The Diaries - 01 (30 page)

“
Zusammen
,” he
agreed, speaking her native tongue.
 
He
pulled on his coat and, without another word, he was gone, locking the door
behind him.

 
 
***

Monika retrieved
the diary from the bag, nestling back into her semi-comfortable sleep spot on
the lumpy bed.
 
She was nearing the end
of the 1938 entries, reading another passage about Greta’s thoughtful new
husband, Heinrich.
 
She turned her eyes
beside the bed, to the dinged-up nightstand.
 
On the top sat an old push-button phone, the brown handle marked by
years of palm sweat and face oil.
 
Monika
rolled over, opening the drawer.
 
A phone
book, out of date but still viable for what she wanted.
 
She pulled the thick book to the bed, opening
it.
 
Her fingers went to the J’s, but she
didn’t find what she was looking for.
 
She checked the H’s, for der Holocaust.
 
No.

She closed her
eyes, trying to envision the rows and rows of embassies and consulates just
outside of the financial district.
 
In
the warmer months, she and Gage had walked by the Center ten times.

The Center!

Something-something-Center.
 
The name of the institute, the center, is named
after a man’s name…Isaac something…

Monika tugged on
her hair with both hands.
 
“Argh.”

The sign out front listed the cities the
center existed in: New York, Amsterdam, Tel Aviv, Warsaw…

Isaac.
 
Isaac what?

She racked her
brain for five full minutes, and was just sliding the book back into the drawer
when the name hit her—the Isaac
Bettelheim
Center!
 
New York, Amsterdam, Tel Aviv,
Warsaw, and Frankfurt.
 
Monica flipped
through the book, finding the number.
 
As
the phone rang, she shot a glance at her watch.
 
Five until six.

“Hallo?”
 

Monika fingered
the diary.
 
“Could you please put me
through to whoever helps locate displaced people?”

“One moment.”
 
A long period of silence.
 
Click.
 

“
Ja
?”
 
A woman.

“I’m hoping you
might help me locate someone.”

“Of course.”

“Wonderful!
 
The last name…well…where we would need to
start is Heinrich Morgenstern of—”

“Young lady,” the
woman said, cutting her off.
 
“Before you
get in to all that, you’ll need to bring two forms of identification down here
with, of course, a certified consent form or a court order.
 
The consent form can be printed from our
website and needs to have a seal from—”

“You can’t help me
on the phone?” she asked, interrupting what sounded like a boilerplate
rejection speech.

“No, I
can’t.”
 
It was nearly six o’clock, and
the woman’s tone of voice sounded like it, short and snippy.
 
“And once you get all these items, searches
take a minimum of fourteen days.”

Monika let out a
loud breath.
 
“And if this call happens
to be an emergency?”

“Then call
someplace else.
 
I can’t help you.”

“Okay, then,”
Monika said.
 
“When do you close?”

“In about one
minute.”

“Thanks for being
so helpful.”

The woman hung up.

Bitch.

Monica stood and
crossed the room.
 
There was a
college-style refrigerator in the corner.
 
Prices for the enclosed drinks were boldly labeled on the brown
door.
 
She opened the fridge, retrieving
a pilsner beer, popping the top with the hanging bottle opener.
 
Monika lit a cigarette and sat on the bed,
crossing her legs.
 
She took a mighty
swig followed by a luxurious drag of the cigarette.
 
Her gaze drifted to the right.
 
The brown clock with the digital red numerals
now read 18:03.
 
She looked at the phone
again, narrowing her eyes.

After dialing the
numbers, she heard the recorded message.
 
She touched zero.
 
Another message
came on.
 
She touched zero again.
 
A different ring.

“Hallo,” a man
answered.
 
He sounded out of breath, as
if he’d run to catch the phone.

“Hi,” Monica said
cheerfully.
 
“I know you’re closed, but
can you help me?”

“Well, I don’t
know yet.
 
What do you want?”
 
His voice was helpful, flirty.
 
His accent sounded like he might be from England,
or perhaps Scotland.

“I just called,
trying to locate someone displaced by the Holocaust.
 
The woman I spoke with was…well, let’s just
call her less than helpful.”

The man chortled.
 
“That would have been Angela.
 
She’s not known for her personal warmth, or
her phone skills.”

Monika agreed with
him, laughing extra hard.
 
She
quieted.
 
“May I ask your name?”

“Sure.
 
It’s Liam.
 
And yours?”

“Monika.”

“Well, Monika, how
can I help you?”

“I need you to
break a silly little rule for me.
 
It’s
extremely urgent, Liam.
 
I’m leaving
tomorrow, and I have something of great value, an inheritance, to give to someone,
assuming she’s still alive.”

“Let me
guess…you’re hoping I’ll give you a name and address.”

“You got it.”

A pause.
 
“I can’t do that.”

“Liam…” her tone
was still good-humored.
 
“You can’t, or
you won’t?”

He chuckled again.
 
“Won’t.”

“So you
could?
”

“I have no way of
knowing that…yet.”

Monika retrieved the
diary.
 
“So
if
you could, just theoretically, would you start with a computer
search?”

“Theoretically,
yes.”

“And are you at
your computer?”

“I am.”

She stared at the
diary.
 
“Heinrich Morgenstern, taken away
by the…well…you know the whole back-story.
 
He was taken from here in Frankfurt, in thirty-eight, killed the same
year.
 
He was a grocer, if that helps.”

Monika could hear
his breathing over the phone line.
 
Other
than that, he was silent for a half a minute.
 
She matched his silence.
 
Come on Liam, damn it!
 
Live a little!
 
Then she heard keystrokes.
 
Thank
you, Liam!
 
If I was there I would kiss
you on your cheek.

“A grocer, you
say?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Okay,” Liam
answered.
 
“
Theoretically
, he could have existed.”

“With a wife named
Greta?”

“In theory, yes.”

“She was murdered
a short time later.
 
I know all this,
Liam, so you’re not helping me yet.”
 

Liam was silent.

Monika took a deep
breath.
 
“Here’s where I need your help,
Liam, theoretically.”

“
Mmm
-hmm.”

“Greta had a
child.
 
She wasn’t Heinrich’s, but kind
man he was, he took her and the child in.
 
The
Stolpersteine
in front of their home in the West End shows them being killed, but says
nothing else about the family.”
 
Monika
gripped the receiver tightly.
 
“Liam, do
you have anything on your screen about that child?”

Liam cleared his
throat.
 
“Monika, assuming I did,
compromising this person’s identity, this person’s privacy, would be a horrid,
gross abuse of ethics.
 
It would go
against everything our center was created for.”

Monika added an
edge to her voice.
 
“Liam, thanks for
your help thus far, but please, hear my little plea.
 
I’m not Jewish, I’m German.
 
That being said, I think what some of our forebears
did is despicable and without comparison.
 
And while you don’t know me, I’m trying to do something potentially
life-altering here.”
 
She realized she
was nearly yelling.
 
She calmed her voice.
 
“My intent isn’t malicious, but if you don’t
help me right now, things are going to happen which will prevent me from ever
setting this situation right.”

Liam listened
silently, following Monika’s entreaty with a series of personal curses.
 
She could hear him moaning, groaning, letting
out long breaths.
 
Finally, when she knew
she had him, she heard him, in English, whisper the phrase “
fuck it
.”

Eyes wide, brown
hotel pen in hand, Monica furiously scribbled the brief amount of information
Liam relayed to her.
 
After promising him
a few beers in the very near future, she hung up the phone, staring at the
notes she’d made.

She held the sheet
of paper in one hand, the beer in the other, doing a quick dance around the
room.
 
Gage was going to be so surprised!

 
 
***

The early evening streets
were dark and rainy, the wet sidewalks reflecting the hard lights of a city well
into an unusually frigid autumn.
 
Pockets
of snow still clung to corners and patches of dead grass, vanishing slowly from
the rain.
 
What few people that were on
the street kept their eyes down and their jackets pulled tight; evenings such
as this weren’t made for dallying.
 
Gage
stood under the covered bus stop two blocks away trying to flag a taxi, keeping
his face downcast on the off chance that someone might see him.
 
Had he left the hotel a half-hour later, he
might have been able to avert what was soon to occur.

Not long after
Gage’s taxi pulled away from the train station, a large four-door Opel parked
two blocks away in a deserted alley.
 
Its
plates were German, stolen an hour before from a business vehicle whose owner
wouldn’t notice until the next morning.
 
The driver and another man exited the vehicle, walking back the way they
had just driven and then turning onto
Niddastrasse
,
headed in the general vicinity of the Frankfurt
Hauptbahnhof
.

One of the men
limped slightly.
 
He was Bruno Florence, his
forehead stitched poorly by one of the Glaives’ on-the-take doctors.
 
His head still ached from the vicious blows
to the head courtesy of a blackjack and a nickel-plated pistol.
 
“Just two cuts and a nasty bruise,” the South
African doctor had told him, silently considering Bruno a pussy for the way he
had nearly fainted as he had added six stitches to his forehead without the
benefit of any anesthetic.

Bruno and the
other man, Luc, his roommate, brother, and a ranking lieutenant in the
Les Glaives du
Peuple
,
had spent the past hour on the phone listening to instructions from Marcel, along
with occasional profane outbursts from Nicky.
 
Marcel’s asset had tracked the couple to a hotel and, after making
several calls to people who owed Nicky favors, they were eventually able to
find a polizei vice cop who was dirty.
 
He stopped by the hotel an hour before, shaking the clerk down and
making him tell him what room it was that had been checked into by the blond
man and the olive-skinned beauty.

The two goons had
been twenty minutes outside of Frankfurt, stealing the license plate, when they
had gotten word.
 
Third floor, room F.

“Don’t kill them,”
Marcel commanded when Nicky had stepped away from the phone.
 
“Nicky wants revenge on the man
only
.
 
Just let the girl go and take
him
,
you got that?”

Stopping outside
the hotel, the two men pulled gloves onto their hands and glanced into the small,
poorly appointed lobby; no one was visible.
 
They entered, Luc pushing his gloves through his black hair, squeezing
the rain backward as the remainder trickled down his face.
 
They used the stairs to climb to the third
floor.
 
Once there, the two men crept
down the hall, headed toward room F, located at the end.

***

Gage exited the
taxi near the storage space, this time well west of the
Leipziger
Strasse
U-
bahn
stop.
 
His location was out of view of the cameras,
although not by his own design.
 
He
stepped into a small store, knowing it was set to close in minutes, purchasing
two types of hair-dye and a pair of shearing scissors.
 
A red-head and a platinum blonde: he would
let Monika choose the one she wanted.