“Weapons. It’s a lab he called Peenemunde. But that’s all he would say, that’s all. Saying more could get him killed.” He shrugged.
Then Kowalski suddenly started coughing furiously. A nurse appeared. She was a middle-aged hag with hair dyed black. Her face was a smear of mascara. She glared at Olivia.
“Enough already, lady. The reporters have been all over the home.”
To Kowalski she said, “Alright, Eddie, time for your meds.”
Olivia went to Tom.
“This is not right, Tom.”
“What’s not right?”
She glanced at Kowalski. The nurse was administering medication to him now.
“We should give the box back.”
“What’d you mean—”
“It must mean a lot to him.” Olivia took the box from him. She went into the room, ignoring the nurse’s new protest. Olivia knelt by Kowalski.
“We can’t take the box, Eddie.”
“What…”
Kowalski’s eyes were starting to glaze over from the drugs. Olivia touched his arm gently and some alertness came back in his features.
“The box, the items in the box must be worth a fortune if you sold it to collectors. We can’t take it. We’d like to give it back—”
“No, lady. I can’t. Whoever killed Harald is gonna be looking for that box. You think they’d spare me?”
Kowalski shook his head and slipped away into sleep.
Olivia figured that the man was right. The contents of the box were as dangerous as what Harald knew.
The ugly nurse led her out of the room and shut the door.
“Looks like we are stuck with it.” Olivia handed the box back to Tom.
Tom pushed the box back. “No, you keep it. See what you can find.”
“I need a drink.”
“Of course.”
7
Smokey was waiting when Olivia entered her apartment an hour after leaving the Baker Home.
The cat took a look at her and scampered under the table.
“What, you’ve seen me drunk many times, Smokes,” she drawled drunkenly.
She took off her coat and slid the door closed with her heel. She drove the lock in and swept her eyes around her dump. The box from Kowalski was in her hand. She took a look at it again.
Some of the energy she felt as they walked up the hill to meet Kowalski coursed through her again.
Smokey jumped onto the table. The chessboard was opened on it, like a battlefield, soldiers alert and prepared for an unfinished war.
“No, man. No chess tonight. I’m working again.”
The cat stared at her and Olivia could have sworn there was surprise on that feline face.
It was dark outside and a little chilly. She drew the curtains together and shut the windows.
Ten minutes later she came out of a hot bath, dripping and bright-eyed. She fed her cat, insisted on no chess games again, and of course, no booze.
Hallelujah, she thought.
Laptop up and running, a bag of potato chips on standby, and she was searching for the things Hitler and his scientists did in World War Two.
Olivia ran a search on Peenemunde.
It turned up quite interesting articles about the Third Reich and the quest for weapons supremacy. There were laboratories, as she was told by Kowalski. She had gone through the contents of the box again with Tom Garcia.
There was a piece of paper, yellowed with age and worn from so much thumbing. On both sides there was scribbling of various sorts; mathematical formulas, theorems, drawings of strange looking organisms. There were also rocket diagrams.
On one very soiled piece of paper there were the following numbers:
778460007, 1666759949
7525097660071389
75251S00714W
7515059S04283W
751535S0417W
Tom had joked about the numbers. “They could be lottery numbers.”
Her search hit a snag when she found the present site of the labs in Peenemunde was now occupied by residential buildings. She felt a finger of disappointment.
What did she expect? Was she hoping to make a trip down there? How could she finance such a trip?
And the other objects in the box.
There were two objects. One that she understood well and another that befuddled her. The first one was what she was sure used to be an insignia on a ring, the swastika wrought in gold and red.
The other object was the size of an infant's fist. It was lighter than it looked, made from aluminum and rough around the edges. It was shaped like a cross and had a ragged hole in the middle.
Olivia took photos of the object with her mobile phone.
Her eyes stung. She rubbed them. She pushed the thought of a drink aside but it wouldn’t go away. She went into the bathroom to pour water on her face.
There, in the bathroom, she got a load of what she had become in the past months.
Lines, on the corners of her eyes, were deeper.
The flesh around her mouth sagged. She was staring at a tired, nervous woman who’s running from her reality. That familiar lump rose from below and lodged itself in her throat.
“No.” She shut her eyes. She would not cry. She was strong.
She dropped into her bed, face down, minutes after.
The phone woke her. It was the sheriff. His voice was dry and raspy. Olivia concluded that he hadn’t slept well too. She had cruised from layers of wakefulness to sleepy, intermittently.
“What have you got?”
“A bunch of things,” she said, sitting up in bed. Early morning brightness washed through the closed windows. She wanted that glow now.
“Harald Kruger was an important guy, considering where he worked in the war, a science lab in Peenemunde. According to sources, that lab was the only one of them that the small tramp visited—”
“Small tramp?”
“That was what the press here called Hitler.”
“And those little things in the box?”
“I hit a snag there, Tom.” She reached over for her note on the table close by. “The lab is not there anymore. And as far as the web is concerned, Antarctica is just a patch of ice and glaciers, no hidden labs or underground stations.”
“Of course, if there is anything there it couldn’t be so obvious, right.”
“I know that,” agreed Olivia.
Governments were covering up things all the time. She wondered if the CIA might know something about a hidden station underneath the ice.
“And the lottery numbers?”
Olivia snickered. “Not on your life, Tom. As far as I know they are just numbers. You could run them through your contacts in Washington DC.”
Tom groaned, “No, not now. I’d like for us to put this under wraps for now. Best not to jeopardize this investigation early, especially if it’s something big. And I think it is.”
Tom said he wanted to get to the station and see what else the boys there have dug up about Harald “John Doe” Kruger. Olivia, on her part, promised to keep digging.
It was Smokey who reminded her that she needed to do something about John’s funeral anniversary. Not that she didn’t remember, she did.
The death of a loved one was a complicated thing to deal with; you were afraid that now that they were gone, you just might lose them totally, even from your memory. And you didn’t want this to happen.
Secondly, you hope that you’d just as soon forget them so you can move on in life. This is the hardest part. Some deal with the painful intricacies of this shove and pull by working harder. Others leave the place they shared with the loved.
For Olivia, she took alcohol to forget.
In honor of John, her lover, she did house cleaning. She took all the empty bottles and trashed them. She vacuumed, put away used clothes, and did the dishes. She aired the kitchen, where cockroaches had taken over the tenancy.