The big one pulled me out of the trunk like wet laundry. We were on the docks. I had never been in this part of town, but I knew where it was. It worried me a little that they were not concerned with me seeing where we were going. Getting roughed up is one thing, kidnapped goes a little further. Getting murdered was crossing a line for me.
The big one felt me consider making a run for it. He had his paw on the back of my neck and was gently directing me to one of the larger ships. When I turned slightly in the opposite direction, he showed me how willing he was to pop my head off like a dandy lion.
“Do you know what this is?” The slimy one was always asking questions. But it worked for him; the big guy had been providing me with their answers. They were perfect for each other.
I chanced a wise ass response as I assumed it was a rhetorical question. Boat?
“Sure, it’s a boat.” The sarcasm dripped from his words. The man literally oozed. He never answered his own question; my answer must have been good enough. We boarded and passed some men with guns. Same haircuts, same tattoos, same guns, same dead eyes. They might have been serious German treasure hunters, but based on their style they seemed organized crimey. I mean things were really leaning towards Nazis, but come on, Nazis? The news headline ran through my mind, with the type writer noise and everything. “Grad student kidnapped by the Nazis in search for Hitler’s lost gold.”
They put me in a room, it smelled like shit, feces, as in someone defecated here. They sat me in a chair that had one leg maliciously bend out of place. It teetered, and clicked against the metal floor. They hit me a few more times to convince me of their hospitality. I made a mental note to add them to my Christmas card list. They left, I tried the door but it seemed locked, or jammed. Using my advanced reasoning skills, I came to the conclusion that anything they weren’t willing to do in the apartment was bound to happen here. I checked my wallet for my insurance card.
Later, a new friend came into the small room. He had the same head as the others, but was dressed more appropriately. Wife beater t shirt, leather gloves, foreign looking jeans, tats, lots of tats. He didn’t say much, almost nothing at all. But despite our slow start we developed a rhythm. “Where is the gold?” He would ask me, then he would hit me, and we would start over again. At some point one of us lost the point. Depending on what he wanted out of this exchange, it could have been my misunderstanding. But at some point he stopped waiting for me to respond to his question, and then after a while the question itself disappeared.
In his defense, and I am not necessarily saying this is where our communicative breakdown occurred, the answer to “where is the gold” is not “fucked your sister”.
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