The German police detective, Sigmund Frist, who had been plowing his American counterpart, Clint Folsom, the previous night couldn't have picked a worse time to want further attention from Folsom. Folsom had gone to sun bathe and to dry out the effects of a raucous night topside on the MS River God as it shot down the most scenic segment of the Rhine. But he'd been waylaid this morning on the Helios deck by a heavenly endowed African potentate who had him stretched out on a lounger and was mining his ass with his very royal manhood.
Folsom's first thought when Frist interrupted this little orgiastic death out of Africa scene was that Frist was jealous and territorial. But then he discerned that there was something much more serious behind the German's gruffness and insistence that Folsom go below with him.
With apologies to the good-natured African, who was easily placated with the promise of a rematch, Folsom rose and pulled on his Speedo and slipped a T-shirt over his head. Seconds later, he was padding along behind Frist down to the Apollo deck, where the major suites were sandwiched between the Ambrosia restaurant and the reception foyer and the Alexander lounge.
Frist responded to none of Folsom's questions as they descended from the sun deck. He just went to the door of the Zeus suite, looked around to ensure that they were not being spied on, indicated that Folsom should open the door and pushed him inside, and then shouldered the door closed behind them.
Folsom gasped, hardly believing what he saw. He had seen this tableau before—and it was one that he'd never forget and that marked the turning point in his life. He was forced to look away in horror. He turned to Frist, who was looking very serious and was pulling surgical gloves on his hands. He didn't, however, offer Folsom a pair.
Bruno was stretched out, on his back and naked, on a king-sized bed. He was spread-eagled with his appendages bound to posts at the four corners of the bed. He was quite dead, and the grotesque grimace set on his face indicated that he hadn't died easily. A thick sounding wand was buried deep in the piss slit of his cock and he had bled from both his ass channel and from a knife wound below his rib cage on right side of his torso.
This scene was all too familiar to Folsom. This was exactly the scene of his lover and partner's death, a death that Folsom had been tracking Bruno Meister down for having committed. This was such a fitting death for Meister, but a gorge of rage rose from Folsom's belly that Meister had escaped him—that someone else had gotten there first.
"Who. What . . . ?" Folsom stammered out.
"The knife wound was enough to kill him," Frist said. "But the anal bleeding indicates he was probably fucked by an oversized object as well. Probably just a kinky sex party gone bad, but this is quite an inconvenient mess."
"Yes, probably just a party gone bad," Folsom repeated in a shocked monotone. But his mind was crying out that no, the similarities between this scene and that of Brad Robert's death were just too coincidental. No, something else was afoot here. He was sure of it. But who else on this ship other than he himself could make this connection. He had to think. And he had to hide these thoughts from Frist. Frist, first of all, was a policemen. And this was his territory.
"I don't understand. Why are you showing this to me? Are you taking on this investigation? Who else knows of this."
"That isn't all," Frist responded, clearly indicating that show and tell wasn't over and the answering of questions hadn't begun. He motioned for Folsom to open the door and follow him back down the corridor. They went down the stairs at the foyer to the deck below and walked into the short corridor of passenger cabins under the midship portion of the Alexander lounge. Folsom heard the sound of sobbing, which increased as they walked toward the end of the corridor, toward where the door to the exercise room was on the right and the door into a crew area and eventually, Folsom assumed, led to the door under the stairs in the Hephaestion club room. Frist turned to the right into the small exercise room, which seemed overflowing with men and equipment.
The first man encountered was the ship's captain, who was standing stiffly just inside the doorway with a deep-creased frown on his face. Looking past him, Folsom saw the source of the weeping. Roman the Magnificent, the tormentor of the previous evening in Hephaestion, was hunched over the weight bench and wailing to beat the band. He seemed to be playing the tormented rather than the tormentor today.
And then Folsom saw the reason for Roman's lamenting. He was shielding and hugging the naked body of his erstwhile assistant, Dieter, which was propped on the bench, wrists tied to the handlebars of the treadmills on either side of the bench and ankles to the feet of the opposite ends of the treadmills. There was a sounding wand buried in his piss slit, and a knife wound under his rib cage, and, if he could have seen past Roman's protecting body, Folsom was sure that there would be bleeding from his rectum too. There was entirely too much of this going around.
Folsom stood, dazed, watching the touching farewell love scene between Roman and Dieter, a near twin of the one he himself had had with Brad Roberts when he had come upon that murder scene. No, there was no coincidences in these two deaths on the Rhine, Folsom told himself. And he was sure there was a link to Roberts's death as well.
While Roman was grieving and the wheels were spinning in Folsom's mind, Frist and the captain were speaking in low tones at the door. But when Folsom turned toward the door, Frist was gone and the captain was taking command.
"The German authorities will, of course, come on board as soon as we reach Koblenz late this afternoon," the captain said. "I'll send someone down to tend to Roman and to seal this door. But in the meantime, Mr. Folsom, I would appreciate it if you went to your cabin and stayed there and didn't speak of this to anyone."
"Yes, yes, of course, Captain," Folsom responded and turned immediately and walked back up the corridor. He had been in such a daze upon the discovery in succession of two identical deaths that, as he walked slowly back to his cabin, he couldn't remember whether any mention of Bruno Meister's death had been made to the captain at all.
Folsom was surprised to find Frist waiting for him in his cabin. He tried to discuss what had happened with Frist, but his mind was working too slowly in gauging what to say that didn't bring in the connections to Robert's death or reveal that Folsom himself had planned to kill Meister. Before he could form what to say or ask, Frist was shushing him and had pulled off his T and had his torso arched back as Frist attacked his nipples with his lips and teeth. Folsom was pushed down on the bed that had been lowered before he entered the room, and Frist slid his Speedo off his hips and down his legs. He spread the younger American's legs wide, thrust inside him, and fucked away all of Folsom's questions. Exhausted once more by overwhelming sex, Folsom was nodding off as Frist left him and exited the cabin. It was only right before sleep claimed him that Folsom remembered the most pressing question that he had. How had Frist gotten into his locked cabin?
The captain had Folsom's dinner delivered to his cabin that evening. A trembling and obviously troubled Tiho brought the tray in. He was on the verge of saying something to Folsom, but then he clamped his jaw shut and scurried out of the room, the very personification of a scared rabbit.
About an hour after the boat arrived in Koblenz, Folsom got the call that a German inspector wanted to talk with him in the library. Folsom had watched the boat round the bend at the gigantic bronze statue of Kaiser Wilhelm the First, and move up into the Moselle River. Then he had seen from his cabin window the police launch come out to the boat, which had anchored about a hundred feet from the dock. He had no idea what the other passengers were thinking about the failure of the ship to dock and to open its doors for access to the city's waterfront. Folsom told the captain that he'd be in the library in a half hour.
