Death of a Siren Page 5

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing, really. The girls weren’t drunk, and the boys were all from important families. It was just like here, on the mainland, although we all did get lectures from various deans, and the boys were fined. In my opinion the boys would have benefited from a day or two in jail. They made quite a mess.”

  I gave her my best cop frown.

  “I learned my lesson,” she assured me. “Now we both better get going.”

  “Yes. I hope to see you again.”

  “So do I.”

  I watched her walk down the pier, then turned back toward the gunboat.

  “Good morning, Mr. Freiman,” said a young sailor who was standing next to the gunboat’s gangway.

  “Good morning,” I replied.

  “I’m Seaman Rojas, sir. Sergeant López has left word that I’m to be your translator.” His English was hesitant at first but totally clear and understandable. Was he the one who’d blabbed about my being a cop?

  “Where’s the sergeant?” I asked as I stepped aboard.

  “He didn’t tell me, sir.”

  López was certainly on his toes, I thought as the gunboat backed away from the dock. Thinking one step ahead. And he’s still with me, I added darkly to myself, even though he’s nowhere in sight.

  As we approached Floreana later that morning I pondered the contrast between the bone-dry shore and the ring of damp, gray clouds that now crowned the not-so-ancient volcano. We pulled alongside Pegasus and found the sailor who’d been assigned to look after her practically beside himself with worry.

  “He says there was a lot of shouting ashore last night, sir. At the castle. And then there were gunshots. Many gunshots,” reported Rojas after he’d listened to the sailor’s excited explanation.

  “Did he go see what was happening?” I demanded, knowing I wasn’t going to like whatever Rojas told me.

  “No, sir. He didn’t think he should go ashore and investigate. His orders were to take care of your boat.”

  “When? When did he hear it?”

  “Late at night. Maybe early in the morning.”

  I took a deep breath. I could understand how the sailor felt. If he’d wanted to charge into gunfights, and face the dead bodies that generally resulted, he’d have joined the army. Or the NYPD.

  I groaned inwardly. López already had me hard at work even though he probably didn’t know it yet. I glanced at the gunboat skipper. He looked very uneasy. I turned to Rojas. “Ask the sailor if he could tell what language they were shouting in.”

  “It wasn’t Spanish, sir,” reported Rojas. “He thinks it was German, although it could have been English.”

  I nodded, not sure if there was any significance to the sailor’s answer, then asked Rojas to suggest that the skipper accompany us—Rojas and me—ashore to investigate. The petty officer looked away. I told Rojas to remind him that he was the highest-ranking Ecuadorean official within many miles. The skipper looked back at me coldly and nodded in reluctant agreement. He didn’t like being told what to do, especially by a foreigner who couldn’t even speak his language. I’d managed to make another enemy.

  I retrieved my revolver from Pegasus, and we rowed ashore. There I led my reluctant companions up the path to the castle. The air was filled with the faint perfume of sun-baked rocks and seaweed, and all was silent except for the occasional rustle of lizards or the drab little finches. I stopped on the patio and looked in the darkness behind the still-opened double doors, the hair on the back of my neck beginning to prickle. “Hello?” I shouted, hoping that the presence of the two sailors would somehow prevent Metal-Mouth from blowing me to pieces. “Ritter? Ernst?” The only answer was the whispering of a gentle gust of wind in the dry shrub around us. In we go, I thought with teeth clenched and revolver raised.

  I stepped through the double doors and found bloody chaos. Much of the elegant, polished furniture had been shattered, its fragments spread all over the room. The baroness’s body was gone, safe in the ice factory, but what was left of Ritter and Ernst now lay in her place, Ritter’s teeth gleaming slightly through the blood. The walls and floor, which Sofía had been told to mop, were thickly spattered with a whole new harvest of almost-dried blood. The flies were having a field day.

  There was a gasp behind me. I turned in time to see Rojas and the gunboat skipper back slowly out the door, shock written large on their faces. Grasping the revolver even tighter than before, I examined the wreckage more closely. Everything that had been there yesterday—the sofa, the coffee table, the chairs—was still there, although most of the chairs had been smashed. The white curtain lay on the floor, and the sofa was toppled over on its back. Nothing seemed to be missing. But was there anything new? The bodies, of course, the blood, and four shotgun shells. The lingering scent of burnt black powder. And the dimples in the walls created by a shot that had missed its target. There were also two beer bottles, one broken at the neck. Were they new, I wondered, or left over from the night before? I lifted one of the bottles and looked in through the neck. A few drops of beer flowed from side to side as I shook the bottle. Sofía had done her job the day before. These bottles were new.

  My nerves were ready to burst into flames as I walked across the great room and into the kitchen. Nothing. No blood, and everything was in its place. I lifted the door to my former cell and lowered myself into it. It appeared to be just as it was when I left it—including the stench of vomit—except I could now see that a very large brown spider lived in one corner. I hadn’t noticed him during my last visit. I looked carefully at the jars and cans and bundles of food. Was there anything else I’d missed before? Like a metal box of some sort? A money box, maybe? Not that I could find.

  I took a deep breath, pulled myself up and out of the pit, and returned to the great room, then followed the house’s one hallway, which ran to the back of the building. On the left I found a small, nondescript bedroom with a simple metal bed, a chest of drawers, a wardrobe, and a chair. On the right was a rudimentary bathroom with shower, toilet, and sink. No more bodies, and no blood.

  I continued down the hallway and through a curtain. In front of me was the biggest bed I’d ever seen in my life. And just about the grandest. It was an old four-poster with a green canopy and was covered with pillows of all sizes, shapes, and colors. On each side, on the thickly carpeted floor, was a small mattress. And the room itself, which was almost as large as the whole front of the castle, was a wonder. There were three large windows, four chests of drawers, two wardrobes, and a huge mirror. Half a dozen expensive-looking wall hangings depicting forest scenes brought life to the room. There were two doors in the rear. One led out to a small patio and the other into a bathroom—complete with a tub and a large vanity—every bit as ornate as the bedroom.

  So this, I thought, is how a baroness maintains her dignity, and maybe her memories, out in the middle of nowhere. Despite her unfavorable reputation, my suspicion grew that the woman was a great deal more complex than I’d been told. She’d chosen to voyage to the end of the Earth, to a rough-and-tumble place with few luxuries, and yet she’d created this little nest that spoke loudly of the refined world she’d probably left. Was she just one more fugitive, or had she come because she believed the islands would provide the freedom to create, or live, some very personal vision? She was dead, so I’d never get to know her, but if I was to find her killer, I did have to understand her. And, to be honest, I wanted to.

  I searched the suite again. No blood. Nothing that seemed out of place. Nothing, as far as I could tell, except that the huge bed was unmade. It looked as if a war had been fought in it. Sofía, the maid, had been all too efficient at cleaning up after the baroness’s death. Fortunately for me she hadn’t yet set to work today. I doubted she would, for that matter. Who was left to pay her?

  On the assumption that I couldn’t foul the crime scene any more than I already had, I opened each of the chests of drawers. In the top drawer of one, mixed in with the clothes that j
ammed them all, I found a lacquered wooden box with its lock smashed open. Inside were three passports and a formal-looking document several pages long.

  The first passport I opened was Metal-Mouth’s: Wilhelm Conrad Ritter, Doctor of Dentistry, born December 1899, in Cologne. The second belonged to Ernst Friedrich Lang, occupation not given, born March 1909, in Dortmund. Finally, Bettina Ilse Judith von Arndt, housewife, born April 1906, in Aachen.

  I flipped through the official document. It was in Spanish, so Rojas would have to tell me what it was.

  Glancing back into the box, I realized there were five or six photographs on the bottom, where they’d been hidden under the document. The first showed a well-dressed man and woman, both smiling, standing in front of a palatial stone house that had a round tower or turret of some sort on one side. To my eye it looked very German, or at least European. Between them was a young girl, dressed in a dirndl, with a huge and very convincing smile on her face. In the second photo the same girl was grinning from the back of a carousel horse. The girl in the photographs had to be the baroness and the adults her parents. And unless I was a total fool, her childhood had been a happy one. I continued to leaf through the photos. Another shot of her as a child, in the mountains. Then the tone changed radically. The next shot showed the same girl, to all appearances a teenager now, standing in a barren, treeless street with a tenement behind her. She was wearing a long, dark overcoat, her shoulders were hunched, and her smile was as frigid as the street itself appeared to be. The final photo had been mutilated. It showed the baroness standing beside a very fat uniformed man, but it was impossible to see the man’s face because something, a pen or pencil I guessed, had been shoved through it. And the smile on her face was more of a sneer.

  So the baroness did have a past, after all. What had happened? How had the girl with the winning grin become the arrogant, domineering creature that López had described to me?

  Other than the passports, the photographs, and the document, there was nothing else in the box. No letters, no other keepsakes of any sort, no hints of why the baroness and her two attendants were in the Galápagos, how they’d met nor what they’d done before they came. Each of them must have had a history, but they appeared to have tried, with considerable success, to leave them behind. On the other hand, there was no money in the box, either, even though it looked to me like exactly the sort of place a baroness might keep her ready cash when there were no banks within seven hundred miles.

  I stepped back into the hall and noticed a ladder attached to the rear wall of the building. It led to a trapdoor in the ceiling. It could only be one thing: the tower. I shook the ladder to test its stability and started up. When I reached the trapdoor I pushed it open and found a small, dim chamber. I waited a moment for my eyes to adjust, then pulled myself up and found another ladder leading up to another trapdoor. Once through this second door, I stepped out onto the top of the tower, which was surrounded by a four-foot parapet.

  The blue-green bay and the bluer Pacific sparkled in the sun while the black-brown beach baked. The cliffs glowered, the gulls and frigate birds soared and wheeled and screeched, and the green forest stretched off toward the mountain, its color getting richer as it approached the volcano. At first, the only visible evidence of man-made order was the crude geometries of the two gardens. I leaned over the parapet and stared down into the surrounding scrub. There was no sign of anything that might be called a road, although several paths led away from the castle. Following one of the paths with my eyes, I spotted a small building about a quarter mile away in the direction of the mountain. I looked around at the platform and the parapets. Nothing. No sign that anybody had ever been here. And there was nothing of interest inside the tower as I descended again.

  Who was the Baroness Bettina Ilse Judith von Arndt, really? Who had killed her and her lovers, and why?

  7

  I returned to the great hall and reexamined the bodies, the bloody walls, and the floor, looking for something, anything, to give me a direction. Each of the Germans had been blasted several times at very close range. There were no foot- or handprints in the blood, although it was clear that at least one of the victims had tried to crawl or twist through the mess on the floor. I looked for the weapon but couldn’t find any trace of it. Neither was there any trace of Ritter’s shotgun, so maybe it had been the instrument of his death.

  In death, the metal-mouthed dentist looked just as vicious as he had in life, and Ernst looked just as inconsequential. I had no intention of mourning either for so much as a second, but their bloody deaths, on top of the baroness’s, scared the hell out of me. Was this the beginning of something truly monstrous, or was it all just a figment of my imagination, a manifestation of the dark enchantment the early navigators believed wrapped the islands? Of course not. It was just a series of murders that could be explained in some logical, matter-of-fact way. Somebody had cheated somebody else and paid for it, or somebody had hated somebody beyond all reason. Or maybe had just been infuriated by him—or her. Or maybe it had been simple armed robbery. That was something I was quite familiar with.

  “Rojas,” I shouted over my shoulder, “have you recovered yet?”

  My translator appeared in the doorway, pale but alive. “The skipper and I think we’ve found blood out on the patio. Please come look.” I followed him out onto the patio, where I found the petty officer staring at the ground. I bent down to get a closer look where he was pointing, at some small brown spots. I dropped down to my hands and knees and followed the faint trail of dried blood back through the double doors until it merged with the disturbed stains on the floor of the great hall. In the dim light it was difficult to follow, but possible. I returned to the patio. “Where does this go?”

  We all got down on our hands and knees and followed the brown spots across the patio, only to lose them in the surrounding mix of sand and rock. I straightened up and looked around. The blood trail didn’t seem to lead to the beach but rather off to the side, probably toward the dry shrubbery beyond. I thought of the paths through the bush that I’d seen from the tower. And the building. The baroness was undoubtedly wealthy enough to own an automobile, but I didn’t see one, and I hadn’t seen anything resembling a road. I sniffed the air. “Have you seen any horses, Rojas?”

  “No, sir.”

  There must be some, somewhere, I thought. The building out back must be the barn.

  Before forgetting to do so I handed the document to Rojas. “What’s this? Can you translate it?”

  It took him several minutes to read it through. “It says the government is giving some land—this land, I guess—to the Baroness Ilse von Arndt.”

  “Only the baroness?”

  “Yes, sir. There are no other names here.”

  I looked in at the bodies. I hadn’t seen any large carnivores in the area, except for humans, but I was certain there was an army of smaller ones. Rats, for example. No matter where you go you find rats. And ants. I closed the doors, hoping that would at least help preserve the evidence. “Follow me.”

  The gunboat skipper said something to Rojas.

  “May I ask, sir, where we’re going?”

  “There’s a building over there,” I replied, pointing toward the forest. “It must be a barn.”

  Rojas translated, and the petty officer nodded.

  Now all I had to do was choose which of the three visible paths to follow. I looked behind me and up at the tower and tried to remember which way I was facing when I’d spotted the structure. “This one,” I said, choosing the one that appeared most heavily used and most likely to lead in the right direction. I pulled my pistol from my trouser pocket, where it had been riding very uncomfortably, and checked its load.

  I dove into the thin brush, and the wind seemed to disappear. By the time I’d taken two dozen steps my clothes were soaked with sweat, and an army of flies—horseflies, not houseflies—were already ripping large mouthfuls of flesh from my head and exposed arms. I glanced back
at the two sailors. They were better protected by their long sleeves and hats, but they were still far from immune.

  We all smelled the barn before we saw it. It turned out to be far from grand—big enough for a horse or two and little more. Along two sides were pens that had probably housed pigs or goats. I approached with my pistol at the ready, the finches screeching and twittering in the trees around us while other creatures—little lizards, mice, I don’t know what—scurried over the leaf-covered ground.

  “There’s nobody here, sir,” observed Rojas after we’d looked around.

  Not a soul, I thought. And no animals, either. There was evidence that some sort of cart had been there, but it wasn’t now. There’d clearly been at least one horse, but it was gone, along with whatever tack had been here.

  “Could it have been a robbery?” I mumbled, thinking both of the missing animals and the opened box in the baroness’s room. “Could they all have been killed for their possessions?”

  “Sir?”

  I turned to Rojas. “Could somebody from around here have killed the baroness and the two men in order to steal their animals and whatever valuables might have been in the house?”

  “I don’t know, sir. I’m only your translator.”

  I looked at him. The kid wasn’t stupid; he clearly had some sort of education.

  “Damn it, don’t be foolish. You know much more about the locals than I do. You must have an opinion, and I want it.”

  Surprise appeared on his face, then a wave of anger washed across it only to fade away. There definitely was more to Rojas than I’d realized at first. Which was good, since he was my only contact with the new and nerve-racking world around me.

  “I don’t think so, sir. The local people might kill if they were insulted badly enough, and they might steal, but they wouldn’t kill to steal. I think once they realized both the baroness and her two men were dead they took the animals. People here are poor and wouldn’t see any reason to leave anything for the government to take.”