by Roy Chaney
“She have a name, the woman?”
“Most of them do.”
“What’s her name, Marty?”
“Couldn’t say. Some kind of dancer. She used to work over at Harry Needles’s place.”
Harry Needles—Hagen hadn’t expected to hear that name. Another name from the past. Another old friend of his father’s. Harry Needles had once worked for Hagen’s father at the Sands. He moved on to other casinos later, then got out of casino security entirely, got into the restaurant business.
“What’s Harry’s action these days?” Hagen said.
Marty Ray took one last bite of the chicken wing and dropped it onto his plate. “Runs a strip club over on Industrial. Calls it the Venus Lounge or some such shit. By the way, Sauerkraut. Leave Gubbs alone. He works for me.”
“All right. But you can do something for me.”
Marty Ray tore the leg off the half chicken. “What might that be?”
“Call off the boys you’ve got tailing me.”
Marty looked up from his food with a blank expression. Then a smile slowly appeared on his face. “You’re some kind of comedian now, Sauerkraut? You learn some jokes when you were overseas? Believe me, if I had people following you, you wouldn’t know. Until I wanted you to know. But I’m serious about Gubbs. And anybody else who works for me. Leave them alone. You fuck with them and you’re fucking with me. So then I have to turn around and fuck with you.”
Marty Ray snapped the bone of the chicken leg cleanly in half. More barbecue sauce splattered across his desk. Marty Ray dropped the two halves onto his plate. Across the room the bald-headed Cleveland turned away from the video monitors and gave Hagen a menacing and gap-toothed smile. Ten years ago it would’ve been Hagen sitting there. Hagen was staring down the business end of his own past.
It was time to go. Hagen got up from the chair.
“Wipe your face, Marty. You eat like a pig.”
“Fuck you too, Sauerkraut.”
7.
HAGEN WALKED OUT of Diamond Jim’s.
It was just past five o’clock.
He climbed into the Buick, slid his sunglasses on and started the engine. He pulled out into the street. At the first intersection he studied the rearview mirror while he waited for the red light to change. He didn’t see the black Chrysler. He didn’t see anything. Except a lot of faces from his past, slowly catching up with him.
The Sniff. McGrath. Marty Ray. Peach.
And now Harry Needles.
It was old home week in Las Vegas.
The Venus Lounge was located at the northern end of Industrial Road. The flat outline of the green and white building and the absence of any windows gave it the appearance of a warehouse, albeit a warehouse with a black awning over the front door, a uniformed parking lot valet standing underneath the awning, and a plaster replica of the Venus de Milo rising from the center of a circular water fountain near the front door.
The interior of the club was taken up by three runway stages lit up in colored lights. Several more colored lights were trained on the mirror balls hanging from the ceiling, sending shimmering reflections around the room. The reflections were multiplied greatly by the floor to ceiling mirrors behind the stages and along the walls. Loud rock music shook the building as the topless dancers writhed against silver poles positioned on the stage at intervals of several feet.
Hagen pushed his way through the crowd and up to the long bar. He ordered a bottle of beer. A busty young brunette wearing only a sequined G-string with a fluffy pink pom-pom at the rear danced on a circular platform behind the bar. She ran her tongue across her glossy lips and threw what she hoped was a smoldering glance at two middle-aged men standing to Hagen’s left. The two men didn’t take notice, but a man in a red cowboy shirt to Hagen’s right leaned forward and shouted for the dancer to shake her pom-pom. She obliged, twirling around on high heels and bending over, her rear end up in the air. She reached back and slapped one bare butt cheek once, twice, three times. The cowboy tossed a crumpled dollar bill up onto the stage, shouted further instructions.
When the beer came Hagen asked the woman bartender where he might find Harry Needles. The woman pointed to a glassed-in booth at the far end of the bar where a disc jockey was playing the music that now thudded through the room. Hagen paid for his beer and walked over to the booth. Inside a disc jockey wearing a banker’s visor tapped away at a laptop computer keyboard, plotting his next musical assault. Beside the door to the booth a thin man with Mediterranean features was trying to listen to what was being yelled into his ear by a young man wearing a black polo shirt that bore the Venus de Milo logo. Hagen got the thin man’s attention and asked him where Harry Needles was. The thin man shrugged, told Hagen that Harry Needles might show up any minute and he might not show up at all. Hagen told him it was a matter of some importance, and one that Harry Needles would certainly be interested in. The thin man raised his hands with a flourish and looked up toward the ceiling, as though emphasizing the ethereal nature of Harry Needles and his daily routine. Hagen slipped the thin man a twenty-dollar bill. The thin man wrote down Hagen’s name and told him that if Harry Needles did in fact materialize, he’d give him Hagen’s message.
Hagen sat down at a table near the wall to finish his beer. Five Japanese men in business suits sat with their wives at the edge of the nearest runway stage. The wives were dressed elegantly in evening dresses and sparkling jewelry. The entourage clapped politely and smiled as the leggy black woman at the edge of the stage rolled her hips, cupped her bare breasts and pretended to moan. One of the Japanese wives stood up and with the encouragement of the others she stepped forward and tucked a folded dollar bill under the dancer’s white garter, then sat down again quickly, twittering with laughter and relief, as though she’d just fed a morsel of raw meat to a roaring lioness.
As Hagen worked on the bottle of beer he thought about what Marty Ray had told him. How hard did Marty believe that Ronnie knew something about Jimmy Ray’s murder? Hagen wondered again if Marty Ray told him the truth about not seeing Ronnie last week. If it was the truth, it might be a very narrow truth. Marty Ray didn’t need to talk to Ronnie in person. Marty Ray had other people who could talk to Ronnie. Perhaps the discussion had gotten out of hand. Tempers flared. Guns were drawn. Shots fired.
No, that didn’t add up. Ronnie was sitting out at Hoover Dam at midnight. If Marty Ray arranged to have some of his men get heavy with Ronnie, they wouldn’t have done it at Hoover Dam. And if Marty Ray simply wanted Ronnie murdered, Hoover Dam still wasn’t a likely choice. No, Ronnie was sitting in his car when he was shot. The shooter walked right up to the driver’s side window and fired. The shooter hadn’t snuck up on Ronnie. Not in an empty overlook parking lot in the middle of the night. The shooter was someone Ronnie knew and who he wasn’t surprised to see.
Because he’d gone out there to meet him.
And what did McGrath know? McGrath hadn’t said a word about Ronnie being implicated in Jimmy Ray’s murder. And yet McGrath had worked that case. Either McGrath was holding out on him or Marty Ray was lying about the police believing that Ronnie knew something about Jimmy Ray’s murder.
He’d talk to McGrath again. But first Hagen wanted to talk to Harry Needles.
And the woman too, whoever she was . . .
She was lying on a powder blue blanket in the middle of the lawn. She wore a black leotard and she lay on her shoulders, her arms propping up her back, her legs bicycling briskly in the crisp spring air. She sat up quickly when she noticed them walking up the stone pathway toward the house.
They’d interrupted her exercises, she said. What did they want?
Her name was Ingeborge Stromm.
She’d once been Heinrich Kress’s lover . . .
When Hagen and Johannes Vogel returned to Berlin from Hamburg, the long work of researching Heinrich Kress began. All the available databases of the BND, the Bundeskriminalamt, the CIA, and MI6 were searched. The hours of interrogatio
ns that occurred after Kress’s arrest for the Hamburg nightclub bombing were pored over. A list of names was compiled. Relatives. Friends. Former employers. School acquaintances from Kress’s days at the University of Kiel. The Totenkopf files pieced back together by the puzzlers identified three Stasi-supported terrorists. Natzweiler—Kress—was accounted for. He was dead. The other two, Totenkopf and Hohle, were unaccounted for and might still be active, somewhere in Europe, somewhere in the world.
Only one name stood out as a possibility better than the others.
Ingeborge Stromm.
Stromm met Kress in Kiel at the university in the 1970s. At the time of the nightclub bombing in 1988 she resided in the small town of Hochenhiem, only a few kilometers from Hamburg. After Kress’s arrest the Bundeskriminalamt had questioned Stromm closely on several occasions. Stromm expressed profound shock that Kress might be involved in a terrorist bombing and denied knowing anything of Kress’s recent activities. The Bundeskriminalamt could find no holes in Stromm’s story to exploit and in the end they gave up on her.
But one item that came to light during the Bundeskriminalamt sessions stood out—Stromm had admitted that she lived with Kress for several months in 1985. The Bundeskriminalamt hadn’t made anything of it in 1988 but now, to Vogel and Hagen, it was a telling admission. Kress, as the Stasi-sponsored terrorist known as Natzweiler, had spent quite a bit of time in East Germany in 1985. Perhaps Stromm knew of Kress’s East German trip. Perhaps Stromm had gone with him.
But where was she now?
Hagen and Vogel sent out inquiries through BND and CIA channels. Three weeks later the French Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire—Directorate of Territorial Security—replied with a short message indicating that a woman identified as Ingeborge Stromm, formally of Kiel and Hochenhiem, now resided in a small town near Morlaix on the Brittany coast in northern France. She was a freelance writer who traveled extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East.
“You’re going to visit this woman,” Severance said at a meeting with Hagen and Vogel in his office. Severance outlined a simple plan that had been used successfully before. “The French have nothing on Stromm. Neither do we. If she is Totenkopf or Hohle or if she knows who they were, she is safe at the moment. But she doesn’t know that or at least she can’t be sure. So we need to shake her hard. You’re going to tell her that you know she was involved with the Stasi and that you want to employ the remaining members of Kress’s cell. You’re going to threaten to make this information known to the authorities if she doesn’t play along. Then we sit back and see what happens. If she knows nothing, she’ll go to the police, and the DST will notify us. If she doesn’t go to the police, then you keep going back until she tells you something we want to know. She’s going to sink or swim, gentlemen. If she swims, we let her go. If she sinks, we’ll throw her a rope so she can hang herself.”
Vogel dyed his brown hair a shade darker, combed it differently and grew a thin mustache. Hagen cut his hair close to the scalp, affected a pair of large thick glasses, inserted lifts in his shoes to change his gait. When they arrived in the village of Locquénolé, seven kilometers northwest of Morlaix, they were armed with two French-made pistols and the name of one of the Stasi case officers who had overseen the training of Totenkopf, Natzweiler and Hohle—Kurt Glaub. Glaub’s name was useful because Glaub was now dead. He couldn’t blow their cover.
Hagen and Vogel arrived at her house early in the morning to find her on the blanket in the yard, her legs treading the air above her head, like an upside-down swimmer treading water. Sink or swim . . .
Ingeborge Stromm was in her mid-forties now. She was thin and wiry, with black shoulder-length hair. Her face was drawn, her eyes sharp and inquisitive. Hagen introduced himself and Vogel as onetime associates of the late Kurt Glaub. The woman picked up on Hagen’s accent, thought he was an Englander. Hagen didn’t say one way or another.
“Glaub?” Stromm shrugged, pushed a curling length of hair off her forehead. “What is that to me? I know no one by that name. Who are you?”
“Businessmen. We’re interested in engaging your services.”
“Are you with a magazine?”
“It’s not exactly in that line.”
Stromm led them to a brick patio behind her house. A pitcher of ice water and a single glass stood on the patio table, beside a blue package of Gitane cigarettes. Hagen and Vogel sat down. Stromm pushed a cigarette from the pack and lit it, remained standing. A hundred feet away a man in a gray jacket and straw hat was clipping a hedge that ran along the back of the house. He paused to look at the three of them on the patio, then continued with his work.
Hagen did most of the talking. Vogel slumped down in his chair with a disinterested look on his face. The conversation began in French but quickly shifted to German. Hagen mentioned Glaub and he mentioned Heinrich Kress. Then he spoke of Totenkopf, Natzweiler and Hohle. As Hagen described the terrorist cell that Kress was a part of, a smile appeared on Stromm’s face and remained there, frozen in place. When Hagen suggested that Stromm had also been a member of that cell, Stromm glanced at the gardener across the yard, as though wondering if it were time to call for help.
“Once again, gentlemen, you have me at a disadvantage,” Stromm said. “As I’ve already said, I didn’t know your friend Glaub. And as for Heinrich, I told the German authorities everything I know years ago. I think I’ll have to ask you to leave now.”
“You worked with Kress. You could be valuable to us.”
“This is all very amusing,” Stromm said after a long pause. “Do you mind if I get my tape recorder, so I can get this down just as you have told it to me? And my camera too—surely you won’t object to me taking your photograph? And when I’m finished, perhaps I’ll call the police. You can make your proposition to them as well.”
“That’s not advisable.”
“And why not?”
“If you go to the authorities, we’ll have to tell them what we know about you. And if you choose not to assist us, we will also drop a line to the authorities.”
“Do what you think you must, gentlemen.” Stromm chewed on her lower lip as she studied the faces of her two visitors, then glanced once again at the gardener. He’d finished clipping the hedge and was now tossing the clippings into a metal trash can. “As for me, I have more important things to do today than listen to your nonsense. You’d better go now. I don’t know how it is you’ve come to me or why and I don’t care. But please don’t come back. Rest assured, I’ll tell the police whatever I like if you continue to bother me.”
Hagen asked Vogel for a pen. On a piece of note pad paper he wrote the name and phone number of their hotel in Morlaix and tossed it onto the table.
“We’ll be in Morlaix for a few days,” Hagen said. “You can contact us there—when you are ready to discuss this further.”
Stromm lit another cigarette as she watched Hagen and Vogel walk out to their rented car.
The plan was to stay in Morlaix for two or three days. They had to give Stromm time to think about the proposition and then to act, in whatever way she chose to act. In the meantime, Vogel and Hagen would spend as much time as possible away from the hotel. The false passports and other carefully prepared documentation they’d left in the hotel rooms would tell anyone who searched their rooms that they were who they claimed to be, two men traveling on Russian passports with extensive ties to the Middle East. Their belongings, right down to the labels on the clothing packed in their suitcases, were all chosen to support their cover story. The Russian angle was legitimate—many former Stasi operatives had retreated to Russia after the fall of East Germany. The Stasi had always worked closely with the Soviet KGB and many officers in the new Russian intelligence service had belonged at one time to the Stasi, including the now deceased Kurt Glaub.
They killed time in Morlaix all afternoon. When they checked back at the hotel that evening there were no messages for them. Vogel and Hagen went to their rooms to
wash up before dinner. Neither man found any evidence that their rooms had been searched.
That night Vogel and Hagen drove to a country auberge several kilometers outside of Morlaix, on the road to Trégastel. The restaurant was recommended by the innkeeper in Morlaix and the auberge kitchen was as good as they had been led to believe. Vogel and Hagen finished the meal with half a bottle of Normandy Calvados, then settled the check and departed.
The channel fog rolled over the landscape. The air was crisp. Their breath left clouds of vapor as they walked out to the Mercedes. The Calvados was making Hagen feel sluggish and sleepy. Vogel agreed to drive.
“What if Stromm doesn’t bite?” Vogel asked as they drove along the narrow country road. The fog was growing thicker and Vogel kept the speed down to seventy kilometers an hour. “Will we try the next name on the list? I hope the next person lives someplace a little more hospitable. The south of France perhaps. Or Italy—I’ve always wanted to go to Capri. Have you been to Capri, Bodo?”
Hagen was half asleep when the front end of the Mercedes suddenly bucked and the vehicle veered off toward the shoulder of the road. Vogel hit the brakes, pulled the car over. A flat front tire. And they were somewhere out in the forest, far from any petrol station. Vogel swore. Hagen sighed.
They got out of the car. Hagen stretched, took a deep breath of cool air. Vogel walked around to the trunk.
There was no warning. Hagen didn’t hear a thing. One second there was only the deep evening silence along the empty country road, and the next second Vogel was screaming.
