Page 57 of Clive Cussler The Iron Storm
“I’m sorry he…” Bell made a vague gesture toward her blackened eye.
“If only that was the worst Karl left me with,” Magdalena said and laid a protective hand across her belly in a gesture as old as motherhood.
“Did he know?”
“It wouldn’t have mattered if he did,” she told him matter-of-factly. “He was finished here in town and finished with me.”
“I’m sorry,” Bell said sincerely. “What will happen to you now?”
“I have two aunts in Antwerp. They arecélibataires. They never married.”
“We call them spinsters.”
“My father is sending me to live with them. I can return some months after the baby is born and claim the father was a former soldier who was killed resisting the Germans.”
“There will be a lot of women in that exact same situation in the coming years and a whole generation of fatherless children.” Making such a statement made Bell think about what he was going to report to Wilson. The more he worked on this, the harder a recommendation became.
“At least those women can talk about their husbands’ nobility, their sacrifices. My child will not hear such tales about his own father.” Anger pinched her voice.
“I know I already asked, but it is important. Is there anything, anything at all that Rath let slip about his plans?”
“I am sorry, monsieur. He told me nothing. I realized too late that I was his servant and plaything, nothing more. Wait, in Germany on the night he was to rescue you from the castle, he mentioned there are other men like him from all over the world who wanted to shape the future how they saw fit. I did not know what it meant.”
That wasn’t exactly a revelation, he thought. The world was filled with megalomaniacs who thirsted for power and control. He kept the disappointment off his face. Magdalena had proved helpful in her own right, but not to the detail Bell had hoped. He asked, “Do you have access to the black market?”
“Monsieur?”
“I only have a little bit of local money, but I have plenty of British pounds. If I give you some, can you get it exchanged?” Marion had packed him far too much cash and so he felt it was the least he could do.
“I can, but it is not necessary.”
“I don’t know how much longer this war is going to go on, so you will need it. If not for yourself, then for the baby.” He gave her a smile. “I hear they grow expensive very quickly.”
She looked like she was going to refuse again. Bell pulled some notes from the wallet Marion and Clementine had provided and thrust them into her hand. He closed her fingers around the bundle. With the Belgian economy in ruins, it was probably the most money she’d seen since the Germans rolled across the frontier back in August of ’14.
Her eyes went limpid with tears. “Merci, monsieur. You are very kind. I saw that right away.”
Bell settled his hat back on his head. “Take care of yourself and good luck.”
Bags in hand, Bell walked out of the bar. The train station was over a mile away, but he had plenty of time. He went down the street for no more than a half block when he spotted a narrow alley. He looked back and saw nothing untoward, but still he darted into the alley, set down his bags, and waited for his quarry.
He needed only a minute before the aproned man from the tavern rushed by. Bell reached out a hand to grab his arm and pull him into the shadowy alleyway.
“I figured you wouldn’t talk in front of your daughter,” Bell told the startled tavern owner. “But I sensed you have something to tell me.”
The two men sized each other up. Magdalena’s father had salt-and-pepper hair and mustache, a slight gut, a slouch, and tired, tired eyes. He was a man who now merely existed rather than lived. Bell suspected his daughter’s pregnancy at the hands of a bastard like Karl Rath was the last straw on his trail of defeats.
Bell wasn’t sure what the Belgian saw in him, but whatever it was it seemed to pass some internal test. “That man who…”
“No need to say it,” Bell assured him.
“Will you kill him?”
“He tried to kill me and a friend as well as executing three innocent airmen. For those crimes alone, I plan on killing him. As for the rest of his villainy, that will be between him and God.”
The barman studied Bell’s eyes, and he nodded. “I believe you. He would come in occasionally on nights when my Magdalena wasn’t working, drinking with some of his men. They would sing folk songs in their native tongue and get drunker and drunker. They scared away other customers, but I was powerless. They had been known to beat shop owners, and they had stopped paying rent on that warehouse after threatening the owner’s family if he tried to evict them. We have no police and no one would dare tell the Germans, so there was nothing we could do.”
“I’m sorry, but how does this help me find him?”
