Eye Wit by Hazel Dawkins, Dennis Berry Read Free Book Online Page B

shaft material—some perfectly straight wood of some kind––same color, same fletching, same razor-sharp blades. There’s no question they came from the same place. Here’s the denouement: the two arrows are so much alike, I’m saying they probably came from the same quiver. Interestingly, both are hunting arrows, not target arrows.”
    The ME smiled at Dan. “Now aren’t those what a detective would call significant facts?”
    “Apart from a few missing links such as ‘who and why?’” Dan said.
    “Hey,” Dante protested, “tell me you find this interesting––I know I’ll wait till I’m an aging queen and hell has frozen before you find me interesting.”
    “I assure you, Dante. You’re the most interesting aging queen I know.”
    “I’ll take that as a compliment. God, now I feel thlimmenos .” 
    “ Thlimmenos ?”
    “Sad,” Dante explained.
    “You’ve little reason to be sad, Dante. You’re still a fucking doctor.”
    “Not often enough.”
    “Ohh…Kay…. Anything else you found that can help me figure out why Marco Fellini and the balloonist are connected? Why’d the balloonist be flying a balloon across lower Manhattan?”
    “Outside of the obvious?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Maybe because he could. Maybe because he was another Phillippe Petit. You remember. That oraios French dude who walked the high wire he strung between the Twin Towers?”
    “ Oraios ?”
    “Handsome. Charming. Devastatingly gorgeous. God, if he’d only been gay. We could’ve had a beautiful life together. I could have knit his bones back together when he fell….”
    “Or opened him up with your famously tidy Y incision, right here on the slab.”
    “Thank you, mystikos praktoras, for bringing another cherished fantasy down to Earth.”
    “ Mystik os -whatsis ?”
    “Detective,” Dante explained.
    “Oh. All part of a day’s work for us mystikos whatsis, Doc.”
    The ME nodded. “You owe me a drink, Daniel Riley. At least a drink.”

12
     
    Thanks to the sacrifices of Malina Lublinski in 1943, I, Hans Reiniger, am alive to tell this tale today as a Gypsy of Bohemian heritage and a bona fide citizen of Switzerland.
    By the spring of 1943, Malina Lublinski had been a prostitute for two years, a fair-skinned eigh teen-year-old beauty with tresses the length and color of late-harvested straw and eyes the cerulean hue of a canyon-flanked fjord. To every camp guard, she was the ideal and—more importantly—available Nordic goddess, a wet dream in the flesh. She looked fourteen.
    Unknown to the guards, she also was as Jewish as her parents, Ca smir and Cyla Rolnik, both professors of biology and botany at the Agricultural University of Lublin.
    Malina was sixteen and living with her parents on the northern ou tskirts of Lublin when Casmir and Cyla were questioned at home by Generalgouvernment troops, then escorted out their own front door and executed as dissidents who were proselytizing against the Greater German Reich. Their bodies were left to rot on the doorstep as an object lesson to Jews and other dissidents.
    Malina Lublinski escaped capture by sneaking out the back door as the troops approached the house; she escaped discovery by burrowing into a pile of manure alongside her neighbor’s barn.
    Malina entered the manure pile a young woman who had been pla nning a career in veterinary medicine. She exited to find her parent’s bullet-riddled bodies—and herself an orphan with no assets beyond her body and a determination to avenge her parents.
    To escape detection as the daughter of dissidents, she would forego her parent’s surname and call herself Malina Lublinski from that date forward—a good Christian trade name: “Magdalene from Lublin.”
    Malina knew all the guards at Majdanek concentration camp; they were her most devoted cu stomers. Evening after evening these guards demonstrated their devotion to racial purity by taking turns pillaging her Aryan exquisiteness. Her payment in