The Devil's Menagerie (2 page)

“Bye-bye, Jimmy,” Beringer said.

For an instant after releasing his grip he stood there by the rail, breathing easily, listening, waiting. All he heard was the thin catcall of traffic somewhere overhead and what might have been the turgid motion of the river far below. And, immediately behind him, the girl’s hysterical whimpering.

When he swung around, the girl scurried toward the steps. Beringer caught her arm and easily pulled her back. He felt the weight of her, a little plump, not like the skinny soldier. His left hand grabbed her bottom, pulling her closer. Solid curves where there were supposed to be curves. At a visceral level the discovery pleased him. He hated stick women. Slovenly in her dirty housecoat, skinny legs sticking out, bathing him in the warm milk of mother’s love one moment, yelling at him the next, snapping his head back with a hard slap …

“
Gott in himmel!
What have you done to my Jimmy?”

“Maybe he can swim. He sure as hell couldn’t fuck you the way I’m gonna fuck you.”

“You … you can’t do this! It is crazy—please!”

“I don’t feel like arguing about it,” Beringer said with a smile.

She struggled as he held her, and he liked the feel of that, the chunky body writhing against his, those full soft breasts loose under the thin cloth coat and a blouse. He reached in with one hand and caught the top of the white blouse, one button still unbuttoned, and ripped downward, popping buttons and tearing the fabric. When the girl raked at his face with her nails, he jerked the coat down over her shoulders, imprisoning her arms. The action parted the coat. Indelible image of the torn blouse and the white globes peering at him out of the darkness.

He tried to pull her down to the floor of the platform. They fought, the girl silent, desperate. Somehow she wriggled free of the cloth coat and broke for the steps again. When his hands fell heavily on her shoulders, hauling her back, she found her voice.
“Bastard!”
she screamed.
“Bist du des teufels?”

She struck at his eyes, claws out.

Beringer’s anger exploded. He began to scream back at her, each word accompanied by a blow: “Lying—cheating—fucking—whore!” The first punch knocked the resistance out of her. The second snapped her head back and made her mouth go slack. The next, a smash to the chest, broke something and she crumpled.

She was lying inert on the platform, Beringer kneeling astride, the refrain drumming in his brain, over and over.

The image that came to him afterward was of a butcher pounding a slab of red meat.

L
ATER, RESTING ON
his haunches beside the body on the platform, he picked up the purse she had dropped, intending to toss it over the railing toward the dark waters far below. Some keys spilled out, a wallet, a tube of lipstick. Picking up the wallet, he fingered through it, searching by touch. He extracted a few German marks and a U.S. ten-dollar bill. He came across a plastic folder with several cards inside. One was an identification card with the girl’s picture. In the darkness he could not make out her face.

Beringer extracted his eyeglasses from their case and put them on, being careful with the earpieces, which were easily bent. He had to strike a match to read the name on the ID card. A gust of wind blew out the first match. The second flickered over the name: Lisl Moeller. Alongside the name a pretty face peered eagerly into the camera. The face dissolved as the flame guttered out.

In that brief flare of light Beringer understood for the first time how fate had intervened to show him the way to his personal magic kingdom. It was a yellow brick road, he thought—every twist and turn laid out exactly as it was meant to be!

He dug his Swiss pocketknife from his pocket. He smiled in the darkness as he crouched over the girl’s body.

It was the most exhilarating moment of his life.

T
HE
FBI
AGENT
, who was stationed at Bonn, was called in by the German police as a matter of form because the girl had been seen frequently with an American soldier. The agent’s name was Karen Younger. She was twenty-four years old, one year out of the FBI Academy, with a BA in psychology from Penn State and a law degree from Georgetown. She had never seen a murder victim before, much less a young woman mutilated and beaten to death. She walked shakily out of the morgue and staggered to a nearby bathroom, where she vomited into the toilet. When she looked into the bathroom mirror she thought she saw the pale face and haunted eyes of a dead woman.

The stolid German detective who had driven her to the morgue waited for her in the white-tiled corridor. She surprised him by insisting on examining the body more closely. Aside from the victim’s battered face, which would torment Younger’s sleep for years to come, what riveted her attention was the initial, approximately three inches high, carved crudely into the dead woman’s abdomen. The same weapon had been used for vaginal penetration and a savage vertical cut. According to the medical examiner’s preliminary report the raw slashes had been made with the point of a small blade, not very sharp. The minimal bleeding indicated that both wounds were postmortem.

“What does the letter mean?” Younger wondered aloud.

The German policeman shrugged. “It is her initial,” he said. “Her name was Lisl Moeller.”

“And she was last seen with an American soldier?” the agent asked after a moment, still trying to breathe slowly and deeply.

“
Ja
. She was seen with him many times before.”

“They were lovers?” Was that what this was? A crime of passion? “Has the soldier been identified?”

“He is Corporal James Crowell of your United States Air Force,” the detective said in precisely correct English. “He is stationed at the Air Force base near Wiesbaden. He has not reported back to the base.”

“I guess we’d better find him.”

The soldier was found the following morning by two young boys who had gone down to the river to fish. The body, in the water more than thirty-six hours and carried two miles downstream from the bridge by a strong current, was in poor condition, but Karen Younger was able to note two details of particular investigative interest. One was the soldier’s broken nose and the purplish bruising beside it, suggesting that Crowell had been in a fight. The other was Crowell’s hands, which were unmarked.

It hadn’t been much of a fight, she thought.

T
HE
I
NDIAN SLIPPED
through brush and smoke, invisible until he popped up next to Dave Lindstrom. Startled, Dave lurched back a step.

“I scared you,” the Indian said.

“You sure as hell did. How do you do that?”

“It’s something my people learned fighting the cavalry.”

“You’re too young to have fought the cavalry.”

The smoke-blackened Indian was a Navajo, no more than twenty-five years old, Dave guessed, one of a team of firefighters flown in the day before from Arizona. His name was Jim Roget. “Like the champagne,” he had said when he introduced himself.

“Where did you acquire a French name?”

“It’s a long story of oppression and deceit. You wanta hear it?”

“Not really,” Dave had answered with a grin.

The Navajos were experienced firefighters, and Jim Roget had been assigned as a crew boss for Lindstrom and his group of volunteers. They fought the fire with shovels and McLeod rakes and Pulaskis, the latter a double-edged ax and hoe, each of these tools used to cut down, clear away or bury combustible brush and grasses. Right now the volunteers were strung out along a service road on the east flank of San Carlos Canyon, halfway up the slope, trying to widen the gap created by the road before the fire reached it. Farther along the road Dave could see the line of fire engines, four-wheel-drive brush rigs and pumper trucks, and a tangle of thick hoses strung across the road like spilled intestines.

Dave had been on the lines for thirty-six hours. It was hot, punishing work and every muscle ached. His blisters had blisters. Roget, he noted, looked as fresh as he had when the buses dumped him and the other Navajos at the base camp in San Carlos Regional Park the previous day.

Unlike the Navajo, Dave Lindstrom was not a professional firefighter. He was an assistant professor in the Film and Television Studies program at San Carlos College. He had taken volunteer training with the county fire department, plus two weeks with the Forest Service, and this was the second year he had been called upon to help battle a major fire in the hills on the outskirts of San Carlos. Some of his academic colleagues thought he was crazy, and right about now Dave was inclined to agree with them.

The time was the last week of September, the beginning of the fire season in Southern California. No rain since last April, and the brush on every hillside was—as the television anchors kept repeating—tinder dry. Set a match to it, or even throw a cigarette carelessly out of a car window, and the brush literally exploded. This fire had been started farther up the canyon two days ago. Some thrill-seeking arsonist slipping out of his car at the side of the road in early morning darkness, catching the glitter in his eyes as the first flames crackled in the brush.

So far six thousand acres had burned and twelve homes had been destroyed along with their lifetime accumulations of possessions and memories. Most of the houses had burned the first night of the fire, hillside homes above Canyon Drive where the blaze had started.

Off to Dave’s left there was a loud explosion. A tall palm tree burst into flames, a dazzling fire on a stick like a fireworks display. Through the pervasive smoke Lindstrom could barely see the strike force of firefighters who were making a stand before some threatened homes, hoping to stop the relentless march of the fire before more dwellings were gutted.

A helicopter flapped overhead, one of the larger, twin-rotor choppers hauling a huge bucket of water at the end of a long cable and moving toward the threatened homes. Working his shovel, sweat pouring down his face, Dave peered through a film of his own making as the helicopter dropped its load. The water fell on a finger of flames, turning that little patch of hillside into a black smear. He felt like cheering, but the flames beyond the dousing seemed to leap higher and race even faster through the brush.

Someone was shouting at him. Dave saw several of the other volunteers straightening up, clambering onto the service road. “Pull back! Pull back!”

Lowering his head, momentarily blinded by white ash, Dave stumbled as he tried to climb. A strong hand gripped his arm, preventing a fall. Jim Roget, encased in his fire-retardant Nomex jacket and pants and matching yellow helmet, grinned at him. His black eyes peered through a coating of white, as if he wore warpaint. “Hang in there,” the Navajo said. “Help is on the way.”

“What? The wind’s shifted?”

“Naw, a couple of Super Scoopers are gonna hit this side of the hill. You know, those big mothers scoop the water right out of the ocean on the fly. We’re pullin’ back. Now.”

He went along the line, informing and encouraging the crew. One by one they climbed onto the road, peered at each other through the gloom, and began to trudge up the slope toward the ridgeline. Laboring after them, Dave wondered if the Super Scoopers were as effective as claimed. Even more effective than the helicopters and the C-130 tankers that were used to drop either water or fire retardant onto the fire, the banana-yellow Super Scoopers were able to scoop up 1,600 gallons of water at a pass, repeating the maneuver again and again without returning to base.

Above him Dave could now make out the phalanx of equipment and firefighters massing along the ridge above him. This, then, was the next line of defense. Beyond it, on the far side of the hill, were not isolated homes but the beginnings of a crowded subdivision, Mountain Ridge Estates, expensive homes overlooking San Carlos and the coastal hills on out to the Pacific Ocean.

Nearing the ridge, Dave had a panoramic glimpse through a rent in the curtain of smoke. Along the side of the canyon scores of men in their yellow gear were clambering up the slope, like an army in retreat. And the fire, as if sensing a rout, blazed higher, leaping over terrain the retreating firefighters had surrendered. A stand of trees ignited, one after the other, sharp explosions succeeding each other like the crash of big guns. A sinuous thread of fire, licking through a cut in the hillside, merged with another, and the flames suddenly soared thirty feet into the air.

The retreating firefighters were scrambling now, stumbling with exhaustion and a hint of panic, for the fire raced up the hillside faster than they could run. For Dave Lindstrom and the others, the heat was now a force, two thousand degrees at its heart, sucking the oxygen from the air and from their lungs. He was winded, exhausted, his legs wobbling like the Straw Man in
The Wizard of Oz
. Ray Bolger on a bad day, Dave thought.

Suddenly there was a thunderous pounding almost directly overhead. Dave looked up in time to see the big, gleaming yellow shape of the highly touted Super Scooper aircraft swoop low across the canyon. A wall of water spilled down onto the advancing flames. Dave felt the moisture in the air, fine and hot against his face like scalding spray.

Then he was being pulled onto the road at the ridgeline, hearing scattered cheers through the general turmoil. The road was crowded with men and equipment, everyone moving, shouting. Dave was pushed into a line with other volunteers at the side of the road, setting to once more with their shovels and axes and rakes. The smoke was now so thick that the entire scene was obscured. Digging and hacking away at tangled brush, Dave had no idea what was happening with the fire. He could hear the roaring of the flames even though he couldn’t see them, the hissing from the fire hoses, the shouts of crew chiefs barking orders. More than once he thought he heard the Super Scooper returning, and he had a glimpse of one of the water-dropping helicopters as well. He knew that some backfires had been set, a thin red line spilling over the slope toward the main fire like a small squad of suicidal soldiers. The whole scene was like a battlefield, thought Dave, who had never been in a battle. He had read that real military combat was often much like this, troops blundering along blindly the best they could, no one knowing what was happening more than a few yards away, confusion everywhere …