The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 2 Read online

  The Gestapo clearly resented this impediment to bloodletting, but nonetheless stood at attention and saluted. The giant returned a sieg heil, but one of distraction. Quickly I shuffled through Rigby’s flashcards. Could this be cross-eyed Joachim von Ribbentrop, Foreign Minister? Or dapper Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments and War Production? No; I was quite sure I’d never before seen this gussied-up grizzly.

  He galloped past the Gestapo, skidded to a halt two feet away, and bent from stratospheric height to gain better perspective on my face. He mashed his lips to suppress gales of giddiness, pushed aside the mjölnir, and unclipped from his belt a leather satchel. In Dr. Leather’s lab I’d met my share of worrisome implements but none so bizarre as the gadget this man extracted.

  It was a slide rule, a tool capable of kindling panic in any young student, except that this one was crossbarred with needle-nosed calipers and hinged with a pair of arachnid arms. He came straight at my face with it; I, of course, juked and prepared a punch. He chuckled, his mustache points tightening, and showed me his palms—see how pink and innocent? Gingerly he placed the top caliper against my eyebrow, drew down its partner until it was snug beneath my chin, and then recorded the measurements upon a pad of paper. He used the same procedure to measure my nose, length and width, and the diameter of my skull.

  The man giggled approval.

  More surprises crawled from the satchel. Next came a svelte cigarette case, except that instead of smokes it contained twelve glass eyeballs, the irises ranging from sky to chestnut. He held each false eye alongside my own to make a match. Finally he brought forth a short rod from which dangled thirty tiny ponytails of human hair. He draped them gently over my forehead until he had matched my hair tone as well. He returned to his pad of paper, noted the findings, and turned the page.

  “Your name, if you please.”

  Beneath his German accent, my melodious mother tongue!

  “Zebulon Finch,” exclaimed I. “Oh, thank you, thank you.”

  His cheeks chubbed into a grin.

  “From ‘Fink’—German surname.”

  “Is that right? How wonderful.”

  “Location of birth?”

  “America. That is, Chicago.”

  “Chicago! One-sixth German population. One-sixth!”

  “Marvelous,” said I.

  He lowered his voice to a volume better suited for scurrility.

  “Are there Slavs in your hereditary line?”

  “Slavs?” What were Slavs? “Heavens, no.”

  “And Jews? Forgive the question, but we must know.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t think so.”

  He grimaced an apology. “Again, Mr. Finch, I beg forgiveness. But your ancestry must be free of Jewry through 1800. Is this something you can credibly verify?”

  His hesitation made good sense, for a typical seventeen-year-old would have been born in 1926, multiple generations displaced from his forefathers. To the contrary, Abigail Finch had brought me into this wretched world in 1879, thus was it easy for me to confirm heritage.

  “There is no question,” said I. “No Jews.”

  The men I’d known who sported clipboards—Leather, Roseborough, Rigby—liked to keep them close, but this stranger let his drop. It clattered to the cell floor; I jumped; he clapped his gigantic hands once; I jumped again. He raised his conjoined fists in celebration and expelled an elated exclamation.

  “Mein Bruder!”

  His gargantuan paw gobbled mine and shook it as a dog does a rabbit.

  My bafflement in that moment is, I think, forgivable, though in reflection there is no misconstruing the reason for his euphoria. Is it possible, Dearest Reader, that we have journeyed so far into my somber saga without a description of my basic physical features? ’Tis an oversight due for rectification.

  Zebulon Finch is blond-haired, blue-eyed, pale-faced, strong-shouldered.

  In short, the Aryan ideal.

  “This glorious winter morning I was instructing a unit of Stapostellen regarding the relevance of the Futharkh Runes, a task I undertake on behalf of our beloved SS, when one of my students described to me the curious physical state of an apprehended American. I closed the lesson at once, for I knew that it was you! Years, Herr Finch, have I dreamt of this moment!”

  “I am sorry,” said I. “You know me?”

  “Ja, ja! In Europe there exist academicians of the obscure, and in such circles you are spoken of, most often in disbelief. But have I doubted? Nein! I knew you must be real.”

  “Well, you speak English. That’s enough for me.”

  “Ja, Ich spreche Englisch! Also do I parle français and Latine loqui, if you have a preferred lingua franca.”

  “English,” said I. “Please.”

  He rubbed his hands with elation enough that the mjölnir whirled.

  “Come, come! Let me deliver my distinguished guest from this uncivilized lodging. There is so much I wish to learn from you. So many concepts I wish to deliberate!”

  From scared scraps I built a smile.

  “That sounds very agreeable. Only—my effusive apologies—I am an ignorant boy. To whom do I speak?”

  “Ach!” He gripped the head of the mjölnir, snapped his heels, and drew himself to full girth and height. “Udo Christof von Lüth, head of the Deutsche Volksforschung und Volkskunde, Schrift und Sinnbildkunde of the Forschüngs und Lehregemeinschaft des Ahnenerbe, facilitator of the Wahrheitsgesellschaft, dedicated völkisch scholar, and very soon, I hope, der Führer’s modest, deferential Minister of the Occult. I exist only to serve you!”

  Even for an aficionado of Nazi nouns like myself, this was gibberish, save a scintilla of the spectacular. Future Minister of the Occult? If this von Lüth fellow was about to be inducted into Hitler’s inner circle, this chance meeting would gobsmack even the unsmackable Rigby! I’d bungle it if I didn’t keep my head. Oh, it was a grim struggle for a loose-lipper like myself to weigh words prior to their utterances, but I’d been coached to give a statement, and once I began its recitation, I felt closer to Rigby. Despite the war-torn miles, the lie bonded us.

  “If, as you say, you wish to know my heart’s desire, I will disclose it. Your great führer, I would do anything to meet him. It is why I have defected. In America, I am not appreciated. They prize progress, which is well and good, but in doing so neglect the mysteries of the old world of which I am a part—of which we all are a part. Adolf Hitler, though—there is a man who appreciates humanity’s past.”

  Von Lüth’s eyes wobbled within cataracts of tears. He clasped his hands at his sternum as if a curtain were falling and he were impatient to applaud.

  “You are a faun, Herr Finch, and your words are a pan flute played from our most enchanted of forests. Der Führer has the most curious mind; he will adore you! He and I are great friends, and it shall be my honor to ensure that your dream is realized. But first, these Gestapo who have mistreated you, forgive them. They are true-hearted but not so good at visualizing the future of the Reich. Though quite good, if I may say so, at the tactics required to make that future happen. Ja?”

  V.

  VON LÜTH SIGNED PAPERS RELEASING me into his custody, and, dressed again in my civilian wear, I followed him into the leather backseat of a silver-fendered, diesel-engined Mercedes 260D sedan, capped by a hood-ornament swastika over the grinning grill. We pulled from Gestapo Headquarters, and I craned my neck to read the infamous address: 8 Prinz Albrechtstrasse, Berlin, SW 11. OSS training be damned. Here was a shortcut to pulling off Operation Weeping Willow! Though von Lüth’s lavish ensemble denoted no specific Reich faction, a black uniform with lightning-bolt patches identified his driver, whom he called Kuppisch, as SS, the Schutzstaffel, the most feared military division of all. Kuppisch had a bulldog underbite and mistreated our elegant auto as if it were an obstinate mule.

  Berlin was a city of insignia. Uniforms, caps, and visors of black and beige, navy and gray, and green and olive painted stripes of order onto streets o
therwise lacking. While I had stagnated in a D.C. dungeon, Allied air raids had churned half of Berlin to rubble. Von Lüth’s bulldog rocketed the Mercedes around gnarled craters, between foothills of scorched brick, and beneath the shadows of brave walls that had withstood shellings. Even there, crisp Nazi flags flapped from existing windows, a field of blood-bright poppies.

  This is why they shall lose the war, thought I. Their budget is wasted on flags.

  We parked against a curb twenty minutes away from the nearest bomb site. I frowned through the window. Seeing how my escort was the grand marshal of a parade of honorifics, I had expected a sprawling estate, not a proletariat three-story, six-unit apartment building. Kuppisch opened the car door (for von Lüth; to me, he shook slobbery jowls) and took a guard dog’s position, rifle held like a prized bone. Von Lüth marched into the building, and I followed.

  He glided past a snoring lobby attendant and with startling grace bounded up two flights of stairs before unlocking a thoroughly unremarkable top-floor unit. But of course! thought I. Those wily Germans hid their top officers in plain sight! Alas, the interior offered further disappointment. No butler bowed; no maid demurred; no domestic hovered. The three-room abode was barren and dust-bunnied, but von Lüth showed no shame. He strode into the kitchenette and plucked an apple from one of a dozen baskets. Each contained, amid its cargo of fruit or bread or dessert, an envelope.

  “Presents! They are the burden of being a confidant of der Führer.” He raised his pitch through a full mouth. “ ‘Herr von Lüth, here is Sauerbraten for you, here is Spätzele, here is cake.’ I cannot refuse such generosities during days of rationing. To the proletariat class, it means so much.”

  I felt as if hooked to Leather’s Isolator oxygen tank; the needle of my skepticism leapt. It seemed absurd that a highborn crony of Hitler’s would live in a pauperism comparable to what Church and I had endured in the 1920s. I toed forth.

  “Your favor cheers them. A man of your stature, sampling their wares.”

  Von Lüth simpered his pleasure and pointed at the ceiling.

  “No more gloomy walls. Let us ascend to the sun!”

  You might take this as metaphor, as did I, but it was literal. Von Lüth took a dangling piece of rope and pulled down a hatch. From it unfolded a wooden ladder. He scampered up the steps, looking in his powder-blue suit like a gigantic boy straight from Sunday School. He unlatched a metallic overhead door, and sunlight dumped down like grave dirt. Not an attic but the roof—ah, now there was the place to hold a clandestine congress of Party bigwigs!

  For a third time, expectations were obviated. The flat roof was not of brick, nor tar, nor shingle, but rather of lush German forest. Herculean effort had been spent sodding the roof with two feet of soil. Grass grew to spite the cold, as did shrubs, evergreens, and—the sincerest sign of life—tangles of weeds.

  Von Lüth dandled a leaf twixt finger and thumb and flattened his nose against tree bark as if snuffling for sap. I followed him across the grass until he arrived at a small facsimile of a Neolithic stone circle. There he reclined against a three-foot boulder (who had lugged that up there?), unmindful of his clean suit; indeed, he appeared to relish dirtying it. He crossed his ankles near a miniature creek filled with rainwater, and clouded the January air with a contented exhale.

  Books were scattered about with the nonchalance of pebbles, each one dog-eared, antlered with inserted notes, foxed from the elements, and clad in jackets of damp leaves. It was here, not the apartment, where von Lüth logged research hours.

  He pounded the mjölnir against transplanted earth.

  “Sit, sit. You and I, we are like Hitler and Stalin before the nastiness: We have a nonaggression pact!”

  My unease deepened. Here I was, a loaded weapon keen to be fired, and this oversized claimant upon the title of Minister of Occult wished to lounge about cold grass? I kicked aside a rain-stained file folder, plucked a few pencils from the dirt, and sat. Von Lüth, oblivious of my mounting disquietude, sighed.

  “Modern life! It demands a city address. Whether that city is my Berlin or your Chicago, it is the same. Eins, it is loud. Zwei, it is dirty. Drei, it clouds brain and soul with industrial anxieties. In my heart, I am a simple burgher, and the work I do at the Ahnenerbe, our institute of historical research, is toward one goal: to bring my countrymen back to their völkisch roots, which so long ago anointed us as the chosen people.”

  “ ‘Völkisch,’ ” ventured I. “Related to our word ‘folklore,’ perhaps?”

  Von Lüth’s face lit up.

  “Young, virgin minds are the most receptive to the tenets of Volkstum!”

  Young? Virgin? I ignored both hilarities.

  “I am sure that you are right,” said I. “Say, shouldn’t we be making arrangements?”

  “Before we work in tandem, it is useful that you understand how everything begins with this.” He indicated his wrist: naked, pudgy, vulnerable. “Blood—Blut.” Next, he pinched a bit of soil, placed it onto his tongue. “Soil—Boden. Blood and soil, Blut und Boden: the primeval urgency of the Germanic peoples to reclaim the land of their inheritance. It is why there is war.”

  “Blood and soil. Both elements of which I possess too little.”

  “Why, then, you are like Germany! We call it Lebensraum, the moral right of the robust races to displace the sickly ones that poison defenseless lands. Your United States are proficient in these matters. Surely you have witnessed one race wrest property from another?”

  Four years I’d spent cracking skulls in Chicago’s Little Italy; six years I’d toiled in poverty in Manhattan’s Chinatown. You could not pace either metropolis without seeing the waving banners of this or that clan of immigrants. Block after block, pride versus pride; of course blood was spent onto soil—or, as it was, concrete.

  The gun in my chest felt as ineffectual as a penny; it galled me.

  “This is the rationale for conquering the whole of Europe? It is convenient if you are German.”

  Von Lüth rolled tight the tips of his mustache.

  “Herr Finch possesses a Socratic spirit! Nein, my intelligent new friend, nein. The notion that der Führer intends to turn our continent into a killing floor is laughable. We Germans are linked to our Nordic roots through the balance of the farm, the renewing rituals of sun and moon. These principles, not violence, will water the fields of the Tausendjähriges Reich—the Thousand-Year Reich.”

  There was a rustle amid the brush. We both turned to see fronds undulate and a swath of grass shiver. Von Lüth yawped in joy.

  “Look! A diligent little squirrel! Or perhaps a friendly badger! You see? Even in this capital of brick and steel, Earth’s creatures find a way to commune with the soil. Industrialization is a carousel, ever turning, and only a revolutionary like Hitler has the power to properly manage it. You said yourself, Herr Finch, America marches to the drumbeat of progress. The entire world moves so quickly, never considering what is lost along the way.”

  Quickly? Oh, indeed! Almost five bombastic decades had passed so far in my seventeenth year. Against better judgment, I was intrigued. Nazi though he was, von Lüth had guided me from a pulverized Berlin to this flourishing oasis. Was it possible that I, like Germany, suffered so that one day I, too, might clear away the smoke of battle and find within it rebirth? Might there be further ladders yet to climb? Von Lüth had been right in calling me young. I felt like a confused child before a lecturing adult. I cradled my weary face in my hands.

  When next I peeked, von Lüth was prowling about, the seat of his pants smirched with grass. He checked behind the boulder and then hopped across the creek to investigate a shrub. Finally, in the perfectly illogical storage spot of a tree limb, he located a small chalkboard. He wiped from existence dozens of symbols with his sleeve and produced a kernel of yellow chalk. To my great surprise, he kneeled in the soft soil at my side and gripped my shoulder with a huge, heavy paw.

  Any thoughts of casting the hand aside were erased by
the mildness of his whisper.

  “It hurts me to see you so burdened. This alienation and melancholy you feel? The cause is obvious. Year after year you live, and yet no one has given you reason to rejoice. Will you allow me to try? For fifteen years after the travesty of the Versailles Treaty, we Germans looked at nothing but our muddy, unworthy feet, until a man rose up so high that we, too, began to lift our heads. Now we look toward the fire of a rising dawn. So should you.”

  Dirty Nazi. Hateful Hun. Vulgar German. None of the slurs stirred in me the expected satisfaction. Stranger only than the spot on earth where I found myself was the compassion being offered. Not once, after all, had Rigby tried to ease my pain. I gestured, rather rudely, for von Lüth to go ahead, chalk what he needed to chalk, anything so that I might be relieved from being the focus of kindness.

  Mercifully, he did so. Upon the board he drew the simplest shape.

  “Let us begin with the circle, the symbol of creation, destruction, and regeneration, revolving around what we call the solar year, the time it takes to align the planets with the next house of the zodiac—in terrestrial terms, 25,868 years. A scholar of distinction named Madame Blavatsky once studied a text called the Stanzas of Dzyan, kept hidden for centuries in a Himalayan monastery, and from it learned that within each solar cycle evolves the ‘root-races.’ ”

  “A secret text that no one else has seen? Why, it must be true.”

  Von Lüth laughed, his baby-cheeks shining.

  “Your doubt is invigorating! Madame Blavatsky, I assure you, was welcomed to many mysterious places: the subterranean Babylonian city of Agadi, the Shamballah oasis in the Gobi Desert—ancient, forgotten archives of esoteric insight. Blavatsky left behind directions; of course, to protect them, they were left in code. At the Ahnenerbe, we work to unlock the codes, rediscover these wells of wisdom, and with them prove the German right of dominion.”

  “Is that all? No harnessing of black-magic hocus-pocus?”

  He chuckled and raised his hands as if admitting guilt.