STAG WOKE WITH a start. This time, the trauma of Holly was fractured with shards of mirror, her last words echoing though his dreams, scratchy and far away. As if recorded on an old shellac 78.
He sat on the edge of the bed, his head in his hands, trying to wake up and pull himself out of the loop of his nightmare. He and Jake had stayed up late while Stag brought him up to speed on the diary, Tarnhelm, and all the strange happenings since they’d last seen each other. Now the comforting smell of freshly brewed coffee was wafting in. When he looked up, Jake appeared at his door with a steamy cup, in the same old wrinkled clothes he’d arrived in.
The one thing Jake could do was pack light.
“I thought I heard you. Rough night?” the older man said.
Stag grunted and gratefully accepted the mug.
“While you explore that strange apartment, I’ll do a bit of research.” Jake raised an eyebrow. “You never know what a little academic digging can turn up.”
“Where the fuck do you start?” Stag asked, rhetorically.
“I think I should start at the German Resistance Memorial Center. We’ve got a rebel on our hands in Isolda Varrick. Maybe there’s something there that can be useful.”
“She probably deserves her own damned memorial. But I don’t know that we’ll ever even know her real name.”
Jake said nothing. There was nothing to say.
Jake stood in the hall of the new exhibit at the German Resistance Memorial Center, in front of the glass display case of uniforms on the mannequins. There they were, the tailored uniforms of the rogues’ gallery: the Gestapo, the SS, the SD. Letters in code, along with their translations, were posted along the narrow walls. To make for an eerie effect, the museum piped in the sound of people whispering in order to create the dread and paranoia one must have felt as a lone resister against the Third Reich.
Reading one letter, he went back and forth several times to the display case where the uniforms were. Something clearly bothered him. He stopped in front of the SD uniform, his gaze riveted to the left sleeve. He took as good a picture as he could with his GoFone, then he returned to the wall of letters, one in particular holding his attention. When the photo of it was taken, he hastily placed the phone back in his wrinkled khakis, zipped up his overcoat, and departed, not even noticing it had begun to rain until he was back in the apartment and it pelted against the large plate-glass windows.
Stag waited in the rear of the Dresdenhof for the service entrance to click. Dressed in workman’s overalls and a toolbox he’d snagged from under the sink at the Airbnb, he couldn’t shove down the trepidation tightening his throat. Kronbauer was cooperating, and for some strange reason, Stag had trusted him. Perhaps it was the recognition of a fellow conflicted soul, or perhaps it was just that he really was running out of options. But when the service door lock released, Stag knew he’d made the right choice. Kronbauer had done his part and gotten him back in. Now it was Stag’s turn.
He stepped inside.
He held the key to 12A in one hand and the P-83 in the other. He met no one as he rode the service elevator. Inside the hallway, he found he didn’t even need the key. Kronbauer had kindly left the door to 12A unlocked.