The Magicians of Night

Chapter Eighteen

THE HOUSE IDENTIFIED BY intelligence by von Rath's Berlin headquarters stood isolated in the colorless autumn wasteland of empty fields, scrubby birch and pinewoods and nodding weed stems that stretched along the Spandau canal north and west of the city, a wasteland Berliners called the Jungfern Heide. Limping awkwardly down the long drive that connected it to the tramline of the Alt-Moabitstrasse, Captain Thomas Saltwood studied what could be seen of the building above its gray stone wall. The steep roof had shingles cut out in coy Victorian half circles like a fish's scales, a bit of rusted iron gingerbread along its ridge crest, and two rounded dormers that spoke of attics above the second floor. Or first floor, as the British would have it, Tom thought with a wry grin. In Barcelona he'd nearly gotten himself killed by climbing one flight of stairs too few to meet a local Communist leader in what ultimately turned out to be the wrong flat. He still remembered the disgusted lecture Hillyard had given him on the King's English, once the shooting was done.
As the long-delayed Intelligence reports had indicated, the nearest house - another middle-class Victorian villa - was boarded up and deserted, over a half mile away, and the isolation of the SS house was further emphasized by the wire fence enclosing nearly an acre of ground outside its already forbidding stone wall.
"But it beats hell out of that lodge in the forest they were in all summer," Tom murmured to himself, as he let himself through the unlocked, unguarded chain-link gate where the drive entered this outer perimeter. He said it in German. He had been speaking in German, even to himself, since he'd paddled ashore the night before last in Hamburg.
The villa wall was eight feet high, blocks of the same dreary gray granite from which most of Berlin's overpoweringly heavy public buildings were made. The wrought-iron gate had recently been backed by sheet steel; on either side of it, cut stumps and a litter of twigs, chips, and rotting berries marked where two beautiful old rowan trees had flourished. Blocked the field of fire from the gate, Tom thought, looking regretfully down at the raw, foot-wide stumps. Damn Nazis.
In a way he was a little surprised actually to be here. The confusion of an impending invasion that had followed Dunkirk had put off his errand; the chaos of German bombs hammering London - invariably pulping those East End neighborhoods whose inhabitants were only trying to make ends meet on two pounds a week, he added to himself - had put it off again. Hillyard had departed for a Commando base in Scotland, taking Tom with him, and though Tom had ultimately spent an energetic summer, he hadn't really expected to get any closer to the SS's tame magicians than Boulogne.
He scratched his unshaven jaw, checked his watch, and turned back to survey the line of telephone poles that ran from the villa back to the drive's junction with the main road. Acid-drip devices were accurate to within ten minutes or so. He was burdened with a heavy tool kit and a massive orthopedic boot that not only made him limp whether he remembered to or not but that provided - along with the patch over his left eye - a visible reason why a man of good health and military age was wearing no uniform more formidable than that of the telephone company. It had taken him at least that long to walk this far.
He rang the bell by the gate. "Telephone company," he said to the young Storm Trooper who appeared, speaking in the slangy Berlin dialect he'd picked up from old Stegler in the Wobblies. "We had half a dozen complaints this morning; we're tryin' to trace a fault in the line. You having trouble?"
"No," the young man said, regarding the orthopedic boot with unconcealed distaste and starting to shut the gate again.
Tom pulled out two cigarettes and offered one to the sentry, who hesitated, then pushed the heavy gate back. "'Preciate it if you'd check," Tom said, ignoring as best as he could the derision in the young man's eye. "We're short on petrol this month and it's a bitch of a hike."
"Do you good," the guard said coolly, taking a lungful of smoke. "It is better to strengthen feeble muscles than to pamper them."
Saltwood made himself laugh heartily. "I keep tellin' myself that." He grinned, thinking, I hope you draw guard duty tonight, creep.
But the guard, clearly mollified by this gesture of submissiveness, stepped back and opened the gate. Mentally thanking the encyclopedia salesman he'd once ridden the rails with, who'd taught him the value of agreeing with insults, Saltwood limped in, gazing around him incuriously at the house and outbuildings while the young man went into a small wooden gate lodge and picked up the telephone. By the way he slammed it down again Tom knew the acid drip he'd rigged in the main junction box had worked.
The Storm Trooper emerged from the lodge looking at Saltwood as if the crippled telephone repairman had been personally responsible for the nuisance - which was, in fact, the case - and said, "I'll take you in."
Saltwood shook his head sympathetically and stubbed his cigarette out against the granite of the gatepost, carefully stowing the butt behind one ear. "Bitched-up Jew wiring, that's what it is." He followed the young man across the yard.
From atop the telephone pole while installing the drip, Tom had gotten a fair look at the house already. In a way, he was glad of the summer's delays - it would be a hell of a lot easier to disappear into Berlin once the job was done than to escape the hue and cry in the wilds of the Prussian woods. He guessed this house at ten rooms exclusive of attics, completely surrounded by the wall. The old coach house and a servants' cottage had been converted to quarters for half a dozen guards, Deaths-Head SS, not Wehrmacht - not an army project, then. The shrubbery all around the inside of the wall was badly overgrown, an easy sneak-up. While the sentry knocked diffidently on the door of the downstairs study, Saltwood observed the catches on the windows, easy enough to trip with a knife blade.
"I hope for your sake the matter is critical, Trooper Weber," said a voice as soft as a thug's silk scarf. Turning, Saltwood saw in the study doorway the man who must be Captain von Rath.
Saltwood shifted his eyes away immediately, knowing he must not stare. But the man who stood framed in the umber gloom was only superficially recognizable as the one whose picture he had seen in London. The man in the picture he'd been shown in London - a picture taken in Prussia in the spring - had had the look of a man dying, burning up inside. This man...
For some reason, Saltwood, schooling his features into casual respect that had no trace of recognition as he looked back, was reminded more than anything else of a wealthy and well-cared-for woman in the fourth month of a pregnancy that pleases her. Von Rath had that same glow, that same sense of beauty fulfilled and radiant... that same very slight air of smugness. The gauntness had filled out without losing the shape of those splendid cheekbones, and even the man's hair seemed thicker, brighter, stronger despite its close military cut. Yet there was something else, something that the picture had entirely failed to convey, though Saltwood was damned if he could figure out what. Strong as a physical impact, he had a sense of evil, of wrongness - of darkness masquerading as triumphant light.
Oh, come on! he chided himself, disgusted. I thought you got over that good guys/bad guys stuff in Spain!
But when von Rath's frost-silver gaze touched him, he shivered and came at the major's beckoning with an unwillingness that went to the bone.
"Short in the wiring someplace," Tom explained, his ingratiating grin feeling like a badly made denture. "Buggered up half the lines around here. We need to check whether it was in a phone here, either one that's still in use or an outlet that was taken out, see." Von Rath made no response, and Tom felt the sweat start under his cheap billed cap.
He had talked strike in mines and on factory floors, never knowing which of those scared and angry men were the management bulls, but he'd never in his life had this sense of irrational terror of another man. As he spoke, he noticed small details: the almost metallic quality of the pale gaze; the short saber scar on the cheek; and the white slimness of the hands. Of course with a "von" hanging off the front of his name, he'd never done a day's manual work in his life. Like Marvello the Magnificent and every other carney magician Tom had ever met, von Rath wore hoodoo amulets around his neck - twenty or more circles made of jewels and glass and what looked like animal bone on one necklace, and on another a single uneven ring of woven silver, crystal, and iron. This medicine-show fooferaw should have been funny, like Hitler wearing lederhosen, but it wasn't. Tom couldn't tell why.
"There is a telephone in my study," von Rath said at last, "and another upstairs in my room. A third is in the guards' lodge out back. Those are all that have ever been in this house. Take him around, Weber, and see that I am not disturbed again."
While Saltwood opened up the bottom of the study telephone and poked around inside, von Rath returned to his bulbous Beidermeyer desk and his book, but Tom was nerve-wrackingly conscious of the man's presence in the room. Get a hold of yourself, he thought irritably, trying not to run out of the room when he was done; but by the gleam of sweat on Trooper Weber's upper lip when that young man met him in the hall again, he saw that von Rath had that effect on others, as well.
And why not? he thought, disgusted with himself as he followed Weber upstairs. He looks like a dangerous hombre to cross, even if he does wear Woolworth's Finest strung around his neck. HE's the one I ought to kill.
But ten years of bar fights, of tangles with management stooges on picket lines and occasional pop-skulled crazies in hobo jungles made him think uneasily, I'd sure hate to try.
"Chilly bugger," he volunteered, pulling apart the phone in von Rath's Spartan bedroom and giving it, and the skirting boards, a cursory once-over. Trooper Weber, his arrogance still cowed by the encounter with von Rath, nodded. Von Rath's chamber was by no means the original master bedroom of the house - either Sligo had that one or they were using it as a workroom. "Any chance of getting a quick look at the other rooms in case there's a dead lead? It'll take just a glance around the skirting and save me a trip back here if we still can't find the short. That way we won't have to disturb His Nibs again."
Weber hesitated, then nodded, and gave Tom a tour of three other bedrooms on the upper floor, during which Tom was able to orient himself mentally and establish entries and possible escape routes. Only at the far end of the passage, where the two major bedrooms stood opposite one another, did Weber demur. "It is forbidden to go into either of those."
"What's in there? Secret plans?" The locks on both were new.
Trooper Weber gave him a fishy stare. "There is nothing in there." He was a lousy liar.
Tom shrugged. "No old phone leads? It'd be a wire about so long sticking out of the skirting..."
"There is nothing like that."
"Thank Christ for that." He turned and limped back down the hall, deliberately slowing his pace to irritate his guard, who had to keep stride with him. To the right of the stairs as he emerged on the ground floor was a sliding door of polished mahogany, also recently decorated with a brand-new lock, but as he limped over to investigate, the door was shoved open from within and a young man poked his head out.
"Who are you? What do you want? What is this man doing here, Trooper?" The boy was short, fat, and coked stupid - past him Tom had an impression of black tapestries and some sort of altar, candles, chalked circles on the bare floorboards, and a stink like a San Francisco joss house.
Trooper Weber saluted smartly. "A man from the Fernsprechamt, Herr Twisselpeck. He wants to know if there was at any time a telephone in that room that might be causing a short in the lines in the neighborhood."
Herr Twisselpeck - the boy couldn't have been over eighteen - swiveled weak tea-colored eyes up to Saltwood; beneath thick glasses and enough dope to raise the dead, Tom could see the jealousy in them at his height and the breadth of his shoulders. "So they're hiring c-cripples these days, are they?" he demanded nastily. "No, there isn't a telephone in here. There never was a telephone in that room. You should know we'd never have ch-chosen it for the temple, the Holy Place of Power, if there had been any kind of electrical wiring in its walls." He jerked back into the darkness of the temple and tried to slam the doors - the heavy, sliding mahogany slipped out of his jittering hand on the first try and he heaved and fussed at it for a moment to coax it closed. A moment later the lock clicked
Tom shook his head. "Takes all kinds."
As he was limping after his escort toward the guards' station - once the old carriage house - and taking more accurate note of the wilderness of overgrown shrubbery that should conceal very nicely his appearance over the wall, he espied an old man, clothed in nothing but a loincloth despite the autumn chill of the day, standing rigidly on a little terrace at one corner of the house, his left arm held to his side, his right crooked out before him, elbow bent so that his fingers pointed back at his abdomen, right knee bent up to rest his foot on his left knee, for all the world as if he endeavored to mold his body into an approximation of the letter B. As they passed the old man began to yodel, a long, undulating, full-throated howl in which the drawn-out sounds "Booo-o-o-o-e-r-r-r-c-cccccc..." could be barely distinguished.
Tom had seen weirder things in California.
He came back later that night.
He'd repaired the junction box, lest the inconvenience drive von Rath to contact the real Fernsprechamt. It was an easy matter to disconnect the entire box again at two A.M. With luck no one would know of Sligo's death until morning, but if there was a slip-up and the alarm was raised, they would be that much later getting the dogs after him. With even a few hours' start he'd be well on his way back to Hamburg.
He approached the house from behind, sliding under the wire and crawling through the scrubby sedges of the enclosed field, his black SS uniform hidden under a ragged gray blanket. The field, unlike much of the wasteland of the Jungfern Heide, had been recently mowed; in places, the bare ground showed signs of fire. The moon was a few days past full, bright as a beacon in an almost cloudless midheaven. A bomber's moon, they were already calling such conditions in London.
At Commando headquarters in Lochailort they'd given him a collapsible ladder, a lightweight steel alpinstock with rungs folded into it on either side. The wall was higher than the ladder's six-foot length, but not by more than a yard. He'd picked his spot carefully that afternoon, where the bulk of the old coach house would screen him from the sentry who would in all probability be stationed by the kitchen door. Once he was over, his uniform would almost guarantee anonymity - he'd thankfully disposed of the eyepatch, boot, and four-day beard that had constituted his disguise - and he made the jump down, taking the stock with him and stowing it out of sight in the bushes, without a sound.
The house was dark. There was a tiny chink of light around a blackout curtain in the front hall, where a guard would probably be dozing; another guard stood by the back door. Like a specter Saltwood glided through the dark laurels, forced open a dining-room window, and stood listening for a moment to the silence of the house. A chair creaked in the front hall. Looking through the dining-room door, he saw a Storm Trooper sitting in a hard-backed chair beside a lamp in the front hall, reading a lurid-covered paperback novel and moving his lips slightly with the effort. Tom slipped the garrote from his pocket, disposed of the man without trouble, took his keys, and manhandled the limp body into the bottom cabinet of a built-in china hutch where nobody was likely to look. Folding the wire garrote back around its wooden handles, he stepped quickly over to the "temple" doors and, with his pocket flashlight shielded behind his hand, had a quick look around to make sure it was no more than it seemed.
It wasn't. A black-draped inner sanctum straight out of the Benevolent Protective Association of the Rhinoceros Lodge, a Rosicrucian's lobster-supper dream complete with a closetful of white, black, and scarlet robes and a louring stench of old blood and charred meat that even the whorehouse incense couldn't conceal. He wondered what they'd sacrificed. Jemal Nightshade, a slow-spoken Negro who'd worked beside him in the West Virginia mines, had confessed one night over a couple of drinks to offering chickens to the loa back in Port au Prince - a goat, if the family could afford it.
Did they really believe this stuff?
Saltwood remembered those bone amulets and shriveled little skin bags hanging around von Rath's neck, and shivered unaccountably. Evidently twelve years of being force-fed the opium of the masses in Lutheran Sunday school hadn't been completely eradicated by the big doses of Voltaire, Marx, and Hobbes he'd had since, he thought, hugging the wall as he climbed the stairs to keep his weight from creaking the risers. The lab, at a guess, would be in one of those two locked bedrooms upstairs, or in one of the attics...
In the darkness, the sense of the infernal in the place was stronger, revolting him as none of Jemal Nightshade's talk of veves and legba ever had. When it came right down to it, Nightshade's voodoo had never struck him as being that different from old Tommy Wu's ginseng Buddhism or the sight of those old Spanish women in Saragosa, crawling over cobblestones with bleeding knees to kiss a pillar in a church. Come on! he told himself. All this is just to make people think they're crazy... And anyway, let's not talk about evil after you've just added that Storm Trooper - not to mention that Merced County "special deputy" the orange growers hired to bash the migrants - to your body count in Spain.
You're here to do a job.
A wavery thread of candlelight marked the bottom of one of the locked upstairs doors; the other room was dark. Tom entered that one first, gingerly trying key after key in hair-prickling silence, then stepping cautiously inside and flashing the light quickly around. It was a laboratory, all right - an absurd wizards-kitchen straight out of L. Frank Baum, stocked with everything from mandrake roots (in a wooden box labeled with Teutonic thoroughness) to a collection of revolting mummy fragments, undoubtedly looted from every museum from Paris to Warsaw. There was not a shred of wire, not a radio tube, not a soldering iron to be seen, even in the drawers and cabinets.
Saltwood smiled inwardly. What a collection! Old Marvello would swap his firstborn child for a crystal ball that size!
That means the real lab must be across the hall, or in one of the attics upstairs. But the lab itself was of only secondary importance.
He looked back at the thread of light under the door. Not strong enough for a working light...
A bedroom, then. And he'd seen von Rath and Twisselpeck, and the old geezer on the terrace that afternoon fit the description Mayfair had given him of the third member of this particular cell of the Occult Bureau, Jacobus Gall...
At a guess, this room would be Sligo's.
Of the three new keys on the ring, he'd already eliminated one as belonging to the lab door; the first of the remaining two he tried fitted. He had a story ready that his uniform would have backed up; but when he stepped silently through the door, he found he didn't need it. The man sitting perched on a laboratory stool at the table had his back to the door, and was far too absorbed in what he was doing to look around or even, evidently, notice that someone had entered. Even in the dim glow of a single candle, which was all the illumination the room could boast, Saltwood recognized him: Professor Rhion Sligo, self-styled wizard and pet mad scientist of the SS, a broad-shouldered bearded little man clothed in a hand-me-down Wehrmacht sweatshirt and patched fatigue pants, bent over a weird construction of braided metal wires, small glass spheres, and the biggest hunk of rock crystal Saltwood had ever seen.
Both Sligo's chubby hands rested on the twisted wire base of the thing - crude and lumpy iron wound around with something that looked like gold but was probably brass. His head was bowed, his eyes shut and his breathing slow, as if in sleep or deep meditation, Saltwood took the garrote from his pocket and silently unwound it, wrapping the handles tight in his hands.
He really does believe it...
His face still turned away from Saltwood, the Professor straightened up a little on his backless stool and raised his head, but the candlelight showed his open eyes focused inward, devoid of any awareness of his surroundings. It seemed to Tom, standing behind him, that a faint secondary glow seemed to be coming from the crystalline gizmo on the table, shining faint bluish white, like distant stars, in the lenses of Sligo's glasses.
Sligo stretched out one hand, keeping the other on the gizmo's base.
It has to be a reflection. An optical illusion... But it seemed to Tom that in Sligo's cupped hand a seed of blue-white light blossomed, cold St. Elmo's Fire that threw a ghostly radiance on every line and ridge of his fingers without appearing to burn the flesh. But if it's a reflection of the candle flame, shouldn't it be orange?
Tom stepped nearer. Sligo stretched out his hand, and the ball of light drifted upward like an ascending balloon. He raised his head to follow it with his eyes. Fascinated as Saltwood was by the trick, the trained assassin in him said Now.
Tom stepped soundlessly forward and crossed his arms; Sligo never knew what hit him until the garrote pulled tight. With the dancer's grace that an Italian thug had taught them all at Lochailort, Tom turned his body, hooked his shoulder under the taut wires and dragged the little man off his stool and up onto his back. He felt the futile twist of Sligo's body, the slapping, desperate grope of his hands as he tried franticly to find something to grab or strike. But in this position there was nothing, no purchase possible, no way to make contact with anything but the strangler's back and sides. Thirty, forty seconds at most...
But with a final convulsion, Professor Sligo hooked one foot in the stool on which he'd been sitting and kicked it as hard as he could against the wall. In the dead silence of the night it made a noise like the house falling down, and von Rath's room, Saltwood knew, was immediately next door.
Cursing, he threw Sligo's limp body to the floor and whipped out the dagger that was part of the SS uniform, jerked his victim's head back by the hair, and slashed at the exposed throat. For one split second he found himself looking into Sligo's wide, terrified blue eyes...
And the next instant light exploded, blinding as the glare of a welder's torch, inches in front of his nose. Taken totally by surprise, Tom flinched back from it and felt the body pinned beneath him twist free. Blinded by the aftermath of the glare, he made one flailing cut at where he thought Sligo would be as he tried to get to his feet, and, a split second too late, thought, That stool...
Somewhere behind him Tom heard the sobbing gasp of Sligo's breath - then the lab stool connected full force with his head and shoulders.
Saltwood couldn't have been unconscious for more than a few seconds. Electric light flooded the room as he came to; yells, curses drifted into his awareness, and a black ring of shapes swimming like sharks through his returning vision. He curled instinctively as a boot crashed into his belly; a second one exploded against the back of his head...
And then silence.
Swamped in pain and half stunned, still he knew what that silence meant.
"Stand up," said the voice like the whisper of silk over the point of a knife.
It wasn't easy to do so without retching. Groping at the table for support, Saltwood noticed the lumpy gizmo of iron and crystal was gone. Professor Sligo stood next to the door, green with shock except for the livid red bruise of the garrote across his throat.
"Lay him on the bed," von Rath instructed quietly, not moving from the doorway where he stood. "Get him brandy." Over the dark-red silk of his dressing gown, the double chain of amulets gleamed faintly, the small circles of bone clinking against one another and against the twisted ring of silver and iron. His face was calm, impersonal, but Saltwood knew that with him in charge of it, whatever would happen next was going to be bad.
"Who sent you?"
"He's one of ours!" Baldur Twisselpeck gasped, stumbling belatedly through the door and shoving his smudged glasses onto his face as one of the half-dozen Storm Troopers pulled the forged SS i.d. from Saltwood's pocket.
"Don't be stupider than you are." Von Rath barely glanced at the young man. "Papers can be faked - as can a patched eye, a limp, and a telephone repair kit."
"You mean that was him today?" Baldur gaped, blinking. He was shouldered out of the doorway by Jacobus Gall, barefooted and, like von Rath, evidently naked under his dressing gown, and like von Rath also seemingly indifferent to cold. Gall went to where Sligo lay, eyes shut now under a tangle of hair that was almost black against his waxy skin, on the bed that occupied most of the narrow room's western wall. Looking around him, Saltwood saw in the better light that the room was, in fact, Sligo's bedroom. Its windows were boarded up; the door had no handle on the inside.
Tom realized that Sligo was a prisoner, and not a free agent as Mayfair had believed.
"He should have a doctor," Gall stated, examining the bruises left by the garrote. "If he is to assist in the demonstration Monday..."
"The phones are dead again, Captain," an SS Sergeant reported, entering from the lights of the hall. "We could send Reinholt to the Lebensborn in the Grunewald - that's the nearest doctor - and from there he could phone the Gestapo..."
"I expect you put the telephone out again before entering this house." Von Rath's ice-gray eyes returned to Saltwood's face. "Didn't you?"
Saltwood said nothing.
Without looking back at them, von Rath added, "As for the Gestapo, I think not." Head tilted a little to one side, he continued to study Saltwood with disquietingly impersonal interest. "He is of a higher type, isn't he, than the Jew and Slavic swine they've been sending us from the camps?" he went on softly. "A finer body, certainly, and therefore a stronger and fitter mind."
Saltwood felt his stomach curl with dread. Oh, Christ...
"Shameful, isn't it?" Baldur Twisselpeck said sententiously, crowding back to van Rath's side. "The orphans of the race, betraying the heritage of their Fatherland to breed with the corrupt apemen of Jewish-dominated countries like - "
"Oh, I think not," von Rath purred, with a dreaminess in his level voice that was almost pleasure, though his eyes remained chill, almost blank, as if whatever dwelled inside were wholly occupied with itself and itself alone. "If that is the case - if his blood is corrupt - he is certainly a throwback to the original root race, and that's all we need. It is all that the best of the British will be. Gall, be sure to take his cranial index and other physical data tomorrow. Himmler will want to see them." He signed with his finger to the sergeant.
Two Storm Troopers closed in on Tom from either side, handcuffing his wrists behind him and shoving him before them out of the room. Behind him, he heard von Rath say, "Take him to the house on Teglerstrasse for tonight and tomorrow. We'll need him there for the demonstration in any case. See that he comes to no harm."
Looking back over his shoulder, Saltwood saw von Rath step through the door of the bedroom, switching off the lights so that only the candle's feeble gleam illuminated the boarded-up chamber. Taking a key from his dressing-gown pocket, he locked Sligo in. As Saltwood's guards pushed him down the stair, the murmur of von Rath's voice drifted behind him, with Gall's crisp Viennese tones and Baldur's adolescent adenoidal whine.
"Should we send for a doctor?"
"I don't think it will be necessary. I've mastered all he can teach me."
"Then after the demonstration, Himmler can have him? I'm sure Himmler's right - I'm sure there's some kind of physical difference that gives him his powers. Mengele should be able to make something of it..."
"Nonsense! Proper purification of the body, proper nutrition, and mental attitude is all that is needed for the working of magic."
"Scarcely," von Rath purred. "Nevertheless, I don't think we need share with Herr Himmler what can be learned from - ah - experimentation. And after Monday's demonstration we may not need to deal with Himmler again. For you see, providence has been kind. We needed a higher type of subject for our final demonstration, the type of trained warrior with whom our invading forces will actually have to contend. And now we have him."