STAG WOKE WITH a lurch. Through the stickiness of sleep, he knew he’d been shouting. He was having the nightmares again. Not only did they mess up his sleep, they’d managed to scare every potential girlfriend into a one-night-stand for the past year. He’d taken all the prescribed cures: Xanax, psychoanalysis, EMDR—Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing—but the night terrors still hung on as tenacious as a starving tick.
He rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling. In the other room, Harry snored on the futon, deaf to the shouting. Stag rubbed his leg. It ached as it always did, a dull thumping pain that left him exhausted. When he walked, the thrum moved from the titanium rods in his ankle, pounding its way up to his hip. At thirty-five, he was already an old man, weak and limping. Every day it was just another drop of water that comprised his own personal ocean of fury.
PTSD was a bitch. He was thankful he’d only had one blackout. He’d come out of it in the middle of Walmart. As if waking from a dream, he’d looked down and saw he had a cartful of items he would only buy for Holly: popsicles and animal crackers, tampons and champagne. It had scared the piss out of him. There was no rational motive for what he’d done, no context, no why. He stood staring at the items in the cart for such a long time that a little tattooed Goth queen asked him if he was all right. He’d looked up at her blankly, wanted to knee-jerk the words he was fine, but he wasn’t fine. He was terrified. There was no answer for him being at Walmart with a cart full of inexplicables. He was lost again without the why. He looked at the black-clad girl, and then he fled as fast as his lame leg would take him.
Rubbing his face, he sat up in bed and made up his mind. He couldn’t save Harry from the flood that had washed away his marriage; nor could he save himself from the landslide that was burying him little by little every day. The only thing they could do was get out of the way of the reminders.
“Wake up,” Stag barked to Harry. “Let’s go see Jake.”
“Meh?” Harry slurred.
“Yeah. Get up.”
Harry rolled out of bed and righted his huge form on the edge of the futon, still groggy. “If the sheriff’s taken the bar, I gotta find some work or shit.”
“You don’t have to today.”
“I don’t have any money.”
“You don’t need money. I got this,” Stag replied.
Harry opened his eyes wider.
“I’ve got the Fucking Settlement, remember? I can afford to prop you up a while. Let’s go talk to Jake.”
Stag went to the kitchen and began a pot of coffee.
“Look at the detail. Superb. Even the underlay on the shoulder straps. That’s good ol’ SS toxic green.” Dr. Jake Bratch, retired head of the University of Wisconsin Center for World War II Studies, leaned back in the leather swivel chair in his den. He peered at both men from above his reading glasses. The seventy-year-old man’s khakis and blue oxford shirt were as wrinkled as used Kleenex. Stag knew from all the late-night, beer-laden discourse at Gerde’s that Jake was brilliant, but his obsession for knowledge made him unaware of many of the social graces. Since his wife passed away—a Wuttke girl—Stag doubted the guy’d ever washed his clothes.
“Where did you get this?”
Stag and Harry seemed unable to move.
Jake continued, not making note of the sudden discomfort. “This is really remarkable. You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen an oil portrait of him. Very rare.”
“Him?” Harry had grown more and more tense while Jake studied the portrait.
“Yes, there’s no mistaking him. He’s got the Honor Chevron for the Old Guard, first- and second-class Iron Cross, the Frontflugspange, for aircraft reconnaissance work; it’s all there in detail.”
“Who is it?” Stag asked.
“Look at his eyes. There’s only one man who looks like this. They used to call him the Green Basilisk, eyes like a dragon. Yes, it’s Heydrich. This is Heydrich.”
Stag felt a coldness work down his spine. He’d been right in his suspicions. Now that they were confirmed, he could see. It was Heydrich. “Our Reini.”
“Sorry, I’m not up on my Nazi stuff. Who the hell is that?” Harry blurted defensively.
But Stag knew who it was.
He stared back at the unfeeling expression, the awful realization that behind the bad overpaint, this face had been hanging in Gerde’s all the years he’d been going there. Heydrich. The one and only. The Hangman. The Blond Beast. The Nazi Aryan ideal all wrapped up in the Gestapo, the SS, and, worst of all, the SD, the Nazi security agency. He had so much information on people, even Hitler and Himmler got nervous around him. Sure, they gave him a nice SS funeral when he was assassinated in Prague, but no one was really sorry to see him go.
No one.
Jake placed his fingertips together, forming a chapel-roof with his hands. His expression steeled as he looked at the face in the painting. The light in his eyes stilled. “Harry, I hate to have to introduce you to Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich, Reichsprotecktor of Bohemia and Moravia, Chief of the Gestapo and the SD.”
Harry looked like his mouth had gone dry and it was difficult to speak. “I thought Heinrich Himmler was head of the SS.”
“Yes. But within the SS was the much-more feared SD. The Sicherheitsdienst.”
“Sicherheitsdienst?” Harry wore a vaguely nauseated expression. “Doesn’t that mean—”
“Exactly. Security service,” Jake interrupted. “These were the ultimate men of the Reich. They literally determined who lived or died.” Jake took another study of the portrait. “The provenance of this piece must be researched. I hate to say it, but it would bring a fortune on the Nazi memorabilia market. Anything Heydrich-related is very rare. But, in truth, I’d rather see it’s handled properly and donated. We don’t want this to form the centerpiece of some neo-Nazi cult. Now tell me where you got this again?”
“Look, I don’t understand. I’m of German heritage but that doesn’t make me an expert on Mein Kampf!” Harry crossed his arms as best he could, almost in an act of defiance.
Jake released an ironic smile. “Very few are. Even back in Germany in the thirties, Mein Kampf sold to every household and illiteratti, and made Hitler millions, but no one cracked it open. Oh, they loved his ideas, but even Hitler regretted writing such a crappy book. However, it was a required purchase, if you didn’t want guys like this snooping around.” He nodded to the painting.
“Never heard of him.” Harry was adamant.
Jake nodded. “Czech patriots assassinated Heydrich in ’42, which is partly why he’s not a household Nazi name, so to speak, but had he lived—many were fully expecting him to take over the entire SS from Himmler. Perhaps even take over from Hitler. They had a saying, ‘Himmler’s Hirn heisst Heydrich.’ ‘Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich.’”
Harry shook his head. “He was under Himmler then? He was some kind of SS?”
“You don’t understand.” Jake clasped his hands as if in prayer. “This man founded the SD, the Sipo—SS Security Police—and the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing squads that murdered all in their path behind the Wehrmacht as the German army drove east. Heydrich had been instructed to develop the death camps of Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, and Auschwitz-Birkenau—as a kindness, believe it or not. Gassing was a way to relieve the Einsatzgruppen of their emotional burden of shooting women and children. But quite frankly, I don’t think Heydrich himself ever thought about the emotional burden.”
Jake finished, his voice dropping. “Heydrich was the reason the Third Reich kept their secrets. He was the one behind the horror of our first enlisted men stumbling unawares into Buchenwald. Heydrich was bad. Ground Zero bad. He could make Himmler look like a philanthropist.”
“Weren’t they all bad?” Harry blurted out, a creeping revulsion tightening his expression. “I mean we’re talking about Nazis here.”
“You’ve heard the saying, ‘Three men can keep a secret as long as two of them are dead’? I’d be surprised if Heydrich didn’t make that quote up. He was good at his job because no one talked. No one dared. So they put him in charge of the Wannsee Conference.” Jake took a long hard look at the painting. Suddenly the old man’s shabby clothes were overwhelmed by the intelligence and fierceness in his eyes. “This is the man who organized the Final Solution.”
“Fuck me,” Harry whispered, a strange emotion in his eyes.
Stag glanced at the painting. Heydrich’s stare frosted up even more.
“Seriously, where did you get this?” Jake asked. “You know, there’s something familiar about it—more than just Heydrich himself. I feel I’ve seen this before.”
Harry said nothing; he simply looked at Stag as if for help.
For some strange reason, evasion seemed to be in order right now. The idea they’d all been drinking beer for years beneath the painted gaze of Harry’s family’s “Reini” wasn’t quite appetizing, and Harry’s revulsion over that fact was palpable.
“I found it in a junk shop,” Stag interjected. “I figured you’d know who he was.”
“If you can find out where this came from, it might really be worth looking into. Like I said, Heydrich died young. His reign was short but notorious.” Jake pointed to the canvas. “This didn’t come out of a vacuum. There’s a story behind it. Without a doubt.”
“Without a doubt …” Stag’s words drifted off.
The men sat in silence for a moment before Jake said gently, “You should write a piece on this for the paper, Stag. Get back in the swing of things again.”
“Maybe I will,” he answered noncommittally.
Jake turned to Harry. “Sorry about Gerde’s. No place like that one. I can even remember my father going there after the war.”
Harry nodded, his eyes worried.
“This portrait may be important to Holocaust studies. If you’d care to donate it, I can have that arranged. We’d have professors and students lining up to research it.”
“I want to get some more info on it before I do anything like that,” Stag said.
“Where are you boys going to do your drinking from now on? With Ruthie dead and gone, I can’t bear the evenings alone. I confess Gerde’s filled them for me for a long time.”
Harry took another miserable glance at the painting. “This guy was involved in all that?”
“Not just involved,” Jake said. “A main architect. It’s believed the operations of the death camps were named Aktion Reinhard in his honor after his assassination. Heydrich was able to do things others could not bring themselves to do.” He grew sober. “We’ve got to find the history behind this. It is that important.”
Stag stared at Harry. Harry looked like a drowning man.
A moment of silence followed before Jake said in a harsh voice, “At Heydrich’s funeral, Reichsfurer-SS Himmler referred to him as, ‘The Man with the Iron Heart.’” He gave both younger men an ominous stare. “Gentlemen, you have a helluva portrait on your hands.”