More of Chapter 1

There were several faces that kept popping up in his photos on the walls, from all over the world. There was a woman in front of the Brandenburg Gate and the Eiffel Tower that definitely wasn’t my grandmother. These photos were obviously taken while my he and my grandmother were married. I knew that for a fact because of his age. My grandmother would tell me, “Ernie is on a business trip,” when her would disappear for a week or so, every few months. What kind of history teacher goes on business trips every few months? I never did figure that out as I grew up. It was one of the mysteries of Ernie.

There was the same man in several of the pictures with the same stylish hat as well. Those photographs were taken in China and Japan. It didn’t take a genius to figure that out. I could tell by the architecture. I wanted to know who these mysterious people were, and why they were in all of these different countries together with my grandfather?

I knew it wasn’t right of me to snoop through his library without his permission. He had made it very clear to me on many occasions as I was growing up in his house. But I just knew that this would be one of the very few chances I would have to look around until, or after his death someday.

I wanted ton know more about him while he was still alive. So I could ask him about the pictures, for one thing. But what else might I find out about my grandfather this townhouse slowly and methodically? I just knew my “Ernie,” had to be more than what he appeared to be.

He had his library organized better than any public library. It was easy to seer what his interests were. There was a large section on languages, a section on physics, and the largest section of all was reserved for history. There were plenty of other books on other subjects, but these three sections to be the most important areas of interest to him. Some of that seemed odd to me.

He never once showed me that he was interested in physics or languages. He always seemed to have a history book in his hand whenever I saw him, but never one on languages or physics He never even hinted to me that he could speak another language or that he cared about science at all.

Then it hit me, like the nuns in school. What the doctor had said to me while Ernie was in the hospital the first time. He had been put into a drug-induced coma while his brain healed from a small aneurysm. “Your grandfather seems to be mumbling in several different languages. Mostly, it seems to be Italian and Arabic however.

At first, I thought it was just because he had traveled so much over his lifetime and had picked up bits and pieces of several different languages. But, then it occurred to me, “what if he could speak those languages after all? And if he could, why would he keep such a talent, a secret from his only living relative? Especially from his grandson, who was following in the same path at the university that he taught at? I was study world history like he had, and I was probably the closest person on Earth to him? Why keep that a secret from me?”

Over the next few days, as I returned to the tall, narrow white house, I tried to create some kind of story in my head to explain all these odd bits of information that I had gathered about my grandfather. There were only a few possible answers. Oner was that perhaps, he was actually a part time travel guide.

that would explain the photos on the den walls, and his ability to speak a little of several different languages. It would also explain why the same people of those people kept showing up in those photos on the walls from several different parts of the world. That seemed plausible to me. But then why not tell me about all of those adventures. Perhaps he was too proud to let me knoiw that he was paid to be a travel guide.

The next possibility was that he traveled, in part, due to his work. He was a history professor after all. that was surely a very good reason to travel. He not only traveled to enhance his resume, but perhaps to see the places where all that history had actually taken place. But then the question arises again. Why not tell Bobby, your grandson about those trips? Surely, they could have been made interesting to a small, inquisitive child.

The Third possibility that I came up with was that he did something that required him to be somewhat secretive. That would explain everything. The photos, the cigarette butts, the disappearing woman, and the choices he had made in the make-up, of his library. I couldn’t believe it at first, but it made the most sense to me. I could be wrong. I didn’t really have much to go on. The other two choices were almost as plausible, but not quite.

I continued to visit my grandfather as always. After he came home from the hospital the first time, I tried to open up several different areas of conversation with him that we never ventured into before. But he was a quiet man, and he didn’t talk much.

He was always interested in what I was up to, and whether or not I had a girlfriend yet. He was always very interested in what I was doing, but he didn’t ever tell me what he was interested in. I was interested in his past. and what, if anything, he had kept hidden there.

I dropped what I thought were subtle hints to direct our conversations, but he never fell for them or opened up. To be quite honest, it was very frustrating. He seemed quite good at deflecting my questions and turning the tables on me. I always ended up telling him what he wanted to know about me, and my activities, even when I didn’t always want to.

Then it happened again. He had another fainting spell at the market while he was shopping and an ambulance had to be called to take him to the hospital. I hate to say it, but part of me was excited to think that I might have a chance to search through the house and library again while he was back in the hospital for what I hoped, would only be for a couple of days.

I still had his keys to get into the house with. But then, for the first time, I noticed the two extra keys on the ring. They were both copper colored and quite small. One was surely a P.O. box key, but waht was the other one for? It looked like a key to a small padlock or cabinet of some kind.

As In left my grandfather’s bedside in the hospital, with the keys in my hand, I knew I was going to search his house the next day. It was Saturday and I didn’t have any classes, so I had the whole day. I didn’t feel very good about it, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me.

I din’t sleep well Friday night. I had a couple of beers before bed, and tried to sleep, but the the dreams started. I saw my grandfather looking at me with his arms folded across his wide chest as I went through all his things in my dream. He wasn’t happy about it. I could see that on his face.

In the morning when I got up, it felt like I hadn’t slept at all. I dressed quickly and drove out into the rain and headed to Ernie’s house. The traffic was awful as always in the morning, but it was too cold and rainy to ride my bike. So off I went in my beat up old Honda.

It took me half an hour to cover the four miles. It was days like this that made me wish I had finished my degree already and had left to some exotic paradise to work on god knows what. The cold went all the way through my bones.

When I reached the house, the weather had cleared up, and the sidewalk was almost dry. I found a place to park on the street just two houses down from my grandfather’s townhouse, and walked up to the front door, breathing vapor as I exhaled with each breath.

The door opened easily, after unlocking it. I bent down to pick up the mail on the floor as I entered. The house smelled just as I remembered it, clean and dry, with the scent of an old man and his books.

The house seemed very different without my “Ernie” there. It seemed to have lost it’s soul and warmth. I walked back into the kitchen from the front entry and I thought I heard something from upstairs, as I laid his mail on the kitchen counter. It sounded like a door being closing softly, but I wasn’t sure.

I walked out of the bright kitchen and across the small dining room and into the den. the French doors were closed, and the back yard was empty, but cigarette smoke and the smell of perfume still lingered in the small room. There was a cold cigarette butt in the ashtray, with the telltale lipstick.

How long had it been sitting there? I had no way of knowing. It hadn’t been there when we went off to the hospital, I was sure of that. I had tidied up the house before I had left for the hospital, and everything was in order. The butt was completely cold to the touch.

I heard the gate close in the back-yard fence as i was walking down the hall to the front of the house from the kitchen and turned right, into the library. “Maybe it was just the wind,” I thought. It had kicked up a little and the rain had started again.

As I entered his office and scanned it, I could see two possibilities for the small key on the ring. One was a curio cabinet in the corner of the room next to the window that faced the street. I turned to the left and walked and tried the door. The key wouldn’t fit. So I turned, and walked across the room, away from the street, to my grandfather’s desk, and sat in his chair.

I could hear his strong voice behind me, in my imagination.”What in the hell do you think you are doing?” I slid the key into the the wide center drawer below the blotter-covered desk top. To my surprise, it unlocked the drawer. “Should I open it?” I asked myself. Even against my grandfather’s expressed wishes just uttered in my imagination, as he stood behind me?” “Yes,” I had to open it.

I Slowly started to go through the contents of the wide, shallow drawer. I could smell the cedar as I looked down into the drawer. There were insurance papers, note pads, envelopes, pens, and lots of other useless bits and pieces that one expects to find in a desk. Then I dumped the contents on to the desktop and slowly went through it again. Nothing of Interest showed itself.

Then I noticed the envelope taped on to the bottom of the drawer. “Why would anyone tape an envelope to the bottom of a drawer?” I removed it carefully, trying not to bend it or leave any hint that it had been discovered. It was not sealed.

Inside it was a three by five card with some numbers written on it. They read, 13-33-63. It was obviously a combination to a lock or safe somewhere, but where? I placed everything back in the drawer, and searched the rest of the desk. When I bent down to check the lowest drawers on either side of the chair, I saw it above me in the center of the underside of the desk. An auto matic pistol, resting in a well used holster that was attached to the bottom of the desk, under the middle drawer support.

I wasn’t sure what it was at first. But the longer I looked at it, the clearer the shape became. Why would my grandfather have a gun hidden under his desk? What could he have been afraid of? The neighborhood wasn’t like it had been in the past, but it wasn’t that bad.

When I opened the the bottom right drawer, I found a box of .38 ammunition and several clips filled to capacity. There must have been eight or ten clips in the drawer. The box of ammo was still two- thirds full and looked very old. The metal corners of the box were rusted, and the red coloring from the rust had infiltrated into the thick paper that the box was made of.

It said Remington, on the top and sides of the small sturdy box. I stood up and looked around the room again. It was more important than ever now to search his house, and try to find the safe that I hoped might be hidden somewhere in it. I now had real evidence that “Ernie,” was more than he appeared to be. Or so I thought, at least.

I started walking to my left away from the desk, and ended up in the corner of the office farthest from the door to the room. The door to the office was four feet away from the front door on the left side of the entry, just inside the front door of the house s you came in. I was well away from from that corner now, and in the corner farthest from the entry and the street.

The large front door faced the long hall that ran from the front door, all the way to the back of the house. The living room was directly across from the office on the right as you entered, and was about the same size as the office. The stirs were located on the right side of the hall as you came into the house from the street. They were very narrow and steep. All of the houses were buoilt long ago before Edison”s dream of electricity had become a reality.

I started my search in that far-left corner, and looked behind all of the books on the shelves as I moved to my right. The bottom half of the cupboard consisted of cupboards with doors. The top half of the unit, were open shelves, filled with books. Half way to the right, I came to a section of paperback books. They were at eye level, about two feet wide, and sixteen inches from top to bottom. they were the only paperback books in the entire library, and they seemed oddly out of place.

All the other shelves contained hardbound books, some of which were quite large and heavy. but here sat a shelf with light, small, paperback books on it. Could there be a safe behind those books and the large, round, china plate that rested behind them?

They would surely be easier for Ernie to move than the other, larger books. My heart beat like a drum as I moved the books and the large China plate carefully and set them down softly on the counter top to my right.

There it was. A large, white, metal door behind where the plate had rested against the wall. The black dial on the safe went up to one hundred. I went back to the desk, and retrieved the three by five card with the combination written on it.

I turned the dial to the right, and stopped at thirteen. Then I turned it to the left two complete rotations and ended at thirty-three, and then back to the right again and stopped at sixty-three. There was a click, and I pulled the door to see if it would open. It opened smoothly, and then as it did, I could just make out the contents deep in the shadows.

There were several large paper folders on the left side of the safe, standing in edge, five or six at least. There were a couple of small black velvet jewelry boxes holding up the envelopes. I took them out and looked inside of them. One held my grandfather’s and grandmother’s wedding rings. The second held several military medals and battle ribbons. I knew nothing of my grandfather’s military history, or even if he even had one.

As I reached back in to remove the envelopes, I touched something cold, hard and cylindrical. As I moved forward for a closer look, I could see what looked like a small pipe on first inspection. It was about six inches long, black, and about one inch in diameter. As I moved in closer for a better view, I knew exactly what it was. I had seen enough James Bond movies as a child to know what a silencer looked like.

But why would my grandfather have a silencer? I took it in my hand and walked over to his large desk, placed it on the of the contents of of his drawer, and stared at it. “All right then, my grandfather has a silencer,” I thought. There has to be a simple answer to that question, but what the hell is it?

I reached under the desk, and retrieved the gun that was still hidden in that old holster. I sat down in the chair at the desk and tried to screw the silencer into the pistol. It was a perfect fit. The two pieces, now one, felt heavy in my hands as they rested in my lap.

I slid the top of the gun back to see if there was a bullet in the chamber. there was. IO found the release for the clip and pushed it, the clip popped out into my left hand. It was fully loaded as well. I slid back it back into the gun until I heard the click, looked down at it and tried to figure out what all this meant.

As I sat there, thinking over all the possibilities that unfolded before me, I smelled that familiar aroma of cigarette smoke and perfume again. With my hands holding the gun in my lap, I looked up and saw here leaning in the doorway against the right doorjamb.

She was on the thin side, and looked very fit. She looked like she might play tennis or be a long- distance runner. She had a red hat on with a veil that came down over her face, but it was sheer, and you could see her features clearly.

She was beautiful. She had red hair, light red eye shadow over sweet brown eyes, a perfect nose, and then those lips. Those soft, moist, red lips that answered one question immediately, but brought up so many more. She was the ghost that came to my grandfather’s house and smoked, and spent time with him, but why, and who the hell was she?

She was young. She was near my age, perhaps just a year or two older than myself. I wasn’t sure. She had startled me. That much was certain. Why the hell would she be hanging with my gramps, and how did she get in? Did she have a key as well?

She was wearing a Coco Chanel dress suit that fit her perfectly. It was tight but not too tight. The skirt came down to just above the knees. The vest was sleeveless, with a matching jacket. In her left hand, she held her red, high heeled shoes, with a matching Jacket, and a cigarette. In her right hand, she held a silver, automatic that would fit nicely into her little red purse, which was now lying on the table next to her by the door. As our eyes met, she spoke to me in an Eastern European accent. “We need to talk Bobby, now.”

“She knows my name,” I thought, as I ran that beautiful face through my brain’s facial recognition system. I hadn’t seen her in any of my grandfather’s photos. She was way too young to be in any of those.

I ran my fingers over the gun as she spoke to me. “We will talk and then we will go.” “Go where?” I thought. Did she know I had this gun in my lap? How long had she been standing in that doorway? Did she see me go through the safe?

I had no answers and certainly couldn’t talk at the moment. “I am friend of your grandfather’s for a long time.” She was my age; how could she be a friend of anyone “for a long time?”

She walked over to the desk with her gun pointed at the floor. “I didn’t know it was you in here.” She shrugged her shoulders, placed the gun in her little red purse, that she had picked up before she walked across the room and then sat ion the chair across from me. “Put the gun on the desk, you won’t need it right now. We are friends on the same side, your grandfather’s side.”

She sat there in front of me with her legs crossed and kicking the one leg on top, bck and forth slowly. it captured my attention to say the least.

I lifted the gun from my lap, and placed it slowly in the desk in front of me. “My name is Ruby, I know Ernie for a very long time,” she said again. “You and me, we are okay.”

I was relieved to hear her say that. I had almost wet myself when I saw her standing in the doorway.

“Your Ernie and I, we’re working together on some things.”

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That’s the end of Chapter One.

Things are about to get interesting. This book is finished and available on Amazon.

I am working on a prequel to this novel about Ernie’s father, WW ll and the CIA. I have twelve chapters already finished.