Death of a Siren Read online

  Navy Bay, like all the others I’d seen in Las Encantadas, was round and wide open on one side, strongly suggesting that it had started life as a volcanic crater. Off to the right was a cluster of wooden dwellings much like those at Wreck Bay, only the cluster was smaller, more the size of Blackwater Bay. Off to the left, however, was something more impressive. A line of rocks had been built up a few feet offshore, creating a low seawall. The area behind the seawall had been filled in with rocks and sand, creating a level platform about a hundred feet square. On one side of the platform were three smallish wooden houses. On the other were the beginnings of several stone walls. “The skipper says that’s where the Herzog brothers live,” reported Rojas, pointing at the construction project. By the time the gunboat had turned into the wind, anchored, and put a rowboat over the side, three Herzogs had gathered to watch our approach. Two men and a woman. Like all the foreign settlers I’d met so far, they were tanned, weathered, and wiry. None of the Europeans seemed to get fat in Las Encantadas.

  “What language do they prefer?” I asked Rojas, who repeated the question to the skipper.

  “He says German, English, Spanish—it makes no difference to them.”

  The boat drifted up to the rocky side of the man-made platform. One of the men knelt down and grabbed the gunnel. He was short, slightly bowlegged, so very wiry he was almost springy, and about my age. “Welcome,” he said with a smile that stretched from ear to ear. “I’m Gregor Herzog. You must be the American everybody’s talking about.”

  “I am,” I replied as I reached for a stone to pull myself out of the boat. “Come along, Rojas,” I directed as I stood. “Tell the oarsmen to go back to the gunboat. We’ll signal for them when we’re ready to leave.”

  “No, no,” said Herzog, “they’re hot, tired, and thirsty. Have them tie up to that wooden dock over there and get something to drink while we talk. You’re here to talk, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s very kind of you.” I nodded for Rojas to relay the invitation to the sailors.

  “This is my wife, Carla,” said Gregor, pointing at the lithe, attractive woman standing off to one side with a tall, bearded fellow. Carla had a clever, almost fox-like face with eyes that radiated an intense but guarded passion. And she didn’t look German; more Mediterranean, maybe. Something like Ana.

  “And that’s Kaspar, my brother.”

  “Fred Freiman.”

  We all nodded and shook hands. “Seaman Rojas, sir,” sputtered my startled translator when Gregor grabbed his hand and shook it.

  “It’s hot,” said Gregor. “Let’s get out of the sun and have some lemonade.” With that he led the way—practically bouncing with energy as he went—toward one of the three wooden houses. As we walked I glanced at Carla and Kaspar. The bearded brother had a faint, almost amused smile on his face. The wife had a considerably more strained one.

  “You have a major construction project here,” I remarked, looking around.

  “Yes,” said Gregor, his pride evident. “We plan to stay for a long time, so we’re building in stone. Those walls over there will be our new cistern, to hold the rainwater from when it rains, which isn’t that often. As it is, we can catch and save some, but we still have to get water from the springs inland. Once the cistern is done, we build our new houses.”

  A young, blonde woman walked in the door just after we had entered the house. “Ah, Karen,” said Gregor, “meet Fred Freiman, the American who Sergeant López has gotten to do his dirty work for him.”

  Karen, who turned out to be Kaspar’s wife, shook my hand and then followed Carla into the kitchen.

  I looked out the window, at the other two wooden houses. “You have another brother?”

  “Yes,” Gregor assured me, “Albrecht. He’s on his way to the mainland, on business.”

  “When did he leave?”

  “On the Guayaquil boat, two days ago.”

  An alarm went off in my head. “When will he be back?”

  Gregor frowned briefly, then burst into laughter. “I think López picked the right man to do his hunting. Yes, Albrecht could have done it and then run away. Except he was right here. Kaspar took him to Wreck Bay the day the ship sailed. He’ll be back in a few weeks.”

  I nodded, thinking I’d have to talk to the sergeant about having the Guayaquil police talk to Gregor’s brother. “So, you’re glad you came here?”

  “Glad! Do you understand what’s happening in Germany?” Gregor’s smile had returned, then disappeared again. “The German people have lost what little sense they ever had. Before this is over, the whole world will wish it had moved here. Life is hard, but we’re free to do pretty much what we want to do.” For a moment I thought he was going to jump to his feet and start waving his arms.

  “You’re fishermen?”

  “Yes, except Carla and Karen have a big garden and some pigs and goats. We can’t eat only fish.”

  “Where do you fish?”

  “All over. We fish where the fish are.”

  “Do you ever fish near Floreana?”

  The smile reappeared on Gregor’s face. “You mean the baroness’s island? Yes. I have some lobster traps there. As I said, we fish everywhere.”

  “There are more than enough fish and lobster around here,” snapped Carla as she walked in with a tray of lemonades. “You don’t have to go so far all the time.”

  Gregor continued to smile. “Carla worries about the dangers of the sea; she thinks I may drown. But we got here, didn’t we? We sailed all the way from Hamburg.”

  “Yes,” she replied darkly, “the dangers of the sea.”

  “So tell me, Fred, what have you learned about the baroness’s murder?”

  “Very little, except that her two friends were also killed, the next day.”

  “Oh? I hadn’t heard about that.”

  “What do you know about her? And them?”

  “The same as everybody else, I’m sure. That she may have been a baroness, that she had a lot of money, and that she liked men.”

  “Why did she—they—come here?”

  “I would say the same reason as all of us. Either she was running from something or looking for a place where she could be herself. I don’t think she liked the Nazis, although she sometimes acted like one herself. I wouldn’t be surprised if she had an enemy or two of her own back in Germany.”

  “Did you know her?”

  “I sold her some fish and sometimes saw her at Wreck Bay. Once or twice. She was very secretive. But there are many stories about her.”

  While Gregor discussed the baroness, I noticed that Carla was staring at him with a fixed expression, her lemonade untouched.

  “As far as I can tell she wasn’t very popular.”

  “So I think too, but I never saw her do anything really bad. But then I didn’t have to share an island with her.” Gregor chuckled.

  “Kaspar,” I asked the bearded brother, who had remained silent as he listened to the exchange, “can you help me here with any information?”

  “I know no more about the woman than Gregor does,” he replied in between sips of lemonade.

  I leaned back and took a sip of my own drink. Once again I’d run up against the same brick wall—nobody liked the baroness, some hated her, and not a soul gave a damn that she was dead, much less wanted to know who’d killed her. Except López. And me—in part because López cared so much and in part because I did.

  “Of course you know the Hanson brothers?”

  “Of course,” agreed Gregor.

  “What do you know about them?”

  “An interesting situation,” said Gregor, settling back in his chair. “Their father is a very severe, no-nonsense preacher back in Norway, which is undoubtedly one reason why they’re here. From what they say about him, he considers even taking a deep breath to be a sin that God will punish with total ferocity.”

  “What about the brothers?”

  “The brothers,” said Kaspar, “ar
e the father. Each of them is half of the father.” I must have looked confused because Kaspar continued, “Olaf is insanely religious—he sees sin everywhere—but whatever his feelings, he never seems to call God’s wrath down on those he doesn’t like. Piers seems to have forgotten about God but not about wrath and revenge. He can be a very violent fellow.”

  Yes, he can be, I thought, remembering my visit with him. “Do you know Martin Becker?”

  “He’s a Nazi, a Fascist,” snapped Carla, her eyes flaming.

  “We don’t know that,” said Gregor.

  “Yes, we do. I talked to him at Wreck Bay one day. I guess he doesn’t talk to the rest of you. Only to women. Or maybe you don’t listen.”

  “Do you know what he’s doing here?”

  “Making trouble. Bringing all that shit we left in Europe over here.”

  Gregor leaned over to kiss his wife on the cheek, I suppose to try to calm her down. She swatted him away and walked into the kitchen, her eyes still blazing.

  “He’s been wandering around the islands for several months now. I don’t know why López doesn’t know everything there is to know about him. He knows everything about everybody else. I’ve never seen Becker do anything bad.”

  “You’ve seen him a lot?”

  “Seen him, not talked to him, except to say hello. He keeps popping up everywhere, just like those Americans in their big schooner. Whenever I go someplace to check my traps they’re either just leaving when I arrive or just arriving when I leave.”

  “Even at Floreana?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which?”

  “Both. At different times.”

  “You all came here to escape the Nazis?” I asked.

  “We came here because we couldn’t breathe in Germany,” snapped Gregor. “There was no food, no money, and no hope. The Depression may be all over the world, but it’s especially bad there, although some say it’s better now, since we left. The Kaiser destroyed the country in the war, and then the victors—yes, you Americans and the British and French—ground our faces in it and totally bankrupted us. The people were angry and hungry and terrified and stupid. It was all a great mound of garbage, and the Nazis just grew out of the slime.”

  “And it was a great adventure,” added Carla, bursting out of the kitchen, her eyes warning her husband not to cut her off. “How excited we were when we sailed out of Hamburg on that old sailboat. Gregor had told me this place would be almost like Italy. And how scared I was. I was so happy to be leaving the snow and sleet, and at the same time so certain that we would all die long before we saw the sun again. The wind, the waves, the darkness. But we made it, although the boat did sink about a year after we arrived.”

  “You came over in a sailboat?”

  “Yes, just like you. Gregor, Kaspar, Albrecht, and me. Karen was already here; her family lives on San Cristóbal.”

  “And you like it here?”

  “We certainly don’t plan to move,” said Gregor.

  I took another sip of lemonade and digested what they were telling me, not that it seemed related to the murders.

  “It’s Saturday, you know,” announced Carla suddenly. “You have a girlfriend back home? A wife?”

  I thought of Erin, and my pain must have shown.

  “It’s like that, eh?” asked Carla. “Well, you’re a good-looking fellow, and you don’t seem too stupid. We may have a friend for you. Right, Gregor?”

  Gregor chuckled.

  “We all work hard here, so we have good parties on Saturday nights with a few guests. You stay the night. Rojas, too. We may have a friend for him if the Echeverrías bring their girl. Tell the navy to go back to Wreck Bay and come get you tomorrow. It’s Saturday night there, too, and many of the sailors have families. Or friends.”

  I looked at Gregor, who was nodding encouragingly, as were Kaspar and Karen.

  “Don’t worry,” urged Carla, “we have plenty of food and beer and our own wine. We can eat, drink, sing, and dance. On second thought, better tell the navy to come get you Monday.”

  Rojas was nodding along with everybody else. I was totally outvoted.

  “Do you know the de Guzmáns?” I asked. “They live somewhere on this island.”

  “Yes. They’re very nice people,” replied Carla. “Do you know them?”

  “I’ve met Ana a few times. I was thinking about visiting them while I’m here.”

  “There’s no time to visit them tonight. You should give them some warning. That’s only polite.”

  Several hours later, the lowering sun had painted a golden path across the dark-blue waters of Navy Bay, and I was slumped in a chair under one of the scrawny, thirsty trees that so favor the Galápagos shore. About twenty feet away a pair of marine iguanas were catching the late rays as they searched listlessly through the long, fingerlike roots of the mangroves. Out in the bay a small pod of porpoises was rummaging around for dinner while a fishing boat sailed slowly toward the other settlement. A bird rustled in the tree above me. Rojas was stretched out in Gregor’s living room while the Herzogs were all comfortable in their own beds. We were all resting, waiting for the party.

  After I sent the gunboat back to Wreck Bay, Gregor and Kaspar had insisted on giving me and my aide a full tour. We started, understandably, with their fishing boats, which they’d been caulking with strands of pitch-soaked Manila rope shortly before we arrived. Each was about thirty feet long and, to my eye, well built and fastidiously maintained, in contrast to the unpainted, crudely built boats on the beach at Wreck Bay. Even their little auxiliary engines, one-cylinder diesels, were just short of polished. You can take the German out of Germany, I thought, but you can’t take Germany out of the German. Then they’d shown me their fish traps and paced out the extent of every wall of every structure they planned to build on the platform. We continued on, without a pause, to admire their goats, pigs, chickens, and vegetable garden. Carla and Karen, having finished with the basic preparations for the party, joined us near the end of the tour, and we all had another beer before retiring for a short nap to restore our energy.

  They’d all managed to fall asleep almost immediately, but I hadn’t even tried. I had some serious thinking to do. I was worried, confused, and scared. I was now certain that if I continued investigating in this way, I’d never find the murderer—or murderers. If I didn’t solve the murders, how serious was López about shipping me off to some man-made hell on the mainland?

  As the sun edged closer to the horizon, the wind began to pick up. I watched the ripples bulk up and start to tumble over those ahead of them, and a nagging suspicion forced its way to the forefront of my thoughts. It had been there for a while, but I’d been so busy acting out chapter 1 in the detective manual that I’d brushed it aside. López didn’t expect me to solve the murders! He didn’t even want me to. He wanted a somebody, a believable somebody, to send to the mainland to be tried for the crimes. But it couldn’t be any somebody; it couldn’t be the wrong somebody.

  Whatever was happening around me in these shadowy, elusive islands, with a mad governor and clans of out-of-place Germans, was much bigger than just a few murders. A war was coming. A mysterious German and a brash, aggressive American yachtsman were drifting around up to who knew what. Both were acting as if they owned the place. And then there was López himself. He was a player, too. I was going to have to come up with a new theory or two and a whole different approach to investigating. And I was going to have to do it without letting Sergeant López know I was slipping his leash. At the same time, I couldn’t completely forget about the murders themselves. It was all connected. I couldn’t ditch the detective manual. I still had to know where Ritter and Ernst were when the baroness was killed.

  12

  I sat up with a snap and watched intently, all thoughts of the baroness, Becker, Thompson, even López blowing away in the breeze, as the launch turned into the bay. I rubbed my forehead and wished I hadn’t let Gregor and Carla feed me so many beers. Bet
ween the powerful equatorial sun and the alcohol I felt logy, washed out. I had to keep my wits about me if I was ever to leave Las Encantadas. More important, I desperately wanted to be awake and alert for the party. Ana might enjoy playing silly games from time to time, but I was certain she had no interest in beer-addled fools. She’d made it clear she’d outgrown them in New York.

  The launch’s arrival was no surprise. Earlier, before disappearing for her nap, Carla had let the cat out of the bag by telling me the real reason I didn’t have to visit the de Guzmáns. Ana was coming to the party. When she’d told me I’d smiled.

  “How well do you know her, Fred?”

  “I just met her for a few minutes. She seemed very forthright.”

  “And she’s also very pretty. No?”

  “Yes.”

  “And fun. She’s one of the few people around here who knows something about the world. She and her parents have been our friends almost since we first arrived. They won’t be coming tonight, but they have in the past.”

  “Do they have a car?”

  “Yes, but there’s no road between here and there, so they use their launch.”

  I watched the launch approach and felt that pleasant tingling from head to foot. My worries about López and the bastards back in Manhattan blew away with the late afternoon breeze. She was very pretty and also a little . . . not really tough, but she knew her mind.

  I was the only person standing on the little dock as the launch came alongside. Ana, standing next to Roberto, was dressed more or less as before, in dungarees with a long-sleeved cotton shirt and some sort of halter underneath.

  “Ah, Mr. Freiman,” she said, showing only the faintest evidence of surprise. “I hope your boss isn’t here too.”

  My eyes fell to the dock, along with my heart. Had she classified me as nothing more than López’s flunky, as some sort of cur in service to a yet greater one?

  She studied my expression a moment, then smiled again. “I’m sorry, I’ve done it again, haven’t I? Let me start over. Ah, Mr. Freiman, what a great pleasure it is to see you here. What a great surprise. Carla has outdone herself.”