lead to her reputation. This reputation made Seth fear for his life.

  "It's your funeral..." Seth said, jumping up and blasting off some rounds to cover Nina "...just remember it could be mine too."

  Nina, under the cover of the bullets, took off across the room toward the clutch of bodyguards standing in a ring around the perimeter. In one fluid motion she put two rounds into the chest of one of Braun's men, caught his body and then used it to shield herself from the rest of the bodyguards as she walked her way around the room. Amidst the distraction, Seth was able to put down a couple more bodyguards, leaving only three alive in the room.

  Once her clip was emptied and her human shield had exhausted all its usefulness, Nina found herself in a bit of a bind. She didn't have another gun in front of her and she couldn't exactly scramble around on the ground to find a gun from a fallen bodyguard. She felt a pain in her side and noticed a thin slit in the black leather of her dress, her olive skin contrasting against it, and the fresh bullet graze contrasting against everything. It throbbed more now that she looked at it, but she didn't have time to worry about such a slight wound, and since she didn't have a bullet bouncing around inside her body, she could take it easier after the firefight, after people stopped shooting at her. Looking around, she found a hiding place behind a column in the middle of the room. The three remaining thugs were prowling, stalking, preparing to surround Nina. She'd lost track of Seth, but since she hadn't heard a peep from his gun for what seemed like a lifetime. She feared the worst.

  Nina cowered behind the column, unsure what to do. She hadn't though this through quite enough, and now she was paying for it. She felt the sticky blood trickling down to her leg, and even though she'd been around her share of blood in her line of work, knowing that the blood was coming from her was making her queasy.

  "Shit" Nina said to herself, almost silently. Slow, plodding footsteps thanked toward her. She gripped her side, which only made the singeing wound hurt that much more. The bodyguards got closer. The gun felt heavy in her hand, but it was useless to her without bullets. She didn't know how many rounds the bodyguards had left, but it would only take one of them to do what they needed to do. She sweated and thought about the possible paths she could take, paths that were dwindling to nothing with each step the bodyguards took.

  Nina felt a hand clasp on her shoulder, and she did all she could to fight against it, but within a couple of seconds the hand had pulled her to the ground, her head smacking hard against the marble floor. Her vision blurred and she lost her bearings, and all she saw was a dark figure standing over her, a black gun gripped in his hand. Gunshots cracked in her ears, but she was so disoriented she wasn't sure where they were coming from. Looking up at the figure, she didn't think things would end like this, so suddenly, so...anticlimactic.

  "Didn't think that one through, did you?" Because she wasn't familiar with his voice, it took Nina a second to figure out that it was Seth, a couple of seconds more she realized that Seth was connected to the hand that was now dragging her across the floor, the report of his gun echoing off the walls as he pulled her into cover.

  After a few more shots from Seth, the room went eerily silent. A testament to his badassness, Seth casually checked the action on his gun and looked down at Nina. "You can get up now." He said.

  Nina eased up onto her elbows and crawled up a chair in order to get back on her feet. "Uh...thanks for the save."

  "You got hit?" Seth kicked a nearby bodyguard just to make sure he was all the way dead. It was occurring more and more to Nina that Seth wasn't a guy given to small talk.

  "Yeah, it's a graze, but it hurts like hell."

  "It's not gonna kill you in the next five minutes, is it? Could really ruin my plans for the night." So, he did do humor. Decidedly of the black variety, but Nina saw it as a start.

  "I think I'll be alright. The dress won't fare so well." Nina said, checking the wound one more time to make sure she was telling the truth. It was already glazing over, it wouldn't need stitches, but it'd leave a hell of a scar if she didn't get to it soon. "So how are we getting out of here?"

  Seth pointed at the window on the far side of the room with his gun. "That way."

  "You know we're twenty stories up, right?"

  "Ahh, roll into it as you hit the ground, it'll absorb all the shock."

  Nina looked at Seth "What the fuck are you talking about?"

  Seth smiled "I set up a window washer's cart against the building a story down. You think you can deal with a ten foot drop?"

  "I'll do my best"

  "Then get the case and grab a spare gun. We've got places to be...probably more people to kill along the way."

  Nina shook her head at the dryness of Seth's humor. He may have thought of himself as funny, but in reality he came across as a bit of an ass. She went over to the case and hefted it. With the rip in her side the case now felt a lot heavier, but she was able to deal with it. As she was about to turn around back to Seth, she heard three sharp gunshots snap in the room, followed by a glittering shower of glass falling down to the ground of the room as well as to the ground twenty stories below. Nina hobbled over to the side of the room where Seth had provided the new ventilation, while Seth ran towards it and dropped out of view as he hit the edge of the building. Nina dreaded needing to jump down so far, fearing the exertion would turn her pithy little wound into something much more serious. She leaned against the steel frame of what was previously the windowpane and looked down to the cart below. Seth was standing there, looking up at her.

  "Coming down?" He said "Or are you going to just stand there and keep giving me a look up your dress? I don't mind either way."

  "You're really an asshole, you know that?"

  "I've been told..."

  Seth laughed a bit, stared at Nina for just a couple seconds more, but yielded and hit the button to wheel the cart up to Nina's level, saving her the drop. "Come on, it's not much of a drop now."

  Nina leaned out the window and Seth caught her, leading her down onto the platform. The chill of the night air made her cut ache a little bit. Without the windows cutting down on the glare, Berlin was a glittering haze of lights, sounds and distant smells.

  Seth and Nina descended the side of the building, looking as conspicuous as possible. They needed put as much distance between themselves and the chaos they'd created. It would be a while before the authorities came around, as the penthouse of the building was
sequestered enough from the rest of the building that the businesses them below them didn't hear the reports of the guns, but the shattering glass would call some major attention.

  "How's the cut?"

  "Stings..."

  "Here" Seth shuffled his shoulders back and slid off his jacket. He reached under his collar and untied his tie from around his neck. He wrapped the silk around Nina's waist, putting the widest part of the tie tight against the cut. "That should help a little bit at least."

  "Thanks." Nina looked down at the tie. It wasn't exactly the most glamorous thing in the world, but it stemmed the pain, for now at least.

  3

  David Parker sat at his desk, looking menacing. It was what David Parker did best. His office enforced that menace, with dark wood and the occasional blood-red accent. There were no windows in the office. Parker and sunlight didn't have an amicable relationship. Parker was a very neat man, and his desk reflected it. Other than the folded laptop and a few notebooks, Parker's desk was neat, calculated and exact.

  Parker was cold, planned to the last detail. Every movement he made seemed to have been planned hours ahead of time. His dark brown hair was slicked back into a perfect swoop. The pinstripes on his suit were all somehow perfectly perpendicular to the ground. His face was cemented into a permanent scowl, a reminder to everyone to not fuck with him, or else.

  He looked across the desk at his two guests, his eyes moving back and forth, trying to decide which to bark at first. Neither of them appeared like they wanted to be anywhere near Parker, but they both knew that if they hadn't showed up to this meeting, they'd have gotten acquainted with the mean end of a shotgun. Parker was a man that got to the point when it came to things like that, and he wasn't known for ever giving an ounce of compassion to anyone, friend or foe. This is what made him one of the most powerful men in New York, so powerful he was rumored to have a friend in Gracie Mansion. That fact was unrelated to the situation at hand, but that didn't stop Parker from pointing it out all the time to whoever would listen.

  "I work alone, you damn well know that, Parker." Seth said, settling down in his chair and averting his gaze from the criminal patriarch.

  Parker grumbled and lightly rapped his knuckles against his chin. Parker was on the wrong side of his fiftieth birthday, but he still maintained a presence that made people pay attention to him. His chin was a slab of granite and his brow ridge jutted out like a shelf, giving him a Neanderthal look. His mind, though, was anything but Paleolithic.

  "Yes, I realize you work alone, Mr. Harkin. Trust me, Ms. Kokuri told me the exact same thing about herself already."

  "That's right..." Nina said.

  "The thing is, the both of you owe me favors, big favors...favors I've decided to call in right now. What you're going to do for me, it's a two person job, no way around it. If I only had one guy go in there, he wouldn’t be coming out alive. The two of you have a slightly better chance of survival as a pair."

  Seth sat up in his chair and leaned in toward Parker, trying to cut Nina out of the conversation.

  "If you need a two-man job, cut the girl out of it and let me bring a guy I know, a guy I can trust, in on the job." Seth looked over at Nina "No offense, you know..."

  "Think you can just say 'no offense' and the person won't be offended? It doesn't work that way." Nina stood up from her chair and walked over to Seth "So, yes, offense...taken"

  Seth rolled his eyes, more convinced by the second that he didn't want to work with this woman.

  "You see this, you see what's going on here?"

  "The fact that we hate each other already and we just met?" Seth said

  "Exactly. I love it, it’s great. Just what I want."

  "You must be getting a little senile, Parker. You realize you're not making sense—"

  Parker smacked his open hand on the desk and snapped Seth and Nina to his attention. "I'm not getting fucking senile, Jesus Christ I'm fifty-three years old! No, I'm putting you two jerk-offs together on this job because I know you two aren't going to skip out on me when you two pull in the heist. Both of you will be so fed up with each other, wanting to get the fuck away from the other one that you'll get back to me with your loot as quickly as you fucking can. That's why I'm making you two go on this together." A chill went over the room. If there was any doubt as to Parker's command of a situation, it was gone by this point. He'd put them into their place, and there wasn't much either Seth or Nina could do about it.

  "He does have a good point, you know..." Nina said, looking at Seth.

  "How do you think he got us into this situation in the first place?" Seth said.

  "Shall we get down to business, then? You two gonna keep it together long enough so that my loot gets back to me in one piece?"

  Nina and Seth nodded

  "Alright, then. How much do you two know about World War II?"

  "Nazis, Hitler, D-Day..."

  "Internment, prosecution of peaceful Japanese-Americans..." Nina said "my grandparents could tell you some stories about that."

  "I didn't ask that question to call a referendum on the social policies of the United States in the mid 1940s, I just wanted to make sure you two knew that something did in fact go on at that time, some serious shit. This is called setting the stage for my story."

  "Go much longer Parker and I'll need to buy popcorn..." Seth said.

  "You're going to sit here and listen to this, the whole thing, or I have a couple of guys standing outside this office who could fit you for some concrete shoes."

  "You guys still do that? Seems so...I don't know, stereotypical." Nina said.

  "Cram it, sashimi...now, listen, during World War II, it may be hard to believe, but the Nazis were into some straight-up evil shit. Stuff guys like me could only dream of doing. I'm not talking about the Jews or anything, I'm talking about the wholesale thievery of Europe. While those jackbooted SS weren't pumping bullets into the French Resistance, they were searching every nook and cranny of the motherland for anything that would fetch a good price on the open market. One of their favorite parting gifts was fine art, and they took tons of it. Cut it right out of the frame and rolled it up on their way to Paris and beyond. Thousands of pieces, nabbed from their God-given resting places and stashed away in tanks, on boats, under the helmet of every Klaus, Fritz and Dietrich who cared to partake."

  "But the Nazis lost, that stuff got recovered..." Nina said

  "Not all of it, not by a long shot. Hundreds of pieces are still floating around out there, and while most of it is useless, valueless bullshit, there's one mother lode out there under the control of a very evil motherfucker. And me saying someone's evil, that's a testament to how evil he is, right?" Parker let a bit of a laugh slip out.

  "I'm really waiting for you to tell me my role in this..." Seth said, fidgeting in his chair and looking at the door. He could get there in three seconds, tops, and be out of this whole situation.

  "Kids these days, goddamn, never willing to hear the set-up, the big build. Alright, here we go. That mother lode I was talking about, that's what I need you two for. This guy, Aldo Braun--"

  "The Aldo Braun? Leader of Die Hunde. You know what he did to the last guy who just looked at him the wrong way?" Nina said.

  "Of course the Aldo Braun...why do you two think I'm sending your sorry asses into this instead of sticking my own neck out?"

  "How kind of you." Seth looked at the door again. So few steps to freedom, at least temporary freedom, until Parker's men took his fingers as souvenirs.

  "Now if you two will let me just finish, word is that Braun has spent the past five or so years scooping up these formerly lost pieces of art. Turns out when he's not eviscerating his enemies, he's a bit of an art snob. He's been carrying this briefcase everywhere he goes for a while now, probably takes it into the bath with him. I can only assume that briefcase contains those pieces of art."

  "Parker, with all due respect, what the fuck do
you know about art?"

  "I know enough that the artists in that case read like an Art 101 lesson plan. Picasso, Cézanne, Monet, Van Gogh...anything you could think of. These things have been missing for sixty years. They were worth a shit ton of money back then, so when they come back on the market, they’ll be hotter than the fucking sun, and I'll be a much, much richer man. You think I care about art? Hell no I don't, but I do care about money."

  "And you need me...need us to find this Braun guy and take his magic briefcase?" Nina looked at Parker skeptically. She wasn't sure she was buying this whole thing yet.

  "The two of you don't need to find Braun at all. I can tell you right now where Braun's going to be..."

  Parker laid out the details of the little poker game, what was going to happen and where everyone was going to be. Nina and Seth just had to put themselves in the right place at the right time. It seemed way too easy, all of it right in front of them, the worst thing happening being a little physical violence. Seth thought that all of this could be a trap, and so did Nina. At least they had something they could agree on.

  But Seth and Nina didn't have a choice, didn't have anything even beginning to resemble one. They did owe Parker favors, big favors, so big that neither of them would have been alive had they not called on Parker's aid. Their only option was to agree with Parker, to go along with Parker's schemes.

  "What's our payday?" Seth said "More importantly, what's my payday?"

  "Of course, of course, it always comes down to the money. Can't any of you people do this just out of the kindness of your hearts?"

  "No." Nina and Seth replied in concert. They seemed to be agreeing on more and more things by the minute. At this point, their record for agreeing was more than that of most married couples.

  Parker laughed heartily, a bit of a departure from his usual expression, which resembled a maddened bulldog. "You'll both be getting half a million once I get that briefcase."

  "What if she doesn't make it, do I get the full mill?"

  "Motherfucker..." Nina muttered under her breath.

  "No, Seth. Goddamn you're cold, aren't you? Nina, I feel sorry you have to work with this sorry asshole."

  "Well, thanks for making it happen. I really appreciate it." Nina said, standing up from her chair and walking toward the door of the office. "We done here?"

  "Pretty much. Your plane leaves tomorrow. Non-stop first class to Berlin...don't say I never gave you two anything."

  "Yeah, yeah." Nina said, making her way out of the office.

  Seth nodded to Parker "I think that's my cue to get out too."

  "Get out of my hair, what's left of it. Next time I see you two, you better be handing me that briefcase. If you don't come back with the briefcase, don't come back at all."

  Seth walked out without saying a word. He intended on bringing it back, he wasn't the kind of guy who looked for the double-cross. He'd worked with some guys like that, ones who pulled the rug out from under him once it was time to divide up the loot. Their fates were varied, but none of them came out of it able to walk ever again, Seth made sure of that.