The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 2 Page 7

  I turned to the baker.

  “Is there time to return to the big shelter?”

  “Dummkopf!” she spat. “First you strike child in public. Second you complain of shelter. Is this not gemütlichkeit enough for Mr. America?”

  “I only suggest that we might have hidden just as well in a crowd.”

  “It is your luck these people do not sprechen English. We would be out in ditch. Mein Gøtt! ” She tossed up her arms. “Direct hit, we die anyway. This make you stop complain?”

  The woman interrupted her shaming screed to arrange sandbags as a seat upon the cold dirt floor. I refused to follow suit; I crossed my arms and challenged each inhabitant’s gaze. With menfolk out manning anti-aircraft flak, it was an estrogenated lot. A matron recommenced work on a half-finished knitted scarf. A young wife gathered her three children and opened a storybook to a marked page. Squatting at the far end, two adolescent girls picked up their game of chess. Only the elderly woman huddled upon a throw rug addressed me, and with spirit; she sent me the sign of the evil eye, or some such juju, before turning away.

  Meixelsperger snorted.

  “She no more goes home. She stay down here always. You believe this makes her coward?”

  The question brought me discomfort. I shrugged.

  “You females appear to judge me just as harshly.”

  “They should! Shelters, they are already full with disease. The measles? How do you say it? The weeping cough? They are old and with children. They are nervous because you are ill.”

  Oddly, her assessment left me in high dudgeon.

  “I am not ill. I am pale.”

  “I need hero, and America sends me sick child.”

  “I am no child, madam. I can do everything asked of me. More, even.”

  She arched her eyebrows. Let us be factual: it was all one eyebrow.

  “You look covered with brick dust, like you crawl from rubble. What do you think this make them think? Husbands, sons. Maybe they crawl from rubble as well? A very sad thing to think.”

  “I make them sad, do I? What do I care? Are these your friends?”

  She smirked.

  “Down here, Herr Finch, we keep to our own business.”

  Brief though my London stopover had been, I’d been regaled with tales of English camaraderie, how each Luftwaffe blitz had further stiffened inflexible Brit lips. This shelter brokered no such esprit de corps. Deep in my gut, Johnny’s golden aggie, that symbol of rebellion, burned with certainty. Though this wasn’t the gadget-rigged spy HQ of which I’d dreamed, each one of these females had something to hide from the Third Reich.

  The first bomb fell. Distance reduced the sound to crinkling, but flakes of rust slalomed down the steel siding, and dirt dropped onto our heads. The children cheered this novel precipitation. I, as ever, loathed blemished clothing, and after brushing myself clean, crawled, with inflated reluctance, from the room’s center to beside the brusque baker. As if to mock my preening, she refused to acknowledge the dirt clods caught in her hair.

  “Begin talk. How do you help us with progress?”

  I goggled at her demanding expression.

  “Help you? I believed you were to help me! What is this Geschenk I heard so much about?”

  “Mein Gøtt! The world is upside down. You hide away with Pig Pigtof von Pig so long that all strategy I gathered for you is useful no more. If you get close to der Führer, a thing I now very much doubt, you tell me at the bakery and then, ja, our resistance will not disappoint, I promise you. So many little overthrows they will equal one of giant size. You tell me, Mr. American Hero, what you need, and then I rate the difficulty. How about we get rid of your beloved von Pig?”

  I bit back a retort in von Lüth’s defense. The giant had treated me more than squarely. His chief fault, as far as I could see, was being lost in the hedge maze of academe. I’d suffered similar disorientation as an overeducated youth, and sympathized. Forced to choose between von Lüth and this irritable operative, the decision was simple. Drop all the bombs you’d like—I’d take an open, green rooftop over this crumbling ossuary.

  “Leave him be,” said I. “Though, he has an SS agent I could live without.”

  “This is very easy. We will kill this agent for you. All it will do is reveal us, destroy all we have worked for. As long as Mr. America is happy.”

  “I am doing,” bristled I, “what I can.”

  “This is not what the Americans say. They tell me you achieve nothing.”

  So swiftly were the winds of indignation stolen from my sails! Had Rigby, who’d pushed for my deployment, been given the lash by superiors for having believed in a lazy malcontent, if not outright turncoat, like Zebulon Finch? Rigby would have been fired; he’d be jobless in a wartime economy; by now, his whole clan would be living on stale bread and powdered milk—Janet, Roy, Sandra, Walter, Patty, Stanley, and Florence. Why did I have to remember every single damned name?

  I’d planned to shut up Meixelsperger by crowing about von Lüth’s promised confab with Heinrich Himmler, but the boast died in my throat; it would out me as the gullible patsy that I was. Meixelsperger, on the other hand, was a tidal power.

  “America,” muttered I, “is fortunate to have you.”

  She made a fist of kitchen-scuffed knuckles, but resisted cuffing me.

  “America does not ‘have’ me. I am not interested in America. I have interest in Deutschland not losing all. Your Americans, they give me transmitter called Joan-Eleanor. I do not know why this name. Code, decode, all night until fingers bleed. Some of what they ask is simple. Ration reports, curfew hours. Is this building bombed? Is that? But revolution is not so small. If you, Mr. America, do your job, all will change. In one day it will change. Much danger for me, for everyone, but much rejoicing when—”

  Detonations: one, two, four, six, a dozen, guttural throat-clearings from a subterrestrial demon that snatched our ball of soil and rattled it about like a die. We grabbed for the walls, but the steel siding vibrated like mechanical saws. Terror, terror! Meixelsperger, the bravest, cried out. The bulbs winked off, then on, and everyone was on all fours as plates of dirt chunked from the ceiling cracked across our backs. A hole opened above us—through it, a tapestry of stars—and pretty flowers dangled into the shelter like garroted bodies.

  The tremors subsided. Blocks away, flak fire boomed.

  The mother resumed storytime, but from a page that had been torn.

  The girls pushed dual pawns, pieces that now slid through tears.

  The knitter traded scarf for Russian phrasebook, practice for the aftermath.

  The old lady grinned at the sky, her teeth blacked out with mud.

  Meixelsperger was the sort of immovable object to which one huddled for comfort. Unlike the others, she did not participate in masquerade. She remained stomached to the floor, a half-inch forehead slash painting a tidy black stripe of blood down her cheek. She bore it as she did the dirt in her hair, proud evidence of suffering. Her country had been gelded and blinkered, and still she cantered about as she wished and took in treachery with wide-open eyes.

  “How do you do it?” begged I. “For I cannot.”

  Meixelsperger blinked past blood.

  “How do I be brave? A stupid question. You are born woman here, brave is only choice. You are ‘future mother.’ You are ‘breeder of the master race.’ Poor men—the National Socialists take their minds. But it is worse, I think, how they take a woman’s body and soul.”

  From her deep bosom she fished a silver chain that ended in a golden starburst centered by a blue cross and black-enamel swastika.

  “Look! This is greatest honor for a woman in the Reich. It is the Mutterehrenkreuz, the Mother’s Cross. But it is not so difficult to obtain. Birth eight children, that is all.”

  Eight children? Though I was confident that this bruiser could cannon out one hundred sucklings without breaking for lunch, I detected no facility for petting and cooing, nor did her eyes sparkle
with motherly mist at the mention of her prodigious brood. I knew why. It was all but guaranteed that most of her children were Party faithful and that some of them had already died for their love of der Führer.

  A few streets over, a building exploded. It must have been of wooden construction. The splintering made the rather pleasant crackle of a fireplace, and the ensuing drop of lumber had a glockenspiel quality. But we were not fooled. The children sobbed, the girls shrieked, the old woman howled, and I pressed my face to the dirt. Meixelsperger, though, as if perversely inspired, sang through the clamor, the sleet of soil. Just four notes, a radio call sign I recognized.

  “Pom, pom, pom, pom.” She had to shout; planes were bearing down, buzzing like a stinging swarm. “You know this BBC? Many Germans have what we call ‘detector,’ an item of wires for our radios. BBC broadcasts in German, for Germans, and now my brothers and sisters, they too know what I know, know of truth, know how the Wehrmacht loses Stalingrad. Germans begin to taste the bitters of defeat, and it is stale taste—no Geschenk, that is certain. When Hitler speak, what they hear now is lies. When they read newspaper, they think, is this false news? How strange, all these stories of Jews being resettled. Resettled where?”

  The skies above popped with gunfire. Orange light strobed through the ceiling fissure. Wind whipped; detritus levitated; pieces of debris darted about our cave like wasps. When struck, Meixelsperger did not flinch. She looked alive, grinning like the mouse who’d outsmarted the lion. The noise was deafening now, and she shouted like a general ordering her troops on a suicide charge.

  “Something is rotten but now we smell it! Resisters grow like weeds, like the White Rose group in Munich—school children beheaded for celebrating free thought! But what happens, Mr. America, when you cut the weeds and do not pull the roots? Weeds grow back stronger! These are the children I mother! These are the daughters of dissent!”

  Meixelsperger raised her Mother’s Cross, but it was yanked away when our humble hill was walloped by a wind that slung all ten of us to the eastern wall. The lightbulbs swung and shattered. The western wall caved with a sigh. We were pressed together, a black tangle of flesh, mud, flesh, mud. For a moment, sound was the only sense: down the block, a hailstorm of brick cracking against the street, the muffle of the old woman caught beneath the dirt, the frantic rabbit-scratch of the two girls digging to free her. Was I still whole? I shifted my legs and stirred a lethal soup of broken glass, knitting needles, chess pieces, a set of false teeth.

  The gods of war, all of them—Anhur, Ares, Mars, Mixcoatl, Pele, even von Lüth’s Wōden—linked arms rugby-style and came straight at us. We curled like snails, some squealing, some praying, and one of us damning Brit and Yankee alike. It was not Frau Meixelsperger, Reader, but Mr. America himself, for I knew that there were good people in Germany, innocents and fighters for right, but after they were tilled into the soil, who would ever know it? Blood and soil, Blut und Boden. Here were both elements, expanding not across Europe but into the caverns of hell.

  Fingers were pulling my hair. I resisted but was wrenched nose-to-nose with the half-buried Meixelsperger. In the fiery flicker, the oven scars of her forearms were revealed as war tattoos as true as Church’s, as true as my own. The Mother’s Cross was pooled between us, so close that I could see how all eight corners had been whetted to points. Meixelsperger had turned the unwanted honor into a weapon. Yes, it might prick her breasts from time to time, but wouldn’t such stabs only sharpen the fantasy of sinking the cross into the jugular of Hitler himself?

  There came a purple flash and the sound of the sky being ripped in half. Meixelsperger’s arms wrapped around me and mine around her—instinct, not affection, but oh, how grateful it made me. I thought of Mary Leather, the last truly good woman I’d known, and wondered if she, with her bold buds of feminism killed off by an early-century frost, might have evolved into someone like this mad baker, able to take her life into her own calloused hands rather than let it be manipulated by man’s mania.

  Dry lips pressed to my ear to croak over the firestorm howl, the same as had Rigby’s in the moments before I’d tripped and fallen into a foreign land, and she used my real name, a gesture that, even amid apocalypse, did not go unnoticed.

  “Down here is where myths are born, Herr Finch. The underground shapes the overground, never the other direction. We are counting on you.”

  IX.

  WARTIME FACILITATES FARCICAL FLIPS OF fortune. Bomb-shelter soil was still powdering from my wounds when three weeks later I found myself reclining in a luxury train compartment. Von Lüth and I, dressed as if for a midnight ball, were choo-chooing across the country’s broad chest. Germany, should you need reminding, is shaped like a torso having suffered at the hands of a sadist—both arms and legs have been dismembered. Berlin, as is fitting, is located where the heart would be, while our destination, the village of Wewelsburg, lay just beneath the liver—the gallbladder, if you will.

  Reader, do you know which substance the gallbladder warehouses?

  Bile.

  It was evident that the train’s manifest had underlined von Lüth’s presence. Serving wenches paid him special mind throughout the six-hour trip, and Gestapo agents at every checkpoint saluted rather than demand identification. I did my damnedest to melt into my seat, but von Lüth basked in the fuss; his mustache wiggled like a cat’s whiskers. Such treatment lent him confidence regarding our mission, which, as I shall describe, he badly needed.

  After the bombing, I’d wrestled through rubble and staggered back to von Lüth’s building, the relentless Kuppisch materializing from nowhere to trail me, while Meixelsperger’s declaration zinged about in my skull like a trapped bullet. The underground shapes the overground. Von Lüth’s promises to me, once as bounteous as his fruit baskets, had developed worms, and I felt toward him as I had my first friend, Giuseppe Fratelli, after he’d hijacked my Black Hand spoils in 1893. Was von Lüth’s operation to bring me before Hitler a blitzkrieg or a sitzkrieg?

  Before I could ambush and accost him, he paraded inside at ten that night with a piece of mail held before him as if it were a flapping falcon. His shock was such that he didn’t notice my leopard spots of filth and zebra stripes of rust, and his voice, when he dared use it, was the affectless monotone of my shelter mates when they’d crawled from our blasted hole.

  “This came while I was away,” said he. “From Reichsführer-SS Himmler.”

  There went my best derisions. He’d reached into my lungs and thieved them.

  Von Lüth shuffled forward, clutched the corner of the comforting counter, and contemplated the missive he’d stuffed wrongwise into its envelope.

  “He . . . Oh, Herr Finch! He will grant my request! And he will do so during a visit to Schloss Wewelsburg!”

  My regret at having misjudged von Lüth’s intentions was quickly replaced by a cold thrill. Stand down, Mr. Rigby and Frau Meixelsperger. At last, it was happening.

  “ ‘Schloss.’ ” I thought I knew the word. “You’re meeting him at a farm?”

  Von Lüth brayed laughter—too loudly and too much of it.

  “Herr Finch, you are a jewel! ‘Schloss’ is ‘castle’! Schloss Wewelsburg—the brain, heart, and soul of the SS, a shrine to our Aryan past, and the foundry where we will forge the future. Schloss Wewelsburg? The honor, it is indescribable! And it is not I who will travel there. It is we, Herr Finch, in partnership. As the Americans say, you will be my trump card, the proof that I am Europe’s leading intimate of the occult. An audience with der Führer will follow, I guarantee it!”

  Quickened though I was by the news, von Lüth’s stunned reaction to his own success troubled me, and the intervening weeks found him distracted, snappish, and unable to eat the smoked meats and candies brought by the postman. Instead he nibbled on the blandest of breads before enduring long sessions in the commode. My mission notwithstanding, I cared; I brought him glasses of warmed milk and laid out books that, by their folded pages, I judged to be p
ast sources of comfort. He saw what I was doing, forced smiles, and did his best to partake.

  The stomach upset had not quit, and the swaying of our train did little to correct it. Von Lüth’s one defense was to redirect his excreta through his lips, a forceful stream of minutiae regarding the history of Schloss Wewelsburg, former stronghold of the soldier-bishops of Paderborn (whoever they were), who fought the Battle of Teutoburgerwald (whatever that was) under the great German warrior Arminius (whoever that was), thereby halting the Roman invasion into the Fatherland.

  The houses in the village bowed before the castle, which lorded from a hill of neon verdancy. It was only at the foot of the hill that von Lüth paused his chatter, kneeling and bringing to his nose a handful of dirt. He inhaled, smacked at the mud it made in his sinuses, and sighed.

  “May all of Europe soon smell so sweet.”

  Cavaliers like von Lüth knew how to broker an automobile, but as a völkisch scholar he would not hear of it. Listen to the trilling of the birds, the rattle of underbrush scuttlers! Here was the woodland his rooftop only mimicked. The grade was steep, but again the genial giant impressed with his starch and sinew, never wheezing as he praised Himmler’s humble origins as a chicken farmer, as well as his not-as-humble belief that he was the reincarnation of King Heinrich I. Von Lüth howled at my unfamiliarity with this German patriarch, and punished me with a lecture on how Heinrich’s battle against the Slavs and Franks had set historical precedent for Hitler’s two-front war.

  Schloss Wewelsburg was more imposing when seen from its outer gates. The castle was triangular to match the hilltop wedge upon which it sat. The northmost of the three towers jutted over the Westphalian plain and River Alme like the bowspirit of a battleship, and slotted into the white-bricked hull were a hundred black windows. It was a fortress in the middle of nowhere—anything at all could be happening inside, and that, I think you will agree, was worrisome.