End Time (60 page)

Bhakti's voice came again, like Virgil explaining the circles of hell to mute Dante:

“The Nazis never found the secret of the floating cities, even with all the help they received. The Fallen sent their drones to work down here, not to share secrets but to see every effort squandered, the war machine fail. No gravity bells were ever perfected. Not the kind of magical plaything to be lavished on the insane children of the Wehrmacht. Powers like that are reserved to only the highest forms of galactic life, not demented Über-men here at home.”

As if to agree, the thunder gods of the Allies' war hammer pounded bomb upon bomb aboveground. And beneath the earth men cowered in their skins. A single dying shriek of five thousand naked slaves echoed in the tunnels and then suffocated under a mountain of rubble as the roof of the world caved in.

Why wasn't his father among the doomed technicians in their blue overalls and the burning mantids? Where was his father? How had he escaped?

Bhakti's Virgil brought Lattimore to the surface. Fire stretched as far as the eye could see, while the drone of Allied bombers faded under a boiling night sky. Searchlights lanced into the dark along with ack-ack tracers, eager to shred any aircraft straggling behind the squadron. Aboveground most of the buildings were smoldering rubble, but not all. Here and there partially damaged structures dotted the smoking landscape.

Inside an exposed lab building Clem found his father.

His father, clad in dirty overalls and work boots, must have crawled up from the hell below. The man sat at a workbench in the light of a kerosene lamp, the sleeve of his left arm rolled to the elbow. In his free hand a tattoo needle hummed, pricking the skin of his forearm. The needle whirred and whirred. Carefully his youthful father etched blue numbers on his arm.

The vision was more than enough to break Clem Lattimore's mind apart.

Dad wasn't shaved-head slave labor at all, but one of the favored few, one of the master technicians, working of his own free will. Now that the world lay in ruins, he sought a way out, to escape punishment, becoming a karmic chameleon: changing from coddled scientist to pitiful concentration camp inmate.

Using a few scratches of ink to become a displaced paperless refugee, then magically morph back to coddled scientist once more when the danger of discovery had passed, racing into the arms of the Americans, who would soon scour the German countryside for anyone who'd worked on the Wunderwaffe, the wonder weapons.

“No, that's not right. Not right!”
Lattimore cried.

Bhakti brought him back to the library in Sioux Falls, sitting in the chair just as they'd started. The specter exuded a deep well of contempt, the skin of a man filled to the brim with pus and venom, extremely frightening now. Not the man Lattimore knew at all—not the kindly, gentle scientist so interested in showing him about the Aerogel manufacturing facility, so devoted to his work and family. The Punjabi scientist's face seemed choked with bile. No, this was another being entirely, rejecting everything good and decent in life, but with a sly grin on his face, a knowing sneer.

For a moment the mask had slipped, and Lattimore saw the real creature inside the Bhakti-skin: a grinning gaunt man in a top hat and tails, sitting at a desk in a wood-lined study. One of the Fallen, a man of evil tastes and long fingers with strings attached to the weak parts in every human soul.

This wasn't Bhakti sitting in the chair. No, but the creature behind the mirror, a parasite occupying a passive host, his sneering essence glowing through a dead man's eyes—a poisoned angel daring Lattimore to say one of the demon's many names out loud. The Adversary. Beelzebub. Lord of Flies. Gaunt fingers stretched out to shake his hand with unctuous words of greeting. “Glad we finally met.”

Lattimore awoke.

He swept the clammy washcloth from his forehead. Snow swirled against the bronze glass windows and over the nighttime streetlamps in the street below. Could everything he believed about his father have been a lie?

He jackknifed off the couch and started pulling books off the library shelves: a history of Nazi wonder weapons, and then Hilberg's
The Destruction of the European Jews.
There were problems with the sick fantasy the hallucination of Professor Singh had showed him. Inconsistencies. Project Riese—Project “Giant”—in Lower Silesia, where the Nazis supposedly built the antigravity bell, was located in the Owl Mountains of
Poland,
not Germany. And the Mittelbau-Dora complex was situated in
Germany
, not Poland.

Moreover, only the concentration complexes of Auschwitz and Birkenau used ink arm tattoos—but then as an educated scientist, his father might have been transferred from either of those camps to Buchenwald at some point and thence to Mittelbau-Dora. So perhaps the ruse might have worked.… In any case the Americans gave just about anyone with advanced degrees in the sciences a free pass to come to America, so why put the numbers on your arm at all?

Stop, Clem. This is just the devil talking. The gaunt man talking through the image of a good man. Don't start gnawing your own bowels over a long-dead past. There was no logical way to reconcile the young scientist of his nightmare with the same father who built him a tree house. Nevertheless, Lattimore couldn't help wondering. What about his parents' vanishing act when he was a kid—appearing naked and wet with a broken camera and a few damp Polaroid snapshots? What of that strange conversation upon their return, which Clem had overheard from the stairs?

Mother objecting:
“No one will believe us.”

Father countering:
“Would you?”

Mother again:
“What about the Polaroids?”

Father:
“No one will understand them.”

Mother:
“No, that's not what I mean. What are you going to do with them?”

Father's final words:
“Keep them somewhere safe.”

Lattimore found the bourbon decanter and poured himself a double, which went down way too quick. Mildred lay asleep on his bed, tuckered out. The middle-aged woman had taken off her shoes and unzipped the side of her skirt. The clock said three in the morning.

Back in the library, a photo had slid from his father's Deutsch copy of
Ship of Fools
. Not one of the mysterious Polaroids, but a black-and-white snapshot: Werner von Braun among his rescued colleagues and soldiers of the United States Army. Von Braun's arm was broken and in a cast, but despite this, the genius Kraut showed no signs of fear or subservience to his new masters; instead, he boldly stared into the lens with grim triumph. The faces of his men glowed with a knowing certainty. The whole crew had gotten out clean, found new patrons. Moreover, they were going to do what they did best: make more rockets.

Some wiseass had penciled a devil's goatee and little horns on von Braun's head.

Lattimore chuckled. That could only have been Pop.

Across the room, Jasper's laptop screen beeped to life. A communication window blinked at him, an outside party requesting a video chat. So somewhere out in the big bad world an Internet server still worked. Apparently Wi-Fi still operated in parts of Manhattan. The screen's identification panel read
Caller Unknown, Room 3327, New Yorker Hotel.

Why was that so familiar?

Something about that hotel, about that room number … He really should know about this place, but nothing clicked. The name New Yorker Hotel floated about his head like fake snow in a glass ball. Until very recently all you had to do was type a question, get an answer. Google addiction. Search-engine dependence.

Then it clicked.

A seemingly insignificant factoid of arcane trivia.

Room 3327 was Nicola Tesla's suite in the New Yorker Hotel—where the great scientist had lived the last years of his life, broken down and alone.

 

33

Hysterical Blindness

Piper sat in his study stroking the lava lamp.

Gee Willikers, he loved getting inside a man's head and messing around. Shock the human rat in the maze; watch him jump.

Hiding a falsehood between two truths was Mr. P.'s specialty, and he'd only become more adept with age. Mortals knew they had no time in life's hourglass, so they believed anything and everything. Aerospace boss Clem Lattimore couldn't have been a better subject, and conjuring the image of that dopey Punjab scientist to toy with the poor sap, a true bit of genius.

Bhakti's ghost had been loitering about the crack of Hades, refusing to go down since his recent demise; might as well put his angry spirit to some use. The really delightful thing was that Piper's patsies never knew which parts of his tales were true or false. And that went for both the living
and
the deceased.

Take the war of the silver cities, the Mound of the Dead.
Mostly
true. Take his own role in it. Mostly what you'd expect: a “fallen angel,” a refugee, the last survivor of his “immortal” kind. Oh, how wonderful life had been before the casting down, he and his playfellows ruling like princelings and princesses in the floating city of glass. They lived among the clouds, wanting for nothing, bathing in heavenly pools and making love in scented gardens, every earthly delight theirs for all eternity. Answerable only to the Master of the First Thought.

Ah … the Big Him must have known his shepherds who bedded his sheep would eventually go to war over the flock. The mating impulse, so irresistible … And how better to control and improve the stock? The struggle for supremacy was inevitable. Frolicking with the maidens and youths of the fields, sweeping them up from their toil below and keeping them for a while, returning them to their huts and hovels all the better for it …

Ten thousand years ago.

Plenty of time for superior breeding to take effect. More than enough time for everyone involved to forget it ever happened, except in tale and myth and the immortal word of
. Except for El. Him. The One You Cannot Look Upon. The Infinite Mind.

At the final reckoning, when Mr. P. stood naked before the doors of Elysium and Horus weighed his heart against a feather, the gaunt man had long ago decided to claim the Big Book as his defense. Lord, I was just following orders:
“You Angels. You mighty ones who do his bidding, who obey his word … be you fruitful and multiply. Now scatter thy enemies with thy strong arm.”
Piper smiled at his clever manipulation of scripture, stroked the lava lamp, and whispered, “‘Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done. On earth as it is in heaven.'”

Amen.

Now, take the incredibly useful gravity drive that upheld the floating cities of pre-antiquity and legend. Sure, it existed, but the Nazi version never worked, and thousands died trying to make it work—while the ever-helpful praying mantids
made sure it never worked.

What the hell were the Germans thinking? That greater beings than themselves would actually teach them how to float? Hah. Better to be buried alive and burned to death from electrically charged mercury. All their work amounted to nothing; now that was justice.

As for Pop Lattimore … The gaunt man inserted that ugly bit about Daddy Lattimore tattooing himself into a kike for the heck of it, pure schadenfreude. Just to torture the little boy living inside Clem. While thousands of SS men burned the Reich tattoos from their arms, why not make old man Lattimore get himself a bigger yarmulke, play up his persecution pedigree for after the war? Wouldn't be the first to switch sides a couple of times when the going got tough.
Who cared what was true and what wasn't,
just as long as the grown-up son couldn't get it out of his head.

As for the overwrought, gullible Punjabi scientist mooning over his own untimely death, Mr. P. didn't even have to make him a son of Abraham. Bhakti was the easiest of all to manipulate, believing what he saw with his own lying eyes. After a hopeless search of five thousand miles, more or less, he'd looked up to a window, only to see what he wanted so desperately to see: Lila Chen and Little Maria waving down at him from an apartment window. More than enough to drive the poor Punjabi over the edge.

Then dragged away from the high window on black wings?

Well, not exactly God's honest truth.

Yes, Piper had come into the room, but all he'd done was glance at the two girls staring down to the street. What were they going to do,
jump
? Don't be absurd. The two brats glared over their shoulders at him—part surprise, part annoyance—as though caught doing something naughty.

“Be careful. Don't fall out.”

The third member of their cozy little family sat on the larger bed below the Beatrix Potter bunny rabbit mural, touching his iPad. The beanpole preppy looked up only to mutter sullenly, “Right, the first step's a doozy.” Then went back to the flickering pictures on his little screen.