Where the Bones are Buried (4 page)

Chapter Seven

Dinah took out the number Thor had given her and opened her phone. She had no choice now. Her mother had been abducted. She said, “It must have been Hess. He had to have taken her out past the front desk. Go ask them, Margaret, while I talk to the police.”

“Wait. She left a note.
Gone ahead to meet Florian at his art gallery and run some errands. Y'all don't have to come if you don't want to, but here's the address
.”

It didn't sound like it was written under duress, and Swan was notoriously absentminded. Maybe she just set down the dryer and walked away, negligent as a child. The address she gave was on the Kurfürstenstrasse near Breitscheidplatz, one of the busiest squares in the city.

Dinah stopped off briefly at her apartment, with Margaret on her coattails like a stick-tight. She hid the Indian doll in her bureau and took out the Smith & Wesson snub-nosed revolver that Thor had given her. She stowed it in the center pocket of her shoulder bag and tried again to dissuade Margaret. “You're sick. You should stay inside or you'll catch pneumonia.”

“Bring it on. They don't call it the old person's friend for nothing.”

“Good grief, Margaret. You should be on Prozac.”

They walked to the U-bahn station at Hausvogteiplatz, around the corner from the apartment. At the station entrance, Dinah reviewed her subway map. She jogged down the stairs to the trains, hoping to lose Margaret in the crowd milling around the tracks, but the woman proved remarkably spry for an old boiler with a head cold. Dinah stuffed a few coins in the ticket dispenser and hopped aboard the train at the last minute. Margaret squeaked through the closing doors in the nick of time, ticketless.

They found seats across from a young couple in soccer-flag T-shirts and cutoffs. They had matching leg tattoos from ankles to knees, stretched earlobes with silver flesh tunnels, and a bottle of beer, which they passed back and forth between them.

“If I'd known you could drink on the train, I'd have brought a traveler,” muttered Margaret.

“You can't want a drink at this hour. It's not yet ten.”

“I'm still on Georgia time.”

As the train gusted through the tunnels beneath the city, Dinah worried the little piece of spray-painted concrete in her pocket, allegedly a chip off the Berlin Wall. Every souvenir shop in the city sold them by the gross. She knew it was fake, but it had a nice indentation for her thumb and she had rubbed it smooth. She rubbed it now and tried to assay how much of what Swan and Margaret had told her was true, and how much delusional nonsense. She thought about her mother striking out on her own in a huge foreign city where she didn't speak the language, to meet a man she'd only met on Facebook—a German who styled himself as Thunder Moon. Was this Thunder Moon a separate manifestation of Swan's insanity, or was he the go-between to Reiner Hess?

The train ground to a halt and the doors slid open. The couple with the beer got off and a platoon of Chinese tourists crammed inside. Margaret sneezed explosively and they covered their mouths and shrank away toward the rear of the car. The doors slid shut; the train gusted on and gathered speed.

Margaret said, “I've been watching how you are with Swan. You're tense as a wire, like you're afraid she'll blurt out something terrible. Maybe something you can't forgive.”

“Such as?”

Margaret declined to go out on that particular limb, but ventured onto another. “Do you love her?”

It was a snide question. Backhanded and presumptuous, but painfully on target. Dinah wished she could come back with a resounding yes. The fact that she couldn't, made her feel like a traitor. How could she not love the woman who brought her into this world, who taught her to read and ride a bike, who played piano duets with her and filled her head with songs and
Mother Goose
rhymes and fairy tales? But there was a wall in her heart, love on one side, doubt and dread on the other. The doubts began with Cleon's admission that he had killed her father. Did Swan know and, if she did, when did she know? Dinah couldn't delete the question from her internal hard drive. She was afraid to hear the answer, yet she couldn't come to terms with the past until and unless she did. But however conflicted she might be, her feelings about Swan were none of Margaret's beeswax.

The train slowed as it approached the next station and she stood up. “She's my mother, Margaret. With all the
Sturm und Drang
that implies. And this is our stop.”

The knot of Chinese passengers shoved their way out the door ahead of them. Dinah weaved her way through the mob onto the platform and followed the arrows to Kurfürstenstrasse. She heard Margaret huffing behind her, but she didn't look back. She jogged up the stairs to street level and headed toward the central shopping district.

There are almost no old buildings in Berlin. The Allies bombed the city to rubble during World War II and the new Berlin is a mosaic of uber-modern architecture and rampant development. Boom cranes sprout across the skyline like dandelions and the noise of construction is so constant that you cease to notice. One of the more curious sights is the jungle of gigantic pink, yellow, and blue pipes that parallel the streets, snake around corners, climb and loop overhead. At first, Dinah had thought it was some kind of art installation. In fact, it is plumbing. Berlin sits smack in the middle of a swamp and before a new building can be erected, water must be pumped from the foundation pit into the River Spree or one of the canals. Emerging onto Kurfürstenstrasse, they passed under and through a labyrinth of blue pipes.

Rows of shops selling everything from vinyl records and funky hats to designer fashions and elegant jewelry lined both sides of the street. The face of Chancellor Angela Merkel smiled serenely from a large political billboard. The country had trusted her to steer the ship of state for the last eight years and just this past weekend, voters reaffirmed that trust and re-elected her in a landslide. They called her
Mutti
, or mommy.

In the window of a second-hand bookshop, the lurid covers of pulp crime novels reminded Dinah of the gun inside her purse. She stopped and stared at the images of blood-drenched corpses, terrorists brandishing machine guns, and scantily clad babes with pouty lips and pistols. Feeling slightly absurd, she shifted the purse from one shoulder to the other. She ought to call that policeman Thor had mentioned, but there was no point until she knew whether her less-than-trustworthy
Mutti
had been snatched or gone off of her own volition.

“You won't get rid of me so easily,” said Margaret, coming up alongside her. She wheezed and blew her nose. “Are we close?”

“It's somewhere in the middle of the next block, I think.”

They walked on together until they came to a window that displayed a bronze sculpture of an Indian brave standing over a dead buffalo. The sign on the door read
die ewigen Jagdgründe
. She took out her smartphone and Googled it. The phrase translated to the Happy Hunting Ground.

“Geronimo,” she said, and pushed open the door.

The air was thick with the incense of desert sage and piñon and the plaintive sounds of a flute wafted through the interior. Colorful canvases of Indians adorned the walls—Indians hunting, Indians dancing, Indians riding horses, Indians contemplating the mountains and the plains, and ghost Indians looking down from the sky. She felt momentarily disoriented, as if she'd been teleported to Santa Fe in the blink of an eye.

“
Guten Morgen
!”

“God's sake,” said Margaret, as an Indian loomed from behind a stack of fur throws and pelts. His red-painted dome was bisected by a brownish mohawk and a necklace of mottled grizzly claws curved against his bare chest. A painted black hand cradled his chin and mouth, the thumb jutting up on his left cheek and the fingers extending up the right side of his face to his eye. A diagonal line of white dots extended from above his left eye to the tip of the black thumb.

Dinah didn't know whether to laugh or scream. Somehow, she managed to keep a straight face. “Good morning. We're here to see Herr Florian Farber.”

His smile, in the context of all the war paint, appeared fierce, but his tone was friendly. “I am Florian Farber. Welcome to my gallery.” He shook both of their hands. “Please do not be alarmed. I am dressed for an event later tonight. How may I help you?”

“I believe my mother had an appointment with you today. Mrs. William Calms. Is she here?”

He beamed. “You are Frau Pelerin, Swan's daughter? Yes, of course. I should have recognized you. She told me you had moved to Berlin and would be visiting the gallery.
Willkommen
. Come in. It is Dinah,
ja?
May I offer you a cup of tea?”

“Thanks, no.” She ran her eyes around the place. Interspersed among the paintings were intricately painted masks, Hopi, she thought. They looked like those worn during religious ceremonies. A glass display case with an assortment of artifacts and jewelry cut through the center of the gallery. In the southeast corner was an ordinary business desk. In the southwest corner stood a stone statue, a fearsome combination of lion and bear and lizard that would have looked more at home in the Museum of Cairo.

“Is the lady here?” demanded Margaret.

“No. I don't anticipate that I will see Frau Calms until tonight at our powwow.”

“When do you anticipate that Mr. Hess will arrive?”

“Reiner Hess?” The name seemed to rattle him. “Reiner has not been to a powwow since…a while.”

Margaret scowled. “You mean since the police came after him for tax evasion?” She balled her fists on her hips as if she might clobber him if he didn't say what she wanted to hear.

The light of welcome dimmed in Florian's eyes, and the painted black hand that held his mouth, compressed. “I don't know anything about that. Reiner is an acquaintance. A member of
der Indianer
club for a long time, but not active in our meetings. I know nothing of his business or financial affairs.”

Dinah laid a restraining hand on Margaret's arm and smiled—disarmingly, she hoped. “We don't know anything about Mr. Hess, either. We're just trying to locate my mother. She left a note that led us to believe she would be paying you a visit this morning. It's her first day in Berlin, she speaks no German, and I'm concerned that she'll get lost and won't be able to find her way back to her hotel. Do you have any idea where else she might have gone?”

The reference to Swan restored his obliging manner. “Yes, you would naturally be worried. I will of course be happy if she drops by the gallery today, but in her last communication to me, she said only that she looked forward to meeting me and the other club members at the powwow tonight.”

“Here at the gallery?” Dinah couldn't picture a bunch of would-be Indians whooping it up in this crowded shop.

“No. It is held near the south shore of Müggelsee in the southeastern suburbs.”

“Where exactly is that? And when?”

“Seven o'clock. Take the S-bahn to Friedrichshagen. There is a ferry across the lake and we will meet at the top of Kleiner Müggelberg.”

Having so far not traveled much beyond the Mitte, Dinah had no idea where this Müggelsee might be. She racked her brain. Where could Swan have gone? Her note was vague as to time, but stated clearly that she was going to meet Farber. Had she taken the wrong train? What and where were the other “errands” on her itinerary? Or had she been kidnapped? Was she locked up somewhere in this gallery? In a secret chamber behind one of those paintings, perhaps? She scanned the walls and display cases.

Farber said, “You will of course be most welcome at the powwow tonight also.”

“Thank you. Do you by any chance sell Indian dolls?”

“Dolls? No, I seldom see a doll worth acquiring, although I once had a very nice Inuit doll made in eighteen-twenty.” He smiled. “While you are here, you must come into the courtyard and meet some of our other members.” He gestured them toward the rear of the shop.

Margaret vented a succession of impressive sneezes. When she could speak, she said, “You go. I need to sit down and rest for a few minutes. If there's a chair.”

“
Ja, ja. Durchaus
!” Florian fetched a folding chair from behind the desk and seated her. “Are you ill?”

“Just tired.” She cut her eyes at Dinah. “My young friend sets a mean pace.”

“I'd like to meet the other club members,” said Dinah.

“Very good. Come.”

She followed him past the desk, which was almost as cluttered as hers, and out the back door. A lanky man wearing long braids and a fringed buckskin shirt and leggings stood in front of a yellow tepee decorated with red zigzags and black buffalo heads. His face had been colored with tan makeup, but his hands were white. He wore a silver Indian head ring with a teal enamel headdress on one hand, and a Zuni ring with multicolor stone inlay on the other. A youngish blonde in a beaded deerskin dress squatted in front of a charcoal fire tending a tin kettle. She looked up at Dinah and smiled. “
Moin
.”

“Dinah, this is my assistant, Drumming Man, and his wife, Little Deer.”

“A pleasure to meet you,” said Dinah. Drumming Man shook hands with her, which was the usual manner of greeting strangers in Germany. His wife didn't offer.

“And I am Baer Eichen,” said a silver-haired man sitting cross-legged on the ground. He reached out and shook her hand. “Forgive me if I don't stand.”

“He has an artificial foot,” said Farber, which brought a look of frank displeasure to Eichen's face.

“I am not disabled,” he said, and pushed himself to his feet. He wore a tan suit, blue shirt, and a braided leather bolo tie secured with a turquoise clasp the size of a duck egg. His blue eyes assessed her from behind avant-garde black wooden eyeglasses. He spoke perfect English with no discernible accent. “I'm in my banker's mufti, but tonight I will don leggings and a tattered ghost shirt and become Takoda. It is a Sioux name meaning Friend to All.” His eyes twinkled. Flirtatiously, she thought.