Soul Intent (3 page)

I thought they owed it to me. “I consider it hazard pay,” I said. Last year Andre Feret’s henchmen had blown up our guesthouse in Sterling, shot at us in Maryland, and almost suffocated us in India. Feret himself had threatened to kill us in Venice.

“Good point,” she said. She leaned over and kissed my cheek. “Maybe this assignment will be nice and boring, and then you’ll start wearing green to work.”

“Let’s hope not.” I parked the car in the underground garage of the three-story, giant yellow clapboard building that was Soul Identity’s world headquarters.

I punched the “3” on the elevator panel. James’s stool stood empty and dusty in the corner, so I wiped it off, climbed on it, and shouted, “All aboard—next stop overseer floor and depositary!”

“You do sound like him,” Val said. “I wonder if he’s enjoying his retirement.”

James had been Soul Identity’s elevator operator until he retired and left for Florida last year. He had provided Val and me with some crucial help and comic relief as we fought against Feret’s shenanigans.

“My guess is he got bored and took a job on the Disney train,” I said.

We walked into Archie’s office and saw him sitting around his coffee table with Berry, Ann, and Madame Flora. Berry, once my neighbor on KentIsland, was now Soul Identity’s other overseer. Ann ran the depositary. Madame Flora, still a palm reader, was Rose and Marie’s grandmother and the person who shot Feret. These four made up the organization’s leadership.

After we greeted everybody, I looked at Ann. “So your impregnable depositary has finally cracked. Somebody broke in?”

“Back up, Scott,” she said. She sat with her arms crossed and her forehead wrinkled by her scowl. “All our records are in order. There’s been no break-in.”

“But you know the gold is gone and the documents are missing,” Archie said. His bowtie hung askew, and tufts of his usually neat and trim white hair pointed in all directions. “Tell them, Flora—you were there when we deposited it.”

“I was there, but all I know is what you told me,” Madame Flora said. “As you will recall, that wasn’t much at all.”

The two of them glared at each other.

After a minute of silence, Berry turned to face me. “These three have been going at it all morning. Mr. Morgan says somebody robbed a soul line collection, and Ann says there’s no way anybody broke in. Flora’s acting mysterious as usual.” He let out a sigh and stood up. “Glad you made it, Scott. You can get to the bottom of this, and I can get back to my work.”

Val patted me on the shoulder. “I’m going too—my team’s waiting in the dungeon.”

As the door closed behind them, I took Berry’s chair and looked at Ann. “Whose soul line collection was it?” I asked.

“We’ve been waiting for you to get here so he’d start spilling the beans,” she said.

Madame Flora gripped the arms of her chair, and I could see her wiry arm muscles straining against her wrinkled forearms. “There should be no bean-spilling,” she said. “I strongly suggest that we let those sleeping dogs lie.”

“Relax, Flora,” Archie said. “Scott will perform his investigation with discretion.” He looked at me.

“You have my word on it,” I said.

Archie nodded. “Then I shall start at the point where I stepped off the Swiss ferry and entered post-war Germany.”

four

July 1946

Freidrichshafen, Occupied Germany

Archibald Morgan hopped onto the hot front seat of the green Willys-Overland Jeep. His green bowtie, white shirt, and green slacks were still spotless, but badly wrinkled, after three days of travel.

He rocked back and forth until the springs fit properly against his legs and back. The map showed a three hundred kilometer journey from the shores of LakeBodensee to Nuremberg, and with Germany’s vaunted autobahns still a mess, he expected the trip to last most of the day.

The driver tossed Morgan’s luggage into the back of the Jeep. Then he buttoned the tarp and climbed behind the steering wheel. He wiped his brow, smoothed the wrinkles out of his green uniform, and jabbed the starter button. “We’re all set, Mr. Morgan,” he said. “Next stop, Nuremberg.”

Morgan cocked his head at the driver. “It appears you worked for the railroads before the war.”

“Assistant conductor on the Toledo—Cleveland line until forty-one, when I joined Soul Identity.” The driver stuck out his hand. “First Sergeant James Little, Mr. Morgan.”

Morgan looked at his hand. “First Sergeant?”

The driver’s eyes widened. Then he shook his head and chuckled. “I’ve got to remember I’m back to deliveries now that the war’s over. James Little, sir. My own line’s got fifty-six years of service.”

They shook hands.

“How long a drive is it, Mr. Little?” Morgan asked.

“It’s James, sir,” he said. “Four hours, if there’s no truck accidents, so call it six to be safe.”

“That is faster than I had hoped for.”

James shook his head. “And then we have two more hours for the American checkpoint.”

Morgan nodded. “We had better get going then.”

“Yes sir.” James pulled the Jeep onto the road and steered around the potholes. He reached behind the bench and brought out a dull green steel case the size of a lunchbox. A small brass padlock dangled from the front of it. “Mr. Morgan, this package arrived in the Nuremberg office yesterday afternoon.”

Morgan took the case and examined it. It weighed only a pound or so. The wax seal covering the padlock’s keyhole showed no signs of tampering, and he carefully peeled it off.

Morgan unknotted his bowtie, unbuttoned his collar, reached inside his shirt, and withdrew a key on a long chain necklace. He unlocked the padlock, then turned and used his body to shield the case from James. The hinges screeched as he opened the lid. He took a deep breath, then reached inside and pulled out a green velvet cloth bag.

A tap on his shoulder caused Morgan to whirl around and slam the lid shut. “Mr. Little, I must request privacy.” His words cut through the stifling hot air.

James pulled back and frowned. “Sorry, Mr. Morgan. I’m supposed to watch you at all times.”

Morgan narrowed his eyes. “Watch from a distance.” He turned back to examine the contents.

five

Present Day

Sterling, Massachusetts

“And that was how my first European overseer assignment started,” Archie said.

I thought about the last few wars we fought, and how long it took for the violence to quell even after we declared it over. “Germany must have been a mess in 1946,” I said.

He nodded. “James told me that when he arrived in Nuremberg that June, the local resistance still strung telephone wires across the highways at night. They decapitated many of our soldiers before they were caught.”

I remembered learning about Nuremberg in school. The Allies held the Nazi war crimes trials there because the city’s courthouse was one of the few to survive the Allied bombings.

“Why would Soul Identity send an overseer to collect a deposit?” I asked. “Especially to such a dangerous place.”

“The size of the deposit and the significance of the member,” Archie said. He frowned. “Also, I was the youngest, and I suppose the most expendable, overseer.”

That made sense. Now on to the driver. “Is First Sergeant Little also known as James the elevator man?”

Archie smiled. “The one and the same.”

“After he was injured in Nuremberg,” Madame Flora said, “Archibald let him run the elevator. He rode that little box-cage up and down until he retired last year.”

Archie frowned. “Please, Flora, your out-of-sequence comments only serve to complicate my story.”

I hoped she’d continue. Fortunately she appeared to agree with me.

“Complicate your story?” she asked. “You’re about to bore us with your long road trip and introduce us to each pothole James drove you through.” She pointed at him. “Maybe you’re right—Scott can help us with a thorough investigation. I’ll tell the next part.”

six

July 1946

Nuremberg, Occupied Germany

Flora straddled the window sill, sitting where the glass would have been if the house hadn’t been bombed. She let her right leg dangle out over the patch of scorched earth below. Her left leg rested inside, her foot on top of the remaining glass shards she had plucked out of the frame.

While she waited, she leafed through the pages of an overseas January issue of Life Magazine that she had found at the last refugee camp. “Baba, you wouldn’t believe what they’re saying here,” she said.

Baba sat on the dirty floor in the corner of the room with her head tucked tight against her chest. She had been dozing much more often since they reached Germany. Her heart just couldn’t keep up, and even on this stifling hot summer day, she shivered in her sleep.

She’d just have to keep shivering until the overseer finally arrived and the suspicious housekeeper across the street let them inside the big house.

If the overseer actually did arrive. It had taken four weeks for Flora and her grandmother to stumble their way from the Istrian city of Umag to Nuremberg—and though Baba still claimed they would eventually make it to America, Flora remained convinced they were chasing yet another broken dream.

Just a week ago their last hope of finding Flora’s father had been dashed at Dachau. The bearer of the dreaded news: a now-imprisoned concentration camp guard. He gleefully told them how a Nazi doctor and an SS officer had killed a hundred Jews and Gypsies to better understand how downed Luftwaffe pilots could survive a prolonged ice-water submersion. Apparently the method they used for Papa’s resuscitation failed, and he was gone. Unfixable. Just like the glass pane in whose space she now sat.

When the prisoner leered as he told how he forced Gypsy women to have sex with the almost-frozen men, Flora hefted a discarded brick and smashed it in his face. His cheekbone broke; she heard the crack. She wanted to kill him, and she would have too, if the American soldiers hadn’t pulled her away.

Baba’s heart had given up that afternoon when the fate of her only son was confirmed. The two of them remained the only survivors of their Gypsy tribe. Baba spent every night telling Flora more of the old Roma stories. Knowing she would soon be the family’s last surviving member, Flora struggled to swallow her anger, pay attention, and learn.

Where was the overseer, anyway? She leaned out and looked up and down the street. A family dressed in rags even more threadbare than hers and Baba’s poked through the rubble of what must have been their former home. No overseer.

She turned back to the magazine. “Grim Europe Faces Winter of Misery,” blared one article; the next read “Americans Are Losing the Victory.” Flora couldn’t understand why the Americans obsessed over finding and reporting bad news. Did they think they could just snap their fingers and make centuries of strife disappear overnight?

Now seventeen years old, Flora was born in a land overly familiar with strife. Istria suffered under Mussolini’s forced Italianization program, which was the latest in a series of indignities inflicted upon the peninsula by her hungry European neighbors. Centuries ago during the Holy Roman Empire, the Venetians took control and remained Istria’s overlords until Napoleon established his ItalianKingdom. Then the Austrians took charge, until they lost the Great War and Italy grabbed the reins. In 1943, after Mussolini’s dismissal and Italy’s capitulation, the new ItalianSocialistRepublic, Germany, and Croatia each claimed Istria. Finally Tito’s Yugoslavian Army “freed” them last May.

During the early years of the war, Mussolini had successfully protected Jews and Gypsies from deportation. Life then was hard but bearable. But that was before
il Duce
capitulated—Flora vividly remembered her and Baba’s return from a week-long food-gathering trip, when they discovered the rest of their family had been loaded on railroad cars and sent to Jasenovac, a Croatian concentration camp. Flora and Baba had been hiding in the forest ever since—even after the war ended—because apparently Tito’s Yugoslavian Communists hated Gypsies just as much as Pavelic’s Croatian Ustasi.

It was only by chance that the Soul Identity letter had reached them at all. A former Ustasi member had hiked into the forest to deliver it. He spent a month evading bands of Istrian freedom fighters and almost died when they shot and wounded him, but he eventually delivered the letter. That set in motion the chain of events that brought the two of them to Nuremberg.

Baba kept the letter in a waterproof pouch pinned to her skirt, but Flora had read it to her so many times that she could recite the words from its blood-spattered pages.

22 March 1946

Soul Identity Headquarters

Sterling, Massachusetts, USA

Violca Drabarni