by Robert Brown
STOLEN HERITAGE
By Robert Brown
© Robert Brown 2018 All Rights Reserved.
This is a work of fiction, any names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are purely from the imagination of the author or used for fictitious and entertainment purposes only. Any resemblance to real people living or dead and actual events is purely coincidental.
No parts of this book may be reproduced. Reviewers may quote small passages in the book for reviewing purposes.
Dedication
For Graham and Christine, with your kind words of support I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing today. Thank you both so much xx
✽✽✽
Challenges are what make life interesting; overcoming them is what makes life meaningful.
Joshua J. Marine
To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
About the Author
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CHAPTER ONE
Heinrich Muller hated it when work interfered with pleasure, especially when it happened at the high point of his collecting year—the annual Big Apple Collectors Fair.
Celebrating its fifteenth year, the Big Apple Collectors Fair was bigger than any other collectors fair in the country except for the one in Los Angeles, but they were a bunch of West Coast pussies and didn’t count. The fair took place in a huge convention center in Yonkers, with a giant main floor filled with stalls. It made for a small, temporary town of collectibles and memorabilia. More stalls were crammed in the wide gallery that encircled the main floor.
Heinrich was there on a group outing with the local chapter of the Old Farts Who Love Old Tunes group. The Old Farts collected the oldest music they could find. A record that ran on 33 or 45 RPM was too new, and don’t even talk about CDs. It had to be a 78 or nothing at all. Some of the richer members even collected Edison cylinder recordings dating back to the 1880s. With the money from one of his recent cases, Heinrich had bought himself a fine Edison cylinder player from the 1890s, in perfect working order. In the deal, he’d gotten some scarce jazz recordings from the turn of the century. Now he was on the prowl for some more cylinders, plus any choice 78s he could find.
It was proving harder than it should have been. The organizers hadn’t clustered the vendors by type of collectible. This was partly because many vendors sold a variety of stuff, making their stalls look like a high-end yard sale, and partly because the organizers wanted everything jumbled together, knowing that most collectors had more than one obsession or might buy gifts for their friends.
It worked. Heinrich had just picked up a classic Airfix model of a British World War Two Spitfire.
“I didn’t know you did modeling,” said Neil Balfort, an attorney with a taste for old ethnographic recordings.
“It’s for Jan. I got him into making models to teach him patience.”
“You sure he isn’t sniffing the glue?” Neil asked.
“The staff at the halfway house lets him do the models only under close supervision. They lock up the glue when he’s done.”
“Smart move,” said Thornton Bell, a violinist with the New York Philharmonic. The man had an eagle eye for choice classical and opera 78s and already toted a big stack under his arm. “Couldn’t you just get him any old model instead of plunking down fifty bucks for a kit as old as you are?”
“I’m hoping he’ll catch the collecting bug.”
“Hanging out with you, he probably will,” Thornton chuckled.
They strolled along the aisle, glancing to their left and right at all the vintage toys, eighteenth-century books, Shaker furniture, and baseball cards. The crowd was big that day. Mostly guys, of course, and mostly middle-aged like they were. The other two members with them were Jordan Carter, a beefy, greying African-American who was the richest guy in the group, and Avram Davidson, a forty-something municipal bureaucrat. He was new to collecting and his eyes were as wide as a teen’s in a porno shop.
“Damn, look at all this stuff!” he kept saying.
A table selling gramophones grabbed their attention. Each of them already had one or more of the old 78 RPM players, but they stopped anyway to admire the delicate Japanese-style painting on the horn of a circa 1910 Edison phonograph, and the fine preservation of a rare 1902 Victor Model R. That model had a plain, undersized oak casing and a simple brass horn. When it came out, it had been intended as a budget model. However, the run was so limited, it had become the most expensive machine on the table.
“Hey, Heinrich,” Neil called from another table. “Isn’t this the 1960s Barbie you were looking for?”
He held up an impossibly proportioned doll with an impossibly high price tag.
“Shut up,” Heinrich said.
Neil chuckled.
“Got any 78s or cylinders to go with those players?” Jordan asked the dealer.
The old man behind the table shook his head. “Feller came along about an hour ago and cleaned me out.”
“Just our luck,” Heinrich grumbled.
They moved on.
“Hey Heinrich,” Neil called in a loud voice. “Isn’t this the Shaun Cassidy single you were looking for? He was a real heartthrob back when you were a teenybopper.”
A passerby carrying a collection of lead soldiers gave Heinrich a disgusted look.
“Can it, Neil.”
The lawyer snickered.
A few minutes later they struck pay dirt at a stand piled high with 78s. They dove in like a half dozen birds of prey. Within ten minutes they all had several records under their arms and the vendor was a few hundred dollars richer.
“I can’t believe he had Malinowski’s original recordings from the Trobriand Islands!” Neil exclaimed. “These are some of the first ethnographic recordings ever made, and still some of the best.”
“And a complete run of Ernest Hogan,” Jordan said with pride as he examined his purchases.
“I thought you had all his stuff in cylinder,” Avram said.
“Yeah, but it’s better to preserve those and play the vinyl,” Jordan replied.
Avram nodded. “You think I paid too much for this Vladimir Kastorsky?”
“Nah. It’s in near mint condition and the coloring on the logo is well preserved,” Thornton told the newbie as he pointed to a golden cupid on the center of the record.
“He was one of the best Russian bass singers ever,” Avram said with a sigh.
“It’s worth paying a bit more for something you like,” Heinrich said.
Just then Heinrich saw something he liked. A dusky woman with soft brown eyes and raven black hair down to her shoulders. She looked to be in her late thirties, so not out of the market for an athletic guy in his
forties like himself. Her dress was conservative, a plain black knee-length skirt and red top on her petite but fit frame. The woman walked quickly down the aisle, her eyes darting every which way, obviously looking for something specific. She stopped a little past them at a stand with a bunch of statuettes that looked like they were from ancient Greece.
Heinrich broke away from the pack and went over to the stand. The woman was picking up the statuettes one by one and checking them with an expert eye. Heinrich could tell a pro when he saw one. The look was the same no matter what the collectible.
“Fascinating stuff,” Heinrich said. “I wish I knew more about archaeology.”
The woman nodded but didn’t reply. She picked up a little bronze figure of a nude woman.
“Aphrodite?” he asked.
“Yes. She’s in her Uranian aspect. You can see from the globe she stands on,” the woman said in an accent that marked her as a native New Yorker.
“Interesting. And what were her characteristics in that aspect?”
The woman looked equal parts annoyed by the distraction and eager to share her enthusiasm. It was easy to rope a collector into a conversation. He only wished more chicks came to fairs like this.
“The ancient Greeks believed that Aphrodite had two aspects. The more common one we tend to think of today is the goddess of earthly love. The Uranian aspect was more celestial and symbolized a more elevated form of love. Unlike with most Greek deities, her worshippers did not offer her libations of wine, and her priestesses took vows of chastity.”
“Oh, I see,” Heinrich said, although he didn’t. Why worship the goddess of sex if you couldn’t get any?
“Hey, Heinrich! Isn’t this the German-made 1920s porcelain Kewpie doll you were looking for?”
Neil waved an annoyingly cute yet priceless doll over his head while the nervous vendor tried to snatch it from his hands.
“Jackass,” Heinrich shot back. He turned to the woman. “That was a joke. I collect old music. So, you collect antiquities?”
“Of course not!” the woman snapped, and walked off.
Heinrich blinked. What had he said wrong?
A chorus of chuckles came from the guys.
“Heinrich’s having his usual good luck with women,” Jordan said.
“Fuck you and fuck the rest of you. Especially you, Neil.”
“You sure you don’t want the Kewpie doll?”
“Maybe there’s some vintage porn around here somewhere,” Avram said. “That will cheer him up.”
Heinrich shook his head in frustration. It wasn’t the ribbing he was getting from the guys; that was par for the course. It was the bluntness of yet another rejection.
Why? He was a decent-looking guy, he made a good living, and he was in great shape from all the boxing and working out he did. Plus he was capable of giving a woman multiple orgasms on the rare opportunities he was given the chance.
So why was he always missing out? Every one of these jokers was married. Neil had been married three times. Why couldn’t he, Heinrich, get a woman?
After a minute, he shrugged it off. The brush off was too common for him to dwell on it for long. The guys had already tired of the game and were busy scouring the stalls for vinyl sides. Some of the tables that held a variety of antiques had one or two 78s. These were the best finds because the vendors weren’t specialists and didn’t know their real value. A few minutes later, a bargain on a near-mint-condition Leroy Smith from 1928 cheered up Heinrich. Only ten bucks? That was some serious bragging rights!
A lone 78 among a bunch of bric-a-brac drew him to another stand. He nodded to the African American man standing behind it, pulled off the sleeve, and checked the title.
THE FIERY CROSS
SUNG BY THE ALABAMA KNIGHTS OF THE KU KLUX KLAN
“What the fuck?”
Heinrich glanced at the rest of the table and saw old tin signs showing stereotypical blacks eating watermelon, an ad for a laundry soap in which a white child was dunking a black child into a washbasin and turning her white, and some postcards labeled “Gator Bait” showing crying black children being chased by alligators. Flanking the stand was a pair of lawn jockeys.
Heinrich looked at the black guy running the stand. He was young and tough-looking, with a camouflage jacket and a black beret.
“You’re selling this stuff?”
“None of it’s for sale.”
Heinrich cocked his head. Now he was doubly confused.
Jordan walked over. “Hey brother, this is a hell of a collection you got here.”
The man’s eyes lit up. “Oh hey, ain’t you the Light Bulb King?”
Jordan owned a light bulb factory. It wasn’t as glamorous as being a private detective, but it paid a hell of a lot better.
“In the flesh,” Jordan said, giving the man a fist bump.
“I didn’t know you were famous, Jordan,” Heinrich said.
“I was featured in the latest issue of The Black Entrepreneur.”
“Oh, missed that one. My subscription ran out.”
The dealer gave him a sour look.
Jordan plucked the 78 out of Heinrich’s hands and let out a low whistle.
“Now this is a rarity. How much you want for this?”
Before Heinrich could tell him it wasn’t for sale, the vendor said, “For you, fifty bucks.”
“Sold,” Jordan said with a nod.
“Wait. You’re buying this tripe?” Heinrich couldn’t believe it.
“Hell, yeah. This is part of our history.”
“And we don’t want it to fall into the hands of some cracker,” the vendor said pointedly.
Jordan made a dismissive gesture. “Oh, he’s all right. He’s no cracker, he’s just an asshole.”
Both black men laughed.
“What is this, pick on Heinrich day?”
“Don’t take it personally, white boy,” the vendor said. “I come to these exhibitions to show people like you that the good old days were good for only some. I don’t really come to sell, but if a brother wants to buy some of our sad heritage, that’s all right by me. My main reason for being here is so that people like you get to face your past. Most of my ancestors couldn’t afford any of the things for sale here, even when they were new and cheap. We had to be content with seeing them in shop windows, and seeing ourselves made fun of in advertisements and movies.”
Heinrich almost slipped into a defensive reaction, but his grandfather had been a Nazi war criminal, so he shut up and took his lumps.
After a few minutes of lecturing about America’s grim past, which seemed to make Jordan more uncomfortable than it did him, Heinrich got a chance to slip away and continue shopping.
The guys had cleared out, probably hearing that guy’s lecture from afar and beating a hasty retreat, so Heinrich wandered alone for a while until he spotted that archaeologist chick at another table at the far end of an aisle, just below the gallery. He glanced up at the gallery. He hadn’t been there yet. Maybe he’d find another good dealer.
But first he wanted to make another play.
He approached the stand, which he could see was filled with more Greek antiquities. The girl stood next to an academic man with thinning gray hair combed back in a European style. His hefty paunch was squeezed inside a tweed vest.
“Please don’t tell me she said no to me because she’s with him,” Heinrich muttered.
The two said something to each other as the older guy used his phone to take a photo of an artifact. The girl nodded and turned away, heading in Heinrich’s direction. Her eyes took him in and immediately focused on something else.
That disappointed Heinrich enough that he almost didn’t see the man in the gallery forty feet above heave a large chunk of marble and drop it right on the old guy’s head.
CHAPTER TWO
“Look out!” Heinrich shouted.
Too late. The marble slab crushed the man’s head like a watermelon, a spray of blood and brains shooting out in all
directions. The man’s body fell to the ground with a thud, the marble ending up on top of him.
As people screamed and ran away, Heinrich glanced up at the gallery and caught sight of a young man ducking out of sight.
Heinrich hurried up to the murder victim. The marble slab was the torso of a Classical statue about half life-size. It lay on the man’s chest, the twisted limbs and pulped ruin of the man’s head making a mocking completion of the beautiful ancient form.
In less than a second, Heinrich took in every detail. The next instant, he was sprinting for the nearest stairway up to the gallery, a set of broad concrete steps not twenty yards away. He bowled over an old man, sending an armful of signed baseballs rolling in every direction, swerved around two guys (who hadn’t even noticed the murder just a few paces from them) haggling over a book of stamps, and took the steps three at a time.
When Heinrich got to the top, he didn’t see the murderer. However, he did see the startled wake he had left in the crowd. A stand had been knocked over and several people were shouting at someone well ahead of Heinrich. He followed the direction they were facing and spotted the murderer ducking around a corner.
Heinrich put on some speed and rounded the corner just in time to see that the man had passed the bathrooms and taken a left down a service passageway. The man glanced behind him and spotted his pursuer. Heinrich bolted after him, instinct making him take the corner the long way around.
Instinct saved him. The guy was just around the corner, in a stance that told Heinrich he had planned on tripping him up and stomping on his head once Heinrich was on the floor.
Instead they ended up facing one another, just out of reach.
Heinrich took a good look at the man. He had swarthy Mediterranean features and wore a loose white t-shirt and camouflage pants with running shoes. His face was dark with a thick unibrow over hard brown eyes. The instant he discovered he wasn’t going to be ambushing Heinrich, he had moved his broad-shouldered and thick-limbed body into a fighting position. A trained fighter for sure. Heinrich had been boxing for years and knew the type. This guy wasn’t in a boxing or a karate stance, though, just a basic self-defense stance.
