The nun was so aged and feeble that she had to perform her limited duties from a wheelchair.
"Dunajcik!" Gabiek gasped.
He didn't know how he knew, but he did. It hit him like a thunderclap. There remained not a shred of doubt.
Kubis gave him a strange look.
"I'll wait here." Gabiek slid behind a pillar, afraid Dunajcik might react as he had. The old woman seemed popular. She might send someone after him…
The conviction grew more absolute. Inside that crone was the man who had caused all this by his treachery at the programming theater…
Gabiek backed from the church, his head shaking. It was a mystery. How could he be so positive? And how could the lieutenant have become a priestess? The man had always been weak and effeminate, and a bit too mystically oriented-but this vast a failure in one educated by the State?
He, as Neulist, had failed, he realized. He had not extinguished the spark of Uprising. It persevered, and had thrust its insidious evil into his own office…
The idiot was so happy he almost glowed. Was do devoted that he had done nothing to apply twenty-first century common knowledge to the retardation of the aging process in the body he wore.
Was the fool in such a hurry to get to Heaven?
Or had that ugly body been too old when he had arrived?
At least some laws of chronological conservation appeared to be in effect.
The Hangman, despite his ruined spine, would not die till the historically appointed moment. He lingered till the fourth of June.
Meanwhile, the Protectorate (and Reich) rapidly deteriorated toward chaos. Gabiek, ignored in all his efforts to betray the Resistance fighters in the church, and to link Lidice with the assassination attempt, suffered frustrations equaling those of his dealings with the Zumstegs. Damn it, the security police had to move. Fian Groloch was bound to remember his history soon. This fuss had to alert him.
But the timetable continued rectifying itself back toward historically established precedent.
Heydrich finally died.
Something clicked. The engine of history ceased sputtering, began to hum.
The security police closed in on Karl Borromaeus Church.
There were no survivors when they finished.
But this time there was no one named Josef Gabiek among the dead.
Next morning, carrying papers identifying himself as Dr. Hans-Otto Schmidt of the SS-Reich Economic Administration Main Office (the incongruously named bureau responsible for the death camps), in transit from Theriesenstadt to Mathausen, Neulist-Hodzв-Gabiek was on the move, destination Ostmark, the Austrian province of the Greater German Reich. In the false bottom of his physician's bag lay stamps massing less than half a kilo, yet worth millions of Reichsmarks. They would be his means till he could reach his Swiss deposits.
There was no easier way to move a fortune.
He was in Linz, preparing yet another identity, when the sword of this vengeance finally touched a Zumsteg.
That was the morning of June 9, 1942.
The massacre at Karl Borromaeus Church hadn't seen enough blood spilled to satiate Heydrich's avengers. For days all the Protectorate had been waiting, treading a razor's edge of fear, not knowing where the inevitable blow would fall.
Early that morning ten trucks rolled to the outskirts of Lidice. Captain Rostock ordered his troops to surround the village. They were hard-faced men, Totenkopf men, ready for murder.
Their first victim was a twelve-year-old boy, shot down as he ran to warn his father, who worked in the mines at Kladno.
The next was an old peasant woman, shot in the back repeatedly as she fled across a plowed field.
The men they drove into Mayor Horak's cellar…
And the killing began in earnest.
One thousand three hundred thirty-one people died at Lidice, including 201 women. And it wasn't over then. More would perish in the camps. The babies of pregnant women would be murdered at birth.
Among the 1331 was Fian Groloch, who didn't realize what was happening till far too late. His final remark, to Horak, was, "Ignorance can be a capital offense too," which puzzled the mayor for the few minutes he remained alive.
Groloch spent his last minutes trying to reason out why the Heydrich-Lidice scenario differed from what he vaguely remembered. In the absence of knowledge about Neulist, he erroneously concluded that his own presence had affected the changes. He made admonitory notes in his diary, buried it in a box beneath Horak's cellar floor. The construction crew excavating the foundations of the agency building might find it.
He tried to compose himself.
But he died terrified for the State.
Then Rostock burned the village, dynamited the ruins, and leveled the site. The surviving women went to the camps. Their younger children went to racial experts for determination of which were worthy of adoption into good National Socialist families.
And for three and a half years, in Vienna, a Dr. Schramm smiled, awaited the Russians, and considered how he would pick up his mission in America after the war.
XXI. On the Y Axis;
1975
Cash was reasonably impressed with the Tran family. The boys were a handsome pair, he thought during the introductions. Taller than their parents already, and not at all uncomfortable with American ways.
When he mentioned it, Tran replied, "They spent several years in the company of American children in Saigon. Children are more adaptable than us old folks anyway."
"That's the truth. That's why they turn them into soldiers. Well, let's get your stuff upstairs, show you your rooms. The boys are going to have to share, I'm afraid."
The Vietnamese hadn't brought much with them. Annie asked if the rest of their things were being shipped.
"This is it," Tran replied, almost apologetically. "We weren't able to bring much out." Then, to ease Annie's embarrassment, "Something smells good."
"Supper. It's just spaghetti. I didn't know what to fix."
"You won't hear any complaints from my sons. They were ecstatic when they saw how near that pizza shop is."
"Imo's?" Cash asked. "I know it well. Michael and Matthew damned near kept the place in business when they lived at home. This's it. Your room." He hadn't been into it for weeks. Annie had done a job. New curtains, new sheets, new bedspread, some plants in the windows, everything squeaky clean.