“That pass goes straight into Österreich,” one of the policemen said.
“Österreich is Deutschland now,” said another.
Thomas ignored their comments. He lowered his eyes to the ground and closed them. Why on earth would this veterinarian fool tell them the plane had crashed?
“You’re certain?” Thomas asked the boy.
“Yes,” Peter replied. “The plane didn’t crash.”
Thomas nodded. “I hate to be an inconvenience, but would you mind if we look around?”
The mother’s face was neutral as she held the screen door open wide. Two other policemen went into the house. Thomas donned his hat and pulled on the brim out of respect before taking the other two policemen to the barn.
Hörst wiped sweat from his forehead and stepped up the two steps to the farmhouse, close to Frau Heinz.
“How did you know about an airplane?” she hissed.
“Your boyfriend mumbled it in his feverish pain. And I want ten thousand reichsmarks to change my story,” he rasped. “To hide your transgressions and that…that English-speaking man.”
Frau Heinz curled her lip and motioned Peter back into the house. With her girth she pushed Hörst from the steps and then stood nose-to-nose with him in the yard. “This is my family you’re playing with, you devious bastard.”
“I’m not playing.”
“You’re endangering their lives.”
“Not if I get my money, I’m not.”
“I’ll get you, Hörst. Do you hear me? You just remember that when you lay your filthy head down at night. I will get you for this.”
Hörst spat brownish juice at her feet and smiled, showing the wad of tobacco in the corner of his disgusting mouth. “Yeah, sure, tough old bitch…so, we got a deal?”
“You’ll have your money. Just get them out of here.”
Hörst spat again before taking a swig from his flask. He crossed the yard and disappeared into the barn.
Frau Heinz stared after him, her eyes welling with tears.
~~~
The cellar was damp and cool, marked by the familiar earthy smell of cellars the world over. Neil was motionless, holding the Colt in both hands as he had over the previous ten minutes. Several minutes before he had heard voices as the men had walked through the barn. Days before, in a prescient move, Neil and Peter had moved the disassembled airplane parts from the barn, concealing them under hay bales in the grazing field. That move had proven wise—but hiding in this cellar felt idiotic. If Peter hadn’t fully covered the cellar door, or if these men were meticulous in their search—or if one simply stepped on the door and felt its hollowness—then Neil would have to decide whether to exit peacefully, or to come out shooting.
Neil continued to aim the Colt upward as the voices returned. Though the sounds were muffled, he heard someone say something about “die Laternen,” meaning “the lanterns.” The cellar door had gaps between the boards, and while the top of the door was covered in hay, it displayed the sudden illumination through the gaps. Neil controlled his breathing, trying to listen, praying they wouldn’t find the door.
“Just a hallucinating old drunk,” he heard one voice say.
“But the family acted odd,” another voice said. “Like they knew more.”
“With the Nazis running roughshod, everyone acts odd nowadays,” remarked a third voice.
“Careful talking like that,” the second one replied.
Neil tensed as he heard boots scrape in the stall above him.
“What’s that?” one voice yelled.
Neil heard someone distant yell something about being mistaken.
“How could you be mistaken about something as distinct as an airplane crash?” asked a voice just above the door. Neil could see the shadows playing through the thin strips of light.
The other voice became clearer. Neil recognized it, guttural and rough as a cob. “Because sometimes when I get drunk I see things.” It was the veterinarian—the damned drunken veterinarian that had performed the surgery on him. Neil gritted his teeth as uncontrolled anger coursed through his veins.
The boots in his stall moved away. Neil moved up the ladder, turning his ear so he could hear the exchange.
“Do you realize that you’ve wasted a full day of our investigation with your bullshit?”
“But, I wasn’t bullshitting. Sometimes when I see these things I really believe…” The voices trailed off.
Neil took deep breaths, wondering what that crooked animal doctor was up to by leading a team of investigators here.
Another voice. “The house and the barn are clean. This is a damn wild goose chase.”
Footsteps, going away.
In another minute, car doors slammed, engines started, and gravel crunched as the cars drove off.
Neil waited. He didn’t relax. Just waited.
Several minutes later, he shielded his eyes as the trap door opened. It was Gabi. “They’re gone.” Her smile was triumphant but her eyes held concern. Neil tucked the Colt into his waistband and climbed out, wincing as the pain from his fall finally hit him.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“It was the veterinarian, wasn’t it?”
She pinched her lips to one side and nodded. “Yes.”
“Tell me his name again.”
“Hörst Baldinger. He’s always been a loose cannon. Apparently he told some policemen from Nürnberg that a plane had crashed in the lower field.”
“Nürnberg?”
She nodded. “Does this have to do with your gunshot wound?”
Neil turned his head to stare outside into the darkness. He didn’t answer her, although he knew the airfield where he’d shot Willi was near Nürnberg.
“Where’s your mother?” he asked. “Where’s Peter?”
“Peter’s in the kitchen, waiting on you. Mama…”
“Go on.”
“She’s in her bedroom crying.”
Neil tapped out a cigarette and lit it. Gabi held out her hand for one. He started to object but she must have read his look because she said, “I bought those for you so don’t even think about trying to deny me one. I’m a grown woman.”
Unable to find humor in the moment, Neil gave her a cigarette and lit it. They stepped into the night air and didn’t speak for a bit. In the distance, he could see the cars driving away. Neil looked up at the starless sky, watching the movement of the clouds as he reflected on the situation. God, how he hated that he’d involved these nice people in his problems. And now, due to the veterinarian’s actions, he’d probably endangered their lives.
“So you’re not going to talk?” she asked, pulling him from his reverie.
“Just thinking,” Neil whispered, dropping his cigarette and grinding it under his foot
“Well, think out loud, will you?”
“I just regret that I’ve involved you and your family in this mess.”
“I don’t,” Gabi said with an impish grin. She dragged on her cigarette and said, “Boring as hell around here.”
“Looking for excitement can get a person in trouble, Gabi.”
“Don’t lecture me,” she said, a strange note to her voice. “Oh…who’s the picture of?”
“What picture?”
“The little girl on Peter’s dresser. I hid it with your other things.”
“Just someone I want to remember.”
“Is she dead?”
“I hope not,” Neil breathed.
As he scanned the area with his eyes, her next question gave him a jolt. She asked, “Who shot you?”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“Gabi…”
“You were shot—there’s no debating that. So who did it?”
Neil was silent.
“Who?” Gabi snapped.
“A man.”
“Very good. That really narrows it down.”
“I didn’t know him, Gabi.”
“He was a complete stranger?�
��
“Sort of.”
“‘Sort of’ means ‘no’.”
“Damn if you’re not persistent.”
Gabi smiled.
Neil spoke quickly and monotone. “That was his airplane, okay? I hired him to fly me to Austria. He landed in a place called Velden and tried to rob me, but not before he shot me. But he didn’t rob me. I took his airplane and crashed it in your field. That’s the truth.” He opened his arms. “Satisfied?”
“You left something out. I’m not going to ask you if you shot him.” She pulled in a long drag from the cigarette. “I’m not going to ask you because I know the answer already.” She wagged her finger back and forth and said, “Because, even out here in the dark, I can see the answer in those dual-colored eyes of yours.”
“I need to talk to your mother.”
Just as he started to walk inside, Gabi grabbed his wrist and turned him to her. She flicked her cigarette away in a streaking tangerine arc. Then she stood on her tiptoes, put her hands around Neil’s neck and kissed him. Neil nearly fell over as she pressed her sweet tongue into his mouth. He was suddenly quite aware of her breasts and her midsection as she pressed against him, and even though he didn’t want to, he gently removed her hands and pulled himself backward.
“Why’d you do that?” she asked.
Neil touched the back of his hand to his lips. He held the hand to his nose, inhaling her scent. Then Neil turned and walked to the house.
He went directly to Frau Heinz’s room and there, between the sobs of a woman who, for many years, had done a yeoman’s job of being both father and mother, he listened as she relayed the story about Hörst, obviously shaken to her very core.
“Ten thousand reichsmarks?” Neil asked.
She dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief. “I don’t have that kind of money. I’ll have to mortgage everything.”
Neil gave her a hug, probably something she wasn’t used to receiving. The crying began again as Frau Heinz spent twenty minutes sobbing into Neil’s shoulder. Over the course of her release, she mentioned her sweet babies, and how she just wanted to keep them safe.
And while Neil did a good job of comforting this woman who had been so good to him, his mind raced at light speed as he thought about that wicked sonofabitch Hörst Baldinger.
Neil’s anger hadn’t abated at all. Like a fire doused with gasoline, it grew.
And grew.
CHAPTER FORTY
IT WAS JUST AFTER THREE IN THE MORNING. The crisp air invigorated Neil as he rode with the window down on the old Adler truck. He had taken special care to slowly roll the vehicle away from the Heinz’s barn and to the top of the service road. With his foot on the clutch and the vehicle in third gear, he allowed the Adler to roll several hundred meters from the barn before he popped the clutch and started the engine. He hadn’t wanted to wake Peter or Gabi. But Frau Heinz knew all about his leaving. In fact, she had given him the keys and the look they had shared said everything.
Neil puttered northbound, connecting with the road to Hausham, a cigarette dangling from his lips as the cool September evening whipped his now shaggy black hair. He could smell the tang of the nearby crops in the sweet night air. After several kilometers, just as Frau Heinz told him he would, he saw the church with the bell tower, the structure lit by a solitary electric spotlight. Hanging over the front of the bell tower, probably covering a cross, was a Nazi flag, blazing red in the spotlight. Neil pulled into the parking lot and retrieved the bundle from the truck. He walked around the church and connected with the east-west street located a block north. It was more of a rutted trail than a proper thoroughfare.
He began to walk east. At such an early hour, a person might question whether or not the town was inhabited. Other than the spotlight at the church, there were no lights anywhere. And while there were no stars out, the sky held a faint glow, making it a deep shade of grey. His eyes were now adjusted to the dark and, up ahead on the eastern limits of the town, he clearly saw the two-story ramshackle building, just as Frau Heinz told him he would.
Once he was close, Neil was able to make out the hand-painted sign that read Baldinger Veterinary & Husbandry.
Moving into the blackness between two buildings, Neil placed the bundle at his feet. He closed his eyes, hearkening back—back to the Great War, when his meditations would give him peace. Back to his time as a teenager, in the Sierras, when he learned all the secrets.
He halted his train of thought, closing his eyes.
Your actions escaping the ship were crude, clumsy. You nearly died.
Then in London, in the Tube…pathetic. You were lucky. Nothing more.
But now, after weeks of solitude and sobriety, there’s no more excuse. You must do better. Think of Jakey. Think of Emilee. Think of little Fern.
And think of the good Herr Baldinger, inside, awaiting you.
Awaiting what you bring him…
After opening his eyes, Neil retrieved his bundle.
He walked around the building, making a wide arc, seeing nothing of interest. He went back to the front door, prepared to pick the lock as he pulled open the outer screen door. But with a quiet turn of the knob, the front door proved unlocked. He eased the door open to make sure there was no bell attached to it. There wasn’t. Once inside, Neil heard the racket, coming from up the rickety stairs. It was deep and throaty, grating at its edges.
Snoring.
The night air had cleansed Neil’s sinuses and, even over the animal stenches of Hörst’s place of work, Neil could easily smell the cloying odor of a sleeping drunkard’s breath. As he slept forty feet away, Hörst’s ninety-proof exhalations had wafted throughout the entire two-story structure, infusing the inside air with sweet nastiness.
Staring up the stairs, Neil opened his bundle. After putting the wads of money in his pocket, he gripped the freshly sharpened kitchen blade in his hand and began to move. Using the outer edges of the stairs, he climbed without a sound.
The Pale Horse cometh.
~~~
In Hörst Baldinger’s dream, the oily woman disappeared into a vapor of nothingness, replaced by an unbroken horse, set on trampling him. The funny thing about it was that Hörst knew he was dreaming but, just in case he wasn’t, he hurried to get away from the crazed colt. Many years before when he was at university, back in his sober days, Hörst and nine other students had watched in horror as one of their professors was trampled to death by a spooked old nag. Horses can kill a man at any time. Perhaps that’s why, whenever he was attending a horse and the owner wasn’t nearby, Hörst would beat on it incessantly—just to show the beast who was the boss.
In the dream, he struggled as the steed worked him up against a hard wall of some sort, making it difficult for him to breathe. Claustrophobic, Hörst panicked, yelling out. Just as he felt the nag might crush him, instead, it nipped him on the neck. And the nip was painful, damned painful, like the metallic pinch of sharp scissors.
Something strange began to happen, as thousands of hands appeared from the blackness, smacking his face. Then voices. Odd voices.
“Wake up, you sonofabitch,” came the deepest of them.
Hörst opened his eyes. His kerosene lamp was lit, burning low. The horse turned to vapor, morphing into a human shape. It was the man Hörst had patched up over three weeks ago; the man Hörst had led the investigators on a wild goose chase for earlier in the day.
But now the man was perched on top of him, straddling him tightly with his knees pressed against Hörst’s ribcage. Hörst tried to push the man off. His efforts were in vain.
“I would not do that if I were you,” the man warned. There was something odd about the situation—more odd than waking up with a strange man astride him—more odd than the fact that the man appeared to have blood smeared on his face in an odd pattern—and this oddness convinced Hörst to obey the man. The oddness was the man’s hand, clamped to the side of Hörst’s neck, the source of the pinching pain in his dream.
&nb
sp; But his hand wasn’t on Hörst’s neck.
It was inside it.
“Do not move, Hörst. I’ll show you why.” The man adjusted his hand. In a flash, he reached to the rickety bedside table and held something cold to Hörst’s neck. While he couldn’t see it, his left ear detected a rushing sound, like water through a pipe. Then the man replaced his right hand and lifted the glass that had contained whiskey only a few hours earlier.
It was half-full of thick red blood. Hörst’s blood.
Suddenly the veterinarian wasn’t able to breathe. He felt lightheaded and nauseous as he leaned his head back into the pillow and clenched his eyes shut.
“I have no idea how to say it in German, but in English, the critical pathway of yours that I have punctured is known as the jugular.”
“Jugularvene,” Hörst moaned, his tears beginning.
“Well, that’s easy,” the man answered. “Probably comes from Latin. Anyway, my pinkie finger is in there now and it’s making a pretty good seal. I made only a tiny hole, but boy does it gush when uncorked.”
Hörst began to sob and shudder. “I will die. I will die like a stuck pig here in my bed.”
“A drunken stuck pig,” the man added. “But I doubt you’ll die here. If I let you go right now, I’m guessing you’ll die pounding on a neighbor’s door. But you’ll probably ruin their porch in the process. Blood isn’t easy to remove, especially from wood.”
Hörst arched his back, crying and wailing like a toddler in the midst of a conniption fit. The man on top of him remained in place, pinkie finger acting as a plug in Hörst’s dike of life. When Hörst began to regain his senses, he slowed his crying, speaking with a trembling lip. “Why are you doing this?”
“It’s simple. You weren’t to say a word to anyone about me. That was our deal, and I take deals very seriously.”
“But they don’t know the whole truth. I did it as a warning, to get the money.”
“I’d already paid you.” Then, the man removed his finger and blood spurted out of Hörst’s neck like a west Texas oil well. Hörst screamed: a primal, guttural sound. After a moment the man replaced his finger before lowering his enraged face to Hörst’s. “You will never tell another soul that I was here. If anyone comes around asking again, stick to the story that you were drunk and hallucinating.”
Final Mission: Zion - A World War 2 Thriller Page 37
