The Love Potion Murders in the Museum of Man (26 page)

“Beckmann!” He spit it out like an expletive along with bits of food he was chewing.

“And Gustav Klimt,” I went on, baiting him a little. “I find his prostitutes touching and beautiful.”

“Degenerates,” he said dismissively. “Weimar scum.”

The pot, I thought, calling the kettle black. But I simply shook my head and tried to dissemble a distinct repugnance as I remarked to myself the congruence between my host’s opinions and the shirt of scarlet silk beneath his tunic and the welling Wagner and the flames from the roaring blaze in the fireplace
reflecting off the polished walls and the deplorable oils, the whole effect creating a hellish Valhalla.

It got worse.

Mr. Bain leaned across the table and shook his head with exaggerated effect. “Do you know, Norman, who is the greatest artist of the twentieth century?”

“I have some opinions, but I’m not very passionate about them,” I replied.

“Adolf Hitler.” He paused for effect.
“Der Führer.”

“You’re not serious,” I said, rising to the bait with that queasy disquiet such topics elicit. Just a bad joke, I hoped. Because, guest or no, Miss Tangent or not, drunk or sober, I was not to be suborned into anything like admiration for or understanding of, however ironic, that archvillain.

Mr. Bain’s smile had that Mephistophelean curve I had come to know. “Think of it, Norman. Think of it in terms of what we are told art must do.
Épater le bourgeoisie
. Well,
Mein Führer
épatered them to the roots of their little beings. He épatered them like no one else has before or since. He made us stop and think what it means to be human.

“Or inhuman …”

It was not really a conversation. My host had turned declamatory, his words coming like something he had gone over in his mind or rehearsed with others again and again.

“War is not art,” I said.

“On the contrary. World War Two was his masterpiece. The world itself was his canvas. He drew his brush across it. He carved and painted with men and machines …”

“And madness.”

“Yes, but inspired madness.
Der Führer
was modern way beyond his time. While Picasso and the others were dabbling at their little experiments with reality, Adolf Hitler conceived and
executed a fantastic, glorious war. He created new levels of reality. Do you have any idea of what life was like during the battle for Stalingrad? Do you know that human beings experienced there another order of existence?”

“Is that art?”

“By today’s standards, certainly. Think of it in conceptual terms. Think of it as a kind of installation …”

“Not a permanent one, thank God.” I turned to Miss Tangent, thinking she would at least smile at my rejoinder. But she was under the man’s spell.

Mr. Bain leaned across the table and jabbed the air with his fork. “What do those poncy little critics keep telling us every time someone slices a cow in half or buggers himself with a crucifix? They tell us it is art. And if we protest, we’re told it’s
supposed
to disturb us. Well, by that standard … I mean
Der Führer
disturbed all of us, didn’t he? He still disturbs us, doesn’t he?”

I looked to Diantha and, even allowing for the amount we had all drunk, was appalled to see her apparently impressed with the rantings of this charlatan. Perhaps she had heard this all before. Which made it worse.

“You are pushing the limits of irony,” I said, hoping for some relieving laughter.

Freddie Bain shook his large head, and his expression showed a twist of demonic anger. “Irony? What makes you think I would stoop to irony? Art is supposed to show us as we really are.
Der Führer
held up a mirror to mankind and we remain horrified at what we’ve seen in it.”

“But the Holocaust,” I said, my answering anger making me stumble over the words.

“The Holocaust.” The man laughed, a laugh I can still hear. Then serious, boring in again. “The Holocaust was Hitler’s masterstroke. With the Holocaust he made himself immortal.
Look around you, Norman. His monuments are everywhere. Every time the Jews put up another memorial or try to get the Gentiles to acknowledge their suffering, they honor Hitler’s achievement.”

I took my napkin off my lap and put it on the table preparatory to rising. “Who are you?” I asked.

He ignored my question. “Think about it, Norman. Think of those he killed. The Jews. Stalin killed more people, many more. Stalin had them shot. He had them worked and starved and frozen to death. But who did he kill? Kulaks. For Christ’s sake. Peasants with a couple of cows. A few intellectuals. Poets. Bureaucrats. Do you think if Hitler had killed twenty million Chinese anyone would care? Mao killed many more than that. No, Hitler killed Jews. The best and the brightest, no?”

I was reduced to shaking my head.

His eyes, cold and mocking in his inflamed face, bore into mine. “They wanted, my friend, to be chosen. Hitler chose them.”

“I am not your friend.”

“As you please. I regret to upset you.”

But he clearly didn’t. He was leaning even farther across the table, his voice a loud whisper. “Do you know what every Jew fears deep in his heart?”

“People like you.”

“No, no, I am not jesting. They fear, my friend, deep in their hearts, that Hitler was right.”

“That kind of fear is only human,” I replied with some fervor. “Most people know in their hearts that Hitler was wrong.”

“Don’t be so sure, Mr. de Ratour. You would like to think, wouldn’t you, that you would never have joined the
Schutzstaffel
, that you and those you know would be incapable of such a thing. But under different circumstances, in different times … People who thought of themselves as decent and law abiding and
progressive joined the Nazi Party. The same kind of people joined the Communist Party …”

Incredibly, he laughed. “They both got more than they bargained for, didn’t they? They got right up to their noses in the blood of others. And when the party was over and the fingers started pointing, they scuttled for cover like cockroaches.” Then he turned serious. “But my father never did. He never hid what he was.”

“Diantha, I think you should come along with me now.”

“You see, Norman, what we really don’t want to admit to ourselves is that evil can be fun. Think of all those films that have Nazis and ex-Nazis in them. That shiver of excitement when the swastika fills the screen.”

“Hitler is dead.”

“Then why do we have to keep killing him?”

I coughed to clear my throat. “I’m finding this conversation more than distasteful.” I stood up to leave.

He rose to his feet as well. “You’re running away, Norman. You’re running away from yourself.”

“You are not I.”

“Do not be so sure, Norman.” He made my name sounded like a mockery. He stood up as well and leaned across the table. “Tell me, are you a Christian?”

“I’m an Episcopalian,” I responded, not sure I had answered his question.

“Yes. Then tell me, sir, where was your Episcopalian God when the trains pulled into Treblinka? Where was He when Stalin and Kaganovich, a Jew, by the way, deliberately starved to death six or seven million people in Ukraine? Where was He when the machine guns of the special units overheated at Babi Yar? Where was your Episcopalian God when Stalin worked and starved and froze to death those millions in the mines of
Magadan? Where was He when Pol Pot murdered a quarter of his countrymen? When the Hutus sharpened their pangas and hacked to death half a million Tutsis? Tell me, sir, where was your almighty Episcopalian God then?”

Had I only heard the man’s voice it might have sounded like a
cri de coeur
. But Freddie Bain was smiling broadly, was on the verge of mirth.

“God is not cruel.”

“Then why did He create us as we are?”

“Man is free to be evil,” I said.

“Then God, too, is free to be evil. Think about it, Mr. de Ratour. If we are made in the image and likeness of the Almighty, Mr. de Ratour, then like us He needs a good laugh now and again. And what could be funnier than looking down on mass murder? Hilarious. Knee-slapping. God-roaring. A scream. Face it, God is a joker. If He made us for anything, He made us for His amusement.” At which point he laughed himself, his noise bouncing like the reflected flames off the surfaces curving around us.

“That, sir,” I said though a clenched jaw, “is the most damnable blasphemy I have ever heard.”

“Not so, Norman. If not laughing, what else could He have been doing? And if God doesn’t exist, then what difference does it make? We are but infinitesimal specks on a speck, our greatest and worst moments of history of no more significance than what happens on a petri dish.”

“History judges,” I said, grasping at straws.

“History comes and goes.”

“You’re mad” was the best I could do.

“Bah” was all he said to my pathetic response. Then, “And I want my tape.” With that he turned unsteadily, but with a certain melodramatic flourish, and walked across to the fire. There, backlit by the flames, he stood and toyed with a cigar.

A moment later Miss Tangent went over to join him. I looked at Diantha. “I think you should come home with me now.”

But she seemed under a spell. She looked across at Freddie Bain and said, “Oh, Dad, Freddie’s just pulling your leg. He has his little rants. Everybody does. You should have heard Sixy get going about gays. He wanted to kill them all.”

I implored her again, knowing it was futile. I was torn myself, in turn afflicted with the lowest form of lust, with enough anger to want to burn the place down, and with an awful foreboding. Though I had no real proof, I was now certain Freddie Bain had a lot to do with what was happening at the Museum of Man. But I couldn’t stay.

It was freezing and dark outside, with the upper reaches of his preposterous domicile looking like battlements against the night sky. I got in and started my cold old car. I had been shocked into sobriety but still drove with the exaggerated care of the technically drunk. I was full of rebuttal. In the after-arguments running in my head, I stood back, remained dignified, and said things like,
If Hitler was an artist then art has no meaning
. Or,
The profundity of nihilism is an illusion
. Or, better,
Nihilism is the profundity of the unimaginative
. Why? he would ask. And I would respond:
Because it is easy to imagine nothing, and evil is a form of nothingness
.

I stopped at a roadside diner to drink coffee and calm myself. I kept trying to convince myself that God is good. That the world is good. That people are good. The worst kinds of self-doubts gnawed at me, the kind from which you cannot escape into nice big abstractions like nihilism. Could I, I asked myself, have been a Nazi under other circumstances? No, I said, no. At the same time, I knew my denial was an indulgence in the moral luxury afforded by hindsight.

I also wondered, as a more immediate concern, if I had done
the right thing in walking away. Am I a coward? A moral coward and, where Miss Tangent is concerned, a sexual coward?

I am confused. With Elsbeth gone only days, I scarcely know my own heart. I know I loved Elsbeth. I thought I loved Diantha. And perhaps I do. But now that love has been polluted with lust for another. I sit here writing this with my head on a poker of pain wanting, in the depths of my corrupted being, feeling her lips and her touch, to be in that big bed with that mocking, maddening Lorelei.

It is Monday, December 18, and Diantha has not returned home since Friday, and, frankly, I have become concerned for her welfare. She did call yesterday, mostly to tell me she wouldn’t be going with me to the Curatorial Ball, which we held last night. She hinted and then proposed outright that she come and bring Freddie Bain and Celeste Tangent. I hesitated a moment, but then said no, that I didn’t think it would be a good idea.

My evening at that grotesque fortress-cum-mansion still resounds within me. I want, of course, to dismiss everything that madman said, but it lingers, like an intellectual infection. I keep running it around in my head. If we are made in the image and likeness of God, what percentage of our DNA, ontologically speaking, overlaps? Is God a joker? I’m sure the question is hardly a novel one, but I have wrestled with it repeatedly since that weird evening. Did God simply set in motion the awesome machinery of natural selection, then sit back and watch? Does He laugh at us?

It would have been worse, I’m sure, had I stayed the night. But I sometimes wonder. Miss Tangent, her eyes, her hair, her touch, also lingers, so that I suffer a kind of low-grade erotomania in which she and Diantha and Elsbeth tease and tempt and leave me. They invest my sleeping dreams, night visions bizarre and poignant, from which I awake in torments of lust and despair. I would have thought grief something pure, a kind of suffering that renders one innocent.

And then it’s all mangled and mingled with my workaday life, the heavy routine of being a museum director. Not to mention my role as a part-time murder investigator. Who is Freddie Bain? Had I stayed Friday night, might I have found out? Is he Moshe ben Rovich? It hardly seems likely, given his proclivities. How does Celeste Tangent fit into all this? It’s obvious she works for him as a seductress. And Ossmann? Penrood? And myself, had I not suffered the rectitude of indignation that night? What would he want with a powerful aphrodisiac? To sell it as an illegal drug, obviously. What might Diantha be able to tell me when she comes back? If she comes back.

Korky and I went to the ball together, not as dates, of course — I certainly didn’t dance with him. Still, we raised a few eyebrows when we came in. I could hear their thoughts. Is Norman coming out or just swinging on the closet door? But as time goes by, I find myself caring less and less what people think. It has occurred to me, finally, that the standards of yesteryear, for better or worse, no longer apply.

Korky appears to be doing well, considering what he’s been through. We had a drink at my house before setting out. Elsbeth’s absence shouted at us from every cornice and corner. We clung together for a small tearful moment. But said nothing. One word and neither of us would have shut up for the evening. Which might have been cathartic in its own way.