by Hal Duncan
Outside the taksi, the early-evening city streets are busy, shops open later than they would be back home, people here thronging the way they do in these warm countries where there's little worry about the weather, about raincoats and umbrellas. Street culture, street living: It's one of the things he likes about this time and place. He couldn't stay here forever—you can't get a good White Russian in all of prewar Bursa—but it's good to visit once in a while, for the ambience.
The waiters hovering outside the restaurants haggle him, beckoning at the displays of fresh fish by the doorways, the warm glow of the little two-story buildings with their waxed-cloth table covers, TV sets showing Galatasaray playing Fenerbahçe FC, men inside cheering, bottles of Raki. He smiles, shakes his head and walks on. It's only a few more yards before the last of the restaurants is behind him and the street is darker, quieter. He unslings the jacket from his back and puts it on before ducking down the alleyway over cobblestones and—
Dug-up tarmac, fenced off behind wire mesh. The whole road is blocked like this, little mechanical diggers parked behind the fence. The pavement—sidewalk, whatever—is uneven and narrow even without the stalls of socks and plastic trinkets. He keeps finding himself moving against the flow of people, having to weave between them. He turns a corner onto a less busy street, heading toward the Zocalo, checking his watch and quickening his pace. It's nearly eleven here, and there's a free concert on tonight in the vast square in the center of the city; he doesn't want to get stuck in the flow of the mob moving back to their homes after Alessandro Gussman's finished singing. Not after the last time. Christ, there's twenty-five million people in the Distrito Federal, and the last time he was here and now, it seemed like they'd all been at the concert, and like they all had to go down the same street to get home. Eventually, he'd just given up and ducked into a small cafe for a cerveza and a cigarette while he waited for the street to quieten down. It was a cute little place, all decked out in red, green and white bunting, which he'd assumed was some kind of cheery nationalism in the run-up to Independence Day, until he spotted the football—soccer, that is—on the television, Inter Milan against… someone or other, and realized that it was an Italian cafe. In the heart of Mexico City.
He jogs across a road, strides down the block to get to the next corner and across before the first of the concertgoers come streaming down onto the street behind him. Made it.
“Perdón, señor.”
He turns as the kid bumps past him, lets himself stumble a little, grab the kid's arm so he doesn't fall. It brings the kid round between him and the woman on his other side, her hand slipping back into her own pocket as if it had never left, an almost imperceptible frown on her face as she walks on.
“Perdón,” he says himself, patting the kid on the shoulder.
The kid doesn't even notice that he's lost his own wristwatch and the roll of bills from his inside pocket. Serves him right for being such a bloody amateur.
He pats his chest to feel the bulk of the wallet still resting there. It wouldn't have done the pickpockets any good anyway, a handful of Turkish lira and a bunch of credit cards that expired two years ago.
He turns a corner.
Another street, another city, another year. The buildings are still black with grime, the stone still ground in with decades of car fumes and coal fires, once resplendent tenement-style, banks and offices ornate enough that you could probably climb right up their grooved, ledged facades if you wanted to. The rubbish in the gutters still stinks of rotting fruit and the people still sit in bars shouting at television sets. The city is universal. The universe is a city. At least, his is.
Down Rosenstrasse and across the Bridge of Sighs. Skirting Skid Row, Hell's Kitchen and a Soho that's as much New York as London. Brown brick, red brick, sandstone, granite. Every so often he spots a landmark that he recognizes, but mostly he ignores them; impressive as they are, they're not his navigation beacons on these streets of refuse and real life. No, it's the congruences that he follows, the commonalities of people leaning out of windows to shout down at friends outside, of folks walking their dogs, or cigarette butts falling down a drain. That's one of the reasons that he smokes, actually; you drop a cigarette in a puddle and it links you to a million other instants—or more—of a cigarette falling with a splash and a hiss into a puddle, instants all different, never quite the same, but close enough that you can take just one small step across from one into the other. Bursa, Mexico City, Mirenburg, Firenze. In the end, they're all one city, a universal city of a million districts, Latin Quarters, Jewish Quarters, West Ends and Chinatowns all mixed up in the mess of their inhabitants’ forgotten heritages, the little bits of homeland brought with them in their hearts to be displayed in windows and on walls, collages of identity cut up and strung together so you could, if you weren't paying close attention, mistake them for mere decoration, like red, green and white bunting in an Italian cafe in Mexico City.
He cuts off Ingram Street, down past a low red sandstone block of a building— some once-rich Glasgow tobacco importer's commissioned offices long since rebuilt inside, transformed into a nightclub—and comes out at the top of Virginia Street, a dilapidated side street of gay bars and shopping arcades, the loading bay of a department store. There are a couple of buildings collapsed here, another just condemned, steel on the doors and windows, warning signs. Another corner and he's on a side street off the side street, and in a different decade entirely.
He walks up the steps, nodding at the bouncers in their disheveled tuxes far too tight for them. It's not exactly a gentleman's club but they do have Bombay Sapphire and good armchairs in Club Soda, downstairs, behind the dance floor, down a corridor of dark-green wallpaper and wood paneling, in the back room where the poker is played. He's whistling as he pushes the door open.
He recognizes Joey immediately, almost smiles his recognition with a chipper hello before the khaki uniform and its insignia register … and the four guards with him, all armed.
“Major Joseph Pickering,” the man says. “If you'll just come with us, sir. Let's not cause a fuss here.”
Foolish Stories, Mad Stories
“My name is Reynard Carrier. I was—”
“Reinhardt von Strann,” says Pickering, cutting him off.
“I was born in Rene-le-Chateau, in France. I was brought up in Paris. I owned a nightclub in Berlin until the Futurists—”
Pickering shakes his head. How long is the damn fool going to keep this bloody charade going?
“Your name is Reinhardt von Strann,” he says. “You were born in Strann, West Prussia. Christ, man, we know who you are. We know everything.”
It's not entirely true. Pickering has a file on Reinhardt von Strann, aka Guy Fox, that's as Joycean in its incomprehensibility as in its length. The problem is that over half of the intel and intercept contained in it, verified from multiple trustworthy sources, is entirely contradictory. So saying everything is therefore something of a fudge. And to be fair, it's not so much we as I. The rest of MI5 isn't terribly interested in a “crackpot pamphleteer,” a mad socialist-anarchist railing against the dangers of the new government's “fascist” policies. There are more important enemies these days.
“This is absurd,” says the man.
His accent is impeccably French, of course—a hint of American in his English as one would expect, but not a trace of guttural German. Pickering doesn't believe it for a second. He takes his cap off momentarily to rake his fingers through his crow-black Brylcreem hair and slaps the cap back on his head; it's an unconscious habit, as if he's pushing long hair back out of his face, and he has no idea where he picked it up, having worn a short back and sides since the day he joined the army.
“You were a nightclub owner in Berlin before the war,” he insists, “for a brief period following a less illustrious career as a—how can I put this—gigolo and jewel thief.”
“Oh, now really, I can't say I've led the most virtuous life but I'm no thief.”
/> “No common thief.”
Pickering stands up from his chair and wanders to the corner of the room, leans back against the wall, arms folded, sizing the prisoner up. He returns, takes his cap off and lays it on the table.
“In July 1940,” he says, “you were arrested for your activity in helping refugees escape from Germany, and sentenced to death, a traitor to the Neues Reich. Given the pedigree of the von Strann family, this was no small scandal. Not that your family was without scandal before this … your brother, for instance. But we'll come to that.”
“Look, I don't have a brother. Please check your records. I am the only child of Alphonse and Marie Cartier of—”
“Shortly before your execution, however, you managed to escape Gestapo custody and nothing was heard of you until—”
“I'm telling you, you have the wrong man.”
“ Until after the war, September 1947, when you were caught breaking into a Siberian gulag. They had you in a locked room, no windows. They leave you alone for one minute and—poof-—you're gone. Two days later a man answering your description is shot at by Polish border guards crossing over the Iron Curtain. We have the NKVD and Stasi files on it all. Believe me, it makes for interesting reading. Two days to get from Siberia to Warsaw. Two days.”
“Major—Pickering, was it?—I've been in Britain—sorry, Albion, I mean—I've been in Albion since I fled Berlin in 1941. I wish I was this von Strann character you talk about. He helped refugees escape, you say? He sounds an admirable man.”
The prisoner smiles weakly.
“But I am not a brave man, Major Pickering. The most I ever did against the Futurists was to urinate in their cognac. And I was very drunk at the time. I was afraid of them, Major Pickering. And when the opportunity arose, I fled, alone. I got out through Holland and I did not look back. I took no one with me, thought of no one but myself. I am not like this von Strann. I am not this man. The Dutch Resistance, your own people, there are scores of individuals in London alone who can verify my story. The captain who debriefed me, Captain MacChuill—”
“General now. Yes, General MacChuill remembers you quite well. As he recalls, you supplied some quite invaluable information as regards munitions sites, potential targets.”
“Well, perhaps I was of some use. But I do not understand why, if Captain MacChuill has verified this …”
“There are no records, though, are there?”
“I'm sorry?”
“Oh, the general recalls you perfectly. He is quite adamant about that, and there is no question that he's telling the truth. And yet, there are no records of his debrief, no records of your arrival, no records at all. Why is that?”
“War is a confusing time, Major Pickering. Things get lost in all the chaos, lost, forgotten or …”
“Stolen? A hundred little routine scraps of officialdom that should be there, but aren't. None of your friends has any photographs. No mention in any correspondence. But they all swear blind they've known you for seven, eight years now. How can that be, Herr Strann? Or is it Herr von Strann? I'm not sure how one addresses Prussian aristocracy.”
“Please, Major Pickering. My name is Cartier … Monsieur Carrier, if we must be formal. I would prefer Reynard.”
Pickering says it tired and labored, like he's speaking to an idiot child.
“Your name is Reinhardt… Reinhardt von Strann. We know this. We know that you owned the Fox's Den, in Berlin, between—”
The prisoner holds up his hand. It's shaking just a little. He seems equally tired.
“Wait, Major Pickering. I am being honest with you, believe me. When you talk of this von Strann, I do not recognize the name. But… the Fox's Den, you say?”
“The Fox's Den.”
“This I remember. I never knew the proprietor's name, but I heard stories of him. He had a brother in the army, yes?”
“Johann von Strann. Do not play games with me.”
“No games, Major Pickering. This is not a world for playing games. Not since … not since …”
He shakes his head.
“But I will tell you these stories. Perhaps I do know something of what you want to hear. But they are foolish stories, mad stories, things that are not possible— but if this is what you are looking for, if this is what you want… I only ask one thing, Major Pickering, one little thing.”
Pickering says nothing.
“At least call me by my own name, Major Pickering. Call me Reynard.”
three
SORROW'S PRISONERS
The Thief of Lives
hey say he was in Dresden, my brother. They say he was in Dresden when v’ the Allied firebombs fell. They say he was in Dresden and Koln, and Düsseldorf and Hamburg. They say he was in London during the Blitz, jumping from rooftop to rooftop—a latter-day Spring-Heeled Jack—and every time his jackboots touched a house, every time he leapt again out of his crouch, that house was blasted with a crack of thunder and abloom of flame. They say he was in New York when the first of Von Braun's newborns ripped a streak of fire down Wall Street.
In Dresden, London and New York the bombs followed him, as if he was their golden harbinger of death. Or as if, perhaps, it was my brother that they sought to blast and not the families huddled in coal cellars, factory-worker women with their children and grandparents, or businessmen standing at windows twenty stories high, watching in horror as the light came searing through the darkness, closer, closer. They say they saw him walk out of the firestorms inviolate, this spirit of all Blitzes, created in destruction. They say he was in Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Wherever there was fire, in those days, they say they saw my brother, Johann von Strann—Jack Flash as the English called him—übermensch, avatar, moonchild. But then it was in fire that he forged himself, in blood and fire.
He wanted to become a hero of the most ancient sort, a god summoned into the body of a man. Instead he was a man caught in the dreams of God.
In Dresden, Florence on the Elbe as they called it for its architecture of rococo and baroque, the capital of Saxony, a god of fire can only feel at home. That city of Dresden china, fired in kilns, dark clay transformed in the furnace into fine, white porcelain. A port city of heavy industry, of foundries and forges, iron and carbon melded into steel for manufacturing. My brother often talked of one of his heroes, Michael Bakunin, holding the city after it rebelled, after it rose up and threw the king of Saxony out for rejecting the constitution of the German Empire. He talked of Bakunin and his army of factory workers taking art treasures from the city's museums and placing them on the barricades to discourage Prussian troops from shooting. Bakunin and his rebels fighting on the streets for four days while the shopkeepers, the petty bourgeois shopkeepers, formed community guards supporting the troops against the insurrectionists.
You do have this history in your world, I hope? No, no, I'm sure you do. You still remember a century of swastikas and sickles, the bullet years that shot from Bosnia to Bosnia, years when the Great Game became deadly serious and great powers, great ideas, moved in dark floods across the world, impervious to all boundaries, moral or geographic. The world after this, believe me, is not so very different. We try to change it, but sometimes it seems we only change ourselves.
Prometheus changed the world. So much so that Prometheus, bringer of fire, is bound in a relief sculpture on the wall of Dresden's Katholische Hofkirche. A city such as Dresden, after all, has much to thank that thief of fire for, who gave us the means to build our modern world. Poets and musicians who visited Dresden from all over Europe left and wrote great masterworks extolling that titan figure of enlightenment. Romance and Reason, in the figure of Prometheus, are fused like iron and carbon in the steel with which we make our ships and cars, our tanks and guns; and so the two implacably opposed ideals of Western thought found something they could share in that tragic, heroic figure of Prometheus bound, in chains, in statues cast in bronze, in lyric verse, in symphonies of crystal sound, in stone relief… in Dresden.
There are no photographs of my brother, I believe, only stories; but the stories are the sort that never make it into official records. A silhouette walking unscathed from a building that's become a furnace. A figure crouched on a chimney breast, calling down the firestorm. War seems to generate such myths, and some of them become famous: angels who appear to rout opposing forces; dead comrades who save a soldier's life only to disappear into the smoke they came from. But Jack Flash, that flame-haired angel of death in billowing army overcoat, whose growl was the thunder of approaching bombers, whose howl was the keen of diving V-3 rockets, and whose roar was the blast of buildings blown to kingdom come—I've heard the stories of him only here and there, from those who saw their loved ones die; and, always they have told the stories quietly and reluctantly, as if merely to speak of him might be to summon him again.
They are quite wrong, of course. My brother accepts no summonings, no invitations. He needs no persuasion.
