Monsters and Magicians Page 3

  It had not been until he had left the beach and climbed the high dunes that he found any single trace of mankind. There, partially buried in the sand, he had found a long, wooden ship or rather what was left of one—masts all snapped off, sand completely filling its forecastle and part-decked hull.

  However, when he had forced open two doors below the quarterdeck, he had found some artifacts—a big knife and a small, copper cup—in the first. Behind the second door, in the larger of the two cabins, he had found more artifacts . . . and treasure, real treasure, a cour bouilli casket almost filled with ancient coins of gold.

  "And that," he muttered to himself as he again turned the spitted fowl, "was when all hell really started popping."

  Knowing next to nothing about coins, he had taken a double handful of the ones he had found, just what his pockets could easily hold, back to his own world with him, hoping to get only the bullion value of them, perhaps as much as fifteen hundred dollars— enough to pay off the balance of his ailing automotive abortion, get some needed repairs and, possibly, a decent-looking suit from the Goodwill store.

  He had driven the miles into the city of his former residence and taken the coins into the shop of a dealer, a retired Army NCO he knew vaguely from the VFW. Then he had come within an ace of actually fainting, right there in the coin shop, upon being given a rough estimate of the true values of the coins—mostly from the Mediterranean littoral, none of them minted less than a full millennium past though some were centuries older than even that, and all in unbelievably good condition for such archaic rareties. —

  Then it had all just snowballed, happening almost too fast for comprehension. Believing Fitz's spur-of-the-moment fabrication that the coins had been the bequest of some deceased uncle, Gus Tolliver had

  taken advantage of his guild's far-flung network of contacts to begin to sell and mail-auction the exceedingly rare collector gold pieces all over the world, taking a fee of twenty percent of the profits and giving Fitz the remaining eighty.

  The very first thing that Fitz had done with his newcome wealth was to buy the rental house and land outright. Then he had hired a general contractor to convert the decaying edifice into a small luxury home with attached double garage to house the two new vehicles with which he had quickly replaced his clunker.

  Next he had paid off the balance of the credit-union loan, which meant that he then began to receive his full retirement pension from his former firm—not that he had any need of so trifling a sum anymore, with money pouring in from sales of the forty pounds or so of golden coins from the casket in the wrecked ship.

  In his by then copious spare time, he had spent many full days in what he had come to think of as the sand world, and further exploration of the old ship had disclosed another and much larger cabin behind the two smaller ones, extending completely across the beam of the wrecked vessel. With bits of furniture from the other two cabins and modern items laboriously brought down the narrow, ever-treacherous stone stairs Fitz had fashioned of the sterncabin a moderately comfortable pied-a-terre in this world of sea and sand, birds and sea creatures but with no recent trace of man.

  The dunes seemed to march on into infinity to the east, the west and the north, as far as he had walked.

  It had not been until he had thought to buy and wrestle down the stairs an off-road motorcycle that he had begun to learn more of the sand world, had seen the long, broad Pony Plain north of the dunes and glimpsed the succession of dark-green, forested hills rising on the other side.

  He had first brought firearms into the seemingly uninhabited sand world because no matter where he went or travelled within it, he experienced the unpleasant, uncanny feeling that he was being watched, being observed. Even within the locked, barred and shuttered sterncabin he often felt that he was not truly alone, that someone or some thing was invisibly with him.

  Trouble was brewing in the other, more mundane world, too, coming fast to a roiling boil for him and Gus Tolliver. First came a succession of break-ins at Fitz's house during various of his sojourns in the sand world; although little of any real value was ever taken—save the two artifacts, the knife and the copper cup which had been his first finds aboard the beached ship—he had liked so little the idea of strangers poking about his home that he had taken extreme and very expensive steps to harden up the place and its grounds—steel-sheathed solid doors, special windows and state-of-the-art locks, high cyclone fencing for the perimeter of the entire property topped with barbed wire, floodlights, trip-flares, banshee-loud alarms, the works, the best that money could buy.

  Gus Tolliver, too, had had at least one break-in at his shop. Although a good number of silver coins had lain exposed in glass cases and there had been some modern gold coins in the big, old-fashioned, deliber-

  ately visible safe that had been skillfully opened, then just as skillfully reclosed, none of this had been so much as touched. Despite intensive, destructive searchings, the location of his hidden safe had never been found. But what had upset the old soldier more than this had been when word had been privately passed to him that certain governmental agencies had been putting pressure on officials of his bank to disclose certain information of a private, financial nature.

  That had been when he first had confided in Fitz of his fierce distrust of certain bureaus of the government he had served so long and so faithfully. Furthermore, he had announced his avowed intent of foiling them all.

  Fitz had heard his partner out, sympathized aloud, and then simply forgotten the matter, figuring that it had been just one more instance of a disgruntled taxpayer blowing off a little steam. Months later, to his sorrow, he discovered that Tolliver had been serious, dead serious, and that his manner of foiling the Internal Revenue Service had tarred them both with the same brush in the mind of one Agent Henry Fowler Blutegel.

  In one corner stood a splendid full suit of fluted, Maximillian-style plate armor, its crossed gauntlets resting atop the pommel of a period bastard-sword. On a stretch of wall not covered by a carpet was h^Pg dog-face bascinet-helm and crossed below it were a medieval battle-sword and a horseman's battle-axe, with a short-hafted, quintrefoil mace hung upright between them. All of these pieces were authentic and of museum quality.

  The furnishings looked every bit as old, though outstandingly well kept, as authentic as the weapons, but they were not, none of them; rather, they were painstaking reproductions of tables, chairs and cabinets of the period—all dark woods, leathers, inlays and black wrought-iron or rich bronze. Nonetheless, it was a chamber in which a Renaissance nobleman or lady would have certainly felt comfortable, almost at home.

  The desk, chair and console were wrought of the same dark woods with similar decorations, but there the similarities ended. The lamps were electric, with variable intensities of brightness. What might have been two small, carven and inlaid chests on either side of the desk actually housed telephone and an intercommunications device, and another on the console held a tape-recorder and its condensor microphone. A fourth, much flatter chest contained a wide selection of hand-rolled cigars, a box of cigarettes and two lighters.

  In the leather swivel-chair behind the desk sat a man who, in period attire, would have matched his archaic surroundings almost perfectly. His hair and moustache were raven's-wing black, his skin-tone sat-

  urnine, the backs of his hands and long, tapering fingers black-haired. Only a close approach to the whipcord-slender figure would have revealed that the eyes beneath the dark brows were a piercing blue.

  As he often did, Pedro Goldfarb found himself working late at his office, so tied up in a case that he had allowed time, partners and employees to depart the offices unheeded.

  Before him, a profusion of thick books lay, some of them open, some of them closed but with scraps of paper marking places in them. One yellow legal-size pad lay aside, filled with his neat, pencilled notes, and a fresh one was already a quarter filled. The stubs of two thin cigars lay among their ashes in a big, bronze tray and
a third had smoldered out there. Beside a mug half full of cold, black coffee a crystal goblet of a pale amber liquor sat almost untasted.

  The man did not miss even a stroke of his writing when, after a light knock, one of the pair of doors opened and a woman's voice said, "Talk about smoke-filled rooms. Sorry, Pedro, I'd thought somebody d left the lights on in here. Do you mean to go home at all tonight?"

  "Minute, Danna," replied the man. "Important I get this down now, fresh off my brain."

  Wordlessly she seated herself in the side-chair nearest his desk and sat, silent and unmoving, until at length he completed his scribblings and laid aside his pencil with a whuff

  "Still on Belcher, Pedro?" she asked. "Or is this that new one, McKiernan?"

  He had, as she had been speaking, leaned forward

  to bring the mug to his lips, but after only the briefest of tentative sips, he grimaced and declared, "Cold! Hell, Td rather quaff as much hemlock as cold coffee."

  The woman stood and reached for the mug, saying, "Here, Pedro, I can go out and fire up Doris's Silex and . . ."

  "No, forget it/' He smiled. "Thanks anyway, Danna, really, but if I drink any more caffeine I'll never get to sleep tonight. No, I'll work on this cognac, I think. Would you care to join me?"

  Resuming her seat, she replied, with a slight shake of the head, "No, no cognac for me, thank you, but I will have a small glass of your excellent sherry, Pedro."

  With a nod, the dark man pushed back his chair, stood and crossed to his commodious liquor cabinet. Then, with a decanter poised over a slender, crystal sherry goblet, he inquired, "Dry or cream, Danna?"

  "Not cream, Pedro. Do you still have some of that amontillado?"

  When both were again seated, he waved at the clutter atop his desk. "Since you asked: no, not the McKiernans, they're in no real trouble and the agent they're dealing with is a gentleman who goes strictly by the book, young Khoury—reasonable, civil, understanding. No, I turned their case over to Murray.

  "But poor Belcher, he's another question entirely. Yes, he's made some mistakes and his halfwitted brother-in-law made some more and far worse ones, and that damned Henry Blutegel rode them so long and so brutally before they came to us that they're both terrified nervous wrecks. But if we can keep them from flipping out and impulsively admitting

  guilt to things they really didn't do or, at least, intend to do, my researches here tonight just may cost that Czech bastard this case.

  "And in regard to Blutegel, Danna: Has your private research project turned up anything interesting on him and his background?"

  The auburn-haired woman's lips became a grim line. "Heinrich Blutegel, a Displaced Person from Czechoslovakia, entered the United States in May of 1947 in company with his bride of twelve weeks, an American Red Cross worker nee Rachel Feingold. His new wife was a native of Kansas City, a registered nurse by profession and heiress of a modest inheritance. Blutegel was then in his mid-twenties— according to his records which, of course, were backed up solely by his sworn statements, his birthplace and former home village having been completely wiped out and destroyed by the Nazis in the course of the war—so she sent him to college and, by the time he had graduated with a degree in accounting in 1952, he had mastered English, speaking the completely unaccented, colloquial English that he uses today. Quite a feat for the unlettered Czech peasant he was supposed to be, Pedro."

  He nodded. "I'll say. He's not married, now; I once heard that he was divorced. Have you been able to contact or talk to his former wife, Danna?"

  She shook her head once. "Rachel Blutegel committed suicide in 1958, leaving no note and for no apparent reason. His second wife, a younger cousin of Rachel's whom he first met at the funeral, lost her mind and had to be hospitalized in 1965; when she was declared incurable, hopeless, he divorced her

  and almost immediately married another nurse, a German immigrant woman thirty years old. She divorced him in 1972, took him for nearly everything he had while he, against advice of counsel, never lifted a finger to contest any of it. She returned to Germany and I'm trying to track her down. At present he lives alone with his bottle in a cheap, furnished apartment; to the best of anyone's knowledge, he owns not one friend and all of his acquaintances are connected with his work."

  "Hmm," Pedro gazed long and hard into the glass of pale liquor, then asked her, "It would be very interesting to discover just what the third wife held over his head to keep him from contesting that divorce, that divorce which was so very cosdy to him, so immensely rewarding to her. Who was his attorney in that action, Danna?"

  She sighed. "Bill Smith, Pedro. Another dead end street for me."

  "Maybe," mused the dark man. "Then again, maybe not; maybe, rather, a part of a deadly pattern. I knew Bill Smith, Danna, knew him rather well, really. Like all his friends, I could never conceive of him pulling a Dutch, as he was supposed to have done. Dammit, that young fellow had real promise, he was headed places, else old Nussbaum wouldn't have taken him on like he-did. The assumption of the authorities was that he was despondent over his personal debts, but it just didn't wash with anyone who knew him at all well. He was on his way up and he knew it, too, moreover, he was proud as punch about his little boy, then two months old. Could it be, Danna. . . ? Could it be that our own Agent Henry Blutegel. . . ?"

  She blanched. "Pedro My God, Pedro, that's insane] Why in the world would even a thing like Blutegel. . . ?" She paused, then nodded slowly, "You think that perhaps . . . that, maybe, Bill mightVe learned something that could've frightened Blutegel enough to drive him to ... to. . . ?"

  Grimfaced, the dark man nodded. "Could be, Danna, could very well be, all things considered. Tell you something you didn't know, too: Bill Smith wasn't born a Smith. His dad legally changed the family name because he had become so ashamed of bearing his true surname early in World War Two. The name was Messerschmidt. Bill didn't tell many people the truth, only his closest friends, that he was originally Wilhelm Messerschmidt, and that he spoke, read and wrote excellent German.

  "Now, I've never done any divorce work, myself, but I know the procedure, nonetheless. Who can say that there did not occur some exchanges, possibly very heated exchanges, between the estranged couple? What would be more natural than that, saying things neither of them wished their listeners to understand, they retreated to the supposed safety of a language foreign to said listeners, spoke their thoughts or threats in German? Then, if the dispossessed and not in the least happy Blutegel had in some way learned that his one-time attorney most probably had comprehended all that had been said in his hearing. . . ?

  "Danna, this is an order: hand over all your cases to Dundas or Emily or Hammill. Hear? Devote all your working time to this Blutegel thing. Go wherever you need to go, do whatever you need to do: you write the checks, I'll cover them, never fear. It's

  the very least I can do for the shade of my dead friend, Bill. This slimy Blutegel may or may not be a hide-out Nazi, but right now I can clearly see him as a murderer and 111 be just as happy to see him proven the one as the other.

  "But, back to that other, have you heard anything from that man in Austria?"

  After a sip of sherry, she replied, "No, not directly, Pedro. I'm just now in contact with a group in New York City that's in some way affiliated with him and his group. I've also been talking on the phone with a young attorney who works for the Justice Department up in D.C., and I've sent both him and the New York people photocopies of my current file on Blutegel, plus the one I sent to Austria and yet another sent to a man who wrote to me from Tel Aviv. Just today, I got two letters—one from Bonn and one from Prague—asking for copies of the file." She grinned maliciously. "Just wait until you see this month's Xerox bill, Pedro, not to even mention the postage meter."

  He waved a hand in dismissal. "Forget it, Danna. Like I just said: you write the checks, I'll see to it that they're covered, all of them. Although I warn you, Danna," he grinned, himself, "any written to jewellers, department store
s, boutiques or luxury auto dealers are yours, all yours to cover."

  Then all at once he sobered and, in dead-serious tones, said, "But, Danna, how ever much it costs in time or effort or money, get me proof of some kind on that bastard. It's no longer just his crusade against Fitz and Gus Tolliver now; now the sullied honor of an old friend is in the balance, too. When his death

  was ruled a suicide, his life insurance holders refused to pay one cent to his widow. I and some others have tried to help her but she's proud, she just won't accept anything that smacks of charity. But as she has no marketable skills, she's growing old long before her time trying to support herself and her kids on the paltry salaries of two menial jobs. She deserves a better life than that, Danna."

  Danna Dardrey wrinkled her brows. "She's still a young woman and, as I recall from one brief encounter with her, rather an attractive one. Surely she could find another husband?"

  Pedro Goldfarb fielded the question with one of his own. "Is that what you did when your husband died back during World War Two, Danna?"

  The auburn hair swirled as she shook her head. "Oh, Pedro, you know better. No, I never remarried, but my own situation was different. I had the home, the security and the moral support of Kevin's parents, who were fairly well off, and I also had Kevin's GI and civilian insurance."

  "Nonetheless," he insisted, "don't you think you'd have been better off, more comfortable, more fulfilled in many ways had you found and married some } decent, honest, personable man with a good job and income? So why didn't you do just that, Danna? Why didn't you give your sons a new father, at least, a role model to guide their development?"

  "Tom Dardrey, Kevin's dad, was all the role model any boy could've asked for, Pedro," she replied. "He exulted in having two new sons to make into the same kind of fine young man he had made of their father. It helped him better to bear up under the

  loss of Kevin, I think. As to why I never remarried, well, I just didn't want another man, any other man, for many years . . . not until I met. . . until Fitz and I found each other, finally. I was never rich, but I was able to provide all the necessities and even a few small luxuries for me and my sons through my working income and the investment f d made with Kevin's insurance policies and, later, the modest bequest his father left us. Besides, I just was stubborn enough to need to make it in this world on my own."