In fact, the attacks were just a prelude. Just a cheap coming attraction for the main event.
The night of the July Sweep was a stifling one, airless from dawn. Most of my people could not sleep. They sat on their stoops, wilted and fatigued, waiting for the heat to break, hoping for a reprieve from the oppressiveness of the humidity.
What they received instead was a visit from Satan himself. Leading a convoy whose purpose the average man or woman, even those of the most depraved nature, could not imagine.
The brigade was actually something of a ragtag troupe. I have heard they were all volunteers and I tend to believe this. It is rumored that they had a communal nickname, that they called themselves the Reapers. Like a sports team or a fraternal order. They came in a variety of utility vehicles borrowed from the city garage. Some even drove jeeps and motor scooters privately stolen just for the occasion. None of the young men or women wore their badges that night, though each carried their government-issued machine pistols.
There is a myth that the Reapers assembled in some secluded corner of Devetsil Park prior to the raid, that they performed some sort of bonding ritual to strengthen them for what was to come. I have heard it said that they liberated an infant lamb from one of the farms out beyond the Polish Quarter and formed a circle around the mewing and terrified animal and slaughtered it, gutted the quaking newborn from throat to entrails. That each soldier took a bite of the steaming heart and passed it down the line. I have also heard a version of this story in which the sacrificial victim was a newly born baby, a human child, just hours old and spirited out of the convent at St. Wenceslas Abbey. I mention these tales for your consideration, Inspector. You are the man obsessed with puzzles and myths. For myself, I only know that the Reapers were first spotted that evening already on the march, snaking their way toward the fifth district under cover of the over-heated night.
The rear of their cavalcade was brought up by an ancient, paint-spattered flatbed truck carrying as much cyclone fencing as could be strapped upon its apron. And the very last float in the parade was the crown jewel of the procession, so large and beautiful, in fact, that it looked like it could not have belonged with such a shabby convoy as preceded it.
Tell me, Inspector, how do I describe for you what has come, inevitably, to be the central monstrosity of our hideous myth? How do I make it both technically accurate, conveying the fact of the machine — the truth of its existence in this world, that it was born of etchings and blueprints and the draftsman’s toil, that it was constructed from prefabricated metals, assembled by men in greasy coveralls, that it was powered by the common internal combustion engine and that it fed on diesel fuel, that it operated with the same grinding noise, belched the same noxious exhaust as any piece of heavy industrial equipment — how do I tell you this and, at the same time, express to you what that fact signifies, the enormity of this creature’s monstrousness, how its purpose that night in July elevated it to something greater than a machine, larger than a piece of equipment, made it into a steel metaphor, transformed it into the demon which had been waiting for us since the expulsion from the garden?
As always, we start with a name. There is no existence without the naming. To name is to create. So let us bring the demon to life once again, Doctor. The machine was called the Pulpmeister. I am not being humorous. I am not being perverse. Though I can see where you might think so. No, this is the truth. The Pulpmeister. Were you to obtain one of the catalogs routinely mailed to the larger lumber corporations, you would find an entire section devoted to all makes and models of this beast. At heart, it was nothing but an industrial tree shredder that had been wildly enlarged and customized. This was, ostensibly, the machine’s only purpose, the on-site pulping of raw wood. I am told there are sales films in which the larger models are shown to transform enormous sections of fallen redwood forests into mountains of soft, sandy powder. No doubt you have seen tiny versions of this particular piece of equipment. Last August, after that particularly costly windstorm, the city had the machines everywhere. You could find them on every avenue where a tree had succumbed or a large branch broken away. Surely you have seen the public arborists in their deep green jumpsuits, their yellow helmets and their heavy gloves, parking their pet monster in the street, proudly setting up their orange cones supposedly to ward off traffic, though I tend to think that the purpose of the cones is actually to draw the attention of the passersby—look at our machine, look closely at our obliterating devil, see the teeth, see the speed with which it can make nothing out of something.
But just in case you are ignorant of the beast, Doctor, I will play Jonah for you and describe my monster. First let me say, the shredder which came to visit the Schiller that night was very likely the largest that has ever been constructed. And this is what leads the professional theorists to their refrain of full governmental knowledge and consent. For who, the reasoning goes, could have ordered the customized construction of such a monstrosity but the Ministry of Public Works itself? No fanatical death squad operating on its own could have afforded such a luxurious and opulent tool.
Something about the thing itself was decadent. Something about its very design seemed to send a message. There is, I believe, a saying in this country about using a Howitzer to kill a housefly. At first I believed that was the case in the July Sweep. A matter of overkill. The inevitable result when zealous despisement breeds with an insane egotism. But later, thinking about the use of the machine, thinking about the process, the particular way the disappearance was performed, no, Doctor, there was more to it. There was a brilliance behind the manuever. Because one of the simplest lessons of history is that slaughter alone is not enough. Even in the case of the most brutal and inclusive slaughter. No, Doctor. One must wipe out all trace of the despised. One must obliterate the remains. One must make any and all evidence vanish in such an absolute way that you are left free to begin denying that the despised ever existed in the first place.
For a time, you may have to argue with the memories of the neighbors. But if you are obsessive enough, meticulous enough, even memory can be manipulated in the end. If you eradicate until there is nothing left to eradicate, there will be nothing for the cantankerous to point to. And even reasonable men and women will come to accept your version of the truth.
The passenger places a hand lightly on Otto’s shoulder.
“Is our time up already?” Otto asks. “So soon? But I have not even begun, Doctor.”