“No fucking way. Not at first. It was—it is—a horrible project. The first time he showed me some of the archival materials, I—Jesus. It was—”
She turned in the swivel chair and began to thread a strip of film into the Steenbeck. “It was like seeing films of people at Auschwitz. Or Chelmno. Horror. It was pure horror.
“But then I got curious. I looked at the stuff he’d collected, all those photos, old film stock. He’d already transferred a lot of it to disc or tape, so that made my job easier. Yeah, for the money; but there was more. It just—it became important to me. Sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to, I think, and make people look at them. Even things that people don’t want to see, or read about or listen to. Especially those things.”
She bent and slowly began turning a dial. There was a whirring sound. Across the screen images flickered. Black-and-white, some grainy, others sharply focused. Blurred faces, scarred as Nellie’s own; objects that might have been machinery or aircraft or broken umbrellas. He spent several futile moments trying to find a coherent narrative thread in the film, before realizing that it was nothing but hundreds of still frames strung together; thousands of them.
“I had to do it.” Nellie’s voice grew strained. “He knew that I would, in the end. And he paid me really well. Maybe it would have been better if he hadn’t—if I hadn’t taken the money. But I did. And he gave me all this”—a wave at the editing room—“in exchange for this.”
Abruptly the whirring stopped, and the streaming images. A single black-and-white frame filled the screen. It seemed to be some kind of glass bottle or pickling jar, the photograph enlarged so that its contents looked grotesquely out of scale. Nellie leaned back in her chair so that Jack could see more clearly.
He gasped.
The jar was not out of scale. It was huge, and it held a man. He had been bisected from head to groin. Viscera floated in murky formaldehyde beside his upheld arms, and it was still possible to discern a grimace upon the distorted features of one side of his ruptured face. On the spongy white palm of one hand characters had been inked or tattooed; not numbers but ideograms. Above his broken skull his hair rose like ragged black flames.
Jack felt as though he had been dropped from a great height. His mind raced crazily trying to create some fathomable explanation for the photograph. There was none.
“Unit 909,” said Nellie without looking at him. “Have you heard of it?”
Jack shook his head.
“A secret Japanese research project to create biological weapons during World War II. They were headquartered near Dzoraangad, in Mongolia. The Gobi Desert. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed—Chinese, Koreans, Mongolians. Some Europeans and Americans, too. They were experimenting with bubonic plague, with nerve gas and anthrax and cholera. The Geneva Convention had banned biological warfare, so the Japanese figured this must be some pretty intense shit. In 1937 they formed Unit 909. They were trying to come up with new pathogens to use against the United States in the war. They did all kinds of shit—even sent balloons across the Pacific Ocean, to drop canisters of plague-bearing fleas in the United States. Two years ago they found the remains of one of the balloons in Utah.”
Her hand touched the controls. Once more images began to move across the screen, but slowly. A chamber empty save for a screaming child. Human heads floating in tall jars. White-clad surgeons standing around a table where a man sat upright, his mouth an enlarged O of pure anguish: his chest had been sawed open, and one of the doctors held something darkly shining in his gloved hand. Rows of men and women marching across a blinding white plain. Rows of lockers with Japanese characters written on them. Rows of human feet. An infant’s hand with needles protruding from the fingertips. A half-inflated balloon dangling from a scaffold. Teeth.
“‘The human capacity for barbarism is, seemingly, bottomless.’”
He thought Nellie had spoken. But it was her voice on a soundtrack, harsh and disembodied. A minute’s worth of motion picture frames danced jerkily. Badly scratched black-and-white film showed the same screaming child depicted before, now glimpsed through an observation window. Smoke began to fill the chamber; at the same time, a door swung open and a woman ran inside. Her mouth opened and closed in mute agony as she covered the child with her own body, trying to save him from the gas. In the corner of the frame a shadowy hand moved, camera operator or one of the watching torturers.
“‘We sons of pious races,’” a man’s voice recited as the screen went black.
Across the bottom screen letters appeared. Night Voices in Tegel, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The frame filled with words written in a fine, runic-looking hand.
“Leonard.”
Jack was not aware that he had shouted until he saw her drawn face beside him.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t—”
He stumbled to his feet but she caught him. “Lie down, you should lie down—”
Nellie half dragged, half carried him into the room with the futon. He fought her in avid silence, feeling as though he had lost his mind; then suddenly collapsed onto the mattress. He knelt there weeping in the near darkness, his breath coming in savage bursts. With a soft cry he fell upon the futon, and slept.
He woke to silence. A blanket had been pulled over his shoulders. He had no idea how much time had passed. The image of Jule’s crumpled body glowed as though branded upon his retina. For an instant he thought the suicide had been a terrible dream.
Then he saw that the bed was not his own. There were papers and photographs scattered along the wall. The pillow he leaned upon smelled of sweat and stale makeup. Jule was dead, and Jack was somewhere within the GFI Pyramid, surrounded by evidence of a forgotten wartime atrocity.
“You’re awake.”
Nellie Candry knelt at the end of the futon, brass candleholder before her. In it three small candle ends burned brightly. She picked it up to move closer to Jack.
He rubbed his eyes. She had removed her death’s-mask makeup. In the dim light her scars looked fresh, unhealed. “What—what time is it? Did someone call from downstairs? About a ride?”
“Not yet. I checked about an hour ago. We can try again. It’s just past four.”
“Jesus. My grandmother must be frantic—”
“No—it’s okay, someone got hold of her. I called downstairs to check with security. Apparently she’s very upset but one of your brothers should be there by now—”
“Dennis.”
“They’re very anxious for you to get back. Of course.”
“I thought some cop was supposed to give me a ride. They kept me down there for two hours, and now they don’t have the decency to help me get home? What the fuck is going on?” He began to shake again. “Who the fuck are you?”
Nellie moved to one side of the futon. She put some books on the mattress and set the candlestick atop them, reached for something at the foot of the bed. “Here.”
It was a mug, steam lifting from it. Jack thought of knocking it from her hand.
But of course he did not. He took the mug, gingerly and held it before his face. He hoped it would be coffee, but it seemed to be some kind of tea. The heavy warmth in his hands felt good. The steam had a rich herbal scent like cannabis. He sniffed it tentatively.