So the anticipation and pressure of Berlin started to infect everyone, except that Elahah and I didn’t catch the bug. Those three weeks were the best of my life and I think Elahah was enjoying herself, too. She never seemed to be bothered by Chris’ hysterics over another skin breaking, or Midas shrieking about the wrong guitar strings, although both of those things were now my responsibility. I had to start wearing all black for the shows, because I spent time on the stage, handing over guitars and bottles of water and in Big Al’s case, water mixed with tequila. Ugh. Gimme Jim Beam, thank you.
Elahah was playing like an angel. I think everyone noticed and that was why Brody made her step up for her solo in Bad Mergentheim. I know that night was the best night of Elahah’s life. She floated, after that concert, a dreamy smile on her face.
Three days outside of Berlin was when it all hit the fan. Loren had shifted most of my crew duties on to other people so I could set up the equipment and instruments back stage before the shows. Not that I asked him to. It just seemed to happen. But it was a big help, all the same. We were in Hanover that night and I was already half-way through preparations when Elahah showed up. She was late, something she never was. She walked through the wings toward the backstage area like she was going to an execution.
I stopped her with a hand around her elbow. “Hey.”
She looked at me, trying to hide her face. But even as she looked, her eyes filled up with tears.
Alarmed, I pulled her behind the flap that held back the curtains and into the dark corner. “What’s happened?”
She pressed her lips together and for a moment I really thought she was going to tell me it was none of my business, which is what nearly everyone else around there would have said. But a tear dripped down her cheek. “They found me,” she whispered and held out her phone.
Something dropped inside my chest, making my belly crawl. I didn’t need to know who “they” were. But I took her phone anyway and looked. There was an email open on the screen. At the top was a clipping from a German newspaper. I couldn’t read the story. I only know about five German words and I learned them all while touring there. But I didn’t have to read it. The picture was enough. It was Elahah, side by side with Brody on the stage, both of them playing their hearts out.
“Scroll down,” she whispered.
I scrolled.
The words underneath the clip were pretty simple. YOU OWE US, SLAVE. €20,000 WHEN YOU REACH BERLIN OR WE TELL WHO YOU ARE.
“You have to tell Brody and the band about this,” I said, giving her the phone back.
She shook her head. “It’ll be on them for hiring an alien. I don’t want to get them in trouble. They didn’t do anything wrong. They didn’t know I’m illegal.”
“I wouldn’t bet on that,” I told her. “They seem to know a lot more about a lot of things than I wouldn’t have thought they did. Especially Brody and Veris and Taylor.”
“I don’t want to get them involved,” she whispered, looking scared. “These people,” and she lifted the phone a little bit, “they’re seriously scary. I got away from them only because of my mother’s money, but the other women.…” Her gaze focused inward and she shivered. “Those poor women.”
I rubbed the back of my head. If she wasn’t going to ask anyone for help, what could I do? But it also wasn’t up to me. “What do you want to do about it?” I asked her.
Elahah pressed her lips together, hiding away the fullness. “I…I don’t know. I just know I don’t want to drag anyone else into this.”
“If these fuckers are so scary, maybe you should,” I pointed out. “You should pull people in and shout it from the rooftops. They can only do this to you because you’re afraid they’ll tell everyone about you. So, do it first. Tell everyone yourself. Then they can’t do anything.”
She swallowed and the beautiful color of her skin turned a sickly pale shade. “I don’t know if I could do that. What would happen after? I can’t go back to Iran and that’s where they would take me if they find out about me. I’m not legal, anywhere else.”
It was a big tangle, that was for sure. I felt just as awful as she did. But here’s the thing—she went out on stage that night and played like nothing was wrong. That’s when I knew that somehow or another, she was going to make it big…if this thing with the people in Berlin got fixed.
I had no idea how to fix it. I didn’t have twenty thousand Euros. If I did, I would have given them to Elahah without blinking. But the Euros weren’t going to magically appear, so I did the best I could. I watched her back.
That took a bit of effort because I also had to take care of the rest of the band during a show and the gear and stuff afterward, but I did my best to be in two places at once. Loren got only mildly pissed at me for being late and taking too long to get things done. I guessed I had earned a bit of slack because I had done my fair share up until then, but that would only cover me for a while. I just wanted it to cover me for the four nights and five days we were in Berlin. Then I would knuckle down and tend to my job properly.
But that was why I nearly missed what happened, when it went down. On the third night, after the concert ended, I was cleaning off equipment and stowing guitars for the next night’s show—the last night in Berlin. Maybe that’s why I got careless. We’d been here three days and nights and nothing had happened except Elahah looked like she was losing a pound every hour. She wasn’t eating, didn’t look like she was sleeping and wasn’t talking to anyone including me. But by day three I had sort of figured the whole thing had been a giant bluff, just in the back of my mind, where it hardly formed into a complete thought.
So I relaxed and was busy caring for instruments and shit and looked up and around with a jerk as I realized that the stage had grown very quiet. The crew had finished set up there, which meant it was late. The band and the back-ups would have showered and changed and might already have left the auditorium.
I almost sprinted to the backstage door where the coaches were waiting to take everyone back to their hotel. The limos that took the band to the hotel had already left. So had the first coach, which took the set-up crew back. The three back-ups, Elahah, Johnson and Kimbo, took taxis and there was one of the cream-colored taxis pulling away as I got out the door, but I couldn’t see who was in it.
There was an odd, muffled sound, far to the right and my heart did a big leap. I knew that voice, even muffled like that. I spun, trying to get my eyes to adjust to the dark out here. There was a black car, some foreign thing like a Mercedes, with dark tinted windows. The back door was open and someone was struggling behind the open door. Then a hand gripped the top of the door. A small hand with clever, musical fingers.
Whoever had her must have yanked, for her hand tore away from the door, the door slammed shut and the car pulled away, leaving rubber and bad exhaust fumes.
I didn’t think about it. I just hauled ass for the other taxi and jumped in the back. “Follow that car!” I told the driver, then felt my mouth open in surprise. I had just said that?
“Was?” the driver said, looking at me in the rear-view mirror.
I pointed as the Mercedes flashed past. “There! There!” I moved my hands so one was following the other. “Follow!”
The driver rolled his eyes and got the taxi going, following the Mercedes at a sedate pace.
“Faster!” I urged, gripping the back of the seat. I made a shooing motion with my hand.
The taxi’s speed crept upward. I sat back and for the first time tried to think about what I was doing. I had my wallet but no phone and barely any Euros. I wasn’t sure how I was going to pay the taxi, either. I was going to have to talk fast when I got there. Wherever there was.
The driver didn’t seem to be going fast, but the Mercedes never quite dropped out of sight. Maybe Berlin was like L.A.—despite the sprawl, there were only one or two ways to get anywhere if you wanted to use the quickest route and most of them went via freeways. Except the driver didn’t know where the
Mercedes was going and neither did I.
But it was a long way away from the auditorium and we passed through some really shitty suburbs. Worse even than east L.A. The Mercedes slowed and starting turning into side streets, which meant we were getting close to the destination. The slum quality of the area hadn’t picked up at all. If Elahah had been taken by the people who had threatened her, then it made sense they would hang out in a dump like this. There probably wasn’t too many locations even in a city the size of Berlin where you could hide human prisoners and slaves and not have the neighbors take notice.
Because it was pretty late in the night, there wasn’t a lot of traffic or people around and that didn’t make me feel much better about what I was doing, which was mostly reacting and not a whole lot of thinking.
When the Mercedes turned off and stopped in front of a really tall chain-link gate fencing off a yard, the taxi pulled over sharply to the right and idled. “Lights!” I whispered, as if the Mercedes could hear me from half-way down the block. Miraculously, the driver understood and turned off his headlights. He looked at me over the seat and rattled off a whole lot of German and pointed to the meter.
I held up a finger, then all five. “Five minutes,” I told him. I pointed to the floor. “You wait here. Stay here.” I reached for the door handle, but the driver lurched and gripped my arm and started jabbering again. I thought he was demanding his money, but when I looked at him, he pointed through the screen at the Mercedes. There were two men standing in front of it, working on a lock on the gate. They would have seen or heard me getting out.
The taxi driver had figured out what was going on, I guess and had warned me.
I nodded my head at him and watched through the screen. The gate was rolled backward with a rattle of wire and metal and the Mercedes drove through. The gate was shut behind it, so I watched the yard that I could see through the wire.
The Mercedes pulled up at the shed inside the yard and the back door opened. A man got out, reached back into the back seat and hauled Elahah out. She didn’t go easy. She kicked and screamed and fought every step of the way and she was stronger than she looked, so they had to work to get her inside. I was proud of her.
The driver looked at me and grimaced. “You…know?” he asked, jerking his head toward the yard.
“Yes.” I nodded.
He clicked his tongue, with a sad sound. I had to agree with him. “Polizei,” he added.
“No!” I shook my head vigorously, hoping that would get it across. “She didn’t want anyone to know and if you knew the reasons why, you’d understand. If the police get involved, she’s as good as dead.”
He looked unhappy, but he understood. Maybe not the details, but my big panic must have told him enough.
I looked through the windscreen again and wondered what to do. Even if I did know how to throw a punch, this was way beyond swinging fists around. If the people who had Elahah were keeping slaves, then that probably meant guns and more, too. I had seen Taken just like everyone else and even though it was a movie, I figured it wasn’t too far off the truth, except I was a long way from being Liam Neeson.
That was when the hand knocked against the window, right next to me. I almost jumped through the roof of the taxi and had to clamp my hand over my mouth to stop myself from yammering in fright. My heart was doing sick things against my chest. But a bad guy wouldn’t have knocked. He would have just shot, or smashed the glass in. So I opened the door, fumbling at the handle.
Brody slid into the taxi and closed the door, moving fast and silent and slick.
My mouth and eyes opened as I stared at him. Nothing occurred to me. Not a single thought. My shock just jammed everything up.
Brody nodded at the driver and said something fast in German. The driver yammered back and pointed at the yard. That was when the front passenger door opened and Taylor slid onto the seat and shut the door with a soft click. She gave me a quick smile and looked at the driver and began to speak in German. It sounded like the real thing to me, like she had been born to it.
Brody squeezed my shoulder. “Taylor is going to settle the fare for you. Veris and I are going to take it from here. I want you to wait here for us.”
I wasn’t sure I could speak. Over Brody’s shoulder, through the window, I could see Veris waiting on the pavement. All three of them wore dark clothing, nothing fancy. Jeans and black shirts and jackets, mostly. Brody had his hair pulled back and tucked into his leather jacket. You could pass them on the street and not even notice them, which was really bizarre if you was used to Brody like he looked when he was with the band. The only thing that made them look unusual right now was Veris’ size and coloring, but this was Berlin and he fit right in here.
I finally got my tongue unglued. “Why are you even here? We didn’t tell anyone.”
Brody nodded. “I’ll explain as much as I can afterward. First, we’re going to get Elahah back and sort everything out. Will you wait?”
“Just get her back,” I urged him. “The people who took her…they’re bad.”
“We know,” Brody said and gave me a small smile. “But we’ve had a bit of practice dealing with assholes.” He got out and the door shut quietly once more.
But even before the door shut, Brody and Veris had moved to the gate. They were just two dark shadows in the dark street and they seemed to shimmer up the fence and float over the top. Then they were gone.
I watched where they had been, trying to tell myself I had really seen them do that. They had moved like…like nothing I had ever seen before. Even black ops heroes in the movies didn’t flow like they had.
Taylor looked at me over the back of the seat. “They’re really very good. Don’t worry.”
I worried, anyway. I think that was the longest twenty minutes of my life, at least so far. It lasted for a few years and it didn’t help that there was absolutely no sound coming from the yard. No guns fired, no one screamed. Although I’m not sure what I would have done if something had exploded or someone had started screaming. I was already wound up like a jack-in-the-box. One notch more and I think I would have bounced all over the back seat with my teeth chattering and my mind leaking out my ears.
The silence stretched on and on. Taylor murmured to the driver, who seemed to be happy just to sit and wait, now. He watched through the screen as anxiously as I did.
Then the gate rolled back for a few feet and three people slipped through. Just from their sizes, I could tell that it was Brody and Veris…and Elahah. Inside the yard, on the far side that I couldn’t see from here, there was a lot of talking happening and the volume was creeping up and up. Woman’s voices, sounding stressed and upset and panicky, but the language was foreign, not even German.
The three of them came over to the taxi and Taylor got out to greet them. The back door opened before I could get my hand on the handle and Elahah threw herself across the seat and up against me. Her arms went around my neck and her lips pressed against mine and she tasted heavenly, even though I couldn’t breathe, but that didn’t matter.
Another year or so past while my brain did funky things and my heart stopped.
“Whenever you’re ready,” Brody said from somewhere nearby. He sounded amused.
Elahah let me go. Her makeup was streaked, her cheeks marked with tearstains, but she was smiling. She didn’t remove her arms.
Brody was smiling, too. “Step out for a minute, Andy. We need to talk.”
I loosened Elahah’s arms. Didn’t want to, but Brody was waiting. “Wait for me,” I told her.
She nodded and squeezed my hand.
Brody was sitting with his butt on the back of the taxi and Veris stood in front of him, his legs spread and his arms crossed. Neither of them showed so much as a scratch, anywhere. They were both relaxed, like they would be if they were standing around the stage, dissecting a song. Except that Veris never did that, but you get what I mean.
Brody patted the trunk and I settled against it, although my legs w
eren’t nearly long enough to actually sit on it. My heart was still doing strange aerobic things.
“I don’t understand how you knew to come here,” I said.
“You’re probably going to have to live with that,” Veris said, his voice low.
“Okay.”
Brody shifted. “Okay? Just like that?” He sounded startled.
“Sure. There’s lots of things no one wants dug up about themselves. You guys know my secret. I just got a hint about yours. But I don’t want to know the rest.” I hesitated. “I think you can probably guess about Elahah’s secret now.”
“We already knew,” Veris said.
“Not the details, but you’re right, Andy,” Brody said. “People with secrets tend to understand when someone else is holding one or two of their own. I wish Elahah had come to us about this before it got this far, but that’s another thing about holding secrets. It’s hard to know when you can share them and it gets harder the longer you hold them. But we can do something about this now.” He glanced at Veris.
Veris nodded. “Andy will do.” He said it like he was passing judgment.
I looked at him, trying to figure out what that meant.
Veris straightened up on his feet. “I’ll sort out the taxi and get Taylor. We’ll be in the car.” He moved around to the front of the taxi, leaving Brody sitting next to me.
“Car?” I asked. “You drove here?”
“The limo, but Veris drove. Don’t worry about it,” Brody said. He pulled his hair out of the back of his jacket, pulled the band off it and shook it out, then scratched at the back of his head. “That’s better,” he said and stuffed the band into his pocket. “I’m going to ask you to do a few things that are going to make no sense to you at all.”
“I’m already lost,” I said. “So that’s not going to be a problem.”
Brody grinned briefly. “First off, we’re going to pay this taxi to drive you and Elahah to Alexanderplatz in downtown Berlin and drop you off. Do you remember how to get back to the hotel from there? It’s walking distance.”
Time Kissed Moments 1 Page 5
