Obsessed

Chapter One Hamburg, Germany July 17, 1973 Tuesday Morning ROTH BRAUN SLOWLY TWISTED THE DOORKNOB AND GAVE THE door a slight shove. A familiar medicinal odor stung his nostrils. Outside, the sun warmed a midsummer day, but here in the dungeon below the house, the old man lived in perpetual twilight. Roth imagined a Jew stepping into a delicing shower and let himself relish the horror he might feel in that moment of realizing that more than lice were meant to die in this chamber. Roth was in a very good mood. The smothering quiet was broken by the sound of the old prune's tarred, seventy-eight-year-old lungs rasping for relief. Gerhard's wheezing annoyed Roth, ruining his otherwise perfect mood. The only living soul he despised more than the Jew who'd stolen his power was Gerhard, who had allowed the Jew to steal his power. He glanced at Klaus, the gangly male nurse who had tended his father for three years. The white-smocked man hovered over Gerhard in the corner of the room, refusing to meet Roth's eyes. Gerhard Braun sat in a dark-red leather recliner, blue eyes glaring over the nasal cannula protrudingfrom each nostril. "Good morning, Father," Roth said. He closed the door quietly and stepped into the room, pushing aside a curtain of tinkling glass beads that separated it from the entryway. "You wanted to see me?" His father looked at a servant, who busied himself over the table inthe adjacent dining room. "Leave us." By the trembling in his voice, either Gerhard really was dying, or something was upsetting him, which invariably sowed its own sort of death. How many men alive today had been responsible for as many deaths as his father? They could be counted on two hands. Even so, Roth hated him. The servant dipped his head and exited through a side door. The steel door closed and the nurse flinched. Glass in a cabinet behind the table rattled despite the room's solid-concrete walls. The nineteenth-century Russian crystal--one of dozens of similar collections pilfered during the war--had once belonged to the czar. The Nazis' defeat should have sent Gerhard to the gallows; instead, the war had left his father with obscene wealth. The paintings alone had netted him a significant fortune, and these he owned legally. He'd shipped them to Zurich, where a hotly contested law made them his after remaining unclaimed for five years.Compliments of the Swiss Federation of Art Dealers. Until the day I suck the energy from your bones, I will love you for showing me the way. Until the day I suck the energy from your bones, I will despise you for what you did. Gerhard held up a newspaper. "Have you read this?" Roth walked across the circular rope rug that covered the black cement slab and stopped five feet from Gerhard. A hawk nose curved over his father's thin, trembling lips. Wispy strands of gray hair backlit by a yellow lamp hovered over his scalp. Skeletal, blue-veined fingers clutched what appeared to be a Los Angeles Times . A stack of newspapers--the New York Times , Chicago Tribune , London's Daily Telegraph , and a dozen others-- sat a half-meter thick on the small end table to his left. Gerhard routinely spent six hours each day reading. Gerhard flung the paper with a flick of his wrist, never removing hiseyes from Roth. It landed on the floor with a smack . "Read it." The male nurse pretended to fiddle with the oxygen tank. Roth stood still. This attitude of Gerhard's was no longer simply ruining his mood,but destroying it altogether. "I said, 'Read it'!" Roth calmly bent and picked up the paper. The Los Angeles Times was folded around an article in the Life section, "Fortune Goes to Museum." Roth scanned the text. A wealthy woman,Dekker, Ted is the author of 'Obsessed', published 2006 under ISBN 9781595543110 and ISBN 1595543112.