It’s a strange thing, to walk into Mugshot and see Floyd sitting there.
I’m so used to seeing him in his bookshop, surrounded by all the dusty volumes and newspaper cuttings. He fits there perfectly. Here, he definitely stands out. His gigantically magnified eyes are peering around at the place with bright interest, his ringed fingers tapping against his cappuccino. All of his grey flyaways are illuminated by the early sunlight.
He waves excitedly when we walk in, rushes to get up, and nearly upends the table he’s seated at. Aiden quickly gestures for him to stay there, then heads to the counter to order our drinks.
I lead Kasey and Will over to the table. Floyd picked one tucked back into a corner, away from any listening ears. He’s got his notebook out, a folder next to that, a pen woven through his fingers. Today's newspaper is laid out on the table, too. I can see right away that he’s been circling things, taking notes. Hunting for mysteries, as always. There are fresh ink stains all over his fingertips.
I find myself smiling when I realize that he chose a table with five chairs. Being considerate of the ghosts, even if he’s not totally sure whether or not to believe that they exist.
“Good morning!” he says brightly, beaming up at me. “Please, sit, sit - did the ghosts come along? Kasey, sit by me, won’t you - and Will, good - good morrow, or-”
“You can just say good morning,” I laugh, dropping to sit across from Floyd. “Will’s been around for two hundred years, he knows the lingo.”
“Ah, of course - forgive me, Will,” Floyd says to the chair next to him, which Will hasn’t sat down in yet. "Just trying to be polite, my dear spectral friend!"
Kasey giggles as she takes the chair on Floyd's other side, and Will breaks into a grin.
“I’m rather fond of this fellow,” he chuckles.
"Me too," Kasey laughs.
I smile at the two ghosts before I turn back to Floyd.
“Thanks for staying in town overnight. Aiden and I were both so tired after the exhibition opening, we just didn't have the energy to talk.”
“Perfectly understandable.” Floyd waves a reassuring hand at me, his rings clicking softly. “You worked so hard on it, I could really tell.”
"Thanks!" My eyes flit to the newspaper he just set aside. “Did Aiden tell you that a critic came to the show?”
“Ah, yes, but don’t expect to find the review in today's paper.” Floyd scoops up his cappuccino and takes a sip. “Art critics typically attend multiple shows, then choose their favorites or least favorites to write about. He’ll be visiting a few other exhibitions before he publishes anything about yours. Trust me, I’ve worked with enough of them at the paper to know.”
I smile at Floyd again, relieved. Aiden and I were both too nervous to check the paper for the review before we left his place this morning. Now I know that we don't need to worry about it. Not for a little bit, at least.
“Now, how is this meant to work, with the ghosts?” Floyd asks. “Will you just tell me if they're talking, so I don’t speak over them? Oh - hello, Aiden!”
“Hey, Floyd,” Aiden says warmly, dropping to sit down next to me. He ruffles my hair, then slides me my coffee.
I take a long, grateful sip. It’s cold outside, and I'm still exhausted from all the work we did on the exhibition. The heat of the cup against my fingers, the scent of fresh coffee, Aiden’s warm hand on my knee - it all feels good, gently helping me wake up.
And I need to be awake, because Team Ghost Office is about to have a meeting. Floyd has updates for us on the Botswick case.
“Before we begin,” he says, “I’ve got one thing I want to talk about. Unrelated to the case.”
Aiden shrugs, lifts his coffee to his mouth. “Alright?”
Floyd pulls out his phone and starts searching through it for something. “I just need you and Jamie to confirm a theory for me.”
“And it’s not about the case?” I ask, surprised.
“No. It’s about the mystery of who converted a billboard by the highway into a giant sign for my bookshop.”
Floyd pulls up a picture on his phone, then turns it around to show us. It’s the amazing billboard that Ripley did for Body Bag Books, the skull with the melting candle on top.
Floyd zooms in on the candle until Aiden and I are staring at the three concentric curves in the melting wax.
Floyd lets us look for a moment, then scrolls to a different picture. It’s the sunrise that Ripley spraypainted in the hallway between the two rooms at the exhibition.
“I can’t help but notice,” Floyd says, and points to a very specific cloud, one with the three curves of Ripley’s tag worked in.
I blink at him, stunned that he made the connection. It’s so subtle in both pieces, so easy to miss. Especially if you don’t know to look for it, which Floyd didn’t.
“Now, I also noticed,” he says, setting down his phone, “That one of the young artists at the opening last night had pale pink paint stains on his fingers. I think he attempted to cover it up by staining his hands with other colors. Maybe he couldn’t get it to come off. He did a good job hiding it, but it’s beneath his fingernails. Your co-curator, Aiden. I believe his name was Ripley?”
Aiden and I stare at Floyd in disbelief. He hasn’t been an investigative journalist for a long time, but I guess his instincts never faded away. Or faded at all, really.
“Floyd…” I hesitate, biting my lip. “Ripley could get in big trouble, if-”
“No, I won’t say anything!” Floyd fixes me with a bright smile. “I only wanted to thank him.”
"Oh." I let out a relieved breath, then smile back at Floyd. “Well, we already thanked him for you. Believe me, he knows how much you love it.”
“Holy shit, Floyd.” Aiden shakes his head, amazed. “Can’t fucking believe you figured it out.”
“Seriously,” Kasey says, looking at Floyd with new eyes. “You know what? I’m glad this guy is on our team.”
“Kasey is impressed,” I tell Floyd, who instantly twists around to beam at her. Kasey gives him a big grin in return, even though he can’t see it.
“Speaking of Kasey.” Floyd pushes his glasses back up his nose, retrieves his pen, and flips open the folder he brought. “Let’s get into some history, shall we? An intersection of Port Sitka history and Stasi history, which is something I never quite expected to see, let me tell you! And people say my ideas are out there…” He chuckles to himself as he flips through the pages. “Reality is always stranger, my friends!”
Very true, I think to myself, as the two ghosts seated across from me exchange a grin, and the Heliomancer by my side lazily folds an arm around my shoulders.
“So!” Floyd folds his hands on top of the folder. “Any luck cracking the code?”
Kasey tips her head back and groans loudly. “No, goddamnit.”
"No," I tell Floyd, who nods, understanding.
“These things take time. What I’ve found might be helpful, though.”
"Do tell," Will says, green eyes hopeful.
I nod at Floyd, who taps an ink-stained fingertip on the papers before him.
“The Stasi,” he begins. “East German secret police. A highly effective intelligence agency. Collected a staggering amount of information on a staggering number of their own citizens, hunting for dissidents. And, as far as secret police go, they kept a great deal of records.”
“That’s true,” Kasey puts in. “The German Federal Archives has almost seventy miles of shelved documents from Stasi records alone.”
“Seventy miles?” I sputter, and Floyd nods, already having figured out what Kasey must have said.
“That’s exactly what I was about to bring up,” he says. “Aiden, you’re an archivist, and you were trained in Germany, correct? So you might know about the massive archival project related to these records.”
Aiden blinks in surprise, lowering his coffee to the table. “Um - yeah, actually. I do.”
Floyd spreads his fingers at Aiden, waiting for him to go on.
Aiden is clearly exhausted from working on the exhibition, but now he sits up, sorting through his thoughts, deciding how to explain.
“Well, like Floyd and Kasey said, the Stasi kept an unbelievable amount of paper records. When the German Democratic Republic was in its final days, protestors swarmed the Stasi precincts and overran them. So the Stasi rushed to destroy those records before they could fall into the public’s hands. They tore everything up, then stuffed all of it into bags that they intended to burn. But they never got the chance to destroy the bags.”
Aiden pauses and looks at Floyd, checking to see that he’s on the right track. Floyd gives him an encouraging nod, so he continues.
“There’s a team of archivists trying to reassemble all of the torn-up documents in those bags. They’ve been at it for thirty years.”
“Thirty years?” Will repeats, wide-eyed.
Aiden shrugs his broad shoulders.
“They’ve got about fifty-five million pieces of torn paper to sort through. And they’re doing it by hand, literally figuring it out by matching up handwriting, paper color, text… then manually putting each document back together with archival tape.”
I make a sound of disbelief, and Aiden nods at me.
I can tell that he’s happy to have a chance to tell us about archival stuff. He bites his lip, like he’s probably said enough, then rushes to add:
“The torn-up records are still in their original bags. When the archivists start on a new bag, they cut it open lengthwise, because there are layers of shredded documents. Almost like sediment layers in geology, except with paper colors. The archivists take out each layer, reconstruct each document one by one, it’s - it’s pretty fucking cool, actually.”
Floyd is smiling widely at Aiden, nodding so hard that his flyaways are bouncing.
“Those archivists Aiden spoke of, they’ve done five hundred of the bags,” he tells us. “They’ve got over fifteen thousand bags left to go, but they’ve made tremendous progress, tremendous! And the information they’ve found is tremendous, too.”
He shoves his glasses back up his nose excitedly, bending over his notes.
“Now, most of this information is related to domestic surveillance. Files the Stasi kept on their own citizens. But there are also training materials, internal documents, and, most important to us - materials from the Stasi’s foreign intelligence arm. Out-of-country operations. We know that two agents were posted at that farmhouse to watch over the boy, since he was a high-value target. So I started combing through personnel files, looking for someone who met the description. And I think I found someone of interest.”
"What?" I stare at Floyd, startled. “Where did you even start with that?”
“Process of elimination.” He holds up his notebook, shows us pages and pages of scribbled notes. “For example - if a name is marked with ‘IM’, that means inoffizieller Mitarbeiter, or ‘unofficial collaborator’. Informers, not agents. We’re looking for an intelligence operative, so I struck all of those names immediately.”
“Floyd,” Aiden says, his blue eyes widening. “We didn’t mean to make you - that's so much work, that's-”
“Oh, Aiden, please!” Floyd lets out a bright, happy cackle. “Don’t you dare apologize, I’m having the time of my life!”
“What did you find, Floyd?” Kasey asks, leaning through him to look at the paper he extracted from the folder.
“Now, what I found,” he begins, before I can even translate, “Is this man. A Stasi agent by the name of Ronald Scholz. There are a number of reasons why he caught my attention.”
Kasey is speed-reading the file, and she nods, like she already sees what Floyd noticed.
“Active in the field during the years of the Cold War relevant to the case,” she says, as Floyd hands the file over to me and Aiden. “And he had already been assigned to bodyguard duty for various Stasi officials. He had experience with it.”
“Exactly, Kasey,” Floyd says, when I tell him her observations. “And there's more than that. Scholz was assigned to an overseas job very early in 1961, and the records related to it are all redacted completely. It must have been something of the utmost secrecy.”
“Very early in 1961,” Kasey repeats, her eyes lighting up. “That’s exactly the right time!”
Floyd nods excitedly when I relay this to him.
“After Scholz was assigned to that job, there’s absolutely nothing about him in any of the archived materials,” he continues. “All I can figure out is that when he came back, he was immediately dismissed from the agency. Then he disappears from the records.”
Aiden's eyes dart up from the Scholz personnel file and go to Floyd's face. "He was fired?"
"Yes."
I’ve been staring down at the picture of this guy - a surly-faced man built like a mountain, with intimidating eyes - but now I look up, troubled by this discovery. If Scholz was supposed to keep the kid safe, and he was immediately fired after he came home from being on the protection detail... what happened to the kid?
Based on Kasey, Will, and Aiden's expressions, the same thought has occurred to them.
Floyd takes a printed photo out of his folder, slides it to the center of the table. “This is the man Scholz was assigned to protect, before he was reassigned to the top-secret job that ended his career.”
It’s a black and white shot of a tall man, crossing the street, flanked by other men in uniform. He’s handsome, but there’s a frigid, harsh look in his eyes that's extremely offputting.
“This man looks like someone important,” Will observes, taking in the uniform, the medals, the heavy security clustered around him. “A highly-ranked member of the Stasi, presumably?”
“Very highly-ranked,” Floyd confirms, once Aiden translates. “Now, it occurred to me that if this man trusted his own personal security to Scholz, he might-”
“Trust his kid’s security to Scholz, too,” Aiden says, realizing out loud.
“Yes,” Kasey says slowly. “Oh - yes! This guy’s son would have been a valuable target, no fucking doubt!”
“So - this guy's son is the kid who was living in the farmhouse?” I ask, my head spinning. “And Scholz was one of the two agents protecting him?”
“That’s my working theory, yes.” Floyd leans forward, looking very serious. “There’s only one problem with it.”
“Okay?"
“There’s no record of this Stasi official having a son.”
We all sit back in our chairs, unable to hide our disappointment.
“But,” Floyd continues, “That begs the question.”
He takes another photo from his folder and holds it out to show us. It's marked with the stamp of the CIA public archives, not the Stasi ones. A date is scribbled at the bottom.
It was taken in 1960, the year before Scholz was assigned to the overseas job.
The picture was hastily taken, and from an odd angle, but this is clearly the same Stasi official. He’s accompanied by Scholz, and two other men in suits who I have to assume are additional security.
The official is walking with a little boy. Gripping him too tightly by the arm, practically dragging him along. The poor kid looks ready to burst into tears.
The familial resemblance is undeniable. Besides age, the only difference between the two of them is that the kid doesn’t have that icy coldness in his dark eyes.
I think we’ve all figured out Floyd’s question, but he says it out loud, anyways.
“If the Stasi official didn’t have a son,” he asks, “Then who is that?”
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