by Paul Kenyon
She followed the sound of water to the river and headed for the rendezvous spot. Behind her, the searchlight finally switched off and the disturbance quieted down. They must have decided it was a false alarm.
It had taken her an hour to get this far. She had to wait no more than another thirty minutes for Skytop and Wharton. Wharton must have driven like a maniac over the jungle trail to get here this fast, only two hours after Sumo's signal.
Skytop vaulted over the side of the jeep before it stopped moving. Wharton cut the motor and followed.
She cut their greetings short. "We're going to move."
Skytop nodded with satisfaction. "None too soon. There's a Brazilian army patrol beating the bushes, looking for a couple of cops we killed. They think a band of terrorists is operating in the neighborhood. We've managed to stay one jump ahead of them so far."
"What have you got for us, Baroness?" Wharton said.
She told them about Heidrig's laser-triggered fusion bomb.
Skytop whistled. "That's too dangerous a toy for a bunch of resurrected Nazis to play around with. Any idea how we're going to take it away from them?"
"Yes. Hit and run. Inga's made friends with the kennel master; she'll put the dogs out of it. Tom found a blind spot in the wall; you'll come over without alerting the guards. We'll have to stand off the opposition long enough to set up explosives and incendiaries in the laboratories." She passed over a sheet of paper. "Study this. Tommy says that these are what have to be destroyed — don't waste time on the rest. The computer memories especially. It'll make it impossible for them to reconstruct the work for a year or more. In that time, NSA should be able to think of a more permanent solution. And we'll have the matrix diamond and photos and measurements of the laser assembly. That will be enough for our own scientists to go on."
Wharton said hesitantly, "The martrix diamond is locked in Heidrig's safe, you said. How…" He didn't finish.
Penelope tried to ignore the jealousy in Wharton's eyes. She said gently, "I'll be keeping Heidrig busy, Dan, while Sumo cracks the safe again. The… relationship… is about ripe already." Very ripe, she thought. "Heidrig will be ready to take me as his Brunhild, his Eva Braun — a fitting mistress of the master of the Fourth Reich — in another three or four days." She gave a short, sardonic laugh. "That's about how long it'll take me to finish working on him. I may not be a Teutonic maiden, and I'm certainly not blond, but I am a baroness, and I come from adequate stock, and I've convinced him that I despise 'inferior races' as much as he does."
A heavy silence fell over the three of them. They sat listening to the nocturnal chirpings of the riverbank, slapping at mosquitoes. Skytop broke the silence.
"When do we hit 'em?"
Penelope looked at her watch. "Ninety-six hours from now. Exactly." She stood up, put the camouflage netting back over her face. "Don't be late."
Chapter 13
Heidrig came toward her, the two glasses of champagne in his hands. Behind him the phonograph blared Wagner, the Love Death from Tristan. He didn't look like an Obergruppenführer now. He looked like an old man. He wasn't bothering to hold himself erect, and the bare legs under the brocade wine-red dressing gown were old man's legs, pale and hairless and bony.
Penelope could see herself in the big mirror hanging over the bed and the three-panel dressing mirror strategically placed at the foot. She was costumed in a bizarre set of underthings Heidrig had produced from his bureau drawer and diffidently asked her to wear. Had any living woman ever worn such things? There was a sort of black strapless corset in satin and lace that pushed her breasts up to spill over the rim. It ended in a cascade of ruffles just below her navel, leaving her bottom lewdly bare. Long straps held up a pair of black net stockings that began halfway down her thighs. And there was a black velvet ribbon around her neck with a huge blue-white diamond sparkling in front. She felt like a dance hall girl in a screenplay by Krafft-Ebing.
At least, she thought gratefully, he hasn't brought out the boots and whips. Yet.
"Ich bin Mondestrunken," he said, handing her the champagne and patting her on the thigh. "Do you know what that means? It means 'moon drunk' — ach, you must begin to study German right away. I am drunk with moonbeams because you are beautiful and have made me feel like a boy again."
She smiled. She was a figure in his fantasy now, a figure he had carried about for forty years and reconstructed from time to time out of happenstance female flesh and scraps of satin and lace. He didn't like his fantasy to talk too much, she had noticed, except for obligatory cooings from a script she was gradually learning as she went along.
He clinked glasses with her. "To the future," he said.
"To the future."
"And what a future it will be! The whole world Eindeutschung — Germanized. Judenrein — cleared of Jews at last. A harmonious world society, Volksgemeinschaft, under a single Führer."
"But Wilhelm, how can this be?"
He chuckled fondly. "You are a woman and should not bother your head about such things, but there is a secret weapon. Ach, such a secret weapon! If Hitler had had it, we would have crushed our enemies. The Russians, the English, the Americans…" He shook his head. "Forgive me, liebchen, I forget my manners. Of course, if we had won the war, people like yourself, people of good blood, aristocrats, would have become part of the New German State. Cleichschaltung. And in the new world state that I am about to create, you will stand beside me, like a proud Valkyrie!" He took a sip of champagne.
"You spoke of a whole world united under a single Führer. You mean yourself, Wilhelm darling?"
"Ach, nein!" He smiled tolerantly. "I will direct things from behind the scenes, of course. But I am realistic. I have not the fire, the magic, to whip the masses to love and loyalty. And I am too old. What is needed is someone whose name radiates power. A new Hitler!"
"Where would such a man come from?"
He put down the champagne glass and looked at her seriously. "Horst."
"Horst?" Penelope couldn't believe it. Horst was about the most unlikely new Führer she could imagine.
"I know what you are thinking. And I cannot blame you. As I said, I am a realist. I see Horst's deficiencies. He is not impressive physically. He is not an orator. And frankly, between you and me, he is a little callow."
"Then how…"
"I said that what is needed is a new Hitler. I meant that literally. Horst is a new Hitler."
"Wilhelm, you're mystifying me!"
He chuckled with delight. "I am being naughty. I will explain. Horst is a Hitler. He is Hitler's son."
Penelope did some quick arithmetic in her head. Horst was under twenty-five unless she missed her guess. Hitler died in 1945. It couldn't possibly be.
Penelope stretched luxuriously and settled back on the pillows. Deliberately she played up to Heidrig's fantasy. The triple mirror at the foot of the bed showed her black hair piled high on her head, painted face with garish lipstick and bright circles of rouge, the luxurious mounds of breasts pushed impossibly high over the stiff top of the corset, the dark triangle below the garment, the net stockings with six inches of white thigh showing at top. Heidrig was staring at her with undisguised greed, his eyes darting from her body to the multiple images of it in the mirrors. What odd scenario was going on in his head at the moment? His hand crept under his dressing gown; he shared at least one vice with his beloved Führer, she had found out during the past twenty-four hours.
She lit a cigarette in the long black holder. It completed the picture in the triple mirrors.
"I think you had better tell me about it, Wilhelm," she said lazily.
"It is very simple, my dear," he said. "Hitler did not die on April 30, 1945, as the world believes. He lived another twenty years, well into his seventies."
The rest of the story poured out of him. He paced back and forth, gesturing, his eyes glittering with enthusiasm. It was an old story, and Heidrig was telling it to himself rather than to her, so there were some ga
ps. But she was able to prompt him discreetly from time to time without interrupting the flow of words. And by piecing together what he was. saying with things she knew, she was able to get a fairly complete picture.
On that day, April 30, 1945, Hitler was ten days past his fifty-sixth birthday, still limping from the unsuccessful bomb blast of the July 20th assassination attempt, his skin yellow from liver damage and the medication his doctors were pouring into him. He was insane or close to it, a trapped mad dog, with the Russians already past the Oder and closing in on Berlin, the Americans at the Elbe.
By this time, Hitler had lost the last vestiges of sanity. He shot poor bovine Eva Braun, as he had shot his first partner in kinky sex, his niece, Geli Raubal, fourteen years earlier.
Heidrig and a couple of other SS men burst into Hitler's quarters when they heard the shot. They found Hitler, a smoking revolver in his hand and tears rolling down his cheeks, sobbing "Geli, Geli!" He was pointing the revolver ineffectually at his own head, making vague circular motions with it.
Gently they took the gun away from him. There was no time to lose. The Russians were nearly upon them. They told Hitler that he must leave with them immediately to "take command of the western front." He allowed himself to be led from the bunker, disguised as a laborer. An SS Haupsturmführer of Hitler's size and build had been sacrificed, shot by Heidrig himself, and his body soaked in gasoline and burned beside the corpse of Eva Braun.
During the weeks that followed, Germany was a mad shambles, with Nazi officials scurrying like rats through the ruins. Himmler, disguised with an eye patch and shaved mustache, fled with four automobile loads of SS officers, but was arrested at a British checkpoint. While the doctor who was searching him for poison inserted a rubber-gloved finger into his anus, he bit down on the phial of cyanide that was concealed in his mouth. He was buried by a British sergeant-major who in civilian life had been a garbage man.
But Heidrig and his little band of cronies were incredibly lucky. Somehow they got through Allied checkpoints, found Nazi sympathizers who hid them and sheltered them, forged new identities for them, even the demented quavering Hitler whose papers declared him to be a Schriftsteller, a writer, the same classification that had appeared on his identification card only thirteen years earlier. In those thirteen years he had managed to turn a piece of the world into an imitation of hell.
How long would it take Horst, Penelope wondered.
Penelope screwed another cigarette into her holder; Heidrig was at her side at once, gallantly lighting it for her. She held out her glass gaily for more champagne. Heidrig poured them another glass, went on with his story.
In due course, Heidrig and his trusted aides were able to smuggle Hitler aboard a ship to Brazil, ex-Nazi officials helping them all the way. Hitler had turned into a trembling, pathetic lunatic, prematurely aged. He asked where they were taking him. They told him that they were taking him to his country estate in South America — didn't he remember conquering the entire world?"
Ja, he remembered it. His lunatic brain began to fill in the details.
A fortune went with them. Seven years' worth of accumulated loot. Stolen paintings and art objects and gold chiseled out of the bridgework of piles of gassed corpses at Auschwitz. A good part of Heidrig's cache was diamonds. He was obsessed with them.
Penelope fingered the blue-white stone at her throat. It was an oddly cut stone, without the sparkle it should have had for its size, but evidently it was an essential ingredient in Heidrig's fantasy. He had kept his eyes fixed on it the last time he goaded his old man's body to orgasm. Yes, that younger Heidrig thirty years ago would have had plenty of diamonds, enough to make him a wealthy man, a fazendeiro, when he sold them one by one to the wholesalers in Rio de Janeiro.
They hid the Führer in the estate on the Rio das Mortes, surrounded by attentive retainers. From time to time it was necessary to play little charades with him. Show him maps, draw up official-looking documents that reported on the Germanization of the world. He recognized the old comrades that, one by one, were drifting into Heidrig's orbit. They all had been coached. They told him stories of the world outside, brought him specially printed issues of Der Volkische Beobachter and Die Schutzstaffel run off at night in German-owned printing shops in Rio.
They brought the old man prostitutes from time to time, stupid girls who were rehearsed in what to do and paid afterward to forget. He called them «Geli» or "Eva," and sometimes wept.
Hider's sexual practices, Heidrig said delicately, were of a kind that ruled out any possibility of pregnancy. Even Geli, an oversexed teenager who had admitted to hordes of lovers, had once been heard to say in public, "My uncle is a monster. No one can imagine the sort of things he expects me to do."
But there are exceptions to everything. One of the prostitutes, a girl coincidentally named Eva who had been supplied by the local madam in Queimadura, was a special favorite of his. She was a placid dark heavy-limbed girl, who, though she knew no German, nodded at Hitler's babble as if she understood. He was noticeably calmer, easier to manage, when she was around. They arranged for her to stay with Hider at the fazenda for several months, until the time when he might grow tired of her.
And she became pregnant.
There was no doubt. The child was Hitler's. Improbable as it seemed, this heavy coarse prostitute was carrying the seed of the Führer.
They bribed her to stay. Kept her a virtual prisoner at the fazenda. Had her cared for by the best German doctors. The elderly Nazis around Heidrig cooed and chortled at her, chucked her under the chin, got tasty morsels from the kitchen for her. And waited to see if the baby would be a boy or a girl.
"Can you imagine?" Heidrig laughed. "All those tough old SS men who had been through so much, acting like a bunch of sentimental grandmothers?"
I can imagine, Penelope thought. It sounded like a Satanic nativity, the coming of a dark messiah to lead them to a diabolical millenium.
"The child was a boy," Heidrig said. "Horst. You know the rest."
"What happened to the mother?" Penelope said.
"Oh, she nursed the baby for a few months," Heidrig said indifferently. "But she was talkative. And of course by this time she understood what was going on. She became too restless, wanted to go back to Queimadura. So unfortunately I had to dispose of her."
"So little Horst grew up without a mother?"
He did not notice the irony. "He never missed her. Never was a baby so spoiled. My Kamerads and myself taught him everything we knew."
"I'll bet."
Penelope fit another cigarette into the long black holder that Dan Wharton had made for her. Heidrig was at her side instantly to light it. He sat on the edge of the bed next to her.
"We have been spreading the word in German communities throughout the world," Heidrig said fervently. "A new Führer is coming. Prepare yourselves. Be ready when the time comes. This time we will not fail."
He was lying on the bed beside her, his hand working busily under his robe. Penelope put her cigarette holder down carefully in the ashtray beside the bed.
The black holder, its needle of crystallized poison waiting in the hidden groove, was aimed at a spot some two feet above her prone body. Now she had to get Heidrig into the line of fire.
She opened her thighs and pulled Heidrig down on top of her. He positioned himself with a muffled groan, and she winced as the old man's gristle-tough tool pushed into her. Heidrig got to work, grunting with effort, his glazed eyes fixed on the diamond at her throat. Penelope waited, watching him clinically. It seemed to go on forever.
The cigarette in the holder was almost burned down. She estimated another minute till the glowing tip reached the fuse.
Heidrig was making rapid little bleating sounds now, working in a desperate frenzy, the sweat streaming off his body onto Penelope. Abruptly he paused. She felt his body stiffen, and then he was making a final valedictory thrust, beginning a long, drawn-out moan.
There was a sharp phhhht
! from the bedside table, and the moan turned into a gasp. Heidrig arched backward in a sudden reflex of agony, his hand slapping at the back of his neck. The massive shock of the Black Widow neurotoxin killed him even as his body, mindless, accomplished the final dribbling throes of involuntary ecstasy.
Penelope turned her head. A little puff of white vapor was drifting from the end of the cigarette holder. The phonograph needle was stuck, repeating the same phrase from the Liebestod over and over. She could see herself in the big mirror suspended above her, an erotic fantasy in black corset and garters, an old man in the stylized posture of death lying beside her.
Chapter 14
"Hold him," Horst said.
The old man with the Schmeisser motioned toward the carved, high-back chair against the wall. Sumo obediently sat in it, his hands folded in his lap. Until it was absolutely clear that there was nothing to be gained by it, he would continue to maintain the pose of a harmless, prim, slightly effeminate Japanese fashion designer.
It had all gone wrong. Penelope hadn't been able to maneuver Heidrig into her bedroom. Instead, he had taken her to his. It would be impossible to get at the safe where the matrix diamond was kept until Penelope could improvise an opportunity. So he had hung around Heidrig's door, listening to the sound of Wagner coming through it, waiting for some sort of signal from Penelope.
Twice, at the sound of footsteps, he had disappeared around the corner of the upstairs hallway. The third time he had been unlucky. Horst had tiptoed by, making no footsteps for reasons of his own.
He could offer no plausible explanation of why he happened to be skulking about Heidrig's door. It would have been impossible anyway. He was supposed to be locked in his room.
"There is something peculiar going on here," Horst said. "I think I had better look in on Uncle Wilhelm."
"I think he would prefer not to be disturbed at the moment," the old man said with a smirk.
Horst whirled round in a fury. "Speak when you are spoken to!" he spat.
