Keepers of the Lost City

6 Nazi Grammar

At Wrichtishousis, Nina was finalizing the cataloguing of documents. These were the very documents Purdue had held back from the authorities before deliberating the deal which discussed the way he had procured the documents. Although she reckoned that the Nazi soldiers deserved not to be returned to their country, she found some things in Purdue’s hoard quite sentimental. Wedding rings, short notes to loved ones, and monotone photographs of children gave the mummified Nazi devils some humanity.

Bruich shot in from the main corridor, but Nina did not notice him. Her nose was buried in a love letter found on one of the cadavers, one Feldwebel Dieter Manns from Wolfsburg. The scribblings represented a passionately terrifying farewell that, according to Nina’s reasoning, the soldier wrote without any hope of it ever reaching its destination. Addressing someone called Heike, the letter contained more than a sorrowful vergiss mich nicht-type of goodbye. As a matter of fact, the letter contained those very words.

“This means they knew they were going to die,” she whispered to herself. Across the room from her, some of the bodies were individually wrapped and placed in respective, makeshift coffins. Nina’s imagination fused the subject matter of this particular document with the silence in the brightly lit forensic laboratory under the hallways of Purdue’s mansion. Her German was pretty good, so her only obstacle was deciphering the man’s horrendous handwriting. Dressed in her lab coat, Nina grabbed a pen and note pad to translate the words as accurately as she could to put them in context. Even in his own tongue, some of the grammar did not prove Feldwebel Dieter Manns to be much in the way of a well-educated writer.

The first section of the letter to his Heike, Nina was able to ascertain that they were married and very much in love. However, the rest she copied down was a tedious exercise in misplaced knowledge of the planet.

“What are you talking about?” Nina moaned, a deep frown sinking into her forehead.

“My mum always said that pulling my face while the clock struck 12 would leave my face in a permanent wince,” Sam remarked.

Somewhat irate at both the dead crewman and Sam, Nina’s sat up with a jerk. Her dark, perfectly lined eyebrow lifted over her right eye. “I see you did not listen to her warning.”

“Ouch!” he cried, holding his chest in mock hurt. “What are you not understanding there, love?” He sauntered over and had a look at the page she was working from. “Geez, no wonder you don’t know what he is saying. Look at how he makes an ‘r’!”

“Sam,” she sighed in vexation.

“What? Look at it! Bloody terrible,” he teased.

“Sam,” she repeated.

“Alright, I’ll shut it. Just let me sit here with you, okay?” he pleaded.

“Daylight hammering your head?” she asked nonchalantly as she went back to her business.

“Aye,” he sniffed and wiped his eyes. “Worst hangover in a long time.”

Nina’s lack of response conveyed a subtle message for Sam to shut his mouth, while she concentrated. Slowly, as she read, her right hand crept along the note pad’s surface, forming the words one by one as she translated them. The unsettling silence of the lab produced no more than a miserable buzz from the overhead lights, and Sam quickly rebuked a momentary urge to slam his hands down on the desk to give Nina a scare. He knew better, though, and abandoned the juvenile idea to save his testicles from a hearty pummeling.

“My God, this man is uneducated. He cannot possibly have been this ignorant, especially for a German recruit in Hitler’s Kriegsmarine. No way,” she muttered.

“Why? What does it say?” Sam asked.

She shook her head without taking her eyes off the page and replied, “He is jumbling up his bloody sentence structure like a daft bastard. This is not the right way to say these things. I mean, shit, he is German, but he writes like a goddamn six-year-old. Things like this just irritate me. I can’t help it.”

“You cannot help being a grammar Nazi?” Sam jested openly, phrasing the two words to sink in with a flavor of mockery. Nina paused and then looked up. She gave Sam one of her rip-your-bollocks-off looks, waiting for him to utter another nail in his proverbial coffin. Sam laughed jovially at her reaction. He lifted his hands in surrender and sat farther back against his chair to keep his distance, just in case she struck.

“I’m sorry, I had to. It was just too good to let that one slide! Come on! That was golden!” he chuckled.

The handsome darkness of Sam’s features accompanied his comic laugh so that Nina could not possibly fault him for the remark. Without reservation, she burst out laughing with him.

“Alright, I’ll give you that one. That was pretty brilliant,” she giggled.

Something shifted around the casket area of the lab, propelling them both out of their humorous fit and straight into a frozen stare.

“Did you hear that?” she asked. “And I know this time it is not you fooling around because you are sitting right here.”

“Aye,” he whispered. “That wasn’t my doing.”

Again, it sounded as if a lid was creaking, but the two of them held strong. They were both equally curious about what was to rear its head from the neatly arranged and marked coffins.

“If you make a mummy joke, a Jesus joke, or a zombie joke, Sam, I swear I will punch you in the face,” she warned softly.

“No fucking problem,” he replied, his voice quivering slightly. “I am too busy trying not to shit my pants over here.”

“What can it be — logically?” she asked, still not moving. Her big dark eyes were glued to the collection of human remains, not that she wished to see anything that caused such a sound.

“This is a lab, so the question of rats is out,” he speculated under his breath. “The caskets are brand new from the hardware store, so it is not wood rot or old hinges.”

“You know, I would run out, but you are in my way,” she finally said, provoking a flabbergasted expression from the tall journalist. His frame was crouched somewhat, as if he was cowering. Nina knew Sam to have nerves of steel, the type of investigative journalist that would walk right into the lairs of the enemy. To see him cringing was rather unsettling for her.

“Alright, this is just too interesting,” he announced, sitting up straight. His voice was loud and clear. “I have to investigate that noise, don’t you think?”

“Go ahead,” she said a bit too quickly to stop Sam. “I’ll be over by the front door by the time you find the source. Seriously, let’s just get one of Purdue’s people to come and have a look.”

“What? And destroy my reputation as a tough guy?” he frowned playfully. “Look, if it was something dangerous, it would have gotten us by now, right? It’s not like they can wake up now, suddenly, after five days in the house.”

“This is preposterous,” she sighed. “We both know better, for God’s sake.”

Sam was halfway across the floor, maneuvering his way through the small maze of steel tables and medical cabinets on wheels that held examination instruments. The light buzzed monotonously as she watched Sam brave the confines of his courage to see what was irking them so.

From the caskets came a low moan that had Sam turn his head to look at Nina. She gawked in amazement while he was pallid from fear. His heart was beating madly, but his legs were like granite under him and he could not move an inch to bolt out of there. When he turned from Nina to find the source of his horror, something shot out from the boxes. Along the floor the swift thing squealed and scarpered right into Sam’s legs.

“Jesus!” he screamed, trying to run, but the table behind him trapped him, and he stumbled over it with a mighty crash that sent him hard to the floor. Two gurneys toppled from the force of the pushed table, clattering to the floor with an ear-splitting clamor. All Sam could do was curl up to protect his body from whatever was falling around him. The fine clanks of silver and steel tools ended off the magnificent noise with gradual decline until only the footsteps of rushing staff members echoed nearby.

Sam gathered his strength, with his hangover still in firm control of his motor skills, and got up. On his knees, he finally dared look up towards the door only to find Nina smirking, gently stroking the big old cat in her arms. Behind her a stood the butler and the housekeeper, desperately trying not to follow Dr. Gould’s suit.

“Bruichladdich, you bastard!” Sam howled, dusting off his knees. Charles, the butler, quickly rushed to assist him in correcting the damage. Nina burst out laughing with Miss Lillian, the merry housekeeper who knew her employer’s friends like her own children. The dead serious Charles, thank God, was too British to share in the silliness and spared Sam his ridicule.

“I will take care of this, Mr. Cleave,” he reassured. “No worries.”

“Ta, Charlie,” Sam wheezed from the diminishing terror and effort. He gave Nina a hard look, fraught with humor, and seized his cat from her. The big feline moaned in a meow that imitating exactly the sound that so frightened them a few minutes before. Defensively, Sam told the pretty historian, “You know, you were as frightened as I was.”

“Aye,” she smiled.

“And now you act all pompously,” he whined in his own macho way.

“Aye,” she chuckled.

Miss Lillian’s giggle stopped abruptly when Purdue appeared in the doorway. “What happened?” he asked her. Nina and Sam were engaged in a little banter over by the desk where the documents were being examined by the historian before, so Lillian delivered a concise account of the hilarious incident to catch him up.

“Hey, you would have shat yourself too, mate,” Sam told the laughing Purdue, as he gave Bruich to the jolly housekeeper. “Please lock him in the dungeon, Miss Lily. I don’t want to have to endure this again, unless it is because of a proper fucking ghost.”

“Of course, Mr. Cleave,” Lily winked at Nina, and removed the mischievous feline.

“Grown any wiser, dear Nina?” Purdue asked. His white hair was wet and his skin moist, permeating the scent of cocoa butter and aftershave. Nina was lurching over the love letter again, with Sam checking the charge on his equipment at the wall plug.

“Look at this,” she replied, and showed him the original letter. Purdue perused the piece with intense concentration, having a good command of German himself. Sam turned to face them and leaned against the wall-mounted cupboard, fiddling with his camera. Nina waited for Purdue to note what vexed her, and he did not disappoint. At last, he looked up from the letter.

“His German is way off,” he remarked, as perplexed as she.

“I told you, Sam,” she smiled at Sam, and he gave her a little salute in congratulations. “It has been bothering me too. And did you notice his knowledge of basic geography?”

“Of which there is none,” Purdue added.

“Precisely,” she said. “He is referring to his ship’s orders to sail to Argentina, where they would sail due west to find the lost city. But Peru is north of Argentina. See? El Dorado is supposed to be in Peru, where we were when we followed the priests of the Inca Prophecy, right?”

“That is correct. Although we did not find it,” Purdue reasoned. “It is common knowledge that it is reputed to be close to Machu Picchu, definitely nowhere west of Argentina.”

“I thought the men chosen for this operation had to be prime candidates from their respective disciplines,” Nina conjectured. “Call the Nazi’s what you will, but they were pedantic about picking the elite of men in all their endeavors, especially when it came to sensitive clandestine operations like the Inca treasures we found with their bodies. Why is this soldier so obviously oblivious to fundamental geography, not to mention his appalling grammar.”

Her eyes quickly darted to Sam, silently warning him not to mention the silly moniker again. He only smiled and carried on cleaning his lens caps.