Heidelberg Effect (14 page)

Christof stared at her. He held his hand,
empty, to his chest. “What can I do, Mother?” he said.

“Pray for us.” Greta said, bending to lift
the water bucket.

“I do! But how will my prayers keep you safe
from him? He is obsessed with you. It is all he talks about. He
will burn the convent. At least send your nuns away.”

“Where? Most of them have no home but this
one.”

“If they stay here, they
will die.
You
will die.”

“I know,” Greta said.

“I couldn’t bear it.”

“You will,” Greta said and then she
softened. “Thank you, my lord. You have risked much to come here to
warn me. I am grateful.”

He reached out to her again and she put the
bucket between them.

“And now you must go, please,” she said.

“I should just kidnap you, myself,” Christof
said. “Throw you over my horse and take you to the country.”

“But you are not like that,” Greta said, her
eyes narrowing. “You are not like your brother even if your motives
are better.”

“No.”

“Goodbye, Christof,” she said, smiling sadly
at him. She turned and walked to the convent leaving him standing
there and watching her go.

There was a game Ella liked to play.

Whenever she left the
convent, which was infrequently and for only very short trips, she
tried to picture where the nightclubs and supermarkets of 2012
were. She tried to remember how she felt walking down the main
corridor of the
Altstadt
with Heidi, high from too many Appletinis and
giggling over nothing, stumbling on the uneven pedestrian walkway
and hanging onto each other. Now, as she walked down the same
cobblestone walkways, splattered with horse and cow dung, she tried
to imagine that Heidi was lunching on the corner just ahead. When
she got back to her own time, she would remember the juggler who
stopped to piss in the street right around Ella’s favorite
konditerei
. Of course,
she would never be able to look at the square in front of
the
Church of the Holy Spirit
the same way.

Each time, she had to beg Greta to let her
go out on the streets. Ella argued that she was unarmed and
promised not to speak. She knew Greta felt it was too big a risk to
take, but in the end, Ella insisted.

Today, she was walking with
an elderly nun and a novice. Their goal was the market at
Altstadt
where they
would trade potatoes and turnips from their garden for wine and
cheese. It was generally believed that because Greta was so tall,
she was instantly recognizable from a distance and therefore should
refrain from going into town herself.

The weather was clear and
bright and Ella practically skipped, she was so eager to be
walking. Kitchen work had left her shoulders sore and aching at
night but it was a poor substitute for the full body aerobic
classes she used to take. Ella was careful to walk slowly and look
directly downward but she stole periodic glances of the castle and
the shops that lined the road past
Bismarckplatz
toward the main
square.

The old nun she walked with was mute, or so
Ella assumed since she had never heard her speak. The young girl
seemed as eager as Ella to be out, although she was well trained to
keep her eyes down with her hands on the empty wicker basket she
carried.

They had barely entered the marketplace when
it happened.

Ella, grateful that there appeared to be
nothing bloody and upsetting happening on the raised platform in
the square in front of the cathedral, had forgotten to keep her
eyes down and was drinking in the sights and sounds of 1620
Heidelberg. It wasn’t until a man roughly grabbed her from behind
that she even realized that she had been smiling—a sign of madness
in 1620.

“A juicy one!” the man shouted, pawing at
Ella with heavy hands. She glanced at the elder nun who seemed
resolute in keeping her eyes on the ground and who continued toward
the market ignoring what was happening to Ella. The young novice
never looked up.

The man twisted Ella around in his arms and
a foul blast of breath smelling of decayed teeth and his breakfast
hit her full in the face. She dropped her basket and fought to free
herself from his iron grasp, feeling her stomach knot with
revulsion. She looked around and saw very few people interested in
what was happening and she felt a tightening in her chest as the
man began to rake up the skirt of her habit.

Holy shit, this ape was going to rape her in
the middle of the effing marketplace!

She fought his hands with
hers for the briefest of moments to keep her skirt down when it
occurred to her that if he turned her over or got her on the
ground, she was
done
. When that thought hit her, she willed herself to do the
opposite of what her instinct told her to do. She pulled him
towards her so that they were face to face and she could see the
surprise in his eyes. He was not a revoltingly homely man—even if
the smell coming off him was making her eyes water—but the look in
his eye was as sadistic and base as she had ever seen. Keeping eye
contact with him, she screamed in his face and brought her knee up
sharply into his groin. In a second, she felt him release her and
she stumbled away from his falling body, her own heavy skirts
trapping her. She scrambled to her feet and looked over his
shoulder to see if he had a friend who might avenge him. What she
saw made the sweat that was creeping down the small of her back
turn to ice.

Axel.

Chapter Ten

He stood holding a white horse by the halter
and laughing at what must have looked like street performance to
him. He was dressed in velvet breeches and soft suede knee-high
boots. His jacket was embroidered in rich colors of burgundy and
gold. Unlike this brother, his hair was long and dark. He was
handsome but Ella could see the coldness in his eyes even from a
distance. She was wearing the habit of a novice from the convent.
He could see immediately what she was.

He watched her over the writhing man on the
ground and smiled. Ella stood up straight, her heart pounding, her
stomach ready to empty on the ground before her. She placed her
hands on her hips and stared him down. She lifted her chin.

Motherfucker
, she thought as she
stood and watched him, her knees trembling, her breath coming in
ragged snatches. Preying on the weak. Torturing women, torturing
Greta. The more she looked at him, the angrier she felt herself
becoming. And she did not move. A man came up behind Axel and spoke
in his ear and Axel nodded and waved him away as if he were an
annoying fly. His eyes raked Ella from top to bottom, clearly
mentally undressing her. Then, without breaking eye contact with
her, he reached down with his hand and grabbed the protruding
codpiece he wore between his legs and squeezed it. With the same
hand, he pointed at Ella.

“I will see you soon, little sister,” he
said. He gave the gurgling man on the cobblestones a mean laugh,
mounted his horse and knocked over a large display of apples and
freshly baked tarts as he rode away.

Ella watched him go and felt her hands go
clammy and cold. Movement out of the corner of her eye quickly
confirmed to her that the man on the ground was regaining control.
She turned and ran.

Rowan looked at the GPS on
his cellphone and then at the number on the building. This was it.
This was where she lived. He scratched his chin and looked down the
long street.
Kleinschmidtstrasse
.
Yeah, that’s a mouthful
.
He’d never sent Ella an actual letter so her address hadn’t really
played a part in his need-to-know reservoir. He looked up at the
stacks of ancient windows facing the street and wondered which one
was her apartment. She had talked about a bookstore outside her
balcony. He turned the corner and saw the store in front of him.
When he looked up at the building across the street from it, he saw
her balcony and his heart seemed to pound harder.

He had no expectation that he would find her
there but he could always hope. She didn’t answer her landline or
her cellphone. Her office said they had heard nothing from her
since the day she quit, now almost three weeks ago. Her father,
whom he had called from the Atlanta airport on his way to
Frankfurt, had officially become a certified basket case of nerves
and anxiety.

Rowan entered the building. The stairs were
wide but steep and smooth, worn slick from centuries of feet
pounding up and down them. Not trusting the rickety and ancient
elevator, Rowan bounded up the steps to the third floor. He had
stopped by the rental management office on his way in from the
train station, paid a month’s rent and picked up another set of
keys.

Just that easy.

He found her apartment and unlocked the
door. It was a little musty and if he had to bet, he’d say that no
one had been in it for these three weeks. He dropped his travel bag
on the floor and stood in the foyer of the tiny apartment. The
kitchen opened to the living room and faced the front door. The
first thing he saw was the framed photo of the two of them taken
their last night together.

Shit, Ella,
he thought. Looking at the picture, seeing how
happy she looked that night, and how beautiful she was.

Where are you?

After a quick shower and a
plate of
wienerschnitzel
in the restaurant downstairs, Rowan used his GPS
to walk the route to Ella’s office. The light was dying but he
looked carefully down every alleyway and every side street, trying
to imagine how she might have left her apartment and not arrived at
her destination. When he got to her office building, the employees
long since gone, he checked his watch. Ella was a fast walker and
easily kept up with him and his much longer legs. She would have
made it here in twenty minutes. Satisfied, he walked back to her
apartment as the lights of the clubs and restaurants came along the
way.

He checked the answering machine in her
apartment to make sure no one had called while he was out. Then he
went to bed.

The next morning, he was standing in the
lobby of her office by eight o’clock. A luscious German babe sat at
the front desk typing texts into her cellphone. She looked up and
smiled flirtatiously with him.

That would have to be the lovely Heidi,
Rowan thought. He touched the brim of his cowboy hat and she
giggled.

“Fraulein
,” he said.

“I’m sorry. Who are you waiting for?” she
asked.

“Probably you,” he said. “If you’re
Heidi.”

“I am she,” Heidi said, pinching her brows
together but still smiling at him. Before he could present
identification, she shrieked and clapped a hand to her mouth.

“I guess the penny dropped,” he said.

“You are Ella’s cowboy,” she said when she
removed her hand. “Where is she?” She stood and looked behind him
as if he might be hiding her. “Ella?”

“I don’t have her, ma’am,” Rowan said. “I
was hoping you might.”

Heidi sat down hard. “Where did she go?” she
asked.

“When did you see her last?”

“I saw her the morning of the day she quit.
She wouldn’t talk with me. I was very hurt. I am still very
hurt.”

“You know why Ella might have handed in her
resignation? She ever indicate to you she was thinking of doing
that?”

Heidi looked momentarily panicked, as if she
were about to lie but didn’t feel terribly confident in the
outcome.

“Not really,” she said, now not looking at
him.

“She never let on she was thinking of
quitting and moving back to the States? That’s a pretty big
decision and I thought you two were close.”

“We
were
close,” Heidi said. “Good
morning, Hugo!” she said brightly to a tall blond man who entered
the lobby. He stood with his coat over his arm and a briefcase in
his free hand.

“Good morning, Heidi.” The man stared at
Rowan as if waiting to be introduced.

“This is Ella’s American boyfriend,” Heidi
said to Hugo. “He is here looking for Ella.”

“What happened to Ella?” Hugo asked
Rowan.

Rowan turned to him. The guy looked like he
could have stepped right out of a Warner Brothers World War Two
movie playing the handsome and cold-blooded Nazi lead.

“You didn’t know Ella was missing?” Rowan
asked him.

“No. Why would I?” Hugo said, making a
face.

“You were not friends?”

“Well,” Hugo said smiling thinly at Rowan.
“If you mean were we boyfriend and girlfriend, no. One night of
passion does not make for those sorts of attachments over here. I
know in America an expectation of marriage follows a sexual
experience. This is because you Americans are, frankly—”

Rowan had no idea while the man was speaking
that he was about to deck him. It happened so fast and with so
little fore thought that it was like his fist belonged to someone
else. Before the bastard could finish his sentence, Rowan hauled
off and socked him in the nose and watched him drop to his
knees.

Rowan turned to Heidi who had screamed but
who now, it seemed to him, was trying to hold in an attack of
hysterical giggles.

“So,” he said to Heidi. “Ella quitting came
as a big surprise to you.”

Heidi looked at Rowan and then at Hugo who
was holding his nose with blood pumping out of it. She grabbed her
coat from the back of her chair, punched a button on her intercom
and spoke rapid German into it. She came around the receptionist’s
desk and stepped over Hugo on the rug.