The wings of Goddard’s fleshy nose flared. “Mr. Mulder, are you saying that these… these… Pakis are White!”
Wrench tittered, but Mulder did not flinch. “Many in the upper castes are. At least so Alfred Rosenberg, one of the leading theoreticians of the Third Reich, said, though he did add that they had become ‘mixed.’ In any case, the First Führer treated them as Aryans. There was a Waffen-SS division, the Frei Hind, made up of anti-British Indians. It spent the war near the Bay of Biscay, I think. It saw no combat, but it was racially acceptable to Reichsführer Himmler.”
Spots of angry red burned in Goddard’s cheeks. “I suppose Blacks are Aryans, too!”
“Not black Africans, certainly, but there were Muslims in the Waffen-SS.”
Wrench appeared to be enjoying the turn the conversation had taken, and he cut in: “The Handschar Division. Right, Mr. Mulder? Didn’t the First Führer once line ’em up and hand out little Qur’ans to wear around their necks? Qur’ans with swastikas on ’em?”
“I think so.” Mulder wiped his forehead again. “There were men of many nationalities… Ukrainians, Latvians, Estonians, Dutch, Flemish, French, Romanians, Hungarians, even some Britons… in the SS. More than just blonde, Germanic ‘supermen’: many different White sub-groups. Not everybody was as pure-minded as Obergruppenführer Theodor Eicke, who complained that even many Volksdeutschen, Germans who lived outside Germany, were too weak and undisciplined to serve as replacements in his Totenkopf Division.”
“But…”
“And what if the Reich had won? All those different peoples, all those languages and cultures and traditions? I know what your faction wants. Bill, but it won’t work. Even if you cleansed the earth of every Black and every Jew and every non-German… including yourself, being of French and English descent, I recall… you’d still have to build a world. Hatred is a useful motive in combat, but it makes for very poor economic or administrative policies. You have to look beyond your immediate horizons, Bill.” He made soothing motions with his handkerchief. Clearly he did not want a quarrel.
Goddard struggled with himself, managed a smirk, and grated, “Excuse me, sir.” He went out.
“A good man,” Mulder looked after him ruefully. “Enlightened racism, the service of our Western ethnos, is the theoretical basis of our movement. But Bill takes it too far… and then doesn’t take it far enough beyond that.”
Lessing had decided. “I want to go to see a man in Paris,” he said. “I’ll try to find out about Pacov: who got it, who wants it… who wants me. I don’t promise to give it to you….”
“Nor do we want it. It should be destroyed safely!”
“But I have to know… for my own good.”
“Fair enough. Miss Hilary, down at the plant, will get you tickets and reservations. Leave any time.”
“After I’ve seen Jameela.”
At that time I was still a soldier. Physically and mentally I had the polish of six years of service…. In common with my army comrades, I had forgotten such phrases as: “That will not go. or, “That is not possible.” or, “We ought not to take such a risk; it is too dangerous.”
CHAPTER NINE
Thursday, July 17, 2042
The hotel room on the Place du Havre, opposite the ancient Gare St. Lazare, was small and musty, four paces from scarred door to grimy window, three from the far wall to the bed. It suited Lessing’s needs: Terry Copley’s secretary had said that “le Boss” would return at 1400 hours.
He ran a finger over the tatty upholstered chair, then sat down on — and almost disappeared into — the billowy featherbed that the French still preferred to anything invented since 1600.
He checked the spring-powered spit-shooter Wrench had insisted upon giving him: a short, black, plastic tube that fired darts dipped in a variant of saxitoxin, a poison the experts said would kill within twenty seconds. Lessing had not wanted the weapon, but it did provide a back-up to the 9-mm automatic pistol he carried in a shoulder holster. Neither Indian nor French airport security had objected to his armament, once he displayed the Indoco courier I.D. Mulder had provided him.
Shrill traffic noises penetrated the ancient and many-times- renovated stone walls. He got up to look outside. Paris had solved her time-honored congestion: now the only vehicles permitted within the city were battery-powered electrics, flat-bed delivery trucks, and two-or four-passenger “dodgem” cars with bodies built of a plastic material and engines that would propel them no faster than 30 kilometers per hour. Parisians displayed their traditional gallantry, adventurousness, and contempt for their fellows’ lives by naming the smaller model of these vehicles le duelliste and the larger le char — “the tank.” Both were fitted, de rigueur, with the most strident horns science could devise. The traffic situation improved somewhat, but not as much as was hoped: many people bought both a “town car” and also a larger, petrol-powered traditional automobile for extended travel. The wealthy purchased all three, which enriched the owners of rentable parking space in the suburbs beyond their wildest dreams.
Across the plaza, the weathered, time-wom facade of the Gare St. Lazare bespoke an earlier and more leisurely age. The eggshell-blue July sky seemed eternal. Crowds were denser than ever in this twenty-first century, of course: tourists in colorful shorts and Bylon shirts that could be wadded up in one’s fist and then shaken out like a magician’s handkerchief, unrumpled and crisp; French businessmen sporting fashionable frock-coats and vests, their trouser legs so tight as to be almost body stockings; shop girls in a variety of skirts and sweaters and blouses; and numerous young men attired in the scruffy shirts and pants that were as eternally Parisien as the Eiffel Tower. Lessing’s own nondescript, tan sports jacket and cuffless, brown trousers were ten years out of date here; this was just as welclass="underline" he could never pass for a Parisian nor even a European, but a footloose, not-too-rich American wanderer was a useful image under the circumstances.
There were others on the street He amused himself watching several hookers in the current Banger uniform: a translucent, glassine miniskirt, glittery pasties or metal-tissue breast cups, and long braids, dyed whatever hue their owner felt matched today’s “aura.” Some of the women carried the finger-drums or tambourines that gave B anger music its name — and the rest of the world a headache — while others didn’t bother pretending. Hypocrisy aside, the good burghers of Paris considered the Banger girls an asset, as much a tourist money-maker as the Louvre or the Metro.
Lessing had been in Paris before, once on leave from Angola, and again when he flew out to join in the Baalbek War in Syria. Then it had been sophisticated and exciting; now it struck him as alien, as different from India as Mars. He sensed something of what Jameela would feeclass="underline" a disturbing dose of culture-shock.
That brought him squarely back to his own problems. His last meeting with Jameela had been stormy. She wanted him with her, at Indoco, and she wanted an end to danger and instability. She had been furious when he told her he was leaving for Paris.
“Never do you talk to me! ” she had cried. “Never explain! Never say what you are doing!” In the heat of anger the hard, retroflex consonants of her native Urdu crept back into her speech, and part of her American university polish bubbled away like paint exposed to a flame.
“I can’t. You know that.”
“Take me along!”
“Can’t do that either. I’ll be back in a couple of days.”