Dr. Felsching always picked up his mail very early in the morning.

A day off work today, his office closed for his birthday weekend. He walked down the sidewalk as the neighborhood’s muezzin began the call for the Fajr prayer. That same muezzin would be stopping by Felsching’s office on Monday to bring his daughter in for another checkup on her asthma. Felsching would make sure he had a piece of his birthday cake saved just for the occasion.

The feeble dawn light illuminated his bent figure, clad in a simple white button-down shirt with black slacks and loafers. He carried a book of poetry under his left arm, ready to be consumed along with his breakfast when he arrived as the first customer at his favorite local café, a place that doubled perfectly as his favorite reading spot in all of Damascus. His right hand gripped a walking stick. Two decades before, in 1968, he had been shot in a mugging attempt. While he could still practice medicine, he walked with a limp, and he had become more susceptible to various minor illnesses.

The police had believed it to be a mugging. One carried out by an unknown assailant. The government suspected differently. Felsching knew.

Israel. That uncrushable little nation to the south. Their scars and pain burned as fuel to build a country in which they could raise all their following generations in safety. A place where now, forty years after their foundation, they could rest in greater assurance of their own success than they ever could have in the ghettoes of Europe. For all that, for all of any lickspittle thing in the world, the land of those people whose hatred of which he could boil down to four letters. The land of the Jude.

Before he had been Michel Felsching, his birth certificate, his doctoral thesis, his service records, all bore the name Gerd Thulke. His highest rank had been Sturmbannführer, a major in the SS. No finer expert on human respiration had walked their ranks. He had been well-known at Belzec, Treblinka, and Birkenau. Places where he worked tirelessly to ensure the most efficient breathing could occur.

A reporter had once managed to track him down, and, in a moment of pride, he had given the journalist a brief interview over the telephone. When asked about any regret or guilt he felt, the words had come quickly and simply:

“I regret that we lost the war before we could finish them all. The Jews rejected the Christ, they were agents of the Devil and human garbage. There is no guilt to be had over sweeping up trash.”

Arriving at the post office, both the agent from the General Security Directorate and the usual postal clerk greeted him, bringing him inside and turning on the lights. The agent had been assigned to Thulke ever since he had been shot. The Ba’athist regime liked to do its part to protect its friends.

Excusing himself for a moment, the agent walked to the nearby bathroom while the clerk brought out Thulke’s mail. A few envelopes, some in Arabic, others German. The standout in the group was a parcel about the size of a humidor. The box had postmarks from Paraguay, with a return address from a very familiar and friendly pseudonym. In that moment, early morning and with auspicious times ahead, Thulke forgot certain important things. Pseudonyms could become known by the artful. Postmarks could be forged by the trained and equipped. The agent should always examine such things himself.

With a thin smile, Thulke sliced open the cardboard and pulled open the top of the box sent to him by those who could never forget.

Roar of light. The world snap spinning.

Thulke sprawled on the stone floor, his failing brain only caught up enough to turn both his own scream and the cries of those around him into a thickly ringing drone. The pouring wreck of his right hand covered in splinters of enamel and cartilage as he gripped his face, the fingers of his left hand trying to squeeze out the final agony blazing in his head. His palm covering the fresh ocular void slipping away on a flow of crimson tears.