“I’m Sheriff Tom Garcia.”
Olivia joined Tom.
“And this here is my assistant, Olivia Newton.”
Olivia smiled weakly. Hey there pops, she thought.
“We’d like to have a word with you about Harald Kruger, your neighbor.”
—
“You like coming here a lot?” Olivia inquired.
Kowalski raised his head and looked around. There were more wrinkles on his neck than on the entire clan of oldies in the Baker Home.
“No law against it Sheriff, is there?”
“None whatsoever,” said Tom. “Did you see or hear anything unusual last night?”
“Nope.”
Olivia stepped in. “Mr. Kowalski, we are trying to catch the man who murdered Harald. We have tried but found no trace, no prints, nothing. And he escaped through these woods last night—”
“Yes. He did.”
“—the cameras didn’t catch his face, maybe you could—”
“Harald knew they were gonna come for him soon. He knew,” Kowalski said quietly.
Olivia felt her pulse race. Beside her, Tom stiffened in anticipation. Perhaps he was going to get a quick break on this one after all. He allowed himself a little smile. Olivia was tenacious, she was good.
Olivia touched Kowalski on the shoulder gently. Her voice dropped to a low compassionate whisper.
“Were you close?” she asked.
Kowalski nodded. His eyes shone with age.
“Then help us catch his killer.”
After a moment of thinking, in which Kowalski’s eyes glazed over and Olivia thought they had lost the old man to probable amnesia, he spoke again.
“He had a secret, Harald did. A big one,” he confided, looking from Olivia to Tom and back. “Roll me down to the facility, I’ll show you.”
6
Eddie Kowalski’s room was a bare one beside Harald’s own. It was obvious that he lived alone, as did Harald. Olivia noted that there was only one bed in it. The walls had things written all over them, an intaglio of meaningless scribble from the depths of an enfeebled mind.
Tom had asked Olivia how she had gotten onto the man in the first place.
“He was reading the book upside down in the hallway,” she had whispered.
“So?”
“He wanted us to come to him, he wanted to talk?”
Kowalski rolled over to his bed. He pulled it away from the wall. He glanced at the two visitors. Olivia watched with interest as Kowalski pulled himself out of his chair and got on the bed.
Olivia thought the man was going to sleep but Kowalski started rubbing at a spot on the wall.
As they watched he pulled off a paper tape. Olivia held her breath. She could have sworn that place on the wall was clean.
Kowalski pulled the brick out of the wall to reveal a groove. He reached in. His hand went in up to the elbow before it stopped. When he retrieved his hand it came back out with a black box.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Tom breathed.
Kowalski turned the box around in his hands, as though weighing the thing. He looked at Olivia and Tom.
“Harald kept this with me the year he came here. Said I should keep it and show it to nobody.” His voice trembled. “But I figured when he died he’d want me to turn it over to the cops.”
“Why?” Olivia asked.
The man gazed at the box again. “My guess is, the contents of this box here got Harald killed.”
Olivia was sweating already. Her heart was beating fast. The implications of mementos left by the dead were huge; there was a great story here. Olivia resisted the urge to reach out and grab the black box.
“Contents? Have you opened it before, Mr. Kowalski?” she asked, her eyes not leaving the man’s face.
“Yes. But it’s all a collection of stuff I don’t understand,” he confessed. He shoved the box at Olivia. “Here, maybe you could make something of it.”
Olivia took the box from Kowalski.
“Keep it,” he said.
—
It occurred to Olivia that if the box was so innocuous to Kowalski, she couldn’t trust it to give her much to go on. She needed a background and it was this man who could provide it.
Olivia handed the box to Tom.
She came closer to Kowalski. “You knew Harald. He must have said something about himself, something that this box could never tell us—”
“I get what you mean,” Kowalski interrupted.
“Mind if I sit?”
“No, I don’t. I could use the company.”
Olivia nodded at Tom. He stepped outside and leaned against the wall there with the box in his hand. Olivia quickly extracted her bottle and opened it.
Kowalski smiled knowingly. “It takes a toll, huh, the life.”
“You would know, pops.”
Olivia invited him.
“I’ll pass, that bottle is why I wound up in Baker Home. Sue would ground me if she even so much as sniffed alcohol a mile from me.”
“Okay, pops, hit me.”
“Too early to drink, lady. You should quit.”
A pained look crossed her features. If this man only knew how much she wanted to. If only anyone knew how deep the pain of her loss went. The booze kept her afloat, she always told herself. Now she wasn’t sure if she believed that anymore. Just this morning, just a few minutes ago, she came alive in ways that the booze hadn’t helped. Maybe Tom was right, after all.
Kowalski began talking without preamble.
—
“Harald told me a lot of stuff. You know, at lunch when we ate, or just when we are out there watching the trees dance and the birds sing. Sometimes we just miss our former lives, our grandkids, and the closest we can get is hearing the birds sing and that highway…”
His eyes became dreamy.
Tom had opened the box. He was out of earshot. He had brought out what looked like a map, folded into place. Tom was staring at the contents now, his mouth opened.
“I think some of the things in that box, he got from the labs during the war.”
“What lab?”
“Harald, he did some stuff for the military in World War Two. Science experiments—”
“He was a scientist?”
“Yes, a very smart one.” Kowalski glanced at Tom too.
Tom had opened the map. Hard lines had formed in the map like a mesh from staying folded for so long. Tom was peering at, and frowning.
“Harald always looked at that map every chance he gets. He pored over that map so much I thought he’d go crazy, or blind,” said Kowalski.
“What exactly did Harald do in the labs?”
“Weapons. It’s a lab he called Peenemunde. But that’s all he would say, that’s all. Saying more could get him killed.” He shrugged.
Then Kowalski suddenly started coughing furiously. A nurse appeared. She was a middle-aged hag with hair dyed black. Her face was a smear of mascara. She glared at Olivia.
“Enough already, lady. The reporters have been all over the home.”
To Kowalski she said, “Alright, Eddie, time for your meds.”
Olivia went to Tom.
“This is not right, Tom.”
“What’s not right?”
She glanced at Kowalski. The nurse was administering medication to him now.
“We should give the box back.”
“What’d you mean—”
“It must mean a lot to him.” Olivia took the box from him. She went into the room, ignoring the nurse’s new protest. Olivia knelt by Kowalski.
“We can’t take the box, Eddie.”
“What…”
Kowalski’s eyes were starting to glaze over from the drugs. Olivia touched his arm gently and some alertness came back in his features.
“The box, the items in the box must be worth a fortune if you sold it to collectors. We can’t take it. We’d like to give it back—”
“No, lady. I can’t. Whoever killed Har
ald is gonna be looking for that box. You think they’d spare me?”
Kowalski shook his head and slipped away into sleep.
Olivia figured that the man was right. The contents of the box were as dangerous as what Harald knew.
The ugly nurse led her out of the room and shut the door.
“Looks like we are stuck with it.” Olivia handed the box back to Tom.
Tom pushed the box back. “No, you keep it. See what you can find.”
“I need a drink.”
“Of course.”
7
Smokey was waiting when Olivia entered her apartment an hour after leaving the Baker Home.
The cat took a look at her and scampered under the table.
“What, you’ve seen me drunk many times, Smokes,” she drawled drunkenly.
She took off her coat and slid the door closed with her heel. She drove the lock in and swept her eyes around her dump. The box from Kowalski was in her hand. She took a look at it again.
Some of the energy she felt as they walked up the hill to meet Kowalski coursed through her again.
Smokey jumped onto the table. The chessboard was opened on it, like a battlefield, soldiers alert and prepared for an unfinished war.
“No, man. No chess tonight. I’m working again.”
The cat stared at her and Olivia could have sworn there was surprise on that feline face.
It was dark outside and a little chilly. She drew the curtains together and shut the windows.
Ten minutes later she came out of a hot bath, dripping and bright-eyed. She fed her cat, insisted on no chess games again, and of course, no booze.
Hallelujah, she thought.
Laptop up and running, a bag of potato chips on standby, and she was searching for the things Hitler and his scientists did in World War Two.
—
Olivia ran a search on Peenemunde.
It turned up quite interesting articles about the Third Reich and the quest for weapons supremacy. There were laboratories, as she was told by Kowalski. She had gone through the contents of the box again with Tom Garcia.
There was a piece of paper, yellowed with age and worn from so much thumbing. On both sides there was scribbling of various sorts; mathematical formulas, theorems, drawings of strange looking organisms. There were also rocket diagrams.
On one very soiled piece of paper there were the following numbers:
778460007, 1666759949
7525097660071389
75251S00714W
7515059S04283W
751535S0417W
Tom had joked about the numbers. “They could be lottery numbers.”
Her search hit a snag when she found the present site of the labs in Peenemunde was now occupied by residential buildings. She felt a finger of disappointment.
What did she expect? Was she hoping to make a trip down there? How could she finance such a trip?
And the other objects in the box.
There were two objects. One that she understood well and another that befuddled her. The first one was what she was sure used to be an insignia on a ring, the swastika wrought in gold and red.
The other object was the size of an infant's fist. It was lighter than it looked, made from aluminum and rough around the edges. It was shaped like a cross and had a ragged hole in the middle.
Olivia took photos of the object with her mobile phone.
Her eyes stung. She rubbed them. She pushed the thought of a drink aside but it wouldn’t go away. She went into the bathroom to pour water on her face.
There, in the bathroom, she got a load of what she had become in the past months.
Lines, on the corners of her eyes, were deeper.
The flesh around her mouth sagged. She was staring at a tired, nervous woman who’s running from her reality. That familiar lump rose from below and lodged itself in her throat.
“No.” She shut her eyes. She would not cry. She was strong.
She dropped into her bed, face down, minutes after.
—
The phone woke her. It was the sheriff. His voice was dry and raspy. Olivia concluded that he hadn’t slept well too. She had cruised from layers of wakefulness to sleepy, intermittently.
“What have you got?”
“A bunch of things,” she said, sitting up in bed. Early morning brightness washed through the closed windows. She wanted that glow now.
“Harald Kruger was an important guy, considering where he worked in the war, a science lab in Peenemunde. According to sources, that lab was the only one of them that the small tramp visited—”
“Small tramp?”
“That was what the press here called Hitler.”
“And those little things in the box?”
“I hit a snag there, Tom.” She reached over for her note on the table close by. “The lab is not there anymore. And as far as the web is concerned, Antarctica is just a patch of ice and glaciers, no hidden labs or underground stations.”
“Of course, if there is anything there it couldn’t be so obvious, right.”
“I know that,” agreed Olivia.
Governments were covering up things all the time. She wondered if the CIA might know something about a hidden station underneath the ice.
“And the lottery numbers?”
Olivia snickered. “Not on your life, Tom. As far as I know they are just numbers. You could run them through your contacts in Washington DC.”
Tom groaned, “No, not now. I’d like for us to put this under wraps for now. Best not to jeopardize this investigation early, especially if it’s something big. And I think it is.”
Tom said he wanted to get to the station and see what else the boys there have dug up about Harald “John Doe” Kruger. Olivia, on her part, promised to keep digging.
—
It was Smokey who reminded her that she needed to do something about John’s funeral anniversary. Not that she didn’t remember, she did.
The death of a loved one was a complicated thing to deal with; you were afraid that now that they were gone, you just might lose them totally, even from your memory. And you didn’t want this to happen.
Secondly, you hope that you’d just as soon forget them so you can move on in life. This is the hardest part. Some deal with the painful intricacies of this shove and pull by working harder. Others leave the place they shared with the loved.
For Olivia, she took alcohol to forget.
—
In honor of John, her lover, she did house cleaning. She took all the empty bottles and trashed them. She vacuumed, put away used clothes, and did the dishes. She aired the kitchen, where cockroaches had taken over the tenancy.
Olivia even washed her hair.
Then she went down to the grocery store and got more booze, and some milk for Smokey.
Incidentally, to get to the cemetery she had to drive about a quarter of a mile on Highway 11. That gave her a brief view of the Baker Home. That created a diversion as well, for as she passed by, the thought of Mr. Kowalski crossed her mind.
Some intuition told her that the numbers that Harald Kruger wrote on the paper were key to solving the case.
—
Olivia was still tumbling the numbers around her mind when she drove through the iron gates of the cemetery not very far from the trailer park towards the east.
The air was fresh with the redolence of newly cut grass. She parked her Volkswagen Jetta under a large maple. The breeze tugged at her hair and the hem of her skirt. Mortuary monuments spread before her.
There was no one in sight. No one who had lost someone on this day, she reasoned.
Perhaps none that feel guiltily responsible for the death of the most important person in their life?
She picked the flowers she had gotten and walked into the early morning sun.
She thanked the caretaker inwardly for cutting the grasses.
She was kneeling before a white tombstone that declared:
Here Lies John Rueben Willia
ms Who Died.
She choked.
She always had to read his epitaph. She always had to relive every moment that led to his death, from the moment she heard the gunshot—slide by slide it played in her head— till the devastating, soul-wrenching instant his head exploded, right before her eyes.
And then her eyes welled up with tears.
The convulsing act of crying shook her shoulders, violently.
“Oh John, I’m sorry,” she sobbed. “I am so sorry, John. It was all my fault, I should never have…”
She fell on her knees and wept, gripping the flowers so hard they were ruined. She bent over and heaved.
She heard the sound of a car approaching but she did not turn around to see. Maybe she wasn’t the only one hurting today, after all.
But soon she heard footsteps and it seemed as if they were coming her way, behind her. When she turned around, it was Sheriff Tom Garcia.
—
Tom Garcia was one of the first people to come to her aid, and was the last to let her off when the time came. Healing was a longer process than she thought and that morning was proof.
Tom held her tight and let her cry.
“Betty couldn’t make it, she went in for an appointment with her doctor.” He soothed her. “She sends her condolences.”
Olivia sniffed.
“I miss him so much,” she whined in a thin, broken voice. “I just want him back, Tom. I can’t deal anymore.”
“Yes you can, you have. And you will, Olivia. You’re a strong woman.”
“I killed him, Tom. It was my fault.”
Tom held her closer. “Come now, don’t say that. You know the people who are responsible for John’s death, and they are in prison. You put them there.”
“I need a drink.” She sniffed.
Sheriff Tom Garcia exhaled. He herded her back to his car. He told her he didn’t think Olivia was in a condition to drive. She protested. Tom insisted.
“I’m taking you home. Betty won’t be long, she’ll make some food. You need hot coffee, not a drink.”
“You’re kidnapping me, Tom.”
They both smiled.
8
Hunt for the Holy Grail Page 3
