The Past Sucks, page 5
“First of all, Caldwell, this is not the equivalent of a love potion. It induces puppy-like devotion in the target and an instant charisma boost for the person delivering it. Secondly, I’m not the one who’ll be using it.”
She capped the lipstick and handed it over. I regarded the cylinder dubiously.
I gazed into the Ox’s fake blue eyes and allowed myself some very bad thoughts about how things might play out if I used it on her.
She returned the look in spades. The last time I’d seen that expression was on a cat staring at its human, knowing that its servant was powerless to resist feeding it whatever it desired.
“I’m immune to the effects of the lipstick,” she purred. “You’re not.”
She narrowed her eyes, enhancing the feline look. I sensed that however bad my thoughts had been, I was an amateur compared to what she would do to me if I ever became putty in her hands.
I laughed. That was never gonna happen.
I decided that despite her irritating tendencies, I enjoyed working with this woman. And we hadn’t even reached the part yet where I got to punch Nazis and tweak Hitler’s stupid moustache.
Before we could enjoy those pleasures, though, I first had to seduce an industrialist.
With my lipstick.
Chapter 10
Weimar Germany.
You can say a lot of bad things about it. The Ox certainly had in her briefing.
The hyperinflation of the 1920s had wiped out everyone’s savings, leaving the elderly destitute and dying. The putsches and insurrections of that period had settled down, but there was an ongoing low-level civil war. Fourteen years after the First World War had ended, parts of Germany still remained under occupation by foreign troops. Düsseldorf in particular cursed the French and Belgian soldiers who had murdered its citizen protestors.
Scratch the surface and there was a lot of hatred to go around, a shocking amount of it directed at Jews. The Ox had explained that this would only get much worse.
With a third of men out of work and on the streets, Germany was not in a good mood.
And then there was Adolf Hitler.
Like I said, there was a lot that wasn’t good about Weimar Germany, but they did have impressive bathrooms.
I opened the door to the gentlemen’s washroom and found myself in an antechamber of masculinity. An old blowka stood at attention, wearing a biblical beard and a Parkhotel uniform, towels draped over one arm. Subdued lighting cast artistic shadows over alcoves displaying tiny marble statues. These depicted classical warriors, stallions, and bulls, all of them naked and impressively endowed.
The air was greasy with sandalwood and manly scented oils that had probably been decanted from the hairy chests of ancient Olympic wrestlers.
I thought I’d slipped through a dimensional portal and into a 23rd-century gay massage parlor. But the attendant clicked his heels in military fashion and wished me a curt good evening.
It ruined the homoerotic vibe. In the Weimar period, this was simply how gentlemen of substance went about doing number twos.
I tipped him a bank note and he opened the door to the inner sanctum of Teutonic toiletdom.
It was, I suppose, the bathroom equivalent of the bar. Opulence took the form of mirrors and marble. The tiles on the floor and walls were hand painted. I had licked things dirtier than that floor, although in my defense, they had been far more interesting things.
Fortunately, I was the only one there, so I shut myself into a stall, sat on the polished throne, and followed the Ox’s instructions by smearing her lipstick onto the index finger of my right hand.
Once I’d acquired a good-sized oily lump, I rubbed it over the inside of my cheek.
It tasted like floor polish cut with something that had been rotting at the back of the larder.
I gagged, shaking with disgust.
Once my retching had subsided, I inspected my finger and was relieved to see that most of the gunk remained. It looked as if I had stuck my hand inside the workings of an engine and come away smeared in grease. And then a cat had thrown up in my hand.
I heard the bathroom door open. Shoes clicked on the tiled floor as someone came in to do their business. I tracked his progress to one of the great porcelain edifices that passed for urinals and waited until I judged he’d finished. Then I flushed and exited my stall.
The man’s slight corpulence filled out his well-tailored double-breasted suit jacket. He avoided eye contact yet seemed to register my attention.
Ignoring me, he washed his hands in one of the marble sinks. I took position a couple of sinks over.
As I twisted the gleaming brass tap, I suddenly remembered I couldn’t risk washing off the lipstick.
So I pushed my left hand under the water and splashed it around, keeping the right dry. In the mirror, I could see the man staring at me, aghast.
“Are you here for Herr Hitler’s speech?” I asked.
He drew a deep breath and then replied as carefully as the bellboy had earlier in the day. “I’m here for the Industry Club meeting.”
Not a fan of the National Socialists, then. “Me, also. I suppose I’m interested to hear what the man has to say. It is important to keep informed.”
“Indeed.”
“Max Bicheroux,” I announced. I held out my right hand, the hand I hadn’t washed, the one with the grease and cat sick.
On instinct, he half raised his own hand to shake. Then he froze, staring at mine in horror.
I clasped his wrist with my left hand and pushed my right under his, smearing my fingertip over the back of his palm.
He flinched, tried to pull away, but my grip was too strong.
“Madman,” he muttered, fear flickering in his eyes.
I released him and he fled for the safety of the antechamber with its ordered manliness and bewhiskered guard.
A minute later he reappeared, wiping his hands with a damp towel. He walked over to me in a daze. “Max Bicheroux, was it? My apologies. My name is Giersch. Friedrich Giersch.” He frowned, and I think he was making a last, desperate counterattack against whatever the lipstick was doing to him.
Then he capitulated and an innocent expression took over. The Ox was right. He looked like a puppy.
“I don’t recognize you,” he said. “You’re new. It would be my pleasure to show you around the club. I can introduce you to some very important people.” Panic flared in his eyes. “Not that I’m suggesting you aren’t important, Bicheroux.”
“It’s okay,” I assured him.
I washed my hands properly with plenty of soap. The Ox’s tricked-out lipstick had done its job.
“First, we must enjoy a drink,” Giersch announced. He slapped me on the back as if we were old comrades. “This will be unlike anything you’ve ever experienced.”
Now that, I could believe.
Chapter 11
“He’s with me,” my adoring industrialist explained to the guardian of the function room.
The hotel man looked me over and considered this threat to the order of his establishment. On my arm, the Ox was smoking hot, but the hotel employee didn’t even glance her way. He gave a slight shake of his head. “With regret, sir, the name must be on the list.”
“Do I look like a damned Bolshevik?” I snapped.
He peered at me. I hadn’t meant for him to take my question literally, but I think he was honestly trying to judge whether I was indeed a minion of Stalin.
To be honest, unless one was wearing a red scarf, waving a red flag, or flaunted a lapel button that said, ‘I love Uncle Joe’, I wasn’t sure what a communist actually looked like.
The stone temple guardians twisted enormous necks and directed their baleful stares at me. I began to wilt under the observation. The melanin suppressant helped to conceal me from casual observation, but under this intense scrutiny, I doubted I looked like a good German.
“Herr Bicheroux represents something new,” declared Giersch in an earnest voice. “A venture that will lift the German people from our current situation.”
Our. My new best friend’s way of saying the word included me, and these people had a certain standard for who they considered ‘German’. Strict ideas about ethnic purity ran far deeper in this society than the insane ramblings of the Nazis.
It did the trick. The hotel employee gave a polite nod, and we pushed on through.
“Ahem.”
I froze. And turned back to face the hotel man who had cleared his throat in a disapproving fashion.
He was glaring at the Ox. “There is no room for secretaries and aides. The lady may enjoy the hotel’s other facilities or wait in her room as she chooses.”
She looked flustered.
Good.
The Ox liked to put about that she was a seasoned temporal super spy and that I was a frakktwat oaf with the mental acuity of a stale turd. And yet she hadn’t accounted for this eventuality.
I think it was because in her mind, I was only there to observe and gopher while she carried out the Hitler snatching.
On the other hand, I didn’t know what to do after we’d grabbed the target. Such as how we would get home.
I needed her. More than she needed me.
So I pleaded with the hotel guy. I explained how she was my executive assistant with a perfect memory recall of my business plan. When that didn’t work, I switched to a more earthy explanation of why I wanted my hot secretary in with us. I reached inside my jacket for a bribe.
“Are you shitting me?” he responded.
Technically, he didn’t say those words. In fact, he didn’t speak at all, but the arched and disapproving eyebrow spoke eloquently. I judged that admission of ladies was a line he would not permit us to cross. Standing firm on this issue gave him moral cover for his indiscretion in letting me in at all.
It was the kind of hypocritical moral contortion I’d used my entire life. So I knew he wouldn’t budge.
“Quite so.” I beamed and smiled at the Ox. “You run along, my dear. I’m sure you’ll have more fun with the other girls.”
I would say that she glared at me, but that wouldn’t quite convey the concentrated malice emitted by those lovely blue eyes.
A lesser man would have been cowed by her attempt to choke off my windpipe through sheer force of will.
Me? When I find I’ve dug myself into a hole, I have a death wish that makes me dig faster. Then I call for sharpened stakes and poisoned asps to be absolutely certain I’m not getting out alive.
“You’ll be better off with the other secretaries,” I explained to her. “I’ll have to sit with fussy old men and listen to a boring speech that you wouldn’t understand anyway.”
You see? Sometimes I can’t help myself.
The Ox gave an animal snarl. I thought I heard words within her exhalation of rage. In fact, I’m pretty sure ‘Stiletto’ was in there. As was ‘fucking kill you’.
But I wasn’t really listening, because I’d already led Giersch into the safety of the function room.
* * *
I did the lipstick thing again, smearing the disgusting muck over my hand. I figured that in the absence of my veteran boss who’d been and done it all, but failed to account for the way bintas were treated in the 20th century, I’d go for the subtle approach and grab Hitler’s hand.
I was sitting with Giersch at one of the many small tables set out in the function room as if expecting a cabaret performance. I’d heard Weimar was hot on exotic dancers, but unfortunately the podgy act we’d come to see was already here, sitting with his entourage at a raised seating area.
“What is that?”
Giersch was staring at my lipstick.
I’d told him to shut up unless spoken to, but I admit it was a bit much to expect him to keep quiet when I was doing very strange things with lady’s lipstick. Especially seeing as I’d drugged him to obsess over me.
“You ever tried cocaine?” I asked him.
“I have.”
“This is like coke but better. I’ll give you some if you like, but first…” I waved my arms like a drunken man and then jabbed a thumb in Hitler’s direction. “Let’s go see what the man of the hour has to say for himself.”
Giersch looked at Hitler, then back at me. His face blanched. “Are you sure that’s wise?”
“Of course.” With my un-lipsticked hand, I slapped him on his back so hard that he half-slid out his chair and knocked into a passing waiter, spilling several glasses of champagne. I whispered to Giersch conspiratorially. “What’s the worst they can do to us? Shoot us?”
My friend went even paler, but I just laughed drunkenly and made a beeline for Hitler, pulling a reluctant Giersch in my wake.
I took the dozen or so steps up to the raised area and advanced on my target. My unexpected appearance wrought consternation among the Nazis.
Too slow, suckers.
I stretched out my hand to shake.
But Hitler wasn’t playing, keeping bum on seat, hands on lap, and staring with a savage fury that blazed from his pale blue eyes and made the Ox’s glares look amateurish.
I steeled myself to lunge at the malevolent piece of weasel shit, but I was already too late. Black-shirted SS guards had rallied to his defense and pushed in front of me, forming an impenetrable wall of National Socialist flesh.
Tricky.
I’d blown my best chance, but I don’t give up easily. I shifted to Plan Z, my forlorn hope, a desperate last chance. I tried to charm him with my words.
“Herr Hitler, it is such a pleasure and an honor to have you here with us at the Industry Club. Forgive my forwardness, but my friend and I couldn’t help ourselves. We simply had to come over and express how welcome you are here.”
“I’m pleased to hear that,” Hitler replied. He didn’t sound pleased.
I checked Giersch hadn’t abandoned me. He was a few feet behind, looking like he was about to throw up in fear. Good man.
“This is Herr Giersch of Hoesch Steel and Mining. I myself head TDV, a new joint venture between Thyssen and Krupp. We feel TDV shall be the first and greatest of a new way to harness German business and German workers in profitable service to the national interest. And all in accordance with Nationalist Socialist principles.”
I thought I’d stuffed in all the right buzz words. I’d even strung them together in a sequence that just about made sense. Hitler, though, was not impressed. His left eye twitched as rage boiled within him.
“Why was I not informed?”
Yes, why, Stiletto? Because TDV was a lie. And I was a man from the future sent here by an even farther future to bring Hitler back for… For reasons as yet unknown.
I’ve met a few smooth talkers in my time, and I am not one of their number. I had no idea what to say. Worse, the SS men were tuning into their leader’s anger and twitching with sympathetic rage. For the Devil! These people had unimaginable reservoirs of hate, and all of it was currently aimed at me.
I gulped like a naughty schoolboy, caught in the act.
I didn’t have a contingency plan. I could see no way out.
But a most unlikely savior came to my rescue. Adolf Hitler himself.
He mastered his anger and remembered his purpose tonight was to persuade the Industry Club that his lot were the nice radicals, cuddly and definitely not even a little bit communist. But times were hard, even for them. Buddy, can you spare a reichsmark?
I could still taste Hitler’s anger, but he cloaked it. The man even smiled at me like an insincere politician. Well, like any politician, I guess.
I seized the moment. “TDV is a shell company without assets of any significance as yet. It’s a financial thought experiment in the earliest stages of being worked out. An economic gedankenexperiment.”
Hitler appeared mollified, but then he launched a dirty counterstrike by asking me an entirely reasonable question. “What is this concept that TDV is attempting to prove?”
“It’s the… ah… the idea being the creation of a national industrial block in service to the German people and its body politic. So long as our parent corporations continue to see themselves primarily as rivals, they will always be tempted to win short-term advantage by allying with international capitalism against the needs of the German people.”
I had essentially regurgitated the same word foo as before, and Hitler took a moment to take it all in.
Although his pale eyes still burned with anger, I began to suspect that this was a permanent feature. He twiddled his silly moustache happily. “I admire your patriotism, sir. You set an example. I commend you.”
The SS men were like a pack of dogs. When their leader had been angry at me, they had been snarling with rage. Now that I was Hitler’s best pal, they were practically wagging their tails because they were so happy to see me.
Being Hitler’s chum didn’t sit well with me.
I assessed the man and decided the great evils I knew would be done in his name made him seem more than he really was. The human reality before me was an unassuming middle-aged man, his skin sallow and tired, shoulders slumped. His sharp business suit was perfectly tailored, yet it didn’t fit. It was crease-free, but somehow he still managed to look crumpled.
I had to admit that despite this unimpressive appearance, there was an aura of danger about him that some people would find magnetically attractive. To me it was more the aura of a plague dog, a mad beast that needed to be put down.
He turned to say something to the fat man sitting beside him and I realized that I’d been so awestruck by the being part of history thing that I was allowing my moment to slip away.
“Sir,” I said. “May I have the honor of explaining a little more about TDV after your speech?”
“Yes, of course.” He indicated one of the SS officers. “Dietrich here will look after you. I anticipate many will wish to speak with me, but I hope to find time for you.”
I reached across the table and offered him my hand smeared with its mind-bending contact drug.
There was a moment of hesitation, but then Hitler put on his politician’s smile and reached for my hand.
