Black Sun Reich (10 page)

Ach. Mein. Gott
.

“Is this safe?”

Hughes didn't hesitate.

“I won't lie to you, Doctor. No, not at all.”

“Vas?”

“Drop zone in ten, nine, eight . . .”

“Herr Hughes, how many times have you employed this device?”

“Including today?”

“Ja!”

“Today's drop would bring it to . . . I think, one. Yes. One. Releasing pod.”

Rucker whooped a cowboy yahoo.

Deitel cried out, too. “I hate Texas!”

And kept on repeating it.

 

CHAPTER SEVEN

Manhattan Island

New York City

Capital of the Union States of America

R
ucker and Deitel were walking the streets of New York City and it wasn't even 9:00
A.M.
Almost exactly twenty-four hours before, Deitel had been standing on the tarmac in Colombia under the sweltering heat and the rising sun. Now he was chilled to the bone from the cold, damp air here in New York City.

“Everyone in Texas is clinically insane,” Deitel was saying. “I speak as a medical professional.”

“Hey, your people are making monsters. Actual, bona fide monsters. Don't judge,” Rucker said.

“I need a shower,” Deitel said.

“You had a bath. The East River, it's called.”

Deitel sniffed the back of his hand.

“That's why I need a shower.”

“Helps you fit in,” Rucker said.

Deitel scratched furiously at the clothes he'd put on after the two dragged themselves and their inflatable boat out of the waterway under the Queensboro Bridge. Rucker had them change into very plain suits with industrial tailoring and cut from thick, itchy wool. The jackets were extremely high-waisted and the lapels very thin. The trousers were narrow and worn so that their socks showed, apparently the fashion here. They wore tweed scally caps that looked more ridiculous than Rucker's straw cowboy hat.

Rucker said they had to fit in with the locals, which also explained why for the first time Deitel saw Rucker without his big Colt pistol strapped to his thigh. He'd gone for a more subdued approach—twin .45 Webley compact revolvers in a shoulder harness rig.

The Texans and their toys.

They rounded a block to find yet another block of utilitarian, concrete tenements.

“So, this is New York City,” Deitel said.

“This is New York City.”

Deitel sniffed. “I thought it would be bigger.”

“Largest city in the Union States,” Rucker said. “Look, you're not seeing this place at its best. It's a good place that could have been great. The Old Quarter is something to see. It has the most amazing architecture. The underground art movement here is easily the rival of the art movements in New Orleans or Paris, and that's in everything from jazz and painting to the theater scene. Last century, this place was a powerhouse in terms of cultures coming together, clashing, and evolving into something more than the sum of its parts. It just all went wrong around the turn of the century when the progressive and socialist movement drove out the capital and the old money. The decency laws drove out the thinkers and the artists. The eugenics movement drove out the old fashioned liberals, and the temperance movement drove out the fun.”

Most of the buildings on their route, especially the public tenements, were built in the post-Wilson era of National Greatness and Austerity. In fact, only the strings of drying laundry—how did anything dry in this weather?—added any color to the city scene in this, the worker's sector. Browns and grays and blues, mostly, and yellowed whites. But that was something.

“This is the cultural center of the old American dominion, the national capital of the Union States,” Rucker said. “This is the center of their nation's pride.”

Deitel nodded.

“What is that smell?” he asked.

Rucker pointed up at some windows across the street, where a woman was pouring a chamber pot onto the gutter. Then he pointed at the carcass of a horse lying in the street up ahead.

“This is what happens when everyone owns everything,” Rucker said. “No one takes care of anything.”

“What causes this kind of . . . this?” Deitel said, sweeping his arm before them. “They were one of the leading economic nations as late as 1900.”

“They all point the finger up here at something or another. Big Business. Big Banks. Big Labor,” Rucker said. “I think maybe they never stop to consider the problem is Big Ideas.”

Deitel cocked his head. Rucker idly thought the body language resembled a dog trying to understand English.

“All the promises their leaders make them. All the things they vote for themselves to get, and all the big projects that their leaders can stick their names on. Big Ideas,” Rucker said. “I think they'd be surprised at how well things would go if they'd just leave things alone.”

Deitel shook his head. “But if everyone is just pursuing their own hedonistic desires, how can there be room for national goals such as—”

“The conquest of Austria and the Czechs?”

“That's not fair, I'm talking about improving the people. Serving the greater good..”

“What if people don't want to be improved?”

“The laissez-faire approach might work if people were perfect, but they aren't.”

“Why do people have to be perfect to be free?”

“People have to be protected from their own excesses,” Deitel countered.

“Look, if you're free you own yourself. You can hurt yourself by too much food or too much liquor. You can ruin yourself at the poker table. You can piss you life away any number of ways,” Rucker said. “It would make you a damn fool and, if the preachers are right, a damned soul. But if you aren't free to do all that, you're not free at all. You can't be free to stand up if you're not free to sit down and die.”

“Do you really think people want the freedom to fail? To starve?” Deitel asked.

Rucker did allow that their route took them purposefully through the worker districts on the east side—not the more prosperous and upscale districts on the west side so commonly seen on the newsreels—exactly because they would attract less attention here.

The Union States weren't all poverty and mediocrity like this. In other parts of the city the governing elite, party members, select industrialists, and chosen mercantilists provided the glamour and extravagance for which New York City was still renowned, despite the past three decades of economic stagnation.

“So,” Deitel said, “I notice when you want to avoid discussing a topic, you start discussing economics or politics or Tennessee whiskey or anything but the obvious. So?”

“I don't want to talk about it.”

“We're on our way to contact your ex?”

“Shut up.”

“I was surprised to hear this, really.”

“Shut up.”

Deitel could barely contain his amusement.

“Herr Hauptmann Rucker: romantic.”

“You do know what ‘shut up' means, right?”

“One gets giddy at the thought of meeting the former Frau Rucker.”

“I have a gun. Two guns. I can shoot you. Right here. New York City street. No one would notice.”

“The mind reels imagining the kind of woman who would take your hand and your name.”

Rucker actually growled.

“Shut— If I tell you, will you agree not to bring it up again?”

“Jawohl, mein hauptmann.”

They turned west onto 72nd Street and found themselves in a press of humanity along the sidewalks.

“Tell me about your ex-wife.”

“My ex-fiancée. Not my ex-wife.”

“Of course,” Deitel said insincerely.

“I can and I will shoot you.”

“Please, continue. No more peanuts from the gallery.”

Rucker had to resist the urge to pull out a cigar to chew on. It would stand out here—creature comforts weren't the norm in this extended depression. Discussing her always brought on the urge. Chewing a Cuban was the bad habit so many aviators picked up. Since a pilot couldn't smoke a cigar in an open cockpit plane, they learned to chew them.

“It was five years after the war. Before I went into business with Chuy. April 1923. I was flying a charter route between Greece and Cairo. She was my charter—said she was an Egyptology student out of Virginia, trying to hook up with some Spanish expedition. Her one-day charter turned into four weeks traveling along the North African coast together. We fell in all hell's kind of love.”

Deitel thought he knew the rest.

“And she wanted you to marry her. To give up your life as the winged soldier of fortune trekking around the world, so you could raise sheep, cotton, and fat children in Virginia.
Ja?
”

Rucker spat.

“Close enough. Except it was
me
who wanted
her
to give up trekking around the world and settle down on a little ranch down near Cabo. Me giving tinseltown tourists flybys of the movie star homes in the Cabo Madera Hills.”

“And?”

“She said yes. So we were engaged for a whole, glorious week. We barely left our hotel room in Casablanca.”

“And then? The suspense has me on the pins and on the needles.”

“She stole my plane and flew to Tangiers. Left a goodbye note. ‘Dear Fox, so long and thanks for all the hummus and romance. You're a sweet boy but I'm not that kind of girl.' ”

Deitel didn't say anything.

“Found later she was working for the CSA's foreign service. Just using me as cover for her mission,” Rucker said.

Deitel kept looking straight ahead. Finally the corner of his mouth twittered. And that was all it took to unleash his laugh. He nearly fell over.

“I am so shooting you as soon as we get out of here,” Rucker said.

“Oh. I'm sorry,” Deitel said, wiping a tear from his eye. “That is terrible, but, what is the English?”

“Creepifying? Horrificsome?”

“Is that English?” Deitel asked. “I think I mean ironic. Anyway, it's just it was exactly what I didn't expect to hear. How is it that she is in Texas now?”

“The CSA ain't got the same problems the Union States do, but they got their problems all the same,” he said. “Especially for a woman who isn't content with just running a household or teaching Sunday school, I reckon.”

Rucker patted all his pockets looking for the cigar he knew he didn't have.

Deitel just grinned.

“You know, only the Germans would have a word for taking pleasure in the misery of other folks,” Rucker said. “Anyway, something happened, so she told the CSA to go to hell because she was going to Texas. That's all I know.”

“You have since spoken?”

Rucker growled again.

“I told you I'd tell you about how she's my ex. Now you have to shut the hell up.”

They passed a nicer section of brownstones at 72nd and Madison. Deitel noticed the marked improvement in the architecture this side of Park Avenue.

And despite his initial take on the Big Apple, he could sense there was a vibrancy to this city straining beneath the surface.

In better times—perhaps a better reality—he could envision this place with electricity in the air.

“Okay, Doc,” Rucker said. “We're coming up on Fifth Avenue. Time to put your war paint on.”

“It was never explained why it was so crucial we meet your ex-fiancée this morning, rather than tonight or even tomorrow. Or why she couldn't have just come to us,” Deitel said.

“Yeah, see, here's the thing about that. Her assignment was to the Morgan Museum of Natural History in New York City. It's one of her actual specialties, but it just so happens the Morgan Museum is located right next to National Security Service headquarters. The museum shares space with the NSS decryption and analysis branch,” Rucker said. “So all it would take is a little stealth and a little more leg thrown to the right clerk, and she'd know what the NSS knew before they knew it.”

Deitel was a little scandalized. And a little impressed.

“But apparently she's off the reservation and on the warpath,” Rucker said.

He explained to the doctor how just six months before, the assistant Union States ambassador to Austin had been caught having inappropriate relations with a grammar school girl. As if there was some sort of appropriate relationship for an eight-year-old girl and a fifty-three-year-old man. The outrage had been reported widely in the Freehold's newspapers.

Of course, diplomatic immunity meant the man couldn't be touched, but he was immediately shipped home, where, Union diplomats promised, he would be properly prosecuted.

“And yet today,” Rucker said, “in what's sure to be a well-attended brunch ceremony on account of the concurrent display of national treasures from Hawaii on loan to the Morgan Museum, that very same assistant ambassador is being named full ambassador to the Kingdom of Hawaii.”

Deitel's nonresponse told Rucker he didn't see the connection. They were well into Central Park now.

“She's going to blow her cover and kill the miserable bastard,” Rucker said. “It's a family matter.”

“Oh good. For a minute there I was worried this was going to become normal,” Deitel said. “And we are to . . . what exactly?”

“Get into the ceremony. Protect her cover. Get her out. Escape from New York.” Rucker ticked them off on four fingers.

Then he pointed to the great opening of the trail ahead, just beyond several hundred yards of manicured lawn cut right into the heart of the park. There it was. Nestled in front of Turtle Pond. A stunning work of neoclassical and early Georgian design. A knockoff, sure, but a good one, right down to the columns on the front and the expansive West Wing.

“Oh, and the ceremony is being held at Hamilton House. Where President Kennedy lives. In about—hmm, thirty minutes. Did I forget to mention that?” Rucker asked.

Deitel stopped in his tracks. His head shook slightly.

“Herr Rucker, what are you going to do?”

Rucker grabbed Deitel's sleeve and tugged him along.

“I don't know. Let's find out.”