“Who took over from the Jap I killed? Who else have you got on my trail?”
Beck looked at me with something close to contempt.
“I would have taken you out myself, Haider. The Japs wouldn’t have known anything about it.”
I looked at him blankly.
“But then why…”
“Haider, you still don’t understand. The Japs don’t know I’ve got him, nobody knows. This is my own show, the rest of my agents are still searching Manhattan for him, I’ve kept them compartmentalized from the beginning. I had to call in the Komeito to help eliminate Grauber and Fiske, and I made the mistake of giving them a crack at you, but I handled everything else myself. I was just as worried about my own agents finding the scent as you and Kohler.”
This was losing me.
“Wait a minute, Beck, you’re working for the Japs, why…”
“I told you, I’m working against the Nazis.” He paused for a moment, then looked up at me and spoke softly, intensely. “I don’t suppose my motives would mean anything to you, Haider, you’re just another one of their programmed zombies. But I’ve been fighting this foul system all my life. My father was with the Resistance in ’46, one of the regular army officers who defied Eisenhower over the Ultimatum. The collabos hanged him with Patton and the rest after the Chicago A-bombing.” That same fierce look gleamed in his eyes again. “I was weaned on bitter milk, Haider. I’ve never lost the taste.”
I listened to him with fascination. I’d known there were some Patties still hanging on in dark corners, but I never would have believed they could penetrate the Gestapo.
“My mother and a small circle of friends carried on after Federation,” Beck continued. “I was groomed to enter government service from the very beginning. I put on a good ideological front and I was already a district leader in the Viking Youth when the Japs recruited me. That was back in the fifties when they were contacting a lot of Resistance survivors to build their network here. They needed us because they were too damned visible on their own, and we needed them because they were the only force left opposing the Reich. They may have been doing it for their own imperial reasons, but along the way they managed to preserve some of the values that’ve disappeared in the rest of this madhouse world.” He paused. “But my first allegiance is to those values, not to Tokyo. That’s why once I found the Jew and talked to him, I wasn’t going to let him out of my hands. Not for anything.”
This was getting deeper every minute.
“How the hell did you find him?”
“The same way you did, through the skull. Although you were one up on me there, I never thought of the kids as witnesses. I came to New York on my own from Washington the day after I saw that first report. I alerted our apparatus here and went to see Fiske, and then Pickett. That was why they both had to die once you started—either of them could have blown me if you’d ever started asking the right questions. Pickett gave me a description, not very good, but enough to start on.” God, I’d never even asked Pickett who he’d talked to before me. “And then I thought, was it pure accident that he buried the skull in Washington Square Park? Was he just passing by and decided it was as good a spot as any? Or was there some connection, some specific reason he chose that location. It was a long shot, but I hung out in the park day after day, striking up conversations with every gray-haired elderly man who seemed to be a habitué of the place, looking for anything off-beat, anything furtive or suspicious. I must have gone through around sixty possibilities before I found him. Playing chess, maybe even with that poor old priest you knocked off. I followed him, waited till he was alone, and then pulled him in.”
It had been that simple. “And you managed to keep it a secret from your own men?”
“Yes. At the beginning I just planned to wait a few days, talk to him, find out how he’d escaped. That’s when I took him here, for secure interrogation. Then I would have got him out of the country and into Japanese territory. After all, he’d have been safe there, and the Imperial psy-war people could have made an idiot out of Heydrich, maybe even blackmail him with it, pressure him to tone down his demands for parity in Southeast Asia. No, I planned to hand him over, I would have allowed him to be used as a political pawn as long as it would hurt the Nazis or delay the Contraxists’ war plans. But only until I talked to him. Then everything changed.”
“Why, for God’s sake? You had him in your hands, you said yourself he would have been a great propaganda plum for the Japs…”
Beck just shook his head wearily.
“You don’t understand, Haider, you probably never will. What happened was that I learned the truth, the same truth the old priest tried to give you before you murdered him. Felix is not a survivor of your camps. He comes from a different society, a different plane of existence, a parallel space-time continuum if you will. And in his world the Nazis lost the war in 1945!”
I looked back and forth between the two of them in bewilderment. Either they were crazy or I was. Or all of us.
“Tell him, Felix,” Beck urged. “Tell him.”
Hirsch looked at me, his eyes anguished. “It is true.-How it happened or why I do not know. My memories of my own world are blurred and distant, when I try to remember it’s like walking through cobwebs. There was another city, another New York, a city I fled to forty years before to escape the Nazis.” He laughed bitterly. “To escape. And there was Rachel, and Hilde, but I can no longer see their faces. Father Francis asked me so much, at the beginning I could still remember things, but now it’s all vague, unreal, insubstantial; My last memory, I was lying in bed, Rachel was there but I cannot remember… And then it was like a great hand, clutching at me, wrenching me away, and then cold and black and a billion stars like eyes…” His voice broke. “When I awoke the first things I saw were the Nazi flags on the buildings, the men in Nazi uniforms. To a Jew in my world they were only a terrible memory. Here, suddenly, they were reality.” He ran a trembling hand across his forehead. “Reality. I’m no longer even sure my world ever existed at all, outside my own mind. Sometimes I wonder if I exist myself. Perhaps it is all a dream, a nightmare. Perhaps I am already dead.” He paused. “God knows, I must have gone a bit mad at that moment of awakening in your asylum planet. I did not recover my senses until Father Francis took me to his loft. Father Francis, the man you murdered.”
His eyes fixed on mine, then fell away.
“You poor innocent monsters, you do not even see your own evil. But Francis did. Of all the people I might have stumbled upon, he alone could have restored my sanity. And did. He thought it was no accident that I was brought to him, he believed all of this was part of some vast cosmic plan. So does Peter in his own way. I do not know. Perhaps I have just died and been plunged into gehenna, the hell of my people. What better devils than you?”
Beck spoke quickly, desperately.
“Don’t you see, Haider, this man is a key, a gateway to another life, another world. If we learn his secret, if he can just grasp and control it himself, we can penetrate the secrets of the universe!” His eyes gleamed hotly, fixedly, and I suddenly realized he was more than a little mad. “Perhaps I can leave this butcher’s world with him, part the veil of time and space, find a place that isn’t drenched in blood, that doesn’t revel in sadism and suffering…”
Hirsch only sighed.
“Poor Peter, he is a. prisoner of his hatreds as much as all of you. He sees me as some magic carpet to Utopia.” He smiled gently at Beck. “I’m just a lost old man, Peter, a Kasper Hauser thrust into an alien world. I’m not your savior. There is no going back for me.”