Lessing looked up to find Mulder and Goddard standing over him. Wrench hovering in the rear.
My honor is my loyalty.
The Nazis are still with us. Hitler died in Berlin, but his evil offspring still lurk in the ugly corners of the world. Even here in America the racist. anti-Semitic. Nazi beast awaits its chance. If is our sacred promise to our Jewish people that these monsters will never regain so much as a penny’s worth of credibility or power. Whatever we have to do to assure this is justified. Let every Jew beware of what lies just beneath the surface of the non-Jewish soul, particularly those who speak of the “Western, Christian — and hence “Aryan” — heritage. And, especially, let every Jew keep a little flame of hatred alive in his or her heart for the German, for there is the enemy!
CHAPTER FOUR
Monday, April 7, 2042
“No,” Wrench insisted. “They really are the SS. What it’s become, anyhow.”
Lessing didn’t want to think about Mulder’s secret Nazi connection. He wasn’t political, he didn’t care, and he wasn’t interested either in condemning or joining. He said, “And my mother’s Chicky Chicken, the cartoon queen!”
Wrench clucked and made flapping motions with his elbows. “If you say so.”
“Look, do you mind? Jameela kept me busy yesterday filing reports with the CID, identifying the opfoes, Bauer, statements… the whole mess.”
“I heard. Two foreigners, car parked on the main road, no I.D. Just two lost coyotes looking for a home.” “Coyote” was slang for an unemployed mercenary.
“South Europeans of some kind: Greeks, Italians.”
“And Bauer?”
“No connection. Nothing to do with the burglars. Or with the taxi-wala. Some third man stuck him. An Arab, maybe. There’ve been as many of them wandering around India as elsewhere since Israel finished gobbling up the last of their land.”
“How is Bauer?”
“Better. Balrampur Hospital.”
“Mulder and Goddard think there is a connection. Bauer was a diversion, to keep us all singin’ and dancin’ while the others went in for the books.”
“No chance! Mulder and Goddard can go play drop the soap in the shower.” There was no reason to tell Wrench about Bauer’s fear of Lessing himself. That was obviously irrelevant.
“You don’t realize the importance of those books! The records of the SS from 1945 to the present!”
“Stuff the books… sideways. Mulder and Goddard… a pair of closet Nazis! Let ‘em dress up in black uniforms and heil each other till the cows come home!”
Wrench put on a reproachful expression. “They’re the real thing.”
“Goddard is Goring, and Mulder is Adolf Hitler reincarnated. I thought only Calif omians went in for looney cults!”
Wrench took a turn around the verandah. It was just after dawn, and the sky was still a bowl of lapis lazuli, as glorious as any ever carved by a Mughal craftsman. Later it would be shrouded in white dust-haze, and the dry earth would swelter like bricks baking in a kiln. He took up a slice of crunchy, dark toast from the silver rack on the table, slathered it with whitish butter, and dunked it in his teacup.
Lessing watched.
“Well?”
“Well what?” Lessing poured lea for himself and added sugar and milk, Indian fashion. The tea was strong enough to walk by itself, not the “yellow dog piss” — his father’s term — his aunt Eileen used to make from tea bags. For a moment India flickered away, and Lessing looked out upon the softer, greener, more familiar contours of his Iowa childhood. Then reality snapped back into place like a loaded magazine locking into the butt of a pistol.
“Do you want to hear about the SS or not?”
Lessing sighed. “I don’t care. I don’t ask questions. They pay, I do. Curiosity kills cats and meres.”
Wrench snorted. “Lessing, you eat, you shit, and your feet stink; otherwise I’d think you were dead! God, but you’re an apolitical animal!”
Lessing eyed him impassively.
“You’ve two choices, you know. One, you join; two, you get a rocket up the bunghole. Whoosh! ” He pantomimed a sky-burst with his toast.
“Four choices,” Lessing corrected. “Three, let things go on as they are: I do my job, and we’re just like before. Four, you pay me off, let me go, and never hear from me again. I told you I don’t talk.”
“Mulder and Goddard won’t believe you. You’re in or you’re thumbed. I argued, but they wouldn’t….”
“I told you: I’m not political.”
“You’re asking for a fucking bullet, man! Goddard….”
“Let him try.”
“But Mulder thinks you may be useful, and he’s the one who counts. He tells me, I tell you.”
“Some decision.” Lessing gulped tea and waved an iridescent blue-green fly away from the marmalade jar. “I join or I get unzipped.” He shifted his weight so that his belt holster bulged beneath his beige-colored, raw-silk bush shirt. He had other weapons as well. “Unzipping” Lessing would be no easy op.
“At least hear what we’ve got to say!” Wrench demanded.
“So talk.” Lessing gazed out across the sun-drenched courtyard toward Mrs. Mulder’s garden. The mango trees there were inviting, cool and dark and green against the naked glare from the whitewashed compound and the revolting, pink ugliness of the mansion. Colors were never muted in India, never pastel, never soft; they tore at you like shrill music, like hot spices, like the violent smells of the bazaars.
Wrench decided he had Lessing’s attention. “In 1945, when Germany lost, two submarines arrived in Argentina. Some of the remaining senior officers of the SS were aboard. They brought money, lots of money, a good part of the ireasury of the Third Reich. People thought it was lost or stolen, down in Bavaria, but it wasn’t.
“I’ve seen the movie,” Lessing scoffed. “‘Martin Bormann in the Promised Land.’”
“It’s true, though. You can read the historical stuff later, if you want.”
“Thanks. When I run out of comic books.”
“It wasn’t only Bormann. There were others.” Seeing Lessing’s look, Wrench hurried on. “They founded a colony, set up businesses, made connections. Later they invested, linked up, developed. They built a series of interlocking corporations. The postwar boom and the recovery of Germany helped those corporations become conglomerates, then huge international holding companies based in the goddamndest places.”
“The Nazi Family Robinson.”
“What? God, you’re a comical asshole! Yes, everything neat and tidy, out of sight, away from the Jews and the Nazi-hunters and their network of financial institutions and pressure groups. The Third World made it easier. There ‘re fewer controls here, fewer restrictions, fewer checks, fewer regulations, fewer watchdog agencies. Less hassle with privacy: you can spot outsiders coming, like that koel bird in the mango tree over there; he can see all around his nest.”
Lessing looked but said nothing.
“They… the SS and their descendants… made friends in local governments. The Third Worlders needed know-how, money, connections, and expertise.”
“Expertise? Like death camps? Torture machines?”
“God damn it, Lessing! That’s TV propaganda! It’s just crap!”
“You sure?”
“I mean it Of course, since the Jews got the Anti-Defamation Amendment added onto the American Constitution back in 2005, it would be a miracle if you had ever heard anything but crap! The ‘Holocaust’ is now the only legal history. You go to jail for saying different.”