The torqued man, p.12
The Torqued Man, page 12
Finn, not one to put up a fight against a free meal, agreed. “Truth be told, I could eat a nun’s cunt through a convent gate.”
“That’s the spirit,” said Crean, clapping him on the back.
They ate black-market Eisbein at a restaurant a few steps off the Molkenmarkt. The proprietor addressed Crean obsequiously as “mein Herr” and brought a bottle of champagne, which he insisted was on the house.
“This is quite an organization you’ve got here,” said Finn. “The university must pay its visiting lecturers well.”
Crean laughed. “No, no, these perks—which I’m quite happy to share with you, Finn—come from my auxiliary vocation.”
He couldn’t mean the radio broadcasts. “The art dealing, you mean?”
“Precisely.”
“Not that it’s any business of mine,” said Finn, “but isn’t the Pickled Herring a rather queer spot for selling art?”
“I have different locales to cater to my different clients. You see, I deal in an art that has a niche appeal. And while not suitable to everyone’s tastes, it cuts across class and rank.”
“Intriguing,” said Finn, between mouthfuls of smoked pork, pureed peas, and sauerkraut.
“I’m glad you think so. In fact, this very table is yet another of my impromptu galleries. Only here I service a more elevated clientele.”
The proprietor removed their plates and returned with a small humidor and two snifters, into which he poured an exquisite Armagnac pilfered from the cellars of the Occupied Zone.
“I’d be happy to show you a wee sample of my collection,” said Crean. “Though I must warn you, the art I deal in concerns matters of an erotic nature.”
“I see,” said Finn.
“Often of an unconventional sort. And some of these pictures are, well, shall we say, not met with favor by the authorities.”
“Ach so,” said Finn, imitating Crean. “Might these pictures be the reason that guileless barmaid at the Pickled Herring refers to you as der Dreckmann?”
Crean made an annoyed face. “Yes, though she only reveals her ignorance. While I grant that this art is controversial and decidedly erotic, it is not smut.”
He reached into his portfolio and pulled out a large envelope. He placed it on the table before Finn.
“Go on. Have a look.”
Finn unsheathed three photographs and fanned them across the table.
It was, in fact, smut. Though not like any he had ever seen. While prudery was an alien concept to him, Finn felt an instinctual revulsion well up at the sight of these photos. He swallowed it back down and proceeded to inspect them with a disinterested curiosity. They depicted:
A skinny youth, bound and gagged, buggered by two men in white coats.
A stern-looking male nurse collecting ejaculate on a spoon, presumably to feed to the patient whose mouth was held open by a mechanical device.
A hooded man hanging upside down, suspended from a gibbet by his feet, with his foreskin being stretched in a metal clamp by a fully clothed attendant.
“What do you think?” asked Crean.
“Well, the compositions are certainly thoughtful. Tightly framed scenes, dynamic angles, that sort of thing. And while I’m no expert, they seem to be well made. I’ve always gone in for that high-contrast style.”
“And as regards the subject matter?” asked Crean.
“A bit too clinical for my tastes, I’m afraid.”
“Well, that’s just one of several genres I deal in. There are also schoolmaster scenes and a forest-dungeon tableau. But,” asked Crean, “the homoerotic nature doesn’t bother you?”
“Oh, God no. A man’s ass is as good a place for a prick as any other. But these photos remind me of going to the doctor. Which is about the least erotic thing I can think of.” Finn shuddered, remembering the battery of tests that had punctuated life in the pit.
“Funny you should mention doctors,” said Crean. “Many of my clients are doctors. In fact, I have a very important one coming here tonight to make an acquisition.”
“Is that so?”
Crean leaned toward Finn and lowered his voice. “I always make sure to know a bit more about them than they tell me. A sort of insurance policy in this line of work.”
“Prudent,” said Finn.
“And this one tonight, Dr. Wagner? Well, he’s the head of the Reichsärztekammer.”
Finn jolted as though kicked. “I’m sorry, did you say Wagner?”
“That’s right. A real muckety-muck, as they say.”
“Dr. Gerhard Wagner?” asked Finn, floating out of his body and up to the corner of the room.
“The very one,” said Crean. “Why, do you know him?”
“No, no. Just saw his name in print a while back, something about new breakthroughs in medical research.” His own voice sounded strange and distant.
“Of course. These Germans have a keen grasp of health as a total concept. And from what I hear, Wagner’s one of the pioneers of the new medicine. God knows we could use something like that back in Ireland. Can you imagine all the miserable souls who’ve been leeching the lifeblood out of the Celtic race? Ah, but you’ll never get a proper eugenics program going there with the Church in the way.”
“Isn’t that the truth?” said Finn, nodding his head to the mournful lack of state-sponsored death back in his homeland. But while Finn’s fleshly vessel carried on in the company of Crean, his mind went back—to the Spanish pit, where he first met Dr. Gerhard Wagner.
The screw had pulled him from his cell for the dawn executions. Only that day, instead of being taken to the garroting post, he was led to a cold and empty room. The white paint on the walls smelled fresh, though he could still make out palimpsests of spattered blood. In the corner on a long table was a mounted camera. Its eye would soon record every inch of his body. An hour later, two men in white coats entered. While the screw hovered nearby, the white coats unpacked their heavy black valises and arranged their instruments on the table. A stopwatch, a thermometer, a pad of gridded paper, three ballpoint pens, a set of calipers, syringes, a pack of needles, a jar of cotton wool, vials of different hues, two scalpels, tongue clamps, arm restraints, a leather head harness, a small flashlight, a ball-peen hammer, metal rods of various circumferences, and two sets of black rubber gloves.
One of the white coats snapped on the gloves, while the other introduced himself. “I am Dr. Antonio Vallejo-Nágera,” said the man in Spanish, “and this is my colleague, Dr. Gerhard Wagner.”
“Take down your trousers,” said Dr. Wagner in accented English.
And so, with that first urethral probe, began a twelve-week battery of tests designed to measure the bio-psyche of Marxist fanaticism.
Vallejo-Nágera’s theory, as he expounded it to Wagner across the unclothed body of their Irish specimen, was that Marxism was a congenital affliction. Just as Mongoloids possessed a series of physical traits that directly correlated with their inferior intelligence, adherents of communism and all other variants of antisocial, left-wing revolutionism were characterized by aberrant psychologies and submental brain function. He would be the first to document the full biological portrait of those suffering from the red sickness. Which would be of tremendous value to the health of all nations. Through the use of preventative social policies based on sound medical evidence, Marxism could be eradicated from Europe.
Of course, many thousands were already irredeemably afflicted. These would have to be weeded out and eliminated. Vallejo-Nágera’s study would save authorities immeasurable time in identifying and sequestering these diseased minds, who up to now had hidden in plain sight. But with any luck the doctor would soon have a system of facial, cranial, and genital recognition that would lay bare the contours of born Marxists, making them as plainly visible as a Jew.
Though the Spanish doctor was technically in charge of the study, it was the German who performed all the examinations. While Vallejo recorded the results on the legal pad, Wagner groped and prodded the prisoner’s body until it yielded knowledge. Finn could tell he liked to work with his hands. To feel naked flesh through his gloves and against the starched fabric of his coat. He always leaned in close, his face almost grazing the patient’s skin, the better to smell his fear and humiliation. Finn was haunted by the man’s breath, a revolting synthesis of coffee, chorizo, and quince jam, which was as appalling as the painful experiments they conducted on him.
But the worst of the ordeal was Wagner’s smile. During the more invasive of the examinations, there were moments when his face, which otherwise bore the stern look of a Prussian professional, would undergo a hideous transformation. Whenever Finn flinched, whenever his body betrayed him, whenever his nervous system overrode his spirit and the scent of helplessness filled the room, Wagner’s thin lips would crack, and in the growing chasm of teeth and tongue bathed in a sheen of rancid saliva, a smile would emerge. It was the sign of a private pleasure born of coerced intimacy. These were the moments, Wagner’s smile told Finn, that made the practice of medicine so rewarding.
After another brandy to steady his nerves, Finn thanked Crean for dinner and left. But instead of going back to his dwellings, he found himself circling the Molkenmarkt and eventually planted himself in the shadows of the government building opposite the restaurant.
He fingered the small folding knife in his pocket. Not exactly the man-killing ax a hunter of his stature merited, but Finn McCool could gut his enemies with a hangnail if circumstances required it. He had taken his revenge on Wagner so many times in his mind, always with a battle-ax and always with the doctor in his white coat, that Finn didn’t recognize the portly man in hat and gabardine jacket who walked by him and entered the restaurant. But when he came out twenty minutes later and the light in the doorway caught his face, Finn looked upon the bland profile of his tormenter.
If the Reichsärzteführer saw Finn, he gave no sign of it. Nothing about him betrayed that he was in fact a sadist carrying a kilo of illicit pornography in his briefcase. Instead, he looked like the self-satisfied and preeminent citizen he was—a respected leader of the Doctors’ League, director of the euthanasia program, and all-around exemplary National Socialist.
Finn’s grip tightened and loosened around his knife in rhythm with the doctor’s footsteps. The streets were still crowded here in Mitte. He would only follow him for now, he told himself. He would track him to his home, and then, after knowing where he lived, he could take his time setting the perfect trap.
But what if he was sent back to Erin before he could follow through? Though talk of another Irish mission had grown increasingly abstract over the last few months, there was still a chance he would be shipped off in another submarine at a moment’s notice.
Wagner had just turned at Spittelmarkt and was now walking along the narrow canal of the Kupfergraben. It was quiet here and even darker than the rest of the city. Finn saw his moment and decided to seize it.
His jerkin burst at the seams as his abdominal muscles popped into high relief [like muffins rising in the oven]. His great lumps of thigh meat [white as un-befouled snow] began firing like two fulling hammers, carrying his shapely feet in silent, deer-quick patter over the pavement. Leaping at the Teutonian, he clasped a catcher’s mitt of a hand over his rank mouth and pinned him against the rail of the canal. He flashed his hunting blade and lodged its tip just beneath the man’s eye.
“Guten Abend, Herr Doktor.”
The doctor screamed a muffled reply.
“Do you remember me?”
Wagner shook his head.
“There were so many of us, yet there was only one of you. You and Dr. Vallejo, that is. In a little white room in San Pedro de Cardeña?”
A flash of recognition shone on the doctor’s face.
“So you do remember. I was one of your Irish Marxists. I believe ‘social imbecile with strong psychopathic tendencies’ was your professional assessment.”
Finn leaned in and whispered in Wagner’s ear. “You’ll be glad to know, Doctor, that I’m doing this for the health of the Volk.”
And with that, Finn plunged the knife deep into the man’s belly, just below the navel, and jerked it upward until the hilt caught at the sternum.
A dreadful stench hissed from Wagner’s innards, which had become, for lack of a better word, outards. And from his mouth came a torrent of blood.
Satisfied that his work was done, Finn pulled the knife from his chest and, grabbing the good doctor between the legs, heaved him over the rail.
15
journal
January 6, 1944
I spent the winter not thinking about my niece. In an idle moment, I would often catch myself not thinking about her. I learned then that to remember you are forgetting is itself a form of mourning.
It was Pike who was on my mind. I used both his company and my fixation with him to stanch the wound of Gretchen’s death. With Operation Sea Eagle on hold through the winter, we kept to our routine, sexless but at least together.
He had returned from Copenhagen heavier, filled with stories and a bundle of books. Kriegsmann’s wife had brought a whole duffel bag from Dublin to catch him up on the last five years of Irish literary life. He couldn’t stop talking about one of them, a comic novel by a writer named O’Brien. “Utterly deranged and brilliant,” pronounced Pike. He said he’d laughed so hard his organs hurt. But when I asked if he might lend it to me, he put me off, saying he was making a thorough study of it.
Val Kriegsmann, a name I soon tired of hearing, had also passed on clippings from the Dublin press wondering what had become of the illustrious republican Proinnsias Pike, who had gone off to fight Franco and never come back. Apart from those that judged him dead, various theories had surfaced as to his whereabouts. He was living incognito in Buffalo, New York, driving an ice truck. He was teaching English at a university in Guanajuato, Mexico, raising funds for an anti-fascist insurgency in Spain. He had been arrested by the NKVD in Zaragoza and was now in exile in Siberia, covered head to toe in tattoos. None of them dared guess that the radical republican and socialist was collecting checks from the Abwehr and wheezing his way through winter in Berlin.
In March the Bretons were given the ax, and I was tasked with moving them out. I was not unsympathetic to their plight, but at the time I was able to cloak myself in a protective glibness. I see it now for what it was: a state of denial expressed as cynicism. Of course it was an unpleasant business, I told myself, but I was simply driving a car from one place to another. Besides, I thought, at least the living room would no longer smell like a latrine.
It was around then that Veesenmayer called me into his office. Unlike Lauhusen’s, which occupied a roomy corner overlooking the Landwehr Canal and looked like a gentleman’s study, Veesenmayer’s office was about as cozy as an engine room. On the walls hung a portrait of Hitler and maps of Europe and the Balkans. His desk was stacked neatly with internal reports and a large jar of Pervitin, which he chewed like dinner mints.
He was a specialist on the South Slavs, having written his doctoral thesis on German settler communities in the southern Hapsburg lands during the Balkan Wars. It was amazing how often he found occasion to bring it up in the course of conversation. “The living Völkerkundemuseum of Europe”—that was his vision for the Balkans under future German administration. An outdoor zoo of nearly extinct peoples, where industrious Aryans could go on weekend trips to indulge their curiosity, taste a ćevapčići, wash it down with a raki, watch Serbs in traditional dress dance a kolo, then shoo them back to their mountain dugouts until the next tour bus arrived.
But Veesenmayer was in no mood to discuss the Balkans that morning.
“Sit down,” he said, pretending to look at one of his reports. I noticed it was littered with the telltale orange crumbs of a freshly devoured Vitamult.
I sat.
“As promised, I’ve taken statements from the captain and crew of the U-boat regarding Russell’s death.”
“Yes?”
“And Captain von Stockhausen said something very interesting.” He looked up at me with bloodshot eyes. I noticed he was grinding his teeth.
“Oh?” I said, pretending to suppress a manufactured yawn.
“He distinctly recalled an episode at dinner on the first night where Russell and Pike were arguing—”
“That’s hardly distinct! They bickered every minute they were together.”
“Don’t interrupt. As I was saying, during this particular episode, the captain clearly remembers that Russell called Pike a Jew.”
This caught me off guard. Then I recalled Russell’s gibe about the Marx Brothers, which had triggered the captain’s deluge of Jewish jokes. It had seemed meaningless then, but that was before Pike revealed to me his mother’s ancestry.
“That’s absurd,” I said. “Captain von Stockhausen barely speaks a word of English.”
“It doesn’t take much English to understand when someone is called a Jew.”
“We were talking about the Marx Brothers! Russell called the Marx Brothers Jews, not Pike.”
“Marx certainly was a Jew, as I’m sure his brothers were too. But you have no business discussing him or his Jewish-Bolshevist rot!”
“Not Karl Marx, Herr Standartenführer. The Marx Brothers. They are an American comedy act. They make films.”
“This is all beside the point! What matters is that Captain von Stockhausen has filed an official testimony that Pike is a Jew.”
“Excuse the correction, Standartenführer, but he testifies that he heard Russell call Pike a Jew, which he misheard. But even if he did hear an insult correctly, that does not make Pike a Jew. Surely—”
“Enough! I will not have you calling a captain of the navy a liar. You were the one who recruited Pike as an agent. You were the one who submitted his character assessment. Now tell me, do you have any reason to believe that Frank Pike is a member of the Jewish race?”
