“Phew!” he greeted me. “You smell like [expletive deleted]!”
“Like something fished out of The Watergate,” I agreed nastily. I didn’t stop to continue the conversation. I headed straight into the bathroom, stripped off my clothes (they’d have to be burned), and dived under the shower.
A long, long time later I emerged, smelling a great deal better, looking a great deal cleaner, feeling somewhat more like coping. Dickson was waiting for me impatiently. He filled me in on what was happening.
The kidnappers had contacted him again while I was gone. They had seen me leave with Peggy and realized the mistake. Now they wanted me to return to the staircase in front of Sacre Coeur and wait for the right girl to contact me.
“Did you tell them that damn place is crawling with blondes in black raincoats?” I complained to Dickson. But there was no choice. I headed back to Montmartre.
This time she was waiting for me. No sooner had I leaned against the railing than she came up to me. Of all the filles in all the black raincoats going up and down that long flight of stairs, she had to take the prize as the ugliest. So I’m a male chauvinist pig! Sue me! She was fat and sloppy and pimply and bow-legged and flat-chested and cross-eyed. Outside of that, she may have been a very nice woman, kind to dumb animals, considerate of her mother, forgiving of the male establishment. I don’t know. All I know is that to me she was a disaster area.
The girl didn’t look like a Lilliputian. What I mean is, besides her other attributes—or, rather, lack of them—she was, normal sized, not noticeably small. What I couldn’t help wondering about was her involvement with a radical group presumably composed of midgets, pygmies, and dwarfs? And, incidentally, what, any, was the connection between the Lilliputian Liberation Army and ‘Insecticide?’ Between the kidnapping of the President’s secret daughter and the various attempts on his life? Between all these factors and PeePee Rococco, D.O.P.E., the Mafia and/or Heinrich Bussinger?
She handed me a small, solidly wrapped package and left without a word. I wasn’t sorry. Peggy may have been the wrong girl, but she had offered compensations beyond this other lassie’s ken.
I took the package back to the hotel and Dickson. We opened it. There was a tape cassette inside. Mystifyingly enough, one side was labeled THE ARYANS. We slipped the cassette into a player and listened.
The tape began with a drumroll, mounting in intensity until it melded into the sound of thousands of boots marching in a cadence so regular as to be unmistakably a goosestep. Behind the pounding of marchers’ boots a male chorus sang out the opening bars of Deutschland über Alles. The stirring rendition continued behind the voice of the commentator which replaced the thunder of the goosesteps while maintaining the goosestep rhythm.
“The Nazi image took another pounding in Russian, British, and American propaganda this morning in early spring of nineteen forty-five, hitting the lowest point ever known in Buchenwald. Prestige has declined there by ninety-nine point nine percent since nineteen thirty-nine, and this Austrian thinks it’s time to speak up for the Germans as the most genocidal, and possibly the least appreciated Aryans in all the world.
“As long as twenty-five years ago when I first started to research Mein Kampf, I read of Reds on the Volga River and in Kiev. Well, who finally rushed in with men and munitions to help? The Nazis did, that’s who! They have helped stamp out communism in France, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Russia itself! Yet today the hallowed walls of the Führerbunker are under siege, and no foreign land has sent even one ‘observer’ to help.
“Holland, Belgium, and to a lesser extent Denmark and Norway were lifted out of the clutches of inferior races by the Nazis who poured in millions of bullets and suffered other bullets fired in return. None of those countries is today showing even the slightest appreciation of the debt owed to Nazi Germany.
“When the Vichy government was in danger of collapsing in early nineteen forty-four, it was the Germans who propped it up. And their reward was to be spit upon and shot at in the streets of Paris. And I was there; I saw that!
“When village provinces are threatened by communism, it’s Germany that hurries in to help. Lidice, Czechoslovakia, is one of the most moving examples. . . . So far this spring eighty-six Nazi divisions have been flattened by enemy armies. Nobody has helped! “The SS shipped millions upon millions of inferior peoples out of countries threatened with mongrelization. And now newspapers in those countries are writing about the brutal, atrocity-committing Germans.
“Now, I'd like to see just one of those countries that is gloating over the downfall of the Nazi regime build its own gas chambers. Achtung! You schwein! Let’s hear it! Does any country in the world have a setup to equal Auschwitz? Ravensbruck? Treblinka? If so, why don’t they use them? Why do they all use German-made extermination facilities? Why does no other land on earth consider putting a man—or a woman or a child-in a gas chamber?
“You talk about French militarism and you get Waterloo. You talk about English militarism and you get Dunkirk. You talk about United States militarism and you get Pearl Harbor. You talk about German militarism and you find Prussians in Poland, Prague, Paris—not once but several times throughout history and always ready to try again!
“You talk about atrocities and the Nazis put theirs right in the butcher-shop window for everybody to look at. Even our scientists are not to be pursued and hounded. They’ll be right there on the streets of Cape Canaveral. Most of them, unless they fall into the hands of the Russians, will be getting American dollars from NASA and the Pentagon to spend down there33 .
“‘When the Germans get out of this bind, as they will, who could blame them if they said, ‘The hell with the Reds’ threat to the world! Let somebody else burn the huts! Let somebody else bomb or destroy foreign dams, or set up free fire zones to be napalmed to ashes in air raids!’
“When the armies of Spain, Japan, and Italy needed munitions, it was the Germans who supplied them. ‘When Germany’s Wehrmacht, and the Luftwaffe went kaput, nobody loaned them an old Luger! Not even Mussolini!
“I can name you five thousand times when the Nazis raced to the help of other people threatened by mongrelization and decadent democracy. Can you name me even one time when someone else raced to the Nazis in trouble? I don’t think there was outside help even during the Normandy invasion.
“Our neighbors have faced it alone. And I’m one Austrian who is damn tired of hearing them kicked around. They’ll come out of this bunker with their Swastika high. And when they do, they’re entitled to thumb their noses at the lands that are gloating over their present troubles.”
(The male chorus behind the commentator faded out softly to the final strains of “Deutschland über Alles” and was smoothly replaced by Kate Smith singing “God Bless America” as a background to the remainder of the commentary.)
“I know America will be one of these. But there are many obedient gook-hating Americans. To the victor belong the Heils!”
The Fred Waring Orchestra and Chorus joined in with Kate Smith34 for a final, rousing chorus of “God Bless America.” The tape concluded with a thunder of goosesteps.
The record was over. Dickson had been visibly moved. Puzzlement, however, slowly replaced admiration on his face. We stared blankly at each other.
What the hell?
Chapter Seven
We played the flip side of the tape cassette. The male voice was immediately familiar. We were in touch with the Lilliputian Liberation Army, the group that claimed to be holding Alicia Alvarez prisoner. He made a short introductory statement, and then we heard Alicia’s voice.