As his finger tightened on the trigger of the pistol, Hitler imagined Ernst Streicher zooming into the future in the circular shape of
die Glocke
, and he wondered if those in the years to come would look back on him—the führer—as a god.
Bang!
* * *
At 3:40 p.m., the outsiders entered the study. Hitler’s instructions had been to wait ten minutes.
So soundproof were the two doors that only Eva Hitler had heard the single shot that millions of people around the globe desired. The first to enter the room was Hitler’s valet. Choked by the pistol powder and the poison fumes that made his eyes smart in the airtight confines, he retreated. Martin Bormann led the small group—including Göbbels, the Hitler Youth leader Artur Axmann, the valet, and Hitler’s adjutant—that finally entered to survey the carnage.
The führer was slumped over but still seated on the couch. Blood oozed steadily from the gaping hole in his shattered right temple. The drops pooled on the rug at his end of the sofa. It was evident that he had followed the pistol-and-poison protocol as advised, squeezing the trigger and crushing the capsule simultaneously. The pistol had slipped from his right hand and fallen to the carpet at his feet. Because most pistol-only suicides are found still grasping their handguns tenaciously, that meant that the potassium cyanide had accomplished its poisonous job.
Eva Hitler had died painlessly, too. Her body was in the same position she’d assumed when she’d kicked off her pumps, and she looked like a schoolgirl with tucked-up legs on the velvet sofa. She had ingested the poison but chosen not to use her pistol. It was found by the valet on the small table next to the colorful scarf. He checked the chamber and confirmed that it was fully loaded. The Dresden vase, having tipped over and spilled water on Eva’s dress near the thigh, had tumbled unbroken to the carpet. Feeling the need to restore order, Linge picked it up, checked for cracks, filled it with the scattered spring flowers, and set it back up on the table.
“Move the table and chairs aside,” directed Hitler’s adjutant.
That done, he spread two woolen military blankets on the floor and left to summon three young officers from the guardroom to carry the bodies up to the chancellery garden. While he was gone, the surgeon came in to examine the bunker newlyweds.
“Both dead,” he pronounced.
Three tall SS soldiers lugged the führer’s corpse up the forty-four steps that led to the emergency exit. The cadaver weighed 180 pounds. With no stretcher, it was an awkward task to haul the warm corpse up the spiral staircase. Clutching him beneath the shoulders, two men pulled him from above while the last man shoved from below with a grip on both ankles. The blanket hid Hitler’s bloodstained head from view, but not the black trousers of his simple uniform.
Martin Bormann carried Eva Hitler’s body out of the study like a sack of potatoes, with one apelike hand clasped over her breast. In life, she had done nothing to mask her loathing for her husband’s sycophant, and had complained to Hitler that the lout made constant harassing passes at all the bunker females. Now, in death, Eva was being groped by—in her words—the “oversexed toad,” and that so incensed the other males in the funeral procession that they seized her body from Bormann and passed it up man to man.
Her face and shoulders visible, she appeared serene.
On each of the four landings in the stairwell exit, the pallbearers paused to try to catch their breath, but instead they choked on sulfur fumes and smoldering embers mixed with plaster powder and blinding rubble dust. By the time they reached the garden, their eyes smarted and their mouths tasted of ash.
Hell on earth was the only possible description for what they faced above. Berlin was a land of red flames and billowing black smoke. Searchlights slashed the burning sky. The funeral music was supplied by the shrieking Stalin organs as shrapnel zipped through the air. With a brace on his leg, Dr. Göbbels was the last to limp out into the rubble-heaped chancellery garden. This wouldn’t be the final macabre requiem for him, however; it would be followed by the
Selbstmord
deaths of his six children, his wife, and himself.
The SS officers lowered the corpses into a shallow ditch less than ten yards from the bunker’s exit. Next, they emptied several jerry cans of gasoline over Adolf and Eva Hitler, saturating the blankets that wrapped them like shrouds. The wind made it difficult to light the makeshift pyre, but after several thwarted attempts, Bormann was able to ignite it with a torch of twisted paper.
Whoosh!
The bodies in the trench burst into blue flames.
There was no music, no flag, no swastika banner. The sendoff of the führer to his Aryan Valhalla was a brief, spontaneous affair that took place in an interval while the Red Army artillerymen reloaded. Without anyone giving the order, the Nazi survivors, as one man, stood at rigid attention on both sides of the blazing ditch and snapped their right arms out in the stiff, palm-down Hitler salute.
Sieg heil!
Vancouver
May 27, Now
Swastika felt like Perseus on the hunt.
The Nazi motive behind his previous cleansings of
Untermenschen
had been nicely masked by
The Vancouver Times
in its rush to sell newspapers and win the endless media war against its competitors. The parallel to the whitewashing done by the Pentagon when it imported Nazi visionaries and their hardware into the United States in those tumultuous months following the Second World War wasn’t lost on Swastika. Satan himself would be transformed into a hero if doing so would advance the agenda of backstage puppeteers plotting to score money or power.
Look what they did for Wernher von Braun and his rocketeers.
Overcast and Paperclip.
And look what they were doing for Swastika now.
Different puppeteers.
Same agenda.
The killing of the Congo Man had been no more difficult for the Nazi superman than the squashing of a bug. That’s why he’d spiked the African child-killer to the ground. It wasn’t meant to imitate the blinding of the Cyclops in Homer’s
Odyssey
. It was to mimic the way an entomologist pins a bug into his collection, so as to attract the attention of Special X.
But Cort Jantzen and
The Vancouver Times
had cloaked his actions in the heroics of classical Greek myth, and the public had concluded that the Congo Man was a monster who’d deserved retribution.
Swastika was a hidden hero in the public eye.
The Vigilante.
The challenge for the Nazi superman was to maintain that crowd-pleasing theme. To do that, he was turning the paper’s reportage back on
The Vancouver Times
. Cleansing the crooked business exec whose stock manipulations had ruined so many lives was a no-brainer. With Midas as his name, the “golden fleece” angle had almost suggested itself. Sure, there were those tut-tutting over how he was flayed to death, but that was just another angle from which to sell papers or fill dead air.
Tonight, however, Swastika planned to outdo himself. Hitler’s modern-day spawn was enraged that the swastika signature left at his cleansings was being hidden from the world because of an obvious conspiracy between the Mounted Police and
The Vancouver Times
. Why else would the symbol from the jpeg not have appeared in the paper? If Sgt. Dane Winter and Cort Jantzen thought they could suppress and manipulate Swastika’s birthright for their own
Untermenschen
ends … well, each man would suffer for his disrespect.
* * *
Rattlesnake venom has curative side effects. Not only does that serpent’s poison dissolve the blood clots that cause heart attacks and strokes, but it also prevents the metastasizing of cancer cells. That’s why rattlesnakes—so plentiful throughout the Cariboo region of British Columbia—were being kept in a portable glass vivarium in a medical research laboratory in the department of zoology at UBC. There had been an article on that research in yesterday’s edition of
The Vancouver Times
. It was now with the other clippings on the map room table in the replica of Hitler’s bunker.
The zoology lab was just a few minutes’ drive from the bunker, which was hidden underground on University Hill. In the blackest hours of the night, there wasn’t a soul about. Breaking into the herpetology hut was a snap, and Swastika’s penlight quickly found the portable vivarium tucked into one corner. The snakes were sleeping soundly in the darkness of the lab. Reptiles become animated in the thermal rays of the sun and turn lethargic when it cools down. Jiggling the case, however, rattled them into a frenzy. Now the serpents were squirming, hissing, and baring their fangs at Swastika. He could hear the death rattle of all those tails thrashing behind thick glass.
The first thing Corp. Jackie Hett noticed when she walked into the living room of Sgt. Dane Winter’s condo was the poster on the wall. The framed bill advertised a 1953 Republic serial film called
Canadian Mounties vs
.
Atomic Invaders
. In Stetson and red tunic, with his gun drawn, the stalwart hero dominated the upper half of the poster. All warm and fuzzy in her fur-collared white parka, the love interest sought protection behind his broad shoulder. At the foot of the poster, wearing fedora hats, were two dastardly spies intent on setting up a missile base in the wilds of Canada. Somehow, Hett got the feeling that the colorful placard was the film’s only claim to fame.
“Taking the myth a little too seriously, I hear,” she said.
The redhead nodded toward the poster.
“It’s been quite a morning,” Dane replied. “First, I had to shoot some government spook playing cat burglar in my home. Then I played midwife to a cat.”
“What’s her name?” Jackie asked, squatting down beside the mother cat who was kneading her paws as a litter of six sealed-eyed kittens slept close to the warmth of her belly.
“Puss,” said Dane.
“Now that’s original.”
Yesterday after work, they had arranged to meet for breakfast this morning on Granville Island to discuss any questions he might have about integrating himself into the swastika investigation. As Granville Island was a short walk from Dane’s home, it seemed wise to avoid the parking nightmare on that stepping stone in the salt sea of False Creek and have Jackie meet up with him here. Having phoned Special X on the drive over to see if there was breaking news in the case for them to feed in over bacon and eggs, Hett had heard about the assault on Dane. While parking her car out back of his condo, she’d seen the meat wagon from the body-removal service drive off to the morgue.
There were few signs inside Dane’s home of what had gone down in the darkness. Bloodstains on the floor where the living room entered the hall to the bedroom. An oblong hole in the balcony door. That was it. The corpse and the clues were gone. To see if the corporal agreed with his suspicion about the origin of the heavily armed intruder, the sergeant now booted up the computer and showed her the images captured by his digital camera.
“Well?” Dane asked.
“You can’t buy that stuff at Radio Shack.”
“Not a brand name or serial number on any of it. Everything is so high-tech that Ident can’t identify what some of it is for. The goggles and the torture device are out of science fiction. That’s a laser cutter, and that’s a thermal-imaging device. We’re going to try to isolate what band the communication equipment links up to, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a spy satellite.”
“Want my gut reaction?” Jackie asked.
“Indeed I do.”
“I think you just had a run-in with a hit man from a U.S. black-ops unit.”
“Why send a hit man after me?”
“I don’t know,” Jackie said. “But I’ll hazard a guess. It might have something to do with this file.” Her finger moved from the computer screen to the swastika file on his desk.
“Keep going,” said Dane.
“Did you watch the Republican National Convention when Kerry ran against Bush?”
“Snippets.”
“The speech by the First Lady, Laura Bush?”
“Yeah, she followed Schwarzenegger. I couldn’t miss him.”
“In rallying the convention to the righteousness of the president’s war on terror and the invasion of Iraq, she told the delegates that her father had served in Europe with the 104th Infantry during the Second World War, and that his company had liberated the Nazi concentration camp at Nordhausen. Remember?”
“No,” said Dane.
“Well, my dad’s uncle helped liberate Nordhausen, too. He spent the rest of his life trying to forget the sickening horrors that he witnessed there. What the First Lady failed to mention was that Nordhausen was the overflow camp for Dora-Mittelbau, the hellhole where twenty thousand slaves died assembling the V-2 rockets of Wernher von Braun. Today, if you were to ask a so-called American patriot about Dora-Mittelbau, chances are he’d say, ‘Who’s she?’ Ask the same patriot to comment on Wernher von Braun, and you’ll likely hear, ‘He’s the American hero who put us on the moon.’ My dad won’t stomach that.”
“Sounds like your dad’s an honorable man.”
“He’s dedicated his life to preserving the values on which America was founded. The way Dad puts it is this: ‘If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.’ Hundreds of thousands of American heroes died on the battlefields of the Second World War. Every one of them deserved a medal of honor. Instead, in 1975 the president gave one to von Braun, a man who had climbed the ranks of Himmler’s dreaded SS. My dad says that action spits on the graves of all those who died for
something
in the war. They gave up their lives and got nothing. Von Braun, however,
did
give us a piece of hardware.”
* * *
A cop’s mind works the jigsaw puzzle of a murder case differently than a lawyer’s mind does. The cop in Dane was trained to follow the clues until they led him to a suspect, and hopefully proved the offender’s involvement beyond a reasonable doubt. But the lawyer in Dane was trained to rework the puzzle until the pieces could be used to raise a reasonable doubt. A defense attorney used his creative imagination to get his client off. A prosecutor used his to foresee the defense strategy and undermine it.
At the moment, Dane was tapping into both his cop’s and his lawyer’s training to try to puzzle out the pieces on the computer screen and in the file on his desk.
Two victims killed in Vancouver had swastikas gouged into their foreheads.
Dane had asked U.S. authorities, through the FBI’s VICAP links, about similar signatures.
A high-tech hit man from what was probably the American black-ops world had invaded Dane’s home.
After the Second World War, the Pentagon’s black-ops world had teamed up with Nazi scientists like Wernher von Braun to beef up space-age ordnance in the arsenal of democracy.
How the jigsaw pieces locked together remained a mystery, but Dane suddenly saw another potential link.
The final mission in his grandfather’s logbook before he got shot down and spent a year and a half in a prisoner-of-war camp said:
“1943. August 17. Ops. to Peenemünde. Bombed V-2 rocket site.”
Dane felt as if the octopus arms of the Nazi swastika were reaching forward in time to wrap their tentacles around adversaries who were still caught up in the Second World War
today.
His cellphone jangled.
“Winter,” he said.
It was Cort Jantzen.
“There’s been another swastika murder.”
“How do you know?”
“The killer,” replied the reporter. “He sent me a jpeg and an e-mail with directions to the crime scene.”
* * *
The crime reporter was sitting on the porch of a gingerbread house in the Kitsilano neighborhood of Vancouver when the Mounties pulled to the curb and got out of Jackie’s car. With a laptop computer on his knees, he was already at work on tomorrow’s story.
Cort was the ideal reporter to play this game of cat and mouse with the Swastika killer. For as long as he could remember, his taste in reading had centered on heroic fantasy, from childhood superheroes and sword-and-sorcery epics in his teens to the computer-generated spectacles now on the big screen. The Greek myths ran through all of that like Theseus’s thread through the labyrinth.
Though it was unclear whether the Swastika killer had planned the blinding of the one-eyed Congo Man to mimic the myth of the Cyclops, it was certain that he had warmed to his mythological theme on reading Jantzen’s coverage of the impaling. The proof was in the MO of his subsequent murders—first the skinning of Kurt Midas, and then what had most likely been done to the woman in this house.
Now, as Sergeant Winter and his sidekick climbed the stairs to the porch, the reporter called up his morning’s e-mail and turned his laptop around for the Mounties to see. It read:
Subhumans deserve to die
You’ll find Medusa here
My signature is the Swastika
Display it in your story
The address at the bottom of the e-mail matched the address of the gingerbread house.
“Let’s see the jpeg,” said Dane.
Cort punched a key. The image that appeared was a close-up of a terrified woman’s gagged face. Just the flesh, not her hair, with the focus on her eyes. Gouged into the skin of her forehead and still dripping blood was a Nazi swastika.
“Recognize her?” Cort asked.
“No,” said Dane.
“
The Times
did a piece on her in yesterday’s edition. She strips at a downtown club called the Snake Pit.”
“Ah. The extortion.”
The reporter displayed the newspaper article on his laptop for the cops:
Snake Pit
A prominent Vancouver dentist, whose name hasn’t been released, has filed an allegation of extortion with police, charging that he was enticed by a stripper in a notorious club on the edge of the financial district to join her for a private showing in the back room. A day later, the man was called at his office and ordered to pay $20,000 to a collector who would drop by the next afternoon. If he refused, he was told, pictures of him in a compromising sexual encounter would soon be seen on the Internet.
The dentist refused to give in to the threat, and the photos were posted on the World Wide Web. His wife received an anonymous e-mail directing her to the site, as did other patrons of the club who had fallen prey to similar “honey traps.” …
The newspaper photo that ran with the story showed the outside of the Snake Pit. On the billboard beside the door, a naked stripper writhed erotically onstage with a boa constrictor wrapped around her body. The ecdysiast in the photo was the same woman whose terrified face was in the jpeg.
“While I was at the paper collecting this e-mail,” said Cort, “news came in that a vivarium full of rattlesnakes was stolen overnight from a lab at UBC.”
“A vivarium?” queried Jackie.
Dane introduced them.
“A terrarium. An aquarium. A glass case for animals.”
“Who lives here?”
“The stripper,” replied Cort. “I checked.”
“That’s enough for me.” Taking care not to smudge any latent prints, Dane tried the door and found it unlocked.
He drew his gun.
Jackie drew hers, too.
“I’ll take the point. You back me up,” the sergeant said.
* * *
While the Mounties entered the house, Cort stayed outside on the porch and returned to the sidebar he was writing when the cops had pulled up:
A Gorgon is a mythological female monster whose hair is a nest of writhing, venomous snakes. Medusa was turned into a Gorgon for bragging that she was more beautiful than the goddess Athena. Suitors who came looking for her turned to stone the moment their eyes met hers. Medusa lived in a cavern populated by the statues of men who were petrified by gazing at her face.
Eventually, the Gorgon was killed by the heroic Perseus. Using his shiny shield as a mirror so he could find his way to the monster without looking directly at her, he hacked off her serpent-haired head and dropped it into a bag. Later, he withdrew the head during a battle and defeated his enemies by turning them all to stone …
* * *
They found her in the upstairs bedroom at the front of the house. Like Perseus in the myth, the cops could see her plainly without gazing at her face. The ceiling of the stripper’s bedroom was one big mirror, so that action on the bed was reflected back like a porno movie. What was playing off the mirror at the moment, however, was a horror film.
The naked stripper was tied spread-eagled to a four-poster bed. To stifle her screams, her killer had stuffed a tennis ball tied with a gag into her mouth. Her hair, as in the myth, was a nest of snakes, with each serpent cinched tightly by tresses around its rattle. The rattlesnakes were trying to break free of their leashes, writhing and slithering and hissing and baring their venomous fangs. The face and chest of the woman were punctured by so many bites that she looked as if she’d died from an outbreak of smallpox. Some snakes had snapped their bonds and made it to the floor, and these cold-blooded squirmers—as angry as any reptiles in
Jurassic Park
—now came charging at the cops.
Dane slammed the door.
* * *
“How did the killer do it?” Cort Jantzen asked after Dane had described the crime scene to him.
“Easy,” the sergeant said. “If the snakes were stolen from the lab in a vivarium, all he had to do was pump or spray aerosol anesthetic into the glass cage. With the rattlers knocked out cold, he could easily noose their rattles with the stripper’s hair. That’s probably when he snapped the digital image in the jpeg. That terrified woman is waiting for the snakes to come out of their stupor. When they did, they repeatedly sank their venomous fangs into her.”
“And the e-mail?” Cort asked.
“It, like the others, will be untraceable. Stolen computers, Internet cafes, blind servers, et cetera. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”
“I meant about the swastika. The killer wants it displayed in tomorrow’s story. That presents a problem. If I fail to display it, he’ll think I’m in cahoots with you and might stop writing. Also, that might enrage him enough to kill again. If I display it, there goes your hold-back evidence. You’ll have copycats yearning for his Nazi fame.”
“I’ve thought of that.”
“So what do I do?”
“Help us smoke out the killer.”
“By doing what?”
“I’ll have to get the okay of Special X. But if I do, I want you to go ahead and display a swastika.”