Werewolf Cop (12 page)

“You should've woken up half an hour ago. Your wife would've been here. She's been here practically the whole time—s'why I'm spelling her for a few minutes. Bad timing on your part. She's a much nicer person than I am and with far superior tits. On the other hand, I bet she never scored fifteen million at Temple Run 4. Plus she can't bring you up to date on the Paz murders.”

The Paz murders. Dominic Abend. It came back to him. Zach tried to sit up.

“There's a button. . . .” said Goulart, gesturing sideways with his chin so he wouldn't have to stop playing the game on his phone.

Zach found the button and raised the head of his bed. “What's new on the Paz case?”

“Nothing,” said Goulart. “Or nothing much. We've been trying to locate any properties Paz owned, anyplace he might've stored his stolen goods, you know, so we might be able to find out what Abend, if it was Abend, was looking for, if he
was
looking for it. . . .”

Zach got a whiff of something—a smell—it was coming off Goulart—just for a moment, then it was gone—but in that moment, Zach thought:
He's lying.
And with a sour feeling in his stomach, he remembered what Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell had told him:
We have reason to believe Goulart is dirty.
Was his partner hiding something from him—or had Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell just managed to plant her foul suspicions in his head?

“And you haven't found anything?” he asked.

“We found a warehouse in Woodside under a shell company we think was Paz's. But someone must've gotten to it when they heard Paz had been murdered. It was cleaned out by the time we got there. What about you? You come up with anything in the old country?”

Zach said: “That woman . . . in Germany. . . .” It was all coming back now. The museum. The double row of stone apostles. The hunched professor hobbling toward him, cigarette in her hand. “Gretchen Dankl . . . it was a dead end. She was crazy.”

“Yeah, well, I figured,” said Goulart. Then he let out a curse. He'd lost the game, the one on his phone. He shook his head with annoyance and slapped the plastic rectangle against one thigh. “Fucking thing. Anyway, I figured. I tried to contact her after you got back. No one at the university has ever even heard of her.”

“What?”

“It's hard to get anyone on the phone over there right now with the apocalypse going on and all, but we've had some e-mail contact. No one's ever heard of a Gretchen Dankl. She sure as hell's not on the staff.”

“The paper she wrote . . . on the baselard. . . .”

“No one's ever heard of her paper either. No one's heard of Stump's Baselard, or whatever it was. Looks like you got punked, brother. I don't know why. My guess is she's some sort of Dominic Abend groupie or something. You know, like one of those women who marry serial killers in prison. If I'd only known that was the best way to get laid. . . .”

Now Zach remembered something else. A clearing in the moonlit woods. A noise—a noise unlike any other he had ever heard—a moaning growl half animal, half human. . . . He shook his head quickly to make the thought go away. Must've been a fever dream. To keep from thinking about it, he asked again: “What's a
Gretchenfrage
?” He gestured at Goulart's phone. “Look it up for me, will you?”

Goulart tapped the word in with his thumbs. “‘A compound of the name Gretchen—a diminutive of the name Margarethe—and
frage
, meaning
question
. In reference to . . .' I don't know how you pronounce this . . . ‘Goth? Gothe? Goth's
Faust
, a play first published in 1808, in which Gretchen asks Faust, who is in league with the devil:
What do you think of religion?
Hence it is any question that gets to the core of an issue, especially one with a difficult or unpleasant answer. A question about a person's religious beliefs.' There you have it:
Gretchenfrage.
Let's move on to Obscure Words for 200.”

Zach shook his head, mystified. “I never heard of any of that,” he said. That wasn't quite true: the name Margarethe rang a bell, but he couldn't quite remember why. But the rest: Goth, Faust,
Gretchenfrage.
. . .
“How could that have been in my—”

But before he could finish, the door banged open. His children shouted “Daddy!” and rushed across the room to him. His wife came in behind them, smiling through her tears, calling out to warn them, “Careful, kids. Gently.”

The children obediently pulled up short and did not launch themselves on top of him—their original plan. Instead, they rested their elbows on the edge of his mattress and gazed at him raptly with their scrubbed and rosy angel faces.

Zach was not prepared for the strength of the emotion that welled up inside him, not prepared for the size of it, which seemed too big for his body to contain. He caught a whiff of his blue-eyed boy—the brown-sweet scent of his flesh—and a whiff of the silken shampoo blonde of his daughter's hair; and then Grace sat down beside him, and that mysterious atmosphere that always surrounded her, that always made him yearn for something that was beyond her but that he could only somehow get to through her—all of this filled his nostrils, his lungs, his body head to toe, and a feeling welled up inside him that was beyond anything he could remember experiencing. It was as overwhelming and savage as lust, as primordial, but it was not that. It was his love for them—for his woman, his boy, his girl. It was the very thing that bound him with them as completely as the cells of his own flesh were bound together.

He had to touch them. Had to. Had to put his palm against little Ann's cheek and ruffle Tom's hair, and then he had to reach up a weak arm trailing intravenous tubes and draw his woman—his mysterious Grace, whose inner life was a riddle to him—draw her down to his chest and press her close, press her into that spot where she fit beneath his chin. He kissed her hair and kissed her cheek and smelled . . . he could smell her very blood pulsing inside her, pulsing through the artery in her white throat. He could smell her blood—and his own blood seemed to mingle with it through the love he felt for her so that they seemed spliced together into a single living system.

A guttural noise came out of him, a low growl of passionate attachment. “God, it's good to see you, Grace,” he whispered into his wife's ear. “I could eat you up.”

10

ON THE HUNT

T
here were cheers and applause when he finally swaggered back into the Task Force Zero squad room. There were cards and flowers on his desk and even, courtesy of Janine in Records, an oversized plastic cowboy doll from some cartoon movie: “Welcome Back, Cowboy.” Much shaking of hands all around, some bumping of fists. Many jovial remarks on how pale he was, how thin, practically invisible if you tried to look at him from the side.

He'd been there five minutes when the Director's receptionist summoned him upstairs over the in-house phone. Which would've been fine—he would've figured it was just a welcome-home from the boss—a rueful postmortem of his wasted trip—except that the receptionist added “Just you, Agent Adams. Not your partner.” He remembered his last meeting with Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell, how she'd tried to enlist him in her vendetta against Goulart, how he'd walked out angry. Now it seemed they were going to take things up where they'd left off. So he went up in the elevator with a sense of foreboding.

It was fifteen days since he'd gotten back from Germany, eight since he'd come to his senses in the hospital. The events of his trip and the dreams of his long fever had blended together in his mind so that he wasn't sure anymore which ones were which. There were some things he felt fairly certain about. The drive to Freiberg through the fairytale landscape, the meeting with Gretchen Dankl, or whoever the hell she was, in the hall of stone saints—these, he was sure, had actually happened. Then there were other things that
seemed
real enough but that
couldn't
have happened. The professor's transformation into a raging beast, the fatal wounds that magically healed—these must have been the hallucinations of his illness.

And then . . . then there were the mysteries. Things in between.

There was the report, for instance: the paper Gretchen Dankl had written, which he had read on the plane. If that had been real, where was it? The pages she had sent him were gone, though he had no memory of discarding them. The link to the abstract that he had found on the Internet that one time—it too seemed to have vanished. And yet, if the report had not been real, if it had been some kind of fever dream or hallucination, where had the information come from? There really was a Peter Stumpf, it turned out, accused of being a werewolf in 16th-century Germany, and there really was a Thirty Years War in the 17th century and a Nazi operation code-named Werewolf—but Zach had never heard of any of them before. He could not have made the report up, in other words. So it must have been real—right?—but where the hell had it gone?

And then there was that dream, that dream he'd had in the hospital. The graveyard in the mist. The scaffolding. The executioner.
Ja, das ist die Gretchenfrage.
Again, there really was such a word, but he'd never heard it before the dream. And the sword the executioner had held—the strange sword with the rounded blade that had no point—that was real too. He'd looked it up. Medieval German executioners had actually used such swords—what would they need a point for?—but Zach had had no idea. All of which was not to mention those damp fingerprints just fading from his wrist when he'd awakened. That had to have been some sort of illusion because . . . well, because things like that didn't happen, that's why. Still, it just didn't make any sense that he could see.

These matters bothered him, but he had tried to push them to the back of his mind. Work to do. Returning to family life. Regaining his strength. Catching up. Too many other things to think about. . . .

“Welcome back,” said the chief's receptionist as she nodded him through the half-open office door.

“Zach! You look good,” said Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell, striding from behind the great desk to greet him with a brusque handshake. She was as she ever was. Wiry, wound-up. Navy blue pants suit. Power jacket, red this time. The long depressed pony face set in its
I'm-all-business
expression. She gestured Zach to the oversoft sofa and took a detour to turn off the flatscreen on the wall. All four pictures showed some Arab-looking guy addressing a cheering crowd.

“Christ,” said Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell as she marched to her armchair. “First Greece and Italy turn into gangsterocracies. Now France. . . . Pretty soon we'll be the only free country left in the world.”

Zach suppressed a flashing memory of Gretchen Dankl leaning toward him urgently through the smoke from her cigarette . . .
stop him before he does to your continent what he has done to mine.

“So—the German trip? Total write-off?” She was planted in the chair across the coffee table from him now, leaning forward, her arms draped over legs crossed at the knee.

“Professor Dankl, or whoever she was, believes Dominic Abend is an immortal warlock who destroyed post-war Europe with a magic dagger and is now coming after the U.S.,” Zach told her.

“Great. So we move on. Have you had time to catch up?”

“I just got in.”

“But you've talked to Goulart. Impressions?”

“Well, the Paz case seems. . . .” Zach paused to choose the word.

Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell barked it at him: “Stalled. Completely. What do you make of it?”

Zach already knew what she was getting at. He could smell her anxiety—or sense it, anyway. She knew she had lost him last time. She knew she needed his support in the bureau. She didn't have the patience to let it ride, so she'd been waiting all this time for the chance to win him back. He was thinking wearily:
This again
. He had no patience for playing political games with her, so he spoke right out. “Come on, boss! You gonna try to tell me Broadway's dogging it 'cause he's on the take?”

“He tell you about Paz's warehouse? Emptied out? Like someone knew we were coming.”

“Well, someone
would
know, Paz being hacked to pieces and all.”

Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell drew herself erect, unsmiling. “It's like a game we play, Zach. I point to something suspicious, you rationalize it away.”

“Because Goulart's
not
on the take,” Zach drawled—that set-in-stone drawl that made his wife crazy with frustration. “He's not working for Abend. If you've got proof otherwise, show it. If not. . . .”

Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell's sinewy frame uncoiled from her chair in one tight, swift movement. “You think it's personal? You think it's just that I don't like him because he's a sexist loudmouth who calls me an idiot behind my back?”

“I would understand if you found those particular character traits less than endearing,” said Zach.

She did smile at that, or one half of her mouth lifted anyway. “Goulart's not my favorite person. I admit it. But no matter what he thinks, I am a professional. I wouldn't accuse an agent of turning rotten just because of that.”

She pinned him with a challenging gaze and waited for his reply, but he let the silence grow awkward. The truth was, he believed this about her. She
was
a professional; she
wouldn't
accuse Goulart out of personal animosity. But on the other hand, when a fellow gets under your skin, it's easy to start seeing things in a certain way, to see corruption and evil where there's just . . . who knows what? Bad luck. A tough case.

Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell was on the march again, striding back toward her desk, framed by the big window, the white skyscraper against the blue sky. “While you were gone, Isaiah Medina moved away.”