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Authors: Michael Slade
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scored an honorary Stetson.
“Eat your heart out, baby,” Bess cooed as she sashayed off to the powder room.
Teeth grinding and blood pressure rising to a boil, Jantzen sat down at his desk in the newsroom to write his story on the death of the Congo Man. He spread prints of the photos he’d surreptitiously snapped at the crime scene across the cluttered surface, studying the patch over one of the cannibal’s eyes and the stake rammed into the other. He tried to fathom the motive that would induce a killer to leave a signature like that.
It wouldn’t come to him. But a story angle did. An angle with the potential to turn his story into the Story and seize the Scoop from the byline bitch.
Pandora’s Box
May 25, Now
The blood of the Congo Man stained the tip of the SS dagger in Swastika’s right hand. Carving the symbol into the Untermensch ’s brow had bloodied the Damascus steel of the SS-Dienstdolch’s point. Now, as the Fourth Reich Nazi wiped away the subhuman’s slime with a chamois cloth, the steel polished up to a mirror finish along the center-ridged blade that had been etched with the SS motto “Meine Ehre heisst Treue” —“My honor is loyalty.” The ebony grip of the service dagger was inset with the silver eagle-and-swastika emblem of Hitler’s Third Reich. The handle was capped by an enamel circle struck with the two lightning bolts of the SS runes.
Sieg heil, thought the killer.
Satisfied that he had cleansed the dagger back to Aryan purity, the Nazi assassin slipped the gleaming blade into the sheath of its scabbard. The scabbard was anodized to a black finish, and a coat of lacquer gave it and the interlaced swastikas across its middle a Black Corps shine. Attached to the scabbard was a double chain made of alternating links of Totenkopf skull and crossbones and SS runes. Triangulating up to a clover-leaf clasp, the edged weapon could be slung from the metal loop that hung from the lower-left tunic pocket of an SS officer’s black dress uniform.
But not tonight.
The interior of the black walnut case was lined with black satin for a plush display. Gently, Swastika returned the dagger to its resting place, after first wrapping a silver cord with a slide, stem, crown, and ball around the upper part of the grip and cross-guard of the dagger’s handle. Known as a portepee, the cord designated the status of the wearer. Here, the dagger would rest until the next “solution.”
Lowering the lid, Swastika closed the case.
The original owner’s name was engraved on a silver plaque.
“SS-Obergruppenführer Ernst Streicher.”
* * *
Named for the University of British Columbia, University Hill—surmounting the cliffs out at the tip of Point Grey—is the area with Vancouver’s finest real estate. Above Chancellor Boulevard was the habitat of retired professors who had bought into this pricey area before the cost went sky-high. The realm of real money was below Chancellor Boulevard, where the half- and whole-acre spreads on the bluff commanded a panoramic view of the white-capped waters of English Bay and the snow-crowned North Shore peaks. The title to one particular estate was held by a law firm in Switzerland, and had been ever since the years just after the Second World War. Buried underground in the cellar of the $10-million mansion was a reconstruction of the Führerbunker from the dying days of the Third Reich.
The map room was an exact replica of the room in which Adolf Hitler had wed Eva Braun, fifty-some feet under Berlin as the Red Army rushed to raise the hammer and sickle over the blasted ruins of the Nazi Reichstag. The map table around the SS dagger box displayed newspaper cuttings from editions of The Vancouver Times in which Cort Jantzen had covered the court-ordered release of the cannibal killer.
Armed with a pair of scissors, Swastika seated himself at the table to mutilate that morning’s edition of the Times , which had hit the streets at
“Eat your heart out, baby,” Bess cooed as she sashayed off to the powder room.
Teeth grinding and blood pressure rising to a boil, Jantzen sat down at his desk in the newsroom to write his story on the death of the Congo Man. He spread prints of the photos he’d surreptitiously snapped at the crime scene across the cluttered surface, studying the patch over one of the cannibal’s eyes and the stake rammed into the other. He tried to fathom the motive that would induce a killer to leave a signature like that.
It wouldn’t come to him. But a story angle did. An angle with the potential to turn his story into the Story and seize the Scoop from the byline bitch.
Pandora’s Box
May 25, Now
The blood of the Congo Man stained the tip of the SS dagger in Swastika’s right hand. Carving the symbol into the Untermensch ’s brow had bloodied the Damascus steel of the SS-Dienstdolch’s point. Now, as the Fourth Reich Nazi wiped away the subhuman’s slime with a chamois cloth, the steel polished up to a mirror finish along the center-ridged blade that had been etched with the SS motto “Meine Ehre heisst Treue” —“My honor is loyalty.” The ebony grip of the service dagger was inset with the silver eagle-and-swastika emblem of Hitler’s Third Reich. The handle was capped by an enamel circle struck with the two lightning bolts of the SS runes.
Sieg heil, thought the killer.
Satisfied that he had cleansed the dagger back to Aryan purity, the Nazi assassin slipped the gleaming blade into the sheath of its scabbard. The scabbard was anodized to a black finish, and a coat of lacquer gave it and the interlaced swastikas across its middle a Black Corps shine. Attached to the scabbard was a double chain made of alternating links of Totenkopf skull and crossbones and SS runes. Triangulating up to a clover-leaf clasp, the edged weapon could be slung from the metal loop that hung from the lower-left tunic pocket of an SS officer’s black dress uniform.
But not tonight.
The interior of the black walnut case was lined with black satin for a plush display. Gently, Swastika returned the dagger to its resting place, after first wrapping a silver cord with a slide, stem, crown, and ball around the upper part of the grip and cross-guard of the dagger’s handle. Known as a portepee, the cord designated the status of the wearer. Here, the dagger would rest until the next “solution.”
Lowering the lid, Swastika closed the case.
The original owner’s name was engraved on a silver plaque.
“SS-Obergruppenführer Ernst Streicher.”
* * *
Named for the University of British Columbia, University Hill—surmounting the cliffs out at the tip of Point Grey—is the area with Vancouver’s finest real estate. Above Chancellor Boulevard was the habitat of retired professors who had bought into this pricey area before the cost went sky-high. The realm of real money was below Chancellor Boulevard, where the half- and whole-acre spreads on the bluff commanded a panoramic view of the white-capped waters of English Bay and the snow-crowned North Shore peaks. The title to one particular estate was held by a law firm in Switzerland, and had been ever since the years just after the Second World War. Buried underground in the cellar of the $10-million mansion was a reconstruction of the Führerbunker from the dying days of the Third Reich.
The map room was an exact replica of the room in which Adolf Hitler had wed Eva Braun, fifty-some feet under Berlin as the Red Army rushed to raise the hammer and sickle over the blasted ruins of the Nazi Reichstag. The map table around the SS dagger box displayed newspaper cuttings from editions of The Vancouver Times in which Cort Jantzen had covered the court-ordered release of the cannibal killer.
Armed with a pair of scissors, Swastika seated himself at the table to mutilate that morning’s edition of the Times , which had hit the streets at
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