“So now they burned the book? Then why save any of this?” I ask.
Once again, Serena and I look down at the panels. My father hasn’t taken his eyes off them. And once again, like clockwork, he’s fourteen steps ahead of us.
“It’s not a word puzzle. It’s a visual one,” he says.
“What?”
“Comics are a visual medium. All the panels—they’re pictures, right? Now look at the pictures . . . see what they have in common.”
I stare but see nothing. “What’re you—? You spotted something, didn’t you?”
“A moon,” Serena blurts.
“Exactly. A moon,” my father says. “There’s a moon in each one.”
On the table, I see the moon in the Yowzie panel but nowhere else.
“Like Ellis’s tattoo,” my dad says, now excited. “He had a crescent moon in his tattoo.” But as I continue to stare . . .
“You still don’t see it, do you, Calvin? It’s in every panel—and not just in the sky,” my dad says, finally pointing it out. “Look at the base of the flame . . . the barrel of the gun.”
“Hocus-pocus,” Serena whispers to herself. “How’d you even see that?”
I’m tempted to ask the same, but I know the answer. My father was a painter. To match that restaurant lettering . . . he always had the perfect eye.
“So you think the moon’s the key?” Serena asks.
“Not the key,” he says. “More like the X. As in marks the spot.”
One by one, he peels each of the wet panels from the table.
“What’re you doing?” I challenge.
“Just watch,” he says as he overlaps the moon in the Yowzie panel with the moon in the King Street one. Thanks to the wetness of the wallpaper, we can practically see through them.
“And that does a big fat nothing,” I point out.
Undeterred, he peels the sopping wet gunshot panel from the table and overlaps that moon with the other ones.
Like before, it’s just a mess of overlapped art.
“So now what?” Serena asks.
It’s the only question that matters, but my dad’s not answering, his eyes dancing from the overlapped art to the final panel, then back to the overlapped art.
“Yowzie,” he blurts.
“What? Is Yowzie good?” Serena asks.
“I don’t believe it,” he adds as his voice picks up speed. He’s not scared anymore. He’s excited. “Those sneaky sons of bitches—when you match up the moons . . . It’s like you said—just like they did with the KKK.”
He peels the final wet panel—the one with the man and the torch—from the table, then lowers it toward the others, overlapping its moon with the rest. “Hidden in front of everyone.”
I study the panels again but still come up empty.
“You really don’t see it?” he asks.
I stare again. It’s still a mess. “Lloyd, tell me what the hell I’m looking at. Is it something in the middle or—”
“Not the middle. On the outside. Wait, lemme . . .” From his front pocket, my dad pulls out a cocktail napkin—looks like it’s from a bar—and covers the center panel. On the napkin is the handwritten note “GATH 601174-7.” The container number from the original shipment. But that’s not what he cares about. “Here,” my father says as he presses the napkin into place. “How ’bout now?”
His fingers race as he traces the outer edges of each panel. “We just— We had it wrong. It’s not a Book of Lies at all. It’s a Book of— Book of—”
“Truth,” Serena and I mutter simultaneously as we study the outer panels and read clockwise.
“Book of Truth,” I repeat. “That’s great, but— I don’t— What’s that even mean?”
“It means here’s how the panels are supposed to be,” he says, still excited.
“I thought it was supposed to have who killed Jerry’s dad,” Serena points out.
“Maybe it’s not,” I say. “Maybe it’s something else.”
“Do we even know what a Book of Truth is?” Serena asks.
“I think . . . that’s what some people call the Bible, isn’t it?” my dad says, rotating the napkin and still fiddling with the letters that show up in the overlap.
“T-H-U-L-E,” my father spells out, pressing his finger on the H as it seeps through the wet napkin. “Who’s Thule?” he asks, his voice much slower, as though he’s confused. “Or maybe Theul or . . . Uleth?”
“Maybe that’s the killer’s name,” Serena points out.
“Maybe it’s someone Jerry knew,” my dad adds.
“Or maybe the curator had it wrong,” I say.
But as all three of us sit there, crowded around the table and lost amid what feels like another dead end, my father freezes.
“I don’t think the curator had it wrong,” he announces. His voice is still flying, but as he motions to the art, his mouth falls open and he shakes his head. Forget excitement. He’s back to fear. “Oh, God. This is— Serena, this is bad.”
Like before, he’s staring down at the panels. But with all our sitting around, the water has now soaked through the napkin that covers them. Like before, he’s the only one who sees it.
“What? What’re you looking at?” she asks.
“Their symbol . . . it’s their symbol. . . .”
“Whose symbol?” I ask, scanning each of the outer panels. “The KKK?”
“Worse.”
“Who’s worse?”
My father points back to the moon, but it’s not until he slaps his palm against the art—like he’s swatting a fly—that the water fully seeps through the napkin and I finally see what he’s talking about. It’s not just the letters on the flaps. It’s the picture that’s created when you line up the images underneath.
A flush of blood buzzes my ears. A sharp burn ignites inside my chest, as if there’s someone curled inside my rib cage trying to kick his way out.
The curator had it only partly right. Jerry Siegel didn’t know the exact person who killed his dad. But that didn’t mean he didn’t know who the killer worked for. Or who we’re now up against.
Even in 1932, there was no mistaking a swastika.
59
I’m not a Nazi, Ellis had told himself when he first read the diary. Yes, his grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s names both had been found on the officer list kept by the ITS, the International Tracing Service, which kept some of the most meticulous records of the atrocities. His grandfather even served briefly at the Wolf’s Lair in East Prussia. But their allegiance was never to Hitler. Their allegiance was to Thule. Always Thule.
That’s what made them Leadership.
Of course, the swastika confused the issue. Today, it was nothing more than the Nazis’ symbol of death. But the swastika existed long before the Nazis, dating back over three thousand years, when it was a symbol of life, good luck, the sun, and even the spinning thunderbolts of Thor’s ancient hammer to fight evil spirits.
Most important, as Ellis learned from the diaries, it wasn’t Adolf Hitler who chose the swastika. Indeed, it was used years earlier, selected by the elite Germans—his great-grandfather among them—who made up the Thule Society.
From its earliest days, the elders of Thule chose their membership carefully from German aristocracy. Yes, they began as occultists, which usually brings to mind crazies in long cloaks. But the original Thule members—the Leadership—knew there was nothing crazy about the quest for the secrets and origins of the universe.