“We would not fight him, because we did not believe.” She looked up at him with unnerving steadiness, her eyes set deep in her pinched simian features. “For us, there is only flesh and pleasure and pain. And who would choose pain? Who would choose conflict? We would rather become what is evil than dare to oppose it. This is what Dominic Abend understood.”
She unlocked the door and pushed it open, and again Zach held it for her as she went in. She turned on the lights and moved to crush her cigarette in a cheap metal ashtray resting on a cabinet.
“You have read my paper that I sent you?” she asked.
Zach stepped in after her. The door slipped from his fingers and slammed shut loudly. “About Stumpf’s baselard? Yes, I did. Pretty wild story.”
They were in a small, cramped book-lined room. The air smelled sour with old smoke. No space here for anything but the three pieces of furniture: the uncomfortable-looking wooden visitor’s chair and the desk chair and the desk between them, a square desk of scarred wood. The desktop was smothered in papers and books. The computer and printer were drowning in them. There was a window, small and square like the desk, four frames of glass looking out on a patch of grass and a linden tree.
Professor Dankl hobbled around the desk, lifting a finger back at him. “I show you.”
With a few quick gestures, she brushed some papers aside and lifted a manila envelope that had been hidden underneath them. From this, she drew an old photograph which she then slapped down on a large book. The book was propped sloppily on a desk lamp, so the photo almost slipped off. She had to slap it again to keep it in place.
“You see?” she said.
This was another moment he considered—later, when he thought back on it. Like the moment when he woke up in the plane, his mind saturated with old German legends—like the drive here through Grimm Brothers fairyland—like this weird conversation—like the moment the case began, in fact, the moment he had walked into the slaughterhouse aftermath of the Marco Paz murder—this moment now, when he looked at the photograph Gretchen Dankl slapped in front of him, later seemed to him a candidate for that decisive instant when his life detached itself from the gravity of natural things and floated into the deep space of the uncanny.
It was a black-and-white photo of several Nazi officers—thirteen of them, it would turn out when he got the chance to count them. They were arrayed around some sort of old jeep, at once relaxed and formal, leaning on one another’s shoulders in a collegial manner and yet unsmiling, staring into the camera lens with grim purpose.
And in answer to the professor’s question, yes, Zach did see—he noticed right away the soldier on the far left, a man of around thirty or thirty-five with crewcut hair, thin lips, a bulbous nose, and eyes that gleamed with unmistakable cruelty.
“Unternehmen Werwolf—Operation Werewolf,” Professor Dankl said. Then, seeing the uncertainty in Zach’s eyes, she asked again, more urgently, “You read my paper, yes?”
Zach dismissed his first thought at the sight of the young Nazi’s face—because it was ridiculous; impossible—and forced his attention back to her. “Operation . . . ?” Embarrassed, he realized he must’ve skipped over this part of her paper as he drifted into a snooze. He tried to remember what he could. “Hitler tried to recover the dagger, you said. . . .”
Her long haggy finger with its long haggy gray nail tap-tapped the photograph. “Now the historians say the operation never happened. They say it was just a desperate dream that Goebbels had—a guerrilla underground to get behind the Allied lines as they closed in for the kill. It never materialized. But that—the underground resistance—that was just a ruse, a cover-up for this—” tapping the photograph—“a core of SS men sent to find Stumpf’s Baselard, Hitler’s last hope of saving himself, saving the Reich. They say they named the operation after a novel about the Thirty Years War: Der Wehrwolf. A clever—how do you say?—inside joke, you see?”
She tap-tapped the photograph again, drawing Zach’s eyes back to it—back to where her long, gray nail was spearing that very same man he had noticed, the SS officer on the far left.
“So . . .” he said. “What? Your paper didn’t tell what happened to the mission.” He remembered noticing this, even as he dozed.
“Nein! No. Of course not. Of course not! What good is it to send a warning no one will believe? I hoped only that others would follow the evidence, see for themselves. That is the only way they would understand. Ach, it is too late for Europe now anyway. . . .”
“I’m sorry. What are we talking about here?” said Zach. “Are you saying they found it? Operation Werewolf. They found the dagger?”
Professor Dankl’s simian features bunched together in her intensity as she stabbed the photograph yet again. “I’m saying he found it. It had been removed with the other works of art from the Zwinger Palace in Dresden when the war began. Somehow he traced it, found it—and, realizing that the Nazi cause was lost, he buried it before he was captured by the Russians. Fifteen years later, when he was released from the gulag, he returned to dig it up. By then, he had helped to form the Brüderlichkeit—the Brotherhood—the criminal organization, yes?”
“I know it.”
“And with the dagger in his possession, he took complete control. Complete control.”
“And so now you’re saying . . . ?”
The professor gave what looked to Zach like a heavy Germanic shrug. “He must have lost it again somehow. Or misplaced it. This is what I believe. This is why he has killed your people in New York. He has lost the dagger! It is the one thing, the only thing, that would bring him out into the open like this. It is the chance, the only chance you may have to find him, to stop him before he does to your continent what he has done to mine. You must find the baselard, Agent Adams! You must find it before Abend does.”
“Wait. . . .” Zach began, leaning over the desk, peering down at the picture, trying not to let his voice sound too droll or skeptical. “What are you telling me here? You telling me that that’s Dominic Abend? That there in the picture?”
“That is Abend, yes. Though he had another name then. Heinrich Dietz. But it is Abend.”
“Well . . . Professor,” said Zach, forcing down a smile. “That man there must be at least thirty-five, forty years old in that photo if he’s a day. Why, he’d be well over a hundred by now. Well over.”
“I know what you’re thinking.”
Zach couldn’t help it then: a curt, riffling laugh broke out of him. She couldn’t possibly know what he was thinking. He was thinking he must have fallen asleep on the jet coming over and that everything after that, including this, was a dream. Or if it wasn’t a dream—he was thinking—if it wasn’t a dream, he had just traveled four thousand miles to hold a parley with a woman who’d been thrown off the haywagon one too many times.
He straightened his long body from the table and stood towering over her. “Look, professor, I want to thank you for your help with my case. . . .”
Her hand shot up from the photograph. She gripped his wrist with surprising strength. She was staring fire at him. “Do you think I brought you all this way to tell you what I knew you would not believe? No. No. I brought you here to see. You must see—and then you will believe.”
7
IN THE BLACK FOREST
He wanted only to go home now. He realized—what he had known in his heart before but only now accepted—that he had come to Germany, traveled all this way, to escape. He couldn’t kid himself about it anymore, not after that mad meeting with the nutty professor. He had come for no other reason than that—to escape what was, of course, inescapable: himself and his troubles. The case, the lead, his hunch about the baselard, the professor—all were excuses, distractions designed to disguise his true purpose, to hide his true purpose from his own mind. Even the unpleasant office politics between Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell and Goulart—even that was a distraction. It was all about Margo, that was the truth. He had come here to escape Margo, to escape
the consequences of having been with—having had sex with—having committed adultery with—Margo. And from those consequences, he realized finally, there was no escape.
He checked in at his hotel, a quaint pink-stucco building on a cobbled side street, one of the red roofs he had seen as he drove into town. He made his way up crabbed stairs to the top floor, to a small but pleasantly modern room. Dropped his bag on the shiny parquet and plunked his butt on the narrow bed. He sat there hunched in a beam of afternoon sunshine that streamed down through the skylight in the sloped ceiling. His mind, he noticed, was clear now. That fog of unreality he’d been immersed in all day—he understood that it had been a thing of his own making, the psychic symbol of his self-deception. Now that he had fully acknowledged why he had come on this excursion, the fog was gone.
The fog was gone, and he saw what he had to do.
He turned his phone on long enough to pick up his e-mails and his messages. She had phoned him—Margo. He had suspected she would.
“Oh, you’re away,” she said—and the sound of her voice brought her back to him, brought back the uptown New York aura of elegance and sophistication with which she’d gulled the West Texas rube still inside him, brought back her magazine-shiny presence and her scent, brought even the silken touch of her flesh back to his palms and fingertips. “Well, listen . . . I need to talk to you. I’m serious, Zach. Don’t make me out to be the bitch-devil here, darling, really. I just want to talk. Please call me when you get back. All right? Please. I mean it. Love you. Always. Call me.”
He would. He would call her. He would talk to her; confront her. If she would not agree to leave him alone for good, he would confess everything to Grace. The thought of hurting his wife like that was agony to him. The thought of losing her was nigh on unbearable. But he wasn’t a man to go on living with lies and he wasn’t a man to hide. He wasn’t going to be blackmailed. He wasn’t going to be controlled. He had done what he’d done—that’s where the source of the trouble lay. There was no taking it back, no erasing it. If he could protect Grace from the truth of his infidelity, he would. If he couldn’t, he wouldn’t make it worse by adding deception to deception. He would confess everything.
Using his phone, he dashed off a few quick e-mails. He wrote to Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell and Goulart and told them that the meeting with Professor Dankl had been a waste, a dead end. He wrote to Grace and told her he loved her. He wrote to Tom and Ann and told them that Germany looked like Disneyland and Daddy would be home soon. When he was done, he lay back on the bed and closed his eyes and said a quick prayer for strength and guidance. He slept for an hour. Then he got up and got ready to go.
He had agreed to meet Professor Dankl one more time, at a quarter to five, at sunset. She had given him directions to the spot. She had said he would see and then believe. Okay. He’d come all this way. He might as well give her the chance to show him whatever else she wanted to show him.
But what exactly was she expecting to get him to believe? That Dominic Abend was Heinrich Dietz? That he was some kind of warlock kept supernaturally young by the magic of an old dagger that had been used to kill a werewolf? What exactly could she show him that would make him believe that? Whatever it was, if it worked, hell, it’d certainly make this trip more interesting! So he thought anyway, smiling with one side of his mouth, as he drove out of the city in the late afternoon.
The sky was gathering toward sunset, the drifting clouds red behind the silhouetted church tower in his rearview mirror. But oddly, or maybe not so oddly, the drive this time had none of that fairytale sense of unreality that had suffused the drive in. The traffic of trucks and small European cars was certainly real enough. So was the sleek but somehow miniature freeway with the scrubby trees by its side. Even as he broke out of the more urban areas, wound back through rolling farmlands dotted with forest, and even as the first dark blue of oncoming dusk turned the scenery distant and two-dimensional, as pockets of thick mist settled into the valleys among the distant hills, it all still looked real enough to him, like any farmland. It might have been parts of upstate New York he’d seen, except for the foreign street signs and the strange, quaint shapes of some of the barns.
If there was any sense at all that he was journeying out of the everyday world, any omen of the supernatural, any warning of what was going to happen next, it came when the professor’s directions took him away from the main thoroughfares. Then the misty twilight did begin to transform the scenery. The trees edged toward the sides of the road like tall phantom sentinels taking up their night positions. The forest grew eerie with the oncoming night, the trees clustering thicker and the low sun sending final flashes of orange past the naked trunks of the junipers and pines. A canopy of oak and maple and linden branches folded over him so that the dark grew even darker and their yellow and red leaves turned gray. Tendrils of mist threaded through the woodland spaces in the middle distance all around him, like spirits following his progress toward their secret homes.
He switched on the Sebring’s headlights. Where the hell was this woman dragging him? What the hell was it all about?
Following her instructions, he turned the car onto a dirt road. Suddenly he found he was in the middle of nowhere, deep in the Schwarzwald, the Black Forest.
The sun was still stretching fingers of dying light through the towering conifers. There were still patches of gold and red where the oaks and maples caught the fading glow. But the trees’ high crowns were melding into the deepening indigo of the sky. Second by second, the forest around him was becoming dim and hazy—so dim, Zach nearly missed the place where the road ended. He had to stop sharply to avoid planting his fender in the gruff trunk of a pine.
He sat there in the car, the engine running. He hoped he would spot the professor in his headlights. A bird, frightened by the motor noise, shot out of a far tree. It flew the length of the windshield and vanished into the woods. After that, nothing moved.
Zach shut the car off. Climbed out into a fine autumn chill. He felt the earth soft under his shoes: this was no road anymore. He took a few steps toward the edge of the forest, peering into the trees. He was aware of a watchful tension in himself—the same sort of feeling he would have had entering a house where a suspect might be hiding. His hand made a move toward the place beneath his windbreaker where his gun would have been, had he been wearing one—then it fell to his side.
Professor Dankl had told him there would be a trail, and yes, there, he spotted the head of it, a thin dirt path snaking deeper into the forest. He walked it slowly, his footsteps whispering over the fallen leaves, crackling on the dead twigs. The trees gathered closer around him. The beams of sunlight narrowed and flattened and began to fade. The darkness settled down through the crown cover above him and crept in around him through the gnarled branches. A bird cried out as he approached. A stream gurgled. The underchatter of frogs and insects waxed and waned.
The sun went down. Its hazy beams dissolved. The trees blocked the horizon light. The trail sank out of sight. He had a flashlight on his keychain, but it didn’t help much. It barely picked out the next few feet of the way.
He wound around a bend and came into a flat clearing. It was brighter here. A circle of tall conifers surrounded him. Tortuous oak and maple branches, silhouetted against the last blue of dusk, pressed in behind them. Zach stood and listened to the croaking frogs and twittering crickets and the underlying silence.
A wooden door shut nearby. He tensed. He heard footsteps on—what?—wood?—stairs—a porch, yes. Now he heard the steps whisper and crunch over the leaves. He saw another flashlight bobbing through the trees.
“Ah, good. You came. And just in time,” the professor said—her familiar voice in the shadows, low, heavy, but with a certain energy that had not been there before.
He had to squint to pick her out of the gloaming, just the shape of her behind her flashlight. Then she stepped from the forest tangle, moved through the encircling evergreens, and came into the clearin
g with him. He saw that she was dressed as before, in the nondescript skirt and cardigan, only now she also had a dark overcoat thrown cape-like over her shoulders against the cold. She was carrying something under her arm, but the wing of the coat hid it from his view. She hobbled toward him with her strange half-crippled gait, her flat shoes shuffling through the carpet of leaves.
When she was closer, only a few yards away, he could make out her worried-monkey features. He saw fresh depths of pain and sorrow in her bright eyes. It came to him again just how crazy she was, a couple of tacos short of a combination plate.
She stuffed the flashlight in a coat pocket. Drew out the object she had under her arm: an ornate box of some kind. His own flashlight picked out portions of the carving on it. It looked machine-done to him. Cheap wood, stained to appear fancy. Some sort of souvenir box from a tourist shop.
“Here, take this. Open it,” she commanded.
“This is what you brought me out here to see?”
“Open it.”
He pocketed his own flashlight. Took the box. Opened it. Even in the thickening forest dusk, he could see that there was a pistol inside.
“What’s this?” he said.
He put his hand on it. Drew it out. An old .38 Smith and Wesson. He tried to make sense of it. Was she going to tell him it was a relic of World War II . . . ?
“Do you know why the bullets are silver?” she asked him.
“What? Oh. Silver bullets. For, like, a werewolf.” Now he got it. It was a magic gun to kill Dominic Abend with. Great.
“Silver is the metal that conducts the best. Heat. Electricity. But not just that. More. More mysterious things too. It is not the bullets that will do the death-work, you see. It is your ‘Yeah, sure.’ That. The silver conducts that as well.”
“Right,” said Zach, with a sarcastic drawl. He gripped the gun in his hand and turned it this way and that, from professional habit mostly: he couldn’t see it well. “And you want me to have this. To protect myself from Abend. Is that right? Well, I don’t know if I can get it back through customs. But thank you kindly for the thought.”
Werewolf Cop Page 7
