The Chaos Loop

by Peter Lerangis

  “What did he say?” Corey asked.

  Leila swallowed hard. “‘Be careful, piglet. I have my eyes on you. We will meet again inside.’”

  18

  Corey’s knees were shaking as he and Leila entered the Bürgerbräukeller.

  “I. Can’t. Even,” Leila said.

  “Me neither,” Corey replied.

  “That was Adolf Hitler,” Leila said. “He put a hand on you. What was going through your mind?”

  “You want to know the truth? I wanted a selfie. Because no one will ever believe me.”

  “That is revolting!”

  “I know.”

  As Hitler descended the staircase, a roar went up from the crowd. The room had been crammed with maybe twice as many tables as usual, and every seat was already taken. In the balconies, people rushed to the railings to see. An aisle had been left down the middle of the main floor, and as Hitler marched to the stage, everyone stood. Someone cried “Heil, Hitler!” and the room erupted into a deafening chant as the Führer mounted the two steps to the stage.

  Corey looked at the clock on the wall. Georg had synchronized it to match the bomb’s clock to the second.

  8:02.

  Twenty-three minutes before the explosion.

  “Remember,” Leila said, “at eight fifteen we leave this dump.”

  The Nazi officers sat in chairs behind Hitler. He stood at the podium, just a foot or so from the pillar. Maria had managed to get the staff of the Bürgerbräukeller to move the tables away from the bomb. The customers were Nazi sympathizers, but the point was to get Hitler, not cause collateral damage.

  But now the people in front, eager to be closer, were sliding their tables toward Hitler’s podium. Maria rushed over, trying to smile and sweet-talk the people into moving back. The last thing she wanted to do was arouse suspicion. “She’s telling them they’re too close to the Führer and he needs breathing room,” Leila said to Corey.

  “She’s putting herself in danger,” Corey said.

  Hitler watched the commotion with mild impatience. He took the opportunity to snap a vigorous Nazi salute to the crowd, which everyone returned.

  Corey scanned the faces. The most chilling thing to him was that they didn’t look angry or evil or brainwashed. They looked happy. If you’d shown Corey a photo of their faces, minus the salute, he would have thought they were watching Olympic skating or a dog show. “This is making me sick,” he said.

  The moment Hitler began, the crowd dropped back into their seats and fell instantly quiet, like someone had turned a switch. Hitler began to speak in a forceful but low voice. The people hung on every word, leaving entire meals untouched on their plates. Even the waiters, who had been scurrying from table to table, stood transfixed. “What’s he saying?” Corey asked.

  “‘The German people are emerging from the dark into a new . . . glory’?” Leila said. “Stuff like that, over and over.”

  Hitler was picking up steam now, gesturing with his hands, pounding his fists.

  “Okay, now he’s saying that true Germans have been robbed,” Leila continued. “By a small group of greedy invaders that go by the name . . .”

  She didn’t finish, but Corey knew. The last word in Hitler’s sentence was “Juden!”

  The people stood again. Now their faces were twisted and resentful. They were cupping their hands to their mouths, shouting back to the stage. Hitler tipped his chin up, looking from side to side with hands on hips.

  The clock said 8:11.

  As a chant of Sieg heil broke out, people began rushing forward. Hitler continued, his voice rising in pitch and volume until he was practically shouting. His movements became jerky and odd, his greasy hair flying across his forehead, his eyes bugging out. Half of Corey wanted to burst out giggling, but the horrified half kept him quiet.

  More than anything else, he wanted an image of this. If his mission was going to be successful, he wanted a reminder of what he’d seen.

  With all eyes focused on the stage, Corey angled his body away from facing Leila. He pulled his phone from his pocket. It was still connected to the cord, but he left it that way. He had to do this fast.

  Making sure no one was looking, he cupped the phone in both hands, hiding it from sight, his thumbs poised over the screen. He lifted his hands to his face as if he were about to sneeze, making sure the lens was unobstructed. The white cord hung down, but it didn’t matter. He could have stripped naked and danced, and no one would have noticed. As he got the image of Hitler on his screen, he snapped a couple of photos. Quickly he scrolled through them to make sure they were okay. Picture one was too dark, but pictures two, three, and four were amazing. The fifth photo was the image of the bomb he’d saved from his web search when he was in the present, so he shut the phone off and slipped it back into his pocket.

  There was a commotion in the front now. People had left their tables and were squeezing into the space Maria had cleared, the buffer zone between the tables and Hitler. They were staring adoringly at the Führer, directly in front of the podium. Maria was trying to herd them away, back to their tables. She was whispering, trying not to disturb the speech. Hitler didn’t even seem to notice her. But his officers, sitting behind him, were scowling.

  “She’s trying to save those people’s lives,” Corey said.

  “Why is she doing that?” Leila asked. “They’re Nazis!”

  “We have to help her.”

  “We have to leave in four minutes!”

  “Maria is right in front of the bomb, Leila!”

  Together they raced up the aisle toward the stage. “Maria, pass auf!” Leila yelled.

  A few people turned, looking annoyed. But most looked to be in a state of hypnosis. Hitler looked over their heads, shouting and gesticulating as if nothing unusual were happening.

  The clock said 8:14.

  Eleven more minutes.

  Corey and Leila grabbed Maria’s arms and pulled her away from the podium. Onstage, Bruno’s eyes pinned Corey. The young officer slipped away from his seat, circled back into the shadows, and then ran toward Corey. Grabbing him by the arm, he pulled him away from the stage. He shoved Corey down a path between the tables, in the direction of the kitchen.

  “Get your hands off him!” Leila shouted.

  She caught up with them at the restaurant wall, not far from the kitchen. Grabbing the young Nazi’s arm, she yanked him away.

  As Bruno lurched back, caught off guard, his fingers caught on something sticking out of Corey’s pocket.

  The white charger cord.

  With a sinking stomach, Corey realized he hadn’t shoved the cord fully in after taking the photos. And because the wire was still attached to his phone, Bruno’s grab had pulled it halfway out of his pocket.

  “Oh. Sorry. That’s mine,” Corey said.

  Bruno locked eyes with Corey and sneered. “We meet again, American dog,” he said in a heavy accent, grabbing the phone. “And what is this? A weapon?”

  “You speak English?” Corey said.

  “No-o-o-o!” Leila cried out.

  “Sssshhhhh!” shushed a well-dressed couple at a nearby table.

  Hitler bellowed on, reaching some kind of climax. Now people were jumping to their feet. But Bruno was transfixed by the smartphone. He tapped it, nearly shrieking as it lit up. Corey’s screen showed a ticking analog clock, set to New York time. Bruno’s eyes followed the white cord right into Corey’s pocket. “Lieber Gott . . .” he murmured. “Ist es möglich?”

  “It’s a long story,” Corey said, trying to grab the phone back. “Look, it’s a phone, that’s all.”

  His thumb grazed the Home button, which sensed his print and caused the start screen to vanish. In its place was the last image Corey had seen before putting the phone away.

  The screen grab of Georg’s bomb.

  “Eine Bombe?” Bruno muttered. “Eine kleine Bombe?”

  “He thinks your phone is a small bomb,” Leila said. “Or a detonator, or
something.”

  Corey grabbed the phone back. “It’s just a picture. Look. You want to see more?”

  But Bruno was sprinting back toward the stage. “Es ist eine Bombe!”

  The other officers leaped to their feet. Now Hitler had noticed. His face went pale, his eyes trained on Corey like a death ray.

  Now Maria was rushing toward them. “Tell them it’s harmless!” Corey said.

  “Nein! Es ist keine Bombe!” Maria shouted back toward the stage. “Es ist harmlos!”

  Bruno leaped toward Hitler, shielding him with his body. Behind Corey, the room was slow to react. But as the word Bombe made its way through the crowd, people began stampeding for the stairway.

  “Stay!” Corey said to the group of Nazis, holding out his phone. “It’s a telephone. Telephone! It has pictures!”

  Corey felt a firm hand on his shoulder. “Corey, come on! This thing is going to blow!”

  Instead of heading for the staircase, Leila pulled Corey toward the door at the back of the stage area. With Maria, they sped down the hallway toward the kitchen. From behind them came the tromping footsteps of other restaurant workers.

  As they reached the kitchen, a team of dishwashers looked at them as if they’d lost their minds.

  “Corey, we have to get out of here, now!” Leila said.

  Corey yanked the backpack off his shoulders and reached inside, just as the clock clicked to 8:25.

  19

  Normally Corey liked snow. But he preferred it fluffy and soft and under his feet. Not wet and icy and in his face.

  “What just happened?” Leila asked. “Corey, did the bomb go off?”

  “Pkaacchh.” Corey spat out the snow and sat up, in a mound of slush on the side of an icy river. He was happy to hear Leila’s voice, because he couldn’t see much. His head felt swollen, making his vision blurry. Above them the sky was gray and greasy-looking, tinged orange by streetlights barely visible though the fog. The temperature had dropped about twenty degrees. The night was quiet save for the laughing of distant voices, the putter of a car engine, and the clopping of horse hooves. “I don’t know. I guess so. It feels like we got blown out of the restaurant.”

  Leila stood. “Through the roof of the kitchen and clear across town to the Isar River? Where five inches of snow fell in a sudden furious blizzard that we didn’t notice?”

  “Yeah, good point.” Corey blinked and took a few deep wintry breaths. He could see more now. They were on the broad bank of a broad river. To their left, at the base of an ornate stone bridge, a homeless man slept curled in a blanket. Each stanchion of the bridge held a lamp with a flaming torch. A soot-faced man in a dark suit was adjusting one of the flames, but he paused to tip his hat to another man crossing the bridge on horseback. “This doesn’t feel like nineteen thirty-nine,” Corey said. “I think we hopped backward.”

  “Duh,” Leila reacted. “But how?”

  “I reached into my backpack, Leila,” Corey said. “We have artifacts in there. I wanted to get us out—”

  “But we were in the kitchen!” Leila protested. “We were far enough from the bomb. We wouldn’t have been affected.”

  “You wanted to stay?” Corey said.

  “Yes! Now we don’t know what happened! Did Hitler escape in time? Did we get him?”

  Corey groaned with the effort of standing up. The last few hours were running in his mind, in all their nightmarish detail. “I messed up. We failed, Leila. Hitler survived.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “He and his people were racing out of the place way before the bomb was set to blow,” Corey said. “They were gone by the time we were at the door at the back of that stage.”

  “But the bomb could have collapsed the place—”

  “In all those archival photos I saw back in New York? The only damaged part of the restaurant was under that balcony, remember? He was far from that. And it’s all my fault. Because I was too careless about my phone. It would have worked if that guy hadn’t seen my cord.”

  “Yeah, but we changed history, remember? We changed the timing of the bomb—”

  “I changed history.”

  “Right. So anything could have happened.” Leila stood up, too. She exhaled a white puff of breath and shuddered. “I’m dying to know.”

  Corey was already checking his phone. “No cell service.”

  “What a surprise.”

  In the fog it was hard to see very far. On the other side of the bridge, torchlit paths wandered through what looked like a park setting. On this side, people were streaming out of a grand brightly lit building ornamented with statues of cherubs and bare-chested Greek gods. The locals strolled arm in arm down a set of stairs, the women in furs and the men in top hats and long wool coats. Some were met at the curb by horse-drawn coaches and some by drivers in shining old-style cars.

  “Model Ts . . .” Corey murmured.

  Leila drew her arms around herself and shivered. “Where are we?”

  Corey reached into his pack and pulled out the framed painting by Leila’s great-uncle. “I must have touched this.”

  Leila’s face brightened. “Vienna, nineteen oh eight,” she said. “This is where I wanted us to go in the first place. It’s where Opa’s dad went to school—”

  “The Vienna Academy of Fine Arts,” Corey said.

  “Exactly!”

  From the street came a loud voice attempting some kind of song. “We-e-e-r hat so viel Pinke-Pinke . . . we-e-e-er hat so viel Ge-e-e-eld?”

  Two men were staggering off the sidewalk toward Corey and Leila. The snow was throwing them both off-balance, so they put their arms around each other’s shoulders for support. One of them, a broad, blue-eyed young guy with a cleft chin and bright red hair, held up a half-empty bottle and shouted “Guten Morgen!” This made the other guy burst out laughing. He was thin, dark, and dressed in black, with straight black hair that jutted out the sides of a knit cap.

  “What’s so funny?” Corey said.

  “He said ‘Good morning,’” Leila replied.

  “And it’s night,” Corey said dryly. “I get it. Hilarious.”

  The guys approached them on rubbery legs. “Geld für Überlebenskünstler?” asked Blue Eyes. “Oder vielleicht ein Kuss?”

  “Hau ab!” Leila said.

  She and Corey backed away. “He asked if we have money for a starving artist. Or maybe a kiss. I told him to get lost.”

  “Ew,” Corey said. “He doesn’t look starving anyway. He looks drunk.”

  But Corey’s eyes were trained on Mr. Black Hair. He was thin and sensitive looking, with high cheekbones, piercing eyes, and a mole on his left cheek. Corey tried to imagine him with the hat off, thirty years older and heavier. He pictured bags under the guy’s eyes and a brown Nazi suit. “Leila,” he whispered, “do you think that’s him—the black-haired guy?”

  “Who?”

  “The Führer who must not be named!” Corey said. “He’d be about eighteen now.”

  “No way. This guy is too handsome.”

  The big guy let out a huge belch. He wasn’t looking at them anymore, but farther up the riverbank. Leila’s retort seemed to make him lose interest. Now he began dragging Black Hair toward the man who was sleeping by the bridge abutment. “Aaahh. Hahahaha!” he cackled. “Ein schlafender Hund.”

  “He just called that guy a sleeping dog,” Leila whispered.

  “Wow. Super clever insults,” Corey said. “He could go into politics.”

  The two guys stumbled toward the unsuspecting man. Blue Eyes seemed to find him hilarious. “Arf, arf!” he barked. “Wachen Sie auf! Schon Zeit zu arbeiten, Sie Faulpelz!”

  “‘Wake up! It’s time to go to work, lazybones!’” Leila translated.

  “Jackass bully,” Corey murmured.

  The homeless guy didn’t answer and didn’t move. “He looks dead,” Leila said.

  “Arf, arf!” Blue Eyes repeated.

  Black Hair began pulling him away.
“Otto, komm.”

  Instead the red-haired man, Otto, yanked himself free. With a grunt, he stepped toward the homeless man and delivered a sharp soccer kick to his side.

  The guy cried out in agony. He struggled to his feet. Even tangled in his thick, tattered blanket, he was obviously small and skinny and no match for Otto.

  His reaction made the bully howl with laughter. “Tanzen Sie, Teufel, tanzen Sie!” he yelled, as Black Hair tried again to pull him away.

  “‘Dance, devil, dance,’” Leila translated.

  “He can’t do this,” Corey said. “Come on, there’s strength in numbers.”

  They both rushed through the snow toward the mounting fight. The old painting from Leila’s great-grandfather slipped out of Corey’s hand into the snow. But he couldn’t think about that now.

  The homeless guy’s face caught the light. It was bony and hollow and sad, lined with soot. His eyes were wide with fear, his nose small and delicate. He muttered something that Corey couldn’t hear, but it made Otto scream with rage.

  The big guy lurched toward the poor man, who leaped aside with the grace of someone who had not been drinking. He grabbed a rock from the ground and held it aloft.

  “Otto!” screamed Black Hair, trying once again to pull his bigger friend away.

  Otto, still a little unsteady on his legs, looked down at his feet as if he’d stepped on something.

  He had—a branch. He dug it out of the snow and held it with two arms like a baseball bat. Otto and the homeless man circled each other warily, each lurching forward to threaten the other. Then, with a roar, Otto took a vicious swing at the homeless guy.

  At the last moment the ragged man jumped away. The swing missed, and it spun Otto around. Planting his feet, the poor man reared back to throw the rock at Otto. But it was too heavy and the effort made him lose his balance. As he plopped down into the snow, the rock arced through the air and smacked Otto in the ankle.

  Otto grimaced, gritting his teeth with pain. With a deep, angry cry, he charged forward. Steadying himself by the helpless man, he raised the branch high and brought it down toward the man’s head.