The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  Clement turned his head and glared at his faculty father. He opened his mouth and ran the tip of his tongue along the line of his upper teeth. It made a deep, smooth, unhesitating dip beneath each eyetooth.

  Fred Fletcher remarked, “I swear he feels those doggone fangs himself.”

  Dr. Fairchild looked at April. “All right, my dear,” he called to her benignly, “when you’re ready to give us the data, just shout.”

  She said, “You’re crazy,” turned her face to the harsh ceiling lights, and shut her eyes.

  “As you will,” he replied. Then, to Spuds and Stallion, “All right, sons, put him inside with her.”

  Stallion pushed at once. Spuds hesitated, saying, “I’m not sure ...”

  “Then let go and stand back, weakling!” snapped the professor, shoving the football hero aside and thrusting the crucifix at Clement’s back. The vampire moaned and cringed forward. Stallion simultaneously kicked and released him. He half fell, half stumbled against the cell table, started to pick himself up and turn on them, and Fletcher swung the door shut with a light squeal of hinges and a heavy slam on the vampire’s despairing cry.

  “But…but,” Spuds worried, standing back while Fletcher and Stallion dropped the bolt into place, “uh ... sir, doesn’t this kind of thing make us as bad as they were?”

  “No, Bartlett, it does not,” Fairchild replied, tapping the crucifix on his left palm with immense satisfaction. “Their cause was evil, and ours is just. The world must never forget. It must never be allowed to forget. In order to make sure that the world always remembers, no price is too high, no sacrifice of mere private, individual conscience too great.”

  XX

  (From the Memoirs of Sylvia Tomlinson Marlene)

  Cagey turned the coffee carafe upside down over her mug. A couple of drops came out. “If that were human blood,” she observed, “it wouldn’t be enough to sweeten Czarny’s glass of Bugs Bunny. Glad we didn’t ask if the restaurants have to cope with any safe-food guiderules in order to stock raw animal blood for him, if it wasn’t just V-9 juice, after all. I saw it as blood. But if they plan on keeping us here all night waiting for our check, somebody could at least come around and re-coffee this carafe for us.”

  “It seems to be a popular place, Lieutenant,” I responded.

  “Umpf. About time we checked in with Aunt Cherky. What’s her number?”

  I called it up from my pocketcom and Cagey punched the numbers on her wristphone as I read them off.

  The phone chimed six times before Aunt Cherky answered. “Hello? Hello? Who is it?” She sounded nervous.

  “Thursday and Tomlinson here, M. Zigabarra. Just checking to make sure your niece got in all right.”

  “Oh—Oh, yes! Yes ... Lieutenant, everything’s ... uh, A.O.K. here. Yes. Please take your time, everything’s just fine here. Uh ... April’s just gone out to a screenshow with some friends. Good night. Thanks again! Good night.”

  “Over and out,” Cagey said into a connection that may already have been cut off at the other end.

  She looked at me, drummed her fingers once more on the table, and said, “Something’s wrong out there. How much will our tab come to?”

  “Uh…twenty-five or thirty tridols, I think.”

  “Leave a fifty and let’s get going.” Cagey stood up, bumped her thigh on the edge of the table in getting out, mumbled some grunches, and headed for the door. I rose, reaching for my beltpurse, and found Al hurrying to our table, possibly alerted by the sight of Cagey leaving. Before he could even get out our check, I had slapped a fifty tridol bill into his hand, told him to keep the change, and bustled out after my friend.

  She was already getting into the car. Tumbling into my seat behind the wheel, I observed, “Petty cash owes me a fifty.”

  “Petty cash owes you a lot more than ... Hold on!” Her wristphone was chiming. She opened the connection and told it, “Hello, Thursday speaking.”

  “Lieutenant Thursday. Ramon Mendoza here. Could I ask whether you’ve happened to notice any of my brothers of the Purple Rose hovering around you this afternoon?”

  I started to speak. Cagey waved for me to be quiet.

  “You’d recognize them, wouldn’t you?” Mendoza was adding. “Or maybe a blue Cougar or red Sparrowhawk in your vicinity?”

  Remembering the sporty little red car that had played peekaboo with us on the way back, I mouthed, “The Sparrowhawk!” at Cagey in the light from the parking-lot lamps.

  She made her decision. “Yeah,” she told Mendoza. “We’ve seen Stallion C. Drinkwater. Ate half a dinner in the same restaurant as us just now. Not with us. Just in the same restaurant.”

  “Ah! And is he still around?”

  “Why?”

  “I have a message for him,” said Mendoza. That sounded like a lie: it was too pat.

  “No, he isn’t around anymore,” said Cagey. “He cut out with your dracula a few minutes back. Something about inner-sanctum fraternity business.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Czarny ate with us. Not just in the same restaurant. With us.”

  “I see. Thank you, Lieutenant, you’ve been a great help. Ten-four, over and out.”

  “Over and out,” she repeated as the connection broke. “And I’ll bet you five to one Mendoza phoned from Aunt Cherky’s,” she added to me. “Step on it, Tommi, and let’s try not to get lost!”

  We didn’t get lost. We made such good time that I felt justified in giving myself a mental pat on the back as we pulled up in front of the house.

  There weren’t any other parked cars in sight around M. Zigabarra’s property, and her two-car garage, as we knew from our visit at lunchtime, had room for only one car between the boxes of old books and other yardsale mathoms. Of course, Mendoza could have arrived by some other means of transportation. Cagey was out of our car and walking for the porch almost before I’d finished parking.

  Again I hurried to catch up, reaching the front door a few seconds after Cagey’s knock—when in a hurry, she always knocks first, in case the chime is out of order. It was answered in about a quarter of a minute. The person who answered was a student-aged woman whom neither of us had ever seen before, a semi-slinky young blond with eyes made up in an almost Egyptian style, wearing a sleeveless orange tunic over purple shirt and slacks in pale shades that, somehow, looked coordinated.

  “Lieutenant Thursday?” she exclaimed, grabbing Cagey’s hand.

  “And you are?” Cagey replied, letting her hand be shaken.

  “Theda Hari. I’m so proud to meet you! It was a real disappointment, finding out you were at the brother house this morning and I’d missed you. We thought you might be coming over here even after what Aunt Cherky told you, so I took the chance and stayed. Glory! I’m glad I did.”

  Recovering her hand, Cagey said, “Where are the others?”

  Theda Hari turned demure, dropped her gaze for an instant, rolled it back up at us in a sidelong glance, smirked in a way that looked as if she were trying to appear mysteriously secretive, and asked, “Lieutenant, how do you feel about Nazis?”

  “Members of last century’s happily long-dead ‘National Socialist Party’ in Germany,” Cagey replied. “They were nasty sadists at worst, and at best they were ordinary, everyday folks who got trapped in what the Chinese curse calls ‘interesting times.’ And why the double heck do Nazis keep coming up today?”

  Theda persisted, “And how do you feel about Nazi hunters?”

  “Sick and tired of hearing about them.”

  I put in, “I think I’d have been proud to help hunt Nazis if I’d lived last century, but what’s the point now?”

  “The Commemorative War Crimes Trial!” Theda replied. “Coming up in 2045 in Jerusalem or Geneva or Nuremberg or wherever they finally agree to hold it.”

  “To stage it, you mean,”
said Cagey. “It’ll be a farce. So far they’ve got exactly one defendant lined up, that Kansas plumber allegedly descended from the ‘Beast of Buchenwald.’ For pete’s sake, the original Nazis are all dead!”

  “No!” Theda caught her wrist and then reached out with her other hand to catch mine, too. “At least one of them is still alive, and living in this area!”

  “That’s impossible!” I exclaimed. “It’s been a century—”

  “No, it isn’t impossible! It’s Adolf Wagner, the ‘Wolfcub of Dachau,’ Wulf Wagner’s son! Doktor Wulf Wagner, the infamous Nazi medical scientist. Adolf was born in 1940 and his parents kept him with them in their luxury quarters right there in the death camp. His earliest tinker toys were made out of human bones! The family got out just ahead of the Allied liberation forces, used a false name and pretended to be legitimate refugees, got to America, changed their name again, and got away with it for almost a century, but—”

  “My God!” Cagey exclaimed. “The old man in the nursing home! April Greenhill’s grandfather!”

  I said, “But he’d have been five years old at most when the Last Great War ended! You don’t mean to tell me they’d actually put him on trial?”

  “Why not?” cried Theda, and I still couldn’t tell if she was all for it, or opposed, or too keyed up for any other emotion than simple excitement. “He’s an Original Nazi, isn’t he? Maybe the very last one still alive anywhere! And they’ve got signed documents from death camp survivors that talk about the mean little boy who used to toddle around helping torture prisoners—pinching them and stamping on their feet and so on.”

  With a tug to free my wrist from her grip, I leaned on the porch rail, feeling sick. “He’ll be a hundred and five when the trial begins ...”

  Cagey asked Theda, “How do you know all this?”

  “Ramon Mendoza! He’s been spying on them for years.”

  “Spying on whom?” said Cagey.

  “On ... Wait a minute. Whose side are you two going to be on?”

  “Greenhill’s,” Cagey snapped back without hesitation. “She’s the one who came to us for help in the first place, doggone it!”

  “Even though she’s a criminal against humanity, too?”

  “Oh, come on!” I exclaimed. “You can’t be a war criminal if the war was over three quarters of a century before you were born! If you can’t even be a criminal if you actually did something that wasn’t against the law yet at the time you did it, then how can you be a criminal if you never did it at all and it happened years before you were born?”

  “That’s for ordinary kinds of crimes,” said Theda. “Not for Last Great War Crimes Against Humanity.”

  “Yes,” Cagey added softly, “they could do it, too. There are historical precedents, whole ethnic groups being held guilty for centuries for things a few of their ancestors did. There are Biblical texts that could apply. They could even make it stick!”

  “Anyway,” our informant went on, “it isn’t so much April herself. Not even her grandfather. They’re after really big fish. They think Wulf Wagner himself is still alive!”

  “What?” I cried.

  Cagey grabbed Theda’s arm above the elbow. “You’d better explain that.”

  “He was supposed to be working on an immortality drug for the Phew-roar. They think he found it, too late for Hitler but not for himself. They think his wife and son refused to take it—the old man, their son Adolf, alias Donald B. Baxter, even married a Jewish-American woman when he grew up—that could make it a bit tricky when they put him on trial, so they’ll probably try to suppress the marriage data—but they think Doktor Wulf Wagner himself took his drug. He’d changed his name to Claude Baxter, but when he’d aged as far as he cared to, he took the drug, moved his whole family up here, changed him name again, to Paul B. Baxter, and started a new life passing his son off as his father. He married again, had April, and then at a certain point put some other man aboard that plane along with his wife and a hidden bomb—or maybe they put some other couple aboard in both their places, the theory allows for the chance that April’s mother could still be alive with him—went off somewhere else, and took the immortality drug again.”

  “Anyone who would believe that,” I murmured, “would believe ... would believe ...” In draculas? I thought, and couldn’t bring myself to say it aloud.

  “So ‘they’ think,” said Cagey, “that April Baxter Greenhill isn’t just Wulf Wagner’s great-granddaughter, she’s his daughter. And the old man in the nursing home’s sister. Making her a second-generation Nazi, not just a third- or fourth-generation one. Without even the benefit of a Jewish grandmother in her favor—by their theory, Wulf’s son’s wife wouldn’t be any blood relation at all to April Greenhill, only a sister-in-law. Yes, that could make a difference at the trial ... if they could get the court to swallow it!”

  “But they think April knows all about it! At least, that she knows her father is still alive, and where he is. That’s what they’re after, his whereabouts, even more than April herself.”

  Cagey didn’t quite shake Theda, but she grabbed her other arm and took a wide stance as if she was ready to shake her. “And ‘they,’” she said in a low, angry voice, “include Dr. Matthew Fairchild Stanley, faculty father to the Pi Rho fraternity!”

  As soon as she said it, I saw her drift. “Yes!” I cried. “All his talk about the secret of eternal youth, the Nazis searching for it and maybe finding it—and we just thought he was talking about the immortality in the dracula legends!”

  “And that’s what the business was all about with Pi Rho pledges being asked for April Greenhill’s ‘real’ family name,” Cagey went on. “But who’s in it with him? Stallion Clearwater? What about Czarny?”

  Theda shook her head. “Stale, yes. Clement, we hope not—but are you still on our side?”

  “Whose side are you on?” Cagey demanded.

  Theda’s eyes opened very wide. “But—April’s, of course! And Ramon’s, and Keiko’s—Why, what did you think I’d be doing here at April’s house? Helping the Fairsquare and his Nazi hunters?”

  “All right, so where’s Aunt Cherky?”

  “Packing. She says April is like her own daughter, and April’s mother was her best friend, and she can’t let her go off alone—”

  “And where is April?”

  “We don’t know! We only hope they can’t hurt her if they need her to stand trial.”

  “Mendoza phoned us from here, didn’t he?” said Cagey. “And we told him about Clearwater taking Czarny away on ‘fraternity business.’ Nine to one that means either the Pi Rho house or their hunting cabin.” Releasing Theda, she turned for the car, missed the porch stairs, took a long step down into a bush of late-blooming chrysanthemums, and eventually rolled to a stop a meter across the lawn.

  Theda and I scurried to help her up. Glancing back, I saw that Aunt Cherky had finally appeared in the lighted doorway, with what looked like a large skillet gripped paddlewise in one hand. I guessed that the noise had brought her, and that the skillet was not necessarily one of the things she was packing for flight.

  “I’m okay,” Cagey insisted, letting us gather her up. “Just my trousers again…heard something tear ... It’s all right,” she pronounced after a hasty feel. “Just the left knee, nothing in any potentially embarrassing places. Hi! Aunt Cherky. Don’t worry, we’re friends, we’ll get her home the minute we can.”

  “You’d damn better,” said Aunt Cherky.

  Cagey waved, turned, and headed across the lawn, this time without mishap. I kept pace. As we reached the car and opened the doors, Theda Hari, who had paused to say something to Aunt Cherky, caught up with us.

  “You aren’t leaving me behind!” she announced. “Not after the only reason I didn’t head out with the others right away was for the chance of meeting you!”

  “That,” Cagey remarked,
“and in order to head us off from Aunt Cherky if we turned out to be hostile. Your ‘the others’ being Mendoza and who else? Keiko Ko-Ko?”

  “Yes. Kokyo and Val Saladin. And yes, it almost has to be the Pi Rho house in town. Or maybe Dr. Fairchild’s home, though that’s a longer shot. Anyway, if it’s the hunting cabin, you’ll need me to navigate you there, but I’m almost positive it isn’t, because—”

  “Tell us in the car,” said Cagey.

  We piled in—Theda in the back seat, where April had ridden that morning—and we were off. Theda’s account went as follows, editing out most of our incidental comments on short cuts, avoiding pedestrians, and other matters concerning driving and traffic:

  “Struwwie—Studs Struwwelpeter—caught Keiko and me prowling around Clement’s bedroom in the Pi Rho house, because Kokyo had gotten pretty worried about Clement because of whatever you said to her today. Struwwie shut us back in the closet a few minutes while he phoned someone. We’re reasonably sure it was Dr. Fairchild. Then he took us both out to the hunting cabin, locked us in, and sat guard outside for the rest of the afternoon. All that time, I just thought it was a big comedy, and it gave me a grand chance to look at the ‘Lest We Forget’ program. We’d found a copy in Czarny’s trunk—”

  “‘Lest We Forget’?” said Cagey.

  “Oh, haven’t you ever heard abut it, either? I’ll tell you later. Even better, I’ll let you see it for your—Oh, hey?” Her wristphone had begun to chime. She opened the connection. “’Allo?”

  She had an excellent wristphone; the young male voice came through clearly enough to reach even me in the driver’s seat. “Most refulgent and honorable lady of—”

  “Oh, blank the fraternity stuff for now, Val! What’s the story?”

  “Did they ever get there?”

  “Yes, and they’re friends.”

  “Great!”

  “We’re on our way right now,” Theda added. “Where are you? What have you found out?”

  “We’re at the house. Here in town. The basement’s locked up and we think we hear some kind of meeting going on down there. Sounds like Dr. Fairchild arguing with Clearwater and Struwwie—I mean Bartlett. Mendoza thinks he can make them open up for him because of his being the most senior Pi brother in town, having been around even before Dr. Fairchild became Pater. I’m going to hide up here and call Emergency for the ambulance or fire truck if we need a commotion, while he takes Keiko down and pretends he found her eavesdropping outside. They can’t know that he knows they had her and you locked up in the cabin all afternoon.”