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Chapter One
Talking Horse |
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Mulheisen was sitting in Pinky's restaurant, staring at a
remarkable picture of a naked woman. Pinky's was one of his
favorite places in Detroit. It was basically just an old frame house, located near
the MacArthur Bridge, on Jefferson Avenue. The house had legendary associations for
Mulheisen since, in his childhood, every time they passed the house in his father's car,
his father or his mother would point it out as the place "where they caught those
Nazis." The "Nazis" were said to be spies who had assisted a Luftwaffe
pilot, a prisoner of war who had escaped from a Canadian prison camp. This was not exactly
the case, as Mulheisen eventually learned.
Mulheisen's
father had been for many years the water commissioner, responsible for, among other
things, the municipal waterworks in Detroit. One of the principal installations of these
works was located in Waterworks Park, just a few blocks farther out Jefferson Avenue from
Pinky's. During World War II, it was feared that the waterworks might be sabotaged by
Nazis, or Nazi sympathizers -- "fifth columnists" in the slang of the day --
which tremendously enhanced the glamour of the tale of the escaped Luftwaffe pilot in
little Mul's mind. The fact that the Naval Armory was nearby also helped in building this
legend. Wow! Nazis! Actual Nazis, here in ordinary old Detroit! The mind reeled.
The fact that
Mulheisen later bothered to find out the known facts about this legend says something
about his character. He had become a policeman, ultimately a detective, a career choice
that greatly startled his parents. What he learned was that Pinky's was not the house
where the escaped Luftwaffe pilot (a magical phrase which rang in little Mul's imagination
like a golden bell) had been arrested. It was in the neighborhood, though, and the pilot
had been briefly harbored by an amiable middle-aged couple who were not Nazis or even Nazi
sympathizers, but merely Germans who had immigrated to Detroit at least twenty years
earlier ... innocent people, themselves victims of war. The Luftwaffe pilot had escaped
from a prisoner of war camp in northern Ontario in company with a Wehrmacht captain who
was a cousin of the wife in the couple. The Wehrmacht officer was recaptured quite early,
but the Luftwaffe pilot made his way to Detroit, where he took the chance that the couple
might assist him, which they did, out of compassion for a fellow German who was in danger
and despair, and perhaps out of fear -- they may have simply wanted to move the escapee on
down the road, so that he did not imperil their already troubled circumstances.
It wasn't
easy being a German immigrant in Detroit, in 1944, with a noticeable accent; one kept a
low profile. The American public did not distinguish between ordinary Germans and Nazi
Party members. For that matter, one didn't even have to be a German to be harassed as a
sympathizer, as in the case of a suburban family who found their house surrounded by angry
neighbors one night because a babysitter had told her parents, who told other neighbors,
that there was a well-read copy of Mein Kampf in the house. (The husband,
something of a self-styled intellectual, convinced his neighbors after a long harangue on
the porch, that he was "just trying to find out what the hell all this danged Hitler
fuss was about.")
As it
happened, the pilot was never caught, Mulheisen learned. He managed to get to New Orleans
and thence onto a freighter that took him to South America. He didn't make it to Germany
before the war ended, so one could say that he failed in his duty, but he had certainly
tried and he had been brave and nearly successful. The German-American couple, however,
were nabbed by the FBI and sent to prison for a good long time, their lives utterly
ruined. Perhaps they were lucky not to have been hung, or shot, which surely would have
been the fate of their counterparts in Nazi Germany.
Mulheisen was
aware, of course, that his own family was of German origin, having immigrated to America
in the mid-19th century. But they made very little of their German heritage, perhaps
because of two world wars in which their new homeland took sides against the fatherland.
There were times when Mullers changed their names to Miller, and towns once called Berlin
overnight became Lincoln City. He didn't even really know where in Germany the Mulheisens
had come from, although he had a vague idea it was in the north-central region, perhaps
around Erfurt. He wondered if his parents' interest in this episode had been enhanced by
their own Germanness and if they had somehow, perhaps unconsciously, communicated their
heightened interest to their child.
Legends
aside, the reason Mulheisen had first come to Pinky's, years ago, was because he had heard
that it served an excellent calf's liver. He had since decided that he didn't like calf's
liver; indeed, he wondered how he could ever have liked calf's liver. But he still
went to Pinky's because it was a comfortable place with an ambience that appealed to him,
of homeyness overlaid with a modest and confident elegance. As for the alleged Nazi
association, it was interesting to him that even after he had discovered the evident facts
about the case, Pinky's still gleamed in his imagination with a mysterious, if dimmed,
glamour.
Pinky's was
rather empty today and he and his old friend Vito Belk had scooched their chairs together
at one of the tables so that they could both look at some pictures that Vito had brought.
These pictures looked like photographs, but were actually computer generated. They were
mostly black and white, about eight inches square, but some were in color and some looked
like infrared. They were aerial shots. Some were of a mountainous terrain seen from
several hundred feet, but most were much closer.
"These
pictures are tremendously magnified," Vito said, "so details tend to be a little
fuzzy. She's not fuzzy, though." Vito was a heavy man, a fuzzy man, with a beard that
covered almost his whole face; when he smiled his teeth sparkled through the hedge.
Mulheisen
smiled back at Vito's joke, but his smile didn't exactly sparkle. He was an almost homely
man, with a longish face and longish teeth that were slightly separated. This feature had
given him the nickname "Sergeant Fang," on the Street.
Vito's joke
was that the woman in the picture was floating on her back in a pool, her arms and legs
outspread, and while she had a great mane of black hair drifting about her head, she had
no other hair visible on her body. She was gazing upwards, seemingly in a state of bliss,
as if looking directly into the camera. She was a small woman, slim and almost boyish,
except for the mane of black hair. Almost no breasts, no hips. Very pretty face, with
large, dark eyes and full lips. The faint line of the vagina was visible.
"What altitude
was this camera?" Mulheisen asked.
Vito wasn't
sure. He looked at the back of the picture and then at the others. There was nothing on
the back. "They're from different satellites," he said. "I'm not, uh ... I
can't say which satellites. You understand. But most of them are about 200 miles, I
think."
Mulheisen
wasn't interested in which satellites had taken the pictures. He was just interested in
what was in them. Each picture had a date and time line printed on it, such as "8
September, 1801:05 GMT", or "18 December, 2145:27 GMT". This was the
instant, in Greenwich Mean Time, when the picture was taken, Vito explained. "Not
that it's a snapshot, or something. There's no film involved, just transmitted bits of
electronic information that get stored in a computer." He didn't say where, but
Mulheisen could guess.
"This is
a great shot," Vito said, tapping the one of the naked woman floating on her back. It
wasn't clear if he meant that the picture had come out well or that he liked the subject
-- perhaps both. It seemed to have been taken from a distance of about ten feet above the
water. Three accompanying shots of the same instant -- the same shot, actually, at
different magnifications: say from a hundred feet, five hundred feet, a thousand feet --
revealed that the pool was a hot springs on a mountainside, surrounded by mature evergreen
trees.
The woman in
the picture was known to Mulheisen as Helen Sedlacek and he believed that she had murdered
a Detroit crime boss named Dante "Carmine" Busoni. He believed that she did it
with the assistance of man known in the crime world as Joe Service, but known in the
Butte, Montana area as Joseph Humann. He believed that Helen had killed Carmine because
the latter had ordered the killing of her father, a charming crook known as Big Sid. This
hot springs was located on Joseph Humann's property, some forty miles south of Butte. |
