Stormfuhrer (12 page)

Was the doctor one of the “good Nazis”?  Did he really care about his patients?  Hayes ventured a statement that he knew could cost him the game.  “They are like us as much as we say they aren’t.  Killing them or just letting them die--both are murder.  Not just Savina.  All of them have value.  They’re all human, Doctor.  I think we both know that.”

The doctor looked casually into Mauer’s eyes.  It was clear he didn’t trust Mauer to say what Mauer really thought.  He was a manipulator.  He didn’t even seem shocked, though he might have if he had thought Mauer was being candid.  “Then you are a murderer.”

“
As are you Doctor.”

The doctor nodded imperceptibly.

They sat silently in the room for several minutes, each clearly wanting to trust the other with their truest sentiments regarding the war, the Jews, the Leader.  Hayes broke the silence first. “Clearly neither of us likes what we are doing here.”

“
Clearly.”

“
How do we make it stop?”

The doctor shook his head, looking at the floor.  The wispy gray hair only partially covered his otherwise spotted pinkish-white scalp.

“I’m getting out of this,” Richard whispered.  “I want to be able to trust you when the time comes.”

The doctor looked at his hands.  “I know what kind of man you are.  You would say or do anything that served you for the moment.”

Hayes felt a slight sting from the comment but  understood.  “I’m not that man.”

The doctor looked at him and smiled.  “Even if you weren’t, I couldn’t help you any more than you could help yourself by simply walking out the front gate.  Driving would be more practical though.”

“What if we took over this camp?  We could let everyone go and get ourselves out of here, to Switzerland, maybe.  Let them scatter in all directions while we simply vanished!  We'd make them think we were tracking down prisoners, giving us plenty of time to get hundreds of kilometers away.”

“
If you tried, I would take sides against you,” the doctor replied, firmly.

“
So you
enjoy
being a murderer?”

“
I enjoy the idea of my wife and children staying alive.  They would be murdered by the Gestapo if I were to participate in such an insane plan.”

Hayes had finally crossed the line.  His position in the game, his avatar's career, his implicit “score,” was no longer important.

“Living isn’t the same thing as just existing, Doctor!” Hayes exclaimed as he jumped up from his chair and ran into the examination room.  He had seen a large syringe filled with a clear liquid, residing in an ominously open box.  Instinctively, he knew its purpose.   He reached across the metal table and grabbed the syringe.  He stabbed his own chest with it one time, deeply, leaving the needle nestled well between two left ribs.  By now the doctor had entered the room and lunged at him, trying to keep him from pressing the piston into the liquid.  Mauer's own blood began to swirl into the now pink liquid of the syringe as the doctor wrestled feebly with it.  The syringe stuck out horizontally from Richard’s chest, empty, lodged there and suspended by the thick needle.

“
You stupid man!”  The doctor was breathless and leaned against the table.

In moments, the tiled floor met the side of Heinrich’s face.  Richard’s head jerked inside the helmet as it filled with darkness and cold silence, save the rhythm of his own quick breathing.  He sat there, wondering whether outside the helmet there was daylight or night or something in between.  Ultimately it didn’t matter.  That was the end of Heinrich Mauer.

January 1940

A pale, emaciated, but fully-formed death mask stared blindly from the wall and past the Reichsminister’s bony left shoulder.  Just below it, a huge globe of the World sat in a wooden frame of semicircles, like ribs meeting around the dead amber heart of a giant.

The face that met Farash was equally thin, the eyes set back in the skull of its owner, dark in their recesses but bright with ideas.  The man’s brown, double-breasted suit jacket enclosed a long torso below a wondrously thin neck.  His nose was sharp, angular above a thin and lipless mouth. 

Here was one of the most powerful men in Germany standing before Farhat Farash’s avatar, Karl Ernst Krafft.   Smiling, this short and skinny man who couldn’t have weighed more than two sacks of Indian grain was convincing a nation that the Jew, making up only two percent of the population, was Germany’s biggest threat.  Farash didn’t linger much on that.  He was out to not just survive the game but to become the Fuhrer himself, the next fuhrer.  It had to be possible.  To do this, he would prove to the Fuhrer through this thin man how winnable the war was for Germany.  Farash had the hindsight of history and could frame his exceptional foreknowledge as a supernatural thing.  He wasn’t a man from the future but a mystic in whom Hitler would trust completely.   Ultimately to become Fuhrer
must
be the point of the game, the
ultimate
win--
to gain the trust of the most evil man in history, to prove his merit in a political battle that would so gain the trust of the man that he would name him his second.  THAT was his method of winning.  It was the only method of winning that Farash could see.  To win the game he would have to become Hitler’s Deputy Führer, his second in command, his heir.  Then, he would kill Adolf Hitler.

To do this, he had to show up Goebbels, to put the Reichsminister of Propaganda, and others, in bad graces with the Führer, to have Goebbels disgraced by mere comparison to the brilliant strategies proposed by Farash through the supernatural knowledge of his avatar, Karl Krafft.  Getting close to Goebbels in this way, and so quickly, couldn’t have been a coincidence—it
must
be an element of the Game.  This would have been all but impossible in the reality.  But Farash had one power over the propagandist that would put him at an infinitely greater advantage.  He had history.  He knew, as any high school world history teacher would, of the blunders that took the German Fuhrer from the world stage, premature with regard to his arrogant and mistaken designs.

The Reichsminister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda had stood up from his studded maroon leather chair.  He didn’t even pretend to be busy doing something else when Farash, in the form of Krafft, the Swiss astrologer, was led in by an SS guard.  The thin man in the double-breasted suit met Krafft in front of his desk.  In some ways they were remarkably similar--both about the same height with dark hair combed straight back, oiled.  Only Krafft was slightly taller and much better looking than the man with the cavernous eyes.

“Mister Krafft, I am Joseph Goebbels.”  They shook hands.  The thin man was very friendly, steating himself casually at the front edge of his own desk.  “Please.”  He pointed to a chair in front of the desk where Krafft was to sit.  The man then sat back down behind his desk.

Farash directed his character to sit, smiling, making consistent but deferential eye contact with the speaker.  He was nervous.  It was a game, but he was unaccountably nervous.

“I hear you saved our Fuhrer’s life.”  It sounded more like a statement than a question.

“
He saved his own life, Herr Reichsminister, by believing in the truth of my note.”

“
Yes . . .Yes.  So what powers do you have?  I understand you are an astrologer.”  The thin man’s elbows were on his desk, his long fingers folded together under his narrow chin.

“
I can predict things.  Things that matter.”

“
Predict something,” responded the Reichsminister, obviously amused,
“something that can be easily verified, like what I will say next.”

Farash had almost responded, “As I said, I predict things that
matter
,” but that would have been a clear insult.  He must mount the horse before spurring it, he thought.  Instead, he said, “Events are chain reactions, and there are two theories with regard to future events.   Either the future is set in stone and we cannot change it no matter what we do, or the future changes with each action taken that is divergent from its current path.”

“
Which means?”

“
If I predict something and it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t mean that it wasn’t going to happen the moment I predicted it.”

“
Ah.  So you are of the second school of thought, that the future is changeable.  That is very convenient for a soothsayer, isn’t it?”  Goebbels leaned back in his chair, smiling, comfortably repositioning himself but without taking his eyes off Krafft.

“
I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

“
Well, if you say that lightning will strike that pole outside in sixty seconds and it doesn’t, well now, that’s okay because perhaps an uncertain event occurring between the prediction and the event kept it from happening, like a crow or something might to fly into the cloud, causing the lightning to re-target itself.  Perhaps the wind shifts ever so slightly because of the crow’s flight.  That wind stirs up the static molecules in the dark cloud that would have produced the lightning, but it doesn’t.  That sort of thing.”

“
I suppose so, though it isn’t likely a crow could alter the path of a lightning strike.”

“
Indeed.  Then what makes this crow so out of the ordinary?”

“
I’m sorry?”

“
In other words, why did not the crow figure into the original prediction of lightning striking the pole?  What made it a thing outside of your original prediction?  Certainly, it should have been figured into the equation by the one doing the predicting and thus no prediction concerning the lightning and the pole could have been made, assuming the prediction were accurate and the soothsayer not a pretending fool.”

Farash was silent.  If the Reichsminister and Farash had been playing a game of chess, Farash would have already lost his queen.

“So is it true,” the Propaganda Minister continued, “that some predictions are truer than others in your expert astrological opinion?  That some predictions take into account more variables leading to the occurrence, making them more accurate?”  Goebbels was giving him a pass, probably the last he would receive.

“
That is it exactly.  One prediction can be assumed superior to another if it takes in the greatest percentage of accurate factors.”

“
Perhaps, then,” the man behind the desk went on, seemingly impressed with his own deductive capabilities, “the prediction made closest in time to the event would prove most accurate, having the least number of variables that could interfere with the chain of events leading to the predicted event.”

“
Yes.  That’s also true.”  Farash knew better than to give in too easily, but he didn’t seem to have a choice.

“
Yes.” The speaker paused, one finger touched his nose and then pointed to the ceiling. “Yes. Of course, there is the other possibility.  The first school of thought that you had mentioned.  The one that states that the future is unchangeable, predetermined by the first cause, that all factors should already have been taken into account by a legitimate soothsayer as they are unchangeable, and that those who say otherwise to hedge their predictions as resting on possibly uncertain or merely intervening variables . . . are . . . mere frauds?”

Krafft was again silent.  Why had the Reichsminister called him here if he simply wanted to accuse him of fraud?  If he were to be tried as a conspirator, it wouldn’t be necessary for him to be brought here first.  He would simply be executed--after signing a confession of course, saying that he knew of the bomb plot against the Fuhrer through his own traitorous connections.    “He is playing with me,” he thought.  “He wants to take the superior role.  He believes that I
may
be able to predict future events or else I wouldn’t be here.  But in any case, he doesn’t want to acknowledge that such a power would give anyone that much control.”  Or maybe he had already made up his mind that Krafft had been part of the bombing conspiracy and--torture having been completely unsuccessful with the man--simply wanted to whittle him down to a nub of information-providing graphite through rhetorical fencing, of which Joseph Goebbels was a master.

After a long pause, “I understand that the Fuhrer believes that I am not a fraud.  Otherwise, I would already be dead.” Farash was taking a big risk.

“Hmm.” Goebbels stared into the eyes of his frail adversary.  “
Are
you a fraud, Mr. Krafft?”

“
I am not a fraud.  And if I might be allowed, I can further prove it.”

“
Please continue.”  The man leaned back in his chair.

Farash paused, thought, but decided it was worth the risk.  He remembered a number of trivial facts from Goebbels’ diary, which had been published piecemeal and in 2023 still didn’t exist as a complete historical document.  “Respectfully, Herr Reichsminister, you didn’t start out as an anti-Semite.”

“What is that?”

“
You had a Jewish professor that you admired greatly at Heidelberg.  You must have learned much from him.”

Goebbels reflected, unfazed.  “That is true.  Of course, no farmer begins his vocation with a true understanding of the worm’s role in destroying his fields.  Once he sees and experiences the problems caused by the parasite, however, his view of the worm changes.  These bits of a man’s history can be found out with little effort.  Go on.”

Krafft closed his eyes, as if concentrating deeply.  He placed the fingers of both hands to his avatar’s forehead.  “You vehemently defended the Jews to your lover, Anka . . . or Anda, who wrote to you that Jews were ‘as greedy as pigeons after a crust of bread.’”

“
Some of my letters are missing.  I believe them to be in the hands of my enemies.  Perhaps you know their whereabouts?”

Silence.  Farash was trying to dig more out of his stubborn memory.

“Go on.”

Krafft continued.  “You were in love with her, but with a clubbed foot, you hesitated to make love to her, thinking she would reject you.  In fact, you never made love to her.  Respectfully Reichsminister, and I only say this to prove that I am who and what I say I am, you only first made love to a woman just after your 33
rd
birthday.”

The Reichsminister stared intently at his guest.  Farash had taken a big chance.  A part of him wondered how such candor would be viewed by such a spinner of self-created truths that were regularly conveyed as genuine facts.

After a time, Goebbels nodded.  “Have you read from the works of Nostradamus?”

“
Not really.”

“
You will.”  He took out a book from his desk entitled
The Quatrains of Michel de Nostredame.
  It had been translated into German, its original publication dated 1555.  Goebbels turned to a dog-eared page and handed it to him across the desk. “You may find a more far-reaching enlightenment in there.”

Farash flipped through the book of poems, all grouped in lines of four.  He read one of the quatrains aloud.

An emperor will be born near Italy,

Who shall cost his empire dearly;

It will be said by those who gather around                             him,

That he will prove to be less a prince than a
              butcher.

“One of the Medici?” Farash inquired.

“
Mussolini.” Goebbels corrected.

“
Are you sure?”

“
Does it matter?  What matters is how convincing you can be of your own interpretation.”

“
I’m not sure I follow.”

Goebbels grinned.  “It’s not about what it says or even about what it really means.  It’s about what you can convince people to think it means.  Turn to quatrain five dash twenty-nine.”

Krafft turned to the stanza mentioned and read aloud:

Liberty will not return,

They shall be occupied by a dark, fierce,                                           sinful villain;

As the laws of the people will be overruled

By Hister, and Italy, a fascist republic.

“Hister?”

“
Hitler or perhaps Ister—the Latin name for the Danube River, near which the Führer was born.  Nostradamus played with names, some believe, to hide the truths of his prophecies from those who would have him burned for witchcraft.  He was obsessed with a ruler named ‘Hister.’  Some said that maybe his oracular chickens just pecked at a few of the wrong letters and really meant ‘Hitler.’  Now read quatrain two dash twenty-four.”  Farash as Krafft obeyed.