The Last Count

Damien Kelly

 

The possibility was 1963, and the first Count von Nürburg stood in the garden salon of the castle he’d established and regretted his fortune.

Morning filled the walls and lit their leaf-of-gold panel mouldings. By its light, Ulrich stared into the untroubled landscapes of impressionists like Slevogt and Corinth, while sharing the floor with silver-horned stags and jade hunting cats and impossible monsters all. As his tour of the room brought him back to the fireplace, he ran cold fingers over the gilt edge of a fire screen adorned with a great yellow eagle, and stared into the hollowed-out eyes of a bronze lion dominating the centre of the mantelpiece.

He recognised the lion from his childhood, drilling himself on the back catalogues of Christies and Sotheby’s and Bonhams. Looking more like a bulldog than a lion, the bronze was north German in origin, mid thirteenth century. Sotheby’s had last sold it for half a million pounds when he was maybe six or seven. He concentrated on recalling its provenance. One of the Dukes von Ratibor had owned it up until 1945—whether third or fourth he genuinely didn’t know; an heir had died during the war and the succession had become confused after that. He could remember reading where it had first been offered for sale to the public in 1992, when the Belthaven Group’s private collection was liquidated, and that’s when he’d first seen it: sitting with his father in the office, looking through the catalogues. But he couldn’t remember who’d owned it in the intervening years.

Who got it when the war ended?

The tick in his memory pricked at him; provenance, after all, was everything. The ownership of a thing was what synthesised notions of history and value. Time and money. To Ulrich, the two had always been indivisible. He’d been born Ulrich Katz, the son of a successful antiques dealer in London in 2006, and he’d made his fortune travelling in time.

“Do you know what this is?” He indicated the bronze to his companion.

“No.”

“It’s called an aquamanile. It’s a sort of jug, for water. You would use it to wash your hands before eating.”

“Is this a prelude to some quip about Pontius Pilate?”

“The heavy-handed symbolism seemed worth pointing out, yes.”

“Well then, I’m very sorry for stamping on your punchline. But then, Pilate had much the same trouble with his mouthy Jew, didn’t he?”

Ulrich laughed, but it was an indulgence and Salter didn’t join in. There was no humour in the day. Salter went back to his drink and a thousand yard stare into the hills above the tree line. He was a long shadow, sunk into the chair in his black suit, the sparkling schnapps an ever diminishing mote of light in the swallowing darkness of him. Ulrich, dressed alike, imagined himself getting thin and flat as shadow, too; a black stain against the bright walls. That line of thought needed nipping in the bud, lest his body shape itself to his imagination. He continued his inventory of the antiques that surrounded him to shake the gloom, hiding from his guilt in the very source objects that inspired it. They were so beautiful, though.

“I love this house.”

“For God’s sake, Ulrich, you’ve never even seen this house before. The building you knew was a ruin nearly four hundred years ago.”

“Three hundred, Salter dear. This is only 1963.”

“Possibly.”

“Possibly,” Ulrich acceded with another indulgent smile. “And you mistake me anyway. I love this house now. God help me, but I love everything he’s done with it.”

Salter set his drink down and stood up, turning to retrieve his tallit bag from beneath him. He took out the prayer shawl and wrapped it around his shoulders.

“I’m thinking I might have enough time for morning prayers. Am I right?”

“Depends on how long it’ll take.”

“How very telling. Forty-five minutes.”

“Yes, then.”

“I’m going to find Ari and Joseph. My display is on if you need me.”

He threw the bag back into his abandoned chair with a little too much force.

“Wait. I’ve upset you,” Ulrich said. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to romanticise him.”

“And yet you do.”

“Speaking to him—”

“The word is confessing, surely? Which is very Catholic, by the way. I’m sure he’ll appreciate that.”

“You know it’s not really about telling him. But it is about admitting it. Here.”

“We’ve all heard it, Ulrich. And you know what? The place doesn’t matter. You’ve reserved this for him. You think you owe him.”

“Rabbi—”

“Don’t call me that!”

There might have been more, but a lifetime of caution kicked in and Salter waved the flare of temper away with the back of his hand. Unnecessary noise might bring disaster. He made the first stab at a smile Ulrich had seen in a week.

He looked so tired.

“Maybe you’re right, Uli. What would I know?”

“It’s never been about what we knew, just what we believed.”

“Believed? Do you even know what I believe, Uli? Hmm? Where my faith actually lies?”

“No.”

“Afterwards, Uli. The forgiveness that comes afterwards. In Olam Ha-Ba. In college we were instructed to be modern, to focus only on life in this world, leave the world to come to its own devices. But that has always been my strongest belief. Everyone gets to heaven. Everyone, even this bastard. No destruction of the soul, no Sheol, no damnation. Instead, all God asks for is truth and time.”

He pulled the tallit up over his head, the black stripes twisting in his grip.

“You think to face your truth now; it takes more time than that. And you and I, Ulrich, we have made time itself into a lie. I don’t know, any more, what God will ask of us.”

Salter left the room, leaving Ulrich to his regrets. The treasures of a continent ranged before him and he wandered through them again, just as he had once navigated the worn strips of carpet separating many of the very selfsame objects—then transported to his father’s auction rooms. He touched again the porcelain and glass he’d been forbidden to touch as a child. He lifted the same gold and silver trinkets his father had often had to pull out of whatever jacket or trouser pocket Ulrich had tried to hide them in. That was fifty years from now; universes away from here. Then, his father’s valuations were all that mattered. Now, though, it was the stock his grandfather set by these things that stayed with him.

It was the Jews who taught them what everything was worth, my dear, his zeidy said. If they hadn’t been carrying these things with them when they went into the ghettos, who knows what price the gentiles would have put on them? When these were exchanged for lives: that was the Jewish price. And when they tried to run with all this metal stuffed in their pockets and couldn’t run fast enough—well, that was the Jewish price too.

He lost more than an hour to these thoughts.

“Ulrich, you wanted to know when it was quarter-to.”

Highland had entered silently; the display he had in his hand was muted. Ulrich could read the various levels through the transparency, even reversed, but he asked what their status was anyway.

“All green. Solid as a rock.”

“Well, spread the word. It’ll settle everyone’s stomachs a bit. We’re more likely to provoke a possibility now out of spooking one of our own than anything else.”

Highland’s smile split his cheeks like a butcher’s knife, so deep and wide was his grin. “Right so,” he said, and headed out again.

Ulrich missed the man’s smile the moment he was gone. Highland had showed up as an interference in a planned possibility event a year or so ago. He’d known Ulrich and the others all his life, and they’d never met him before. Highland’s peaceful acceptance of what had happened to him was indicative of the man’s core identity; his was a soul at ease. Ulrich had relished getting to know him in the way he already knew Ulrich, him and that broad, warm smile alike. Highland never adapted his features, or his body shape. He always looked the same.

But why shouldn’t he, with a face like his? With that smile? It was so at odds with the day-to-day business they were in, though; here and in that other possibility alike. Ulrich had come to rely on being able to look over and seeing that smile beaming back at him—rolling back through collapsing dimensions, once-possible blood becoming impossible again on his hands—and feeling clean inside. Highland’s smile spoke of righteousness and nobility. But whether his easy nature was truly his own, or just part of the social norms that Highland had been brought up with in his own universe, the young man hadn’t the capacity to articulate, and there were times when Ulrich was haunted by the idea of a possibility where even cold-blooded killers wore such angelic countenances as Highland’s.

He turned and found where Salter had left his drink, crossed the room and lifted it for himself. He pushed all the others away: his father, his zeidy, Highland and the rest of the team. He swallowed his regret with the sparkling schnapps and set his mind to the work at hand. His father’s watch kept absolute time, reassuring him he was still where and when he thought he was.

Fifteen minutes to the hour. Less, with all this brooding.

It was time to meet the incumbent Count von Nürburg.

* * *

The Count had since dressed. Ulrich had lifted him out of his bed in the dark, handling him like a silken marionette, one hand wrapped about his mouth and nose. The others had moved in to support his little weight and he’d been paralyzed while they held him in their arms. They’d taken him to his closet while Eric shaped to take his place, and then it’d been a veritable game of musical chairs avoiding the Gestapo all morning with the body in tow, until the house had been vacated for the start of the Grand Prix. Now, though, he was every bit the figure of myth: every hair in place, every crease sharp, his glasses set straight and that wolf-like focus in his eyes. As the rest of the team filed in about him, he never took those eyes off Ulrich.

“Guten nachmittag, Führer.”

Adolf Hitler was a man of seventy-four. His black hair had been allowed to grey around the neck and across his temples, like a crown of laurel marking his victories. The moustache had gone with shifting fashions. The black suit gave illusionary breadth to his wasted frame. He was an older rather than an old man, and though his brow was more pronounced and the sockets beneath darker and more sunken in, he didn’t stoop or shake or crease his eyes to peer. And his voice was just as Ulrich remembered from a score of other possibilities.

“I imagine my English will be considerably less offensive to you than your German is to me,” Hitler answered, “so—if you please.”

“As you like.”

“And these days, the people have been so good as to name me Graf, or Count if that is easier. The title Führer goes on without me.”

The barb was felt around the room and Hitler took explicit pleasure in it. His smile was likewise wolf-like; as unexpectedly wide as Highland’s. This Hitler was the oldest Ulrich had ever met, his Reich the most established. He was well practiced in self-satisfaction.

“My name is Ulrich Katz. Sometimes Ulrich von Are as well, though: the first Count von Nürburg. What say, to avoid confusion, I just call you Herr Hitler, eh? Won’t you have a seat?”

“Won’t I—? Ah. I see. Because this is your house, yes? A terrorist and a lunatic both, what a fine specimen of Jewdom you are.”

Hitler walked and the team walked with him, keeping a rough semi-circle around him at all times. Ulrich and Salter had cleared the furniture back, tipping many of the dictator’s treasures into a heap against one wall and leaving just one armchair about six feet from the fireplace. All but a skeleton staff were at the Nürburgring track for the German Grand Prix, and the remaining guards weren’t expected to pass within view of this room for almost forty minutes yet. All the same, the chair had been placed to allow the team to stand both within arm’s reach of Hitler and in obscurity at the same time. But the guards would never pass: the world would end first. Ulrich had built it that way.

“So, have you demands?” Hitler asked. “Or are you just going to shoot me and be done with it?”

He sat perched on the lip of the seat, so that he could turn and look at the rest of his captors as well.

“Come on. Which one has the camera, then, to provide your communist paymasters with their proof?”

“There is no camera, Herr Hitler.”

“No? What an oversight. How will they immortalize you in their student magazines?”

“No camera. No magazines. No communists.”

Hitler relaxed back into the chair and steepled his hands beneath his chin. The position gave him jowls he’d not had before and his true age was more apparent.

“Plain old Zionists, then. Or maybe Zealots? The delusional mind is entirely in keeping. Tell me, when they write of you and what you did today, will your madness be characterized as merely a charming eccentricity? The English love their eccentrics. That is an English accent, isn’t it?”

“I am English, Herr Hitler, yes. As to eccentric—”

“For fuck’s sakes, Ulrich! Stop playing with him.”

Ari’s outburst startled everyone. Salter grabbed the young man’s hand, and Ari’s teeth clamped shut behind a puckered mouth. But even after the shock had passed, Ulrich could see the frustration that had precipitated Ari’s loss of composure echoed in each of his friends. He knew he should say something to calm things, but Hitler beat him to the punch.

“Meine Herren, I have quite exceeded my threescore years and ten. My labour and sorrow. I cannot give you what you truly want. I won’t be intimidated by threats. I can’t be toyed with, or accused; I’m too old to care. But, in the absence of any other audience, I am the only one here to acknowledge this moment for you. If I were you, I would respect that audience. Otherwise the moment might as well be meaningless. And killing an old man is already meaningless enough.”

It was clear then that Ari was desperate to strike him; his thigh muscle swelled as his weight tipped forwards onto it. Ulrich crossed and put a hand to Ari’s chest, echoing Salter’s touch on the other side. It was like he and Salter were completing a circuit. For a moment, the young man’s eyes were popping with anger, but then he reached up and squeezed Ulrich’s hand. Peace flowed in and through and out.

“I know,” Ulrich assured him. “It’s overwhelming. But it’s almost over.”

Ulrich turned back from Ari and, as he did so, he reached in and lifted a fresh display out of Highland’s shoulder bag. He thumbed the corner and the transparency opaqued to paper, the photos it contained rising to the surface as he passed it to Hitler. The pictures, fading one into another in turn, were strikingly similar. The men in them were all of a similar age. Very few of the uniforms were all that different from the rest. Only the manners in which the men died distinguished one from the other. Their murders had been creative. And frenzied.

“Herr Hitler,” Ulrich told the man, “in all the years I’ve been killing you, it has never once been meaningless.”

“Was ist—”

“No camera this time,” Ari said. “We probably should have been more specific.”

Hitler ran his fingers across the image of his ruined face, only for it to fade and be replaced by a corpulent hanging.

“How does this technology work? So thin.”

“That’s hardly of concern, Adolf,” Highland answered. “Surely?”

“Why? You think I should focus on the pictures instead? Be impressed? Be frightened?” Hitler looked at the shifting images again, before dropping the display. “By these . . . illusions? These sick fantasies?”

“What if you could go back and kill Hitler?”

All eyes fell on Ulrich.

“Such a hackneyed old notion. Indeed, my first year cosmology professor chose that very question to introduce his first lecture, precisely because it was such an old cod of a concept.”

“Back?”

“The past, mein Herr. Back in time.”

“Well…this gets better. And this is what you have done, is it? Come from the future to kill me?”

“A future, yes. Not yours.”

“It’s rather presumptuous, don’t you think?” Hitler smiled. “I would contest that going back is only half of the challenge your professor’s question supposes. What makes you think Hitler will be so easy to kill?”

“I think our presence here renders the first part moot, Adolf,” Highland answered him. “And we’re quietly confident about the second.”

“Your delusions—”

“The point,” Ulrich cut the man dead, “that my professor wanted to make, you see, was that even if you did go back, the most that you could hope for was to completely dislocate yourself from your own timeline. You’d end up in a universe where you’d killed Hitler, but he was a Hitler who’d never actually existed, while the real Adolf Hitler—the original Adolf Hitler—would just carry on, oblivious to your attempt on his life until his established death in 1945. This, he felt, rather defeated the purpose. And we agreed with him, of course, until one wit piped up from the back. Great! he said, means we can all have a go! And everyone laughed, and I heard myself say: yeah, and I’ll sell the tickets.”

“1945? You should consult your calendar, Herr Katz. It is 1963. You’re late.”

“I’m trying to tell you, Herr Hitler, that we travel in more dimensions than time, my colleagues and I. We travel in time and hunt you in any universe you rear that blighted potato of a head of yours. Then we go home. Knowing what year it is where you are is as relevant to me as carrying a map of Berlin while walking through London. It’s a fact, but only elsewhere.”

The team were all smiling now, all except Salter. But even he had lost much of that churlish, disappointed look that had squatted on his face these last months. Ulrich returned the smiles with love, and an unexpected sense of relief. The change in mood was palpable to the whole assembly.

Hitler sat forward. “So, your professor was wrong then?”

“No, he was mostly right, but he lacked the perspective one gets from outside one’s own world. I won’t bore you with the dry science of the thing.”

Ari and Joseph actually chuckled.

“I led the world’s most scientific, industrialized nation for over twenty-seven years, young man, not a flock of mindless sheep, despite what Jews and Communists like to suggest. I’d thank you not to speak to me as if I were an ignorant shepherd.”

They all kept quiet, Salter and the team, but they kept smiling, too. They knew this was the point of today, the culmination that Ulrich had craved for so long now.

He felt the glare of history’s spotlight, but it was a thrill. The anxiety, the guilt: they were lifting, just as he’d hoped. A thrill of hope.

“As you wish. Gentlemen, watch the time for me, please.”

“Loads of it,” Highland assured him.

He squared with the aged dictator. “Where to begin? Well, I was a child when the speed of light was exceeded, but it wasn’t until I was in my fifties that I finally managed to do it myself—”

“Fifties?” Hitler interrupted him again.

“A different world, Herr Hitler. Better living, better drugs. The physical is readily shaped. Only ideas have durable existence in my world. And in that world, yes, my professor was right; in so far that any kind of paradoxical change to an established timeline would provoke entirely new universes to accommodate it. Where he was mistaken was in thinking that these different universes were truly separate, or that they were of equal weight and endurance. They are gadflies, these alternate worlds; mere possibilities, until they achieve sufficient resonance to exist in their own right. Please, stop me if my English gets too complex. I can explain in German just as well.”

“I doubt that, very much. Just continue. Even if the meaning escapes me, the whole performance remains most amusing.”

That was weak.

Ulrich grinned. If Hitler wanted to plant the suggestion that this was all meaningless, nothing more than an empty gesture, then he was rather late to the paranoia party. Ulrich had dreaded the same. That he’d feel deflated in this final act. This man, still full of malice but so much reduced from the evil he’d once been, blunted by self-congratulation and hubris: he was not the man Ulrich loved to kill. He’d worried this man’s death would leave him empty. And now here they were, Ulrich making his confessions—and even the insults were weak. The way Hitler mouthed “Jew” was just a pantomime of contempt. He affected the posture, but he had none of the power.

But that felt right, unexpectedly. It felt like completion. Like being honestly present at the end of the man. A natural end, for all that it would come on the unnatural edge of a blade. It was Hitler who was getting thin, becoming a shadow. When Ulrich killed this man—this last man—it would not just be the moment that Hitler stopped continuing into the future. It would be the moment in which the universes finally began to forget him.

“Gravity, mein Herr, is the key. The force of gravity is a reflector off which reality bounces, back and forth. It’s that which determines our continuous reality from out of a chaos of quantum variations. Gravitons, the particles that exert this primary force, lie outside the many dimensions we live in, and the multiple universes we occupy. They sit in the gaps between these universes, which is why their effect seems weak and easy to overcome from our perspective. In fact, gravity is the strongest force of all. Matter collapses into different forms across many different universes, but it remains its peculiarly consistent self in any one of them because it is recalled by an echo carried by gravity. The universe unfolds and refolds in infinitesimal instances but, with each dying breath, hidden variables reflect past waveforms and use gravitons to echo them to the future. In every fractional moment, hidden variables remind that universe what shape it should resurrect in.”

“Hidden variables?” Hitler affected disdain. “That’s a rather empty explanation, surely?”

“Plato called them Forms; Jung, archetypes. The blessed ignorant will call them Mystery and consign their meaning to God. I even met an old con man once who told me—with all the portent of a man uttering prophecy—that they were human minds desperately screaming out for memory. Any name for them is like to be little more than an approximation. These variables function merely to resonate, like with like. Heedless of time or space, where two such particles are the same, they will beat to each other’s heartbeat, telling each other and countless twinned sub-quantum counterparts what to be in the eternal, almost instantaneous recreation of the universes. And they communicate those messages, and share those resonances, by reflecting them off of gravity, the most powerful force there is. That which makes us fall.”

“How romantic. And the gadflies?”

Hitler looked genuinely intrigued. Ulrich opened his mouth to continue—

—and experienced an odd sensation of doubt.

This wasn’t how he imagined this going. It was how he’d wanted it to be, but . . . telling the man, finally telling him what he’d done…

Why was he so very willing to listen?

“What do you care how it’s done? Believe, don’t believe. Why indulge me either way?”

Hitler smiled. For two whole seconds he opened his mouth and nothing came out. He seemed taken aback.

“This is my last battle, boy,” he said, finally. “You have determined its manner; I am abiding by the rules of engagement. You argue, I’ll refute. Don’t worry—the whole performance remains most amusing.”

. . . the whole performance remains most amusing.

The same line. Still weak. And a lie.

Ulrich had spent half his life in single-minded study of one man, over hundreds of possible manifestations. This Hitler answered as if he’d been suddenly derailed. And he’d repeated himself. Replications, no matter how seemingly innocent, suggested interference.

The suspicion that Hitler was suddenly and inexplicably hiding something almost took the legs out from under him. Ulrich searched the man’s face for a tell, eyed the windows for signs of anything or anyone unaccounted for.

The bastard was waiting. Ulrich pressed on with his speech to fill the silence.

“In the continuous recreation of whole universes, mein Herr,” Ulrich began to recite, “any alternative is available, obviously, but when causality is altered, a new echo is all that results. This echo, communicated with all the rest by that blind graviton, seeds a universe. The unchanged echoes fill in the rest. And on it goes. But one small voice in a maelstrom is soon lost. The tendency, we discovered, is for common echoes to drown out the uncommon, for hidden variables to want to resonate like their mates and not in an individual pattern. Only where sufficient commonality exists—where a change in history produces a number of possible, similar alternatives—do universes persist for any period of time. More often, momentary alternatives arise and wink out almost unnoticed. Unique universes never come to be.”

He rushed through his words, his well rehearsed lesson in paradox. What had been clever and commanding in the mirror, now sounded obscure and flat. And still he scanned about for the signs of interference.

Keep going, keep talking. It doesn’t matter if it’s flat. It’s still true.

“Had we not become so skillful and . . . diligent about monitoring the symphony of gravity, humanity might never know of the existence of these momentary universes, or the cause of their demise. Now we know that there are not infinite universes, Herr Hitler, but rather a very finite number indeed. One can provoke others, of course, and one can even be structured in how one does so, giving them substance and a workable lifespan. Some even endure if one has subtlety and an eye for detail. Some rightfully lay claim to the title of history. But all are few and fragile, just like their little human occupants. Few universes, fewer Adolf Hitlers. Now, almost none.”

He took a breath, which was almost a gasp. He’d not noticed his heart start to race, his lungs begin to labor. Salter’s worried countenance appeared in the periphery of his vision and jolted him into motion. He first turned, unwilling to show either friend or foe this moment of weakness. He then thought to go pour another drink, but he knew his feet would falter before he got across the room. Instead he took what steady steps he could to the fireplace and fixed his sliding gaze on the lion-shaped aquamanile. Into its face and those dark and empty sockets.

Calm down. Calm down.

It was like drunkenness. Swimming in hot air. What was going wrong?

No one spoke for a half a minute. Predictably, it was Hitler who finally took the initiative once again.

“It takes it out of you, doesn’t it, this fantasy of yours? I mean, I can see why it would be tempting to believe: imagining you’re saving millions. To be the hero of your whole race. But the fantasy provides you with only a moment’s sensation, doesn’t it? And so you must imagine doing it again and again, in a host of worlds to a host of men. And all the while time marched on, and I got older and older and your revenge was worth less and less.”

Ulrich’s eyes began to water, but this meant his sight was starting to clear and he regained the wherewithal to laugh.

“A hero? It didn’t feel that way. There were too many we couldn’t save for any of us to feel that way. You see, in my world, you took your own pathetic life in 1945. That was the natural order, at least as I saw it. To kill you any earlier than that, and to do so with anything like the frequency we intended, would be to create too many universes with a different history to our own. We would risk destroying our home by making it unique No, our plan was to hunt you to extinction in only those futures where you lived longer—even by one more moment—than you did in ours. We propagated our own timeline. Targeting the alternatives, bringing them in line with our own, until they just ceased to be.”

Ulrich wiped his tears and turned back to face the room. He smiled at Highland and the young man repaid him in kind with his Cheshire cat grin. It eased Ulrich’s disquiet considerably.

“Dexter, I think the competition might be on to us. Can you do a check?”

Highland’s smile faded. Everyone’s did.

“Hell. Right, yes, I’m on it.”

“Competition?” Hitler’s smile was intact.

“All those universes. All those Adolf Hitlers in their histories. You surely don’t think we were the only ones to have this idea?”

Highland opened a display, Ari and Salter did likewise, while Joseph moved closer to the windows to check their perimeter. Salter sent a message to Eric at the race track to be vigilant.

“It was nothing like heroism.”

Ulrich shuffled to the side of Hitler’s chair and dropped to a crouch. He gripped the arm.

“I told you I planned to sell tickets. And I did. They queued up to have the chance to kill you. They paid through the nose. And it takes a lot of new timelines where you’re dead to cancel out the one where you’re still alive.” Ulrich stretched to bring his face round to Hitler’s. “Do you have any idea how many times you can kill a man over the space of five minutes?”

He was forced to put one hand to the floor to steady himself. And felt a smooth surface yield beneath his knuckles.

Ulrich lifted the display from the ground. It had returned to its transparent state. Hitler had used his foot to slide it under his seat when he sat forward. It had been practically invisible and they’d have easily overlooked it.

Flat. Obscure and flat.

“Why did you try to hide this?”

Hitler’s annoyance at the discovery was plain; his sneer forced.

“You’re the man from the future. Shouldn’t you already know?”

* * *

“We haven’t moved, Ulrich.”

While Joseph watched Hitler, Ulrich pulled the rest of them into the hallway. Highland used the same display Ulrich had retrieved from the floor to show him the levels, but Ulrich reached over for Ari’s instead, unwilling to trust what the elder Nazi had touched.

“It doesn’t make sense,” he told them. “He planned to steal that display, to leave it behind to be found. Sudden technological advancement would have provoked hundreds of possibilities, any number of which could have gained resonance.”

“It wasn’t found, though. You stopped him.”

“In this possibility.”

“We haven’t moved.”

“Everything has moved, Dexter. The readings will need finessing.”

Salter rounded from the window he’d been looking out of.

“This is madness. He made an opportunistic attempt to steal technology, yes, but that doesn’t mean he believed you, Uli. Maybe he thought his death could serve some greater purpose if he gained intelligence for the Reich. Maybe he thought he could leave some evidence of who his killers were. Either makes more sense than what you’re suggesting.”

“He knew how to turn it off.”

“It’s intuitive.”

“If you were born in the twenty-first century, maybe.”

Salter stabbed his finger at the display, buckling the surface and crumpling it in Ulrich’s hand.

“The levels haven’t changed. Has your watch changed?”

“I felt an interference, Salter. I felt myself in interference.”

“So who did the provoking, Uli—you or Hitler? Are you a new you? Are any of us still ourselves?”

“Don’t be stupid, we’re obviously still tethered to the graviton.”

“Then what did you feel?”

“It could be shock,” Highland said. “All the body shaping.”

“I shape every day. No—think. We might still be in the original possibility, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a range of new possibilities out there now, brought on by what he’s done.”

“But there aren’t.”

“The readings are false.”

“Oh my God—”

“He knows something, Salter.”

“Then he’d have to have known everything,” Salter told his friend.

“I know how it sounds—”

“Do you really know how it sounds, Uli? Really? Because he would have to have been aware of events as they were going to happen, moment by moment, in order to be ready to act in the way you imagine he did. You’re saying he knew we were coming, are you?”

“Guys, we have guards walking up in nineteen minutes.”

“If another team found this place—”

“And made a deal with Hitler?”

“Or intend to use him.”

“They’d have provoked possibilities.”

“If they—”

“And that would mean this wasn’t the possibility we thought we were going to. He’d be a new Hitler. For God’s sake, Ulrich! Are the home systems corrupt too? Because we would have seen all this before we ever left.”

“I feel—”

“Guilt!”

Salter took refuge from fresh anger in yet another window. He couldn’t see the hills above the trees from this room, though, they were too close.

“Anxiety, depression, hysteria: take your pick. This sick need to make account of yourself to that . . . inhuman animal has your wits twisted. You want to see disaster here, because you don’t want to have to stop punishing yourself. Well, I’m done helping you with that. Killing Hitler is right. It has always been right. You wanted him to know who you were, what you did—fine, you’ve done it. Now leave it.”

“Even if I’m out of my mind, Salter, that doesn’t explain what he did.”

“It doesn’t matter, though,” Highland said, his voice taking on its usual, calm depths. His touch was as gentle as the voice, as he reached across and opened up the fist that Ulrich himself hadn’t realised he’d made. The display, out of his grip, unfolded with a snap and relit. “I’ve finessed. No change. We’ve not moved. We’re no further from the graviton now than we were before.”

“Who do you think you’re telling, Dexter?” Ulrich was in no longer in any mood to be soothed by an over-sympathetic assassin. “What are you looking at that I didn’t devise myself?

He shook the display, first in Highland’s face and then at each of them. He pointed it at the back of Salter’s head, raising it where he knew the man could see it reflected in the glass.

“You’re listening to me when you listen to these things. All you have is my word that we’ve not moved and I’m telling you that I’m not sure.”

“The technology is just a receiver,” Salter’s faint reflection replied. “You are just the listener, Uli: the word is Hashem’s.”

“Oh, spare me your crap about God, Salter.”

“Everything is where it should be, Ulrich,” Highland said.

“No! Everything is not where it should be, Dexter. For one thing, the upper hand has shifted.”

He went on speaking to the back of Salter’s head. “Hitler knows. He knows. I think he knows everything. Something has gone wrong.”

“Fine.” Salter’s voice was flat. “Then we get out of here. If we discover there really is a whole new batch of possibilities when we get home, then . . . great. Means we can all have a go.”

“Do we still get to kill this one now?”

Ari’s voice, by contrast, was straining to break; his anger hadn’t gone very far, it seemed.

“Yes,” Salter replied. “He still distinguishes this castle from the others and he’s the root of any provocations. I’m sending Eric a message now to get himself out of there, and out of that face. As soon as he gets back, you can cut his throat.”

“I’m not finished talking to him,” Ulrich snapped.

“You’re done.”

“I’m not.”

Salter’s moment of composure ended. The body shape he’d adopted for this trip was slight, athletic. Easy to move, easy to hide. But for himself he favoured a bulky, overtly muscular shape; a brick wall of flesh he could pen his frustrations behind. In a flash he had shaped the flesh back to its usual mass, and now he brought all that solid weight to bear as he wheeled and lunged, driving his best friend back against a wall, his forearm swinging up under Ulrich’s chin and pinning him across the neck.

“Stop it!” he screamed in Ulrich’s face.

Ulrich’s neck bones were popping loudly.

“You’re hurting me.”

“Good! That’s the right thing to feel, Ulrich. This pain you’re feeling is right, it comes from an honest source. This is as much as it should mean to feel. All else . . . all else is Hashem. Whether you accept that or not, it is His province, and we need to learn to leave alone what we cannot fix. You can’t fix this now! So leave it.”

He pulled back and dropped Ulrich back onto his feet.

“Leave it for afterwards.”

Ulrich put a hand to the heat of his throat, where the skin was busy repairing the thread blood vessels Salter’s assault had broken. As the bruising faded, he raised both hands and shoved Salter backwards.

“I can’t.”

* * *

“Do you know the history of your residence, Graf von Nürburg?”

“Yes.”

“Well then, you will know its origins remain unknown. No Roman fortifications to precede it, as would be usual, no solid explanation as to why it was erected here. Nowadays its raising is attributed to Ulrich, the son Count Theodore von Are in the twelfth century. Ulrich, however, rather audaciously declares himself the first Count von Nürburg instead.”

Ulrich set a couple of glasses on the mantle and set about filling them. “I could never resist a bit of showmanship.”

“Yes. I can see.” Hitler didn’t smirk.

“Show some gratitude; I put it here for you.”

“For me?”

“The castle, the village. I put that fine Grand Prix racetrack in for you as well. It couldn’t suit you better. I even doctored your constitution to make this the ideal gift from a thankful nation to its Führer.”

“Why?”

“The finery was just to attract you, ensure you wouldn’t turn it down. But the castle itself was essential to your very existence. It keeps this universe from losing its possibility by borrowing on the echoes of our own, reinforced universe. It’s been pushed from one world to another, through a whole series of provoked possibilities. And then all those possibilities, those other castles and the Earths beneath them undone, made impossible once more. It’s a masterpiece of Bohmian mechanics, and you couldn’t imagine the costs involved. Those hidden variables controlled, a graviton tethered to such a singular intent. And keeping it secret? It’s been the work of many lifetimes. Not that time has come to matter much any more.”

“Again, why?”

“To have you. To control the very last Hitler, and his final death.”

Hitler gave a breathy laugh. There was a sharp thud from across the room and the laugh cut out, but Hitler kept his eyes on Ulrich.

“To beat your competition.”

“Exactly. And I was very diligent about making sure no other clever bastard pulled the same trick. The gravitons are intricately shared, but only if you know what to look for. I thought I’d been very careful, but now I’m not so sure. My friend Salter thinks you’re just an opportunistic little weasel. I don’t underestimate you that much.”

“What is it between you and him?”

“How did you know how to switch off my display?”

“Are you lovers?”

If Hitler harboured any remaining resentment at being discovered in his theft of the display, he was doing a better job now of masking it. Ulrich handed him a glass, checking over his shoulder on the figure by the wall as he did so. Relieving Joseph, Ari had positioned himself with his back against the door, on a spot as far from the Nazi as he could get and yet keep him in clear view. His arms were crossed over his chest, his foot raised to brace the slope of his body and every couple minutes he would let his head fall back against the wood with a dull thump. He was marking his count, Ulrich could tell. A beat to mark each minute that passed; filling his head with climbing numbers to drown out the sound of the conversation on the other side of the room.

“How did you know how to shut off the display?”

“Brothers, maybe?”

“There is no quid pro quo, Adolf.”

Hitler drank his schnapps in three mouthfuls. He raised the glass for Ulrich to retrieve, but it was Ari who leapt forward, crossing to seize it and firing it into the fireplace to explode on the grate. He was less brisk in taking up his sentry position again, lingering a few seconds before walking backwards to the door, his face impassive.

“Who is it that you suspect?” Hitler asked Ulrich, though he kept looking at Ari. “If this competition of yours let slip a name, I may have overheard it.”

Hitler was toying with him, yes, but it could as readily have been from insecurity as anything else. He might be outside the loop. Ulrich had been trying to resolve the lack of provocation evidence in the scans. Now, he considered for the first time the slow drip of adaptations that would be necessary to make adjunct changes to the universe without provoking a distinct alternative. If possible, such a managed change would take years. Hitler could conceivably have been subject to a lifetime of suggestion and priming. After all, Ulrich had last seen this Adolf Hitler when the Nazi leader was twenty-six, and hadn’t dared visit once in the intervening years that passed here. Almost half a century, each day ripe to accommodate subtle sabotage.

“Was it even conscious, I wonder? Did you even know you were doing it?”

Hitler gave him nothing.

“That would have been quite unnerving, I imagine. Your hands moving to an alien rhythm, your body having an agenda that wasn’t your own design. You might even have been a little bit afraid.”

Hitler laughed. “Herr Katz, what you have just described is age, with which I am well acquainted. For a man of supposedly advanced years, you seem to have learnt nothing about it.”

“I’m older than you, Adolf. I might be the only Jew on the planet right now who can claim that privilege.”

“Ah, outrage and recrimination. Spare me you tired accusations, Jew—I told you, I’m too old for petty debate.”

“Watch your tone, Adolf.” Ari clearly wasn’t having much luck drowning the conversation out.

Hitler turned to face him, and though he had more care than to keep up the smirking face he’d been pulling, his voice scratched like a match striking.

“Watch my tone? Ridiculous. This is an argument between rats and the butcher’s dog, do you understand me? Look at you. Look at the situation. You stand revealed as criminals, and yet you imagine I should be made to acknowledge your equality enough to watch my tone? I do not even acknowledge your humanity.”

Ulrich expected Ari to react, but he just stared. When he finally moved, it was only to raise his eyes to Ulrich’s.

“Make your confession, Ulrich. We have less than ten minutes.”

And then he left them alone.

“Confession? What more have you to confess, Herr Count? I thought the stories of wonder at an end.”

Ulrich had practised his scientific explanations many times; but never this. Practise it and he risked explaining it, and then justifying it. He had presumed instead that, come the awkward moment, it would just spill out in one painful lump; messy, such that he couldn’t take it back, couldn’t spin it or excuse it. But it would be out. This cancer.

Maybe he imagined it too much like a cancer, like a growth inside him. Lethal but inside its own capsule, never actually coming into direct contact with the rest of his body. Because in truth, it was an infection, a poison in his blood, and the only way it could come out was with bleeding. An internal bleed, filling up his insides until it came dripping from his mouth. Slow. Suffocating.

“On those first worlds, the ones closest to us, we found you’d died as you should have. It was essential, actually, to the variables sustaining our own dimension. Outwardly, we accepted it, Salter and I. We even made a show of celebrating it as the natural order. But we were both on edge. It took us a few days, to first recognise and then admit that we were disappointed. Disappointed. That you were dead. We were ashamed, for a while. But, then it seemed to free us. Our desire to see you die was greater than our relief that you were dead, and when we admitted it, it was more than relief. It numbed us completely to guilt. Once it was acknowledged, we discovered that it was exactly what we needed to get the job done.”

“So I saw. It did not look like the work of someone numb, though. It was, if anything, enthusiastic.”

“Oh, we were more than able for killing. We didn’t even have to bother with that after a while, when the custom rolled in. No, being numb made it possible to get the job done: making it business. Profitable.”

The Nazi’s rasping laugh again.

“The very Jew. Shylock the Jew.”

“Yes, Nazis just love their Shakespeare, don’t they? Without a hint of irony, either. Thing is, you ignore the fact that Shylock never wanted money. He wanted justice.”

“Revenge.”

“Yes. And Shakespeare was first to admit that revenge was always revenge; Jewish or Christian qualification be damned.” He took a breath. “But it does cost.”

Ulrich ran a hand through his hair. Over the course of the morning, hiding in corners from the Gestapo and shifting his body mass up and down to suit had left it longer by consequence. He concentrated on shortening it.

“It wasn’t greed. I spent my childhood surrounded by treasures,” and he indicated the sweep of the sunlit room. “But I was born a scientist and that’s the life I loved. Simple. But even at what we were charging, the cost of making these trips was . . . beyond astronomical. It left very little for afterwards. Killing you made it possible, but that should never have been the work’s only legacy. My technology could do so much more. I just wanted to have the means to preserve it until I knew what that might be.”

He touched a silver ashtray.

“The last Hitler: what wouldn’t they have paid? But the price was too high. What my zeidy—my grandfather—called a Jewish price. I couldn’t bring myself to ask it of anyone else.”

Hitler sank back into his chair.

“The last of my blood waits to be spilled. Let that be what time remembers. It really won’t matter afterwards who it was for.”

Afterwards.

“Not the last.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It’s not the last of your blood. You are not the last Adolf Hitler. There are still countless others.”

“I don’t understand. Surely this was the point of your entire endeavor?”

“Adolf Hitler didn’t always become the monster you became. There are innocent men living innocent lives in a host of possibilities. We have no argument with them. But they were the ones who sparked our curiosity. Once we traced the divergence in their shared histories with the men like you, we began to investigate new timelines at earlier points. We began planning to overstep the mark.”

“What mark is that?”

“Our self-imposed limit on your life. The rule about not killing you before your established death in 1945. We travelled further back and, God, it was so tempting—looking at those men in their twenties and thirties, and knowing we’d found a possibility where the worst was yet to come. The temptation to just say, hell with it, and end the horror before it ever started. Too tempting. And so much more lucrative.”

“I thought your own existence depended upon this limit.”

“We were numb; otherwise the risk would have been unimaginable. But we’d begun ranging out, further and further from home, and the differences were so pronounced. Sometimes, as I said, you were innocent. Other times, you were already dead. So, we knew that our own timeline was being cushioned by distance. We decided to gamble on just how far was far enough. Ask me now—having refined my understanding and my technology—and of course I can see when a possibility is attached to a different graviton than one our universe depends upon. But back then, we were playing dice. We could have destroyed ourselves, but we were too numb to care.”

“Or stupid.”

“Possibly, but the wording of history is the privilege of the victor. And we were winning. In those far flung universes, where we could see the coming Holocaust in a possibility, we’d stop it. We never killed you as a child, only as a man, but we never let you gain one scrap of power. It was the dream. Even discounting the universes that collapsed without you in them, we still saved millions in the ones that went on. Away from the vicinity of our world, they didn’t need to die. Our own ruined history became a sacrifice that allowed us to exist, so that we could save those lives in all those other possibilities. It was a brutal economic, but . . . we were numb.”

Hitler grinned his wolf-like grin.

“Except: not here. Yes? Here they died. And Ulrich von Are had both created and condemned them to do so, am I right? Because you hid me here, accommodated me here. You could have killed me as a boy, but to preserve your advantage you made me a prince instead.”

“I told Salter that it had to have a history that was close enough to our own, at least up until 1945, otherwise tethering the two universes by means of the castle could never have worked. When you eventually die in this final incarnation, and the gravitons are released, this universe wouldn’t be able to locally sustain itself. This timeline will never have been.”

A faint knock came, but Ulrich barely heard it.

“I convinced him. That’s why he can’t understand why I feel the way I do now.”

The second knock was clear, but not sharp.

“Ulrich, guards are on the move.”

“All right, Dexter.” Ulrich called back to Highland. “All right. This is getting pointless.”

“On the contrary. This is everything.”

Hitler’s eyes were on the ceiling above him, his lower jaw jutting upwards. His grin had become a kind of grimace, a determined set that exposed his yellow teeth and strained his lower lip.

“Whole universes against me, assassins in time I could never have seen. I should never have achieved any of it. Yet, still I won. Still I did God’s work.”

“No.”

When Hitler brought his eyes back down to the room, he found Ulrich crossed to the door, his hand turning the key silently and with exaggerated care. The older man pushed himself to standing. Clearly, he took Ulrich’s action as signaling the end, and he would meet it on his feet. And defiant.

“I say yes, Herr Katz. I say, despite you trying to wipe me from existence with one hand you were moved to actually facilitate my sacred work with the other. That is the hand of God, I say. Because even if you try to erase it now, it still was. God has seen it, and it was you, my English Jew, who upheld His will.”

Ulrich closed the gap between them. “Not His. Not yours. Mine.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

Finally, atop the suffocating bleed that had filled him, floated the choking truth.

“I thought the castle would be enough to keep this universe stable. It was not. Too many variables ruined it, and the castle fell. It couldn’t anchor anything. I knew that if I was to act in time to keep the plan going, it couldn’t be with a Hitler who was unique unto himself. The hidden variables had to be yours, so there needed to be more of you in other dimensions for this possibility to exist. But Salter and the others, they were killing the guilty so fast . . . the only variables I had . . .”

It was a truth neither of them could bear.

“You’re lying.”

“I knew I had access to a stable set of possibilities, and I knew I could calibrate the display readings to show anything I liked. They’d never know. Salter would never know. He still doesn’t.”

Ulrich was brought to a halt again. Muscular spasms wracked him, a vacuum pulled the air out of his lungs and he felt like he wanted to be sick. He was suddenly aware of Hitler striding towards the windows, and he had to throw himself forward to catch the older man from behind before he could alert the guards.

“Unhand me, you Jewish pig!”

“All those innocent men, anonymous men.” It came in a painful rush at last. “I wasn’t taking the life of any of them. I went back into their shared past and started creating the castle over again from scratch, to maintain my story for Salter and the others. Then one young man, provoked at twenty six into two possibilities—”

“You’re lying! You think to humiliate me before you kill me, but I am not a fool.”

“I kept telling myself, I was never going to allow it to continue forever. The timeline would be erased, it would never have been. But underneath I knew . . . I knew that any possibility, no matter how transient, how fabricated—oh God.”

Ulrich’s stomach lurched again, and he cried out in genuine, physical pain. The room was spinning again, just as it had earlier. It shook him from his guilt and grief. No—

This isn’t grief, he thought. This is interference.

For a second there was a clamor of noises—slapping against the glass, and the locked door shaking—but the sounds were coming from odd angles, and just as quickly stopped. Ulrich found himself on the floor, hands and knees. Looking left he found Hitler, hands pressed to the windows but silent and unmoving. The guards’ backs receded. Ulrich pulled himself up and over, the buzzing and queasiness still high in his head and guts.

“They didn’t hear me.”

“You couldn’t have … tried very …”

“You think I want you to kill me now? Don’t flatter yourself.”

“The display … who told you?”

Hitler gave him a sideways glance. It looked curiously deadened, but then Ulrich’s focus was unsure.

“No one told me anything. I need rely only on myself. This is who I am, regardless of what you think I might have been.”

He went back to looking out on the lawns. The guards were nowhere to be seen.

“The display was too valuable to let fall out of German hands, and I had seen that it could be rendered clear before you turned it into paper.”

“No—you knew how to turn it off.”

“Yes. I watched you. Your thumb in the corner.”

Ulrich’s thoughts were thick with bad blood and the pain of interference.

“No! You knew about us before we ever said a word. That’s why you were so willing to believe. It’s why you believe now.”

“I believe, Herr Katz, because of what I have seen with my own eyes. I believe because of you.”

“What?”

“I saw you. When I was twenty-six. When you say you were interfering in my life, yes? I spotted you, often, and your face stuck with me. When I saw you again today I wondered whether you were a son or grandson of the man from the past, but I couldn’t believe such a coincidence likely. Your story is the only one that makes sense, which makes your display technology and what it contains utterly invaluable to the Reich. And yes, maybe it could have saved me too.”

He glanced at Ulrich, and the smirk flashed for a second.

“Who knows? In some other world…?” The smirk faded. “Now—spare me anymore.”

The door rattled to the beat of Ari’s fist. It was Salter’s voice calling his name, though. Ulrich leaned against the glass, cold on his forehead, next to the Hitler he’d created.

“I’m fine,” he called to the rattling door. “Give me a minute.”

“We don’t have it. Eric’s back. He drew them off, but he’ll be back inside any moment, and the guards will be in tow.”

“One minute!”

“Ari says he heard you screaming.” Highland’s muffled voice was nonetheless uncharacteristically sharp. “Is it interference again?”

“I don’t know, Dexter. I don’t—”

“Everything is where it should be, Ulrich.”

He’d heard that before. From Highland, the same line.

Everything is where it should be.

He’d told him it wasn’t, but maybe it was.

Ulrich looked right, and his eyes found the lion-shaped aquamanile. He’d finally figured out who got it after the war.

He’d felt himself in interference; he’d said as much to them outside. Just as he’d told them they only had his word that the readings on the displays were correct. Of course, the whole thing hinged on him setting this up after the fact, making adjunct changes to a possibility without provoking any new ones; but then, the order of time didn’t much matter anymore.

He looked at his father’s watch and it had stopped.

It wasn’t the castle this possibility depended on, and it wasn’t Hitler either. The hidden variables were those of the Count von Nürburg: the first, not the last.

Ulrich lifted away from the glass and walked behind the armchair to the fireplace.

“Come here.”

Hitler followed him silently.

“Do you know what this is?”

He put his hand on the lion head of the bronze jug.

“No.”

“It’s called an aquamanile,” Ulrich told him, lifting the lid in the animal’s back.

He’d designed Eric’s shaping program himself; he, above all of them, knew the features intimately. Of course, it helped to have the original in front of him to work from. Unlike Salter, Ulrich never favoured a large body shape, so there was no need to change that. He just shaped his face to match. Hitler himself seemed more bemused than shocked.

Ulrich looked with Hitler’s eyes and traced a line from the fireplace to the door through the armchair in between. When they burst through it, the bastard’s body would be obscured. At best they’d see legs sticking out; legs much the same size as Ulrich’s. The guards had proved the point—the Hitler you expected to see left you blind to the one you didn’t.

“It’s a jug,” Ulrich said. “For washing your hands.”

He lifted out the pistol. Hitler’s sneer was forced.

“You and I, Jew—”

“Shhh!” Ulrich raised a finger to his lips.

“Afterwards.”