The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 2

by Daniel Kraus

  “My superiors will notify me when I can speak frankly. But might I suggest that you see this as an opportunity? Not everyone is so specifically called upon to serve his country.”

  The apocryphal compliment portended far more than the destruction I sought. I shuddered and searched for an escape route as I was led to a concrete-block bedchamber identified by a card reading J-1121. The compartment was doorless, but what good did that do me? My fellow cellar dwellers had their own open doors, their own case numbers, their own blackmails.

  After I spent a productive afternoon flushing the toilet for kicks and a rewarding night counting the cracks in the wall, Rigby returned to room J-1121—new white shirt, same red-ink splotch—and waded us back into the fluorescents.

  My toilet-flushing and crack-counting had induced reflection. I’d come to realize that every OSS agent who entered the compound deliberately removed himself of identifying traits: clothing choices that divulged any personality, accents that indicated regional affiliations, car keys that disclosed propensities toward style or speed, and so on. To know one of these men was to be able to manipulate him, and before my butt hit the bench, I’d eagle-eyed Rigby’s telling detail.

  His left ring finger had a tan line from a removed ring.

  Reviving fighting spirits is difficult when you can still feel the sand of a Californian beach in your deepest wounds. Yet my only hope was to get this man talking, root out his weaknesses, and connive a way out of the government spotlight.

  “I worry we embarked upon a false foot,” said I. “Do go on about yourself. Your wife, for instance. Does she enjoy the perks that surely come with government work?”

  Though it could have been the fluorescents, I believe Rigby’s eyes flashed with alarm. He busied himself with hefting a file that dwarfed the dossier. It was a good thousand-pages thick, and he winced around his breakfast cigarette as he dropped it upon the table. The bang drew pre-coffee snarls from area sad sacks, but instead of recoiling, I grinned, the portrait of conviviality.

  “It is unsporting that you possess these reams of information about me and yet I know nothing about you. If we are to work together, let us take this morn to break bread as brothers. You must have children. What are the names of the adorable little crumbsnatchers?”

  My impolitic tongue could not sell such saccharine sap. Rigby sank back into default drabness and nodded at the column of paper.

  “You have to read this.”

  I eyeballed the impossible tome.

  “I did not think you capable of wisecrackery, old sport.”

  “You’ll find it divided into daily allotments.”

  “Homework, is it? Cover yourself—my heart might burst with joy.”

  “My superiors wish you to establish a knowledge base before proceeding.”

  “Proceeding with what?”

  “I’m not at liberty to—”

  “Yes, of course. Here in the land of liberty, there is precious little of it to share.”

  Rigby, of course, did not react. How I loathed this bland bureaucrat! I pulled back the cardstock cover and found dozens of brown envelopes, each stamped with what appeared to be a due date. I untwirled the string latch of the first day’s assignment, extracted a medley of documents, and absorbed the title page as one might a left hook:

  NATIONALSOZIALISTISCHE DEUTSCHE ARBEITERPARTEI:

  A Conspectus

  My instinct for scholarship hadn’t changed. I crumpled the page in a fist and zinged it at Rigby. It bopped off his temple.

  “You and your so-called superiors are a pack of driveling dogs if you think I shall waste good hours attempting to penetrate phrases of such poison construction! Nay, they do not even qualify as words! They are a typewriter’s vomitus, a dictionary’s entrails!”

  Rigby picked the balled paper from the floor and with maddening lack of temper smoothed it flat upon the table before placing it back before me. His orders, it seemed to me, were to unwad what I wadded, tape anything I shredded, replace with mimeographed copies anything I irreparably rent. Subtle sieges, Reader, are the most insidious sort.

  “The German language is agglutinative,” said he. “That means the words are long but exceedingly logical. Consult the included guides. Everything is navigable.”

  He folded his hands to show that he was ready to receive my next tantrum. The act robbed me of catharsis; I cheeked my cud of cussing. After a minute, he nodded, stood, remarked that he’d return on the morrow, and left me to my cellarworld of furtive murmurers. I writhed in my seat and pretended that it was because of the paper meal I was being force-fed. The truth was more compromising: I did want to know about Rigby beyond how it might help my escape. Terse ten-minute briefings were insufficient in sating a social need I still hadn’t bled from my nature.

  Bored to capitulation, I learned that evening that “Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei” was too much for anyone to handle; the world had truncated it to “Nazis.” I’d heard of them: snappy dressers, proficient marchers, makers of mischief. The implication that I was being groomed for a role at OSS, however, confused me. Perhaps they believed that my extended death had won me some depth of wisdom? Had they not noticed that I was still seventeen?

  Regardless, I trudged into the narrative, which traced the founding, floundering, and flowering of the Nazi Party. The tome was interminable, yes, but I bulled through twenty pages of it before reappropriating the latter ten toward the nobler purpose of nifty paper airplanes.

  Rigby sucked down three cups of coffee and three cigarettes during the next morning’s quiz. I failed—and how, but then showed off my fleet of folded aircraft. He did not seem impressed.

  “This won’t please my superiors,” remarked he.

  “Agreed. They will observe that my planes need coloring, and they will be right.”

  Rigby unfolded each aircraft, which pissed me off, and filed each one into his folder as official documentation of my immaturity. Once finished, he pushed his blankness against me like suffocative pillows.

  “What will it take to get you to focus?”

  “You have a wife,” cried I, “though you refuse to tell me her name. You have children, though you pretend they do not exist. Perhaps you also have a family pet? Well, what is it, I ask you, that a pet desires? Relax, Rigby; I do not expect you to answer, for I understand how potential pet ownership is a matter of maximal national security. I shall answer the question myself—a pet desires treats.”

  A curlicue of concern again dimpled his forehead.

  “I was not aware that you liked . . .”

  “Things? Oh, indeed. Of things I am quite fond. I am dead, sir, not retarded.”

  Rigby’s jaw worked in small circles. Forced off script, he was intrigued enough that his eyes squinted one one-millionth of a degree. He took up his clipboard.

  “Tell me what you’d like. I’ll see what I can do.”

  So it happened that my research into Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich became entwined with obtaining every fanciful fandangle a young man could want. First, I mastered Rigby’s vocabulary words—“Deutschland” meant “Germany,” “Aryan” was the Nazi idea of a master race, blah-de-blah—and in exchange my dismal walls leapt to lusty life with pinup tootsies: Rita Hayworth bursting from a black nightie; Betty Grable swimsuited with gams that could crack a coconut; and Jane Russell prickling atop a bed of straw, her gauzy top losing its brave battle against an unbeatable bosom.

  Subsequent rewards included civvies a guy could feel good about (a single-breasted sporting jacket, teardrop-patterned scarf, trilby hat) and, best of all, a 16mm projector. I had to get along with a government archive of classroom crap like “Let’s Learn about Good Posture,” auto-safety screamers like “Danger Is Your Companion,” and didactic dramas like “Sex Hygiene in the Army,” but each piece of celluloid distraction helped build a wall between myself and my fresh regrets. With Rigby, there was always more to learn and recite, brick after brick after brick.

  Present
ly I was an internationally recognized expert in Germanic studies! Ah, Reader, I hear you sniggering; you know too well my scholarly follies. Facts zipped away from me like dandelion fluff, with one exception. Elaborate wordsmithing on Black Hand ransom notes had been the literal death of me in 1896, but still nothing tickled me like big words, of which German had an inexhaustible supply. While Rigby struggled, and failed, to feed me fortifying biscuits of basic language, I instead salivated over unwieldy delectables like Ortsgruppenfachberater, Bandenkampfabzeichen, and Ermächtigungsgesetz. Such morphemes tasted to me like rich platters of food.

  Months into my miseducation, Rigby presented me with a box of three-ring binders containing a translated work by Adolf Hitler himself. I dug into the manuscript with high hopes. Any dictator’s prose, thought I, could only improve upon the artless composites of OSS typists. Entitled Mein Kampf, it led with a biographical sketch with which I could not help but identify: young Adolf’s wayward moonings in Austria, his teenage vagrancy in Vienna, his every attempt at social advance rebuffed by doubters.

  From there, it bogged terribly into fathomless polemics on the failures of Marxism and the innate evils of Jews. I allowed that the Jews’ holidays were oblique and their hairstyles inadvisable, but der Führer’s beef with this “world pestilence” left me perplexed. I begged Rigby to torch the damn thing. After he refused, I purloined some paste and plastered pages from Mein Kampf to the wall for use as a projector screen. It always felt as though a particularly obnoxious audience member kept lecturing during my movies, but one does try to make the best of one’s situation.

  Rigby did not approve. The poker-faced fellow almost mustered a genuine frown. He stated that he would read the book aloud to me, page by page if required. Now, that was a credible threat, and it revived my drive to find a way out. Rigby, though, had yet to divulge a single exploitable detail. I renewed the pressure. What new motion pictures had he recently seen? Had his nameless wife and indeterminate number of children gone with? Did the lot of them travel in an auto, and if so, what color was it? To all queries he gonged his tuneless refrain—I’m not at liberty to say—though, unknown to either of us, those reins of liberty were about to be flung aside.

  II.

  IN CLOSING, THE COMMITTEE DEEMS client J-1121 unsatisfactory. He is unambitious, uncooperative, indecent, and excitable. He rates high only in the category of confidence, so high that he is a hazard to all affiliated parties, and represents a significant risk of rebellion and/or desertion.’ ”

  “Disappointing,” said I. “Not a word about my velvety singing voice.”

  Rigby turned the page.

  “ ‘However, the committee remains conscious of the rare opportunity that J-1121 represents, and therefore approves the agent’s recommendation that Operation Weeping Willow be put into immediate effect.’ ”

  Rigby, being a robot, was incapable of displaying pride through human signifiers, though I sensed a shallowing of his forehead divot. He slipped the appraisal into an envelope, licked the adhesive gum, pounded it flat, and tucked it inside a briefcase pocket. The caution seemed inordinate; we met, for once, not in the commissary but in a private room featuring the modern marvel of a door. Through the walls I could hear the muffled reactions of others in my position. One squabbled, another sobbed, yet another rattled a locked doorknob.

  Such noises do not soothe the nerves of the new draftee.

  “Operation Weeping Willow, eh?” I forced a grin. “I am curious as to what a recipient of such poor grades is qualified to do.”

  Rigby spun the locks on the briefcase and cleared his throat.

  “In three weeks you will be air-dropped outside Berlin with the mission of assassinating Adolf Hitler.”

  A laugh darted from my throat. It cracked about the concrete like a trapped sparrow. I laughed some more, expelling a whole flapping flock.

  “Oh,” sputtered I. “Is that all?”

  It was no joke, and I should have known it. “Joke” was as foreign to Rigby as “Nationalsozialistische” had been to me.

  “Penetration into the Reich is SO’s top priority. Within that priority are what we call Targets of Precedence. More traditional methods of approach have been considered. Blowing up the rails under Hitler’s train. Poisoning his water supply. Dropping snipers onto his property in the Alps. All of them have proven too difficult.”

  “But punting me off a plane, that’s easy? Am I intended to land upon his head?”

  “Intelligence tells us that Hitler is consumed with the occult. He has built an entire unit that advances behind the battle front, emptying Europe of relics alleged to have mystical powers. There are rumors that he’s acquired the Holy Grail.”

  “Rigby! Are we little children? These are campfire tales.”

  “We have every confidence that Hitler, upon hearing about your arrival, will come to see you in person. That is when you, using a planted weapon, will implement your objective.”

  “Let us pretend, just for laughs, that you are of sound mind. How in Gød’s contemptible name could you plant a weapon I could reliably access? The Nazis would have me in chains, behind bars, at the end of a hundred muzzles.”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  “The instant I made a move, his wolves would chew me to gristle.”

  “You may be harmed, that’s true. But that’s what makes you valuable. You can withstand a certain amount of harm and still achieve your mission.”

  “That’s assuming I don’t break my arms, legs, and neck in the drop!”

  “We drop men on Germany all the time. Once in Berlin, you’ll have a contact. This contact will make himself known to you. When you fulfill Operation Weeping Willow, this contact will coordinate coups at several key sites, setting off a chain of events that will hobble the Reich. You have no idea how many Germans, even officers and generals, believe Hitler is bringing their country to collapse. If we lead, they will follow.”

  Rigby sat back, lit his eighty-fifth cigarette of the day, and waited for me to, I suppose, produce Old Glory from my pocket and begin waving it. In the adjacent room, the sobbing man had begun to scream. Wasn’t that its own answer? I crossed my arms over a heart that, had it still functioned, would have been blasting away with anxious disbelief. Wartime destruction was what I craved, but I wanted it done quickly and anonymously, and without the government I loathed doing the captaining. Rigby emitted smoke like an oil-based engine.

  “The committee said you weren’t ready,” said he. “I stood up for you.”

  “That ought to teach you.”

  “I did it because I know the best agent is one who doesn’t follow his heart.”

  I pictured the Excelsior, its whiskey gleam chilled inside an evidence locker.

  “I’ll grant you that mine beats no more,” said I.

  “And one who does not hold to ideals.”

  “Well, I have none of those. That’s no secret.”

  “And one who savors deception.”

  I smashed both fists to the table—once, twice, thrice.

  “Yes! Yes! Yes! So I fancy a falsehood now and again! What of it? You, Looney Bird, ask me, Dead Body, to self-invade Nazi Germany at her very apogee? When, according to billions of pages of your own research, she has expanded five hundred miles east and another thousand miles west? Where she controls Western Europe’s industrial might and Eastern Europe’s agricultural centers, not to mention the whole continent’s natural resources and the free labor of millions of conquered peoples? And then you puff your cig and lament my want of excitement?”

  Rigby, in a powerful display of passion, raised his eyebrows a half inch.

  “So you have been paying attention.”

  I swiped the only thing available for swiping, a ceramic ashtray, and hurled it in the direction of the next-door screamer. It exploded against the wall; the screamer paused, then recommenced screaming. Rigby, having no better option, ashed upon the table.

  “Sandy,” recounted I. “Age
forty-four. Dead on the scene. Go on, bring back your police reports, send me up the river. It cannot be worse than this preposterous sentencing.”

  Rigby, same as ever, folded his hands. His voice, though, was softer.

  “I don’t want to do that. I’d rather ask you a question. What is it you’re afraid of losing that you haven’t already lost?”

  Four-eyed, edge-squaring, monotone automaton though Rigby was, the U.S. Government had been shrewd in entrusting him with the hellion Zebulon Finch. This man knew my heart—or what it might have looked like had it not been drained and dried. How could I clamber through day after desolate day, knowing how I’d devastated Bridey, miscarried Merle, and forsaken Church? Were I to sport penitentiary fatigues, the grave rat of guilt would gnaw at me all the same. Furthermore, though it felt indecorous to acknowledge it, a legacy of great infamy awaited the person who pulled the trigger on Adolf Hitler.

  “You wangling wretch,” hissed I. “When do I leave?”

  Five days, that was it, before I was to join a Britain-bound battleship, and not one minute of it could be wasted. I was desperate to know how I would contact the Berlin spy, but Rigby was not at liberty to say, for nothing was more important than protecting a field agent. He yielded only that the signal word was “Geschenk”—in English, “gift.” Be vigilant, said he, and ready for that signal to come.

  Rigby’s first exercise was flash-carding Nazi principals so that I might identify them should we cross paths. I was anxious, and that anxiety birthed adolescent ripostes. Martin Bormann, Party Chancellery Chief: “Egads! Which elephant stepped on his nose?” Hermann Göring, Reichsmarschall: “Why, look, Rigby—a two-hundred-pound baby!” Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda: “An old crone in a cabinet position? How progressive!” Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer-SS: “No wonder the Nazis are formidable. They’ve taught rats to wear glasses!” Often the conditioning went past midnight; Rigby massaged his throbbing eyes and kept flipping.