Cinnamon Kiss

came in through one of the neighbors’ driveways and into the backyard of Axel Bowers.

It was a garden house set behind two weeping willows. You might not have seen it even looking straight at it because the walls and doors were painted green like the leaves and lawn.

The door was unlocked.

Axel’s holy place was a single room with bare and unfinished pine floors and a niche in one of the walls where there sat a large brass elephant that had six arms. Its beard sprouted many half-burned sticks of incense. Their sweet odor filled the room but there was a stink under that.

A five-foot-square bamboo mat marked the exact center of the floor but beyond that there was no other furniture.

All of the smells, both good and bad, seemed to emanate from the brass elephant. It was five feet high and the same in width.

At its feet lay a traveling trunk with the decals of many nations glued to it.

Somebody had already snapped off the padlock, and so all I had to do was throw the trunk open. Because of the foul odor that cow-ered underneath the sweet incense I thought that I’d find a body in the trunk. It was too small for a man but maybe, I thought, there would be some animal sacrificed in the holy ashram.

7 3

W a lt e r M o s l e y

Failing an animal corpse, I thought I might find some other fine art like the pieces that graced the house.

The last thing I expected was a trove of Nazi memorabilia.

And not just the run-of-the-mill pictures of Adolf Hitler and Nazi flags. There was a dagger that had a garnet- encrusted swastika on its hilt, and the leather-bound copy of Mein Kampf was signed by Hitler himself. The contents of the trunk were all jumbled, which added to the theory that someone had already searched it. Bobby Lee said that he’d sent people to look for Philomena — maybe this was their work.

There was a pair of leather motorcycle gloves in the trunk. I accepted this providence and donned the gloves. I’d made sure to touch as few surfaces as possible in the house but gloves were even better.

A box for a deck of cards held instead a stack of pocket photographs of a man I did not recognize posing with Mussolini and Hitler, Goring and Hess. The man had an ugly-looking scar around his left eye. That orb looked out in stunned blindness.

For a moment I remembered the boy I killed in Germany after he had slaughtered the white Americans who’d made fun of me.

I also remembered the concentration camp we’d liberated and the starved, skeletal bodies of the few survivors.

The putrid odor was worse inside the trunk but there was no evidence of even a dead rat. There were a Nazi captain’s uniform and various weapons, including a well-oiled Luger with three clips of ammo. There was also, hidden inside a package that looked like it contained soap, a thick stack of homemade pornographic postcards. They were photographs of the same heavyset man who had posed with the Nazi leaders. Now he was in various sexual positions with young women and girls. He had a very large erection and all of the pictures were of him penetrating 7 4

C i n n a m o n K i s s

women from in front or behind. One photo centered on a teenage girl’s face — she was screaming in pain as he lowered on her from overhead.

I took the Luger and the clips of ammo, then I tried to move the trunk but I could see that it was anchored to the floor somehow. I got down on my knees and sniffed around the base of the trunk — the smell was definitely coming from underneath.

After looking around the base I decided to pull away the carpet that surrounded the trunk. There I saw a brass latch. I lifted this and the trunk flipped backward, revealing the corpse of a man crushed into an almost perfect rectangle — the size of the space beneath the trunk.

The man’s head was facing upward, framed by his forearms.

It was the face of the young man hugging his mother — Axel Bowers.

7 5

12

Ihad seen my share of dead bodies. Many of them had died under violent circumstances. But I had never seen anything like Axel Bowers. His killer treated the body like just another thing that needed to be hidden, not like a human being at all.

The bones were broken and his forehead was crushed by the trunk coming down on it.

The smell was overwhelming. Soon the neighbors would begin to detect it. I wondered if the person who had searched the trunk had found Axel. Not necessarily; if they’d been there a few days before, there might not have been a smell yet, so they’d have had no reason to suspect there was a secret compartment.

It was a gruesome sight. But even then, in the presence of such awful violence and evil intent, I thought about Feather lying in her bed. I felt like running from there as fast as I could.

7 6

C i n n a m o n K i s s

But instead I forced myself to wait and think about how even this horror might help her.

The knife was worth nothing and I didn’t think that I had the kind of contacts to sell Hitler’s signature. For that matter the signature might have been a fake.

I considered taking a couple of the Klee paintings from the house, but again I didn’t know where to sell them. And if I got caught trying to fence stolen paintings I could end up in jail before getting the money I needed.

For a while I thought about burning down the ashram. I wanted to get rid of the evidence of the murder so that I wouldn’t be implicated by Dream Dog or some other hippie on the block.

I even went so far as to get a can of gasoline from the garage. I also took tapered candles from the house to use as a kind of slow-burning fuse. But then I decided that fire would call attention to the murder instead of away