Nothing good comes from a call in the middle of the night.

At 0300 his little black beauty warbled from the nightstand, and stirred Walker from an erotic embrace of his pillow. Grable, his .45, slept next to the receiver. She could sleep through anything. He was jealous as he fumbled for the phone.

“Awake?” Jack’s distinctive voice came over the wire.

“I am now.” Walker’s eyes focused on becoming alert.

“Meet me at the Narrenturm, ninth district.”

“Why?”

“The IP are here already.”

Walker washed a hand over his face, still in the fog. “What is it, Jack?”

“Dead body in the Fruitcake House.”

The informative sentence ended with a click. The IP, the International Police, was a guarantee that the crime scene would not be kept contained.

Walker threw his legs over the side of the bed.

His room was square, clean, and impersonal. There was no pretension to domesticity, like paintings, books, or excess furniture. The room measured 50 square meters. His bed was the bedroom, the upholstered chair, his living room, and a hot plate for his kitchen. A walnut armoire rested against the wall, next to the bathroom door. There were doors to a balcony so small that it would make suicide difficult.

Each night before bed Walker draped a towel over the chair, and he placed a pail of water on his balcony. Then he’d inventory the room. He would know if something was moved in the monastic cell that he called home. Out of habit he slept barefoot, his feet in the open air, so he could sense if someone had entered the apartment.

He dropped his shorts, went out onto the balcony naked in the cold air, picked up the pail of now freezing water and poured it over his head.

He had learned this trick from a Russian POW. Cold water forced the body to discharge negativity and disease. The same POW, he was told through a translator, did this ritual every single day without fail regardless of season. Walker never got used to the shock. The water made his skin scream. Any heaviness escaped him through his heels and his mind focused. He was awake, ready for whatever Jack Marshall had for him at the insane asylum.

He toweled off, dressed, and coaxed Grable out of her sleep and under his arm.

***

The Narrenturm sat next to the Allgemeines Krankenhaus, the largest hospital in Austria. The first lightning rods in Vienna were installed on the roof, and this institution was where blood groups were first typed. The Narrenturm was the second mental hospital in Europe after Bedlam in London. The German word for the place was Gugelhupf for its architecture, which was why Jack called it ‘Fruitcake.’ Like the dessert Jack had referenced, the building had a corkscrew circular corridor and twenty-eight patient rooms on each of its five floors. Each room displayed a slit window that only a starving bird could contemplate for roosting. Escaping the place was as formidable as finding it.

The local Viennese called the place ‘The Fool’s Tower’ because the psychiatric hospital has housed the mentally ill, the criminally insane, and political prisoners. Patients, chained to lattice doors, screamed like unrepentant heretics in medieval dungeons well into the nineteenth century.

After Walker flashed his papers and asked for directions, the MP told him in factual German that Courtyard 6 was accessible from one of several entrances. ‘Take Alserstrasse, Garnisongasse, or Spitalgasse, and then consult the map.’ It was just the right amount of sibilants and consonants in German to confuse him.

In darkness and frustration Walker found the wrought-iron gate with the curved snake. He ran his fingers over the Rod of Asclepius, the diamond-shaped iron fixtures for snakeskin. Old man Hermes must have taken back one of his snakes. The Caduceus of Hermes, he remembered, had two serpents.

He climbed steps, heard voices above him in the darkness. He saw Jack, some members of the International Police around him, the air charged with a Babel of languages. Even in a crowd Jack Marshall stood out as a man not to crowd.

 Hands behind his back, Jack whispered to Walker. “The German word for magician is Der Zauberer. Whoever did this is a magician. He performed his trick, and then poof, gone.”

Approaching them were the four policemen, one representative for each of the countries that controlled the city. They reported to an Inspector, each in their respective languages. Walker knew the Inspector would summarize the scene for him and Jack in English.

The French IP, with the long haggard face from smoking too many cigarettes, spoke with a phlegmatic bass. The Brit talked details in a reedy voice and posh accent. The Russian, after he had spoken, stood at attention, winter in his face, whereas the American, a young kid, gave a report, about as graceful as a southpaw in a room of righties. Walker’s ears listened for any German, keen for the second verb at the end of the sentence so he could understand what was being said. The Inspector scribbled notes with a very short pencil that took brevity to an art form.

In a lilting Austrian-inflected English, he said, “Gentlemen, it appears we have an unfortunate scenario here. The victim was discovered two hours ago. The IP arrived at the scene after hearing a tip from an informant who said this facility was being used for illegal activities. Thinking that they might discover black-market penicillin or some other commodities popular these days, the IP found the body. A medical examiner is with the deceased as I speak.”

The man continued as the four policemen lingered behind him.

“The victim in question was, according to our preliminary findings, a man of the medical profession with questionable ethics.”

Jack, hearing the euphemism, said, “You mean a Nazi doctor.”

The Frenchman behind the Inspector coughed, “Bosch.”

The Inspector’s eyes acknowledged the profanity without turning his head. “The deceased is said to have performed medical experiments on prisoners in the camps. He did horrible things to children, women, and particularly, Russian prisoners of war. Unconscionable.”

The Russian, a silent Ivan, stared ahead without a flinch.

The Inspector with a modest bow of the head and genteel click of his heels handed Jack a piece of paper. “It’s all there,” he said. Jack said nothing, accepted the paper and began the short walk to the scene.

Jack and Walker entered the patient’s cell. The room smelled of something tarry. Some other men there left in whispers, leaving them alone with the doctor and the corpse.

“How’s the patient?” Jack asked the man.

“Dead a day or two according to his liver temperature. Rigor has set, as you well can see from the positioning.” The doctor made his own notes while he talked.

“Any thoughts to cause of death, Herr Doktor?” Walker asked.

The doctor used his fingers to show an invisible syringe and did the motion of pressing the plunger. Abgespritzt. Lethal injection. I would say, carbolic acid.”

“Sounds to me that would be a fast way to go, Doctor,” Jack said.

“Not necessarily. Ten to fifteen millimeters of the liquid, if injected directly into the heart, should induce ventricular tachycardia in, say, fifteen seconds. Our man here was not so lucky. First, I found no such puncture in the chest. I did find, however, a puncture in his arm. I would say this man took an hour to die.” With this pronouncement, the small birdlike man clicked his little black bag shut and left Jack and Walker inside the cell.

Walker imagined the history within the room. He estimated that the chamber was tall enough, walls thick enough, that a man could scream all he wanted and nobody would know he existed. He imagined centuries of torment within the cell and maybe some claw marks on the walls, too. “How did he get in here?”

“And what does the way the body was staged mean?” Jack asked.

The dead man had been propped up on a stool meant for prisoners, naked. A metal T behind him formed a cross bar. His left arm was secure to iron while his right hand was placed over his heart. The elbow of the left arm displayed the injection site. The head was cocked back, the throat muscles taut but the mouth closed shut in typical Germanic stoicism. The eyes had clouded over, the light gone from them when the heart stopped.

Walker and Jack walked around the body without saying a word. In front of the dead man was an SS uniform, folded neatly in a stack. The shirt’s right collar patch bore the runic double lightning bolts, the left patch and matching right shoulder board said, with its three diamonds and two double bars, Hauptsturmführer, Captain. His .32 was holstered and at his feet, next to his shined boots.

Jack had already processed the scene. “Ready?”

***

They descended the stairway towards the exit. Both stopped to look at the display of the hydrocephalic baby inside a formaldehyde jar. They each contemplated it for a few seconds and said nothing, because there was nothing to say.

“What do you think, Walker?” was the question once they were outside.

 “The Inspector said our stiff was a medical man but there was no serpent badge on the uniform. That tells me he wasn’t in the Medical Corps. He was standard SS, maybe with some medical knowledge, but no doctor, so I don’t know why the Inspector would say he did medical experiments, unless that report he handed you says something different.”

“Anything else?”

“Those slacks,” Walker said. “They had cat hair on them.”

“So the dead guy either had a cat—”

“Or the killer has one. And another thing: those clothes were pressed and regulation-folded. The killer knows how the Nazis folded their uniforms. Since those clothes were ironed and starched, our stiff wasn’t wearing them when he was killed. Day or night, nobody would walk through Vienna wearing that uniform. The clothes either were placed in front of him as he was dying, or after he was dead. It’s staged to make a statement. Question is, where did his street clothes go?”

Jack touched his breast pocket, where the Inspector’s report rested. “We have another problem, Walker.”

“And what might that be?”

Jack was quiet.

“What? You want me to chase down an orange cat?”

“Relax, Walker. The Inspector’s report was in German, which is why I didn’t show it to you.”

“So my German isn’t perfect, but I can manage. What does it say?”

“It gives us the man’s name.”

They stood outside together as the sun came up. Jack glanced upward to the stone turret from hell. “The man was on our list. Either way we’ll never be able to talk to the Captain.”

They walked to the curb together. Jack hailed a cab, opened up the suicide door, got in, but delayed the driver with a few words in German, and from the car window gave an order to Walker.

“There’ll be a report on your desk in the morning. Read it then, and we’ll talk”

He banged on the side door as a signal to the driver to take off.