The Eldridge Roster

by Stephen Ames Berry

  “Okay, so you need some sharp guys to go with you on a trip, a little outing to someplace nearby, rescue a few friends from some bad men. Would these bad men be any I know?”

  “No,” said Jim, watching the food slip into Eddy’s mouth. “They’re not in the same line of work as you.”

  Eddy chewed thoughtfully for a moment. “I hear Tooky Azarian got shot over in JP, helping out an old friend,” he said, slabbing butter on his toast.

  “Tooky’s a nice guy,” said Jim.

  “Umm. Yeah, well, while he was nicely catching a bullet the guy he was with got away. Neighbors got a good look at him, though.” Eddy looked at Dee, sitting a few tables away, sipping her orange juice and watching them. “She read lips or something?”

  “Minds.”

  “Okay. So El Tee, I figure this is some real heavy shit you got going down. Any guys I ask to come along, they’re going to want compensation.”

  “Ten thousand each,” said Jim. “Five when they show up, five after we’re finished.” And if we all get killed, he thought, I won’t have to pay. The cash would be coming from the diminishing wad in his money belt.

  “What about their boss?”

  “He’s an old friend. I wouldn’t insult him by offering him money.”

  Eddy laughed. “For sure. So, you want to tell me what this is about? This isn’t any of your spy shit, is it?”

  “Kaeko’s alive.”

  “Your little girl?” he said, shocked. It took a lot to shock Eddy Murphy.

  Jim nodded.

  Eddy had unexpectedly visited them in Tokyo at a time when it was best for him to be out of the U.S. During his two months in Japan he and Kaeko had become friends, with Eddy taking her out to the zoo and the park and numerous ice cream stands when Jim and Emmy were busy. Emmy liked Eddy, enjoying his brave but futile attempts at Japanese, and introduced him to her first cousin Tamiko. “He’s such a gangster!” Emmy had laughed, as if gangster were synonymous with clown. “When does he plan on leaving?” she’d asked after the fourth week. Their apartment wasn’t large. “Either when the charges are dropped or Tamiko gets a job,” he’d said.

  “He’s teaching her English,” Emmy had said, straight-faced.

  “How?” asked Jim. “He doesn’t speak English.”

  Eventually the FBI liaison from the American Consulate (Fred Kessler’s predecessor in the job) had come around with a Japanese National Police colleague, inquiring about Eddy. Eddy had left early the next morning to visit relatives in Dublin, using a passport bearing a name other than his own.

  “Kaeko’s over on Small’s Island,” said Jim. “The guys who kidnapped her killed Emmy and raised Kaeko with no knowledge of her real parents. And there is some heavy shit going down over there. She’ll be right in the middle of it. I’m going for a little visit.”

  “Forget about money, El Tee,” said Eddy. “This one’s on the house.”

  Jim was again going over the information about Smalls Island given him by George—it truly wasn’t much. Before leaving Virginia he’d printed out the sketch of the island and its buildings. It would’ve made a reliable tourist map. As a key aid for planning a life-or-death mission it wasn’t helpful. The only hope they had of rescuing Angie, Kaeko and O’Malley was to know precisely where they were, go there, get them and get out. To go in there and start stumbling about looking for the prisoners with Lokransky and his men on alert would be suicide.

  Of course I have The List, he thought, getting a cup of coffee. Would Schmidla and Whitsun agree to a trade? Never.

  The coffee was too acrid even for his callused taste buds. He was just brewing a fresh pot when his cellphone rang. ”Mr. Beauchamp,” said the caller, “my name is Musashi. We need to meet.”

  A half an hour later they stood inside a noisy North End trattoria, crowded with young Italians watching the big screen TV hanging from the wall, cheering Italy’s national soccer team on to victory over Argentina. Roars of “Eee-tal-ya! Eee-tal-ya!” resounded. There was nowhere to sit.

  “Sorry,” said Jim. “It’s usually quiet here.”

  “How about a walk?” said Musashi.

  A few minutes later they sat on a bench near the fountain in Paul Revere Park, the Old North Church behind them.

  “So,” said Jim, looking appraisingly at the younger man, “how are you involved in this? And how did you get my cellphone number?”

  Musashi laughed, as if he’d said something funny. “If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.”

  “Try me.”

  The Japanese shook his head. “I’m the man who can get you into the right place on Smalls Island and past all those Cossacks.”

  “I don’t know anything about you.”

  “Your daughter would like very much to meet you. I told her about you, her mother and her grandparents. I think she’s beginning to believe me. But only you can convince her. Her belief is essential if Schmidla’s hold on her is to be broken.”

  “Besides me only Schmidla or Whitsun could know all that,” said Jim, fingers wrapping around the pistol in his jacket pocket.

  “There are other players in this. I’m but one of them.”

  “Okay. Tell me something about Kaeko that Whitsun or Schmidla couldn’t know.”

  Musashi thought for a moment. “Her father used to carry her on his shoulders and sing to her.”

  “A lot of dads do that.”

  “He sang Sukiyaki to her off-key and in very bad Japanese.”

  Jim just stared for a moment, astonished. “How could you possibly know that?”

  “How I know is unimportant—it’s what I know that is. And I know enough, just maybe enough, to save those three Potentials. You need to make up your mind now whether or not to trust me.”

  Jim held out his hand. “My friends call me Jimbo.”

  “Tennu,” said Musashi, shaking Jim’s hand.

  “We plan to go in tomorrow tonight. Today we’re reconnoitering.”

  “I’d like to go with you,” said Musashi. “I’m familiar with the island.”

  “Welcome aboard.”

  “One more thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “Not now but soon, I would like to have the Eldridge roster.”

  Jim laughed. “So would a lot of other people. What makes you the winner?”

  “I’m one of the good guys. If you don’t want what Schmidla represents to destroy all that you know and love, I will need that list before much longer.” He held up a hand at the look of skepticism on Jim’s face. “When you’re ready, we can talk some more. But soon.”

  “Well?” asked Jim a few moments later, as Dee joined him, walking down busy Prince Street, back to the condo.

  “Weird,” she said. “I couldn’t pick up anything from him.”

  “You mean he kept you out?”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s like he wasn’t there.”

  Chapter 22

  “Maria,” said Schmidla, looking up from his desk as she stepped into his office. “I was worried, my dear.”

  She just stood there looking at him, this unfailingly kind but always aloof man who’d raised her. “Of course you were.”

  Taking the envelope of photographs from her pocket, she tossed it across his desk, the pictures cascading out. “Death and betrayal. You’re no stranger to them, but I was. The road to belief was hard: shock, disbelief, anger, depression and acceptance. You’ll be pleased to know you’ve raised a superior child.” She held up a hand as he started to speak. “I passed through the whole process in a few hours. I can only think that I’ve always known, always remembered that you killed my mother and brought me here.”

  He glanced at the photos, not touching them. “Maria...”

  “My name is Kaeko,” she said coldly. “Kaeko Gabriella Beauchamp. And yours is Martin von Kemnitz.”

  “Martin Amadeus von Kemnitz,” he said. “You must believe me, Maria... Kaeko. I have always treated you as I would my own child, had I a child. I
gave you the best education money could buy—my money, not the government’s.”

  “Money stolen from dead Jews,” she said contemptuously.

  “Old family money,” he said. “My mother’s family held their estates from Barbarosa, in what is currently Poland. We were never poor. I slowly and surreptitiously liquidated everything in the mid-Thirties and moved it to Switzerland. It was obvious that when war came, America would enter it to protect their cousins. Caught between West and East again we would lose again.”

  There’d been no ancestral estates after the 1920s. His money had come from pharmaceutical patents he’d helped develop during the war, using death camp inmates and the Blücher survivors as his lab rats. The mortality rate had been high, but the results, obtained with comparative speed, were still in commercial use and provided a steady income. Later, the CIA money had made the patent royalties superfluous.

  “And as to the dead Jews,” continued Schmidla, “I can tell you honestly, from the perspective of more years than most men are granted, that we rarely killed anyone who didn’t need killing.”

  “What a monster you are!” she said, her voice filled with hate.

  “We dreamed of a better humanity and tried to achieve it,” he said. “That our methods were crude doesn’t mean that we were wrong or that our dream is dead. It is in fact very much alive, in part thanks to you. And soon it will become reality. As to being a monster, if so, well then I’m a monster who raised a fine professor. Not that you will, but you should thank me for your superb education and your finely-honed intellect. And the resilience that permits you to confront me but a few hours after deciding that I killed your mother.” He stopped her forward rush with an upraised palm. “Which I did not!”

  “Really? Who did?” she demanded, leaning toward him, fists on his desk, face pale with rage.

  “The men Admiral Whitsun sent to get you and your mother botched it. There was a struggle. She’d had some martial arts training and put the first man down. Afraid she’d identify them, the others pitched her off the balcony.”

  Kaeko stepped back and took a deep breath. “What am I to you?”

  “Such an open question, Kaeko. Rather, I think you might ask, ‘Am I anything to you?’”

  “Am I?”

  “I’m very fond of you,” he said after a moment. “And very proud of you. You’re a very fine girl, a very intelligent girl, a girl who, sadly, tragically, has a unique gift—a gift that I must use to sow the seeds of a better humanity, one that will scourge this world of the teeming, mongrelized billions that infect it like some scabrous sore.

  “I’m in the god building business, Maria—an enterprise to which you’re essential. I’ve subordinated all else in my life to that end. An end you’re privileged to help me attain. Future generations will honor our names.”

  “Along with Hitler’s?”

  He shrugged. “Every journey has a beginning, every process a catalyst, no matter how unlikely. A mad genius possessed of a flawed vision, was Adi, but useful in his madness. He wouldn’t understand—you don’t conquer from without, you conquer from within, and the deeper from within the better. And what is deeper than our very genes? How I wish I were sixty again, knowing what I know now.

  “My success requires that Hitler serve as the undeserved Messiah of a New Man. Much as credulous millions believe a bedraggled Jew rose from the dead, a renewed and better humanity will cherish not the straight Cross but the crooked one. The origins of faith are unimportant. It’s creating, inculcating and manipulating belief to the right ends that matter. Such was St. Paul’s mission, so partially is mine. And if you can beget both a new faith and new life itself, and bind them together, then you forever change humanity, set it on a higher path from which there’s no turning back.”

  The angry certitude she’d felt walking into the room had dissolved amid growing fear and horror as Schmidla spoke. “You’re insane! What have you done to me?!”

  “You? Nothing, really. Just brought forth the talents you were born with. And created a more pliant personality to house them. Since you were five, you’ve been given daily doses of Ethinamate, a hypnotic I helped to develop back in the 40’s. It’s been very useful in creating and maintaining the duality you are, Maria. The witty, charming, talented teacher and the lonely, insecure little girl who craves her uncle’s attention and does what he tells her—a little girl with a powerful Potential that is mine to use. Naturally, you’ve had to be kept close so that either Mrs. MacDonald or I could see that you received your medication.

  “And now my dear Kaeko, I’m afraid it’s time for you to go to sleep—I need little Maria for a few hours. Don’t worry, she’ll recall none of these distressing events. We won’t meet again, you and I, Kaeko. Goodbye.”

  Terrified, the sudden half-remembered nightmares overwhelming her, Maria-Kaeko turned to flee.

  “Quarks in three-quarter time,” said Schmidla as she reached the door.

  Kaeko Gabriella Beauchamp, newly awakened, went back to sleep.

  Schmidla watched as the girl turned back toward him, confused. “Uncle Richard? Is something wrong? I had this bad dream—you did something terrible and I hated you.” Maria rushed toward him and threw her arms around him as he rose, stepping around from his desk.

  Maria Nelson, age six, found the bad dreams fading as her Uncle Richard took her small hand in his big strong one and led her up the stairs and tucked her into bed.

  Standing there, watching her sleep, he was again struck by how much she resembled that young Jewess at Nordhausen, before the Blücher experiment and his subsequent impotency. Raven-haired Rebecca of the flashing dark eyes and the sad soprano flute.

  Rebecca. How could he ever forget her? Especially that first time, standing before him naked yet defiant, the “For Officers Only” tattoo still fresh on her wrist? Like Maria, an exquisite creature, creative and highly intelligent—she’d been a concert flutist in Salzburg—and like Maria, so vulnerable and ultimately so malleable. The key to Maria had been time and drugs and hypnosis. With Rebecca it had been the coarse but effective wartime therapy of the riding crop. That she’d hated him was good—he enjoyed her hatred and it lent her passion. Indeed, he’d even found himself in weak moments daydreaming of helping her survive the war, their Baroque piano and flute duets soaring down through the years. Ridiculous fantasy of an exhausted researcher. The war over, an treacherous ingrate like all her kind, she would kill or betray him at the first opportunity.

  It ended when Rebecca became pregnant. She’d tried to hide it, knowing the fate of a Jew whore carrying a half-Aryan abomination. But to a physician who was also her lover the signs were unmistakable. Confronted, she’d confessed, sobbing wildly, begging him for an abortion. He’d agreed. It had made things easier. Certainly it could have been easily arranged. But illegal and more importantly, dishonorable, as no other officer at the camp could have availed himself of that remedy. As a kindness, he’d slipped her a sedative, blowing her brains out as she slept. A bullet was always so much more gratifyingly atavistic than a drug. Besides, a man of integrity shoots his own dog.

  Hearing one of her beloved Mozart sonatas always brought back warm memories of Rebecca and their brief, passionate time together—heady days of wine and music and death.

  Back in his study Schmidla sat looking at the photos, wondering where the hell Maria had gotten them. He suspected the affable Mr. Kim, absurd as it seemed. A few months ago it might have mattered. Now it didn’t. Win or lose, it was endgame.

  He dropped the photos into the wastebasket and got back to work.

  Angie sat on the chair in her room, a thick steel door and two shaven-headed Russian commandos between her and freedom, trying but failing to deny herself the luxury of despair. A smart and bookish girl, she’d grown up mostly alone and very lonely, learning to hide her wild talents behind a wall of aloofness. An expert in keeping everyone at a distance, all her relationships before Jim had been superficial and several intentionally manipulati
ve. Having dedicated herself to finding out what had really killed her father, she’d followed the faint trail George Campbell had given her to Whitsun, then from Whitsun to Erik. Erik, easily seduced, had quickly shown that while he knew nothing about his uncle’s work he very much enjoyed Angie’s body. In their five months together she quickly came to despise his arrogance, sexism and intellectual vacuity, and the assured way he would take her, riding her long and hard, watching her face and waiting for her to come—which she never did. Not once. An adept cocksman, he employed the full gamut of his skills, and every time she felt her body starting to respond, she clamped down, waiting for him to finally spend himself within her. He’d lie staring sullenly at the ceiling while she took a long hot shower.

  Jim and the Eldridge roster had freed her from Erik, freedom she’d been about to grant herself anyway. Or so she told herself.

  And so what had that list brought her? she wondered, pacing the small room. Well, it’d brought her Jim, if perhaps only for a little while. And the beginnings of a sense of fulfillment—she’d been right to pursue the nebulous trail of the Eldridge and Telemachus—right to follow it wherever it went. But most all, she thought, staring out the window into the night, most of all it had brought her the courage to finally let someone into her heart.

  She was throbbing with pain where Lokransky had hit her. Wetting a cloth, she lay down and held it to her face, trying to rest.

  In the next room an exhausted Tim O’Malley, drained of visions, drifted uneasily into sleep, fragments of an old hymn slipping through his mind:

  Day of wrath and doom impending,

  David’s words with Sybil’s blending.

  Lokransky met the reinforcements as they came ashore, moving quickly up off the beach amid the clanking of weapons and equipment. A sullen red sun was just rising out of a sea unusually calm for so late in autumn.