Chapter 32: Friday, Dec. 15

Mr. Bain leaned across the table and jabbed the air with his fork. "What do those faggy little critics keep telling at us every time someone slices a cow in half or buggers himself with a crucifix? They tell us it is art. And if we protest, we're told it's supposed to disturb us. Well, by that standard... I mean Der Führer disturbed us, didn't he? He still disturbs us, doesn't he?"

I looked to Diantha and, even allowing for the amount we had all drunk, was appalled to see her apparently impressed with the rantings of this charlatan. Perhaps she had heard this all before. Which made it worse.

"You are pushing the limits of irony," I said, hoping for some relieving laughter.

Freddie Bain shook his large head and his expression showed a twist of demonic anger. "Irony? What makes you think I would stoop to irony? Art is supposed to show us as we really are. Der Fuhrer held up a mirror to mankind, and we remain horrified at what we've seen in it."

"But the Holocaust," I said, my answering anger making me stumble over the words.

"The Holocaust." The man laughed, a laugh I can still hear. Then serious, boring in again. "The Holocaust was Hitler's master stroke. With the Holocaust he made himself immortal. Look around you, Norman. His monuments are everywhere. Every time the Jews put up another memorial to try to get the goyim to feel sorry for them, they honor Hitler's achievement."

I took my napkin off my lap and put it on the table preparatory to rising. "Who are you?" I asked.

He ignored my question. "Think about it, Norman. Think of who he killed. The Jews. Stalin killed more people, many more. Stalin had them shot. He had them worked and starved to death. But who did he kill? Kulaks. For Christ's sake. Peasants with more than one cow. A few intellectuals. Bureaucrats. Do you think if Hitler had killed twenty million Chinese anyone would care? Mao killed many more than that. No, Hitler killed Jews. The best and the brightest, no?"

I was reduced to shaking my head.

His eyes, cold and mocking in his inflamed face, bore into mine. "They wanted, my friend, to be chosen. Hitler chose them. The Jews claim they were chosen by God. But we Aryans know we were chosen by nature."

"I am not your friend."

"As you please, Mr.... de Ratour. I regret to upset you."

But he clearly didn't. He was leaning even farther across the table, his voice a loud whisper. "Do you know what every Jew fears deep in his heart?"

"People like you."

"No, no, I am not jesting. They fear, my friend, deep in their hearts, that Hitler was right."

"That is only human," I replied with some fervor. "Most people know in their hearts that Hitler was wrong."

"Don't be so sure, Mr. de Ratour. You would like to think, wouldn't you, that you would never have joined the Schutzstaffel, that you and those you know would be incapable of such a thing. But under different circumstances, in different times... People who thought of themselves as decent and law-abiding and progressive joined the Nazi party. The same kind of people joined the Communist party..."

Incredibly, he laughed. "They both got more than they bargained for, didn't they? They got right up to their noses in the blood of others. And when the party was over and fingers started pointing, they scuttled for cover like cockroaches." Then, his face taking on a strange, haunted cast, he said, "But my father never did. He never hid what he was. Never."

"Diantha, I think you should come along with me now."

"You see, Mr. de Ratour, what we really don't want to admit to ourselves is that evil can be fun. Think of all those films that have Nazis and ex-Nazis in them. That shiver of excitement when the swastika fills the screen."

"Hitler is dead."

"Then why do we have to keep killing him?"

I coughed to clear my throat. "I'm finding this conversation more than distasteful." I stood up to leave.

He rose to his feet as well. "You're running away, Mr. de Ratour. You're running away from yourself."

"You are not I."

"Do not be so sure, Mr. de Ratour." He stood up as well and leaned across the table. "Tell me, are you a Christian?"

"I'm an Episcopalian," I responded, not sure I had answered his question.

"Yes, then tell me, sir, where was your Episcopalian God when the trains pulled into Treblinka? Where was He when Khrushchev and Kaganovich, a Jew, by the way, deliberately starved to death six or seven million people in 1932 and 1933? Where was He when the machine guns of the special units overheated at Babi Yar? Where was your Episcopalian God when Stalin worked and starved and froze to death those millions in the mines of Magadan? Where was he when Pol Pot murdered a quarter of his countrymen? When the Hutus sharpened their pangas and hacked to death half a million Tutsis? Tell me, Mr. de Ratour, where was your almighty Episcopalian God?"

Had I only heard the man's raised voice it might have sounded like a cri de coeur. But Freddie Bain was smiling broadly, was on the verge of mirth.

"God is not cruel."

"Then why did he create us as we are?"

"Man is free to be evil," I said.

"Then God, too, is free to be evil. Think about it, Mr. de Ratour, if we are made in the image and likeness of the Almighty, Mr. de Ratour, then like us He needs a good laugh now and again. And what could be funnier than looking down on mass murder? Hilarious. Knee-slapping. God-roaring. A scream. Face it, Mr. de Ratour, God is a joker. If He made us for anything, He made us for his amusement." At which point he laughed himself, his noise bouncing like the reflected flames off the surfaces curving around us.

"That, sir," I said though a clenched jaw, "is the most damnable blasphemy I have ever heard."

"Not so, Mr. de Ratour. If not laughing, what else could He have been doing? And if God doesn't exist, then what difference does it make? We are then but infinitesimal specks on a speck, our greatest and worst moments of history of no more significance than what happens on a petri dish."

"History judges," I said, grasping at straws.

"History comes and goes."

"You're mad," was the best I could do.

"Bah," was all he said to my pathetic response. "And I want my tape." With that he turned unsteadily, but with a certain melodramatic flourish, and walked across to the fire. There, backlit by the flames, he stood and toyed with a cigar.

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