The Folks at Fifty-Eight by Michael Patrick Clark Read Free Book Online Page A

Mosin-Nagant rifle butt in the back of the head. She gingerly rubbed at the bruise and smiled quietly into the passing countryside.
     

4
     
    Alan James Carlisle wasn’t every girl’s dream, but he was smart enough, good-looking enough, incorrigible enough, and, at thirty-seven, still just about young enough to charm his way into a few. Carlisle was tall and rangy, his hair black and thick, his eyes dark and soft, his voice a seductive bass-baritone. Like so many lotharios before him, Carlisle took great pride in his appearance. He kept himself physically fit, well-groomed and permanently doused in cologne, and wore only expensively-tailored suits and shirts and handmade shoes.
    When he wasn’t chasing women, and sometimes even when he was, Alan Carlisle worked for the U.S. State Department, under the rapidly expanding remit of the Office of Occupied Territories. His published brief was to aid America in better understanding European cultures and traditions. His unpublished brief was an altogether different and less worthy one.
    A product of privilege and Princeton, Alan Carlisle was something of a State Department rising star. Those who worked with him thought him the Office of Occupied Territories’ proverbial rough diamond: undeniably flawed, but with the potential for brilliance. Those who slept with him, however, and that included a fair number of their wives, found themselves only able to recount the flaws.
    Carlisle spent his working hours commuting between glamorous locations along the U.S. eastern seaboard and a dour-looking building in U.S. occupied Germany. The glamorous locations included upmarket addresses on New York City’s Manhattan Island, a multi-millionaire’s sprawling estate in Connecticut, and the corridors of power in Washington D.C.
    The dour-looking building was the main debriefing block at Camp King, a U.S. military base to the north-west of Frankfurt. Before the war, Camp King had served as a Wehrmacht detention centre. It was now one of America’s most secret military establishments.
    Carlisle was making his third visit to the base in less than a month. Pacing the floor of interview room two, in reality a euphemism for a holding cell and not a particularly pleasant one at that, he gathered his thoughts.
    Interview room two’s walls were soiled and defaced with all manner of graffiti. Its ceiling had been stained yellow with nicotine. Its air was damp and stale and thick with cigarette smoke. An electric bulb, surface wired and out of reach, was its only source of light. A wooden desk, two wooden chairs, and an iron bed with an enamel chamber pot beneath were its only amenities.
    Carlisle finished pacing and sat down at the table. He briefly scanned one of the documents laid out in front of him, and then boomed an order to the prisoner, who had only recently arrived from Berlin and now stood waiting outside.
    “Come along in, Herr Kube, and tell me some interesting things about Prague.”
    Two military policemen brought in the shackled and prison-suited Martin Kube. Carlisle assumed an air of arrogance and indifference while he studied the overweight Gestapo chief. Finding nothing remarkable, just another overweight and underwhelming Gestapo thug, he told the guards to wait outside and gestured for Kube to sit.
    The guards stepped out. The door swung closed with a thud that shook the walls. Kube slumped on to the chair. Carlisle tried a disarming smile.
    “My name is Alan Carlisle. I work for The U.S. State Department. My brief is to identify suitable candidates, who might aid America in better understanding European cultures and traditions. We think you might be one of those people, Herr Kube.”
    Kube shook his head and spoke in a voice heavily laced with exasperation.
    “My name is Linz, Martin Linz. I told them at the hospital.”
    Carlisle held the smile as he read from his notes.
    “Now that is strange. It says here there’s a warrant out for Martin Linz, issued by the Nuremberg