Wyatt's Revenge: A Matt Royal Mystery by H. Terrell Griffin Page B

the night, heading home to bed. The owner came over to ask if we needed anything else. Jess asked him to call us a taxi. In a few moments, the cab pulled up in front. I paid the check and we left.
    The hotel was small, but comfortable. It was apparently used mostly by mid-level businessmen, the ones whose companies wouldn’t pay the price for a room at the Intercontinental. The night clerk, a young man in his early twenties who spoke impeccable English, checked me in. I used a false name. The clerk asked for my passport. I whispered to him that I didn’t have a passport with me and that I wasn’t supposed to be with the woman who accompanied me. I winked. I told him, between a couple of men of the world, that I would think fifty euros might make up for the lack of a passport. The clerk beamed and held out his hand.
    I paid from my dwindling cash reserves. I had no idea who was after me or what resources they had. If they had access to credit-card records, they could track me in real time. I knew that every morning the hotels gavethe police a list of the foreigners who had spent the night. I didn’t want my name on that list. Who knew who had access to it.
    Jess and I retrieved our bags from the concierge and walked to the small elevator. I punched the button for the third floor. “Are we on the same floor?” she asked.
    “Same room,” I said, and explained my subterfuge. “Plus, I’ll feel better about your safety if we’re together. I’ll sleep on the floor.”
    And that’s what I did. Regrettably.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
    The next day, a cold and blustery Tuesday, Jess and I were sitting at a table in the Dornbuscher Bierstube waiting for Jock’s man. I’d gotten a call first thing in the morning from Burke Winn. Olenski had told him about my call the evening before, and he was worried.
    “I’m all right, Burke,” I’d said. “I’ve got a friend who works for the government, and he’s seeing to it that I’m armed.”
    “Be careful, Matt. If you get caught with a gun in Germany, there’s going to be very little I or anyone else at the embassy can do for you.”
    “I know, but I’ve got to have some protection. Did you get in touch with Speer?”
    “Yes.” Winn gave me a phone number. “He’s waiting for your call. He’ll get you into the archives, but he’s not sure how much help that’ll be. The records are indexed, but he said you have to know what you’re looking for.”
    “Thanks. I’ll give him a call when I get to Bonn.”
    Jess was sipping a hot cider and I was nursing a pilsner in a tall glass. She put the small mug on the table. “I’ve been thinking about that list of names. One of them jumped out at me, Robert Brasillach. During World War II, he was a leader of what might be called literary fascism. He was a writer and perhaps the best known Nazi collaborator during the Vichy years in France. He was editor in chief of an anti-Semitic weekly newspaper and was executed by the French after the war.”
    “The young man who brought the money to Banchori to pay for Wyatt’s murder had the same name. He would have been too young to be Brasillach’s son. Grandson maybe?”
    “No. Brasillach didn’t have any children. He was openly gay.”
    “It was some kind of twisted joke. Robert Brasillach, a dead man, from Odessa. Not the city, but the SS organization. Banchori just assumed that the drunken ramblings about ratlines had to do with a sailboat. What could he have meant when he said he was rolling up the ratlines?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe he was trying to protect some of the people involved in them after the war. Not many of them would be alive today.”
    “Did you recognize any of the other names?”
    “Yes. Your information was pretty good about who most of these people were. I’ll have to do some research on others. I’m not very knowledgeable about the postwar activities.”
    I looked up every time the door opened, but it was just another local coming in for lunch or a