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Page 59.
 "Oh yes, and call me Jack."
"You Americans."
He put his hands over hers. "Let me explain. We are as class-oriented as you, but with slightly different underlying assumptions. Anyone can be hey-you one day, and sir or ma'am the next. When we call each other Jack or Miranda, it's just a different way of saying Sir or Ma'am."
She had a nice, bubbly laugh like a forest stream. "Okay, Jack Sir. I'll try to wrap my English skull around your folkways."
"Yes, Miranda."
"I see what you mean. It's not the familial Jack or Miranda. They are more like titles."
"Exactly," he said, squeezing her hands and letting go. "If you look in a typical corporate org chart, the boxes usually have either titles or names in them; sometimes both. The knife work is the same."
Newly comrades in arms, they walked together in the damp breeze on the vast airfield, where giant planes like singing whales moved about among terminals, continents, and great cities.
Miranda drove an unmarked tan Mercedes belonging to the German federal government.
"Glad I have you to navigate through all this," Jack said as she expertly maneuvered the powerful car through massive traffic arteries.
"Frankfurt is the most important business center in Hesse, and one of the largest in Germany," Miranda said. "I've lived here on and off for several years."
"I take it you read the CIA country guides, or their MI6 equivalents."
"I read myself to sleep at night," she confessed, blushing at the hint of intimacy.
"So do I," Jack said. "Mostly either romantic suspense thrillers, or very dry books on topics like ancient Roman topology. Frankfurt has a large Roman ruins section in the old city."
"I know. Sounds intriguing. Now you want to travel to the zoo?"
"Yes. The crocodile section, to be exact."
Approaching the Frankurt Zoological Gardens, Miranda parked in a reserved government space outside the ornate, two-and-three-story headquarters, built in a somewhat severe looking Italian Renaissance style in 1876. Like most of Frankfurt, the spacious building, with many offices and several roomy halls, was destroyed in the Allied bombings during World War II. Like many historic buildings thus destroyed, it was restored over a period of decades.
They met a Herr Udo Grün in office on the first floor, after walking through sunny corridors of closed doors to find him as prearranged. Grün was a tall, odd looking man with the hunched posture and opportunistic eyes of a vulture. His narrow, beaked face and longish brown hair—combed strangely downward and forward across the ears and cheeks—radiated what Jack would describe as office politics radars of the finest attunement. But Herr Grün was helpful, as evidenced by his dropping everything, by his firm dry handshakes, and by his determined stride as he led his visitors out the back of the administrative building into the zoo itself.
He explained fondly as they walked through his domain: here was the great lake, with islands and a bridge over it. On the lake's north shore was the ape house with gibbons and other primates, while its surface was covered with ducks and more exotic birds. In a farther, smaller lake were pelicans. Other areas of the zoo included a jungle for big cats (jaguars, panthers, and the like); an African savannah with horned, ungulate grazers; a taiga for owls; a veldt or bush for African birds; an Affenhaus for more primates; and so many more reproductions of native habitat for camels, elephants, flamingos, without an end to the list, it seemed.
"The young lady who discovered the body," said Grün, "is too traumatized to ever work in the Exotarium with the serpents and reptiles again. She is on medical leave just now, and will return in a few weeks for new duties in a less ominous environment. Shame, because she did well with the reptilians."
"Any idea who brought the victim in, or when, or how?"
Grün shook his head. "Obviously, an inside job. Our security and the Frankfurt police and Hesse Landespolizei are working on the premise that whoever murdered the man must have had access, keys, all that sort of thing. What I am wondering is why?"
"So are we, Herr Grün," Miranda said. "So are we."
"We have reason to believe that he was last seen in Kaiserslautern, the day of or before his death," Jack said. That got no response, and he dropped the line of inquiry for now.
At the Exotarium, they met a smallish woman, aged about 50, with gray curly hair, a business suit, and a white lab coat over that. She had her hands in the lab coat's wide pockets, and extended her right hand to shake hands with the visitors. "Zweig," she introduced herself with a faint dip of the head.
"Frau Doktorin Professorin Hannah Zweig," Grün said formally.
"An honor," Jack said, and Miranda mirrored the head-schnappen along with the knickser.
"Frau Doctorin Professorin Zweig is the chief clinical officer of all veterinary operations at the zoo. She also knows a fair amount about operational fields including human physiology, criminal forensics. And she is the director of the small infirmary for staff and guests."
Zweig laughed in a friendly manner. "A Czech of all trades, a master of one or two." Her English was quite good—the kind of German-accented British most Germans learn as school-children. "Giraffes, crocodiles, humans—they are all animals to me."
"Very noble," Miranda said.
"Did you get the autopsy results on the victim?" Jack asked. He'd already seen a report passed along to him by Rector, while flying across the Atlantic during the night.
"Ja," Frau D-P Zweig said, "what can I say? Lividity showed that he was dead hours before he arrived here. He was garroted so severely that his spine was broken, and his neck was nearly bisected. And so the poor girl found him when she unlocked the Exotarium to prepare for the morning rush—typically, classroom tours from schools around Frankfurt and Darmstadt and the Speckgürtel (fat belt) around the Zentrum, meaning the suburbs and exurbs where the wage earners live who commute into the city each day for work. Our tax income."
Grün added: "Our city detectives, who have been directing the investigations, keep me informed as well as Dr. Zweig and the top officials of the Zoological Gardens. They have so far neither motive nor weapon. We do know that the dead man was a Norwegian national, living in Oslo when not traveling on business for a company that makes retrofit luxury automobile interiors—you know, mahogany, ebony, fine leather, that sort of stuff."
"Sounds intriguing," Jack said. That was obviously a cover for Sigma 2020 field operations. Ribeye had been tasked with finding a connection between the Chinese source firm and the Anaconda technical bureau in the K-Town area, intended to continue the R&D on Project David before it was hijacked by this BLUM organization.
"All I can really show you is the spot where Fräulein Siegrid Unger found the victim." She brought them inside the rounded Exotarium—house of exotic animals—where, on a rear walkway, several concrete paths converged. Crocodilians, with dark tan bodies, and black striping, lingered behind heavy gates and thick glass panes. They were nowhere near as huge as Australia's sea-going saltwater crocs—whose mature male could exceed 6 meters (20 ft) in length, and weigh over 1.5 tons. These ten-foot sweetwater cousins from Australia were motionless. They were coiled springs of sudden frenzy and violent, frothy pink death. They lay on slimy artificial embankments, on which they could launch instantly into their pools, just like on semi-arid river banks and washes back in northern Australia. The water, visible in some of the windows, was dark mossy green in the shade of large trees above, and bright mud-color where sunlight penetrated. It was a dreamy study in terror, fueled by an inbred human revulsion against snakes, spiders, and reptiles.
"Obviously the crocodiles were not able to call out for lunch," Jack observed.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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