Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

“I had a blackout or something. It’s a gym. What’s the big deal? The guy had it coming.”

“You could have fractured his skull.”

“What I said in there? You don’t hold it against me, do you?”

“Said what? What are you talking about?”

“I said I was disappointed by the remark you made. You know, about my keeping an apartment for romantic interludes? You used a vulgar term for it. That’s not you, Weldon. Fellows like you set the standards for the rest of us. I was just surprised, that’s all. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

I couldn’t begin to explain what went on inside Roy Wiseheart’s head.

He felt his jaw before he got in his Rolls-Royce. “Boy, that guy’s got a punch.” Then he laughed.

ON THE WAY home, I stopped at a neighborhood drugstore for a box of aspirin. In those days we seldom locked our cars or homes. Perhaps we felt that the slaughter of thirty million people had somehow driven evil from our shores and that V-J Day marked the restoration of the isolationist policies we had clung to during the prewar era. Didn’t our prosperity indicate as much? Wasn’t there a divine hand at work in our lives?

I sat at the soda fountain and drank a cherry milk shake and listened to Hank Williams on the jukebox and tried to forget the bloody business I had witnessed at the boxing gym. The doors of the drugstore were open, and the interior was breezy and cool, the comic books on the magazine rack ruffling. Across the street, stubborn kids who refused to go with the season were playing baseball in a park, the pitcher taking an exaggerated full windup before his delivery, smacking the ball into the catcher’s glove as fast as a BB. I watched a seedy man wearing a hat and wire-framed dark glasses ride a bicycle past the window on the sidewalk. He was also wearing cloth gardening gloves. A moment later, I saw him stop his bicycle and look directly at me. His face was expressionless, like a death’s-head, his mouth small and downturned at the corners, his face as deeply lined as a prune. He tossed a package wrapped with twine and brown paper through the open window of my automobile.

By the time I got outside, he had rounded the corner and disappeared on the other side of the baseball diamond, like a satyr working his mischief among the innocent and seeking another vale in which to play. I got behind the wheel and picked up the package from the passenger seat. It was thin, perhaps fifteen by fifteen inches in width and breadth, the paper stiff and neatly folded on the corners, the twine snipped and tied in a square knot.

I opened my pocketknife and cut the twine and peeled back the paper gingerly. There were no wires, no capsules containing explosive gelatins, no suspicious devices that I could see, only a square tin box. At the bottom of the lid was a small German swastika. I took off the lid and removed a reel of movie film from the box.

There are times in your life when you know, without any demonstrable evidence, that you are in the presence of genuine evil. It is not generated by demons, nor does it have its origins in the Abyss. It lives in the breast of our fellow man and takes on many disguises, but its intention is always the same: to rob the innocent of their faith in humanity and

to destroy the light and happiness that all of us seek.

To watch the film was to do the bidding of iniquitous men. To destroy it was to preempt any chance of finding out who had sent it. I drove to a photography store owned by a family friend who had been a member of the OSS and had parachuted into the Po Valley in the last days of the Italian campaign. “Can you put this on a projector?” I asked.

“Yeah, but I’d like to know what for,” he said.

“An anonymous person dropped it on the seat of my automobile. I have no idea what’s on it.”

My friend tapped his fingernail on the tin container. “I’ve seen these cans before. They were carried by German army combat photographers, sometimes by guys who worked for Joseph Goebbels. Some of them shot footage in the camps, then doctored it. You don’t want to see the footage that wasn’t doctored.”

“I walked into a camp right after the SS pulled out. I’m not worried about the content of a newsreel, doctored or undoctored.”

He placed the reel on a projector in the back room and aimed it at a small screen on the wall. His thumb rested on the switch. “Is there a reason I should leave?”

“None that I know of.”

He clicked the switch. The footage was in black and white and set in a large room with three beds in it. At first the lens was partially blocked by a man who had a head like a white bowling ball and a thick neck spiked with pig bristles. He wore suspenders and jackboots and was drinking from a stein and eating a sausage, his porcine face split with a grin, his tombstone teeth shiny under a lightbulb suspended from the ceiling. Two naked young women were sitting side by side on the edge of a bed, their faces turned from the camera. One had her arm around the waist of the other.

An SS colonel walked past the lens, his shoulders erect, a cigarette held in front of him, the way a European gentleman would smoke. The two women were taken to separate beds, where one was slapped repeatedly in the face by the man with the beer stein and the other was systematically degraded and mounted by the colonel.

“I don’t think this is the kind of crap either one of us needs to see,” my friend said.

“I’ll watch it by myself,” I replied.

“Turn it off when you’ve had enough. We need to find the guy who left this in your car.”

I didn’t answer. He started to leave the room. Then we saw another woman appear on the screen. She was wearing a dress that went almost to her ankles, and a Spanish blouse, and pearls around her neck, and a white rose in her hair. I felt as though a sliver of ice had been pushed into my heart.

“I’m going to turn it off, Weldon,” my friend said.

“Leave it alone.”

“Don’t do this to yourself, buddy.”

“I’m fine. I appreciate the help you’ve given me. I’ll let you know when I’m finished.”