Der Narwhal

 

                                                                                                  I

Prison taught Lenya Fischer to savor every cigarette. It was currency in there and hard to come by. If you were a sucker and smoked through your whole stash, you ate only the slop the taxpayers of Deutschland bought for you and glared daggers into diese arschlöcher sitting there in ecstasy eating smug gled-in Peperoni Chipsfrisch. And if you showed a little discipline, got more out of fewer smokes and saved up, you could trade for meth, blow, Vicodin, Oxy, Irish whiskey, and tampons. The commissary never had enough tampons and the pads they doled out couldn’t hack it with the papery under wear they issued.

 

Lenya never touched drugs and menopause was be hind her. But once she had enough cigarettes saved up— once she was in the black—she would splurge on some contraband cognac smuggled into Die Justizvollzugsanstalt für Frauen in Berlin and live the High Life like some kind of a goddamned Count. Or Countess.

 

Then Ruth Berger set the price for a girly girl - a schlampe, a lipstick femme—at 200 cigarettes. There were plenty of consenting gay-for-the-stay types and plenty of true-blue buttenschlecken, but Ruth wanted a slave trade for pretty straight girls that could be brutalized into giving it up for protection and she got it. Lenya knew the heavy hitters inside wouldn’t make a move against Ruth because Ruth ran the rackets, Ruth brought in the best smugglers to visit, Ruth had the most guards paid off, Ruth had the best crime family connects on the outside—particularly with the Turks—and Ruth had the most cigarettes. The prison economy needed Ruth– she was too big to fail—and if you ran any contraband, Ruth got a taste.

 

So Lenya saved up. She savored every cigarette, got more out of fewer smokes, traded cigarettes for Oxy, traded Oxy with her visitors for euros, slipped just enough euros in the palms of just enough guards and used the rest to buy meth and blow her visitors would smuggle in and they were the best—much better than Ruth’s knucklehead Turks that had everything confiscated every three trips. These were contacts Lenya made back in East Berlin in the Eighties. They smuggled diamonds, drugs, guns, cigarettes, Bibles, Western music, uranium, plutonium, and people over both sides of the Wall and they did it for Stasi, ‘Ndrangheta, SoIntsevskaya Bratva, CIA, Mossad, and KGB.

 

Now Lenya had the best smugglers, Lenya had the most guards paid off, Lenya had the best crime family connects on the outside, and Lenya had the most cigarettes. The economy could take Ruth’s exit so Lenya was finally able to pay off the toughest group of butch buttenschlecken to do the deed with a shank through the back right into her lungs. Lenya freed the slaves. They looked at her like she was Moses. But crossing that life or death line always caught up with her no matter how convinced she was it needed to be done. She waited until she was alone to puke in the toilet and squeeze out a quick sob. They couldn’t see her like this. Moses can’t cry.

 

A month before her parole, Lenya ran the rackets. Maybe it was ironic that an old East German communist had such good business sense. Maybe it was ironic—or hypocritical—that an old communist Stasi intelligence officer went to work as a private eye for Western corporations and billionaires after they tore down the Wall. Then she got locked up for bribing a police chief for access to his files. Never mind that the files she tried to access would have exposed a crooked rich drecksack that belonged in prison longer than her and the police chief put together. Instead, they still named streets after the guy and picked on the people going after him. Maybe God had a sense of humor. Or was it Karl Marx?

 

Marx knew that everything was money just as Freud knew that everything was sex and cocaine was a miracle drug that could cure all ills but instead nearly killed him. To those two idiots, that’s all there is. To Lenya, money—and sex— made it easier to survive and to burn through legal tender such as Overstolz cigarettes without enjoying it had to be a cardinal sin.

 

Three weeks out on parole, she exhaled slow with her lips puckered up in a kiss. She was sixty-three now, pale as always, with hair dyed jet-black and gray eyes like an arctic wolf.

 

She spoke in German. “So what brings you here today to see me, Herr Gruber?”

 

Otto Gruber—Austrian doctor of law to cure what ailed Europe’s richest families—squinted behind his round glasses as he spoke in German. “Frau… Just Frau, I guess.”

 

“That’ll do,” Lenya said, the chocolate croissant on the little round plate in front of her still untouched. She took another drag on her Overstolz and darted her eyes around the cobblestone square next to their outdoor café table in Salzburg for just a second. “Suits me just fine.”

 

Gruber nodded. “Yes, they wouldn’t tell me your real name and I can’t quite bring myself to call you by that some what ridiculous nickname they gave you.”

 

Lenya chuckled. “Der Narwhal.”

 

Gruber smirked. “Yes, that’s what they told me. And how did you come to be known by that?”

 

“Stasi,” she said. “Right after my tradecraft course finished and I was about to be fielded, a senior officer named Karl Katsch called me into his office. He started droning on and on about something mundane and then, right in the mid dle of it, he pulled a hunting knife out of his desk and stabbed it into his own leg.”

 

Gruber jerked his head back and widened his eyes. “Wow…”

 

Lenya nodded. “I wasn’t told in advance, by design, that he had a prosthetic leg so of course he felt no pain and didn’t flinch. He wanted to see if I’d flinch. I didn’t and he was stunned. He told me then that his leg was a fake and that he couldn’t believe that any woman, especially one as pretty as I was back then, would be tough enough and cold enough and ready enough not to flinch on the fly like that. He told me he had objected to the idea of Stasi training a woman as a case officer, not a snitch or a honey trap but a case officer, and if I flinched when he stabbed the knife in his leg like even most male recruits did, then he’d fire me. But I didn’t and he didn’t. Quickly, I was his favorite.”

 

Gruber narrowed his eyes. “Right, but how does that explain your nickname? The Narwhal?”

 

Lenya chuckled. “A narwhal is a porpoise with a horn on its head. The unicorn of the sea. They live up in the arctic and there’s a mythology about them among sailors because it’s so rare that you see one. That’s partly because they’re stealthy. Deep sea swimmers. When Karl Klatsch saw I didn’t flinch, and he knew no one tipped me off, well he told me I was a narwhal. I asked him why and he said a narwhal was pale like me, sneaky, stealthy, a deep-diver, completely rare—an outlier like a female Stasi case officer—and since they lived in the arctic…” Lenya continued as she leaned to ward Gruber to whisper, “…very, very cold.”

 

Gruber laughed. “I like that. You’re a good story teller. They told me that. They told me a lot about you, actually.”

 

“Like what?” said Lenya. “Well, they told me your investigative reports are very dense and dry with very long, very German sentences,” said the Austrian Gruber. “They also told me you’re a little bit of a conspiracy theorist, especially when it comes to all things Russia.”

 

“The Russian word for intelligence tradecraft is konspiratsiya,” said Lenya.

 

Gruber nodded again. “But that you like Russia. You’re not anti-Russian.”

 

Lenya shrugged. “Well, I don’t like what they’re doing to Ukraine, but I’m not one of these…”

 

“They told me you can be a little… blunt,” said Gruber. “Scrappy, even.”

 

“I’m a mean kitty,” said Lenya. “I scratch. They must have told you I was in prison. Recently.”

 

“Right,” said Gruber. “They did. But they also told me… forgive me and please don’t shoot the messenger, but your husband… he… They told me you were open about it. About the circumstances of his death. Is it true? That you… killed him?”

 

Lenya took a drag and then a deep breath. “Depends on what your definition of killed is.”

 

“Excuse me?” said Gruber after a nervous laugh.

 

Lenya exhaled smoke. “A firing squad killed him and I wasn’t amongst them. It was 1988. Hans was a tech nerd. I wore the pants in the relationship. He was a tech nerd for Stasi designing better tools for audio surveillance, things like that. I caught him selling classified Stasi technical equipment on the black market for extra cash. Maybe not to a foreign government, but treason just the same. I was a patriot. I loved my country. I reported him for treason and he was killed, yes. Been happily single ever since.”

 

“I see,” said Gruber. Lenya cleared her throat. “Karl Katsch, the guy that stabbed himself in the leg with a knife I told you about… he was killed that same year. 1988. Purges. Tortured him to death. Pulled his fingernails off with the back of a hammer, electrocuted him naked tied to a metal bed. Made me watch. Then they just shot him. Wasn’t his fault. That’s Stasi. It was a little bit like those witch trials at Salem. Just what happens when a chicken has its head cut off. The Wall fell down a year later. I loved both of them, you know. Hans and Karl. In… every way.”

 

Gruber sighed. “Sounds like you’ve been through a lot.”

 

Lenya chuckled. “Woe is me. Did they tell you that?”

 

Gruber tilted his head. “No, but they told me, warts and all, you were good at what you do. Even if your reports could use some work and your… history. But, look… they told me you’re damn near the only person in the world that knows where the Pope’s 007 of Money Laundering went…”

 

“Anti-Money Laundering,” Lenya corrected him. “And Financial Times is… sensationalistic…”

 

“…after the Pope fired him and the Vatican police raided his office,” said Gruber. “The guy who the Pope ap pointed as the first and maybe last layman to be head of the Vatican Secretariat’s Financial Information Authority. The guy who used to head up Liechtenstein’s Financial Intelligence Unit and helped the CIA recover Saddam Hussein’s money squirreled away there. Orell Schneider. You’re the only one who knows how to get in touch with him. Is that true?”

 

“Yes,” said Lenya. “That is true.” “And is it also true,” said Gruber, “that he… disappearance aside… could still put you in touch with his contacts who set up all the private family foundations of Liechtenstein and get for my client documentation to prove the deeply secret ultimate beneficial owners of her cousin’s half of the family business empire?”

 

Lenya rubbed out her cigarette in the ash tray in front of her. “It isn’t her cousin?”

 

Gruber shrugged. “We’re hoping not. We’re hoping it’s not just for tax purposes he’s been cloaking the owner ship over there in Liechtenstein. We’re hoping he’s got some embarrassing silent partners he’s trying to hide. Toxic people. It’s unusual for a corporate empire this out in the open to be this opaque. We don’t have much else to go on. He…”

 

Lenya crossed her arms sans cigarette and tilted her head back. “Who is he? Text me the name on Wire. Disappearing messages.”

 

Gruber’s text read, “Peter Brunner. And my client is his cousin Ilsa Brunner.”

 

Then Gruber said aloud, “Litigation is to begin within a few months. Or arbitration, rather. All the family companies use an arbitration clause stipulating that any dispute be settled through arbitration seated here in Salzburg. The family’s estates that pass on ownership of these companies by inheritance use the same clause as well as a morality clause. My client’s trying to wrestle control of her cousin’s half of the family business empire away from him on the grounds that he’s been a poor steward of the family fortune. Made strange bedfellows, maybe. Tax evasion. That sort of thing.”

 

Lenya nodded. “Well, you shouldn’t have told me it was the… Now I’ll raise my prices. They’ve got more money than…” She paused for a second and then leaned in to whisper, “You want documentation from private family founda tions in Liechtenstein? Now you’re a lawyer and that might not be… strictly speaking… legal.”

 

“Neither was heresy and Jesus did it anyway,” said Gruber.

 

Lenya laughed. “Okay… I didn’t know you had it in you.”

 

“And it doesn’t need to be legally admissible in court if the press gets it first,” said Gruber. “Like the Panama Pa pers. Then we cite the press as evidence.”

 

“Sure, yeah, the glorious press,” said Lenya. “You can’t just get at this through discovery?”

 

“No,” said Gruber. “We don’t have enough evidence to file a claim yet, let alone convince a tribunal to compel discovery.”

 

Lenya nodded. “Alright, seventy thousand euros and I’ll reach out to Orell Schneider. He’s alive and he’ll do it and his contacts will take the fall for this if they’re caught and not me or you. It can’t trace back any farther than an invisible man. A man who can’t be found. And it shouldn’t take more than two weeks to get you what you need.”

 

“Wunderbar,” said Gruber. “Der Narwhal. She does exist.”

 

                                                                                       II

 

Lenya pulled her white Mini Cooper into the driveway of her little gray and glass modernist cube of a house on Klaus Groth Road in the leafy Charlottenburg-Wilmesdorf borough of Berlin. She turned off Devo‘s “Gut Feeling” playing from the speakers and pulled her black Glock 45 out of the hidden compartment next to her glove box that Chancellor Scholz and die Polizei didn’t need to know about. Something special happened when she first fired that thing at paper targets on the sprawling estate of one of Orell Schneider’s friends in Switzerland. It wasn’t sexual. It was romantic.

 

Lenya turned off the ignition, slipped the Glock in her purse, and entered the home she shared only with Fritz. Fritz was a blue-gray Korat cat with green eyes that glazed over in sensual ecstasy whenever they glimpsed a bird through the window. Fritz—like Lenya and all investigators - was at his deepest core a predator and knew no nobler pur pose or higher euphoria than the tracking, chasing, domination, and conquest of prey. Most people who say they like animals are wrong, Lenya decided. Most people don’t like animals. They liked spayed and neutered pets. Lenya liked animals.

 

“Him handsome boy,” she told Fritz in a low-pitched imitation of a man’s voice as she pet his head between his eyes and ears. “Fritz. So handsome. Did you get any girl kitties pregnant today?”

 

Fritz purred, squinted his eyes, and rubbed his head on Lenya’s forearm.

 

“Yes, you did,” said Lenya. “The ones that weren’t spayed. Did you fight any male kitties today? Be honest.” Fritz purred. “No? Yes, you did. I see the blood on your fur and it isn’t your blood. They probably deserved it, didn’t they? They asked for it. Yes they did.”

 

Lenya pat Fritz right before his tail, causing him to raise his backside in ecstasy. Then she started up the stove and called Father Mukuta’s burner phone with her own burner on Wire—even more secure than Signal with no personally identifiable information required to register.

 

“Yes, it’s one of those type of meetings where you don’t bring your cell phone,” she told him. “Not even your burner. I’m gonna take the battery out of mine so no one listens. I’m making kartoffelpuffer potato pancakes. It’ll be a dinner meeting, too… Great, I’ll see you in a few.”

 

German Catholic missionaries in the Congo had con verted Mukuta’s parents so he thought it only natural he came to Berlin to take his priestly vows. Then the Pope ap pointed Orell Schneider head of the Financial Information 9 Authority and Orell appointed Mukuta one of his Berlin snitches. Mukuta kept an eye on a cabal of crooked cardinals embezzling Vatican funds in real estate scams, heard about the Narwhal through the private eye grapevine, and told Orell to hire her.

 

Then she met Orell and he ran her from Vatican City as a stringer in Berlin, Zurich, Paris, London, everywhere. Orell also romanced her and they were on again off again. Orell was younger, barely over fifty, with a boyish handsomeness and energy beneath his years. Lenya binged and purged on relationships like a bulimic ever since Hans’ death and thought she was fine with the arrangement. It surprised her how much it hit her when he went underground—when he went in the black.

 

Father Mukuta grinned and bowed at the door. They got the usual salutations out of the way and how glad he was to see her free again and then they sat down at her dining room table over red wine and kartoffelpuffer.

 

Father Mukuta flashed the white above his irises. “You’re going after Peter Brunner? Of the Brunner lumber empire? No wonder you had me leave my phone at home. The Brunners have been a kind of power behind the throne all across Europe since the Holy Roman Empire. Since the Habsburgs. They didn’t stay on top through two world wars by being nice. They don’t like to be investigated.”

 

Lenya nodded. “Any idea why Peter’s half of the business is such a dizzying web of shell companies in Cyprus, Malta, and Liechtenstein and Ilsa’s half is straightforward? What is Peter hiding? Just tax evasion or avoidance or some thing more?”

 

Father Mukuta sighed. “I have no specific knowledge. I don’t know. But these Brunners fund so many politicians in all parties in all EU countries that…”

 

“It will rain snares, fire, and brimstone and a horrible tempest,” said Lenya. “That shall be the portion of my cup, right? Well, I need Orell anyway for the Liechtenstein foundations at the top of Peter’s pyramid. So if Orell’s snitches get caught, it will only trace back to Orell and no one can find him. But he’s still sending you his latest burner phone numbers, isn’t he?”

 

Father Mukuta nodded. “He is.”

 

Lenya turned up one side of her mouth into a smirk. “There you go. Once he’s got photos of the documents, he’ll send them to you from one of his burners on Wire. Or Protonmail from an internet café. Then you’ll get them to me. I know you never like to be compensated, but…”

 

Father Mukuta waved his hand in objection. “No, no. I’ll reach out to Orell for free. But that’s it. Quit while you’re ahead and please leave me out of the rest of it. I can’t believe you’re taking risks like this so soon out of…”

 

Lenya took her last sip of wine. “It’s all I’ve ever known. How many other jobs could I get with my record? One that would pay my mortgage?”

 

“Better the little that the righteous have than the wealth of many wicked,” said Father Mukuta. “For the power of the wicked will be broken, but the Lord upholds the righteous.”

 

Lenya arched one eyebrow and smirked as she held Father Mukuta’s gaze. “Maybe that’s exactly what I’m trying to do.”

 

                                                                                     III

 

A week and half later, Lenya sat by her lonesome on the sec ond floor balcony of the 24 hour Café Schwarze on Kantstrabe Road in Berlin smoking a cigarette under the stars. Her burner phone vibrated in her purse. It was a Wire text from Father Mukuta with a URL link to a Welt article. The Welt article was dated an hour earlier and it said Orell was dead.

 

Lenya looked down at her own arms and hand still gripping her phone and they were just as much a part of the scenery as everything else. She watched herself and felt her self inhale slowly as a sinking weight gripped her heart and lungs. The headline read, “The Pope’s Former Banking Watchdog Dies in Car Bomb Attack.” The article said Orell Schneider—missing for months since the Pope sacked him and the Vatican police raided his offices—was killed by a car bomb in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

 

“You don’t think this was related to our thing, do you?” Lenya texted to Father Mukuta.

 

“I don’t know what to think,” he texted back. “He was cleaning up the Vatican Bank and not everyone wanted the Vatican Bank to be cleaned up. He had a lot of enemies. Odds are it wasn’t our thing, but you never know.” “He didn’t have a chance to send you any documents, did he?”

 

“No.”

 

She gripped the steering wheel tighter and tighter on the drive home, fighting to contain a slow burn of ever-expanding rage. She teared up. She walked in the front door to find Fritz hanging from a noose of piano wire duct-taped to the ceiling. The whole place was trashed with papers strewn everywhere, lamps smashed apart and knocked over, framed artwork shattered, the sofa ripped up with a knife. She ran to Fritz and held him. His green eyes were open but there was no Fritz in them. He was dead.

 

She sobbed and screamed and screamed and screamed. Whoever did this was a ghost trying not to see the Grim Reaper. Lenya would hang on to the bottom of a car for a thousand miles to stab these fuckers in the front—not the back—and watch the soul leave their eyes. Real vicious, real cunning. Real fucking hinterfotzig. Hardball gangster speed chess.

 

There was a white business card taped to Fritz’s stomach. It read:

 

DIE NEUGIERDE

 

Curiosity.