Paul Christopher - Michelangelo_s Notebook

“Like what?”

“Some kind of special mission. Six trucks-Opels, not Mercedes. That means they’re gas, not diesel, and that means they’re meant to move fast. Six trucks like that wouldn’t be used to guard troops, and they wouldn’t waste more gas on them lights like they were doing last night. It’s maybe bigwig Krauts taking a powder, but you’d think they’d be in staff cars. The officer I saw was wearing a general’s uniform but he was too young, no more than thirty-five. He’s gotta be a phony.”

“Your conclusion?”

“Like I said, some kind of secret thing, hot-footing it, you know. They’re carrying something-loot, papers, something valuable.” He paused and cleared his throat. “And then there’s the broad.”

“The woman you mentioned.”

“Yes, sir.”

“A phantom perhaps, wishful thinking?” Cornwall said with a faint smile.

“No, sir. She was real enough.”

“You mentioned before that it might have been some relation to the occupant of the farm. What about the hypothesis?”

I don’t know about any hypo thing, but I know she was real and if she was some farmer’s wife or something she wouldn’t have been walking around free like that in the middle of the night.”

“Do you think it might be important? Tactically.”

“Tactics aren’t my business any more than hypo-watsits. I saw a broad. I thought you should know, that’s all.”

“All right,” said Cornwall. “Now I know.”

“So what do you want to do?” the sergeant asked. “The sniper saw us coming. They’ll make a move before we do, try to break out, maybe.”

“What would you do?”

The sergeant smiled. He knew that Cornwall was looking for more than just advice. He was asking for some kind of plan because he didn’t have any fucking idea of what he was doing.

“Depends on whether or not you want to keep those trucks from getting blown to shit or not.”

“That would be preferable.”

“Then we hit them first, before they can do anything. Hold them down with the fifty-caliber, blowing the fucking sniper out of his fucking tower with Terhune’s M9 and go in hard.”

“Day or night?”

The sergeant resisted the urge to tell Cornwall not to be an asshole. “Night.”

“All right,” the lieutenant said again. “Let me think about it.”

Just so long as you don’t think about it for too fucking long, thought the sergeant, but he kept his mouth shut and thought about the broad and the bogus general instead.

He reached out and let his long, bony index finger play over the faded photograph pasted neatly into the Great Book beside the careful drawing of the farm: Stabsfuhrer Gerhard Utikal of Einsatzstab Rosenberg, last seen in the early spring of 1945 near Fussen and Schloss Neuschwanstein in the Bavarian Alps. In the picture he was in his early thirties, wearing, illegally as it turned out, the uniform of a Wehrmacht Hauptman, squinting into the sunlight in three-quarter profile, trees and a large ornamental pool behind him, the snapshot probably taken at Versailles or the Tuileries Gardens in Paris sometime between 1941 and 1943, his years of duty there.

The naked, gray-haired man smiled vaguely, remembering. Gerhard Utikal had been the first, so long ago now. According to all the files Utikal had vanished like smoke, but in time he’d found him, living in Uruguay, dividing his time between an apartment on the Playa Ramirez in Montevideo and a huge ranch in Argentina on the far side of the River Platte. By then Eichmann had been taken and the Butcher of Riga, Herberts Cukurs, had been liquidated by an Israeli death squad after boasting to journalist Jack Anderson that he was “invincible.”

Utikal wasn’t invincible, just smarter. Instead of keeping a set of neatly pressed Nazi uniforms in his closet like the Latvian had, he had chosen instead to hide in plain sight, adopting the identity of one of the interned sailors from the scuttled battleship Graf Spee. It worked for the better part of twenty-five years, but not quite long enough or well enough.

The naked man put the tip of his finger over the face in the photograph. The first of many, and more to come. Utikal had screamed as the first tenpenny nail was pushed slowly into his left eye, then died, twisting horribly in the chair as the second three-inch sliver was pushed into the right. The naked man closed the Great Book.

“Mirabile Dictu,” he whispered softly. Miraculous to say. “Kyrie eleison.” Lord, have mercy on our souls.

Valentine’s kitchen on the top floor of Ex Libris was a paean of praise to a fifties that Finn had never known. The floors were covered in blue and white linoleum tile, the cupboards were yellow with chrome handles and white interiors, and the two small country-style windows that looked out onto the roof garden planted with staked tomatoes were trimmed in blue chintz.

The stove was a forty-inch Gaffers amp; Sattler factory-yellow four-burner gas range with a thermal eye, heat-timer griddle, and a fifth burner. The refrigerator was a 1956 turquoise Kelvinator. There was a Rival waffle maker on the yellow-flecked Formica countertop along with a bullet-shaped chrome toaster and a huge chrome breadbox that actually hid a very up-to-date microwave.

There was a four-seat yellow vinyl and chrome dinette set in the middle of the room, and off in one corner there was a sky blue vinyl breakfast nook under one of the windows. Finn, wearing her panties and one of Valentine’s crisp Sea Island cotton white shirts, was lounging in the breakfast nook, drinking coffee brewed in the big silver GE percolator. Valentine, nude except for an idiotic barbecue apron that said “A little sugar for the chef makes sure the cookin’ is sweet,” was making scrambled eggs at the stove. Finn reached out onto the breakfast nook table and toyed with the green-skirted, hula-dancing, ukulele-playing ceramic boy and girl salt-and-pepper shakers. According to the tail-swinging, eye-rolling cat clock over the sink it was just after eight in the morning. Apparently everything in the fifties had been in pastel shades of “cute.” Tellingly, there was no visible dishwasher-or at least one that she could see at first glance.

The whole thing was ridiculous to the point of fetish, but she knew it was almost certainly accurate down to the plastic laminated cowgirl placemats and the bright yellow “Mornin’ Ma’am” cowboy coffee mugs. She felt herself remembering their time in his bed the night before. She stretched in her seat, a shiver running through her from the back of her neck to the pit of her stomach. There was no doubt that Valentine was a perfectionist in everything he did.

“You always show your women a good time like this?” She grinned.

He turned and smiled, looking at her, the expression on his face taking ten hard years off his face.

“There aren’t that many to show a good time to,” he answered. Finn almost said something but stopped herself. She had a pretty good idea that Valentine was a lot like the guys she’d yearned after in high school. They didn’t have the slightest idea they were attractive, which in itself made them even more so. On the other hand, his love-making had been smooth, practiced and knowledgeable. Could you know a lot about women without knowing a lot of women? She stopped herself from thinking about it at all. They’d made love for hours and it had been wonderful. That was all she needed-or wanted-to know right now, certainly not his reasons for doing it, or hers. Maybe she’d been in school for too long; this was the real world. And she didn’t want to think about that too much either.

Valentine took two plates out of the warming oven, slid a mound of scrambled eggs onto each then went back for the toast and bacon. He picked up both plates and fitted them into his right hand, then snagged the ketchup off the counter with his left. He brought the meal expertly across the room, put everything down on the breakfast nook table and slid onto the blue vinyl seat. He slid the plates onto the placemats, and they began to eat, talking easily between bites with no obvious discomfort at their situation. To Finn it felt as though they’d been lovers forever, which was a little scary.