The Julian Secret (Lang Reilly Thrillers) (6 page)

Once on the eastern side of the river, Sonia turned left on the Paseo de Crisobal Colon and the streets became narrow and twisted. Stuccoed buildings hid behind walls of handmade brick, their orange tiled roofs visible. They were in the old part of the city.

The Hotel Alfonso XII was a structure in an impressive mock-Mudejar style. Its abundance of Moorish flourishes, impeccable service, and lavish accommodations were such that, according to Sonia, the guests to Spain’s most recent regal wedding had stayed there, having only to cross Calle San Francisco and the small Plaza de Jerez to the cathedral to watch the eldest royal daughter marry a Spanish nobleman.

But they would have had trouble reaching the venerable church today. The street was filled from curb to curb by men in black robes, peaked hats, masks, and with bare feet. Most dragged wooden crosses.

“What is that—who are those
volk?”
Gurt asked from the backseat.

“Looks like the Ku Klux Klan,” Lang observed. “Except they’re wearing the wrong color.”

“Penitents,” Sonia explained. “This is Good Friday,
the Friday before Easter. This is the next-to-last Seana Santa, Holy Week, celebration. The men in the robes seek forgiveness of sins committed the year past.”

“Not hard to see where Nathan Bedford Forrest got his idea for the Invisible Empire,” Lang muttered.

“Who?” Gurt wanted to know.

If there was anything Lang did not want to have to explain, justify, or apologize for, it was a post–Civil War organization that had morphed into one of America’s most famous hate groups. “Nothing. Can we edge by into the parking lot?”

An hour later, the streets were empty of those hoping to clear their souls. Lang and Gurt rode with Sonia down narrow cobblestone streets until huge wrought iron gates opened to admit them to the loveliest patio Lang had ever seen.

Lang got out on the street. “We could have walked.”

Sonia nodded in agreement. “I had to bring the car back.”

Lang hesitated before entering the enclosure, reaching up to pick a ripe orange from one of a line of trees. He followed the Mercedes into the patio as the gates slowly swung shut, peeling the fruit as he went. The first bite brought such an explosion of sour acid into his mouth that he spat the pulp without thinking.

Sonia, unsuccessful at hiding a grin at his discomfort, said,
“Anglese
. We call those oranges ‘English’ because only the English buy them.”

Lang spat again, but the bitterness remained. “The English eat them?”

Sonia could no longer suppress a laugh. “Eat them? No, Mr. Reilly, they make their beloved marmalade from the rinds.”

Lang was wondering if he could ever enjoy that jam on his breakfast toast again when a tall, blond woman
came out of the house. Wearing her hair pulled behind her head only emphasized the long, almost equine, face. Her height seemed to give her an awkwardness so that she appeared to walk with disjointed steps, as if her bones had not been properly attached to her body.

She extended a narrow, knobby hand. “Langford Reilly. My dad told me about you. I’m Jessica Huff.”

Lang took the hand. “Most likely he told you what a young idiot I was.”

She gave a sad smile as she turned to Gurt, just now climbing out of the Mercedes. “And you are Lang’s wife?”

Gurt shot a warning look at Lang. “No. I am Gurt Fuchs.”

Puzzled, Jessica shook Gurt’s hand anyway, waiting for an explanation.

When she realized none was forthcoming, she gestured toward the house. “Let’s go in. I appreciate your coming.”

Jessica ushered them into a wood-paneled room and indicated they should sit. Lang was surprised at the comfort afforded by the uninviting chair of leather and wood carved in the Spanish fashion.

Sonia appeared with a tray of coffee cups.

“Again,” Jessica said, “I appreciate your coming.”

Lang accepted a cup, tried to balance it on the narrow arm of his chair, and conceded he would simply have to hold it. “Again, I owed your father big-time and we’ll help any way we can. But I don’t know what we can do. If Don spoke of me at all, you know I wasn’t in Ops. I sure didn’t learn anything about criminal investigation.”

Jessica nodded, a person not surprised. “You were one of the few of my father’s former, er, associates, he ever mentioned. I didn’t know who else to turn to.”

Gurt’s head swiveled, following the conversation.

Lang took an experimental sip of the coffee. It was as bitter as the orange. “Have the local police any idea who . . . ?”

Jessica clasped her hands. Lang noticed they were red, as though she had been doing laundry in strong detergent. “That’s just it. They aren’t doing anything. I mean, they came to the house, poked around, asked questions. Since Dad wasn’t a local, I get the impression his . . . his murder is permanently going on the back burner. They don’t have a clue.”

“And you do?”

She glanced at the heavy beams in the ceiling as though seeking inspiration. “It had to be because of the book he was writing.”

Lang shifted in his chair, uncertain how long he could hold the cup in his hands. “The book—what was it about?”

“Some Nazi. His name sounded Polish or something, not German. After the war he, the Nazi, wound up in Spain. Dad came here to do research.”

Lang glanced at Gurt. She was no help. World War II was something intentionally slipping from the German national memory. She would have been more helpful with the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

Her people won that one.

“But who . . . ?” Lang began.

“Some group of Nazis,” Jessica explained. “People who don’t want that book published.”

Lang finally got up and placed his half-empty cup on a small oak chest with brass edges. He spoke as he returned to his seat. “Jessica, anyone who fought in that war would be nearly or over eighty. I can’t see someone that age killing anyone.”

“I’m not suggesting they did it personally. Eighty years old or not, no one wants to go to jail. How often
do you read in the papers that some retired autoworker is being shipped back to Eastern Europe to stand trial for war crimes or an old man living on a beach in Florida was actually a concentration-camp guard?”

Lang had to admit she was right. Old or not, no former Nazi was going to prison if he could avoid it.

She continued. “I read about a secret organization of SS officers,” she said almost crossly. “They didn’t hesitate to kill when it suited them.”

“Odessa, in popular fiction of a few years back. It
was
fiction.”

“The name was, er, fiction,” Gurt said, breaking her silence, “but the group was real.
Die Spinne
, the spider. I remember my father of it talking. The Communists wanted such organizations destroyed as much as did the Americans. It was one of the few areas of cooperation.”

Jessica was showing an interest in Gurt. “Your father?”

“He was in the East German government,” Gurt said, as if that explained everything.

Lang stood again. “I have no idea what I’m looking for, Jessica, but I’d like to see the room where . . .”

She also stood and headed for a staircase. “Daddy used one of the upstairs rooms.”

Lang hated talking to the back of someone’s head, so he saved further questions until he, Jessica, and Gurt were on a gallery above the first floor. “Who knew about the book?”

Jessica shrugged. “Everybody, I guess. I mean, he hassled his old buddies for a chance to see the files of the old OSS. That was what the Agency was called during the war, Office of Strategic Services. I know he already had a literary agent, and I think she was negotiating with a publisher. The book wasn’t a secret. Other than research in Spain and that it was about some Nazi, I didn’t
really know much about it.” She stopped and opened a door. “This is it.”

Lang walked into a room equipped as an office might be: two desks, two computers, each with a printer. Government-issue bookshelves, gray metal, lined one wall filled with stacks of papers, books, and a dinner plate with a thriving colony of mold.

“You and Sonia have cleaned up?” Lang wanted to know.

“That’s what I was doing while Sonia went to the airport.” She nodded to the increasing green on the plate. “As you can see, I haven’t finished. That’s why I booked you into a hotel. Sonia won’t come in here. She’s the one who found Daddy when she came to work the day before yesterday. He was lying right here,” she pointed, “partially blocking the door.”

Lang took a closer look around the room. “If he was blocking the door, how . . . ?”

“The room adjoins another,” Jessica said. “In fact, almost all of the bedrooms in the house adjoin each other. It used to be a method of ventilation.”

And assignations
, Lang thought but did not say. Don Juan’s largely boastful memoirs were full of adjoining bedchambers. “Did the police check the other rooms?”

“I—I guess so. You’ll have to ask Sonia. I didn’t get here until yesterday. I called you before I left. Anyway, Sonia was here when the police inspected the place.”

Gurt had been poking through the stacks of papers. She held up several. “These are research notes all. Does anyone have the manu, manu . . .”

“Manuscript,” Lang finished.

“Does anyone have a copy of the whole manuscript?”

Jessica shook her head. “According to Sonia, there was only one complete copy, but it is missing along with the computer’s hard drive.”

So much for the theory Don Huff was killed for something other than the manuscript.

“And this?” Gurt was holding up a small metal filing box full of index cards, a device that reminded Lang of how he wrote term papers in the age before computers.

Jessica shrugged again. “I don’t know. I hadn’t seen Dad in over two years, had no idea even how he was going about his writing.”

Lang took the box from Gurt. Each card had a single name, address, and what Lang gathered to be phone numbers at the top. Under that were one or two words in what looked like German. The rest of the card had handwritten dates, some as recent as two weeks ago.

Lang handed it back to Gurt. “What do you make out of the cards?”

She flipped through slowly. “It is a list of subject matter and people. For instance, here is someone with a reference to the Nuremberg Trials, another with reference to a parachute jump over Crete.”

“What does that all have in common?” Lang asked.

No one had an answer.

Hotel Alphonso XIII
17:30 (the same day)

A call to the police station from Don Huff’s house had informed Lang that Inspector Pedro Mendezo, the investigating officer, observed the usual siesta and would return to duty around 18:00, six o’clock. With nothing better to do and the shops shuttered for the next four hours, Gurt and Lang had returned to the hotel. Before succumbing to jet lag, they had made love, a wild and noisy affair that Lang suspected could be heard all the way down the sumptuous hall.

Neither cared.

Refreshed and sated, they awoke famished.

“Should I telephone the room servicers?” Gurt asked.

“Room
service
. No, let’s go out,” Lang called back from a shower that far exceeded those in most European hotels.

This one allowed the bather to actually stand rather
than squat in a tub while using a flexible hose with a nozzle at one end. The normal arrangement reminded him of the German word for shower,
Dusche
. Stepping out of the shower, he helped himself to a luxurious robe and walked into the other room, where Gurt was lighting her first cigarette of the day.

“Do you have to?” he asked.

“You smoke cigars,” she replied, shaking out a match.

“Once or twice a month, maybe.”

“So your cigars are five or six times larger than my cigarettes. I smoke one, two cigarettes a day—it is the same, yes?”

There was a logic error there somewhere, but Lang wasn’t sure where. At least he had gotten her habit down from over a pack a day. If she didn’t quit, she wasn’t going to be around long enough to become the next Mrs. Lang Reilly. So far, though, he had had little luck in persuading her into marriage. Instead, she seemed perfectly content, pointing out that their relationship worked just fine as is. He had had no success in finding the logic error there, either.

Minutes later, they were getting out of a taxi in front of a building with the unmistakable facade common to 1930s-era dictators, a style of architecture Lang referred to as Fascist Modern. After they passed through metal detectors found in public buildings worldwide, a uniformed officer directed them to the office of Inspector Mendezo.

Blinds against the still-fierce afternoon sun created an artificial twilight. Silhouetted by a dim lamp, a thin figure rose to extend a hand and a
“Buenos dias.”
A chink in the blinds behind him allowed sunlight into the two visitor’s chairs in front of the desk, an arrangement that made it difficult to see the face of whoever was behind the desk, a setup Lang was certain was intentional.

In Spain, manners required the usual prefatory discussion of the weather, Lang and Gurt’s accommodations, their impressions of Seville, and the inspector’s recommendations as to local restaurants, a suggestion that was amended when he learned of their arrival by private plane. Lang guessed his potential dinner tab had doubled.

Preliminaries out of the way, the inspector produced a pack of cigarettes and looked at Gurt. She nodded, producing a pack of her own. Lang, unable to say a word, prepared for a double volume of secondhand smoke.

Or double lungful.

The inspector leaned across the desk with a gallant flourish to light Gurt’s smoke with a lighter encased in gold. Pushing a cheap glass ashtray across the desk, he asked in heavily accented English, “So how may I help you?”

Although he couldn’t see the face because of the light in his eyes, Lang would have bet the policeman was giving Gurt an appraising stare. “The Huff murder,” Lang said. “His daughter asked us to look into it.”

“Hmmph!” Lang could not tell if the snort was derisive or angry. “Americans. They see too many detective programs on the televisions, believe every crime can be solved in sixty minutes with time for advertising. Even in your country, I think crime is not solved that quickly.”