The herrenhaus forfeit c.., p.1
The Herrenhaus Forfeit: Chasing Mercury Book Two, page 1
THE HERRENHAUS FORFEIT
CHASING MERCURY BOOK TWO
Paul Phillips
Copyright © 2024 Paul Phillips
All rights reserved.
The right of Paul Phillips to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the author. For information regarding permission, contact the author via https://www.bypaulphillips.com/chasing-mercury.html
For Roz, Thomas and Freddie, who put up with a lot...
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
CHASING MERCURY: A NOTE ABOUT THE SERIES
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
Afterword
CHASING MERCURY: A NOTE ABOUT THE SERIES
The Herrenhaus Forfeit is the second book in the Chasing Mercury series and the story begins shortly after the events described in the first book, The Borodino Sacrifice.
However, it is designed to stand alone as a separate novel, as well as being a continuation of the story. While certain key plot points may be recapped here, there is no requirement to have read the first book before starting this one.
I hope you enjoy it!
Paul Phillips
CHAPTER ONE
The men who had set off up the mountain before daybreak were not professional killers, although two were gifted amateurs and the other four eager to impress. With tools across their shoulders their long shadows took on the look of workmen, particularly when the mule path narrowed above the grotto of the Madonna della Rocca and they began to ascend two-by-two. But these were no labourers. They wore hats, suits and waistcoats. The tools were guns.
In the villa on the edge of the little town that perched on the crags, the three crazy Americans were arguing, as usual. It had taken Nino many days of watching and listening to understand that they were not truthfully arguing at all but he kept such knowledge from his face, knowing best that what the crazy Americans wanted from him was big eyes, a bigger smile and an even bigger appetite. These things were easy to provide.
Mamma had lit the fire beneath the range and was preparing breakfast. Nino crept into an empty storage niche to observe.
Schaefer, the junior in age if not rank, had emerged from the bedrooms to find the others already at the kitchen table. As Nino would have put it – as indeed he had reported about the neighbourhood – Schaefer was a Capitano with a neat moustache and a certain quality about him. Not quite like the crucchi, despite that name of his, but more than a little reminiscent of Il Duce’s pig-defiling squadristi. He worked in an office, down in the big town. There Nino’s comprehension deserted him.
“Anaheim, Azuza and Cu – camonga! Say Bradley, gotta train to catch?”
The bigger man flashed Schaefer a forced grin and said nothing. He was lacing his army boots, but since he wore only his singlet you didn’t have to be Fearless Fosdick from the funny papers to see he was just heading out for his morning’s exercise.
Stockinged feet up on the table, a book in his lap and an unlit pipe between his teeth, it was the third of Nino’s crazy Americans who answered.
“Sergeant Bradley doesn’t feel he’s earned his chow until he’s conquered a couple of mountains.” The older man, the nose-poker, Nino called him, raised the glass of almond wine that was perpetually at his side and added in his terrible Italian: “Salute.”
Captain Schaefer shook his head and lit a cigarette.
“You oughta find yourself a girl, Bradley.”
“Oh, he found one. And then he lost her.”
Bradley tied a knot he’d need his jack-knife to undo.
“Tom, you’re forgetting the conditions of your room and board.”
“Fuh-geddin? What am I fuhgeddin?”
The two younger men exchanged a look.
“You promised not to ask us about our work,” Schaefer said.
Tom Cabot sniggered into his vino di mandorla.
“I’m a reporter. I had my fingers crossed. And I wasn’t asking anything, I was telling. I’m sure you got it all on file how he was wounded on a secret mission behind Russian lines after VE Day. Czechoslovakia, wasn’t it Bradley? But did you know it was all about a girl? He sprung her from under the noses of the NKVD. And then she pulled a Houdini on him.”
“Story of my life,” Bradley grunted.
“Story of mine, when I get to the bottom of it. All this…” Cabot waved his pipe-stem. “How Schaefer’s no more a public health advisor than I got a can of DDT up my caboose. How he’s really Navy Intel and you’re here to clean up the mess you made putting the Mob back in charge of this place… Phooey! Sidebar on page eight, tops.”
And with that, Nino’s incomprehensible nose-poker sat back and poured another large one. Breakfast of Champions, they called it. Bradley shrugged.
“I told you he wasn’t as stupid as he looks.”
“I can fix that part about the DDT though,” Schaefer said.
Through a combination of the bomb damage it had sustained, its position on the cliffs and the all-importance of its tumble-down roof terrace, the villa had a tendency to seem inside-out, upside-down and back-to-front. With a small bow to Signora Greco, Bradley limped up the steps to the hallway and wrenched open the front door. Beyond the arch of stooping pomegranate trees, in a glare of dusty light, stood a man with a submachine gun.
* * *
They had been billeted in the villa for two weeks now and after a shaky start with the locals that had seen their jeep stolen and stripped bare, they had thrashed out a kind of truce. Like everything else it revolved around food. Once they had demonstrated their bottomless reserves of K-ration cheese, chopped meat and cigarettes, the eggplants, tomatoes and fennel started appearing and it was now an established fact that Signora Greco kept the kitchen open – and the almond wine uncorked – all day, with all-comers welcome. The jeep was miraculously restored to full health and sat unmolested every night in the olive grove between the house and the road. Just as swiftly, Tom Cabot appeared, and his easy manner made him an instant hit with the townsfolk. Everyone from Nino’s gang to the local priest would stop to chew the fat with Tom, even the older guys with their card games and their secrets. These rumours of forced DDT treatments on the island’s coastal plains were unpleasant, certo, but such unfathomable American business could be left at the foot of the hill each evening. On the roof terrace, with a full stomach, playing ‘donkey’ and sipping ficodindia moonshine as the sun sank behind the Etna, such concerns were far away.
Which was just copacetic, given their real mission, which came down to food just the same. The food and other supplies that vanished from the docks at Naples and Salerno, Messina and Palermo, ninety percent of it, every ship. And the cause of that? It was marked nightly, on every wall, in the fresh death notices, the ass-backwards Hammer and Sickle and the outraged slogans – MAFIA ASSASSINI! Cabot the newsman had cut straight to the point: the shameful deal that Naval Intelligence had done with Luciano in New York, to get his capos over here to play ball for the invasion, never caring how it would become the island’s future, to be dragged back into its racketeering past. Word was that Schaefer Senior had been one of the geniuses behind that stroke. Word was that Luciano was on his way home to the old country. So Junior was here ahead of him, working out of Army CIC in Naples and independent of the Naval Detachment at Palermo, to schmooze local dignitaries in the areas that had not yet been handed wholesale to the Mob.
Supposedly. And for Bradley, a soft posting while his knee and shoulder mended.
Supposedly. Seemingly not.
As he flung his weight against the door, he was conscious of three imperatives. That the gun firing had to be a different gun firing from a different position, or else he would have been perforated. That something had been tossed through the door as he closed and bolted it. That in all probability he had once again dislocated his shoulder.
A German stick grenade, skittering down the steps. In that instant of revelation he had frozen. In the next, Time did the same. Bradley reached the kitchen with a hop, skip and jump. As he overtook the grenade he vaulted the kitchen table feet-first, felling the astonished Cabot. He had just enough puff left to heave the table onto its side and bulldoze it forwards before the thing detonated.
“Sonofabitch!”
Why did I ever come to Sicily, he thought – why didn’t I…?
He shook his head and it felt like they’d clamped his brain in a vice.
Cradling his useless arm, he got to his knees. The table was in pieces, along with every bit of glass or crockery in the kitchen. He could hear tiles still falling, inside and out. He could smell olive oil and lamp oil mixed in with the burnt explosive. And something else, close by. Almond wine.
Tom Cabot was clawing at him, pointing at the stable door that led to the vegetable garden out back. At first Bradley thought the old war correspondent was proposing a swift retreat, and almost considered it, before noticing the boy and his mother huddled together in one of the wood storage holes at the side of the oven. Then he realised that the door had blown open and Cabot had spotted another intruder at the rear. It took two crouching strides to get to the range and the cast iron skillet the Signora had left in there, another two to reach the back door. The top half of the door was ajar. When the face appeared, Bradley ignored the pain in his dead arm and swung the other with all his might.
The results were impressive. It could only have been the oil and fat spilling onto the bottom of the skillet with the impact but the intruder’s face didn’t just flatten, it went up in smoke.
Again Bradley slammed the door and latched it. He knew better than to try for the guy’s weapon. That kind of thinking was greedy. That was how you got your head blown off. And for the moment, and very belatedly, he needed his to think with.
He sat down again as the pain sapped the strength from his legs.
More gunfire from outside the front of the villa. Excited voices coordinating a further attack.
“Gotta get my shoulder back in,” he said to Cabot.
“How do you do that?”
“Not me. You got to do it, Tom. I got to relax.”
As he lay back on the debris he saw Cabot clamp down hard on his pipe-stem. He looked like he was trying not to sneeze.
“Relax. Sure, why the hell not?”
“Stretch my arm out to the side then kind of push it up and back behind my head, like a pitcher winding up. I might pass out for a while there, but you should feel it click back in alright.”
“Which pitcher?” Cabot’s strained voice and face were shrinking to nothing as the pain rolled over him.
“Uh... Carl Hubbell...”
“Knucklehead! Hubbell’s a southpaw and this is your right arm. Under the circumstances, I’ll make it ‘Dizzy’ Dean...”
When he tuned back in he was propped against the remains of the table with Cabot fashioning a sling from the tablecloth.
“Reckon you’ll be able to move?”
“Reckon I’m gonna have to.”
He wasn’t here for his charm. He was here to ride shotgun for Schaefer on their trips down to Taormina and Catania. But his side arm and tommy gun were tucked away on top of the wardrobe in his bedroom, out of Nino’s reach. He’d already found the kid making free use of his smokes and had no desire to see him with a .45.
Schaefer, the diplomat, had dressed for duty without a side arm, of course.
Bradley frowned.
“Where the hell is he?”
Cabot’s nod indicated the way to the downstairs bedrooms.
“Scooted along there when that potato masher came down the steps. Jeez, I thought I was a goner!”
“You still are, probably. I think there’s a whole bunch of them out there.” Bradley had taken a couple of shaky steps towards the passage when three pistol shots rang out and the captain reappeared in the doorway.
“Someone breaking in through your bedroom window!”
“Did you get him?” That was Cabot, always wanting to know more. Bradley took one look at Schaefer’s face and used his left hand to take his pistol instead. There was no resistance.
“Four rounds left?” He had to say it twice before Schaefer nodded. Bradley could understand him going for the pistol not the tommy gun but leaving behind the holster with the spare magazine pouch, even for an officer, was something else. Not that he’d be able to reload it or rack the slide one-handed. Nor hit anything with his left hand anyhow.
“What do you want us to do?” Cabot asked.
“Pile whatever you can over the back door and window. And find some knives.” He couldn’t think of a way to defend the front entrance. There was nothing to barricade the door up there and in any case the stairs from the roof terrace came down into the hallway. Better hope their assault on the front of the villa was confined to his bedroom.
He knelt where he could see both the steps and the passageway.
Just for a second, he shut his eyes again and felt his heart pounding. Just for a second he thought Wish you were here.
Out at the front, a machine gun opened up. His hearing was still scrambled but it sounded strident enough to be a German MG 42, firing wildly. The door he had slammed and bolted began to fly apart in chunks but they didn’t have the angle to fire down into the kitchen so the only real danger would come from a ricochet.
The only real danger to us anyhow – he marvelled as the MG ripped through another belt without pausing.
The question was whether these jackasses were covering an assault or shooting up the place for the hell of it. And if it was an assault, had they switched entry points? Surely not even they would be fool enough to come down from the roof at the same time as blasting the hallway, although he’d be happy to watch them try.
There came a different-sounding bang from out front, which was either a different weapon being brought up or some kind of catastrophic malfunction in the overheated machine gun. Shrill cries suggested the latter.
Whatever had happened, it was the distraction he needed. He snuck up the two steps into the passageway and listened for movement as he approached the front bedroom. Nothing, only the shouting or wailing up top. He stuck his head around the doorjamb.
Two intruders. One sitting on the bed cradling a wounded arm, the other halfway through the heavy shutters with a finger to his lips, eyes comically wide. The window guy had a sawed-off scattergun so Bradley took him first, nearly missing despite the point blank range. He aimed more carefully for the other man’s shirtfront and tore a flap off the top of his skull.
Tucking the pistol into his sling, he stepped onto the bed and tried to reach above the wardrobe for the Thompson and the rest of the ammo. No dice. The paralysis in his injured shoulder had crept around to the good one and try as he might he couldn’t raise his arm without losing balance and nearly blacking out. In desperation he stuck a hand behind the wardrobe and heaved it over.
No-brains had toppled backward to spill his last onto the bedspread. Shit-for-brains was still draped over the windowsill, groaning. With a groan of his own, Bradley retrieved the gun, whacked the guy with the buttstock and went back out into the passage.
In the kitchen he let Schaefer take the pistol and reload it. He asked for Cabot’s help to cock the Thompson.
Heavy breathing all round. Four ashen faces. The sound of cursing and clashing metal from up front was terrifying.
“It’s gonna be OK now,” he said.
Spooked though he was, at least Schaefer didn’t do anything dumb like pull rank. Instead he and Cabot listened while Bradley told them how to defend the kitchen. As he spoke, Bradley found his gaze drawn by Nino’s horrified expression. He tried to give him a reassuring wink.
“And where are you going?” Cabot wanted to know.
“Up there,” Bradley indicated the hallway by the bullet-riddled front door, where the staircase ran up to the main bedrooms and the roof terrace. “Someone’s got to finish this.”
* * *
The others were just staring now. Tom Cabot, Captain Schaefer, Signora Greco, Nino. They were seeing someone as if for the first time, someone quite different from the injured, inward-turned man they had known. A stranger, a phenomenon.
Nino watched in wonder as Bradley prepared himself. From the way he turned his head and half-turned his body, from the way his eyes narrowed and swept the room, the boy could see he was thinking about his path up the kitchen steps, past the front door, and up the stairs to the roof landing. Planning it, picturing it. After a few seconds, grasping for the understanding of what he was watching, he saw Bradley go over to the bench alongside the flue. There was one of the Americans’ miraculous cans, one of those drab green cans with the little key attached, with the biscuits and coffee powder and, wonder of wonders, the chocolate inside. They had been about to open it for breakfast, but now Bradley picked it up and turned it around, half-smiling. Then he wedged it between his body and the bench and reached for one of mamma’s cooking implements, a pasta-cutter Nino’s father had made, so she said. In astonishment the boy watched Bradley force the cutting blades into the end of the green can. But if he wanted a piece of chocolate so badly (and Nino knew that one could feel like that) why hadn’t he used the key?
