The expression that spread over his nasty puss gave me everything I needed. That had always been another of Franz’s problems: he was a lousy poker player.
He balled his fists and took three short steps in my direction. “Fuck you—”
I closed the distance between us before he could do any more. I took him by the lapels, slammed him up against me, and kneed him in the balls hard enough to drive them up into his throat. That ersatz killer’s gaze vanished fast enough as his eyes crossed and the breath went out of him.
GBO (you can read that either as garlic body odor or goonish bandity one, either one works) clenched his fists and stepped in to protect his boss. I took his throat in my right hand, squeezed just enough to make his larynx hurt, and lifted straight up. I was smiling into his eyes as I brought his toes half an inch off the floor.
He finally brought his arms up in the classic counterplay to break my hold. But he’d telegraphed the move. So I simply released him, throwing him backward into the nicely painted wall.
His head went bonk, and he went down. Which was good, because Bandity Two finally realized that something was amiss. Except that Boomerang was on him like stink on shit. I never saw Boomerang’s hands move. But the Ivan dropped like a sack of goatshit.
Franzie finally found his voice. He falsetto’d “You bastard” at me. Then he pushed off and came full tilt at me, fists clenched, head down, shoulders straight.
Which is exactly what I wanted him to do, because I knew that cocaine fucks with your timing, and from the look of him, his timing was completely FUBARed.
I sidestepped, waited, and chopped at his thick neck as he went past me. The blow dropped him to his knees. I wrenched his right arm up and behind in a painful come-along, which brought him back onto his tippy-toes. From inside my trouser waistband, I retrieved one of the two Mad Dog Micro Flyer composite blades I was carrying, both of which Otto and his metal detector had missed. I put the tip of the little knife far enough into Franz’s neck to draw blood, and close enough to his carotid artery to cause him anxiety.
“Y’know, Franz,” I said, making sure the asshole was in considerable discomfort, “I didn’t like you very much when you worked for Ricky Wegener.” I pricked him another eighth of an inch with the knife. “And guess what? I don’t like you any better now than I did then.”
I could tell from Lothar’s expression that he realized this little encounter wasn’t producing the kind of social intercourse he’d anticipated. Which is precisely the reaction I wanted from him. I wanted the son of a bitch off balance.
But then Lothar did something else totally unexpected. He smiled that big, toothy grin at me and started flapping the useless dexter again. “If that is how you feel, you simply must come with me, Kapitän,” he said, as if nothing had just happened. “We will talk, you and I, and I can see now this is not the place.”
He waved the pair of wounded byki57 off; the Ivans withdrew in silence, casting worse-than-dirty looks at Boomerang and me as they did. Lothar gave Boomerang what passed for an aristocratic glance. “You, the tall one with the fast hands,” he leered, his tongue running across his lower lip, “Kommen Sie, too.”
Boomerang giggled. You and I know that when Boomerang giggles, he wants to kill something. But Lothar didn’t know that, and from his expression, he’d put Boomerang’s reaction down to nervousness. You could see it in the disdainful expression on his face. B-A-D mistake.
I brought Franz around and took the knife out of his neck. The sonofabitch actually tried to sucker-punch me. But like I said he’s a bad poker player, and he gave the move away.
I stepped up, grappled him close, chopped his clavicle, then as he collapsed I kneed him in the balls again for good measure. I spun him around and released him in a rude bum’s rush, sending him crashing across the room into the display case of antique pistols. Franz went face first into the glass, and if it hadn’t been reinforced, burglar-proof stuff, he would have had a new scar or two to show off. He dribbled off the table frame and collapsed onto the floor.
“I don’t deal with byki assholes like him,” I said, indicating the ex-commando, who lay sprawled facedown and groaning. I plucked the little knife off the floor, slid it back into its sheath, and waited to see what Lothar had to say.
Except he didn’t say anything. He just stood there, his hands on his hips, looking at the damage I’d just wrought. “You shall deal with me—and only me,” Lothar finally said, a new and dangerous edge creeping into his tone. He galumphed over to Franz, bent over, took the creep’s face in his hands, and slapped him rudely until Franz opened his eyes. Lothar held on to Franz’s chin and machine-gunned a bunch of idiomatic German I didn’t understand at him, speaking so fast that globs of spittle spewed off Franz’s scarred cheek.
Oh, Franzie didn’t like that at all. In fact, the look he gave his BoB58 was not to be believed. But finally, he shook his head, and grunted something I took to be a reasonable facsimile of “Jawohl,” pulled himself to his feet, and goose-stepped out the door we’d entered, his right hand pressed to his nicked and bloodied neck.
Lothar’s eyes followed Franz as he exited. Then he turned in my direction. “Zooo,” Lothar said, looking into my eyes. “Now, we are alone. Follow, please.”
I stepped aside to let Lothar lurch and lunge back the way he’d come. I followed, with Boomerang playing rear security. We walked down a short dark anonymous corridor that ended at a simple steel door.
Lothar pushed it open, and we emerged from the Middle Ages into the twenty-first century.
Lothar’s office was all black and chrome. His desk, which commanded a view encompassing the river from the Rheinbrücke to the Altstadt, sat atop a skeletal textured steel platform. The ceiling was twenty feet high, and the window was a huge expanse of steel-reinforced glass. Facing the desk were four Mies van der Rohe chairs. A separate conversation pit was placed at the far end of the forty-by-forty-foot expanse.
“Do you like it?” Lothar pressed a button on the intercom that sat atop his desk and rat-a-tat-tatted German into it. “I bought the building because it has the best view in Düsseldorf. What do you think?”
It was moderately impressive and I told him so.
“Ja.” He laughed, his big head moving up and down, his perfect horse’s teeth gleaming. “‘Moderately impressive.’ Oh, that is good, Kapitän.” He indicated that we should be seated.
I remained standing. This was combat. I don’t fight sitting down. More to the point, I don’t like to fight on my enemy’s terms. I am an unconventional warrior. That means I don’t take the field in neat ranks, and march to battle with pipers piping and drummers beating tattoos. I hit you where you don’t expect to be hit. I am your worst nightmare. I come out of the dark and slit your throat.
But Lothar didn’t know that. Or, if he did, he wasn’t letting on. “Franz told me you were ein Original,” he said. “I didn’t realize how right he was.”
I said nothing but waited Lothar out, allowing him the opportunity to hang himself with his own words.
My reasoning behind this course of action lies with Roy Henry Boehm, the godfather of all SEALs. As a young man, Roy was a devoted student of oriental philosophy. Tao, Shinto, Buddhism, Confucianism—he mastered them all. He scrutinized Islam. He read the Bhagavad Gita. And from all those studies, he extracted a series of precepts that became the philosophical nucleus of his Warriordom.
I remember one night a long time ago when Roy and I were sitting on adjoining bar stools, staring into space. Roy slapped his bottle back onto the bar, swiveled toward me, and growled, “Krishna says, ‘A man can accomplish much by doing, but a man can also accomplish much by not doing.’” Then he turned away, retrieved his beer, took a long pull, and was silent for the next hour and a half.
Now, this kind of talk was confusing to me, especially as I was only a bare-balled tadpole in those days. I didn’t want to listen to any oriental bullshit—even from Roy. I was impatient. I wanted to break things and kill
people. I wanted endless supplies of hot pussy and cold beer. And so, Roy’s words bounced off my young and empty head, broke into a million pieces, and were lost in the sawdust on the floor. And he, inscrutable bodhisattva that he was, didn’t bother to clarify things.
Now, however, in my maturity, I realize what he was getting at. What Roy was saying is that timing is everything. Sometimes, you must act—now. And sometimes, you must wait. Impetuosity, he was telling me, is a bad quality in the Warrior. Decisiveness, i.e., knowing when to act, is one of the qualities that differentiate the true Warrior from the rest of mankind.
But Lothar didn’t know that. Lothar never had the pleasure and honor to study at the gnarled flippers of Roy Henry Boehm. And so, he looked at me, and thinking I was tongue-tied, he continued talking.
“Ein Original,” he repeated. And then he launched into a monologue that I won’t bother repeating here, except to say that it was quite unfuckingbelievable in its complexity and range.
He quoted Heine and Schiller, Frederick the Great and Bismarck, all to buttress an argument that went, more or less, as follows: It was Germany’s destiny, Lothar argued, to become the dominant economic and political force in twenty-first-century Europe. But to do so, he insisted, the weak, spineless current coalition government would have to be changed; altered; moved to the right, just the way the Deutsche Volks Union,59 which Lothar called a “patriotic front,” but I know from my research to be a bunch of radical right-wingers, had already accomplished that goal in Saxony-Anhalt, a federal state in what used to be called East Germany.
It was his own destiny, Lothar said, to help Germany achieve these goals. He had made no secret of his ambitions, and so he felt no reticence in explaining them to me. And he would brook no interference—either from me, or from my government—in the fulfillment of this God-given objective. “I will do what I have to do,” he said. “Whatever it takes.” He paused. “You know, Kapitän,” he said, “before what you call the Second World War, Hitler made a pact with the devil—the devil being Stalin—because that was what it took to achieve his goal.”
He grinned malevolently. “Hitler didn’t go far enough,” he said. “That was his mistake.”
He turned away from me for an instant, to peer out over the Düsseldorf skyline. When he turned back, the deranged, sociopathic expression on his face cannot be described, other than to say it was truly frightening, even to me.
“I will not make Hitler’s mistake,” Lothar Beck said. “I will go as far as I have to, to achieve my goals.”
Lothar’s lips rolled back from those perfectly capped teeth in the beatific smile of the truly loony. “Full schtopp, Kapitän,” he said. “End of schtory.”
As Roy told me, a man can accomplish much by not doing. But a man can also accomplish much by doing. And now it was time to do.
I advanced on Lothar, moving around the desk and getting up close and personal to him. He backed away. That told me he didn’t like to be squeezed. Some societies, Latinos for example, don’t mind your getting real close to ’em. They love in-your-face fuertes abrazos.60 Germans don’t. Krauts like to maintain a sensible, Teutonic distance between you and them. So I put my schnozz in Lothar’s puss, and my body up against his, and gave him my best War Face and said: “Tell you what, Lothar, maybe someday, if you’re still alive, we can go someplace and have a couple of bottles of schnapps, and a steak or two, and talk things over before I kill you. Maybe if the food’s good and we have enough to drink, I’ll think you’re less of a crazy, dangerous, pencil-dicked, pus-nutted, shit-eating, motherfucking cocksucker than I do right now. But it ain’t likely.”
Lothar backed away, muttering nonsense to himself as he scampered (tha-whomp, tha-whomp) up the textured steel stairs to put some precious distance (and his big, polished Bauhaus desk) between us. I saw as he reached his left hand under the shiny black surface of the desk as if to push something.
Boomerang’s eyes caught the move, too. He turned and headed for the main office door, located at the far end of the big glass-walled room, dragging one of the Mies chairs as he went.
Lothar’s face took on a more-than-slightly fretful expression.
“Not to worry,” I said. “He’s just going to make sure that we can talk without anybody interrupting.”
I advanced up the stairway toward Lothar, who was now fumbling in one of his desk drawers.
Lothar was quick, but I was quicker. I caught the edge of the drawer and slammed it shut, catching his left hand in the process. He screamed in pain and spasmed, his useless starboard paw flailing wildly, flapping air in my vague direction. I slapped it down, then jerked his left hand out of the drawer, reached inside, and extracted a shiny, blue pre–World War II Walther PPK.
“Nice piece.” I dropped the mag, racked the slide back, and caught the extracted round in my hand. I took the rest of the bullets out of the magazine, then fieldstripped the pistol, put the spring in my pocket, rendering the weapon useless, and tossed it back in pieces at Lothar. They landed bouncie-bouncie on his desk, putting a couple of small dings in the perfect finish. Lothar’s expression turned from shock to hatred. Yeah, I’d read him like a fucking primer. He was the kind of anal-retentive Kraut who couldn’t stand his expensive furniture being marred.
I saw that Boomerang had wedged the chair under the door handle. The kid threw me an upturned thumb, and I returned the gesture.
Down at Boomerang’s end of the office I heard pounding from the outside. Lothar’s security people were trying to get in. Well, it would take ’em a few minutes. Meanwhile, I’d come here to shake this asshole from his hump to his toes. So it was time for what we few warriors left in Naval Special Warfare call the Rogue’s no-shitter.
“Okay, Lothar,” I said, pushing him down into the leather and steel chair behind his now not-so-perfect desk. “You said your piece. I think you deserve to know what I’ve got in store for you. So you know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna aufdekken die Karten for you, just like you did for me.”
He glared up at me, his tongue running lizardlike over his thick lips.
“Here’s Karte eins. You’re a fucking terrorist,” I said, staring down at his suntanned face.
He started to say something. I leaned down and smacked him, whap-whap, just like you used to see Erich Von Stroheim do to captured pilots when he played the monocled, nasty Nazi officer in all those World War II movies.
“Karte eins. You’re a fucking terrorist,” I repeated. “Now, here’s Karte zwei. You’re in bed with Khaled bin Abdullah.”
Oh, the look he gave me was ineffable. Pure hatred is an understatement.
Whap-whap. “Karte drei,” I said, “is that you’re involved in selling nukes.”
He started to rise in protest. I put him back in his big chair with another backhanded double swat.
“Karte vier,” I continued, “is that you’re mixed up with the Ivans. Just like Ribbentrop, who Hitler sent to see Stalin before the Second World War, you’ve made a deal with the Russkies. Except that you made your deal with the Mafiya, not the government. Like you said, you didn’t think Hitler went far enough. So you took it one step further.”
I paused and stared down at his face. Oh, Lothar was good. He tried to control what was going on inside him, but he couldn’t. So I continued my little monologue. Whap-whap. “And Karte fünf?” I paused rhetorically. “Karte fünf is that you’re a dead man.”
I paused just long enough for Lothar to start to say something. When I saw that he was about to speak, I cut him off with another double slap. “Those are my Karten,” I said. “And they look like a royal flush to me. Now, just in case you didn’t know it, a royal flush is an unbeatable hand, Lothar. Which means, I’m gonna flush you . . . royally.”
I gave Boomerang a high sign, he removed the chair from under the door handle, and a bunch of blue-blazered Keystone Krauts burst into the office, burbling in German and looking for their boss.
I smiled in Lothar’s direction and cocked my righ
t index finger at him the way General Crocker does at me.
“See you in hell, Lothar,” I said. I dropped Lothar’s ammunition into the palm of the closest Kraut security dweeb, whose expression told me he was obviously confused about the situation. “No problem, bub—we’re about to leave,” I said. “But I’d like our hardware back, first.”
12
CONFLICT ALWAYS MAKES ME HUNGRY AND THIRSTY. AND so, the preliminaries over, and little, with the exception of obtaining certain equipment, to be done until the Glom,61 it was time for a world-class lunch. I led Boomerang past banks and municipal buildings, working our way north on a course roughly parallel to the Rhine, until we came to the crowded, narrow streets of the Altstadt. We stopped at the first Bierstube we came to and downed a couple of glasses of Schlösser Alt, brewed in the cellar and drawn from a ten-liter keg. Then we threaded our way through the knots of tourists, students, and drinkers until we stood before the smoky, thick plate glass front window of an Argentine steakhouse called El Lazo.
It had been perhaps two, maybe three years since I’d been here. But Señor Francisco, who owns the place, never forgets a French braid. “Conjo, Señor, Ricardo!” He stood in the narrow doorway, hands on hips, and laughed at the very sight of me. Then he ran into the cobblestoned street and gave me a tight abrazo. I hugged the roly-poly little man back. “So, Herr Franceesko—is the best wine still Spanish and the best beef still Argentine?”
“Jawohl, mein Frigatenkapitän!” Francisco ran a manicured finger along the top of his little mustache, stood aside, and beckoned for us to come inside with a courtly little bow. “Everything is just as you remember it, except that the wine is more potent and the bief is better.”
I pushed Boomerang through the cheesy beaded curtain and down a narrow entry corridor. The interior of the restaurant was as dim as ever. I took a quick look around and was delighted to see that indeed, nothing had changed in the couple of years since I’d last been in the place. Dusty pots of wilted plastic flowers still hung suspended over the booths. Worn faux pinto horsehide still covered the bar stools. On the whitewashed, rough-finished plaster walls, the same mélange of hand-hewn wood ox yokes, hand-wrought branding irons, and heavy, fringed leather saddlebags was still mounted haphazardly in a disorganized, primitivo paean to the Gaucho gestalt. The huge open-faced, wood-fired parrilla62 where Francisco cooked thick churrasco, lomito,63 T-bones, and garlic-enhanced Argentine chorizo64 sat right in the restaurant’s big, greasy-opaque plate-glass front window.
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