Swastika

by Michael Slade

  His sobs had gone on for an hour.

  * * *

  Red, white, and black swastika banners flanked the trio of waxworks that captured the ideal Aryan family. The third figure was that of a young lad in a Hitlerjugend uniform. His mother had sewn that for Swastika at an early age, lengthening both it and the wax mannequin as he grew up.

  As soon as he was old enough to learn how to kill, Swastika and his dad had gone hunting with a crossbow, a rifle, and a skinning knife up in the Cariboo.

  “Fire!” his father had whispered, so fire he had, and the bolt of the crossbow had shot through the trunks of the forest trees to strike a doe in the flank with a sickening thud. “She’s down,” his father said, handing him the skinning knife. “Now go finish her off with your bare hands,” he ordered.

  If you’d seen them stalking through the brush toward the wounded deer, you might have thought they were Lord Baden-Powell and one of his Boy Scout cubs. In a way, they were. The Hitler Youth version, with him in the uniform sewn by his mother. His father had taken him roughing it in the woods near their Cariboo ranch—in that part of central British Columbia that seems to speak to the Black Forest yearnings of Germans today—for the same survivalist training that Nazi instructors had drilled into his dad as a youth.

  “Kill her,” came the order as they stood over the downed deer.

  “I can’t.” Quivering.

  “Toughen up!” demanded his dad.

  His hands were shaking. He began to cry. He pointed to the forest clearing, where two Bambis stood watching.

  “They’ll survive. I did. Now wash your hands in blood!”

  He hesitated, frozen.

  Too long for his dad’s temper.

  The führer clenched his son by the scruff of his neck and whipped him with his belt until the pain was more than he could take, giving him no alternative but to plunge down the blade.

  Jabbing a finger into the gaping slit in the deer’s neck, his dad had blooded him with the warm, red war paint, signing a swastika on his forehead.

  “Wear it with pride!” commanded the former Werewolf.

  * * *

  Swiveling 180 degrees in the waxwork corridor, the Nazi killer clomped across the threshold into the replica of Hitler’s private quarters. Jackboots echoed through the tight confines of this bunker, for tonight Swastika was all dressed up in the same Black Corps uniform that had once been worn by his grandfather, SS-Obergruppenführer Ernst Streicher.

  Untermenschen

  At heart, he was a nihilist. He hated everyone. His upbringing on a pig farm behind the Iron Curtain had warped his outlook on this shitty world and all the subhumans in it. Total and absolute destruction of everybody and himself had been his impossible dream. But now he actually had the means to bring that about, thanks to the treasure trove of long-lost Nazi secrets that he had recovered from the Knight’s Hall at Castle Werewolf in what was now Poland.

  As a boy in East Germany, he had often heard the Teutonic myth of Götterdämmerung, the twilight of the gods, which told how the end of the world had begun with the birth of a brood of wolves fathered by the great wolf Fenrir in a forest to the east. One of the pack had chased the sun and caught it in its jaws, extinguishing light and plunging the landscape into endless winter. As snowstorms swirled, war broke out all over the earth, culminating in an epic battle between the Norse gods and evil giants on a battlefield in front of the gates of Valhalla. Its upper jaw touching the heavens and its lower jaw brushing the ground, Fenrir, the demon wolf, spurted fire from its eyes and nostrils and dripped blood from its fangs. The wolf swallowed up Odin, the king of the gods, with a single snap of its jaws, and the rest of the combatants slaughtered each other chaotically. With all their gods dead, men were abandoned, and the human race was swept from the surface of the world by a cataclysm of fire, earthquakes, and tidal waves that subsumed everything into an abyss of nothingness.

  Only now did the East German boy, having grown into a man, see the myth of Götterdämmerung as a prophesy. Of late, he had watched with interest as America veered toward the political right, nodding with agreement when the Christian crusade was launched against those “sand niggers,” and recognizing the echoes of his ancestral past in the tortures of Abu Ghraib and the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay. That’s why he had sent a sample of the treasure trove from Castle Werewolf to the Pentagon by way of Switzerland, along with an extortion demand for a billion American dollars.

  Götterdämmerung!

  As a nihilist, he would gladly sacrifice his life to the cause of the end of the world, but not before he had a money-is-no-object blowout of sky-high proportions to compensate for all the suffering and deprivation he had once endured.

  Meanwhile, there was the hunt …

  * * *

  He thought of himself as “the Aryan” when he was on the hunt, prowling the streets of boy’s town in this dusty farm truck, just another hick from the sticks looking for male ass. Oh, he was looking for ass, was obsessed with ass. But not male ass for perverted sex like all these Untermenschen cruising Davie Street.

  Davie Street was the club scene for fags in Vancouver. There was a sewer to fit every subhuman debauchery in the five-block stretch from Jervis to Howe. After midnight they came out on the street in force. They should be wearing pink triangles, thought the Nazi killer, and peering through the barbed wire of a death camp, waiting for him to drive a stake through their hearts.

  Mein Kampf.

  My struggle.

  He tensed as he touched the cover of the book that he’d tucked into the map pocket of the farm truck’s door.

  Someone had to die.

  The SS-Führerdegen—Ernst Streicher’s sword—offered his only relief.

  “Pigsticking,” the Aryan called it down in the mine at the Cariboo ranch.

  * * *

  The hot new club on Davie Street was Cabaret Berlin. Harking back to the sophisticated depravity of the cabaret cellars of the Weimar Republic, this club was so buzzed with collective lust unashamedly flaunted that the sexual energy crackled out onto the street through its swinging door.

  Marya Delvard was onstage, singing “The Lavender Song.”

  Yuri could see her as he paced, paced, paced.

  He couldn’t get in to the club.

  He was only fourteen.

  They styled her “The Valkyrian Dominatrix” on the poster outside the door. Like her Austrian namesake from a hundred years ago, the drag queen exuded femme fatale. She was wearing a slinky floor-length gown the same inky hue as her hair, which fell to bare shoulders on either side of her chalk white face. The gown was slit to her waist to expose garters and a fishnet stocking up one thigh as she poised her stiletto heel above the groin of a prostrate man who was naked except for a codpiece with a thong up the crack of his ass. Draped behind the drag queen’s neck and flouncing as she sang her sultry song was a boa that extended from her fingertips like dual bullwhips.

  Marya Delvard.

  Chanteuse of “I am a Vamp!” “I Don’t Know Who I Belong To.” “It’s All a Swindle.” “The Washed-up Lover.” And her favorite, “Streets of Berlin.”

  Pace, pace, pace …

  “Jib, cryssie, ice, speed,” the street kid mumbled as a mantra.

  Yuri was going snaky.

  He was desperate for crystal meth.

  * * *

  The license plates on the farm truck were neither legitimate nor stolen. A natural when it came to mechanical things, the Aryan created miracles in a basic workshop. If you had the willpower of Nietzsche’s superman, you could teach yourself to do anything from texts in the library, postings on the Internet, and dogged trial-and-error experiments.

  Hadn’t he proved it in his makeshift lab down in the Cariboo mine?

  So creating license plates that weren’t genuine and couldn’t be traced as stolen was a snap.

  For years, the Aryan had stalked the dingy alleys of boy’s town. A better urban hunting ground didn’t exist. The yo
uths skulking back in the shadows were hiding from everyone. Almost all were misfits, runaways who’d ended up peddling their asses to make ends meet. Not only were they hiding from the law and from nosy social workers, but they were hiding from their families as well. Picking one of them off was like kidnapping a ghost.

  Boy’s town was Valhalla.

  * * *

  “You’re a drag hag, honey,” Marya had teased Yuri that first time she’d taken him back to her place from the street. “I dress in drag. You dress in drab. D-R-A-B. ‘Dressed as a boy.’ Get it?”

  “You’re a transvestite.”

  “Ugh,” said Marya, dropping a limp wrist. “Don’t say transvestite. That’s sooo passé. I’m a cross-dresser who lives en femme. I’m always in stealth mode.”

  “What’s a drag hag?”

  “You’re a homovestite,” Marya said, laughing. “You dress in the garb of your birth sex, but you hang with me.”

  Never had Yuri seen a more feminine residence. Portraits of divas decorated the walls. Ute Lemper sang like a dream from the CD player, a bust of Marlene Dietrich sat on a table stacked with 1930s- and 1940s-style hats, and everywhere there seemed to be outrageously flamboyant gowns draped over or within easy reach of several full-length wardrobe mirrors.

  “You’re welcome to stay for a while, honey. Until you get on your feet. I know what it’s like to run away from being misunderstood. There is, however, one rule you must never breach. It took a lot of pain for me to kick drugs. I won’t have drugs around, and I won’t coddle a druggie. If I catch you high, you’re out the door like this.”

  The snap of her fingers had the crack of a whip.

  And so it was, for several weeks, that Yuri had stayed with Marya. On show nights at Cabaret Berlin, over dinner, she would ask, “What drag should I wear in the show?”

  For the next few hours, Yuri had watched her prepare. Marya used a gaff to hide her penis, an elastic waist-cincher for that figure-eight contour, foam padding for shapely hips, and a cleavage-creator for boobs. Next up was a runway fashion show in front of the mirrors so that Marya could select her lingerie and frock. Finally, to impersonate whatever diva held her fancy, she put her false face together through makeup wizardry at a dressing table once used by Gypsy Rose Lee.

  Marya Delvard.

  Queen of the drag ball.

  How Yuri longed to return to that womb of security, to again have a mother figure who understood her adopted son, so he could stop peddling his ass in boy’s town just to survive on the street. If only he’d played by her golden rule of no drugs, Marya wouldn’t have made good on her threat to kick his sorry ass out the door.

  Please, Marya!

  Help me!

  God, I need a fix!

  “Jib, cryssie, ice, speed.”

  Pace, pace, pace …

  If only Yuri could get word to Marya inside this club; beg her to leave the stage and come outside; promise to shake the monkey if only she’d take him back in; tell her how crystal meth had sunk his life to hell on earth; explain that jib was a popular drug with kids at raves, that ecstasy was laced with it and that’s why he’d begun, that there was an aphrodisiac kick in it, that it made you feel sexy as hell. Who knew it hooked you worse than crack or junk? He only knew that it was cheaper and a longer high, then—fuck!—this jib monkey was in way over his head.

  Yuri peeked in the door.

  The bouncer scowled at him.

  “No way, kid. Move on down the street.”

  What time was it?

  How long till the end of her act?

  Sweating, twitching, paranoid, and fearful of seeing things.

  He wasn’t ready for detox.

  Not here on the street.

  Just one more fix would see him through …

  Through till Marya got offstage …

  Then he’d go straight …

  No more jib monkey, nosiree …

  But first, he had to score cash fast for that fix …

  And that’s when Yuri saw the farm truck idling at the curb.

  * * *

  The jackhammer pounding of Neue Deutsche Härte industrial rock, with its blitzkrieg assault of Teutonic drums, battering-ram bass, distorted guitars, and death-growl vocals, blared deafeningly in the Aryan’s ears. Having grown up behind the Berlin Wall, where this Wagnerian techno music had been spawned, he felt its bone-crunching power feed his cauldron of hate through the headphones clamped over his ears and covering the swastika studs punched through both lobes.

  The person who glowered back at the Aryan from the rear-view mirror was an Über-blond Eurotrash punk like those you’d find headbanging in a Hamburg underground club. The purest of the pure, yet he had once wallowed in dirt back on the East German farm where he had learned to hate. The Aryan’s hair was close-cropped and his eyes were ice blue. The tattoos partially hidden by his black leather skin were Nordic runes, and the barbed wire inked around his neck dangled an Iron Cross scar.

  The Aryan personified the master race.

  The sandwich board outside the cabaret across the street announced that tonight was a homo event titled “Getting Clocked.” It was some sort of dress-up affair for drag queens, transgenderists, cross-dressers, and female impersonators, or whatever they called themselves. They played for prizes, trying to pass themselves off as members of their fantasy gender, instead of “being read” as masqueraders hiding their birth sex.

  Who was a he?

  Who was a she?

  Who fucking cared?

  If Hitler had won the war, there’d be no shit like this on the streets of Berlin, be none of these Untermenschen alive in Germany, be no need for him to journey here to claim what was rightfully his, be no compulsive attraction to this toilet of a club to stoke his seething wrath before he drove several blocks east along Davie Street to hunt his prey in boy’s town.

  Wait a minute.

  What have we here?

  Coming toward the truck?

  The Aryan’s heartbeat quickened as he watched the druggie cross the street and round the front of his vehicle to the passenger’s side. He knew enough about street kids to know that this one would die for a fix. The kid had Slavic cheekbones. What more could he ask?

  Punching off the Discman to silence the music, the Aryan turned in the driver’s seat to face the opening door. He could hear through the lightweight headphones hiding the swastikas.

  “Want me?” the kid asked, poking his head inside.

  “A suck and a fuck,” the Aryan said. “I’ll pay you in cash, meth, or crack.”

  The kid was so hungry for one of the drugs that he didn’t quote his price, just swung into the passenger’s seat and said, “I know a dark place nearby.”

  “Buckle up,” the Aryan said. “It’s a bumpy ride.”

  “Bette Davis, right?” The kid’s voice was shaky. “‘Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night?’”

  As soon as the kid was cinched in against the padded L-frame of the passenger’s seat, the driver pulled a lever that compressed a metal plate against the back of the seat frame, jabbing numerous tranquilizer needles out of miniature tubes that had been drilled like Swiss cheese holes through the seat’s chassis. Like a first strike of tiny missiles launched from secret underground silos, the needles pierced the padding and spiked into the rump and back muscles of the boy. Impaled by what was tantamount to an iron maiden, he let out a squeal of surprise like the pigs did back home at the ranch, then passed out.

  No need to go to boy’s town.

  Boy’s town had come to him.

  The Aryan put the truck in gear and pulled away from the curb, turning at the next corner to bypass boy’s town and wend his way toward the Trans-Canada Highway. He had a long night’s drive ahead of him, up the Fraser River and the Fraser Canyon to the pigsticker waiting in the Cariboo mine.

  Angel of Death

  Berlin

  April 3, 1945

  Entering Hitler’s bunker was like descending into the
claustrophobic confines of a cement submarine. It reminded the SS general of the tight squeeze Wolf Pack crews had to endure on torpedo runs under cold Atlantic waves, cut off physically and mentally from surface reality.

  Firebombs devastated Berlin up there.

  Down here, utensils rattled.

  The Führerbunker was an underground tomb on two levels. Behind the bulkhead that separated it from Kannenberg Alley, where the guards had confiscated Streicher’s pistol and his sons’ daggers, were the upper-level servants’ quarters. A long oak table laden with food, cognac, wine, and bottled beer ran the length of the central dining passage. The aromas from the hearty German cooking prepared in the kitchen still lingered in the stuffy recycled air. Single file, the general and his sons skirted one side of the table, where several drunks slept off the booze with their flushed faces cradled in their arms, and made for the spiral staircase at the opposite end.

  Clang …

  Clang …

  Clang …

  The general’s jackboots stomped down the dozen wrought-iron steps.

  The lower level continued under the chancellery garden. As this was the innermost sanctum, and Hitler rarely left it, another team of armed sentries guarded the steel door through the last bulkhead. Beyond this point, rumor was, lunatics ran the asylum.

  “General, der Chef is waiting for you,” a voice chastised Streicher as he and his sons stepped past the point of no return. If there was a meat hook waiting for him in the torture chamber at Gestapo HQ, he would soon know. “I see you’ve come dressed for the occasion,” said Martin Bormann, head of the Nazi Party chancellery and Hitler’s private secretary.

  “He is the führer,” Streicher replied.

  “Follow me.”

  With the Reich crumbling around them and fear of traitors lurking everywhere now that the Nazis’ Kriegsglück—war luck—had all but run out, the SS general and his sons had dressed up to remind the führer of his glory days. After a downtrodden cavalcade of wartorn, bloodstained officers reporting military defeats in field gray battledress, would Hitler not yearn to feast his eyes on the black dress uniform of his SS elite? And—even though it was unseasonable attire for the first week of April—would not the summer uniform of his Hitler Youth, a version of what Nazi Brownshirts had worn during their climb to power, warm his heart?