The torqued man, p.1
The Torqued Man, page 1
Dedication
For Mom and Dad—my original readers
Epigraph
Our country has been depopulated, our people degraded, our industries destroyed. If Hell itself were to turn against English policy, as it is known to us, we might be pardoned for taking the side of Hell.
—Eoin MacNeill, article in Fianna
And the individual, powerless, has to exert the
Powers of will and choice
And choose between enormous evils, either
Of which depends on somebody else’s voice.
—Louis MacNeice, Autumn Journal
Thou hast chosen an ill place to rest and slumber in, before the city of thine enemy.
—The High Deeds of Finn McCool
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
S-E-C-R-E-T: 05 September 1945
1: JOURNAL: November 30, 1943
2: Finn McCool in the Bowels of Teutonia: Concerning His Murderous Exploits in Berlin, “The Bowels”
3: JOURNAL: December 1, 1943
4: Finn McCool in the Bowels of Teutonia, “The Pit”
5: JOURNAL: December 4, 1943
6: Finn McCool in the Bowels of Teutonia, “Valley of the Nymphs”
7: JOURNAL: December 9, 1943
8: Finn McCool in the Bowels of Teutonia, “The Boat”
9: JOURNAL: December 17, 1943
10: Finn McCool in the Bowels of Teutonia, “Cloudwatcher”
11: JOURNAL: December 21, 1943
12: Finn McCool in the Bowels of Teutonia, “Birdsong”
13: JOURNAL: January 1, 1944
14: Finn McCool in the Bowels of Teutonia, “First Hunt”
15: JOURNAL: January 6, 1944
16: Finn McCool in the Bowels of Teutonia, “The List”
17: JOURNAL: January 7, 1944
18: Finn McCool in the Bowels of Teutonia, “Writer of Deeds”
19: JOURNAL: January 9, 1944
20: Finn McCool in the Bowels of Teutonia, “Baiting the Trap”
21: JOURNAL: January 11, 1944
22: Finn McCool in the Bowels of Teutonia, “An Appointment”
23: JOURNAL: January 13, 1944
24: Finn McCool in the Bowels of Teutonia, “Gifts from on High”
25: JOURNAL: January 14, 1944
26: Finn McCool in the Bowels of Teutonia, “A Grand Plan”
27: JOURNAL: January 15, 1944
28: Finn McCool in the Bowels of Teutonia, “The Fianna”
29: JOURNAL: January 18, 1944
30: Finn McCool in the Bowels of Teutonia, “A Heist”
31: JOURNAL: January 21, 1944
32: Finn McCool in the Bowels of Teutonia, “Hibernation”
33: JOURNAL: January 25, 1944
34: Finn McCool in the Bowels of Teutonia, “Convalescence”
35: JOURNAL: February 1, 1944
36: Finn McCool in the Bowels of Teutonia, “The Poisonous Mushroom”
37: JOURNAL: February 10, 1944
38: Finn McCool in the Bowels of Teutonia, “The Hausfrau”
39: JOURNAL: February 22, 1944
40: Finn McCool in the Bowels of Teutonia, “Final Victory”
41: JOURNAL: March 23, 1944
42: Finn McCool in the Bowels of Teutonia, “Eine Spritze”
43: JOURNAL: March 24, 1944
44: Finn McCool in the Bowels of Teutonia, “Lump of Sugar”
45: JOURNAL: April 20, 1944
46: Finn McCool in the Bowels of Teutonia, “Krankenhaus”
47: JOURNAL: April 21, 1944
48: Finn McCool in the Bowels of Teutonia, “Downriver”
49: JOURNAL: April 22, 1944
50: Finn McCool in the Bowels of Teutonia, “Forest Father”
51: JOURNAL: April 23, 1944
52: Finn McCool in the Bowels of Teutonia, “Flying Column”
53: JOURNAL: April 24, 1944
54: Finn McCool in the Bowels of Teutonia, “Final Testament”
S-E-C-R-E-T: 08 September 1945
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
S-E-C-R-E-T
Date: 05 September 1945
CPTN FLOYD WEEKS
BERLIN DISTRICT INTERROGATION CENTER
APO 755 US ARMY
TO:
CPTN CHARLES CARSON
OFFICE OF STRATEGIC SERVICES, BERLIN
APO 401 US ARMY
Charles:
Am sending the enclosed MS for your review in case it is of any value. It was found this morning in the remains of a bombed-out house in Schoeneberg following the arrest of former Abwehr agent Adrian DE GROOT. Little is yet known of DE GROOT’s activities during the war, other than he was involved in Spanish and Irish operations before being imprisoned in 1944, then later drafted into the people’s militia. At the time of his arrest, he was living under the alias Johann GROTIUS and employed by the Real Estate and Labor Office at the new Coca-Cola plant in Steglitz. He is currently under interrogation and seems eager to cooperate.
The Brits want next crack at him, as it was SIS who tipped us to his identity. I figure if we can save them several hours of reading, it would be the neighborly thing to do. Anything in the MS that can clarify the role of Proinnsias “Frank” PIKE in his affiliation with the Abwehr would be of particular interest. PIKE, an IRA fighter and socialist agitator who escaped from a Spanish prison in 1940, is thought to have gone to Germany, where he disappeared during the war.
Please give this a look and send a report at your soonest convenience.
Yours,
Floyd
P.S. It appears there are actually two distinct MSS that have been collated either by their owner or the rubble women who found them. I leave it to you to puzzle out their relation.
1
journal
November 30, 1943
Frank Pike is dead.
The news is not surprising, and yet it still comes as a shock. Strange, given the perpetual state of shock life has become. I wonder if he ever knew how much he meant to me. I do feel partly to blame for the way things turned out.
Kriegsmann saw the body before the hospital was hit. Now it’s a hole in the ground. I would have gone myself had I known he was there. But with this gash in my leg—damn that dog—and the mountains of smoldering rubble clogging the roads, it would have taken days just to get across the city. Imagine: Berlin burning all around him, and the man dies in bed from a fever. As though one needed other forms of dying these days. Nonviolent death seems like one of God’s little eccentricities.
According to Kriegsmann, he expired in the arms of a nun. Perhaps he had a chance to talk her out of her vow of chastity—one last thrust of the pike, as it were. Even in his beleaguered state, deaf as a post and limbs atremble, his skin cirrhotic and face caving in on itself, Frank Pike knew how to charm. It’s a pity he never could find a proper use for his talents. For all his peccadilloes, questionable loyalties, and that ceaseless Irish garrulity—a verbal spigot for which there was no wrench, not even his handicapped German—he was, it must be said, a man of action. Or at least he could have been. It was our stymieing of his energies, those three years of forced indolence, that caused his undoing. Only in the Germany of today could a man of Pike’s vitality become such a colossal waste. We may add it to the tally of murders foisted upon the world by our regime. Perhaps there are no nonviolent deaths after all.
I first met Pike in a Burgos prison in 1940. Despite the bleak setting, I felt almost giddy, as I’d just spent a week in the company of Himmler and would sooner have chosen to become an inmate there than suffer one more minute with that dullard.
I still shudder when I recall that trip. I had been assigned to be the Reichsführer’s interpreter on his tour of Spain, a demotion that was part of the Security Office’s attempt to flex its muscles over the Abwehr. I knew I was in for a miserable week as soon as Himmler boarded the train in San Sebastián. He immediately began complaining that the nitrate deficiencies of the Iberian soil had thrown off his digestion and were interfering with the rhythm of his bowel movements. As if that weren’t enough, his wife had neglected to pack his bee pollen supplements, no doubt a malicious act, thereby dooming him to eight days of throat constriction and adenoidal hell.
To my horror, this harangue directed at everyone in his retinue—and to which we were obliged to listen attentively and fill the pauses with a natürlich! or wie interessant!—did not end when we pulled into Atocha but continued for days. Through the galleries of the Prado, where the Reichsführer insisted on seeing only the German and Dutch Old Masters and admired them without breaking stride, he lectured us on the wonders of the neti pot, the earliest Aryan form of medicine, a nasal-irrigation system for the warrior caste that led directly to the conquest of the decadent Hittites—it was all to be found in a proper study of the Sanskrit documents. Only when we came to Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights did our group pause, as the Falangists and SS men all marveled at the ingenious tortures of the right panel, cooing like women ogling dresses in a window display.
The next day, the mayor of Madrid staged a bullfight exclusively for the Reichsführer. A poor showing. The corrida hadn’t yet recovered from the long siege during the war—the bulls were sluggish, the matadors timid. The regime had to bribe or coerce several hundred civilians to fill the stands and, to ingratiate themselves further with their Nazi guests, had chos
“You see, Reichsführer,” said Serrano Suñer, “we Spaniards are descended from the Visigoths. There is good Aryan blood running through our veins, like yours.”
Himmler scoffed. No Aryan, he said, would make such a grotesque sport out of maiming innocent animals.
I hated seeing Spain papered over in swastikas. I state this with absolute sincerity, even while I admit my sympathies had once been with the nationals. I didn’t want to see Spain go red—the churches torn down, the women renouncing dresses and dancing for overalls and agitprop, the vineyards collectivized and turned into Stalinist beet farms. In my naïveté, I had believed a conservative stand against the excesses of materialism would preserve the soul and, with it, art, which is always, in its authentic form, an expression of the soul. But those of us with a true preservationist impulse against the onslaught should have known we had no party to speak for us. I soon learned that Franco’s regime, in its obsession with limpieza social and terror of foreign infection, was really only a rebirth of the Inquisition. Perhaps my idea of Spain, the one I saw threatened by the left, had never existed in the first place and was merely a postcard fantasy from my student days in Salamanca. But with Franco’s victory, it had become clear to me that the caudillo and his Falangists were of the same stunted, loathsome issue as the thugs of our own regime.
By the time we reached Barcelona, I was about to tear my hair out. I had been buried in a deluge of utterances about poultry-rearing, Aryan pottery, and nasal hygiene. Stuck in my brain like a shard of glass was the phrase Rudi, Deine Hände, bitte. This was how Himmler beckoned his masseur, who traveled by his side at all times and was constantly realigning the Reichsführer’s chakras.
On the eve of the pilgrimage to Montserrat, I seriously considered feigning illness. Himmler, through his study of bogus scholarship and his own lunatic theories, had concluded that the Holy Grail was hidden in the library of the mountaintop monastery and was dead set on finding it. I was lying in my bed at the Ritz, bracing for a day of temper tantrums and trying to will myself into contracting a fever, when a message came for me.
It was from the legend himself: Canaris. Only rarely did I receive a direct communiqué from the head of the Abwehr, and it was like receiving a lightning bolt straight from Zeus. Canaris was flexing his own muscles now—letting Himmler know he’d have to make do with another interpreter because his agent would be busy doing actual espionage. I was so happy, I ordered a bottle of cava and drank it in the bath.
I left the next morning for Burgos. My instructions were to recruit an Irishman currently serving a life sentence in San Pedro de Cardeña, but it felt like I was the one who had been freed from prison.
His name, Proinnsias Pike, was not new to me. It was my job to know the name of the man Franco once boasted of as his most important prisoner. Pike had come to Spain to fight fascists. He’d led the Irish Connolly Column but was quickly promoted to staff officer of the International Brigades, where he spent the following year organizing forces and directing propaganda. In the spring of ’38, he was captured by an Italian tank division at Gandesa and had been rotting in prison ever since. When Ireland recognized Franco’s government after the war, the caudillo commuted Pike’s death sentence to life in prison. In the meantime, Canaris had convinced Franco to let us have him. That is, if he would have us.
San Pedro de Cardeña was a monastery the Falange had converted into a prison camp and slaughterhouse. Stuffed into its cells were nearly a thousand men from the International Brigades and twice as many Basques. At least, those were the numbers when I had visited shortly after the end of the Civil War. Now, upon my arrival a year later, the overcrowding problem appeared to be improving. I had little doubt how. Of course, there were still five or six men to each cell originally intended for a single pious monk. And the place still reeked of piss and blood and garlic, the latter owing to the daily cooking of huge vats of soup, which along with a moldy crust was the prisoners’ only meal.
Spanish prison conditions had shocked even Himmler. At least back then. I’m certain the poultry farmer has since orchestrated worse. But it is not an exaggeration to say that in 1940 to have been a republican in Spain was as dire as being a Jew or communist in the Reich. Franco had enslaved the remnants of the Second Republic and was killing them through work and starvation. But Himmler, as he had remarked on our tour of a concentration camp outside Barcelona, saw no reason why purportedly European racial specimens—albeit second-rate ones—should be exterminated like this. After all, these were only ideological enemies, he contended, not racial ones. A few should be shot, certainly, and the gypsies and crypto-Jews naturally would have to go, but most could be reeducated. Serrano Suñer politely begged to differ. The caudillo’s top advisers had conducted research definitively proving that Bolshevism was a congenital affliction similar to racial degeneracy. “That may well be,” replied Himmler, annoyed. “But you people are mismanaging things all the same. With better sanitary conditions and a doubling of the prisoners’ bread ration alone, their productivity could be increased tenfold.”
A Carlist in a red beret saluted me and led me to the inner sanctum. The Cloister of the Martyrs, with its colorful twelfth-century Mudéjar arches, had been repurposed as an execution grounds by morning and a recreation area by day. A garrote stood in the center, beneath it a black stain on the earth, wet with the daily evacuations of strangled men. I was looking absently into this puddle of gore when the Carlist returned with a prisoner.
“You’re Proinnsias Pike?” I asked uncertainly in English. He had the same shock of black hair on a pale, puckish face as the photo in my dossier. But prison had made him gaunt and hollow, hardly the strapping Irish street brawler I had been expecting.
“Unless you speak Irish, it’s Frank. But most just call me Pike.” In contrast to his appearance, his voice was an unblemished baritone with a cadence I found beguiling.
“Very well, Pike it is. My name is Johann Grotius. I’m liaison to the German Embassy in Madrid,” I said, putting out my hand.
He gave me a quizzical look before taking it. I noticed his grip was shaky.
“Would you mind if we spoke for a few minutes?”
“Well, I’ve got to give a tennis lesson at two, and then it’s lunch with the duchess, but I suppose I could squeeze you in.”
“That reminds me,” I said. I produced a length of fuet, a small wheel of Catalan cheese, and two rolls from my jacket. “Souvenirs from Barcelona.” Pike’s eyes ballooned in their sockets. “Please, this way,” I said, leading him to a corner.
It was a warm August day, but Pike, in a soiled tunic and canvas trousers cinched with a rope, was shivering like he was out in winter. He eyed me warily. “You mind if we walk? Good for me to move my legs.”
“Of course,” I said, “but don’t you want to eat?”
“We Irishmen have an astounding ability to move our mouths and feet at the same time.”
We began to walk the cruciform path. Pike of course noticed my infirmity but didn’t say anything. I have a mildly deformed leg—a clubfoot. My left leg is six centimeters shorter than my right, and my foot turns in on itself by about fifteen degrees. I wear an orthotic shoe, which allows me full mobility but not without a slight limp. Aside from the expected childhood pains of teasing and exclusion from sports, my defect did not mar my life until Goebbels mounted the rostrum. Then the comparisons came flooding in. That poisonous dwarf has made life for us clubfoots—at least those of us German clubfoots who are less than fanatical about National Socialism—a perpetual embarrassment. It seemed every Spaniard I had met in the last seven years had deemed it necessary to point out that I shared the same condition with Señor Gebel. One of them had gone so far as to nickname me Gebelito, which stung far more than any cry of “freak” or “goblin” had in the schoolyard. I was therefore grateful when, whether out of prudence or politeness, Pike declined to comment.
