by Dion Baia
Using the silver crank on the machine’s side, the nurse wound up the black box until it could twist no further. Morris stared at the wires connecting his fingers to the box.
“This is the Black Mariah.”
Morris whipped his head up to the doctor.
“Mister Hayden hired you to find his daughter.”
“No, Mister Hayden hired me to find his maid’s daughter.” Morris glanced up at Mengele.
The doctor smiled. “Come now, why else would he care about some Negro maid’s child?” Mengele waited for an answer that never came. “What have you uncovered?”
Morris remained silent.
“Nein.”
The nurse pressed the silver button next to the crank. An unimaginable pain coursed through Morris’s body, making him convulse in agony. It was much more painful than he’d imagined it would be, and he involuntarily let out a loud wail. He didn’t even realize he was screaming until he heard his own voice. A moment later the assistant turned the box off. His body went limp and he slumped against the restraints.
Mengele motioned at the black box. “Packs a powerful punch. Not even trained British agents from the Secret Service Bureau can withstand the Black Mariah for long.” He yelled over his shoulder. “Karl!”
Karl’s head straightened up and it pushed its shoulders back, like a large machine being turned back on. It took two steps toward them. The doctor calmly issued a command in German and Karl grabbed Morris’s left pointer finger. The detective tried to pull away, but his restraints kept him in place. Karl’s grip was firm but cold, like the wrinkly touch of someone whose hands had been underwater for too long.
“Tell me, what have you uncovered? What have you been told about Grand Central Terminal? How familiar are you with Herr Oberscharführer Stroheim’s plans for tonight?” The doctor paused. “Trust me when I say he will not just break that finger, he will tear it off.”
“Grand Central?” Morris physically trembled. “You can’t…I don’t know what—you…I—I don’t know. Please, I really don’t know!”
Out of nowhere, the lock section of the double doors exploded in a spray of metal and kindling from the force of a shotgun blast. The door was kicked open and Agents Helms and Mathers rushed in, followed by Howard Crothers and some of Hayden’s estate staff.
Caldonia remained in the center of the room, motionless.
Helms discharged the second barrel point-blank into Karl’s head as the beast charged toward them. Its head exploded and the body continued to stumble around blindly. Seeing this, one of the sentries ripped open his trench coat to expose a grease gun. He unloaded half a clip that accidentally tore through Mengele’s older assistant as it hit Mathers.
Mengele caught two pellets in his shoulder from the shotgun blast but quickly disappeared out of the room. Morris was still strapped to the chair, so he could do nothing when he saw him leave.
Helms pulled out a .45 and dropped his shotgun. He killed the sentry with the grease gun and unloaded the rest of his ammo into the nurse, who then released his hold on the Black Mariah. The gunfire ceased and Helms hurried over to untie Morris.
“See to him,” Helms said, motioning toward Mathers, who lay wounded on the ground. “I’m going after Mengele.”
After he freed Morris, Helms bolted out of the room, and the detective joined Howard, who was already seeing to Mathers. The special agent was on the dance floor, bleeding profusely.
“Kick that chopper from that motha’s hands!” Morris shouted to Howard, who frowned and looked over to where Morris was pointing at.
One of the estate staff hurried over to the dead sentry and violently kicked the machine gun away from the corpse’s hands, then kicked him repeatedly in the face several more times, making sure the man was dead. Apparently really dead, dead.
Morris peered back down at Mathers. “Just hang in there, ya sonofabitch,” he said in a sarcastic tone to hopefully make the Special Agent laugh, but it didn’t work. From down the hall, they heard machine gun fire erupt between Agent Helms and the fleeing intruders. Sporadic bursts were exchanged, followed closely by handgun fire.
The detective shot a glance over to Howard and the two butlers near the door who were keeping a close watch. “My man,” he said, “go find something in here to put over his gunshot wounds. We need to help stem the bleeding.” Howard stumbled over toward the other side of the dance floor where a waiter station had linen table clothes stored underneath.
Blood dribbled down Mathers’ chin and he was in a great deal of pain when he spoke. “You have to stop them.”
Morris propped his head up with his forearm. “How’d you find me here?”
“We…tailing you at The Creo Room…lost them when they left the city. When we got up here, the house staff directed us.”
“He asked me about Grand Central. What’s that?”
Mathers narrowed his eyes, but didn’t hesitate to respond, “We…think they’re gonna blow the whole thing up….”
“Blow it up?” Morris exclaimed. “I thought it was just gonna be a robbery?”
Mathers winced as he nodded. “They stole the blueprints. Classified blueprints. At the Empire State Building. They parachuted off—”
“Oh my God.”
“No one knew at first, they covered their tracks…bought themselves time. Made it look like they were robbing a vault designing company instead.”
“Grisham Vault Company. I saw Laszlo giving the Irishman Rory Caven those specs.”
Mathers nodded. “Yeah, they probably made money or roped them into the scheme somehow by giving him those diagrams.”
“Luring the Caven mob in to help them with Grand Central.”
“They didn’t shop it to the Italian or Jewish mobs; they stayed low-key and lured the Caven crew in….” Mathers coughed up blood and appeared to be getting weaker. “We need to tell the G-Men.”
“What are they gonna blow up? A train? Is the president coming to town or something?”
The agent appeared to be relaxing in his arms and his breathing became shallow. He began to whisper and Morris had to lean in to hear him clearly. Mathers hesitated at first because of the sensitivity of the information, but the situation invalidated any classification it might have.
“About eight stories or so under Grand Central Terminal are two massive AC/DC turbine generators. They power the entire eastern portion of…of the New York Central Railroad….” Mathers coughed, and dark red blood caught in between his white teeth. “Everything from Boston to Philadelphia. She grinds out power for all of that winding rail, plus for every building that sits atop the Grand Central railyard.”
Morris frowned. “So what do they want?”
Mathers’s lips curled and he spoke through gritted teeth, accenting every other syllable with a mixture of spit and blood. “Think about it! With the war going on…every infantryman, sailor, Marine, and pilot who leaves to fight from New York by boat arrives first on a train in Grand Central.”
Morris looked at the situation around him while processing what Mathers was saying. Caldonia was still standing in the middle of the room where she had been left. She was covered with splatters of blood but miraculously had not been shot. Her treacherous dead boyfriend Laszlo was several feet away from her, tied to a chair and surrounded by a pool of his own blood. Karl’s headless body was still attempting to keep on walking, even though the walls were holding it back. Every other second, blood would shoot up into the air from its carotid artery, coming down onto the chassis and the floor around it.
“Hey!” Mathers yelled, which snapped Morris out of his thoughts and back to the man in his arms. “If something were to happen to those generators, you’d knock out the power supply to the railroad…”
“And virtually stop all the troop movements on the Eastern Seaboard,” Morris finished.
Mathers nodded
before coughing up a dark, phlegmy mixture of blood. “The Army has been guarding that thing around the clock for the past three years.”
“Then it’s all going down tonight, and they’re using Rory Caven and his Irish mob as a type of Trojan horse, and they probably don’t even know it.” He glanced down and saw Mathers was slipping. “Shit no, okay, okay. Stay calm….” Morris realized the effects of his concussion or whatever it was were now gone, leaving him with an incredible headache. At least he wasn’t hallucinating anymore.
Mathers was fading fast. “Take it easy now,” he said with concern.
Mathers grabbed his suit jacket at the biceps, as if he were trying to use the leverage to climb up toward Morris’s face. “Go find Hayden! We…we didn’t have time to search the mansion…but…but they got Hayden…you got too close…forced him to help them get awa…y…” That was about all the energy that Mathers had left. He collapsed down to the floor. “Ain’t much time left.”
“Hey!” Morris said to one of the staff. “Go look after her!” He pointed to a lifeless Caldonia and a kitchen worker ran over and placed his jacket over her shoulders. Her facial expression didn’t change to acknowledge the person helping her.
Agent Mathers was now staring behind him and up at the ceiling. He exhaled one last shallow breath and died in Morris’s arms. The detective held onto him for a short time before letting out a deep sigh. He laid Mathers down, then got to his feet.
Howard came back over with the linen and covered up Mathers’s body. He followed Morris as they both hesitantly approached Caldonia. The man who was tending to her briefly made eye contact, and the detective instantly knew by his solemn expression that something was terribly wrong. Caldonia stared blankly out into space. Any hope that Morris had left within him dissipated. He waved a hand in front of her bright blue eyes. She continued to stare. She was long gone.
The detective wanted to shed a tear but wouldn’t; he was still on the job. “Please, I need you to look after her and round up everyone else who works here,” he said to Howard. “Get them to a safe place away from the mansion and wait for the police to arrive. Okay? And make sure they’ve been called.”
Howard nodded in compliance. “Will do, sir.”
Morris picked up one of the loaded machine guns from the floor and came back to the elderly man. “Take this grease gun and keep your head low. And please, be careful.”
Chapter 26
CUTHBERT HAYDEN’S LOT
Morris stepped out with Agent Mather’s .45 automatic and made his way down the hall. His head was throbbing every time he moved, but at least his side was completely numb. He checked his pockets and still had the Pervitin tablets Gray Matter had given to him, so he took double the amount to try and take the edge off. But the horror show he’d just witnessed firsthand had knocked out any of the lingering fogginess remaining in his head.
He rounded the corner and stumbled upon Agent Helms, lying dead on the floor. He was on his back, his limbs in unnatural positions, sprawled out. The top of his head from above the nose on, looked like a broken gumball machine. Various sized chunks resembling shards of an exotic watermelon with hair, smeared outward in an explosion across wall and cream carpet, already pooling up and soaking in.
Morris continued onward and saw a large door that was slightly ajar. He crept over and kicked it open. It was an enormous library filled with bookcases on every wall, each as high as the room’s vaulted twenty-foot ceilings, the kind with ladders on tracks in order to access the higher shelves. Taking up the entire east wall was an enormous stone fireplace big enough to park an entire car. A small flame still flickered within and was throwing off a warm orange glow around the room.
Past a pair of black leather couches and a colossal free-standing globe was a large desk in front of huge cathedral-style windows. And on top of that desk was Cuthbert Hayden, lying on his back in repose. A floor lamp was next to the desk, shining down harshly on the body like a spotlight. As Morris made his way over to Hayden, the brutality of what they had done to him became apparent. Hayden’s limbs had been skinned, along with his stomach and torso.
“Jesus Christ.” The detective’s stomach churned.
In the center of Hayden’s chest was a mechanical implant, half exposed and half imbedded in his skin. It looked to have been implanted a long time ago, perhaps even dating back to the original car accident that crippled him. To Morris, it was clearly another one of Von Stroheim and Mengele’s devices, much like Howard Crothers’s leg. Next to his implant were two extremely disgusting-looking input holes that could each fit a quarter-inch cord, presumably for an external power supply. They had been filled with what appeared to be petroleum jelly.
Hayden’s face had been severely beaten, both his eyes were completely swollen shut and a pool of dark coagulated blood surrounded the back of his enlarged head, flowing down to form a large stain on the floor.
Morris listened to his chest. He was still breathing, but barely. The machine sounded pained in its function. “Shit! You’re one of them, those scientifically engineered….” Morris couldn’t even begin to fathom the implications. “Hayden…Hayden, can you hear me?”
Hayden inhaled loudly, like he was taking a lifesaving breath deep into his body, straining the mechanical pump even more. “Aahhhhhhhhhh…” He opened his eyes as much as he could and found Morris gazing worriedly back at him. It was a few moments before he could place the detective, and it took all his energy to look down at the apparatus in his chest.
“You know my secret…I would have never survived my accident without them.” His eyes closed, he was starting to remember again. “Stroheim…”
“Yes, Stroheim and Mengele, they both got away.”
“He took my Caldonia away…my little girl.”
“I know, Hayden.” Morris sighed, suddenly faced with the sad reality of the girl’s condition. But now wasn’t the time to be the bearer of bad news. “We found her. She…she’s alive. Don’t you worry.”
Hayden began to cry. His speech was slow and tired. “They took her because she’s the only thing I care about anymore.”
“Where are they going?” Morris pressed on before he lost him. “How are they getting out of the city?”
“I saw her…they brought her to me. I saw what he did to her. They took my Caldonia away from me. My baby….”
Morris paused; he was becoming frustrated and needed answers. “How are they getting out of here, Cuthbert? Please tell me, you must remember.”
There was no response. Hayden’s eyes started to roll back into his head and his machine made loud suction noises.
“Hayden!”
Hayden’s eyes flew open. “…a boat.”
“A boat, as in a freighter?”
“Yes, my boat. The Demeter….”
“That’s its name?”
“Yes, they need it to…to get their plunder out.”
Morris’ brows furrowed. “Plunder? What plunder?” Hayden was beginning to drift off again and he needed to keep him talking. “Hayden! Come on, stay with me. What plunder?”
Hayden opened his eyes “…the fortunes they looted…all from the millions of Jews and Poles that they gassed and murdered. It’s all here.”
Morris gasped. He thought back to the icehouse and what he’d found in that one crate. Gold fillings, bridge work, and other precious metals. Beyond the frozen bodies in ice, he could only begin to imagine what else could be hidden in the hundreds of other crates of various sizes that he saw in the warehouse.
Hayden sniffled. “My baby girl…my poor baby…I’m sorry…I’m sorr…”
The machine in Hayden’s chest stopped working and he went into cardiac arrest. Morris attempted to save him, but with his injuries and implant, he didn’t know where to begin. He banged on his apparatus to see if it would start to function again, but nothing happened. Hayden Cuthbert was dead.
Chapter 27
THE CHASE
Morris hurried out of the Hayden mansion, and no quicker than his feet had hit the gravel of the horseshoe driveway was he met with gunfire. He slid across the ground and kept low while glass, mortar, and brick exploded behind him. He leapt forward and took cover behind an extended four-door Lincoln Continental. There were two men in dark gray trench coats, dressed exactly like the other sentries, both carrying Thompson submachine guns and hiding behind a 1940 Ford Coupe some yards away.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” He couldn’t catch a break.
The pair unloaded a burst of fire. The bullets ricocheted and landed in the front fender and hood area of the large sedan. Morris drew the .45 he’d stowed in his waistband and returned fire, something they hadn’t counted on. When both their drums were empty, he opened the passenger side door and crawled in, his foot hit something heavy on the floor.
He felt around and discovered a Browning automatic rifle. He checked the breach and ejected the magazine; it was full. It must have been Mengele’s ride and was left by the dead henchmen inside the house. Morris crawled over and checked the ignition, which luckily still had the keys in place. He started the engine and the Lincoln purred. Morris quickly put it into gear and dropped the pedal to the floor, careening down the long and winding driveway that led down to the guardhouse and onto street below.
