Basic Law

by J Sydney Jones

  “Sam.”

  His body goes cold and rigid.

  “It’s me, Sam. Maria.”

  “You okay?” he says, feeling anger sweeping over him and losing himself in it.

  “I’m okay.” Then she hurriedly says, “Whatever they want, don’t give it to them, Sam. Don’t give in …”

  More muffled sounds on the other end and then Vogel’s voice is back on the line.

  “You still there, Kramer?”

  “I’ll have your heart on a plate for this, Vogel. You hurt one hair on her head …”

  “You’re the one who is hurting her, Kramer. You turn over the list you were speaking about, and all copies; then we can talk about your girlfriend.”

  The anger brings bile into Kramer’s throat; he cannot respond for a moment.

  “Do we understand each other, Kramer?”

  “Where?”

  “You just sit tight. I’ll be getting back to you this afternoon. And no police. I get word of police activity on this, and I cut my losses. Understand? Meanwhile you figure out how you can assure me there will be no lists published. Ever.”

  There is a clunk and then the dial tone. Kramer sits in bed, holding the receiver for moments, listening to the tone as if it were a mantra.

  He doesn’t sleep again. The night seems to go on forever as he sits and thinks, or wanders the apartment, cursing himself for his arrogance that has brought this on Maria.

  They’ve obviously been following me, he figures. Saw Maria come and go from here; followed her back to Prague.

  But it doesn’t matter how they got to her, only that they did. Her life is on the line because you got cute, Kramer. Because you were playing hardball in a league way over your head. He wants a Scotch but knows he has to keep his head clear.

  By first light, Kramer’s anger has hardened into purpose. He fixes coffee and a day-old Semmel with marmalade and forces himself to eat. Then he gets the Walther from the third drawer of his dresser, out of the cloth sack he has stored it in tucked under a level of socks, takes it back to the kitchen, and cleans it methodically. He has half a box of ammunition left; he fills one clip and shoves it into the grip, then loads a backup clip, making sure the spring mechanism is in working order. He’ll carry the rest of the bullets loose.

  By eight thirty, he’s on the phone to Munich. The receiver is picked up on the fourth ring.

  “Bitte?”

  The voice is low and thick. Still in bed, Kramer figures.

  “Sorry to get you up, Rick. Kramer here.”

  “Hey, Sam.” Rick’s voice brightens. “You always get up this early?”

  “Sure,” he says. “Margit there? I’d like to talk to her for a second.”

  “She’s sleeping.”

  “Wake her, will you, Rick?”

  “You okay, Sam? You sound sort of stressed.”

  “Just wake her, all right?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  Kramer waits for what seems hours for Margit to get up and to the phone.

  “Hello, Sam,” she says. He can hear the sleep in her voice, too.

  “Margit.” He pauses. This is a hunch. Instinct. A place to begin. Vogel is in the skin trade; perhaps Margit, with her Munich connections, knows something about him. And there was that comment she made the night at dinner in Vienna when he was talking about the car traced to Vogel: You mix with very strange company, Kramer.

  “Look, I need some information. You know anything about a guy named Vogel?”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. I just need information.”

  “Like for example?” Her voice is suspicious, on guard.

  “Like where he might go if he wanted to hide away. Some little country retreat.”

  She pauses. “How important is this?”

  “Life and death.”

  Another pause and then he hears her voice away from the receiver asking Rick to go make some coffee. Then, into the receiver once again, “This is between you and me, right, Sam?”

  “This is all the further it goes.”

  “Okay. It’s just I wouldn’t want Rick to know. A couple of months ago, Vogel was recruiting some of the girls from the district for a big party out at his training grounds. We were supposed to be the prizes for a bunch of recruits who just finished basic training. It was a fucking zoo scene with about five men to every one of us.” There is emotion in her voice, a tremor, the catch of breath.

  “I only want to know where it is,” Kramer says.

  “I know. It just all comes back when I think of it. You going to nail that little prick?”

  “I hope so.”

  “You take some friends along, Sam. He’s got a permanent staff out there. Five, six men.”

  “Margit. Where?”

  “It’s just over the border,” she says. “In Austria, so the German police don’t bother him. Near the lake district.”

  She gives him exact instructions; he knows the area, has hiked it before.

  “You want some help, Sam?” she says finally.

  He thinks about it. “No. But there is one other thing. That night at the restaurant in Vienna, you said something that maybe I didn’t understand.”

  They talk for another few minutes, and Kramer makes the final connections in the puzzle. It all fits together for him. He knows now what he has to do. There is no other choice.

  “Thanks, Margit,” he says. “Give Rick a hug for me.”

  “We’ll see you soon, right?” she says.

  “Right.”

  He gets out some topographic maps for the lake district, which he keeps in the bookcase next to his work desk. The one he needs is torn from when the goons turned over his apartment, but he repairs it with Scotch tape and spreads it out on his desk, examining the area. He sees the symbol for the disused forestry station just where Margit described, puts a finger over it and jabs it once, twice.

  Then he takes his old portable Olivetti that he retrieved from Inheritance out of the drawer of the desk. It’s dusty, but the keys are okay and the ribbon fresh enough. Reni used it for the memoirs. He inserts a sheet of plain white paper and begins typing.

  The sound of his doorbell startles him. He waits for it to sound again, then gets up, goes to the kitchen, and gets the automatic. The doorbell sounds a third time when he gets to the door. He jerks the door open suddenly, holding the pistol straight out in front of him.

  Randall is standing in the door jamb looking distraught. His eyes go down to the pistol aimed at his stomach.

  “So you know,” Randall says.

  Kramer lowers the gun, looking both ways along the hall before closing the door behind them.

  “Know what?” he says.

  Randall wastes no time, crossing to the repaired Tyrolean hope chest recently resupplied with booze. He opens it, takes out a bottle of Scotch, and drinks straight out of the bottle, replaces the cap, and puts the Scotch back in the chest.

  “Come on, Sam. Why else the gun? You must know.”

  “You tell me.” Kramer puts the gun down on the foyer table next to his wooden Madonna.

  “Look. I’ve been in Prague for the past week staying with Maria. When she didn’t come home last night, I called and called here to see if she’d come to pay you a surprise visit. When no one answered, I got worried and hopped the early-morning flight. By the looks of you, she’s not here, either. So what’s up?”

  Kramer is about to lie, then thinks better of it. “Vogel’s got her.”

  “Vogel? What the shit for?”

  “I was putting pressure on him, doing a trade for some information Reni left me.”

  Randall squints at him, bobbing from foot to foot as if he has to use the john. “So he kidnaps Maria?”

  “Upping the ante,” Kramer says.

  �
��We’ve got to call the police.”

  “No!” Kramer hears the panic in his voice and does not like the sound. “No police. He warned about that and there’s no telling what kind of contacts Vogel has.”

  “So what does he want?”

  Kramer goes to the liquor chest and takes a swig of the whiskey himself, straight from the bottle. It tastes of peat bogs and burns all the way down.

  “Assurance that I give him back all copies of the lists; that I never publish them.”

  “So okay, give them to him.”

  Kramer shakes his head. “Maybe it’s not that simple.”

  Randall looks at the gun on the table in the foyer.

  “So you’re playing cowboy. You’re going after him, aren’t you?”

  “Maybe.”

  Randall grabs his shirt, shakes him. “You’re playing dice with Maria’s life, you shit.”

  Kramer takes Randall’s hands off his shirt, steps back, holding his rage in. “It’s not so simple,” he says again. “You’ve got to believe me on this one. She’s dead if we don’t do something.”

  Randall looks at him for a long moment, then slowly nods.

  “You know where she is?”

  “I think so.”

  “So,” Randall says, “when do we leave?”

  Kramer is about to protest, then stares back at Randall and knows it’s no use.

  “Okay,” he says. “We leave soon. First I’ve got this to finish,” he gestures toward the typewriter on his desk, “and then I have a call to make.”

  They leave the back way, just in case Vogel has men watching the flat. Kramer carries a copy of the memoirs in an old leather day pack, the gun in the pocket of his coat. At the Landesgerichtsstrasse, he flags a taxi and has it take them across the Donaukanal into the Second District.

  “This isn’t the way out of town,” Randall says, looking out the window to the brown-green water below as they cross the Aspernbrücke.

  Kramer says nothing, keeping a watch behind them to make sure no one is following. The taxi drives up Taborstrasse into the heart of the Second District and finally stops on a side street not far from Praterstrasse. Kramer pays the driver, and he and Randall walk the two blocks to the address he got over the phone.

  Randall asks no further questions, not even when Kramer stops at a large villa near the Augarten with the huge bulk of the World War II antiaircraft tower visible through leafless branches in the center of the park. A butler in eighteenth-century livery answers the door and nods politely at them.

  “Herr Kramer?”

  Kramer nods back in affirmation.

  “He is waiting for you,” the butler says, and leads them through a gaudy marble-floored foyer, up a grand staircase under a crystal chandelier to the second-floor suite of rooms, and into a library with floor-to-ceiling bookcases. In front of a fireplace blazing with three-foot logs stands Rudi Tourescu, decked out in elk-hide knee britches and a heavy sweater, his hands behind his back and a smile on his face.

  “You are ready, my friend?” he says. “But first, tell me. This Vogel and his Germany United you mentioned on the phone. They think it’s fun to burn immigrant hostels, beat up foreigners?”

  “Among other pastimes.”

  Rudi looks squarely at Kramer, his dark eyes, usually playful and smiling, are now hard and appraising.

  “So it is not just a matter of private vendetta. This is a payback for Rostock and Solingen and how many other insults and atrocities. You see, Kramer, I would help you no matter what. I sense a good man inside you, someone sympathetic to the underdog, the outsider. Maybe because you feel like one yourself. But to involve my other men, then there must be something bigger than personal vengeance. They are professionals; they know how to handle themselves and have proved it. But they are not simply soldiers of fortune to be aimed at a target. They trust me to use them in the right cause, the proper cause.”

  It’s the first time Kramer has seen this side of Rudi—the calculating, responsible leader—and he’s happy for it.

  They travel in two Range Rovers, new models worth at least forty thousand dollars each, and with five extra men. Kramer doesn’t get a good look at the men in the second vehicle, only at the leather-encased arsenal they’re carrying. Hunters off to the hills.

  Rudi keeps the CD player going the whole way: Jussi Björling belting out Verdi and Puccini.

  “The way he hits that high C in ‘Nessun dorma,’ now that is artistry,” Rudi says just as they are approaching the industrial outskirts of Linz.

  Kramer has said nothing since leaving Vienna. They’re making time on the E5 autobahn, in the left lane all the way, leaving Mercedes-Benzes and Audis behind. The black Range Rovers hold close together and other drivers make way, as if sensing their purpose. But still Kramer keeps his peace. As they head southwest past Linz toward Gmunden he looks at the digital clock on the wooden dash: 11:13.

  Björling is melancholy and lost, and Kramer finally notices the music, picking up the mood from him, feeling the welling up of anger and regret, seeing for the first time that the cycle of history is repeating itself. Plans and schemes have once again put Maria in harm’s way, made her the victim of others’ machinations. Easy enough to blame Reni for all those years; harder now to face the blame himself. But he knows it is no use playing “should have, could have.” There’s only one thing that can save her now.

  Rudi is sitting in back with Kramer; Randall is up front with the driver, Georges.

  “So that there is no misunderstanding when we arrive,” Rudi says, looking at the scenery, “what is it you want, my friend?”

  This is an easy one for Kramer.

  “To get Maria out of there alive.”

  Rudi nods his head slowly, ruefully. “That may be a lot to hope for.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  They fly past Bad Ischl doing a hundred miles per hour, turning north again past the Wolfgangsee.

  “Here it is,” Kramer says as they approach the exit to the secondary Route 154.

  Georges hits the turn signal but does not slow for the exit, and soon they are at the Mondsee, all green and blue under scattered clouds like a calendar picture, but there is no tranquillity in it today. Kramer’s stomach is in knots. Rudi finally has Randall switch off the CD player, and now there is silence but for the tight hum of the engine. In another ten minutes, they cross Route 1 and Kramer pulls out his topographic map.

  “The turn should be soon,” he tells Georges. Out the window, he sees signs for Lengau. “There, to the left.”

  The Range Rover bumps onto a narrow country road cutting through rolling hillsides, some of them in winter wheat, others covered in pine and deciduous forest. The second Rover is close behind, its hood picking up mud from them. They drive deeper into the wooded countryside, passing no other vehicles. Kramer hopes for the hundredth time that his instincts about Vogel are right; that he has crept off to a country hideout with Maria and is not in Munich, holed up at his headquarters. If she’s not here, Kramer will have to make it back to Vienna in record time to get Vogel’s afternoon call.

  She’ll be here, he tells himself. She’ll be here.

  Soon they pass the forestry road going off to the right, just as shown on his map. A guard stands at the gate dressed in hunter green, smoking a cigarette and trying hard to look nondescript. Kramer crouches forward in his seat as they pass by the guard, not wanting to be seen, and is thankful for the tinted windows of Rudi’s truck. They continue another mile past the turning to the forestry road, around a bend and out of sight of the sentry, and Kramer tells Georges to pull over. The second Rover parks in back, and they get out into the brisk fresh air. Kramer takes in a couple of deep breaths. It is midday, but now he is no longer so concerned about time. She is there, all right, he tells himself. Why else post a guard?

  He has to risk gambling that Mar
ia is being held at this camp; has to use the element of surprise with Vogel, the best weapon he has and the best chance to get Maria back alive.

  “So that was it?” Rudi says.

  “That was it.”

  Rudi is at the back of the truck pulling out leather scabbards, unzipping them and extracting Mannlicher rifles. Kramer can smell the fresh gun oil on them.

  Randall wraps his arms around his chest, shivering. “Anybody remember to pack a lunch?”

  “Maybe Vogel will have something for us,” Kramer says.

  Randall considers this. “Maybe so.” Then nodding at the rifles, he asks Rudi, “You got one of those for me?”

  “Most assuredly,” Rudi says, unzipping the last of the scabbards.

  The four men from the second vehicle, and Georges busy themselves with ammunition, then hump on protective vests before putting NATO jackets on over them. Kramer looks at the vests, and it hits home that this is for real; this isn’t playing cops and robbers.

  Rudi is at his side suddenly, one of the flack vests in hand. “I recommend you wear this.”

  Kramer takes it gratefully. “Thanks. Thanks for everything.”

  “Save it for later. Until we know what we have to be thankful for.”

  It’s not so much a plan as a maneuver Kramer has in mind. He pulls out the topographic map and shows the location of the three converted forestry huts, explaining the situation to the men at the same time. They all listen closely, Georges nodding his head at intervals. The other four appear just as Rudi said: proven soldiers. There is that faraway look in the eyes that Kramer has seen before in soldiers going into action: a sort of stoic fatalism and a turning inward before battle. They’re all sizes: a large, raw-boned one with a kid’s rosy complexion and the eyes of an old man; a shorter wiry one who cuts his eyes between Rudi and Kramer; and the other two who are about the same size and weight, almost interchangeable. They could be brothers. Kramer has no instantaneous make on them; hopes only that they are competent.

  “We may have fire power in our favor,” he says to them after detailing the layout. “But it means nothing without surprise. That’s our real tactical weapon. With Maria under guard inside, we can’t afford to lose the element of surprise.”