Vic Socotra

12 September 2009

The Consultant

(The Nazi monument found in the park)

I was down on the farm last night. It was cool and clear downstate, away form the nagging low pressure system that is lingering off the Delaware coast.

Slept great, despite being on the fold-out sofa. I had been in Charlottesville, on another feckless mission of commerce.

It was a relief to pull off the smooth pavement of Virginias Route 50, after passing the big bunker at Mount Pony, where the Federal Reserve once kept all the cash that would be used to finance the post-apocalypse economy.

There are panics, after all, there are panics. It is useful keep everything in perspective. There was once a tie when your government assumed that Washington and New York might suddenly become molten radioactive slag, and people would have to start over.

They made prudent and expensive plans, and when the nightmare passed, they gave the money back to Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers and declared the mountain vaults surplus.

I shut down the Bluesmobile on the gravel driveway and consider the next move in the hunt for the Nazis.

I am not a detective, though some of what I do could pass for the analytic work to support an investigation. I am not nearly as smart as Sherlock Holmes, much less his older smarter brother Mycroft. Sherlock did bill himself as the “world’s first Consulting detective,” and I was at least the first part of it.

I like “consultant” better than “bandit,” and I operate quite as effectively outside the Beltway as inside it. Well, on some matters.

For example, Mr. Holmes would probably have figured out the coffee-maker at Refuge Farm this morning.

I couldn’t. I managed to get one of the little lights on the front to blink plaintively at me, and my lip curled in contempt. Another machine that is smarter than me. I finally figured it out it after cleverly defeating the safety features and exploding a cloud of ground coffee dust all over the little kitchen. The machine had warned me, but I was determined.

That was the sort of resourcefulness required to defeat the Nazis. Indomitable. Second try, the deep brown dust of the partially ground Russian coffee and hot plain water cleaned up, the coffee was brewed and I could confront the world again.

This case had begun with a voice in a parking garage. It is not important where, except to say it was in the city, and not far from the Metro.

“Socotra,” it called. “Over here.”

I am accustomed to being solicited in the depths of the pits below these great shining towers, and naturally I stopped and shrugged my leather delivery bag into a position of readiness on the strap over my shoulder.

“Who are you?” I asked, peering for a face.

“A friend with an interest in… history. You have been posting a lot of material about something you don’t know about, or at least what is going on now. You may have the only link between the boundary stones of the District of Columbia, and the crypto-Nazis of George Lincoln Rockwell, the American Fuhrer.”

I was already late for one meeting, and possibly about to be assaulted in a public garage. Naturally I was intrigued. I moved closer.

“Not too close. There has to be plausible deniability in this matter. It is sensitive. No one wants the truth to come out- not the Feds and not the local yokels either.” From behind the pillar came a thick manila folder. The hand and arm that held it gently placed it on the hood of a lime-colored Prius with District tags. “Chew on what is in here. We need to find the cemetery, and we need to find where the monument was placed, and we need to do it quietly.”

The hand disappeared. The voice receded, moving away from the rear of the pillar and into the Stygian darkness of the G3 level, where the air is heated by its proximity to the earth’s core.

I generally give deference to disembodied voices, and I gave this one two potatoes before I advanced to pick up the folder. The word’s “Formerly Restricted Data” were stamped on the front, and there were several dog-eared 8-by-ten photos and dozens of reports.

I tucked it in my bag for examination later, after we sorted out why the numbers for the month were inauspicious upstairs.

After I got the umbrella set up on the porch at the farm, and unpacked the trunk of the Bluesmobile, I poured a tall vodka and spread the content of the files on the dinner table. Old mug shots went in one pile, diagrams of a cemetery with numbered plots, dated 1911 and 1947, went in another.

There were transcripts of the trials, and reviews of some books. Satellite imagery of undetermined date were in the middle, showing Bolling Air Force Base and the Blue Plains treatment plant. The Presidential helicopter detachment at what had been Naval Air Station Anacostia and the White House Communications Agency were blanked out, as you would expect.

I could barely make out the disturbance in the soil at the shore that marked where the bogus Metro tunnel crossed under the river, and permitted the Executive Branch to escape the city if necessary.

I chuckled. The easiest way to hide something is to leave it in plain sight. In a couple drinks I was as current on the Nazis as you are- who they were and what had happened to them.

I was pretty clear on why it happened to them, too. The urgency of their execution was attached to national security, which in this case was the reputation of the Number One G-man, J. Edgar Hoover. If the American people had realized the German Kriegsmarine could land agents by swift U-boats with impunity anywhere on the East Coast, they might have also discovered that the Japanese were flying balloons carrying payloads of plague over the Pacific Northwest.

I sighed. The Farm is a great refuge. The satellite radio is a little quirky. When a cloud passes or a branch dances in the wind and interrupts the view of the bird out there in geosynchronous orbit, it disturbs the signal, which is mostly great. When that happens, the old speakers popped and ground to the extent I thought there was someone at the door.

I noted I had missed the Seventh Day Adventists who trespassed on my property to give me the Good News of the coming resurrection. Or at least it will be good news if I clean up the act and accept the plain truth and submit to the Will of God.

I forgive them their trespass, remembering enough of my Christian education for that, at least. If they were Adventists, that is.

I took a break from going through the transcripts of the Military Tribunals. It was depressing, the voices all seeming like regular Joes, not the cardboard cut-out Nazis from the movies.

Looking down into the pastures there were five deer in the little herd that appears at dusk. Two fawns, rising, to maturity and three adults.

The buck looked up at me on the balcony and decided he did not like the sound of the Blend channel on Sirius radio, and they disappeared into the neck of the passage into the lower paddock and into the deep woods.

As the darkness fell, I looked at the picture of the object that had created the latest stir, and presumably why the folder had been directed to me. It was a picture of a gravestone, and the words on it read:

“In memory of Agents of the German Abwehr who were executed August 8, 1942.” The names of the men who were left as numbers in Potter’s field are below it.

There was a print-out of a web site paper clipped to the picture. It talked about the executions, and Herbie Haupt, the only American citizen among them. The words described the marker, which had appeared in 1982. The summary said “a German-American organization marked the graves of the six agents with an appropriate tombstone.”

I gave a low whistle, and suddenly I knew what this was all about. I guess some people forget quicker than others. “A German-American organization,” I repeated out loud, ironically.

So that is what they are calling it now, I thought. The letters are clear enough on the actual photo about who donated the stone: “N.S.W.P.P.”

The National Socialist White Peoples Party. This wasn’t ancient history. It is the skinheads and the Aryan Nation now. That is who my informant looking for.

This was going to call for some intrepid Nazi Hunters. I could not do it alone. I thought hard. I would need a beautiful woman with great insight and subtlety. And some field experience. A Colonel of Marines, maybe.

Shit, this might call for The Justice League of America. I don’t know. I finished my drink and unfolded the sofa bed. More about that tomorrow.

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