Thieves of the Black Sea. Joe O'Neill
even with hundreds of masons working tirelessly on the tiniest of details.
The entire square was surrounded by Gothic-looking apartment buildings with gray bricks, long windows, and pointed arches at the top. The apartments were crammed together.
In front of the cathedral, steel tracks made way for a lazy red streetcar moving slowly through the rising fog.
Gathering his thoughts, Foster went and sat at the fountain and took out a black leather notebook he carried with him for jotting down notes and ideas. He’d been thinking about nothing else but Wu Chiang on the journey over. He took a minute to look over his previous notes.
He had tried to put himself in Wu Chiang’s shoes. What would he do? Where would he stay?
He knew next to nothing about the man—only a vague outline of his appearance and not much more. He didn’t know his travel habits. He had no inkling if he had any friends.
Foster decided the first thing he would do is visit the harbor to see if the ship from Ceylon was still docked. If it was, perhaps he would get lucky and a dockhand might remember Wu Chiang. If that didn’t work, Foster could check the passport office next.
It was a start.
The baker came out with a cup of coffee and sat next to him.
“Such a peaceful plaza, and such a shame about the Serbian embassy,” he said, taking a slurp of his coffee.
“Serbian embassy?” Foster asked.
“You didn’t hear? It was bombed two days ago. Two bombs actually. Over fifty people dead, and now the Serbs are blaming the German police. Such madness in the world. This is such a peaceful city; why would anyone want to kill innocent people?”
“This happened two days ago?”
“Yes, here, let me get you a paper. You can read for yourself.”
The baker went back inside his bakery and returned with a paper. He handed it to Foster.
The headline was in large bold font: No clues into bombing of Serbian embassy. Serbs still blame German police.
The article included a photograph of the scene after the bombing. It showed a blown-up building with bricks scattered everywhere, and a woman in a white dress who was crying in the street.
Foster read about the bombing, and about the mobs in Serbia who blamed the Germans, even beating a German tourist who found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It all made perfect sense.
Wu Chiang was behind this bombing. That’s why he was in Bremen. He was creating tensions between Serbia and Germany. Tensions that might eventually lead to a war.
Foster hoisted his backpack over his shoulder, asked the baker for the general vicinity of the Serbian embassy, and made his way across town.
Two hours later, Foster stood at the Serbian embassy bomb site.
The outside of the embassy looked like a giant monster had chewed it up and spat it out. Spikes of steel that were once the embassy gates stuck up from the ground like broken toothpicks. The front of the building was completely blasted away—like a wrecking ball had shattered the front wall and only a few lonely bricks remained. Dust had settled everywhere.
There was a constant crowd of mourners, and people had taken to placing bunches of flowers along the outer embassy wall. The bouquets numbered in the hundreds and stretched down the wall for over a block. In one section, someone had erected a makeshift shrine on a column and pasted a piece of paper with a note to someone lost in the blast and a candle underneath. Others followed suit until the shrine was covered in leaflets and letters with dozens of candles on the ground.
An old woman dressed in black sat next to the wall where she had slept through the night. Her body and face were covered in dust. She held her hand against the brick wall in the faint hope that her dead husband would come for her.
Over one hundred soldiers dressed in gray uniforms surrounded the embassy. They were positioned outside the embassy gate and all around the interior grounds. Absolutely no one was allowed in or out of the building without specific clearance—clearance that Foster Crowe most assuredly did not have.
He had hoped to get inside the embassy grounds to the blast site for a clue of some kind, but he now saw that would be an impossibility.
Foster stared at the old woman and the hundreds of people gathered around the embassy. A small group circled together in prayer, while others merely stood and observed the destruction.
A man called out with fresh pastries and hot apple cider. Foster purchased a strudel and cider and then approached the old woman by the wall.
“I’m sorry,” he said to her.
She looked up at him. Her eyes wanting and full of pain. Her face and gray hair covered in dust.
“Who would do this?” she asked him.
Foster shook his head.
“Only someone who cares nothing for the world.”
“A person such as this should not be allowed to exist,” she answered.
He wanted to say something, anything, to comfort her. But the pain and grief in her eyes told him that was impossible.
“I brought you some breakfast. Do you need anything else?” he asked, and placed the cider and strudel next to her.
“You are very kind. No, I just need to be here. To be here with him.”
“I understand,” Foster answered, put his hand on her shoulder, and then returned to the crowd outside the former gate.
He thought deeply about Wu Chiang. He understood, now, that he planned to create tensions among countries. He probably already had agents in place around Europe. It was as if he’d been building a bonfire and now he was lighting a match.
There was something else that was bothering him.
The newspaper article had stated that tensions were high in Serbia and mobs were already forming to attack German tourists.
It was peculiar how fast these German newspapers had the story, Foster mused.
Too much of a coincidence—was it possible that Wu Chiang had someone within the German newspaper writing planted stories about events in Serbia?
If Wu Chiang’s work in Bremen was now done, Foster knew he would be on the move toward his next target.
Foster slung his backpack over his shoulder and ran back to the train station.
CHAPTER
— 5 —
MANDOLINS IN THE MOONLIGHT
That night, the boys were treated to a magnificent feast by Captain Scopas and his clan. A long and fat sea bass was being grilled on a spit over an open fire pit on deck. The fish, still whole with its eyes and tail, was being turned and doused with a mixture of olive oil and herbs until its skin began dripping and the luscious white flesh was solid and meaty. Some sardines were fried in a huge black pan and given as appetizers.
“Aji and I used to beg for sardine scraps in the harbor. These are much better than the raw ones we used to suck on,” Tariq said.
“Raw sardines? That sounds disgusting!” Aseem said and the boys laughed.
Captain Scopas played a mandolin and sang song after song in his native Greek. Eventually, the entire clan gathered in a circle and sang with him, stomping their feet and clapping their hands in a frenzy of song and movement. The boys’ faces lit up with excitement watching the dancers in the firelight on the old boat.
The eyes of each sea gypsy glowed in the darkness, illuminated by the fire. Unlike city dwellers, these people didn’t know how to hide their emotions.