The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  “No, watch,” Theda told her.

  Scrolling by itself, the screen brought up a lot of fireworks and followed them with the words:

  * * * *

  “For to forgive is to condone,

  To condone is to approve,

  To approve is to become accessory to the fact.

  But the guilt of this crime beyond words

  Can never be approved,

  Never be forgiven,

  Lest the world forget.”

  * * * *

  Computerized transfers of old 1940s footage of one of the death camps smoothly replaced the words on the screen.

  “Oh, God!” said Keiko. “Here, take it back a step. I want to see what happens if you choose the one about contributing to the World Peace Fund.”

  “You won’t like it.”

  “I don’t like this.”

  Theda worked the program back to the multiple choice, and positioned the cursor at “B.” The screen flashed into a cartoon of a triumphantly leering Hitler between two swastika banners, followed by the explanation:

  “Negative.

  The World Peace Fund is associated with groups such as Quality of Mercy, which is working toward a statute of limitations on crimes against humanity, and Amnesty Universal, which promotes and applauds the creation of ‘sanctuary’ territories.”

  “Oh ... my ... God!” Keiko repeated. Nonjoiner though she was, she had half considered joining Amnesty Universal herself. It was only about twenty years old. The last Original Nazi had been arrested, tried, and convicted at the beginning of the 2020s.

  “I told you you wouldn’t like it,” Theda said cheerfully. “Who would like being told like that they’d made a mistake, even out of curiosity? Do I smell dinner?”

  “Over there. Better get your own. If I touch anything right now, I’ll start breaking it or throwing it or something.”

  The sorority woman regarded her soberly for a moment, then asked, “What about your own dinner, Kokyo?”

  “I’m not hungry anymore. Eat yours before it gets cold.”

  Theda watched her a few seconds longer before sliding out of the chair and going over to the dinner tray. Keiko stood for a little bit, staring at the screen and grinding her right hand over her left fist, feeling like she was made out of broken bottles and had just had a bad blow to the stomach and if she wasn’t very, very careful, she might fall apart. She kept grinding her hands together, left hand fisted, then right hand fisted, then fingers twisting each other until they felt ready to snap, and she didn’t even care if they did.

  There was the sighing snap of a beverage tab being pulled off. Theda came up, touched Keiko’s shoulder, said, “Here,” and put the can of Leinenkugel into her hand. Keiko drank about half of it down before surfacing for air. Ordinarily, she could hardly stand beer.

  “Now,” the sorority woman went on, “get it out of your system. Think of me as your mental hygienist. What seems to be the trouble here?”

  Keiko set the can of beer down on the computer desk with exaggerated care. “The trouble ‘seems to be’ that the Nazi war criminals are all dead!”

  “We can’t be entirely sure,” Theda said reasoningly. “If someone was a teenager in the 1940s—”

  “They’d be almost a hundred and twenty years old today! Lord and God! You mean to tell me they’re still a threat to the world? And what about their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren? That’s really what this shit is all about, isn’t it? ‘Unto the whatevereth generation’?” Her fist jerked out, stopped just short of the keyboard, smashed into her thigh instead. She grabbed her wrist, bent over with elbows on legs—the right elbow digging viciously into the brand new bruise—put her chin down hard on her hands, started repeating, “Bushido, bushido, bushido,” to herself, over and over, and tried to slow her breath.

  After another few minutes, Theda said very gently, “Now. What is it really about?”

  Keiko took two more deep breaths. “All right. I’ll tell you. Two of my grandparents survived Nagasaki. One of the great-grandmothers, the one who was already over here, got put into one of the old United States concentration camps. Sure, they weren’t death camps like the Nazi ones, but what if they had been? How many good, free, non-Butterscotch U.S. of A. citizens would have griped about it? Dammit, to the Allies in the Last Great War, my people were the untermenschen! Look, I’m not complaining about that. Even if between Nagasaki and the concentration camp experience, it kept my family from interbreeding with any round-eyes until ... Oh, Lord, the branch that produced me is so doggone inbred, you wouldn’t believe it. But that part’s okay. I can handle it. It’s just what always happened, what always had to happen in the big wars, what still happens in every heavy state of riot. You’ve got to propagandize your own side into believing the other side is subhuman, so you’ll be able to kill them. Us Nihonjin must have propagandized ourselves into thinking the round-eyes were subhuman, too. Every side gets to the point where it’d be only too happy to commit genocide on the enemy—civilians, noncombatants, peacedoves, clergy, babies, and all! ‘Blessed is the one who dashes your little ones against the stones ...’ We still have that in some of our prayerbooks, for the love of God! Because people don’t even think of it as genocide anymore, just as pest extermination. What the hell is war itself, if not the ultimate ‘crime against humanity’? All right, I can handle all that.

  “It’s what happened after the Last Great War,” she went on, taking a shaky breath. “And went on happening, and on, and on, and on, and, my God, it’s still happening! Americans who keep hunting down senile old Nazis—even when there aren’t any more senile old Nazis left to hunt down!—as a way to cover up what the Allies did to the little yellow Japs! Why didn’t the Nihonjin ever get a chance to put the American leaders and military on war crimes against humanity trial, will you please tell me that? Because we only had a couple hundred thousand or so casualties, not counting the U.S. concentration camps that only ruined lives, and you’ve got to have at least five or six million actually dead or it doesn’t count, and to heck with all this fine talk about the value of every single individual life? Or was it because the little Butterscotch untermenschen were on the losing side? Because what happened to the losers didn’t matter so much? Because the losers were still untermenschen, even after the war?”

  “Keiko,” said Theda, “I’m sorry.” And sounded like she meant it. “If there’s any way ... I mean, if we can petition for a tribunal of justice or—”

  “Thanks! I’ve had it up to here with ‘justice.’” Feeling a little calmer after her tirade, less from relief than from pure, shaky exhaustion, Keiko reached back and put her hand over Theda’s. “What the heck kind of tribunal would we petition for? Heck, I’m American. I was born here, my parents were born here, two of my grandparents were born here and the great-grandmother they put in the concentration camp was born here. I’m as American as you are, so where’d I stand in that tribunal, huh? With the accusers or the defendants? If I’d been Vanilla or Chocolate or Cinnamon or Chinese-flavor Butterscotch back then, I’d have howled just as hard as anyone else for Jap blood.”

  “No, you wouldn’t have, Kokyo. Not you.”

  “Yes, I would have! Dam—Darn it, it’s part of being human. No, all I want is for all these people who are still trying to fight last century’s Great War to leave us alone and let us live our own lives and stop trying to guilt-trip us if we don’t happen to want to join their blood hunt.”

  “It’s really because we found this with Clement’s things, isn’t it?”

  Keiko smiled at her shakily, sighed, and took another long swallow of beer. “Yeah. Probably.”

  “As you said, it can’t be anything he cares that much about, or he’d have taken it along with him right away.”

  “Yeah, there is that.” Of course, he hadn’t taken his swimming and music medals, either, and K
eiko knew they meant a lot to him. But that was different. She hoped. The medals were “worldly vanities” and he could have left them behind as an exercise in letting go of earthly pride. He went through intense spurts of that kind of thing from time to time, especially when he was feeling depressed. “I’ll bet he hasn’t even gotten around to booting up this shitty program yet,” she added, trying to look at the brightest possibility. And then, in a rush, she added something she’d never said aloud even to her best same-gender friend, “Oh, God, Theda, I want that vampire!”

  “Listen.” The Pi Sigh stood up, cocking her head.

  “I don’t—”

  “Shhh.” Theda went to the window and looked out. “Blank the lights.”

  Keiko blanked them and joined Theda at the window. It was almost dark outside by now, but something even darker seemed to be moving between trees and cabin. A long cape?

  “Say, Kokyo!” Theda sounded like an eager little kid at a monster screenshow. “Wouldn’t it be something if you got your wish right away?”

  XVII

  (Whispering Pines Rest Home)

  It hadn’t exactly gone the way they’d expected. That is, looking back, Maklowski wasn’t too surprised; but he could tell it had pretty well nuked his junior partner.

  “Relax,” he told Hartwick for the twentieth time, sitting there sipping anemic decaf and watching him pace the nursing home lounge like a prisoner about to be coldstoraged. “You’re making me nervous, too.”

  “Drat it, how the ‘H’ can I relax? I blew it! Maybe the world’s last chance, and I blew it!”

  They had marched into the old man’s room, the aging head nurse following tightlipped at their heels, and found him propped up on a hospital-style bed, with three or four extra pillows at his back, faded blue and yellow pajama jacket that looked like silk and might have been expensive years ago when it was new. Magazine in his lap, turned out to be an old New Yorker, jumbo-print edition. Hair gone, eyes a watery, washout blue, but bright, like the nurse said they always were for hours after a visit from his granddaughter.

  Hartwick, the big ham, the half fancy-class Champion of Truth, Justice, and the American Way, had pulled out his gun and said, “Vell, vell, vell. Adolf Vagner, I presume.” And then a German phrase that Maklowski was confident he mispronounced the life out of, and then in cornball accent, “Zo ve meet adt last.”

  The old man had looked at them, coughed, rattled, and sunk a little deeper into his pillows, with his stare freezing over.

  Yep, Lance Hartwick had blown it.

  “You didn’t blow it,” Maklowski lied. “The old guy’s heart blew it.” As maybe it would have no matter how they approached him. And somehow Jason Maklowski couldn’t even make himself feel all that sorry about it coming out this way.

  “Probably the last original one alive anywhere!” Hartwick wailed on.

  “Not alive anymore.”

  “A floater the world was hunting for over a century—”

  “Not a century,” Maklowski corrected Hartwick. “Only about forty or fifty years. Just since the last of the older ones started giving out. And not exactly ‘the world,’ either. Unless you consider us trained elite added to a handful of private hunters ‘the world.’”

  “Well, with the rest of the world standing by to cheer us on.”

  “Yeah. Sure.” If that was the way Hartwick perceived it, why go on arguing. He might not be completely wrong, at that. Just half, maybe two-thirds wrong. Funny thing, public opinion. You couldn’t ever be entirely sure ... “Anyway, the world probably stands a reasonable chance of surviving. Adolf Wagner,” Maklowski mused on. “So the file is finally closed on—”

  “No! Maybe not. They may still pull him through. They hustled the resident doc in fast enough, didn’t they?”

  “Don’t kid yourself. He was dead before Nursie ever pushed the panic button. They’re just going through the forms, making sure nobody can accuse anybody of neglect or malpractice. And even if he wasn’t quite braindead when the medics reached him, you can be sure he will be by the time they get through with him. Or didn’t you notice the looks they threw at us? They’re going to make good and sure of keeping him off our hook, no matter what it takes.”

  Hartwick stopped pacing and stared at Maklowski with all the horror of the lily-pure Pro-Lifer. “You’re talking about euthanasia.”

  “Yep. Except the way they see it, it’s more like saving the last bullet to keep the savages from taking you alive. These people only know what the old man’s been for the last twenty or thirty years of his life—forty, at most. To them, what he used to be in the middle of the last century is just Dark Ages history.”

  Hartwick started pacing again. “Damn! But that makes them as bad as—”

  “Maybe. Except the chances are it’ll never come up. I’m telling you, the old floater was already dead before they hustled you and me out of his room.”

  “And not one blasted thing we can do to prove it either way. Unless an autopsy ... Think Forensics could run a good enough autopsy on it to—”

  “Forget it, Lone Ranger. With a heart that chancy, think we could have kept him alive long enough for the trial, anyway?”

  Hartwick muttered something that sounded like good old Twenties language and speeded up his pacing, back and forth between the semi-lumpy couch that looked like something deliberately shipped over from some middleclass family’s playroom and the row of moldform rubberplas chairs with lamp tables at each corner.

  Eventually Maklowski said, “Would it have made you feel any better if he’d jumped for it and you’d had to drop him with one of those fancy silver bullets of yours?”

  “What do you know about my bullets?”

  “What most of the Service knows. You order them ‘custom made’ from Smith and Wesson. Except I have to tell you, some of us ran a check, and they aren’t exactly custom made. Turns out the firm has a special department churning out novelty bullets. Kind of makes you shudder, doesn’t it? Enough gun-toting fanciers out here to keep a whole special department of Smith and Wesson in operation.”

  “I’m not a fancier.”

  “Who said you were, Hartsie? All I’m saying is, a dozen of us each ordered a box as the first part of our check, so we’ve got a nice little cache any time you want to buy it back out of our hands. Of course, we aren’t sure how much silver your own ‘custom mades’ are. Seems they come in silvertip, silverplate, several varying thicknesses of silvercore, and ‘solid sterling.’”

  “If you’ve got to know, I use solid sterling, and the only reason I use it for general loading is to make me think three times about shooting.”

  “Sure. Because of the expense. I get it. Okay, if we’re stuck with all those other boxes because anything less than solid sterling isn’t expensive enough for you, then we’re stuck.” Not Maklowski, though. He’d ordered the solid silver and just now won the betting pool on which kind his partner favored. He gave himself a few minutes of smug secret satisfaction about fishing the admission out of Hartwick before he slipped back into wondering how many of those fanciers could really be trusted with their gun licenses, and how much longer he was going to have to sit here watching his partner pace before they could clear out with a semi-official copy of the preliminary death certificate in lieu of their man, and recontact Fairchild.

  They’d tried phoning him from the rest home, and gotten no answer, not even from his old-fashioned answering machine. A time like this, with the net closing in, and their key local contact goes incommunicado for Lord knew how long.

  Jason Maklowski was tuning in the picture that Operation Bloodline had gotten a little too doggone crowded with borderline fantasy perceivers.

  XVIII

  (From the Memoirs of Sylvia Tomlinson Marlene)

  Early customers were already filling the restaurants, many of which were the kind of plain or specialty cubbyholes t
hat university towns attract, so Cagey picked out an Oldtown tavern not far from Dr. Fairchild’s neighborhood, a picturesquely ramshackle building a century and a half old, left purposely sided with a crazy quilt of pebbled tarpaper; and we went in for a cup of coffee. That is, she wanted coffee. I tried to suggest that she might be putting a little too much of it into her body, and ordered limeade for myself. She replied that it couldn’t be any worse for her body than the tobacco so many of her hardboiled prototypes chainsmoked had been for theirs; but for once she ordered denatured—decaffeinated and de-acidified—and then left it barely tasted.

  We drove up to Our Lady of Peace about 18:10, planning a short stakeout to spot Czarny as the congregation left church, and found it already deserted. From a man who was going around turning out lights and checking pews for accidentally abandoned personal possessions, we learned that they hadn’t been able to get a substitute priest on short notice, and lay communion liturgies were shorter than masses.

  “We outsmarted ourselves, trying to play it close,” Cagey remarked as we got back in the car. “Well, let’s try out that place Aunt Cherky recommended for dinner.”

  The Viking was built out partly over the lake. Before we went in, Cagey paused for a look around. What with going inside the church to learn what had happened and then getting slightly lost—it would have been difficult to get seriously lost in a town that size—we had spent a good quarter hour getting to the restaurant, and the sun might already have set behind the heavy clouds that now covered the entire western sky, except for a few patches where the sunset colors seemed to be fading even as we watched. Cagey nodded, said, “The witching hour approacheth,” and went inside.

  It was one of those places that look elegant at first glance, until you notice that the effects are all created with inexpensive materials. It was crowded, but large, and Cagey and I found ourselves a newly vacated table next to the mirror that covered the far wall, reflecting the lake view through the window-wall opposite. There was no maitre d’ or hostess, but eventually we were able to attract a waiter, a harried young man who might have been a student himself, and to convince him we were not the party who had left the empty dishes in front of us. Calling a busgirl to clear the table, he slapped menus into our hands and hurried elsewhere.