My Enemy's Enemy, page 4
It would not have been enough to play dead in the stream. So long as he lived, his body heat would silhouette him on overhead thermal imagery. He would be easily distinguished from a corpse, which would quickly cool to its surroundings’ temperature.
Fleeing, and so becoming a moving target, meant certain death. But weakened by injuries, freezing as the water coursed around him and sucked away his body heat, staying put was scarcely better.
However, as the Sheik had said, his cause was just. God was with him. God had spared him from the blast, and now from the drone’s further predation.
The fog of shock, and the numbing anesthesia of the freezing water, mercifully dulled his pain. As consciousness faded he realized that if God chose to bring rain, or snow, and flood this stream, he would drown, trapped beneath this ledge.
Had God spared him from the blast to serve a greater purpose? Or merely to grant him a peaceful death? Soon enough the Asp would learn which.
He tugged the knapsack close against his torso for insulation, then closed his eyes.
* * *
Seven weeks after the Asp had evaded the Paki damage assessment party, sent overland for on-ground evaluation of the drone strike, his ankle merely throbbed.
The twelve-hundred-kilometer journey from Pakistan’s former Tribal Areas to the port of Karachi could be covered by automobile in one or two long days. But security, not speed, was his priority. And he required intervals of rest to heal. He relied more upon local buses than upon the sometimes policed trains. Even though True Islam still had many friends in Pakistan, not least among those who enforced its laws.
A friendly orthopedist, who treated the infection created when the Asp had amputated his own, frostbitten, left small toe, had dismissed the broken arm as a closed fracture of the ulnar shaft. It was, he had said, an injury familiar to Paki physicians. It occurred when common thieves, and also demonstrators, shielded their faces from nightsticks swung by the police. The orthopedist had also amputated another frostbitten toe from the Asp’s left foot.
Today the healed “night-stick fracture” remained fragile enough that the Asp towed his rolling suitcase using his uninjured arm. A slight limp, caused by his diminished left foot, remained for the moment. It would, God willing, heal soon enough.
This part of Karachi’s East Wharf, along Chinna Creek, smelled of rot and creosote in the humid sea air. But its pavement made for easier walking than the rocky mountain trails he had sometimes resorted to during his journey.
Still, he paused fifty meters from the freighter’s gangway, both winded and to assess the unexpected next obstacle to his progress.
The Quran counseled patience and frugality’s virtues. But the primary reason he had avoided air travel was to avoid the heightened security that accompanied it.
He had already purchased two serviceable false passports, from a forger in Karachi. Based on the first of these, and on one-way passage paid in full, and in cash, he had been issued a passenger’s port photo ID. The tag allowed him to pass onto this wharf. His pass would allow him to do the same at intermediate ports of call, if he chose.
The bereted public servant who loitered at the gangway’s base was a cargo inspector. He had no reason or jurisdiction to interfere with a passenger, properly documented or not. But he wore a walkie-talkie on his broad belt. The Asp had no desire to contest his authority and invite scrutiny.
As at most ports, vessels that called at Karachi carried, in addition to freight, a handful of passengers. He had booked passage on this break-bulk forty thousand DWT vessel because of its unflattering online photos of its three passenger cabins.
More particularly, he had booked it because those photos probably accounted for the fact that all three cabins remained un-booked, just one day before sailing. His voyage’s purpose was not to make new friends among fellow passengers.
Sailing time was in one hour. The cargo inspector no doubt reasoned that the ship’s sole passenger would be along directly.
The Asp donned plain-glass reading spectacles, extracted his leather-bound copy of the Quran from his case’s front pocket, and approached the gangway with the book open, as though he were reading.
When he reached the gangway, he flashed his photo ID, suspended from the lanyard he wore around his neck.
The cargo inspector stepped between the Asp and the gangway.
The Asp stopped, heart pounding, and looked up at the inspector’s mustachioed frown. “Is there a problem, Inspector?”
The cargo inspector didn’t answer. He simply pointed toward the Asp’s Quran. “That is a beautiful edition. May I admire it more closely?”
The Asp handed it across.
When the inspector returned the book, the rupee notes that had formed his bookmark were gone.
It was a silly dance, but an ordinary one outside the First World. Minor government officials were routinely paid less than living wages. They were expected to make up the difference by extracting gratuities. For doing the things that the law required them to do anyway. More enterprising officials, like this one, extracted a bit extra, for not doing things that were none of their business in the first place.
For the Asp, this exercise’s upshot was reassurance that, during this adventure, forgers’ shortcomings could usually be remediated by folding money.
Suitably compensated, the cargo inspector smiled. “First freighter voyage?”
“Yes.”
“Do you speak Chinese?”
The Asp shook his head.
The inspector jerked a thumb at the rust-streaked black hull that rose behind him. “The captain speaks no Urdu or Pashto. Don’t be alarmed when he demands your passport. It’s normal. He’ll return it to you when you leave the ship in Shanghai.”
“I know.”
When the Asp disembarked in Shanghai, he would destroy this set of identity documents anyway. He would depart Shanghai with new documents better suited to the roles he intended to assume. Commercial hubs like Shanghai hosted expansive communities of competent, reliable providers and modifiers of documents, stolen or forged. Several such providers appeared on the Sheik’s list.
According to what the Asp had read online before booking this cabin, none of this vessel’s crew spoke Urdu or Pashto. Another privacy bonus.
The cargo inspector smiled once more and snapped off a salute as he left. “May God grant you gentle seas, fair winds, and a successful journey.”
* * *
Seas, winds, and unflattering photos aside, the Asp’s cabin was a plain but clean metal box. So many years removed from his upper-class childhood, he now found the accommodation sinfully luxurious.
A single bed, dressed in white Egyptian cotton, would be changed weekly. A rectangular porthole, and en suite bathing facilities, would pamper him as he healed. And he would rebuild his strength in the ship’s “gymnasium,” a space scarcely bigger than a market stall in the Khan-el-Khalili.
He removed his laptop from his wheeled case, then plugged it in to charge at the cabin’s small writing desk. Freighters offered passengers no internet connection, and he would have avoided one’s insecurity anyway.
He faced toward Mecca, removed his prayer rug from his bag, prostrated himself on the cabin floor, and completed the afternoon prayer.
After prayers, the cabin’s deck plates shuddered beneath his feet as the ship’s engines stirred. He sat at the desk, started up the laptop, then scrolled through the reading list of two hundred fifty-six books and videos that he had downloaded.
He needed no book to teach him that Islam’s enemies were the Jew, and the Godless states the Jew manipulated. What he needed to know more about were the Jews’ other enemies. One enemy in particular. Because this quest, upon which he was embarked, depended on the proposition that the enemy of one’s enemy was one’s friend.
The twenty-one-day voyage to Shanghai afforded him the gift of time to understand the past. The past was immutable, but without understanding it he could not confirm which truth confronted him in the present. Nor could he utilize that truth to devise a plan to shape the future in a manner pleasing to God.
He selected an appropriate volume, then studied until aches in his leg and forearm broke his concentration. He pushed his chair back, stretched, and peered out his porthole at the darkness that had fallen.
Facts were necessary. So, too, historians’ opinions. And maps, black-and-white photographs, and jerky, grainy newsreel films, viewed on a laptop’s screen. The Asp’s study of such things, and thereafter his action taken, based upon it all, would, God willing, bring forth God’s great fist.
But the Asp wished that, instead of darkness, he could see back through time to where it had begun. In the decadent tumult of the Weimar Republic.
PART II
I still [in 1974] wear the Iron Cross with diamonds Hitler gave me…The real guilt [is] that we lost.
—Hanna Reitsch, “Germany’s Amelia Earhart.” Presented a poison vial by Adolf Hitler, in his bunker April 26, 1945. Died August 24, 1979.
If some day we are compelled to leave the scene of history, we will slam the door so hard that the universe will shake.
—Joseph Goebbels, German Minister of Propaganda. Appointed successor Chancellor of Germany by Hitler, April 30, 1945. Cremated the following day in the bunker’s courtyard. Alongside his wife, after they poisoned their six children, then themselves.
Three
“I can’t believe they ignored a Duesenberg!” Rachel Bergman’s brother, Jacob, snapped his eyes away from the two flappers on the sidewalk. Pouting, he clenched his hands on the steering wheel as he drove.
Rachel peered over her shoulder at the girls receding behind them. They were older than she was, probably twenty, but affected the same cloche hat, spit curls, and short hem uniform that she did. An odd way, it suddenly struck her, for 1928’s modern woman to assert her individuality and independence.
She rolled her eyes at her big brother. “What they ignored was a pimple-faced eighteen-year-old Jew driving his uncle’s car. Jacob, the thing that interests or disinterests a modern woman about an automobile is its driver.”
To be fair, Uncle Max’s pale gray dreadnought interested the very devil out of Rachel Bergman. Not so much because it did turn most heads, or because it smoothed Munich’s ancient cobbles into silk, but because it was as American as The Great Gatsby.
Jacob snorted. “You weren’t old enough to drink beer until this morning. What does a sixteen-year-old child know about what interests a modern woman?”
“I know that the modern woman we dropped off Uncle Max to meet is a gentile, a divorcee, who bobs her hair, and carries cocaine powder in her compact so she can sprinkle it on the mirror. Also she will probably sleep with him after dinner, to get her loan approved.”
“What?”
“Mother told Father when they didn’t know I was listening. Mother did not approve.”
Jacob parked the Duesy a block from the beer hall, helped her from the car, and they walked together as the dusk deepened.
He said, “You know this is still blackmail under the law. Blood relation to the victims is no excuse.”
“Jacob don’t be an idiot. You’re not a lawyer yet. You’re escorting your sister out for beer on her sixteenth birthday. Uncle Max snuck you out under Father’s nose the same way on your sixteenth birthday.”
“And you threatened that you would tell Father that he did.”
“I did not. I merely suggested the three of us ask Father whether his daughter and son should be treated equally.”
“Equally? Ha! Hell will freeze before Father lets me get away with half what you do.”
“No.”
“Yes! You’ve been getting away with everything for so long that you think you always will. You think that mere reality can never defeat you.”
Rachel narrowed her eyes. “Are you saying there’s something wrong with that?”
* * *
The Hofbräuhaus am Platzl had stood unchanged in Munich for so many centuries that Mozart had drunk beer in it. But Rachel had never been inside before. She would have preferred a smoky jazz cabaret, like the one where Uncle Max and his divorcee were drinking gin, and doing whatever one did with cocaine powder. But hard liquor remained, officially at least, years in a sixteen-year-old’s future.
The Hofbrau’s vaulted plaster ceilings, painted with floral murals, canopied a pillared cavern of a hall that on busy nights accommodated three thousand. Early on this June weeknight a few hundred scattered customers dotted the benches that lined the cavern’s long wooden tables.
Not that the place was quiet. A lederhosen-clad brass band, on a central, elevated stage belted out Bavarian drinking music. So loudly that the lager rippled in the glass steins of customers seated near the stage.
Jacob led her past the stage, found them an empty table away from the noise, and after they sat asked, “What did Father say to Mother when she tattled about Uncle Max’s divorcee?”
Rachel scowled and growled, imitating Sheldon Bergman. “Well, someone has to examine her collateral.”
Her brother laughed.
A pigtailed blonde bar maid with blacksmith’s biceps dropped off two liter steins of lager, from the eight she carried.
Jacob and Rachel clinked steins, then he sipped.
Rachel gulped, then she looked away and blinked, so her brother couldn’t see her eyes water. A sip would have been more prudent.
Jacob furrowed his brow. “You swill that stuff like you’ve done it before. Has somebody been examining your collateral?”
She raised her chin. “This is 1928. Men don’t tell women how to drink beer. Or with whom to drink it. You’re stodgier than Father.”
They sat and listened while the music blared and thumped.
Bavaria was home. It was charming and beautiful. It was also as old and boring as the smiling fat men playing old-fashioned music on the stage.
Today she was old enough to drink beer. With the law’s blessing, if not her father’s. Soon enough she would enter university. That would require her father’s blessing. Or at least his pocketbook. America, rude and an ocean away, was out of the question. Even, or perhaps especially, for Father’s little princess.
But today, Berlin’s cabarets crackled with America’s wicked electricity. People said Berlin was now “the sexual capital of Europe.” But Father wouldn’t even let her drink beer, when the law itself said it was perfectly fine. To let her leave home for anywhere was going to be difficult enough.
Jacob said, “Father’s not ‘stodgy,’ he’s responsible. Like any good banker. Uncle Max can afford his Duesenberg because Father moved the bank’s assets out of Marks at the beginning of the war, before the government decided to just print money to finance it.”
“Finance this.” Rachel wagged her head. “Collateral that. You and Father can be such…Jews.”
“It’s not a disease, you know.” He narrowed his eyes at her. “Sometimes I wonder whether you are the least Jewish Jew in Europe. Or merely still a rebellious child, Rachel. Do you understand what Germany’s endured since the war? What Jews have endured since the Pharaohs? And how much better off our family, and the bank’s depositors, whether gentile or Jew, have been than most Germans? Because of Father’s prudence, and humanity, and common sense. Because he’s ‘such a Jew.’”
“Don’t patronize me, Jacob.” She shouted to be heard over the tuba as she stabbed a finger into her brother’s chest. “I’ll tell you what I understand. I understand Versailles wasn’t a treaty. It was the public stoning of an entire nation, by other nations that were no better. Followed by armed robbery and a gang rape.”
Jacob leaned close and whispered, “Rachel! If you expect to be treated as a lady, don’t shout about gang rape.”
A passing, mustachioed man, whose right arm ended in a stump at the wrist, leaned toward them. When he did, the two tiny medals pinned to his loden jacket swung from their ribbons.
He nodded. “That’s the truth, young lady!”
She felt the warmth and tingle of her first beer, and stuck her tongue out, little sister to big brother. “He knows a lady! And I know the truth. When I was eight, I saw the Bolsheviks beat people in the streets. So hard that blood spattered the lamp posts. I heard the gunfire. And the screams. And the sirens. Before I was twelve, I saw two more revolutions fail. I saw the government print paper marks by the bushel to pay the Versailles reparations. The same country—” she pointed at the one-handed veteran’s back, “—for which that man gave his hand, devalued his life savings. Until they were too worthless to buy his family one loaf of bread. We let the French steal the Ruhr from us at gunpoint, because Versailles denied us guns to defend our own land.
“Jacob, Germany’s been in the toilet for most of my life. And most of Germany blames it all on Jew bankers.”
“No. Not ‘most of Germany.’ The National Socialists tried to blame the economy, and the war, on us. They also tried to start a revolution in a beer hall. The Nazis who weren’t shot got thrown in jail for their trouble. Today the economy’s booming. Rachel, the Nazis won less than three percent in the elections last month. From now on they’re irrelevant. And so are their ideas.”
“Father disagrees. Father told Mother that now Hitler’s out of jail he’s soft-pedaling the Jew baiting, and the violence. That he’s saying that the good times are a house of cards, built on loans from American banks. And that the American stock market is a bigger house of cards. It will crash. And when it crashes, the Americans will call their loans. And Germany will crash, too.”
“Well, Father and Hitler happen to be right about the economy. And Hitler’s the only politician with the guts to predict the big, roaring party’s going to end badly.”
She shrugged. “Father says it’s not guts, it’s opportunism. That politicians change their convictions like honest people change their underwear.”
Jacob shrugged back. “Sure. But when the markets crash, and Germany’s in the toilet again, Hitler will look like Nostradamus. And nobody will care about his dirty underwear. You know, he could be chancellor by 1933.”
