"Wrong answer," Remo said. "Whack time." He slammed the man's head against the wall once again. Again more concrete tumbled away. "I'd feel safer living in a shoe box," Remo frowned, looking down at the rubble in the alley.
"Please!" the young man begged woozily. "I do not know this Holloway."
Remo shook his head. "You must," he stated, firmly. "My last lead pointed me here. And your 'Hi, I'm an asshole Aryan' merit badge-" he nodded to the swastika armband "-indicates to me that you're maybe not being entirely forthright. Hey, I know what might jar your memory!" Remo said brightly. "A whack!"
He slammed the man's head against the wall. This time most of what was left crumbled away, tumbling in long angry sheets to the asphalt five stories below.
Once it was gone, only one four-foot finger of mortar remained upright.
"Gus ...Gus," the man wheezed, choking on dust. "Gustav? Do you mean Gustav?" He looked desperately up at Remo, one eye shut painfully. A shard of concrete had gotten stuck beneath the lid during his last whack. By now his forehead was bleeding profusely.
Remo frowned, confused. "Yeah, I think that might be his alias or something. Is there a Gustav here?"
"Yes!" the man cried. "That vas him." Still halfblinded, he pointed at the hole in the roof.
"The fat guy that looked up here?"
"Yes!" the neo-Nazi howled in frustration. Remo shook his head angrily. "Why didn't you say so?" Cupping his hand on the back of the neoNazi's head, he drew the man toward the last upright section of side wall.
"Vait! No vack! No vack!"
"That's 'whack,'" Remo instructed even as he slammed the man's head into the remaining portion of wall. It collapsed against the pressure.
Unlike the first three times, the man's injuries did not end with a simple whack. As he passed through the wall, Remo released his grip on the young man's hair. The neo-Nazi continued his forward momentum, sailing out over the alley amid a pile of concrete fragments and a cloud of mortar dust. Bleeding and filthy, he dropped from sight. He landed with a squishy thud in the alley a few seconds later. Remo did not stay on the roof long enough to see him splatter. As the young neo-Nazi was free-falling to his death, Remo had gone over to the hole in the roof. He hopped down into the apartment below, landing atop the pile of collapsed ceiling.
The apartment was empty. Scowling at himself for allowing his target to escape so easily, he moved stealthily through the small flat and out into the dank hallway.
FOR THE PAST SEVERAL months, Gustav Reichschtadt had been hearing about the pair of terrifying men supposedly slaughtering neo-Nazis throughout Germany. He had disregarded the stories.
Certainly Gustav didn't deny that people were being killed. However, he was convinced that it was the work of the German government out to punish pro-Nazi groups for the embarrassment they had caused a few months before.
Modern Germany prided itself on its intolerance of the underground fascist organizations that seemed to spring up cyclically-like spring daisies in a Bavarian meadow. It was therefore humiliating to the national government when hundreds upon hundreds of its citizens began clamoring to the French border after the covert neo-Nazi takeover of Paris that had occurred the previous summer. Much to the German government's embarrassment, these young fascists made it clear to the world that they wished to join the leaders of that great campaign as soldiers under a unified Nazi flag.
The crisis in Paris had been defused by means that were still uncertain-at least as far as the press was concerned. The men who had eagerly swarmed to join the neo-Nazi forces had returned to their homes, never having set foot on French soil. And Germany was left to squirm in embarrassment as the world looked on in veiled distaste at the country that had failed to anticipate or control its most vile element.
It was at the beginning of this silent condemnation that the first bodies began to show up.
Gustav was certain that German authorities were doing the killing. The government in Berlin was attempting to prove its worthiness to a scornful world by murdering its most favored sons.
This was what he had been telling the members of the Goring Brotherhood for the past several months. He had told them this in English, for-though he dressed as a Nazi, lived in Germany and vociferously condemned the current weak German government--Gustav spoke not one word of German.
Gustav Reichschtadt had been born Gus Holloway, son of "Cap" and Dottie Holloway of the Pittsburgh Holloways. He had lived at home, jobless, bitter and without any life prospects, until his thirty-fifth birthday, at which point his more than tolerant father had thrown him out on his hairy ear.
With so much time on his pudgy hands, Gus had whiled away his youthful days at home as an active member of several American fascist groups. He had even achieved some notoriety for once throwing a chair at the host of the Horrendo show on national TV. When his parents finally disowned him, his friends in the skinhead movement took him in.
In a movement that was notoriously undercharged in the sparking-synapse department, Gus Holloway-with his high-school GED and unerring ability to accurately spell Mein Kampf-became a shining star.
Eventually Gus renounced his American citizenship and followed the movement to its birthplace. The home of the fuhrer himself. Germany.
He was promptly thrown in jail for distributing illegal Nazi literature. Gus learned the hard way that the current German government wasn't like the one to which he had pledged his undying fascist allegiance.
While in prison, Gus met up with many individuals like himself. After his release, he joined his newfound friends in the underground skinhead movement. He was reborn as the leader of the neoNazi Goring Brotherhood. Changing his name was part of that rebirth.
He was working in his capacity as leader of this secret group when the whole world came crashing in. When the dust cleared, Gustav realized that it wasn't the world after all just most of the ceiling of his apartment.
Fortunately for Gustav, he had been standing on the other side of the room at the time.
The neo-Nazi leader had been running off his latest propaganda leaflets from an old-fashioned printing press that his mother had given to him for his eighth birthday. His fat fingers were smeared with blue ink as he crept over to the pile of collapsed building material.
When he looked up through the hole in the ceiling, he found himself staring into the coldest eyes he had ever seen.
It was him! One of the two men who had been spotted slaughtering members of neo-Nazi groups all around Germany. The German government's politically correct hit squad had finally come to claim the great Gustav Reichschtadt!
The fascist leader had immediately lumbered from the room.
The tenement in which the brotherhood conducted its holy work was overrun by neo-Nazis. Gustav waddled frantically down the urine-soaked flight of stairs to the fourth floor. He pounded a desperate fat fist against the door across from the bottom of the landing. The ink on his hands left marks like toeless baby footprints across the thick metal door.
"Help me!" Gustav screamed in English. He was hyperventilating. "They're here! Good God, they're coming to kill me! Hurry!" He pounded harder.
Finally the door opened a crack. A suspicious eye peered out at him from within the apartment. Somewhere unseen, an aged scratchy recording of Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" was building to a warped crescendo.
"What is it?" a voice asked in thickly accented German.
"The killers!" Gustav hissed. "The government hit squad that's out to destroy all our work. They're here."
The eye peered first left, then right. It finally looked back at Gustav.
"I do not see anyone."
Gustav flapped a large mitt toward the ceiling. "They're on the roof. Let me in!"
He forced his meaty palms against the door. Although the old man within the apartment was far from strong, he didn't need to be; there was precious little strength behind the push. Gustav only succeeded in spreading more ink across the face of the door. He pulled away, panting at his exertions.
"I need help," Gustav begged. He was on the verge of tears.
There wasn't a hint of sympathy in the eye. Obviously its owner had had a run-in or two with Gustav Reichschtadt before. But that was not to say that there was no sign of emotion in the orb. It suddenly blinked once, as if in great surprise. All at once, the door slammed shut.
Gustav wheeled around, ready to run panting for the next door. He didn't get an inch down the hallway before he saw what had made his fellow neoNazi slam the door.
The government killer with the dark, dead eyes was coming down the stairs from the fifth floor. He steered a path to Gustav.
Gustav broke into a dead run down the corridor. To his horror, his pursuer trotted easily up beside him.
"Are you Gus?" Remo asked as they both ran.
"Nein, nein!" Gus insisted, wheezing heavily. It was the only German word he had mastered in his nine years in that country. "Me no Gus. Me German."