They ambushed him around the next corner. Four of the guys, Mort standing back, evidently the master at arms.
They dragged him into the mess hall, and threw him screaming into a giant soup pot of boiling water. He settled down after a while, once he realized it was just hot enough to be deeply relaxing. “This is a damn fine idea,” Charlie said. “We should do this every night, what do you say?”
The others laughed. “What is with this guy and routine?” Spartacus asked.
“Tomorrow night we have something extra special in store for you,” Mort said.
Charlie felt the goose bumps rising on his skin, and shivered despite the 105 degree water. Just the thought of the unexpected undid most of the calming effects of his steam bath. He looked up to find the others laughing at him. “Jackals, all of you,” he griped. “Jackals before the antelope separated from his mommy.”
The next night, Charlie ironed his socks. The four jokers from the night before stood at the door shaking their heads at him. Spartacus said, “I didn’t know you could iron socks.”
“Oh, yeah,” Mort said. “You can also starch a sheet so much, you can patch the side of the boat with it.” The others laughed. “I’ve learned a lot from Charlie.”
“Apparently just not how to give a man his privacy.” Charlie slammed the butt of the iron up against the makeshift ironing board.
***
Willy, one of the intrepid foursome assigned to Mort’s Cure-Charlie team, was the true mastermind behind the practical jokes. This was before Mort and Willie had had a chance to get close. Looking back, he realized the practical jokes were the ice-breaker between them.
Willie’s next ploy was ingenious.
They snuck into Charlie’s bunk late at night, at virtually the crack of dawn. After slipping him out of his bunk, they carried him on his over-starched sheet, and into a coffin one of the tradesmen aboard ship had hammered together for them.
Above deck, they said their final goodbyes to Charlie.
“To a prim and proper man,” Mort said.
“He was never late to anything, including his own funeral.” Spartacus saluted.
“I especially liked the way he polished his shoes. I could use them to shave, if I couldn’t find my pocket mirror.” Dillon put his hand against his chest as if saying the pledge of allegiance.
Porticos dabbed his moist eyes with his handkerchief. “The way the man separated peas from carrots on a dish, the way he sorted the creamed corn from the tiny slivers of red bell pepper… the man was a real artist.”
“You don’t think that scorpion sting just paralyzed him? And he’s still alive, do you? And he just can’t move?” Spartacus asked.
“Impossible,”Mort said, “there’d be brain damage by now, in any case, best he go the way we remember him.”
Of course, they knew Charlie was listening to all of it, because each time one of them made some smart-assed remark, the pounding inside the coffin crescendoed, and the entire box would rock in their hands.
“Over the side, gentlemen!” Mort shouted. “He wouldn’t want us to miss his assigned departure time on account of sentimentality. It’s almost sunrise. Five. Four. Three. Two. One.”
They tilted the coffin and out slid Charlie through the trick panel at the foot of the coffin.
The yelling didn’t stop for a good thirty seconds, when reality slowly crept back in. And he found himself on the deck and not in the water. “You bastards!” Charlie screamed impotently, the sounds of his seizuring larynx drowned out by the laughter of the others.
“Take my advice,” Mort said, “and take the stick out of your ass, or you’ll keep drawing these practical jokers to you like bees to honey.”
Charlie screamed and stomped off.
“Yeah, I think we made a difference,” Spartacus said. “The being pissed off thing is just a big act. He’s laughing on the inside, replacing that hard, constipated nature with gooey softness.”
The next morning, during calisthenics, Charlie kept erupting in laughter. And later that day, when he went running through the ship’s cannon in the middle of being fired, oblivious to the wartime exercise, he had the presence of mind to shout, “Oh shit!” and jump out of the way of the cannon’s recoil in the nick of time, laughing even louder than usual as he disappeared in the distance. Despite the laboriousness of the cannon discharge exercise, Mort smiled.
The past, once it had been turned from stone into putty, wasn’t such a bad place, after all.
***
Santini stirred in the dead of night to find the two scientists going at it as fervently as ever. Thanks to the exoskeleton, Milton’s vim and vigor was enough to sustain him even in his enfeebled state. The adrenaline of excitement that accompanied the creative acts which consumed him was probably every bit the tonic healing him from the inside as his wife Aala’s juju juice.
Santini strolled over to the window overlooking the street, feeling like a lazy hound dog on guard duty that had been negligent with his responsibilities. The street was clear. What few ominous shadows lingered, thrown by the full moon, weren’t moving, suggesting they were imprinted on the ground by the fixed facades of the buildings themselves.
All the same, he turned down the louvered blinds, sheltering the insides from men in black who might be hiding in the shadows. Then he checked the door, secured by a steel rod anchored to the floor. It’d be easier to come through the wall than through that door. He’d improvised the reinforced barrier with what Milton and the kid had lying around, feeling every bit as scientific in his own more pragmatic way.
Content they were as safe as they could be, he laid back down. He supposed all it would take was one good RPG to erase the entire flat and its occupants from memory. But after today, he figured he could hand over at least some of their protection to those self-evolving algorithms Robin Wakefield insisted dogged them every bit as much as the men in black. The possibility she might be wrong was ironically a soothing enough thought to help him get back to sleep.
The second his head hit the pillow, he was gone from this world. He awoke to find himself in Germany, in the life he’d recanted earlier that night to Gretchen. He figured if he couldn’t control where his mind wanted to take him, he could at least intervene with the storyline, much as Gretchen had suggested. Maybe there was something to her idea that the past, once “reinterpreted,” could free him to be a better person in the present. It was worth a try. If nothing else, he might awaken less exhausted from torturous nightmares.
***
Santini approached his mother lying in bed with the pillow in his hand. She knew right away what he was up to, and smiled placidly, nodding her encouragement. Outside, the sounds of soldiers’ footsteps nearing impressed them both with a sense of urgency. “Your father suffered all his life with asthma,” she said. “Not a day went by without him ever feeling like he wasn’t choking. Find some other way.”
Santini nodded, his eyes watering. “I’d do it myself,” she said, “if I had the strength. It’s you who have to live through these horrible Nazis, who will live to suffer hell on Earth.
She struggled as he put the pillow to her face until she could struggle no more. He sobbed the entire time, and for hours afterwards, until he could sob no more, every happy memory of her flooding to the surface. His mind fought valiantly to lock her in memory forever. But the floor of the memory-room was made of quicksand, and he could feel her slipping away from him even before the tears dried. The memories he rehearsed would push out the ones he didn’t, until they too pushed one another out of his head by the shortening intervals he had each day to dedicate to the ritual.
He spent the rest of the night stripping and oiling his Luger. He broke it down, and reassembled the weapon, and did it all over again, until he couldn’t remember why.
He looked up to see the bullet he’d put in his father’s head.
Santini assembled the weapon for the final time with no pain. He’d fastened the lid down on his emotions; he was
a man of action now, vindicated by the knowledge that these were just the first steps in a long campaign to set the world straight. He was working for the greater good now, an angel of the Lord, and angels had to be tough. He let the loving part of him on the inside power the hardened shell on the outside like a nuclear reactor, like yin and yang forever tied in matrimony, like there was no better way to be at one with the world. And he felt at peace like never before, no nagging doubts, no guilt, nothing eating away at his newfound sense of solidness. He had done the right thing with his parents, he thought, stuffing the gun into his holster, and he was going to keep right on doing the right thing.
From that day forth, Santini used his father’s World War I sniper rifle to make his point. Every time he fired it, it was to take off the head of the highest ranking Nazi he could find. And every time he discharged the weapon, he got closer to his father; it was their time together, time they seldom spent in one another’s company when he was alive. He talked to the rifle as he wished he’d talked to his father. “Didn’t leave much for the crows,” he said, watching the splatter from the exploded head of the Unterfeldwebel, the colour sargeant, from the edge of the tree-line overlooking the passing panzer division.
“Just when we thought his head couldn’t get any bigger,” he said, as the shrapnel from the Hauptsturmführer’s (captain’s) exploded skull peppered the mistress beside him in bed. She extricated the bone fragments from her arms and torso without shedding a tear. She eyed the hole in the window and listened to the gunfire outside, perhaps thinking it no more than a stray bullet that had stolen her from fate’s tight grip. Santini removed his eye from the scope of the rifle, and slinked down the tree in the rain, wondering how the bullet had ever hit the mark when just one raindrop was enough to throw off the trajectory at this distance. Maybe fate wasn’t as impartial as all that.
Before his time was through, Santini scored a hit on a Riechsführer-SS (field marshal), proudly adding him to the collection. The shot, taken from a clock tower at the tolling of the bells, was so clean, so unobtrusive, that the other officers around the table continued their conversation and laughter, unabated. The field marshal died with a smile on his face, further camouflaging his changed condition. Santini chuckled on his way out of the clock tower. “I guess it’s true what they say about friends: you can never have enough of them, not when it comes to lending you cover.”
***
Gretchen walked the winding road in Palermo leading up the mountain, looking skyward. This time, when she saw the Junkers Ju 87 swoop toward her, she was ready. The air raid siren mounted on the plane sounded. Its use was an early form of psychological warfare. Bastards. Strange she hadn’t recalled the siren before. She saw the mother and the two boys in the chocolatier’s, their faces doused in melted chocolate, smiled, and returned her attention to the dive bomber.
Once the plane was in range, seconds before it discharged its MG17 machine guns, Gretchen let go on her rocket launcher. It was a tad period inappropriate, but she wasn’t here for a history lesson. She had till dawn, rising through the window in the flat—evident even to her pre-conscious mind—to get healed of all this nonsense, to put this chapter of her past behind her. There’d be more wounds from past-lives calling out for attention in the days ahead, which meant these events would get short shrift in the squeeze to make her whole again if she didn’t make good use of her time.
The plane erupted in the sky like 4th of July fireworks, sending paroxysms of joy through her body analogous to the chocolate slipping down the throats of mother and children in the store beside her.
She watched them step safely into the sun, and then forever walk out of her life. She had never felt better.
At the shoreline moments later, courtesy of a dream state that collapsed the past accordion-like, Gretchen was barbecuing on the beach. She looked down at the grill to see the chunks of kids, reduced to so much chum from the sharks in the water. The parents swam out to sea to feed her barbecue pit, which had become a strange sort of sacrificial altar.
The guests then supped on the body parts: decapitated heads, severed hands, tibias attached to feet, the muscles still largely intact, slices of face with just one eye… They laughed and danced and carried on on the beach throughout the night, enjoying the bonfire and nibbling at the leftover barbecue until it was gone.
Despite the bizarre cannibalism, Gretchen couldn’t deny she felt better by the end of the evening, as she watched the sunrise on the beach. Maybe, the symbolic act of the parents bringing the pieces of the children to her to be eaten meant they had forgiven her, had let go, had found humor in the perverse tragedy, and so should she.
Perhaps this was an annual round up on the beach in which they all participated as part of a healing and a letting go ritual which had gone on for years, still not complete. The ghosts of the dead would one day be healed enough to go into the light. In any case, she found that surrendering to the surrealism, letting her mind find its own way to make her whole, was imminently more effective than trying to take too tight a control of the reins during her lucid dream.
***
That morning, Gretchen, Santini, and Mort awoke more or less in tandem.
Mort was the first to squeeze out of his sleeping bag on the floor. “You were right, Sister Gretchen. I haven’t felt this rested in years.”
Santini grunted his concession on the matter.
“And now that we’re all revitalized,” Mort said, “we may have a problem with the working class over there, lacking the inner resources of such aristocratic souls as ourselves.”
Gretchen and Santini passed their eyes over Milton and Fabio, passed out on the floor, asleep on the hardwood as comfortably as if curled into a down mattress. Technically speaking, Milton was still cocooned in his exoskeleton.
When Aala strolled out of the bedroom, Santini said, “You have some witchy way of waking them, Romani woman?”
“Of course.” Aala sauntered to the kitchen sink, filled a pot of water, padded out, opened Milton’s face plate, and poured the water over him. She was kind enough to do the same for Fabio, lying beside him. Neither budged. Mort didn’t look impressed.
Aala returned with the shorn end of an electrical cord connected to the outlet and put it in the puddle of water. Both men rose from the dead, levitated off the magic carpet of water, and jumped to an upright position.
It took Milton a while to regain his equilibrium. The shorts to his exoskeleton didn’t work their way out of the circuitry for a good minute or so, causing him to convulse and twitch.
“A witch-wife and an evil is three-halfpence worse than the devil,” Aala said. Then, losing herself to her morning ritual in the kitchen, she grabbed one of the chickens off the floor, strangled it, and plucked feathers in the sink.
“Yeah, I remember when my mother spent most of the day in the kitchen preparing the meals,” Mort said. “She’s old school, all right.” He turned to Santini. “What now?”
“How long is assembling that thing going to take, exactly, fellas?” Santini asked, looking at Milton and Fabio.
“A week, maybe less,” Fabio and Milton said in perfect stereo.
“We can’t stay in one place more than twenty-four hours,” Mort advised Santini, “we just can’t. Not unless your idea of fresh air is to get aerated by machine-gun fire.”
“Come on, I have an idea.” Santini footed it to the door, Mort right behind him—as soon as he confirmed his gun was fully loaded.
THIRTY-ONE
“Hey, boss, get a load of this,” Pontius Pilate said, his tone registering outside his usual blunted emotional range.
Rufus turned to take in the black 1940 Packard Custom Super 8 180 parked in the gravely driveway. “It’s very us, isn’t it?” He glanced down the road at the broken-down black suburban SUV, a men in black cliché, and sighed. “I suppose it’s time for an image upgrade.”
“He loves flowers, just like you, boss.”
Rufus surveyed the garden packed
with wildflowers—not an orchid in the bunch. Still, he saw no need to correct Pontius. He couldn’t deny the charm of the English hamlet nestled in the countryside.
After hopping in the driver’s seat of the Packard, Rufus checked for the keys in the overhead visor, only to find them in the ignition. “Trust, that’s what’s missing from the world today, Pontius. He’s entirely right to ignore the blight of spoiled humanity sweeping across the land. You oppose a thing too long; you become it. Best to just live out life surrounded in denial and your flower gardens.”
He turned the ignition, set the car in gear, and backed out of the driveway.
A few minutes later, the engine, powering their very smooth ride down the road, was humming; it had warmed up enough to overcome all its knocking.
Rufus set the GPS device, ripped out of the SUV stalled back along the road, on the dashboard. He keyed in Santini’s, then Gretchen’s and Mort’s images, and sicced the GPS unit’s facial recognition algorithms on their facades. They’d search one traffic-light camera after another, creep through the city’s grid, until they found them. There was nothing like agency tech not yet in the public domain.
“What’s with these three?” Pontius asked.
“They’ve attached themselves to a man hell-bent on building a time machine. They’re his pit bulls. We eliminate them, the rest’ll be like taking candy from a baby.”
“A time machine? What in hell for? You can go anywhere in time just by turning down another road. What is this, the Middle Ages?”
Rufus laughed. “Such is the nature of End Times, at least according to ancient Tibetan Buddhist scrolls. On the day of our enlightenment, the time line collapses, proving only to be a mirage, an outcropping of not being able to manifest anything our heart desires in the moment with the power of mind we were born with. The God within emerges as soon as the tarnish of ego-consciousness is removed. As good an explanation for this new Renaissance age we’re entering as any, I guess.”
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 109
