“You say Dieter Muller lost his nerve—is that why you poisoned him?”
“I could see he hadn’t the stomach to take on the giant. Not even for this.” She waved her hand at the splendor surrounding them. “He was scared. Scared to risk his miserable hide, and scared that even if he didn’t assist me, the giant would reckon he must have had something to do with it and come after him anyway.”
“You were in Gesternstadt when he decided to jump ship, as it were.”
“Further unfinished business.”
“Ah yes, Herr Hund’s gambling debts.”
“I have no sympathy for elbow shakers—they bring their misfortune upon their sorry selves. Another sap. Men!” She summoned phlegm from her throat and spat onto the floor at Gretel’s feet. “Give me a woman any day of the week.”
There was an uncomfortable stutter in the flow of their conversation. Gretel felt panic rising, and did not care for the way in which Inge was now letting her gaze sweep Gretel’s body from furry-hatted head to clumsy-booted toe. Surely the toxic woman was not about to suggest some manner of alliance?
“And yet,” she said, “you have brought many men with you. And dynamite.”
“Such men are hired for their muscle, not their wit. At the top of the hour, if I have not reappeared, they will blow up the great doors to this nonsense of a place and gain entry.”
“The giant will resist. He is quite terrifying in his strength and size.”
“My men are armed and hungry for loot.”
“Even so, I should not want to be found here to face Herr Giant’s fury.” She pulled a pin from her hair and turned quickly to the door. With a minimum of fuss and fiddling she had the lock undone and the door open. “Will you not flee while you have the chance?” she asked Inge.
“What? And leave all this?” She shook her head defiantly. “I shall remain and await my men.”
Gretel made to leave.
Inge was astounded. “Will you go empty-handed? All this treasure before you, and you quit the room without taking what you can?”
Gretel resisted touching the pearls at her throat. Clearly Inge had not noticed the necklace. Gretel refused to think of taking them as theft. There was a wrong to right, a debt, or several, to be paid. A single string of pearls was fair enough, she reasoned.
“I did not come here to rob the giant,” Gretel told her. “I may have a game to play, but it will be a fair one.”
Inge gave a derisive snort. “Such lofty ground you inhabit, fraulein. The air must be very thin up there.”
“At least I have no trouble sleeping.”
“I sleep well enough.”
“Ah, but what phantoms people your dreams?”
There was a fizzing silence. The two women regarded each other sternly. Inge stood tall, hands on hips, defiant, and yet she gave no answer to the question. Though it may have been a trick of the flickering candlelight, Gretel fancied she glimpsed fear in her eyes. Or was it regret? Gretel said no more, but left the room of wonders, closing the door softly behind her.
Retracing her steps, she found her way swiftly to the cats’ room. A few steadying breaths were necessary before she could bring herself to enter. Inside, the floor pullulated with the soft, sinuous creatures. Gretel whipped out her notebook and searched back through her entries until she found the descriptions she had written down of Frau Hapsburg’s cats.
“Right,” she said aloud, as much to soothe her nerves as to gain the cats’ attention, “anyone here called Floribunda? Tortoiseshell. One white paw.” She searched through the ever-shifting throng. “No. Not a tortie to be seen. What else? Ah, a big ginger tom.” This was more difficult. There were several ginger cats. Her notes suggested this one should be of great size and with four white paws. “No. Nothing here like that.” She briefly entertained the idea of taking another of the cats that matched the color and simply painting its paws, but she knew Frau Hapsburg would examine each one minutely. “Right. No Lexxie. So, only Mippin left. Silver tabby, juvenile, a particularly fine example, apparently.” She scanned the room. Even Frau Hapsburg’s home could not contain as many felines as she was now in the company of. Dozens, possibly hundreds of the things, purred and mewed and padded about. Some slumbered on soft cushions. Others scampered up and down branches. Still more chased each other around the ornamental pond and fountain. Many of them were indeed tabbies, and Gretel was uncertain of the precise definition of silver tabby.
Reasoning that any cat belonging to her client would have been well tamed and would know its name, she began to quietly call.
“Mippin? Mippin, Mippin, Mippin? Come out, come out, wherever you are?” She was on the point of giving up when she felt a featherlight body press itself against her legs. She peered down to find a small, gray, stripy cat, not much more than a kitten, staring up at her with slowly blinking green eyes. “Mippin?” she asked. The little cat meowed sweetly and flicked its tail. “Mippin!” Gretel decided. She scooped up the creature and pushed it into the canvas bag. “Sit still,” she told it, but it began to protest and squirm about, scratching frantically at the bottom of the bag. Gretel noticed a fluffy patchwork cushion and took it, pushing it in with Mippin. “There,” she said, “curl up with that.” The cat paused in its scrabbling and then settled down to purring and gently kneading the cushion, as kittens are wont to do.
With haste, Gretel secured the buckles firmly. She made for the door. As she turned to close it behind her, something made her hesitate. Hundreds of eyes, some amber, some yellow, some green, some blue, turned to fix upon her. While she had no fondness for cats, there was still something about the fate that awaited these hapless pets that gave her pause. Whatever her personal views of the things, it seemed a cruel and pointless end to so many lives.
“It’s no good looking at me like that. I can’t possibly take all of you.” Still the eyes watched her, pleading, pathetic, unbearably endearing.
At that moment, fate, or rather Inge’s men, intervened to save Gretel the bother of formulating some sort of rescue plan for the animals. A thunderous boom shook the very mountain, throwing Gretel off her feet and sending cats fleeing in all directions. She struggled to right herself, checking that she had not entirely squashed Mippin.
The kitten wailed but seemed unharmed.
“It would appear,” she told him, “that Frau Peterson-Muller did not supply her troops with a timepiece.” She peered down the passageway. There were cats bounding for freedom in great furry leaps. From the direction of the front doors came sounds of a battle raging between the treasure hunters and the giant. Smoke plumed upward toward her. It was clear she would have to find an alternate escape route. She recalled noticing some small, high windows farther along the corridor, back toward the treasure store. She located the first, but there was no means of getting to it. The second, however, was positioned next to an ornamental alcove. Grunting with effort, she began to climb. The uneven walls were rough and painful to clutch at, but did at least provide many footholds and tiny indentations on which to cling. As she made her slow ascent, further noises of the conflict at the entrance to the cave reached her. It seemed the attackers were making headway and at least some of them were advancing toward the giant’s hoard. Gretel redoubled her efforts. At last she reached the window. The glass was thick and the frame solid. Fortunately it was not locked, the giant obviously deeming it unlikely anyone would attempt entry through it. By the time she had squeezed her bulk through the narrow opening, the reason for this became clear. The winding passageway had led farther upward than backward, so that the drop from the window was sheer, long, and quite terrifying. There was a narrow ledge, however, that ran around the side of the outer wall with a promising downward slope, though she could not tell where it ended, as its conclusion was out of sight. She teetered upright so that her heels—and therefore the greater part of her weight—were against the hillside. While aiding balance, this technique did mean that, as she inched sideways, the horror of the potential plunge
was all she could see. There was nothing to be gained by trying to focus in the middle distance somewhere, as all that was revealed were further giddying hills and precipitous pathways. Gretel closed her eyes. As if sensing danger, Mippin began to wriggle in the bag.
“Now is not the moment to resist,” Gretel told him. “For both our sakes, stay calm and stay still.” Palms flat behind her against the cold stone, she made slow and shaky progress along the ledge. As she neared the turn in the wall, sounds of the fighting at the front door grew louder. It seemed the giant was still defending his home vigorously. Progress was painfully slow, but at last she wriggled far enough around to have a clear view of all that was taking place below. What a scene of chaos and mayhem it was. The exploded remains of the great doors lay about the place as if the giant himself had been passing the time in a game of spillikins. Gretel counted three bodies among the wreckage. A gaggle of rough-looking men was blasting away with muskets and mounting sporadic charges. The giant loomed on the threshold, smoke billowing around him. He roared as he snatched at his assailants, his fez dislodged, his fine jacket in tatters, one mighty foot missing its slipper. He lunged forward, knocking flat three men with one sweep of his arm.
Gretel noticed two members of Inge’s small army dodge beneath him and slip through the entrance and into the cave. Seeing that everyone was fully occupied, she cast about for a way to get down. The slope of the ledge had at least reduced the distance between her and the ground. To fall now would not mean certain death, but it would involve broken bones. She needed to descend farther. The ledge continued all the way down to the top of the doorway, but to get so close to the fighting would be far too dangerous. There was a worrying lack of options. The only protuberances from the sheer face of the rock were the ornamental gargoyles, and they were too widely spaced to provide a safe descent.
A movement at the periphery of Gretel’s vision caught her attention. A figure was skulking behind a thorn bush, observing the calamitous events. It was Hans. If he were to fetch the mare and position the cart beneath the most reachable gargoyle, it might be possible to drop into it without serious injury.
Gretel signaled as best she could, balance being her most pressing concern. Hans, however, was far too absorbed in what he was watching to notice her feeble flapping, so that she was eventually compelled to yell at him.
“Hans! Hans, up here!”
Despite the cacophony of the giant’s thunderous roaring and the screams of his attacker, years of training meant that the singular pitch of Gretel’s voice penetrated her brother’s consciousness. He gazed about him, searching, looking hopelessly gormless. At last, though, he spotted her. His face registered surprise, pride, and then worry.
“Bring the cart!” Gretel instructed him. “Park it beneath me. Hurry!”
He scuttled off to do as he was told. Or at least he would have, had not the giant spotted him. Clearly unable to differentiate between his attackers and a hapless bystander, the giant bounded forward and snatched Hans up, raising him high into the air, roaring in fury as he did so.
Hans screamed. Gretel screamed.
The giant heard Gretel and looked up. Spotting her on the ledge, he flung Hans aside and began to stride toward where Gretel was perched.
Gretel felt her mouth go dry. She saw Hans freeze, mouth agape, incapable of either fight or flight. The giant lumbered toward her, great arms outstretched, colossal hands preparing to pluck her from the ledge and crush her in his rage. It did seem, at that moment, that it might be all up for Gretel, that Gretel, of Gesternstadt. She took a shaky breath, aware that her brother was watching, not wanting him to witness her terror.
If anyone had ever asked Gretel for her opinions of cats, they would have received a stream of invective, denouncing the creatures as sly, devious, and not to be trusted. From her position on the cave wall, watching her nemesis approach, knowing that it was cats that had brought her to this place, she might have added one or two more pithy criticisms of all things feline. However, the events of the next few moments were to change her view of the furry critters forever.
Just as the giant came within grasping distance of her, a great caterwauling, a wailing, a hissing, and a yowling echoed out of the cave entrance. The giant paused and turned in time to see a flood of cats pouring from the hole in the mountainside, scattering in each and every direction, flinging themselves over boulders, past bodies, and off and away as fast as ever their little feet would carry them.
The giant let out a great cry of anguish.
“No! No, my beautieth! Come back!” he wailed. His murderous intentions toward Gretel forgotten in an instant, he rushed toward the fleeing moggies, clutching and snatching at them, desperation clear in his every movement and expression.
Gretel felt her heartbeats slow back to a level that suggested she might, after all, live a while longer. Shaking from her mind her surprise at the giant’s apparently genuine affection for the cats, she scanned the scene for Hans. He was still lying on the stony ground, shocked into immobility.
“Hans!” she cried. “Hans, fetch the cart!”
He shook his head, staggering to his feet, and sprinted away showing a surprising turn of speed. Gretel attempted to edge farther along, and therefore down, the ledge, eager to decrease the height of the jump she was going to have to make. Even so, when Hans did eventually succeed in positioning the mare and the trap beneath her, it was clearly too risky to simply drop down into it.
“Gretel!” Hans struggled to hold his own nerve and that of the horse, which was not at all happy about being maneuvered into the thick of the fray. The giant was still lurching after the cats, which darted this way and that in search of hiding places or escape in their panic, pausing only to flatten any of Inge’s men who dared to come within reach. Suddenly, Inge herself reappeared, charging out through the doorway, blunderbuss in hand, followed by several of her accomplices, who stumbled beneath the weight of chests and trunks full of the giant’s treasure. Seeing a conveyance so helpfully close at hand she hurried toward it, but the giant screamed at her.
“You! Thith ith your doing, you wicked wretch!” he yelled.
Inge hesitated, turned, took a stick of dynamite from her skirts, lit it, and lobbed it at the giant. He roared, flinging himself to one side in an effort to avoid the worst of the blast.
The explosion, when it came, was too much for the bay mare. She threw up her head and bolted, leaping into a gallop with such suddenness that Hans fell backward into the cart, the reins pulled from his hands as the horse careered through Inge’s men, living and dead, charged past the prone and groaning giant, and disappeared down the mountain trail. The force of the blast, coupled with the increasingly terrifying sequence of events, caused Gretel to lose her footing. She shrieked as her feet slipped and she felt herself plunging down the sheer rock face, the unyielding stone ground rushing up to meet her. She closed her eyes, bracing herself for an impact that didn’t come. Instead she felt a fierce jolt, and then nothing. Opening her eyes, she saw that her cape had lifted as she fell, and that the red peasant’s pinafore she had donned before leaving the inn had opened as she dropped and snagged on one of the elaborate gargoyles above the entrance. Now she dangled, unable to go either up or down, swinging slowly from side to side. From the canvas bag Mippin set up a nervous meowing.
Inge looked up at Gretel and smiled. It was not a nice smile. Slowly, carefully, almost as if she was enjoying the moment, she raised her gun to her shoulder and took aim.
THIRTEEN
Gretel felt more than a little cross with herself. She had been in some narrow scrapes recently, and many of them had involved no small degree of embarrassment and humiliation. There were, of course, dangers that went with her chosen profession, and these she accepted. What rankled, however, what was currently causing her to grind her teeth and utter silent oaths, was the undignified manner in which she seemed destined to depart this world and enter the next. For a start, there were her clothes.
T
rue, her underwear was of good quality. And her own dress and cape, while not at the cutting edge of the fashion of the day, were well tailored and of respectable provenance. The red pinafore was a different matter entirely, and had no doubt come from some haggard creature who had toiled her life away in a field somewhere. Gretel could still smell the turnips. The furry boots were abominable and made her feet look several sizes larger than they really were. And the hat. The dreadful fur of some low-living vermin, at best Russian polecat, or quite possibly Mongolian rat, made her look like something in disguise. Even now it was slipping ever further down over her eyes, giving her a pitifully dim-witted appearance. She was too intent on clutching tight to the bag containing Mippin to risk taking the loathsome thing off and flinging it at her would-be murderer.
And then there was the dangling. Snagged and hanging, slowly swinging, she was unable to protect herself or improve her circumstances in any way. And to cap it all, she was to be dispatched by the vile and amoral Inge Peterson. Gretel felt fury rising within her and marshaled it, determined not to let her soon-to-be murderess detect just how utterly beaten she felt.
“I see you have got what you came for,” she called down to Inge.
“And more besides.” She laughed up at Gretel, enjoying her discomfort. “You don’t look so high and mighty now, Fraulein Detective. What, no clever remarks? Proper betwattled, you are! No judgments to make on a poor trug like me? Me being the one holding the gun that is pointing at you, mind.”
“There is no harsher judge of a person than one’s own conscience, I believe.”
“A pox on conscience! Yours, mine, or any cully else’s. A body does what a body needs to do to survive in this world, no more, no less. The strong takes from the weak, the clever from the jolter heads.” She raised her gun higher, putting her eye to the sights.
Gretel didn’t have to bother closing her eyes, as her hat finally descended sufficiently to entirely obscure her vision. This being the case, she had only a confusion of sounds to tell her what was happening.
Once Upon a Crime Page 21
