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Page 61.
Scene 27. Jack in K-Town: M. L. Sombra
 On the A6, flying southwest toward Kaiserslautern, Jack drove Miranda's powerful German sedan. There were no federal speed limits on the Autobahn. The system was a Hitler-era strategic highway system that had served as one of the models for Dwight Eisenhower's U.S. Interstate Highway System in the 1950s. The invasion of Europe, starting with D-Day in June 1944, had been a logistical universe of myriad moving parts, and Ike, as a five-star general overseeing the entire galaxy, had come to admire the German highway system. Grafted onto existing U.S. patchwork road systems, Ike's neo-Germanic highway network became the world's longest highway system when substantially completed as late as 1992. To the overpopulated and disciplined Germans, freedom of the Autobahn was a national relief valve. To impose speed limits would be like dictating limits on gun ownership in the United States. It was culturally unthinkable. Drivers throughout the world were obsessed maniacs, with U.S. drivers in torpid last place for speed and recklessness. In Germany, people drove at 135 kph (81 mph), which were not speed limits but polite government suggestions. They drove at rocket speeds, stacked on one another's bumpers, often just a few feet apart, looking for the slightest opportunity to accelerate their powerful machines over 200 kph (over 120 mph) and pass on the grassy shoulders if necessary.
At a leisurely 100 mph (160 kph) on the A6 (a.k.a. E50, or European highway 50), the drive from Frankfurt to K-Town took about forty minutes. Jack kept to the right lanes, while streaks of white (German) and yellow (French) headlights grew in his rear view mirror, and just as quickly formed passing red taillight rockets before his dizzied eyes.
Much of the journey alternated between rolling industrial farmlands, cultivated urban forest parks, a few German military installations including residual Cold War jet airfields, and the ubiquitous castle ruin clinging to a vine-overgrown crag.
Jack, the History and Classics professor, hummed to himself, treasuring his hoard of professional, enjoyable, and half useless information. As it would turn out, his knowledge of Roman history would prove useful as the situation at hand wore on.
Today, the German Autobahn (meaning car-runway) system was the fourth-longest in the world—after roads in the U.S., China, and India—totaling around 12,800 km, or 8,000 miles.
As Miranda primped, Jack said: "You know, something about this bothers me."
"Oh?" Miranda said. She was looking this way and that way into the mirror on the back of her window visor. She was carefully applying the faintest bit of makeup—barely visible blush on her cheeks, and a nearly translucent pink that Jack thought looked good on her rather lush, pale lips.
"It's too easy."
"What do you mean?"
"The people I work for said, as they sent me here for this job—that crocodile business—someone is sending someone a message."
"And what would that be?"
"It's a come-on. Just be careful in this job. You always have to out-think your potential adversaries by several steps, as in chess, even if you can't see them. Even if you don't know for sure that they exist. Every move you make, think—how can I be blind-sided or checked when I go here or I call that person or I do this?"
"Good pointers," Miranda said. She teased a few minims of mascara up her eyelashes. As she looked at herself, left and right, the tip of her tongue wiggled out and stuck in the corner of her mouth.
"Trying to keep us out of trouble," he said. Being on a Sigma 2020 mission on German soil, he was authorized to concealed-carry like any host nation detective or federal agent, but only as long as he had a German or other authorized handler along. That would be Miranda, still on a U.K. passport, but hauling BND and NATO papers.
"Next time, let's take the scenic back road through Speyer and Neustadt," she suggested.
Jack saw his opportunity to lay some groundwork. "Maybe, after we're done with work and business and all that, you can show me around a little bit."
"We'll see," she said, carefully hedging.
It's not a flat 'no,' Jack thought hopefully. One had a right to be enthused.
When they came into the city, Jack took the first exit in the eastern part of the city. Refueling at a gas station, he asked Miranda to take the wheel. She expertly navigated along the city streets across town to the Bahnhof district. Together, Jack and Miranda cruised until they found their way down Richard Wagner Street to Beethoven Street. The street signs in this part of town were blue and white enamel, dating to the French occupation of 1919-1926. Everything in Europe was layered with histories upon histories, Jack thought. While Miranda waited with the engine running, Jack memorized the information given him on a slip of paper by Grün at the Frankfurt Zoo.
He soon found the small, dingy high-rise apartment building on the inner corner of the triangle formed by the two streets. As in places like this the world over, he found a rusty vertical row of name labels, each beside a round white bell button. A few of the labels were neatly typed on yellowing paper. Several had the names printed or scrawled in various colors and stroke-widths of ink. One or two were empty, although in one of those someone had written a barely distinguishable name on the spotted brass. Only the typed labels were mostly covered with little transparent plastic shields. One was of glass, as they must long ago all have been.
One label caught Jack's attention. It was brand-new, typed in 10-pitch Pica on an old-fashioned typewriter, and read Muller. Something puzzled Jack, until he realized that the standard German name, equivalent to the English Miller, was Müller or Mueller. Not only had this label been newly inserted into its tiny, age-speckled brass frame—but the writer must be foreign. Who was this alleged—maybe phony—Muller on the third floor?
Jack pressed the buzzer.
While he waited for a reply, he took a fine-point pen from his pocket and picked at the label. It crumpled up, like a snail racing across a leaf. Sure enough, underneath on a slightly older label, was the legend M. L. Sombra—'My name is Darkness,' in Spanish.
On the second buzz, a man's voice replied in accented German: "Hallo?"
Jack said in English: "Sorry to bother you. I am looking for my cousin, Mr. Sombrero."
Pause.
"There is nobody here by that name."
"He called me yesterday and said to meet him here. It's urgent. I have money for him."
Money changed the equation. After a pause, the voice said: "Just a moment."
The door buzzed, inviting him to push it open as the lock was momentarily disengaged by a press from Muller above.
Jack signaled for Miranda to drive around the block.
Then he entered the narrow, dark hallway. He caught a faint, foul smell, as if a mouse had died in a corner. With a tiny keylight, which ran on one AAA battery, he examined the hallway. On its walls, he noted there were small black spatters. Leaning close, he sniffed—and nearly gagged. It was the smell of decaying blood. If Ribeye had been garroted, chances were good it happened right here in this passage.
He checked the 9mm automatic in its holster under his left arm, hidden by his wind breaker, as he climbed the stairs one creaking step at a time.
A pair of young men in stocking feet awaited him at the third floor landing. Behind them, an apartment door stood half open, admitting gray, rainy light from an alley window beyond. Down the street, he had noted, were some sex clubs with strident neon signs, with English and French words meant to entice either U.S. or French soldiers, or Turkish or Arab workers.
The two men were casually dressed, each in jeans, one with a white T-shirt, the other with a maroon pullover. They were dark-haired, probably Mediterranean, perhaps Arabs or Berbers.
"Guten Tag," they said in unison, offering handshakes.
Jack shook hands with them, noting that one had soft hands like a student or teacher, while the other had calloused hands like a man who worked with his hands—but his horn-covered knuckles suggested someone who practiced heavy-duty karate.
"My name is Sombrero," Jack said. "Alberto Sombrero, cousin of M. L. Sombra."
"Like the Mexican hat," said Knuckles, with an evil grin full of malice and self-righteousness.
"You have money for him?" the one with the soft hands said.
Jack heard the hatred in their voices. Their German sounded resentful, learned by force of circumstance—the tongue of an enemy.
"Yes, indeed. A month's pay. So just now you happened to remember that you know him?"
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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