American presidential editorial cartoons, on the theme of the president posing for a sculpture, were the second most common, the joke always being the sculptor’s idealization or contra, truth-telling, about the stentorian great man posing before him in the required profile. Hand in breast of jacket strictly optional.
Then an odd run of middle-tier European talent expressing itself in hagiographical portraits of powerful nobles. It seemed that the pose was favored by those with a strong sense of self-importance, while others preferred to face the instrument of record straight on.
And finally…
What have we here?
He clicked.
The image jumped out at him. Two strong faces, lean of jaw, forceful of nose, taut cheeks over bed-knob bones, foreheads caparisoned in helmets or hats, and the future they so dutifully faced made possible by the three words immediately before them, Garanten Deutscher Wehrkraft, or “Guarantors of German military strength.”
It struck him how similar the two stylized faces in the logo were to this piece of Nazi poster kitsch. Gershon quickly diverted to another software program called Abonsoft Image Compare, which let him run more exact comparisons between the poster and the logo and enabled a fast pixel-to-pixel comparison. He loaded the two images and zoomed in on the lines of profile, bold in the logo, less strident in the poster, isolated them, aligned them, and clicked. Abonsoft found that the profiles of each were almost an exact match in pitch of forehead, angle of nose, cast of mouth, shape of chin. Whoever had designed the logo must have known about, studied, perhaps even idolized the image from the poster, which was ascribed to an artist called only “Mjölnir.”
Mjölnir was quickly revealed by Dr. Google to be Hans Schweitzer, house artist of the Ministry of Propaganda, pet of Dr. Goebbels, the Nazi Norman Rockwell. The Internet quickly revealed the scope of his work. It seemed that he was a specialist in heroic profiles staring off to the left, as all manner of SS men, SA men, and Waffen-SS Soldats were captured in that pose, even a couple of rather horsey German women, though once in a while he’d turn them to face the other direction. He was also responsible for the poster for a Nazi movie called Der ewige Jude, with an image of the eternal jew as a kind of Fu Manchu facing the world in sinister yellow skin behind two squinting, malicious eyes and an enormous massif of nose.
Gershon felt a little sick, as did most people when they saw this shit laid out before them.
But he continued, becoming an expert in two minutes on Hans Schweitzer, who, after the glory days of the war, settled back into obscurity as a commercial illustrator and didn’t die until 1980. But it was all right. Justice was served. He was made to pay a fine.
So: who would allow himself to be influenced by Hans Schweitzer?
Who found the imagery so powerful and raw that he’d commissioned its replication seventy years after the last real Nazi was gunned down in the rubble of Berlin by Red Shock Army troops?
Begin with family. He went to an Institute database, found nothing, then sent an e-mail to a friend at the Holocaust Research Center and in very few minutes heard back.
Gershon, I don’t approve of holding a son guilty for a father’s deeds. It’s even more questionable here, as Schweitzer was really only guilty of what can be called Artcrime. Yes, he specialized in the world’s most hateful imagery, and prospered from it, and enabled the killers in some extralegal philosophic sense, but he himself did nothing except draw.
You assure me this is necessary for some national defense issue. Then I will dutifully comply and tell you that Schweitzer had a son with some graphic talent who worked in advertising for many years. The son’s son has the same talent and now is a senior partner in a graphics firm in Berlin called Imagetorrent. The man’s name is Lukas Schweitzer, and it saddens me to report that he did in fact change his name back to Schweitzer to capitalize on his grandfather’s “fame.” It seems to have worked. Do what you will with this information, but remember, these people are guilty only of translating into imagery the sick fantasies of the truly evil. What does the world become if you are guilty of “drawing bad things” and can be punished for it?
Gershon had no plan to punish Lukas Schweitzer for his grandfather’s intellectual crimes, but he did plan to do some actual spying.
That didn’t take much effort, as the firewalls around Imagetorrent’s internal affairs were quite fragile, easily penetrated, and it took only a few minutes to crank into the e-mail of Lukas Schweitzer and call up its “trash” file, where that which had been erased lay in perpetuity, and pore through it until he came on a file of e-mails labeled “Nordyne.”
It was a back-and-forth between artist and patron.
Artist: I’m sorry you are disappointed in the submission. I find myself reluctant to pursue your ideas any further. Yes, I profit by my family associations, call me a hypocrite, but it is still a painful area for me.
Patron: Bourgeois sniveling. You have accepted a generous payment. You have agreed to follow my ideas. Your opinions of them are not interesting to me. Use your talent as I have directed and as I demand, or there will be ruinous legal problems for you and your firm. I want the same purity of line that marked the great Mjölnir’s work; that talent is in your veins. Embrace who you really are.
Artist: Let me know if this works for you. I have tried to eliminate any supremacist content and utilize only the core of my grandfather’s imagery. You don’t WANT associations with him, do you? You can’t. You just want some essence of his “spirit,” right? I hope so.
Patron: At last. Yes, it is acceptable, and the final fee will be paid, with a bonus. All these e-mails must be destroyed, incidentally. But you knew that.
The patron’s e-mail address was Anton1@Toryavesky.net. It didn’t take long for Gershon to learn that Toryavesky was the holding company at the center of a certain Russian oligarch’s empire. That man was Vassily Strelnikov, about to become the new minister of trade of Russia.
CHAPTER 50
Inna lillahi wa inna ilaihi rajioon.
To him we belong, to him return.
Having spoken directly to Allah by means of a dua, as such direct declarations were called, Salid came out of his religious trance. It was still the same, only it was five seconds later.
The senior group leader SS lay on his side on the narrow width of the bridge, in a gigantic puddle of blood that soaked his clothes and gleamed in the dull light of the occluded sun; some of it slid through the slats and drained down to the swirling waters below. There was so much blood you could smell it. The corpse’s eyes were open, as was his mouth. Blood ran from his nose and welled into his mouth from his throat but had not overspilled its boundaries yet.
Where could the shot have come from?
It had to have come from a long, long way out, so far out that its noise largely dissipated before it so tragically arrived.
Salid blinked, hoping for the arrival of a clarification. Men looked at him in stupefied horror, waiting for orders. He himself wished someone were there to give crisp, concise, well-thought-out orders. But in the absence of Dr. Groedl, he was the senior officer.
He could think only of himself.
The man I was sent to protect is dead despite my best efforts. I will be blamed. I am, after all, the outsider, the one who does not belong. My greatest sponsor was Dr. Groedl, and now he is gone, the sniper has escaped, I have shamed my father, my grandfather, my cousin the Mufti, my family, my faith, my destiny. The Germans will shoot me for gross incompetence.