The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fic - By Mike Ashley Page 0,218

the Blaue Gans. “I want Heinrich Konrad in this house. I want to confront that man. I want to find out his mission in this country and I do not want him to be able to accomplish it. Do you understand me?”

Andy Winslow asked, “Why don’t you go to the meeting yourself, Caligula? I’ll warm up the Packard and—”

Foxx’s frown and his angry growl were all the answer Winslow needed. He already knew how much Foxx hated to leave his home. “All right, Caligula. Then why not just invite him over?”

“He would ignore my invitation. No, Andy, we must lure the rat from his hole and into our trap. That will be Miss Schmidt’s job. I have known Konrad for a quarter of a century. I know his taste in many things, including women. He is drawn to women of – pardon me, Miss Schmidt – a certain size and appearance. Large women with long blonde hair worn in braids.”

He turned to the woman in the brown dress. “Did Jacob Maccabee explain your assignment to you? Is this agreeable to you, my dear?”

Lisalotte Schmidt laid a large fist heavily on the table. “He is one of Hitler’s men, this I know. You know they kill people. Mostly Jews they kill, but also others – anyone they choose. My brother Heinz, he was – how do you say it – slow. He was like a child. He did not understand everything but he was a sweet man. He harmed no one. He wanted only to please.”

She shook her head. “They came for him, the Nazis; they said they were taking him to a hospital to make him better, to make him like everyone else. He trusted them, my Heinzie; he went with them, smiling back at me and merrily waving, but it was not to a hospital they took him. It was a camp. They killed him there. Hitler’s men. Men like this Konrad. Yes, I will lure him here, Herr Foxx, Pan Foxx; I will bring to you this foul Nazi rat.”

*

It might have drawn too much attention had they arrived together, so Andy Winslow and Rose Palmer, Jacob Maccabee and Lisalotte Schmidt walked into the Blaue Gans a few minutes apart. December night falls early in Manhattan. Duane Street was a small thoroughfare, running from West Broadway to Church Street. The lighting was poor.

A cold wind carried a hint of sleet. Andy Winslow and Rose Palmer scurried through the cut-glass doors of the Blaue Gans into a merry world that could have come from Mad King Ludwig’s Bavaria. The restaurant was decorated with stuffed hunting trophies. Bartenders seemed to compete for the title of Largest Belly and Biggest Moustache. Serving-girls carried foaming steins of beer.

Winslow asked a waiter where the Beethoven–Wagner Institute was holding its meeting, and he and Rose Palmer were directed up a flight of stairs to a meeting-hall filled with oversized tables set with white linen and shining china. There must have been a couple of hundred members of the Institute at least – the majority of them males – gathered in groups, exchanging conversation in a mixture of German and English.

Half a dozen oversized portraits decorated the walls. Winslow assumed that the fierce-looking individual with the shock of dark hair was Beethoven – at least, he thought he’d seen that image on the cover of a record album in Foxx’s collection. Then the other old-timer in the fey-looking outfit must be Wagner. Winslow nudged Rose Palmer. “Who’s that gink next to Wagner?”

“Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,” she whispered back. “Don’t you know anything?”

He recognized Otto von Bismarck from a herring-can in Reuter’s kitchen. The guy in the fancy uniform and trademark moustache was the old Kaiser, no question about that. And then there was the biggest portrait of them all. Der Führer.

Andy Winslow and Rose Palmer drifted from group to group. Rose drew more than her share of male attention and not a few suspicious glances from females. They kept well away from Jacob Maccabee and Lisalotte Schmidt. Jacob’s features might be a little too obvious in this crowd, Winslow mused, but he could handle himself.

Most of the men in the crowd – in fact, Winslow realized with a start, every one of them – wore unobtrusive pins on their lapels. They depicted an angry raptor not unlike the old NRA blue eagle. But, when Winslow got a closer look at one, he realized that instead of holding lightning bolts in one claw and a cogwheel