Preston Child - The Babylonian Mask

“Thank you,” was all he said, to her surprise.

Löwenhagen, twenty-seven years of age, sat contemplating his future in the cozy lighting of the pub as the sun abandoned the day outside, painting the windows in darkness. The music grew a bit louder as the evening crowd dribbled in like a reluctant leak in a ceiling. While he waited for his food, he ordered five more stiff drinks and as the soothing hell of alcohol burned inside his injured flesh he thought of how he had come to this point.

Never in his life did he think that he would become a cold-blooded killer, a killer for profit no less, and at such a tender age. Most men devolved as they aged, becoming heartless swine for the promise of monetary gain. Not him. He had been aware as a fighter pilot that he would have to kill scores of people in combat someday, but that would be for his country.

Defending Germany and the W.U.O.’s utopian goals for the new world was his first and foremost duty and desire. Taking lives for this purpose was par for the course, yet now he was engaging in a murderous spree to serve the wishes of a Luftwaffe commander that had nothing to do with Germany’s freedom or the world’s well-being. In fact, he was now accomplishing the contrary. It depressed him almost as much as his dwindling eye sight and increasingly challenging temperament.

What bothered him most was the way in which Neumand had screamed when Löwenhagen set him on fire the first time. Captain Schmidt had hired Löwenhagen in what the commander had called an extremely covert operation. It had followed the recent deployment of their squadron just outside the city of Mosul, Iraq.

From what the commander had told Löwenhagen in confidence, Flieger Neumand had been sent by Schmidt to procure an obscure and ancient relic from a private collection while they were stationed in Iraq during the last plague of bombings aimed at the W.U.O. and especially the C.I.T.E. branch there. Neumand, once a teenage offender, had the skill set needed to break into the home of the wealthy collector and steal the Babylonian Mask.

He was given a picture of the slim, skull-like relic and with that he managed to steal the thing from the brass box it slept in. Soon after his successful plunder, Neumand returned to Germany with the prize he’d attained for Schmidt, but Schmidt did not count on the weaknesses of the men he chose to do his dirty work. Neumand was a compulsive gambler. On his first night back he took the mask with him to one of his favorite gambling haunts, a back alley dive in Dillenburg.

Not only did he commit the most reckless of practices by carrying an invaluable, stolen artifact around with him, but he invoked the rage of Captain Schmidt by not delivering the mask as discreetly and urgently as he’d been hired to do. On learning that the squadron had returned and finding Neumand absent, Schmidt immediately contacted a fickle outcast from his previous Air Base barracks to acquire the relic from Neumand by any means necessary.

As he sat thinking about that night, Löwenhagen felt his seething hate for Captain Schmidt spread throughout his mind. He was the cause of unnecessary casualties. He was the cause of greed-fuelled injustice. He was the reason Löwenhagen would never have his attractive features back again, and that was by far the most unforgivable crime the commander’s avarice had imposed upon Löwenhagen’s life — what was left of it.

Hilt was handsome enough but for Löwenhagen, having lost his individuality struck deeper than any physical mutilation ever could. To add to it, his eyes had begun to fail him to such an extent that he could not even read the menu to order his food. The humiliation was almost worse than the discomfort and physical handicap. He swigged his schnapps and clicked his fingers above his head for another.

In his head he could hear a thousand voices passing the buck to everyone else for his ill-fated choices and his own inner reason being left mute at how fast things had gone wrong. He recalled the night he had procured the mask, and how Neumand had refused to relinquish his hard earned loot. He’d followed Neumand’s trail to the gambling den under the stairs of a nightclub. There he’d bided his time, posing as just another party animal frequenting the site.

By just after one in the morning Neumand had gambled away everything and he was now in a double or nothing challenge.

“I’ll float you €1000 if you let me keep that mask as a surety,” Löwenhagen offered.

“Are you kidding?” Neumand cackled in his drunken state. “This fucking thing is worth a million times that!” He’d held up the mask for all to see, but thankfully his inebriated state made the shady company he was in doubt his sincerity on the item. Löwenhagen could not allow them to think twice about it, so he acted quickly.

“Right then, I’ll play you for the stupid mask. At least I can get your ass back to the base.” He’d said this especially loud, hoping to convince the others that he was just trying to get the mask to get his friend to go home. It was a good thing Löwenhagen’s deceptive past had honed his skills of guile. He was extremely convincing when he ran a con, a trait that usually benefited him. Until now, when it had ultimately caused him his future.

The mask sat in the middle of the round table, surrounded by three men. Löwenhagen could hardly object when another gambler wanted in on the action. The man was a local biker, a mere foot soldier in his chapter, but it would have been suspicious to deny him access to a poker game in a public dump known to local low lives everywhere.

Even with his cheating skills, Löwenhagen found that he could not swindle the mask from the stranger sporting the black and white the Gremium emblem on his leather cut-off.

“Black seven rules, motherfuckers!” the big biker bellowed when Löwenhagen folded and Neumand’s hand yielded an impotent three-of-a-kind of jacks. Neumand was too drunk to make an effort to get back the mask, although he was clearly devastated by the loss.

“Oh Jesus! Oh sweet Jesus, he is going to kill me! He is going to kill me!” was all Neumand could utter with his hands cradling his bowed head. He sat there moaning until the next group who wanted the table told him to piss off or end up in the pot. Neumand walked away, mumbling to himself like a lunatic, but again it was written off as a drunken stupor and those he shouldered out of his way took it just that way.Löwenhagen followed Neumand, having no idea of the esoteric nature of the relic the biker was swinging in his hand somewhere ahead. The biker stopped for a while, bragging to a bunch of girls that the skull mask was going to look wicked under his German army styled piss pot helmet. Soon he realized that Neumand was, in fact, following the biker into a shadowy concrete pit where a row of motorcycles gleamed in the pale rays of the lights that did not quite reach to the parking area.

Quietly he watched as Neumand pulled out his gun, stepped out of the shadows and shot the biker point blank in the face. Gunshots were not exactly an oddity around these parts of town, although some people alerted the other bikers. Their silhouettes rose over the edge of the parking pit soon after, but they were still too far away to see what had happened.

Choking for what he beheld, Löwenhagen played witness to the gruesome ritual of slicing off a piece of the dead man’s flesh with his own knife. Neumand dropped the bleeding tissue into the underside of the mask and started stripping his victim as hastily as he could manage with his drunken fingers. Wide-eyed and shocked, Löwenhagen learned the secret of the Babylonian Mask there and then. Now he knew why Schmidt was so eager to get his hands on it.

With his new grotesque looks, Neumand rolled the body off into the trashcans a few meters away from the last vehicle in the dark and then nonchalantly climbed onto the man’s motorcycle. Four days later, Neumand took back the mask and absconded. Löwenhagen tracked him down outside the Schleswig base, where he was hiding from Schmidt’s wrath. Neumand still rocked the biker look, complete with shades and dirty jeans, but he had gotten rid of the club colors and the bike. Mannheim’s chapter of Gremium was looking for the impostor and it wasn’t worth the risk. When Neumand encountered Löwenhagen he had laughed like a madman, rambling on incoherently in what sounded like an ancient Arabic dialect.