“All right, Lotte, HI fix it for you.” Inside the room the guy who liked to kill little girls was dragging the moaning kid over to a hobby horse with a large leather phallus built into its back. He hoisted her up on top and rammed her onto the thing then started rocking her back and forth, laughing and cursing as blood began to dribble down over the saddle. He seemed to have gained about an inch in the process. “But I can’t do anything before tomorrow, it’s too late.”
“We have a deal, Lieutenant.” She turned and started down the hall. “I’ll take you to Penny now.” She moved in a supple liquid motion, almost boneless, the long dress rustling over the red and black tiled floor. I wondered if she rattled when she was angry.
We went up a spiral staircase to the second floor and stopped at the first door on the landing. Lotte went through the mirror check, then stepped aside so I could view the merchandise.
“She’s almost through, and she doesn’t have another session for an hour. You can take your time, but give her ten minutes to take her bath before you go.”
I nodded, and looked through the peephole. Penny was a pretty little girl of eight or nine with long blonde hair. She was dressed up in a little blue and pink sailor suit and looked, intentionally or otherwise, like Shirley Temple in “The Good Ship Lollipop.” Right now she was crouched between the legs of an immensely fat nude man, his pendulous stomach enveloping her face as she worked.
“You can have her if you’ve got time,” Lotte said, “on the house. But remind her to brush her teeth before her next client, he’s a stickler for hygiene.” She turned to go. “Call me tomorrow afternoon about the Slavs. And remember, between six and fourteen, and decent looking too, tell them I’ll come up and make the selection myself every month.” She paused. “Do they ever make an exception about the tracheotomy?”
“No, it’s done at birth.”
Lotte looked disappointed. “Our customers like them to scream. Oh well, you can’t have everything.” She slithered off down the hall and I returned my attention to the mirror. Penny was through now and the man was getting dressed while she perched on the edge of the bed, fondling a floppy teddy bear. He patted her on the head and headed for the door, a pleased smile on his face, so I stepped to one side.
“Goodbye, sweetheart, I’ll see you next week.” He noticed me and nodded affably. “A little darling, sir, you won’t be disappointed. Just like your own daughter.”
Penny looked up with a bright toothy smile as I came in.
“Hello. Are you next?”
She had dimples, too.
“No, Penny, but Miss Lotte said I can talk to you. You don’t mind, do you?”
“Oh no.” Her soft lips pursed in “a small frown. “She’s funny, Miss Lotte. I don’t think she ever has any fun.”
Lotte wasn’t exactly Miss Conviviality, come to think of it. I closed the door behind me and walked toward her. “Do you mind if I join you?”
“Oh, no.” She patted the bed next to her and I sat down. I wasn’t very experienced in handling kids, but this one didn’t seem to require much ice-breaking.
“This is Peter,” she said, holding out the teddy bear for inspection. “He’s not really a teddy bear, he’s really a prince enchanted into a teddy bear. His real name is Prince Peter.” She added as an afterthought, “I think witches must look a lot like Miss Lotte. Don’t you?”
“I’d put money on it. Look Penny, there was a man who used to come here to see you, an old man with gray hair, you met him in the park and all he wanted to do was talk. Do you remember him?”
“Oh, sure I do.” Her china blue eyes were bright. “He gave me Peter, and he told me all about the enchantment. He knows all kinds of stories like that, about dragons and castles and magic and things. I like him a lot.”
“Did he tell you his name, Penny?”
“Oh yes. His name is Papa, he said to call him Papa.”
Papa. The next one I had to phrase carefully. “How did he talk, Penny. Was there anything… different about his voice?”
“No.” She frowned again. “Oh well I guess so, not that different, but a little different. Like the Captain.”
“The Captain?”
“Oh yes, he talks the same way. He must have looked like a prince when he was young too, he’s still very handsome. He has a scar on his face and everything, from a sword he told me, just like the knights in armor. And he wears a pretty uniform all black and silver with those things like lightning all over.”
I stiffened. God, there might be something here after all. She was describing the uniform of the SS Fuhrerkorps, an elite, all-German division of the Waffen SS. If Papa spoke like the Captain, Papa was German. And Pickett had told me the old man who attacked him in the antique shop had a German accent. God, just maybe. Maybe.
“When was the last time’ you saw Papa?”
She thought about that for a moment.
“I guess it was two weeks ago, yes I think it was two weeks. It wasn’t last week because Mr. Zeelan came and then I was sick till the weekend, so it must have been two weeks.” She smiled brightly at me. “Are you a friend of Papa’s?”
“Yes, yes I am,” I said carefully. “Papa called me, he has another present for you, but he can’t take it himself because he has a bad cold and has to stay in bed for a while, so he wants me to bring it to you.”
She nodded gravely.
“Yes, I have to stay in bed too after Mr. Zeelan comes. That’s no fun at all, is it?”
“No, Penny, it isn’t. But Papa wants you to get your present and I said I’d pick it up. But do you know what I did then, Penny? I did a very silly thing, I lost Papa’s address. So I thought I’d come over and get it from you and then I’ll visit him and bring your present back.”
She looked miserable.
“Gee, I’m sorry, but I don’t know his address. He never told me where he lived, I never asked him. Right here in New York City I guess.”
That was a big help.
“Didn’t he ever mention a neighborhood, a street? In Greenwich Village maybe? Somewhere in Greenwich Village, Penny?”
“No.” She giggled. “He used to say he came from heaven. He’d say, ‘Hilde, I came from heaven and I didn’t know it till I found hell.’ Isn’t that funny.”
“Yes, that’s very funny. Why did he call you Hilde? Isn’t Penny your real name?”
She nodded, her blonde curls bobbing.
“Oh yes. But Papa always called me Hilde. It was funny you know, he’d call me Hilde but then sometimes he’d tell me stories about somebody else named Hilde. She was a little girl too, and Papa said she looked just like me. He always looked funny when he told those stories, like he’d gone far away. And he always looked so sad. So I’d kiss him to make him feel good again. I tried to take my clothes off and make him happy but he wouldn’t let me. Once I tried real hard and you know what he did? He cried.”
One thing for sure, Papa was crazy enough to be our boy. But so far nothing she’d said really proved anything one way or another. There were probably ten thousand elderly eccentric men with German accents walking the streets right now, and only one Jew.
“Did Papa ever talk to you about religion, Penny?”
She nodded eagerly.
“Oh yes, he talked about magicians and sorcerers and all kinds of things, and fairy princesses and all wonderful things. He’s the only one who ever talked about things like that with me.”