“Some chap named Pacov. I think that was the name. Russian, eh?”
Lessing fled up the stairs, toward the bedroom Mrs. Delacroix had provided him.
The ignorant see my grandfather’s Germany as a place of ultimate horror, a scene in which the major landmarks are the labor camps, the secret police, and the darkness of despair. They fail to note that the only ones In despair were those who were not part of our society: those who were alien by birth or those who had alienated themselves by their selfishness, their decadence, or their adherence to alien causes or creeds.
They omit, often deliberately, the happy scenes: a recovering economy, jobs, stable currency, new highways and construction everywhere, an end to the street-righting between Left and Right, art and music, and a healthy interest in nutrition, exercise, and sports. Most Germans were optimistic for the first time since before World War I.
It all ended too soon for most of us. We had a few years of peace, and then came the long and terrible night of war. We Germans knew that our country did not start the war, although we weren’t permitted to say so after 1945: we were the bulwark of Western civilization against the Asiatic hordes and the madness of communism. The war brought casualties, bombings, rationing, forced labor, and all the horrors of a society being pounded into rubble. We endured it bravely and even gladly. We were fighting for positive values, for the survival and progress of our people.
You ask about labor camps and oppression? Tell me, what would you Americans have done, surrounded by enemies? How would your gentle liberals have treated their camps full of Nisei if Japanese armies were advancing through California? Let them look into their own souls and then say honestly whether they would have done differently than we did!
Paint the future in gay colors and show the world that a totalitarian state is no regimented monster! No wars, no violence, no tyranny, no tanks rumbling in the night! Not a military takeover, but a free election, such as the plebiscite that swept our First Führer to power in 1933. People must vote us into office.
Why? Because we are the best chance this planet has! Perhaps the only chance, the last chance before Armageddon. The world must realize this.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Monday, July 14, 2042
“What was the guy’s name?” Wrench twisted at the wheel of the little Ikeda Outdoorsman to avoid a gaggle of children and water buffalo in the rain-soaked road ahead. “The one that came home after twenty years and only his old dog recognized him?”
“Odysseus,” Lessing replied. “How in hell do you know about him? They stopped teaching Greek lit in high school fifty years ago, even in English translation.”
Wrench feigned insult. “Hey, man, I got culture. I read it in a World Classics comic book.”
“Anyway, it doesn’t apply to me. I’ve been gone less than a week.”
“I still feel like a dog. Mulder says: ‘Go get Lessing.’ I go get Lessing, all the way to Lucknow.” Wrench squinted and racked the vehicle down to make a turn. “Woof, woof! Out here I feel like a dog most of the gubbin’ time.”
The monsoons had lowered over the dry north-Indian plain since dawn; now they became a cataract that thundered down with the vengefulness of an angry god. Mrs. Delacroix’s jet had dropped Lessing off at Palam Airport in Delhi, and the local flight to Lucknow was late, as usual. Lessing felt like a discarded mango peeclass="underline" limp, tepidly wet, sticky, smelly, and gritty all over. He hung on grimly against all that Wrench could do.
Wrench had told him about Indoco: not another breakin, as Lessing had feared, but a mass demonstration outside. There had been perhaps a hundred “students” and another dozen unidentifiable goondas, “ruffians,” the Hindi term for anything from the Prodigal Son to Al Capone, who were undoubtedly paid agitators, though nobody knew whose. The plant chaukidars had taken one look and fled, leaving the mob free run of the plant. Indoco would now have to rebuild three warehouses and replace some machinery, but no one had been seriously injured. Mulder was furious. He was talking of adding a score of foreign meres to his security force, but getting clearance for them from Delhi would not be quick or easy.
Most important of all to Alan Lessing was the fact that Jameela was safe and waiting for him. He felt greater relief than he wanted to admit, even to himself.
There was something new on the fumoff leading from the main highway to the plant: a straw-thatched hut and a cloth-draped pole down across the road. “They put in a police post,” Wrench grumbled. “For our ‘protection’ from more incidents.” He produced papers, shoved them at the dark, dripping face that poked itself into the driver’s window, held out a ten-rupee note, watched it disappear into the night, and drove on.
Jameela, Mulder, Goddard, and three Indians awaited them on the verandah of the main house. Servants with clumsy, black umbrellas splashed out to the Dceda, and Lessing proceeded to flout a thousand years of Indian tradition by marching over and embracing Jameela in public. Her warm, dry, spice-fragrant body felt wonderful.
“You smell bisaind,” she whispered sweetly in his ear. The Urdu word meant “stinking,” like raw meat.
Mulder cleared his throat. “Meet Colonel Srivastava, Indian Army, assigned to protect Indoco until there’s been an investigation. This is Sub-Inspector Mukerjee, Uttar Pradesh Police, and Mr. Subramaniam from the CID. Gentlemen, Mr. Alan Lessing, chief of plant security. He’s been away on a business trip.”
Lessing was tired. He could barely see the figures around him or feel the hands that reached out to shake his. He heard Mrs. Mulder’s tremulous, fairy-godmother soprano chirping at Jameela: “Take him upstairs to the guest bedroom. It’s too late to go back to your own apartment.” Then, somehow, he was there, in a boxy, whitewashed little room with frilly curtains. Jameela shooed servants out and herself struggled with the cantankerous plumbing to produce hot water for a shower. Then he was in bed.
He awoke thinking how he hated to sleep on a hillside, his head higher than his feet. Where in hell was he? Syria? Yes, north of Damascus, with his mere comrades in the gulley below him, and Major Berger’s crack Israeli brigade over the ridge, where they were taking fire from those big, new mortars the Russians had given the Iranians. The shit was heavy over there. Any minute Berger’s air strike would come in and…
Why was he so cold and so damp? In Syria? He rubbed at his eyes with his knuckles and was surprised when the scene dissolved and coalesced again into an unfamiliar bedroom It contained one cushioned chair; a huge clothes-cabinet that Jameela called an almari and the British, who could never pronounce anything foreign, an “almirah”; a slow-turning ceiling fan; and electric wires stapled to the wall. A tiny, harmless lizard, which Jameela called a chipkili, walked upside down across the ceiling over his head. The roar of Iranian mortar bursts became the gurgle of the ancient air conditioner that Mulder was always intending to replace. It did keep the room both clammy and damn near freezing. He glanced down and saw why he had dreamed of sleeping on a hillside: Goddard was sitting on the foot of the bed, his ponderous weight enough to scuttle an ocean liner…
Goddard was not only big, he was bristly as a boar: his broad skull, the backs of his hands, his shoulders, all were covered with springy, coarse, black hair. The light from the window made a halo around his head, something he would have only if Satan ruled in Heaven! How old was he, anyway? Forty? Goddard was an American from Chicago, a hard-ass, a comer, a would-be exec, smart, and on his way up to the top of Indoco’s dungheap.