CHAPTER 11
If a medieval castle and a fairy-tale palace had a love child, it would be the Hart mansion. The house and the grounds it sat on were larger and more palatial than I’d ever imagined.
“This is where you grew up?” I asked from the front door, gazing at the elaborate hedge maze, the tennis courts, and the swimming pool inspired by the fountains of Versailles.
“It wasn’t as fancy as this when I was a kid. My father has made a few changes in recent years.”
“Like what?”
Harry pointed. “He added the landing pad over by the maze for his personal airship. But only after he launched the fleet.”
“I guess you were really slumming it before that happened, huh.”
Harry ignored my sarcasm and pushed the enormous front door open.
It struck me as odd that a house this big didn’t have staff to open the door for us. “Where’s the butler? Don’t you have a housekeeper or a maid or a dungeon master or something?”
“For some reason, my father ordered the entire staff to take the day off. I guess he was feeling generous. It doesn’t happen very often, so when it does, nobody questions it in case he changes his mind.”
I followed him into a large vestibule with a Grecian mosaic floor, a curved grand staircase at one end, and a crystal chandelier the size of my office.
He led me left, through a high-ceilinged, gold-columned, grand ballroom, then through a large gallery housing some of Howard’s private art collection, a sitting room with wallpaper featuring geese and fair maidens, a library and a map room, another sitting room with wallpaper featuring a fox hunt, another gallery, another sitting room, and finally he opened a door that led into a lavish den replete with a large ornately-carved mahogany desk and walls lined with honors, awards, and certificates of appreciation for Howard Hart’s many contributions to various business ventures.
“I’m guessing that desk is locked up tighter than a Wells Fargo vault,” I said, eyeing the opulent desk up and down.
Harry confidently made his way behind the desk and sat in the throne-like chair. “It is. But I know the key to open it. There’s a hidden cipher.”
Harry pushed on a carved panel on the left side of the desktop, and it opened to reveal a secret compartment. I looked over his shoulder to see a small metal gadget set inside the compartment, like a series of dials and locks.
“Something tells me you’ve done this before.”
Harry winked back. “When I was a kid, I used to sneak the odd cigar from his drawers.”
“You smoked? Are you telling me the golden-haired child of the richest family in town smoked his old man’s cigars?”
“No, I never smoked them. I sold them to the other kids at school.”
“Don’t tell me you needed the money,” I said, gesturing to the amount of luxury that practically dripped from the walls .
“No, it wasn’t about the money. It was about being my own man. Starting my own business venture.”
“Like the nightclub.”
Harry nodded. “My father can have his ships and trains. All I ever wanted was a place where people can dance and be happy and forget about life for a while.”
Listening to his words, it suddenly struck me that Harry’s nightclub was indeed the perfect metaphor for his need to step out from under his father’s shadow. He was constantly referred to as the heir to his father’s business, but I wondered if he even wanted Hart Industries at all.
“This is kinda fiddly,” he said, turning one of the dials on the cipher. “These things are tricky to move. You could break a nail doing this.”
He turned the first dial to the number fifteen.
He moved his attention to a small wheel like a clock featuring the months of the year and swiveled it to March.
His fingers then scrolled through a third dial, this one containing letters, until he formed the word “IDES.”
“The Ides of March,” I observed. “The fifteenth day of March, when all manner of chaos descends upon the world.”
“You know about the Ides of March?”
“I’ve heard it’s an unlucky day.”
“That depends entirely on your point of view. Julius Ceasar was murdered on the Ides of March. For him, unlucky indeed. But what some people consider unlucky, others—such as Marc Antony—deem as fortune’s favor. As my father will often say when he’s about to expand his global empire, ‘Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war.’ He’s obsessed with Shakespeare’s Julius Ceasar . To him it’s not a tragedy, it’s a heroic struggle for power.”
Suddenly a series of clunks and clacks sounded inside the bones of the desk, and in the next moment all the drawers unlocked with a click.
Harry moved to close the cipher panel—eager to uncover what secrets might be concealed inside the drawers—but before he did something caught my eye. “Wait.”
Reaching inside the small compartment, I scraped out something hard and chipped.
“What is it?” Harry asked.
“It seems you were right, you could indeed break a nail turning those dials.” I showed him the chipped broken nail in my fingers. “Red nail polish.”
“That’s my mother’s,” Harry whispered. “She’s been through my father’s desk too.”
“I get the feeling she wasn’t exactly after your old man’s cigars. The question is, was she taking something… or returning it?”
I quickly opened the first drawer on the right and a map cylinder rolled into view.
Harry opened the first drawer on the left and gasped.
I turned to see him pulling a pistol out of the drawer with his thumb and forefinger as though he was holding up a dead fish by the tail. “A pistol? My father owns a pistol? God, I hate guns.”
“Then put it down before you shoot your goddamn toe off… or mine.” I could see he was about to toss it onto the desk before I added, “Carefully! Put it down carefully, would ya?”
Daintily he laid it on the desk.
I swiveled it around so it pointed away from us, then turned my focus back to the drawer.
I pulled out the map cylinder and opened it, unrolling several maps on the desk.
Meanwhile Harry continued fossicking.
“These are maps of Wilde City Harbor,” I muttered, baffled, staring down at a map that outlined the major landmarks of the city, including Wilde City Tower, the river running along the east side, and the city’s gasworks on the foreshore. It also included a large section of the ocean beyond Wilde City and the land leading up north, much of it farmland. There was a curved dotted line running through it from the city to the sea, crossing through large patches of red. “What are these?” I asked Harry.
He looked over at the map. “I think those are the sections of farmland that my father purchased so he could build his railroad. That’s part of the deal with the Governor.”
“Is this the railroad?” I pointed to the curved dotted line.
Harry nodded. “I’m pretty sure that’s it.”
“It runs straight to the sea. What kinda railroad goes nowhere but the sea?”
“It’s his test track. I guess we’ll find out exactly where it leads tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow is Saturday. It’s the maiden journey of the Millennium Express .”
“Aren’t you supposed to be on that train?”
Harry nodded.
Panic struck me. “You can’t be on that train, Harry.”
“I have to be. It’s what’s expected of me.”
“No, Harry. I’ve got a bad feeling about all this. And I’m not the only one.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your mother. She’s not having an affair with her chauffeur. He’s not even a real chauffeur. He works for the FBI and your mother has been secretly filtering this information to the Bureau.”
“The FBI? Buck, are you serious?”
I nodded. “Something big is going down. Your mother has known about it all along, and now she’s trying to stop it from happening.”
“You mean… my mother’s some sort of whistleblower?”
“Whistleblower, informant, spy… whatever you wanna call her, Crystal Hart is trying to turn your father in without him knowing it.”
“Oh God, she really is in trouble.”
“You betcha. As Stella would say, ‘Snitches get stitches.’ Or worse.” I pulled more items out of the drawer. “She’s potentially shown all of this to the Feds. Look here, a telegram mentioning the completion of work by some guy named Bockenheimer. And here’s the diagram of some kind of clock, or something, I don’t know. And here… here’s a letter from Herr Garbutt confirming a wire transfer of funds from the German Nazi Party to your father to the amount of… holy shit!”
But Harry had stopped listening to me. Instead, he was holding up something he’d found in another drawer. I recognized it instantly…
A red, white, and black lapel pin with a swastika on it.
At that moment, we both turned our heads to the window, hearing a low droning sound outside.
“What the hell’s that?” I asked.
We stepped over to the window, and there in the sky, materializing through the clouds, was Howard Hart’s private airship.
At the same time, we heard the rumble of several trucks and turned to see a small convoy making its way up the drive.
The trucks pulled up in front of the house and dozens of men in gray coveralls exited the front and back of each vehicle, offloading large crates and striding toward the house while the airship descended toward the landing pad beyond the maze.
“What the fuck is going on?” Harry asked, a sense of panic in his voice.
Before I could answer we heard the banging of doors and the stomping of boots through the house.
Harry and I hurried toward the door to the den and peered warily down the hall to see several men pulling artwork off the walls before sealing them in crates. Several other men took priceless vases and exotic artifacts off shelves, before hastily wrapping them and securing them in boxes.
“What is this, some kind of raid?” Harry whispered urgently. “They’re taking everything! ”
“No, not everything.” I noticed there were several items they ignored. “They’re only taking the things that are worth something.”
“Who are they? Thieves?”
“No, not thieves. They’re removalists.”
Suddenly two men came hurrying toward the den.
Harry and I ducked back inside the room. I quickly shoved everything back inside the drawers of the desk before Harry scrambled the cipher and closed the hidden compartment in the desktop.
The sound of footsteps in the hall outside grew louder.
“We need to hide,” I said. “Where can we hide?”
Harry headed straight for a tall bookcase standing against the wall. “Stay close,” he told me.
I pressed myself against him, wrapped my arms around his waist, unsure what was about to happen next.
Harry ran his fingers along the spines of the books on a particular shelf, stopped at William Shakespeare’s Julius Ceasar , then pulled it out an inch.
With a lurch, the bookcase—along with a circular section of the floor beneath our feet—began to revolve.
“Jesus, a secret tunnel?”
“How else do you think I got outta here with all those cigars?”
As we rotated into a dim, gas-lantern-lit tunnel, I caught sight of the men entering the den.
A moment later the bookcase sealed us safely inside the tunnel.
I was expecting Harry to lead me along the passage then down the set of stairs I spotted a short distance away, but instead he pulled another book from the shelf to reveal a peephole looking back into the den, large enough for both of us to peer through.
Inside the room, apparently unaware of our presence behind the bookcase, the two men took several pieces from the walls before turning their attention to the desk.
“That stays,” ordered a voice with a thick German accent from the doorway.
I recognized the voice and quickly angled my head so I could see through the peephole toward the door, and there stood the one-eyed German, Hans Hammer.
“The desk stays for now. Herr Hart has yet to finalize things here. A second airship has already been arranged to pick up the remainder of his belongings tomorrow morning. In the meantime, gather the accolades from the walls and make sure they’re on this shipment. The first airship leaves for Berlin in twenty minutes, are we clear?”
The men stomped their heels together and quickly started pulling framed certificates from the walls.
Harry replaced the book covering the peephole and grabbed me by the hand. “Come on.”
“Where are we going?”
“This tunnel leads underground to the far end of the maze. From there we can sneak out through the rear of the estate without anyone seeing us… hopefully.”
As he hurried along the damp, cramped confines of the secret passageway, memories of our thwarted childhood escape through the tunnel underneath Hell’s Bells flashed through my mind.
How far we’d come together, Harry and me.
Yet there we were, still scurrying through tunnels, hand in hand, looking for a way out.
At the end of the passage was a set of stairs leading up to an old door with a slide-bolt. Harry opened the door and sunlight filtered through thick foliage. I realized there was hedging all around us. We pushed our way through it and into the middle of the immaculately manicured maze.
“Do you know your way out?”
Harry nodded. “Like the back of my hand. Right, right, left, right, left.”
He hadn’t yet let go of my hand, and hurried me through the maze until soon we raced out through an exit at the rear of the labyrinth.
There we paused a moment and looked back over our shoulders.
Looming large beyond the maze was the airship. As we watched, a new banner was unfurled, the symbol of the swastika unraveling itself down the side of the aircraft.
Harry stared in wide-eyed shock. “What the hell is happening, Buck?”
I took a deep breath. “If I’m not mistaken, your father is about to relocate Hart Industries—and his family—to Berlin.”