by G. Zotov
They’d been told they weren’t in captivity. This wasn’t a prison. This was a place for the chosen, the best of the best. They hadn’t been kidnapped: they’d been granted the great honor of joining the Paradise. Long after Pavel had left its heavenly pastures, he came across the black triangles on office doors in every European city. The biggest one, with its own apple orchard and swimming pool, was located in the center of Moskau within walking distance of the Greater Germany metro station. He had to hurry past it quite a few times while on business; he used to look into its windows, curious, but had never actually plucked up enough courage to go in. Pointless. Doubtful anything had changed within. Same nurses patrolling the corridors, same lookalike children, same watchful guards in black uniforms: the Paradise was curated by the SS.
They had indeed changed the rules, though. These days they needed the family’s consent to remove a child; the parents had to provide blood test results and a certificate from the Race department confirming the purity of his Aryan provenance.
Who might his parents have been? Pavel hardly ever thought about it. The DNA test he’d taken in the Gestapo lab ten years ago had confirmed that he had Slavic blood running in his veins. Either Russlanders or Slovaks; possibly Czechs or Bulgarians even. He didn’t know his real name: the children’s names were changed upon arrival.
Afterwards, he’d changed names many times. He had about a hundred of them.
The Paradise was stifling in its orderliness; it stuffed your mouth like cotton wool, blinding you with the sterile white of its painted walls. Calorie-appropriate nutrition, classical music, Let’s Draw the Führer art contests and lessons in Aryan comportment: a purebred person was obliged to know how exactly he differed from the untermensch.
They studied eight hours a day. The Paradise’s main task was to plant the required ideas into their heads. Nurse Berta Lüdinghausen was a gaunt Hessian woman (pronouncing her name used to be a torture) who took them out for walks along Moskau streets noisy with construction works: the now-deceased Oberkommandant pulled old buildings down by the hundred, erecting new ones which were “in keeping with the Teutonic spirit”.
The Physical Education lessons were held in the giant Triumph sports center built in place of the Kolomenskoe Estate torn down in 1945. Berta, who had an answer to everything, explained to them in her barking tones that the estate had been considered a “garish abomination typical of Slavic architecture”. Walking along the Moskau river embankment with children trailing after her, she never forgot to point her finger, informing them that back in 1931, the Bolsheviks had destroyed the snow-white Cathedral of Christ the Savior only to build another “garish abomination” in its place, namely the Palace of the Soviets.
What Berta forgot to mention was that in the very beginning of the war the Reich’s leaders had had both the Assumption Cathedral in Kiev and the St. Sophia Cathedral in Novgorod razed to the ground. Today, Greater Germany and Russland may call each other brothers, but in those days the Slavs hadn’t been supposed to have much of their history left.
Someone knocked on the door. Softly first, then louder.
“Pavel! P-Pavel, fu-fuck you! O-open the d-door! You asleep or wh-what?”
Pavel jumped to his feet, knocking the chair over. The unfinished tea cup softly dropped sideways onto the carpet. He must have fallen asleep. He’d been dreaming of the Paradise again. It had been years but he couldn’t get it out of his head. He’d returned there almost every night, walking the white-walled corridors amid identical pallid faces.
Pavel draped the hotel dressing gown around himself and turned the key.
Obersturmführer Carpe froze in the doorway, black as thunder. His both cheeks and forehead were covered in bandages. The first-aid surgeons had counted twelve cuts on his face from the glass that had flown everywhere during the explosion. Pavel didn’t look much better. Talk about idiot’s luck. Had the Japanese suicide bomber activated his device a second later, the rescue team would have had to scrape their guts off the sidewalk.
“L-lucky b-ba-bastard,” Jean-Pierre said, looking at him. “It didn’t take you l-long to re-recover.”
Pavel flashed him a cynical smile. His skin was perfectly intact. “What would you like, whisky or gin? Your pick. It’s Japanese. I brought some from Hong Kong.”
“Whi-whisky s-sounds good. Haven’t had any p-p-plum spirit in quite a whi…while. I could dr-drink it all day l-long,” he downed the glass, his teeth chattering.
“Go sit down,” Pavel offered, wrapping the dressing gown tighter around himself. “Wanna order some chow?”
“Kein problem!” Jean-Pierre agreed. “My stomach thinks my throat’s been cut.”
Pavel dialed the restaurant and, ignoring the menu, ordered some eisbein. The law demanded pork to be permanently available in every Aryan Nutrition joint, so you could eat Bavarian anywhere, even in some God-forsaken Germanville somewhere in a Russian backwater.
Pavel replaced the receiver. “Have you found the old lady?” he asked without much hope.
“You’re joking?” Jean-Pierre mumbled. “Our detectives even ripped out the floors and tapped the walls all over in the old Jap’s rented apartment. Not a trace. Now, it could have been two things. Either she legged it — or, may the Iron-Forest witches take me, some smartass had been there before us. Someone uploaded a video to the Shogunet half an hour ago in which the old boy accepts responsibility for the terrorist attack and praises the Forest Brothers in broken Russian.”
Pavel walked over to the window, clasped his hands behind his back and cracked the joints of his fingers. “No way he’s a Bolshevik. It has to be a stitch-up. It’s the Japs, I just know it. They’d love to serve my guts up in a hole in the ground with some concrete sauce on top. And they would, had it not been for my little secret ability. I’ve been to the Nippon koku God knows how many times doing Gestapo jobs. Last year, remember? Manila, the Solar Tower? I had to stab the Japanese General Staff’s courier and retrieve his briefcase. I just don’t know how they worked me out. They can’t have my description. Tracked some e-funk message? Whatever. They just knew I would be on board that plane and they were going to take care of me. You can’t take someone like me prisoner. You kill ‘em on the spot.”
“I just hope next time I’ll be somewhere else when it happens,” Jean-Pierre took a long swig of whisky. “Your wounds heal in a couple of hours while I had to have God knows how many stitches. And once I came round, I had to go to the old Jap’s apartment to take some DNA samples. I had no choice but to go by the wretched metro — I’m so fed up with our traffic jams. Shaking on the train like some fucking jelly. Can’t stand our subway, you know that? Never have done. It’s only five lines, but all those throngs of people! You can’t breathe on the trains: they have no air conditioning. I think the Reich’s public transportation is an extension of their concentration camp system.”
Pavel listened to him absent-mindedly while studying the yellow roof of a Mitsubishi bus by the hotel entrance below. They circulated all around Moskau, advertising the magical services of the Thule Society. Black magic was undoubtedly popular in the Third Reich: just as popular as the cults of Odin and Thor. Triumvirate-licensed wizards had the right to practice their lore. At the peak of its popularity in the 1940s, the Thule Society had made a name for itself by claiming that Aryans had arrived on Earth from the Aldebaran solar system. The society had attempted to set up a mass resurrection of dead soldiers; they imported Tibetan lamas and tried to master the art of thought reading. Over time, this facility which once had boasted the Reich’s best mystics and visionaries had become a mundane fortune-telling show. These days, Thule’s customers were mainly young unmarried girls wishing to know their future who’d sometimes buy protective charms which guarded their bearers against guerrilla attacks.
“Well, what do you want?” Pavel yawned. “They built five lines: four to form a swastika and one as a ring road encircling it. Ideologically very clever. But in reality, people are crammed down t
here like sardines in a can, cursing the wretched subway to hell and back.”
Pavel walked to the table and took a file stamped Confidential.
“Olga Sélina stayed with the priest for two months,” he said pensively, rustling the pages. “Not as a slave but rather as a privileged prisoner. She had dinners with him and received care and medical treatment even though she couldn’t leave the premises. The DNA test has shown,” more rustling of paper, “that the traces of blood on the sacrificial stone belong to the priest. She contaminated him like she contaminates everything around her, the temple included. You’ve seen what’s going on in there: we had to lock the gate, cordon if off and post guards all around,” he paused, leafing through the file. “There’s one thing I don’t understand… your people all lost their marbles when exposed to her. But the priest didn’t. Wonder if his little blood-letting ritual prevents this from happening? Their meeting was an accident but now Olga Sélina won’t let go of him. She needs him really badly. No idea why. That’s what scares me. There’s some sort of connection between the two of them.”
The sound of clattering plates came from outside the door as security checked their order.
“We might have less time than you think,” Jean-Pierre sighed. “We can’t keep it under wraps for much longer. Our operatives back in the temple saw what contamination can do. Very soon Moskau will be plagued with the kind of rumors that would make the Völkischer Beobachter weep with envy.”
A gray-haired waiter in the uniform of a kitchen service Hauptmann (with silver-ladle collar badges and a white peaked cap) rolled in a serving table crowded with plates. Smiling politely, he served out the side dishes and moved the mustard pots closer to them.
Jean-Pierre’s e-funk rang. He apologized and walked out, only to return promptly. “I’ve got two bits of news for you. One is excellent. They’ve apprehended both. They used their card to rent a Buch computer. How stupid can you be? Later they withdrew one hell of a sum from a Geldautomat, then blocked their bank account. The second one is not so good. They’re in Uradziosutoku now, and the Gestapo needs to get clearance from the Japanese police to work there. Thor almighty, how on earth did they get there? They were in Moskau today. Uradziosutoku is seven hours by plane.”
Pavel lifted the cover off a dish. The room filled with eisbein’s delicious aroma. “They didn’t fly there,” he licked his lips. “They teleported.”
Chapter Three
The Invisible
Uradziosutoku, Ryokan ‘Swallow’
POLISHED WOODEN FLOORS. Sliding paper partitions depict long-legged cranes dancing amid groves of bamboo. These doors don’t open normally: you have to slide them apart like those of a wardrobe. Thin tatami mats cover some of the floor. Steaming tea is waiting on a tray, next to the inevitable little bowl of soy sauce and some rice in bone china cups.
We’ve found refuge in one of the ryokans: small Japanese hotels styled as a traditional country cottage. These days there are hundreds of them all over Uradziosutoku, patronized mainly by secret lovers. Ryokans are perfect for their purpose. The receptionist can’t even see you: part of her cubicle window is frosted so you can only see her hands as she accepts payment. No names asked, no IDs required. Just pay and go to bed.
Which suits us just fine.
It’s getting dark. When I look through the window, I can make out the streetlights on the Mikado Peninsula, covered in Japanese characters.
She’s sitting cross-legged on the tatami eating rice, deftly using her chopsticks.
“That was really stupid, renting a Buch with a card!” I say bleakly.
“Absolutely,” she touches her hair, rearranging it. “Now the Gestapo know which city to search. They still need to get here, though. It might take them some time. We can at least spend the night and get some rest. We need to decide where to go and what to do next.”
Good point. Back in Moscow I had a job, an SS rank, a status, a service car (unchauffeured) and holiday bonuses every Thorrablot and Disting[xiv] day. I used to be quite an important person any way you looked at it. Now I am a criminal on the run, sitting on the floor in this bug-ridden hole while my record must have already been added to the Weltgestapo database. Assisting Schwarzkopfs is very serious business. The best-case scenario: banishment to Africa. The worst, the Spitzbergen concentration camps where inmates die within the first two weeks.
“What to do next?” I say with a sarcastic smile. “Next, we go into hiding for the rest of our lives. Forest or cellar, take your pick. There’re no neutral countries anymore. Even Switzerland has allied itself with the Reich. Its capital city has been moved from Bern to the German Canton of Zurich. You can always find shelter somewhere in the Ural Mountains controlled by the Schwarzkopfs. But me… it might probably be easier to just buy a Japanese passport, adopt a Japanese name and stay here. The Schwarzkopfs kill all Odin’s priests, as the Forest Church demands. The Triumvirate will be looking for me, of course, but…”
She clicks her chopsticks in a most contemptuous way. “The Triumvirate?!” whenever she has to say the word, she always does it at the top of her voice. “We live in a country of ghosts. Our head of state is a schizophrenic who died seventy years ago. His will is executed by three men no one has ever seen. Don’t you think it’s funny? This secrecy, this holy mystery of power? Our people don’t even know the names of those who rule them. We hear their speeches on the radio, we read their articles in newspapers but we have no idea what the Triumvirate members look like. They’re ghost rulers devoured by the dark.”
There she goes again. Her nightly dose of bleating. Yes, so the Moskau administration is anonymous. Nobody argues that. After the Führer’s death in the Mausoleum blast of 1942, all of the Reich’s top officials were ordered to abstain from public speaking. They stopped attending NSDAP congresses, couldn’t go to the Reichstag or have beerhouse meetings.
Not that it helped though. The Schwarzkopfs went on a hunt for all remotely important National Socialist leaders. At different times, guerrilla fighters slew the Reichskommissar of Ukraine Erich Koch, the Finance Minister Funk and the chief honcho of all work camps Adolf Eichmann. Over the years, the city streets grew safer as the Schwarzkopfs moved into woods but still, the powers that be already knew they’d never cease to be a target.
So upon the ending of the Twenty-Year War, all the Reichskommissariats apart from Turkestan switched to the three-leader system: the Triumvirate. Now that guerrilla fighters didn’t know which of the three was the Reichskommissariat’s actual leader, they couldn’t plan an assassination attempt. The leaders didn’t ride cars, they didn’t fly, they made no TV appearances: only radio addresses read by presenters with identical steely voices. Triumvirate leaders couldn’t be killed, but most importantly, this system allowed them to be replaced at any given moment, swiftly and soundlessly.
Moskau rumors had it that ghost politicians were constantly being shuffled like a deck of cards: some lasted in the role of Reich leader for a month, another maybe a year. It didn’t matter. The empire was being ruled by the dead Führer and any number of ghosts with blurred, mist-corroded outlines.
At least none of them had to worry for their lives.
But would I actually let her have the final say? I don’t think so.
“Sorry, I’m afraid I’m not in the mood for a highbrow political discussion,” I inform her with sarcastic courtesy. “Especially seeing as you never answered the big question.”
She sighs and leans down to place the cup on the floor. I can see her chest. She’s not wearing anything at all under her kimono: I’m sure she’ll go to bed naked. What a shame I didn’t think of renting a pair of handcuffs at the same time as the Buch.
“You still don’t believe me?” she asks. “You simply fainted, I assure you, you just zoned out for a while. I have no doubt that you might have seen the collapsing Uradziosutoku and me as a perambulating zombie. Hallucinations are known to be a common byproduct of teleportation.”
Oh, I’ve made
her defensive! The gods would have been proud of me. But I have to strike while the iron is hot. I have a splitting headache and can lose control of the situation at any moment. “Do you suggest I should calmly embrace the fact that once I discovered you lying in a pool of blood on the temple floor, my life has never been the same? Of course! It’s perfectly normal, isn’t it? I’s nothing. You’re staying at my place, and every night I have apocalyptic visions of Ragnarök: cannibalized horse carcasses, dying people, frozen cities lying in ruins. What’s so strange about the fact that objects around me begin to disappear and stone walls turn into sand dunes? Nothing weird about that, is there? It takes us two seconds to transport ourselves seven thousand miles away from my apartment: I find myself sitting in a café watching the earth open up, devouring Uradziosutoku. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against it. It just takes some getting used to. And now I’m sitting here talking nicely to you instead of trying to strangle you with my bare hands because I realize perfectly well: such things do happen. I’ve gone mad.”
She leans toward me. Her lips smell of rice. How unromantic. Or am I a hardened cynic?
“I’ll tell you everything about myself, I promise, whatever you want to know. The moment we get somewhere safe, I’ll do it. But I really don’t know why certain things happen to me. I can only guess. I’ll try to explain… I’ll show you why it’s the way it is. But not here.”
“Where, then?” I ask a logical question and promptly shut up, unwilling to hear something I might regret: the Schwarzkopfs aren’t known for their lack of expletives. But admittedly, my intellectual approach sometimes does work to restrain her primeval lack of manners.
“There’s this place to the north of Moskau… I’ll take you there. It’ll happen soon enough, I promise. Strange how tables turn, don’t you think? Twenty-four hours ago, I was your prisoner. And now I’m free but… I don’t want to leave you. We can’t really tell now which one of us holds the other captive, can we?”