Children of the Dusk Read Online Free PDF Page B

mind like those idiots had at the Passion Play at Oberammergau? He had gone there for solace and, he had told himself, spiritual healing after those sleepless nights in the Black Forest, where he had taken his advanced Abwehr training. Someone in the audience had whispered "Berlin" when Bethlehem was mentioned, and suddenly the program had taken on new meaning. By the time Christ was raised upon the Cross, people's eyes had become bright with anger and resolve. It hadn't taken genius to read their faces. The Jews had killed Him, of course. It was always the Jews. The audience, though, would not let that happen again. They would not crucify the new Messiah, for if the audience had its way, there would be no more Jews.
    No, he thought. He might have been gullible then, but not now, when he knew the real Hitler. Not the public man who stood on the Reichschancellery balcony and fluttered his hands like small birds, as Solomon's papa used to say. The one who thought nothing of insisting that a young Abwehr officer--who may not have loved the Party, but certainly his country and his Führer--put a bullet in the brain of his favorite dog, the only unwavering friend he had ever known. All because Achilles had bitten one of their screeching Pfaueninsel peacocks. What had the Führer expected, when the damn thing was strutting around like a long-lashed transvestite whore?
    As for Taurus, Killi's daughter, he had begun to live with the morbid feeling that she was nearing the end of her capacity to survive in this unrelenting heat and humidity. The dampness aggravated the existing inflammation in her hips; an open invitation to disaster. Her disability had increased markedly since they'd arrived--though perhaps the defect simply was more noticeable now that the animal was free of the ship's confines.
    With only minor satisfaction, he watched the log floor of the headquarters tent being emplaced. Next to it stood the medical tent, the first structure to be finished. He wanted to visit Taurus, to comfort her, but to go to the medical tent could mean seeing Miriam, and he didn't want a confrontation. Instead, he reached out, as he had done so many times, and touched Taurus's mind with his own. A dull throbbing grew in his hip, as he took some of her pain onto himself, trying to ease her burden for a short time. How he detested his inability to help her more!
    Angered, his thoughts returned to the people who had sent him here. He would show them all, Adolph Hitler included, he reassured himself. He would oversee the building of the base camp here on Mangabéy, and the creation of the docks at the mouth of the Antabalana River, over on the mainland. He would stand with his zodiac team of trainers and shepherds and watch the first voyagers of the greatest exodus in history disembark from the ships from Europe. But Madagascar would not be another concentration camp. As far as he was concerned, his charges were colonists--not slaves or prisoners. If every one of them happened to be of the Jewish faith and that satisfied the Reich's larger plan, so much the better.
    Come what may, he would spit in the Führer's eye. Whatever Hitler wanted he would get, but not the way he wanted it. He, Colonel Erich Alois, would see to that. At the top of the list was presenting the head of Major Otto Hempel on a stick. On the beach on a stick, turned toward the East, so the son-of-a-bitch could watch the sun rise each morning while the flesh rotted off his face. He would crush them all. All. Whatever it took.
    Erich lit a cheroot and watched the match burn down. Deliberately, he let it singe the unfeeling flesh of his damaged left hand. He stared at the skin, fishbelly white ever since his fingers were caught in a falling sewer grate during childhood. Despite the lack of full use of his hand and by virtue of his unwavering regard for what it meant to be a soldier, he had risen in the world of perfect Aryan men; by unfaltering compassion for the animals that were