T. Bunn - Winner Take All

She leaned forward and said in the musical tone that marked Erin at her most dangerous. “It was nice to see how well the cemetery remains tended.”

The Mother Superior’s eyes were gray in the manner of a cloudless sky the hour before dawn, so clear Reiner could look and see nothing but the hated stillness of this place. “The parents still come. Three of their next generation are with us now.”

“How utterly calamitous,” Erin spat back, “that not even they could learn the mistake of their ways.”

Agnes started to reply, then changed her mind. “I will help you,” she decided. “But not for the reasons you think.”

“Of course not.”

“How long do you need us to care for your child?”

“Not long. A week. Perhaps two. Then all this will be settled and behind us.”

Agnes walked around her desk and reached for the child. Reiner’s relief at turning Celeste over must have been evident, for the nun shot him a severe look. Nothing escaped her. Nothing. “How old is she?”

“Sixteen months.”

“Her name?”

“Celeste.”

“She is a beautiful child.”

Erin rose from her chair. “I will pay you, of course.”

“You will do no such thing. When did the child last eat?”

Erin faltered for the first time since entering. She glanced at Reiner, who could only shrug. Agnes observed this as well, and hardened. “Two weeks, Erin. Any longer and I will be forced to ask questions of my own.”

Just before Kirsten’s last visit, the Düsseldorf airport had caught fire and been largely destroyed. She passed through the new soaring steel-and-glass structure with a threatening sense of entering enemy territory.

In her previous existence, Kirsten had made the pilgrimage to Düsseldorf twice each year. The Igedo was the largest fashion event in northern Europe. For five days Düsseldorf’s hotels and restaurants and limo companies and nightclubs and cafés were dominated by the rich and beautiful and impeccably dressed. Cruise boats from as far away as Sicily were moored along the Rhein docks, serving as additional hotels and reception venues. A model with Escada or Ferragamo or Hermès or Jil Sander was queen for a week. The entire city became a runway for the newest and latest. Porsches and Ferraris outnumbered Opels. The moneyed crowd from all over Germany, Scandinavia, Holland, Luxembourg, Belgium, and Eastern Europe came to be part of the spectacle.

She took a taxi to the antiseptic European-style commercial hotel where the London embassy had booked her a room. Once checked in, Kirsten walked the seven blocks to the American Consulate, which through downsizing had relocated from its massive building on the Rhein to a series of rooms above a bank. Kirsten sat in the office of an assistant commercial consul who made no attempt to hide her curiosity. The sealed windows were inch-thick glass embedded in steel frames. A building of dark gray brick rose directly opposite, close enough to touch. The air conditioner’s soft sigh only heightened the claustrophobic closeness. Kirsten waited the woman out, giving nothing in response to her questions.

On the way back to the hotel, she used a pay phone to call the detective. She wanted to meet this man in person. The consulate had obviously alerted him, for he was ready to roll as soon as he heard her name.

Back at the hotel, she called the German lawyer and explained enough to justify the woman shifting her schedule around. As soon as she cut the connection, the front desk rang through to say the detective was downstairs.

In the instant between hanging up and reaching for her purse, the phone rang once more. Kirsten hesitated a long moment, for no one save the consul knew she was here. “Yes?”

A woman demanded, “You are Kirsten Stansted?”

“Who is this?”

“You have friends in high places.” The American voice sounded grated through wire mesh. “There’s a service tonight at the International Church of Düsseldorf.” She spelled out the address.

“Why don’t you just come here?”

“Because you’re being followed. Obviously somebody else thinks you’re important.”

“Did Senator Jacobs’ office tell you I was coming?”

“Seven o’clock, Ms. Stansted. Be on time.”

Downstairs, the detective proved to be extremely German but otherwise cut from the same mold as his British counterpart-former cop, prematurely gray, overdosed eyes, stone voice. An utter professional. He heard her out with scarcely a blink, then only said, “I will require four additional staff. And a retainer, since you are not local.”

“I’ll call as soon as America wakes up to confirm, but for the moment go ahead.”

As he rose to leave, she added, “I’ve just heard I’m being followed.”

“We can check on this also. Do you wish for a bodyguard?”

“Only if it’s for real. What should I do in the meantime?”

“Wherever you go, before anything else,” he instantly replied, “find the rear exit.”

It was a lovely cool day, so Kirsten decided to walk to the restaurant where she had agreed to meet the German lawyer. She took Graf Adolf Strasse to Berliner Allee, passing high-rise thrones for the mighty German alliance. She turned right onto Schadowstrasse, and passed an invisible barrier. Suddenly all the signs were in Japanese, the majority of faces stylishly alien. People greeted one another with oriental bows and voices that sang amid the thundering din of a workaday world.

She entered the restaurant through a series of three doors-sliding glass, then reed, then a portal framed with hand-carved beams. Beyond that opened a world of soft colors and honeyed wood and sparkling fountains and glowing lanterns and bowing ladies in silk robes. Kirsten crossed a tiny stone bridge and entered a tatami-square chamber with sliding shoji screens.

A blond heavyset woman demanded, “Ms. Stansted? I’m Maggie Heller.”

“Nice to meet you.” Kirsten lowered herself onto a cushion. “You’re American?”

“German to the core. But I did my doctorate at NYU, then clerked there for a year. Loved the place too much to stay any longer. It was either get out or change allegiances.” She waited while the waitress made a ballet of slipping out of her wooden clogs, kneeling by the table, and offering them hot towels and tea. “I’ve ordered for us. Hope that’s okay. I’m due back at court in thirty-five minutes.”

“It’s fine.”

Another waitress arrived bearing two lacquered lunch trays of sushi, miso soup, ginger chicken, and rice. Heller’s opening was casually brutal. “Your client stands very little chance of recovering his child. Shall I tell you why?”

“All right.”

“There are several main problems. The first is that German family court does not have the right to enforce its own judgments. Unlike America, our legal system is not set up to be coercive. We can’t send in the federal marshals like you can. But that’s just the start. Our federal government doesn’t have the right to act as amicus curiae . Do you know what that means?”

“A friend of the court.”

“Right. In America, if the government feels a lower court has issued a flawed ruling, it can enter suit in federal court, seeking a new judgment. But over here, the Nazis used the courts as a tool to persecute and destroy. So now civil liberties are tightly protected. Not only that, but many small-town judges are convinced from the outset these half-German children will grow up better in Germany.”

“You’ve handled a lot of these cases.”

“Too many, and the numbers are steadily mounting. I tell the left-behind parent the same thing every time. The German court system is rigged against you. There is a standing rule in our family court system. If the child has been relocated for more than six months, it is too damaging to force another move.”