Anyway, I couldn't even vote at the time, since I was overseas for a month of Sundays they called The Great War. Didn't see anything too great about it at the time, mind. Just a lot of men laying down the knife and fork for nothing. My job, and a fitting one at that, was to pick up the dead in my lorry and give them an earth bath somewhere the lead weren't falling like raindrops.
After the war, I decided to go live on the Spanish Riviera. Beautiful country, that. I can still remember the last time I saw the sun setting over the hills beyond the casa where I lived. There was even a dame there - there's always a dame, isn't there? She was keen on me, but when the Nationalists started making noise, she signed up and got a bullet for her trouble.
By that time I had already beat it over Italy way. This Mussolini guy was in power - I got word that he was just as bad as Franco was in Spain, and I keep my head down to hope it'll all blow over.
Fast forward to 1936. I'm approached by some Rusty Guts calling himself Mycroft. He says he's part of something called D section of the British Secret Intelligence Service, and he needs my help for God and Country. I was already on a fake German passport in Italy, and he found me, so I figured why not.
I take the next train to Jolly Olde Deutcheland, and spend my war sitting in cafes drinking stale coffee with German SS officers. Occasionally I was called upon to kill some of these guys, but most times I just had to tell the boss man what they were up to.
Once, when I was following a group of especially sinister blackshirts, I saw a group of local resistance fighters leap out of the bushes with foot-long, razor-sharp claws and eyes like some sort of fever dream - all skin and claws and teeth. They almost killed me, too, but something stopped them. Maybe it was my panicked screaming in French that I was their ally.
I fled that bloodbath, and never told anyone until today. Not because I was worried people would think I was crazy, but I was stone sober: I remember thinking that if we had a few more Frenchies like that, we wouldn't need the army.
Like I said, I spent my war all going down by the ground. I would find out where important people were trying to hugger down, pass the word along, and a few days later read in the newspaper how they caught the monkey with the long tail.
So I'm eating in France in 1955, and a real saucebox of a bird walks up, puts herself down right in front of me, and tells me a long-winded story about some nazi still dead set on hunting down herself and her family. At first I wanted to tell her to scram, that's not what I do around here, but something about her eyes made me stop. They were bright blue. On top of that, I thought it was real funny how she didn't look Jewish, Greek, Gypsy, or anything else the nazis cared about.
Besides, I ask her, what sort of crab cake keeps up the business of Jew-hunting after big A.H. himself bit the bullet? She gives me some fimble-famble about another bunch who he already wiped out in 1954. Funny how that one didn't make the papers.
By this point I'm so taken with the ridiculous story that I gotta find out how it ends. I take the case.
I found out quick. He wasn't even trying to hide, just walking around in broad daylight like no cares in the world. This guy winds up dead real fast, and the same girl as before finds me again, and floors me with what she says next: that I should join her happy little family. She tells me it's either this or go out of print myself.
I still remember dying that night in July.
I still remember my blood draining out into this weird chalice thing, and one of her "brothers" walking over and giving me a transfusion of his own.
Needless to say, I quit the Secret Intelligence Service when I could no longer answer the phone during the day. Besides, it turned out there was quite a market for gumshoes like me at night anyway.
I've been all over since then, from France in the 50s and 60s, to New York during the long night of short knives called the 1970s, and then Gloryhill in 1995. Been here in the city on the hill since then. And sometimes, if the wind is just right, you don't smell the trash they let pile up in the streets.
An epic beginning :D But, who is your Watson?
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