Ruins of War (20 page)

H
e rode beside the wagon driver. The wooden wheels clattered over the cobblestones of the narrow alley. They traveled the short distance and entered a courtyard. In front of them, three stories of outer brick wall were all that remained of the shoe factory, and to the left, three single-story outbuildings. The wagon stopped in front of the last outbuilding in the row, and the driver and he climbed down. In the back of the wagon lay several crates of junk metal and the main prize, a twisted carcass of a motorcycle. While the driver unloaded the crates, he unlocked a small reinforced door and entered the building. With a loud clank of sliding bolts, the wide double doors swung open.

The wagon driver waited by the wagon. “You’ll have to help me with this motorcycle, Herr Lang.”

Alfred Lang was the name he used in connection with his workshop. “No need,” Lang said. He reached up, grabbed a chain, and pulled. A steel triangular lift unfolded from the wall above the double doors. Lang wrapped the chain around the motorcycle and pulled the other end. The large pulley and gears did all the heavy lifting.

In a moment he rested the motorcycle on a metal rolling pallet. He paid the wagon driver with four packs of cigarettes. An exorbitant amount, but it kept the driver quiet about the delivery.

The wagon pulled away and Lang proceeded to wheel in the collection of scrap metal he had collected from the ruins.

Inside the workshop were shelves of tools and metal parts separated by function and size. Against the back wall sat a partially completed 1905 Altmann steam-driven car. He’d found the rusting body with most of the engine intact behind a burned-out house just outside of the city. Shelves along the north wall contained pendulum clocks, carved wooden cuckoo clocks, Victrola gramophones and radios, all in various states of disrepair. Also among the items sat his next automaton project: a mechanical magician who made his own head disappear, then, with a wave of his wand, his severed head would rise up from a black box. The outbuilding had been a machine shop associated with the shoe factory, and Lang had managed to repair most of the metal saws, punches, and lathes. A network of strategically placed chains hung down from the ceiling pulley system.

As he turned to retrieve the last crate, he was startled by a barrel-chested man standing in the courtyard. The man had his hands on his hips and wore a big grin. A crime boss before the war, the man had bought his way into the Gestapo and hunted down Jews. Many of the crime bosses had fled or been thrown in the camps during Hitler’s reign, but he, along with a number of others, had played the system and now that the Nazis had gone, they had taken over the streets once again.

Lang knew him only as Rudolph, though he was sure that was a false name. Rudolph controlled a large swath of southwestern Munich. There were rival gangs of Russian and Polish displaced persons, as well as American, British, and French deserters, but those gangs were after bigger cash hauls. Rudolph and the few other German gangs knew someday the rivals would have to pack up and leave, so he and the others stuck to the black market and protection. The man was very dangerous, and Lang despised him, but his fate for the moment was tied to Rudolph. He would have to play the supplicant a little while longer.

“Alfred,” Rudolph said, “I believe you have something for me.” He walked forward with two ex-Wehrmacht soldiers in tow.

“I put the finishing touches on it a few days ago,” Lang said.

Lang and Rudolph walked into the shop while the two musclemen waited outside. They stopped in the middle of the workshop, where something sat under a canvas cover. Lang pulled off the cover. Underneath was a 1928 NSU 500cc motorcycle. It looked as close to showroom perfect as Lang could get, relying only on salvaged and black market supplies.

Rudolph walked around admiring it with his toothy grin. “It’s beautiful. You’ve done an amazing job. How does she run?”

“I would say, better than factory,” Lang said, avoiding Rudolph’s gaze. “Much of the engine I made or modified myself.”

“You truly have talent,” Rudolph said. He eyed Lang for a moment. “Why are you so nervous, Herr Lang? Do I scare you that much?”

Lang had done everything he knew to feign nervousness: speaking too fast, twisting the canvas cover in his hands. “I think, Herr Rudolph, that I am working too hard and not sleeping.”

Rudolph grunted and nodded to one of his musclemen. The man stepped forward. Lang stepped back as if startled.

“You
are
nervous,” Rudolph said. “Are you doing business with one of my rivals?”

“No, sir. Of course not.”

The muscleman handed Rudolph a paper sack, and Rudolph held it out for Lang. “The new American military pass and salvage permit. Those are very hard to come by. I had to pay the American clerk a great deal. Therefore, I can only give you two cartons of cigarettes.”

“Still very generous, Herr Rudolph.”

Rudolph waved for the two musclemen to roll the motorcycle away. “You also have two months’ protection, as usual. Just be sure your workshop keeps making me money.” Rudolph noticed something over Lang’s shoulder. “What is that?”

Lang knew what Rudolph was referring to, the large rectangular object concealed under a black cloth that sat in the back corner.

Rudolph walked toward it. “What are you hiding from me, eh?”

Lang rushed to catch up. “Nothing, Herr Rudolph. I—”

Rudolph yanked back the cover, and parked before him was a black 1928 Mercedes-Benz SSK. Despite the weather-beaten body and torn upholstery, it was still a beautiful automobile.

“This is marvelous,” Rudolph said.

“This is a very personal project, Herr Rudolph. I have no plans to sell or barter for it.” He actually had big plans for the car, and they included Herr Rudolph. What he needed from the man would cost a fortune in black market currency, and what better way to reel him in and increase the price than by feigning a deep reluctance to sell.

“Who can afford personal projects?” Rudolph countered. “And what can you do with it, anyway? Germans are not allowed to drive.”

Lang shrugged. “It’s not nearly ready to be driven yet, Herr Rudolph.”

Rudolph shook his index finger at him. “For your own good, I will take this off your hands. You’ll be paid very well, I assure you.”

Rudolph began walking away. Lang chased after him.

“Herr Rudolph, I don’t want to sell it.”

“I won’t cheat you. And the most important thing is, neither will I steal it. Think of a price, and we can negotiate when it’s ready. Good day to you, Herr Lang.”

Lang stood outside the double doors, watching Rudolph and his men disappear down the driveway and out of sight. Without the distraction of the outside world, the voices within rose to a shrill hiss. Behind him, in the dark interior, he could feel a shadowy presence. The dread of what he must do made his body let out a great shudder. He’d hoped that by salvaging in the ruins that morning and finding a project to tinker with, the distraction would calm him, but now that he stood near the large doors that stood open like a black maw, he realized that he must come to grips with the inevitable.

Still facing outward, he pulled the double doors closed and locked
them with the sliding bolts. He lit a kerosene lantern, closed the single door, and turned to face the center of the room. The lantern threw exaggerated shadows on the walls. The odor of motor oil and the vapors of old fires and mildew overwhelmed the fresh air. And just below those fumes, the scent of blood and death. Or was that his imagination?

In the center of the room, he pulled a chain. The clank of the chain on the geared pulley seemed deafening in the enclosed space. A two-by-four-foot rectangle slab of concrete flooring rose up on one side, revealing steps that led downward to a bomb shelter the shoe factory mechanics had constructed during the war for themselves and the factory executives.

He hesitated at the top of the steps. The lantern light pierced only a few yards of the darkness below. After the other sacrifices his elation had been so great that the task before him served as another phase of the celebration for a well-performed beatification. But this time he had defied the urgings to select a child for sacrifice. He had hastily chosen an adult for beatification to appease the voices, but the ceremony had become an ordeal. Instead of elation, anguish came. The screams, the blood, the horror had given him no pleasure.

Lang reassumed his true identity—Dr. Ernst Ramek—as he descended the stairs. His legs seemed drained of blood, and his knees threatened to buckle. With each step down, the memories, the visions, the sounds flooded back, immersing him in the very hell he desired to escape. Each descending footfall brought with it a sense memory of those he had taken into the medical research blockhouse at Mauthausen concentration camp, its dark hallway lined with doors, and behind the doors, victims of experimentation, mutilated, sliced open, infected, gangrenous. . . . And none allowed medication to relieve the pain. Every day to walk that hallway and listen to the moans, the pleadings for mercy, the screams of those driven insane by relentless terror and agony. At the end of that hallway—the vision very clear now—lay the operating room, where he’d been compelled to go each day to assist with mutilation done in the name of science.

He had made a pact with evil to save his own skin. What man
would say no? A question he had often used to justify those abominations over certain and cruel death. As madness replaced abject horror, the victims’ suffering, their blood, their writhing bodies, their pleading for mercy elicited a kind of carnal passion. Each “procedure” brought lust then despair, excitation then depression in equal quantities.

His feet touched the former bomb shelter’s floor, thirty feet underground. A short hallway led to a steel door. He unlocked it and entered a large, square room with an operating table in its center. Pools of black coagulated blood covered the table. Bloodied rags lay scattered around. An open aluminum vat held blood collected from the hole at the foot of the slightly tilted table.

The sights induced another flashback: a prisoner patient writhing on the operating table as one of the doctors sliced through the torso and dug out the stomach. A victim he’d helped select, strapped down to the table, and told lies that no harm would come, that the doctor simply wanted to examine her.
For research, you understand?
But the victims suspected the fate awaiting them in the medical blockhouse. They’d heard the rumors, and sometimes the screams. They knew that very few “rabbits,” as the Nazi doctors liked to call their subjects, who entered that blockhouse were ever seen again.

Dr. Ramek fell against the wall and covered his eyes.
Please stop.

He was being punished. All his efforts, all his success could be repudiated. He must obey the urges. He must suffer along with the Chosen One. Only then would the beatification ceremony expunge his sins. He must embrace the anguish, for only then would he be lifted up among the venerated in heaven.

Resolve gave him strength. Excitement and anticipation returned. Past images no longer assaulted him, and his mind cleared. He began to hum an obscure tune from his childhood, as he went about making the room pristine again, preparing for the true and perhaps final sacrifice.

M
ason had decided to walk despite the freezing rain that had started with nightfall. The damp cold helped revive him after the tedious yet macabre task of wading through endless written testimonials of ex–concentration camp inmates. As the afternoon had worn on, his outrage at the grisly details dulled to numb detachment. Single acts of unimaginable cruelty, which had horrified him at the beginning, began to elicit as much reaction as a weather report. How many more testimonies of savagery would it take before he was so dulled by the suffering that he lost his compassion altogether, the empathy slipping away, grain by grain?

He stopped across the street from Laura’s hotel and lit a cigarette, took a puff, then decided he didn’t want it. He tossed it to the pavement, crossed the street, and entered the hotel. The lobby exuded old-world charm: walls of carved wood framing painted Bavarian pastoral scenes, oak-beamed ceilings, and silk-upholstered furniture. Candles provided most of the light, though a few lightbulbs glowed dimly at strategic places, probably powered by an army-supplied generator. Two German hotel employees were in the midst of decorating a Christmas tree in one corner.

Mason continued past the spiral staircase and a bay of elevators
and traversed a short hallway that led to the restaurant entrance and the hotel’s bar. Plush but tattered sofas and low tables filled the lounge, with a long bar at the far end. Two large fissures spanned the marble floor, the only testament to the violence of the bombs exploding all around the hotel.

He saw Laura sitting at one of the tables. She laughed along with a group of companions: three women and two men in civvies and two men in uniform.

Mason removed his hat, but remained where he was. He hoped to attract Laura’s attention from a distance. Laura spotted him. She excused herself and joined him.

“I hate to break up your little shindig,” Mason said.

“It’s fine. My friends and I were just having a little farewell party.” She took him by the arm. “I’d introduce you, but four of them are reporters. You’d be like a minnow with the sharks.” She led him to a sofa tucked away in a corner. “Did you eat? I’m sure they’re still serving.”

“I’ll order a sandwich or something. Whose farewell party?”

Laura sat and patted the cushion next to her. “I’ll give you the whole scoop when you sit down.”

A waiter arrived when Mason sat. Laura ordered a martini. Mason ordered a ham sandwich and a double whiskey.

“I bet you had a bad day,” Laura said.

“You don’t know the half of it.”

“I want to know all of it.”

“You first.”

Laura hesitated then shook her head. “Maybe we’ll wait for your whiskey.”

“Ah. Ply me with alcohol before giving me the news.”

“Something like that.”

The waiter brought the drinks and promised to bring the sandwich in a few minutes. Mason and Laura clinked glasses.

“Here’s to new horizons,” Mason said and held up his whiskey. “You’re going to have one juicy story by the time this case is finished.
But you might have to convince someone else to tell the rest. Your boyfriend, Jenkins, has given me one week to solve it or I’m out.”

“He’s not my boyfriend. We called it quits a few days—” She stopped. “What do you mean, you’ve only got a week?”

Mason told her about the meeting with the brass that afternoon, then about how everyone was stunned and distressed over Albrecht’s suicide and the cathedral murder scene. “Now the entire army brass is breathing down my neck. They’ve given me one week. And for some goddamned reason, I fought to stay on this investigation. I don’t know why. So we can go through the motions of solving this case while we wait for the next victim.”

“If they boot you off, that’s one thing. There’s nothing you can do about that. But you need to give it everything you’ve got. Then, if you don’t solve it, you can walk away knowing that you did all that was humanly possible. Otherwise, you’re going to carry a big weight around on your shoulders.”

They both fell quiet when the waiter came back with the sandwich. Laura snagged one of his limp fries. “The German cook hasn’t mastered the art of french fries yet. Cooks them like they do all their potatoes.”

Mason took a bite of his sandwich. “Let’s talk about you. Why did you break up with the general?”

“Maybe it’s time I really got to know the lowly doughboy.”

“You’ll enjoy the novelty . . . for a while.”

Laura picked up a french fry and threw it at him. “That’s just a form of conceit. It doesn’t suit you.”

“A cop and a reporter . . .” Mason rubbed his chin and feigned a thoughtful pause. “Well, they said man would never fly.”

Mason saw her expression change in a split second from confident to vulnerable.

“Laura, what is it?”

Laura tried to smile at him, but it turned lopsided. “I’m leaving in a few days.”

Mason was aware of Laura probing him with those intense blue eyes, but he’d lost track of what his face was doing. He felt like he’d been punched in the stomach. “Leaving for where?”

“Berlin, first.”

“For good?”

Laura shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know. The story I told you about when we first met—getting an angle on the black market?” When Mason nodded, she continued. “I’ve been doing a whole piece on it, and I’ve made a few contacts—German and American—who run sizable operations.”

“Laura, that’s dangerous work.”

“I’ve been in dangerous situations before. I can handle myself.”

“Haven’t you had enough of people shooting at you? Not enough thrills for one lifetime? No, sir, not you. You can’t stand to be away from it.”

“Look who’s talking.”

Mason had no argument against that, and they fell into silence for a moment.

Finally Laura said, “One of my contacts has connections with a major ring that operates out of Berlin. Those people have their hands on everything. Their principal line of supply is a route that comes up from Italy into Austria, through a small town called Garmisch-Partenkirchen, into Munich, and on to Berlin. My contact is going to help me get in touch with someone in Berlin.”

“Are you going to share whatever you find out with the police?”

“A reporter is only as good as her confidential sources.”

Mason was about to say something, but Laura went on. “Look, some of the stuff they’re into is despicable, but it’s mostly coal, fuel oil, food—”

“Drugs.”

“No doubt. But I promise that if I learn of anything that harms innocent people, and if I’ve got hard evidence, then I will contact the police.”

“When you do that, make sure you’re far away.”

Laura nodded and looked away for a moment. “That’s why I’m not sure when, or if, I’ll be back.”

“I wish you’d leave this kind of thing to the police.”

“You said it: Dangerous assignments are my way of thumbing my nose at my parents.”

“I’m being serious this time. You’ve got to be careful.”

A smile spread across Laura’s face. She leaned over and kissed him. To Mason, the room seemed to disappear. Nothing else existed, but only for a moment.

Laura broke the kiss and fished for something in her purse. “I won’t be leaving for four or five days.” She laid whatever it was on the table and slid it over while covering it with her hand. “Why don’t we make the most of it?” She stood and walked away.

Mason watched her go then looked down. Laura had left a note with her room number.

A few minutes later, Mason entered Laura’s room. The only light came from the fireplace. Laura stood up from the bed and met him halfway across the room. Mason lifted her chin and kissed her hard. Their lips never parted as they pulled off their clothes, gently at first, then frantically as if they couldn’t get them off fast enough. They stood next to the fire, their hands caressing and probing. With Mason’s passion came the bliss of forgetting. Only her body, her moans of pleasure mattered. He grabbed the quilt off the bed even as they embraced. He wrapped them both and lowered to the floor. While making love, he felt an intense relief, precious moments when nothing pressed on his mind and his body felt weightless. For a few moments, he could push aside thoughts about how it would all flood back again.

The ocean always falls away before the tidal wave roars ashore.