Serpent's Walk

CHAPTER FOUR

Monday, April 7, 2042

“No,” Wrench insisted. “They really are the SS. What it’s become, anyhow.”

Lessing didn’t want to think about Mulder’s secret Nazi connection. He wasn’t political, he didn’t care, and he wasn’t interested either in condemning or joining. He said, “And my mother’s Chicky Chicken, the cartoon queen!”

Wrench clucked and made flapping motions with his elbows. “If you say so.”

“Look, do you mind? Jameela kept me busy yesterday filing reports with the CID, identifying the opfoes, Bauer, statements… the whole mess.”

“I heard. Two foreigners, car parked on the main road, no I.D. Just two lost coyotes looking for a home.” “Coyote” was slang for an unemployed mercenary.

“South Europeans of some kind: Greeks, Italians.”

“And Bauer?”

“No connection. Nothing to do with the burglars. Or with the taxi-wala. Some third man stuck him. An Arab, maybe. There’ve been as many of them wandering around India as elsewhere since Israel finished gobbling up the last of their land.”

“How is Bauer?”

“Better. Balrampur Hospital.”

“Mulder and Goddard think there is a connection. Bauer was a diversion, to keep us all singin’ and dancin’ while the others went in for the books.”

“No chance! Mulder and Goddard can go play drop the soap in the shower.” There was no reason to tell Wrench about Bauer’s fear of Lessing himself. That was obviously irrelevant.

“You don’t realize the importance of those books! The records of the SS from 1945 to the present!”

“Stuff the books… sideways. Mulder and Goddard… a pair of closet Nazis! Let ‘em dress up in black uniforms and heil each other till the cows come home!”

Wrench put on a reproachful expression. “They’re the real thing.”

“Goddard is Goring, and Mulder is Adolf Hitler reincarnated. I thought only Calif omians went in for looney cults!”

Wrench took a turn around the verandah. It was just after dawn, and the sky was still a bowl of lapis lazuli, as glorious as any ever carved by a Mughal craftsman. Later it would be shrouded in white dust-haze, and the dry earth would swelter like bricks baking in a kiln. He took up a slice of crunchy, dark toast from the silver rack on the table, slathered it with whitish butter, and dunked it in his teacup.

Lessing watched.

“Well?”

“Well what?” Lessing poured lea for himself and added sugar and milk, Indian fashion. The tea was strong enough to walk by itself, not the “yellow dog piss” — his father’s term — his aunt Eileen used to make from tea bags. For a moment India flickered away, and Lessing looked out upon the softer, greener, more familiar contours of his Iowa childhood. Then reality snapped back into place like a loaded magazine locking into the butt of a pistol.

“Do you want to hear about the SS or not?”

Lessing sighed. “I don’t care. I don’t ask questions. They pay, I do. Curiosity kills cats and meres.”

Wrench snorted. “Lessing, you eat, you shit, and your feet stink; otherwise I’d think you were dead! God, but you’re an apolitical animal!”

Lessing eyed him impassively.

“You’ve two choices, you know. One, you join; two, you get a rocket up the bunghole. Whoosh! ” He pantomimed a sky-burst with his toast.

“Four choices,” Lessing corrected. “Three, let things go on as they are: I do my job, and we’re just like before. Four, you pay me off, let me go, and never hear from me again. I told you I don’t talk.”

“Mulder and Goddard won’t believe you. You’re in or you’re thumbed. I argued, but they wouldn’t….”

“I told you: I’m not political.”

“You’re asking for a fucking bullet, man! Goddard….”

“Let him try.”

“But Mulder thinks you may be useful, and he’s the one who counts. He tells me, I tell you.”

“Some decision.” Lessing gulped tea and waved an iridescent blue-green fly away from the marmalade jar. “I join or I get unzipped.” He shifted his weight so that his belt holster bulged beneath his beige-colored, raw-silk bush shirt. He had other weapons as well. “Unzipping” Lessing would be no easy op.

“At least hear what we’ve got to say!” Wrench demanded.

“So talk.” Lessing gazed out across the sun-drenched courtyard toward Mrs. Mulder’s garden. The mango trees there were inviting, cool and dark and green against the naked glare from the whitewashed compound and the revolting, pink ugliness of the mansion. Colors were never muted in India, never pastel, never soft; they tore at you like shrill music, like hot spices, like the violent smells of the bazaars.

Wrench decided he had Lessing’s attention. “In 1945, when Germany lost, two submarines arrived in Argentina. Some of the remaining senior officers of the SS were aboard. They brought money, lots of money, a good part of the ireasury of the Third Reich. People thought it was lost or stolen, down in Bavaria, but it wasn’t.

“I’ve seen the movie,” Lessing scoffed. “‘Martin Bormann in the Promised Land.’”

“It’s true, though. You can read the historical stuff later, if you want.”

“Thanks. When I run out of comic books.”

“It wasn’t only Bormann. There were others.” Seeing Lessing’s look, Wrench hurried on. “They founded a colony, set up businesses, made connections. Later they invested, linked up, developed. They built a series of interlocking corporations. The postwar boom and the recovery of Germany helped those corporations become conglomerates, then huge international holding companies based in the goddamndest places.”

“The Nazi Family Robinson.”

“What? God, you’re a comical asshole! Yes, everything neat and tidy, out of sight, away from the Jews and the Nazi-hunters and their network of financial institutions and pressure groups. The Third World made it easier. There ‘re fewer controls here, fewer restrictions, fewer checks, fewer regulations, fewer watchdog agencies. Less hassle with privacy: you can spot outsiders coming, like that koel bird in the mango tree over there; he can see all around his nest.”

Lessing looked but said nothing.

“They… the SS and their descendants… made friends in local governments. The Third Worlders needed know-how, money, connections, and expertise.”

“Expertise? Like death camps? Torture machines?”

“God damn it, Lessing! That’s TV propaganda! It’s just crap!”

“You sure?”

“I mean it Of course, since the Jews got the Anti-Defamation Amendment added onto the American Constitution back in 2005, it would be a miracle if you had ever heard anything but crap! The ‘Holocaust’ is now the only legal history. You go to jail for saying different.”

“I’ve been told.”

“Well, then, leave that for later. Let me bring the story up to date. The SS… what was left of it… had business objectives before and during World War n. When the war was lost they just kept on, but from other places: Bogota, Asuncion, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, Colombo, Damascus, Dacca… you name it. They realized that the world is heading towards a ‘corporocracy’; five or ten international super-companies that will run everything worth running by the year 2100. Those super-corporations exist now, and they’re already dividing up the production and marketing of food, transport, steel and heavy industry, oil, the media, and other commodities. They’re mostly conglomerates, with fingers in more than one pie. Some of them are owned now by the old-money interests; the Japanese and various foreign cartels run others; the Born-Agains have a couple; the Jews and their buddies control some big ones; and we, the SS, have the say in four or five. We’ve been competing for the past sixty years or so, and we’re slowly gaining.”

“Lose the war, win the peace. Which ones do you button-down Nazis own?” Lessing was interested in spite of himself.

“I’ll let Mulder tell you, if he wants. But I’ll give you an example, one I saw myself. About ten years ago we swung a merger, a takeover, and got voting control of a supercorp that runs a small but significant chunk of the American media. Not openly, not with bands and trumpets…”

“Or swastikas flying…”

“…But quietly: one huge corporation cuddling up to another one and gently munching it up, like a great, gubbing amoeba. Since then we’ve been replacing executives, pushing somebody out here, bringing somebody else in there. We’ve swung program content around, too. Not much, but a little, so it won’t show. We’ve cut down on ‘nasty-Nazi’ movies… good guys in white hats and bad guys in black SS hats… lovable Jews versus fiendish Germans… and we have media psychologists, ad agencies, and behavior modification specialists working on image changes. Hell, if you can con granny into buying Sugar Turds instead of Bran Farts, then why can’t you swing public opinion over to a cause as vital and important as ours?”

“Hard to get people to love death camps.”

“We don’t try. You can’t erase a hundred years of lying propaganda overnight. We play those aspects down and stress the positive ones instead: the mystique, the scientific approach to racial genetics, the efficiency and organization, the dedication, and the heroism. People will buy that. Good people, who haven’t seen a real American victory for a century now. People who are tired of watching the Jews and the mud races gobble up the world. People who don’t want their country run by guys with alien ideas. People who ‘re tired of being shat on and fucked over.”

“But the gas chambers! The ‘Holocaust’…?”

Wrench held out his hands, palms up. “What gas chambers? Show me one piece of real evidence! There were labor camps, sure, and thousands died from typhus, dysentery, poor treatment, and malnutrition. What do you expect during a war? Your country surrounded, fighting off Russia, Britain, and the United States, the three most powerful nations on earth with manpower and supplies to bum while you’re scrounging for undigested grain in the chicken shit! A lot of Germans died, a lot of Americans and Englishmen and others too. People died in the war, people died in the camps, people died in the Allied bombings of Dresden and Berlin and Hamburg. But all we ever hear about are the poor, innocent Jews and the awful ‘Holocaust,’ when, in fact, there never was an ‘extermination policy,’ a ‘Final Solution,’ or anything like it!”

“Oh, come on! What were the gas chambers for, if not for extermination?”

“Oh, there were shootings of partisans, hangings of saboteurs, and the usual atrocities that always happen in every war, but the real use of the so-called ‘gas chambers’ was for decontamination: ridding the clothing of camp inmates of lice and fleas!”

“Nuremberg? People confessed.”

“Under pressure, Lessing. Some real bad pressure, though nobody likes to think about that now. Confessions? Either hokum or else poor bastards hoping for a lighter sentence from the victors!”

“How in hell do you expect me to believe this? All my life… all my parents’ lives… everybody has taken the ‘Holocaust’ for rock-solid truth.”

“Some rocks are less solid than others. This one’d wash away with the tide if it weren’t for certain ‘interests’ propping it up. Look at our evidence sometime. In any case, we’re slowly replacing those negative images with others: the ‘Good Bad Guy’ routine.” Wrench spooned a tea leaf out of his cup. Outdoors, in India, it was wise to do that: it could always be a fly gone in for a swim. “What do you think of Jesse James? John Dillinger? Julius Caesar? Genghis Khan?”

Lessing raised his pale eyebrows.

“Bad guys, maybe, but nobody hates them. The same with the North Koreans, the Red Chinese, the North Vietnamese, the Con-federates, the Romans, the Turks, Attila the mother-humping Hun, for God’s sake! The reality may have been rough, but there’s a sort of glitter about most of those dudes: mean honchos but respectable. It’s all how you package it. Opinion is a goddamned commodity!”

“Impossible with the Nazis…”

“It works with anybody. Remember the Pied Piper, the guy who tootled his flute, stole everybody’s kids, ran off with ‘em, and was never seen again? A child abuser! But who hates hirri! Now he’s a dinkin’ fairy tale! Image, just image.”

“Next you’ll make Joseph Mengele over into naughty, sexy Doctor Joe, every housewife’s soap-opera wet dream!”

“You’re a funny man, Lessing. I mean it. Mengele was a physician and a scholar. He wanted to help his country’s war effort at a time when it was needed. Some of his experiments were rough… as rough as putting American soldiers next to an A-bomb test, or trying Agent Orange on your own men, like the U.S. government did. He didn’t do most of the things the Jews have accused him of, but he did put people into freezing water in his efforts to develop techniques for saving the lives of fliers shot down over the North Sea. His experiments were really a lot more humane than those performed by the Russians, the Japanese, or other scientists back when medicine was younger. Nobody advocates such experiments today, but you do have to understand the urgency which existed then.”

“Sure.”

“Some guys get good press, others get bad. Compare the Palestinians with the Jewish gangs who murdered both Arabs and Britishers before Israel was founded. Ask any American: he’ll tell you the Arabs are murderous terrorists, and the Israelis are lovable freedom fighters and heroes! If George Washington had lost, today’s kids would be reading about him as George Q. Terrorist, the Scourge of Decent Englishfolk!”

“You’ll never convince enough people to matter!”

“Give it time. Aside from the media, we’ve been buying up private schools… and helping some public ones through philanthropic foundations… and working on the churches and the Born Agains.”

The ceiling fan was doing its valiant best, but the verandah had grown hot. Lessing arose, squinting against the raw sunlight pressing in through the vines on the east side of the senior-staff-quarters building. He stopped in front of Wrench. “When… and if… this happens, what does your little band of supermen want?”

“We’re in competition, Lessing. We win, it’s our genes that survive and our Western heritage… our Aryan culture, if you like… that provides the model for how people will live on this planet for the next millennium. If we lose and the Israelis win, then they run the bagel shop their way, exactly what they’ve been trying to do for centuries. If both of the above lose, then the Chinese, the Japanese, or some new booga-booga ‘power’ in the Third World gets to pilot the ship on the cruise down to Hell. As a White man, I wouldn’t want to live in such a mongrel world!”

“So your SS is hot for world domination again? Business as usual!”

“Lessing, you dumb mother, that’s the name of the game. That’s been it, the whole turd-pile, the be-all and end-all, since Cheops built his pyramid! Power, man, power! Who gives the orders and what gets done. If you want your kind running the future, then you do what you have to do!”

“And incidentally thumb the world?”

“Of course not! Why should we want war? Too many atom bombs and killer satellites and city -busters out there as it is, and not even cockroaches can live on a nuked planet! We don’t want war, or slaves, or colonies! We want a future for our Western heritage, peace and plenty, an efficient government, an end to the social evils that’re tearing us up today, and purpose and hope for our kids.”

“If I knew Deutschland Über Alles, I’d sing!”

“Better the Horst Wessel Lied.”

“You never mentioned this stuff before.”

“Would you have listened? Mulder had asked me to talk to you, but you never showed any inclination: as apolitical as a cow-pie. Then came the breakin, and you found out for yourself.”

“I never saw Indoco as a hotbed of far-right radicalism!”

“Indoco doesn’t need the publicity. It just goes on making fertilizers and pesticides and agro-chemicals. It’s a subsidiary of Tee-May Industries of Athens, Greece; Tee-May is part of Rocco Corporation of Florence, Italy; and above that I don’t know. We do our jobs, watch the world go by, and quietly work to change public opinion.”

The sunlight made blinding, silvery dazzles of the cutlery, the teapot, and the milk and sugar pitchers. Lessing picked irritably at his shirt, already stained with perspiration and sticking to his spine. “What about the neo-Nazis? The Missouri Seven? The gang who blew up the power station in Munich in 2040?”

Wrench waved a manicured hand. “They’re part of it. Every movement needs street troops. Our enemies are tough; we’re tougher. Anyhow, there’s no such thing as a neo-Nazi; you’re either with us or you’re part of the problem. A lot of little organizations are called ‘Nazi’ when they’re not: some who ‘re right off the wall… rubber-room material… who mix our ideology with Christianity, survivalism, grassroots American patriotism, gut-level race-hatred… with almost anything. Wouldn’t surprise me to find a cell of conservative rabbis somewhere passing as ‘Nazis.’”

“Oh, sure. And while we’re at it, just what do you have in mind for the Jews and the Blacks? More gas chambers?”

“I told you: there never were such things. None. That was wartime propaganda that the Jews kept going in order to gain sympathy, support, and money for Israel. We don’t hate other races or ethnic groups; we just love our own people more. Our civilization is best fitted to run this ball of mud, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to slaughter all of our fellow inhabitants. If they cooperate, they’ll be a damned sight better off than they are right now.”

Lessing frowned. He could think of nothing to say.

“As I said, we’re in competition with those people for world supremacy. We will win because we are the best fitted to do so. If others choose to live in peace within their own regions, we won’t harm them. Those in our territory who are not our people will have to leave and settle elsewhere. It’s as simple as that. We’re willing to let other ethnic groups have their place in the sun, but as for living with us, running us, or grabbing what we have worked to build up for ourselves… no way! If that takes force to achieve… and maintain… then so be it. As the Jews say, ‘never again!’”

“No slavery? No labor camps… even if they’re not ‘death camps’?”

“Nope. Slavery doesn’t work. It always ends up, eventually, with mixing between slaves and masters, and then one has a real mess. Look what happened in the United States after the Civil War. We’ll govern ourselves and do our own work; others can run their societies the way they want. We’ll use force only if others try to dominate us.”

“But what about non-Whites in America and other Western countries?”

“They’ll have to go elsewhere: establish their own enclaves, set up their own governments, and run their own show the way they want it. They cannot live permanently in our territory. No more ‘minority rule’… or TV propaganda persuading our kids to go for mixed dating and mongrel mating!”

“That’s prejudice!”

“So? That ‘s been the policy in the state of Israel since that country was founded a century ago: no intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews, second-class citizenship for non-Jews, and worse for Arabs! Smile crooked at them, and they blow up your house in ‘retaliation.’ You can call it ‘prejudice’ if you want, but don’t accuse us of having a monopoly on it.”

“And if non-Whites don’t want to live under your Nazi rule and don’t want to go away either?”

“Tough cases demand tough solutions. We will try to sort them out… preferably without violence.” Wrench wriggled his fingers in the air. “We are going to do this. Either that or watch the future dribble away into a mishmash of alien ideologies and beliefs. Earth is overcrowded as it is, and what’s coming will be worse: over a billion Indians, another billion and a half Chinese, Africa bursting at the seams. Hunger, war, pestilence, death… the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse… are riding straight for us unless we head ‘em off at the pass. We’ve got to take control, got to become efficient, got to weed out weakness, got to build up our defenses. Otherwise we… and all the other races too… are doomed. Humanity’ll go the way of the dinosaurs!”

Lessing stared at him. “You’re serious? Really serious? Un-scramble the races? In North America? In New York City alone? Send the Blacks to Africa, the Chicanos to Mexico, the Haitians to Haiti…?” He chortled. “The gays to San Francisco?”

“Lessing, you asshole “

“Hell, even God couldn’t do it! It would make the shift of Muslims to Pakistan and Hindus to India back in the last century look like a kindergarten fire drill by comparison!”

“It will be done, without violence or war if possible. Our movement is international. Our sister-organizations in other countries will help other races and ethnic groups to develop ‘movements’ of their own. They have their pride and their right to live, just as we have ours. They’ll persuade their people to come and live with their own kind.”

“You’re out of your motherly mind!” Lessing had another thought. “What of the mixes? The interracial marriages? The millions of mixed-race kids in the ghettos? Suppose they refuse to go?”

Wrench got up. The heat was a physical wall at the edge of the verandah. “You’re right: a problem But not as bad as we have now with those ghettos in full swing: sinks of poverty, crime, drugs, AIDS, and hopelessness. The present Establishment can’t pay the costs of welfare and medical aid for much longer. Those people will be better off separated and living in enclaves of their own than they could ever be with us. Given a worst-case scenario, though, if they don’t want to work things out, and if they offer violence, then… and only then… will there be trouble. Even so, it couldn’t be as bad as the mess we’re heading for now.”

“How do you get ’em to go?”

“Make ‘em an offer they can’t refuse: land elsewhere and other positive inducements if they go quietly… or whatever it takes to get rid of them if they make a fuss.”

Lessing rubbed the high bridge of his nose. “Okay, what about the North American Indian? You going to move the White folks out of the United States to give the Indian back his country?”

“Give us a break! We can’t right every wrong all the way back to Cain and Abel! We’ll do what we can to make territorial homelands for people who want ‘em. That’s the best we can offer.”

“You’re nuts. I am working for a sackful of certifiable pecans!”

“At least, we’ll try. We won’t just stand around with our fingers up our asses and watch doomsday come rolling in, like the politicians and liberals now.”

Lessing snorted.

The rattan porch chair squeaked and crackled as Wrench dragged it back out of the brazen sunshine. “How about it, Lessing?” He held out a hand. “You in or out? What do I tell Mulder?”

“I’ve already said. I don’t give one flying finger-jerk about your hare-brained ‘cause.’ You’re welcome toil. I workforpay. You pay, I work. Okay? Verstehen Sie? Tell your teddy-bear Führer that.”

Wrench shook his head. “Money’. A helluva reason to do things! Low class, man!”

“I know. It’s not everything.”

“But it’ll do until ‘everything’ comes along. Okay, I’ll tell Mulder. He won’t like it, and Goddard’ll beg for your balls on a platter. But Mulder’s the boss. He’s one of the Directors. I don’t mean a director of Indoco… they’re just front men… but a ‘Descendant ‘ in the Central Directorate of the movement. You saved his life, and he likes you.” He feigned a thick, British accent: “A mercenary’s mercenary, wot?”

Lessing opened the screen door. “Answer me one last question. Are you one of these… these…?”

“‘Descendants?’ Nope, just a red-blooded, American boy fresh out of Rapid City, South Dakota.”

“How did you get in with this gang? You always struck me as somebody with sense.”

“Just a maverick, I s’pose.” Wrench shifted to a cowboy twang. “Ever since ‘hah skull.’ Never did believe the cow-pucky they taught us in civics class. Started readin.’ Got interested in political systems, then in history, and then the Third Reich. Met a guy who knew a guy who knew Mr. Mulder, and here I am.”

“Jameela said you had an advanced degree…?”

“Oh, I do. But it didn’t completely wreck my ability to think, like it does for some folks.”

“God, a sackful of pecans…,” Lessing muttered to himself. He dove into the cool shadow beyond the screen door. Wrench stood and blinked after him for a moment, then followed.