Swastika

by Michael Slade

  A prisoner, his hands cupped like a beggar’s, blocked the door to the crematorium. The skeletal man was among those forced to incinerate their dead friends in the ovens. Twenty thousand slaves had died at Dora-Mittelbau. Quickly, the small crematorium had been overwhelmed. But starvation had shrunken the workers so thin that four at a time could be shoveled into an oven, and soon each oven could process about a hundred bodies a day. Still, the crematorium couldn’t keep up with the dead, and bodies lay heaped outside in a gruesome pile. From what Hawke could see, the cadavers had been whipped and brutally abused.

  Hawke couldn’t tell what the prisoner wanted in his cupped hands. He was hard to understand because of his ghetto accent. Hawke’s offer of a chocolate bar was refused. He then knocked a Lucky from his pack and held it out, but the man didn’t seem to want a smoke either. As Hawke struck a match with his fingernail to light one for himself, the ghost took hold of his khaki sleeve and gave it a weak tug.

  “You want to show me something?”

  Out back of the crematorium, the ghostly man showed the major a pit that was about eight feet long by six feet wide by who knows how many feet deep. It was filled to overflowing with ashes from the ovens inside. Small chips of human bone were evidence of that. Bucketfuls, it seemed to Hawke, had been tossed in from a distance, just as you would empty ashes you’d scooped from a hearth.

  “Twenty thousand,” the prisoner said, “in a year and a half.”

  As Hawke sucked on the Lucky Strike and let the implications of that sink into his military mind, a puff of wind blew ash from the end of his cigarette onto the mass grave.

  Farm Truck

  Vancouver

  May 26, Now

  Corporal Jackie Hett was sitting at her desk in the main-floor squad room at Special X when she got a summons from the commissionaire at the front door.

  “Corporal, we have two … uh, ladies here at the check-in asking to speak to someone about a missing youth.”

  “Ladies! How archaic, Fred. Call them what they are. Women.”

  “I wouldn’t say that, Corporal.”

  “Why not?”

  “Come out and see.”

  Jackie pushed away from her desk beside the wall-mounted display of Wild West firepower and strolled out into the entrance hall to solve the gender mystery. A pair of workmen who were taking down the moth-eaten bison head over the lower stairs for transport to the upcoming red serge dinner had paused to gawk at the commissionaire’s “ladies.”

  “I’m Corporal Hett,” Jackie said as Fred grinned like the Joker behind the showy cross-dressers.

  The taller drag queen introduced herself as Marya Delvard, then shook her wig and clucked her tongue at Jackie in disappointment. “Tsk, tsk, honey. You’ve let yourself go. What I could do with cheekbones and a set of tits like yours. Lipstick and a little blush? How about a makeover while we talk?”

  Jackie smiled. “I play it down in here.”

  “Shame on you!” Marya exploded, whirling on a high heel to drill Fred with her bitchiest glare. “There’s a woman trapped in this uniform, and you force her to look butch!”

  “Not me,” Fred said. He looked as if he was afraid any further comment would bring charges of sexual harassment his way.

  The smaller female impersonator, her splashy wardrobe bright red, stepped forward and introduced herself. “I’m the Queen of Hearts.”

  “Ladies,” Jackie said, sweeping her arm toward the interview room across the hall.

  “Ladies,” Marya mimicked, chastising Fred. “You should learn to be chivalrous, sir.”

  “Yeah,” scolded Jackie, wagging her finger at the commissionaire. “Archaic is cool.”

  * * *

  How strange to be sitting across from two males whose makeup took the art of being female to perfection. Working from the skin out, Marya and the Queen of Hearts had applied beard cover, foundation, and powder for a base. They’d shaped their eyebrows, plucking stragglers and adding on to ends to form arches. Eyeshadow and eyeliner had followed, the bottom lids and outer third of the top lids traced to make their eyes appear bigger, an effect enhanced with mascara and a lash curler. Their lips were lined with sensuous color and shone slick with gloss. Blush topped it all off.

  Even more unnerving to Jackie was the way they examined her for faults and blemishes, probing her looks with queer-eye-for-the-straight-gal deconstruction. She felt as if wayward hairs were growing out of her nose and wavy cartoon stink lines were wafting up from her armpits.

  “Who’s the missing youth?” she asked.

  “Yuri,” replied Marya.

  “Last name?”

  “Ushakov. Yuri Ushakov.”

  “Friend? Relative?”

  “A street kid I befriended. I don’t want to get him in trouble if you find he’s safe.”

  “What sort of trouble?”

  “You know.”

  “Drugs? Prostitution?”

  “He’s a good kid. He’s had a tough life. His mom’s crazy, and she kicked him out when he was thirteen. He lived in foster care for a while, and then tried living with his dad. His dad found out he was gay and beat him up, so Yuri stuck out his thumb and hitchhiked west. He wasn’t in school, didn’t have a job, wasn’t getting welfare, and didn’t have a sleeping bag. When I chanced across him, he was living in coffee shops to keep warm. One by one, they all tossed him out.”

  “You took him in?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve been there.”

  “Is he still with you?”

  “No, I threw him out too.”

  “Why?”

  “Off the record?”

  “Ms. Delvard, I’m a homicide cop. I have more than enough to do without hassling street kids. Or you, for that matter. Unless you’ve done something very wrong.”

  “I’m clean.”

  “So why’d you throw him out?”

  “He got into crystal meth. He promised me he wouldn’t. That was the one rule I imposed on him. I used to have a drug problem, and I want to stay clean.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “Boy’s town, I believe. That was the only way he could survive on the street and support his habit.”

  “When’d you see him last?”

  “Months ago,” said Marya.

  “But I saw him yesterday,” interjected the Queen of Hearts.

  “Where?”

  “On the sidewalk out front of Cabaret Berlin.”

  “I work there,” Marya added.

  “What time did you see him?” Jackie asked the Queen.

  “Early morning. Around two.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Trying to get into the club. He’s only fourteen. The bouncer kept him on the street.”

  “Okay,” said Jackie. “Why do you think he’s missing?”

  “I was crossing the street toward the club when I saw Yuri. I knew him from back when he lived with Marya. He pleaded with me to get a message to her. He said that he had to talk to her, and that he’d be waiting outside the club in an hour. Then he ran across Davie Street and climbed into a farm truck.”

  “Someone he knew?”

  “Doubt it. I think he was turning a trick.”

  “For drug money?”

  “Probably. The kid was in bad shape. He was twitching, fiddling. Know what I mean?”

  “Yes,” said Jackie.

  Marya picked up from the Queen. “I went outside after the show, but there was no Yuri. Then I saw your warning about the boy’s town predator in the Times, and we’ve been looking for Yuri ever since. No one has seen him since he climbed into that truck. To play it safe, we thought it best to come here. You did ask anyone who’s seen anything suspicious in boy’s town to report it.”

  “You did the right thing. But could it be that Yuri got high and is sleeping it off somewhere?”

  “Could be,” Marya agreed. “But two things trouble us. First, Yuri begged to speak to me.”

 
; “Begged,” emphasized the Queen of Hearts. “Second, that truck smelled of the stockyard. In jaywalking across Davie Street to Cabaret Berlin, I skirted the back of the truck and got a whiff. No mistaking that stench. I was raised on a farm. My dad slaughtered pigs and sold the pork locally. He took the guts to a rendering plant in our truck. The truck that Yuri got into stank like that.”

  “Did you see the driver?”

  “No.”

  “Can you describe the truck?”

  “No need to,” said the Queen of Hearts. Reaching into her red bag, she extracted a camera phone. “That stench made me feel uneasy. So as the truck pulled away, I snapped a photo.”

  “Get the license plate?”

  “See for yourself,” said the Queen of Hearts.

  * * *

  It was easy enough to uncover the registered owner of the farm truck by punching the license plate into CPIC, a Canada-wide database maintained by the Canadian Police Information Centre. The name that popped up on the computer screen at Jackie’s desk belonged to a resident of Prince George, a town hundreds of miles north of Vancouver.

  The next step was to run that name through CPIC to check for a criminal record or outstanding charges. When she did that, Jackie got back a perplexing response.

  At about the same time that the Queen of Hearts was snapping her camera-phone image of the license plate on Davie Street, a truck with the same plate had been stopped leaving the parking lot of a Prince George pub. And while the drunk sobered up overnight in jail, his vehicle had been impounded by the local Mounties.

  Jackie was onto something.

  What if …?

  What if the guy who picked Yuri up on Davie Street had forged a license plate instead of stealing one? There were only two reasons to go to that sort of effort. First, so the driver couldn’t be traced through his real plate number. And second, so the forged plate wouldn’t turn up as stolen in a random roadside check.

  Jackie’s pulse quickened.

  The driver had picked up a street kid just a few blocks from boy’s town, and the plate forgery meant that he didn’t want anyone to know who was actually prowling that area in that truck.

  Why? Jackie wondered.

  Because he’s the stealth killer Special X is hunting?

  If so, how do I track him?

  An idea sparked in her brain.

  As Jackie reached for the business directory and flipped to the Rs, the phone on her desk jangled.

  “Hett.”

  “The chief wants to see you upstairs.”

  * * *

  Three men stood in front of the Strategy Wall in DeClercq’s airy, high-vaulted loft of a corner office.

  “Corporal,” DeClercq said, “meet Sergeant Winter.”

  “Jackie Hett,” she said, crossing the room with her hand extended.

  “Dane Winter,” the sergeant replied.

  Good-looking guy, thought Jackie. Having him around would be a definite perk of the job.

  One day, Jackie Hett hoped to have this office. She coveted the horseshoe-shaped desk and the high-backed chair with the barley-sugar frame. The two window walls looked out on Queen Elizabeth Park, at the summit of Little Mountain. Behind the desk was a portrait titled Last Great Council of the West. It showed scarlet-coated Mounties with hands on swords meeting feathered Indians at Blackfoot Crossing in 1881.

  The windowless wall was covered from floor to ceiling with corkboard. This was the Strategy Wall, where DeClercq pinned reports and photos to help him and his officers visualize a case. A military strategist, he used his corkboard wall the way generals once deployed toy soldiers on campaign maps.

  “Corporal, Sergeant Winter will be seconded to us for the duration of a case,” said DeClercq. “Inspector Chandler”—he nodded toward the man standing at the Strategy Wall—“will head the investigation. You know the ropes. Integrate the sergeant.”

  “Yes, sir,” Jackie said, a hint of conflicting emotions buried in her voice.

  * * *

  The corporal had to wait while they finished constructing the Swastika Case on half of the corkboard wall. The other half was occupied by the Stealth Killer Case, her case, the case with the hot new lead that might eventually blast her up to DeClercq’s corner office. Instead, here she was cooling her heels while the sergeant filled the brass in on his murders.

  “Where you from?” Dane asked to break the ice as he and Jackie descended the staircase from the chief’s office down to the main floor. The bison head above the lower stairs had been carried away.

  “From all over,” Jackie said. “I have dual citizenship. My parents are American, and my dad was in the U.S. military, high up in NORAD. While my mom was with him on a tour of Arctic defenses, she went into premature labor. Being born here makes me Canadian, but I was raised in the States.”

  “Why join the Mounted?”

  Jackie laughed. “What cop in her right mind would turn down riding horses and wearing red serge?”

  “You grow up on a ranch?”

  “My granddad had one. In New Mexico. Bought it after he got out of the 509th Bomb Group.”

  “Did he fly in the war?”

  “He was in the crew of the Enola Gay.”

  “Whew! The big hot one. My granddad got shot down over Nazi Germany. Sounds like we have a lot in common.”

  “Do you have your pilot’s license?”

  “No,” said Dane. “Do you?”

  “Uh-huh. Both fixed-wing and chopper.”

  “How come you’re not in Air Services, flying for the Mounted?”

  “Because I’d rather be a homicide cop.”

  “When the chief asked you to integrate me into Special X, I think I caught a hint of disappointment in your voice. Something wrong? If so, spit it out.”

  “It’s just that I got a hot new lead on the Stealth Killer Case, and I was about to pursue it when I got called upstairs.”

  “Okay, pursue it. Do double duty. No reason why we can’t discuss the integration procedure in a moving car instead of a stationary coffee shop.”

  * * *

  The industrial zone of this city hugs the commercial docks, along the north edge of a prostitutes’ stroll. Even in the middle of the day, hookers hang out on the streets, offering sex to blue-collar workers who crave a quickie instead of lunch.

  The neat, tidy buildings of the rendering plant gave no hint of the grisly work going on inside. A dozen storage silos loomed above a low-level complex of reduction stations, pumping equipment, ladders, and catwalks. Raw materials made their way here by train or truck. Big loads or small, the by-products were the same: the waste remains of livestock.

  Blood, bones, meat scraps, inedible fats, offal, and guts from meat-packing plants, butcher shops, and supermarkets. Feathers from plucked poultry; innards pulled out of chickens and turkeys. Fish scales and fins from canneries; shrimp shells peeled off seafood. Rancid kitchen grease from thousands of restaurants. All were reduced and rendered here into useful products. From truck and railcar to grinder to cooker to press to centrifuge to drier to mill to storage—waste was recycled into animal feed, cosmetics, soap, shampoo, candles, paint, perfume, plastics, and cleaners. Fats and oils were pumped directly from the storage tanks to boats in the harbor. Solid products were moved in boxcars that shunted between the rendering plant and the railhead, or in sealed containers that were lifted onto ships bound for ports around the globe.

  Who says you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear?

  The foreman’s name was Horton Grubb, and he loved fattening beer. A porker with a pig face, he embodied his job. The blood red color of his skin suggested he wasn’t long for this world. The Mounties spoke to him out in the chain-link pen of the loading yard while he puffed on a cigarette and watched a line of offal trucks come and go.

  “We need to find a truck.” Jackie flashed her badge.

  “Take your pick. We got lotsa trucks.”

  “This truck,” she said, holding out a blow-up of the image
caught by the Queen of Hearts on Davie Street.

  “You got the license number.”

  “It’s a forgery.”

  “You know how many farm trucks pass through this yard? We get product from every farm, big and small. Restaurants, too.”

  “This truck has a dented fender on the left rear and a cracked cover on the tail light.”

  “That helps,” the foreman said sarcastically, dropping the butt and crushing it underfoot.

  “It’s important. A kidnapping case.”

  “What makes you think that truck came here?”

  “A hunch. Someone smelled guts in the back.”

  “Kidnapping, eh?”

  Jackie nodded.

  “Some kinda sex thing?” Grubb said, sneering.

  “Can’t say.”

  “If the trucker’s a perv, I could run him through the machines and turn him into a bar of soap.”

  “We don’t need talk like that.”

  “I’m just sayin’.”

  “We need you to check your records,” Dane pressed.

  “Got the name of the guy? The name of the farm? The name of the company?”

  “No,” said Jackie.

  “Then you’re outta luck. Even the name of the farm mightn’t help. Don’t keep records of small deliveries.”

  “Nothing you can do?”

  Grubb shrugged. “I’ll ask around and show that picture. And keep my eyes peeled.”

  Death March

  Gardelegen, Germany

  April 13, 1945

  “Was ist das hier für eine Judenschule?” the Nazi barked.

  “Jewish school” was the usual curse SS officers used when something was not in order, and what was not in order here was this gaunt straggler who’d stepped out of line.

  Bwam!

  The Death’s Head guard shot the Polish slave through the temple, dropping the starving wretch to the side of the bomb-pocked road as the rest of the exhausted Work Camp Dora evacuees struggled on toward the solitary barn.