Perhaps it's due to some post-traumatic stress reaction, but in that instant I'm transported to the afternoon at the Swiss boarding school when the trio of Miss Slutty Vandersluts took turns choking me to death, mugging with my eyeglasses and ridiculing me before bringing me back to life. I feel a hand descend to clutch at my arm, a huge, coarse hand, cold as the mortician's table; the calloused fingers wrap my elbow, as tightly as a swastika armband, and something lifts me to my feet. Perhaps it's due to some suppressed memory of some skeezy undertaker's fondling touch, the reek of formaldehyde and men's cologne, but I pull backward. The entire thirteen-year-old weight of me falls backward, pushing my fist and skinny arm forward in a rocketing arc, a pinwheel swing which connects with something solid. This... something... crunches against the bony impact of my knuckles. Again, I collapse into the soft carpet of dandruff flakes, only this time something heavy lands in the dead skin beside me.
The crowd's laughter goes silent. My hands unearth my glasses. Even through the dirty lenses, fogged with dead flakes of scalp, I can see Adolf Hitler crumpled beside me. He moans softly, a purple doughnut of a bruise already forming around one closed eye.
The ring, the diamond ring which Archer had stolen from a groveling, slobbering, doomed soul trapped in the cage beside my own grimy cell, this ring around my finger has collided with Hitler's face. Like a bulbous, seventy-five-carat brass knuckle, the fat diamond has knocked him cold. My fist vibrates. My wrist thrums like a tuning fork, so I shake my fingers to regain full feeling in that hand.
A man's voice shouts. Archer's voice, behind the stunned wall of onlookers, shouts, "Take a souvenir!"
As Archer would explain later, all great bullies have taken totems or fetish objects in order to steal the power of the enemies they have vanquished. Some warriors took scalps they could display on their belts. Others took ears, genitals, noses. Archer insists that taking a souvenir has always been crucial to assuming an enemy's power.
There I stood with Hitler lying prone at my feet. To be honest, I really didn't want his boots. Nor did I feel the slightest desire to lay claim to his necktie or silly armband. His belt? His gun? Some little piece of Nazi costume jewelry, a tin-plate eagle or a skull? No, good taste seemed to preclude taking any readily apparent portion of his costume.
And, yes, I might be a formerly nicety-nice girl with no qualms about using the words preclude or qualms, and no hesitation to coldcock a fascist tyrant, but I continue to be very particular about the manner in which I accessorize my very bland wardrobe.
From the far edge of the crowd, Archer's voice shouts, "Don't be a pussy!" He shouts, "Take the damned mustache!"
Of course, it's the one talisman which bears the entire identity of this madman. His mustache—a tiny scalp to hang from my belt—it represents something without which Hitler would no longer be Hitler. Bracing the heel of one sensible loafer firmly against his neck, I lean over and entwine my fingers through the coarse, pubic-feeling fringe of the tiny lip hairs. His breathing feels warm and damp against my hands. Even as I brace myself for one gigantic pull, one herculean yank, Hitler's eyelashes flutter and his eyes pin me with their focused rage. Stomping my foot into his throat, I jerk, pulling the short hairs with all of my strength—and Hitler screams.
The crowd recoils, retreating a step.
Once again, I fall backward, my arms pinwheeling but still clutching my prize.
Adolf Hitler holds his face wrapped in both hands, blood pouring from between his fingers; his bellowing words sound garbled and choked, the sleeves of his uniform running with blood, so soaked that the vivid red erases the dull swastika banded around his arm.
Cupped within the palm of my hand curls the warm little mustache, torn away, still attached to a pale, thin crescent of upper lip.
XXIX.
Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. My taste for power continues to grow, as does my ability to accrue it.
The diamond ring, Archer explained, came from Elizabeth Bathory, a Hungarian countess who died and has been imprisoned within her own grimy, hellish cage since 1614. Always a beauty, the Countess Bathory had once struck a servant girl, who bled from the assault, and where the spilled blood accidentally splashed on the countess it seemed to rejuvenate her royal skin. Based on this clearly anecdotal evidence, Elizabeth Bathory went nuts for this new skin-care ritual, immediately hiring and exsanguinating some six hundred servant girls at a lightning pace, so that she might continually bathe in their warm blood. These days, the countess looks terrible; she sits slobbering and comatose with frustration and denial, unable to transition from a bloodthirsty Miss Whorey Von Whoreski.
Armed with the ring of vampirish Elizabeth, I could more easily knock out Adolf Hitler. And now, armed with his tiny fascist mustache, I banished the Nazi superman. Of course, once someone is sentenced to Hell, it becomes nearly impossible to discard him further. My solution was to send him someplace where I myself never planned to venture. My initial selection was the Sea of Insects; however, with additional consideration I revised my choice to the Swamp of Partial-birth Abortions. There it is, in the hell of Hell, that boggy landscape of nightmares where stewed infants simmer beneath an enormous movie screen, an inescapable billboard, upon which The English Patient plays in a never-ending Technicolor loop, that's where Herr Hitler resides, shorn of mustache and identity.
Deprived of their demagogue, Hitler's mindless drones inevitably fell into step behind Archer and me, traversing the Dandruff Desert in our footsteps while we continued our journey Of course, I requested they discard their distasteful armbands, and to underscore my demands I did brandish the tiny profane mustache.
We'd ventured no farther than the Lake of Tepid Bile— Archer and I and our band of newfound sycophants—when we encountered a statuesque woman holding court amid a retinue of bowing, scraping attendants. A great ill-gotten heap of Almond Joys served as her throne, and the members of her court formed concentric circles surrounding the hem of her brocaded and embroidered gown. The woman, while mad with a manic, eye-rolling hysteria, wore a coronet or a diadem of pearls perched atop the nest of her elaborately plaited hair. Even as her court kowtowed at her feet, her wan smile fell upon Archer and me and promptly vanished.
As our traveling party neared this new sight, Archer leaned close to my ear. His Ramones concert T-shirt pungent with the stench of his perspiration, he whispered, "Catherine de Medicis..."
If you asked my father for advice he'd tell you, "The secret to being a successful comedian is to never stop talking until you hear someone laugh." Meaning: Persevere. Meaning: Be determined. Make just one person laugh; then leverage that person and that joke into more laughter. As some people decide you're funny, increasing numbers of people will begin to agree.
The tiny Hitler mustache secreted safe within the pocket of my skort, I listened to Archer's counsel.
"She's some queen of someplace," Archer whispers.
Of Renaissance France, I reply. The consort and queen of Henry II, she died in 1589. Most likely she's condemned to eternal hellfire for instigating the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, in which Parisian mobs slaughtered thirty thousand French Huguenots. As we draw nearer and nearer, the queen's eyes become fixed upon me, perhaps sensing my newfound power and my growing lust for more. In the same manner that Hitler was trapped in the persona of a ranting blowhard, and the Countess Bathory was fixated on being a permanent youthful beauty, Catherine de Medicis seems far too attached to her imperious noble station of birth.