A Room Full of Night

by TR Kenneth

  “Wake up,” Stag barked to Harry. “Let’s go see Jake.”

  “Meh?” Harry slurred.

  “Yeah. Get up.”

  Harry rolled out of bed and righted his huge form on the edge of the futon, still groggy. “If the sheriff’s taken the bar, I gotta find some work or shit.”

  “You don’t have to today.”

  “I don’t have any money.”

  “You don’t need money. I got this,” Stag replied.

  Harry opened his eyes wider.

  “I’ve got the Fucking Settlement, remember? I can afford to prop you up a while. Let’s go talk to Jake.”

  Stag went to the kitchen and began a pot of coffee.

  “Look at the detail. Superb. Even the underlay on the shoulder straps. That’s good ol’ SS toxic green.” Dr. Jake Bratch, retired head of the University of Wisconsin Center for World War II Studies, leaned back in the leather swivel chair in his den. He peered at both men from above his reading glasses. The seventy-year-old man’s khakis and blue oxford shirt were as wrinkled as used Kleenex. Stag knew from all the late-night, beer-laden discourse at Gerde’s that Jake was brilliant, but his obsession for knowledge made him unaware of many of the social graces. Since his wife passed away—a Wuttke girl—Stag doubted the guy’d ever washed his clothes.

  “Where did you get this?”

  Stag and Harry seemed unable to move.

  Jake continued, not making note of the sudden discomfort. “This is really remarkable. You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen an oil portrait of him. Very rare.”

  “Him?” Harry had grown more and more tense while Jake studied the portrait.

  “Yes, there’s no mistaking him. He’s got the Honor Chevron for the Old Guard, first- and second-class Iron Cross, the Frontflugspange, for aircraft reconnaissance work; it’s all there in detail.”

  “Who is it?” Stag asked.

  “Look at his eyes. There’s only one man who looks like this. They used to call him the Green Basilisk, eyes like a dragon. Yes, it’s Heydrich. This is Heydrich.”

  Stag felt a coldness work down his spine. He’d been right in his suspicions. Now that they were confirmed, he could see. It was Heydrich. “Our Reini.”

  “Sorry, I’m not up on my Nazi stuff. Who the hell is that?” Harry blurted defensively.

  But Stag knew who it was.

  He stared back at the unfeeling expression, the awful realization that behind the bad overpaint, this face had been hanging in Gerde’s all the years he’d been going there. Heydrich. The one and only. The Hangman. The Blond Beast. The Nazi Aryan ideal all wrapped up in the Gestapo, the SS, and, worst of all, the SD, the Nazi security agency. He had so much information on people, even Hitler and Himmler got nervous around him. Sure, they gave him a nice SS funeral when he was assassinated in Prague, but no one was really sorry to see him go.

  No one.

  Jake placed his fingertips together, forming a chapel-roof with his hands. His expression steeled as he looked at the face in the painting. The light in his eyes stilled. “Harry, I hate to have to introduce you to Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich, Reichsprotecktor of Bohemia and Moravia, Chief of the Gestapo and the SD.”

  Harry looked like his mouth had gone dry and it was difficult to speak. “I thought Heinrich Himmler was head of the SS.”

  “Yes. But within the SS was the much-more feared SD. The Sicherheitsdienst.”

  “Sicherheitsdienst?” Harry wore a vaguely nauseated expression. “Doesn’t that mean—”

  “Exactly. Security service,” Jake interrupted. “These were the ultimate men of the Reich. They literally determined who lived or died.” Jake took another study of the portrait. “The provenance of this piece must be researched. I hate to say it, but it would bring a fortune on the Nazi memorabilia market. Anything Heydrich-related is very rare. But, in truth, I’d rather see it’s handled properly and donated. We don’t want this to form the centerpiece of some neo-Nazi cult. Now tell me where you got this again?”

  “Look, I don’t understand. I’m of German heritage but that doesn’t make me an expert on Mein Kampf!” Harry crossed his arms as best he could, almost in an act of defiance.

  Jake released an ironic smile. “Very few are. Even back in Germany in the thirties, Mein Kampf sold to every household and illiteratti, and made Hitler millions, but no one cracked it open. Oh, they loved his ideas, but even Hitler regretted writing such a crappy book. However, it was a required purchase, if you didn’t want guys like this snooping around.” He nodded to the painting.

  “Never heard of him.” Harry was adamant.

  Jake nodded. “Czech patriots assassinated Heydrich in ’42, which is partly why he’s not a household Nazi name, so to speak, but had he lived—many were fully expecting him to take over the entire SS from Himmler. Perhaps even take over from Hitler. They had a saying, ‘Himmler’s Hirn heisst Heydrich.’ ‘Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich.’”

  Harry shook his head. “He was under Himmler then? He was some kind of SS?”

  “You don’t understand.” Jake clasped his hands as if in prayer. “This man founded the SD, the Sipo—SS Security Police—and the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing squads that murdered all in their path behind the Wehrmacht as the German army drove east. Heydrich had been instructed to develop the death camps of Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, and Auschwitz-Birkenau—as a kindness, believe it or not. Gassing was a way to relieve the Einsatzgruppen of their emotional burden of shooting women and children. But quite frankly, I don’t think Heydrich himself ever thought about the emotional burden.”

  Jake finished, his voice dropping. “Heydrich was the reason the Third Reich kept their secrets. He was the one behind the horror of our first enlisted men stumbling unawares into Buchenwald. Heydrich was bad. Ground Zero bad. He could make Himmler look like a philanthropist.”

  “Weren’t they all bad?” Harry blurted out, a creeping revulsion tightening his expression. “I mean we’re talking about Nazis here.”

  “You’ve heard the saying, ‘Three men can keep a secret as long as two of them are dead’? I’d be surprised if Heydrich didn’t make that quote up. He was good at his job because no one talked. No one dared. So they put him in charge of the Wannsee Conference.” Jake took a long hard look at the painting. Suddenly the old man’s shabby clothes were overwhelmed by the intelligence and fierceness in his eyes. “This is the man who organized the Final Solution.”

  “Fuck me,” Harry whispered, a strange emotion in his eyes.

  Stag glanced at the painting. Heydrich’s stare frosted up even more.

  “Seriously, where did you get this?” Jake asked. “You know, there’s something familiar about it—more than just Heydrich himself. I feel I’ve seen this before.”

  Harry said nothing; he simply looked at Stag as if for help.

  For some strange reason, evasion seemed to be in order right now. The idea they’d all been drinking beer for years beneath the painted gaze of Harry’s family’s “Reini” wasn’t quite appetizing, and Harry’s revulsion over that fact was palpable.

  “I found it in a junk shop,” Stag interjected. “I figured you’d know who he was.”

  “If you can find out where this came from, it might really be worth looking into. Like I said, Heydrich died young. His reign was short but notorious.” Jake pointed to the canvas. “This didn’t come out of a vacuum. There’s a story behind it. Without a doubt.”

  “Without a doubt …” Stag’s words drifted off.

  The men sat in silence for a moment before Jake said gently, “You should write a piece on this for the paper, Stag. Get back in the swing of things again.”

  “Maybe I will,” he answered noncommittally.

  Jake turned to Harry. “Sorry about Gerde’s. No place like that one. I can even remember my father going there after the war.”

  Harry nodded, his eyes worried.

  “This portrait may be important to Holocaust studies. If you’d care to dona
te it, I can have that arranged. We’d have professors and students lining up to research it.”

  “I want to get some more info on it before I do anything like that,” Stag said.

  “Where are you boys going to do your drinking from now on? With Ruthie dead and gone, I can’t bear the evenings alone. I confess Gerde’s filled them for me for a long time.”

  Harry took another miserable glance at the painting. “This guy was involved in all that?”

  “Not just involved,” Jake said. “A main architect. It’s believed the operations of the death camps were named Aktion Reinhard in his honor after his assassination. Heydrich was able to do things others could not bring themselves to do.” He grew sober. “We’ve got to find the history behind this. It is that important.”

  Stag stared at Harry. Harry looked like a drowning man.

  A moment of silence followed before Jake said in a harsh voice, “At Heydrich’s funeral, Reichsfurer-SS Himmler referred to him as, ‘The Man with the Iron Heart.’” He gave both younger men an ominous stare. “Gentlemen, you have a helluva portrait on your hands.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  HE WAS ABLE to do things others could not bring themselves to do.

  Things others could not bring themselves to do.

  His stomach fell every time Stag thought of Heydrich. Harry’s reaction was worse. A weight seemed to have settled on Harry since they left Jake’s.

  “Our Reini. Our.” Harry stared down at the beer mug in his hand. They’d stopped off at the first tavern on Wuttke Avenue, another sad, run-down bar frequented by bikers.

  Stag was at a loss. “You didn’t know,” was all he could think of.

  Harry’s face was pale, and he’d grown quiet since they’d left Jake’s office.

  Stag thumbed the moisture forming on his beer glass. “I mean, shit, the guy was painted over. After the war, someone could have sold it to your grandfather for a loaf of bread, and the name stuck. No damnation in that coincidence.”

  “Nobody in my family had to fight for the USA. My grandfather was too old, my father wasn’t born yet.”

  “Just because they didn’t fight the Nazis doesn’t mean they sympathized with them.”

  “Yeah,” Harry said, unconvincingly.

  “Your family was the best there ever was.” Stag had to pull the words from the cold place in his soul. The spot had frozen over since Holly had been standing by his side. And then wasn’t anymore.

  “You and your family, out of the goodness of your hearts, took on a fucked-up, rebellious, completely charmless, thirteen-year-old. Your folks were all right. You can’t question that just because they had a creepy painting in their bar. They probably didn’t even know about it.”

  “But what about the SD. The Sicherheitsdienst?”

  “What about it? It was a security service. Every government has one. If we knew everything the NSA has done, we’d never sleep at night. Are we responsible for them?”

  Harry seemed unconvinced. If anything, he got even paler.

  “They were good people, Harry. Good people.” Stag swallowed a sudden feeling of helplessness with a swig of beer.

  A long silence followed before Harry began to murmur his thoughts. “Back in high school I did a paper on Birkenau, the death camp at Auschwitz. Ever tell you that?” He emptied his glass and motioned for another. “One guy—he worked in Birkenau as a guard—he’d oversee gassing people all day long. Men. Women. Children. Men would cram them into the chambers until they could barely shut the door because the gas worked more efficiently that way. Here were all these naked and shaved people, families, mothers and babies. Total chaos and terror. One day the guard wrote about an incident. A little boy about five years old tried to stop in this mass of screaming humanity because a little girl ahead of him had dropped some kind of trinket she’d managed to keep. The little boy picked it up off the ground and chased after her, until he was crammed into the death chamber with all the rest.

  “At night the guard would go home after seeing all this, and he’d have dinner with his family. In his journal, he would write about how excited he was to take his children to the movies in town. Yeah, all day he would gas other people’s children, nice children, sweet children trying to return trinkets, and then go home, and do something completely normal with his own, like he was the goddamned postman.”

  His next beer arrived, and he took a deep thirsty gulp. “And that was the worst part about doing that paper, see? Not what the guy actually did in Birkenau, but that I had to explain the unexplainable. Here was a guy just like my dad, hardworking, responsible. He would go home at the end of a long day, and have dinner, and plan fun times with his kids, never thinking at all about what he was doing all day.”

  He frowned, the shadows on his full face deepening into furrows. “We’re all capable of that, you know. We don’t want to admit it, but it’s really easy to just go along with things, and not think about them, not question what we’re doing until we’ve become monsters. We detach ourselves. Pretend what we’re doing is okay. We can do really bad things. Then go on, normal as pie.”

  “‘Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities,’” Stag said, quoting Voltaire.

  The chiming of glassware as the bartender stacked it was the only sound breaking the ensuing silence.

  “There’s always worse though.”

  Stag raised an eyebrow.

  Harry took a long swig. “Worse are the ones that do give it a lot of thought. ’Cause they’re convinced they’re right.”

  The cell number had been listed in the name of Harold Gerde. 4EVER did his research. It had taken another nanosecond to find the address. But there was nothing at the listing except a defunct bar with civil sheriff’s tape across the door. He moved on to the other name: Stag Maguire, the one they’d talked to. That name came up in research as both Stag and the fucked-up name of Hyortur Maguire. But it eventually made sense. Hyortur was an Old Norse name for deer or stag. Maguire, it turned out, was Icelandic-American; probably—as 4EVER’s research told him—from people who farmed in North Dakota or Minnesota. All that was easy. What wasn’t easy would be getting information directly.

  There was the obese Mr. Gerde who owned the phone they’d called the Dresdenhof on, and the goddamned Viking, Stag Maguire, who’d done the talking. The employer wanted information and for that they needed Maguire to tell them what he knew and why he had called. 4EVER’d been on the phone to Zug, Switzerland, for ten minutes. Fear was one method of getting people to talk. It wasn’t the only method, and there was debate whether it was the most effective. But it was certainly an effective way to start.

  And that was how he was told to start.

  He parked the Infiniti in the parking lot of Hyortur Maguire’s apartment complex.

  4EVER didn’t understand what all the Nazi shit was about, but ultimately, he didn’t care. Nazis were other people’s scourges. His ancestors came out of the plantation system of the Old South. He was born to a welfare-mom crackhead on Livernois Avenue. If his IQ hadn’t been off the charts, there was no way a kid like him would have been offered a free ride through Harvard. Now he was one of the highest-paid independent contractors in the world. And he gave the Ivy League full credit for that.

  Along with his thug life in Detroit. And a healthy dose of training by independent military contractors like Tarnhelm. They loved him in Zug. He was a rarity. He bought vertical auctions of rare wine, and he came with a genuine street cred and name. 4EVER.

  Because when he did his job, you were “Deyah-d fo’evah.”

  From the scrupulously clean windshield of the Infiniti, he watched a fat man in a dingy blue parka leave Maguire’s ground-floor apartment. It was Harry Gerde. He matched the mug shot from a DWI he’d gotten just last year. Now it looked like the guy was either having a stroke or drunk. 4EVER figured the latter because the hog staggered across the parking lot, skidding on the ice patches and righting himself as only a drunk can.

>   4EVER waited and watched, poised like a Zegna-clad bird on a wire. A bird of prey.

  Rummaging through his pockets, Gerde found keys to the car in front of him. He opened it and retrieved three six-packs of Beck’s. Juggling them, he shoved the car door closed, and turned toward the apartment.

  “Excuse me,” 4EVER said, getting out of his car. “Excuse me, sir.” He hoped the camel topcoat and the swank white car would keep the guy disarmed. Nothing like an impeccable white middle-class accent to generate trust in a black man.

  “I’m looking for Mr. Maguire. Do you know where Mr. Maguire lives?”

  Gerde looked a bit startled. “Yeah. He’s right over there.” He pointed to the door of the apartment.

  “I’m with a law firm trying to reach him to settle an estate. We have some money for him.”

  “Some money?” The guy’s triple chin went slack.

  “Could you do me a favor and give him my card, Mr…. uh?”

  “Gerde.”

  “Where can I reach you, Mr. Gerde?”

  “I’m right-the-fuck here.”

  4EVER smiled. He didn’t know if the guy was being honest, or sarcastic, or stupid. Nonetheless, he gave him a trademark warm smile, letting his lip curl boyishly. It was amazing how much information people gave you when you just asked. He extended his Hermès-gloved hand. “Here is my card. Would you please convince him to call the number on it?”

  4EVER watched Gerde’s reaction to his creamy, expensive engraved card. It was a fraud; of course, a beautiful luscious fraud of a card, but Gerde would never know.

  “Okay. C’mon.” The fat fuck turned toward the apartment from which he came.

  “Actually, I’m not the one who needs to speak to him. I’m really just here to deliver a message.”

  Gerde sloshed around and stared at him with dull, alcohol-fueled eyes. “He’s right here, dude. Jus’ c’mon.”

  “No. When he’s ready to talk, have him call this number. You got that?” 4EVER stepped closer to the guy. Gerde took an unconscious step back.