Apparatus 33 by Lawston Pettymore (bearly read books TXT) 📕

dilemma by reminding him that this pregnant fish, sequencer and all, had been promised to the Israeli intelligence services.

Besides, the agent continued, he had just been informed from sources across the river that the workshop had been raided by the Stasi, KGB, and GDU teams ten or fifteen seconds after their departure. In the ensuing scuffle to find NIX, Zerrissen had been shot dead on the spot.

The news was bittersweet for Nicolaus. He had never liked Zerrissen, but his contempt had been tempered by the awareness that Halina shared no such enmity who in fact saw him as something of a father, the gentlest heterosexual male she had ever met in her tragic life. In the end, Zerrissen did pursue redemption for his deeds at Die Kuppel. With Halina, baby, and Nicolaus now safe, Zerrissen had received a lethal dose of it.

Nicolaus broke away from the crowd admiring the new addition to the Israeli Navy submarine force, to join Halina, with her baby in her arms, umbilical cord clamped, inside the ambulance that would take them to a hospital’s maternity ward through ten minutes of traffic. Halina with her sweat dripping hair, soaked in bilge water, and smelling like the floor of a latrine, smiled in understanding as Nicolaus cracked open the small window by her gurney, letting in the sounds of a bustling, vibrant West Berlin, as well as fresh air, in through which a large white bird flew and landed on Halina’s head, staring at the baby, as if memorizing its face. The attendants shooed the bird away, unaware of its relationship to Halina, and it flew back out the window. It was the last Halina or Nicolaus would ever see of Buttercup. Perhaps it was a trade planned by the Universe. A cranky, addicted, profane bird in exchange for a beautiful little girl borne from turmoil and grief.

Halina called fruitlessly for the bird and handed the baby to Nicolaus to admire. He was still absorbing the idea of being the uncle of the first child ever to be born on the Spree, a perfect little girl, a natural citizen of West Germany with bright sparkly eyes, a pink face, a contented smile, and most importantly, two perfect little legs.

Halina offered, without being asked, her hands busy holding the baby, she moved expressed herself to Nicolaus using words for the first time he had ever heard from her. The words were mushy, as if her mouth were full of peanut butter. The words required strength, perhaps those muscles being victims of polio. But they were understandable.

“Raynora.” Inhaling, she repeated, pausing between thickly pronounced words for emphasis. “Her… name… is… Raynora.”

Nicolaus blinked back his thoughts, the first, to tell her about Zerrissen’s capture and execution; the other, to share his doubts about Zerrissen’s loyalty to them. But he decided against both, because for one, he could never argue with Halina, and besides, the truth in this case would set no one free.

Absinto

As unaware as almost everyone else on Earth about this April surprise, Halina and Nicolaus, as guests of the West German state, were separated for the second time since the intervention of the Red Cross twenty years earlier. Nicolaus regarded Raynora as an loving uncle would his niece, despite his lingering contempt for her namesake, and Halina was celebrated for her courage as a polio survivor escapee from Die Kuppel and East Berlin, about which very little was known other than its patina as a Nazi concentration camp.

In return for handing them NIX and sequencer, Israel granted Nicolaus access to their files on a Nazi immigrant named Helmut Gorgass, who was not on their list of wanted Nazi war criminals. Nazi hunters were satisfied with the cover story that Gorgass was at Die Kuppel seeking a cure for polio, and as this disease no longer existed on the planet, they showed no particular interest in him. The top-most war criminals from the Bunker, according to their calculus, were Raynor Zerrissen and Procrustes Todtenhausen, both now officially dead.

Out of fondness for Halina and Raynora, however, the Israelis struck a deal with Nicolaus that should he produce some hard evidence that Gorgass was in fact Todtenhausen, then the Mossad would put him at the top of their most wanted list. Their claim that it was Kathe’s voice pronouncing the numbers in the continue broadcasts was intriguing as well, but even harder to believe.

In any case, those on their Nazi War Criminal list quickly and unambiguously found themselves on trial in Jerusalem in a public auditorium, exactly as their current defendant recently abducted from the streets of Bueno Aires in broad daylight.

Halina and baby Raynora were relocated as guests of the State in a kibbutz on Israel’s northern coast, where Halina’s skills with shop tools, welding, and equipment repair, essential to the business of farming to which these settlements were dedicated, would be valued and compensatory. Splicing the tongue of a tractor hitch was not exactly artisanal, but Halina being Halina, made such banalities seem so. Raynora would have her own welding rig and be fluent in Hebrew and English by the time she was six. Halina’s life, as unglamorous as her leg brace, was exchanged from being a charwoman for the State, to one of diesel fuel and fertilizer.

Halina knew no Hebrew, and no spoken language at all, of course, but she prospered in her with sign language which may be the one universal language on Earth, the only other candidate being Braille, should it ever be modified to serve that lofty purpose.

Settlement expansion required blasting rock, excavation, and other types of earth moving, and Halina being interested in absolutely everything, became intrigued with the art and science of pyrotechnics and the mechanisms to safely control them. She was soon leading her own teams to shape the Gaza plateaus to revive God’s promised land of Abraham. Being himself a gentile, Nicolaus was invited to seek his new life elsewhere.

That elsewhere, Nicolaus finally decided, was Brazil, the location his Mossad sources