The White Vixen (2 page)

“Those Japanese boys today are not my friends,” she said angrily. “They wanted to hurt me.”

He took her by the shoulders. “Maybe so,” he said, “but they learned their lesson today. I doubt if they’ll bother you again.”

Jo Ann hesitated. “Daddy, they called me a name today. A Japanese name. I am sorry, but I do not know its meaning.” Although she was fluent in the Korean and English she had learned as a toddler, she was still struggling with Japanese. “What does ‘yariman’ mean?”

Her father frowned. “It is a very bad name, I’m afraid,” he said solemnly. He sighed. “I will tell you now what the word means, but we will discuss it at another time, because it will lead to a whole other subject. The closest English word for it is ‘slut’.”

The way her father said the word convinced Jo that it was truly bad, and she decided she would look it up in the school dictionary, or perhaps the one her father kept in his study here at home. But that was for another time. She looked up at him proudly. “I want to be a warrior, Daddy. Like the Hwa rang dan. Like the Gearys. I will be a great warrior, even though I am a girl.”

Joseph smiled at her again. “I believe you will be, Jo. You have some real gifts. You have a gift for languages, and the martial arts, too. I think you have many other gifts we are just beginning to see.” He paused. “How would you like to go to a place where you can really develop those gifts?”

Her eyes were wide. “Yes, Daddy! Where?”

He smiled, and touched her hair again. “I just found out today, my little warrior. Soon we will be moving to America.”

**
*

Rio Negro Province, Argentina

“There is nothing to be done, then?”

The short, gray-haired man with the brushy mustache shook his head. “He has a day or so, perhaps only hours.” He glanced at the stocky, plain-faced man in the other chair. “You may want to alert the others. He might wish to see them one last time.”

The stocky man shook his head, looking down at the schnapps in his glass. “No, he wouldn’t recognize them anyway.” He threw back the schnapps with one swallow. Putting the glass on a side table, he rose from the stuffed chair and walked to the large fireplace. Dominating the dark oak mantle was a bronze sculpture of a bull, its wicked-looking horns set to gore whoever might dare to get close. Flanking the bull were a few framed black and white photos. As was his wont, the stocky man gazed at the sculpture. A small brass plate on the wooden base bore the words
Der Stier
. The Bull.

It had been a gift from his wife on their tenth wedding anniversary, a tribute, she said during a particularly rapturous moment, not just to his husky, broad-shouldered physique, but to his sexual prowess. She had borne him ten children, and he fathered several more over the years, and every one of his many women—he never used the term “
lovers”, or anything with any connotation of emotional attachment—praised him for his size and vigor. Thus he chose the code name Taurus when he began planning this particular endeavor. From the standpoint of astrology, he wasn’t really a Taurus; his sign was Gemini, having been born a few weeks too early to be under the Sign of the Bull. He didn’t care. Unlike some of his colleagues, he paid no attention to astrology. Taurus was chosen for other reasons.

The doctor was little more than a quack, he knew, yet the Bull trusted his diagnosis in this case. The doctor had proven useful before, with his experiments and so forth, but Taurus tolerated him then only because his work kept certain associates happy and occupied. Taurus was a man of politics, not of science, but even he knew enough of the latter to doubt the dubious value of the doctor’s research. Yet several important men, including the man dying in the next room, valued the doctor enough that they insisted he be included in the Relocation. Now, he had come to examine the man in the next room; not at the behest of Taurus, who did not trust him or anyone else, but at the urging of certain others among the
Kameraden
, who evidently still did. Taurus could have refused, but decided it would do no harm to let the quack have a look.

“He is, after all, seventy-two years old now,” the doctor said. “His age, combined with his various ailments…well, quite frankly, I am surprised he has lived this long.”

“He is a survivor,” the Bull said, still gazing at one of the photos on the mantle. “He survived the trenches and the gas in the first war. Prison. The bombing. The shooting in the bunker.”

“It is most fortunate that you intervened when you did, that night,” the doctor said.

“It was my duty,” Taurus said, remembering that terrible night, with the earth above them shaking from the artillery shells, women sobbing uncontrollably, some men disappearing as they made their own desperate escapes. Only sixteen years ago, yet it seemed much longer sometimes.

Duty. Coming into the bedroom, seeing the woman lying on the bed amidst her own blood, and seeing the man in a nearby chair, hand shaking as he turned the Luger toward his own mouth. Duty had made him grab the pistol and pry it from the trembling fingers before they could pull the trigger. Duty had made him take the man with him and a few most-trusted companions a few hours later, through the secret tunnels, into the dark of night lit up by explosions. He suppressed a shudder as he recalled one particularly vicious artillery barrage, so fierce it separated him and his companion from the others. He kept going, though. Duty kept him by the man’s side for the next harrowing days, hiding by day, moving by night, always concealing the man’s identity, somehow getting them to the coast, where the submarine, thank the gods, was waiting as planned.

Yes, duty required him to bring the man across the ocean, enduring the brutal undersea journey, the terror of the depth charges in not one but three different attacks, the destroyer captains up on the surface having no clue as to whom they were really trying to kill. It was good that they had not known, or their entire fleet would have come to pursue them to the ends of the earth.

And what was his duty now? To the man in the other room, to his vision? A vision that, despite the Bull’s work behind the scenes, had led to disaster. They had fled a nation in ruins, crushed under the heels of the invading Bolsheviks. And today, what was left? A third of their country still enslaved by the enemy from the east, the other two-thirds…well, it might as well be. The invaders from the west called the shots there, and they were only slightly more civilized than the Slavs. Both sides, facing each other, armed to the teeth, ready for only a spark to ignite a conflagration that would be the final act, the
Gotterdämmerung
that would wipe his precious country off the face of the earth.

It could not be allowed to happen. Taurus looked again at the photo on the mantle. It showed a group of soldiers—Taurus was not among them, for he had not been a soldier then, and in fact few photographs of him even existed—sitting at a café in Paris, twenty years ago now. He knew none of their names, but from the moment he first saw the photo, he was profoundly moved by its significance. Four young men, wearing their nation’s uniform, holding wineglasses to the camera in a toast to their conquest, while a pretty but sullen French waitress stood next to them. To the Bull, the picture represented his beloved nation at the zenith of its power, and power was something the man understood very well. He’d once had it, and so had his country, but he had let loose one or two strings at the wrong time, and it all came tumbling down.

Almost all of it. A small bit of it remained, here in this new land on the other side of the world. Enough of it, perhaps, to rectify the mistakes of the past, to lead his people into the glorious future that was their destiny. He took a deep breath, and with one last look at the long-ago soldiers, he turned back to the doctor.

“Thank you, Josef,” Taurus said. “It is late, and I’m sure you are tired.”

The doctor stood up, recognizing the dismissal. “Indeed I am. Good evening to you,
Herr
Reichsleiter
.” With a short bow, the quack left the room.

In the next room, the old man lay on the bed, his breathing shallow. The once jet-black hair was pure white now, and a few strands of it drooped down across the sallow forehead. The famous mustache was likewise white, hard to distinguish from the pale skin.

The Bull stood next to the bed, watching the old man. “So it has come to this,” he said. “Thirty-five years together, through the back-room maneuverings, the clashes in the streets, the marches and rallies. You were the voice, I was the brain. You were the inspiration, I was the one who did the dirty work of politics. You were the symbol, but I was the Party.” The old man’s eyes flickered, then focused on him. “You stood up with me at my wedding, and three years later I repaid you by having your niece liquidated as she was about to tell the police of your sordid affair. Without me, Geli would have brought you down, brought us down, but I acted then, and you became chancellor, and together we nearly captured the world.”

He sighed. Not for the first time, he regretted entering that room in the bunker. “Well, it is not too late after all,” he said. “The Kameraden, those who still worship you, will not hear your voice again, will not be privy to your final testament, will not carry one last image of you into the years ahead, when we have so much work to do and cannot be distracted by dreams of past glories. They must look to me now, and only to me.”

The old man’s head lay on two pillows. The Bull gently pulled the bottom one away, and as his head lowered, the old man’s eyes grew wide. The mouth opened also, the famous mouth that had once uttered words that moved a nation and frightened the world, and a bit of drool ran down into the pillow from one corner.

The old man was fully awake now, and lucid. He turned toward the stocky man standing at his bedside. The rheumy eyes blinked, then re-focused with that strange combination of charm and danger. “Martin?” The voice was but a rasp now, its old power long gone.

“Rest now,
mein Führer
,” Taurus said as he lowered the pillow onto the old man’s face.