From Bad to Wurst Page 20

  “You do,” cooed Helen.

  “No, you do,” insisted Dick.

  “No, you do,” chirped Helen.

  I wasn’t even going to bother asking them what they’d discovered. It was obvious the only thing Dick and Helen had found last night was each other.

  “Get a room,” Bernice crabbed at them as she joined me. She shook her head. “See what you started? The Teigs pawing each other in public. The Stolees asking the cashier if she’s got any cheerleading outfits and pompoms in stock. The old married couples can’t keep their hands off each other. It’s disgusting. Yuck.”

  “I think it’s rather nice.”

  “You would. Say, you need to place an order for me with Tilly. I want a whole case of that compound I’m using.”

  “Uhh—that’s going to depend on how many batches she’s cooked up back home.”

  “Why does she have to make it from scratch? Can’t she just order it ready-made?”

  “I don’t know if her New Guinea supplier offers it ready-made.”

  “We live in a global economy. If they want to compete with the big boys, they’ll have ready-made. So I’d like my order express-mailed so it’ll be waiting for me when I get home.” She smoothed her hand over her cheek. “I don’t want any interruptions in the treatment.”

  I looked across the store to find Tilly chatting with Nana at the front entrance. “She’s standing right over there. Why don’t you ask her yourself?”

  “Because that’s why we pay you the big bucks—to troubleshoot for us. Get with the program, honey.”

  I smiled stiffly. “So how’d your research assignment pan out last night?”

  “Are you kidding me? With all the spying the government does on our Internet activity, you’re telling me to watch naughty videos? Are you crazy?”

  “I wasn’t asking you to watch the really naughty stuff. I only wanted you to access the material that’s considered titillating without being gross.”

  “Devout Lutherans don’t do titillating. We’re above that.” She paused. “No. Let me rephrase that. We don’t mind doing it ourselves, we’re just not big into watching other people do it. So are you going to speak to Tilly for me?”

  “You got it.” At least I could be counted on to frame the request a little more politely than Bernice would.

  “Good. Now, point me in the direction of the restroom. My next beauty treatment is due in two minutes.”

  I scrubbed Bernice’s name from my mental list. Ten down, two to go. Tilly’s information could turn out to be a wash, so my whole theory basically rested on the findings of Lucille and Osmond, who were nowhere in sight. Please have good news for me, I thought as I scoured the store for them. Please have good news for me, I thought as I noticed the commotion in the parking lot near our tour bus.

  Uh-oh. What was up with that?

  After delivering Bernice’s request to Tilly on my way out the door, I arrived on the scene to find both Wally and Etienne trying to pacify the musicians, who were making noises as if they were about to stage an open revolt, rattling their instrument cases in a manner reminiscent of peasants wielding pitchforks and torches.

  “You promised us,” said Wendell in a growly voice.

  “What kind of raw deal is this anyway?” griped Otis. “A promise is a promise.”

  Wally threw his palms up in a helpless gesture. “I’m sorry! I’m not the manager of Kehlsteinhaus. I have no control over the event schedule.”

  “What’s happening?” I asked Arlin.

  “Oh, the head honcho at the Eagle’s Nest place called Wally to cancel our appearance because he’s getting an unexpected visit from the Bavarian yodeling team that won some big state championship last week. So they’re on and we’re off. I guess yodeling trumps American heroism.”

  “That’s terrible!” Not to mention gut-wrenchingly disappointing.

  “I say you phone that fella back and give him a piece of our mind,” barked Gilbert.

  Head-nodding. A rowdy chorus of hear, hear.

  “Yeah,” cried Maisie. “He can’t disrespect us like this.”

  Etienne removed his cell phone and held it aloft. “I’ll make the call for you.”

  A cheer rose up as he separated himself from the group to conduct the call. After watching him listen, gesticulate wildly, and listen again, we held our collective breaths as he returned with a response.

  “He apologizes for this embarrassing yet unavoidable turn of events, but he’s willing to make a concession as a gesture of good faith. His Twitter feed has been lighting up with accolades for a visiting American musician, so he’s willing to shave some time off the yodelers’ performance to accommodate a fifteen-minute slot for our famed accordionist Bob Andrew.”

  “No kidding?” enthused Dad.

  You could say that was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.

  Jaws dropped. Nostrils flared. Fists doubled.

  However, instead of becoming an angry mob, the musicians withdrew into the kind of bristling silence that signals both outrage and retaliation, and, like an army of drones, they returned their instruments to the storage bay and stormed away.

  Standing beside Mom in the parking lot, Dad watched them leave, his hand secured around the handle of Astrid’s accordion case. He stared after them, mystified. “Was it something I said?”

  “The Kehlstein bus is here!” Wally announced as the big red vehicle pulled into the car park. “Let’s go, people. Everybody climb aboard.”

  nineteen

  The twenty-minute bus ride to the top of the six-thousand-foot mountain was a nail-biting rollercoaster adventure around hairpin turns that dropped off into nothingness and through cavernous tunnels that had been excavated by an army of Italian stonemasons. Our driver navigated the narrow road quite admirably, hugging the mountainside like bark on a tree, so the trip would have been uneventful if not for the trumpeter for the Brassed Offs. Overcome by a fit of acrophobia, he screamed “we’re all going to die” on every death-defying switchback, which was about every thirty seconds. Not that anyone blamed him for his outbursts. He’d never set foot off Iowa soil until this trip, so he didn’t realize he had a fear of heights.

  We exited the bus on a broad plateau beneath the mountain peak to find the temperature cool enough to chill our hands and turn our noses red. Snow clung to the craggy bluff that towered above us, capping the jagged rocks like sea spume and giving no indication that it would melt anytime soon. At the very lip of the bluff sat Adolph Hitler’s mountain retreat, a modestly sized structure whose exterior looked too unexceptional to qualify it for a spot in a Parade of Homes tour. In fact, from what little I could glimpse, it looked pretty ordinary in a commercial sort of way, but you couldn’t beat the location. There probably were not too many houses built at the top of the world.

  “There’s a footpath from the parking area that allows you to hike the final four hundred feet to the top,” Wally called out as he herded us toward what looked like a railway tunnel left over from the Gilded Age. “But we’re going to take the elevator instead. Follow me.”

  We scurried behind him, hugging our collars to our throats as we entered the tunnel through an edifice of grandly chiseled stone. Beyond the entrance, the tunnel seemed to bore toward infinity, slashing deep into the heart of the mountain. Chandelier lighting illuminated the space from overhead, casting shadows on the unpolished marble walls that arched around us. I was surprised how quickly everyone was moving. I guess we were all excited about piling into the elevator to see the compartment where infamous Nazis once crowded together. Either that or we were anticipating piling out of the elevator and being first in line to find the baseboard heating units.

  The endless passageway shunted us into a domed hall that had the look and feel of a ginormous igloo lit by old-fashioned wall sconces. The elevator attendant beckoned us forward
, allowing half our group to file into the compartment before cutting us off. “I’ll be bahk,” he assured the remaining guests, his Arnold Schwarzenegger accent making me realize that we were so close to Austria, the locals might talk like that for real.

  “Well, would you lookit that,” said Nana as she seated herself on the elevator’s luxurious wraparound leather bench. Above the cushioned backrest the walls were paneled with brass mirrors that glowed like liquid gold, as resplendent as the most ornate of Mad King Ludwig’s chambers. Hitler’s cronies had obviously spared no expense to outfit his twice-used retreat.

  The cables began to whir. “Wheeee,” giggled Mom, clinging onto Dad as we began our ascent. I guess she was feeling the same tingling sensation in the pit of her stomach that I was. After jerking to a stop, we clambered out into a small entrance hall and followed the sign that directed us to an opposite doorway. Speisesaal read the sign, with a translation below: original dining room. But it was a dining room no longer, having been converted into a European-style café, though I suspected the wood-paneled walls and checkerboard ceiling with its recessed wooden squares were all part of the original interior.

  Every seat in the room was occupied. People drinking beer. People drinking coffee. Flatware clinking against plates. Voices raised in laughter. Waitresses scurrying back and forth. And nearly all the diners were wearing T-shirts stamped with the words Bavarian Yodeling Champions.

  Aha. The famous yodelers.

  While the rest of the gang made a beeline through the congestion to reach the opposite doorway, I grabbed Mom and Dad and shuffled them toward the counter where an aproned attendant, who looked as if he might be the chief cook and bottle washer, greeted us with a jolly guten tag.

  “Would it be possible for my father to store his accordion case behind your counter for a short time? He’ll be performing for your guests after the yodelers, but he’d prefer not to have to drag the case around while he’s touring the house.”

  “Ja, ja. I play also, though not so well. You leave it right here.” He rolled the case behind the counter. “Play loud so I hear you in kitchen. You want to see menu?”

  “We have vouchers for the main dining room, so…this isn’t the main dining room, right?”

  He gestured toward the door at the opposite end of the room. “Main dining room that way.”

  “How clever of you to think of freeing up your father’s hands like that,” Mom commented as I led them through the café. “Wasn’t that clever of her, Bob?”

  Dad nodded. “Yup.”

  I gave my lips a self-satisfied smack. “That’s why they pay me the big bucks.”

  We descended a wide staircase that deposited us into an octagonal banquet room that was even more crowded than the café had been and a hundred times more noisy. Windows the size of double beds filled six recessed bays on the exterior stone wall, and sound bounced off the natural stone like gunfire in an echo chamber. Clattering dishes. Shrill voices. Floor-scraping chairs. The only architectural elements that could absorb the racket were the wooden beams that lined the ceiling, but unfortunately they weren’t getting the job done. I noticed an open fireplace with a raised hearth to our right, but since no one had bothered to light a fire, it failed to add any warmth to a space that was in desperate need of it, both physically and atmospherically. “This is the room where we’ll be eating lunch,” I instructed Mom and Dad before marching them down another staircase to a smaller chamber. “So, Dad, make a mental note, okay?”

  “You bet.”

  “I’ll make a mental note too,” tittered Mom, sounding suspiciously like her old self.

  There were so many tourists jammed into the smaller chamber that the only interior features I could distinguish were two massive windows that looked out over a panorama of blue sky and snow-capped mountains. A pleasant male voice was sharing what were probably pertinent historical facts over the room’s speaker system, but I’d have to wait for the English version before I’d be able to understand him.

  “Did you read the sign what’s hangin’ by the elevator?” Nana asked as she threaded her way toward us. “We can’t take no photographs. Dang.”

  Mom tilted her head, her gaze drifting upward to the beams on the ceiling. “Where did you say we are?” Squinting suddenly, she lasered a look at Nana. “And don’t tell me Space Mountain. We’ve already been there.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we welcome you to Kehlsteinhaus,” the canned voice recited, “often referred to as the Eagle’s Nest. The road that brought you here was constructed between the years 1937 and 1939 under the supervision of Adolph Hitler’s deputy, Martin Bormann. It climbs two thousand feet in four miles and…”

  I hit the mental pause button when I spied Lucille Rasmussen by one of the windows. “Gotta leave you, folks. Duty calls. Stick together so you don’t lose each other.” I pointed a threatening finger at Mom. “And no squirting Nana with hand sanitizer.”

  “The octagonal room serving as our present-day restaurant was originally purposed as a reception hall and conference room,” the voice went on. “The marble fireplace was a fiftieth birthday gift to the führer from Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. After the war…”

  “Lucille.” I squeezed in beside her at the window. “Do you have anything to share with me from last night?”

  “I certainly do.” She retrieved an official-looking paper from the outside pocket of her purse and handed it to me. “I’ll accept a personal check, but I’d prefer cash.”

  I scanned the note. “This is an invoice.” My eyes riveted on the number in the Amount Due column. “Eight hundred and thirty-six dollars?”

  “And twenty-four cents.”

  I would have said something else if my jaw hadn’t crashed to the floor.

  “I’ve included all the necessary details: name of video, amount of time spent watching it, charges and fees.”

  “Eight hundred and thirty-six dollars?” I wheezed.

  “Who knew the X-rated stuff was so pricey, huh? And most of them were so short, I never felt like I was getting my money’s worth. Highway robbery if you ask me. Glad I’m not the one footing the bill. Is the altitude bothering you, Emily? You don’t look so good.”

  I opened my mouth but nothing came out except pathetic choking sounds. Lucille splayed her hand over her chest.

  “I’m afraid I’m feeling a little nostalgic this morning,” she sniffed. “Watching all those videos by myself got me to thinking about Dick. He’s missed out on so much by dying the way he did. Two new grandchildren. The interview Katie Couric did with Sarah Palin. Facebook. Smartphones. Flash mobs. Can you imagine how gaga he’d be over today’s technology? I can see him now.” She smiled as a faraway look crept into her eyes. “Stretched out on his recliner. Cigar in his mouth. Electronic tablet in his lap. Charge card in hand. Enjoying an evening’s worth of smut in the privacy of his very own man cave, confident that no one but North Korean hackers would ever find out about it. That would have meant the world to him.” She gave her head a reverential bow. “I really miss the big guy.”

  “Lucille.” Her name shot out of my mouth in a gasp. “For eight hundred and thirty-six dollars, please tell me you discovered a cache of Astrid Peterson videos.”

  She crooked her mouth in thought. “No Astrid Peterson, but I watched a ton of Ophelia Peterman. Would that work just as well?”

  “An Allied air raid on April 25, 1945, destroyed the Obersalzberg headquarters,” the taped voice narrated, “but the Eagle’s Nest was spared. It was confiscated by the American occupation troops and on June 20, 1952, was given back to Bavaria. The terrace at the back of the building…”

  “I really appreciate your input,” I told Lucille, numbed at the prospect of making good on all the charges she and the rest of the gang had racked up. Oh, God. How was I going to explain this to Etienne? I heaved a sigh as my optimism took a nosedive. “Have you seen Os
mond?” He was my one last hope.

  “As a matter of fact”—she pointed straight out the window—“he’s right over there.”

  Before I could hyperventilate over the possibility that Osmond might be outside, clinging to the face of a six-thousand-foot mountain, she spun me halfway around so I could see for myself.

  There he was, in a room that branched off at a right angle to ours, standing behind an enormous panel of plate glass, taking pictures of…us.

  I waved.

  He smiled and waved back.

  I stabbed my finger at him and with over-exaggerated lip movements instructed, “Stay right there.”

  He smiled and waved back.

  “I’ve gotta catch him before he disappears. Thanks, Lucille.” I skirted around the perimeter of the room and, as I opened the door leading to the terrace, got hit with a blast of frigid air that felt as if it was being piped in from the North Pole. The terrace was as long as an indoor shooting range, with a towering bank of windows that overlooked the sheer drop-off below and absolutely no evidence of baseboard heating units. They could build a road halfway to the stratosphere but couldn’t remember to install indoor heating? Geesh. With geniuses like that in charge of military strategy, no wonder they’d lost the war.

  With my breath steaming through my nostrils, I hurried toward the room’s farthest window, where Osmond was snapping pictures of the mountainscape. “Talk to me before my toes get frostbitten, Osmond. Did you find anything last night?”

  “Lots.”

  “Really?”

  “Yup. How much time you got?” He accessed another screen on his phone. I hugged my arms to my body and stomped my feet to warm them up.

  “Did you get hit with a lot of credit card charges?” I asked, dreading his answer.

  “For what?”

  “For watching the videos I asked you to watch.”

  He shook his head. “Didn’t have to pay a cent.”

  Bless his little heart. He’d probably hacked into the sites. I wondered how he’d feel about offering Lucille an advanced tutorial.