The defiant declaration was punctuated by an artillery blast that fractured a nearby wall of the Chancellery. Russian troops were swarming into the garden. Several of the boys, seeing their last hope lost, threw down their empty weapons to surrender. As they marched toward the enemy with their hands behind their heads, Axmann shot two of them in the back. Terrified, the rest ran away. Axmann leveled his gun, but there were too many.
“Leave them!” Petro shouted above the din of the dying city.
Axmann looked at him, his eyes brimming with fear and confusion. He didn’t know how many bullets remained . . . and he must leave one. “We must bury this!” he cried, shaking a corner of the canvas. The sound of Russians shouting across the garden drew his attention. He sprang to his feet in a posture of indecision.
“I know just the place,” said Petro. “Leave it with me. Run!”
“But. It is my job!”
“No one will know,” said Petro, reassuringly. “Leave it with me. Go. Save yourself.”
This was all the encouragement Axmann needed. He bolted westward through the rubble toward his only hope of rescue, the Anglo-Americans.
Calmly, Petro tucked himself into a shell hole, and pulled the canvas over him.
That night, after the shooting died down, he climbed out of the hole and changed into the medic fatigues he’d kept in his rucksack. Carefully, he folded the canvas about its contents, slung them over his shoulder, and made his way along ragged paths of rubble where streets used to be, toward the Brandenburg Gate.
The Americans were glad to see him. Everyone was looting, seizing whatever came to hand, small mementos of the struggle that had cost them so much. Only one soldier, a young lieutenant from Des Moines, had asked him what was in the sack, and that only out of curiosity.
“Hitler,” said Petro with a smile. “I’m going to take him home. One day I will show him to my sons.”
The soldier laughed.
There were many conflicting reports of what happened to the remains of Adolph and Eva Hitler. The captured Germans had one story, the Russians another. Years later they claimed to have matched the Fuhrer’s dental records with a skull they’d found, but somehow the skull went missing. There are those today who rest comfortably in the belief that the mystery is solved.
But only Petro knew the truth and, apart from his sons, he told no one. Only that he had put evil in a box that he kept under his bed. The lesson of the remains had been lost on his sons, had failed to save them. But who knew what horrors had been averted, how many other lives had been saved when Petro took history in his hands, and stored it in a box beneath his bed?
He put the aspirin bottle on the shelf, unopened. He had lived with the devil’s needles of his aches and pains so long they had become familiar companions, reminders that he was alive. One violence had been put to rest. There were many others out there, roaming the world, devouring the innocent; others would have to find the boxes to contain them.
A breeze wafted through the window in the manner to which breezes everywhere hold the exclusive patent. The recipe of this particular zephyr was scented with equal parts acacia, peach, lemon and bougainvillea with sprinklings of nutmeg, sea salt, and cinnamon. The overall effect, which would have otherwise been pleasant, was disturbed by a pungent suggestion of smoldering Hitler. Had it been a wine, the connoisseur would have said the bouquet, while possessing a distinctive “nose,” was irredeemably corked.
When he opened his eyes, Rat was staring directly at the reflection of his soul in the mirror on the opposite wall. Like him, its expression was introspective, self-searching. Like him, it seemed to have passed a disquiet night. Unlike him, it was sewing or knitting something. Its claw-like fingers deftly poked, wove, and pulled in an exercise that seemed well-practiced, though there was no thread or yarn in evidence.
Cummings entered, preceded only momentarily by the ornate silver platter upon which rested the morning’s repast. He had not time to give voice to the greeting he had rehearsed before the Resident spoke.
“Violence.”
“I beg your pardon, sir?” said Cummings who, while possessed of a ready response to most conventional greetings, had none for the noun under review.
“Violence,” said Rat. “That’s what last night’s gig was about.”
“Disturbing, sir?” queried the butler, decanting an aromatic tea of his own devising into an earthenware cup.
Rat took a sip of the tea without really noticing, and nodded. “Yes. Putting aside our daily verbal joust for the time being, it was disturbing. Damn disturbing.”
Cummings cocked an eyebrow as he buttered the toast, upon which task the bulk of his attention seemed focused with the intensity of one of your Renaissance geniuses laying down the gesso for a forthcoming masterpiece. Rat interpreted the gesture, correctly, as an invitation to further comment.
“I am a violent man.”
“Indeed, sir?”
Rat nodded again. “You have heard the phrase ‘turn the other cheek’?”
Cummings cleared his throat in an unpretentious manner. “I trust you will not think me immodest, sir, if I aver that, in my formative years at Prigmither’s School for Young Men of Promise, I was twice honored to receive the Scripture Knowledge prize.”
“Your answer, then, is ‘yes’?”
Cummings inclined the cerebral orb. “It is deeply engraved upon the tablet of my mind, sir. Yes.”
“I’ll bet my grannie could quote you and all your prepubescent cronies at Prigmither’s clean under the table; Old Testament, New Testament, and their accompanying Pseudepigrapha.” Cummings inhaled as if to protest—even a butler has his pride—but Rat held up the forestalling hand. “All of which is beside the point, which is this: I grew up in the ’hood where that particular proverb has a different spin, something more like ‘give ’em one up-side the head.’ ‘Do unto others before they do it unto you.’ Understand?”
“The gist does not elude me, sir.”
Rat studied his hands. “If anybody got in my way, I’d cap ’em.” He formed a pistol with his fingers. “Wouldn’t think nothin’ of it.” He lapsed into the vernacular of his youth. “I was a bad . . .” He used a term with which Cummings was not familiar, but that seemed to imply an incestuous relationship. “Cut me off in traffic,” Rat continued, pulling the imaginary trigger, “look too long at my woman,” he pulled it again, “sit on the hood of my car . . .” He pulled it again.
Cummings was aghast. “You took umbrage easily, sir.”
The smile with which Rat replied had an edge to it but was, at the same time, distant. “That first day I walked outta the water and saw you standin’ there so big and bald and . . . white, you know what I was thinkin’?”
Cummings didn’t want to know. “No, sir. May I pour you some more tea?” He slapped at the pockets of his waistcoat. “I seem to have mislaid the sugar tongs, perhaps I should go get them.”
Rat pointed the business end of his finger at Cummings and cocked his thumb. “I was thinkin’, ‘If I had my Glock I’d put some serious holes in that spook,’ is what I was thinkin’.”
Cummings swallowed hard. “You’d have shot me, sir?”
“In a heartbeat.”
“Why?”
“That’s the thing, ain’t it?” said Rat, blowing on the end of his finger and holstering it behind the rope cord of his flannel PJs. “That was my reaction to anything I didn’t understand.”
“You are frightened by such things, sir?” Cummings ventured.
“Frightened!” Rat responded, with a mouthful of the aforementioned umbrage.
“Violent reaction, of the kind you describe, sir, is a reaction to fear, generally the result of ignorance.”
“You callin’ me ignorant?”
“Good heavens, yes, sir! At least, that was the case at our first meeting. Allow me to clarify that I am referring to ignorance, not stupidity. No doubt you made the most of what little knowledge you had.” Cummings leaned back his prodig
ious head with a recollective smile and began to twiddle his white-gloved thumbs. “The depth of your ignorance, at the time, was—”
“Never mind,” said Rat.
“—profound,” Cummings concluded, the word already having formed in his mouth with nowhere to go.
Rat thoughtfully foodled his breakfast of beans on toast with the end of his fork. “You’re right.”
If Cummings applauded this revelation, his celebrations were inward and in no way manifested themselves upon his exterior person.
“I’ve hurt people,” Rat said, still foodling. He looked up at the reflection of his soul, which was still sewing or knitting with great concentration. “I don’t deserve even that for a soul.”
Cummings said nothing.
“You may correct me, Cummings.”
“I would not presume to do so, sir. Besides, you will recall, I am unable to see what you see.”
Unpleasant memories flooded Rat’s mind; faces and voices of all the people he’d used, abused, and misused in word or deed throughout his long and ruthless climb to his place at the top of a ruthless profession. “Everyone’s worth something, aren’t they, Cummings? I mean, they all have feelings, same as me. Dreams, and hopes, and heartaches . . .”
“Yes, sir.”
“I mean, people are just people. We make mistakes. We do stupid things. We all carry around holes inside, holes so deep you can yell prayers into ’em, and never hear the echo. Holes where we put our pain and insecurities. And if the echoes do come back, we drown ’em out with foolishness. The Monday night line-up on CBS is a perfect example. Or video games, diet fads . . . rap music. Conversation that dances on the surface of things like a water bug, but never jumps in for a dip, or even a good, long drink.”
“The metaphors, though somewhat jumbled, are, if I comprehend them correctly, not without merit, sir.”
Rat lapsed into a long, pensive, and troubled rumination. “Who am I, Cummings?”
“The answer to that, sir, is one none other can provide but he who asks.”
“That’s just it,” said Rat, roused by a realization. “Nobody asks anymore! I sure didn’t. I made myself what I wanted people to think I am. I even started to believe it!” He lay on the ground, in a bed of living grass, and Cummings put a cloak over his shoulders and a helmet under his head. The room drifted away. They were on a small island of peat in a vast, intractable bog surrounded by a deep and threatening forest, one in which danger resided, palpable and earnest. Night was closing in. Smoke from a large fire in the center of the encampment rose to the height of a man’s head, and hung there in thick and acrid clouds, in which could be traced the faces of the dead among whose bones the 19th Legion made camp. The air was heavy with the smell of death and hopelessness. His muscles ached.
“I’ve turned myself into a two-dimensional caricature,” Rat said somnolently. “A cartoon. But it wasn’t me.” He was rambling. “I never meant to hurt anyone. I don’t want to be on Santa’s bad side. I want people to like me. I want . . .”
“To be good, sir?” said Cummings, his voice becoming indistinct and dreamlike.
“It’s not an easy thing, is it?”
“No, sir. To do right requires far more character than to do wrong, though the good among us are often the recipients of contempt.”
Rat struggled to retain a hold on the thread of thought. “It’s because they remind us of our weakness.”
“An observation worthy of contemplation, sir,” said Cummings. “If there is nothing else?”
Rat shook his head, which seemed as large and liquid-filled as an overfilled water balloon, and Cummings drifted out of sight and out of mind. As his eyes closed, Rat saw himself reflected in a sword stuck in the ground beside his helmet. His name was Lucius Gracchus, son of Piso, a freed slave of Cappadocia. He was about to embark on a journey the likes of which no other soldier before him had known, to a place that reason dictates cannot exist. The place of . . .
Goldspin
The thirteenth night
That night the army had been ambushed by a savage coalition of Germanic tribes—the Chauci, the Bructeri and the Cherusci—and driven into the forest of Teutoburgium and its notorious bogs. It was there, six years earlier, that Varus and his legions had been similarly routed and there, among the bones of those dead comrades, that Caecina, their general, had required them to set up camp. Of the glorious legion, fewer than half had survived. Of those, only a thousand were fit to fight. There were no places to set up tents. The hasty construction of earthwork fortifications after a day’s furious fighting had left the men exhausted, and they slept where they fell upon sodden ground. Leeches feasted upon their blood, but they were too tired to salt them. Too tired, even, to dream.
Caecina strode among the troops, threatening, cajoling, reminding them of the glory that would be theirs when they—though so vastly outnumbered—would, in tomorrow’s battle, by stratagem, guile, tactics and brute strength, yet put the barbarian tribes of Arminius and Inguiomerus to rout.
His voice, as he threaded his way among the long-dead, the newly-dead and the dying, was strong. Unwavering. Not admitting of the possibility of defeat. “Remember what is dear to you,” he said. “We do not fight for ourselves, but for those we love. For our gods, our homes, our wives, our children.”
These words echoed in their heads as sleep, at long last, overtook them.
Lucius, for all his exhaustion, could not sleep. His brain refused to leave off its circular sorting through the confusion of a world so violently inverted. Their mission had been simple: subdue the rebellious tribes on the other side of the Rhine. They had done it before, countless times. A show of brute force—scorched earth tactics, the leveling of a few villages and the methodical slaughter of their inhabitants—had never failed to put the poorly-organized tribes to flight, tribes that warred with one another as violently as with Rome, and with very little provocation. Divide and conquer. Pit one group against another; a policy of conquest that had subdued the world.
What had gone wrong? How had Arminius and Inguiomerus so readily overcome their bitter hatred of one another to forge a union of their tribes? They were out there now, encircling them in the forests, on high ground. Dry. With wood that burned rather than smoldered. Food that wasn’t covered with the blood of fallen comrades. They celebrated their day’s victory with bestial noise, filling the valleys under the hills with hideous laughter and mocking songs, with vulgar and savage shouting that summoned the wrath of their primitive gods and rattled the pillars of night with thoughts of foreboding.
Lucius’s blood ran cold. He could feel it congeal in his veins, but he could not sleep.
All around him, the groans of the dying, those for whom there was no hope, wove feeble flags of surrender on eternity’s hem. But there could be no surrender. Evidence of the barbarians’ savagery lay all around them, in the remains of Varus’s once-mighty army.
A kind of sleep, one in which nightmares were more real than waking, must eventually have fallen upon him, for something woke him in the middle of the night. The darkness was heavy with silence and he was surrounded by fog. The barbarians must have succumbed to the wine of their revelry. The dying around him must have died. Stillness lay so thick that, as he got to his feet, taking his sword in hand, he felt he almost had to hack a path through its grasping tendrils that sucked at his sandals.
The ground was clear and grassy. Where the bodies of the dead had been, there was nothing but the small, resilient flowers and tender shoots of early spring. Of his comrades in arms, there was no sign. Had he slept through the battle? Had he been mistaken for one of the dead and left unmolested? The notion was at once heartening and chilling. He was alive. But he’d been abandoned. He softly spoke the name of the comrade who had been nearest him when he’d lain down.
“Valerius?”
There was no reply. He stooped and ran his hands over the earth. It was dry, apart from the gathering dew. Firm. He was no longer in the bog.
He began walking in small circles, expecting to find . . . something. But of the vaunted 19th Legion, there was no trace. There were no dead. There were no arms discarded in flight. Nothing. The circle of his search became a spiral, expanding slowly outward. Curious. The ground swelled upward slightly. How could this be? At the last light of day he had been in a low-lying morass, a waste of tiny tufted islands in a stagnant sea of decay.
Nature laced the air with its subtle perfume. He breathed deeply. Perhaps he was dead. No. His muscles still groaned after the previous days’ grisly exercise, the dried blood on his wounds tugged at the hairs on his arms and legs like the stings of a wasp. Surely death would remove all pain. But who knew? Who had crossed the Styx and returned to tell what manner of existence death was, or what creatures inhabited its uncharted regions?
For a moment the mists cleared and there, not ten feet away, was the eagle, symbol of the Invincible Legion, atop its pole, stuck in the ground. This was a terrible sign. No survivor would have left it behind. No Roman soldier, however desperately wounded, would have allowed it to touch the earth, a sign of defeat; rather they would have stuck it in their belly and fallen under it. But no hands clung to it. Nor would the barbarians have left it standing, untouched. They would have borne it away amidst a chorus of shouts as a sign of their own victory. The situation beggared every possibility.
Lucius thrust his sword, a spatha of Spanish iron, into its scabbard, the better to hold the standard as he plucked it from the ground. He shook the earth from it and, holding it before him with both hands gripped to his chest as was the custom with standard-bearers, began to walk slowly away from the scene of his waking, up the slopes of a low hill. Any moment now, he would stumble into an enemy encampment. The barbarians would rise from their drunken stupor, seize him and slay him, but he would not dishonor the eagle. He would hold it ’til his dying breath; the symbol of all he cherished.
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