Swastika

by Michael Slade

  “Vancouver is divided into different prostitute strolls based on the income level and sexual orientation of potential clients. The locations of the various strolls have shifted over time, but that hasn’t prevented us from analyzing and computerizing their historical patterns. We know the number of missing-person reports that each stroll has generated in the past, as well as the ‘survival rate’ for a missing person—how long before he or she is usually found. From that, we’ve derived a mathematical formula that tells us what to expect in the future. The statistical graph for boy’s town looks like this.”

  A graph hit the screen.

  “The formula is built into ViCLAS, the Violent Crime Linkage Analysis System, the Mounties’ equivalent to the FBI’s VICAP. As each missing-person report is fed into the system, it is analytically compared to the past. In other words, ViCLAS is a front-end system programmed to routinely scan crime data and missing-person reports to identify unusual levels of activity or abnormal clusters. If, based on historical crime patterns, too many things start happening, in too short a time and too small an area, the alarm goes off. In short, your so-called disposable people are watched over by an early warning system designed to detect stealth predators.”

  Bang. The cyber cop hit a button that caused the graph onscreen to spike abnormally.

  “That’s boy’s town. See the mark of the stealth predator?”

  “Wow,” said Bess. “Where’d you get the idea?”

  “It’s a redesign of models created by epidemiologists to track outbreaks of virulent disease.”

  * * *

  There is a natural tendency among hyper-conservative cops to deny that a serial killer might be preying on their patch. This springs not only from a desire to avoid having to commit limited resources to the bottomless pit of a major investigation, but also from the irrational feeling that such an admission is tacit acknowledgment that past policing has failed.

  DeClercq saw matters differently. Foolish and negligent would be the cop who dismissed a Rossmo warning, he believed, for what sort of dimwit blinds himself to the laws of mathematical probability? The chief knew of one force that had done just that. The dinosaurs in the path of the comet thought they knew better than some egghead who could use a computer. They said that they had no bodies, so there was no proof. That’s tantamount to a fire station refusing to roll its trucks because reports of smoke aren’t proof of fire. They snubbed the cyber cop’s warning that it was time to swing into action, and ended up with several more victims on the ground.

  Talk about fumbled footballs.

  “Your series on disposable people reflects bygone attitudes,” DeClercq told the staff of The Vancouver Times. “At least at Special X, we’ve studied and learned from the successes and failures of past serial-killer manhunts. We don’t suffer linkage blindness. We don’t ignore the ‘less dead.’ We know how to organize overwhelming information. We coordinate with other police jurisdictions. And we don’t see ourselves as adversaries of the media. History shows that it is usually some member of the public who provides the key to solving any serial killings, and you are our link to the community.

  “It’s probable that a stealth predator has been stalking boy’s town for some time. To take him down, we need your help. First, we ask that you publish an alert in tomorrow’s paper, advising the public that we have the area and those prostitutes whom the killer is targeting under blanket surveillance. Second, we’re asking that anyone who saw, knows, or suspects something contact Special X. There may be someone out there who knows something without realizing its significance. To stop this killer, we need that person to get in touch. Ted Bundy was caught because he was seen backing out of a middle-class driveway in the dead of the night. Peter Sutcliffe—the Yorkshire Ripper—was overheard dropping a hammer and ice pick onto the concrete in an effort to hide them.”

  * * *

  Cort Jantzen and Bess McQueen crossed paths at the boardroom door as the briefing let out for a coffee break. From the gloating expression on her face, you’d think the queen bitch had just scored an honorary Stetson.

  “Eat your heart out, baby,” Bess cooed as she sashayed off to the powder room.

  Teeth grinding and blood pressure rising to a boil, Jantzen sat down at his desk in the newsroom to write his story on the death of the Congo Man. He spread prints of the photos he’d surreptitiously snapped at the crime scene across the cluttered surface, studying the patch over one of the cannibal’s eyes and the stake rammed into the other. He tried to fathom the motive that would induce a killer to leave a signature like that.

  It wouldn’t come to him. But a story angle did. An angle with the potential to turn his story into the Story and seize the Scoop from the byline bitch.

  Pandora’s Box

  May 25, Now

  The blood of the Congo Man stained the tip of the SS dagger in Swastika’s right hand. Carving the symbol into the Untermensch’s brow had bloodied the Damascus steel of the SS-Dienstdolch’s point. Now, as the Fourth Reich Nazi wiped away the subhuman’s slime with a chamois cloth, the steel polished up to a mirror finish along the center-ridged blade that had been etched with the SS motto “Meine Ehre heisst Treue”—“My honor is loyalty.” The ebony grip of the service dagger was inset with the silver eagle-and-swastika emblem of Hitler’s Third Reich. The handle was capped by an enamel circle struck with the two lightning bolts of the SS runes.

  Sieg heil, thought the killer.

  Satisfied that he had cleansed the dagger back to Aryan purity, the Nazi assassin slipped the gleaming blade into the sheath of its scabbard. The scabbard was anodized to a black finish, and a coat of lacquer gave it and the interlaced swastikas across its middle a Black Corps shine. Attached to the scabbard was a double chain made of alternating links of Totenkopf skull and crossbones and SS runes. Triangulating up to a clover-leaf clasp, the edged weapon could be slung from the metal loop that hung from the lower-left tunic pocket of an SS officer’s black dress uniform.

  But not tonight.

  The interior of the black walnut case was lined with black satin for a plush display. Gently, Swastika returned the dagger to its resting place, after first wrapping a silver cord with a slide, stem, crown, and ball around the upper part of the grip and cross-guard of the dagger’s handle. Known as a portepee, the cord designated the status of the wearer. Here, the dagger would rest until the next “solution.”

  Lowering the lid, Swastika closed the case.

  The original owner’s name was engraved on a silver plaque.

  “SS-Obergruppenführer Ernst Streicher.”

  * * *

  Named for the University of British Columbia, University Hill—surmounting the cliffs out at the tip of Point Grey—is the area with Vancouver’s finest real estate. Above Chancellor Boulevard was the habitat of retired professors who had bought into this pricey area before the cost went sky-high. The realm of real money was below Chancellor Boulevard, where the half- and whole-acre spreads on the bluff commanded a panoramic view of the white-capped waters of English Bay and the snow-crowned North Shore peaks. The title to one particular estate was held by a law firm in Switzerland, and had been ever since the years just after the Second World War. Buried underground in the cellar of the $10-million mansion was a reconstruction of the Führerbunker from the dying days of the Third Reich.

  The map room was an exact replica of the room in which Adolf Hitler had wed Eva Braun, fifty-some feet under Berlin as the Red Army rushed to raise the hammer and sickle over the blasted ruins of the Nazi Reichstag. The map table around the SS dagger box displayed newspaper cuttings from editions of The Vancouver Times in which Cort Jantzen had covered the court-ordered release of the cannibal killer.

  Armed with a pair of scissors, Swastika seated himself at the table to mutilate that morning’s edition of the Times, which had hit the streets at about one a.m. A pair of articles on the front page required his attention. “Stealth Killer Stalks ‘Boy’s Town’” was the headline of Bess McQueen
’s story. That string of disappearances posed the greater threat of arrest, so Swastika studied the piece for clues that might lead Special X to the abandoned Skunk Mine where Ernst Streicher’s companion Nazi sword—his SS-Führerdegen—continued to pigstick young blood.

  Nothing.

  At least not in print.

  With no indication that he was in jeopardy on that front, Swastika switched focus to the other story. This one—written by Cort Jantzen, who was following up on his earlier coverage—had a headline that matched that used for the boy’s town piece, as if the editor had decided to set both stories up as rivals. “Vigilante Kills Alleged Cannibal” it reported. The subhead added, “Settling the Score?”

  After he absorbed the angle adopted by the reporter, the Nazi killer nodded in agreement with the heroic myth that had been boxed in a sidebar next to the main text. “Blinding the Cyclops” was its title. The myth wasn’t Nordic, but it appealed to Swastika’s imagination.

  Snip, snip, snip …

  Having cut the vigilante piece out of the Times, Swastika arranged it with the earlier stories on the “taken care of” side of the dagger box. Then he turned back to the paper to find something suitable for the bare surface on the other side of the desk.

  Snip, snip, snip …

  From the business section, he removed a story about a corporate exec who had viewed his company as a personal piggy bank, emptying the employee pension plan and divesting stockholders of their life savings. No one knew where the cash was now, but some of it had surely lined his lawyers’ deep pockets, for they had kept the case from coming to trial for several years and would probably hold it off for several more. The money worries he’d caused had driven a distraught investor to suicide. The dead man was the father of three. But there would be no murder charge.

  Swastika grinned.

  Before leaving the map room, the Fourth Reich assassin snipped a Scrabble tray of letters out of various headlines and arranged thirteen pieces along the edge of the desk.

  The word described how he viewed the social outcasts of the Times’ pieces, for whom his final solution was extermination.

  The word was “Untermenschen.”

  * * *

  When he stood in the deathly quiet corridor outside the map room, a replica of the Führerbunker conference hall where Hitler had said farewell to his diehard disciples, Swastika thought he could still hear the footsteps of all the fugitive Nazis who had slipped into this city in the post-war years to plot the rising phoenix of the Fourth Reich. Hidden in the secret storage passages behind these walls had once been a fortune in Nazi gold. It had been smuggled out of the Third Reich just before it fell, and later was buccaneered up from South America with Flugkreisel hardware in the only U-boat ever sanctioned by the Pentagon to sail this coast. Those whose phantom footsteps Swastika heard haunting this hall were the most elusive Nazi war criminals, all unaccounted for in 1945.

  But now those disciples were gone.

  And so was Hitler’s gold.

  Except for the gold in Switzerland, which maintained the family trust that kept this far-flung estate in Swastika’s hands.

  This mansion in Vancouver.

  And the ranch in the Cariboo.

  The phantom footsteps came to life as Swastika walked along the narrow corridor, reviewing the waxwork figures against the far wall. The rheostat that controlled the ceiling fixtures was dimmed so the lamps would cast evocative shadows. His mother—a woman of many talents—had sculpted the wax much as the display artists do at Madame Tussaud’s. Fittingly, the first figure he came to was the führer. But this führer was taller, to match his father’s height. It wore the uniform Hitler had worn during those last days in the bunker, perfect in every detail. Its glass eyes were riveting, as if fired up for one of Hitler’s Nuremberg speeches.

  Swastika snapped his arm up in the Nazi salute.

  Sieg heil, Father.

  The memory was as sharp as Streicher’s dagger: the first time his father had whipped off the belt of his führer’s uniform to thrash his son for spying on something he shouldn’t have seen. That was back in the hazy days of his early childhood, just after he had somehow discovered—had the door been left ajar?—the secret passage where the Nazi gold had once been cached. He remembered descending the staircase to the bunker. He remembered seeing light coming through the peephole in the false wall. He remembered sneezing from the dust as he placed his eye to the spy hole. He remembered the terror of witnessing his father’s rage. He remembered the pain of the beating. But there was a blank in his mind. Whatever he had spied had been wiped from his memory by the fury of the führer’s belt.

  Only later had he uncovered clues in his mother’s closet.

  That was shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, when his parents had both vanished in East Germany.

  The female waxwork was supposed to be Eva Braun. The facial features, however, were those of Swastika’s mother. In fashioning the wax to fit her husband’s fantasy world, she had morphed the face of Hitler’s submissive wife into her own. The figure wore a replica of the black taffeta dress in which Eva had wed.

  The door off the hall at Swastika’s back led to an anteroom to the study in which Hitler had blown out his brains. Off the study to the right was Hitler’s bedroom. Off the study to the left was a reconstruction of Eva Braun’s boudoir that included a closet full of role-playing costumes, all of them, like the wedding dress in the hall, copied by Swastika’s mother from varied historical sources.

  Half of the closet lay open, flaunting knock-offs of Eva Braun’s clothes, from dirndl country attire to haute couture fashions looted from occupied Paris. As a boy, Swastika would watch his mother undress in preparation for one of their cuddly bed-rests, and she would neatly hang her clothes, garment by garment, in the open half.

  The other half, the verboten half with the big lock, was to him, as a young lad, akin to Pandora’s box. Pandora’s box, his mother had told him one day when they lay naked together in Hitler’s bed, was where the gods had hidden all the evils of the world. If the box were ever opened, all hell would break loose.

  That’s how he had imagined the locked half of his mother’s closet throughout his prepubescent years. Like Pandora’s box, full of delicious secrets. So once his parents were gone and the mansion belonged solely to him, Swastika had busted open the lock on his mother’s subconscious Freudian kinks.

  It was a man’s world in the years that followed the Second World War, and GIs returning from overseas had snapped up pulp magazines with lurid covers of hot nympho babes in peril or imperiling. These appealed to their basest male instincts of sex, power, and war. For thirty-five cents, a vet could purchase Swagger, Rage, For Men Only, Escape to Adventure, American Manhood, or any of the other rags that Swastika had found on a shelf in his mother’s secret closet. The cover of Climax: Exciting Stories for Men said it all: a burly, shirtless he-man straddled a flagpole flying a tattered American flag.

  The women in the mags were all bursting at the seams. With shirts unbuttoned to bare ample cleavage and skirts torn up their legs, the ones on the pages earmarked by his mother were captives trussed up in Nazi chains. Other pages depicted dominatrices—busty women in unbuttoned shirts with swastika armbands, Nazi helmets on their heads, and skin-tight jodhpurs sheathing their showgirl waists and thighs—tormenting red-blooded American POWs in concentration camps flying swastika flags.

  There were also canisters of film.

  Ilsa: She-wolf of the SS read their labels.

  On the shelf, beside the fantasy pile, Swastika had also discovered an album of Second World War photographs of the two most notorious Nazi women.

  Both Ilses.

  Irma Ilse Grese. Born 1923. She became a camp guard at the age of nineteen and transferred to Auschwitz in March 1943. There, she rose to the rank of senior SS supervisor and was placed in charge of thirty thousand female prisoners. Her murders, tortures, and sexual excesses were legendary. Irma enjoyed shooting pris
oners in cold blood, or beating them to death with a plaited whip, or allowing her half-starved dogs to tear them to pieces. She ordered guards to cut off the breasts of Jewish and gypsy women, and personally selected victims for the gas chambers. She demanded that she be brought their skins, which she stitched into lampshades, book covers, and household items. At Auschwitz, she had a love affair with Dr. Josef Mengele, and later, at Bergen-Belsen, she had one with Kommandant Josef Kramer.

  The first photo in the album showed Irma Grese in her SS uniform, complete with jackboots, pistol, and whip.

  On her arm was the swastika.

  Ilse Koch. “The Bitch of Buchenwald.” Married to Karl Koch, the kommandant of that camp. Ilse was especially fond of riding her horse through Buchenwald, whipping any prisoner who attracted her attention, and selecting those with distinctive tattoos for gassing. Like Grese, Koch had a sexual fetish involving human skin. But in addition to making those tattooed hides into lampshades, book covers, and shrunken heads, she had them tanned into human leather and stitched into gloves and a lady’s handbag. Those, Ilse wore as proudly as any South Seas cannibal did his harvested human trophies.

  The iconic photo of Ilse in that album showed her in her riding attire, with whip and spurs.

  Beneath the shelf of that closet full of inspiration, Swastika’s mother had hung her Freudian role-playing costumes. She had imitations of the bodice-rippers and SS Black Corps uniforms like Ilsa wore on film and copies of the dominatrix wardrobes favored by Grese and Koch.

  What she had done with them, Swastika had no inkling. For try though he might, he couldn’t get backstage of that iron curtain in his tortured mind to whatever sadistic burlesque had gone on in the master bedroom.

  That’s where the peephole was.

  Whatever the trauma his father’s belt had masked, it still shook him to the core. When he broke open the closet that day to release the evils of Pandora’s box, Swastika had inexplicably burst into tears.