Made Men (16 page)

H
er surreal feeling
ground to a halt when Rickard stooped to clear some books from a shelf, then
slid aside a thin façade behind them.

This was her world. She had walked by
that very spot a thousand times.

Familiar
aisles at her back, the unknown loomed down the rust-pocked, metal stairs.

Boldness had been easy with a candy in
her mouth
.

Clicking
on a light, Rickard smiled at her, but seeing the passage better made her feel
worse. Gitte struggled to regain her resolve.
After
all, she’d just ventured to and from East Germany as simply as she might visit
the grocer. A surge of energy hit, but didn’t last.

Of all the days to wear a skirt
.

It
would be necessary to back down the stairs and inappropriate to wiggle her legs
and bottom down toward their waiting faces, so she’d have to go first.

As
her belly scooted on the cold wooden shelf, she froze, terrified. The boys
squatted near. One got down on
his own
stomach to urge
her on.

“You
are vigilant.” The tiny person was so calm.

Vigilant. She was, wasn’t she?

She
had known they were there all along, had felt the boy’s presence before they
had even left clues.

“Your
intuition is correct,” he continued. “This is a place you shouldn’t go.”

This he said with her cold backside
exposed to who knew what!

She
clawed, trying to haul herself out. “You said I could see him safely!” Gitte
pinwheeled her legs in the dark; suddenly she felt that she’d lowered herself
into a shark-ridden sea. Scratching her legs on the stairs, she scrambled for
something solid behind her to launch back out of the hole, but there was
nothing.

“I
did,” soothed the boy, “and you can. I’m sorry to have alarmed you.” Gitte
heaved, panting, exhausted already. “I said it to validate your instincts about
this place.” The little face searched her eyes as though he could see her
thoughts. “They are correct.”

“How
do you know we are safe?” She blurted, heartbeat slowing a touch, yet still
whacking her throat so hard her eyeballs jumped.

“Because
he is dead.”
Eyes wide,
Gitte nodded.

“Ryker?”

“Yes?”
The boy dabbed sweat from her forehead as though he were her father, smoothing
her hair reassuringly—though most fathers denied the existence of
monsters—and he prepared her to see his.

“Somehow,
that the thing is dead … does not make it better … this…” she swallowed hard,
thinking that she could feel her feet again “…will explain where you are from?”

“No
…” This close, she identified Ryker’s longer, slightly thinner nose.

Rickard’s was different.

So
close she could smell the boy’s breath; it reminded her of wet sand on tanned
leather. Ryker’s eyes were sincere.
Wild, but frank.
“It won’t
explain
where we are from.
It
is
where we are from.”

The
panel was larger than it felt, Gitte noticed, once she’d backed down even with
it. Rickard crept down next, and held her hand. Ryker joined them at the base
of the stairs, taking her other hand, and they led her through the winding
dark.

“How
can you see?” she wondered aloud.

“I
don’t know,” one offered, “how we are different, exactly, but we are.”

Yes. You certainly are.

Dimly
lit from above, they came to a rust-gnarled door. The iron bled through the
curly flakes of gaudy green paint. Her hands felt so cold, so she bunched them
to fists, not wanting to touch anything, forcing the remaining blood in her
fingers back to her gulping, galloping heart. The door scraped open, hinges
buckled—misaligned and barely functional.

It was a horrible room.

A nauseating green.
Hard looking cots.
The stench of rot.
A small sink.

Things—animals—were
strewn along a wall. Reminded of the frog she cut open in biology class in
primary school, Gitte shivered, uncurling her fists to hold her hands against
her mouth.

Some of the creatures were large.

“What
is all this?” She looked at the nose of the boy who reached out for her.

Rickard.

She
held the paw he offered tightly.

It seemed colder, even, than hers.

“Specimens,”
the other said. “We can explain later. Neither of us have a fondness of this
room.”

Ryker,
the longer-nosed boy, worked open a different decrepit door she hadn’t noticed.
The mottled, overwhelming green, the smells,
the
sickly
light had disoriented her. Gitte approached with caution, clinging tighter to
her little chaperone. “This is the monster?”

“Yes.”

Focusing
on the boy’s nose, she took more steps.

It was a trick she’d used in times of
stress.

There
had been many. By focusing on just one thing, and nothing else, she could still
function. It was a person’s nose—yet it wasn’t. Its shape was correct,
its size …

What was it?

Gitte’s
free hand flew to cover her mouth, all thoughts of noses gone. Her eyes teared up,
knees threatened to buckle but didn’t.

She was braver than she ever thought.

The
body in the room was in a stage of advanced decomposition. She could see that
it was once a man—now a soft slime of filth clinging loosely to bones. He
appeared a rack-full of small bits of drapery: burned, doused,
then
hung to dry. “Who is … who
was
he?”

The
viewing was over. Ryker eased her out, closed the door, and turned the key in
the lock. By her hands, they led her back to the relatively sweet, mineral air
of the tunnel. Neither answered until they were in the bent part of the shaft,
safely back in the dark. Gitte felt thankful for the cold on her face.

Her stomach flopped.

One
gave her hand a reassuring squeeze. “His name was Wolfgang Bähr. Technically
speaking, he was our ancestor …” Slowly, Ryker began to explain his
understanding of their origins. Gitte had to lean her back against the cool
rock wall to keep
herself
upright.

It
wasn’t the descriptions of their imprisonment, or even of their escape that
made the enchanting, young, German librarian decide to go with them; it was the
strength in their faces. They were survivors.

So was she
.

No
matter what they were made of, they were like her.

A
s they left, Gitte
gathered her favorite books. She didn’t bother to stamp them or check them out
in the log.

She would look at them on the train.
Maybe even leave them there.

“I
don’t have much money,” she blurted.

“We
do,” one answered.

How?

“How?”
she demanded, pumping the brakes on the runaway train. “How could you have
money?”

“Like
this,” Rickard said pleasantly, his arms hanging straight at his sides. “We
wrote Wolfgang’s betters in his handwriting … we asked them to send all they
could. They believed him to have perfected cloning. In our letter, Dr. Bähr
promised…”

Rickard didn’t talk with his hands, but
Ryker did.

“…
claimed
that he needed all possible resources behind the
effort, which we’d promised would bear a great financial return.”

And gave a little nod when done with
each speech. They were different. Individuals.

Gitte
pressed the books to her chest, puzzled. “He didn’t, of course—” She
needed to know. “…
perfect
cloning.”

“Of
course not,” Ryker explained, his hands conducting his words. “He was a
scientist of marginal capabilities, but they believed us. They sent large
amounts of money. Cash. And with a lot of cash, you can create more of it.”

Rickard’s
nostrils and ears wiggled agreement, yet his arms stayed wooden. “Money is not
a limiting factor.”

Ryker
led them out, carrying a bag she hadn’t noticed before. Gitte wondered where
he’d got it. “Ryker, what have you got?”

He
patted the side of the thing reverently, not a break in his stride.

“Everything
we need.”

Bertioga, Brazil February 7
^th
, 1979.

T
he optimized human being
who had named himself Osgar—
the
spear of God
—watched the
outline of a regular man from below as he swam. Warm and clear, the ocean
provided the faintest shimmer to the form, a kind discretion, although his
quarry was unaware of his scrutiny.

The
man,
The
Angel of Death
, was now sixty-seven years old, yet splashed at the
surface with a young man’s optimism. Sallow, softer than his Nazi years, his
distinctive gap between his central incisors was the same. Stiff, tired of
slapping his arms at the surface, he paused to rest. As Josef peered into the
depths, Osgar gazed back. The
heavily-muscled
human
ideal had found each of the Nazis known to have fled Berlin after World War II.
He’d killed them all. Mengele was one of the last.

They
watched each other.

Finally,
the anthropologist and physician—researcher, butcher,
suturer
of one man to another, torturer—turned his head to one side for a breath.

He always turned to the same side since
his stroke
.

Then
he turned back, searching to find the man-fish thirty feet below.

Osgar
ascended leisurely. Just feet below the surface, he rolled to become Mengele’s
anaerobic mirror. At twenty-two, he was the man Hitler had wanted them all to
be: the other half of the
final solution
… the quintessential Aryan. Pleased, Mengele offered a quizzical grin. His joy
for the unexpected visit displayed unevenly upon his face, and he reached into
the water to pull Osgar up.

Here was a man he’d like to meet.

The
submerged Aryan reached back. For a moment, they merely held hands—age
and youth, vigor and infirmity. The man in the water held something.

A gift? Something … oh.

Mengele
knew the shape well.

A syringe.

Sleek
and strong, shoulders like Neptune, the being didn’t seem to need air.
Marveling at the trick, the war criminal glanced away from the instrument to
admire the visitor’s features. Chiseled, inviting, he seemed to beckon Mengele,
willing to teach him the feat of not breathing. He nodded.

Yes. Teach me.

So peaceful that he appeared
immortal—without cares or ever a pain down there.

Osgar
pushed the needle between Mengele’s first and second fingers, injecting the
devastating anticoagulant. Josef grimaced but nodded.

If that was what it took
.

Josef
turned his head for a breath. When he turned back, the mantic being, some male
equivalent of a siren was gone. Mengele broke the surface to look around.

There! Nearby, he floated on his back.

Sun
glinted wildly from his smooth, taut skin. Splashing toward the thick-jawed
marvel, his neck as thick as the old man’s thigh, he felt ashamed of the
spluttering sounds the flesh of his old limbs created.

Loose pockets and
lumps.

Then
he circled the statue-like entity
who
sculled,
effortlessly, in place.

The
man spoke. “You have questions.”

German?

The
Nazi hadn’t spoken it aloud in decades, and it seemed, suddenly, an old
language, but felt proud that he knew it.

 
“I do. I do. Who are you?”

“The
ideal,” he answered. “Wolfgang Bähr’s ideal; your own.”

He did it? His life’s work was realized?

“We’ve
done it?” Mengele treaded water so quickly his neck surfaced. “We have created
you?”

“You
have…” glistening “…are you pleased?”

“I
am!” Josef’s head had begun to hurt. A terrible, roaring ache. The worst pain
he had ever felt. He rolled, apologetic, gamely trying to pretend for the young
man that he was fine. He squinted at the sun, at the pain, and floated beside
him.

“What
have you done to me?”

His words sounded wrong.

Hollow and hoarse and far away.

“I
have killed you. That is what you should know.”

Killed me.

Floating.
Side by side with a god.

“Why?”
Mengele managed. “Why would you kill me? I have loved you my whole life …”
Unlike his own voice, his visitor’s voice boomed.
His words crashed inside his head like cannonade.

“Neither
that nor anything else matters. Just float here with me and tell me what dying
is like.”

So
they floated for a while. Josef Mengele’s face changed more. Each heartbeat now
irrigated his ruined brain
;
his blood: water-thin and
moving fast through the new cracks in the dam.

“He
is here.” Josef managed, his mouth an uneven maw, eyes fixed, unblinking, on
the sun.

“God?”
Osgar asked.

“I
don’t think so…” Mengele pulled his last, thin breath. “…
no
.
I don’t think so.”