Джеймс Эллрой - This Storm

Enter Hector Obregon-Hodaka.

He’s a cat’s paw. Hanamaka brought him up here. He knew that Hector would be interned. Hector would suck up to his Statie captors and reveal that this place exists.

Hector was a patsy. Hanamaka rigged the faked-death scene all by himself. Hector got lucky. Captain D. L. Smith set him free.

It’s virgin turf. No tags, no tape seals. It’s a fresh toss.

Dudley checked the kitchen. He found a toilet plunger and plunged the two commodes. He brought up gauze strips and adhesive-bandage snips. The gauze showed water-bleached bloodstains. It confirmed his wall-tableau theory.

He emptied cupboards. He opened canned foodstuffs and dumped the contents. He dumped drawers and examined innocuous glut. He unscrewed sink drains and plunged standing water. He ripped apart stuffed furniture. He unscrewed light fixtures. The net yield was zilch.

The walls now.

He brought a stethoscope. He attached the earpieces and began downstairs. He walked room-to-room. He tapped the walls and listened. He got all solid thunks. He worked downstairs to upstairs and wall-tapped. He got all solid thunks.

He walked back downstairs. He retapped the walls, higher up. He turned down a side hallway and tapped the right-side wall. He got solid, solid, solid, solid, and—

Hollow thunks. Pitch-perfect — tap, tap.

He brought a pry bar. He ran to the living room and grabbed it. He ran back to the hallway and swung.

The wall was wood-reinforced plaster. Two hits crumbled it. The boards snapped. Plaster grit swirled. Twelve hits ripped a floor-to-ceiling hole.

A hidey-hole. Rendered inaccessible. There was no latch entry, no wall-panel hinges and slides.

The hole ran twelve by twelve. It was carpeted. There were light fixtures, clothes racks, and shelves.

Dudley brushed off grit and sawdust. He stepped in and tapped a light switch. Well, now. What’s this?

Mahogany walls. Well buffed and gleaming. A flag spray at the rear. Pole-mounted banners, elegantly fringed and draped.

Dudley unfurled them. They were smooth silk. They proclaimed stark alliance and devilish intent.

A swastika flag, a rising-sun flag, a hammer-and-sickle banner. Flags for Franco’s Falange. Ku Klux Klan flags. Redshirt Battalion flags. Flags ablaze with “SQ”s and coiled snakes.

Lovely silk twill. Bright yellow fringe. Lurid emblems, ablaze.

Dudley smelled mothballs. They hung from gauze sachets. They protected haute- KKK outure threads.

Nazi uniforms. Winter- and summer-weight wool. Gray Wehrmacht tunics and breeches. Black SS dress kit.

Collar and shoulder insignia. All field-grade rank. Creased trousers and puffed jodhpurs. Jackboots on foot racks. Peaked hats on a shelf.

Dudley time-machined. Brentwood, north of Sunset. It’s winter ’39 again.

That costume party. The Jewish Maestro’s house, sublet. It’s done up Bauhaus-moderne. He’s an SS Sturmbannführer. The party replicates a Nazi purge. The party swirls out of sync.

More uniforms. Jap Army and Navy issue. Cut small. Hanamaka is small. The yellow peril boys run tiny and shrill.

Soviet uniforms. Coarse olive wool. Drab beside Herr Hitler’s couture.

The People’s Army. Drab comrades. Godless Bolsheviks hooked on dead-Jew Marx and stiff potato brew.

Dudley plucked a Nazi hat and tried it on. It was too small for him. He saw a leather-bound diary, stuffed behind the foot rack. He grabbed it and leafed through.

Kyoho Hanamaka wrote in English. He introduced his historical memory book and stated that he saw it all firsthand. “Please be credulous. I witnessed the following events.”

He ignored chronology. He hopped locale sans explanation. He did not justify his presence at moments of pitiless terror. He remained mutely complicit then and broke his silence on these pages.

He witnesses the Rape of Nanking. Jap soldiers make Chinese fathers fuck their own daughters. Those soldiers behead one thousand Chinamen a day. Jap flyers toss Chinese children from airplanes at five thousand feet.

Witness Hanamaka heads northwest. He visits Hermann Goering. The Reichsführer drinks the morphine-laced blood of Aryan virgins.

El Jefe Franco needs help. He calls El Supremo Jefe Hitler and requests air support. Witness Hanamaka cozies up to the Condor Legion. He joins the bombing runs over Guernica. He describes the firestorm and Basque civilians burned alive.

Witness Hanamaka heads east. He drinks vodka with Joe Stalin and tours Red Square. Uncle Joe predicts the Nazi pact back in ’36. He murders the army brass and Party apparatchiks he deems potential refuseniks.

He kills 100,000 men. Witness Hanamaka views mass murder. NKVD death squads burst into homes and blast perceived traitors. Wives and children scream. The death squads blast them point-blank.

Hanamaka views Stalin’s booze-blitzed rages. Uncle Joe issues five hundred death decrees a day. Hanamaka views torture sessions at the Lubyanka prison. He’s there for the Moscow show trials. They couch all loose talk as sedition.

Stalin orders up slaughter. He’s the psychopathic god to rival Auden’s Hitler. Show-trial defendants stand mute. They are condemned and shot in their cells. Their last words are often “What for?”

Witness Hanamaka hops back to Deutschland. It’s now summer ’34. It’s the Night of the Long Knives.

Hitler’s purges are small scale beside Stalin’s. They are intimately conceived and plotted on the q.t. Brownshirt boss Ernst Röhm is a boy-buggering bully. He’s holed up in a spa hotel outside Munich. He’s there for an all-boy bacchanal. Witness Hanamaka and some SS lads fly down.

They tear through the hotel. It’s a rude disruption. It’s sodomy and soixante-neuf interruptus. There’s death shots to the head. There’s slashed genitalia.

Dudley stopped there. Winter ’39 tore through him. The party reprised the Night of the Long Knives. Tommy Glennon witnessed Sturmbannführer Smith’s nadir.

Maestro Klemperer’s house. The Maestro’s recording of Tristan und Isolde. The prelude soars. The costumed guests caper.

Dudley fondled Nazi uniforms. He touched silver thunderbolts and death’s-heads. He kissed stiff black wool. He loved beautiful clothing. Claire joshed him about it.

He’d sweated through his clothes. He felt dizzy. He reached behind the foot rack and pulled out an oak box.

It was two feet long and weighty. It looked ceremonial. A hinged lid lifted up.

Dudley opened the box. A bayonet had been placed on black velvet. Swastikas were carved on the handle. The bayonet glowed.

Dudley picked it up and cradled it. He gauged the weight as eight pounds. The bayonet was pure gold.

Dissemble now. You’re here ex officio. It’s just a scholar’s lark.

The probable widow played slow. Joan played off of that. Dr. Ashida authored the text. Joan improvised.

I’m with the L.A. Police. This is strictly routine. Your missing-persons report. I’m compiling a lab-file update.

Ellen Marie Tullock. Fifty-five and too thin. The wife of Karl Frederick. He’s on the CCC survivor list. He’s the probable Box Man.

“I don’t quite understand what you do, young lady.”

“I’m a biologist. I work in the crime lab, and we’re reviewing our missing-persons files. We’re up to January 1934, the month you submitted the query on your husband.”

Mrs. Tullock frowned. “Are you a policewoman? I don’t understand why they didn’t send a man.”

Joan smiled. “My immediate superior is Japanese. Given the times, he thought you’d rather speak with me.”

Mrs. Tullock blinked. Joan plainly vexed her. The front parlor broiled. Heating vents audibly hissed.