And had Officer Lloren not pissed him off, he would be soaking in the hot bath instead of waiting out here in the cold.
“Prick,” Ellis whispered, immediately admonishing himself for using the word. Twenty minutes later, he stood when he saw the book dealer’s sister exit the station. She dipped her head, beginning to head off down the street.
“Drop it, my black butt,” he said to himself as he walked to her.
***
Frankfurt, Germany
Jean Jenois sat on his sofa, a freshly-opened bottle of brandy in front of him. The house smelled of scented candles and numerous bouts of spirited sex, bathed in a warm, reddish light from the setting sun. His traditional little black book was open on his knee as he dialed the numbers of the girls with three stars next to their name. The current one he called happened to be an Australian who worked for an international bank in the center of Frankfurt.
“Weeknights are such a bitch,” he muttered as the connection buzzed. He got her voicemail and was leaving a message as he heard his call waiting tone beep through.
“…and frankly, Donna, to get right down to it, I just want to feel you under me again. I want to smell your hair, taste your mouth, and experience your enveloping warmth one more time. I know you regretted the last time because of your boyfriend back home, but who are we both kidding? The world is a selfish place, and he is a man after all. Do you honestly think he’s sitting there at night, staring at your picture? Call me, Donna. I need you tonight.”
He hung up and tossed the cordless phone on the couch. “Entreating like a damned schoolboy,” he said to the walls as he ran a hand through his wavy black hair. Thirty years of chasing women had been hard work and, while frustrating, it never discouraged Jean Jenois enough to make him quit. Then he remembered the phone call that had come through and viewed the caller ID. It was a French number, but one he didn’t immediately recognize.
Just when he was about to call the next girl on the list, the phone rang again. It was the same number.
“Hello,” he answered, irritated.
“Bonsoir, this is Philippe with Fouriere Food Supply. We just wanted to let you know this week’s meat and seafood deliveries are going to be a day late due to the weather.”
Jean straightened. “Sorry, sir.” He cleared his throat. “You have dialed the wrong number.” He hung up the phone and walked to the bedroom, choosing a cell phone from the small charging station on the shelf of his well-appointed closet. He dialed a number and tapped his foot as he waited for an answer.
The gruff voice spoke without greeting or preamble. “Hold for Nicky.” Jean chewed a nail and waited impatiently. Finally Nicky came on the line.
“I need you to run an inquiry, tonight.”
“And hello to you, too, Nicky.”
“Don’t be a smartass! Can you do it?”
Jean squeezed his eyes closed and rubbed his head with his free hand. “Do you know how hard this is for me to do? Once every few years is acceptable…maybe…but I just ran one for you six weeks ago for that Ramzy fellow.”
“Are they watching you?”
“Even if they were, I wouldn’t know. But they aren’t or I would have changed that amateurish wrong number signal months ago.”
Nicky’s voice was eerily calm. “I need this tonight, Jean. Do you understand?”
Jean decided Nicky was too controlled, too calculating for his taste. There were only a handful of people on earth he actually feared, and Nicky Arnaud was one of them, at the top of the list. “What is it, Nicky?”
“Is this line secure?”
“It is on my end. Is it on yours?”
Nicky ignored the question, transparently relaying the entire story of what had happened in Metz, as Bruno told him, leaving nothing out. He told about the killing of the book dealer and about Leon’s murder, and then about the torture and killing of Gerard.
“Back up, Nicky,” said Jean. “What was the genesis of the entire transaction? How did it happen?”
“The book dealer was a queer and a degenerate doper who owed us. To save his ass, he tried to hustle the money from the man I’m now looking for. The man killed my cousin and, according to my guy he left alive, this asshole moved like a trained killer. He claims he must be some kind of commando or professional assassin, although they would have never known it before he turned on them. He was masquerading as a fucking German, but the other homo said he was really an American. He was trying to sell a cache of rare diaries.”
Jean had been lounging on the bed, propped on an elbow. Upon hearing the word “diaries”, he bolted upright, his eyes wide. There was a pause as he collected himself, swallowing thickly. “Really? You don’t say?”
“Had one with him and claimed he had more, stashed somewhere.”
“Who were they written by?” Jean asked without breathing.
“The fuck if I know! I’ll make sure and find out for you before I scalp and flay him.”
Jean couldn’t even breathe as his mind raced over the situation. It had to be Gage Hartline, sneaky bastard. I’d bet a month’s pay on it. Sonofabitch found valuables on my job and wasn’t even polite enough to inform me.
But diaries? How could a diary be worth something? Jean would have to come back to it.
“Do you, ah, have a description of this fellow?” Jean was running his lanky hand through his hair again, hoping beyond hope the description would match Gage.
“Slightly above average height, athletic build and somewhere around a hundred kilos, or just shy of it. Short sandy hair and a heavy beard with a little gray in it. Spoke perfect German and American English.”
Jean’s face spread into a wide grin. He couldn’t have described Gage Hartline any better.
“So can you find this guy?” asked Nicky, sounding irritable at Jean’s silence.
“It could take some time, Nicky. And it will be very expensive.”
They worked out the details and hung up the phone. Jean stood still for a moment before walking to the den and closing the little black book. He poured two fingers of the brandy and gunned it before donning his coat.
No date tonight. He now had somewhere to be.
***
Her name was Carolina and Ellis’s heart went out to her. As they walked to Michel’s store, he surmised she was likely depressed and lonely by the personal tales she openly relayed to him. Her husband of five years had left her the previous year; the selfish architect of an affair with a younger woman. Michel, her missing brother, had essentially taken her in after her heartbreak. They met four or five times a week to cook dinner, drink wine, and bitch about what a mess their lives had become. And Carolina insisted, poking her finger into the air for emphasis, Michel would not disappear without telling her. Ellis believed her; something was indeed wrong.
As she turned the lock at the back door of Michel’s shop, Ellis asked her if she had been in the store since he had gone missing.
“Oui,” she said as she pushed the door open. “It looked as it always does, although I usually visit him in home.” She led the way in, Ellis followed.
Cleaning solution. That’s what struck him first. Who knew, maybe Michel kept the place immaculate, and smelling Windex and Pine-Sol wasn’t uncommon. Rare book stores, in Ellis’s experience, usually smelled musty, like his auntie’s home when he was a kid. Ellis removed his notebook and scribbled a note.
Carolina hit the rear lights. Bright fluorescent light bathed the back area, boxes, tables and shelves in an antiseptic white luminescence. To the right was a safe, locked and seemingly undisturbed.
“Do you know how to get in this?” Ellis asked, patting the six-foot safe.
“No,” she answered, chewing her fingernail. Ellis walked the room, peering high and low, his actions slow and deliberate.
“Do you see something?” she asked.
He barely shook his head, gradually getting a feel for the space. He’d learned many years ago that if there was anything to learn, it usually wasn’
t obvious. Typically he was looking for the clues to a specific crime: a murder, a theft, an assault. But in this case there were no defined parameters, and it was probably a wild goose chase anyway. He just wanted to help this poor girl and, on an off chance, see if the missing book dealer had anything to do with the man who mentioned hiding a diary.
“Can you get the lights in front?” he asked as he stared at the floor, focusing on one spot near the threshold to the storefront.
Carolina went to the front. As the lights came on, Ellis looked at the spot again. He would come back to it. He turned his gaze to the front and, predictably, the volumes and volumes of books displayed around the shop.
“Does he put any of the more valuable books in the safe?”
“I don’t know,” Carolina answered.
Ellis chewed on his bottom lip as he made a circuit of the front, examining the sign and asking Carolina if it was Michel’s handwriting.
“No,” she answered. “But Gerard would have made the sign, and I wouldn’t know his writing.”
He studied the sign a moment, finally turning off the light and moving into the back room again. The concentration of the cleaning fluid was stronger in the back. And there was something about the room…
“Do you think someone took something from the safe?” she asked, fear rising in her voice.
“No, no,” he said, turning his eyes to her. “Just trying to get a feel. So far, everything appears to be normal, I think.” A thought occurred to him. “When you came in earlier today, was the alarm set?”
“No,” she answered, panic washing over her again.
“Do you know the code?”
“Oui.”
“Would it normally be set?”
She nodded, her lip trembling a bit. “Unless he forgot. Michel’s head was sometimes…”
“Fuzzy?” he offered. She nodded.
He studied the spot on the floor and the surrounding area. The tables in the center of the room were a barrier, forcing the foot traffic to take a path to the left or right. The rear door and the bathroom were on the right; therefore the path to the right probably endured more footsteps than the one on the left. The concrete was darker, especially down the center of the pathway, except for the one spot. It was clean—it looked like new concrete, abruptly bounded on both sides by the stain made dark from years of rubber soles. There were striations to the outer edge of the lighter spot that suggested someone had used a brush to scrub it.
Ellis placed his notebook and pencil on the table and stared at the whitish area, moving in a semi-circle.
“What is it?” Carolina asked. “What do you see?”
He gave her a disarming smile, looking at the Braun coffeemaker near the back door; she needed something to occupy her mind. “Does your brother have coffee? Could you make us some?”
With a tissue to her nose, she went around the table, retrieved the pot, and walked to the restroom in the back.
Ellis lowered his head to the cold concrete, staring at the spot from every direction. To the right of the spot, on the outer wall was heavy-gauge wire shelving. He considered moving it, but with everything that was on it, he determined it would be too heavy. On the bottom shelf was a stack of paper reams, another box of what looked like computer paper, and an old cash register. Ellis glanced up and saw Carolina retrieving the coffee basket before heading into the bathroom again.
He removed the items from the bottom of the shelf, seeing that the floor underneath had also been cleaned. But under the center of the shelf was something that began to confirm his fears. It was a three or four inch-long gouge in the concrete, perhaps one centimeter in width. It began shallow, went deeper, and then became shallow again. It looked exactly like the type of gouge made when a bullet is fired at an angle into concrete.
“Need any help?” he yelled.
“No,” she answered with the sink running. “Dark coffee?”
“Yes, please. Very dark.” Ellis was hurrying. He saw nothing in the brick outer wall, so he turned his attention to the items on the shelf. He removed each of them, examining their underside, looking for a slug. He found none.
Maybe it had been a bullet, maybe not. Carolina’s brother could have had a million reasons for cleaning the spot, and the gouge in the pavement could have been caused by any manner of heavy objects which could have been dropped.
Okay, enough devil’s advocate. The Army officer’s breathing picked up as he thought about how it might have happened. A robbery gone awry, someone was knocked to the ground, a pistol was fired. One of the shots connected, one missed, glancing off the concrete before lodging into a ream of paper. The heavy walls would have muffled much of the noise, so the criminal took his or her time, scrubbing the floor and collecting the slugs.
Or, Carolina’s brother dropped a container of cleaning fluid, bleaching the floor white.
Or, he cleaned something that had been spilled.
Glancing around, Ellis found other imperfections in the concrete, other gouges not too dissimilar to the one under the shelf.
“You’re pressing too hard,” he muttered. “And you’re supposed to be on vacation.”
“What?” Carolina asked, handing him a mug of coffee.
Ellis accepted the coffee and shook his head. “Just talking to myself.”
“What did you find?” she asked.
He shook his head, wiping his forehead. “Nothing. I was just moving some heavy items trying to find something, anything. There was nothing.”
“Do you think Michel is okay?”
Ellis avoided her eyes. “I certainly hope so.”
“But you think no?”
“I think there is absolutely nothing here to suggest he isn’t,” he said, his eyes joining hers. “You just need to give it a little time.” While he was telling her the absolute truth, something in the back of his mind told him that there was more to be learned here.
They stayed ten more minutes, Ellis drinking his coffee as he tried to make sense of her broken English. When she was done speaking, again, she swore that Michel would not have left the store unattended and, if he had for some strange reason, certainly not without telling her why.
Ellis’s mind was still stuck on the clean spot of concrete. “You should go back to the police and insist that they do a forensic search on this place.”
After explaining the word forensic, Carolina covered her mouth with her hand. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”
“Not at all. But to be complete, it’s what they should do.” Ellis’s heart ached for the woman. He walked her home, giving her a small hug and making her promise to call the police again. If they didn’t respond, Ellis instructed her to call the Police Nationale.
As he walked down the street, in the direction of his hotel, Damien Ellis wrestled with himself about whether or not to get more involved. A big piece of him was insisting he get on the train in the morning and never look back. This wasn’t his turf, and he didn’t quite feel the local police would be rolling out the proverbial Welcome Wagon anytime soon. And something inside him, a sixth sense, told him this was not a situation to trifle with.
Ellis smoked his pipe as he walked, glancing into his bag at the bottle of wine and remembering the large, claw-foot bathtub in his chamber. At least he’d have somewhere comfortable to think things over. His pace quickened.
***
Saarbrücken, Germany
Gage performed several backtracking maneuvers, each time using a parking garage, to make sure they had not been followed. After crossing the border, they had spent the day in Saarbrücken, in the hotel down the block from Monika’s apartment. Monika checked them in, paid cash. She knew the old lady at the front, so she said her apartment had no power. It being a neighborhood hotel, the old woman took the cash with an understanding smile and never made Monika sign her name. She probably never recorded the sale, or the guest’s name. Taxes, while universally despised, were sometimes a fugitive’s best friend.
Gage didn’t sleep
the entire day on Tuesday. He sat in the uncomfortable chair, wishing he had a cigarette, glad he had quit, but still wishing. He stared out the window all day, watching Monika’s apartment, waiting to see if anyone came looking for her.
After Monika had slept for four hours, she got up and, upon agreeing to his cautioning, left for a few minutes, returning with a pizza and two large bottles of water. They sat in silence, he watching her apartment, she on the bed. She had the diary again, reading. Occasionally she would murmur her surprise at the content. Other times she would read with her hand pressed to her lips.
“Anything interesting?” Gage asked.
Monika let out a long breath, shaking her head ruefully. “She had the child, and her husband, Heinrich, had no idea whose it really was. She told him the baby was from her former husband, in Berlin, who died of a heart attack.”
Gage twisted his head back to the window, finishing off his slice of pizza. He only ate one, swilling from the bottle of water as he stared down the street.
Monika moved to the edge of the bed, touching his arm. “Just listen, Gage…”
Liora is only five weeks old now and, as I stare into her eyes, knowing she depends on me for everything it will take to keep her alive, I ponder just how I can love her so, knowing she is the partial product of such an evil incarnation.
But as I lay in the bed with her today, I counted five fingers on each hand, five toes on each foot. Her eyes were wide, staring at me as if I were the only person on earth. This child, this perfect child, is only half of me. But in my heart, and in my soul, I feel she is fully mine.
Is it right for me to have such heart-rending passion for this baby? I was surely biting my knuckle when she was conceived, loathing her father, and our revolting, vile act. How could something so precious emerge from a deed so very wicked?
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