The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 2

by Daniel Kraus

  The drip, drip, drip of fury I’d withstood since Mauthausen had softened my inhibitions to mush. I took the man’s shoulders with both hands and drove his head against the post.

  “You are the one who walks in the sun, who is blinded by it! You think Gød will save you when they ship you to the camps? You think Jesus will be in the showers to scrub away your pain? Let me tell you, you great fool, what the Reichsführer told me. That the healthy young, when burned in ovens, produce large, lovely, black scuds of smoke, while the elderly and infirm make but sad yellow puffs. What do you think, padre? What color of smoke will you make?”

  His witless response was immaterial. I pushed hard, his legs hooked about the post, and he fell. Reichsmarks rolled about, winking in the golden dusk.

  “Run.” It was the shortest, truest gospel. “Run, you dumb fuck. Run! ”

  He moaned more dangerous prayer; I kicked him. He sang to his Lord, each note a step down the Road to Heaven. It was not the road he thought it was! He had to shut up.

  “Get out!”

  I kicked him again.

  “Get out!”

  Again.

  “GET OUT!”

  Again, again, again.

  The empty square echoed back my cries; I was telling myself to get out. From some embattled bower of my brain eked self-defensive excuses. I was not, I told myself, like the SS guards prodding their prey at the Wienergraben Quarry. I was, to the contrary, hurting this man so that I might save him, just as I’d saved the Fifty-One. Surely a preacher knew that salvation was a painful enterprise.

  I tumbled over his body, my heel dragging the eye patch away from a hollow brown socket, and reeled down the street. I smelled burn. Not my soul but the bakery, it had to be the bakery, just two blocks away. As I approached, the scent did not fatten into the aromas of sugary delicacies, but rather shriveled into a toxic tang.

  Meixelsperger Bakery had been excised as if by science-fiction laser beam. Its quadrant of city lot had become a charred rectangle pyred with scorched wood. So tidy had been its destruction that the buildings to either side were barely singed from heat. Hungry children kicked through the warm ashes for canned goods, drooling strings of gray spit from smoke inhalation. Milling about were Gestapo agents, more than the area’s usual allotment, perhaps monitoring the site for returning conspirators.

  My gait, already shaken by the beating I’d given the preacher, further faltered, and that was the only misstep I could afford. Despite rickety knees, I changed my trajectory so that I might pass alongside the bakery. I was delirious, Reader; I was desperate. Surely, I told myself, this was the consequence of a stovetop left unattended? I could almost believe it until I saw what two little girls were joyfully poking with a stick.

  It was a dead monkey scorched to the pavement, having either danced too close to the fire or been pitched into it by his temperamental owner. You could, in the ashen remains, still make out the ruby tint of its fez and vest.

  This arson was mine. It’d been I who’d bristled at the damned Jewish filth singsong of the bucktoothed Hitler Youth, I who’d slapped the lad’s dancing elbows, I who’d kindled his junior-detective suspicion that Meixelsperger and I were fishy characters.

  Whether the cowlicked cretin and his marching-band brutes had lit the torches themselves or led a charge of proper SS, it did not matter. Meixelsperger was gone. There would be no Geschenk of coordinated coups. There would be no Berlin uprising. I grew lightheaded and wished for someone to whom I could reach for balance, but I was, more than ever, alone. Oh, if not for my hoggish pursuit of the power offered by Himmler, I could have saved weeks of time, Meixelsperger’s life, and the lives of untold others who’d been counting on her.

  I could not help but scan the debris for human remains. Here was a prayer I could have asked the street preacher to second: Please, Meixelsperger, be dead. If the Gestapo had taken her alive, I could only hope they’d not noticed the points of her Mother’s Cross. The tenacious bitch would take one or two of them out, I predicted, before she took herself.

  The Hitlerjugend had led them to one spy; their discovery of me would not be far behind. I began to trace a maddeningly gradual circle back to von Lüth’s building, outside of which I lurked to ensure it was not yet being cased. After von Lüth entered with groceries, I thundered through the lobby, raced up three flights, and burst through the door. Von Lüth stared at me from the kitchen. I fell upon him, a rabid deer against a much larger bear, antlering him across the arms. The groceries fell with the splat of broken eggs, and I stood on my toes so that I could look him in the eye.

  “I have only minutes,” hissed I. “Listen carefully.”

  “Only minutes? But, Herr Finch, I need to hear of your day with the Reichsführer!”

  How I longed to flood the room with the black regurgitate of truth, another mess to clean up alongside the eggs, but who knew how von Lüth would react upon learning the true purpose of what he believed were rehabilitation camps? I pictured him climbing to the roof and jumping over the edge so as to meet Otto at some mythic locale—the Jabal al-Alsinah, perhaps, the Mountain of Tongues, not the origin of the master race they’d long sought, but a private place nonetheless for two people to live, and love, as they saw fit.

  If Meixelsperger’s underground had any hope of realizing success, von Lüth had to remain among the ignorant overground. I fixed him with my most unwavering look.

  “The Party is looking for me. Do not ask why; there is no time. I must run before they come here. If they do, tell them the truth. Tell them you do not know where I have gone. The single favor that I ask is that you occupy Kuppisch with some other business so that I might move unencumbered. Will you?”

  “But, Herr Finch—what is this? Please, tell me how I can—”

  I cut him off with an abridgment of the English exchange between Himmler and Ziereis.

  “Tomorrow morning at seven o’clock, a zeppelin is being christened at the Tempelhof airfield. Hitler will be in attendance. I will meet you there. Tonight you must call upon every friend you have left in the Reich, demand recompense for every past favor. We must be on the guest list to tour the aircraft, do you understand? It is our last chance for you and me, together as one, to show der Führer that Udo Christof von Lüth is, and has always been, the only choice for Minister of the Occult.”

  That von Lüth had matured past egotism made the appeal all the more difficult to voice, but the Fifty-One were waiting, listening. Von Lüth blinked his eyes through the stinging smoke of my soliloquy and looked down at his smudged smock, the trousers with ragged holes worn through the knees, the scuffed shoes with heels chewed thin by city cement. Even his mustache, once flaunting the wingspan of the iron eagle over Mauthausen’s gate, had become a limp patch of pelt. Despite his mjölnir, he was a scholar, not a warrior, and I wasn’t sure that he had any fight left in him.

  Von Lüth’s spine popped as he straightened it.

  My, how tall he was. I’d forgotten.

  His arm rose, ever so slowly, into a sieg heil, and despite my antipathy for what the salute represented, the strength with which he used it filled me with a bittersweet pride. His haggard heels snapped together with jackboot crispness.

  “Tomorrow is Lammas Day.” His voice trembled with awe. “The third cross-quarter day of the Gregorian calendar. One of the eight Pagan sabbats. The first of the harvest days, before the equinox, before Samhain. And this is the day Hitler chooses for a christening? Even now, at this critical hour, he is mindful of mysticism. This is why I trust in der Führer. This is why I trust in destiny. This is why I trust in Zebulon Finch.”

  His tribute was a Holy Lance jabbed into my side, but I was no Gentle Jew. What poured from me were not the curative powers of belief but the injurious energies of betrayal. I fled the building and into city shadow, knowing that I would have to live with what I did—if “live” is the word we wish to use—for a long, long, long, long time.

  XVI.

  TEMPELHOF AIRPORT
HAD BEEN CONVERTED into an assembly line for Stuka dive bombers and was thus accustomed to blanket security. The lone entry point was clouded that morning by fog and clogged by chariots of Auto Union, BMW, Porsche, and Volkswagen insignia, and through the standstill traffic I advanced on foot like a man of faith toward his firing squad, holding my Ahnenpass like the Bible, prepared to receive either bullet or miracle. Even among such chrome ostentation, von Lüth’s Mercedes stood out. I found it idling, rapped on the window, and ducked inside.

  Kuppisch was not the driver; at long last, von Lüth had leashed the canine. I had no time to gush gratefulness; I was, to be frank, a calamity. Though my trousers were passable, my shirt was a chiaroscuro of soot, mud, and rust from an overnight expedition through industrial jungles. Von Lüth, not to be beaten, looked worse. The promise of meeting Hitler again had robbed him of sleep, of breakfast, of demeanor. The shocking white suit he’d chosen strangled him—a tire of perspiring flab gathered above the collar—and he used a sopping handkerchief to push sweat to and fro across his face. He formed a fashionista’s frown of horror when I asked for his jacket to conceal my smudges, but it was fleeting. It was our only hope.

  Without the shrewd drape of tailored cloth, the shapes of his body rose as if through volcanic quag. His buttons crested down his chest and belly like skiers in a double-layout of doom, while suspenders carved through his back fat like roadways through Alpine peaks. I, meanwhile, was an infant drowning inside white tides. My hands did not reach past von Lüth’s cuffs. I began to roll them, wondering if two circus clowns like us would be welcomed.

  There were hundreds of people, though, more than enough to conceal us. After parking, we moved in a human torrent toward a hangar. It was octagonal, three football fields in length, two hundred feet tall, and of unscuffed construction at a time when all else in Berlin was bent and beaten. The mood was troublous and brooding. Hamburg, reported von Lüth, just three hundred kilometers northwest, was being bombed as we spoke, thousands dead or dying, the great medieval city gobbled by flame due to the summer drought. The fog might as well have been Hamburg’s smoke; each haunted face reflected disbelief that der Führer hadn’t cancelled the event.

  Wonderment eroded grief. We heard the gasps before we rounded the hangar and saw the marvel for ourselves: the Deutsches Luftschiff Fliegende Hitler, the greatest floating airship ever constructed, though the war’s coming end would ensure that it would be gone before many could corroborate it. It was August 1943; the zeppelin was a dinosaur. But what magnificent bones it would leave behind! Twenty stories of ridged and contoured silver as smooth and eyeless as a shark, both dorsal and pectoral fins painted with swastikas the size of von Lüth’s building. Dozens of engineers kept the dirigible in check with cables cinched to winches, but even Germans knew how King Kong ended.

  A stage draped with banners looked teensy but important beside the Fliegende Hitler. People huddled close while a large band fed them patriotism, patriotism, patriotism, until that, not the whispered invocation of “Hamburg,” was all that could be retched. I was sickened upon realizing the band was no professional auxiliary but rather a stockade of Hitler Youth, cheeks puffed and red-pink from atonal exhalation. Among them were the Mitte marauders, one of them monkeyless but likely sporting new medals to commend the snaring of a spy.

  So it was with strange relief that I heard the crowd burst into vigorous applause as the day’s speaker ascended to the stage.

  Reader, are you quite prepared?

  Adolf Hitler took the pulpit centered in the bull’s-eye of a swastika. I was yanked, as if by paratrooper chute, back to the OSS basement: the trapped cigarette smoke, the thick J-1121 folder, the upsetting sex hygiene films, the dog-eared flashcards. I’m not at liberty to say, Rigby’s catchphrase, had become my reality in Berlin. I’m not at liberty to act. Now, though, I could smell cold gun metal, taste Nazi blood. The chorus of the Fifty-One hymned approval. Could I make the shot from here?

  An overrash, impatient thought! So obstructed was my view of Hitler that I couldn’t see his face. I saw his hands, flailing like birch branches and crashing down like gavels; I even saw his hair, whisking in ecstatic strips; and of course I heard his voice, those piercing emphases gunned through amplifiers. Von Lüth, much taller, watched with pearled, worshipful eyes and, out of habit, murmured choice decipherings.

  The 1937 Hindenburg explosion over New Jersey, screamed Hitler, had been an act of Fate. It was regrettable that the country’s previous airship, the mighty Graf Zeppelin II, had been disemboweled in 1939 so that the army could harvest its duralumin metal. But today was a brighter day. With victory imminent in all theaters of war, now was the moment to show the world how Germany looked toward a postwar rule where transoceanic travel was again the apotheosis of relaxation and comfort. If the Hindenburg had been the “Queen of the Skies,” the Fliegende Hitler would be the King.

  Germany was winning the war? How could people swallow such lies while peppered with Hamburg ash? It was stagecraft worthy of Christ, the parceling of two fish into kibble enough to satisfy a starving multitude. Hitler’s arm, all of him that I could see, gestured proudly to the Hitlerjugend band, while von Lüth translated the booming final proclamation.

  “‘When the older ones among us falter, the youth will stiffen and remain until their bodies decay.’”

  It sounds, does it not, like a last-minute appeal designed just for me?

  Hitler christened the zeppelin with a bottle of liquid air, and the ship’s captain called upon the luckiest of guests to move forward. The crowd surged like tainted food up a gullet. Von Lüth exhaled and gave me a tight nod, and we progressed across the airfield. The fog had thickened such that the far end of the silver leviathan had vanished, though we could still read the flapping banner beneath which our column marched:

  EIN VOLK—EIN REICH—EIN FÜHRER

  Our names were checked against a typed list of dignitaries, and our reward was two programs printed upon finer stock than any I’d seen since Cornelius Leather had handed me his business card forty-two years prior. Sucker though I was for sturdy stationery, it did not distract me from a covey of SS blocking the zeppelin entrance. How could they resist detaining a perspiry colossus in suspenders and his cadaverous comrade?

  Thankfully, the press of the crowd had the SS guards harried, and they fulfilled the minimum requirement of confiscating photo-camera contraband. Weapons of rank and ceremony, of course, from Luftwaffe daggers and Army dress bayonets to von Lüth’s own mjölnir, were permitted, and with compliments.

  The hammer had weight beyond the physical; von Lüth gripped it as we scaled the thrumming gangplank. We transitioned from B-Deck promenade to a bar at the top of the stairs, a space handsomely wainscotted and generously ferned but stuffed with a hundred bodies. It smelled of breath and skin, the finest of both. Men wore full regalia, and women the sort of gowns only the likes of Bridey Valentine could scrounge during wartime. Acrobatic waitstaff threaded through the bustle to deliver diversions of champagne, while nationalistic leitmotifs piped through speakers.

  Von Lüth and I were corralled with dozens of others along the port side, from smoking room to officers’ mess, until we were, one at a time, permitted a peek into the airship’s gargantuan belly, a dizzying web of bombinating wire lashed along metal cruciforms. From there we climbed to A-Deck and its village of heated passenger cabins populated by cordial Luftschiffbau personnel in blue jackets, white vests, bow ties, and doeskin caps. They smiled and answered technical questions. Von Lüth’s translations were balderdash: echolot, stratoscopoe, inclinometer.

  I consulted the program. This gist, though in German, was clear. A stem-to-stern tour. Breakfast. Then, at last, a chance to shake the hands of attending luminaries two hundred meters up in the sky. This last detail caught me off-guard. Surely my poor translation was to blame. I whispered to von Lüth.

  “Flying? I thought we were only touring.”

  In response, the thuds and tremors of the closing
gangplanks.

  “To Elysium we rise.” Von Lüth, white and trembling with anticipation, filled his chest with buttressing air. “Like the Grâl rejoining Lucifer’s crown.”

  The sealing of my coffin lid was a gentle one. It was a comfort, in a way, not to have to hatch an escape plan, dwell upon a future OSS interrogation, or speculate upon a future outside Reich borders. Once the deed was done, I would be trapped, and that would be that. My heart thudded—no, it was the revolver banging against my ribs as I stumbled past a towering portrait of Hitler to the windows of the passenger lounge. I was dead, but warm air still comforted cold flesh.

  The windows were cranked open and built at a forty-five-degree angle that allowed passengers to gaze down at the silly little world below. I was in prime position to hear the captain crow orders to the ground crew via bullhorn. The prop lines wriggled from the craft like snakes. Gravity leapt, and we began to rise. Everyone in the lounge staggered, then gasped, then giggled; our altitude tickled noses the same as the champagne bubbles. Only von Lüth looked sickly. I wondered if he might upchuck and ruin the whole damn thing.

  Then, smoke.

  With the abruptness of a pulled windowshade, a filthy black cloud enveloped the ship. Ten seconds passed like a slowly drawn inhale, and then a woman screamed: “Feuer! Feuer!”

  Instead of further cries there was a mass crouching, as if each passenger braced for Gestapo nightsticks. I felt an unexpected head rush of gratitude to the Gød who had until then forged a nice, long career out of bedeviling me. It was an unbelievable gift. The Nazis had learned nothing from Hindenburg; the zeppelin was hydrogen, not helium; Adolf Hitler would incinerate to unverifiable black bones; von Lüth would never know how I’d planned to betray him; and I would be furnaced into dust, coagulated in the clouds, and transformed to heavier fog.

  The martial music cut out, and in its place eased the bourbon tones of the captain’s voice. One to the other, Germans blinked, then smiled, then laughed. A hand snatched my wrist, and there was von Lüth, teeth as big as fence posts. He cradled my cold cheek in his clammy palm, a gesture that only at this instant of giddiness was publicly permissible.