Swastika

by Michael Slade

  Blind Alley

  Port Coquitlam

  The traffic out here is a nightmare. Geography creates it. Vancouver sits at the mouth of a river that cuts west to the ocean through a north-south range of mountains. Exacerbating an already tight situation, the Pacific balloons inland, creating a major harbor. For physical setting, there are only six great cities in this world: Hong Kong, Sydney, Cape Town, Rio de Janeiro, San Francisco, and Vancouver. Cram a million outdoorsy Lotuslanders onto a few geographically bottlenecked arteries and the bumper-to-bumper gridlock is enough to enrage even the most laid-back tree hugger.

  “Man,” said Winter, banging his palms against the steering wheel as if that would make the car move faster, “I could live two lives with the time I waste on this highway.”

  “Try yoga,” said Chandler soothingly.

  “If this keeps up, I’ll try my nine-mil instead.”

  “Cars with dead drivers. Somehow I doubt that will help.”

  From the North Shore murder scene, they had U-turned south on Fell Avenue to bridge Mosquito Creek by the lower road, before angling back up to the Trans-Canada Highway. Cutting east across the mountain slopes and fording the harbor on the Ironworkers’ Memorial Bridge—the building of which had cost twenty-five lives in four accidents, inspiring the 1962 hit “Steel Men” by Jimmie Dean—had put them onto this snail trail up the Fraser Valley. Cars inched forward on this highway toward urban sprawl. Finally, just before another bridge stepped across the mighty Fraser River, they branched off onto the old Lougheed Highway, which ran parallel to the freeway. Ahead, in the crook where the meandering Coquitlam River snaked south to empty into the headwaters of the Fraser Delta, stretched the marshy flatlands of Colony Farm.

  “Your family name’s Winter?” said Chandler. “Are you one of the Air Division Winters?”

  “My dad and my granddad. Not me,” Dane replied.

  “That must have been hard on you. Losing your parents and your grandmother in a single crash.”

  “I was young. Somehow that cushioned the blow. It was worse for my granddad. He lost his wife, his only child, and his daughter-in-law in the blink of an eye. All he had left was me.”

  “Still living?”

  “No, he died on Wednesday. Tomorrow morning, the undertaker will deliver his ashes to me.”

  “Sorry to hear.”

  “In the end, it was a blessing. Pancreatic cancer is an ugly route to go.”

  “I loathe hospitals.”

  “So did my granddad. Until just before the end, he wasted away in the house he purchased fifty years ago.”

  “Sounds expensive.”

  “It was,” replied Dane. “I had to create a mini hospital at home for him. Now I’m in the process of cleaning it out. I feel like I’m working an archeological dig. All those layers of family history. Last night, I came across his pilot’s flying log from the war. He flew fifty-plus bombing missions over Nazi Europe and North Africa. Ironic, huh? The odds of his surviving the war shrunk to about one in forty. The Nazis couldn’t get him, and he came back. Then Mother Nature got his family on a civilian flight.”

  “Hit the Razorback, right?”

  “Yeah. Up the valley. Several miles east of here. Strange, but I’ve never been up to the Mountain. I was too young for the memorial service at the time of the crash, and then … well, it’s like I have a psychological aversion to the place.”

  “Perhaps one day?”

  “Oh, it’s gonna happen. Sooner, not later,” said Dane. “Depending on the weather and the avalanche warning. Within a day or two, I have a date with the Mountain.”

  * * *

  It used to be that you would turn south toward the Fraser River off the Lougheed Highway onto Colony Farm Road to drive the eeriest mile on the West Coast down to the Riverside Unit for the criminally insane. Back then, the hills surrounding the murky marsh were thick with primal woods, and the right side of the road was overhung by a line of towering elms. Colony Farm dated back to the era when masturbation was thought to be one of the four causes of insanity, and the haunted-house asylum at the end of that postcard-perfect byway seemed fit for the likes of Karloff and Lugosi. In fact, mad scientists did once work for Riverside, lobotomizing patients with razor-sharp scalpels and unscrambling fried brains with jolts of electricity. One look at that Gothic madhouse, with its crosshatched bars on triple tiers of windows along both wings and black crows perched on the eaves of its flat roof, and you could imagine the screams of those long-ago inmates.

  The flip side of that historical coin was Colony Farm today. Gone was the wooded landscape around the marsh flats; now god-awful monster houses blighted the denuded hills. Root rot from neglecting the drainage had toppled most of the elms, so swaths of sunlight played across the roof of the cop car as it closed in on the vacant riverside lot that once had housed the decrepit asylum. The replacement for that archaic booby hatch was the $60-million Forensic Psychiatric Hospital. Just to the right of the demolished institution spread a spacious lot where Winter parked the car.

  “It looks like a country club,” he said.

  “That’s the idea.”

  “Fancy a round of golf?”

  The gate was forged from vertical bars that were strengthened with a bull’s-eye circle. The lawns beyond were as manicured as putting greens. From the hub of a central hall, where the patients attended school and chapel, a ring of spoke-like paths radiated out to the patient residences. The structures were named Fir, Cottonwood, Dogwood, Birch, and so on. The administration building—Golden Willow—flanked the gate. Opposite it, on the right side, sat the stronghold of Central Control, beyond which was hidden Ashworth House, where the high-risk psychos were caged.

  Psychos like the Ripper.

  And until yesterday, the Congo Man.

  “Back so soon?” the security guard asked Chandler.

  “Unfinished business.”

  The inspector and Winter signed the visitors’ log and handed in their guns.

  The nurse who came to fetch them was Rudi Lucke. Meticulous, wiry, fine-boned, and in his mid-forties, Rudi had given the Congo Man his nickname. Years ago, at Carnival in the Caribbean, “Congo Man”—the calypso tune by Mighty Sparrow—had caught Rudi’s ear. Because the lyrics about never eating white meat seemed to fit the crime that had sent the Liberian refugee to FPH, Congo Man was the ideal sobriquet for Marcus Cole.

  Yesterday, Rudi had informed Chandler about the Ripper’s refusal to see him, just before pointing out the conspiratorial meeting between those psychos in the yard. Today, from the look in Rudi’s eye, Chandler knew the nurse suspected why the Mounties were here.

  “The Ripper?” Rudi inquired.

  “Yes,” said Zinc.

  “His body is in his room. Don’t know about his mind.”

  Buzzing the key reader with his fob—the personal electronic pass that registered who opened which door at what time in Central Control—Rudi led the cops through a security door that led to an interview room. The hall, with its cinder-block walls and window slats instead of bars, seemed common enough. But those blocks encased a steel grating that turned the hall into a cage. The “glass” was really Lexan, an unbreakable polycarbonate resin, and rotating rods were hidden within the slats to foil the bite of hacksaw blades. The pen in Rudi’s pocket was an alarm. Triggering it would bounce a beam off the peach walls and peach floor with its blue stepping-stone squares to a sensor on the ceiling that would summon the entire staff of Ashworth House within thirty seconds.

  You couldn’t be too careful with psychos like the Ripper.

  The interview room, eight feet by ten, was starkly furnished with a table and two chairs. The sterile box had no art or atmosphere. The door didn’t lock.

  “He might not see you,” Rudi said.

  “Bring him anyway,” replied the inspector.

  * * *

  For Rudi, it was the eyes.

  It bothered him that he judged people by a physical characteristic, but the ey
es were different, weren’t they? The windows of the soul? Eyes weren’t like noses, cheekbones, and lips: racial characteristics. Eyes—the eyeballs, at least—were more than that. “If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out …”

  But still he felt guilty.

  His guilt, he suspected, went back to something his grandfather used to say about reading the eyes of the Nazis in order to stay alive in the camp. Lucke was a name with centuries of Jewish history in Prague, so when the Aryans occupied Czechoslovakia during the war, “Good Lucke,” the old man said bitterly, “won me a trip to Terezin.”

  Terezin, a concentration camp north of Prague, had been established in a fortress from the eighteenth century. During the trip there, the Gestapo had stopped the truck convoy of political and Jewish prisoners on an old stone bridge across the Vltava River. They selected five men from each transport group and had them line up along the plunge to the water. Next, they looped a double noose around the men’s necks, joining the five chosen Jewish prisoners to the five non-Jewish political prisoners, who were then shot in the head. As each dead man tumbled toward the river below, the still-living Jew was yanked off the bridge and into the water like jettisoned cargo weighed down by a human anchor.

  “We don’t waste bullets on Jews,” the SS commandant warned the convoy prisoners.

  To this day, Rudi couldn’t glance over the side of a bridge without momentarily glimpsing phantom eyes staring up from the depths of the water.

  Once at Terezin, however, the SS had no qualms about wasting bullets. Prisoners who tried to escape were stoned to death in the courtyard, and others were locked together a hundred at a time without food and water in a cramped room where the SS could watch them die. But past the quarters where the commandant and the ranking guards resided was a target range. There, Jews were forced to run from one side of the yard to the other so the SS could enjoy shooting practice.

  “You can spot a Nazi by his eyes,” Rudi’s grandfather maintained. “I survived the camp because I learned to read their eyes. Nazis escaped after the war and are hiding around the world. Study their eyes, Rudi, so that you can spot them too.”

  On Saturdays, it was Rudi’s chore to accompany the old man to the library. He would lean on the boy and hobble along the street with his cane. Inside, they would find a book on the Third Reich and sit together at a reading table to study the eyes. Hitler’s eyes, flashing as he shrieked fiery oration. Himmler’s eyes, as cold as ice behind his wire-rim glasses. Göring’s eyes, in that piggy face. Eichmann’s eyes, in Israel, on trial in the glass booth. Streicher’s eyes, in one of the few photographs of him to survive the war.

  One day, they had shared their table with a blond man who was also reading a photographic book on the Second World War. “What they did to us was awful,” said Rudi’s grandfather, rolling up his sleeve to expose the number tattooed on his forearm, “and pictures cannot capture the torment we endured.” Frowning, the stranger set his book down on the table, and Rudi saw the photo that he had been perusing. It was of a Nazi with a weird measuring device, some sort of calipers he was applying to the face of a Jew to prove him “subhuman.” Then Rudi noticed the blond man’s eyes. He wasn’t looking at the tattoo on his grandfather’s arm. He was staring intently at the old man’s nose.

  Rudi felt suddenly guilty.

  For staring as unreasonably at the stranger’s eyes.

  Decades had passed since then, but Rudi’s ocular compulsion had not. Some days he was convinced that was why he had sought this job as a psychiatric nurse in Ashworth House. The link went back to the trial of the Manson Family in 1970, when Charles Manson and three female disciples, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten, had carved swastikas into their foreheads as they prepared to face the jury judging them on multiple counts of murder. “I have X’d myself from your world,” that hypnotic guru had declared. Rudi had stared, transfixed, at newspaper photographs of Manson’s maniacal eyes looking out from under the swastika he’d gouged into the flesh above his nose.

  The killer had Nazi eyes.

  The eyes of those in Ashworth House were haunted by psychosis, and none were more unfathomable than those of the psycho in room A2-13. Before he entered the Ripper’s realm in the high-security ward, off a hall that was constantly monitored by watchers in the fortified nursing station at one end, Rudi peeked in through the oblong judas window in the blue door. Though the ward was sealed, the door wasn’t locked. The Forensic Psychiatric Hospital wasn’t an asylum, and its patients were free to leave their rooms to go to the toilet, the dining room, the TV room, the smoking room, and the quiet room for reading. The Ripper, however, rarely left his realm, except to travel.

  To time-travel back to London.

  To 1888.

  Five inches wide and three feet tall, the judas window was a slit in the door. Positioned near the handle, it gave Rudi an overall view of the room, except for the corner by the hinges. A bed with a brick headboard was bolted to the left-hand wall. The Ripper lay stretched out on it with his feet in the far corner. Scrawled on the wall beside his head were Einstein’s theory of relativity and jottings from Hawking’s Brief History of Time. The notes segued into a jumble of occult symbols that spiraled like a time tunnel from the Ripper’s insane mind across the opposite wall, to end in a mishmash of morgue photos and maps on the right-hand wall. The big map was of the East End of London in 1888. Marked on it, and detailed by smaller maps, were the five spots where the notorious Jack the Ripper had struck. Surrounding them were morgue photos of his victims, slashed to ribbons, disemboweled, and relieved of various organs. And ringed around all that, to represent the mouth of the time tunnel, was a deck of occult tarot cards.

  Rudi opened the door.

  The Ripper didn’t move.

  He must be off time-traveling through the wormholes bored into his diseased brain, thought the nurse.

  “There’s news,” Rudi announced.

  The Ripper didn’t stir.

  “Marcus Cole,” he suggested.

  That did the trick.

  The Ripper had not been told that the Congo Man was dead. Rudi sensed that something had brewed in the yard yesterday, so if the Ripper had tried to have the Mountie who put him here killed in the South Pacific—as the hospital’s rumor mill maintained—then wasn’t it likely that the Ripper would try again?

  “What news?” the psycho asked.

  “Come see,” said the nurse.

  * * *

  The two men coming down the hall were a study in contrasts. The athletic nurse was about as fit as a featherweight. Rudi sported his street clothes—plain, short-sleeved shirt, jeans, and loafers—with all the panache of a runway model. His bland attire was dictated by a strict dress code: no ties or anything else that might be seized, cinched, or converted into a noose; no logos or T-shirt prints that might set off the unstable.

  The Ripper, too, wore unremarkable clothes. His jogging suit was standard issue for Ash 2 patients: a navy blue sweatshirt over matching sweatpants, with a pair of Velcro runners. But so anorexic and emaciated was the phantom cannibal that he resembled the walking skeletons who were freed from Nazi concentration camps at the close of the war. Rudi’s granddad had shown him in Life magazine photos snapped by army cameramen as Allied troops were pressing east into the Third Reich. Death-camp images from Nordhausen, Gardelegen, and other hellholes—showing gaunt slaves worked almost to death in secret tunnels that SS-General Ernst Streicher had bored into the Harz Mountains to protect Hitler’s Vergeltungswaffe from the RAF—were the first to shock the Allied nations. The way the baggy blue jogging suit hung on the patient’s skin-and-bones frame reminded Rudi of those starved wretches.

  As they paused outside the door to the interview room in which the cops were waiting, Lucke’s obsessive-compulsive fixation on abnormal psychology made him stare deep into the black holes that were the windows to the Ripper’s soul, and for a moment he glimpsed a symbol that sent a chill down his spine.

  Both
pupils had blown their irises and dilated into fathomless tunnels to a hellish dimension. So intensely had the Ripper sunk into his internal weirdness that the skin of his fleshless face seemed to have been sucked into his skull, crinkling and creasing into the squint of all squints. If what he grasped in his bony fingers was all he would eat, it was no wonder the psycho’s body was cannibalizing itself for carbs. As he gnawed at the imaginary organ meat he’d harvested during his most recent trip back to 1888, he smacked his lips with relish and sucked the non-existent juice out of the phantom flesh that fed his soul.

  “What do you see?” the Ripper snarled.

  Startled, Rudi blinked.

  What he saw—in the same way that he saw ghostly eyes gazing up from rivers—was a swastika that had been formed by the squinty furrows between the psychotic’s eyes.

  “What do you see?” the Ripper shrieked, lunging at Rudi with his long-nailed claws.

  What Rudi saw—or thought he saw—was the last thing he would ever see.

  * * *

  There are screams, and there are screams! And Rudi Lucke’s was one of those screams!

  A scream to wake the dead.

  Chandler, being the cop nearer the door, was first to rush into the hall. A second or two behind him, Winter was relegated to the role of backup. Never having seen the Ripper in the flesh—or lack of flesh, more aptly—he might as well have burst in on the filming of a horror movie. A wiry man was being pinned to the floor by what Dane would have described as a ghoul. An animate skeleton of a creature in humanoid form loomed over its thrashing prey, its bony arms outstretched so that it could drive the overgrown nails of its knob-knuckled index fingers deep into the eye sockets.

  “What do you see?” the ghoul repeated like a graveyard refrain an instant before Inspector Chandler locked that skull-face into the crook of one muscular arm and wrenched it around like the head of the possessed girl in The Exorcist.

  Snap!