My thanks to the patient members of this
list, and your kind assistance in my quest for
this patron's remembered book. Nothing I've come
up with so far, nor anything the patron has seen
on Uchronia.com, is it. I just got a lengthy
description of the book from the patron, and I'm
going to paste it below, just to have covered all
my bases. What follows is very long (funny how
people remember every d--m thing about a book but
not its title or author), so please cut it out of
any answering posts. Thanks for your indulgence,
I'm also going to post this on some alternative
history message boards...
David Wright
Seattle Public Library
"...not that's not it - I looked through the
entire list (below) and the only three titles
that sounded even vaguely famliar were Ben Bova's
Triumph, Arthur Rhodes' The Last Reich, and
Daniel Quinn's After Dachau. This wasn't a short
story, but definitely a novel. It wasn't by
Harry Turtledove, Brad Lineweaver, Dean Koontz,
or Philip K. Dick. Both the novel and the title
were written in American English. The setting
for the entire novel was in the United States,
which had become a semi-independent satrapy of
the Reich. The central character is a cop, a
Joe-Friday-sans-conscience-sans-morality, who,
along with his partner, a younger man, has been
assigned to investigate a particularly strange
murder. As I remember, the dates involved were
in the mid-1960s. America's culture had become
completely Nazified. The novel opens with a
scene in which the cop is asking a woman if he
can question her two sons concerning the incident
he's investigating -- apparently they witnessed
something pertinent to it. She says yes, and
tells them to go into the back yard, where the
boys are playing. When he goes out back, he
finds the two boys, who have nailed the paws of
their pet hamster (guinea-pig?) to a board. As
he walks up to them, they are hammering a final
nail into the hamster's belly. When the boys try
demanding money from their mother to buy another
hamster or other small creature so they can
torture it to death, she exhibits only annoyance
of the "honestly, do you think I'm made of
money?" variety, and tells them no. The cop asks
if he can take the boys downtown to the
station-house to question them; it's fine with
her. So off they go in the cop-car, the cop's
partner driving. The boys try demanding money
from the cop, who simply turns around in his seat
and belts them one. After that, though sullen
and unhappy, they cooperate, telling him what
little they can of the matter.
     Later on, the cop and his partner pay a
visit to a young gay man whose lover has been
murdered, trying to get information on the matter
from him. He is so distraught, however, that
they don't get anything useful. At that point,
the author goes into great detail concerning the
bedroom in which the gay man is talking to the
cops; Nazi banners and Hitler Youth posters are
everywhere, clearly fetish items. It's an almost
sympathetic portrait -- except that the Nazi
regalia is extremely off-putting.
     That evening (or maybe the day after) the
cop and his partner go to a night-club, trying to
track down a witness. The entertainment being
presented in the club at the time consists of a
man literally crucifying a blond, naked Slavic
woman, nailing her to a wooden cross right there
on stage. Her tongue has been torn out, and she
can only make lugubrious gurgling noises.
     And so it goes. At another point in the
novel, the cop goes to a local whorehouse run by
a woman whose name is, I think, Lottie or
something of the sort. The "prostitutes" there
are all young girls, many of them six or seven,
kept there against their will, forced to service
the clients, generally men, who pay (the madame,
of course) to have sex with the little girls.
Some of the clients are murderous sadists; the
madame doesn't give a damn, it's all the same to
her as long as she maximizes the profit out of
the girls before they're too old to appeal to the
perverts, or die as a result of the way they're
treated. It's all perfectly legal. The cop
doesn't seem to be particularly outraged over the
setup, but it is said at one point that the
madame reminded him of a snake -- clearly he was
repelled by her. At any rate, he wants to talk
to a little girl there who had been visited by a
man who only wanted to talk to her. Eventually
the cop and that man cross paths, and that's when
the cop learns that the man is from a parallel
world, our world, a world in which the Nazis were
defeated.
     Other things I remember are something about
a film of or story about a senile, deteriorated
Hitler screaming that he was betrayed, presumably
by his flunkies, who took over when Hitler
started going downhill; that at the end of the
novel, the world was on the verge of all-out
nuclear war between the Reich and the Empire of
Japan, because the latter was refusing to turn
over to the Reich a last, pitifully small group
of Christians who had taken refuge there; and
the fact that every Jew, Black-American, and
other "non-Aryan" in the US had been
systematically hunted down and murdered when the
US was defeated. There was no resistance any
more, though at one point the cop talks to a top
American Army officer who mentions something
about "Pattonites," members of the American
Resistance who were slaughtered right along with
the "non-Aryans."
     There was even a scene in which a beggar,
probably a war veteran who'd lost a limb or
something, acosts the cop as the cop is walking
along a street in whatever city it is that serves
as the book's setting (New York? I can't
remember), and pleas for alms "for Wodin's sake."
 When the cop hands him some coins, he thanks the
cop and says something like "may Wodin bless ye."
     If you want any more information, I'll be
happy to give what I can. Thanks for going to
all this trouble for me. :-)"

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