Too Soon Chapter 38

The Saint, The Lady, and/or the Tiger

From The Princess Bride:
Vizzini: Now, a clever man would put the poison into his own goblet, because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given. I am not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you. But you must have known I was not a great fool, you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.
Man in Black: You've made your decision then?
Vizzini: Not remotely. Because iocane comes from Australia, as everyone knows, and Australia is entirely peopled with criminals, and criminals are used to having people not trust them, as you are not trusted by me, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you.
Man in Black: Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.
Vizzini: Wait till I get going! Now, where was I?

Outside Schwarzenberg, Germany, March 1969

Little Greta Schirrmacher hurried along behind her brother Hans, sticking close to the houses, dodging behind trees. But he never looked back. Hans was a big, tough boy who liked to run things his way. Four years old, he was used to being too fast for her, and ccustomed to their mother's watchful eye, keeping Greta in check. But now she was ten, and he was fourteen, Mother had a job down in the valley, and Greta was sick and tired of being left behind.

At the edge of the village she ducked down behind a hedge for a while, watching as he crossed the ramshackle stone bridge across the stream. On the other side was something of a ghost town: the old village, bombed out in the big war, one pile of rubble after another. The work crews that had rebuilt Germany had been slow to arrive at this isolated alpen town. And when the crews quit for the night and drove off en masse to stay in a hotel, the local boys came out, as boys will do, to comb the ruins, looking for whatever fun or interesting or macabre item they might find. Hans had finished his homework, Mother wouldn't be home from the city to cook dinner for an hour yet. It was cold, just after the spring thaw, and rain threatened. Greta sweated underneath her thick wool coat, her short legs pumping as her elder brother rounded a curve, out of sight of the bridge. She stopped and ducked next to a ruined stone building, hearing her brother call out.

She heard her brother's voice boom out. It had changed recently, and he used it at every opportunity. "Hey. Arne!"

Greta had a crush on Arne, who made the temptation to tag along even more irresistible. Arne was a bit smaller than Hans and much more bookish, with an impish sense of humor. Sometimes he teased Greta pitilessly, sometimes he was kind, and she could never tell which it was going to be, so she loved and feared him in equal measure. She crept close, listening to the boys chat as they tossed bricks, breaking them just for the hell of it.

Arne said, "I found a way into the church."

"No, really? When?"

"I sneaked Papa's flashlight and came down last night. The floor's rotten, but part of it still holds up. We might be able to find some real loot."

Hans laughed. "Well, do you have the flashlight now?"

"Yes..."

"Why didn't you go in?"

"I was waiting for you."

Hans laughed again, the kind of laugh he sometimes directed at Greta before he hit her, or held her down and tickled her until she peed. Greta clenched a small fist. Hans said, "Scared, huh."

"No..."

"Give me the flashlight. I'll go in if you're too white-livered."

Greta heard the boys walking away, and she followed discreetly. The old Gothic church loomed at the top of a rise. Its bell towers had collapsed decades before, the stained glass windows had all been blown out, the buttresses smashed and the stone walls crumbled. The boys made their way through the crazily leaning headstones of the churchyard, then back around to the nave at the north side. The oak timbers of the side door frame were partly splintered, yet they held up a short section of wall. The boys ducked and crept inside. Greta was afraid that if she followed too closely, they'd see her. But follow she did.

She was just putting her head through the doorway. Hans was reading an inscription etched into a stone tile on the floor, something about a saint's relics and his blessings on the church. Arne snickered and threw a fragment of stone across the ruin. "That blessing held up well, didn't it?"

Hans cried out as the floor beneath him gave way, and he fell in a shower of slabs and timber. Arne pulled back instinctively, head over his arms, until the dust settled a bit. Both Arne and Greta heard Hans moaning. Greta crawled into the collapsed church, calling "Hans! Hans!"

From a few feet away, perched on a slab before a gaping hole, Arne stared at Greta. His face was a pale smear in the twilight. They were both crying and coated with dust. Arne coughed, then rasped, "Don't move, Greta."

"Hans is down there!"

"Greta, the floor – it's all rotten under the stone. There's nothing holding you up."

Greta peered into the shadows. "I can see wood down there. Rooms."

Hans was crying now, and then his thin cries rose to a scream. "Get me out. Get me out of here! My legs... agh!"

Arne shifted his weight, and the slab he crouched on swayed like a bobblehead doll. Greta whimpered, and crawled toward her brother's voice. "Hans? Can you hear..."

There was a crack. The support beams for both Greta's slab and Arne's gave way, and she felt herself falling.

When Greta awoke, it was dark, and she was trapped in the labyrinth of cells underneath the church. The little girl sat up, pained and dizzy. She saw her brother lying face-down, half-covered by a slab of stone the size of a twin bed. A pool of blood had run out of his mouth and started to congeal, black around the edges. Both of his hands were outstretched, like Superman flying. Near his right was the flashlight. Hans looked like her little dog, Fritzi, when he'd been run over by a car. No life in him. She grabbed the flashlight, and mercifully it switched on, although the light was flickery and faint. The beam of light swept over Arne, whose upper body was hidden under another slab, smashed altogether. She thought, oddly, "Well. You make nearly a whole boy between you." She wasn't afraid, somehow, just numb. But she called out, anyway, even though she knew no one was around. "Help! Is somebody there?" Not even an echo answered her.

The slabs had fallen in at an angle too steep for her to climb. She supposed there were steps somewhere, but the terrain was a riot of broken walls and fallen timbers. She kept exploring, and found a hole not much taller than she was. The flashlight beam revealed a turn, perhaps a passageway. She went around the corner, and there was the Saint.

She stared, half-horrified, half enchanted. The Saint's body had been there, walled up beneath the church, for centuries. Greta read but did not understand the Latin inscription on a little stone wall plaque:

"Sancte Margarete ad Sacrum Montem

Liberi patroni perditaque"

Saint Margaret of the Sacred Mountain – Patron of Lost Children – had died 573 years before at the age of twelve. She had been an orphan, a devout child who had been put to work in the local mines. And she had been a fiercely intelligent, observant person who in another culture might have been an astronaut, or a detective. It was she who noticed a cracking beam. She who cried out before the beam collapsed and herded the other child miners to safety. She who crawled through a tiny hole and, stone by stone, rescued a knot of terrified survivors by lifting a beam three times her own weight – a miracle if ever there was one. She who collapsed and died, her lungs full of black dust, clutching a gold nugget the size of a goose egg.

She'd made a lovely corpse. The grateful (and now rich) locals preserved her body in a beautiful effigy of wax with sapphire blue eyes, veiled her in fine white linen, and dressed her in the finest silks and velvets money could buy. They festooned her in jeweled brooches and silver chains. They made yearly offerings on her death day, which became her feast day, and prayed to her when the mines filled with poison gas, or when a vein played out, or when raiders came from over the hills to plunder and kill. And when the Calvinist revolution came, centuries later, the faithful knew it was time to hide her away, safe, with only a few holding onto her worship and memory. Eventually that faded away as well, and when the church rector died during the bombing, little Saint Margaret was erased from history.

Greta did not realize at the time that she had been named for her. All Greta saw was a beautiful nightmare. A sleeping princess, her waxen face half-hidden beneath a dusty, rotting veil, her blue eyes winking in the dim flashlight's beam. Her ribs, interwoven with pearl strands and a heart of garnets and gold. Her delicate hands, encased in gloves of lace and gold wire. Her tiny white teeth, shining faintly behind the fragile, tinted pink wax of her rosebud lips. Her flaxen wig and her tiara of diamonds. Her feet, no longer trudging the stony mine roads, bound in kidskin slippers worked with golden flowers. In Greta's eyes she was a beautiful, enchanted, terrifying doll, and as the flashlight beam grew weaker and weaker, the little saint's deathly aspects became less apparent, and her doll-like beauty more so.

It started to rain when the last ray of sunlight left the mountains. Greta sat miserably in the alcove with the little saint, talking to her, and the little saint, who had nothing else to do, talked back, her voice like rainwater on pebbles, sweet and soothing. It was cold, but Greta wasn't afraid any more.

The saint told her all kinds of things. "Nobody hurts you when they're dead. Everyone loves you when you die. And you get to have the loveliest parties. Nobody's mean anymore. When you die, you get to see everyone you love. So, you see Greta, death is a wonderful thing. Heaven is wonderful. Someday, everyone will go there. Hans and Arne will be there, and your papa, and you, too. With me. And we'll have cake." The flashlight faded away, the rain grew heavier, the children's footprint on the bridge and in the churchyard were washed away before their parents even knew they were missing.

Searchers found them shortly after dawn the next morning. They looked down at the two dead boys, half buried in rubble, and Arne's father jumped down into the pit, roaring in grief, trying in vain to pull the slab away from his dead son's body. Greta emerged from the tunnel then, silently, wearing a crown, covered with necklaces and bracelets, carrying a little scepter of mother-of-pearl and gold, topped with an enameled gold pomegranate. She was filthy and bloody, but utterly calm, peaceful even. Beatific.

Other rescuers jumped down and handed her out of the church basement, and her mother rushed to her, crushing her into desperate arms, weeping, overwhelmed with finding one child dead, the other alive. Greta, on the other hand, said nothing but, "Hello, mother."

Greta was a very, very special girl.

•

June 25, 2014, 2818 Rackham Road, Dublin 3, Ireland

Greta Schirrmacher – aka Nita Krystow – and known to Interpol only as "The Crafter" - was sewing a new dress for Tiffany Ross when she heard the girl screaming. Greta jumped up as well as she could, with her sore hip and all, and shuffled to the base of the stairs. "Mr. Murphy?" she called.

"Got it," he answered down. He'd been in his bedroom, most likely playing the concertina along with an old Clancy Brothers album. She didn't really care. After forty years together, they were no longer lovers, and lived simply as housemates. Partners, rather, with a common – or rather, complimentary – hobby. She heard his fast, heavy tread up the attic stairs, the jingle of the key, the door opening, the screams growing louder. A moment later, Tiffany's cat came streaking down the stairs. Greta tried to intercept it, and it dodged past her and slunk into the kitchen, no doubt scenting outside air at the back door frame. She shrugged it off. All the windows and doors were locked. It had nowhere to go. Neither did Tiffany, for that matter.

Greta came huffing up the stairs, but it was rather slow going. She frowned, hearing Murphy's angry rumble, and Tiffany's hysterical mix of talk and sobbing: "They're, they're all dead, what are they, are they people? What did you do to them? Why would you... what, are they real?"

Murphy said, "If you'd kindly shut your trap, I'll explain everythin'."

Tiffany looked frantically around the attic. When Murphy switched on the light, a thousand little white christmas lights blazed. It was weirdly festive. For lack of a better word, there were dioramas. Maybe altars. Life-size dolls, but not dolls: bodies. Bones, covered with wax, their proportions a little too lifelike but their execution crude. There was a "doll" family: a father in a suit, a mother in an apron with a beehive hairdo, an older sister in a lovely red woolen coat, and a little brother in liederhosen. They sat at a dining table saying grace over their dinner. And under the table, waiting for scraps, sat the wired bones of a little dog covered in fake fur.

On the other side of the attic was a sort of angel. Her wings, four feet wide, were insanely ornate, with jewels and beads draped from their spread. Her dress was white satin and velveteen, and almost every inch was encrusted with bottle caps, cheap mardi gras beads, hundreds of salvaged bits of second hand jewelry, buttons, birthday party ribbon... as if Bob Mackie had killed Cher and given an insane twelve-year-old access to a glue gun, a charnel house, and a New Orleans dumpster the day after Mardi Gras. And the angel was housed in a sort of niche, like nothing Tiffany had ever seen. But Richard Castle would have recognized the niche's construction from that Weird Tours of Europe sojourn into the Ossuary at Kutná Hora: a structure made of of human bones, stacked like Lincoln Logs of death. The rest of the attic walls were lined with translucent storage bins, the kind you can buy at any hardware store. Some were labeled "Fabric" "Wigs & Scalps" "Feathers" or "Beads". Some were labeled with contents such as

"Adult Male Femurs" or

"Teen Girl, 5'3"".

Most of the bones were human, but Tiffany could see other bodies as well, cats, dogs, maybe a rabbit or two. Tiffany suddenly realized that the faint musty, sticky smell in the air – that Miss Krystow had faithfully treated daily with Breeze-A-Way-Spray – was that of death and formaldehyde. She should have known. She'd dissected a few animals at vet assistant school.

Panic fueled her. She tried to push past Murphy. "Let me outta here." He grabbed her arm, and she was surprised – for an old guy, he was strong. She couldn't stop talking. "What is this? What happened to these people? Why -" She stopped. Miss Krystow was standing in the doorway now, leaning against the frame, catching her breath. "This guys' crazy," said Tiffany, and then to Murphy, "Let me go. You're hurting me."

Miss Krystow was smiling. "Don't bruise her, Murphy. It takes the price down."

Tiffany stopped. "Price?"

Murphy said, "The meat."

"Meat?" Tiffany broke out in a sweat.

"There's a market for specialty meats," said Miss Krystow with a smile. "In Japan, you can get $1200 a pound. In yen, of course. On the continent, it's gone as high as 1800 Euros."

Tiffany squeaked, "Wha?"

"We sell it as specialty beef. Better than Kobe. Better than Wagyu," Murphy said. He spanked Tiffany lightly on the ass. "They like it well marbled."

"He's the butcher," Krystow added. "And I'm the artist."

Tiffany let out a high-pitched whimper and shrank back. Murphy tripped her, she fell, and he hauled her by the hair and one arm, back into the little room. He shoved her back, and slammed the door on her hand when she tried to block it. She screamed behind the door, pounding. He locked it, then took a chair and hooked it under the doorknob for good measure.

Krystow shook her head. "Tch. I hear adrenaline toughens the meat. Poor little lamb."

Murphy was not so sentimental. "So, do you think we should wait any longer for your man, or should we just kill her now and get her shipped out?"

"Shh. You'll send her into a tizzy." Greta – Miss Kristow – backed out of the attic and pointed down the stairs. Murphy followed her out and locked the attic door.

Knees creaking, they navigated the stairs with care. Murphy said, "She must weigh nearly thirteen stone. I'm not sure I can get her down the stairs as it is, and if you keep feeding her..."

"Could you drug her and lower her down somehow?"

"Drugs make the meat taste funny. You remember. I hate taking refunds."

"Now, I'm still not sure it wasn't the artificial sweeteners. That's the last time we veer from organic feed, agreed?"

"Yeah, agreed. Anyway, can I just haul her down to the basement and slaughter her tomorrow?"

"We're supposed to wait for Michael until July the Fourth. That's the agreement."

Murphy scowled nervously and paused to rub his knee. "What if he's not comin'? Nobody's heard a damn word from Michael, and you saw Rosie on the news as well as me, getting' arrested."

"Did you call Grossmann again?"

"Yeah, he kept me on the phone blatherin' for a couple minutes about nothin'. I think the feds have nabbed him."

Krystow stopped. "What, you were being traced?"

"I hung up. Haven't taken any more calls from him."

"Well, why didn't you tell me?"

"I didn't want to worry you. Your blood pressure and all..."

She smiled back at him, up the stairs. He could be a bastard, but he had moments of surprising sweetness. "You can be such a schwachkopf!"

He gave her a cheeky smile as they came to the bottom of the stairs. "They're in the U.S. It's not like they can find us. What's it been, twenty years since we moved in here? Not even that bitch Rosie knows where we are."

"Eighteen. Speaking of that, the rent is due in a few days."

He nodded. "Yeah, I'll mail it in. Still can't believe Michael charges us rent after all we've done for him."

She shrugged. "Business is business."

•

Castle sat straight up as the folder icon opened into a new finder window. His jetlag-induced fatigue disappeared.

"Oh, shit," he whispered. "Shit."

There were two folders in the window. The first one was titled "The Lady"; the second, "Or the Tiger?"

His phone rang. It was Kate. "Is there anything on the drive?"

Rick nodded, although of course she couldn't see him. "Yeah." He read off the folder titles.

She said, "The Lady or the Tiger. The thing with the barbarian queen and the doors?"

"Yeah. Dilemmas. Choices. One gets you killed, the other gets you laid, but the barbarian princess is kind of a vengeful twit."

Three thousand miles away, his wife felt the hackles raise on teh back of her neck. "Crap. Look, Castle, don't open the folders alone."

"Why?"

"Do you have any idea what you're gonna see?"

He sighed. "Could be anything. Ladies and tigers?"

"You wish."

"Video of us... or snuff like what they were going to do to Elise..."

"Sweetheart, please. Don't do it alone. You need someone to have your back. I don't want you going off like a loose cannon without support."

"What, you don't trust me?"

"Oh, Rick." She sighed. "Yes. Eminently. With my life and my heart and my soul. But Michael knew you almost as well as I do, at least on the surface. And if anything pushes your buttons, it's having your self-confidence undermined. He will mess with your head, just because he can."

Rick sighed. "You're right. I'll call the boys back up. They've gone for a run with Mo and Betsy."

"You promise to wait?"

"Yeah." He sighed. "God, I wish you were here."

"I know, Babe. I know. But I'm working this from my own side. I've had Grossmann call that number a few times. It's a burner, was issued in Germany, and we can't get a location, but someone actually picked it up the other day. We had an analyst give it a listen. He's narrowed it to an older man with a North Dublin accent."

"How can they tell?"

"It's the way they pronounce their Ts and Ds. It's soft."

"Could be faked," Rick said. "On the other hand, North Dublin's next on the list. So it's a possibility." He paused a moment. "Hey, Kate, have you heard anything from Dr. Patel?"

"No," Kate said, "Should I have?"

"No. Probably not. I just wonder if there's been any change. With Nieman." He felt a bitter taste in his mouth, just thinking of her.

"Why don't I give her a call, and you have the boys hang out while you check out the folders. We'll check in. Okay?"

"Okay, Wife." He said it with a smile. With longing.

"I love that. Husband. Now, go to it. I'll be waiting."

Kate hung up, her heart breaking that she couldn't be with him when he really needed her. Her stomach rumbled and she nibbled on some cheese-and-crackers. She looked down at her tummy and patted it gently. "At least one of us feels better," she smiled.