My husband purchased the communique back in 1986, well before the public had access to the Kremlin archives. He didn’t even know it had anything to do with the treasure train. The Purity League sent agents several times to buy it from him, and he refused. His curiosity was piqued. Aaron was an avid researcher, and it intrigued him that the neo-Nazis were so eager to buy an unreadable document. Only after the Kremlin archives were opened, and he went there himself did he unlock the secret.”

“So why didn’t he find the treasure himself?”

“He planned to. He only came back from his research trip to Moscow on March 15 and was killed a little over a month ago on March 26. They stole the document from him.”

“So why haven’t the murderers grabbed the treasure?” Heinrich asked. At this point he wasn’t sure if he was humoring the old bag or if he was believing in this stuff himself.

“Because they only got the original coded message. My husband was taking it to a safety deposit box when he was attacked. He did not have the photocopies of the code book he had made in Moscow.”

“Do you have those?”

“No. I burned them so that if they came after me they wouldn’t find the secret. But these people know what they’re doing. They found out somehow what my husband had and its significance.”

“How could they have known the document revealed the location of the treasure train if it had never been decoded before?”

The widow sighed and stared at a painting of a column of Hitler Youth marching through a verdant Bavarian countryside.

“I don’t know, but I am sure they are researching all the known code books from the Third Reich. It is only a matter of time before they think to look in Moscow.”

Heinrich was still standing at the doorway. He hesitated between leaving and sitting down. The Purity League had ties to far right parties all over Europe. With the way some elections hung in the balance these days if they got their hands on that money they could tip the scales.

“Shit,” he muttered.

“Young man, I do not abide profanity!”

Heinrich patted the bust of Adolph Hitler. “Don’t talk to me about profanity, bitch.”

Amethyst Briggs rose from her armchair and pointed a shaky finger at him.

“Get out of my house this instant! I’ll find another private detective.”

“No you won’t. I know why you called me and not someone else. And yeah, I’ll take the job. My fee is two hundred dollars a day plus expenses, and no complaining about how I spend it. And I’ll take two percent, not one. That’s got to go in writing. And I will get out of this house this instant. I feel like punching something and if I don’t get out of here quick, it will be you.”

Heinrich strolled out the front door as the old woman sputtered behind him in incoherent rage.

Heinrich grimaced. If she only knew that she wasn’t as angry with him as he was with himself.

The train back to Manhattan took an hour, and he cursed himself the entire way.

CHAPTER TWO

 

Roxy’s Gym was a relic of the New York City Heinrich had grown up in, the New York of the Eighties when the city was run down, tough, exciting, and regular people could still afford to live there. It had been a great place to be a teen, but now he was forty-five and the city had become a vast unrecognizable shopping mall for hipsters, corporate trash, and tourists.

If Roxy, the bull dyke with the killer left hook who ran the place, had rented instead of bought back when she and her partner had opened the boxing gym in 1989, she would have been out of business years ago. But she owned it and had held on even after her partner’s death, kicking out an endless stream of property “developers” who showed up with offers to buy her place and turn it into high-rent housing for plastic people in business suits.

The gym stood on the edge of the Bronx, a no-go area back in the Eighties that was now being strangled by the tentacles of gentrification. When he had went here twenty years ago, the gym stood between a dive bar and a porn shop.