ALLAN MARTIN

An iScot Short Story

Part I

THE TERMINAL at Tempelhof Airport in Berlin is the largest extant building from the Fascist era in Europe. It was designed in the shape, seen from above, of an eagle in flight. But the huge building, incorporating aircraft hangars as well as passenger and freight terminal facilities, was still uncompleted by 1939 and was used during the war as an aircraft assembly plant. After the war, Tempelhof became West Berlin’s airport, famously used during the Berlin Airlift from June 1948 until September 1949, and finally closed in 2008. The runway areas are used as a recreation space for Berliners, and the city authorities are keen to find uses for the many chambers of the terminal.

Thus, halfway along a bland and dimly lit corridor was found a door, behind which lay an office, a meeting room, a small kitchen and a toilet. The only windows were at the far end of the meeting room, which looked over the wide green space where citizens walked, jogged, played football, and passed the time of day. On the door, as on every other door on the corridor, was a blue plastic plate about the size of a postcard, on which was etched in white the name of the company or organisation whose space lay behind the door. In this case, the plate read simply, ‘The Cerialis Foundation,’ with, below, in German, ‘Cerialis Stiftung.’

But the name did not refer to the Roman cognomen Cerialis, meaning ‘of Ceres,’ nor to its most celebrated holder Quintus Petillius Cerialis Caesius Rufus, successful general and one-time governor of the province of Britannia. It was simply a play on words, for behind the off-white walls of the corridor and the grey door with the blue plaque lay the headquarters of the League of Ethical Assassins.

The attempts on Hitler had been followed by widespread persecution of innocent groups who were blamed for the outrages

The League, as we shall call it from now on, has a long history, being founded not long after the failed revolutions of 1848 by a small group of people who felt that extremes of evil should be met by equally extreme solutions. They spent the next twenty years harmlessly debating the nature of evil, until, in 1868, an unknown assassin killed an arms manufacturer who had made a huge fortune supplying both sides in the American Civil War and boasted of it as evidence of the value of capitalism as a stimulant of world progress. The assassin applied to join the League, and the period of philosophising was over.

Actions replaced words. Much discussion preceded each action, and much preparation followed each decision, so that the deaths of industrialists, politicians, generals and others were never solved. In many cases they were put down to accidents or natural causes. The League were never sure if their actions made any difference to the world. They realised that capitalism, autocracy, elitism and cruelty could not be erased overnight, or changed by the erasure of particular individuals, but believed that, on balance, if one had the capacity to make some small change, one should make the effort.

Occasionally, word got out about the League’s activities. The author Edgar Wallace caught a whisper and promised to say nothing. But financial pressures led him to publish his successful novel The Four Just Men, presenting a rather simplified version of the League. Despite being warned by the League not to do it, Wallace published not one but two sequels. Finally, in 1933, while in the US working on the script of the epic monster movie King Kong, he collapsed and died. The doctors concluded he had suffered from undiagnosed diabetes. And that is what the world thought.