The torqued man, p.14
The Torqued Man, page 14
Finn McCool in the Bowels of Teutonia
18
Writer of Deeds
Wagner’s death was reported two weeks later in the Völkischer Beobachter. His body had washed up on the banks of the Havel in Potsdam, but it was not listed as a murder.
Finn felt ambivalent about this. On the one hand, he wanted to see his deeds written in print. To see the Nazi press quake in its jackboots. On the other hand, if the Reichsärzteführer’s death really had been ruled an accident, then Finn was free to keep lashing away unsuspected until the bodies piled up.
Perhaps the corpse had decomposed too much in the water for the authorities to see that he’d been gutted. Or, as was likelier the case, they didn’t want to stoke the public’s already palpable fear about the spike in murders since the blackout had been imposed. The S-Bahn Murderer was still on the loose, and there were rumors that another mass killer was prowling the streets of Prenzlauer Berg, though the press was loath to use that term.
“Mass murderers were a symptom of the decadent Weimar regime,” said the Torqued Man one day when the topic of crime arose. “It would be a logical contradiction, you see, if the hygienic racial state of the new Germany was afflicted with the same social disease.”
They were in the beer cellar in Schöneberg town hall. It had been several weeks since he’d descended the Ratskeller steps.
“Speaking of the new Germany, your friend Archibald Crean seems to be an enthusiast of our regime.”
“Oh, I suppose. Though we don’t really talk politics.”
“He’s a curious sort of chap, isn’t he?”
“Yes, curious indeed,” said Finn.
“But you seem to enjoy his company. . . .”
“Oh, sure. He’s good for a laugh, and that head of his is just teeming with epic. He’s always going on about red knights in Parzifal and green knights in Arthurian romances—why, he knows about knights in every bleedin’ color of the rainbow.”
“You know, I enjoy talking about literature too. It’s been months since we’ve really discussed books.”
“Far too long,” he said, sensing the Torqued Man’s jealousy.
“And how is your own writing going?”
“Slowly, but it’s good to be back in the saddle. Except of course when it’s miserable, which is damn near all the time.” In truth he hadn’t yet written a word.
“I think I’ve said it before, but I should be happy to read anything, even if it’s in a rough state.”
“Very kind of you,” said Finn.
“If you don’t mind my inquiring, and I promise I’ll stop hounding you after this, what is your story about?”
“It’s about a murderer on the loose in Berlin.”
“Ah, a pulp novel,” said the Torqued Man, whose cheery reply was unable to conceal the disappointment of a snob. “And who are the victims?”
“Doctors.”
The Torqued Man looked surprised, even a bit alarmed. “Why doctors?”
He shrugged.
“Surely your killer must have a motive.”
Finn leaned across the table. “Justice.”
19
journal
January 9, 1944
The Haus des Rundfunks, a futuristic fortress near the Grunewald, looked as though it were being overtaken by a fungus from the neighboring woods. Camouflage netting hung down the sides, and false trees and shrubs sprouted from its roof.
Hartmann met me in a lobby lacquered yellow and black and with a reverent Japanese air. He led me to the sanctum of studios at the center and introduced me to the group that had gathered to watch Pike’s first broadcast.
“Everyone, this is Mr. Finn’s associate, Emil Fluss, attaché to the Spanish Embassy,” said Hartmann. He still had that same suppressed smile he had displayed two weeks earlier at tea.
The first to turn and shake my hand was Crean. “Come to spy on your friend, have you, Fluss?”
I had not expected to see him there. I mustered a fake laugh at what was likely an innocuous joke, though part of me wondered if he was speaking code.
“I’ve never had a chance to see a live radio recording,” I replied, “and leapt at the chance when Herr Finn invited me.”
In truth, I had invited myself. After all, it was my professional obligation to make sure Pike’s new endeavor did not conflict with his duties to us. Also, I was hoping to catch a glimpse of Wodehouse. Pike said he’d run into him at the station during his apprenticeship, and I considered myself a fan. But, while there were plenty of clueless characters about, there was no sign of the punch-stained novelist.
“It’s always edifying to see how the sausage is made,” said a strabismal man with a red dragon pinned to his lapel. “Usually takes people a few goes before they learn how to speak on the air.”
“Don’t mind Bevan here,” said Crean. “Finn’ll be grand. Pretty soon he’ll be teaching us a thing or two.”
“Us?” I asked.
“Ah, did Finn not tell you? I’m on the Redaktion as well.”
I immediately regretted having consented to this radio nonsense. I also felt a tinge of bitterness toward Pike for omitting any mention of Crean. It was clearly strategic, designed to manipulate me, for had I known Crean was involved with the Irland-Redaktion, I never would have let him join.
“I hadn’t been on German soil three weeks,” said Crean, “before Hartmann sniffed me out and asked me to come aboard. The man can smell Irish blood within a fifty-mile radius.”
I asked Crean what he spoke about on air.
“Casement’s my man. Roger Casement. Do you know him? Our patriotic saint and Teutophile? Victim of the treacherous English, who forged documents of filth to denigrate his character and perverted all rules of punctuation so they could hang him for treason?”
Of course I knew all about Casement’s alleged diaries, detailing his sexual conquests of young men while on philanthropy missions abroad. And the only reason I knew was because Crean never tired of bringing it up. Even more maddening was that each time, he acted like it was the first. “Yes,” I said. “You’ve mentioned you were writing a book on the subject. . . .”
“Well, it’s all rubbish, those diaries. Pure concoction,” said Crean, ignoring my hint that this was well-trod conversational terrain. Then, leaning in close and nudging me with his elbow, he said, “Though they make for a titillating read if you like them long and thick.”
I ignored Crean’s innuendo—or was it an insinuation?—and greeted the others. These consisted of a fiery Irish redhead named Rosaleen Lynch, whose searching eyes searched in vain for signs of my being attracted to her, and a gangly ogre of an American Irishman named William Joyce. The latter seized my hand with such violence that he nearly ripped my arm out of joint.
“Spanish Embassy, did you say? What’s doing in Spain these days? Franco still putting his house in order?”
Joyce spoke with an absurd Etonian affectation and had a scar that ran from temple to chin, as though his face had been peeled off and a new one stitched in its place.
“As I see it, there’s no punishment too severe for those damn reds. Burning churches, raping nuns—it’s sickening. Absolutely sickening. He ought to put every single red against the wall and be done with it.”
I assured him Franco was carrying out his wishes to the letter.
The politics of the Irland-Redaktion broadcasters seemed as motley and unsavory as their personalities. Rosaleen Lynch was an actress who had come to Germany in search of fame and stayed for the anti-Semitism. William Joyce seemed, like all the best Nazis, to have been forged in the crucible of failure, impotent rage, and oratory talent. He’d been a fascist under Oswald Mosley in England and had followed the scent to Berlin. He was the man behind the obnoxious persona of Lord Haw-Haw, whose “Germany Calling” was attempting to defeat English morale through mockery. He was also, despite being a fierce Unionist, the voice of another persona on the Irish broadcast, called Patrick Cadogan. Bevan, as far as I could tell, was a Welsh nationalist who shared Hartmann’s enthusiasm for arcane languages. Crean liked to think he was unpolitical and saw things with the detached gaze of a scholar. He supported a unified Ireland, of course, though as an unbelieving Protestant. And he seemed to think a new world order under Hitler would be good for Geist and Kultur and bad for soulless materialism. Then there was Pike. What in God’s name was he doing here?
I waved to him in the booth. He looked surprised to see me but returned my smile. He then looked to Hartmann and the sound engineer for his cue, leaned toward the microphone, and began his broadcast.
With the exception of Hartmann, none of us onlookers spoke Irish. Crean, fraud that he was, had only a smattering of phrases. But we were rapt all the same at the sound of Pike’s voice. It was warm and melodious, as authoritative as it was playful.
All I was able to decipher in the cascade of foreign words was the announcement of his name. Pike had told me earlier he’d decided to broadcast under the moniker Finn McCool. When I asked him why that name, he was, as usual, shocked by my ignorance of Irish culture.
“Finn McCool, my impoverished friend, is the original broth of a bhoy, the Urquelle of all our incorrigible roguery. The legendary hunter at the heart of the Fenian myth cycle, with a chest as ample as two hillocks, a back as broad as a limestone cliff, teeth like boulders, and a hunting horn as shapely as a Saracen’s scimitar. He leads the Fianna, a band of wandering woodsmen and misfits. Together, Finn and his Fianna rove the land, seeking revenge for the wronged and working their way out of tough scrapes. He is the antihero’s hero. No posture too degrading, no disguise too unmanly for Finn, whose dignity as a scoundrel, liar, and cheat is unassailable. But, cunning and rough-hewn though he may be, utterly unlearned in the refinements of the court, Finn remains a loyal servant to the high king of Erin. What’s more, he is infinitely wise. Having eaten of the salmon of wisdom, he needs but suck his thumb to know his destiny.”
“And where does that destiny lead him?” I asked.
Finn stuck his thumb in his mouth, then pondered its flavor.
“To death, my dear Fluss—where else? But, first, the radio.”
Pike was not the only one seducing souls over the airwaves that summer. At the end of June, Goebbels had announced the war with Russia, presenting it as an act of self-defense against the “conspiracy of the Jewish-Anglo-Saxon warmongers and Jewish power-holders of the Bolshevik Center in Moscow.” I could hear in his phrase-mongering the sound of a language being raped and abused, and yet I felt a strange compulsion toward it. I hadn’t been back in Germany a year, and yet it was already impossible to imagine a day that did not begin with this town crier screaming his lies through the Bakelite aperture into my kitchen.
Was there really ever life without a Volksempfänger? Memories of the many years I spent drinking my morning coffee without an accompanying stream of sonic poison feel fraudulently pastoral. And now, as I hunker in my cellar, surrounded by concrete, that detestable voice with its litany of propaganda is something of a grotesque comfort. It is a daily call to indignation and despair and sustains me in my opposition.
Finn McCool in the Bowels of Teutonia
20
Baiting the Trap
And this was the manner by which Finn ensnared his next fiendish doctor.
He stepped out of the Hamburger Bahnhof on a fine summer day alive with war. The city echoed with the collective, barely stifled groan of Berliners as they were led deeper into a future with less food and more dead sons. But it was the sound of a people who knew how to turn that groan into an official, bloodthirsty cheer.
He could also hear millions of knots coming untangled across Europe as the Teutonians invaded Rusland and the poles of ideology returned to alignment, the past two years of tail-swallowing sophistry and hypocrisy promptly forgotten. The right was once again saving Europe from Bolshevist barbarism, and the left was back to fighting for humanity against barbaric fascism. But Finn had long since freed himself from the pull of polarity. He didn’t need Stalin’s approval, or the Anglelanders’ for that matter, to kill fascists. As he would show the president of the Red Cross that afternoon, all he needed was the knife in his pocket.
He’d realized the hunting would prove a far cry easier if he knew what his man looked like. So he proceeded down his list to a new target:
Grawitz, Ernst-Robert
—President, German Red Cross
—Physician of the Reich
—Gruppenführer, SS
—Commissioner, Reich Work Community of Sanitoria and Nursing Homes
Sufficiently bigwig from the looks of it, but what really sold Finn on him was that, according to the back pages of the Völkischer Beobachter, Dr. Grawitz would be giving a public talk at the Charité hospital on “The Disease of Homosexuality and How to Cure It.” Not only would he get a proper look at his man’s face; he would get to hear the doctor’s thoughts on a subject he himself had some truck with.
As Finn saw it, perversion was one of the sublime endowments of humanity, and we should erect monuments and hold festivals in its honor. The whys and wherefores of how blood flowed into one’s prick were as natural as the hair growing out of his head. He was thus all the more curious what catholicon the good doctor would propose. Surely something sophisticated and humane, like chopping off a man’s testicles and scooping out a chunk of brain. “Good news, Frau Schmidt! Your son’s a vegetative gelding, but we’ve cured him of his sexual perversion!”
The Charité campus was a brick city unto itself. A veritable medicopolis. The southeastern quarter was in ruins from last year’s bombing, with the rubble piled in orderly, oven-like heaps. It was remarkable, thought Finn, how structures not forty years old could so quickly be transformed to look like ancient ziggurats or burial mounds of a forgotten race.
He arrived just before the lecture began and took an aisle seat near the front. He wanted to get a good look at his man. Finn was in his visiting scholar’s guise: clean-shaven and in a tweed suit that was too warm for Teutonian summer but suitable for stowing arms. The hall was packed, almost exclusively by men, save for a row of sexless nurses and a handful of worried mothers. Likely with sons at home who studied their Plato a bit too intensely and had an unnatural enthusiasm for the flute.
After some introductory gushing by the hospital director, Dr. Grawitz mounted the lectern. He was just as Finn had imagined him: ramrod straight and as hungry for a prick as a Friedrichstraße rent boy. You could see by his pinched face that every sweat drop of his being was directed at suppressing the endless parade of tight-trousered sailors that marched through his mind every minute of the day. Even his mustache looked like a piece of heavy tape to prevent his lip from forming the fellatial O to which it was inclined.
The doctor, dressed in his SS uniform, tugged at his collar—no doubt to let out some of the excess semen backed up in his throat—and in a choked voice began:
“Meine Damen und Herren, it is a pleasure to speak to you this afternoon. Before I delve into the topic of today’s lecture, I’d like to say just a few words about the age in which we are living. . . .
“As you know, Germany is locked in a war for her survival, and we have now turned our attention to the Bolshevist threat in the east. War, with its vitalizing, purifying effects on the race, brings innovation—in technology as well as knowledge. Thanks to German science and medicine, we are rapidly learning how to perfect the human machine. We already have pills that will keep us fresh and alert for days. Coffee that has been cleansed of its harmful toxins. And delicious snacks that supply us with nourishing vitamins.
“But, ladies and gentlemen, this is just the beginning. Our campaign in the east will at last give us a complete understanding of racial science and the precipitating causes of humanity’s most dangerous pathogen: the Jewish-Bolshevistic parasite. I foresee an age in the not-too-distant future of our Thousand-Year Reich of a German people living in a world free of disease. I am honored to say that one of my duties as Reichsarzt is to oversee and coordinate this new empire of experimentation. We will be bold, we will be ruthless, and we will be victorious!”
Here the audience of doctors broke into what they deemed suitably enthusiastic applause.
“It is in that spirit that I am excited to share with you a new cure for a disease that has too long afflicted our nation, especially here in Berlin. . . .”
And so Dr. Grawitz began to remind his audience of the horrors of homosexuality, priming them for the moment he unveiled his wonder cure. The cure, as it turned out, was a simple procedure in which the hormone glands of an ox were surgically inserted into the groin of the patient. Within a matter of weeks, the foreign matter was absorbed into the endocrine system, the testes were reconstituted, and—voilà!—the patient was freed from his perverse impulses.
Finn thought he might like to “reconstitute” the doctor’s own testes and see where that left him.
A brief question period followed, mostly filled with groveling compliments for the speaker’s pioneering treatment. A mother raised eyebrows, though, when she asked whether a hormone implant could really solve the problem of something so metaphysical as a perverted will. The doctors in the audience all laughed.
“Madame,” replied Grawitz, “the will is an outdated shorthand for a complex but knowable set of biochemical reactions occurring within the body of the organism. What you call ‘will’ is simply a concatenation of hormonal secretions dictated by the constraints of heredity and environment. So, in short, the answer to your question is yes. Hormone implants render metaphysics obsolete.”
A fellow doctor then stood and raised his hand. “Herr Doktor Grawitz, surely you are familiar with the fraudulent work of the Bolshevik-Jewish-homosexual Hirschfeld, who, before our glorious national revolution, disgraced Berlin with his tawdry Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. It is well known that he performed similar operations using hormonal implants to alter and regulate sexual character. Could you say a few words to explain how your procedure is different, as I’m sure it is, from that of the degenerate Hirschfeld?”
