“Stand still, girl!” Marion Gilbert said, pointing one of her weapons at Gwen. “Move backward and sit on the sofa.” She glanced at me and Rothmann. “All of you!”
We complied. I tried to move my thigh away from the Führer’s, but he wasn’t giving me any room.
“What is this?” he demanded. “You are to show respect to me at all times!’
Marion Gilbert stepped closer. “I’m afraid those times are gone. If you speak again, I’ll put one of these skewers through your tongue.”
Rothmann opened his mouth, but sensibly he made no sound.
Since I hadn’t yet been threatened, I decided to act as interlocutor. “Help me out here, Doctor,” I said. “You were one of the Rothmanns’ guinea pigs?”
She nodded. “There were twenty of us.” Then she sighed and words that she had been holding back for far too long were finally spoken.
“We were all at the top of the class in high school. One of the boys and I wanted to study medicine. The rest were going to be businessmen, soldiers, scientists—a range of professions. And we all had a similar racial background—we were white and of German, Anglo-Saxon or Scandinavian stock.” She pointed at Rothmann. “This…this man and his vile sister set up a fund, and tempted our parents with scholarships and grants for our studies. The only condition was that we had to spend half of each vacation on what they called research projects. We thought that meant we’d be doing research, but it turned out we were the subjects.” She glared at Rothmann. “Guinea pigs is right. We were as expendable as animals. Sixteen of the group were terminated before a year passed.”
“Were terminated?” Gwen said.
Marion Gilbert’s expression softened. “You’re one of us, too, aren’t you? I can tell by your eyes. I can also see that your conditioning is in full effect.” She smiled sharply. “Try anything and the Führer dies in agony.”
Gwen sat back, but her nails were digging into her thighs.
“Were terminated?” I repeated.
The doctor looked at me blankly for a few moments—I got the impression she was struggling to keep focus.
“The people who couldn’t take the conditioning were…killed…. If they were twins, which many of us were, the stronger sibling was ordered to execute the weaker.”
Jesus. Then I remembered the woman who had cut the man’s throat in front of cameras in the camp. Had they been twins, too?
Gwen leaned forward. “It’s not like that now,” she said, looking at Rothmann earnestly. “I was with my twin, Randy, till…” She broke off and gave me a fierce stare. “Until this man shot him last night.” She turned back to her Führer. “Before he killed Professor Irma.”
Rothmann’s eyes locked with mine. Although there was little trace of emotion, I could see that he intended to make me pay the full price for what I’d done to his twin sister.
“You killed the bitch, Matt Wells?” Marion Gilbert asked, her face suffusing with joy. “That’s the best thing I’ve heard since…” She stopped speaking and peered at the skewers in her hands. “Since Malcolm made the Yale chess team.” She took a quick step toward the sofa and buried a skewer to its hilt in Rothmann’s thigh, keeping the other pointed at Gwen. “But that still wasn’t enough for you. Malcolm…Malcolm.” Her voice cracked. “Your sister shot him in the heart.”
Rothmann was biting his lip, but he didn’t have the nerve to speak.
“I couldn’t do it myself.” Marion’s eyes were damp. “So she made me watch.”
I gave her a bit of time. I suspected the conditioning had stopped her grieving for her lost twin until now. I felt a strange empathy for the woman, multiple murderer though she was. I had been struggling enough with what had been done to my brain, but she had obviously been through much worse.
“You’ve been trying to nail them, haven’t you?” I said when she got her breathing under control. “The murders and the drawings—”
That surprised her. “You know about the drawings?”
I nodded. “I’ve been in contact with the detectives.”
Marion Gilbert looked confused. “But you’re a suspect.”
“Not for everyone. That was the FBI’s line, but one of this scumbag’s people was messing with the evidence. Dana Maltravers—do you know her?”
The doctor was staring at Rothmann, as if daring him to speak. His face was twisted in pain, his hands clutching the wound, but he kept silent.
“No,” she said. “We don’t know the identities of the others who have been through the camp. We receive individual assignments and orders.”
“And what were yours recently?”
“To keep them informed of the investigations.” She gave a strangled laugh. “The investigations into the murders I myself committed.” The doctor suddenly looked very tired. She leaned against the walnut-paneled bulkhead, the skewer quivering in her hand. “I…couldn’t help myself. Things that happened at the camp started to come back to me…mock executions…sexual abuse. The others turned on us when we refused to commit incest, they beat us terribly…and then I remembered…I remembered Malcolm’s death…”
“And you decided to hit back.”
She nodded. “The Antichurch…they kept taking us to the rituals, the sacrifices…it’s only in the last day or so that I’ve understood how horrible that side of the process was. They made us believe that Lucifer was rising, that he would reward his faithful servants. So I…I couldn’t stop myself choosing people who were apostates, who had chosen the wrong occult path….”
I thought about her victims. “But Loki the singer was a satanist.”
“An unworthy one,” the doctor said, avoiding my gaze. “He wasn’t serious about the faith. It was all a facade. He only cared about drugs and sex.”
“So you killed Monsieur Hexie, Professor Singer and Crystal Vileda because the Antichurch didn’t approve of their fields—voodoo, the kabbalah, tarot?”
Marion Gilbert still wouldn’t look at me. “Yes,” she replied, then shivered. “I know about the tarot myself—the Vileda woman was a fraud.”
“Hardly a reason to kill her,” I said, unwilling to let her off the hook.
The doctor’s eyes were fixed on Rothmann. “The fact that they were members of proscribed racial groups was also relevant.”
I looked round at the Führer. “Proscribed racial groups? You assholes have such a thing about African-Americans, Jews and Hispanics.” I turned to Marion Gilbert. “Let him talk, will you? I want to see how sick he really is.”
She frowned at me and then nodded.
“They are all subhuman,” Rothmann said, his face still wracked with pain. “Fit only for slave labor or execution.”
“Jesus,” I said. It was the people who had set up the North American Nazi Revival and the Antichurch who were subhuman. But how guilty were the kids they’d turned into monsters? Were they responsible for their crimes?
I looked back at Marion Gilbert. “So, even though you were trying to avenge your brother’s murder, you still chose victims your Führer would approve of?”
She gave me an agonized look. “You have to understand…I’ve been fighting myself…my mind’s been in turmoil for weeks now…it’s like there’s a sharp-toothed worm, biting and gnawing…I haven’t been sleeping…I’ve been two people fighting for control of one body…”
“Sounds like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” I said.
She stared at me. “What?”
I repeated the name of Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous doppelganger.
“That’s right,” the doctor said, blinking rapidly. “That’s…that’s what I called myself.”
“Jekyll?”
She shook her head. “Hyde. Marlon Hyde. The name just came to me. I must have read the book, but I don’t remember…. I rented a room and gloried in the killings there…. Oh, God…”
“Pathetic,” Rothmann said. “It seems you are even weaker than your brother.”
She took a step toward him, but I raised a hand.
<
br /> “The maps,” I said. “Those drawings you left on the bodies. I know what they mean—the camp at Auschwitz.”
“Oh, how clever you are,” Rothmann said sardonically. “I knew as soon as I saw the first one. How could I forget the huts where the subhumans were contained?”
“It didn’t help you identify the killer, though,” I replied, giving him a scornful smile in return. I looked at the doctor. “Why didn’t you just leave evidence pointing directly to the Rothmanns?”
Her eyes dropped. “Because…because I couldn’t. Something inside my head stopped me. The process…coffining…” She looked at Rothmann. “I think I even hoped…hoped that you would realize who was behind the killings and stop me…stop me before I did irreparable damage to the movement.” She let out a brief scream of frustration, then turned to me. “How did you know the drawings were of Auschwitz, Matt Wells?”
“I…I’m not sure,” I replied feebly. My own brain hadn’t exactly been functioning normally in recent days. I had a flash of the machine that had been lowered over me in the camp—and the blaring music, the pounding of army boots, the barking voice…
I turned to Rothmann. “What the fuck did you put in my head?”
“How should I know? You escaped before the process was complete. Besides, what happens in each case depends on the subject’s own mind. Coffining is led by the individual’s unique mental structure.” He gave an icy smile. “Perhaps, deep down, you are attracted to the Reich’s methods.”
I wasn’t going to let him distract me. I looked back at Marion Gilbert. “Did you do the drawings of Auschwitz because you approved of what went on there, or because you realized it was the Nazis’ biggest disgrace?”
She stared at me. “I don’t know…I really don’t. I was only able to do partial drawings, anyway…. they just came from deep within me….”
There were pinpoints of red on Rothmann’s cheeks. “Auschwitz was no disgrace. My father did wonderful work there.”
“Research on twins, no doubt,” I said.
“Of course. That was Dr. Mengele’s main interest and my father was his right-hand man. Following their research, my sister found that twins made excellent research subjects. We were able to monitor each sibling’s progress during the conditioning process by reference to the other. The unusual complex understanding between most twins—not necessarily identical ones—was highly beneficial in structuring their minds to our purposes.”
“Do you know if he ever experimented on you and Irma?” I asked, feeling a strong impulse to hurt the fucker. “Who knows? Perhaps all this is your father’s doing, not yours or your twin’s at all. Perhaps Irma and you were coffined yourselves, back in Auschwitz.”
“Don’t speak about my sister,” he said, his body rigid. “She was a genius.”
“Really?” I said, looking at Gwen. She seemed to be apprehensive and confused. I wondered how deep her conditioning really was. “What about the Antichurch of Lucifer Triumphant? What did two fine Nazi rationalists need with a backwoods cult?”
Marion Gilbert lifted up the mask with the end of the skewer and tossed it onto the Führer’s lap. He gave her a supercilious look.
“We understood early on that Americans needed religion, even a perverted one like that. The history of the country shows that. The founding fathers thought they were creating the perfect state for mankind to develop to its full potential.” Rothmann gave a scathing laugh. “Unfortunately, they failed to take account of mankind’s need for spiritual comfort. If the original state had been atheist, it would have achieved much more. Think of the civil-rights movement and those ridiculous Negro preachers.”
“You’d just have mown them down, I suppose?” I said.
“Certainly not. There is always a need for research material, even from the base races. Besides, this is not a liberal country. How many people are, to use your words, mown down by the police each year? How many blacks and Hispanics are incarcerated, and rightly so? The subhumans need a firm hand.”
I managed not to hit him, somehow. “So you let people wearing gargoyle and hyena masks, the latter with a hard-on, into your pantheon?”
He gave me a cold stare. “Whatever was effective.”
Marion Gilbert pointed the skewer at the mask. “He didn’t just let them into the rituals. He was the man in the hyena mask and his sister wore that one. People like them do not lead normal lives in any way.” She shook her head. “They think the process blanks everything out, but I remember, after the sacrifice of a young woman, I saw them—incest was no taboo for them….”
Rothmann looked completely unperturbed, glancing at Gwen and holding her gaze for a few moments. My suspicions of incest had been correct, but that only opened a new door into the abyss.
“Dana Maltravers,” I said, catching Rothmann’s eye. “Are you her father?”
He shook his head. “The research that Dr. Mengele and my father carried out in the camp, and that my father continued after the war, suggested that genetic defects were a danger. No, Dana is not my daughter. With Irma, I always wore a condom.”
“What happened to her father, then?” I asked.
Rothmann glared at me. “Are you sure you can handle the answer?”
I held his gaze. “You killed him, didn’t you?”
He laughed. “Wrong. Irma did. He was one of the first sacrifices when we reinstituted the Antichurch.”
I took a deep breath and forced myself to move on. “What about the blinding of the victims after death? Was that really necessary?”
He raised his shoulders. “The original Antichurch did that. Besides, our father lost his sight toward the end of his life—heavy smoking had damaged his eyes. My sister and I felt that was the kind of commemoration he would have relished.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” I said callously. “That didn’t put Irma and you off smoking though, did it?”
Rothmann looked at me evenly. I hadn’t laid a finger on him.
“What about Karen and me?”
He frowned. “Surely you have worked out why we abducted your lover. Her investigation into a certain London investment banker was becoming a problem.”
“Gavin Burdett of Routh, Ltd.”
“I know you saw him recently in Washington.” He smiled. “Let’s just say he is no longer of any significance.”
“What? You killed him, too?”
Rothmann shrugged. “He was expendable, and besides, his personal needs were becoming an embarrassment.”
“But Karen’s free now.”
“Like you, she escaped,” he said, giving me a tight smile. “So there’s nothing to worry about.”
“You better not have harmed her or our child,” I said, raising a fist over his bloodstained thigh. He ignored it and kept looking straight ahead.
“I’ll tell you something I don’t understand,” I continued. “Why did the Star Reporter pay so much attention to the occult murders? You suspected one of your own people was the killer, but your own rag was full of the story every day.”
Rothmann gave me a look that suggested I was mentally deficient. “Woodbridge Holdings owns numerous newspapers. Do you imagine we would censor such a major story from all of them? Murders mean major earnings for papers like the Star. Besides, we knew the investigations were going nowhere.”
“You had your niece on the spot. Shame about Dana’s career.”
“She successfully framed you and bought us time. Besides, we have plenty more like her. But you, you should have kept quiet after we took your partner,” Rothmann went on. “We had no specific interest in you.”
“I love Karen. She’s carrying our son.”
He blinked slowly. “That was what Lister said would be your weakness.”
A cold finger ran up my spine. “Lister?”
“You didn’t think he was just a pawn, did you?
“Gordy Lister is involved in all our plans. He masterminded the kidnappings, both Karen Oaten’s and your own.”
W
e really had blown it when we let Lister go, but I couldn’t do anything about that now. “What about Joe Greenbaum?”
“He had long been a thorn in the sides of companies such as ours.”
“Lister set the bomb?”
He looked at Gwen again. “No, he did not.”
I let my head drop. The sick fuck. “You used her?”
“Yes, we did. And her brother. They have turned out to be excellent operatives. The Jew Greenbaum’s work has been atomized for good.”
I felt the blood boil in my veins. The bastard was wrong there, but I wasn’t going to tell him about the data stick yet. I wanted to get off the boat alive and it might be a useful bargaining tool.
I looked at Marion Gilbert. “The double weapons for each victim referred to you and your bother?”
“And to the…the Führer and the professor, and power of two. They were an inspiration to me for a long time…but not…not anymore.” She stepped closer and I realized she had reached the end of her tether—her eyes were wild and her hands were shaking. She raised the skewer high.
“No!” Rothmann screamed. “Barbarossa! Barbarossa!”
This time, the instant I heard the name, I felt my knees give way. My mind filled with clashing images and sounds, but beneath them I felt a strong will that I could no longer resist. I knew it was foreign to me, I knew it was evil, but I was completely in thrall to it. The clamor ceased and I opened my eyes, ready to defend the man who had spoken the word.
Gwen had advanced on Marion Gilbert, who was bleeding from her right hand. Marion slashed at the younger woman. That was when I realized Gwen was holding a combat knife very similar to the one I had acquired during my escape from the camp.
“Now, my Führer?” she asked, her eyes bright.
Rothmann saw that I had moved closer to them. “So, Wells… Are you ready to do your duty?”
I was looking down on myself, as if I were a spirit floating free. I had no control over the self that was in my body.
“Yes, my Führer,” I heard myself say.
“It seems the process advanced further into your brain than we thought.”
Maps of Hell Page 33
