Elmore Leonard - Up in Honey's Room

Carl pulled to the curb and stopped.

“You believe they’ll invite us in?”

“Don’t you want to see Jurgen?”

“When they tell me I can pick him up.”

“What if he’s gone by then?” She said, “You know what? I’ll say my ex-husband asked me to stop by and I brought a friend. We’d never met any spies before.”

Carl said, “You’re having fun, aren’t you?”

“Or, I’ll go in and you can wait here.”

“How about this,” Carl said. “You get out of the car you’re on your own.”

Honey got out and stood holding the door open.

She said, “I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.” Closed the door and waved her fingers at him in the window.

Jurgen was seated with Vera on the sofa, more than half the living room from where Walter was standing in the opening to the dining room, a row of candles on the polished table lighting him from behind. He had placed a few newspaper and magazine pages on the table and now was ready to begin.

“All of you know of the enigma that shrouds the birth of Heinrich Himmler and myself.” He paused.

Vera groaned. She said, “Please, God, shut him up.”

“I think he memorized his opening,” Jurgen said, “and forgot what comes next.”

“Their date of birth,” Vera said.

“I was delivered into the world,” Walter said, “the seventh day of October in the year 1900.”

“On the same day,” Vera said.

“On the same day,” Walter said, “as Heinrich Himmler, the future Reichführer of the SS.”

“In the same hospital,” Vera said, her eyes closed.

“But not in the same place,” Walter said.

Jurgen turned his head to Vera. She was again watching Walter, saying, “What’s he doing?”

“Heinrich was born at home,” Walter said. “Two Hildegardstrasse in an upstairs flat. I also was born at home. However I was taken to hospital with my mother the same day where we were both cared for. My mother had suffered complications giving birth to me.”

Vera turned to Jurgen. “He wasn’t born in the hospital.”

“I have never lied to you,” Walter said. “I believed I was born in that hospital and came to believe Heinrich was also, as my twin, because so many people said to me from the time I was a lad, ‘Aren’t you Heini Himmler? Did you not move to Landshut?’ Or, someone says to me, ‘I saw you this morning in Landshut.’ It’s north of Munich fifty miles. ‘What are you doing here? Isn’t your father headmaster at the school?’ Now I’m living here, and by the thirties I see photos of Heinrich in German newspapers. Heinrich reviewing SS troops with the Führer. I look at the pictures of him and I think, my God, Heinrich and I are identical. I began to consider other similarities. Both of us born in Munich on the same day. Could we look so much alike and not be twins, born of the same mother? Why were we separated, kept apart? I began to believe Heini and I were put on this earth with destinies to fulfill.”

“Not unlike the Virgin Mary,” Vera said.

“In April 1939 I was asked by several of my Detroit friends, did I see myself on the cover of Time, the magazine. I was already reading about this rising star of the Nazi Party who must be my twin. Now he was gaining international attention. Heini was dedicated, conscientious. So was I.”

“Dedicated to what,” Vera said, “cutting meat?”

“He suffers from an upset stomach,” Walter said. “At times so do I.”

“Gas,” Vera said. “Quiet, but telling.”

“At one time he was a devout Catholic,” Walter said. “So was I. He believed that allowing oneself to be sexually aroused by women, who by their nature could not control themselves, was to be avoided before marriage. So did I.”

Jurgen said, “I can’t see Heinrich with a woman.”

As Walter was saying, “Heini’s wife, seven years his senior, gave him a child, a daughter. I’m told he first noticed Marga-who referred to the Führer’s exterminator as ‘my naughty darling’- because of her beautiful blond hair. The woman I married was much younger than I and, unfortunately, quite immature. Honig also had blond hair. My one regret is that she did not provide me with a son before she walked out of my house.” Walter paused. “I saw Honig the other night, the first time in five and a half years.” He said, “She looked the same as I remembered her. Perhaps her hair was more blond.” He stopped and stared into the room at his audience: Jurgen and Vera, Bohdan and Dr. Taylor, Joe Aubrey in an armchair by himself. Walter continued, saying, “Heini believed in unconditional devotion to duty. So do I.” He paused and was thoughtful as he said, “Why did I believe for so long we were identical in every way, one of us an imprint of the other?”

“Because you wanted to believe it,” Jurgen said.

“Because I wanted to believe I have a destiny as meaningful as Heini’s, who has set out to eliminate a race of people from the world by means of Sonderbehandlung, a special treatment, murder in the gas chamber. First in Europe, then comes here and turns his Einsatzgruppen on America, his death squads. They say, now that Heini is head of the SS and the Gestapo, Reich Minister of the Interior, Reich Minister of Home Defense, head of military intelligence, Germany’s chief of police, he must follow the Führer as the next master of the Third Reich. But think about it. Would the Führer in his wisdom choose the most hated man in the world to succeed him? A man so detested he would be rejected even by the Nazi Party? Heini has said people may hate us, but we don’t ask for their love, only that they fear us. He tells his SS, we must discuss the plan for extermination, but never speak of it in public. He said they can look at a thousand corpses in one place, mounds of dead bodies the result of their work, and know they remain good fellows. Heini is responsible for the murder of Jews, Romas, priests, homosexuals, Communists, ordinary people, in numbers estimated to exceed, easily, ten million.”

Vera and Jurgen watched him, not saying a word.

“I cannot,” Walter said, “compare my destiny to Heini’s. I have in mind the extermination of only one man.”

He turned to the dining table and began looking through pages from magazines and sheets of notepaper.

“Himmler,” Vera said.

“You’re joking.”

“Walter is Himmler’s ghost double, his doppelganger. When someone’s doppelganger appears it means the someone he looks like is going to die. It happened with my husband, Fadey. The day I learned he went down with his ship, Bo was trying on one of Fadey’s suits, very loose on him. He put on Fadey’s hat the way Fadey wore it and was impersonating him, the gruff way he spoke.”

“And Fadey walked in.”

“Not this time. Fadey never saw Bo mimic him, but I think Bo was still his doppelganger.”

Jurgen nodded toward the dining room and Vera turned her head to see Walter in his black suit and pince-nez ready to continue.

“I have photographs and my notes here, and a map you can look at later if you want. What I intend to do is assassinate the president of the United States-”

“Frank D. Rosenfeld,” Joe Aubrey said and started laughing, putting it on. He said, “Walter, how you gonna do it, sneak in the White House?”

“The Little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia,” Walter said. “I have learned Roosevelt has been there since March thirtieth, resting, restoring his energy. I was counting on him remaining in Warm Springs through the twentieth of this month, Adolf Hitler’s birthday, but I’m going to move the date of the assassination to the thirteenth. Once I’m successful, the name Walter Schoen will have a place in American history to rival that of John Wilkes Booth.”