Mr. Monk Goes to Germany (9 page)

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.”

“I doubt it,” Monk said.

“Why?” I said. “Why would the killer be here, of all places?”

Monk stopped and looked at me. “Think about it. This is the perfect place for him to hide. A small town clear across the world. Not just any small town, but one steeped in death and disease, one that was so horrific that it spawned an enduring nightmare like
Snow White.
”

“This is a lovely town,” I said. “
Snow White
is a beloved fable.”

“Lohr is the last place on earth I would ever look for him or ever visit,” Monk said. “He knew that.”

“And yet here you are, by sheer coincidence, in the one place on earth he chose to hide.”

“It’s fate,” he said.

“It’s ridiculous,” I said. “Besides, you don’t believe in coincidences, especially when murder is involved.”

“I do now,” Monk said.

I didn’t know whether or not Monk had actually seen a man with six fingers. But I didn’t believe for one moment that the man who ordered Trudy Monk’s death was hiding out in Lohr, Germany. It was obvious to me what was really happening.

“I have a much more logical explanation for what you saw,” I said.

“What could possibly be more logical than what I just told you?”

“You are in a place where you’ve never been and you have to adapt to a totally different language, culture, and way of life than you are familiar with. It makes you uncomfortable— you said so yourself last night. On top of that, you are facing a day where you have nothing to do. You couldn’t deal with it, so in a panic your mind invented something that would completely occupy your thoughts and distract you from all the frightening differences around you.”

Monk stared at me for a long moment before saying, “That is the craziest thing I’ve heard.”

“You can’t tolerate change and you can’t tolerate the idea of having a day off,” I said. “So you created a purpose for yourself that couldn’t be denied: finding Trudy’s killer, even though we are in the least likely place for you to find him.”

“Which is exactly why he is here,” Monk said. “You have just proven my point.”

“You didn’t listen to a word I said.”

“Yes, I did,” Monk said. “But just the words that made sense, which was roughly one out of ten.”

“You mean you only listened to what you wanted to hear.”

“Of course. Why would I do otherwise? That would be like intentionally eating something that makes you sick.”

I couldn’t argue with that analogy. It was totally accurate and unintentionally revealing. He couldn’t listen to anything that conflicted with his extraordinarily rigid worldview.

“So what do you want to do? A door-to-door search?”

“Good idea,” Monk said. “Let’s gather those kids who dress up as the Three Kings and get them to do another collection. We can tag along and see who opens the doors.”

“That doesn’t seem very practical, Mr. Monk. January sixth is a long way off and I don’t think anybody will be fooled.”

“You’re right. We don’t have the time to take the subtle approach,” Monk said.

“That was subtle?”

“We have to go to the police.”

“What can they do?” I said. “There hasn’t been a crime.”

“My wife was murdered,” Monk said.

“I know, Mr. Monk, and I don’t mean to deny the pain and loss that you feel. But she wasn’t killed here and there’s no evidence that the eleven-fingered man you saw, if you even saw him, was the man who did it.”

“That’s why we need the police,” Monk said. “If we find the man, we’ll find the evidence.”

“I have a better idea,” I said. “Let’s hold off doing anything until your appointment with Dr. Kroger tomorrow. Maybe he can help you work through the issues at the heart of all of this.”

“Tomorrow could be too late,” Monk said. “The killer could be packing up and preparing for his escape right now.”

“Okay, let’s see Dr. Kroger today.”

Dr. Kroger wouldn’t be too pleased, but Monk’s mental health took precedence as far as I was concerned.

“I don’t need a psychiatrist,” Monk said. “I need a special unit of trained detectives scouring this godforsaken place for the man who killed my wife.”

And with that, Monk marched off in search of the police and I saw my vacation slipping away into madness.

The Lohr police station wasn’t much larger than the tourist office and it was occupied by just two people: the female dispatcher and a uniformed officer at the counter, who turned out to be the same guy who’d witnessed Monk’s meltdown in the town square and carried him back to the car.

The officer’s name was Schust. To say he was unsympathetic to Monk’s request would be an understatement.

I could understand that, but I was on Monk’s side. Because when it comes down to it, despite whatever reservations I may have, my job is to support and assist Monk in any way I can.

“Perhaps Mr. Monk hasn’t made the situation clear,” I said. “He is a special consultant to the San Francisco Police Department and he’s investigating a murder.”

Officer Schust looked skeptically at Monk. “He’s a detective?”

“The best in America,” I said.

I didn’t believe Monk was right, but I had to do whatever I could to help his cause. Besides, I figured the sooner I could prove to him that either he was delusional or the six-fingered man he saw wasn’t the killer, the sooner we could get back to enjoying our vacation.

“He’s afraid of cobblestones,” Schust said.

“If you were smart, you would be, too,” Monk said. “One wrong move and you could break your neck. Those streets should be paved.”

“We aren’t going to pave the streets,” Schust said. “And we aren’t going to do a door-to-door search for an eleven-fingered man either.”

“I want to see whoever is in charge here,” I said.

“You’ll have to come back another time,” Schust said. “Hauptkriminalkommissar Stoffmacher is unavailable.”

“We’ll wait,” Monk said.

“He could be gone all day,” the officer said. “He’s investigating a homicide.”

“Perfect,” I said. “Point us to the crime scene so Mr. Monk can solve the murder and the Hauptkriminalkommissar can focus all of his attention on finding our man.”

“A crime scene is not a tourist attraction,” Schust said. “We’re done here, Fräulein Teeger.”

The officer turned and went back to his desk. When Monk looked at me, his expression of steely determination was back.

“This isn’t such a big town. It shouldn’t be too hard to find the crime scene,” Monk said. “We’ll just drive around until we find a bunch of police cars.”

“They still won’t let us cross the police line,” I said. “What we need is an introduction. Wait here.”

I stepped outside, took out my cell phone, and called Captain Stottlemeyer. I hadn’t forgotten that we were nine hours ahead of San Francisco, but this was an emergency.

Stottlemeyer answered groggily. “Yeah.”

“It’s Natalie, Captain. I need a favor.”

“Do you know what time it is here?”

“Let me ask you a question,” I said. “Did you arrest that crazy woman for murdering her sleazy son-in-law?”

“Yeah, we did,” Stottlemeyer said. “Can I go back to sleep now?”

“I need more details,” I said.

“Monk was right. Her fingerprints were all over the iron. When she was confronted with the evidence, she spilled the whole thing. We couldn’t shut her up. Satisfied?”

“So you’re in Mr. Monk’s debt,” I said.

“Yeah, I owe him one,” Stottlemeyer said. “When he gets back, I’ll let him organize my desk.”

“That’s not going to be enough,” I said.

“He gets paid for this,” Stottlemeyer said.

“You fired him, remember? He did this out of the kindness of his heart and a deep, abiding sense of public service.”

“He did it because he’s compulsive and he can’t let go of this stuff.”

“That doesn’t matter. The fact is, you’d still be heading nowhere on this case if he hadn’t taken time out of his dream vacation to help you. Now all he’s asking for is a small favor in return.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“We need you to call the police in Lohr, Germany, and convince them that Mr. Monk is a very important and respected member of the San Francisco Police Department.”

“Why do they have to know that?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yeah, because a call like that makes whatever Monk is doing official and a reflection on our department. And second, if you’re hesitating to tell me why you need me to vouch for him, it must be something big. Has he stumbled on a dead body already?”

I sighed. “Mr. Monk caught a glimpse of a man in a crowd today and then lost him. We need the police to help us find the guy.”

“What has the guy done? Was he missing a button on his shirt? Was he only wearing one earring? Was his shoe untied?”

“He had six fingers on his right hand.”

“Oh hell,” Stottlemeyer said.

“You see my predicament.”

“Do you really believe that’s what Monk saw?”

“What’s important is that he believes it,” I said. “Nothing means more to him than finding Trudy’s killer. Even if there’s only a one-in-a-billion chance that he’s right, we have to support him, no matter what.”

“This could end up being a tragic embarrassment for him and for us,” Stottlemeyer said.

“I know,” I said. “But what choice do we have? We’re his friends.”

“Where are you again?”

“Lohr, Germany,” I said. “Snow White’s hometown.”

“I thought her hometown was Disneyland.”

“It wasn’t.”

“Next you’re going to tell me Sleeping Beauty didn’t live there either,” Stottlemeyer said. “Give me a few minutes. I have to wake some people up.”

I went back into the police station and sat down next to Monk in one of the two chairs in the lobby.

“What did you do?” Monk asked.

“I called Captain Stottlemeyer,” I said.

“Is he going to help us?”

I gave Monk a look. “Has he ever let you down?”

A half hour passed. The officer and the dispatcher were clearly annoyed to have us sitting there, but they couldn’t really throw us out.

I told Monk that Betty had been arrested, but he just shrugged. He never doubted that she was guilty, no more than he doubted himself about seeing the man with eleven fingers.

The dispatcher’s phone rang. She answered it and motioned to Schust to pick up the extension. He did.

The officer listened for a moment, looked over at us with astonishment, hung up, and made another call. He spoke to someone for a few minutes, glancing at us repeatedly as he did, then ended the call and walked over to us.

“I apologize, Mr. Monk, if I offended you in any way,” Schust said. “I’ve been ordered by the leader of the regional police to take you to see Hauptkriminalkommissar Stoffmacher right away. Please come with me.”

The officer led us outside to his car. As we followed him, Monk looked at me for an explanation. I shrugged.

“You must have friends in high places,” I said.

“I’m afraid of heights,” Monk said. “That’s why I’m glad I have two friends down here with me that I can always count on.”