Through the closed door she shouted, “Yes?”
She heard a familiar voice. “Hello, Adriana.”
It didn’t surprise her he was here, because she really hadn’t been trying to hide. She had used her new name to rent the flat, and he knew that name. She simply didn’t think he’d come back, and part of her didn’t want him here. After the stormy ending to their last encounter, she had doubted she would hear from him again. And perhaps that was best, she had decided.
When she opened the door, her gypsy eyes were fiery. “I’m not Adriana anymore. What do you want?”
“Nice to see you too,” he replied cordially. “May I come in?”
Saying nothing, she turned and walked into a cozy living room with a fire burning in a tiny grate. He shut the front door, dropped his bag and said, “Long time no see.”
She snarled a sarcastic reply. “Yeah, what’s it been – a week? Can’t live without me?”
“I need your help.”
“You? You need someone else’s help? Bullshit, you self-sufficient asshole! You’ve never needed anyone’s help in your life!” She was yelling and her face was turning bright red.
Calmly he said it again. “I need your help, Adriana.”
His demeanor rankled her and she screamed, “I told you I’m not Adriana! Adriana’s dead! Gone! I’m Carey – Carey Apostol. Get it?”
“Carey…”
“No, Paul! I don’t want anything to do with you! I can’t. I trusted you enough that I ended up in bed with you. I believed what you told me, but all you really wanted from me was that damned book. I hope it was worth it. You’re a bastard and I hate you…” She couldn’t hold back any longer. She dissolved in tears.
He walked to her without a word and took her in his arms, enveloping her body as she tried to push back.
“Stop it!” She squirmed, trying to beat his chest as he held her arms tightly. She looked up at him, her face contorted in anger, and he kissed her. Her half-hearted struggle lasted only a moment before he felt her change. Suddenly she kissed him back, deeply and passionately, over and over. She put her arms around him and clung for dear life.
“Don’t do this to me,” she whispered. “Don’t hurt me again.”
“I won’t,” he promised as she led him to her bedroom.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Carey loved Paul Silver. She was emotionally conflicted in the same way as she’d been with Nicu, but she truly did love Paul. She had loved him since that day they met. Love: it was an unusual concept, one she hadn’t ever really experienced before. For several years, love had equated to sweaty sex with strangers for ten minutes at a time in the back room of her little shop. More recently love had meant the reluctant feelings she had for the monster who had given her both bloodstained gold and a new life.
This time it had been different. She had quickly fallen for this rugged, handsome adventurer, and she had believed everything he told her, which admittedly hadn’t been much. When she watched the fight in her hotel room, she knew Paul Silver was a totally different person. He could be a brutal, methodical man, one comfortable with violence and a man who knew how to inflict pain on others. The sudden metamorphosis had petrified her. She had recoiled, realizing how stupid it had been to trust someone she had just met. She felt betrayed and she retaliated by rejecting him.
Paul’s arrival on her doorstep took her by surprise. Part of her wanted to jump into his arms, but she was afraid. She had no idea what he wanted, and she couldn’t allow herself to fall back into the same behavior. She had to be careful.
Her caution and her good intentions had lasted for a grand total of ten minutes.
Their lovemaking took on a carnal wildness that had surprised them both. As he brought her passion to heights she’d never experienced, she began to act like a ravenous creature. She literally wanted to consume him. She clawed, she bit, she squeezed him in sensitive places until he cried out for her to stop. She loved every second of it, and obviously so did he. Paul had responded with a fierceness that would have been close to cruelty, had they not both been so intensely craving every moment of the experience.
Exhausted, they lay together on the sweat-drenched sheets. Paul laughingly asked her if she’d been trying to kill him.
“You’re the savage in this equation,” she responded with a chuckle of her own.
“I don’t think so. Want to see the marks you left on me?” He raised his arm to reveal a red welt.
“Crybaby. You loved it.”
“Of course I did. It’s because I was making love with you for the first time.”
“Really? I don’t think so…”
“The other time? That was Adriana. She’s gone now. This was my first sexual encounter with Carey Apostol, you sultry hellcat!”
She guffawed. “Wait a minute! That was Carey’s first experience too! Does that make me a virgin?”
“Whatever you say,” he countered. “I don’t think there are many virgins who know how to do the things you just did.”
“You never know! We gypsies are a strange breed.”
They carried on until at last she hopped out of bed and ran into the shower.
An hour later over an al fresco Italian lunch, Paul told her why he needed her help. He explained he had the diary; Philippe had told him it was in a train locker. As she listened, she wondered how much pain Philippe had endured by the time he confessed where he’d hidden the diary. She forced the thought from her mind. She wanted Paul to be a good person, not a sadistic killer.
Paul told her he needed help decoding the diary. Using her made perfect sense, he explained. The book’s potential secrets made it risky to involve outsiders, and she understood Nicu and the diary’s background already. He explained how the other book was the key. There really was a train – a Ghost Train – hidden in a tunnel in Romania, he told her. Supposedly it held the greatest treasures of Nazi Germany. If Nicu’s diary were true, and if no one had found the train for seventy years, then the train was still sitting there.
She could see the excitement burning in his eyes as he related everything he’d learned. He really did enjoy the adventures, and if he was right, this one could top them all. She’d read a little of the diary that first night she had it, and now his enthusiasm was rubbing off.
“Do you know exactly where the train is?”
“Not exactly,” he responded, deftly skirting the truth. He didn’t want to reveal everything just yet to a girl he didn’t know that well. And truthfully, he knew it was at Peles Castle but not exactly where.
“I have to go to Berlin. This thing is too big – too potentially explosive – to keep it to myself. I’m obligated to inform the Ministry.”
She jested, “I’m glad sex with me was more important than going to Berlin!”
Paul snickered at that.
“I’m counting on your help. It’s going to take days and it’s going to be tedious, but we have to learn what Nicu was hiding. I’ve made a copy of the diary to leave with you, and I brought Hitler’s book.”
She was hooked. She wanted to help him already, and his enthusiasm was so infectious that Carey readily agreed. Back at the flat he showed her how to use Mein Kampf to decode the numbers. Finally he said, “Okay, you know everything now. It’s nearly four p.m. If I go to the airport, I can fly to Berlin tonight and meet the minister tomorrow morning.”
“But you’ll be leaving your decoding expert here all alone with no payment for her services,” she purred, squeezing his thigh with her hand. “There are flights in the morning, and you’ll still see the minister before noon. Call him and set it all up. You have ten minutes. I’ll meet you in the bedroom for my payment.”
The next morning Paul flew to Berlin and gave his friend Franz Deutsch, Germany’s Minister of the Interior, the electrifying revelation. The minister was practically hysterical, hardly able to contain his delight. He immediately called his counterpart in the Romanian government, a man whom he had met at conferences over the
years. Being a cabinet-level official in Germany, the economic superpower of Europe, Deutsch would typically have dealt from a position of strength with the far less powerful Romanian official. Politics being the animal it was, the German minister deftly steered Romania’s Minister of Internal Affairs into believing the decisions they agreed upon were his.
Peles Castle unquestionably was within Romanian borders. Claim to whatever was found there would be the purview of Romania’s government, and any decisions would by right come from that country’s minister. Herr Deutsch masterfully steered his friend, using phrases such as, “shouldn’t we,” “don’t you think,” “wouldn’t this be best,” and the like.
Germany had a claim too, he smoothly offered. If the train were real, then it was German, put there by the Nazis and filled with stolen property that must be dealt with. “I will defer to your wishes, of course,” he continued without effort, “and I think a joint press conference should be held once we know for sure. You are going to be famous soon, Mr. Minister. Don’t you think it makes perfect sense that we go there first and see it for ourselves before making the announcement? Pictures and solid information will be far more dramatic than innuendo and hearsay. If that’s your suggestion, Mr. Minister, I’m prepared to meet you. Would tomorrow or the next day work?”
They worked out a plan for three days from now. Herr Deutsch said he and two others would fly to Bucharest airport. The Romanian minister would meet them with a limousine for the short trip to Sinaia. They also agreed to dispatch twenty soldiers from each of their countries a day early. They would go to work at the site when the ministers arrived.
The German minister was a smooth manipulator, skilled in guiding others to do his bidding. By the time the call ended, his counterpart actually believed it was he who had talked the German into visiting the site without informing their respective prime ministers. In fact, it was the other way around. There was no political danger for Herr Deutsch to keep the train private from his superiors because it wasn’t on German soil. What Deutsch had to do was to be sure the Romanian didn’t tell his bosses. Deutsch wanted to see this exciting discovery before the Romanian government got involved. If the train was there, Romania could assert a claim of ownership and lock down the area. Whatever the outcome, the German minister knew this site could soon be the most closely guarded place in Europe.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
The more time Carey spent decoding the numbers, the more fascinating the task became. As she worked, she simply wrote down one decoded word after another without stopping to read sentences. When her eyes got tired and her brain began to go numb, she would pause for a cup of tea and read what she’d written so far. Those were the crazy, delightful times when she saw what Nicu was up to.
It was noon and time to stop for lunch. She’d been at this for four hours, and suddenly something dawned on her. She hadn’t used heroin today! She hadn’t wanted it. She hadn’t even given it a thought. That buoyed her spirits even more, knowing that she was on a different high, one driven by unlocking the incredible secrets of Nicu Lepescu.
She knew a little already; she’d read the last two entries of the diary. Paul admitted he’d read them too. So much of what was encoded in early 1944 was openly written in German words by late August. The end of the war was imminent, Nicu had to have known.
“Since you’ve read the end, I have a question,” she said. “Did you notice that the code was different there? There are periods and a slash separating the numbers. Did you work on that at all? I haven’t, since I’m going straight through from the first, but I just wondered if you could save me some time at the end.”
Of course Paul knew the answer. It was Peles Castle. But he kept it a secret, still not ready to entrust everything to this girl he hardly knew. She didn’t need to know where the train was right now. It made no difference for the work she was doing.
“Keep going as you are. I want you to go through it chronologically. I’ll work on those last entries.”
Today was the second day of Carey’s mind-numbing decoding of numerals. She was nearly three months into the diary, almost finished with March, 1944. There were five months to go. The two of them spoke every evening; during yesterday’s call, she’d told him about the coded entries beginning on January 2, Nicu’s first day as stationmaster, and continuing into the next month.
Paul had already deciphered the first sentence.
The Reich is building a secret tunnel for the Ghost Train.
She told him that on New Year’s Day 1944, Reichsmarschall Göring himself had flown from Berlin to Bucharest for the sole purpose of meeting with Nicu Lepescu, the new stationmaster.
“Wait a minute! Are you serious?” Paul burst out. “What’s that all about? Even though by now he’s no longer Hitler’s golden boy, he’s still a top-ranking officer in the Reich, a very important and very busy man. The war is going really badly by now, but a top Nazi takes time on a holiday to fly to Bucharest just to meet the new stationmaster? What the hell did he do that for? It makes no sense.”
“Hold on tight and you’re going to be surprised!” she proclaimed.
The diary was full of boasts and self-confidence. Göring was effusive in his praise of my work, Nicu wrote. While at Auschwitz Nicu had been assigned two important projects – the extension of a rail line to bring prisoners closer to the camp and the repair of one of the crematoria that had been taken out of service. He accomplished them in record time and with an impressive attention to detail, he dutifully records Göring having said.
“Maybe that was true,” Adriana added. “ Göring’s about to hire him for the biggest project of all!”
The Reichsmarschall explained he had come because he wanted Nicu to oversee a top-secret project. Nicu had demonstrated both his skill at management and his unwavering dedication to the Reich. Göring gave him only minimal information about the job. He said I would be told more as the project unfolded and I needed to know more, Nicu had written. The operation was so secret it didn’t even have a name.
Carey stopped a moment. “On a related subject, when you looked through the stationmaster’s log, did you happen to see if some of the daily entries were in a different handwriting?”
He’d seen it but hadn’t given it any thought.
“What do you gather from that?”
“Nicu wasn’t there on those days. Someone else – maybe a deputy – made the entries instead. The first was on January 3, two days after Göring’s visit. Nicu went somewhere – a place in the mountains he never mentions by name – and met a crew of workers he would be supervising. To keep things secret, Nicu says, he would continue serving as stationmaster and no one would be the wiser. He’d make periodic trips to this place, which must have been close by since he was never gone overnight. There were several lieutenants who reported to Nicu and who were responsible for keeping over a thousand workers busy. From his notes at the end of the diary they were mostly Jews, I’d say.”
Absolutely, Paul reflected without comment. He thought about how easily Nicu could have made a day trip to check on the progress of his important project. It was only eighty-five miles away. He could be off in the morning and back by dusk.
She told him more. Nicu wrote about his frequent visits to this nearby place. The workers were building train tracks and removing dirt for some type of huge tunnel. “It was going to be over six hundred feet long,” she exclaimed. “This was quite a job!”
At last she said, “When I quit for today, I was into late March. The project has been underway for nearly two months and Nicu has been going there at least once a week. He thinks they’re maybe a third of the way toward finishing.”
They ended today’s call with wishes for luck and a promise to talk tomorrow.
Yesterday after she finished the notes from March 28, Carey had stopped. The next entry would take far more time because it was page after page of numerals. This morning she sat at the table and tackled it with mixed emotions. She knew it would be tedious,
but she couldn’t wait for the results. Today’s decryption would take her all morning, maybe longer. The good news was that it had taken Nicu equally long to encrypt it. She wanted to know just what he’d considered so secret.
Around noon she stopped for lunch and read the pages of words she’d decoded. When she finished, she treated herself to a glass of wine, since she had finally learned where all those gold bars had come from.
CHAPTER FORTY
Carey could hardly wait for this evening’s call. After the successful morning, she had kept pushing through the process until she reached midsummer 1944. At the end of the afternoon, she poured another glass of wine and waited for him to call.
She had reaped one unbelievably positive result from Paul’s project. She hadn’t had a fix in three days. Even better, she didn’t want one. After a bit of retrospective self-analysis, she admitted she’d spent most of her adult life doing absolutely nothing productive. Her days had been filled with mindless drivel. She had played away her university days with Philippe, then told fortunes, screwed men in the back room, and spent months chatting with Nicu about whatever he wanted to talk about. What she needed was structure and meaning in her life. Heroin had come close to being her god, she knew, but now she had a purpose.
Paul Silver had come along just in time. She still barely knew him. He was an enigma, but for some inexplicable reason she believed he was her answer. She was in love with this man, in adult love for the first time. She struggled to understand why she felt this way but gave it up. There was no value in analyzing it. Simply put, there was a physical, mental and emotional attraction – a chemistry – that she could neither explain nor deny.
The Crypt Trilogy Bundle Page 64
