by P. W. Child
He decided to risk using Hilt’s cell phone to make one call. This would probably land him in hot water with Schmidt as cell phone calls could be traced, but he had no other choice. With his safety compromised and his mission gone dreadfully wrong, he had to resort to more hazardous avenues of communication to establish a connection with the man who had sent him on the mission in the first place.
“Another Pilsner, sir?” the waiter asked suddenly, jolting Löwenhagen’s heart into overdrive. He looked up at the dim-witted waiter with a voice of deep boredom.
“Yes, thank you.” He changed his mind quickly. “Wait, no. I’ll have schnapps please. And something to eat.”
“You have to take something from the menu, sir. Anything you like there?” the waiter asked indifferently.
“Just bring me a seafood dish,” Löwenhagen sighed, vexed.
The waiter scoffed and smirked, “Sir, as you can see we don’t offer seafood. Please order a dish we actually offer.”
Had Löwenhagen not been waiting for an important meeting or had he not been weak from hunger, he may well have used the privilege of wearing Hilt’s face to bash in the skull of the sarcastic cretin. “Just bring me a steak, then. Geeeezusss! Just, I don’t know, surprise me!” the airman yelled furiously.
“Yes, sir,” the stunned waiter replied, gathering up the menu and beer glass rapidly.
“And don’t forget the schnapps first!” he shouted after the apron-donning idiot, who scampered towards the kitchen through the tables of staring patrons. Löwenhagen sneered at them and emitted what sounded like a low growl that crawled out from deep in his gullet. Disturbed by the dangerous looking man, some people left the establishment while the others carried on with nervous conversations.
An attractive young waitress dared to bring him his drink as a favor to her terrified colleague. (The waiter was collecting himself in the kitchen, preparing to face the irate customer once his food was ready.) She smiled apprehensively as she set down the glass and announced, “Schnapps for you, sir.”
“Thank you,” was all he said, to her surprise.
Löwenhagen, twenty-seven years of age, sat contemplating his future in the cozy lighting of the pub as the sun abandoned the day outside, painting the windows in darkness. The music grew a bit louder as the evening crowd dribbled in like a reluctant leak in a ceiling. While he waited for his food, he ordered five more stiff drinks and as the soothing hell of alcohol burned inside his injured flesh he thought of how he had come to this point.
Never in his life did he think that he would become a cold-blooded killer, a killer for profit no less, and at such a tender age. Most men devolved as they aged, becoming heartless swine for the promise of monetary gain. Not him. He had been aware as a fighter pilot that he would have to kill scores of people in combat someday, but that would be for his country.
Defending Germany and the W.U.O.’s utopian goals for the new world was his first and foremost duty and desire. Taking lives for this purpose was par for the course, yet now he was engaging in a murderous spree to serve the wishes of a Luftwaffe commander that had nothing to do with Germany’s freedom or the world’s well-being. In fact, he was now accomplishing the contrary. It depressed him almost as much as his dwindling eye sight and increasingly challenging temperament.
What bothered him most was the way in which Neumand had screamed when Löwenhagen set him on fire the first time. Captain Schmidt had hired Löwenhagen in what the commander had called an extremely covert operation. It had followed the recent deployment of their squadron just outside the city of Mosul, Iraq.
From what the commander had told Löwenhagen in confidence, Flieger Neumand had been sent by Schmidt to procure an obscure and ancient relic from a private collection while they were stationed in Iraq during the last plague of bombings aimed at the W.U.O. and especially the C.I.T.E. branch there. Neumand, once a teenage offender, had the skill set needed to break into the home of the wealthy collector and steal the Babylonian Mask.
He was given a picture of the slim, skull-like relic and with that he managed to steal the thing from the brass box it slept in. Soon after his successful plunder, Neumand returned to Germany with the prize he’d attained for Schmidt, but Schmidt did not count on the weaknesses of the men he chose to do his dirty work. Neumand was a compulsive gambler. On his first night back he took the mask with him to one of his favorite gambling haunts, a back alley dive in Dillenburg.
Not only did he commit the most reckless of practices by carrying an invaluable, stolen artifact around with him, but he invoked the rage of Captain Schmidt by not delivering the mask as discreetly and urgently as he’d been hired to do. On learning that the squadron had returned and finding Neumand absent, Schmidt immediately contacted a fickle outcast from his previous Air Base barracks to acquire the relic from Neumand by any means necessary.
As he sat thinking about that night, Löwenhagen felt his seething hate for Captain Schmidt spread throughout his mind. He was the cause of unnecessary casualties. He was the cause of greed-fuelled injustice. He was the reason Löwenhagen would never have his attractive features back again, and that was by far the most unforgivable crime the commander’s avarice had imposed upon Löwenhagen’s life – what was left of it.
Hilt was handsome enough but for Löwenhagen, having lost his individuality struck deeper than any physical mutilation ever could. To add to it, his eyes had begun to fail him to such an extent that he could not even read the menu to order his food. The humiliation was almost worse than the discomfort and physical handicap. He swigged his schnapps and clicked his fingers above his head for another.
In his head he could hear a thousand voices passing the buck to everyone else for his ill-fated choices and his own inner reason being left mute at how fast things had gone wrong. He recalled the night he had procured the mask, and how Neumand had refused to relinquish his hard earned loot. He’d followed Neumand’s trail to the gambling den under the stairs of a nightclub. There he’d bided his time, posing as just another party animal frequenting the site.
By just after one in the morning Neumand had gambled away everything and he was now in a double or nothing challenge.
“I’ll float you €1000 if you let me keep that mask as a surety,” Löwenhagen offered.
“Are you kidding?” Neumand cackled in his drunken state. “This fucking thing is worth a million times that!” He’d held up the mask for all to see, but thankfully his inebriated state made the shady company he was in doubt his sincerity on the item. Löwenhagen could not allow them to think twice about it, so he acted quickly.
“Right then, I’ll play you for the stupid mask. At least I can get your ass back to the base.” He’d said this especially loud, hoping to convince the others that he was just trying to get the mask to get his friend to go home. It was a good thing Löwenhagen’s deceptive past had honed his skills of guile. He was extremely convincing when he ran a con, a trait that usually benefited him. Until now, when it had ultimately caused him his future.
The mask sat in the middle of the round table, surrounded by three men. Löwenhagen could hardly object when another gambler wanted in on the action. The man was a local biker, a mere foot soldier in his chapter, but it would have been suspicious to deny him access to a poker game in a public dump known to local low lives everywhere.
Even with his cheating skills, Löwenhagen found that he could not swindle the mask from the stranger sporting the black and white the Gremium emblem on his leather cut-off.
“Black seven rules, motherfuckers!” the big biker bellowed when Löwenhagen folded and Neumand’s hand yielded an impotent three-of-a-kind of jacks. Neumand was too drunk to make an effort to get back the mask, although he was clearly devastated by the loss.
“Oh Jesus! Oh sweet Jesus, he is going to kill me! He is going to kill me!” was all Neumand could utter with his hands cradling his bowed head. He sat there moaning until the next group who wanted the table told him to piss off or end up in the po
t. Neumand walked away, mumbling to himself like a lunatic, but again it was written off as a drunken stupor and those he shouldered out of his way took it just that way.Löwenhagen followed Neumand, having no idea of the esoteric nature of the relic the biker was swinging in his hand somewhere ahead. The biker stopped for a while, bragging to a bunch of girls that the skull mask was going to look wicked under his German army styled piss pot helmet. Soon he realized that Neumand was, in fact, following the biker into a shadowy concrete pit where a row of motorcycles gleamed in the pale rays of the lights that did not quite reach to the parking area.
Quietly he watched as Neumand pulled out his gun, stepped out of the shadows and shot the biker point blank in the face. Gunshots were not exactly an oddity around these parts of town, although some people alerted the other bikers. Their silhouettes rose over the edge of the parking pit soon after, but they were still too far away to see what had happened.
Choking for what he beheld, Löwenhagen played witness to the gruesome ritual of slicing off a piece of the dead man’s flesh with his own knife. Neumand dropped the bleeding tissue into the underside of the mask and started stripping his victim as hastily as he could manage with his drunken fingers. Wide-eyed and shocked, Löwenhagen learned the secret of the Babylonian Mask there and then. Now he knew why Schmidt was so eager to get his hands on it.
With his new grotesque looks, Neumand rolled the body off into the trashcans a few meters away from the last vehicle in the dark and then nonchalantly climbed onto the man’s motorcycle. Four days later, Neumand took back the mask and absconded. Löwenhagen tracked him down outside the Schleswig base, where he was hiding from Schmidt’s wrath. Neumand still rocked the biker look, complete with shades and dirty jeans, but he had gotten rid of the club colors and the bike. Mannheim’s chapter of Gremium was looking for the impostor and it wasn’t worth the risk. When Neumand encountered Löwenhagen he had laughed like a madman, rambling on incoherently in what sounded like an ancient Arabic dialect.
Then he lifted the knife and tried to cut off his own face.
Chapter 22 – Blind God Rising
“So, you finally made contact.” A voice ripped through Löwenhagen’s body from behind his left shoulder. He instantly pictured the Devil, and he was not far off.
“Captain Schmidt,” he acknowledged, but did not rise nor salute, for obvious reasons. “You will excuse me for not responding in proper fashion. I am, after all, wearing another man’s face, you see.”
“Absolutely. Jack Daniels, please,” Schmidt told the waiter before he’d even reached the table with Löwenhagen’s food.
“Put the plate down first, pal!” Löwenhagen shouted, prompting the confused man to obey. The manager of the restaurant was standing nearby, waiting for just one more transgression before asking the abusive man to leave.
“Now, I see you have found out what the mask does,” murmured Schmidt under his breath and dropping his head to check for eavesdroppers.
“I saw what it did the night your little bitch Neumand used it to make away with it. ,” Löwenhagen said in a low tone, barely breathing in between bites as he wolfed down the first half of his meat like an animal.
“So what do you propose to do now? Blackmail me for money like Neumand was doing?” asked Schmidt, playing for time. He was very aware of what the relic took from those who used it.
“Blackmail you?” Löwenhagen shrieked with a mouthful of pink meat minced between his teeth. “Are you fucking kidding me? I want it off, Captain. You are going to get a surgeon to take it off.”
“Why? I recently heard you were burned pretty badly. I would have thought that you would want to keep the face of a dashing doctor instead of a melted mess of flesh where your face once was,” the commander replied evilly. He watched amusedly as Löwenhagen struggled to cut his steak, straining his failing eyes to find the edges.
“Fuck you!” cursed Löwenhagen. He could not see Schmidt’s face very well, but he felt an overwhelming urge to plunge the steak knife into the general vicinity of his eyes and hope for the best. “I want it off before I turn into a bat shit crazy…r-rabid…fucking…”
“Is that what happened to Neumand?” interrupted Schmidt, helping with the sentence structure of the toiling young man. “What exactly happened, Löwenhagen? By the gambling fetish that imbecile had I can understand his motive for keeping what is rightfully mine. What perplexes me, though, is why you would want to keep it from me this long before contacting me.”
“I was going to give it to you the day after I took it from Neumand, but I found myself on fire that very same night, my dear captain.” Löwenhagen was now stuffing chunks of meat in his mouth by hand. Horrified, the people directly around them began staring and whispering.
“Excuse me, gentlemen,” the manager said tactfully in a hushed tone.
But Löwenhagen was too intolerant to listen. He tossed a black American Express card on the table and said, “Listen, bring us a bottle of tequila and I’ll buy all these curious assholes a round if they stop looking at me like that!”
Some of his sympathizers at the pool table cheered. The rest of the people went back to their business.
“Don’t worry, we’ll be leaving soon. Just get everyone their drinks and let my friend here finish his food, okay?” Schmidt excused their present state with his holier than thou, civilized manner. It won the manager’s disinterest for a few more minutes.
“Now tell me how it was that you ended up with my mask in a goddamn public institution where anyone could have taken it,” Schmidt whispered. The bottle of tequila arrived and he poured two shot glasses.
Löwenhagen swallowed with great difficulty. The alcohol had obviously not doused the agony of his internal injuries effectively, but he was ravenous. He told the commander what had happened mostly to save face, not to make excuses. The entire scenario that he’d been fuming about earlier replayed itself as he told Schmidt everything that had led up to where he’d found Neumand speaking in tongues in the biker’s guise.
“Arabic? That is unsettling,” admitted Schmidt. “What you heard was actually Akkadian? Amazing!”
“Who gives a shit?” Löwenhagen barked.
“Then? How did you get the mask from him?” Schmidt asked, almost smiling at the interesting facts of the story.
“I had no idea how to get the mask back. I mean, here he was with a fully developed face and no trace of the mask that was hiding under it. My God, listen to what I’m saying! This is all nightmarish and surreal!”
“Carry on,” Schmidt urged.
“I asked him straight up how I can help him get the mask off, you know? But he…he…” Löwenhagen laughed like a rowdy drunk at the absurdity of his own words. “Captain, he bit me! Like a fucking stray dog the bastard growled as I came nearer and while I was still talking the fucker bit me on my shoulder. He took a whole chunk out! Christ! What was I supposed to think? I just starting beating him with the first piece of metal pipe I could find lying around.”
“So, what did he do? Was he still speaking in Akkadian?” asked the commander, pouring another round for the two of them.
“He took off running, so I chased after him, of course. We ended up going through the east side of Schleswig, there where only we know to get in?” he told Schmidt, who nodded in turn, “Yes, I know the place, behind the auxiliary building hangar.”
“That’s right. We ran through there, Captain, like bats out of hell. I mean, I was ready to kill him. I was hurting badly, bleeding, fed-up with him eluding me for so long. I swear I was ready to just break his fucking head into pieces to get that mask back, you know?” growled Löwenhagen softly, sounding delightfully psychotic.
“Yes, yes. Carry on.” Schmidt was pushing to hear the end of the story before his subordinate finally succumbed to the pressing insanity.
As his plate grew messier and emptier Löwenhagen spoke faster, his consonants more pronounced. “I did not know what he was trying to do, but maybe he knew how to get the ma
sk off or something. I pursued him right into the hangar and then we were alone. I could hear the guards shouting outside the hangar. I doubt they recognized Neumand now that he had someone else’s face, right?”
“Is that when he took the fighter plane?” Schmidt asked. “Was that why the plane crashed?”
Löwenhagen’s eyes were almost completely blind by now, but he could still tell where shadows and solids were. A yellow tinge stained his irises, the color of a lion’s eyes, but he recounted on, pinning Schmidt with his blind eyes as he lowered his voice and dipped his head a little. “My God, Captain Schmidt, how he hated you.”
Narcissism prevented Schmidt from caring about the sentiment of Löwenhagen’s declaration, but common sense had him feeling a bit tarnished – right where his soul was supposed to jitter. “Of course he did,” he told his blind underling. “I’m the one who introduced him to the mask. But he was never supposed to know what it did, let alone use it for himself. The fool brought this on himself. Just like you did.”
“I…” Löwenhagen lunged forward wrathfully amongst clanging utensils and toppling glasses, “only used it to get your precious bloody relic out of the hospital and to you, you ungrateful subspecies!”
Schmidt knew Löwenhagen had served his purpose and his insubordination was of little concern anymore. He would soon expire nonetheless, so Schmidt allowed him his tantrum. “He hated you like I hate you! Neumand regretted ever getting involved with your evil plan to send a suicide squad into Baghdad and The Hague.”
Schmidt felt his heart jump at the mention of his supposedly clandestine plan, but his face remained straight, sheltering all worry inside its steel expression.