The Diaries - 01 (20 page)

Mildly surprised
the two shots had not yet drawn the attention of the local police, Gage grabbed
the diary from the floor, retrieving his blackjack in the process.
 
He used a rag loaded with an ammonia cleaning
solution to wipe all surfaces he and Monika might have touched and, less than
two minutes after swinging the pistol, Gage was out the back door and down the
small street.

***

Gage entered the
hotel, keeping his head down, squinting his eyes.
 
He ignored the bored-looking man sitting
behind the front desk reading a paper.
 
As he had done for the entire run from the book
store, he forced the shock from his mind.
 
Yes, he had killed a man.
 
Yes,
the man had deserved it.
 
Yes, his passivity
streak since Crete was now over.
 

And yes, it almost
felt good.
 
That’s what bothered him most,
other than the agonizing, head-pounding pain behind his eyes.

But there was no
time for reflection, no time for pain.
 
They had to move, and they had to move fast.
 
Monika was in the room, sitting on the bed,
smoking with a trembling hand.
 
She
jumped up, wrapping her arms around Gage as soon as he entered.

“I thought those
men might hurt you!” she cried.

Gage returned the
hug briefly.
 
He pulled back and placed a
finger over her lip.
 
“Listen Monika, and
listen closely.
 
We have to leave, right
now.
 
We need to wipe down the room and
get the hell out of here.”
 
He slid his
glasses back on, the light of the room hurting his eyes.

Monika stared at
him, her lips parted.
 
“Wipe down the
room?”
 
Recognition flashed over her
face.
 
“Gage, what happened up there?”

He looked away
before stepping into the small bathroom and wetting two washcloths, pumping
both with hand soap.
 
“Wipe down
everything.
 
Scrub it hard and don’t
worry about leaving it wet or soapy.”
 
Gage jerked the sheets from the bed, throwing all the used towels into
the middle of the large rectangle of sheets.

Monika watched
him, tears trickling down her face.
 
She
began to numbly wipe the knobs of the bathroom door.

“Everything, Monika.
 
Don’t leave
anything
undone.”
 
His voice
was hard and cold and distant.
 
Gage
walked into the bathroom, turning on the sink’s faucet as well as the one in
the tub, rinsing both with hot water for a full five minutes.

Five minutes later,
the two were walking down the three flights of stairs to the lobby.
 
Gage paused, glancing upward at the corner of
the small foyer.
 
On the ceiling, above a
fake hanging plant, was a small black bubble.
 
It no doubt held a security camera.
 
He leaned close to Monika and handed her his bag containing the two
diaries, whispering to her not to use her hands on the door, but to hurry from
the building and get the car running.
 
She walked out.

Gage stepped to
the counter; it was manned by the same man that had been there when they had
checked in.
 
He was swarthy, in his
mid-forties, with Bassett hound eyes and the most bored of looks on his
face.
 
His boredom would end in seconds.

“
Sprechen
Sie
Deutsch?” Gage
asked.

The man nodded as
if this were the least interesting query on the face of the earth.

“If you remember,
I am a guest here.”
 
Gage forced a
smile.
 
“I own a security company in
Germany and am trying to get more business in this area.
 
If you don’t mind me asking, what type of security
system does the hotel use?
 
Is it
computer-based?”

The clerk let out
a snort.
 
“With our owner?
 
Hardly. We don’t even
have
a computer,” he answered in good German.
 
“The man is a notorious cheapskate.”

“But I see the
camera on the ceiling.”

“Yeah.
 
It’s a twenty-something-year-old system.
 
Uses a DAT tape.”

Gage thanked him, rushing
behind the counter before the man could react.
 
He grabbed the Frenchman by the throat, growling at him to stay
silent.
 
Using the man’s sweater, Gage
jerked him into the back room and, with a hand over his mouth, told him to
point to the tape unit.
 
The man pointed
to a small closet on the far side of the cluttered room.

Gage muscled him
over to the closet, opening the door and seeing the unit.
 
He released his grip on the man, stabbing
downward at the base of his neck with the side of his right hand.
 
The man crumpled to the floor as the massive
vagus
nerve sent a signal to his brain, making every
conscious action shut down as if a switch had been flipped.
 
It was the least violent way Gage knew to immobilize
the man to allow enough time for him and Monika to slip out of town.

Homicide (perhaps justifiable?)
and now assault.
 
And all he had set out
to do was learn more about some damned diaries.

Things were not
going the way Gage had planned.

***

Damien Ellis was
parched from the wine and salty food.
 
He
placed his half-finished novel on the small table and retrieved the champagne
bucket from the bathroom.
 
Slipping on
his shoes, he stepped from the chamber on the second floor, glancing around for
an ice machine and seeing none.

“Not a Hampton
Inn,” he grumbled to himself, shuffling down the hall and descending the
stairs.
 
That’s when he heard a grunt and
a heavy thud.
 
He stopped where he was,
peering over the railing into the lobby.

An attractive girl
used her sweater to turn the door’s knob from the outside, stepping in and speaking
German in a loud whisper to someone Ellis couldn’t see from his vantage
point.
 
The first word she spoke sounded
like she was addressing someone.
 
It sounded
like “Gauge”.

Then, in clear
English, a frustrated-sounding man told her she was supposed to be in the damned
car.
 
And to hide the diaries under the
back seat.

Diaries?
 

That’s what the
man said.

Ellis was hidden
in the darkness of the stairwell.
 
He got
a clear view of the man, slightly taller than average, looking somewhere on the
short side of forty, with short sandy hair and heavy stubble.
 
He wore a great deal of stress on his face as
he glanced around the lobby before hustling out the door, wiping the knob on
both sides with a wet rag.

Ellis took a deep
breath, not knowing what he was about to see.
 
He stepped gingerly down the stairs, saying hello out loud several
times.
 
He knew no one would answer.
 
Ellis could smell sweat and fear as he
stepped behind the counter and into the small room behind the front desk.
 
Propped against the wall was a man in a
ripped and tousled shirt.
 
A piece of a torn
shirt or sheet was around the man’s mouth—a gag.
 
When Ellis leaned the man forward, he
realized the man’s hands had been bound by a strip of the cloth as well.
 
He took the man’s pulse, relieved that his
heart was beating fiercely and he appeared to be breathing normally.

Ten minutes later,
as they waited on the French police, the clerk examined the room as he rubbed
his neck.
 
Nothing, other than the tape,
had been stolen.

Ellis replayed the
snippets of what he’d seen and heard in his mind.
 
The man’s English was American, no
doubt.
 
And he had told the pretty girl
to put the diaries under the back seat, and she had said “Gauge”.

Gauge
.
 
Gauge.
 
 
Gauge
.
 
Ellis burned the moniker into his mind.

Sipping a bottle
of mineral water as he chatted with the confused night manager, Damien Ellis
chided himself, vowing to just give a statement and get back to his vacation.

“You
ain’t
Hercule
Poirot
,”
Ellis murmured to himself.
 
“And this
ain’t
London.”

But ringing in the
back of his mind, over and over, was the name Gauge.

 
***

About the same
time the night manager awoke to see a vacationing Army investigator nosing
around the front desk, Bruno Florence moaned loudly as he awoke from his pistol
whip-induced unconsciousness.
 
He sat up,
watched the room spin, then vomited violently, losing all of the sautéed sole
he’d so greedily eaten hours earlier.
 
The room was alive with the smell of blood and death.
 
Bruno knew that smell well, everything making
sense as what had happened came back to him in a wash of horrific images.

A glance at his
watch told him he’d been out nearly an hour.
 
As his head throbbed, Bruno staggered to the front, staying well away
from Leon and the dead shop owner.
 
Corpses
scared him, and he realized he was crying and whimpering like he once did as a
boy.
 
His tears weren’t borne of sadness
for his boss.
 
As far as assholes went, Leon
was subordinate only to his cousin, Nicky.
 
Everyone hated Leon—behind his back—except Nicky.
 
Only someone like Nicky could love Leon Clavier.
 

As the fogginess
of his unconsciousness dissipated, fear began to paralyze Bruno.
 
He stumbled as he walked through the curtain,
falling to the floor, his large body wracked by sobs while he curled into a
fetal position behind the front counter.
 
Nicky would definitely have him killed for allowing this to happen.
 
Or Nicky might just kill him himself:
something he was prone to do when his blood was up.
 
Bruno pulled himself up, sitting against the
wall.
 
Snot and tears mingled to make a
sticky dampness that trickled down his face while he stared at the cell
phone.
 
Marcel had called several times
in the past hour, no doubt anxious over how the situation with the homo had
turned out.

Rather than call
Marcel, Bruno dialed his brother Luc, getting his mechanical, phone-company-provided
voice mail.
 
Glaives don’t record voicemail
greetings, even moronic Glaives like Bruno and Luc.
 
He waited ten minutes, calling him
again.
 
Nothing.
 
Regrettably, Bruno was sure Luc was probably
passed out cold by this hour, a bottle in his hand.

Afraid to make the
call but knowing he’d better, he opened and closed the flip phone at least
twenty times before finally dialing Marcel.
 
Marcel answered on the first ring.

“Marcel, this is
Bruno.”
 
Uncontrollable sobs.
 
“Something very, very bad has happened.”

***

Château-Thierry, France

Rap music blared
in the enormous bedroom.
 
It was European
rap, blended with a pulsating techno beat.
 
The top-of-the-line stereo distorted as it pushed the heavy tune at the
peak of its volume range, the accompanying Bang &
Olufson
speakers on the verge of blowing.
 

Not that Nicky
Arnaud would care.

The only light in
the overdone room was provided by a gigantic built-in LED television; on it
played a hard-core porn video featuring far more women than men. At one end of
the room was a colossal poster bed, its sheets and garish coverlets rumpled and
damp with a profusion of female bodily fluid and semen.
 
Sitting on the gooey bed was a woman worthy
of a centerfold, nude, save the stiletto heels and thigh-highs.
 
In her hand was a tumbler full of premium
vodka and ice.
 
She watched Nicky—a man
she’d met only three days before—in a state of complete boredom.
 
She guzzled the vodka, smacking her tongue
afterward, yelling to Nicky that she couldn’t even taste it.
 
Three days of cocaine, sex, uppers and
downers tend to deaden the senses.

Nicky didn’t hear
her over the music.
 
He was also naked,
situated in front of a gilded, full-length mirror.
 
In his left hand was a stiletto; in his right
a
Katzbalger
sword.
 
With his short, uncircumcised penis dangling freely, the Frenchman swung
the death objects in something that looked like a lethal dance.
 
He was practicing, having been trained in
Chanbara
as a teenager.
 
An hour in front of the mirror each day kept his instincts at a high
level, or so he frequently bragged.