Page 45 of Clive Cussler The Iron Storm (An Isaac Bell Adventure #15)

B ell had one hope of salvaging this mission.

Magdalena hadn’t given him the name of the tavern her father owned, but it stood to reason that the matchbook he’d swiped from Rath’s office had been a promotional item from there.

Bell recalled the establishment’s name and after fetching his luggage from the little inn and getting directions from the innkeeper, he soon came to the place.

It was late afternoon by this time. Too early for the after-work crowd and well past the late lunch takers.

A little bell tinkled gaily when Bell opened the heavy oak door that was likely two hundred years old.

The interior of the tavern was dim, but not dark, the perfect level of light for intimacy or bonhomie depending on what one was looking for.

There were a half dozen tables, as solid and ancient as the door, and a long bar running along the rear wall that had places for a dozen drinkers.

A man with an apron wrapped around his waist had just left the room through the door to the kitchen. That left a woman bent over a table with a rag in her hand. Bell had only seen Magdalena on two brief occasions, but he was a master of recognizing people even at angles he’d never seen before.

“Magdalena,” he called softly.

She turned. No amount of makeup could hide the black eye she’d been given. She quickly moved her head so that her coils of hair partially covered the ugly bruise even before she recognized the stranger who’d come to her father’s bar. “You?”

“Like the proverbial bad penny.” He crossed to her, and they both took a seat at the table. Besides the black eye, her lower lip was swollen. Her fingers worked at the threadbare bar rag in her hands.

She could not meet his eye. “Karl said you and the Englishman died when your plane crashed.”

“That was the fate he had in store for us, but we had other ideas.” He cupped her chin gently and raised it so she had to face him.

“Why are you here?” she asked.

“I need to find out what he has planned next. I also need to know what happened to the other English flyers. The three men we left when we took off in Rath’s bomber.”

“I am sorry. He had them killed. I saw their bodies when the police recovered them following the fire.”

Bitterness scalded the back of Bell’s throat. He had guessed their fate straight away, but the confirmation struck deep. He would make sure word got back to the Royal Flying Corps of their fate.

“And Rath’s plans? Where did he go? What is it he hopes to accomplish?”

“He took all his belongings for a long trip, but I do not know where,” she said. “He left not long after you that morning, with all of his people except one, a man they call a pyromane .”

“Pyromaniac,” Bell guessed.

“He likes fire. A short while later, the warehouse Karl had rented burned down and the pyromane vanished.”

“Yes, I was just there. A rather unsubtle case of arson. But surely Rath gave you some idea of his intentions. All those men? How many did he have and what were they training for?”

“There were forty-five men in total,” she said, very sure of herself. “He said it was the bare minimum, but he never told me for what. They did, ah, callisthenie .” She pantomimed someone lifting weights over their head.

“Calisthenics.”

“Yes, that. They had classroom instructions, too, but I do not know what they were taught.”

Bell said, “I saw one of the men on the night I stayed in the warehouse. He had a tattoo on his chest that made me think he was a sailor. Did anyone else have sailor’s tattoos?”

Her eyes lit up for the first time as if she were happy to be of some use. “Yes, many of them did. They liked to show them off to me when Karl wasn’t around. Some were very, ah, risqué. Nude women and mermaids with big…” Another pantomime.

“I get the idea.”

“That helps me remember now. When Karl left, he said he was going on a voyage, one that would start a new world.”

Bell arched a brow at the comment. Her information was further proof he was on the right track about Rath’s preparations, though not his exact plan.

“What did he mean by start a new world?”

Magdalena shrugged. “I can’t say for certain. Karl was angry and bitter over the murder of his parents. They were killed by the Hungarian police, apparently over some business dispute. Their farm and lands were taken as a result.”

“Karl is from Hungary?”

“No, further east, high in the Carpathian Mountains where there are no real borders. He and his brother became brigands. But they only attacked and robbed aristocrats. Karl hates royalty. He espoused that all of Europe’s crowned heads be decapitated at war’s end, most especially the Hapsburg monarchy. ”

“He wants a new world order without dynastic rule.”

“It is more than that. I overheard many conversations where he discussed subverting troops to march against their own governments, then to destroy the banks and other institutions.” She looked away a moment with a hardened stare.

“Karl lives to destroy, but thinks he can rise from the ashes of the ruination like a phoenix, to rule all. He is very forceful. Maybe he can do it.”

“Not while I’m breathing,” Bell replied. But he knew history’s cold lessons. Revolutions needed a guiding figure to lead the masses after the destruction ended. Amid the chaos and confusion, the rise of autocratic rule was an all-too-common aftermath.

He shook away the thought, as there was another thread he needed to tug. “Rath’s brother. Did you ever meet him?”

“Yes,” she said, and the melancholy returned. “Balka.”

“Why did Balka go to New York?”

“Karl sent him to live in America. I don’t know why, but it had to be for something important, because he was more like a father to Balka than a brother. He raised him from the time their parents were killed.”

“He was here with Karl and the others?”

“Yes, for a time. They had a radio in the warehouse that Balka operated. He was always practicing on it with another man before he departed.”

“What is Balka like? Big like Karl?”

“No. He is thin and delicate and beautiful. You are a handsome man. Balka is different. He is beautiful, like a woman, but he is still all man. Do you know what I mean?”

“I think so,” Bell assured her.

“He is who every girl believes she loves, but also who their mothers and grandmothers desire as well.”

“Got it.”

“But he is only beautiful on the outside. Inside he is rotting. He has no soul, only cruelty. In that, he is like Karl. He cares only for himself.”

“It sounds like he hurt you.”

“No,” she denied quickly. “I was Karl’s woman by the time Balka arrived in town.”

“I’m sorry he…” Bell made a vague gesture toward her blackened eye.

“If only that was the worst Karl left me with,” Magdalena said and laid a protective hand across her belly in a gesture as old as motherhood.

“Did he know?”

“It wouldn’t have mattered if he did,” she told him matter-of-factly. “He was finished here in town and finished with me.”

“I’m sorry,” Bell said sincerely. “What will happen to you now?”

“I have two aunts in Antwerp. They are célibataires . They never married.”

“We call them spinsters.”

“My father is sending me to live with them. I can return some months after the baby is born and claim the father was a former soldier who was killed resisting the Germans.”

“There will be a lot of women in that exact same situation in the coming years and a whole generation of fatherless children.” Making such a statement made Bell think about what he was going to report to Wilson. The more he worked on this, the harder a recommendation became.

“At least those women can talk about their husbands’ nobility, their sacrifices. My child will not hear such tales about his own father.” Anger pinched her voice.

“I know I already asked, but it is important. Is there anything, anything at all that Rath let slip about his plans?”

“I am sorry, monsieur. He told me nothing. I realized too late that I was his servant and plaything, nothing more. Wait, in Germany on the night he was to rescue you from the castle, he mentioned there are other men like him from all over the world who wanted to shape the future how they saw fit. I did not know what it meant.”

That wasn’t exactly a revelation, he thought. The world was filled with megalomaniacs who thirsted for power and control. He kept the disappointment off his face. Magdalena had proved helpful in her own right, but not to the detail Bell had hoped. He asked, “Do you have access to the black market?”

“Monsieur?”

“I only have a little bit of local money, but I have plenty of British pounds. If I give you some, can you get it exchanged?” Marion had packed him far too much cash and so he felt it was the least he could do.

“I can, but it is not necessary.”

“I don’t know how much longer this war is going to go on, so you will need it. If not for yourself, then for the baby.” He gave her a smile. “I hear they grow expensive very quickly.”

She looked like she was going to refuse again.

Bell pulled some notes from the wallet Marion and Clementine had provided and thrust them into her hand.

He closed her fingers around the bundle.

With the Belgian economy in ruins, it was probably the most money she’d seen since the Germans rolled across the frontier back in August of ’14.

Her eyes went limpid with tears. “ Merci , monsieur. You are very kind. I saw that right away.”

Bell settled his hat back on his head. “Take care of yourself and good luck.”

Bags in hand, Bell walked out of the bar.

The train station was over a mile away, but he had plenty of time.

He went down the street for no more than a half block when he spotted a narrow alley.

He looked back and saw nothing untoward, but still he darted into the alley, set down his bags, and waited for his quarry.

He needed only a minute before the aproned man from the tavern rushed by. Bell reached out a hand to grab his arm and pull him into the shadowy alleyway.

“I figured you wouldn’t talk in front of your daughter,” Bell told the startled tavern owner. “But I sensed you have something to tell me.”

The two men sized each other up. Magdalena’s father had salt-and-pepper hair and mustache, a slight gut, a slouch, and tired, tired eyes.

He was a man who now merely existed rather than lived.

Bell suspected his daughter’s pregnancy at the hands of a bastard like Karl Rath was the last straw on his trail of defeats.

Bell wasn’t sure what the Belgian saw in him, but whatever it was it seemed to pass some internal test. “That man who…”

“No need to say it,” Bell assured him.

“Will you kill him?”

“He tried to kill me and a friend as well as executing three innocent airmen. For those crimes alone, I plan on killing him. As for the rest of his villainy, that will be between him and God.”

The barman studied Bell’s eyes, and he nodded.

“I believe you. He would come in occasionally on nights when my Magdalena wasn’t working, drinking with some of his men.

They would sing folk songs in their native tongue and get drunker and drunker.

They scared away other customers, but I was powerless.

They had been known to beat shop owners, and they had stopped paying rent on that warehouse after threatening the owner’s family if he tried to evict them.

We have no police and no one would dare tell the Germans, so there was nothing we could do. ”

“I’m sorry, but how does this help me find him?”

“ Je suis désolé. I am sorry. I talk too much, according to Magdalena. When they were ready to leave my café, they would always toast a man. He sounded important to them, like they worked for him. If you can find him, maybe he can lead you to that…savage.”

“And the name?”

“Joaquim Marques Lisboa. Does it mean anything to you?”

“Not at all. Sounds Portuguese.”

“I do not know, but they all seemed to respect him a great deal. I know it is not much, but I hope it helps.”

As he did with the man’s daughter, Bell didn’t let his disappointment show on his face. The lofty-sounding name of some foreign gentleman wasn’t exactly a hot tip. “Thank you,” Bell told him. “In my line of work, one never knows where a clue will lead.”

They shook hands, and the Belgian ambled back to his quiet little tavern in an unimportant little town in the middle of the greatest war mankind had ever fought.