“Otto,” Kocian said. “He may not look like it, but Little Karlchen is actually very good at what he does. If there are any guns, tell him.”
Gorner’s face, which had been flushed, now turned pale.
“The Herr Oberst’s drilling is over the mantel in my living room. There are several shotguns. And the game wardens, of course, are armed.”
“Bingo!” Castillo said. “We have just found a Heckler & Koch submachine gun. Otto, get Siggie Muller on the line for me, please.”
“The guy on the road?” Delchamps asked.
“That was an MP7 under his coat,” Castillo said. “Maybe he’ll know where we can find something else we can use. I don’t want to walk into church trying to hide a drilling under my coat.”
“Siggie’ll know,” Kocian said as he reached impatiently for the telephone Gorner had just finished dialing.
Castillo looked at Kocian with curiosity but didn’t say anything.
“What’s a drilling?” Sparkman asked.
“A side-by-side shotgun,” Castillo said. “Usually sixteen-gauge. With a rifle barrel, usually seven-millimeter, underneath.”
“I never heard of anything like that.”
“That’s because you went to the Air Force Academy, Captain Sparkman,” Castillo said. “At West Point, we learn all about guns.”
“Screw you, Charley,” Torine said loyally.
“Siggie, here is Eric Kocian,” Billy said into the telephone. “I need to see you just as soon as you can get here. We’re in the big room. Bring your weapon, preferably weapons.”
[FOUR]
Muller appeared five minutes later. By then Gorner had spoken to the Bundeskriminalamt, and was just hanging up the phone after speaking with his security supervisor.
“You been in the attic lately, Siggie?” Kocian asked.
Muller looked uncomfortable. He nodded but didn’t reply.
“What’s in the attic?” Gorner asked.
“Something the Herr Oberst and I put there and didn’t want you and Helena to worry about. Siggie did not like keeping it from you. I insisted.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“When the Herr Oberst and I escaped from the Russians—”
“Escaped from the Russians?” Castillo asked. “I thought you were captured by the English?”
“That’s the story the Herr Oberst told. He did not wish to further alarm his wife unnecessarily. We were captured by, and escaped from, the Red Army. We walked from near Stettin—now Szczecin, just inside Poland—to here. We saw the rape of Berlin. We saw the rape of every other place the Red Army went. It very much bothered the Herr Oberst.”
“I don’t think I understand,” Castillo said.
“I know I don’t,” Gorner said.
“Let’s show them what we have in the attic, Siggie,” Kocian said.
“
Muller led them to a closet off the sitting room. He took a chair into the closet, stood on it, put his hands flat against a low ceiling, and pushed hard upward. There was a screeching sound and one side of the ceiling folded upward.
“Over the years, there have been improvements to what was originally here,” Kocian said. “The ceiling—the door—is now hinged, for example. We used to have to prop it open. And there were no electric lights here in the old days.”
As if it had been rehearsed, Siggie stretched an arm into the hole. There was a click and electric lights came on. Then he heaved and grunted, and let down from the attic a simple, sturdy ladder.
He looked to Kocian for direction.
“I’m really too old to be climbing ladders,” Kocian said, then climbed nimbly up it.
Muller gestured for Castillo to go up the ladder. He did so and found himself in something he realized with chagrin he had never even suspected existed. The area was as large as the apartment beneath. The roof was so steeply pitched, however, that there was room for only three men standing abreast in the center.
Against each side of the room were six olive-drab oblong metal boxes on wooden horses, just far enough toward the center so that their lids could be raised.
On each box—on the top, the sides, and the front—was a stenciled legend, the paint a faded yellow. Castillo squatted to get a look.
STIELHANDGRANATE 24
20 STUCK
BOHMISCHE WAFFENFABRIK A. G. PRAG
It was a moment before he remembered that under the Nazis, Czechoslovakia had been the “Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia” and that the “Bohemian Weapons Factory” in Prague was the Czech factory that the Germans had taken over.
Kocian saw him looking.
“Hand grenades aren’t the first thing that comes to mind when you hear ‘Bohemia, ’ are they, Karlchen?”
“No,” Castillo replied simply.
Delchamps came off the ladder, saw the boxes, read the labeling, and said, “I was really hoping for something a little less noisy than potato mashers.”
Castillo and Kocian both chuckled.
Kocian went to one of the boxes and opened it with an ease that suggested this wasn’t the first time he’d opened a crate of hand grenades.
Otto Gorner, wheezing a little, came off the ladder.
Kocian took something wrapped in a cloth from the box and extended it to Castillo.
“I considered giving you this when you finished West Point. But I thought you would either lose it or shoot yourself in the foot with it.”
Castillo unwrapped the small package. It held a well-worn Luger pistol, two magazines, and what looked like twenty-odd loose cartridges.
“You know what it is, presumably?” Kocian asked.
West Point—or maybe Camp Mackall—came on automatically. Castillo picked up the pistol with his thumb and index finger on the grip, worked the action to ensure it was unloaded, then examined it carefully before reciting in English: “Pistol 08, Parabellum. Often referred to as the Luger. This one—made by Deutsche Waffen und Munitionsfabriken, Berlin, in 1913—is 9 by 19 millimeters. Also called 9mm-NATO.”
Castillo looked at Kocian.
