HEROES AND VILLAINS

LEWIS SHINER

First published in the United States in 2017 by Subterranean Press

This edition first published in the United Kingdom in 2019 by Head of Zeus Ltd

The following stories originally appeared in Subterranean Magazine:

The moral right of Lewis Shiner to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

9 7 5 3 1 2 4 6 8

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN (E) 9781789543896

Cover Design: Ben Prior

Author Photo: © Orla Swift

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Welcome Page

Dedication

Introduction

The Black Sun

The Next

Doglandia

Doctor Helios

Author’s Note

By Lewis Shiner

About the Author

An Invitation from the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

GETTING HOOKED by an action movie is a very particular experience. In the course of two hours, you make an emotional connection to a set of characters, then watch them take on bad guys who have all the advantages. It’s a philosophical struggle made visible, and the final catharsis always comes at a cost. I’m a tough audience for this kind of picture, but I love it when it does work for me—Jaws, say, or Star Wars, big movies that also have brains and heart.

In early 2004 I had my own blockbuster idea. Two words: Vampire Lawyers. I never considered writing it as a novel because I was not interested in scaling literary heights with this one. It wasn’t in the idea’s DNA. This was about car chases, ticking clocks, and things blowing up in slow motion.

Filming a big action movie, however, is a much more expensive and collaborative enterprise than writing a novel, and not something I could do in my study. Thus I sent my finished screenplay to my hotshot (but nice) Hollywood agent and also to a major producer who was a fan of my work.

And that’s where our two very different ideas of heroism collided.

“No actor in Hollywood is going to want to play this guy,” they told me. The reason? When things started to go sideways, his first reaction was not to get a bunch of guns and start killing people. The hero as mass shooter de jour, brought to you by the NRA.

That was the end of my blockbuster. I put the screenplay on my website in case anybody was interested and went back to my day job and my literary ambitions.

IT ONLY TOOK ME ten years to figure out that there was a third alternative. That if I turned a page of screenplay into a page of prose, I would have about 25,000 words. There’s a name for this art form: the novella. I’d never written one before, but I suddenly realized that it was the perfect vehicle for a movie in prose. I could have all the cgi and exotic locations I wanted. My heroes could be regular human beings instead of Lethal Weapons. Maybe best of all, I didn’t feel the obligation to high seriousness that I did when writing a full-blown novel.

Stephen King’s Different Seasons reinforced the connection. Here was a book I admired that spawned three feature films from its four novellas.

That in turn led me to consider the novella as a possible solution for a few other story ideas that had backed up in my mental queue. Which, incidentally, gave me something to do on my breaks from the highly serious and immensely long novel that I was in the process of writing.

Given a few ups and downs and false starts, that’s pretty much what happened. Bill Schafer of Subterranean Press encouraged me from the start and published the first two of the resulting stories in his online magazine. And within two days of my finishing the final draft of the last piece, I had his contract in hand for this book.

ALL ALONG I’ve thought of these four stories as a group. They all played out like movies in my head as I wrote them, and I tried extra hard to pile on the visuals and the action. Together they make a kind of Saturday matinee, starting with a black-and-white newsreel, continuing with a creature feature and a cartoon, and winding up with a spy thriller to top the bill.

If they also share some concerns about the abuse of power, I hope that doesn’t distract too much from the business at hand: good guys and unabashed bad guys, gun fights, car chases, races against time, things blowing up—and maybe even a happy ending or two.

THE BLACK SUN

THEY ALL KNEW the man who had invited them to this anonymous Paris conference room. They had all seen him perform as the Amazing Adonini, and some had been fortunate enough to study under him or to otherwise know him in his offstage life as Ernst Adler. The thinning white hair, the white goatee, the deep lines that put his mouth in parentheses, all were to be expected of a man in his seventies. What no one had anticipated was the hint of fever in his faded blue eyes, the slump of his shoulders, the faint tremor in his long, thin fingers.

“Gentlemen—and lady—thank you all for being here,” he said, in English that still held the brittleness of his native German. “I know that it was a sacrifice for many of you to come on such short notice. I have one additional favor to ask before we proceed. You have all taken the Magician’s Oath, and I must insist that everything I tell you today be held under that covenant. If you do not feel you can comply, I must ask you to excuse yourselves now.”

The twelve magicians at the table all nodded or spoke their assent, and Adler relaxed visibly. “Paco,” he said, “would you get the lights?”

Paco, under the name of Francisco de Sevilla, was Spain’s greatest magician. His black hair was still lustrous in his fifties, though his waistline had suffered from his success. As Paco stood up, Adler switched on the magic lantern that sat in front of him. Paco flicked off the bank of switches by the door, and the room went dark save for the glowing cone of light from the projector.

Adler inserted a glass slide and a man’s face appeared on the wall at the front of the room. The face was middle-aged and the eyes smoldered with anger. A dark forelock fell across the man’s forehead and a toothbrush mustache sprouted from his upper lip.

“I assume,” Adler said, “that most of you know this man. President Hindenburg appointed him Chancellor of my country a year ago this past January, and since then he has ruthlessly extended his power by any and all means available to him.”

In a quieter voice, he said, “Because illusions are our craft, we magicians are less susceptible than most to the claims of spiritualists and occultists. Yet I must tell you what I have seen with my own eyes. This man Hitler is evil, evil in a sense that approaches the absolute, even the supernatural.

“To be more specific, he combines a homicidal rage and bitterness with a personal charisma that is terrifying to behold. He believes he has been wronged, both personally and politically. Because of what the German people have suffered, from the savagery of the Versailles Treaty, which sought to punish us for all the sins of the Great War, to the runaway inflation that recently bankrupted our entire nation, many have come to accept his vision of themselves as victims.

“He has made no secret of his intentions. Under the pretense of Lebensraum—‘breathing room’—he plans to rearm Germany and forcibly advance its borders to the east, which will likely precipitate another global war. And I believe that he must be taken literally when he says that he means to murder the entire Jewish population of Europe.”

“Preposterous.” The booming voice came from Hermes, an upper-class and well fed Englishman in his late thirties. “Herr Hitler has performed an economic miracle in Germany. This nonsense about mass extermination is mere rabble rousing. We’re speaking of millions of people, here. It’s not even possible, let alone financially tenable.”

The ensuing silence was both long and uncomfortable. Hermes broke it himself by demanding, “What do you mean to do, assassinate him? In violation of every principle of our brotherhood?”

“No, sir,” Adler said. “I do not intend violence of any kind. For one thing, it would only make a martyr of him. For another, I myself am morally opposed to it.” He cleared his throat. “However. I do propose political intercession in the affairs of a sovereign state, which you, among others, may feel is an inappropriate use of our skills. If that is the case, I would excuse you from further discussions, with sincere assurances of no ill will on my part.”

Again the room was silent, except for the faint humming of the magic lantern. Finally Hermes got to his feet. “A long way for a damned waste of time,” he said, cramming on his hat as he made for the door.

“I should also mention,” Adler said, “that what I am about to propose is assuredly dangerous. The odds of success are poor and there is a significant chance of physical harm or even death. I am old enough not to care, especially when I consider the millions of lives at stake, however, many of you have barely begun your adult lives, let alone your careers. I am not asking for commitment at this point, but anyone who is not willing to consider that sacrifice, or anyone who has other reservations, is welcome to depart now, with my thanks for listening this far.”

Two more men quietly rose and left the room.

When the door closed, a woman’s voice spoke up. “If you’re not going to assassinate him, what then do you propose to do?” She spoke English, as they all did, although hers had an American accent. She was dark-haired and shapely, and as the Great Belinda she was one of the few women to headline in a field where her sex was generally consigned to the role of assistant.

“Ah, Cora, that is indeed the question, is it not?” Adler changed the slide in the lantern. The new photograph showed a long line of soldiers in similar light colored shirts, some in matching trousers, others in darker jodhpurs. They wore fatigue caps and marched in tight formation. The camera had caught them with right arms held high in salute and left legs thrust forward in mid-goose-step.

“Germany today is a police state with three different kinds of police,” Adler said, “which is at least two too many. The first were the Sturmabteilung or SA, the stormtroopers, also known as the Brownshirts. Hitler recruited them to attack dissenters at early Nazi rallies.” The next slide showed a man with a round, heavily scarred face, graying hair and mustache, and a warm smile. “Ernst Röhm, commander of the SA, wants to sidestep the restrictions on the size of the German Army by expanding the SA. The regular army, the Reichswehr, understandably feel threatened by this. Also they are concerned about the fanaticism of the Brownshirts, who are known to viciously attack bystanders who fail to give the Hitler salute. They burn down Jewish businesses and turn Communist rallies into street brawls. They are common thugs and bullies.

“Röhm is also well known to be homosexual. This was not a problem in the past, although it is becoming one now as the country turns increasingly prudish, reflecting the pathologically repressed sexuality of Hitler himself.

“So that is one tension, between the Reichswehr and the SA.”

His next slide showed a man in a solid black uniform, his face obscured by a high peaked cap. “Next we have the Schutzstaffel, the dreaded SS, originally an elite paramilitary group within the SA that was charged with guarding Hitler. They are now completely independent, and pledge their loyalty to Hitler alone.” The shadow of Adler’s finger extended into the light to point out the twin lightning bolts on the lapel of the uniform. “Note the runes. I will have more to say about that in a minute.”

He changed the slide again. “Under this man, the SS grew until it now fills the role of both internal security and public police for the entire country.” The face on the wall might have belonged to a stereotypical accountant: weak chin, round glasses, receding hairline, an even smaller version of Hitler’s miniature mustache. “He is a former chicken farmer named Heinrich Himmler, and we will return to him shortly as well. For the moment, note one more tension, which is that the SA feel that the SS have undermined their power.

“Finally we have the Geheime Staatspolizei, the Gestapo for short, the Secret State Police, the creation of Hermann Göring.” The next slide showed Göring to be dashing, in a small-eyed, barrel-chested sort of way, with the breast of his expensive, tailored uniform plastered with medals. “The Gestapo have taken the tactics of terror and intimidation that the SA and SS developed and turned them into high art. Göring created the Gestapo out of the Prussian police on his own whim. Just last month, after numerous clashes of jurisdiction, Hitler took them away and put them under Himmler’s command. Göring was not pleased, nor were many of his officers.”

The next image showed a heavy man with stiff, brush-cut white hair, a skeptical expression, and a mustache with huge curves at the ends. “Technically Hitler is only Chancellor, which makes him subordinate to this man, Paul von Hindenburg, President of Germany. Hindenburg appointed Hitler to his current position, though Hitler had not performed that well at the polls, and there is evidence that Hindenburg now regrets his decision. Unfortunately he is old, getting weaker by the day, and is not expected to live out the year.”

Adler took a sip of water and shifted in his chair. “In short, we stand at a crossroads, a unique moment in history. Hitler’s three most powerful subordinates all despise each other and are maneuvering for position. The man who put Hitler in power is looking for a reason to remove him. Hitler is at this moment more vulnerable than he has ever been, or likely will be again. Left alone, he will doubtless move to consolidate his power, and do so in a ruthless and violent way. We must act quickly to take advantage.”

He placed the slide of the chicken farmer in the machine once more. “Luckily for us, Himmler is the Achilles Heel of the Third Reich. Although he is ruthless, well organized, and absolutely loyal to Hitler, he is also…a believer. He believes in visitors from outer space, a hollow Earth, the magical power of runes, mental telepathy, resurrection of the dead, and the superiority of the Aryan race, among other delusions.”

The next slide showed an engraving of a castle as seen from the air. The walls formed a narrow triangle, the long sides intersecting in a large, circular tower. “This is Wewelsburg Castle, in the Westphalia district of Prussia. It is Himmler’s headquarters, which he intends to restore as a sort of Black Camelot, complete with a Round Table. He sees himself as a pagan, Teutonic King Arthur on a mystical quest.

“And that, my friends,” Adler said, “will be his undoing. And Hitler’s as well.”

OUTSIDE THE HOTEL, Cora watched as Paco, Robertini, and Gideon got into separate taxis and sped away. The sun was setting and the rainy spring afternoon turned from gray to black.

“Do you have time for a coffee?” Adler asked.

“Certainly,” Cora said.

They found an outdoor table under an awning where no one could overhear them. “Five of us,” Adler said. “More than I had feared. Fewer than I had hoped.”

“Against the five of us,” Cora said, “what chance does Nazi Germany have?”

Adler smiled with little conviction. “I thought Gideon’s ideas for the endgame very clever.”

“Clever, yes, but also very strange. Like these French Surrealists. If I may say so, Gideon himself seems strange, perhaps even a little…unstable.”

“Perhaps. I have heard stories. However, he is a brilliant mimic and we need him. And who among us is without his idiosyncrasies?”

“I suppose,” Cora said. She would also keep a watchful eye, for very different reasons, on the escape artist Robertini. He was just the sort of very physical, very intense, very serious man that she was attracted to, and there was no room for such feelings in their undertaking.

“Speaking of idiosyncrasies,” she said, “this will cost you a fortune. Can you really afford it?”

“I am older than I ever imagined I would be. I have no family. What else am I to do with my money? Tell me, have you heard of this man Gandhi, in India?”

“I’ve heard the name. I know little about him.”

“He is trying to better the lives of the peasant class, and I think he means ultimately to end British rule there. He said something to the effect that violence may appear to do good in the short term, yet in the long term it can only do evil. I have spent many sleepless hours thinking about Germany in that light. To fight the Nazis on their own terms would plunge the world into a frenzy of violence that would surpass even the Great War. I asked myself what the alternative could be, and this is the result. Like the fable about putting the bell on the cat, once I had come up with the idea, there was no one else to put it into action.

“But what of you, Cora? Paco has good reason to fear Fascism—it is a constant threat in his own country. Gideon and Robertini are both Jewish. But you, my dear…I am more grateful than I can say for your commitment, although I do not understand why you are willing to take the risk.”

Cora considered for a moment, then said, “Compared to your idealism, this may seem rather petty. Back in Brooklyn, when I was in high school, my best friend was Jewish. Her name was Rebeccah, and I always thought she was beautiful. She herself, however, hated her nose, which had a bend in it, like a tiny eagle’s beak. She thought it made her look Jewish. For her sixteenth birthday the only thing she wanted was plastic surgery, and her parents reluctantly gave in. Except the surgery had complications, two small perforations in the septum that they were unable to repair. After the surgery, whenever she breathed through her nose, there was a whistling noise. From shame, she always breathed through her mouth, and even then you could sometimes hear it. She began to avoid her friends, me included, no matter how hard I tried. The last time I talked to her parents, they said she wanted no contact with anyone from her past.

“All I can tell you is that the memory of Rebeccah has haunted me ever since. What is the power of this hatred that can infect its own victims? That can turn a person against her own beauty and cause her to mutilate herself? It might surprise you to know that I have also experienced prejudice, for being a woman in a man’s profession, for daring to think for myself and manage my own affairs. And now that I have lines around my eyes and a body that is feeling the effects of thirty-eight years of gravity, I am considered old and of no further use.”

“I assure you, you are more beautiful than ever…” Adler said. Cora waved away his objections.

“You’re kind, and I digress. The point is that men like Hitler, whose currency is hatred, do nothing but poison minds and destroy lives. Even as indirectly as they did Rebeccah’s.”

Adler nodded. “When you deliberately appeal to the worst in human nature, human nature sinks to meet you. Which reminds me, when was the last time you were in Germany?”

“Two years ago. Has it changed so much?”

“Berlin especially. You had best prepare yourself for a shock.”

“Well, then,” Cora smiled. “We shall have to change it back again.”

SINCE HE HAD BEEN old enough to read, Robert Sándor had idolized the Great Houdini. For his twelfth birthday, his father had taken him to Budapesst to see Houdini perform the effect he called “the upside down,” his famous Chinese Water Torture Cell escape. From that night on, Robert began to introduce himself as Robertini the Magnificent, to the endless amusement of his friends.

Like Houdini, Robert was Hungarian, Jewish, small for his age, and fiercely competitive. With his father’s help, he found an after-school job with the local locksmith in Kesztolc, and on weekends he hitchhiked to Budapest to loiter in Hungary’s only magic shop. He spent the rest of his time practicing, initially on all the locks in the house, then on all the locks in the village. He never succumbed to the temptation to take anything, and became a local legend when, after accidentally setting off the alarm in the town bank, he took the time to secure the doors before he fled. Everyone knew who was responsible, though he left no evidence, and his father gently suggested that he might want to be more careful in future. Before he finished secondary school he had obtained a booking with a vaudeville company and, with his father’s reluctant permission, he left home for good.

Robert was on tour in England on the night in late 1933 when the Greenshirts of the Hungarian National Socialist Agricultural Laborers’ and Workers’ Party outlined a Star of David in petrol in the field next to his parents’ house and set fire to it. The fire spread to the house and his parents and youngest sister were killed. By the time the news reached Robert and he was able to return to Kesztolc, their bodies were already in the ground and Robert’s heart had become a small, cold thing.

Now it was Sunday, 27 May, 1934, and Robert and Paco stood outside the Swiss Wing of the Hofburg Palace, in the exact geographical center of Vienna. They occupied a lop-sided courtyard thirty meters on a side, surrounded by four-story-high white walls that offered only a single narrow passage as an exit. A perfect place, Robert thought, to be trapped like rats.

In Adler’s grand plan, this was Phase 1, and he had not asked much of Robert: merely to rob the Weltliche Schatzkammer, the Secular Treasury of the Austrian Empire, containing the crown jewels of the Hapsburgs, among other priceless treasures. Not to mention the fact that he had to do it in broad daylight without being detected or even suspected.

Robert’s own plan had taken shape over three days. He’d spent those days wandering through the interlocking white plastered rooms wearing a series of disguises, pretending to stare into the two-meter-high, glass-fronted mahogany cases filled with gold and precious stones and carvings and ceramics, while in reality figuring out the elaborate alarm system, the walking patterns of the guards, the size and make of the various locks.

He had not shown undue interest in the item labeled Heilige Lanze, the Holy Lance, located near the Imperial Crown.

The lance point—it had no shaft—was leaf-shaped, 35 centimeters long, and five centimeters across at its widest point. It was formed largely of iron that had oxidized centuries before into a dark brown, with the exception of a sleeve of gold that wrapped the middle third of its length. Inscribed on the sleeve were the words “Lancea et clavus domini,” lance and nail of God, referring to the belief that the sleeve enclosed a nail from the Crucifixion. It was a complex construction, the outer blades bound to a central shaft with wire, the shaft eventually expanding at the bottom to a socket that would fit a wooden pole.

Adler had insisted that a mere replica of the lance would not be convincing enough, and that the best counterfeit his fabricators could manage would only deceive from a distance. His first requirement, therefore, was the putative original.

Robert checked his watch. It read 3:25. He smiled at Paco who, like him, was anonymous in white coveralls, and said, “It’s time.”

Paco’s return smile was forced. “Can I change my mind?” he asked. His German was accented but passable. “This is clearly insane, what we’re doing.”

“I see you haven’t forgotten that confidence is everything,” Robert said. “Come on, let’s get started.”

Robert, whose German was fluent, carried the clipboard. He led Paco through a wooden archway the color of dried blood, topped with the coat of arms of the Holy Roman Empire, an eagle with elevated wings.

Robert walked straight to Room 11, where the Imperial Regalia were kept, and approached the nearer of the two guards. The boy was scarcely over his teenage spots, clearly uncomfortable in his red blazer and white turtleneck sweater as he towered 30 centimeters over Robert.

“Who’s in charge here?” Robert asked in a bored, mildly irritable tone. “We’re supposed to perform an inspection of the alarms.”

“What, now?” the boy asked.

“Yes, now,” Robert said. “Half an hour ago, in fact.”

The boy caught the eye of the guard at the other end of the long room and tilted his head. The other guard nodded. On his first visit, Robert had quickly determined that only one of the two guards in each hall could leave his post at any given time.

The boy took them to a small office where a paunchy, white-haired man wrote laboriously in an oversized ledger. He had a cigarette in one hand, for which there appeared to be no room in his overflowing ashtray.

“Dieter,” the boy said, “these men are here to look at the alarms.”

Dieter did not look up. “Not now.”

“Sorry for the inconvenience,” Robert said. “I’m afraid our instructions require us to—”

“Perhaps you didn’t hear me.”

“With all due respect,” Robert said, “I believe your supervisor is Herr Grauerholz, who in turn reports to the Antiquities Committee. If you would call the number on this work order, I think you might prevent Herr Grauerholz from himself getting a call that he might find most upsetting.”

The color went out of Dieter’s red cheeks and he glanced up briefly before snatching the clipboard and making the call. Robert was able to hear Adler’s voice on the other end, screaming. When there was a momentary pause, Dieter said, “Jawohl, mein herr,” then the screaming resumed. Finally Dieter was able to say, “Right away, mein herr,” and hang up. The hand that put the earpiece back on the hook trembled slightly.

Dieter looked at the boy. “Give them what they want and get them out of here.”

Robert repressed a smile. “If you could just sign here on the order?”

The boy, now all jangled nerves, took them to the alarm box. “I don’t have the key. Perhaps Dieter…”

Robert briefly flashed his hotel key. “I have the master.” He palmed it as he turned toward the box, replaced it with a pick, and had the gray metal box open in two seconds.

“Er, will there be anything else?” the boy asked.

“Your name?” Robert demanded.

“Peter, sir.”

Robert sniffed. “Peter. We will call you if we need you.”

Five minutes later Robert felt as much as heard a hush go through the museum, followed by the murmur of excited voices, all repeating the same phrase: “Mein Gott, der Führer!”

GIDEON HAD MADE his reputation with a unique combination of comedy and sleight of hand. His innate gift for imitation had earned him several playground beatings as a child in Minneapolis until he’d learned to defuse the anger of his victims by discovering a coin in an ear or a chosen card in a deck. By the time he’d graduated to impersonating Charlie Chaplin and W. C. Fields, he was also juggling, producing doves, and performing two dozen different cigarette tricks.

He understood that there was something not quite right with him. The urge to mock would take him at inopportune moments, driving away everyone who attempted to get close. At first he’d believed that someone would eventually care enough to see past his defenses. Now there were times when he scarcely remembered the name he’d been given at his Brit Milah. He was only Gideon now, and Gideon was so many faces and voices that no one would ever pin him down again.

He did not consider himself a hero—the opposite, in fact. He had volunteered only because it was the Amazing Adonini who asked, a man who was spoken of in the same breath as Hermann and Keller and Blackstone and Thurston, a man whose recognition and respect Gideon craved.

Gideon made up for his barely adequate German with a repertoire of flawless regional accents. It came down to how you held your mouth and tongue. Impressions amounted to the same thing on a larger scale. Once you spotted the trick of posture, the gesture, the rest was easy.

The key to Hitler was his ungainliness, his discomfort inside his own body, his inability to find something to occupy his hands. Then the madman inside would ignite and he would forget his body entirely. Gideon had been doing Hitler for over a year now, since the man had been made Chancellor, so he had the wig, nose, mustache, and trench coat already. He even had a pair of thin glass scleral lenses to turn his brown eyes to the clear blue of Hitler’s, although for the current purpose they would have been overkill.

He and Cora had arrived half an hour early and sat in the parking area outside the museum in awkward conversation. Though she was ten years older than Gideon, she had an unrepentant sensuality and self-confidence that he found most alluring. He sensed that Cora did not particularly like him, and he knew she resented his request that she wear a low-cut dress so as to provide the maximum possible distraction. Her reluctance notwithstanding, she had in fact done a remarkable job in that area, such that Gideon’s own distraction was doubtless making her discomfort worse. Even the blonde wig and heavy makeup she’d affected as a disguise added to her—unfortunately false—air of availability.

Finally Cora glanced at her watch and let out a sigh of relief. Gideon verified that it was 3:35 and they got out of the car.

“Anyone who knows the first thing about Hitler,” Cora said, through a falsely radiant smile, “knows that he would never be seen in public with a woman whose tits were hanging out.”

As they strolled arm in arm past the vast, curving neoclassical façade of the Neue Berg section of the palace, people gaped at them in astonishment.

“Well, whoever they think we are,” Gideon said, “we seem to be having the desired effect.”

They wound their way through the maze of passageways and courtyards to the Swiss Wing, where they simply stood in the sunlight and pretended to converse while Gideon stared at Cora with a wolfish Hitlerian grin. A crowd quickly gathered in the portico outside the Secular Treasury, making only a halfhearted attempt not to stare. Although Austria had not yet joined the Reich, Hitler had been born here, had invented himself right here in Vienna, and curiosity about him was boundless.

Gideon let his gaze drift over the faces in the doorway. Still no sign of Paco. Suddenly the enormity of the risk overwhelmed him. If things went wrong inside, armed guards would descend in swarms, Gideon’s disguise would be penetrated in seconds, and all four of them would be arrested and asked questions they could not answer. A drop of sweat trailed into Gideon’s right eye and he realized that he was speaking nonsense that only sounded like German. Cora raised one eyebrow, as if concerned that he might fall apart at any moment.

He wondered if her fears were justified.

ROBERT FLIPPED THE SWITCH that disabled all the alarms. A red light flashed on the panel and his heartbeat sped up to match.

He nodded to Paco, whose job it was now to help spread the Führer rumor and then get himself into a position to make eye contact with Gideon.

Robert returned to Room 11. The older guard had joined the throng at the entrance while Peter remained on watch, standing directly in front of the cabinet that held the Lance. He shifted from one foot to the other as if he needed the toilet, gazing longingly toward the front entrance.

“Go ahead,” Robert told him. “I’ll watch things here.”

“If Dieter found out, I’d lose my job.”

“Take a quick look. No one will ever know. When will you get another chance like this?”

The boy hesitated, torn between irresistible forces. Robert jerked his head toward the entrance and smiled. The boy melted. “Just for a second, then,” he said, and bolted.

A second was all Robert needed. He picked the lock on the case, opened the glass front, took out the Lance, replaced it with a replica from his pocket, and had it locked again in virtually a single motion. By the time Peter re-entered the hall, Robert was at the far end, tapping one of the cabinets with a middle finger in the way the doctor at the clinic had tapped on Robert’s chest when he’d had the influenza as a boy.

Peter was radiant. “Is it all right? Did Dieter…”

“No,” Robert said. “All is well.”

He made his own way to the front. Paco stood in the crowd at the doorway, looking into the museum. Robert nodded to him, and Paco in turn nodded to Gideon. Robert caught a glimpse of Cora in her costume and had to force himself to look away, a slow smile spreading across his face. He switched the alarms back on and then, for spite, made one more trip to Dieter’s office.

“Everything is working,” Robert said. “Sign here.”

Dieter grunted and signed.

“And here.”

Dieter signed again. Robert resisted a diabolical urge to keep going and tucked the clipboard under his arm.

“What’s all the commotion out there?” Dieter asked.

“I don’t know,” Robert said. “Perhaps a clown doing tricks for the children?”

THAT NIGHT at Vienna’s Westbahnhof railway station, Robert paused at a news kiosk. He set his worn leather satchel on the concrete floor and reached for a copy of the Neue Freie Presse.

An older man in a broad-brimmed fedora appeared beside him and placed an identical satchel next to his. “Gruss Gott, mein herr,” the man said. Robert glanced at Adler, nodded, and looked away. Adler purchased a packet of Atikah cigarettes, picked up Robert’s satchel, and disappeared into the crowd.

THE DAY AFTER the Weltliche Schatzkammer robbery, Adler settled on his final target. And so, he thought, begins Phase 2.

He had been a month in the central German hamlet of Neuenbeken, a long way from any major cities, but only 30 kilometers from Wewelsburg Castle. It was a small enough village for everyone to know everyone else and for strangers to attract suspicion.

His cover identity was Ernst Ackermann, newly retired dock worker from Hamburg, living on a hectare of gently rolling forest land outside town, arriving by bicycle in the warm summer mornings at the library or the greengrocer’s or at the café for leisurely conversation. With his hair cut close to his skull, his goatee shaved, a pair of foam rubber pads in his gums, and an artificial scar across the top of his nose, the likelihood was small that anyone would recognize him as the Amazing Adonini. Instead the locals thought him a good sort, if perhaps a bit dim. If anyone cared to look further, they would find a complete set of impeccably forged documents for Ackermann in the appropriate government agencies.

His target, Rudi, was the 11-year-old son of Mayor Glöckner. Rudi was solitary and melancholic, given to long walks in the woods carrying a copy of The Sorrows of Young Werther.

The spring had been the driest in memory, part of a world-wide drought that was turning the American West into a wilderness of dust. The heat even permeated the forest, and the fallen leaves and pine needles crackled with Rudi’s every step, making him easy to follow. He was sitting under a beech tree, reading, when Adler appeared before him.

The boy started and dropped the book.

Adler smiled, held up a single cautionary finger, and wordlessly took a gold sovereign from his shirt pocket. He tossed the coin into his mouth, swallowed it with comic difficulty, then pulled it out of his right ear. Looking puzzled, he then removed a duplicate from his left ear.

Rudi laughed.

Maintaining his distance and his smile, Adler wiggled one of the coins so that the sun, directly overhead, flashed repeatedly into the boy’s eyes. “Listen to my voice,” Adler said, “and my voice only.”

CORA HAD ALWAYS loved Berlin. In daylight, as she strolled past the fashionable shops on the Kurfürstendamm, it seemed unchanged. The sidewalks thronged with tourists and well-off locals, all overdressed and in high spirits. The streetcars clanged and the architecture dazzled the eye, from the majesty of the Brandenburg Gate to the onion domes of the New Synagogue to the elegant Bauhaus apartments of Maeckeritzstrasse.

It was at night that the difference became inescapable. A few of the most famous clubs and cabarets remained open: Werner Fink still satirized the government at Die Katakombe; the Residenz-Casino, the “Resi,” still offered telephones and pneumatic tubes at the tables so that strangers could send gifts and invitations to each other; the Haus Vaterland still contained five stories of themed restaurants, musicians, and cinema, with a giant dance floor under its lighted dome.

What was missing was the sex.

The Eldorado, famous for its transvestites, where Cora had seen Marlene Dietrich perform; the Hummingbird, the Silhouette, and the Adonis-Lounge; the Café Dorian Grey, the Mikado Bar, the Auluka Lounge, the Monocle-Bar, the Zauberflote, and on and on and on, all of them closed under Göring’s orders, part of his mission to crush Berlin’s wild, decadent, anarchistic, anti-Nazi spirit.

It was true that the great sexual license of Berlin had amounted, in the end, to the freedom of rich tourists to rent the bodies of the nouveau pauvre and use them as playgrounds for their erotic fantasies. There had always been a desperate quality to the revelry, embodied most tragically by Anita Berber, the stunning, androgynous, voracious nude dancer whose appetite for sex, cocaine, morphine, chloroform, ether, and alcohol left her dead of old age at 29.

And yet, and yet…so many had found liberation there, including her friend Kurt, who had come to Berlin from the Bavarian countryside at age 16 and discovered the beautiful woman inside him, and found the lovers of both sexes who adored that beauty. Or Fritzi and Franzi, the two girls who never slept with anyone but each other, who had transformed themselves into mirror images, with their tuxedos and pasted-on mustaches and boy’s haircuts parted on opposite sides, Fritzi with a monocle in her right eye, Franzi with a monocle in her left. And there were the things that Cora herself had done that shocked her now to remember, even as they gave her a wistful smile. She had spent so much of her life in the single-minded pursuit of her career that Berlin’s frank and easygoing sensuality had seduced her before she knew it.

She started at the Resi, making no effort to disguise herself. A glass of overpriced champagne, a slow stroll through the tables, and then she moved on. At each of her old haunts she let herself be seen, and seen to be scanning the faces around her. Finally she returned to her hotel, exhausted and dispirited, as the sun rose.

On the third night, she made a final stop at the Kleist Casino, where the dim lights, tiny crowded tables, and dark red walls were as tawdry as she remembered. Almost immediately she saw a man in his fifties, handsome and dark haired, dressed as always in his black suit, like a mortician. Poor, sad Michael, who had been Kurt’s lover for 27 days and never stopped pining for him. He was so happy to see Cora that he burst into tears.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just that seeing you brings back those days, which I miss so much.” She squeezed herself into a chair at his table and he clutched her hand feverishly.

“I saw,” she said. “So many of the old places are gone.”

Michael shook his head sadly. “If it were only the cabarets and the newspapers I would not care so much. Starting one year ago, they began to round up the Jews, the gypsies, the communists, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the schwulen like me, and send us to the Konzentrationslager, the kz. For Berlin it is in Oranienburg, but there are others. Esterwegen, Dachau. Nobody knows how many people they have.”

“Oh, no. Not Kurt…?”

“No, not Kurt. Not yet. But we live in fear now, every day.”

“Can you get word to him? I need to see him. It’s very important.”

“If you were anyone else I would tell you I don’t know where he is. For you…I will try.”

A FARMER HAD FOUND Rudi wandering, terrified, in the road at the edge of town. Rudi said that he had fallen while climbing a hill and had struck his head a glancing blow on a rock. When he woke up, he said, he was completely blind.

The doctor was summoned but no physiological cause was found. There was no bruise, though Rudi reacted in pain when the doctor touched his temple. Mayor Glöckner personally took him to the hospital in Dusseldorf, where a baffled intern suggested that perhaps the blindness might be “hysterical” in nature.

The owner of the village café, whose name was Kuefer, had taken to having the occasional cup of tea with Adler. Rudi had been blind for four days when Kuefer finally mentioned the incident.

It was Friday, 8 June, and they were sitting at an outdoor table, though the sun had not yet driven away the last of the morning chill. Kuefer, who affected a beret and a walrus mustache, grew damp around the eyes as he talked. Adler listened sympathetically and let him go on for some time about the anguish of the boy’s mother, the desperation of the father, the sense of terrible injustice that had gripped the entire village. All the while he put on a show of increasing discomfort.

“Well,” Kuefer said, “we can discuss something else. I can see that this is making you uneasy.”

“No, it’s not that, it’s…”

“What?”

Adler shook his head. “No, never mind, it’s too ridiculous.”

“What is?”

“I hate to even mention it, because I don’t believe in such things myself. I used to be a bit of a gambler, a card player. One night a couple of years ago this fellow from India was losing badly, and was badly drunk besides. He had no money left and offered to put this sort of large metal talisman on the table to cover his bet. ‘It’s magic,’ he said, very serious. The thing was very strange looking, old rusty iron and a collar of gold. At that point the hand was down to just him and me, and I had already won a good deal of his money, so I agreed. He lost, of course, and I probably would have thrown it away and not given it further thought except for two things.”

Adler paused, waiting to set the hook.

“Yes?” Kuefer said. “What things?”

“Well, first of all, when I touched it, I felt…I don’t know how to describe it. A sense of power. Almost an electrical charge.”

“And the other thing?”

“The look on his face when he lost it. There was sadness, yet there was also…relief. As if a great burden had been lifted from him. We both left the game at that point, and he taught me how to work it.”

Kuefer leaned forward in his chair. “And did you? Work it?”

“No,” Adler said. “As I say, I don’t really believe in such things. Besides…”

“Yes? Gott im Himmel, man, tell the story.”

“Well, the Indian shipped out the next day. And I heard, later, that there was a terrible storm soon after the ship left Hamburg, and that he was washed overboard and drowned. So I decided that even if it was real, maybe it was best to leave it alone.”

“But you think it could cure Rudi’s blindness?”

“The doctors say Rudi’s condition might be in his mind. So as long as Rudi believes the thing has power, maybe that would be enough. But it’s probably a foolish idea.”

Kuefer leaned back in his chair, chewing on a fingernail. “I think it’s a very good idea. Do you honestly believe there’s a danger to you from using it?”

Adler shrugged. “This seems harmless enough. And the cause certainly justifies the risk. I know I’m only a stranger here, but I would like to be of service if I can.”

“Oh, I know you’re all right,” Kuefer said. “I pride myself as a judge of character. I’ll talk to the Glöckners. Come back here tomorrow morning with this ‘talisman’ and we shall see.”

FOR TWO DAYS Cora kept up her search. On the third day the telephone woke her at 11 AM and Michael’s gloomy voice said, “Tonight go to the same place at the same time we met. Yes?”

“Yes,” Cora said, and Michael hung up immediately.

She spent a long time choosing her clothes and applying her makeup, remembering Kurt’s acid tongue. He had always been elegant, whether dressed as a man or a woman, and he expected the same of everyone else.

Yet when she saw him that night in the Kleist Casino, she hardly recognized him. He wore a white shirt, khaki pants, and sleeveless sweater, the bourgeois uniform. His hair was short on the sides, longish on top, parted on the right—a haircut not unlike Hitler’s. He stood up as soon as he saw her and hugged her fiercely. “How beautiful you look,” he whispered.

She held his face in her hands. The fire of his wit still burned in his eyes, but like an abused animal, he couldn’t hold her gaze. “And you,” she said, “look so very different.”

“Yes,” he said bitterly. “I am very männlich now.”

He was alone—poor Michael had apparently failed to get himself included. When Cora reached for a chair, Kurt said, “Let’s walk.”

Even at two in the morning, the Kleistrasse hummed with traffic, the westbound cars partially obscured by the trees in the median. They passed hotel after hotel, then turned north toward the Tiergarten, Berlin’s version of Central Park, a kilometer or so away. Cora’s attempts to reminisce the way she had with Michael only made Kurt withdraw. “It makes you unhappy, thinking of the past?” she asked.

“No, on the contrary. I cannot believe I was so lucky to have been the age I was and to have been in this place. Never before in history has there been such a time for men such as I, and there may never be such a time again. It was like Camelot in the legends, one glorious moment surrounded by darkness. I would not have missed it for the entire world.”

“But it ended so soon.”

“Moments pass,” he said quietly, “even the most glorious. All you ever have of anything is memories, whether of your first love or the words you just spoke. There is no ‘now,’ only, always, the past.”

Cora felt a sudden shock of grief, as if the years of her happiness had only that moment fled from her, never to return. Kurt’s despair was contagious. She felt bereft and alone. “And the future?” she asked.

Kurt showed her a tight-lipped smile. “Here comes the future now.”

Cora looked up to see five drunken SAs in brown shirts and jack boots stagger down the sidewalk toward them. Kurt seized her upper arm and dragged her up against the nearest shop front to make room. As the men passed in a haze of beer fumes, Kurt raised his right arm in the Hitler salute. One of the Nazis slowed, staring at Kurt as if he sensed something out of kilter. Kurt kept his gaze focused in the middle distance and his arm extended until the man shook his head and moved on.

“One night,” Kurt said, “a friend of mine gave a gang of them das Zeigen des Vogels, you know, the middle finger. They beat him so badly that he was in the hospital for a month, and they gave me a solid thrashing too, for being with him.”

“They’re animals,” Cora said. “I don’t know how people put up with them.”

“Who’s going to stop them?”

They walked on in silence. In the distance Cora saw the greater darkness of the Tiergarten. Finally she said, “What if you could change things?”

“What, get rid of the Nazis? You are going to loan me maybe your magic wand? ‘Hey, presto!’ ”

“I’m serious. What if there were a way?”

“If I truly believed it possible? I would do anything.”

“Do you still have your political connections? There must be some kind of organized opposition to…” She trailed off, suddenly afraid to pronounce Hitler’s name. “To the ruling party.” It’s affecting even me, she thought.

Kurt lit a cigarette and shook his head. “You’re too late, by more than a year. As soon as Hitler came to power, he outlawed all of the left-wing parties, from the Communists to the Social Democrats. Ernst Thälmann, our Presidential candidate, was arrested a year ago March. He’s still waiting for a trial he will never get. Clara Zetkin, our great theorist, died in exile last June. Ernst Toller, the great playwright and organizer, is in exile too. Hitler is ruthless and utterly efficient. It was like 1919 again, when they murdered Kurt Eisner, Rosa Luxemburg, and Gustav Landauer within two months of each other.”

“You knew Toller, didn’t you? You were friends?”

“Friends only, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“If you can get a message to him, tell him he must return to Berlin. He must be here on the night of the summer solstice. That would be a week from next Wednesday, the twentieth of June.”

“What happens then?”

“I can’t tell you. But you must be there too, and everyone you know. And here’s what you must do…”

ON SATURDAY

HEROES AND VILLAINS

LEWIS SHINER

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