by Lee Goldberg
He just didn’t realize it yet.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Mr. Monk Goes on Vacation
Thanks to the jet lag, I awoke at four a.m. and couldn’t get back to sleep. So I used the time difference to my advantage and called home to check on Julie.
I assured my daughter that I was having a miserable time so she wouldn’t be jealous. It wasn’t a hard sell. She could imagine what traveling with Monk was like. I felt a little guilty having a European vacation without her, but not so much that I was ready to take the next plane home.
Does that make me a selfish person and a bad mom? I hope not.
After the call, I read through the guidebooks for places to see and things to do and skimmed the German-English dictionary for helpful words or phrases for traveling with Monk.
I couldn’t find any direct translations for “please excuse my friend, he means no offense” and “do you have any disinfectant? ” in German. I made a mental note to ask the Schmidts.
I also wrote a list of nearby places that Monk and I could visit after we exhausted all the possibilities of Lohr, which, judging by the size of the town, we’d do by early afternoon.
Friderike was hard at work in the kitchen when I came down at seven a.m. She was preparing eggs, sausages, and biscuits, which Heiko then brought out to the butcher-block-style table where Monk and four other guests were waiting.
Monk wasn’t eating the hot breakfast, of course. He was having toast, cutting off the crusts and carefully painting the bread with jam.
I sat down across from him and introduced myself to the other guests—a businessman visiting one of the factories, an older German woman who didn’t speak English, and a young couple from Belgium who couldn’t keep their hands or lips off each other.
Heiko set a bowl in the center of the table. There were a dozen white sausages floating in steaming-hot water. I wasn’t sure what we were supposed to do with the sausages, so I waited to see what the others did.
The businessman took one of the sausages out of the bowl with his spoon and set it on his plate. He cut the sausage open at one end, picked it up with his fingers, and sucked the meat out like he was drinking through a straw.
Monk cringed from head to toe and I have to admit I didn’t find the sight too appealing myself. The businessman saw me watching him and appeared to be amused by our reaction.
“Weisswurst,” he said, indicating the sausage. “Very good.”
The old lady took a sausage out of the bowl but she didn’t suck the meat out. Instead, she slit the sausage down the middle, and delicately rolled the white meat out of the skin with her fork. She dipped the meat in some kind of mustard and ate it.
That looked more appealing to me than sucking the meat out of the skin, but I didn’t think I could eat anything with mustard in the morning.
Within a few minutes of my arrival, the businessman went off to his meeting, the old woman was picked up by relatives, and the young couple hurried back to their room, probably to finish what they’d started at the table.
I took a sausage and decided to eat it like the old woman had, only without the sauce. I was about to put the meat in my mouth when Monk scowled.
“You know what a sausage is, right?” he said. “It’s minced meat jammed into a pig intestine. And you know what’s in an intestine, right?”
“Yes, I know, thank you,” I said. “You ate a sausage yesterday.”
“I doubt that,” he said.
“Does that drug you take cause amnesia, too?”
“No, but after it wears off, the things I remember doing are so outrageous that I don’t know how much was real and what was a nightmare.”
“It was all real,” I said.
Monk shivered. “God help me.”
I ate the sausage. It had an unusual texture, but it was delicious and had a surprisingly complex favor. I could taste smoked meat, onion, ginger, and a hint of lemon. I quickly gobbled down some more.
Friderike joined us and asked what our plans were. When I told her we didn’t have any, she told us the farmers market was being held in the town square today. She was going to do some shopping for groceries, and if we wanted to walk with her, she’d be glad to be our tour guide on the way. I quickly accepted for us both, though Monk didn’t look too excited about it.
She retrieved a big woven basket from the kitchen, stuffed it with some small burlap bags to carry her groceries, and off we went.
It was a perfect day, with a mild temperature, a slight breeze, and only a few wisps of cloud in the sky. The air felt clean and light, as if all the pollution had been filtered out as it blew through the Spessart.
Friderike and I walked on either side of Monk, who kept to the gully in the center of the road.
Now that I was up close to the buildings, I noticed that above each tiny doorway was something handwritten in chalk: 20*C+M+B*08. I gestured toward the writing.
“What does that mean?” I asked Friderike.
“It’s the year, two crosses, and a blessing on the house,” she said. “It’s part of a ritual that goes back to the sixteenth century.”
“Everything here does,” Monk said. “It’s time you people modernized.”
“January sixth is the Feast of the Three Kings: Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar. On that day, children go door-to-door dressed as the kings and ring the bell,” she explained. “When you open the door, the children declare that the Messiah is born, sing a song, and if you give them some coins for the poor, they write that sign with sanctified chalk.”
“And if you don’t pay?” Monk asked.
Friderike shrugged. “Everyone pays or you won’t be blessed. Things will be very bad for you.”
“And the police allow this?”
“Why wouldn’t they?” Friderike replied.
“You’re paying for protection. If you don’t, then these ruffians see to it that something bad happens,” Monk said. “It’s extortion.”
“It’s for charity,” Friderike said.
“That’s what they always say,” Monk said. “But it goes straight for hooch and weed. No wonder they are in disguise. It makes it harder for them to be identified.”
Friderike looked puzzled. “Hooch and weed?”
“Never mind,” I said, waving off Monk’s remark as if it was smoke in the air.
Monk motioned to a church we were passing. “The top is missing off that eight.”
There was a date etched in stone atop the doorway. Monk was right. It looked like someone had lopped the top off the eight in the date 1387.
“That’s a four,” Friderike said.
“It’s definitely the bottom of an eight,” Monk said.
“That’s how they wrote fours back then,” she said. “As half of an eight.”
“And nobody could find the time in the last six hundred and twenty years to fix it?” Monk said. “I’ll be glad to do it for you while I am here. Do you have a chisel I can borrow?”
Friderike was so bewildered by Monk’s remarks that she stumbled on a cobblestone, but quickly regained her footing.
“You should walk in the pedestrian lane,” Monk said.
“The what?” she said.
“The people path,” Monk said, motioning to the gully he was in. “It’s much safer.”
“Oh, no, you shouldn’t walk there,” Friderike said. “It brings bad luck.”
“Whoever said that must have been the same guy who thought carving half an eight is the same as a four,” Monk said. “What could possibly be wrong with walking where it’s smooth, safe, and orderly?”
“That’s where people used to empty their room pots,” she said.
“What’s a room pot?” Monk asked.
“A medieval toilet,” I said. “Basically, a bucket of—” Monk yelped, leaping out of the gully and practically into my arms.
He looked back accusingly at Friderike. “You dumped sewage into the street?”
“They didn’t have indoor plumbing back then,”
she said. “The streets are sloped so the drains run all the way down to the creek, which feeds into the river.”
“Where they drank their water, washed their clothes, and got the mud to build their houses,” Monk said.
“It’s a big river,” she said, “with a strong current.”
Monk gave me a grim look. “This entire town is a toxic waste dump. It should be evacuated immediately and quarantined for public safety.”
“People haven’t used the streets to dump their waste in over a hundred years,” I said. “It’s clean now.”
“Radiation has a half-life of centuries,” Monk said, stepping carefully from stone to stone.
“Human waste isn’t radioactive,” I said.
“Nobody thought atoms were until they started splitting them,” Monk said.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said.
“It makes perfect sense,” Monk said. “It explains why this place produced so many dwarfs, why Sneezy was Sneezy, and why people thought writing half of an eight was the same as a four.”
On some subjects it was pointless to argue with Monk becausethere was no chance of changing his mind. This was one of those subjects.
“The town square is coming up,” Friderike said. “Between 1626 and 1629, over a hundred women were accused of being witches. They were tortured until they confessed and then burned at the stake in the middle of the square.”
“And I can guess why,” Monk said. “The poor women probably committed the heresy of suggesting that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to have sewage running down the streets because it could make people very sick, physically and mentally. What was I thinking, coming here?”
“We could go home right now,” I said. “If you don’t mind missing your next two appointments with Dr. Kroger.”
Monk grimaced. “Life is cruel.”
The town square was crowded with people wandering amid the tents, tables, and catering trucks selling fruit, vegetables, meat, seafood, and household knickknacks.
There were also jugglers, musicians, glassblowers, painters, and sculptors plying their art and trade among the vendors, giving the market an Old World, party atmosphere that reminded me of the Renaissance fair that used to come to Monterey each summer when I was growing up.
Unlike the fair, though, this was authentic.
We soon lost track of Friderike. She stopped to shop and we got caught up in the flow of the crowd. I let myself be carried along, but Monk fought the current and ended up looking like one of the street performers.
He leapt, and pirouetted, and ducked to avoid physical contact with strangers and to keep his balance on his selected cobblestones. There were small children who actually stopped to watch him. I did my best to ignore him, preferring to let my gaze wander over the butchers and bakers, painters and puppeteers.
I was browsing through a vendor’s selection of handmade stuffed animals when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw an extraordinary thing.
Monk stopped his strange dance and began to run into the crowd, pushing through the people.
Something was very wrong. I immediately ran after him.
“Mr. Monk!” I yelled. “Wait!”
But he charged ahead, oblivious to the people he was rudely elbowing and shoving aside.
Monk was so determined in his pursuit that he didn’t seem to care at all whether he ran over uneven cobblestones or stepped in the drain.
Whatever had caught his attention was of such great importance that it neutralized his fears and anxieties. I couldn’t imagine what he had seen that could have such power over him.
And then he came to such an abrupt, complete stop that I nearly plowed right into his back.
“What is it?” I said, trying to catch my breath. “What’s wrong?”
Monk had reached an intersection of several narrow streets and was looking up and down each one of them, his head practically spinning.
I was getting dizzy just looking at him. Or perhaps it was the sudden exertion combined with jet lag.
“What did you see?” I asked. “What were you running after?”
“He’s gone,” Monk said, the expression on his face tight and forlorn. “I lost him.”
“Who?”
Monk took a deep breath and closed his eyes. And when he opened them again there was a steely expression of determination on his face that I’d never seen before.
“The man who killed my wife,” he said.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Mr. Monk and the Six Fingers
Monk went up one street and down another, looking in every alley, courtyard, and alcove. He was chasing a phantom and I was hurrying to keep up with him.
“How do you know it was him?” I said.
“I know what I saw,” Monk said.
“Which was what, exactly?”
“I saw a man in the crowd buying a pastry,” Monk said. “He had six fingers on his right hand.”
“Are you sure?”
“It’s not something you see every day,” Monk said. “The man who killed Trudy is here and I let him get away.”
I knew only the general details about Trudy’s murder. She was a reporter for a small local paper and she was killed by a car bomb that was remotely activated by a cell phone.
Monk suspected that Dale Biederback, a ruthless eight-hundred-pound egomaniac known as Dale the Whale, had something to do with her murder. Trudy had written several unflattering stories about Dale, who hadn’t left his bed in a decade and owned half the real estate in San Francisco.
Dale nearly sued the Monks into poverty before settling, dropping his lawsuit in exchange for their summer home, which he then used to store his extensive porn collection. Obviously he did that just to irritate the Monks even more.
Monk could never prove Dale the Whale’s connection to Trudy’s murder, but he did put the morbidly obese monster in prison for hiring someone to kill a local judge.
Even so, it was Dale the Whale who gave Monk the vital clue that allowed him to track down Trudy’s bomber to a New York hospital, where the cancer-stricken man was on his deathbed.
In a dying declaration, the bomber swore to Monk that he’d been hired to plant the explosive by someone else, a man whose name he didn’t know and whose face he never saw, but who had six fingers on his right hand.
Monk and Stottlemeyer had been on the lookout for a six-fingered man ever since but without success.
“You’ve had a rough week emotionally and psychologically, ” I said to him. “You’re jet-lagged. Maybe your eyes were playing tricks on you.”
“My eyes don’t do that,” Monk said. “I saw a man with eleven fingers.”
“Okay,” I said. “Maybe you did.”
“I did,” Monk said firmly.
“But you don’t know it was the same man who hired someone to kill Trudy,” I said. “It could be another eleven-fingered guy.”
