“Can’t get published to save his life. He’s a crank.”
“Totally unreliable?”
“I guess he pulls up some papers at the National Archives now and then.”
“What do you think happened to him?”
“Not my business, Mister . . .”
“Cousins. I’m in El Cajon now. On Broadway, I think. If it’s not too late, I’d like to bring some dinner and talk with you.”
Little warning bells. “It is late,” I said. “How do you know I haven’t had dinner?”
“I don’t. I haven’t eaten since breakfast, though. I could bring dessert.”
“Cheesecake?”
“Sure.”
“What do you want to know, Mr. Cousins?”
“I have to confirm some things Rudy Banning told me. They could be important . . . to me. Also, to a historian like you.”
If he was one of Banning’s little goose-stepping admirers, if he came over with a Luger or a Mauser, I could tick him off with the lyric about Hitler’s lone testicle, and he’d freak and blow my brains out. That wouldn’t be a bad way to go. Quick, with my name in the paper. The Laphraoig was getting low, anyway.
“I actually haven’t had dinner,” I said.
“I’m near a Vietnamese takeout. What can I get for you?”
“Some of those things like egg rolls or lumpia,” I said. “Phô, with tendon and sausage and cooked beef. Lots of basil and jalapeño slices. Forget the bean sprouts.”
I gave him directions to the house.
Outside, I heard the big barn owl hunting in the tall grass, wings whispering like little geishas.
Cousins arrived about an hour later and we ate on the back porch, with the yellow bug lights on. He was a slightly built fellow, not quite thirty, handsome, mousy brown hair thinning at the temples, but it looked good on him. Pale, a little sickly, his forehead damp, but no goosestepper. Eyes intense and dark green, the left eyelid angled down a little, speech quick, hands with long fingers like a piano player’s.
“What do you know about Lydia Timashuk?” he asked after I had finished my Sara Lee cheesecake.
“Timashuk,” I said. “Caught Stalin’s ear in the thirties. Said all the best scientists and doctors in the Soviet Union should work together to make Comrade Stalin live longer. Stalin liked that, but Timashuk was a fraud. She informed on the Jewish doctors in 1952. Most of them were shot.”
Cousins nodded and smiled. I had the feeling I had passed the first test. “She was a fraud. But have you ever heard of a researcher named Golokhov? Maxim Golokhov?”
“Maxim Gorky, yes. Golokhov, no.”
“How about a project called Silk? Started before the war.”
I knew which war he meant. “No . . . Unless it was one of the projects to make artificial silk. For parachutes and stuff.”
“Anything involving Stalin, research on mind control, Lake Baikal, and Irkutsk University? Starting in the 1920s?”
“Nope. But that’s hardly authoritative. They’re still uncovering tons of paper every month over there, files on this or that. Not as organized as Nazi files, but every bit as damning. Stalin was some piece of work.”
“What can you tell me about Rudy Banning?”
“He was the best.”
Cousins smiled. “That’s what he says.”
“You’re working with him?”
“I don’t know what the relationship is, exactly.”
Cousins seemed nervous but stable. The crickets had fallen silent. The house timbers creaked as they shrank. I thought I heard footsteps in the kitchen. I often hear footsteps in the kitchen at that time of night.
It was good to have somebody to talk to.
“Rudy’s books were pretty good once,” I said. “He had a knack for sniffing out rare documents. But something happens after you dig into the thousandth official archive of intolerable brutality. Spiritual evil, as they say. But it’s not demons, it’s flesh-and-blood people doing the unimaginable, then recording it like you and I balance our checkbooks. You come to mistrust everyone, and finally the paranoia kicks in. It can always happen again, you know. Ordinary people are out there waiting for the orgy to start. They lick their lips, waiting for the hate to flow. You study the twentieth century long enough, you want to pack a gun.”
I stretched out my arms and flicked off a mosquito. The neighbors had a stagnant koi pond about three hundred yards down the road, and old folks have thin skin. “Anyway,” I said, reaching my point, “Banning is possessed by the specter of Adolf Hitler. Figuratively speaking.”
“I think he’d agree with you,” Cousins said. He had brought in a blue backpack stuffed full. He reached into it.
I looked at the backpack with vague longing, but I already knew he wasn’t the type to put an end to my troubles. He removed not a Luger but a picture book, Blondi, Dog of Destiny. I had seen it before—in the bargain bin of Wahrenbrock’s in San Diego, marked down to twenty-five cents.
“This is what Silk did to Banning,” Cousins said. “He doesn’t know how crazy he actually is. Neither do I.”
