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Now Available from Final Thursday Press
Kyrie
Poetry by Jonathan Stull
Ghost Wars
Poetry by Vince Gotera
***Winner of the 2004 Global Filipino Literary Award for Poetry***
Laugh. Damnit.
Poetry by Ahkos
Bad Men
Microfiction by Jim O'Loughlin
Vibe
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from The Knowledge Tree
by Paul Hedeen
No doubt Nazi booty was an old story, but still a damned good one. Kaspar knew that while the real money might have run out-even decades ago-the myth of the money never would. The money was like Hitler himself, Europe’s best legend. No matter how dead the corporeal Hitler might be, he was still out there. More accurately, he was still “down” there, still in his bunker, which was our bunker, our Id, the blackest part of our collective nature, the leaden point of the soul, our monster in the closet, the place into which we would never stop peeking. Seeking Hitler obsessively, the modern world could never stop finding him.
Yet no one felt he was chasing real Nazis anymore. Everyone was so civil, after all, even if a bit harsh, formal, and cold. But Nazi wealth, ill-gotten and invested, cashed in and re-invested, may survive, vestiges of it anyway-you know, Euros on the penny. Couldn’t Kaspar play at finding it, even though it was widely acknowledged that American aid and plain old German discipline, long-suffering, and hard labor had paid the freight on the economic miracle? Then again, aging Jews and former slave laborers also sought the wealth behind the wealth-from stacks of bars in Swiss safety deposit boxes, the gold mined from their ancestors’ teeth in the workshops of Sachsenhausen to those profits on certain corporations’ quarterly statements. And there were the jewelry and art-some of it now in museums-that were passing on to the new generation, and that also needed accounting and restitution. All told, there might be certain millions at stake. How much had gone to the escape organization die Spinne? How much supported the SS comrades associations, now largely aged to extinction? How much even lay in the coffers of contemporary German political parties? No one was sure, but the eyes of treasure hunters and fantasists glittered in the contemplation. People became giddy and imagined the keepers as both nervous and close. Most of this was an effort of the imagination, for the keepers, like the money itself, were invisible and probably inaccessible. But people, even rational people like Zapruder and Kaspar, love to dream and to believe. The Swiss, true to their reputations, were so damned chary, guarding the identities of people, even those long dead in the war or hanged or starved in its aftermath. Still the romance of easy money, stolen or otherwise, the PR miracle and windfall of returning a few Euros to the last Jews and their families, all this had the Institute and its minions, Kaspar’s fellow-travelers, with their noses to the ground. This sniffing about was known by the Institute codename “Money Tree.” Find it and you might climb it. Find it and you might taste its fruit.