Short stories complete, p.44
Short Stories Complete, page 44
With sudden resolve he switched on the naked bulb, found a pencil and a scrap of wrapping paper and began listing everything he had ever learned about this quarry.
«««
The hero had been young for his mission when Erich Lebe’s fanatic team dispatched him in 1974—only twenty-eight or thereabouts—which meant that Silverthorne would be searching for someone ten real-time years his junior. Bombastic propaganda eulogies had characterized Lustmann as a physicist, a dedicated scientist who had aided and abetted the perfecting of Lebe’s original temporal-transition device. Silverthorne suspected that Lustmann was actually more con man than “physicist.” The sleek, egotistical gloss of the Reichsheld, pictured in every sort of tribute imaginable, bespoke high intelligence, high resolution and an even higher degree of self-satisfaction.
Rumor had it that Lustmann also dabbled in the occult sciences. His official career, after a celebrated return to a world Germany ruled with dazzling thoroughness, had been a checkered affair: four marriages, an international scandal involving a ballerina in Kharkov Gauleitung (officialese had never been able to completely squelch that one) and a dozen dismal dips and rocketing ascents in and out of Party favor, largely because of his lifelong indifference to politics as such. Franz Lustmann had considered himself above mundane matters because of his single heroic escapade.
And his lifestyle had proved his undoing. The underground movement to which Silverthorne belonged had learned that Lustmann’s widely mourned death in 2004 had not really been caused by a stroke. The hero had drunk himself to death, all the while conducting seances for affluent dowagers reading horoscopes and wenching limitlessly—a demise quite unlike that of any other “physicist.”
Which led Silverthorne back to the ever-present enigma: How had Lustmann, alone and friendless, managed to contact the Nazi hierarchy and make his prescient knowledge felt? How had he changed history—the actual mechanics of it? Silverthorne had heard this question debated endlessly; everyone had his pet theory. There was, for instance, the Martin Borman hypothesis that the mysterious, little-known Borman, who had taken Hess’s place as number-two man in Hitler’s inner circle, was actually Franz Lustmann. The other theories he had heard struck Silverthorne as equally absurd.
He undressed quickly in the chilled room and leaped into bed, staring for a long time at the dim ceiling. It did not matter, really, what method Lustmann had used. Finding the man would solve it all. Finding . . . Lustmann. . . .
Awaking refreshed and filled with new energy, he stopped at a bookseller’s shop in Alexander Platz and bought a guidebook entitled BERLIN VON A BIS Z. Each night thereafter, on a sheet of wrapping paper he plotted every major and minor bistro, opera house, theatre, bordello and movie house he could discover either by reference to the guidebook or through scouring Berlin neighborhood by neighborhood. Making his rounds, searching for that unmistakable face in the crowds and reading about the “war” in the newspapers occupied his days. He lived Spartanly, knowing that his current rate of expenditure would exhaust the cash in about one month. The jewelry was a last resort.
Omsley would have been proud of the way he was atemporizing. He found himself using the rich, racy argot of Berlin’s streets with natural ease. Money was “wire,” “moss,” “gravel” or “powder.” Reichsmarks were called “Eier”—eggs—or “Emmchen, a diminutive of the letter “M.” The best tutors by far were the salty-tongued flower women of Leipziger Strasser. Silverthorne handled the blooms disapprovingly, commenting on their withered appearance despite their excessive cost. The fluent dressing-down he received taught him a great deal about the niceties of slanderous abuse.
He spent many evenings at Staats Oper, arriving a full hour before the performance to watch for Lustmann among early comers, buying a standing-room ticket, spending the intermissions prowling about the lobby, then watching again as the opera house emptied. He enjoyed Freischutz, reveled in the contrapuntal magnificence of Meistersinger, almost developed fallen arches during the interminable vocal dialogue of Parsifal and endured a rather indifferent production of Zauberflaute, concluding that Lustmann was not attending the opera.
He next tried sporting events, concerts and even one Nazi rally, with equally disappointing results. The dread notion that Lustmann had not yet arrived in Berlin cropped up increasingly, bringing on periods of gloomy depression. He resolutely pushed the thought away. Nothing in the present course of events seemed any whit different from the official history of World War II he had studied in school.
Silverthorne played endless suppositional games. He put himself in Lustmann’s place, imagining where he would stay, what he might do to occupy his time. Why, there was no real difference between Lustmann and himself. Both were interlopers, strangers in a strange land. But the man had to be here. Lebe would certainly have wanted his man on the scene when hostilities erupted. It would be best, perhaps, if he just took Lustmann’s presence for granted; that would make finding him a simple matter of perseverance, of never giving up.
At the end of the first week in May a despondent James Silverthorne was consulting his guidebook in a postal sub-station writing room near the Berlin Zoo. He glanced up as a tall man entered, then looked away quickly, forgetting to breathe.
When he dared look again, the man had seated himself in a cane-backed chair. Hand propped to forehead, he was busily addressing an envelope.
Was it Lustmann? Silverthorne was not certain. He rose silently, passing behind the tall man on his way to the door. A hasty glance gave him the impression of florid German cursive written in green ink. He fled the postal sub-station, having no intention of allowing his suspected quarry a look at his face.
Silverthorne hurried to the end of the block, crossed with the light and came back abreast of the postal station’s entrance. He folded his arms across his chest to calm the trembling.
The instant the angular, rather spare figure wearing a well-tailored camels-hair topcoat appeared in the doorway, all of Silverthorne’s doubt vanished. The aquiline nose, rather prognathous jaw and dirty-blond hair firmed his conviction.
Heart pounding, he began to trail Lustmann, stopping once while the man paused to light a cigarette and survey the few pedestrians walking behind him. A very cautious man, Lustmann, Silverthorne could not imagine why he was concerned about being followed.
Lustmann led him several blocks on foot before opening a bright red letterbox—one of five thousand or so in Berlin proper—and posting an envelope. Noting the cross streets, Silverthorne continued his discreet shadowing.
They turned into Unter den Linden. Surprisingly Lustmann crossed the boulevard and mounted the steps of the swank Hotel Adlon. Why not? A gentleman of Lustmann’s sensibilities could not be expected to stay just anywhere.
Picking his way across the swastika-bannered thoroughfare, Silverthorne paused behind a parked car. Yes, there was cautious, careful Franz Lustmann peering from a lobby window.
When the tall man finally quit the window, Silverthorne ran up the steps and pushed his way through the glass door, sitting down on a leather settee behind a marble pillar and feeling rather out of place in the sumptuous lobby. Lustmann was at the desk. A clerk reached up and took a key from the pegboard, passing it over to him with a smile.
Silverthorne waited until the lift doors closed behind Lustmann, then sauntered past the desk. The clerk was now sorting mail and since it was shortly after the luncheon hour, most guests would surely be out. Only three empty pegs remained in the uppermost row; two on the left but only one on the right where the clerk had taken down Lustmann’s key.
Silverthorne left the Hotel Adlon walking on air. Franz Lustmann was a guest in room 612. The long odds against Silverthorne’s chances for success were diminishing rapidly. He retraced his steps toward the mailbox where his quarry had posted the letter. Mail pick-ups were made four times daily during the week. Silverthorne walked fast.
When he rounded the comer, he saw that a postman was reaching out to unlock the letterbox. The man looked startled to see someone dash up to him, heavily out of breath.
“Pardon me . . . sir. Just this moment I posted a letter and I . . . think it was incorrectly addressed. Would it be too much to ask . . . may I check the address?”
The postman squinted suspiciously. “That’s most irregular, sir. I’d lose my job if I allowed anyone to tamper with—”
“No, no!” Silverthorne said quickly. “I won’t even touch the letter. I only want to make certain the street number is correct. It’s written in . . . green ink. You can’t miss it.” Silverthorne folded a Reichsmark note in the palm of his hand.
The postman blinked, then made it disappear. “I suppose we can do that much for a regular customer,” he said pleasantly. “Green ink. . . . Oh! Can this be it, mein Herr?”
Silverthorne locked the address in his mind. “My friend,” he said in a disguested tone, “I’ve bothered you for nothing. The address is exactly as it should be.”
The postman shrugged. “Then everyone’s happy, no?”
“Everyone. Be sure to have a few beers on your way home from work and forget your troubles. Vielen danke.”
“Any time.”
He headed for the nearest bus stop. The letter had been addressed to one Zoltan—no last name—at a street number somewhere in the Wilmersdorf district. It probably meant nothing but he intended to check it out nevertheless.
«««
Silverthorne got off the buss and walked five blocks through an unfashionable section of Wilversdorf. The buildings and streets looked indefinably seedy, as though frequented by less-than-affluent citizens. He passed a delicatessen whose boarded shop windows partially concealed shattered glass. A crude Star of David daubed on the padlocked door told a mute story.
He spotted Zoltan’s sign upon turning the corner at the end of the block, chuckling in self-deprecation. The Great Zoltan, it seemed, was a “world-famous” astrologer.
His establishment’s sign was festooned with zodiacal arcana and capped with a mystical Persian Eye. Lustmann’s letter had sent him chasing rainbows. The “physicist” was undoubtedly even here following his preoccupation with the occult, amusing himself with horoscopes and such nonsense. Good! It meant he would have less time to devote to his mission.
He continued past Zoltan’s place out of curiosity. The window was opaqued. A poster featuring a bearded, turbaned man who glared at the world with hostile intensity was bounded by a catch-phrase almost lost in a forest of exclamation points: “!!!!! the ancient art CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE!!!!!”
Bemused and disappointed, he caught a bus back to Unter den Linden where he stood across from the Hotel Adlon for several hours, reading Volkischer Beobachter while covertly scanning the hotel’s steps. At eight-thirty he gave up and went to his lonely room to think. It had been a productive day; he was happily weary.
But something nibbled at his subconscious all evening, something just beyond range of his mind’s peripheral vision. Whatever it was, he could not seem to focus on it or bring it to the surface. He went to bed early to escape the chill and lay staring into the darkness, revolving strategies, examining theories, suspecting this, discarding that.
Sometime in the wee hours he awoke with a start, crying, “. . . or History!” Leaving the bed in a single bound, Silverthorne began to pace the frigid room, smashing fist into open palm, uttering short, benedictive profanities in four languages.
It fit! By God, it fit! “The Ancient Art can Change your Life,” he muttered. Could Lustmann have actually . . .?
No, no. It was all too damned farfetched. Or was it? For some reason, he knew he had found the answer, unbelievable though it might be: Lustmann was actually playing the role of seer in carrying out Erich Lebe’s fantastic scheme to alter the course of history!
Unable to sleep, Silverthorne watched the dawn that morning—a gloomy gray light seeping through heavy clouds—before once again taking up his post outside the Hotel Adlon.
Twice he shifted to the center mall of Unter den Linden and then to spots farther down the avenue. It would never do for the suspicious Lustmann to tag him as a loiterer. At one o’clock, having learned every word of the May 8th Beobachter by rote, he gave up and had a skimpy lunch. His money was draining away at an alarming rate; he would have to pinch every Pfennig from now on.
The morning’s unproductive vigil left him with a sour taste in his mouth. He had hoped to tail Lustmann and find a connecting link between reality and the outrageous “false prophet” conjecture that yesterday’s letter had generated.
But the “physicist” seemed to be sticking close to his room. Silverthorne decided, after arguing the matter with himself, to reconnoiter the Great Zoltan’s astrology parlor—and to be damned careful how he went about it.
He strolled about for an hour, then returned to his room and spruced himself up, combing his hair, which badly needed trimming, and rubbing the worst scuff marks from the second-hand shoes.
He got off the bus in Wilversdorf and found a pawnshop, where he haggled over a pair of diamond earrings from the handful of jewelry he had carried into the past, amazed to receive one-third more than his estimate of their worth.
Feeling better with money in his pocket once again, he walked the four blocks to Zoltan’s place, finding a glistening black Mercedes sedan drawn up at the curb. The auto was conspicuous, utterly out of place on the sleazy street. He walked past it to the comer and then turned. The Mercedes had a polished, military aspect about it, although the license tab was civilian.
He returned speculatively and paused. Zoltan’s door had no bell. He inched it open—it moved easily, silently—until he could slip through into a reception room hung with musty-smelling red draperies. A crystal ball, like a giant’s teardrop, lay on a badly marred walnut desk. A fearsome poster of the Great Zoltan plying his art leered insolently from the wall.
Silverthorne closed the door with painstaking care. Low voices were filtering toward him from beyond the draped doorway that led to the rear of the shop. He stood deadstill, listening.
“—and you yourself did not read the letter, I suppose?” The testy voice was laden with sarcasm.
“I . . . no, no! It came in yesterday’s four o’clock post, mein Herr. I called your office immediately, just as I have always done.” Silverthorne made note of the accent—Hungarian, or possibly Romanian.
“Patience, Kurt,” advised a more cultured voice. “Herr Zoltan has been most cooperative. I’m certain he will continue to be. Won’t you, Herr Zoltan?”
“Oh, but naturally, sir.”
“There, you see, Kurt? The reason I’ve come personally to talk with you today, Herr Zoltan, is that this madness has gotten completely out of hand. When whoever signs himself ‘A Friend of the Reich’ first began his astounding predictions, everyone considered him a mere crank, nothing more.
“But when he precisely defined the terms of the Munich Pact—even before Prime Minister Chamberlain flew to Berchtesgaden—foretold our co-existence treaty with the USSR and the spineless antics of the British and French when we liberated the Sudetenland, annexed Austria, and liberated Czechoslovakia, the Führer himself became a devoted admirer. In fact, I once chanced to be in his presence when he remarked that ‘great minds think alike.’ Amusing, Herr Zoltan? Or don’t you think so?”
“Star-gazing nonsense!” said the one called Kurt.
After a short, weighty silence, die smooth voice continued. “That may or may not be the case; we shall see. An any rate, Herr Zoltan, this ‘Friend of the Reich’ is beginning to have an unsettling effect upon the very foreign policy of our state. Indeed, Nostradamus pales beside such monumental prophecies. Our ‘friend’ predicted the lull beginning last fall, explaining that the Franco-British alliance would ‘project various offensive schemes it lacked the muscle to execute.’ He accurately named names and Wehrmacht deployments to the regimental level—their then-current positions.
“He told us, and I quote: ‘Germany will not attack Belgium in November, nineteen thirty-nine, as planned, greatly disappointing The Leader, but will wait propitiously until spring, nineteen forty, then strike where a strike is least expected.’ Last month, Herr Zoltan, Norway fell.”
“Ausserordentlich!”
“Actually that is something of an understatement. It is uncanny, crossing all boundaries of mere fortunetelling. The man has been one thousand per cent correct in his predictions.”
The sound of labored breathing emanated from beyond the curtained doorway. James Silverthorne listened, entranced.
“No, do not be afraid,” the silken voice went on. “I plan to make you privy to the contents of yesterday’s letter in the interest of learning more about this ‘great art’ of yours, Herr Zoltan. But do not let your tongue become careless. Should you disclose a single syllable of what I am about to tell you, we will have your skin taken off one square centimeter at a time. Understood?”
An appealing, blubbering sound formed Zoltan’s assurance.
“Excellent, Herr Zoltan! That’s settled. Now I shall skip the usual gibberish, if gibberish it be, concerning Saturn being in the Sun’s second house and so forth. You may pretend to understand all of that nattering if you wish. I do not.
“Let’s see . . . ah, here we are: ‘In the early hours of May tenth, Army Group ‘B,’ namely von Küchler’s Eighteenth Army, striking quickly across the Peel Line, will push Winkelman’s Army of the Netherlands back to the Dyle Line, while von Reichenau’s Sixth Army advances across the Belgian frontier with huge success. Von Leeb’s Army Group ‘C’ will feint an attack on the Maginot defenses, pinning down over forty French divisions, which will allow von Rundstedt’s Army Group ‘A,’ led by General Guderian’s seven armored division, to crash through the forest of the Ardennes.’
