Nightside 02 - Agents of Light and Darkness

was also not usual. Suzie and I stopped outside the front door. It was standing slightly ajar. Suzie unholstered her shotgun, and scowled at the door. I looked at her enquiringly.
    “What is it, Suze?”
    “Don’t call me that. It’s too quiet. Those Nazi freaks always have their martial music running full blast, so they can puff out their chests and march up and down to it and shout Heil ! at each other. This is their usual meeting time, but I can’t hear a damned thing.” She stepped cautiously forward and put her face to the crack of the door. She sniffed a few times. “Cordite. Smoke. Someone’s been firing guns in there.”
    She looked at me, and I nodded. Suzie kicked the door in and charged on in, gun at the ready. I followed after her, at a more sedate pace. I don’t carry a gun. I’ve never felt the need. I soon caught up with Suzie. She’d stopped not far inside. We stood together and looked around the old assembly room, taking our time. There was no need to hurry any more.
    The long hall the Fourth Reich used as their headquarters and meeting place was a fair size. Far too big for the small-scale rallies that were all they could manage these days. And every inch of the great open floor was covered with dead bodies. Dozens of dead Nazis, all in full uniform, all of them soaked in blood and riddled with bullet holes. They lay where they had fallen, outstretched hands reaching out for help that never came, like so many discarded toy soldiers. The walls had taken a lot of hits too. The swastika flags and Nazi memorabilia and old curling photos covering the walls had been torn apart by sustained gunfire. Most hung in tatters, pitiful remnants of a dead empire. And there was blood everywhere, splashed and splattered across the walls, running down to form thick pools between the bodies on the floor.
    Suzie was on full alert, raking every inch of the hall with savage eyes, swiveling her shotgun back and forth, searching for an enemy or a target. Suzie only ever really came alive when there was a chance of killing someone. But there was nothing moving in the assembly room but us. The Fourth Reich was over before it even got started. This was a place of the dead now.
    “Whatever happened here, we missed it,” said Suzie.
    “Someone else looking for the Unholy Grail got here first,” I said, stepping carefully forward, over and around the piled-together bodies. “And whatever questions they asked, they sure as hell didn’t like the answers they got.”
    “Whoever that someone was, they had a hell of a lot of firepower,” said Suzie, moving cautiously forward after me. “You couldn’t do this much damage with handguns. We’re talking heavy-duty weaponry. Given the fire patterns, at least a dozen automatic weapons, maybe more. If the Nazis had any weapons, it doesn’t look like they got the chance to use them. I don’t see anyone dead not wearing a uniform.” She knelt beside one corpse and checked for a pulse in the neck. She shook her head briefly and stood up. “Still warm, though. This all happened fairly recently.”
    I looked around me, estimating the numbers. “We’re looking at… at least a hundred dead people here. Most of their organization. Maybe all of it.”
    Suzie sniggered suddenly. “Hey, Taylor, what do you call a hundred dead Nazis? A good start.”
    “Cheap, Suzie, even for you. You’ll be doing knock-knock jokes next.” I stopped and looked at a huge poster of Adolf Hitler on the wall beside me. Blood had splashed across half his face. Some symbols are just too obvious, even for me. “They say he owned the Holy Grail.”
    “Didn’t do the silly bugger a lot of good in the long ran, did it?”
    “Good point.” I looked back at the dead Nazis, trying to summon up some sympathy, and failing. Given a chance, they would have done this to the whole world, and laughed while they did it. To hell with them. A thought struck me. “Men with guns did this, Suzie. Not angels.”
    Suzie nodded. “Hard to visualize an angel with an Uzi. What do we do now?”
    “We search the place thoroughly. Just in case whoever did this missed something. Something that might tell us where to go next. I’m a private detective, remember? Find me some nice juicy clues, so I can smile enigmatically over them.”

    It took us the best part of an hour, but eventually we found our clue. He was kneeling behind a piano at the far end of the hall, next to a half-open fire exit door. A white statue