Cryptonomicon

Another hour goes by, and then Rudy and Angelo are escorted back through the train by a servant. The coach at the rear of the train is darker and more gentlemanly than the florid parlor where they have been cooling their heels. It is paneled in darkly stained wood and contains an actual desk--a baronial monstrosity carved out of a ton of Bavarian oak. At the moment, its sole function is to support a single sheet of paper, hand-written, and signed at the bottom. Even from a distance, Rudy recognizes Angelo's handwriting.

They have to walk past the desk in order to reach Göring, who is spread across an equally massive couch at the end of the car, underneath a Matisse, and flanked between a couple of Roman busts on marble pedestals. He is dressed in red leather jodhpurs, red leather boots, a red leather uniform jacket, a red leather riding crop with a fat diamond set into the butt of the handle. Bracelet-sized gold rings, infected with big rubies, grip his pudgy fingers. A red leather officer's cap is perched on his head, with a gold death's head, with ruby eyes, centered above the bill. All of this is illuminated only by a few striations of dusty light that have forced their way in through tiny crevices between curtains and shutters; the sun is up now, but Göring's blue eyes, dilated to dime-sized pits by the morphine, cannot face it. He has his cherry-colored boots up on an ottoman; no doubt he has trouble with circulation in his legs. He is drinking tea from a thimble-sized porcelain cup, encrusted with gold leaf, looted from a chateau somewhere. Heavy cologne fails to mask his odor: bad teeth, intestinal trouble, and necrotizing hemorrhoids.

"Good morning, gentlemen," he says brightly. "Sorry to have kept you waiting. Heil Hitler! Would you like some tea?"

There is small talk. It goes on at length. Göring is fascinated with Angelo's work as a test pilot. Not only that, he has any number of peculiar ideas adapted from the Bavarian Illuminati, and is groping for some way to tie these in with higher mathematics. Rudy is afraid, for a while, that this task is about to be placed on his shoulders. But even Göring himself seems impatient with this phase of the conversation. Once or twice he reaches out with his riding crop to part a curtain slightly.

The outdoor light seems to cause him appalling pain and he quickly looks away.

But finally the train slows, maneuvers through more switches, and coasts to a gentle stop. They can see nothing, of course. Rudy strains his ears, and thinks he hears activity around them: many feet marching, and commands being shouted. Göring catches the eye of an aide and waves his riding crop towards the desk. The aide springs forward, snatches up the handwritten document, and bears it over to the Reichsmarschall, presenting it with a small, neat bow. Göring reads through it quickly. Then he looks up at Rudy and Angelo and makes tut-tut-tut noises, shaking his gigantic head from side to side. Various layers of jowls, folds, and wattles follow, always a few degrees out of phase. "Homosexuality," Göring says. "You must be aware of the Führer's policy regarding this sort of behavior." He holds up the sheet and shakes it. "Shame on you! Both of you. A test pilot who is a guest in our country, and an eminent mathematician working on great secrets. You must have known that the Sicherheitsdienst would get wind of this." He heaves an exhausted sigh. "How am I going to patch this up?"

When Göring says this, Rudy knows for the first time since the knock on his door that he is not going to die today. Göring has something else in mind.

But first his victims need to be properly terrified. "Do you know what could happen to you? Hmm? Do you?"

Neither Rudy nor Angelo answers. It is not the sort of question that really needs answering.

Göring answers it for them by reaching out with his riding crop and lifting up the curtain. Harsh blue light, reflected from snow, peals into the coach. Göring shuts his eyes and looks the other way.

They are in the middle of an open area, surrounded by tall barbed-wire fences, filled with long rows of dark barracks. In the center, a tall stack pours smoke into a white sky. SS troops in greatcoats and jackboots pace around, blowing into their hands. Just a few yards away from them, on an adjacent railway siding, a gang of wretches in striped clothing are at work in, and around, a boxcar, unloading pale cargo. A large number of naked human bodies have become all frozen together in a solid, tangled mass inside the boxcar, and the prisoners are at work with axes, bucksaws, and prybars, dismantling them and throwing the parts onto the ground. Because they are frozen solid, there is no blood, and so the entire operation is startlingly clean. The double-glazed windows of Göring's coach block sound so effectively that the impact of a big fire ax on a frozen abdomen comes through as a nearly imperceptible thud.