Once upon a time, the dragon chuckles, a young empress stared up at the frescoed ceiling above her bloodstained bed, a prince cut from her womb crying motherless in the dark with only her grieving lord's manservant to care for him.
"So what." Stomach empty but still upset, I belch long and loud, the world, the silver sea, the red stars spinning blackly around me. "Women die giving birth, even posh ones."
Unseen, a small white jade egg fell from between her cold ensanguined thighs.
"Bullshit!"
Ignoring me, the dragon continues: The egg, tucked bloody and unseen into the sleeve of the Imperial Torturer and Surgeon as a jest, was sold to a collector of oddities for a great price, passing from hand to hand, from curio cabinet to curio cabinet, quietly growing ever larger as it plummeted motionless through the Multiverse.
"So?"
So... The dragon chuckles, a cascade of venom, the hiss of steam, Ssssssooo, my dirty little ferret— why the now quite large egg found itself in the private study of a king with an unseemly interest in alchemy - and young boys. One rainy day it cracked in two and a boy fell out.
"Let me guess, next comes some fairy tale crap about red as blood and white as snow, blah blah blah?"
The red stars overhead pause mid-twinkle to stare down at me. I ignore them…
…the king, disgusted by all women, his queen exiled, his household male, declared the boy his son and heir.
The dragon, the stars and I are silent, contemplating this revelation in our own separate ways.
Finally, "...we're not talking about Frederick the Great, are we?"
Yes, the dragon admits modestly, but on a far, far smaller scale.
Splintered Mirror
Someone Else's Berlin, Someone Else's 1939
Zenith leaned back, pale, spidery fingers holding the lids of his right eye wide, free hand dropping his glass eye into the gaping socket.
Blotting tears, he straightened, studying his painted face in the cracked backstage mirror with satisfaction before putting his smoked, mirrored glasses firmly in place concealing the frigid, staring glass.
Berlin, with a tip of the hat to the Great War, was the capital of clever fakes. Herr Kerkrüppelter the glassblower outdid himself. Few realized that the albino was blind on one side, one lens common silvered, smoked glass, the other with its crosshairs and flashing numbers inert.
Not that Zenith's secret was in any danger of betrayal: Herr Kerkrüppelter, who survived the Great War and wept inconsolable during thunderstorms, died unseen and unmourned of acute carbon monoxide poisoning in Brandenburg along with several other good friends of Zenith's—never mind that everyone saw Herr Kerkrüppelter being loaded along with several others into the black van which had pulled up in front of Herr Kerkrüppelter's workshop.
Nein, they had not seen a thing: not seeing, not mourning, was a good thing if you wished to prosper in Paradise.
Pale lips scarlet with Hans/Helga's lipstick, the albino pouted flirtatiously with his shattered reflection, more bloody-mouthed snarl than smile. Zenith found Hans/Helga's wardrobe, curlers, and stage makeup spilled across the dusty black and green. Hans/Helga'd not entered the black van without a fight.
He studied the stage behind him in the splintered mirror. Big Fritz, the man-sized dummy he'd built for Little Fritz, a dwarf, and Little Frau Fritz, also a dwarf, slumped pop-eyed and gaping where Little Fritz once stood watching Little Frau Fritz (Flossie) perform ballet in her shabby pink tutu trimmed with green sequins as the beggers, the cripples, humiliating remnants of the Great War, disappeared into the backs of black vans while Otto Dix found himself in Ravensbruk for the unforgivable crime of honesty.
The Brothel on Rosenstrasse
"E=mc2."
"Nein! Nein!" Stifling his irritation, Zenith tried to retrieve the black-market marzipan swastika from Dr. Idiot's pudgy nail-chewd hand. "That has nothing to do with…"
Dr. Idiot, Bertie to those who tolerated him backstage between acts, popped the stale confection into his mouth, hair a frizzy gray cloud around his moon face, once more thwarting the albino who used him as a human adding machine. "E=mc2!" The unkempt man rocked back and forth on the creaking stool beside Zenith's cluttered desk, eyes closed, hands flapping in bliss. "E=mc2!"
The lean albino and the obese offspring of Frau Einstein, "Dirty Gertie" a geriatric purveyor of indecent thrills now that the cabaret across the street had been shut down, sat knee to knee, crumbs of stale confection speckling Dr. Idiot's broad, grubby shirtfront and smudged black over yellow triangle.
Drowning in halitosis, Zenith picked a sticky mass of illicit confection from his hair, distastefully setting it aside for later. Denied the Moonbeam Roads and its infinite resources, he'd discovered that feeding the unkempt blob in front of him numbers along with a sticky bribe of whatever he could get now that sugar had been declared a vital military resource, he got the answers he needed for DaVinci's tank.
Bertie's "E=mc2" nonsense was an unasked-for bonus.
Zodiac glanced at his father's heavy silver pocket watch, sighed, snapped the dully gleaming lid shut, and slid it back into his threadbare vest pocket. There was still time before his next appointment.
He just had to be patient.
Which wasn't easy: Bertie, who, when shown the slightest sign of impatience, would burst into loud, inconsolable tears for failing to please unless distracted by sweets.
Bliss subsided, Bertie reached for the box of stale marzipan Führers, magic runes, and swastikas, doubtlessly stolen by the slave of some high-ranking party member and traded for tobacco; another resource jealously guarded by the NASDP.
Zenith, better at ideas than at math, sighed, pulling the contraband with its slightly too yellow lithograph of die Fuhrer gazing steely-eyed into the Future on the lid, out of reach. "Numbers, then sweeties."
"E=mc2?" The pudgy man looked ready to cry.
Zenith broke a Fuhrer in half and held it up. "Numbers first, Bertie, then sweeties." Frau Einstein's little boy was little more than a child in a man's body. "Numbers. First." He repeated, followed by a string of numbers.
Lips moving silently, Dr. Idiot cocked his messy head, unkempt mustache bristling. He frowned, smiled, numbers spilling out of his mouth like a waterfall.
"Gut! Gut!" Grinning, the albino stood, hastily scribbling on the wall with a burnt matchstick with one hand, passing over the bribe with the other. "Schatizis?"
Hands flapping, the savant threw his head back, ecstatically dancing in place the second the reward hit his tongue.
Computation complete, Dirty Gertie's not-so-little boy sat own hard, chirping, "E=mc2?" Leaning forward heavily on the stool, he stared expectantly at the mashed box, tongue unconsciously searching between his rotten teeth in search of sweet.
Zenith, picking crumbs of die Führer's from his shirt, face and hair, paused. "Ja, ja, "E=mc2, E=mc2." he said nodding agreeably.
Dr. Idiot beamed.
Hearts and Stars
Little Fritz and Little Flossie's yellow stars were crudely stitched to the side of his white silk top hat, as was Hans/Helga's pink triangle with its black bar. There were others: the Luigi Twins, tumblers: identical red triangles for refusing to help further the aims of the Reich, Dr. Idiot's black triangle over yellow stenciled with the word "Blöd" overlapping Dr. Idiot's mother's, for the sin of bearing an idiot while being a Jew— morbidly obese Gertie who did things no decent matron of the Reich would… for a price… the bulk of her and her son taking up living space needed by decent Aryans…
…Josephine's exquisite beaded, silk embroidered pink triangle, black bar and three chain links in real gold thread, over his heart…
...Josephine.
The Banality of Evil
Dark Josephine of the Free City of St. Louis watched him set up the lights for her act in a far superior venue than die Puppie, blue frosted lids veiling bottomless dark eyes, smiling like the leashed cheetah beside her, black bar, gold links, and pink triangle embroidered in silk on the left breast of her red satin dressing gown more orchid corsage than social warning label.
He found a telephone number slipped in his pocket when undressing that night in his room in the brothel on Rosenstrasse, the Fuhrer's dreams creeping ever closer on steamdozer treads, the frail bones of the Church of St. Nicholas and the neighborhoods that huddled around her skirts making way for the Future as manifested by Speer.
It never occurred to Zenith that it was Josephine's until after shooing Dr. Idiot back to his mother up the back stairs, he'd opened the door to his room to see her standing there, minus cheetah, swathed in white fur, black hair sleek against her finely shaped skull, an exotic whiff of French perfume in the dank air which stank of stale bedding, bad plumbing and mildewed wallpaper.
She'd stepped into his room, where, unable to afford black-market paper, he'd sketched diagrams of da Vinci's tank, stage machinery, equations as solved by Dr. Idiot, and automaton wiring, upon the water-stained walls.
"Don't see why you didn't call me." She drawled softly, gesturing with a finely manicured dark hand around them at the prostitutes tittering at them in his open doorway, murmuring in forbidden French, "Madame who runs this dump would'a wanted you to. I bring good fortune." Eyeing Zenith, Josephine gave a deep, rich-sounding chuckle, "Seems you do more than just repair stage lights in NASDP brothels and lay down the cards at parties for rich NASDP fools who believe in… heh, magic."
Blank-faced, Zenith slammed the door on their audience. Josephine was not short, fat, sweaty Herr Schlotbaron, the local NASDP block Führer who showed up in his rumpled, pit-stained brown uniform and scruffy red and black armband at the dot of eight every Tuesday, paying Zenith exactly twenty Reichsmarks to stand there and scowl down at him in disapproval as he partook of the sin of Onan.
Zenith got an additional ten for slamming the door to his room in Herr Schlotbaron's pudgy face upon climax hard enough to rattle the window at the end of the passageway. Herr Schlotbaron was a pompous, boring ass who smelt of cheese, but a Reichsmark was a Reichsmark.
At precisely 8:15 p.m. on Tuesdays, Herr Schlotbaron's immediate superior, Herr Scheißkopf, would knock on Zenith's door and then stand there, tongue out thrust, close-set eyes squeezed shut in greedy trembling anticipation until the albino slammed it in a dictionary for fifteen Reichsmarks, thirty if it was an encyclopedia.
The fact that Herr Scheißkopf's tongue looked like it had been run over by a NASDP transport steam truck thanks to Zenith's capitalistic zeal was an endless, quiet source of amusement to Zenith. It was even funnier when looking out his window which overlooked the filthy alley, Zenith saw these two extremely minor Party officials cross paths, faces carefully averted in the bluish light of the ever present public vid screens with die Fuhrer loudly educating the masses—Zenith needed to have a word with the front hall porter about letting in unscreened guests.
Except that he was also the hall porter.
"How you stay out of the camps don't bother me none, silver and cream." Josephine interrupted shrugged in a cascade of falling mink, "Gotta do what you gotta do to survive in the land of blood and steel. Hammer or anvil?"
Darker than he remembered, Josephine reached up, placing her hands on his shoulders– Zenith recoiled, back hitting the diagrams behind him with a thud.
"Tattoos… never would'a guessed…" A pleased, breathy coo. "…I like 'em. Hammer."
…
…
"…I could have done without knowing that."
The dragon laughs at my prudishness. Enforced public virtue has many private faces, my dear. I just showed you one. Like it?
"Get bent."
Already have been my dear, detestably dirty little ferret… in oh, so, so many ways…
…
…
"Raus." Scowling, Zenith shot his threadbare cuffs and pointed at the door. It was quarter to eight. Herrs Schlotbaron & Scheißkopf took pride in their punctuality and Zenith had bribes to pay.
Josephine ignored him.
"Not bad. For an…Aryan." She put his top hat on, cocking it over one kohl-lined eye with a smirk, fingers lingering over a stack of theatrical handbills with his portrait on the cover, handbills which would never be used, then the large dictionary on the dresser by the door, murmuring: "Don't say much, do you? I like that –MY customers can't shut up about the Reich, even when they FUCK. How 'bout yours?"
Bereft of the voices behind his eyes telling him what to do, Zenith tidied where his uninvited guest meddled, sending everything crashing to the floor as this unnerving woman studied the pages of a forbidden engineering text, his sheet music, his cigarette case of black market opium-loaded cigarettes – which she pulled from beneath his mattress… tossing it to him with a shrug.
Zenith angrily flipped the battered lid up, counting the contents; he needed these since selling the pills that Una had given him on the black market… the pain in his joints and stomach was getting harder and harder to ignore… as was the growing monkey chatter inside his head.
"…well, then," Josephine was suddenly behind him, arms around his waist, breath warm through the delicate silk of his worn dress shirt causing the albino to shudder. "Show me what'cha got hidin' 'hind them spectacles."
"Nein." Unhappy at being touched without permission, the albino snapped the case shut and shoved it into his vest pocket, long milk-white braid suddenly unraveling.
"Why not?" Curtained by his hair Jospehine stood before him, just tall enough to fit beneath his chin, "What'cha hidin'? Show me… are you REALLY a king?" She took away his glasses, leaving him half-blind, remaining red eye oscillating and vulnerable.
Zenith's Tuesday night regulars knocked impatient, unheard.
Steam
Runic tattoos ribboning his shoulders in spirals of infinity, the illusionist pulled his white silk-linen tailcoat with its discreet wires and detonator over Hans/Helga's diamond patterned green and black backless beaded evening gown, disgusting oil-silk wrapped bundle in one pocket, Kerkrüppelter's and Hans/Helga's tarnished Iron Crosses around his neck.
Deafened by the voiceless shriek of infection in his punctured right eye, unable to sense a way out of this backwater echo where Jessie Owens was beaten to death at age six in an Alabama cotton field, he'd stumbled upon die Puppie's performer's discreet picnic just outside Berlin, collapsing face down into Fritz and Flossie's meager wedding feast.
Outcasts in a tightening, inescapable noose, they took the tall albino in, teaching him to make the most of his bizarre appearance, flicking silent derision back into the face of the hecklers as the audience roared with laughter. Mingling illusion with reality in the splintered mirror of Berlin's night scene, the King of Nothing survived.
Freshly-oiled Walther PPK a discreet bulge, crudely stitched green triangle with black bar over his heart, the albino, shuffling and reshuffling a well-worn deck of marked cards one-handed in the shadows of the front entrance watched the elephantine flag dripping black car chug to a halt in a hissing billow of steam and Wagner's "Flight of the Valkyries", surrounding barefoot iron-collared Slavs and wolfskin-draped Hitler Youth snapping to a halt in the unseasonable May chill as Hoess and Zenith's niece left the vehicle in the swirling snow.
Zenith spun, cards disappearing up his sleeve with a rattle, two battered red velvet chairs at the foot of the remains of the boarded-up cabaret's little stage standing ready, single spotlight trained upon them, worn black and green tiles swept clean.
Pausing to drop the needle upon the single remaining unshattered wax cylinder of his wind-up gramophone, Josephine's heels clicking, Zenith strode grinning onto the echoing remains of the stage, Hans/Helga's blood-stained blonde wig straggling limply from beneath his top hat, calling, "Meine Damen und Herren—"
"—what the fuck?" I exclaimed, "Everybody knows—"
Shhhhh… listen… The dragon giggles insane, while in the dark canyons behind my eyes the man who bleeds stifles a scream, lash abrupt in the searing heat of a strange sun… Listen…
Afterglow and a Proposal
Comfortably entangled upon the coat with Josephine, a bottle of contraband cherry schnapps between them, large metallic green fly beating itself to death against the naked bulb overhead, Zenith, who normally hated being touched, realized he no longer needed the voices behind his eyes to tell him what to do. And that Begg, his other cousin, could go to Hell along with the entire British Empire no matter what shape it took along with Una, his sometime cousin, sometime lover for that matter.
Camp
(The Angel of the Perverse sashayed like Hans/Helga through the ranks of his enemy's wolfskin draped honor guard, twirling his recovered father's sheathed sword cane, an Edwardian dandy in a tailcoat on Sunday promenade.)
…Josephine, who'd laughed after he bluntly admitted that yes, in this place he was a king, a count really, but not much of either, his titles rendered legally extinct along with his ancestral home, which Napoleon's army accidentally blew up, now a gravel pit for the advancement of the Reich.
Josephine slave-born in the Free City of St. Louis replied that she was in danger of being sent to the camps. Now that he'd sampled her wares, how much to get her out of the Reich and into the Democratic Republic of Poland or the United States of Russia?
Staring blindly upward into the lowering darkness, faced with yet another life to hide, the unwilling King of Freaks slipped a hand between her dark thighs, whispering a price that would get them all safely out of the Third Reich.
What gripped it back was welcoming. Zenith grinned a sour grin. The von Bek family business, the Devil's, so long neglected, meant he'd have to dance with Ilsa Prohl-Hoess between the eagle and the wolf.
"Seems women aren't the only ones forced to sell themselves." I grumbled.
The dragon chuckled. Now you understand.