If Hitler invaded Hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.
—Sir Winston Churchill
If Johan Thoms was guilty, then so, too, was one Henry Tandey (VC, DCM, MM) of the Warwickshires. For it was Tandey who allowed a dispirited, disheveled German soldier to go free during a scrap in Marcoing, France, back in 1918. The private’s name was Adolf Hitler, and he had fully expected to be shot. Thereafter, he had become convinced of his destiny as the savior of the German Volk.
A failed Austrian painter with one bollock, Hitler was of dubious stock; he is thought to have been the product of inbreeding. This might have given his family tree the impression of being a touch too vertical, lacking in branches. He was miffed by the reparations his neighboring Germany had been forced to pay under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles (coincidentally signed on June 28, the anniversary of Abu Hasan’s lingering Sarajevan trump), a begrudging deal intended to neatly wrap up proceedings after more than thirty-six million guts had been spilled.
Berlin’s bill of account was a shocking $33 billion. The Germans’ precious coal was deemed to be French. Swaths of their precious land, their heilige Erde, became Polish. They owed cash to the latecomers from America. Their balls (for not all of them had only one) were firmly in the hands of the British and the Russians. To rub salt into the wound, they were forced to admit guilt for the whole sorry show. (This they soothed somewhat by sinking their own fleet at Scapa Flow off Scotland rather than handing their naval hardware over.)
The Treaty of Versailles succeeded only in engendering a festering, supremely nasty Teutonic resentment. Hitler channeled the anger felt by a nation. He rallied bullies, agents provocateurs, pyromaniacs, murderers, retards, delinquents, and twisted intellectuals. He blamed the Jews for the whole nasty business and zigzagged his way to power through a mélange of Machiavellia and sheer fear. All well documented, all stemming from the outcome of the Great War, and, therefore, all the fault of Johan Thoms.
Or so Johan believed, and that was all that mattered.
* * *
The amateur psychologist in Bill Cartwright might have suggested that Johan’s instinct to head west toward the dipping sun pointed to a desire to disappear and, in doing so, to erase the past. He might well have had a case. But it had also allowed Johan to offer protection from the war to both of the lads, for down at the End of the World in Sagres, even the Great War had had a buffer zone: Spain.
Across Europe, however, the dominoes, were now starting to fall. Portugal fell under the fascist wickedness of Salazar in 1932.
“It’s time to scram. Once again, we shall be forced to rusticate,” Johan said.
So, a very different-looking pair from the ones who rolled into town all those years before packed their belongings together and began their reluctant retreat from the End of the World.
After the Young Hooligans’ Chess Club had made a promise to Johan and to Cicero to continue to meet three times weekly until their friends returned, to limit their use of the word she to just three times monthly and never in the company of a female, to never use red ink in a letter, and to nurture their younger siblings into the society, the boys (and some who were now fully grown, who had returned for the evening) embraced the men they had grown to love deeply. Johan promised to write to them each year on June the twenty-eighth, which he did until he did not even know many of the club, for they continued to induct young boys each new school term, and apparently still do to this day.
Johan and Cicero spent a few silent minutes at Alfredo’s resting place. They then collected the old kit bag from under the floorboards, fired-up the dirty old car, and slipped away from Vila do Bispo and from Sagres under cover of darkness, as they had done once before from a hospital ten miles east of Mostar.