“She looks pretty rough.” Armless noted that her eyes were bloodshot. He removed her gag. Instead of a torrent of verbal abuse, there came a weak cough and a plaintive, “Help me.”

  Armless gave her a nasty grin. “And why in the hell would I do that? What's wrong with you, anyhow? Malaria?”

  Abeni cleared her throat. “Actually, she's been poisoned.”

  “You don't say. What with?”

  Abeni named an exotic—almost mythical—concoction supposedly used by African mystics for various unsavory purposes.

  “Well,” said Armless. “And how did that happen?”

  Abeni made no reply.

  “Kill me,” Ilse Koch said weakly. “I want to die.”

  “You want to die, eh? Well, Ilse, I want a million bucks. But you don't always get what you want.” He hauled her up to a sitting position, forced her jaw open, and stuck his finger as far down her throat as he could manage. When she started to vomit, he removed his hand and grabbed her by the hair.

  “That's right,” he said, shaking Ilse's head while she threw up onto the floor. “Sick up that poison. You still have your whole life in front of you. In prison. What I'd really like is for you to be skinned alive with an esese whip. But, hell, you might actually like that. Sitting in a cell for another 50 or 60 years, though—that's something else again, ain't it?”

  Once it was plain that Ilse had nothing left to regurgitate, Armless picked her up bodily and flung her onto the bed.

  Abeni had been standing next to the front door, ear pressed to the panel. “I think it will be safe to go outside now,” she said.

  The guard slumped against the front of the building wasn't dozing. He was dead. That much Armless could determine at a glance. His eyes were open and had rolled back in his skull so that only the whites were visible. Oddly fitting, Armless thought.

  Looking out over the square, he saw that white men lay sprawled on the ground all around the square. Some were groaning, others were ominously silent and motionless. Armless knelt to examine one of them.

  “Dead.”

  Paul had knelt beside another prone form. “This one, too,” he said. “They all are, I think. Dead or dying.”

  “Where are the villagers?” Armless wondered aloud.

  Abeni sighed. “Oh, they're all safe. Tonight marked the end of this little enterprise. We couldn't have kept the pretense going after what happened.” She took a deep breath and shouted, “Father! Where are you? They're all gone!”

  “Yes,” came a voice. “I hear you, girl.” Out of the darkness beyond the fire pit came the villagers. Many of them had discarded their grass skirts, headdresses and war paint. They laughed and made remarks to one another in a language Armless did not recognize.

  It was the Chief. He had wiped most of the paint off of his face and discarded his dilapidated top hat.

  “What goes on here?” Armless demanded.

  “Things came to a head tonight,” he said cheerfully, “so we had to pull the plug, as they say.”

  The man's diction was flawless, and he spoke with a slight British accent.

  “Where are you from?” Davis asked.

  “Right here,” said the Chief. “But I was educated abroad.”

  “What did you do to these men?” Armless said.

  “Come with me,” he said, “and I'll explain everything.”

  ***

  “We've been sitting on that mine for a long time,” the Chief told them as they sat at the long table in the Great Hall drinking coffee. The rest of the villagers were busy outside, rounding up the bodies of the dead interlopers for disposal. “It's an oddball—off the beaten path. My people have been unable to work it and afraid to tell any outsiders about it. We built the 'temple' over it for an additional layer of secrecy. We knew full well what would happen if outsiders learned of it.”

  “What did happen,” Paul said.

  The Chief shook his head and smiled.

  “No,” he said. “You don't get it yet, young man. What appeared to be happening. Those people... They were not very smart. As long as we played the role of ignorant savages, they took little note of us. We were beasts of burden. Strange creatures, those people. They hated the Jews, for no reason. And blacks were seen as being so subhuman as to be beneath consideration of any kind. Interesting that those with such tragic tunnel vision think themselves fit to rule the world.

  “Von Nemitz—not his real name, by the way—fled Germany shortly before the fall of Berlin in '45. He knew there was no civilized place that would welcome him, so he came to Africa and lived rough for a couple years. He took up with various undesirables, and learned many things. Someone taught him to speak English. And then, one accursed day, he stumbled upon the secret of the Baindada. How, I really don't know.”

  “It's harder to keep a secret in the jungle than you might imagine,” Armless observed.

  The Chief nodded and said, “He was not entirely alone by this time. He had acquired one or two sorry comrades, other Germans he had encountered in various criminal dives. They had guns. We Baindada did not wish to commit suicide, so we assumed what you might call protective coloring. This seemed to play into the intruders' hands. They wanted no one outside to know what was here. And now they had a workforce they could exploit without fear.

  “Basically, gentlemen, we worked the old 'Great White God' routine. I'm sure you've seen it in the movies. A tribe of primitive savages is visited by a white adventurer and is in awe of his miraculous powers. Sort of a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court situation. We shivered with fear and wonder when they demonstrated their magical boom sticks. We oohed and aahed when they used their Zippo lighters. They fell for it quite easily—eagerly, even. So convinced were they of their innate superiority, they accepted our attitude without question. One of them—Von Nemitz himself—went on and on about a Hollywood film he had seen concerning a giant ape who lived on some remote island where he was tended to by a community of subhuman Negro savages. I thought it interesting that while he of course rejected the idea of a giant ape as being completely unrealistic, he accepted the depiction of these natives as gospel truth. Some people see only what they wish to see. He brought in a few German mercenaries he had run across somewhere, and some Senegalese, too. And he managed to keep all of these people on a very short leash.

  “Now that he had a card to play, he got in touch with an international network of scum who had helped other high-ranking Nazis find places of safety. Through this network, he became acquainted with Mister Terre'Blanche from South Africa. Terre'Blanche was very interested. He is—was—not a popular man in the government. He is too radical even for those shameless race-baiters. They like to fancy themselves civilized, you see. Terre'Blanche had no such qualms. A bloodthirsty man, steeped in racist doctrine his whole life. A barbarian, really, in a three-piece suit. A primal, savage, bloody ape. With these new resources at his disposal, Von Nemitz sent for that woman, Ilse Koch, and installed her as the Great White Goddess.

  “It seemed, then, that we had been presented with a solution for our age-old problem. These men, these foolhardy 'secret agents,' would bring in the equipment needed to work the mine—and they would tell no one!

  “We've been feeding them poison the entire time they've been here. Small doses, with a cumulative effect. And it worked on their thinking, too. Even if any of them had sense enough to see through our charade, they were unable to use it. The drug scrambled their wits just enough.

  “We knew what they intended to do. But they brought in the equipment that had allowed for this fortuitous excavation, which was just what we needed. We couldn't have managed it as they did. Their mania for secrecy, you see, was their undoing. That, and their failure to recognize other human beings as their equals.

  “Tonight, with your arrival here, things came to a head. In the final dinner we prepared for them, we included lethal doses of our poison. And now we have barrels full of diamonds and a working mine that nobody else knows about. The irony is very sweet, don't you think? Almost sufficient to make one believe in a higher power.”

  “You... murdered them,” Paul said.

  The Chief shrugged. “Since I am the legitimate ruler of this village, I might argue that they were lawfully executed for... past and future crimes against humanity. You may challenge the state's right to impose the death penalty, but you are not a citizen. It still remains within the law.”

  “Whose law? They received no trial!”

  “Oh, but they did,” said the old man, tapping the side of his head with a forefinger. “In here. They were tried in the only court that matters in this place. Their own testimony—and quite extensive it was—condemned them.”

  “A condemned man traditionally gets a last request, does he not?”

  They turned toward the front of the Great Hall. There, in the doorway, stood Graf Karl Von Nemitz.

  “It may interest you to know, Chief, that I did not partake of tonight's feast. Not the meat, anyhow, which is where you put your poison. You mean you never noticed that I am a vegetarian? Sloppy.”

  He held up an object. It looked a bit like a maraca—a grey metal cylinder about the size and shape of a can of pork and beans, with a wooden handle six or seven inches long affixed to one end. A German hand grenade.

  “Here, Mister Irish,” Von Nemitz snarled. “You ought to appreciate this. They have been nicknamed 'potato mashers.' Fitting end for a mongrel of a Mick. To hell with you!” He twisted the grenade and pitched it into the room.

  Armless O'Neil did a very curious thing. Instead of making haste in the other direction, he ran toward the spinning grenade. He met up with it halfway across the intervening space, jumping up onto a chair and—incredibly—catching the grenade in midair, by poking his hook through the little loop of cord on the wooden handle. Leaping from the chair, he charged at Von Nemitz, who was unable to prevent O'Neil from sinking the hook deep into his belly. The German screamed. O'Neil slipped his arm free of the hook embedded in Von Nemitz' gut.

  “You first,” Armless yelled, and kicked Von Nemitz back out through the doorway.

  Von Nemitz looked down at his stomach as he stumbled backward into the square. Before he could formulate any kind of thought, the grenade went off.

  “Now that's the way to kill a Nazi,” Davis cheered, clapping his hands.

  ***

  “One thing,” Armless said to the Chief later that evening, after Von Nemitz' remains had been gathered up and placed on a large bonfire with the rest of his company of mad dreamers. “You said Von Nemitz was not his real name. Who was he?”

  The old man smiled and closed his eyes. “You might prefer not to know,” he said. “I doubt you'd believe me anyhow. You could possibly achieve a certain amount of notoriety if it became known that you killed him. More likely, though, no one else would believe it, either. The grenade left no identifiable remains.

  “Conventional wisdom holds that he perished in the final days of the war in Europe. That was his fate, according to history. Better, perhaps, that it remain so.”

  Armless' jaw fell. “Are you saying that was…?”

  “I am saying nothing, Mister O'Neil. I cannot be sure. Whoever he was or was not, he is nothing now. He was nothing when he came here. Ex nihilo nihil fit, Mister O'Neil. His journey has not merely ended—it never was. There is no point discussing a man that never existed, is there?”

  ***

  Before he and Davis started their journey back to Brazzaville, Armless O'Neil took an opportunity to pin Abeni down for a private chat. He caught up with her in the little house that had been occupied by Ilse Koch. Abeni had removed or destroyed all of the erstwhile White Goddess's belongings, and was performing a cleansing ritual. Armless figured it might take three or four of them to scrub out Ilse's spiritual stench.

  “Can I ask you something?” he said as she lit a bowl full of incense.

  “Certainly.”

  “Did you ever... work for anyone?”

  “Whatever do you mean?”

  “Well... It just seems like you're very handy with guns and explosives and the like.”

  Abeni thought for a moment. “Well, I suppose there's no harm telling you. I went to school in England, just like my father did. While I was there, I made contact with a certain organization. I won't say who they were or are, but I will tell you that they are very much not on the side of any of the colonial powers on this continent. I learned some things from them, and I have done a few intelligence-gathering jobs.”

  O'Neil nodded. “I thought it might be something like that. But, listen, why didn't you ask them for help with your diamond problem?”

  Abeni gave him an incredulous look. “Mister O'Neil! Would you trust a nest of spies with information like that, no matter whose side they were on? Chances are, they'd have knifed me and my people in the back if they knew about it. Africa is a minefield, and politics of any kind make for very dangerous bedfellows. If one becomes careless, one is liable to go up in smoke.”

  Armless laughed.

  “You know,” he said, switching conversational gears, “I'm pretty familiar with African names, but I've never heard yours. Abeni. What does it mean?”

  “It's from the Yoruba. It cannot be translated into English as a single word. It means, roughly, We asked for her and here she is.”

  “You don't say. That's interesting.”

  “Why is it interesting?”

  “It just is.”

  “I see. Well, traditionally, it is used by parents who have been praying for a daughter.”

  Armless nodded. “But it could mean other things too.”

  Abeni narrowed her eyes. “What are you getting at? You're not thinking about going native are you?”

  He shrugged. “I dunno. Just for the sake of argument, though, suppose I was. I wonder what kind of a reception I might get.”

  Abeni smiled wickedly and put her hand on his left arm. “You aren't missing anything else, are you?”

  “Not yet,” he replied.

  ***

  Armless and Davis bundled Ilse Koch into the back of one of the jeeps and drove back to Brazzaville. The roads were in such a state that it took them longer to make the trip back by jeep than it had taken them to get to the village on foot.

  “Those people are ruthless,” Davis said as they jolted along a rutted road. “Devious, too. I thought tribesmen would be... You know, simple.”

  “No one is innocent,” Armless pontificated.

  “I guess not. Except Abeni. She's sweet. She just got caught up in something that was over her head.”

  Armless grinned and said, “Oh, yes, she is pure of heart,” without a trace of irony in his voice. “A babe in the jungle.”

  ***

  When they arrived in Brazzaville, Armless deposited a bound and gagged Ilse Koch in a dingy hotel room and got in touch with a friend who got in touch with a friend who got in touch with an acquaintance who sent word to someone connected to an international police organization. Arrangements were made to return the Great White Goddess Jordweth—now just plain old Ilse Koch, the Bitch of Buchenwald—to her just reward, and to mete out swift and silent punishment to those who had aided and abetted her in her little jungle idyll.

  ***

  Paul Dunbar Davis had lingered in Brazzaville for weeks on the off chance that Abeni Adeyemi might return there. While he kept this vigil, he rooted out a number of very interesting stories for the Chicago Defender which justified his staying there much longer than originally intended. He knew he couldn't keep it up forever, though. He didn't dare try to find his way back to Baindada on his own, and Armless O'Neil flatly refused to accompany him back there.

  He was walking along the main drag one sultry evening when he caught sight of a familiar figure, and his heart leapt. It was she! She was just pushing open the door of one of the nicer drinking establishments—one where you wouldn't necessarily expect to be stabbed or shot immediately. He hurried to catch up with her as she went in.

  He slipped through the door before it could swing shut and placed his hand on her shoulder.

  “Abeni, hello!”

  “Why, Paul!” she said, smiling and taking his hand. “Imagine seeing you here! I figured you'd be back in the States by now.”

  “No, I ended up... you know, staying on for a while,” he said. “Say, I was just wondering if... if you might like to, you know, go to dinner with me or something like that.”

  She smiled at him. “That's sweet, Paul. I'm flattered, honestly. But the fact is, you're a little bit late.”

  “Late how?”

  “Well... There is someone else.” She turned her head and evidently found who she was looking for. She raised her arm and waved.

  Paul followed her gaze to the table where Armless O'Neil sat. He was clean-shaven, his hair neatly barbered and combed, and he was decked out in a lightweight dress suit. He sported a sleek new prosthetic hand in place of the metal hook that had sent Graf Karl Von Nemitz on his long-overdue journey to hell. Armless saw them and smiled, his expression so beatific that his ugly Irish face became sublime. He nodded and raised his glass.

  Davis frowned for a moment, but found that he couldn't keep it up. Aw, what the hell? He smiled as he and Abeni Adeyemi walked to the table. Sitting down, he placed a hand warmly on O'Neil's shoulder and said, “Armless, to hell with you!”

  The three drank and talked into the night.

  THE END

  1. In modern currency this would be worth around $1,825,000.

  2. A slang abbreviation for “the early years of the 20th century.”

  3. The Congo-Balolo Mission was an evangelical Christian movement founded by Henry Gratten Guinness II in 1888. It was responsible for much of the missionary activity in the Congo Free State in the early years of the twentieth century.