Without turning around I said, “I just brought lunch up to Mr. Rose. The hotel wanted to make it special, but somebody forgot to put champagne on the cart. It was supposed to be a gift, on the house. So I came in here to call down for somebody to bring it up and the door locked behind me.”
It was a total bluff, but all I could think of. Would she buy it? Or would she scream for Rose’s goons to come in here and toss me out the window? The next few seconds felt like a lifetime.
Finally she said, “Here, take this.”
Uh-oh. Was it a bullet? ”Turn around,” she said with a laugh.”Iwon’t bite.”
I slowly turned around to see who I was dealing with.
Wow. Standing in the doorway was a beautiful woman who looked like some kind of old-time movie star. She was dressed in a long, ivory nightgown that looked as slick as silk. It wasn’t embarrassing or anything because she had a silky robe over it. Her hair was dark and done in a perfect do. She wore perfect makeup, too. This wasn’t somebody who had just fallen out of bed. She looked ready for a photo shoot. I couldn’t tell how old she was, not with all the elegant makeup and all, but I’m guessing she was in her twenties. She had a little smile that told me she knew exactly how scared I was.
Once I got over the shock of seeing her, I saw something else that made my heart leap. She was holding out an old-fashioned brass key on a ring.
“I don’t know why he makes all the doors lock that way,” she said softly. “Maybe to catch people who go into places they shouldn’t.” She said this with a smile, like she was needling me. I think she liked to see me squirm. Good for her, because I was definitely squirming. I reached out and took the key.
“Thanks,” I said. “It was a big mistake. I never should have come in here.”
I went back to the main door and used the key to unlock it. When I opened the door, I was relieved to see that nobody villainous was lurking around in the entryway. I was beginning to think I had a chance of getting out of here alive. Quickly I returned the key to the woman, saying, “I’m very embarrassed.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said the woman. “I’ll never tell.” She put her finger to her lips to emphasize her promise to “shush.” It all seemed kind of flirty. Oh yeah, this was going to work out. I gave her a sincerely grateful smile, then turned for the door and freedom.
“Hey!” she shouted after me. I froze. I was seconds away from a clean escape. What had gone wrong? I turned back to her sheepishly.
“What about the champagne? Aren’t you going to make that call?”
Oops. I hadn’t followed through with the bluff. I was such a bad liar. Was this going to bite me in the butt? I had to think fast, again. “Uh… I really shouldn’t be in here,” I said. “I’ll go downstairs and bring it back up myself.”
“Good idea,” she said. “You’re a smart kid.” With that, she left through the door behind the desk…
Ding Dong! The doorbell rang. In a few seconds one of Rose’s thugs would appear to answer it, and I was still in the office! I quickly dashed out and across the entryway toward the front door.
“Hey, you still here?” somebody bellowed. It was the guy who first opened the door for me when I arrived.
“Just leaving,” I said. The thug pushed past me and opened the door. Standing outside was Gunny, with a bottle of champagne chilling in a bucket of ice.
“For Mr. Rose,” he said. “Compliments of the Manhattan Tower Hotel.”
I glanced back over my shoulder and saw that the movie-star lady was watching from the corridor. It was perfect. Gunny had cemented my bluff without even knowing it. I was home free.
The thug took the champagne, then pushed me out the door and closed it behind us. Gunny and I made brief eye contact, but didn’t say a word. We walked quickly past the two security guards in the corridor, stopped at the elevator, and rang for Dewey. The elevator arrived seconds later and we rode silently down to the lobby. Dewey looked at me the whole way down, dying to know what had happened. But he wasn’t going to ask with Gunny there, and I sure as heck wasn’t going to tell him anything. When we got to the lobby, Gunny and I stepped out of the elevator and kept walking until Dewey was out of earshot.
Finally Gunny said under his breath, “You were up there too long, shorty. I was getting nervous. I had to make up an excuse to go up.”
“It was perfect,” I added. “And totally worth it. Wait’ll you hear.” The two of us parted and went about our business for the rest of the day as if nothing scary had happened.
That night Spader, Gunny, and I met in our room, and I told them everything that had happened in Max Rose’s penthouse.
“So these Nazi wogglies,” Spader said, “they’re pretty nasty characters?”
“Yes,” was my simple answer.
“As bad as the gangster boys around here?” he asked.
“Worse,” I answered. “These guys aren’t just criminals. The Nazis are about taking over the whole territory and murdering millions of people along the way.”
“So they’re like, Saint Dane-bad,” was Spader’s conclusion.
“Yeah, they’re Saint Dane-bad,” I agreed.
“So then, what are they planning together?” Spader asked with frustration.
“That is the big question, isn’t it?” Gunny said.
What was Saint Dane trying to do here? Aside from the murderous mission of two gangsters at the flume in the subway, the demon hadn’t made his presence known. ”The Nazis are going to pay Max Rose for his services on May sixth,” I said while pacing. “I think if we figure out what Max Rose is doing for the Nazis, we’ll know what Saint Dane’s plan is.”
“And what is Ludwig Zell-one-twenty-nine?” asked Spader. “Sounds like some kind of code.”
“We don’t know if it’s Ludwig Zell-one-twenty-nine,” I said. “Only L-Z-one-two-nine.”
I looked to Gunny, but Gunny only shrugged. LZ-129 might be the key to this whole thing, or mean absolutely nothing.
“I’ll keep snooping around,” said Gunny.
We ended the meeting by saying we had to keep a closer eye on Max Rose and his band of merry men. We decided to read every newspaper we could get, every day, to see if there was any mention of LZ-129 or Ludwig Zell. You never knew. For the first time since I had gotten to First Earth, I had the feeling that we were on our way to figuring out what Saint Dane had in mind to disrupt this territory.
I was absolutely, totally wrong.
Whatreallyhappened after that meeting was nothing. I’m serious, absolutely nothing. The trail went stone freakin’ cold. Max Rose never left the penthouse. Ludwig Zell didn’t come by the hotel again. We didn’t have any trouble with Winn Farrow and his gang of killers. We read every newspaper from New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, but didn’t find a single reference to Ludwig Zell or LZ-129. Remember, this was long before the Internet. It’s not like we could sign on to a search engine, input “Ludwig Zell, evil Nazi mobster plan” and get a complete history of the guy and what he was up to.
This waswayfrustrating.
Gunny even went to some government offices to look for any documents that showed the kinds of businesses Max Rose was involved in. Good idea, except for one thing. This was 1937. An African American guy walking into government offices looking for information wasn’t exactly common. This was long before the civil rights movement. Guys like Jackie Robinson, Martin Luther King Jr., Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas from the Supreme Court, and Nelson Mandela hadn’t broken down any barriers yet. They didn’t even have very many black movie stars like Will Smith or Eddie Murphy.
So Gunny pretty much walked into a bunch of brick walls.
It would have been a totally depressing situation, if Spader and I hadn’t tried to have a little fun along the way. He showed me a good time on his home territory of Cloral, so I wanted to do the same for him on First Earth.
I took him to see a lot of movies. He had never seen anything like a movie before, and it was fun to watch his reaction. He was freaked at first, kind of like when we saw the holograms on Veelox. But after a while he got with the program. The admission price was only twenty-five cents. Can you believe it? I took him to see lots of Marx Brothers movies, my favorite beingA Night at the Opera. We saw some Westerns with a guy named Tom Mix, and even saw the originalKing Kong. It was fun to see these movies on a big screen instead of television.
