Left of Center (Mobsters Monsters & Nazis Book 4) Read online

  Mobsters, Monsters & Nazis

  Left of Center

  Written by Dan O’Brien

  Illustrated by Steve Ferchaud

  © 2014 Dan O’Brien

  Derrick woke the next morning and pushed himself into a seated position from a stiff cot. Standing with a groan, Derrick paced across the room, pulled on his trench coat and hat, and then pushed open the door, its screeching hinges filling the open space of the factory. Morning filtered in through the factory’s broken windows, the overcast skies dimming what little sunlight found its way through. He walked down the few steps to the cold factory floor and turned to look at the river just beyond the pale and grey of the early day.

  “Ava,” he called.

  Scurrying and the sound of the wind whistling through old machinery answered him back.

  He shrugged and walked across the room to where he had placed his journal the night before. The hair stood up on his neck as he realized it was open and something had been scrawled on previously empty pages. He looked around the factory, unable to shake the feeling of being watched from a distance. He touched the page and traced the scrawling script.

  It was familiar, but he could not place it.

  “Ava,” he called again.

  A soft cough and footfalls sounded on the far side of the building.

  The hymn crawled into his consciousness and suspicion soon joined it.

  He read the scribbled lines quickly, and then placed the journal back into the folds of his coat. Ava rounded the corner, her hair pulled back tightly and a wry grin on her face. “Did you miss me, Diamond? I heard you shouting.”

  “I wasn’t shouting,” Derrick replied.

  Her grin widened. “Certainly sounded that way to me.”

  “Might want to get your hearing checked. I was simply calling for you. There’s a difference.”

  Ava turned. “Why were you calling for me then?”

  Derrick looked around the room, searching for whoever could have written the name and place in the journal. He had never heard of Dr. Faraday; he wasn’t even certain what an astrophysicist did. Searching for the right words, he pressed his hand against the coat pocket containing the journal. “I think I know where we need to go next.”

  She raised an eyebrow and dusted the table with one of her fingers. “And how exactly did you gain such a useful insight?”

  Derrick crossed his arms over his chest. The hymn attacked his mind, clouding his thoughts. “Call it a professional hunch.”

  “You guessed then?”

  He smirked. “Something like that.”

  “Where are we going?”

  Derrick turned and started to walk away. Calling over his shoulder, he couldn’t help but smirk. “Back to school.”

  The Fat Man watched as Der Deutsch paced away from the Yellow Monarch slowly, lighting a cigarette as he did so. His goons, monster and human alike, threw Molotov cocktails at the burning structure with a glee which he thought them incapable of.

  “You see, everything burns, even allegiances,” spoke Der Deutsch as he stood beside the bewildered mob boss.

  “I don’t understand why you’re doing this….” replied the Fat Man, unable to stop staring at the growing flames.

  “Yours is not to understand, mein Freund. You have many holes in your ship, yet you keep pouring in more water instead of pulling the vessel from the sea,” quipped Der Deutsch, observing the blaze with a satisfaction that befit his cruelty.

  The Fat Man remained silent, uncertain.

  “You keep your silence. This is good. Had your foolish little goon done the same, then perhaps Diamond and Harpy would be no more as your club will soon be.”

  The flames continued to grow as the front foyer collapsed. The sirens in the distance would arrive too late to save the club. What had once been the Fat Man’s would be reclaimed by the darkness of the city.

  “Your men are now my men,” stated Der Deutsch as he flicked the ashes from his cigarette.

  “I understand,” replied the Fat Man in a monotone voice.

  “I do not require your understanding. You are vermin, a creature that crawls around in the darkness and builds nests in moist walls. I know what you believe, Fat Man, and you will not rise again,” retorted the Nazi commander. “I will succeed where you have failed. The Object will be mine and the machine will be activated. The time of mobsters and monsters in this filthy city is over.”

  Der Deutsch stalked away and left the Fat Man to contemplate an uncertain future.

  *

  The dark skies overhead cast a gloom over a university whose water-damaged and old buildings had stood for more than a century. A few students milled about as Ava and Derrick walked across the campus amidst a light drizzle. They had not spoken much as the hymn grew ever more present in Derrick’s mind. What had once been just music had becomes incomprehensible whispers that frightened him––and pushed him forward.

  After a few inquiries to some somber co-eds, the pair made their way toward an oddly shaped building at the far end of the campus. The Physical Sciences building was as drab as a building could be: a square structure with square windows, no doubt full of squares in general.

  “So what exactly is this Dr. Faraday supposed to know?” she asked while taking the stone steps that lead to the entrance.

  Derrick shook away his thoughts and answered. “I’m not exactly sure.”

  He began to hum the hymn.

  Ava looked at him strangely. “Where have I heard that tune before?” she whispered underneath her breath.

  As they neared the large doors at the entrance, a warmly wrapped student emerged and scurried out into the grey skies without so much as a hello. Derrick caught the door and held it open for Ava.

  She grinned. “Always the gentleman, Diamond.”

  Derrick smirked and allowed the heavy door to close behind them.

  The halls were quiet. The walls were furnished with various handbills and posters for all manner of activities, academic and otherwise. Ava walked ahead, stopping and reading some of the writing from time to time. Her boots echoed throughout the hall. Derrick took a more measured approach, counting off the room numbers until he arrived at 815. He stopped in front of the door and touched the worn plaque, which read FARADAY.

  “Here,” he called.

  Ava rejoined him. “Here we go.”

  Derrick pushed open the door and looked around the dark room. It was filled with long tables and rows of scientific equipment. On the far side, light shone through the cracks between a pair of doors. “Dr. Faraday?” called Derrick as he entered, holding the door behind him for Ava. “Is there a Dr. Faraday here?”

  They heard a loud scraping noise and the pitter-patter of footsteps as a shadow appeared in the doorway on the far side of the room.

  Ava reached into her jacket for a weapon, but Derrick restrained her hand.

  The shadow flipped a light switch, expunging the darkness.

  An inquisitive-looking gnome looked across the room at the pair. He had thick, dark-rimmed glasses and gray hair that billowed out in tufts from the sides of his head. The discordant scraping of the stool echoed as he approached the pair. Stopping in front of Diamond, he scurried up the stepstool such that he was at eye-level with the detective. “I am Dr. Faraday. How may I help you?”

  Derrick reached into his jacket and pulled out his journal.

  The astrophysicist reached out and grasped the book, opening the pages and flipping through them quickly.

  “Is this supposed to mean something to me?”

  Ava scoffed and folded her arms over her chest.

  Derrick rubbed
his neck and looked around at the cornucopia of science-related paraphernalia. The hymn redoubled in intensity from deep within his mind. “Do you know what an antikythera mechanism is? And can you explain why the Nazis would be interested in it?”

  The good doctor handed the journal back to Diamond and dragged the stepstool to the blackboard just behind him. “How do you know about such a strange, archaic, device? And how are the Nazis involved?”

  Ava flashed the diminutive physicist an angry look. “That’s what we wanted to know.”

  “I am not certain how much help I can be. I only have speculation and theories. I would need to know what the Nazis are using the device for,” pressed the gnome.

  Derrick shrugged. “We know that they’ve built a machine, and that this antikythera thing makes it work.”

  Dr. Faraday smiled wildly. “I see. That is most helpful. I have theorized for some time that the formal knowledge of physics has been known for quite some time. Specifically, I believe the Ancient Greeks knew a great deal more than they were letting on. That perhaps many of their fables were not fables at all.”

  “So the Greek Gods and all that nonsense?” asked Ava irritably.

  Dr. Faraday shook his hands demonstratively. “No, my dear. I mean the myth of Atlantis.”

  The skepticism on Ava’s face was quite obvious. “You think Atlantis is real?”

  The astrophysicist’s enthusiasm could not be deterred. “The Ancient Greeks certainly thought so.”

  “What does Atlantis have to do with the mechanism and the Nazis’ machine?” Diamond asked.

  “I was getting to that.” The doctor paused for effect. “I believe the Nazis wish to open a dimension portal and create a rift in the fabric of the space-time continuum. I theorize that they wish to use the technology the Ancient Greeks coveted so greatly.”

  “Time travel?” Ava and Derrick asked in unison.

  Dr. Faraday nodded. “It is a hypothesis, of course. I believe that they want to go back in time and win the war. However, I’m afraid they have been misled as to what exactly they can accomplish.”

  “Are you suggesting that we shouldn’t be worried about the Nazis using time travel?” Ava asked incredulously.

  Diamond rubbed his hands together thoughtfully and then pressed them into the table in front of him. “It certainly sounds pretty damn discouraging, Doc.”

  “You see, it is not as dire as all that,” continued the pocket-sized astrophysicist. “Time travel will not result in you kissing your mother or erasing your great-grandchildren, unless that was your intention. It is much more nuanced than that.” He began drawing on the blackboard. A single line became many as he created new branch after new branch. “If someone were to go through a dimensional portal created by this machine, then you would become a branch off the narrative we all share.”

  He traced the chalk down on of the branches and then drew another long line that matched the previous one, but in the other direction. Connecting the two lines, he drew a shell-like shape encapsulating that section of the blackboard.

  Tapping inside the encapsulated region, he continued. “Now, you would be trapped inside this recursive space-time event forever. That would be your existence.”

  He paused, and then pointed the piece of chalk in his hand at Diamond.

  “Not you, of course, but whoever it was that went through the portal.”

  “I think I get it, Doc,” Derrick responded.

  “What do you suggest we do then?” pressed Ava, clearly irritated by the entire situation.

  The doctor looked at them seriously for a moment, as if building to some important point. “Understand that the universe favors entropy and act accordingly.” Dr. Faraday looked up as a droning bell sounded throughout the entire building. “If you don’t mind, I have a class that is about to start. Unless you are interested in sitting in on my differential equations lecture, I have to ask you to leave.”

  Derrick and Ava murmured their goodbyes and then shouldered and maneuvered through the throng of wide-eyed and bespectacled students who poured into Dr. Faraday’s classroom.

  Outside the skies remained gray and dour, even though the light rain had passed. Derrick could feel that something was wrong with Ava and it was not long before it boiled to the surface. They had made it about a hundred paces from the entrance to the building before she turned and poked him in the chest.

  “We need to report this to my commander. Immediately,” she said in a steely voice.

  Derrick met her seriousness head on. “Why exactly do we need to involve the top brass?”

  She reached into his jacket with a quick movement and pulled free the journal. Pushing it into his hands like he was about to swear before a jury during a trail, she tapped it angrily. “Someone wrote in this journal while we slept. That someone told us to come here. Don’t you find that a bit strange? Don’t you think that little stargazer’s information was a bit suspicious?”

  Derrick shrugged and pushed the journal back into his coat. “Physics is what he does. Wouldn’t it be strange if he knew nothing at all?”

  Ava did not seem to appreciate his glibness. “We need to have that journal analyzed. End of story.”

  Derrick grimaced. He did not have any real objections to bringing the journal in and reporting what they knew to whatever acronym-aversive, shadowy agency she worked for. Yet something still unsettled him. The hymn grew in strength as he stood in silence looking back at the simple building. When he turned back to Ava, he realized that her mouth was moving, but he had not heard a word she had said.

  The last part of it came in like static on a radio. “…are you listening to me, Diamond?”

  Derrick looked at her and blinked his eyes several times. After a moment, the only word that came out was: “Yeah.”

  She huffed and stormed away.

  After taking a last look at the building, Diamond followed her.

  *

  To say that the goon squadrons captained by Der Deutsch had little regard for personal property would have been a grievous understatement. Searching for anything related to Diamond, the relentless, goose-stepping shock troops and monsters overturned bars and other dives spread out around the city. One by one, doors were knocked down, windows broken, and co-conspirators shaken down for information they didn’t have. They would find nothing of consequence though because Derrick trusted others only as much as he needed to.

  The final stop on the destroy-everything-related-to Derrick-Diamond tour was his apartment. The werewolf thug, whose name amounted to little more than a series of unintelligible grunts, lit up a cigarette as a reptilian mobster with a thin automatic weapon kicked open the door with glee.

  Looking around the disheveled apartment, the slithering serpent hissed irritably as he turned on a lamp. “He didn’t even clean up after last time.”

  The werewolf shouldered past him and flicked the ashes of his cigarette on a small table to the right of the broken-down door.

  “Maybe he hasn’t been back yet….”

  Pointing to the exposed safe in the wall, the reptilian thug smirked fiendishly.

  “He’s been back all right, and he left the safe door open.”

  Without waiting for instructions from the broad-shouldered werewolf, the reptile inched his fingers into the safe and then yelped loudly as a series of booby traps––most of which were meant to injure, not maim––clamped down and forced him to pull his hand free. The werewolf knocked him to the ground with a grunt and then stood over him. “Stop whining,” he commanded.

  The reptilian thug glowered at the werewolf, but said nothing. He stood slowly and then threw some of Diamond’s belongings across the room as he stormed out the front door. Looking around at the mess that remained, the werewolf smashed the light and followed his forlorn companion.

  *

  The shadow held the Object carefully as he stood in a darkened room. Chancing one more look at it, he opened the oddly shaped bird and was bathed in the bright light t
hat emanated from it. Gears turned and widgets vibrated and flexed in perfect unison, like a magnificent play without sound.

  Shutting it quickly, he moved about in the pitch darkness.

  He pushed aside papers and opened drawers before he found the hiding place he had chosen.

  After wrapping the Object in a dark cloth, he deposited it in a drawer and then disappeared into the night.

 

 

  Dan O'Brien, Left of Center (Mobsters, Monsters & Nazis Book 4)

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