Almost Complete Short Fiction, page 42
The old Fiat was a ridiculous car for a job like this, but it had the supreme virtue of inconspicuousness. A better, faster automobile, sitting on a side street just off Il Duce’s morning route, might have drawn attention; but even the two policemen who had walked by, a few minutes ago, had given the parked taxi only a single uninterested glance.
Ritter could see them now, over on the far side of the little piazza, keeping an eye on the handful of people who stood waiting on the sidewalk. Out-of-towners, Ritter guessed, hoping for a look at the Great Man; he spotted a couple of small children clutching little flags and bouquets of flowers. On this side of the piazza, though, there was no one in sight except for a pair of hurrying figures, dressed in flowing black, coming up the street. A priest, he saw now, and a nun. Half the people in this country seemed to be in religious orders.
He said, “Any time now. Be ready.”
“I am ready,” Gruhn said a bit stiffly. “You be ready. Yours is the difficult part—”
A sudden sharp tapping sound made them both jump. Ritter jerked around and saw that the priest was rapping with his knuckles on the right front door. The nun stood beside him, holding a large basket.
“Signore,” the priest said, “a little offering for the poor?”
“No.” Ritter shook his head vigorously. “No.”
“Please, signore.” The priest gestured at the nun’s basket. “To buy bread for the orphans?”
“No.” Ritter wanted to scream but he kept his voice down. He shook his head again and made go-away motions. “Se ne vada.”
“How uncharitable,” the priest said, and pulled out a large pistol and pointed it at Ritter, while the nun reached into her basket and produced a submachine gun of a make Ritter didn’t recognize, with a long thick cylinder where the muzzle should be. “Keep still, my son,” the priest told Ritter. “Hands on the wheel.”
Gruhn said, “Scheisse!” and started to move. The nun raised her odd-looking weapon. There was no sound except the rapid clatter of the bolt, but Gruhn grunted sharply and slumped back onto the seat.
The priest was already yanking the door open and sliding in beside Ritter, keeping the pistol trained. Without taking his eyes off Ritter he said, “Is he dead?”
It took Ritter a second to realize that the last words had been in English.
The nun was getting into the back seat and closing the door. “I think so,” she said, also in English. “Shall I make sure?”
“Not necessary.” The priest’s eyebrows went up suddenly. “ ‘Scheisse’ ?” he said. “Germans?”
Ritter nodded without thinking. The priest said, “How about that.”
He was a big, broad-shouldered young man with dark curly hair and pale, rather delicate features. His hands were white and soft-looking, but he held the pistol in a solid competent grip, the muzzle dead steady. A .45 military automatic, Ritter saw, like the one he had taken off that American prisoner in the Ardennes before shooting him.
The priest, or whatever he was, said, “Speak English?”
“No.”
“So? Ina, shoot him in the back of the head.”
Ritter’s shoulders hunched involuntarily. The priest laughed. “Ah, yes. Never mind, Ina. Good,” he said. “My German is terrible.”
Across the piazza, the people on the sidewalk were craning their necks and staring up the avenue. The policemen continued to watch them. Evidently no one had noticed anything.
“Well, well,” the priest said. “German time travelers, here to assassinate Il Duce. But why? What’s the point?”
“Go to hell.”
“Oh, come now. The game’s up. Satisfy my curiosity, where’s the harm in that? Look here,” the priest said, “let’s do a swap. You tell me why you’ve come to kill Mussolini, and I’ll tell you if your mission succeeded.”
Ritter stared at him. “You too? I mean—from the future?”
“Of course. A somewhat more distant future than yours.”
Ritter’s disbelief must have shown on his face. The priest said, “Think about it. How else would we know about you, except that we got here the same way?”
And, after a pause to let Ritter consider it: “So tell me, have we got a deal? Don’t you want to know what finally happened to your country?”
Why not? “Mussolini,” Ritter said, “is about to destroy everything. In a few more days he will make the decision to invade Greece.”
“Greece? Whatever for?”
Ritter shrugged. “No good reason. A childish attempt to impress the Fuhrer, I think. Anyway, it will be a disaster. The Greeks will beat the Italians and throw them back, with the help of the British. The Fuhrer,” Ritter said, “will find it necessary to intervene, lest the British turn this into a new front on the southeastern flank of the Reich, within bombing range of the Rumanian oil fields.
“Next spring,” Ritter said, “the Wehrmacht will come down through the Balkans and overrun Greece. Unfortunately the Yugoslavs choose this time to be impossible. The whole affair takes much longer than it should. The—” He paused, searching for the word. “The timetable is disrupted. The invasion of Russia has to be put off for a month. Winter arrives and catches us still out on the steppes, with Moscow not taken and the conquest not complete. It is a very, very had winter.”
“And?”
“And,” Ritter said, “in time, because of this, we lose the war. When we . . . left, the Russian tanks were already in the suburbs of Berlin.”
The priest’s face was almost comical to see; his eyes stared and his mouth hung slightly open. “Incredible,” he said after a moment. “And yet it must be true. Why else would the Third Reich make such a ridiculous use of their greatest scientific discovery? Why else would Mussolini matter so much?”
“It answers a lot of questions,” the nun said. “Still pretty damned hard to believe, though.”
“We’re here,” the priest pointed out. “What could be harder to believe than that?”
Ritter said, “Now you tell me your part. Did we succeed?”
“Oh, yes. Very much so.” The priest gestured with his free hand in the direction of the main avenue. “In the time we come from, history records that on the morning of October 10, 1940, Benito Mussolini was assassinated on his way from his home to his offices at the Palazzo Venezia, by two men who suddenly drove past his bodyguards in a stolen taxi and threw grenades into the back of his car. The two assassins were immediately gunned down by Il Duce’s bodyguards. They have never been identified.”
The nun said, “That’s what the history books say where we come from. In a very considerable part of the world you’ll read that the great Mussolini was murdered by terrorists from the international Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy.”
It took Ritter a moment to analyze this. “We won?” he said dazedly.
“Oh, yes.” Suddenly the man looked older; his shoulders sagged a little. “You won, all right. How you won. It took a few years, but after the defeat of Russia the outcome was never again in serious doubt.”
“As of 1956,” the woman said, “almost everything west of the Urals is ruled by the Reich or its allies. There are some Russian forces still at large in Siberia, but they do nothing but fight among themselves.”
“I,” Ritter said. “This, it—” His throat constricted; he struggled to speak. “England?” he asked.
“Still more or less free,” the man said, “but neutralized. After half a dozen years of war, with no successes and the enemy still as strong as ever, the British people got tired of going hungry and doing without and seeing their men go off to get killed in Churchill’s failed efforts. They turned the government out and the new PM let Berlin know he was ready to deal. They got pretty good terms, considering. Not even a German occupation, except for a couple of Luftwaffe bases. And a Gestapo liaison office in London, mostly to keep the press and the BBC in line.”
He laughed suddenly. “What’s funny, though,” he said, “in view of what you just told us—you know the only country on the Continent that’s kept its full independence? Greece. Seems Hitler rather admires them. Ancient warrior race, and all that.”
“The Fuhrer still fives?”
“Oh, yes. Alive and well, getting a little old but not perceptibly mellowing.”
It was all too much to take in. Ritter said, “Mein Gott.”
“Your God, all right,” the woman said. “Ours didn’t come through for us so well. As usual.”
The priest said something in a language Ritter didn’t recognize, his voice sharp and angry. “Remember who you are,” he added in English. “Even if you do look great in that super-shikse outfit.”
A circuit closed in Ritter’s mind. “Juden?”
“You were expecting maybe Ituri pygmies? Oh, I see, the outfits threw you off. Merely a useful disguise—after all, this is Rome. Religious types all over the place, many of them with foreign accents, nobody ever notices. Really, Fm surprised you didn’t think of it.
Ritter was surprised too. It would have been perfect.
“Yes,” the young man said, “I’m afraid your victory was a bit incomplete. You’ll be disappointed to know that despite the best efforts of your countrymen and their friends, we haven’t yet become extinct. Quite a few of us remain, especially in North America.”
“Ah,” Ritter said. “Americans.”
“Geographically, yes. My colleague, behind you, is from Toronto. Her government would fie most upset to know what she’s doing. They’ve been at peace with the Reich for a long time now.”
“Your government wouldn’t be too happy either,” the woman said.
“America is still neutral?” Ritter asked. “In, ah, your time?”
The young man made a disgusted snorting noise. He sounded almost like Gruhn. “The United States,” he said, “is still officially at war with Germany, but only because nobody’s been willing to take the political risk of signing a peace treaty. There hasn’t been any major action for years. The Germans aren’t up to mounting an invasion—Hitler never has had any enthusiasm for amphibious operations, you know that. And the Reich is just too damn big and powerful to screw around with, especially now with the Caspian oil fields and the Volga tank factories all at full production. Now and then somebody’s ship gets torpedoed, or there’s a spy trial, and the Fuhrer and President MacArthur make a lot of chest-thumping speeches, but it’s all bullshit.”
Ritter was getting confused. “But you,” he said, “I mean, you’re here—”
“Oh, I get it. You thought we were on some kind of military mission? No, no,” the man said. “Nothing like that. We represent . . . a consortium, you might say.”
“Jews?”
Both of them laughed out loud. “That part really gets you, doesn’t it?” the woman said.
“Actually,” the man said, “the group we represent is fairly ecumenical in all senses of the word. But yes, I’m afraid there are a good many of us subhumans involved. Especially at the scientific end. You know,” he said, “degenerate Jewish science and all that.”
“Dr. Einstein did the original theoretical work,” the woman added.
“Yes.” The man’s lips twitched downward. “Dr. Einstein hasn’t been listened to very closely in official circles, since a little experiment based on his theories somehow turned most of the University of Chicago campus into a large smoking crater. Luckily there were others, in what you might call the private sector, who still appreciated the good Doctor’s ideas.”
Ritter had never heard of Einstein, but he didn’t say so. He said, “Then you didn’t use Dr. Niedermann’s invention?”
“Niedermann? Can’t say I’ve heard of him,” the man said. “He was the one who made the breakthrough in your own time?”
“Yes.”
“And you did say you were losing the war when you left. So I’m guessing this was a last-minute thing, developed under the pressure of desperation?”
Ritter nodded. “Well, there you are, then,” the man said. “If Germany went on to win the war by conventional means—thanks to your own heroic efforts here today—then there wouldn’t have been any particular need for bizarre research projects. Most likely your Dr. Niedermann would have been dismissed as a crank.”
True enough, Ritter reflected. In fact Niedermann had been in serious trouble, as being politically unreliable, and had only been saved from arrest by Himmler’s sudden obsession with bizarre scientific—and not so scientific—secret projects.
“The original idea,” the woman said, “was to send a team back to kill Hitler. There was a lot of debate about that. Dr. Einstein didn’t like the idea of deliberate assassination at all, but nobody could suggest a better use for the device. Then, while the equipment was being calibrated, some anomalies turned up in the field. Eventually it was determined that someone in the past had already made such a transit.”
“Which,” the man said dryly, “came as a considerable shock. Especially when the details became clear. Two men leaving northern Germany on April 28, 1945? And materializing in Rome on this particular day in 1940? No one could imagine what the connection might be, yet obviously it must be something of supreme importance to cause the Reich to play its last hole card.”
He made a little gesture with his free hand. “And so here we are. It was a great gamble sending us—oh, you should have heard the arguments, white-haired scientists and distinguished scholars screaming at each other like drunk truck drivers, this came so close to never happening and frankly even when I stepped into the accelerator I was more than half convinced the whole thing was insane—but they were right. Here we are and here you are, about to change the world, about to save the fortunes of the Third Reich, the most important assassination since the Archduke Ferdinand.”
Ritter only half heard the last words. “We won,” he said again, almost whispering. “Will win.”
“Absolutely. Only of course,” the man said, “you won’t, now. Because you aren’t going to kill Mussolini after all, now we’re here. One temporal rearrangement cancels another. Fascinating, huh?”
Ritter’s peripheral vision registered movement. He looked past the young man’s face, out through the open window of the cab and across the little piazza, where the group of onlookers had begun to move excitedly forward. One of the policemen stood at the curb, hands up, motioning them back. The other was staring up the street, shading his eyes with one hand.
The bogus priest raised his big pistol slightly. “Shall I kill you?” he said. His voice was casual; he might have been offering Ritter a smoke. “I don’t suppose it matters, really. I’m sure you’re on a suicide mission. They’d hardly risk letting you hang around back here afterward, not with what you know—not to mention the paradox factor. If you’ve got a poison capsule or something that you want to use, go ahead. Or would you prefer I shoot you?”
“If you fire that thing,” Ritter said, “you’ll never get away.”
“But I’ll never get away anyway,” the man said cheerfully. “Don’t you get it? As soon as I kill you, that’s it for your mission. The future changes back to what it was, and therefore I’m not here. Neither of us will be here.”
He leaned back, smiling at Ritter. “You see, we’re both the children of refugees from Nazi Europe. Ina’s father got out of Spain a week before Franco knuckled under to Hitler and started shipping Spanish Jews off to the camps. He met her mother on the boat to New York. My parents were both born here in Italy, but they met in a refugee camp in Illinois. So,” he said, “once your mission fails, we no longer exist. Because we never will.”
“I wonder what it’s going to feel like, winking out like that,” the woman said. “If there’s any feeling at all. It should be an interesting experience.”
Down at the corner, another pair of carabinieri had appeared and were taking up station in the middle of the side street, ready to block any traffic from the avenue until Il Duce had passed.
The young man said, “It appears that the great one approaches. Okay, then—”
Suddenly there was a commotion in the back seat, a muffled cry from the woman and the rattle of the silenced machine pistol. The man beside Ritter started to turn, but then Gruhn came lunging across the seat back, grabbing the big .45 in both hands and forcing it downward. “Go,” he yelled to Ritter. His face was covered with blood. “I got the Jew bitch.”
Ritter was already reaching for the gearshift. “Hurry,” Gruhn said, struggling to hold the pistol down against the seat. “We can still—”
The young man hit Gruhn on the back of the neck with the edge of his free hand. Gruhn went limp, sagging across the seat back. Ritter had the car in gear and moving by now, accelerating hard down the narrow street. The two carabinieri turned and held up their hands and then, seeing the taxi wasn’t stopping, started to unsling their weapons.
Beside him, the young man was having trouble getting his gun free from Gruhn’s unconscious grasp. Ritter clenched his teeth and kept going, flooring the gas pedal, thinking there was no chance at all, but you had to try. Maybe ram Mussolini’s car—
The young man said, “What the hell,” and let go the gun and reached over and gave the wheel a sharp yank. Caught by surprise, Ritter tried to straighten out again, but it was too late. The taxi bucked violently as the front wheels banged up over the curb. The marble facade of an office building appeared over the hood.
Just before the impact Ritter heard the young man say, “Heil Hitler, asshole.”
Benito Mussolini said, “Why have we stopped?”
It was the fourth time he had said it in the last few minutes. He was shifting restlessly, irritably, in the back seat of the big black Lancia Astura, looking this way and that.
In the front seat Ercole Boratto, his long-time chauffeur, said once again, “I don’t know, Duce.”
Mussolini craned his neck, trying to see past the car that blocked the street just ahead. A couple of his bodyguards stood beside it, weapons at the ready. The others had already fanned out and disappeared up the street. Another car like it sat a little way behind the Astura.
