The Year's Best Science Fiction--Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Gunther gave him the other twenty. The boy ran off. At the end of the street he paused and turned back. He stuck two fingers up at Gunther. “Nazi go home!” he shouted. Then he turned and ran away.

  Gunther walked off. My men were watching him, of course. We had not been able to locate the dwarf. He usually resided at a house in Mayfair, near the Swiss ambassador’s residency. The dwarf was as good as untouchable, but Gunther didn’t know that. That suited me fine.

  He walked with the same determined gait of a city dweller. Though he did not know his way he did not appear lost. He did not stop to look at the sights. He made enquiries politely but with a certain force; and the people of London still, when they heard a German voice, were trained to reply helpfully and quickly.

  Seven Dials was only a short walk away. It was a maze of narrow, twisting alleyways between Covent Garden and Soho, a cesspit of racial degradation, or so according to my superior, SS-Obergruppenführer Oswald Pohl. An efficient administrator, he was the overseer of the camps erected to deal with the Jewish question during the war. A falling out with his patron, Himmler, after the war, however (the nature of which I never quite knew) saw him exiled to Britain to supervise the local Gestapo, after the former bureau chief, SS-Brigadeführer Franz Six, had an unfortunate and fatal encounter with a bullet. Six was leading an einsatzgruppe on a hunt for missing Jews in Manchester at the time.

  Pohl, my current superior, took over the job with his customary efficiency, but little enthusiasm. He was a keen lover of the arts, and found England stifling. I also happened to know he’d been a fan of Ulla Blau.

  Standing at the Seven Dials, Gunther was faced with roads leading in every direction away from him. It was as though he stood in the centre of a spider bite, and the infection spread outwards in wavy paths. Rundown drinking establishments faced him from each point of the compass. He saw the Bricklayer’s Arms, and two women fighting volubly over a bottle of gin at the shabby entrance. He stepped around them and entered the pub. Already, he was growing sick of the sight and the smell of British pubs.

  Inside it was dark, dim, and smelled of the sewers. Gunther lit a cigarette to combat the smell. He looked about him and hostile or indifferent faces stared back at him. He went to the bar and leaned across. “I am looking for Doyle, the Irishman,” he said.

  “What’s it to me?” the bartender said.

  Gunther put money on the counter. He did not have much but, in London, Reichsmarks seemed to go a long way. At the sight of the money there was a collective in-drawing of breath.

  “I’m Doyle,” said a tall specimen.

  “I’m Doyle,” said a fat, red-haired man.

  “I’ll be your doll, sailor,” said a bald women with very few teeth and a leer.

  Gunther waited. His stillness was born of the war. A shadow stirred by the far wall. It rose and the others faded into the background.

  The man stepped close. He was a short, wiry man, in a chequered suit and a jaunty flat-top hat with a red feather in the band. His knuckles were scabbed like a bare-knuckle boxer’s. He jabbed a finger at Gunther’s chest.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  “Are you Doyle?”

  “Depends who’s asking.”

  “My name’s Sloam. I was a friend of Ulla Blau.”

  Doyle retreated a step at the name. “Ulla is dead,” he said. His voice was softer.

  “I know.”

  “Heard they found her by the river,” the Irishman said. “Some maniac did her in.”

  He took in Gunther’s beat-up face. Not with suspicion, Gunther thought. But a confirmation of something he already knew.

  “You say you were friends?”

  “Old friends,” Gunther said. Something in the Irishman’s eyes made him trust him; he couldn’t say what it was. “We’d lost touch, until recently.”

  “I liked Ulla,” the Irishman said. “I don’t care what they say about her.”

  “What do they say about her?” Gunther said; but of course, he thought he already knew.

  “She poisoned those boys!” the bald woman said, savagely. She startled Gunther, who didn’t notice her creeping close. “The poor boys in Great Ormond. It’s a hospital,” she said, into Gunther’s bemused face. “For children. They needed medication, pain relief.”

  “Do you know what heroin is?” Doyle said.

  “Yes,” Gunther said, startled. “It’s a medication made by Bayer.”

  “You can’t get it here,” Doyle said. “So…” he shrugged.

  “She cut it with rat poison,” the bald woman said, and spat. “Twenty-one children, dead, in agony.”

  “Now, Martha, you don’t know that,” Doyle said. Gunther felt sick.

  “She was always good to you,” Doyle said. “Who do you come to when you need your medication?”

  “You and your filthy comrades,” the woman said. “We should have stood with the Allies in the war, Doyle. We shouldn’t have stayed neutral.” She spat again. “Neutral,” she said. “Isn’t that just another word for collaborator.”

  Doyle slapped her. The sound, like a gunshot, filled the room. “You’re getting above yourself, Martha,” he said. The woman glared at him defiantly; then the fight went out of her.

  “I need it, Doyle,” she said, whining. “I need it.”

  Gunther watched. He felt sick to his stomach. He could not look away. He could not believe what the woman had said about Ulla. Doyle reached in his pocket and came back with two small pills which he tossed to the woman, like dog biscuits to a pet. She caught them eagerly. “Don’t go opening your big gob of shite, now,” Doyle said.

  “I won’t, Doyle. Honest.”

  “I liked Ulla, whatever they said about her,” Doyle said, sadly. He turned back to Gunther.

  “Let’s have a drink,” he said.

  5

  It may have occurred to Gunther, at this point, that all the men he’d so far encountered belonged to countries that have remained neutral during the war. The Swiss, the Luxembourgian and the Irish were rewarded, for their careful non-involvement, with the status of sovereign protectorates of the Third Reich, and enjoyed a great deal of autonomy as a consequence.

  “Ulla spoke of you,” Doyle said.

  “She did?” Gunther said, in a mixture of pleasure and surprise.

  Doyle’s smile transformed his face. “She called you the one who got away.”

  They were sitting in the back room of the pub. A bottle of whiskey sat between them. Gunther only sipped at his glass. Doyle drank steadily; it didn’t seem to hamper him in any way.

  “You were foolish to come see me,” Doyle said. “You are lucky to be alive.”

  “Would you have killed me, then?”

  “People who come to the Dials asking questions don’t always come out again.”

  Gunther shrugged. “So why spare me?” he said.

  “I’d heard you were in town. Heard you were picked up by the Gestapo, too.” He downed a shot and refilled the glass and grimaced. “Filthy animals,” he said.

  “The Gestapo is a necessary organ of the state,” Gunther said, primly. He was still a good German. Doyle shot him a look of disgust. “Have you asked yourself why they let you walk?” he said. “By rights you should be floating past the Isle of Dogs around this time. Depending on the tide.”

  Gunther shrugged. I think he had an idea. “I want to know who killed her,” he said.

  “She’s dead,” Doyle said. “Let it go. This isn’t your country, or your cause. Go back to Berlin, make movies, find yourself a nice girl.”

  “A nice girl? In Berlin?” Gunther said. Doyle smiled; reluctantly, it seemed.

  “What did she say about me?”

  “She said you were a good man, and that good men were hard to find. She was drunk when she said it, mind.”

  “That does sound like Ulla.”

  “Good old Ulla,” Doyle said.

  “Did you kill her?” Gunther asked, softly; the question hung between t
hem like a cloud of ash. They stared at each other across the table.

  Doyle broke eye contact first. He shrugged indifferently and refilled his glass. “I had no reason to kill her,” he said. “We did business, that’s all.”

  “Drugs.”

  “I don’t advise you to go around asking questions,” Doyle said. “Go home. Be a good German.”

  “But heroin?” Gunther said.

  “It is a powerful analgesic,” Doyle said. “We need drugs, Herr Sloam. If the Reich won’t provide, someone should.”

  “I don’t believe she was involved—” Gunther began.

  Doyle banged the glass on the table.

  “Never trust an actress,” he said. “Oh, Ulla knew what she was doing. Whores, black market medicine—other stuff too, I heard. Nothing to do with me. She knew. She was planning her retirement. Unfortunately, someone retired her first.”

  He drank. The bottle was half empty.

  “It’s nothing to me,” he said.

  Gunther said, “Where can I buy a gun?”

  * * *

  Everyone so far was being very helpful. It was as though London was going out of its way to be obliging to her accidental German tourist. He was as rare and unwelcome as a three-pound note.

  So why, Gunther wondered, was he practically being given the keys to the city?

  Back in the pre-War days, in ’32 or so, when he was young and carefree, and National Socialism seemed, on a good day, like a bad punchline to an off-colour joke, Gunther had worked on a picture called Der Traumdetektiv, for the Jewish director Max Ophüls. Gunther’s commission was to produce a surrealist piece of film noir, a sort of unreal history in which Germany, faced by her many enemies, nevertheless won the Great War. He remembered little from the finished product—which he had done quickly and for little money—but that the detective figure, whose name he could not remember, at some point entered a dusty old bookshop whose strange proprietor was played by the Hungarian actor Szőke Szakáll.

  He remembered it now as he entered Blucher’s, across the road from W. & G. Foyle and next to a florist, on the Charing Cross Road. The shop was low-ceilinged and dark. On a rack outside copies of the Daily Mail were displayed. It was Britain’s sole remaining paper. Gunther picked up a copy and leafed through it quickly. It was at the bottom of page 5 that he found it. Mystery Woman Discovered Dead. The article was only a few paragraphs long. The unknown woman was believed to be a dancer—the implication was clear—and likely took her own life. Gunther thought of Ulla Blau on the mortuary slab with her face shot clean off and fought a rise of bile. He replaced the newspaper on the stand and stepped carefully into the store. A bell rang as the door opened. Poor yellow light fell down in drops. All about Gunther, books were piled up in haphazard piles. They were dusty and rust-spotted, many of them damaged by fire. Gunther smelled old smoke, and cat piss.

  “Can I help you?”

  The man really did look a little like the actor, Szakáll. He was bespectacled and rotund, with the kind of hair that looked like a hairpiece but wasn’t. He sat behind a desk laden with books, his hands folded over his ample stomach.

  “You’re Blucher?”

  The man spread his arms as though to say, who else can I be?

  “You sell many books?”

  “Books?” Blucher said. His myopic eyes looked at Gunther sadly. “Who today has need of books.”

  “They look like they’d been in a fire.”

  “Oh, these are all approved titles,” Blucher said. “But you know how it is, people get carried away.”

  Gunther remembered the public book burnings in Berlin, after the Führer’s rise to power. “Anything you recommend?”

  “Have you tried Mein Kampf? It sells like plum cakes at a church fundraiser.”

  “I read it,” Gunther said.

  “Which part?”

  “Chapters 1 and 2, and most of chapter 3, I think,” Gunther said, and Blucher laughed, shortly and abruptly. The laugh made him cough. He drank water, daintily, from a glass perched on his desk, and dabbed at his lips with a handkerchief.

  “Yes,” he said. “It is no Sebastian Bruce heftromane, I’ll admit as much. You are visiting London?”

  “Yes.”

  “It is a pleasant time of year.”

  Gunther stared at him. The man shrugged. “Perhaps you can visit the countryside?” he suggested. “Yorkshire, I am told, is very nice.”

  “You have not been?”

  “I would go, but who’d mind the shop?” the man said.

  “Frau Blucher?” Gunther suggested. Outside, he thought he heard the neighing of a horse; but it must have been in his imagination.

  “Alas, I have not been blessed with a wife,” Blucher said. “Not for many years. She died, you see.”

  “In the war?”

  “Appendicitis.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Blucher shrugged. What can you do, he seemed to silently suggest. The silence dragged. The books lay still, heavy with ash and ink.

  “I was told you’d be coming round here,” Blucher said. “Gunther Sloam. You are becoming quite notorious, in some circles.”

  “How do you know me?”

  “London is a small place. Word spreads. You were a friend of the actress, Ulla Blau.”

  “You knew her?”

  “Her talent spoke for her. She was magnificent in Die Grosse Liebe.”

  “It was her best picture,” Gunther said. Blucher shrugged again. “It was schmalz, but you knew that already.”

  Gunther looked at him with new suspicion. The man laughed. He took off his glasses and polished them with the handkerchief. When he put them back on his small, shrewd eyes assessed Gunther. “I am not a Jew,” he said. “If that is what you were thinking.”

  “Where are you from, Herr Blucher?”

  “A small town in Austria. Not unlike our illustrious leader,” Blucher said. “I came out here in 1947, shortly after the war. I have always admired the English writers. Who knows, some of them may even still be alive.” He stretched his arms to encompass his shop. “As you can see, I prospered.”

  Gunther said, “I need to buy a gun.”

  “It is quite illegal, Herr Sloam.”

  “A man has a right to defend himself.”

  “Why not ask your friends at the Gestapo?”

  Did anyone in London know his business? Gunther tapped his fingers on the cover of a book. The smell of burnt paper disinclined him from wanting to light a cigarette.

  “Did you know her?” he said.

  “Ulla?” the man’s eyes misted over. “She was a beautiful woman,” he said.

  “Do you know who killed her?”

  Blucher looked at him mildly. “I thought you did.”

  “That is a lie!”

  Blucher sighed. He pushed back his chair with great deliberation, and stood up, panting. He pressed a hidden button, and a hidden drawer popped open in his desk. He brought out an object wrapped in cloth and unwrapped it. It was a Luger, perfectly clean. It was the sort of gun Gunther had used in the war. The sort of gun that only a day earlier took care of Ulla Blau.

  “Will this do?” Blucher said.

  “I want to know who killed her.”

  “Forget Ulla Blau,” the bookseller said, with infinite sadness. “Finding her killer won’t bring her back. Go home, Gunther Sloam. There is nothing for you here but death.”

  “You know something, I think,” Gunther said. He took the gun and examined it. “I would need bullets,” he said.

  “Of course.”

  Blucher brought out a clip of ammunition from the same drawer and handed it to Gunther. “The fee is fifty Reichsmarks.”

  “Where did you get this gun?”

  “A gun,” Blucher said, sadly. “Are we short of guns, Herr Sloam? Of those we have an overabundance. It is not guns but medicines we need. But how do you heal a broken soul?”

  Gunther loaded the gun. He gave the bookseller the money. The man made it
disappear.

  “I’ll tell you a joke,” Blucher said. “One day Hitler visited a lunatic asylum. When he came in, all the patients raised the arms and cried, “Heil Hitler!” Suddenly, Hitler saw one man whose arm wasn’t raised. “What is the meaning of this? Why don’t you salute like the rest?” he demanded. The man said: “My Führer, I’m an orderly, not a madman!”

  He gave Gunther an expectant look, then shrugged in resignation.

  “Where did Ulla get her drugs?” Gunther said.

  “Who knows,” Blucher said. “I try not to ask questions which might get me killed. You’d do well to do the same.”

  “What do you wish to tell me, Herr Blucher?” Gunther said. He sensed that underneath the bookseller’s placid exterior there was a current of rage.

  “Did you love her?” Blucher said. Gunther looked away. He was embarrassed by the naked look in the man’s eyes. Blucher was hurting.

  “Once. Yes.”

  “She was radiant. So alive. She understood a man cannot live by violence alone. There must be joy. There must be light, and music. Without her, London will be unbearable.”

  “Tell me what you know,” Gunther said. He felt a pulse of excitement. “Tell me. Was it the dwarf?”

  “The dwarf!”

  The bookseller made his way ponderously around the desk. “I should not be talking with you,” he said. “You are putting us both in danger.” He looked like he was trying to reach a difficult decision. “Wait here,” he said, at last. He waddled away towards a small door. “I’ll make us a cup of coffee.”

  Gunther stood, waiting. He tucked the gun into the small of his back, under the shirt. He browsed the shelves. Hitler’s Mein Sieg; the book he wrote after the victory. Books on natural history, in English, with hand-painted plates depicting vibrantly coloured birds. It occurred to Gunther he had not heard birdsong since he’d arrived.

  The silence grew oppressive. The dust tickled his nostrils and made him want to sneeze. The books stared at him in mute accusation. It wasn’t me, he wanted to say. I was just following orders. The seconds lengthened.

  “Herr Blucher?”

  There was no reply. Gunther let the moment lapse. He fingered the spine of an ancient volume on moths. It was loused with worm tracks. The dust tickled his throat. The gun felt heavy in the small of his back. He went to the door and knocked, softly.