April 20, 2020

“I Dream of Dieter” (short story)

“Scheisse!” bellowed Dieter Schmidt, almost dropping the splotched glass bottle in his sweaty and trembling hands. For over a decade he’d slept soundly at night, assured in his own safety, but now…now the nightmare was beginning afresh. 

He must master himself, it would all be over soon and then he’d be safe again. Replacing the loose and rotting floorboard under which the bottle had been hidden (alongside a considerable roll of cruzeiros and a passport in the name of one Miguel Alvarez), Schmidt quickly glanced over his shoulder at the door to his shabby apartment, making sure the chain was still dangling in place. His eyes not being what they once were, he had to squint against the flickering orange glow of the apartment’s single lightbulb, which dangled from the ceiling of cracked plaster by a frayed piece of string.

A gentle breeze scented with pollinated flowers and bat shit wafted in through the open window, tickling the old Nazi’s stubbled cheek. Jumping at the sensation, Schmidt stood up and closed the window, but not before taking a cautious glance at the cobbled street below, his ears picking up the evening’s usual chorus of owl monkeys and cicadas. 

No one seemed to be watching the building and yet, the Israelis (or perhaps Wiesenthal’s men?) wouldn’t make it too obvious if they were. The seemingly impenetrable darkness of night, punctured only by the feeble light of a pale winter moon, made it all but impossible to discern human figures—especially ones that were standing still. 

A Mossad agent could be camouflaged in that dark patch of shadow cast by a clump of palm trees marking the edge of wild South American jungle. Or, and Schmidt’s heart fluttered like a crazed hummingbird at this next thought, the Jew bastards were already waiting in the decrepit foyer three flights below, ready to storm the place, tie him up, and smuggle him to a country full of vengeful Hebrews.

No, he would not let that happen, could not let that happen.

Besides, they’re probably waiting until I leave the apartment to take make their move—much less noise that way, he told himself, savoring a modicum of solace at the sudden thought. 

Nevertheless, this was no time to let one’s guard down, not when there were too many unanswered questions. How had they found him? It should have been impossible in a backwater town like this one, a place that had barely beaten back the jungle with some semblance of modernity. A place, moreover, that barely had any running water or sanitary plumbing. 

Schmidt knew every single person within a five-mile radius—both young and old—and that man in the marketplace today, the one who had glanced at Schmidt as he accepted a parcel of plantains, had definitely been new. Hadn’t he?

The glance could barely have lasted more than 10 seconds, but almost three decades of living the life of a fugitive had cursed Obergruppenführer Dieter Schmidt with the animal-like intuition of sensing even the slightest bit of danger. He’d gone from hunting Jews to being hunted by them; from exterminating the rats to becoming a frightened, flea-bitten rodent himself.

The bitter irony was not lost on him and he nearly squeaked with laughter at how poetic it all seemed, even as the walls were closing in once again. 

But this hadn’t happened in so long, not since the schweinhund had laid their grubby hands on Eichmann more than a decade previously. They’d almost had Schmidt then, had wanted him almost as badly as they wanted Eichmann and Mengele. When that happened, Schmidt’s comfortable life in Buenos Aires was revealed to be nothing more than a moth-eaten veil of safety, a fragile thing torn into a million irreparable pieces over the course of a single day.

The wealthy Argentine socialite known as Diego Aspiazu disappeared and in his stead, Miguel Alvarez was born. Kind old Mr. Alvarez who shopped for fresh plantains every Friday.

That’s right, it was Friday night. Would the Jews, whoever they were working for, be keeping an eye on him or would they be taking the evening off to celebrate their holy Sabbath? Somehow, that just didn’t seem likely. Schmidt had a nagging suspicion that Golda Meir and her secret Jew agents would skip the Sabbath and happily eat a pound of bacon, just to see him swing from the gallows.

“Can I help you, Dieter?”

Schmidt yelped in terror at the arrival of a voice that was not his own, a voice that spoke in the casual German tones of the Bavarian village in which Dieter Schmidt had been born a lifetime ago. It was a voice he hadn’t heard in five years, not since his personal funds began to run critically low in 1967. Schmidt looked down and saw the bottle grasped between his hands. 

Made of smooth and clouded emerald glass, it looked like the sort of object one might expect to see in a pirate adventure. But this bottle did not contain tropical rum or the map to a buried treasure; rather, the thing inside it was the treasure. It was a treasure worth infinitely more than all the and gold and artwork the Reich had pilfered from dead Jewish dogs during the war. 

Its worth went far beyond the pale of comprehension for what a normal man would consider to be wealth. Even Schmidt couldn’t fully grasp the power of the little green bottle he’d accidentally rubbed in his panic. But, of course, he’d meant to rub it all along; had meant to summon what lived inside of it the moment he saw that man staring at him in the marketplace.

“Dieter,” came the voice again. “Have you thought about your final request?”

Schmidt turned around to see a man sitting primly on his bed, which was nothing more than a hard mattress with a white top sheet that was fast turning a urine-colored yellow. The newcomer, whom Schmidt had only dealt with on two previous occasions, was dressed in a beautifully tailored suit of navy velvet, a ruffled white shirt, and a bright red silk bow tie. It looked as if he’d just been called away from a rather enjoyable cocktail party.

In 1960, when Schmidt had first come into possession of the strange bottle, the man appeared in a tight grey suit, a starched white shirt, and a skinny black tie. During their second encounter seven years later, the man had preferred a brown plaid jacket, a high-lipped green turtleneck, and a pair of beige slacks.

Seeing the man sitting before him now for the third time ever, it finally occurred to Schmidt that the thing, whatever it was, dressed for the times. Even its deep brown hair seemed to be styled in the same way young men wore their hair and sideburns these days. How this thing could glean fashion trends and hair styles from the inside of a bottle hidden beneath a rotting floorboard was beyond Obergruppenführer Dieter Schmidt. 

Then again, almost everything about the bottle was a mystery.

“Have you thought about what you’d like for your final request?” asked the genie again, its Bavarian dialect as flawless as ever.

“You,” Schmidt said, pointing a gnarled finger (where arthritis was beginning to stake its claim) at the man, his anxiety about the Israelis starting to evaporate. “You can help me get away from them.” 

It was an inexpressible relief to slip back into his native tongue, as though he hadn’t lived in Brazil for over 12 years. He hated Portuguese and what’s more, he hated having to speak it with the sub-human, in-bred monkeys of a country he would never call home.

“Them?” The genie raised its eyebrows in a querying fashion.

“Die Juden,” spat Schmidt, resembling, for a moment, the brash and ambitious SS officer he’d once been. “The fool Wiesenthal or the Israelis and their Mossad. Probably the latter. They want a victory after what happened in Munich a few months ago. That’s all it is, plain and simple. Eleven more dead Jews on German soil and they’re out for blood, any blood—my blood!”

“Ah,” replied the genie, not taking his eyes off of Schmidt, who was now pacing absent-mindedly and muttering to himself. 

“They won’t take me. I won’t let it happen. What have I done? I’m just an old man. I haven’t done anything wrong. I won’t go the way of Eichmann. Not me. Not me. Not me.”

The old Nazi finally ceased his pacing and pointed another finger at the smartly-dressed individual on his ramshackle bed. “How could this have happened?”

“Beg pardon?” The genie flicked a speck of dust off of his velvet jacket.

“Don’t play dumb with me, you worthless bottle imp,” snarled Schmidt, his nostrils flaring like a bull that’s just seen the red of a matador’s muleta. “My first wish in the spring of 1960 was for you to hide me. And now here we are, on the edge of the goddamn jungle, away from everything, and somehow, the Jewish vermin have found me. Well…?”

“Ah, yes, I remember now,” said the genie, unfazed by Schmidt’s anger. “You asked me to hide you, yes, but you did not specify from whom or for how long. If my memory serves correct, and it usually does, I informed you during our very first meeting that all submitted requests must be as specific as possible.”

Schmidt was struck dumb at this. The arm to which his accusatory finger was attached limply fell to the side, although the finger did not retract. It was true, he remembered their first encounter as though (or so the cliche went) it were yesterday. The confluence of events that allowed him to evade capture 12 years before was nothing short of miraculous. 

***

A friend from the old days, one of the many fellows still loyal to the Fuhrer’s cause, had tipped him off about Eichmann’s capture. The friend also informed Schmidt that the Israelis knew about his lavish home in Recoleta and were planning to take him there that very evening. 

Once the Odessa knew you’d been found out, they disavowed you like in that television program, Mission: Impossible. It was nothing like the lousy drivel espoused by that hack author Forsyth (Schmidt had thought about writing to him in order to set the record straight, but that would have been utter lunacy). The Odessa claimed to be a “network of comrades,” but they were nothing more than an unorganized and petulant boys club. No one—not Barbie, not Brunner, not Heim, not Mengele—was willing to stick out their own neck, lest the Israeli noose tighten around them as well. 

If you were targeted, the group’s motto was “Heil Hitler and have a nice life…this message will self-destruct in 3 seconds.”

Hastily packing a bag with some clothes and as many valuables as he could possibly carry, Schmidt quietly slipped out the back of his opulent house and sped to downtown Buenos Aires. There, he hoped to blend into the crowds gathered for the 150-year celebration of Argentina’s independence before finding a way to sneak into Brazil or Uruguay.

Over and over again, he cursed himself for not preparing for such an eventuality. He’d become too comfortable, it was true, and his new life had blinded him to the realities of the world and its attitude toward suspected war criminals. And if the Juden knew about him, they must know about his false identity, which meant they were probably patrolling the exits out of the country, keeping their slimy ears to the ground for any hint of Diego Aspiazu.

Hidden among the swelling and boisterous crowd (fedora turned down to hide his face, briefcase of worldly possessions clutched tightly to his chest), Schmidt began to lose some of his immediate trepidation. The Israelis would not be able to take him here, in the presence of hundreds of eye witnesses. Still, he continued to look over his shoulder every thirty seconds to make sure he wasn’t being followed. 

Savoring his temporary respite, Schmidt browsed the various stalls set up along the packed and noisy thoroughfare. Meat-filled arepas sizzled on chipped metal griddles, dulce de leche bubbled like molten gold in massive cauldrons, and cheap souvenirs (snow globes and poorly-tanned leather goods) teetered on wooden shelves. 

The old crone and her cart stood at the very end of the row.

Her ramshackle rickshaw was packed not with street food or commemorative trinkets, but with a collection of mismatched junk. Broken bits of pottery, half-knitted scarves, paint brushes of varying sizes, and an old fashioned diver’s helmet were among her wares. All these items gave the impression that this woman had recently held up a poorly-stocked antiques shop.

Half-heartedly scanning the scant selection, Schmidt’s eyes fell upon the bottle. The fogged glass, pock-marked with smudges that resembled the grotesque symptoms of leprosy, made him feel uneasy. Perhaps it was the fact that he could not see what was inside of it, although he did imagine seeing the faintest shadow flickering behind the hazy glass.

The woman, a deflated bag of deep wrinkles and noxious varicose veins, followed his line of sight and smiled, revealing a pair of empty, blackened gums. She gingerly picked up the item and shook it. Even with the noise of the bustling crowd, Schmidt heard something move inside the bottle—the sound of a disturbed crab scuttling across a tank full of slippery pebbles. 

It made Schmidt, a man who liked to think of himself as hardened (after all, he had overseen the disposal of thousands of decomposing Jewish bodies during the war) feel nauseous. 

“This bottle,” the crone had begun in slurred Spanish (owing to her egregious lack of teeth), “was cast by Nyarlathotep in the forges of dim Carcosa when the stars were young. He eventually became bored with his creation and looking to corrupt mankind, dropped it amongst the towering dunes of Arabia, where it was unearthed up by an ancient caravan, a thousand camels long. From hand-to-hand it passed, providing Scheherazade with the 1,001 stories that kept her alive, or else granting Alhazred the forbidden knowledge he sought while writing the Necronomicon.”

“What is this nonse—” Schmidt began to say, but the crone cut him off, her voice rising dangerously. Perhaps the story, once begun, had to be finished. And besides, his legs were not accepting the signals from his brain to leave this woman and her pile of rubbish behind. A cold breeze had just rolled through the square, displacing what was left of the crone’s spidery white hair across her balding head. Schmidt noticed and felt even more repulsed by the woman.

“This bottle,” she continued, ignoring his look of disgust, “eventually fell into the blood-soaked hands of Spanish knights during the Crusades. It gifted the Spaniards with the greatest armada the world had ever seen and easily turned the minds of men against the Chosen People.”

“The Jews, you mean? The Inquisition?” Schmidt asked, now somewhat engrossed in the woman’s tale, despite his desire to get away from this unpleasant woman just seconds ago. 

She nodded gravely and continued, “for many years, it remained among the valuable treasures of Isabella and Ferdinand before it was stolen and smuggled to these shores by conquistadors, who used its power to shed even more blood and subjugate an entire continent. After that, the bottle was lost to history, but I offer it you now for a very reasonable price of 20 pesos.”

Schmidt stared at the old woman for a few seconds before letting out a howl of laughter. It was more out of relief than anything else. Her little story had been nothing more than a marketing ploy and a rather engaging one at that. He turned to leave, still chuckling, when she called out to him.

“15 pesos.”

“My dear lady,” said Schmidt turning around to face her again, feeling like he’d finally gained control of the situation. “That piece of junk isn’t even worth two centimes. Now good day.”

“Por favor,” she replied, suddenly looking more like a sweet old lady beleaguered by the unending troubles of the world. How could he ever have been repulsed by this poor creature? “I am just trying to feed my family, sir. I am willing to go as low as 9 pesos.”

Years later, Schmidt would wonder what made him remove his wallet that day. A man on the run doesn’t have the luxury of wasting his limited budget on worthless trinkets. Seeing his resistance, but knowing she was very close to sealing the deal, the old woman put the bottle down and began to push her cart away from the hubbub of the independence day celebrations.

“Come,” she had said and while it could very well have been a trap, Schmidt followed her into a quiet back alleyway ending in a solid brick wall. For the very first time that afternoon he failed to look over his shoulder for possible assailants. Cloaked in a cooling shade, the alley muffled the sounds of the crowd. In short, it was the perfect place for a private exchange between two people partaking in an illicit business transaction or, under different circumstances, the perfect way to trap a Nazi fugitive.

If that’s the case, Schmidt realized, I deserve to be caught. Once again, he made to walk away when the woman held out the bottle to him.

“Please,” she said, “rub.”

“Excuse me?” Schmidt had had just about enough of this chicanery and was mentally berating himself for putting up with so much of it already. 

“Rub,” repeated the woman, now waving her hand an inch or so above the mottled green glass. “As if to clean.”

Now humoring her, Schmidt accepted the bottle and, doing as he was instructed, rubbed the thing with his hand as though trying to remove a recalcitrant smudge of dirt. 

“Alright, I’ve done it. Now may I go?”

“So soon, Dieter?”

Schmidt had never suffered from heart problems, but he nearly keeled over from cardiac arrest right then. He was so sure the new male voice belonged to an Israeli agent, so sure that the old woman had indeed lured him to his doom. For a moment, he could only lick his lips, tasting the salty bite of coppery fear in the back of his throat.

“Who are you?” The question came out as a rasping wheeze. “Mossad?”

There was a dry chuckle. “No, nothing like that, Dieter.”

That’s when Schmidt broke the surface of his paralyzing fear and realized the newcomer was speaking German, the very dialect he had spoken in Bavaria. Was this man perhaps from the Odessa and the old woman an inconspicuous proxy for setting up meetings between members? And if so, why would they make contact so soon after cutting him loose?

“I’m not with the network either, I’m afraid,” the stranger said, pre-empting Schmidt’s next question.

Unable to take it any longer, Schmidt turned around to behold a young and handsome man with a form-fitting grey suit, a starched white shirt; a skinny black tie; tightly-laced black shoes that gleamed despite the shade of the alley; and head full of brown hair held in place by a shiny gloss of Brylcreem. 

He exuded the aura of an advertising executive, not a German-hunting Jew. Had he been with the Odessa, however, he certainly looked the part of someone from noble Aryan stock.

“Then who are you exactly?”

“I don’t have a name per se, but you can think of me as a traveling salesman if that helps,” the stranger said, holding out his hand.

Schmidt warily shook it and almost jumped at the rough and scaly texture of the man’s fair-looking skin. The Nazi was quite relieved when their hands parted company.

“Why are you here?” Schmidt asked. “Where did you even come from?”

The stranger grinned and simply pointed at the bottle Schmidt forgot he was holding.

“No, really,” Schmidt said. He looked at the old woman who beamed back at him with black gums, also pointing at the bottle.

“Genio,” she said. “Grant your wishes.”

For a day filled with so much stress and anxiety, Schmidt sure was laughing a lot.

“Genie? Really?” he managed to say through his latest burst of disbelieving guffaws. The stranger walked around to lean on the woman’s cart. 

“Well, I’ve had many names over the years. If ‘genie’ is the phrase of the day, then so be it. So, what’ll it be?”

Schmidt’s good humor dissipated like droplets of water on hot pavement. He felt a wave of embarrassment and once again berated himself for stopping in front of the crone’s rundown cart.

“Look,” he began, “I don’t know what kind of con job you two are trying to pull, but I won’t be a victim of it. You should be glad I don’t report you to the proper authorities. Now good day.”

He began to pivot in the direction of the main street when the self-proclaimed genie spoke, his voice no longer light and casual.

“Ask for something, anything,” he said. 

“What?”

“Think of it as a sort of test drive, as they say,” the stranger said. “Of course, I can’t let you keep whatever you ask for, but it does help the newly-initiated get their toes wet.”

“I won’t play into this silly little game of yours any longer. I have more important things to do.”

“Things like escaping the Mossad?”

Schmidt carefully eyed the man. He felt that the game was up. “So you are a Jew then.”

“No, I’m not much of anything. Go on, wish for the first thing that comes into your mind. I should mention that all submitted requests should be as specific as possible. Helps give you the biggest bang for your buck. Speaking of, don’t wish for ‘a million bucks’ unless you want to be trampled to death by a million deer. Phrasing is key.”

Just as he’d humored the old woman by rubbing the bottle, Schmidt played along. In any other situation, his patience would have worn out long before this, but some unexplained force (perhaps destiny or God Himself, Schmidt would later theorize) was keeping him here, rooted to the spot.

“Fine. I wish for a plate of Schweinshaxe with all the trimmings.”

Instantly, the mouthwatering aroma of crisped pork, sauerkraut, and roasted potatoes filled the cramped and shaded space. Thrown off by the familiar smells that had no business in Buenos Aires, Schmidt saw the stranger holding a steaming platter of the very food he’d requested a moment before. But how was that so? He’d been looking at the man this entire time. There’d been no time to pull an elaborate parlor trick.

Before Schmidt’s stomach could even growl with longing (he hadn’t eaten since the morning), the intoxicating vapors were gone along with the plate of food. He may have even imagined it and while his mind tried to make him accept that as the most logical explanation, something much deeper—that primitive node every man has in the recesses of his mind, the part that still fears the dark and sees gods in the sun and moon—knew what he’d just seen was true.

“Gott in Himmel,” he breathed.

“Knew we’d get there in the end,” the stranger said, his voice light and casual again. “Now if you wouldn’t mind paying our dear intermediary. There does need to be a proof of sale, you see.”

Lost in a mess of his own chaotic thoughts, Schmidt barely felt himself rummaging inside his pocket for 9 pesos, which he held out. The crone accepted the money with a toothless grin and held up the bills, which disappeared in a bright flash of hot orange flames, their ashes fading in a second chilly pocket of wind. 

As though breaking through a thin wall that once separated two worlds—the real and the fantastical—Schmidt’s brain finally gained a foothold on the dissonant nature of what he once knew and what he now knew. He understood the thrilling ramifications and acting on an instinct, he dropped the bottle he forgot he was holding and lunged at the old woman, wrapping his hands around her throat and squeezing with a ferocity that scared even himself.

Her legs kicked out and began to wildly jerk around as though she were a cockroach sprayed with a healthy dose of pesticide. The gnarled and arthritic fingers were stuck in place, unable to form a necessary grip against the attack. And even if the crone did have the advantage of youthful stamina, Schmidt was twice her size.

Some wispy strands from the thinning head fell over her face as she tried to draw air through the blackened gums. Nothing, except a horrible rasping choke, escaped her cracked lips and once again, Schmidt found himself repulsed by the pathetic, wizened specimen. 

Her wrinkled and vein-covered skin had barely begun to turn purple when Schmidt felt the woman’s windpipe collapse, as though he were playing with the bellows of a rather cumbersome accordion. A muffled snap, the noise of a burly lumberjack stepping over dead twigs in the forest at the onset of winter, signified the breaking of her aged neck.

Breathing heavily, the Nazi finally let the old woman go and she fell to the ground with a lackluster thud, her body displacing a cloud of dust, eyes now bulging like those of a tree frog’s, tongue lolling in the dirt.

“Ah yes, that is usually the case,” said the stranger, now standing over Schmidt’s shoulder as the Nazi fugitive regained his breath. “Pity. Well, what’s done is done.”

Then the sound of running footsteps and hurried voices speaking in whispered tones of Hebrew. Schmidt did not understand the language, but gleaned enough from the mention of his own name. The Jews had caught up with him at last and they were fast approaching the alleyway.

“Hide me,” he hissed at the stranger who could perform miracles. “Take me away from this place. Take me deep into Brazil.”

Next thing he knew, Dieter Schmidt was on the edge of the jungle with a new passport made out to Miguel Alvarez.

In the books and reports written since Eichmann’s capture, Dieter Schmidt always received a special mention (along with Mengele, of course) as the high-profile target who somehow gave Israelis the slip that spring. Two agents claimed to have seen him in downtown Buenos Aires, but lost him amongst swelling crowd of independence day celebrations. 

He’d been seen one minute and vanished the next. Such a miraculous escape gained him the monicker “The Ghost of Gross-Rosen.”

If only they knew how close they’d really come to catching him…

***

“Dieter, if you’re not sure of what you’d like, perhaps you’d allow me to retire for the evening.”

The genie’s words brought Schmidt back to the present, all his reminiscences of 1960 forgotten. 

“Oh no,” Schmidt told the genie, his accusatory finger rising into the air again. “We’re settling this tonight. You’ll stay out here as long as I ask.”

“As you wish,” said the man on the bed, chuckling at his own pun. “Remember, be specific.”

In hindsight, Schmidt’s first two wishes did feeble, poorly reasoned, and without ambition. Still, they came out of necessity and panic, not serious thought. 

For example, his second wish in 1967 arrived when his funds were running low. Afraid to get a job on the off chance he’d be recognized and forced to flee again, Schmidt asked the genie for an unlimited supply of money. Not a second after the request was made, he found a large roll of cruzeiros in his pocket that never shrunk in size, no matter how much he spent.

The giddiness over his newfound wealth broke like a fever when he realized that cruzeiros could only be used in Brazil. Sure, he could exchange a large sum of them for another currency if he ever left the country, but that seemed like a tiresome activity, one that would attract the unwanted attention from a bank. And weren’t all banks operated by Jews? 

When that problem presented itself, Schmidt decided he would remain in Brazil waiting until the hunt for him died down, so that he could resume a normal life of affluence. Perhaps he would build a palatial estate in the countryside, constructed to his exact specifications—a fortress in which to live out his remaining years of health (in all likelihood, there was only a ripe handful of them after all the undue stress of the chase) in luxury and comfort.

The spartan quarters in this small town, while safe and immune from suspicion, drove him insane, particularly after the life he had led in Argentina. It seemed he might never know comfort again if Mossad agents were now lying in wait for him. With snare closing around his neck, the idea of wasting his last miracle scared Dieter Schmidt just as much as the idea of being caught by the Israelis, who continued to take everything from him.

“I could wish for the Jewish swine tracking me to suffer a slow and painful death. But no, that big-nosed bitch Meir would just send more in their stead.”

He was pacing again, purposefully not looking at the genie. Truth be told, Schmidt very much feared the magical being, but his instinct to survive outweighed the fear just now. As it was during the war, you always masked your fear and hesitation—your very humanity—under a thick mask of righteous anger and assuredness. If you were uncertain, your subordinates would be uncertain. If you gave a Jew an inch, he would take a mile.

His mind spun back to the war like a reel of tape. There’d been a young man by the name of Goldman who thought he could horde food. He became more and more brazen, bribing guards and giving extra rations to other, weaker inmates. When Schmidt found out, he brought Goldman in for questioning and used a scalpel (one he let sit outside for a week, so that it became rusted) to castrate the insolent Jew without the use of anesthetics. If you are so hungry, Schmidt had said, then you won’t have a problem eating these, hmm? He’d held the steaming testicles in front of Goldman’s agonized face with a gloved hand for over an hour before the man bled to death.

Schmidt lingered on the warm reminiscence, savoring the raw adrenaline of a moment when he possessed all the power, all the control. When he decided who would live and who would die. 

“What if I wished for all the Jewish vermin in the world to perish?”

Hey, now there was a thought. But no, that wouldn’t do either. It wasn’t just the Israelis or Wiesenthal who were on his heels. The Wester Berliners wanted him, too. Bah! Those ungrateful traitors were ashamed of their own history, of what the Fuhrer had tried to do for them.

“I could wish for all my enemies to drop dead this instant,” he said and the genie gave a titter. It was now lying flat on the bed, hands laced behind its head.

“Something funny, imp?” 

“Well,” began the genie, sitting up, “the way I see it, killing all your, what did you call them? 

‘Enemies’? Yes, that didn’t work so well during the war, did it?”

This was a good point. No matter how many Jew swine they attempted to snuff out, there were always more. They really did breed like common pests and what was more, those that did survive were annoyingly emboldened against their captors. The entire country of Israel was filled, like the pipes of a fetid sewer, with the Untermenschen the Reich had, unfortunately, not been able to kill, whether out of sloppiness or outright defeat. The fungus always grew back if you didn’t destroy it completely—root and stem. 

It was, after all, the same reason why he killed the woman who had sold him the bottle in Argentina all those years ago. It was also why he had not wished for the re-establishment of the Reich or the resurrection of the Fuhrer. If the National Socialists rose to power again, who was to say the world’s armies wouldn’t rise up against them like they did last time? But that wasn’t entirely true. Schmidt could simply wish for an invincible army led by an equally unbeatable leader. 

The truth, plain and simple, was he was selfish. It had been years since he shared common ground with fellow members of the SS and despite his firm commitment to Adolph Hitler, he barely felt any kinship to those men now. At this point in his life, he did not want to waste a wish on something that did not directly affect him. 

By now, Schmidt knew the genie was a shrewd entity, one that would exploit every loophole to the fullest. The results of his first two wishes proved that there was just no accounting for all the ways a request to bring the Reich back could be twisted and turned by this unknowable entity.

His third wish had to be something that was more manageable, something that would ensure his safety from any party looking to do him harm. It was a simple line of reasoning that gave him the answer he sought so desperately. 

“Get up, imp. I know what I want for my final wish.”

The genie sat up on the bed. He looked intrigued.

“I don’t want to be bothered by my enemies ever again, do you understand me?” Schmidt said, standing just below the apartment’s single lightbulb. “I don’t want to live on the run anymore, always looking over my shoulder. If a Jew, or anyone else for that matter, recognizes me, I want them to turn around and walk away, never to return. They’ll remember that they left the stove on or that they’re late for an urgent meeting. They won’t remember ever seeing me. In fact, they’ll see right through me. I’ll become the very ghost they think me to be. And as an extension of that, I don’t want anyone else getting their hands on that bottle.”

“Hmmm,” pondered the genie, scratching his chin. “I feel like that last part counts as an extra wish, Dieter. You’re not trying to cheat me, are you?”

“Ah,” replied the Nazi, confident in his reasoning. “If someone gets their hands on that bottle, couldn’t they undo my own third wish? Wouldn’t it be paradoxical for a person to request my whereabouts if I no longer wanted to be detected? No, no. That just wouldn’t do and what is more, it would violate the guidelines of my third wish. As such, it is only a logical corollary to my final request that the bottle never be found again.”

The genie smiled, but it no longer looked humanoid. Its grin was an evil leer of sharp little teeth that ran in spirals from the front of the mouth to the back of the throat. Snapping instantly back into a state of fear, Dieter stumbled backwards, gasping for air as the genie blinked, his eyes going from a twinkling brown, to a cat-like yellow in the infinitesimal whisper between seconds.

“Simple, specific, and to the point. I like it,” said the thing on the bed, now a coiling serpent of bubbling, writhing corruption; a sight that would loosen the screws of any man’s grip on sanity. 

“As you say it, so shall it be.”

***

Dieter Schmidt woke with a jolt of terror, his heart racing, face soaked in a thin veneer of perspiration. For a moment, he could’t remember where he was or what had happened. Then the severity of his dream came back to him and he shuddered. But it was only a dream—a god damn nightmare, really, something he hadn’t experienced in over 12 years. He rubbed the balls of his knuckles into his eyes, trying to clear sleep from them. Little orange coronas of false light popped before his pupils.

The room was totally dark, except for a thin shaft of pale moonlight streaming in through the closed window. It illuminated a dark and indistinguishable mass on the floor, mostly likely a heap of unwashed laundry. Schmidt sat up and swung himself to the side of the bed that was closest to the door. He wanted (no, needed) some fresh air after a dream like that.

That’s when he remembered about the Jews, the ratten that were after him. Schmidt felt under his pillow and removed the Luger pistol lying there. Making sure it was still loaded and oiled, he tucked the gun into his pants, whose waistband he kept a little loose for such occasions. He got up, stretched, and cautiously walked to the door, one hand firmly placed on the butt of the Luger, ready to pull it out like a Wild West gunslinger if the Jewish fucks tried anything funny.

He reached for the knob and twisted, but the door did not open, it was stuck in place. 

“Scheisse,” he whispered, blaspheming the rusty hinges. He took his other hand off the Luger and wrenched the knob with both sets of fingers. Still nothing. 

“Come on,” he breathed.

For an entire minute, he pulled and tugged at the knob, unable to get the door open. Fine, he’d abandon his plan for a quick stroll and just open in the window. In the morning, he could bang on the door and get someone to help him wrench the damn thing out of its frame. For now, he’d settle for a little jungle breeze inside the stuffy apartment. Schmidt turned around and froze, finally seeing what was sitting beneath the moonlight. It was not a pile of laundry.

“Nein,” he said, unaware he was saying anything. “Nein.”

He strode over to the window (giving the thing on the floor a wide berth) and attempted to throw it open, to feel fresh air on his face. Like the door, it too would not budge.

“Nein,” he repeated. “Let me out of here. I need to get out of here!” The last part came as a scream. “Let me out! Let ME OUT!”

“You wanted to be a ghost, Dieter,” came a soft voice floating out of the darkness. It was traced with just the slightest bit of a laugh. “Wish granted. Phrasing is key, don’t you remember? No one will bother you ever again.”

Schmidt fell to his knees and vigorously rubbed the bottle, but nothing happened. “Come back! Come back to me, damn you! This cannot be! You tricked me!”

And now the quiet voice really did laugh, the sound rising into a maddening and donkey-ish bray of smugness, privy to a cosmic joke Dieter Schmidt would never hear.

The old Nazi wanted to cover his ears, to escape the cruel cackle, but no matter what he did, the sound filled him up like a bowl of hearty stew. He desperately reached for the window again, tugging in vain. “Nein!” he continued to shout until his vocal chords were shredded to tatters and his voice became a hoarse and pathetic wheeze of defeat.

That’s when the door opened.

***

Yoni Aronoff stealthily entered the shabby apartment, gun pointed straight ahead, ready to fire a slug into the Nazi fuck if he tried anything funny. What the young Mossad agent saw inside made him lower his weapon and swear in English.

“Ma Koreh?,” hissed Sandy Blumenfeld, who was watching the stairs. “What happened?”

“He’s dead,” Yoni whispered back in Hebrew.

Now it was time for Sandy to curse. “You sure?”

“Pretty sure, unless he’s having us on. Get over here. Never mind the stairs right now.”

The two Israelis entered the apartment of Obergruppenführer Dieter Schmidt, who was sprawled out on the dusty wooden floor, one hand clutching his chest, the other wrapped tightly around a splotchy green bottle. His eyes, a vibrant shade of pale blue—eyes that once blazed with an unholy zeal as he tortured and killed Jewish victims during the Shoah—were starting to glaze over with a milky white film of death.

“What do you think happened?,” Sandy asked. “Cyanide?”

“I don’t see any white foam around his mouth, do you?” Yoni replied, sounding weary for the first time since the mission began.

“Good point,” said Sandy, now scratching his chin in puzzlement. “What a god damn shame. He looked fit as a fiddle when I spotted him in the marketplace today. You think he knew we’d found him? You think he decided to wash down a bunch of sleeping pills with some booze?”

Sandy pointed at the green bottle in the Nazi’s dead hand, mistaking it for alcohol.

“It doesn’t matter now,” said Yoni, staring intensely at the bottle. 

For the slightest moment, he thought he saw a shadow quivering inside the thing. It was simply a result of the apartment’s single, flickering lightbulb, he told himself, but that trick of the light was enough to make him recall the stories his grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, would tell him about dybbuks and shedim. As a child, Yoni liked to refer to them as “Jewish horror stories” and was always fascinated to hear about these awful creatures, much to the chagrin of his parents.

The camps were places of evil, his Sabba had said, but the Germans weren’t the only monsters living there. Auschwitz, Majdanek, Bergen-Belsen, Sobibor, Treblinka, and the rest, he liked to say, were the perfect breeding grounds for the demons and profane entities that are doomed to travel the earth until the end of time.

I would see them, Yoni, always out of the corner of my eye, gorging themselves on the ashes pouring from the crematoria, or else nestling themselves inside the pits filled with dead bodies. They were shadows within shadows, nothing more, but if you knew where to look at just the right moment, you could see them pop into existence when the line between their world and ours was thinnest.

It took a moment for Yoni to realize that Sandy was tapping him on the shoulder. He jumped at the sensation and was a little surprised to feel that his eyes were a little wet.

“Mah?” he asked. “What?”

“I said what’s our next move?”

“Gather up his stuff,” Yoni said, pulling a walkie-talkie out of his pocket. “I’ll tell Ezra to bring the car around.”

“What do we want with his stuff?” Sandy inquired, already doing as he was told, faintly humming the chorus of “Brandy (You’re A Fine Girl)” to himself.

“Will you stop that? If Schmidt’s death got back to any of other Nazis hiding out down here, they’d turn this poor little town into some sort of perverted shrine. We’re getting rid of him and any proof that he ever existed here. Make sure to check for any loose floorboards or panels. And whatever you do, Sandy, don’t touch that bottle.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t realize Mossad put you on this mission to ask questions. Just do as I say, nu?”

After delivering a message to Ezra Hoffer, the team’s getaway driver, Yoni helped Sandy to wrap Schmidt’s body in his own yellowing bedsheet, both of them taking extra care to not brush their fingers against the bottle of clouded green glass. They added in the man’s clothes as well the considerable roll of cruzeiros and fake passport they’d found beneath a rotting floorboard.

An hour later, Yoni, Sandy, and Ezra had disposed of Dieter Schmidt in the Amazon River, weighting the bundle with the heaviest rocks they could find. As the bubbles receded and the monkey owls screamed and the cicadas chirped, the small collection of Mossad agents said the Kaddish, not for Schmidt, but for the tens of thousands he had murdered.

With that finished, they walked away into the jungle, quietly whispering about how they would each leave the country on different airlines, so as not to arouse suspicion. Each one of them, unbeknownst to themselves, made a silent vow never to return to this place ever again, the memory of what they had done already fading from their minds. 

Their superiors back in Israel weren’t too happy when they couldn’t get a firm answer about Schmidt’s movements and whereabouts, but that’s just as he would’ve wanted it. Because no one, especially the Jews, bothered Obergruppenführer Dieter Schmidt (or his bottle) ever again.

POST SCRIPT:

This story was the result of several things coming together: My fascination with the Holocaust and its aftermath, my love of Jews getting revenge for the Shoah, Amazon’s new Hunters series (go watch it), and a recent reading of Stephen King’s “Apt Pupil.” 

With all those things rattling around in my brain, I wanted to put my own spin on the Nazi fugitive genre and tried to write something in the vein of Rod Serling. After all, the original Twilight Zone is my favorite TV show of all time and “Death’s-Head Revisited” (a Season 3 episode released during the trial of Adolph Eichmann) is a masterclass in limited, cathartic storytelling. Who wouldn’t want to see a former concentration camp commandant tried and executed by the ghosts of the Jews he tormented and killed at Dachau? For someone like me, entertainment doesn’t get any better than that.

Dieter Schmidt is my Captain Lutze, a heinous excuse for a human being who brings about his own demise through arrogance and hubris. And, of course, I’d be lying if I said that “Escape Route” (a segment from another Serling anthology, Night Gallery) didn’t have an affect on me.

Aside from all that, “I Dream of Dieter” was really born out of a question I asked myself about many of the Nazis who escaped justice after World War II. How could it be that Adolf Eichmann and Klaus Barbie were the only top offenders captured when so many others (Josef Mengele, Alois Brunner, Aribert Heim) were able to evade capture and live out their lives in relative comfort and safety? How could Mengele, Auschwitz’ own Angel of Death, so easily have slipped through the Mossad’s fingers during the Eichmann mission in Argentina?

I pondered these questions and struck on a strange idea: What if the Germans who never faced the magnitude of their crimes received help not from underground network of former Nazis, but from something supernatural? What if there was an object or being that could keep them one step ahead of the people specifically trained to hunt them down? 

Naturally, that all-powerful ace up the sleeve couldn’t be foolproof because the Nazi, our bad guy, does have to lose in the end. And that was the real challenge, making sure Schmidt got his comeuppance in a classic twist that, I hope, would make Serling proud.  The solution was simple: An eldritch genie (created by a Lovecraftian entity to satiate the lover of cosmic horror in me) that twists every request you make of it. The concept of ironic wishes is nothing new in fiction, but it was exactly what I needed to give Herr Schmidt the eternal fate he so desperately deserved.

I hope you enjoyed it.