Clara ran her gloved finger down Ed’s hand before taking the offered card. Her smile lingered on her lips as she met his gaze. He could tell she was weighing her options, deciding whether to believe the story or not. After a long moment, Clara slipped the card into her glove.
“I’m staying with a friend at the Belvedere. Come by around 4, I’ll meet you at the Owl Bar and you can buy me a drink while I answer your questions about ‘Mr. Weatherly’.” Clara gave Ed a last appraising look and turned to enter the bathroom.
Ed walked back to the bar and asked Rudolf if there was a phone he could use, preferably someplace quiet. There was no phone at the restaurant, but there was a bar across the street that was quieter and would let you make a call for a nickle, Rudolf told him. Ed smiled and took his leave. A five dollar bill sat on the bar, the best tip Ed ever left for Rudolf.
///
“Lenore, this is Ed. Good news, I found Clara Weiss. I’m going to meet her later this afternoon at the Owl Bar.”
“I’ll let Archie know the next time he phones,” the older woman answered. “Anything you want to pass along?”
“Clara’s definitely a chippy, though a high-priced one. If she took the necklace, she wasn’t wearing it.”
Lenore laughed, “It’s never that easy, kid. Archie followed Mrs. Masters back to her house and overheard a conversation about meeting someone for lunch at the Admiral. He said it didn’t sound like they’d be eating. Archie knows the house dick there, so he’ll have backup.”
“I’m going to run home before my date. I didn’t check in after work last night, Mom will want to hear from me.”
“Now it’s a date? Do I need to be be worried that my two men are spending their afternoons and evenings with loose women in hotels?”
Now it was Ed’s turn to laugh. “We both know Archie is more embarrassed interrupting couples than the couples being interrupted. Worry about me if you need to worry about someone. She’s twice as attractive as that photo the Masters gave us.” Ed could hear Lenore roll her eyes through the bad connection.
“Call me as soon as you have any updates. I’ll call the store if Archie needs you.”
“Thanks, Lenore,” Ed said as he set down the receiver.
The bar was an inviting, quiet place to lose himself in for the next few hours, but Ed knew that he only found Ms. Weiss by random luck and he could not trust her any farther than he could throw her. Trained well by Archie, Ed had kept an eye on the front of Marconi’s, invisible from inside the dark bar across the street. Neither Clara nor her beau had exited the restaurant yet, and Ed was determined to follow Clara until his date with her at four.
Exiting the bar, Ed waived over a taxi and explained the situation. Taxi drivers were always happy to tail someone, especially if it meant keeping the meter running while sitting still. Each of Ed’s taxi drivers in the past seemed to take a pride in driving recklessly in order to follow another car on the flimsy excuse that Ed was “investigating a suspicious subject”. This time was no different and Ed found himself dozing off in the back of the car waiting for Clara to emerge. The warm spring day was conspiring with Ed’s overindulgence the night before to make keeping his eyes open next to impossible. Luckily, fighting the Sandman was a short proposition. Soon a long, black limo pulled up and Ms. Weiss exited on the arm of Mr. Weatherly, both jumping in the backseat and the chase was on.
Chase may have been an exaggeration. The limo slowly wound its way around the backstreets and quiet boulevards leading to and surrounding Patterson Park until it finally found a quiet parking spot away from the laughing children and strolling house wives enjoying the warm, clear weather. The taxi driver had no trouble finding a spot inconspicuously between two “out of service” taxis. The limo driver got out and strolled slowly over to a bench with a bag lunch and a coffee flask.
“On a Thursday afternoon? What are they, French?”
“I doubt it,” Ed replied. “Probably a weekly occurrence. I’m sure the driver enjoys the diversion and lunch out-doors.”
“Not as much as his boss enjoys his diversion.”
A short while later the limo horn sounded and the driver threw away his now empty lunch bag in a nearby trashcan and made his way back over to the black car. In short order, they were on their way again. This time instead of the slow and leisurely pace, the limo roared past the stately town homes and through quiet neighborhoods back to the city center. Eventually the limo found it’s way to the Belvedere. It was looking like Ms. Weiss was telling at least part of the truth.
The taxi pulled up to the opposite curb in time for Ed to see Clara get out of the limo, straighten her dress, blow a kiss into the car, wink at the driver holding her door, pirouette and stride into the art-deco hotel.
“Give it ten minutes, then I have another destination,” Ed instructed the taxi driver. He relaxed into the seat. Ed thought it unlikely that Ms. Weiss would bolt out of the hotel and jump in a cab; it seems Clara told the truth about where she was staying. The whole story from the Masters was seeming more and more preposterous. Mr. Masters might be slipping it to her on the side, which Ed found extremely likely; but Clara certainly was not proving herself a thief. Or a “social secretary” for that matter.
Ten minutes slipped by and Ed gave the taxi driver his home address. Time for a change of clothes and a few quick winks.
///
Arnold Zeit, covered in mud and the blood of his fellow German soldiers, had run out into no-man’s-land to fetch back his lieutenant when the worst happened. The shell that landed nearby sent him head over heals into the air and then back into the trench from whence he had come. Waking up in a field hospital minus one leg and with a case of vertigo so bad he could barely sit up, Arnold spent his waking moments holding onto the sides of the cot to try and stop the room from spinning. The vertigo ended the same day as the war and two weeks later Arnold went home to his wife and two sons.
Post-war Germany was a tough place for an ex-soldier, and an even tougher place for one with a wooden leg and an interest in building a future for his family. Old comrades would drop by to relive the glory days, but none were able to provide him with a lead on a job or suggest a course of action that did not involve schnapps. Eventually Arnold would accept that Hamburg had little to offer him in the way of opportunity. Once his mind was made up, he hopped a freighter to Baltimore, another port city. There was a thriving German-speaking community and America offered a brighter future for his two boys.
Arnold worked the docks until he met Herr Gunther, bookseller. Edwin and his brother grew in the shop, reading more than they cleaned, and had received a first class literary education and mastered the English language along the way. Mr. Zeit managed the shop exactly as it had been once Herr Gunther had his stroke – dark, musty, and filled with the scents of old leather books, coffee, and mildew. To Ed the shop was a second home, to the young men of Baltimore’s establishments of higher learning it was a beacon of banned literature and bawdy pictures.