“But I here get beyond my story. When, in the privacy of the tent I had shared with another Fahnrich who had not come back from the charge, I stripped off my blood-stiff dolmen, blouse and shirt, I could find no trace of the wounds that I knew I had sustained. Just below and a bit to the right of my left nipple was a dent that looked like a very old scar, and there was another just below my left scapula. At the place in which the gunner had speared me, there was no mark at all, for all that the blood had dried on my skin and soaked my clothing, which last was holed in just the right places and ways to match my memories of those two deathwounds. Yet I was a living hero, not the dead one that I should rightly have been twice over that day.
“Justly fearing a charge of witchcraft at the very least, I said nothing to anyone in that army about my wounds or their miraculous healings, nor did I mention to anyone aught of the many other severe injuries that I suffered briefly in the course of that and many another war. Eventually, when certain noblemen and comrades began to openly question my imperceptibly slow aging process, I found it expedient to fake my death and move on to another country and army, something that I have been forced to do over and over again across the long years, as I do now, friend Milo.
“But, then, if what I most strongly suspect of you is of a Tightness, you, too, are more than familiar with this pattern of self-protection from superstitious or envious human beings. At times, one believes so long a life to be a curse—a curse of seemingly eternal loneliness and wandering amongst strangers—rather than the blessing that normally aging humans would imagine it to be. But there is a very positive side to it, in that it teaches one so very much about humanity in general and the proper psychology to be used in manipulating people both in groups and as individuals. You are different. You are very much like me, and my very first suspicion of you was simply caused by the fact that you did not seem to think, to reason like, a common, normal, short-lived human. I have, I firmly believe, met only two others of our rare kind over my years and travels.
“The first was a French comte (although I believe that he did not begin a Frenchman, but more likely as an Italian or a Spaniard), a charlatan, swindler, confidence man, poseur … and these constituted his better qualities. But Monsieur le Comte briefly took me under his wing, recognizing me for what I was, and taught me telepathy and the arts of mindreading and of hypnotism. He imparted to me the few vulnerabilities of men such as ourselves. For we can be killed, friend Milo; anything that prevents the air from reaching our lungs for long enough will render us lifeless as any mere human—immersion under water, strangulation, smothering or a prolonged crushing of the chest and lungs. So avoid these things, friend Milo, and be most wary of fire, as well, for are you consumed faster than the body can regenerate, you will be just as dead as any poor old woman who was burned for a witch.
“Prior to his very precipitate departure from Paris and the French court, Monsieur le Comte first sent bravos to kill me, next notified certain sworn and deadly enemies as to my current whereabouts and finally, all else having failed, endeavored to have me taken by the Holy Office for examination on a charge of witchcraft, sorcery and heresy. This last meant that I, perforce, had to depart the court and city and country in some haste myself; but it was as well that I did so then, for within a very short time the rabble of peasants and artisans had arisen and were soaking France in the blood of the better classes, finally even murdering their hereditary king.
“Late in the nineteenth century, I became a physician and surgeon, and I was practicing this profession in Munich in the years after the First World War when I happened to meet the second of our kind, who then was leading a small political party made up mostly of former soldiers. I was able to teach him much concerning himself and how best to use his powerful mind to sway masses of people.
“He had wonderful dreams and plans for his party and his nation and his race. Had destiny allowed for him more time to prepare properly the ground, to lay firmly the foundations of his new and much better order, to draw about him a corps of capable, effective men rather than the flawed fanatics with whom he found himself burdened, then who knows how very grand and great an edifice he might have built for Germany and the world.
“But, alas, circumstances over which he had no control forced his hand, compelled him to launch prematurely portions of his grand design which should have incubated for much longer. And, slipping into a degree of overconfidence bred from his early successes as much as by the lavish praise of the sycophants then surrounding him, he plunged onward, disregarding my advice and even the warnings of his own reasoning abilities.
“As if overextending a finite military were not enough, he allowed certain frothing, fanatic lunatics to destroy certain irreplaceable resources that might, properly utilized, have even so late given him victory. With a wild abandon, henchmen of these fanatics turned potential laborers into corpses, made of would-be allies sworn enemies, even went so far as to cause battles to be lost and German soldiers to die needlessly in order to misuse the rail transport to their own lunatic ends, hauling Jews off to the slaughter, rather than munitions and supplies to the fighting fronts.
“Heinrich Himmler had always hated me and deeply envied my behind-the-scenes influence on my protégé, and after the try to blow up the Fuhrer failed so disastrously, Himmler accused me of being implicated and ordered my arrest. I fled Berlin and, after assuming the identity of a fellow surgeon who had died only the day before in an air raid on Magdeburg, I used his Soldbuch and orders to get me to the Western Front, then arranged to be captured by the American army, which presented no great difficulty in my unit’s sector, so fluid was the front then become.
“The medical officer of the Wehrmacht I was become—one Hauptmann Klaus Rudolf von Klippe—was well treated by his initial captors, only cursorily questioned by a tired, overworked intelligence officer who spoke very poor German, worse French and most ungrammatical English. After many weeks of waiting and of traveling, Hauptmann von Klippe arrived at Camp Trinidad, Colorado, U. S. A., and he there remained until quite late in the year of 1946, practicing his profession (for which he was paid by the U. S. Department of Defense), living quite comfortably and eating better than most any German then still in Germany.
“Repatriated to Germany in 1947, Hauptmann von Klippe disappeared, ceased to exist, which was not at all a difficult thing or an unusual occurrence in the Germany of those bleak days of defeat and national dismemberment.
“I then lived in Switzerland for a short while after I had claimed and taken possession of certain funds from a numbered account established years before in anticipation of just such a contingency. Then, by way of contacts in the Vatican, I made my way to South America, supposedly one Hauptsturmführer Alois Schmidt, but traveling under the passport of Karl Herbert Bucher provided by the Vatican.
“Friend Milo, I know that many people thought that the Fuhrer actually survived the debacle of the defeat of die Dritten Deutschen Reich, that he faked his death and escaped to Spain or to South America as did so many others, but I do not, cannot, so believe and I possess the very best of bases for my lack of belief.
“You see, I became connected with the ODESSA network, and I traveled all over South and Central America, as well as to Spain, Portugal, the Near East and parts of Africa, on their behalf, and if he had been in hiding I would surely have found him, for no matter how he might have had his physical attributes changed, he could not have changed his mental makeup, and that I would have instantly recognized.
“Oh, yes, we are most difficult to kill. Mere cyanide or a bullet in the brain would not have accomplished the purpose. But, because we know ourselves, a suicide would have been very easy and could have been accomplished most painlessly, as well. Even so long ago, there were drugs available which might have been used by trained personnel in such a way as to have frozen the action of the lungs for sufficient time to cause the organism to run out of oxygen and so die. Then a trusted associate could have fired a bullet into the head and the body could have been borne up to ground level, soaked with petrol and burned.