The Toymaker

by Liam Pieper

  She could see Adam gearing up to fight her, taking a deep breath to begin shouting, and she cut him off. Something had changed inside her, crystallised. She wasn’t even angry any more, just resigned.

  ‘But then you disappear off to Asia with God knows who, right when Arkady needs you the most, and you’re not there when he dies because, presumably, you were right in the middle of someone, and that’s not something I will forgive, ever, because that’s not something he would forgive.’

  Everything seemed very clear to Tess now. She was figuring out, as she stood in the car park and Adam’s fumbling excuses flew by her unheard, that all the anger and disappointment she’d repressed through the years was still inside her, as well as a limitless well of something that, as it burned away whatever feelings she still held for Adam, she recognised as ambition, as the call of destiny. She held up one hand to silence her husband, and spoke, loud and clear enough for the mourners nearby to hear. ‘I loved Arkady. He meant more to me than you ever did, but he loved you, and you let him down, and it’s patently fucking clear that you’ll never be half the man he was. This is done.’

  More mourners were around her, a circle of black suits topped with concerned faces, and a babble of sympathetic noises. Tess pushed through them and then she was running, through the car park and onto the street, and ignoring the voices calling after her. She knew that she should feel ashamed but only felt scorched and broken and free.

  She’d left her purse and her phone in Adam’s car so she walked home, losing her heels after the first kilometre or so and walking barefoot on the nature strips where she could, hot-footing it across the burning footpath when she couldn’t. She was happy to walk; it gave her time to think. By the time she made it home she’d carefully re-evaluated her life, turning over each item and making a snap judgement. The friends she’d just disgraced Adam in front of could go; she didn’t need them. The respect of the business community, gone; good riddance, she’d never been able to stand them, and she was sure the feeling was mutual. There was nobody left to pretend to be happy for; Adam was on his own. Everything was burned to the ground, and that was fine and good. There was nothing to hang around for – she would take the money Arkady had stashed away, then take Kade and go far away, back to New York, raise her son as a good man a world away from his shitkicker father. The walk home was long and she used the hours to decide what to take, and how to explain to Kade, who’d thrown a tantrum before the funeral and stayed home with a sitter, that they were going on a holiday, just the two of them. The sun was going down by the time she returned, and she was ready.

  She packed their suitcases, taking just bare essentials, and was wheeling them out the door when the landline started ringing, and she found out, to her amazement, that her husband had somehow managed to ruin everything, one last time.

  __________

  In the end the Nazis destroyed the crematoriums themselves. The war was lost, and, like men sobering up, they were shying away from what they’d done when they were drunk on cruelty. Everywhere Arkady looked they were destroying evidence. They were burning files by the building-full, driving thousands of prisoners at a time on forced marches through the freezing night in a panicked effort to escape the looming Russian justice. Mengele had slipped out quietly, taking some of his research with him, but most of it abandoned, destroyed, a final insult to all the people he’d killed in his deranged experiments. Before long, the rest of the Nazis – soldiers, bureaucrats, doctors – followed, as their hellish machine collapsed and the parts scattered. Soon only a few stragglers remained to tie up loose ends.

  From inside Dieter’s office, above the howl of the blizzard, Arkady and his companion listened to the symphony of screaming, gunshots and heavy boots running helter-skelter.

  ‘This doesn’t mean the end for you, Dieter,’ Arkady urged. ‘You are a good man; you were acting on orders. The Russians will understand. I will speak to them. I will vouch for you.’

  Dieter smiled, sad, but resigned. ‘Thank you, Arkady. I know you mean well, but what we’ve done here is . . . It would be hard to explain.’

  ‘Well, then you run! Take a car from the motor pool and drive west, drive until you reach Switzerland. Plead asylum. I’ll come with you; we’ll escape together.’ Arkady went to Dieter’s desk and, after a moment’s search, located a map, spread it out, traced a road with a finger. ‘Here, Dieter, come look.’

  Dieter did not humour the notion of the map. Instead, he waited a long, long minute, then spoke carefully. ‘Arkady. I ordered that you be arrested and taken to the labs. It’s my fault you were tortured.’

  Standing behind him, Dieter saw Arkady grip the table and his knuckles whiten, the muscles in his back tense, the angry red flush bloom up his neck. The carotid artery in the side of his neck, the one that fed the brain, bulged with the pressure.

  ‘Why?’ he said softly, after a pause. ‘Why would you tell me that?’

  ‘Because I want you to know that I am sorry. That I never wanted to hurt you.’ He spoke softly as he walked up behind Arkady and laid a gentle hand on his shoulder. ‘Because there is no other way.’

  The needle slid into Arkady’s neck and Dieter’s thumb plunged the syringe. Arkady turned, one hand grasping his neck, eyes bulging and glassy. He charged at Dieter, catching him and bringing him to the floor, but the fight was over before it began. There’d been enough of the chemical in the injection to kill five men – Dieter wasn’t taking any chances. He got Arkady in a headlock and held him while he bucked and convulsed, until he no longer frothed at the mouth, until long after his breathing had stopped. When he was sure the other man was dead, Dieter stood up, and started moving. He had a lot of work to do, and not much time.

  First, he swapped the files he kept on Arkady Kulakov, both as a Sonderkommando and a test subject, with the ones he’d doctored with his own photo and dental records. He tore up the originals, put them in a wastepaper basket, splashed rubbing alcohol on them and then burned them to ash.

  He lit another match to partially burn the doctored records, to make it look like he had tried to destroy the files and failed. As he singed the edges, it reminded him of watching Arkady make a treasure map out of paper and old coffee, for his children. A tear welled up in each eye but he wiped them away, pushed the rest down. No time for that, not now, not ever.

  Next, he stripped to the waist and, taking the automatic tattoo gun in his right hand, he carved a shaky serial number into the forearm of his left. With a pair of clippers, he shaved his head in front of the mirror. There was the matter of his blood-group tattoo, black letters under his arm that were given to all SS, in case they needed a transfusion while unconscious. If the Allies found that tattoo, it was over for him, so he upturned a vial of caustic acid across it. He was unprepared for the pain, and his fingers slipped, spilling the rest of the vial across his ribs and back. Gasping, he found a neutralising agent and doused himself with it, then, gritting his teeth, examined the damage in the mirror. The skin down his arms and shoulder blade on the left side were scorched red, and already starting to peel. It would not heal pretty, but he needn’t worry about his SS tattoo.

  Then, taking a deep breath and a scalpel, he made a deep incision in his chest over his heart, to match the one he’d given Arkady. More rubbing alcohol on the wound, then a little ash from the trashcan rubbed into it. He didn’t want infection, but he needed it to scar. Suturing the wound was harder than he’d anticipated; he got it done, although by the end his hands were shaking badly from the pain and his fingers could barely manage the buttons on the old striped prisoner’s uniform he’d been saving for the occasion.

  Finally, when he couldn’t put it off any longer, he kneeled down next to Arkady and undressed him. He hesitated for a minute over whether to leave Arkady his Rolex, but decided he might need it for a bribe, and slipped it into a pocket. Rigor mortis was on its way, so he struggled to shuck him out of his trousers and shirt. ‘Faster,’ Dieter told himself. ‘You must move fast
er.’ Once his friend was naked, he used a scalpel to remove the skin with Arkady’s serial number, then dressed Arkady’s body in his own SS uniform.

  The two men had been almost exactly the same size, once upon a time, but the Nazi uniform swallowed Arkady whole, his shrunken arms and legs just sticks under the wool and leather. Nothing to be done about that now.

  He fetched a beaker of acid and carefully, one by one, dipped Arkady’s fingers into it to remove the prints, wrinkling his nose at the smell. Once he was satisfied the other man couldn’t be identified, he fired a single shot into Arkady’s temple, and wrapped the dead man’s fingers around its grip. He stood back, observed the scene, made sure he’d forgotten nothing, tried to look at it from a Red Army soldier’s point of view. Here was just another Nazi, taking the easy way out. Now, apart from the Nazi doctors fleeing across Europe, there would be no witnesses. In the weeks leading up to this, Dieter had been careful to liquidate any adults in the camps who could identify him. The children, those who were left, would never know who he had been, just another monster in a white coat.

  Then, a little gasoline about the place, a match to light the lab up, and out into the snow, moving as quick as his wounds allowed to beat the Russian tanks he could hear rolling in. The Red Army, at the end of this war where all pretension of civility had been used up long ago, was marching into the camp, this place where humanity had reached its nadir. It was a collision that did not go well for the Germans who hadn’t been smart enough to flee or kill themselves, as they were rounded up by the Russians and executed. There would be no Geneva for them.

  The snow was thick enough that he could scurry from building to building in relative safety. Out in the blizzard, he heard a German screaming, and a deep Russian voice, full of humour. ‘Don’t waste a bullet on this one. Do him slow.’ Dieter, who’d practised his Russian every night with Arkady, understood all too well. He froze, moved forward a little, froze again. Moving slowly, carefully, wrapped in itching prisoner’s stripes and a greatcoat, he crawled through the night to reach the smoking ruins of Birkenau.

  There he burrowed, like a roach, under the burning brick, and once he was deep enough he lay there through the night, shivering, listening to, the hollering of Red Army squads who had discovered caches of food and alcohol and were distributing them among the prisoners. On the breeze, laughter and singing reached him as men and women were nourished with food and kindness for the first time in years.

  The night was long, a babble of despair and joy, the sound of a humanity stretched like a rubber band to breaking point snapping back into shape. The soldiers didn’t find him until the morning, when the sun rose. A Russian solider, huge, reeling from booze and the horrors he’d seen and committed through the night, heaved a lump of concrete off Dieter and uncovered him. Dieter opened his eyes and saw, silhouetted against the rising sun, the man’s greatcoat, the rifle across his back, the shapka on his head.

  ‘Hey!’ he called to his comrades. ‘Hey! There’s a survivor here. He’s alive! I think he might live!’

  And Dieter, moving feebly, crawled up through the rubble and spoke in Russian. ‘Da,’ he croaked. ‘Yes, I will live.’

  ELEVEN

  After the funeral, and the wake, not being able to get onto Tess and not knowing what else to do, Adam had gone into the office to be alone as he’d given everyone the day off to mark his grandfather’s passing. He slumped heavily into his office chair and after a moment’s consideration fetched a bottle of vodka from the drinks cabinet he’d put in after he’d started watching Mad Men and wanted to introduce a touch of sophistication to his office. He sat in the dark, alone with his thoughts, drinking. Time passed, and when the bottle ran out, he fetched another. He had dozed off until the phone rang and he startled awake.

  ‘Mitty & Sarah,’ he croaked into the phone. ‘How can I help you?’

  ‘I want to talk to the owner.’ The voice was an older woman, twangy and high with outrage, the broken bowstring of an inconvenienced Australian.

  Adam, slow with drink, paused for a moment before answering. ‘Why?’

  ‘I want to complain.’

  ‘Oh,’ Adam grunted in relief. ‘Good. Go on then.’

  ‘For you people to say that you are an Australian company, when all you’ve been doing is lying to us for years and making your toys overseas and . . .’

  Adam cut in, tired, with the scripted response he normally used. ‘Some of our products are manufactured overseas, yes, but all of our toys are designed according to traditional methods since we were founded by my grandfather . . .’ The word stuck in his throat, and suddenly his eyes were moist and his throat thick. He moved the phone away from his ear and stared blankly at it for a moment, the voice still yammering, furious and tinny. He looked down, brought it back to his ear and picked up the thread. ‘. . . So if you think I’m ever going to buy one more toy off you, you can think again, and what’s more it’s disgraceful, just disgraceful, that you represent yourself as a proud Australian company when you are probably just a bunch of Chinese and . . .’ Adam slowly, quietly, put the phone down and let the lady talk into the void.

  Now his mobile was ringing. It was Tess, and for a moment his heart surged with hope that she’d forgiven him. When he picked up the phone, though, her voice was calm, icily so. ‘Adam, what the fuck have you done?’

  ‘Nothing . . .’ he protested, wondering how she’d possibly heard that conversation. Adam thought hard, then pivoted. ‘I mean . . . What do you mean, what have I done? Specifically, I mean.’

  ‘Do you have any idea what happened to your little party in Jakarta?’

  ‘What?’

  Tess’s voice was cold with rage. ‘You moved our business, our flagship fucking product, to some fucking sweatshop in fucking Indonesia, which has just exploded and taken out half a fucking orphanage.’

  It was all over the news. The factory in Jakarta he’d hired to take over production of the Mitty and Sarah dolls had been pulling 24-hour shifts to meet demand, and a floor manager, stressed out and overtired, had mixed volatile chemicals in the wrong order. The explosion had taken out the production deck and all the workers with it. The fire had barbecued the entire workforce before spreading into neighbouring factories. Human rights investigators were crawling through the ruins which were already thick with news crews. Flicking through the TV channels, he found the same scene over and over, the same footage shot from half a dozen angles, of burned and mangled corpses piled together in a smouldering human grease trap. Here and there among the bodies was a miraculously preserved Sarah doll, slightly charred, but smiling. Adam felt a little proud that, even after the explosion, the quality of the dolls was undiminished. He hit the pause function on the remote control, and the broadcast froze. The room seemed too quiet now, so he turned on the radio, the golden oldies station. Good tunes. They didn’t make them like they used to. He flicked some switches, and piped the radio through the PA in the warehouse.

  Taking the bottle of vodka, he wandered out to the warehouse and staggered up and down the aisles, swigging from the bottle and singing along with Crowded House. ‘Hey now, hey now.’ In the next room he could hear his mobile going off, and all the extensions in the office, but he just sang louder to drown them out. ‘Hey now, hey now. Don’t dream it’s over.’

  His life was over. The company, certainly, was over; everything his grandfather had built was now forfeit. Adam had not only fucked up the company, but he’d shamed his grandpa, just hours after he’d buried him. All around him, invisible in the air, laying down to rest inside the internet for all of eternity, were pictures of smiling Mitty and Sarah dolls piled up next to burned women and children. The bottle was empty now, and he threw it overarm, sent it sailing it out into the darkness of the warehouse as far as he could, listening to the satisfying, clean shattering noise. Hey now, hey now.

  He mounted the stairs to the Kindergarten one by one, stopping to steady himself on the rail. When he got to the top, he clambered ov
er the guardrail, to where dusty crates of discontinued lines and one-off prototypes were stacked. The boxes weren’t stored in any particular order, and Adam tripped more than once making his way to the edge of the platform. He crawled to the precipice, the factory floor fifteen metres below, then stood, contemplating the drop. It would be easy, the flopping forward, the sailing through the air, the crack of skull as he hit the concrete, the splat of brains. For a minute he luxuriated in the fantasy, in Tess hearing the news and falling to pieces, begging God for her husband back, sorry for hassling him over a few indiscretions and misjudgements.

  He fell then, but backwards, into the Kindergarten, and lay on his back laughing. There was a centimetre of dust caked on the floor, and he waved his arms and legs to make the shape of an angel. He reached across to a nearby crate to pull himself up but the wood was old and brittle and he accidentally ripped the side clean off, then swore as an avalanche of toys spilled out, squeaking and rattling around him. A toy monkey marched towards his head, banging its cymbals together, and he sat up to grab it, ripping it apart with his hands and hurling the two halves out into the void.

  ‘Shutup,’ he slurred. He’d always hated that monkey. As a kid he’d sometimes wake up from a nightmare and see it staring at him from the top of his toy chest, with its beady little eyes, and he would have to drum up the courage to slip out of bed and turn it around. He realised that the crate he’d ripped open must be decades old, shipped from warehouse to warehouse as the company grew, and it was full of stock samples from the seventies and eighties, all of which were toys he’d grown up with.