Scene: a tiny, cluttered office in the attic of Ford Hall, at the University of Michigan.
A grey-haired head with more sharp corners to its features than a cubist painting peered around the doorjamb. “Miz Dewdrop?”
“I am she. And you are?”
The lean, craggy face came through the doorway, followed by a gaunt man’s body of about 6 feet tall, dressed in a Brooks Brothers black suit.
“Randall Tolliver, ma’am,” he replied in a low country Georgia drawl. “My card, if you’d be pleased to have it.” A gnarled hand reached into a side pocket and withdrew a white pasteboard, then handed it with a slight tremble to the grad student seated in a battered swivel chair.
“Randall G. Taliaferro, Esquire,” she read. “Of the law firm Diggs, Graves and Behries. It must be quite a prestigious firm, Mr. Taliaferro; the engraving on your card is so small I can hardly read it.”
“That’s ‘Tolliver,’ Miz Dewdrop. Always has been. Most people outside the South don’t recognize it for what it is, but I’m used to that.”
“Well, this is about as ‘aht-sah’d’ the ‘Sa’th” as you can get, Mr. Tolliver,” she smirked, trying to imitate the lawyer’s drawl. “And presumably I have something important that you need, if you came to the trouble of calling on me in person.”
“No, ma’am, I have something that might be of interest to you. And as you apparently haven’t been receiving our letters or telephone calls, I was asked by my client to approach you personally.”
“And who is this client?”
“Well, ma’am, it’s kind of hard to come right out and say it. I mean, there’s a lot of foreign elements to this situation, and it’s a rather complex story. Perhaps we could meet in a more comfortable place, because this’un’s gonna take a while.”
“Mr. Tolliver, as you certainly know by now, I’m a graduate student. My general exams are coming up and I’m behind in writing up my lab work. I’m not budging from this ‘office,’ if you can call it that, until I at least finish analyzing my results. So you can push those papers off the corner of my desk, and seat yourself there, and tell me what you need to as fast as you can.”
“Well, that’s kind of you, Miz Dewdrop, and I’ll try to accommodate you.” He shuffled over to the nearby desk corner, ceremoniously lifted the stack of article reprints that tottered there, and deposited them slowly on a square foot of empty floor, wincing in pain as he bent downwards with the heavy pile of papers. Beth Dewdrop closed her eyes in mild embarrassment. She hadn’t meant to cause the old attorney pain, but there wasn’t enough space in the tiny room for her to assist Mr. Taliaferro.
After a few moments to let Mr. Taliaferro shift his bony rear on the battered desk and to offer him coffee (he refused, with great courtesy), she quieted herself to listen to his story.
“As you said, we’re a rather large law firm, with offices in Europe too. Our Berlin office contacted me about six months ago to inform me that they were handling the affairs of a Baron Heinrich von Zemo, who had just been declared legally dead – for the seventh time, they said, oddly enough. Does that name have any meaning for you, Miz Dewdrop?”
“Not at all, I’m afraid. I don’t have any European relatives or connections, and certainly not in the nobility.”
“Well, my colleagues have done their work, and they inform me that Baron Heinrich is, or was, your great-uncle. “
“Really? I’d never have guessed. I mean, I know my mother’s family came from Germany and all that, but they never said anything about being in the aristocracy. All the pictures Grandma has from the old country have men with leather breeches and dirty boots standing in farmyards with pigs, or horses, or cattle. And you’re saying the Treudike family is related to this Baron Zemes or whatever? Grandma will be so thrilled!”
“Hold your horses, or pigs, or whatever for a moment, ma’am. They didn’t say anything about your mother’s family. It’s your father’s family that is tied up with Baron von Zemo.”
“Dad? My dad? Frederick Swee . . . . er, Dewdrop?”
“That’s right, your papa, Frederick Sweetsap Dewdrop . . . .”
“He hated his middle name. Please don’t use it.”
“All right then, Frederick S. Dewdrop, your father, was the nephew of this German baron, Heinrich von Zemo.”
“That’s crazy. The Dewdrops all lived in New Hampshire until Dad came west to teach. There wasn’t a one near Germany – oh, oh, do you mean?”
“What do you think I could mean, ma’am?”
“Dad would never say a word to me, but one night, after Mom had been partying a bit, she told me that my grandfather, Dad’s father, hadn’t been killed in World War II. He’d – he wasn’t even a Dewdrop. Dad was, how did she put it, a ‘love child,’ corny as that sounds.”
Taliaferro hesitated for a while, and finally lifted his weary head to look into Beth Dewdrop’s crystal blue eyes. “Your mother was right. Your grandfather, your father’s father, was a German. His name, if I remember it right, was Baron Ottokar Attila Kublai Tamerlane von Zemo, and he married your grandmother Dewdrop in a place called Zemodorf in June 1939.
“Your grandmother – can I use her full name? Grandmother Fanny Sweetpea Dewdrop dumped Baron Otto in August 1939, just before the war broke out, and fled back home to New Hampshire. Baron Otto died in 1941, or at least the Red Cross said so, and she raised your father under her own name as Frederick Dewdrop.
“Baron Otto had no other children and no other relatives except his brother, Baron Heinrich von Zemo. Baron Heinrich was a Nazi scientist and then an international criminal for years after the war ended. He was killed or disappeared six times and each time came back from the dead, somehow.”
“What is he? Some kind of vampire or zombie or something?” Beth shuddered.
“Can’t tell. Anyway, he vanished again for the seventh time, and it’s been seven years, and they declared him legally dead. His wife supposedly was cryogenically frozen, but she – or her frozen corpse – has also been lost for more than seven years. Zemo’s son Helmut was killed, his granddaughter called Zemette was killed also, so the only remaining branch of the family was your father’s.”
“And he d – passed away – last March,” murmured Beth. “But Mr. Tolliver – that should mean that my mother -- she’s the Baroness, not me.”
“She is not of the blood,” replied Taliaferro. “Whatever honorary title she might be entitled to, you are the only blood heir to the house of Zemo, and I am here to confirm that and to settle the estate on you.”
“Estate? You mean money? Or a castle, or a ranch or something?”
“Unfortunately, very little of that. Castle Zemo mysteriously vanished from Zemodorf at the end of World War II, and only ruins are left. The lands were confiscated as Nazi property, as were the valuables and bank accounts. Almost all that is left to you, after taxes and death duties, are your greatuncle’s scientific and other papers. I have brought them in the valise the firm found in his Liechtenstein bank vault.” He slid from the desk, bent over again with appropriate groans and moans, and lifted the old, cracked black leather briefcase to the desk.
“The papers make little sense, I’m afraid,” he murmured as he opened the case and began riffling through folders. “Compound XX,” “Bios of Scourge of the BZL,” “New ideas for antidotes,” “Flapjack recipe,” “Android patents,” “Communication with Heike at minus 350,” “Four-wheeled tricycle,” and so on.
“Sign these receipts here, and they and this check for $3,546, are yours. I regret that this is all that remains of your greatuncle's wealth.”
Fifteen minutes later, Mr. Taliaferro had left, and Beth Dewdrop spared a moment to daydream. “Elizabeth Sweetwater Dewdrop. Baroness Elizabeth Sweetwater von Zemo. Nah, doesn’t work. Now what happened to that table comparing starved rats' responses to obese rats’?”
Next: Beth reconsiders her position after Flapjack pays a visit.
Playing the part of Baroness Elizabeth von Zemo:
J. Jonah Jerkson
VOICE OF THE PEOPLE
ool-43570953.dyn.optonline.net (67.87.9.83) U.S. Network
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6/Windows XP (0.64 points)
