The Diaries - A Gage Hartline Espionage Thriller (#1) Page 9

  “You’re late,” Jean said dryly. “Did our boy show?”

  “It’s freezing out there. Brutal!”

  You pussy. “Did—Gage—Hartline—show—up?”

  “He didn’t. Don’t you check your messages?”

  Jean jerked his phone from the pockets of his Merino wool pants. The battery had gone dead sometime during the night. He had been too drunk to remember to charge it and, in his hung-over haste, had neglected to check it during the frenetic Monday morning. He slammed the phone onto the table, under his palm. “Fucking battery!” He gathered himself, collapsing into a chair. “So he didn’t come home?”

  “Nope. Not a peep.”

  Jean squeezed the sides of his skull as if his hands were a vise, closing his eyes and imagining. What in the world had Gage found? It had to be significant because he was watching for tails. Running. Hiding. Evading people like James fucking Bond. Jean’s eyes opened as if on springs, his head snapping around to Fredi.

  “Do a level-two sweep that sticks for forty-eight hours. Gage Nils Hartline: spell it correctly. Wash his name and passport through the system for aliases, and run them too, if you find any.” Jean settled a bit, moving his eyes around as he decided on the ruse to utilize. “Tell the Paris desk officer Hartline did a job for us and didn’t collect his money…so we fear for his life.”

  “But I checked the dead drop after he shook me. He got the money.”

  Jean breathed a loud, exasperated breath. “Don’t think, Fredi—just fucking do it.” He stepped to the door, lighting another cigarette and pointing it at the junior agent. “I’ll be in the back office, charging my phone and mainlining Tylox. You get anything at all, you find me. I want him found, today, before sundown. I’m putting every bit of this on you, Fredi.” He turned to go, stopped cold. “And make sure you keep someone on his flat.”

  “We did a switch,” Fredi answered with a manner of pride. “It’s still being watched. Do you want to escalate to a three? Get his description out?”

  Jean shook his head as he walked. “No, that will make someone back on Boulevard Mortier suspicious.” Leaving a vortex of blue smoke, he disappeared down the hall, saying, “Just do as I said.”

  Monika faced Gage, her knees pulled up to her chest, her chin resting on both hands. He’d spoken for the better part of an hour, holding it together better than he thought he might. There were some hitches as he described the Crete debacle, but he made it through. After that, telling the story he’d never before uttered became therapeutic, the tale coming out of him like stitches from a healing wound. It was a good pain, his body happy to expel it, ridding it.

  “And that’s why, with nowhere to go, no trade to ply, I came here, doing low-level jobs for the agencies I’d made contact with over the years. It wasn’t long after that, Monika, that I met you.” He swigged from the water bottle, locking his eyes on hers. “I’ve wanted to tell you the truth for so long, but to be frank, it’s been so long that I don’t hardly know what the truth is any more.”

  Monika stared at him, her brown eyes unblinking, her breathing serene and peaceful.

  “Are you angry with me?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “Will you say something, please?”

  Monika lifted her hands from her knees, opening her arms. “Lie with me, Gage.”

  They stayed there for another hour, their bodies pressed together as Monika asked him questions about his past, things she’d always wondered, and things that seemingly began to occur to her. When she had no more questions, Gage raised up, buttoning his shirt.

  “Where are you going?”

  He stood, bringing the backpack to the bed. “This is what I went to get this morning.”

  “What is it?”

  He zipped it open, carefully removing the 1938 diary, handing it to her.

  “Where was this?”

  “I was storing this one in a locker at the bahnhof. That’s where I went this morning, and I grabbed another one from a little storage space I own.”

  “What is it?”

  “Before I say anything, just take some time and read.”

  She opened it. “A diary?”

  “There’s a reason I don’t want to tell you,” he answered. “Draw your own conclusions…just read, then we’ll talk.”

  Monika eyed him for a moment, finally nodding. She fluffed the pillows, nestling into a comfortable reading position, the blanket around her waist. Gage stared at her form, closing his eyes and giving thanks that he had her, and that he’d had the courage to tell her the truth. He dug into the pack, retrieving the other diary, covering half of 1935. He settled in next to her, opening the diary and reading a passage from late May.

  She grabbed his right hand, moving it to her stomach, clasping her left hand over it.

  They stayed that way for another two hours, reading in silence.

  ***

  Mannheim, Germany

  The train ride from Frankfurt’s Hauptbahnhof had been a short one, especially on the sleek ICE bullet train. Damien Ellis leaned against a towering column just off the platform, eating pistachios, dropping the wet shells into a paper sack. He was due to board the next ICE train in less than five minutes, a fact made clear by the green digital timer staring him in the face, ticking backward like a NASA countdown.

  He took steadying breaths, pressing his mind through the fear, trying to enjoy the nuts. The consternation had struck him on the train, sitting there in his second class seat all alone. And that was the problem.

  All alone.

  Since they’d met, he’d never gone anywhere for pleasure without Rose. Not once. Sure there were business trips when she was alive, but that’s the way he kept them—strictly business—and always in a rush to get the job done and get back home, back to his Rose. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he always viewed time away from his wife as an extreme inconvenience. He’d never once caroused; never hit the bars with the fellas. When Rose Ellis was home waiting for him, his top priority had always been getting back into her arms.

  “But she ain’t there no more,” Ellis said to himself, the deep bass of his voice reverberating in his whisper. “And she’d be so angry right now…flat pissed off if I don’t go on and enjoy this trip.”

  The digital clock displayed two more minutes. Ellis pocketed the remainder of the pistachios. He donned his trilby hat, tugging on it as two women boarded the car before him. After finding his seat, he hiked his right knee up on the ledge at the right side of the train, staring at the station as it slid silently away.

  “You can enjoy it with me, darling,” he whispered, a smile creasing his face. “’Cause we’re still together.”

  ***

  The first diary covered May through December of 1935. While more upbeat in tone, it was just as compelling as the 1938 chronicle. The entries detailed Greta’s past, telling about her finishing Gymnasium, similar to American high school. After two extra years of schooling, which sounded the equivalent to an American junior college, her prescient parents bribed a well-connected government official to assign new identities, and new locales, to Greta and her brother. Instead of Jews, she and her brother were then viewed as good Germans. Greta spent weeks in mourning, each day lamenting her new city, Berlin, and the pain of the separation from her family:

  I’d rather be dead than never see Mama and Papa again. Papa told me over and over, on the day the I was driven to Kassel, to forget who I was. He kept saying, if I wanted to live, to forget the past and focus on the future. “Consider us both dead, or you will be too,” he told me. “A day is coming when they will try to kill us all.” Those were the last words my Papa ever left with me.

  They put Benjamin on a train to the north, I went east. Our family, our beautiful loving family is no more.

  I am considering suicide, diary. There is a nearby bridge that I have crossed over several times. Last night, all alone, I stood on its ledge, staring at the cobblestone below. Two times I leaned out, only to pull
myself back. Something kept me from jumping. A purpose. But what purpose?

  Or is it just my cowardly fear?

  Gage read on, feeling Greta’s emotions, like a volatile stock, rising and falling. While he knew she didn’t kill herself, Gage certainly empathized with the pain of living a ruse. He cut his eyes to Monika, engrossed, her hand drifting up and down his leg.

  He turned the page, reading on. It seemed, as that first summer wore on, that Greta’s mood improved as she grew more comfortable being Greta Dreisbach. Her writing was stilted on August 7th, however.

  I responded to an advert for maid service yesterday, queuing for sixteen grueling hours before I was ushered in to the little building off of Wilhelmstrasse. The catty old women sat behind the table, studying me like they might judge a fattened sow at the autumn festival. They made me lift my arms, checking the skin to see if it might be saggy. I was forced to lift my skirt while a woman touched my legs and bottom, feeling them like she might search for firm apples at the grocery. A doctor of some sort came in, examining my private parts, asking me incredibly personal questions. This all, while bizarre, I was able endure in the interest of making a proper living.

  But they asked me about my family! Every night, before I write, I study the papers given to me by that horrid, perverted man my parents hired. I study the names, my history, where I went to school…all of it. And when they began quizzing me about my past, and taking notes, I so badly wanted to run away. I wanted to run back to Frankfurt and find Mama and Papa and melt into their arms! But, coward that I am, I told them...told them the story, told them the names and places I had memorized.

  A week later:

  I got the job! The woman called me in (a true bitch in every sense of the word) and told me I was one of four chosen from over a thousand suitable candidates. I have to move into the servants’ quarters and will work twelve hours a day, six days a week, but I can do it! She did unnerve me somewhat when she said I had better do anything I’m asked to do, no questions whatsoever. I felt she was hinting at something, with a nasty gleam in her mean eyes. But, with my money almost gone and no prospects, I had to agree. She said I will be surrounded by the influential people of the Party! I’m floating, diary. Floating!

  Who will I meet? What will I be privy to?

  Still, lingering in my mind is the way she eyed me when she told me that I should acquiesce to any demand made of me. My mind keeps going back to that awful little man who was hired to give me my identity. I cannot stop thinking of the threats, the things he did to me, and made me do. Things I’d never thought possible between two human beings, things I will never speak of or write for all my days.

  Why can’t people live and let live? Who would want a person who doesn’t want them?

  I hope, as I write this, touching the locket on my chest, that this job will lead me to a good man who will love me for my soul and not my body.

  There was a knock at the door. Gage padded into the hallway, looking through the peephole, unalarmed but still cautious. It was the maid. He shot the deadbolt, opening the door and pressing ten euro into the older woman’s hand, his mind on the maid he’d just been reading about.

  “One hour, please,” he asked in German.

  The lady arched her eyes, smiling at the generous tip. She nodded, pushing her cart to the next room.

  When he walked back into the bedroom, Monika was prone, staring at him, a finger holding her place almost midway through the diary. Her face was bright, her eyes alight.

  “What do you think?” Gage asked, opening his hands.

  “I think it’s incredibly tragic, but at the same time…and I feel awful saying this…but the story is riveting. I can’t take my eyes off of it.” She flipped backward, carefully turning the brittle pages. “Here, listen to this…

  I read the new grotesque proclamations this morning, adopted by the Reich as infallible rules regarding interactions with Jews. Any man who has sex with a Jewish woman has an unclean penis, and there is no possible way to undo the damage that has been done. That man can no longer father clean children. So, unbeknownst to Aldo, according to this, his people’s own twisted doctrine, he’s now unclean. This makes my decision to tell him the truth even harder. In fact, who am I kidding? I know beyond a shadow of a doubt I will never tell him. He would have me killed. Killed! And what’s worse, diary, is…well, I will save it for tomorrow’s entry. I need to have a good cry.

  Gage nodded his head, remembering the passage all too well.

  “You read this, didn’t you? So you know her hesitation is because she suspects she’s pregnant, no doubt by this sicko Aldo?”

  Gage picked up the plate of croissants, sitting on the bed next to Monika. “Before we discuss the diary—and trust me, it gets more tragic—I want to know that you’re okay with everything I told you. As I sat next to you, reading one of the other diaries, I had a feeling you might be feeling a bit betrayed by my keeping it from you for so long.”

  Monika leaned forward, running her hands over his short hair. Her brown eyes moved over his, flicking back and forth as she studied him. “Gage, I feel closer to you than I ever have. And after what you’ve been through, I wouldn’t have expected you to ever tell me the truth.” She smiled. “But I’m thankful, so thankful, you did.”

  “Thank you.”

  There was a moment of silence between them. She lifted his chin. “But I like Gage better than Matthew. I hope you don’t expect me to call you that…Matthew.” She said his given name in a mocking voice.

  Gage smiled, grasping her shoulders and playfully rolling her supine on the bed. They lay there, their laughter trailing off, staring at one another, expressions saying everything. Finally Gage broke the silence.

  “Anything about the diary that jumps out at you, besides the tragic and twisted content?”

  Monika appeared thoughtful. “Only that Aldo seemed to be a man of considerable power. Though the writer, Greta, never said what it was he did for a living.”

  Gage sat up, nodding. He took a croissant, eating half in an entire bite. With a mouthful he asked, “Have you read about Elsa yet?”

  Monika looked up, recalling. “She’s his wife, or girlfriend, or something. Yes, she’s been mentioned several times.”

  After stuffing the remainder of the pastry in his mouth, Gage washed it down with water. “And has she mentioned the visitors yet, Albert and Margarete?”

  “That’s right where I am right now, in April.”

  “Those names mean anything to you?”

  “Not at all.”

  “I looked them up.”

  “And?”

  Gage made her wait, blinking his eyes, twisting his mouth.

  “And?”

  “Albert was well-known.”

  “Okay…who was he?”

  “Albert Speer, and his wife Margarete.”

  Monika shrugged. Her expression was open.

  “You know who he is, right?”

  She shook her head.

  “Albert Speer was a chief Nazi, the architect and production head of the entire Third Reich.”

  Monika grabbed the water bottle, sipping from it as she cut her eyes to him. “In German schools, we don’t exactly focus on the Third Reich and all its stars. Not exactly our finest hour, Gage.”

  He nodded, properly admonished. “Understood, but nevertheless, Speer was world famous. In fact, before the war he was probably one of the most-talked-about Nazis, other than Hitler himself.”

  She eyed him. “Go on.”

  “Did you notice where Greta lived?”

  Monika nibbled her thumbnail. “Berlin, right?”

  “Yes, in the servant quarters.” He squeezed her knee. “Think, Monika.”

  She rolled her eyes, opening her hands, palms upward. “You’re acting like my dad used to.”

  “C’mon. Think! Speer, the top man…Berlin…Elsa, the girlfriend…Aldo, weirdo, making them both repent by pain…her churning fear over his finding out she’s Jewish, fear
ing for her life.”

  Monika’s face was blank. Her eyes twitched, widening as her hands shot over her mouth.

  “It couldn’t be.”

  He nodded.

  “No!”

  He nodded again.

  “There’s no way!”

  He tapped the diary with his finger. “I looked up the name Greta Dreisbach on Google. It took awhile, but after some time I found her listed as Adolf Hitler’s personal maid. It said she disappeared in 1938.” Gage lifted the diary from her lap. “Later in the diary, she meets a man in Frankfurt after she fled, a kind man named Heinrich.”

  Monika was spellbound her head barely nodding with Gage’s words. “Yes?”

  Gage took a deep breath, his chest falling heavily. “The house where I found all of the diaries, there was a stumble-stone out front.”

  She rubbed her forehead. “Oh, no.”

  “Oh, yes. Listed on it was the name Heinrich Morgenstern, killed in 1938. His wife was listed dead, killed just days later in one of the camps.”

  “And you think it was her, Greta?”

  Gage nodded. “Yeah…you’ll see when you get farther in.”

  Monika used both hands to quickly yank her hair, a flash of anger passing over her face. “Fucking sick is what it was. It never, ever ceases to amaze me. How could they have done such a thing?”

  “There’s one other thing,” Gage said, his hand resting on the diary. “She winds up having that baby.”

  “Yes?”

  “On the stumble stone…”

  Monika closed her eyes, falling back on the pillows, hands covering her face. “Oh God, no. Don’t tell me the baby was killed as well.”

  Gage remained silent. Monika opened her fingers, peeking through them with one eye.