INHUMANUM: A THRILLER (Law of Retaliation Book 1) Read online

  That was a game he didn’t miss.

  Their terrible game pieces were hollow eyes and bony ribs—creative lies, born of love, traded back and forth. “I’m so full, Papa. You have it. I’ll just have to throw it out if you don’t eat it.” Nappi did what she could. If she found any reason to laugh or smile, she ran to him so he could feel her face. Sometimes she tricked him. She’d hold up a stray cat or a toad where he expected her face to be. She was the only brightness in that dismal time.

  While war did horrible things to good people, it turned bad people into monsters. Before they fled to France, he was beaten badly in the bread line. Lucrece sewed him up and read him letters from her mother in St. Germaine. Finally he agreed to the move. Within a month of their relocation, she left him for an aristocrat who considered the war more a nuisance. Money insulated his family from squalor and she joined him eagerly. She was a woman who needed to hear she was beautiful. Alvar didn’t tell her anymore.

  Lucrece gifted him with her thoughts as she packed her things. “Your eyes are mismatched. You couldn’t know this, but you should—one pupil is larger than the other. And oval. You used to have pretty eyes. I remember how blue they were.”

  She didn’t talk about her needs or her dreams. She merely ground away at his damaged parts. After she said her piece, she left without hesitation. For years Alvar wondered if she even paused to look at Nappi. He wondered if she shed a tear. She didn’t sound sad. He didn’t try to stop her. He blamed himself for failing Lucrece, yet was thankful the woman had a stony heart. If she’d been more human she’d have taken Nappi with her.

  “Alvar, war takes and gives what it wants.” Lucrece said from the door. “It’s finally given me what I’ve always deserved.”

  Nappi cried a lot when they packed to return to Helsinki without Lucrece. Without a mother to chase her, she stopped playing with buttons. They left a jar of them behind: Lucrece’s only tangible legacy.

  A friend from the university helped them get settled. Alvar began teaching again, but the school could no longer pay him what it took to live. Nappi paced and pulled at her hair. Sometimes she took his hand away from his pipe to feel her tears. He hugged her and sang old songs. The world never seemed safe, and they clung to each other fiercely. Alvar recalled how terrified he’d been of losing Nappi—his tiny, funny, constant comfort. He wouldn’t have gone on without her. He prayed the world would heal so they could. He prayed to live long enough to teach Nappi how to recognize real monsters. He’d lost his faith in The Winter War, but all children had a god, so Alvar prayed to Nappi’s. Each night that ended with them together, the bolt slid into the frame of the door, was a gift from Nappi’s god. The professor never took gifts for granted.

  Then Alvar’s worst demons paid him a visit. Alvar was a grunt in the war. Captured near the Karelian Isthmus early in the battle of Summa. His fate was sealed when he shoved a bit of broken radio equipment and a notebook in his rucksack. His commanding officer pushed the items at him after receiving a mortal gunshot to the pelvis. The scholar was following orders. Alvar tried to hold pressure on the man’s wound, but he felt bone crunch under his hands and the bleeding worsened. Alvar rocked by the fireplace. He was back again, out in the snow. It always snowed when the memories clawed the haunted man back into their dreaded company. It was The Winter War, after all. He knelt beside the wounded man. The larger man had a warm woolen coat reserved for officers. Officers were issued coats and rifles, but new recruits had to join the effort with what they brought from home. When life left the man’s eyes, Alvar saw that the only weapon he had left, a rag tied around a wine bottle full of petrol and tar, was broken. It didn’t matter. He was out of matches and the Soviet tanks were far past them now. Alvar slipped the officer’s blood-soaked coat on over his thin canvas one and looked around. Hungry, exhausted, alone. Another wave of Russian troops approached. The gaunt intellectual quickly made for the safety of the forest. Resources were scant. Alvar’s boots were un-insulated. He paused to roll bodies. Looking for rifles or even a pistol. Finding no weapons to physically grasp, the intellect sat in the snow, slumped and still.

  He still had his brain—the petrol bomb was his creation. If he could only reach the trees, he could improvise.

  Struggling, he rose to his crackling knees, then to his sloughing, swollen feet.

  Just move your feet. Start with that.

  The months of brackish water and salty biscuits made the reluctant foot soldier slow and weak. Alvar didn’t reach the safety of the tree line. The Soviet lieutenant overtook him in a few embarrassingly slow strides. Since Alvar wore his officer’s coat, he was taken prisoner. It was the first time in weeks he had felt warm. He waited in relative comfort for days.

  “The team will ask you things,” said a man who brought him food. “These are the good days for you.” Alvar was only allowed two small cups of water a day.

  “Can I have more water please?” the inventor asked his mild-faced enemy/provider, polite despite the circumstances.

  “When you tell the team,” the young man answered, “if you tell them what you know.” The team arrived. They brought him to a room. They gave him clean water.

  “Officer, we suspect you may know things of use to us.” Alvar gave the same replies over and over. After some hours he tried apologetic tones. He truly didn’t know anything useful.

  “You’ve got me wrong. I’m not an officer. I took my officer’s coat because I was cold. It isn’t my radio. I’m sorry. I wouldn’t know how to use it if it were in working order.”

  Eventually, Soviet officers called for a man with a hot curved knife. The team held Alvar’s arms—his legs. Without drama, the man twisted the knife into Alvar’s right eye socket. Another man held his commanding officer’s notebook open for his remaining eye to see. The page was a diagram Alvar recognized when they pried his remaining eye open to view it.

  “What is this? What other methods have your people planned against us?” Alvar ignored the question. He pressed both hands to his skull. They carried him to a damp room. It was neither wide nor long enough to accommodate his length, so he slumped miserably against a wall. “Your other eye will follow if you don’t tell us. It will be a cold knife next time and you will bleed to death from the wound. You will tell us.”

  Alvar sat in misery. He groped about in the dark and felt a puddle of fluid he hoped was water. He slurped at it in desperation. It wasn’t water—it was something vile, but it sustained him. The tortured gentleman moaned until he was hoarse. He didn’t know if he could speak. He heard things—and lost what was real. Advanced dehydration caused the unlikely warrior’s heart to beat fast. Bile ebbed and flowed—a sour sea, hot and thick—with no visible moon to blame for the stinging tidal misery. The pain roared, mixed with his breathing and Soviet voices. Time passed. Each time he heard steps approach the room, he shook.

  He had to act. The way to live was to lie—if they’d believed he wasn’t an officer, they’d have killed him already.

  He had to think of something.

  The diagram. It was his.

  The “Molotov cocktail.” It was Alvar’s contribution to the war. A bit of glass, soap or tar, mixed with fuel. An oily rag tied around it. If set alight and hurled at the hydraulic system of a tank, the weapon sometimes caught the armored demons on fire. If the hydraulics went, the ammunition and fuel tanks followed. Then the beast was ruined. Alvar’s petrol bomb required bravery to use. Vyacheslav Molotov lied to the world about the help they provided the Finns. The “bread baskets” they dropped for his people weren’t food—they were cluster bombs. Alvar didn’t name his invention, but he liked the sound of the name that took.

  Molotov lied. Now it was time for him to lie.

  If they believed him, it would buy him some time. If he did nothing, death was assured. “I DO know something!”

  Alvar shouted the words again, decades later. He shivered by the fire and tore at the patch on his shoulder. The demons always brought him to the same pla
ce, but the older his body got, the worse it hurt when he arrived.

  They gave Alvar water. He shook badly and spilled most of it. A man poured him more, but kept it out of reach. “What do you know? Tell us everything quickly so you can have all the water you want. You can take a bath if you like. You appear filthy and miserable. All for no good reasons. When you tell us everything, you will help your countrymen. It will shorten their inevitable and futile battles. You could consider yourself their savior. You can save their lives. None of you are fighters. Look. There, you bleed. We will have a doctor look after your wound.” The team sat down to take notes. Alvar shakily reported a fictitious and important meeting with some high level German officers. The Finns would receive supplies and trade intelligence at the meeting. It would happen on the eighteenth of December. Unfortunately—Alvar didn’t realize—it was already the nineteenth.

  The man returned with a curved, cold knife. With a twist, the man removed Alvar’s remaining eye. Another wound, bleeding and despondent, Alvar was dragged back to the small room to die, but decided not to. He ripped a piece from his shirt and forced the makeshift dressing into his eye socket to stop the bleeding. The bookish man heaved from the pain until he lost the precious water. When footsteps approached, the learned, broken man lay quietly so they assumed he was dead. Soon, it seemed, they’d forgotten him entirely. No one came to yank him from the room to shoot him or to pull his body out. The pain was the same, but he’d been through it already. There was nothing left to do but pray. He prayed for water and he prayed for help. He prayed until he lost hope. After a while, he prayed for death, but it didn’t come. Instead, Finnish troops pulled him from the tiny room on December 21. By the twenty-third, he was back in Helsinki. A hero. A German optician hurriedly fitted him with mismatched eye prosthetics taken in the Invasion of Poland.

  He relived the rest in a more anecdotal melancholy—he was alive and home, but not whole.

  He’d never be whole again.

  Water was plentiful. Food was scarce, but he could run a hand across Lucrece’s belly and feel their baby move inside.

  Alvar remembered the rubbery numbness. He would never see his child. He continued to rock back and forth and recalled other sadness, but the sound of Henna’s voice jarred him into the present. She and Mortimer were back with the eggs.

  “Mortimer got a couple when I wasn’t looking, but there were eight left. Enough for a couple of meals.” Henna sat on the hearth and cleaned a basket of root vegetables to roast for dinner. The dog noisily washed down the pilfered eggs at his water bowl and then joined Henna at the hearth. He threw his head back and unleashed a low rumble at the wolf skin.

  “You got him, Morty. He isn’t going to hurt anyone now.” It was a game Henna played frequently with the dog: Mortimer would growl at the wolf pelt above the mantle, then look to Henna for praise. After Henna told him how wonderful he was, the dog would nap happily in the warmth of the fire. Alvar envied the simple game. The dog had done his job very well. He’d only lost one eye in the battle. When Mortimer started the story, Henna sometimes drew it out—until the beast veritably bayed at the wolf skin—but in the end, he always got his reward: the second half of the story, told by the girl, with high praise.

  “You bit him in the head, Mortimer. No one else could have done it. You broke the window to save us. You’re so brave.”

  Alvar listened. He loaded his pipe with war-haunted hands. A tear escaped him. He imagined finding a button in the pipe. Although he knew it was ridiculous, he pulled the tobacco out of the bowl to check for one. Henna startled him when she sat on his lap. She washed his face with a cloth that smelled of turnips. She put her hands on his face and felt it with her fingertips like he usually felt hers. She wiped his tears as they poured from his ruined eyes. He’d never told the story of his eyes—no one ever asked.

  What good would it do to tell it?

  There was no witness to his pain and sacrifice.

  He hadn’t killed the wolf.

  Sure, he had burned tanks and taught others to do so, but how many fathers like himself were inside them? His brain played tricks. Henna became Nappi, sitting on his lap—at this very hearth—many years ago. When Henna spoke, she spoke for them both.

  “You did what you had to do, Grandpa. You talk at night. I know your heart. You’ve always done what you had to do. You’re a hero—the only human one I have ever known.”

  Henna wrapped her arms around her grandfather’s neck.

  He was wrong. He was whole. Now. After all these years.

  He hugged Henna tightly and cried for the fire, for his eyes—for Nappi and Lucrece. For the war and lost time. Mortimer stirred. He eyed the wolf suspiciously, as though it caused Alvar’s sorrow, then rose with a groan and rested his great head on the old man’s knee. Alvar patted the dog and wiped his cheeks. He was one of the lucky ones. He was alive and here were two creatures that loved him. A peace came over him. He’d changed too.

  Henna saw the change in her grandfather. He still talked in his sleep, but it was to her.

  He even gave lessons while he slept.

  ~Mother Figure

  Raquel had two vices and a constant source of consternation. The source of consternation was her son. After Bonn’s evaluation with the psychiatrist, she couldn’t feel close to him. Raquel treated her son with distracted disdain. She secretly wished he had never been born.

  When Bonn was born she was unable to breast-feed. Troy hired a wet nurse. That changed everything. Her services included diaper changes, childproofing, and twenty-four hour-a-day monitoring of the child. Any sparks of maternal instinct Raquel felt for Bonn were drowned by Audra’s ample and milky breasts. Troy liked to watch the baby nurse. Audra didn’t seem to mind. Raquel drove backcountry roads by herself most afternoons—an attempt to escape the black cloud of her postpartum depression. She took the corners fast. It didn’t help. One evening at a charity auction, a social acquaintance introduced her to her first vice. Cocaine worked much better than racing the Jaguar to lift her spirits. She’d bid enthusiastically on a Chagall to celebrate the discovery of the magic powder. It was only a lithograph, but Troy didn’t care. Raquel made some money in her real estate dealings, but Troy’s family had deep pockets. Cotton, slaves, wool, paper, coal, now law. Although she disliked Troy, it was a profitable union. Raquel found that liberal re-application of cocaine was necessary, so she became a regular.

  Cocaine had side effects, which led Raquel to her second vice. The powder aroused her, but made it nearly impossible to climax. It made her nipples hot, rubbery, and heavy. She pinched them until they became numb, but for a few delicious moments she felt the heat inside the pain. It felt like hot breath on her neck—or strong, warm hands stroking the backs of her legs. Troy didn’t know about the habit. He was shocked when Raquel came at him one afternoon. She begged him to do things she’d never wanted before. To Troy, the ordeal seemed rabid and unhygienic. He attributed it to hormonal changes, which never seemed to last anyway. Troy hadn’t pulled through for Raquel. Neither had the Hitachi Magic wand she kept behind her jewelry box. One afternoon, Raquel quietly observed that Troy was proficient in causing Audra a moment of sexual crisis. Since they didn’t notice her, she said nothing. During Audra’s employ, everyone but Raquel seemed to thrive: Audra got paid handsomely to have an affair with her husband, Troy seemed to enjoy their clockwork trysts, and Bonn nursed greedily while adorned in a dry diaper. Raquel didn’t cope well. She ran through a kilo-and-a-half of cocaine in short order.

  One rainy Thursday, she propositioned the family’s horse trainer. The man did his best, although his usual rugged charm proved insufficient. Raquel asked him to incorporate a riding crop. He whacked her haunches lightly, but Raquel needed more. She threw the crop and demanded he pull her hair. He pulled harder and harder, but Raquel yelped for more. He pulled until it seemed the woman’s scalp would separate from her skull with a sucking noise. Raquel, however, remained unimpressed. Desperate for relief, Raquel r
an a fifty-foot extension cord to the barn to plug in her Hitachi Magic Wand. A bin of sweet feed was knocked over in the fray, but Raquel finally saw stars.

  Audra stayed until Bonn was fourteen months old. He bit her right nipple shortly after. The wet nurse bled badly. While her nipple healed, she pumped milk from her injured side. She attempted to feed Bonn from her other nipple, but Bonn refused. Audra developed mastitis in her left breast since Bonn wouldn’t nurse from it. She believed strongly in the benefits of nursing. She hated to use the breast pump. Bonn would still nurse, but only from her injured side. Audra became cross. She showed him the engorged left breast with a perfect healthy nipple on top, but the toddler pointed back to her injured side. “No, Audra, this one.” Audra shook her head, exasperated. What he said next was too much. “Good bite.”

  Audra gave no notice. To Troy’s dismay, she left while he was at work. Raquel didn’t tell Troy why Audra quit, but she was glad Bonn bit her. After Bonn and Troy were weaned, Troy focused on his law practice more than ever. Raquel, however, intended to continue her indiscretions—on a more biblical scale. A parade of men serviced Raquel for years while Troy focused on his career. When Raquel told Bonn, “Time for me to meditate,” he read in the library while she entertained her guests. By age four, Bonn found he could open the library windows. He crawled out to explore at will. Most days he just traipsed around the side-yard watching the groundskeeper or the horse trainer from a distance. Sometimes his nanny, Frau Hedwig, came with him, but mostly the help left him alone.