Soul Intent (22 page)

The Major shrugged. “Let her be, I reckon. Betty doesn’t need an old bugger like me rattling around the house. She needs somebody young and strong to help her raise our daughter Kate.”

He coughed and turned away, but not before Flora saw the tears in his eyes reflecting the rising sun. She reached out and patted his arm.

He gripped her hand in his, and the two of them watched the sun rise. Then he sighed. “I’m unlucky in love, I reckon. This is the second family I’ve lost.”

She had heard from Baba how Ned Callaghan’s first wife and infant son had died during a typhus outbreak in White Cliffs. Ned had turned his claim over to her grandfather and had gone on a walkabout, fully intending to die in the outback.

She wondered what had kept him alive. “How did you and my grandfather find each other after you left White Cliffs?” she asked.

The Major straightened up. “I spent the next year and a half with me dilly bag, drifting around the country. Sometimes I would ride the rails, and one day I stopped in Ballarat, an almost-dried-up gold town. I heard somebody hollering ‘Old Ned!’, and I spotted your grandfather waving his bloody hat at me.”

He smiled. “That was back in 1913. He took me home, and I boarded with him and your grand-mum,” he said. “I worked for Raddy in his new blacksmith shop until we both were volunteered for the war.”

“The one he didn’t make it home from.”

“Aye.” They sat in silence for a few more minutes. “He was a right chap, Flora. When I returned to Ballarat and found your grand-mum and father gone, I ran his blacksmith shop for twenty years. Until I got buggered by that bloody tram.”

They finished their hot drinks and stood up. Flora handed Callaghan his cane. “The captain says we’ll be at the Carlton-Savoy by noon,” she said.

He nodded. “We have seats on the three o’clock train to Presov.”

“Will the captain let you take Dieter?” She and Ned would need his help in the mines.

“Aye, Dieter rides with us.” The other two would sail on to Budapest, load up, and pick them up from Bratislava four days later. He turned toward her. “If the three of us are late, you won’t make it to Paris in time.”

“We won’t be late,” she said. She hoped she was right.

thirty-nine

Present Day

Slovakia

“While Flora floated down the Danube,” Archie said, “I visited Mr. Goering.” A faint smile crossed his lips. “I spent a long and painful following afternoon answering Colonel Andrus’s questions regarding Hermann Goering’s suicide.”

Shamelessly facilitated by Soul Identity. “Did they ever suspect you?” I asked.

He shrugged. “The media wakes up every few years with another theory,” he said. “And every now and then another old soldier issues a confession about how he inadvertently slipped Hermann Goering the cyanide. I certainly am not going to reveal to them our role in the matter.”

Marie pointed out the window at the river below us. Small fields encased it, and young evergreen forests rimmed the edges. “Is that the Danube down there?” she asked.

George glanced out. “Yes, and that city you see up ahead is Bratislava. We’re over halfway to Kosice.”

I had pulled out a map. “Why not Presov?” I asked. “It looks like it’s the closest city.”

“The airport is now army-only,” he said. “Kosice is twenty miles away.”

“Flora, I thought you mentioned the opal mines were in Hungary,” Val said, looking over my shoulder. “Dubnik’s in Slovakia.”

“Now it is,” Madame Flora said. “When my grandfather was there, that land was part of Hungary.”

“As part of our prep work, I researched the history,” George said. “After World War One, this area joined up with the brand-new Czecho-Slovakia. Then during World War Two, it became part of the SlovakRepublic. The Soviets re-united Czechoslovakia until 1993, when the two split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.”

“Was it the turmoil that kept you away?” I asked Madame Flora.

She nodded. “Baba died in 1948, but the communists got here before I could organize a trip.”

“They’ve been gone twenty years, Grandma. Since we were born,” Rose said. “Are you sure your gold is still there?”

“How can I be sure?” she asked. “Nobody’s mined there since 1918, though recently I heard a visitor’s center will open, and a diving group is organizing tours.”

“Who wants to dive in a mine?” Marie asked.

“Lots of people,” George said. “Thrill seekers. The lower half of the Viliam gallery has been flooded for sixty-something years, and supposedly it’s fabulous. I found some diving sites that rave about the crystal-clear waters and opals shining in the walls.”

Rose looked at her grandmother. “Is this why you had me and Marie spend two summers taking diving lessons?”

The old lady smiled.

I sat down with Madame Flora, Archie, and George when we were an hour away. “You buried the gold in an abandoned opal mine,” I said to Madame Flora.

She nodded.

“And since the mine is now flooded, we’ll have to dive to recover it.”

George held up his hand. “I ordered four suits and rebreathers for you young people to use.”

I looked at him. “Do you have a map of the mine?”

“Of course.” He reached into an overhead compartment and pulled out a tube. He withdrew a map, unrolled it, and spread it on the table. “After some detective work, we got our hands on these plans,” he said. “They were made in 1918, right before operations shut down.”

I looked at the map. “This place is huge,” I said.

“More than thirteen miles of tunnels.” George tapped one particularly complex section. “This gallery is the part that’s underwater. It’s a quarter-mile in. Multiple levels are connected to each other by shafts and rail ramps. Most of them connect back to this other gallery here, but not all of them. Some dead-end into the cave walls, and others look like blind alleys.”

I couldn’t think of a worse place to dive. Val would be in jeopardy of wearing out her singing voice as she kept me calm.

I turned to Madame Flora. “Where’s it hidden?”

“I’m not telling you. Not yet.”

“Are you sure you remember?”

She turned on that wide-eyed stare of hers. “I’m sure.”

The pilot dropped under some clouds, and Val and I got a great view of the High Tatras to the north, the part of the Carpathians marking the border between Slovakia and Poland.

“Good thing the gold’s not up there,” Val said. “Those mountains are covered with snow.”

“And look at those cliffs.” I reached out and took her hand. “I’m really not looking forward to the diving. Are you still feeling committed?”

“Absolutely.” She squeezed my hand. “You’ll be okay.”

“Just stay close to me and be ready to sing if I panic.”

“You don’t have to dive, you know.”

“And let you girls have all the fun?”

We sat quietly for a minute. Then I said, “There’s another reason I want to dive. Old Ned has drawn me in—now I need to be there.”

It seemed to me that the stories I’d heard from the World War Two era were filled with larger-than-life heroes and villains, and packed with high-definition drama, romance, and tragedy. Was this part of history a golden age, or did it just stand out as the New World’s bridge between the Great Depression and its rise to prosperity?

Ned Callaghan was an old man by the time he made his trip with Flora. Though his personal life was in shambles, he fought in both world wars, and it seemed he died helping the granddaughter of a man who twice saved his life. In just a week, he’d become a hero to me, one I was bound to by our shared soul identity. I wanted to ensure his relevancy, and the best way I could do that would be to learn all I could about him, and then put his story into our soul line collection. I couldn’t wait to hear the rest of his final adventure.

I wanted to help him finish his mission. And that’s why I had to dive.

We landed at Kosice airport and got into a large green van. George climbed into the driver’s seat. “We’ll head directly to the mines,” he said. “It should take less than an hour.”

I turned to Madame Flora. “What happened when you brought the gold to Dubnik?”

forty

October 1946

Dubnik Mine, Czechoslovakia

Flora gripped their guide Vlado’s outstretched hand and hopped down from the back of the horse-drawn wagon. “I felt every bump of that trip,” she told him, even though she figured he didn’t understand.

She stretched and looked around the clearing. Two rusting ore cars sat on railroad tracks, which ran into what must have been the mine’s entrance in the side of a hill. A wooden shack stood beside the tracks.

They had arrived five hours earlier at Presov Station, and while the Major arranged transportation to the mine, Flora searched for a guide who spoke German and English. They both were partially successful: they were now the proud owners of two wagons, and they were accompanied by an old man named Vlado who claimed he once worked the mines, and who demonstrated a vocabulary of a few Romany, German, and English words.

But he couldn’t easily string those words together in any decipherable order, Flora soon realized. In the long ride to the Dubnik mine entrance, Vlado’s communication was mainly about his name, his fee, and his joy that the war was over.

The second wagon rolled to a stop next to them, and the Major and the captain’s man, Dieter, clambered off the barrels and jumped to the ground.

“Crikey, I thought we’d never reach here.” Callaghan whacked the iron-rimmed wagon wheel with his cane. “Bloody wagons. Who would have guessed there would be no trucks in Presov?”

The Major directed Dieter to unload the barrels, boxes, and equipment, but when he started, Vlado began shouting in Slovakian and waving his arms.

“What’s he saying?” Callaghan asked Flora.

“I don’t know,” Flora said. She tried to talk to him in Romany, but he continued to shout. She switched to German, then English, with the same results.

“Dieter, stop unloading for a minute,” Callaghan said.

When Dieter stopped, Vlado went silent.

“We can’t afford to attract any attention,” Callaghan said. “What the devil is making him holler?”

Dieter cleared his throat. “Vlado say
verboten
to stay here, sir. Mine is haunted.”

“You understand him?” Callaghan asked.

He nodded. “A little. I served with Slovak SS unit on Russian front. Good little fighters.”

“Tell him we need to unload these bloody barrels and find a hidey hole in the bloody mine.”

Dieter shook his head. “Sorry sir, I don’t understand. Hidey hole?” He looked at Flora.

Flora translated for Dieter, who talked to the guide while they waited. After a few minutes Vlado spat on the ground and stalked off.

“Where’s he going?” Flora asked Dieter.

“Home. He won’t help us. He says to keep the fee.”

“You can’t let him go!” she said. “He’ll just tell the others.”

Dieter ran after Vlado and dragged him back. The old man shouted, and Dieter clamped his hand over his mouth.

“Everybody around here thinks the mines are haunted?” Callaghan asked Dieter.

Dieter asked Vlado, who nodded.

The Major turned to Flora and spoke softly. “Then it won’t matter if he knows—nobody’s going to go down there.”

The Major was right. But maybe she could help spice up the story. She spoke to Dieter again. “Tell him we knew the place was haunted, and that’s why we came.”

He looked at her. “We did?”

She nodded. “The Major and I did. Tell him.”

Dieter shrugged. He told Vlado, and the old man stopped struggling and opened his eyes wide. He said something to Dieter, who held up his hand and spoke to Flora. “He wants to know what you have in the barrels.”

“Cognac, but you already knew that.”

Dieter stared back. “Why are you putting cognac into a mine?”

She smiled. “Because of what’s in the boxes.”

Dieter translated for Vlado. Then he turned to Flora. “What’s in the boxes?”

“
Strigoi morti
,” she said.

At that, with no translation necessary, Vlado started shouting again, and he clawed at Dieter.

“I can’t hold him much longer,” Dieter said. He blocked the guide from biting his forearm.

“Tell him that I am their Gypsy servant,” Flora said. “We’ve brought enough cognac to keep them calm for many years. But tell him that nobody should come here again, or the
strigoi
will become angry at the trespassers, and they will descend on them and their children.”

Dieter relayed this to Vlado, who nodded his head vigorously. Dieter let him go, and the old man fell on his knees in front of Flora and spoke to her.