The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 2

by Daniel Kraus

  “Dust,” said he. “Blowing off the cover. We are all right, Herr Finch. We are all right!”

  Outside, the black cloud was paling. To the assembled aristocracy the dissipating dust was the smoke of not only Hamburg but the entire world war alighting from their minds, if only for the next few hours. They’d forgotten what it felt like to relax. Why, it felt fine! The zeppelin achieved altitude, the twenty-foot propellers growled into action, and the Fliegende Hitler began to cruise. From the window I watched the world I knew disappear into fog. Passengers cheered, and when those cheers died out, engine drones emerged to shush us children into complacency.

  Behind us, a steward built a pyramid of champagne flutes to prove the steadiness of the ship. The rich produced folds of cash and bet against it for sport. Von Lüth sighed at the good German gaiety of it all and, in a spurt of camaraderie, elbowed me hard in the ribs.

  The Smith & Wesson rattled audibly like a belch, slid an inch, and lodged laterally between anterior and posterior ribs. It pinched my left lung and felt thick, like phlegm in the throat. I drove a fist against my chest, three times, a human enough behavior, but the block of metal would not budge. I stared at von Lüth, wondering what twist in the plot he’d just forced, but his expression made me speechless. Look how the giant grinned, even though his nerves had been gnashed to gristle. Could he not yet feel, in the region of his back, the knife I’d planted?

  I lowered my fist, hoped for the best, and tried to return his laugh.

  It got lost in the drone.

  XVII.

  BREAKFAST SERVERS ARRIVED IN CONGA-LINE configuration, coloring each table with bright cubes of cheese, sliced liverwurst and salami, batches of jams and honeys, bowls of cut melon, tomatoes on the stem, and hundreds of boiled eggs in individual pewter cups. Pastries were notably absent, proof of the Reich’s new distrust of bakeries.

  The ship’s cargo of swanked Germans swarmed from sundry corridors. The zeppelin banked slightly with the weight, the champagne-flute pyramid collapsed, and the mess was erased in sixty seconds. No one could make evidence vanish like the Nazis could. As with many a Hollywood cocktail party I’d attended, this was an eat-and-mingle shindig, and soon everyone had a plate and glass in hand, as well as a healthy bolus of food behind which they gabbed. Von Lüth, too, snarfed smoked salmon as if it were nature’s cure for nerves. If that were true, I needed it too, on the double, down in my stomach, where its spoilage might blister the gold off Johnny’s aggie.

  Von Lüth’s plate of fish was knocked into his chest, another stain, but he gave it no mind, for the crowd was joggling for the best of reasons. Bleats of Heil Hitler!, though muffled through mouthfuls, and hearty sieg heils, though topped by fruit-speared forks, compensated for my hindered view. The cockamamie climax dreamed up by Allen Rigby had, against all logic, come to pass.

  The hand I placed over my heart gave me the look of a young Kraut overwhelmed by proximity to his Führer, but you, Dearest Reader, know better. Beneath my palm, under layers of torpid flesh and inside a cradle of ribs, was the snub-nosed revolver. After von Lüth’s elbow strike, was it still removable? Now was the time to find out.

  I hove sternward toward the closest lavatory, but von Lüth shot out his arm with an archer’s speed, snatching me with a salmon-greased hand.

  “Nein, Herr Finch! He is here! We must take our place in line!”

  Being of pureblood pedigree, the SS were tall; it was easy to see them begin to herd the mass of restless nobles into the rough shape of a queue. Somewhere nearby stood Adolf Hitler, shaking hands and trading pleasantries.

  I pulled against von Lüth.

  “Please,” said I. “I need only a moment.”

  His eyes, liquid and pink, popped wide.

  “You cannot leave me! You must be there so that I can—”

  I ripped free my arm. He gasped and recoiled as if struck. Oh, Reader! Gentle Reader! How I wished to whisper into his ear the urgent truths, that he must exit the lounge at once, that he could not be nearby when I attacked, not if he were to have a chance of avoiding execution. But my ears, too, fielded whispers, warnings from the Fifty-One. To risk von Lüth’s reaction was to risk the lives of thousands more soldiers, Allied and Axis both, who would be ground to attritional dust, and thousands more prisoners, who would suffer and die in camps, more smoked salmon to be gnashed by implacable elder gods.

  “Just some water,” said I. “To splash upon my face.”

  Von Lüth’s jowls jiggered in trepidation.

  I gestured at the queue. My hand was trembling.

  “Reserve our place in line. I will rejoin you in one minute.”

  The queue was shuffling forward. There was no time to argue. He sighed in defeat and nodded. The wax-twirled tips of his mustache were too heartbreaking to consider.

  I dodged between prattling packs of Nazis, upsetting plates and sloshing iced teas, only to find the winding queue itself thwarting my route to the restroom. To red-rover its blockade would be to draw SS attention. Think quickly, Herr Finch, quickly!

  A breakfast island was to my left. I grabbed a plate, tossed onto it food enough for a family of four, and charged starboard, where two tall, potted ferns leaned against each another like fellow lushes. I feigned a stumble and threw my plate between them. The zeppelin roared and the crowd pealed; the shatter was no louder than a spoon in a teacup. I knelt so that the green fronds draped over my back; spent five seconds gathering spilled food; and then, praying to Gød or Satan or their undecided offspring Lucifer, ran my right hand up under my shirt.

  If only I’d thought to add a knife or fork to my plate before hurling it! Without a utensil, nor a dubious honor like Meixelsperger’s Mother’s Cross, I had no tools besides my hands. Tearing open one’s body went against every human instinct, but Zebulon Finch, I reminded myself, was not especially human. I closed my eyes, thought of the Japanese we fought in the Pacific and their honorable ritual suicide of seppuku, and did my best imitation.

  Having been cut open by Dr. Leather, sewn shut by Merle, taxidermied by Chernoff, and remodeled by the OSS, my gut had papier-mâché consistency. One good shove, and my hand was swallowed. My fingers met large intestine, dank and reptilian; I grimaced, made a fin of my hand, and minnowed past intestines. My invader hand was one of the Barker’s mondo tapeworms; it was the World War I shrapnel that had scooped from me a ball of flesh; it was a dozen other ugly splatters upon an overlong timeline. My fingertips sunk into ropy diaphragm, redirected past spongy spleen, slid up a lobe of lung, and punched my heart so hard that the old organ contracted, just once, a single thump of shocking life.

  A man cleared his throat behind me. He was a chance player in history, a humble waiter, who wished for me to stand so that he might clean my spill. He tapped my back with a single finger, but with my right arm crammed up my thorax, his gesture was nearly enough to knock me over. I swayed and shouted, my German, always feeble, whittled to a single repeated word—“Nein, nein, nein”—while I swiveled my buried fist with an audible squish. Behind the third and fourth rib, an OSS surgeon had promised me, but fingers, it turns out, are as blind as moles.

  At last, an organ colder than most—a nickel-plated revolver.

  I pulled. Metal thudded. Ribs squealed. The gun was, indeed, stuck.

  The waiter took my shoulder, just doing his job, urging me upward.

  I yanked with all of my might. There was a gruesome double-crack of fracturing ribs, and the Smith & Wesson shot out of me, the Devil’s newborn, black and coated with sour-smelling slime. Gray bits of viscera spattered the floor. A swastika-patterned cloth napkin was in reach, but I couldn’t get it—the waiter was trying to lift me.

  I tore free the damp tape securing six bullets to the revolver’s handle, but my fingers fumbled. The bullets hit the floor. The zeppelin was slanted, and the bullets rolled out of reach; I saw three carom against polished leather shoes and high heels. If the wearers looked down—no, there was no time to entertain ruin! I palmed the
last three bullets and managed to randomly chamber them before the waiter hefted me to standing position. There was an ill sensation—ribs, thought I, poking through skin. I tented my chest with von Lüth’s oversize jacket, dropped the gun into a pocket, and turned to the waiter with a wretched grin.

  His face was folded in concern. He patted my clothes clean, and his helpful knuckles struck the pocket with the revolver. That side of the jacket spun into the crowd, heavy and lethal. I jammed my hand into that pocket, reined it in. Inside I felt coins, and quickly transferred them into the waiter’s hand to buy freedom. I stumbled from the ferned hutch and into a crashing tide of Germans. It was the front of the queue, fattening at a corner, and by the time the stream had straightened, I’d been incorporated. Suddenly I was a mere six people from Hitler.

  To the front, back, and sides of me were soldiers, colonels, and generals locked together in happy banter. I felt a nudge; it was a Marine Officer behind me, rolling back on his jackboots, clacking his ceremonial dagger against his jodhpurs and gesturing that I needed to get moving. Another inadvertent historical player. This impatient young man might be the one to tackle me after I fired. His eyes flicked downward, and he frowned. Had he seen my jutting rib? I whirled away, faced front.

  The line had indeed progressed; I advanced. Four people away now, so close! Hitler was flanked by two other guests of honor, but I could not be bothered to identify them. Minister of Blimps? Secretary of Breakfast? Who cared! There was Hitler’s pumping hand, pink and ringless and chafed of knuckle.

  What was this? I couldn’t recall the pattern in which I’d loaded the three bullets! Would three empty chambers precede the live ones? Would the wasted seconds make the difference? The line lurched. Right in front of me was a woman in a blue, back-bustled dress. She teased the blond hair looping from beneath her pink hat and veil. She adjusted swastika earrings, too; their high-pitched jingle vibrated my exposed rib. Three people away now, and I could see Hitler’s isosceles nose, the gray-mottled black of his toothbrush mustache.

  “Herr Finch! Herr Finch!”

  Dear Gød! Von Lüth had spotted me. A fuss erupted from the other side of the room, followed by the tingling of multiple medals from decorated breasts. Though I dared not look, I knew that the big bear was trying to paddle though the queue so as to join me up front. No, idiot! thought I. Stay back, stay back!

  “Herr Finch! Wait for me!”

  I shifted so as to conceal myself beside the woman, as if we were a couple. She had extended a gloved hand to the Minister of Blimps, and the gent was having a good time shaking it. My eyes, of course, skipped to the next man in line. Now it was I, not the Fliegende Hitler, who floated on air.

  Adolf Hitler was no longer the virile bruiser from OSS photographs. Given the scorch of his dawn oratory, he looked strikingly old. His back, once ramrod, had stooped; his shoulders, once brash, hunched forward; his blue eyes remained avid but shimmered past purple pouches; his hair, heavied by brilliantine, crinkled his forehead with its weight. Despite all of this, he evidenced the same hunger to absorb everything that von Lüth had witnessed during his night at the Berghof. Perhaps Hitler’s mind was fixated upon smoldering Hamburg, though when he spotted the woman, a swan among bovine, his distraction melted and he reached eagerly for her slender hand. His smile, noticed I, was as wee and toothless as an infant’s.

  I became cognizant of an impatient harrumphing. It was the Minister of Blimps, chest puffed, waiting for acknowledgment. My right hand, though, the one required to meet his handshake, was deep inside the jacket pocket, wrapped around the Smith & Wesson. Like a fool, I hesitated, uncertain whether I should expose the weapon that second or wait until I could bury it in Hitler’s gut. The Minister of Blimps narrowed his eyes in suspicion.

  Von Lüth made my decision for me. I saw him as a panicked blur, perhaps ten people back, flailing behind the arms of SS guards who did not like when someone rushed der Führer. Still he cried my name, but what did these words mean to the assembled? What, in fact, did they mean to me? I released the revolver and stuck out my hand, and the Minister of Blimps shook it. His tight smile curdled upon feeling cold abdominal slime. He extricated his hand and examined it in open disgust.

  Disgust always made for opportunity. I shifted into the space vacated by the woman, a sidestep that felt like a paratrooper plunge. Hitler, four inches shorter than me. An exhale like the shuffling of state documents. A permeating odor of eggs. The disinterested black marbles of his pupils cracking against my own. Perhaps because my freshly shaken hand was outside the jacket pocket, it was la silenziosità, not the Smith & Wesson, that I felt rising in defense. Yes, and why not? It would immobilize Hitler as it had countless others, and then it would not matter if I needed to pull the trigger three times, or six, or ten, or fifty.

  I hadn’t summoned the deplorable ability since upsetting the diners at Hearst Castle in 1933. Though that dredging had, as ever, tortured me with fantasies of a delayed death, it had nonetheless stunned thirty revelers into silence. I had every reason to expect the same result with Adolf Hitler. He would be collared by the Grim Reaper’s scythe and forced to gaze upon the pulled fish-guts of his soul.

  Hitler’s eyes, though, were not black pools but black mirrors.

  He was only a man, a higher grade of pencil pusher than his subordinates, but some vital part of him had gone missing. What I saw, for the first time, was la silenziosità reflected straight back. Jarring, yes; frightening, of course; but also, I realized instantly, a chance to confirm Dr. Leather’s conclusion that, though I decomposed at zero-point-eight-three percent the regular rate, I walked the same Road to Heaven as everyone else. The road’s vanishing point, if not its end, should have been visible.

  Why, then, did I see evidence of the opposite? It was as though I’d fallen through a fontanel of flooring and plummeted to the ship’s interior, its infinite spiral of wire so much like the Uterus of Time reflected in Hitler’s eyes, where there was no light of birth at the end. Did this mean I would live on, and on and on, even as a pile of bone, even as a puddle of sludge?

  Inconceivable! Horrible! Unbelievable! Unfair!

  I felt the revolting pressure of physical contact. No living human should touch my accursed flesh, no one! I gazed down in horror and saw my hand being pumped twice by Hitler. His palm, too, came away coated with anatomical glop, but he seemed not to notice. He looked to the Marine Officer to my left, eager to move onward.

  Von Lüth shouted, almost sobbed. Men coughed unhappily at how I’d jammed the line. The third and final dignitary beckoned me forth. All I could discern of him were pins and patches, fifty swastika refractions of the larger versions all around us. Each was a simple four-pronged gear that, when interlocked, could power a mighty engine.

  But hadn’t von Lüth called me the living swastika? If I turned, each cog of the Nazi machine might turn with me. Turn: I pushed my hand into my jacket pocket. Turn: I gripped the handle. Turn: I put a finger to the trigger. Turn: I slipped it from my pocket. Turn: I began to raise it.

  I, Zebulon Finch, was alive and dead; the beast and the ghost; the swastika and the Grâl; above all, I was the Light Bringer. Like Lucifer, Gød had shunned me for my peculiar light, cast me to Earth rather than let me board a heavenward zeppelin. And like Lucifer, I would use my suffering as a torch to illuminate what la silenziosità told me was a waiting eternity of darkness.

  Turn, turn.

  I pressed the revolver into Hitler’s stomach and pulled the trigger.

  It was only in retrospect that I recognized the third dignitary. Though I’d belittled him as the Secretary of Breakfast, he was, in fact, a Nazi deserving of fête, so convincing had been his long undercover tenure as a rambling street preacher. He’d exchanged his cleric’s collar for a black tie, but that broad chest, gray curls, cloven chin, and, most of all, that eyepatch, were unmistakable. It is why the Gestapo had never detained him. By baiting traitorous agitprop on street corners, he’d surely outed countless Berliner
s disloyal to the Reich.

  What was one more?

  His hands and forehead were bruised from the brutal kicks I’d delivered to him hours earlier, but this man was a hero. He recognized me and swiped at my arm before I fired. The first chamber had, in fact, been loaded, but the bullet did nothing more than pock the floor ten inches to Hitler’s left. Der Führer’s body jerked once in surprise, and that became the single, short scrap of film I’d run through my brain-projector for the rest of my death: Adolf Hitler’s little dance step of confusion.

  Forward momentum brought the erstwhile preacher to a kneel. The pretty woman shrieked. I raised the gun for a second shot, but a company of stooges had thrown their bodies in front of their illustrious leader. I scuttled back for room, and on schedule the young Marine Officer lunged, but I brought around the Smith & Wesson hard enough to clock his temple. He went down, clutching at a gout of blood, and I ran, for when the shit comes down, the fleeing instinct is the toughest one to eschew.

  The Fliegende Hitler’s wireless systems were first-class. The pilots knew of a disturbance in seconds. The ship banked, and everyone tumbled portside. This being my set direction, I careened as if from a cliff, crashing through one screen of would-be captors after another. Had I breath, it would have been pounded away when my opened stomach slammed into the waist-high windowsill.

  Dignitaries unsheathed clumsy ceremonial weapons and teetered in my direction. They waffled when I pointed the revolver, and, Dearest Reader, forever shall I regret doing so. The hesitation bought me a good ten seconds, and with them I sought out von Lüth and found him, thereby tossing one more fresh body into my crematorium of memories.

  Six different men had taken hold of his clothing. He towered above all of them, a Hindenburg amid toy kites, and like that bedeviled zeppelin, he was ablaze and diving. What should have been the zenith of his life and career had imploded in a loud, confusing minute. He was in his final moments of disassembling, his face as bleached as my own, lips loose, eyeballs wabbling. He comprehended the depth to which I’d deceived him, and that was bad. Worse, though, was a new understanding of his lifetime of being a sucker and how it had encouraged every condescending insult by Himmler and a hundred others like him.