A cardboard box stood at the end of the sofa when Emil and I arrived in Marcus Bönner’s flat Saturday night. The kind of box that held twenty-five thousand sheets of tractor-fed computer printer paper, a fairly large box.
I sensed the man attempting to cover his own interest in the box; and my attention was drawn immediately to it. “What is this?” I demanded as I crossed to the end of the sofa.
He looked at me. “It’s what you wanted, my Prince. All of the files on the putsch from America’s Christian Center. I included the files that linked their organisation to the others. And the files that showed how they went about destabilising America. The files on the putsch are already on the internet.” He grinned. “I have also sent them to BBC, France Presse, Reuters, and the Associated Press.”
My brow arched in surprise.
“You’ve been busy,” Emil chuckled.
“I gave them the codes to enter this Christian Center’s files as well—was that okay, sir?” I nodded and watched him relax. “I also sent the codes to the FBI in Washington.”
“You seem to have thought of everything, Herr Bönner,” I told him and pulled out my chequebook. What he had done was well-worth a million francs—he had saved the world.
“They’re very organised, my Prince—much like…” He paused and blushed.
“Like the Nazis,” I finished his sentence and watched him jerk his head in a short nod. “Your grandfather was one—the man in charge of the final solution to the Jewish question.” It was not a question. And the thoughts that flooded the forefront of his mind confirmed what I already knew.
“You knew from the beginning?” he mumbled, his eyes on the box on the floor and unwilling to come up to meet mine.
“Yes.”
“Yet, you came to me?”
“You were the only hacker recommended,” I answered, unable to restrain the grin that spread across my face.
“And you didn’t kill me?”
“I needed your help.”
“Afterwards, I mean, my Prince.”
“Marcus, there was little purpose to visit vengeance for the sins of the grandfather on the grandson.”
“But you aided the Jews of Vienna.”
“And lost my lover to your grandfather’s SS.”
“And you didn’t kill me.”
“You'd done nothing to warrant that.”
“How did you get in so easily?” Emil asked, purposefully changing the course of the conversation.
“That was easy. All their passwords are New Testament words or…” He grinned. “If it was an important file, they took the first letter from each chapter of one of the books of the Bible to make a password. Of course, they used the King James’ version—but you'd told me already that they were Protestant and I suspected that they were incapable of learning foreign languages. Their security programme was so simple a child could see what they were doing.”
“Now that we know who is who in their organisation, it should be easy enough to destroy it,” I said.
“Are you going to kill them all, my Prince?” he gasped. “There are thousands of people doing things for them—all across America. They may be poorly educated, even stupid—but they are human still.”
I laughed. “I’d rather tie them to what they’ve done and let the media and police do their jobs,” I told him and wrote him a cheque. “You have done very well indeed, Herr Bönner. I congratulate you.”
Tom still slept the sleep of transformation, but he lay between Emil and myself who loved him. He was safe with us as the world around us turned itself upside down.
The Sunday morning news chat programmes on television competed to read the most damning files to their listeners and have the sagest professors of political science explain what those files meant. By evening that day, every European ambassador had left Washington, called home for discussions.
The fury of hell burst over the American Capital city by Monday when The Washington Post printed its story of the connections between Reverend Bob Patterson and the terrorist militias and the Aryan Order in the west, skinheads in the east, and militias and klansmen throughout the country. Its fires sprang into conflagration the following day in New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
The Southern Baptist Conference issued a news release on Tuesday proclaiming that organisation’s continued faith in Bob Patterson’s ministry but called for the immediate investigation of the Christian Center. Dallas burst into flames as its dailies followed the rest of the country.
By mid-week, television talk show hosts dropped their interest in middle-aged women who slept with their teen-aged daughters’ boyfriends and began airing former members of the Aryan Order, the Klan, and militias throughout the country, trying to delve into their sexual practices. Each host devoted several spots on each show to pleading for any adult who slept with any of America’s top Fascisti to come forth and give their own stories.
Christian Center bumper stickers disappeared from automobiles in Maryland and Virginia as fast as their owners could scrape them off.
The circus had begun. American style.
* * *
Tuesday evening, the comedian’s wide face gazed at us from the television screen. “Where are you going when you take a ride with Bob Patterson, folks?” he asked his audience and paused. “Straight to the hell of an IRS audit,” he answered himself a moment later.
I didn’t think the joke funny but smiled that the country’s comedians were now making the preacher and his groups the brunt of their humour. I reminded myself that somebody once said the reason Hitler was able to rise to power in Germany was because the Germans couldn’t laugh at themselves.
The Americans did, though. And the fangs of that laughter were sunk deep into what was left of Bob Patterson and his allies. But was it enough?
The Fürst von Maribor had seen empires rise and fall in his one hundred and seventy years, and he had seen the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini sweep over Europe, only to be replaced by that of Lenin and Stalin. The course of history could have been changed if Hitler had simply disappeared beneath its waves. Hitler had been the only leader insane enough to immerse the world in war, and he had nearly destroyed Europe with that insanity. Europe and the world could have been spared that destruction if Hitler had died instead of ruling.
The only good thing about the world war was that Hitler didn’t have nuclear weapons. He hadn’t been able to destroy the entire world—plant and animal, mortal and vampire. Patterson, or someone like him, would have those weapons if he gained power in America. He could order the death of the planet; and, from everything I had seen, he was insane enough to do it.
Perhaps, vampires had a duty to prevent such men from gaining power, a duty not to mortals but to the world they shared with them.
|Never, Karl!| The thought exploded across the horizon of my mind. Surprised, I looked over at my lovers to find Tom studying me, a tight smile on his face. But it wasn’t Tom sitting there.
|Sergei Alexandrovitch?|
|We aren’t gods, my love—and we mustn’t play at being one.|
|You know my thoughts?|
|I think we need to take a long walk, you and I—in fact, Tom commands that I do so.|
|We might not get back in time to find a cow in an area we’ve not yet visited.|
|I may have to taste human blood tonight then. Our talking is more important than Tom’s sensibilities.|
Outside, we were two young, good-looking men walking slowly towards Eastern Market and the gay bars there, enjoying our companionship.
“My lives have proved we vampires need to stay out of nearly every aspect of mortal history,” Sergei Alexandrovitch Romanov said quietly in the heated evening.
“Scheiße! Without Hitler, Würther would still be alive,” I growled.
“And be an old man in his late seventies if he still lived, Karli.”
“He’d have joined me, as I joined you.”
“No, he wouldn’t. He was in denial of everything about us.” The Russian chuckled bitterly. “The one thing he couldn’t deny was his—our—love for you. In that, he and Tom are much alike.”
“He’d have grown old and died?” I asked in disbelief.
“That was his intention—both consciously and sub-consciously. But he involved you in helping the Jews of Vienna and that brought the SS after both of you.” He chuckled.
“I wasn’t much better there in Petrograd. I saw that priest haranguing a crowd of workers to march on the Winter Palace, to give the Tsar—our loving national father—a silly petition. I joined them.”
He snorted at the memory. “I led a column. I saw those damned Cossacks sitting their horses. I saw their swords drawn. I touched one’s thoughts and knew what their orders were. And still I marched on at the head of that column of simple workers. Because I was incapable of believing that the Tsar would break the covenant between Mother Russia and her people.”
He chuckled. “It is strange how the human mind holds onto what it wants to believe, even when the evidence is there before it that it’s wrong. Würther believed people could never be really inhuman to other people. I had my belief in Mother Russia; he had his belief in God. Both were goodness incarnate. Yet, both failed.”
“I don’t see it. Sergei Alexandrovitch, without Count Witte there’d not have been a Bloody Sunday. The Tsar would have accepted the petition and no one would have been hurt and Russia would have become a constitutional monarchy. Without Hitler, there wouldn’t have been a Wansee Protocol and a SS. Without this Patterson, there won’t be a nuclear fascist America.”
He turned to study me. “You’re still speaking of an essential goodness—and its antithesis, evil. In that skewered logic, if you remove evil, goodness prevails.”
He stopped, shoving his hands in the pockets of his shorts. “Karl, there is no god and no goodness incarnate. You would have vampires become gods in their place because we are stronger than mortals, because any one of us could have got to Hitler and left him a bloodless husk, even after he was in power.”
His black hair shone under the street lamps, his eyes were hidden; yet I felt them seeing through me. “How can we become gods, Karl? How dare we choose to murder a man simply because we see him as evil?”
“We do that now, Sergei Alexandrovitch. When I choose a victim, I select one who has destroyed his life or made himself inhuman. Emil does the same thing.”
“You choose one who, by your definition, is no longer useful or is inhuman. That’s fine on a one-to-one basis. It’s your justification for selecting that particular person to feed yourself. But it doesn’t work when you tie your definition to history. Would you have killed Albert Einstein?”
“He didn’t…” I instantly saw where Sergei Alexandrovitch was taking our conversation. Einstein had given mankind access to the atom. With him gone before he could revolutionise physics, there wouldn’t be the lingering threat of nuclear destruction.
Yet, the man’s contributions to science had brought mankind to the brink of carrying life to other planets. Without him, much of man’s knowledge of the universe gleaned these past seventy years wouldn’t have been.
“Even now, the American government is rounding up Patterson’s henchmen throughout the country. He is arrested. He and the Fascisti he led are history, Karli. I have no complaint with your contribution to bringing his threat to an end, or with the way you did it. It was an interesting way for us to contribute to our world’s health, even to improve it. But to kill the man now that he is defeated? That would be playing at godhood—visiting retribution for his sin on him. That’s an insanity on the same level as his.”
“So, you would have us forget him?”
“Forget him? Mortals and vampires both need to accept responsibility for the world they live in.” He smiled wryly. “That part of me, Würther, still lives. I’m saying there’s a whirlwind of fear—one caused by all the changes of these past sixty years—waiting to be harnessed and we should watch those who would attempt to harness it. And destroy their attempt if their goals are not good ones—but not as a murder machine.”
“I don’t see the difference between what you’re suggesting and what I was thinking.”
“I said destroy the attempt. You’ve put Patterson up to public ridicule and criminal prosecution. He has been destroyed—and the force of fear he sought to control has momentarily lost some of its strength because of all that laughter.”
“Stephens still sits in the White House.”
“Isolated. Increasingly aware that he no longer has authority. He is like the condemned man caught in the moment between the door falling out from under his feet and the noose breaking his neck. Patterson’s neck is already broken—he is dead. Stephens merely awaits his arrest.”
“Sergei Alexandrovitch…”
“You’d go on and kill a man whose movement is already destroyed. You would institute your own Wansee Protocol, as the enemy already lies defenceless under your foot—in a Warsaw ghetto of this situation, this country and this time. You’d overkill, Karl.”
“You were ever the mercantilist, Sergei Alexandrovitch,” I groaned. “The merchant Prince. It’s too bad you weren’t the Tsar instead of Nicholas—we’d still have empires and our estates.”
He chuckled. “If they existed still with the knowledge we’ve gained this past hundred years, we wouldn’t recognise them.”
I took his hand and visualised the sitting room of our home, ensuring the same picture was appearing in his thoughts as well. And we were there.
* * *
“The Treasury Secretary and a Secret Service detail are waiting in the Oval Office for you, Mr. President,” Doris Schafly told Reed Stephens Tuesday evening as he sat in the study in the family quarters of the White House.
“They’re here to arrest me?” he asked without looking up.
“I think they just want to ask you some questions, Mr. President. They arrested Reverend Patterson this afternoon.”
He nodded. “My family’s already at the lake, aren’t they?”
“Yes, sir. They left this afternoon.”
He took a deep breath and began to let it out. “Tell the Secretary I’ll be down in a moment. “I think you’d better fly to Atlanta tonight.” He looked up at her then and smiled. “Good night, Doris.”
He opened a drawer of his desk as she let herself out. He pulled the Luger out and looked at it, the smile still on his face.
Sexually sated, I lay between my two lovers as the eastern sky lightened outside our window. Languidly, I told myself mine had been a full life these past one hundred and fifty years and accepted it was only just beginning. I had forever extending out ahead of me with these two men to help me explore it.
Emotional storm clouds rose at the far horizon of my mind and moved swiftly over the endless sea of tranquillity that had been my thoughts. I frowned and extended my senses towards them.
Reed Stephens paced the floor of the White House study, his thoughts a turmoil of raging images and unidentifiable fears, a pistol in his hand. Through his eyes, I looked about the room for what had agitated him so and found nothing.
I forced my way past the fears and insane imaginings that churned across the foreground of his mind.
His dreams lay shattered. The Christian Center was gone. He’d never be able to hold the presidency. They were here to arrest him.
It had been a gamble from the beginning. He had his PhD in history. He had teaching positions offered. It would have been a quiet, even sedate life.
Instead, he had accepted Bob Patterson’s request to head up the Center. To give fundamentalist Christianity a political voice.
Reed Stephens laughed. It had been a fun ride, the past eighteen years. Exciting, even exhilarating. It had been more than any middle-class boy from Marietta, Georgia could have hoped for, even in his wildest dreams.
Only, it had now come to a crashing end. Bob Patterson had finally guessed wrong—big time. Little children didn’t sing to him any more—to either of them. Late night television talk show hosts made jokes about them.
He didn’t want to die.
Only he had to—if he wanted to avoid a trial that he’d have no chance of winning. He raised the pistol to his head. He refused to be led around in chains.
I fled Reed Stephen’s mind as the man's finger tightened on the trigger.
I smiled grimly as I shut my eyes and sought sleep. Thomas Jefferson’s dream still lived. Hitler had not been resurrected.
THE END