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

  “ ‘Our bodies are scurfy despite all soaps, and are udumized, pagatized, and baziatized. The life of man has never been so miserable as today in spite of all technical achievements. Demonic man-beasts oppress us from above, slaughtering without conscience millions of people in murderous wars waged for their own personal gain. Wild beast-men shake the pillars of culture from below. Why do you seek a hell in the next world? Is not the hell in which we live and which burns inside us sufficiently dreadful?’ ”

  Lanz, that old baffler, was lucid at last. The man-beasts from above, the beast-men from below? Why, Allied air and ground forces, of course. But also Germany’s own Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht, for they too set firestorms to the natural world so cherished by völkisch ideologues.

  Von Lüth flung aside the Lanz; it macheted into the loam. He stumbled from the hill, ankle-deep in mud and rid of yogic balance. He considered the discarded clothing at his feet, picked from it the mjölnir, and examined it. With a strangled cry, he swung the hammer at a defenseless sapling. A branch cracked open, revealing fresh white wood. Another cry, another blow, and the branch ripped free. The tree was young and resilient, but von Lüth kept bashing, buttocks jiggling from effort. Soon his victim was an atrocity, all shoulders, no arms, like the shape of Germany itself.

  Von Lüth swiveled toward me. Rain drained from his pale lips.

  “In June 1942, Himmler sends a surgeon saboteur to murder his rival, Reinhard Heydrich, on the operating table. Is this proper German behavior? It is not. Bormann, Hitler’s secretary, forces his wife into a ménage à trois with an unclean mistress. This, too, is not German behavior! Göring and Goebbels, National Socialists of highest rank, each day steal millions from the Reich to buy bigger homes and prettier paintings, while the common burgher starves on the street. Not German behavior! Not German behavior!”

  He hurled the mjölnir across the roof. Weeds swallowed it. His ragged cry made me cringe.

  “Wrong, wrong, all is wrong! Himmler, professed connoisseur of the occult, does not even know the name ‘Zebulon Finch’? And this Wiligut he adores? This Karl Maria Wiligut? A senile who twists the texts of List and Lanz in order to present himself as a mystic! He claims that his royal crown awaits him in the palace in Goslar, his sword in a grave at Steinamanger. Ravings! He should be expelled from Wewelsburg! But will Himmler listen to me? Will he read the documents I gathered regarding Wiligut’s years in a Salzburg asylum, diagnosed with megalomaniacal delusions? One begins to wonder, Herr Finch, who exactly is in control of the Party and in what direction they are taking it.”

  Von Lüth’s cloudburst of truths were every bit as sad and sodden as his rooftop library. Operation Weeping Willow—what a suitable name! It was as weak as a willow branch, and all involved in it ought to weep. Von Lüth had told me that der Führer opens new offices like ordinary men open canned meats, but if a Minister of the Occult office was being prepared, clearly the name on the door would be “Wiligut.” Von Lüth had overemphasized, if not outright lied about, his influence in the Reich. Five long months, Dearest Reader, of timid wayfaring about an oppugnant country, and I was no closer to Hitler than when I’d dropped from a plane into unspecified farmland.

  I javelined the umbrella, hoping it might spear a rat, and dropped my ass into the ooze. The pulsing hiss of rain covered the squish of footsteps until a pair of naked, muddied kneecaps met me at eye level. Von Lüth lowered his underweared bottom to sit alongside me. The wet ground quaked and the tree above us listed closer to collapse. He noticed neither; his back was hunched like that of an inconsolable boy, and his voice squeaked in kind.

  “Year after year I devote myself to SS research, and has membership ever been extended to me, as it has been to you? Even once? Why, Herr Finch, why does no one in the Party like me?”

  By now, Futuristic Reader, you have witnessed enough of my world to know the answer to that. Every clique abides one rube whose longing to belong wins him only ridicule—recall, if you will, how I’d willingly stabbed myself at dinner parties for the cheap thrills of Hollywood gadabouts.

  Von Lüth sighed at my silence. Water ran down his big white back.

  “Have I disappointed you that much?”

  My every wound, filled with water, began to boil. Though I’d been moved time and again by his brotherhood, he’d embarrassed himself before Himmler, and by extension embarrassed me, and the flames of that humiliation caught, sucked oxygen, and burned brightly.

  “Ja! Ja! Ja!” cried I. “Do I say this in a language you understand? My nature rebels at tiptoeing about, meek as a doe, waiting for an acorn of fortune to drop before me! How tired am I of being silent—it scrapes at me like sandpaper! At first I thought, Zebulon, old boy, what good luck that this von Lüth chap has found you! Now I know the opposite is true. When I am quite finished shouting, I shall leave this ridiculous roof once and forever more, rip up the Ahnenpass that has become my damned leash, exit this fleabag flophouse, sock your puppy Kuppisch in the muzzle, get arrested, and finagle my own way to Hitler—as was the plan before you charged into my death and ruined it!”

  Von Lüth gazed wistfully across adjacent rooftops, from which silver fairies of rain did their jetés.

  “You wish to shout? Then shout, Herr Finch. Shout loudly—for I have misled you. My excuse is a poor one. I was certain that with you by my side this time would be different.”

  “Different from what? Some previous episode of groveling?”

  Von Lüth shrugged miserably. A thin coat of water slid down his face, as slow as icing from one of Meixelsperger’s cakes.

  “Men of power do not respond to begging,” said he. “It disgusts them. It has taken me too long to learn this. But der Führer and I are one in spirit; about this I have not misled. Some ten years ago, I attended a dinner at the Berghof, a chalet Hitler keeps in the Bavarian Alps. It is true, I was there as a guest of Eva Braun; more specifically, a cousin of Fräulein Braun’s with a superficial interest in pagan studies. Ach, it does not matter. What matters is that my presence there was no accident, just as it was no accident that I found you.”

  “My death is an overlong accident. Sound and fury, sound and fury.”

  “Once you accept the concept of fate, Herr Finch, accidents are impossible. Can I confess to you a secret? I was uncertain about Hitler at first. He spent that afternoon engaged in long dialogues with Blondi, a German shepherd dog he adored beyond seemliness. After dinner, the Great Hall was remade into a theater and Hitler oversaw further foolishness: Hollywood pictures. Forbidden in Germany, but Hitler is nevertheless fond of them. He was visibly moved by a picture directed by a Russian émigré named Chernoff and starring the American actress Bridey Valentine.”

  I laughed once into the sky, filling my mouth with rain. If anyone could pull a drool of desire from the wolf of Europe, it was Bridey. Perhaps von Lüth was right. There were no accidents.

  “Guests began retiring to bed after the picture, but Hitler held court deep into the night. Music, architecture, automobiles. The malignities of smoking, the perks of vegetarianism. Subject matter so trivial that I began to see them as barbed wire strung before a trench. To know Hitler, you had to outlast Hitler, and so I made that my objective. At four in the morning, when I became his final congregant, he stopped speaking and requested that I—Udo Christof von Lüth, a man of trifling consequence—say what I had been waiting to say. You see? I had passed the test.”

  Von Lüth’s cheeks rounded into glad, glistening bulbs.

  “I know Hitler is dreadfully serious in newsreels. If only you could see him after a long night of relaxation! He can be quite silly, hanging his legs over his chair like an orangutan. For three hours, Herr Finch, the future world leader was spellbound by what I said. With kaleidoscopic color I painted a vision of a Germanic future shaped by a Germanic past. And Hitler! Mein Führer! His enthusiasm, the initiatives of architecture and culture he promised to me, were breathtaking! Early risers woke to find that he and I were locked in concord, in
amity, in affinity. Word spread, and from the bedrock of that single conversation have I built my career. This is why the gift baskets all these years later, the salutes, the deference.”

  “He promised you something, did he? And did not deliver? Now we both know how that feels.”

  “ ‘The Party needs you.’ He said that; I will never forget it. ‘Speak to Himmler. Himmler will set the appointment.’ Was I wrong to take heart? Even now, I know that Hitler waits for me. But Himmler? Himmler is jealous. I am forced to wait for him to change his mind, which, I see now, will never happen. Why would he? He is the one with the castle. The armored train. The millions in stolen currency. And I? I have this, as you say, fleabag flophouse. Instead of the Externsteine, I possess these pebbles. What good has adherence to völkisch thought done me? Oh, Otto, mein Otto, Himmler was right—I follow your footsteps always!”

  He planted his face into his muddy hands and sobbed. His back quaked, and the leaves and sticks slicked to his skin skittered. I would not feel empathy for this equivocating fabulist; I convinced myself that his demonstration was deplorable.

  “This Otto is an irritant,” snapped I. “Define him, or delete him from further mention.”

  Von Lüth’s moan was muffled behind palms.

  “It is an unjust, underhand world where Otto Rahn’s name goes unknown. He was an archeologist, Herr Finch, the most brilliant in the history of Germany, if not the world, and the finest years of my life, the finest by far, were spent as his assistant. I took both his notes and photographs as he traveled the globe, under Party sponsorship, to seek out mankind’s greatest treasures. The Golden Fleece, the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail itself. If you have not heard of Otto Rahn, surely you have heard of these!”

  “Even creatures like I am read fairy tales. The Grail, some stupid cup.”

  Von Lüth had shed his clothing like a snake sheds its skin, and now his spine hiccupped like a snake swallowing an egg.

  “Romans and Jews shaped that misinterpretation. The Grail is no cup. It held no drink for apostles; it caught no blood from the crucified Jesus. Why do Americans insist on connecting everything to Jesus?”

  “I am no stooge of Gød, much less his deadbeat son.”

  “To the contrary, Herr Finch, you are hostile to Gød! I understand; I, too, was once young and angry. But Otto showed me a better way. He was patient with believers. It was in Montségur, I believe, where Otto removed from the wall of our sleeping chamber—tenderly, tenderly!—a tawdry illustration of a bleeding Jesus and in its place hung a card upon which he’d calligraphed a beautiful verse by Wolfram von Eschenbach. It extolled not a mortal man’s gruesome death but the illuminative life revealed to all men by Lucifer.”

  “Here we sit, sinking in mud. Fitting we stumble across Satan.”

  “Lucifer and Satan are not the same! Again, blame papists and Jews for the jumbling—you, Herr Finch, know what it is like to be made a scapegoat, do you not? Lucifer is the Light Bringer, the keeper of highest spiritual ideals. The Grail, or as Otto called it, more properly, the Grâl, is a stone, a Claugestiân stone, a lapis exillis. What Otto knew was that it had fallen from Lucifer’s crown. What he tried to discover, with me at his side, was where it had fallen. Is the Grâl at Mount Etna, the fabled Doorway to Hell? Or at the bottom of an anonymous mountain gorge, being worshipped by a tribe of primitives?”

  I watched a bank of soil slop into the ruined creek.

  “Did your chum Otto find his Grâl? Of course he didn’t. Because it is fiction. Your whole life has been wasted chasing fiction. Now we both are mired in place because of it.”

  “Do not you, of all people, know that searching is of far greater import than finding? The questions one asks define him. Otto and I traveled as humble yeomen but strived every day to be the Grâl knights of lore. They were magical years. We could not move a rock or dig a hole without finding bygone Albigensian symbols or cryptic Manichaean texts. Paris, Pamiers, Iceland—we shared cheese in monastery ruins and laughed in castle courtyards. Many was the night that Otto became exhausted and I, the younger, bore him home upon my breast and arranged him for sleep.”

  The cozy scene begged for spoof, but I could not muster it. Once upon a time, I’d had Church as that sort of friend, and for years that bond had given me reason to persist. The way von Lüth fawned over Otto Rahn was a step beyond; it brought to mind how I nuzzled the memory of Wilma Sue, an uncomfortable thought I couldn’t jettison before von Lüth all but confirmed it.

  “There were rumors. That Otto was a homosexual. That our relationship was improper. People say what they will. What is demonstrable is that Otto did not mention my name once in his published diaries. This he did out of love, to protect my reputation from his own. But I was young and stupid. I became upset over the omission. Our discussion grew heated. We parted ways, and eleven months later, mein Otto was dead, and I would do anything, Herr Finch, anything at all, to return to those days of wonder, when life’s map was held by a man who always knew how to read it.”

  Church, disfigured, scarred, and limping about a whorehouse in 1929, had made a similar lament, longing for the grueling existence of trench warfare, where a man at least knew his objectives.

  Raindrops caught in von Lüth’s mustache. Tears, much oilier, razored through.

  “State documents called it suicide. Who, I ask you, kills himself by sitting atop a hill in winter until he freezes? Had the Party supported Otto rather than persecute, he would have found every one of those relics you doubt exist, and his status in the Reich would be second only to Hitler. But suicide? It tars a name, and Himmler believes I have yet to scrape that tar from my boots. He is right. The tar glues me, as tar does, to a single spot—right here.”

  He spread his bare arms as if to pull toward him the whole festering, fulminating forest until he became buried in its piteous two-foot grave. He slid forward, slipping from our muddy mound onto his knees, where, to my dismay, he pivoted to face me. Erased were all memories of the man’s dapper suits and straight back. Cascades of water made his naked flesh wobble as if behind screens of flickering heat; it was as if his whole body were crying. His arms remained open and his apologetic whispers, perhaps to his dead friend, or lover, Otto Rahn, broke into a soft plea.

  “Help me, Herr Finch. Help me.”

  How could I resist those arms? The poor man, who’d handled me as kindly as he might a brother of blood, only wished to be handled in kind. As his slick, soiled body slipped toward nadir in the muck, I heard the mutter of Meixelsperger, the closest thing I had left to a moral compass.

  The underground shapes the overground.

  Von Lüth, fringe scholar, lonesome giant, possible sexual deviant, was the latter. I, flopsy puppet, harmless eunuch, hollow scarecrow, was the former. It would not be the public face of the occult and völkisch thought that would instigate the tête-à-tête with Hitler. It had been me, after all, to whom Himmler had posed his direct questions: You will think about it? You will let me know what you decide? If I wanted to provoke a follow-up invitation from the Reichsführer-SS, what I had to do was respond. To do that, von Lüth and I would need to repair our fractured friendship—for friendship was indeed what we had built together, if timidly. And so I leaned into those arms, cold with rain, heavy with mud, and was dirtied.

  XII.

  FORMULATING A RESPONSE TO HIMMLER was the easy part. The next morn, as von Lüth lay in bed clad in pajamas and dried mud, I wrote down details regarding my every supernatural scrape: Dr. Leather’s probe into texts of magick and daemonologica and his consultation with psychics; Church’s half-cocked yet bewitching Theory of 17; the blunt, bleak insights of la silenziosità; the naked fact of my resurrection. In short, everything that von Lüth hadn’t said at Wewelsburg, I would say to Himmler, and it would deliver twice the impact for not being filtered through the broken bullhorn of von Lüth.

  Von Lüth grimaced upon reading, struggling to accept that he’d become a hindrance. But ridicule and underesti
mation breeds its own pungent spores of resolve—this I know firsthand. He stood to his full seven-foot height and pulled tight the cuffs of his pajama sleeves. Even a corpse could not rid its gelatin blood of Marine Corps discipline. His posture demanded respect, and I found myself not only standing at attention but also swelling with pride at his rebound. Beneath his pillow-flattened mustache, von Lüth’s lips thinned with cunning.

  “Himmler will depart Schloss Wewelsburg soon. We cannot rely on Reichspost deliverymen. Our message must be sent immediately. And for that job, Herr Finch, you happen to be speaking to the right Nazi.”

  There was, after all, one place in Berlin where von Lüth commanded real, not imagined, authority. Thirty minutes later we raced through the ravaged city as only drivers like Kuppisch knew how and into the affluent Dahlem neighborhood, where a sumptuous mansion housed the archeological and cultural-history institute for whom von Lüth worked. For this unscheduled trip to the Ahnenerbe, he’d donned yet another magnificent suit, though his cluster of faux-medals was, for once, absent.

  His mjölnir, however, he’d freed from rooftop weeds, and it swung from his hand as he charged through the door. Secretaries bid guten Morgen, and assistants scurried near with pressing business, but von Lüth dispelled each comer with a single shake of his hammer. I fear you will fault me, Dearest Reader, but I nearly cheered! One day ago a broken man, von Lüth had become a Panzer tank chewing the earth en route to its objective, and I had the pleasure of hanging on to the turret.

  Up three flights, down four halls, and through five doors—the last a hidden one popped from a paneled wall—our quest terminated in a cube in which a shirt-sleeved quartet pressed headphones to their ears, tapped at telegraph machines, and labored over charts. They startled at their superior’s raucous entry and began to stand in salutation, but it never got that far. Von Lüth brought down the mjölnir upon a plate of pastries. The plate shattered, and custard shot out in a dozen directions, staining several of the workers, but not von Lüth, for he was, in that moment, untouchable.