His one friend, a man as alienated as he, was one he had long admired, in historical retrospect. Even though marooned in this desert isle of time, he had never hoped to meet the fellow. Certainly not among the down-and-outs of Brigittenau district, where Jews were thick as flies.
At that time, though, the man was just a young, directionless crank and third-rate artist, possessed by no political ideals and certainly not obsessed with the Jewish Question.
"Things must be different this time," Neulist mumbled to Hitler one morning, when they were alone in the writing room. "Unless I'm more ignorant of your biography than I thought."
The skinny, homely youth glanced up from his watercolors puzzledly. This was the sort of mysterious, never-to-be explained remark that had first drawn him to his companion, this Michael Hodzв. That and a shared feeling that they were trapped in a foreign world.
Over the months, the vague remarks included such cryptic admonitions as, "Finish Sea Lion before you start Barbarossa," and, "Don't trust Count von Stauffenberg."
After each remark Hodzв became embarrassed, as if he had spoken out of turn.
Neulist, aka Hodzв, no longer worried about altering history. His experience with Dr. Mayer had convinced him that he could not. So he did as he pleased, spending his little energy scrounging a living, and for a time completely forgot the Zumstegs.
His latter days of poverty and impotence were, paradoxically, among his happiest in two lifetimes.
Yet he remained the Avenging Sword of the State. It was his duty to pursue traitors even here in the backwaters of Time.
But the State, to all practical purposes, did not exist. How could he presume to act in its behalf?
In this age, in a whole body, he suffered none of the pain, physical or mental, that had driven him over the borders of rationality in his own time.
The friendship with Hitler never deepened, though they became traveling companions. On May 24, 1913, they set off together on a railroad adventure which ended at the cradle of the Fыhrer-to-be, Munich.
The piling international crises of the time, the Balkan Wars and the separatist movements in the imperial Hapsburg hinterlands, brought Europe to a simmer. In June 1913 the men separated. Hodzв returned to Prague. Using forged credentials, he established himself as a physician. He met Hitler again briefly in 1936, when he was physician to the Czech Olympic team. Hitler didn't recognize him.
But the Fыhrer did remember him later, on July 20,1944, at about 12:35 p.m., when the Count von Stauffenberg entered the conference room in the Lagebaracke at the Wolfsschanz with a fat black briefcase.
Hitler puzzled the vague memory till it was too late to flee. The bomb went at 12:42…
But this time it didn't kill.
The colonel had effected a major alteration of the past.
By 1936 he suspected things could be radically changed. There were subtle little differences in this history and they seemed to be accumulating. He continually wished he had studied his history closer so he could identify their nature. The big, shaping changes then still seemed improbable.
Those Prague years, more than a score of them, hurried past. He made only halfhearted attempts to fulfill his duty toward the Zumstegs: He was content with his life.
Contentment and happiness expired late in 1938. They perished on a day when Hitler and Chamberlain were meeting at Munich.
Because he made a delicious, exciting, entirely coincidental discovery. A vagary of Fate fanned his mad anger till it became a raging, possessing demon.
On that ill-starred September morning he had decided to visit Isador Neumann's tiny philatelic-numismatic shop. A tall, rugged, hard-looking man jostled him at the door. Their eyes met. Both frowned, paused as if trying to remember the name of an old acquaintance. Hodzв watched the man walk on while trying to fathom his sudden excitement. Finally, he went inside.
"Ach, Dr. Hodzв," said the gnome of a Jew with the incredibly merry eyes. "Buying or selling today?" And, "What're the English and Germans doing to us now?"
"I'm selling, Isador. And so are the English. But they'll get no joy from their thirty pieces of silver." He opened the special wallet to reveal the stamps within, then glanced toward the door perplexedly. "Who was that man?"
"Him? One of my oldest customers. Not a very talkative sort. You really want to sell these? Hold them another year. They'll go up."
Neumann was a good fellow. His advice was well-meant. But in a year the market would be dead. The fate of Czechslovakia, and of Europe, was being sealed this very day. "Yes. Only the forty-eight copies known. But I want to sell. That man?"
"I have his card here somewhere. He always buys the old Austrian coins. Long ago he gave me the list. Two, three times a year he comes to see what I've found. You're sure you want to sell?"
"Absolutely."
These stamps would explode in value after the war. All these copies, twelve of the forty-eight known, would be destroyed when a misguided Resistance fighter, under the misapprehension that any free Jew must be a Gestapo agent, would, in 1943, throw a bomb into this shop. Hodzв planned to gather the surviving copies in 1945, once the Russian occupation had destroyed the value of everything but food.
Hodzв had been riding the highs and lows of the stamp market since the close of the Great War, often obtaining future rarities at issue. He had developed a vast but portable fortune in tiny bits of paper, and in Switzerland, in a vault in Zurich, was material with a potential worth in the hundreds of millions.
"Here we are. I'm going to have to get this place organized someday."
The colonel-doctor laughed. The crowded little shop hadn't changed in decades. "You said the same thing the first time I came in. That was fifteen years ago."
"And I meant it. I just haven't found the time."
Hodzв took the card, it said in two lines:
FIAN GROLOCH
He nearly collapsed.
"Is something wrong, Doctor?"
"Right here under my nose all the time," he murmured. Off and on, he had had a dozen private detectives tearing up America for as many years, and no amount of money had been able to unearth more than one Groloch, the Fiala whose address he had obtained from a letter written fifty years ago, to the then mayor of Lidice.
He surged toward the door.
"Doctor! Without your hat?"
Neumann's question reestablished his link with reality.
German troops were already over the border at Eger. They had been for days. In hours the full might of the Wehrmacht would roll. It was too late. There was no time to do a proper job. Right now.
He resumed his business with Neumann, a plan already shaping in the depths of his mind. Its success would hinge on two eventualities: his own ability to escape Czechoslovakia before the iron grip of the Third Reich tightened, and Fian Groloch's known unfamiliarity with his nation's early history.
Had Fial been there in Lidice, Neulist's trap could never have been sprung.
His escape route led through Poland, and along the way a Czech patriot named Josef Gabiek lost his papers, identity, and life.
• • •
The night was pitch. The air moaning through the hatch was chilly. Kubis shivered so much his teeth rattled. But that had nothing to do with cold. He had been doing it since takeoff.