Below, soldiers of the White Aryan League goosestepped in their brown uniforms. They were soldiers in name only. They were the malcontents of America, the unemployed and unemployable. They were men without hope or direction, who nursed smoldering resentments against life. Boyce Barlow had given them a place to hide from the world, but Boyce Barlow was gone.
Now, under the guidance of good German stock, they were being welded into killing teams to fight the race war they believed would inevitably come. But Konrad Blutsturz believed in no coming race war. He believed even less in the scarlet-and-white flag that flew from every building in Fortress Purity.
The Third Reich was long dead. 3t lived on only in the nostalgic memories of very old men, and the sons of those men, whom he had recruited to the White Aryan League of America. It lived, too, in the muddled thinking of the morbid young, like Ilsa, who even now was commanding a squad of men with the crackle and fire of a seasoned boot-camp instructor.
Good riddance to the Third Reich, thought Konrad Blutsturz. In his youth it had promised him so much, and cost him so dearly.
Konrad Blutsturz had come to the United States in 1937, a young man of nineteen. He had come with a mandate-organize the German element for the coming war. He had believed in it all then, believed in the myth of German superiority, believed in the great Jewish conspiracy, and he had believed in Hitler.
It was Hitler himself who had plucked Konrad Blutsturz from a Hitler Youth group and given him his mission. "Go to America. Succeed, and you will be the Regent of America when their government is overthrown," Hitler had told him.
It had seemed so grandiose, in those days. So possible. Konrad Blutsturz spat over the railing a great greenish glob of expectorate at the memory of his naivete. In America, Konrad Blutsturz formed the Nazi Alliance. He did not build Bund camps or make inflammatary public speeches. He could have duplicated Fritz Kuhn's 1936 Madison Square Garden rally of twenty-two thousand people-if he didn't care about the quality of those people.
But he did care. Konrad Blutsturz did not want quantity. He wanted quality. German-Americans in the days before World War Two were much more American than they were German, which is to say, they were anti-Nazi, but there were those who believed in the New Germany, and Konrad Blutsturz had sought them out and organized them. They existed as a provisional government in waiting, waiting for the fall of Europe.
But Europe never fell. And Konrad Blutsturz' contacts with Berlin, over shoutwave radio relayed from the German Legation in Mexico City, grew less and less frequent.
After Germany was defeated, Konrad Blutsturz fled to Mexico. And after the Allies discovered certain documents in Berlin, they sent OSS agents on his trail. His Nazi Alliance had been quietly rounded up.
Alone, unsupported, Konrad Blutsturz fled into South America, and from there he was spirited to Japan, where he had intended to offer his services to the emperor.
Then came Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was as if the mighty fist of the Allies was following him into hell itself.
And into that hell came Harold Smith.
Konrad Blutsturz blotted out the memory. He remembered it in his dreams often enough. It was too painful to relive in his waking hours. It was enough that he had survived the hell of Tokyo. It was enough that he had returned to America at last.
Konrad Blutsturz had known Hitler himself, personally. It was that brief relationship that seemed to compel those he met. It moved the Germans of Argentina and Paraguay, as if somehow Hitler lived on through this broken wreck of a Nazi dupe. It had moved Ilsa, the American girl who was no more German-really German-than Svlvester Stallone.
And it had moved Boyce Barlow and his White Aryan League of America, who were desperate for the American dream and were willing to accept a nightmare in its place--just as long as they could call that nightmare their own.
It had been so easy.
When a day had passed and Boyce Barlow was not heard from, Herr Fuhrer Konrad Blutsturz assumed he and his cousins had gotten lost on the way to Baltimore.
When two days passed, he assumed that they had been captured, and ordered his specially equipped van gassed up for a quick escape. If the Barlows were in FBI hands, they would spill their guts for a warm beer.
When a third day came and went without an FBI raid on Fortress Purity, Konrad Blutsturz knew they were dead and had not talked.
And all they had lived for was now his.
Chapter 19
Ferris D'Orr's mother was crushed when he was christened at St. Andrew's Church in Dundalk, Maryland. She had wept on that first day when he went to Sunday school years later. At his First Communion, she was bitter, and at his Confirmation at the age of fourteen, she was inconsolable.
During the drive home, Mrs. Sophie D'Orr went on and on.
"Your father was a good man, God rest his soul," Mrs. D'Qrr said. "Don't get me wrong, he was good to me. The best."
"I know, Ma," Ferris said. He sat in the back seat, slipping lower and lower into the cushions with every word. He was too ashamed to sit up front with his mother.
"We loved each other." Mrs. D'Orr went on. "We couldn't help it. It was one of those things, a Catholic and a Jew. It happens. It happened to us."
Ferris D'Orr sank even lower in his seat. He hated it when his mother raised her voice. The louder she got, the more her accent showed. The other kids always made fun of him over that. She sounded like a cartoon German. It embarrassed him. He wished he had a lemon Coke right then. Lemon Cokes always made him feel better.
"So we married. That wasn't the hard part. But your father, and the priest who married us, got together. This priest said we could marry if we promised to raise the product of our union-that was the phrase that priest used, can you believe it-the product of our union in the faith. They called it that, too, the faith. Like there's no other."
"Ma, I like being a Catholic."
"What do you know? You don't know any other way. You're fourteen now and you don't know your maftir. You've never been to shul. I should have had you bar-mitzvahed. It's too late now."
"Ma, I don't want to be a Jew."
"You are a Jew. "
"I'm Catholic, Ma. I've just been confirmed."
"You can be bar-mitzvahed at any age. It is done. Ask your cousins. They will tell you how it is."
"Kikes," mumbled Ferris l under his breath, using a word he had picked up in Sunday school to describe his cousins on his mother's side. Other kids called him that sometimes. When they didn't call him Ferris Wheel. "What?"
"I'm thirsty."
"I'll buy you a lemon Coke. Will you promise to think about it if I buy you a lemon Coke?"
"No."
Later that night, his mother had taken him aside and patiently explained to Ferris what it meant to be a Jew. "Whether you want to accept it or not, Ferris my lamb, you are a Jew. Because being a Jew is not just being bar-mitzvahed and going to temple. It is not like some of your friends who go to church every Sunday and raise hell on the other six days of the week. Being Jewish is in the blood. It is a special responsibility to keep God's covenant. It is a heritage. You are Jewish by heritage, Catholic or not. Do you understand?"
"No," Ferris had told her. He didn't understand at all.
His mother tried to explain about the holocaust.
He had explained back how his friends sometimes taunted him because his mother was a Jew, and how some of them said that it was the Jews who killed Jesus.
His mother said that they were talking about the same idea. Good Jews had died in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany because of lies like those. For no other reason, six million good people had died. She showed him picture books of the ovens and the gas chambers.
Ferris had said that had all happened in the past, and he did not live in the past. "The Nazis are dead." he told her. "They don't exist anymore."
"It will not be the Nazis next time. It might not even be the Jews next time. This is why we must remember."
"You remember," Ferris said. "I wouldn't be a kike for a million dollars."
And his mother had slapped him, later apologizing for it with tears in her eyes.
"I only wanted you to understand. Someday you will understand, my Ferris."