The Magicians of Night

Chapter Twenty-Two

WHEW, SALTWOOD THOUGHT, as he dropped the truck into gear again and jerked into motion, for a minute there he had me worried.
In the empty streets - the panic-stricken populace not yet having acquired the casual attitude the Madrilenos had eventually achieved about bombing not in their immediate neighborhood - and away from the danger of any but stray drops, Saltwood was able to make good speed. They left the sea of crowded gray monoliths of the working-class districts gradually behind them, the heavy developments giving place first to two-story shops and shabby, semidetached houses, then to trees, free-standing Biergartens, petty-bourgeoisie villas, and open fields. Here an occasional car passed them, driving fast without headlights in the slow-gathering twilight; an occasional family could be seen, crowding near a garden wall, staring southwestward toward the burning center of Berlin with horrified eyes. Get used to it, Tom thought savagely, remembering the motionless red-blanketed lumps carried away by the Air Raid Wardens from collapsed piles of London tenements, the overcrowded school buildings filled with homeless people and the stench of fear and excrement, and the middle-aged men and women picking through the piles of smoking brick for something salvageable from the only homes they'd ever known. It's going to be bad, Hillyard had said, back in the pub before this had ever started, little knowing how bad it would get. Here's a little greeting from your brothers and sisters in London.
It was clear the guards of 723 Teglerstrasse weren't going to be crouched conveniently in the cellar.
"When they bring me here they hoot one long, two short," Rhion said quietly, as the dented and mud-covered truck pulled up before the iron-sheeted gate. He'd replaced the Spiracle on von Rath's magic staff and was again clutching it like a child hanging on to a favorite toy.
"Be ready," Saltwood muttered, hooting out the code. He slipped the truck into first again and prepared himself for a frenzy of strong arm. "With luck they won't see that half those dents are bullet holes till it's too late."
Only one Storm Trooper opened the gate. He stepped back to let the truck pull in, then stepped casually close, his Schmeisser dangling at his back.
Saltwood slammed the door open into the man's face, threw himself out before the guard had regained either his balance or his wits, pulled the Schmeisser from him with one hand, and slugged him hard and clean across the chin with the other. The Storm Trooper staggered and Saltwood shot him with a fast burst of shells, ripped the sidearm from the bloody corpse's holster as Rhion was springing down from the cab on the other side. He grabbed the Professor's arm and the two of them pelted up the gravel drive at a weaving run.
Bullets spattered from the open door. Saltwood returned fire and the guard there fell out forward, sprawling at the top of the steps with blood trickling down the worn marble in the dove-gray evening light. Without letting go of his staff, Rhion bent and pulled the man's weapons free: automatic, submachine gun, and the silver-mounted dagger of the SS. "Search him," Saltwood yelled, ducking into the door and covering the downstairs hall. "Get his identity papers, any money you can..."
A head appeared around a door and Saltwood fired at it with the automatic, ducked back at a returning shot and flung himself down with a long, low roll to catch the guard as he leaned around the door for a second try. Weaving from side to side, Rhion darted into the shadows of the hall and stopped to relieve Saltwood's newest victim of his weapons, as well.
"You ever fired one of those things?"
The Professor shook his head as he followed Saltwood up the stairs at a run.
"Stand guard here. Tuck it into your arm like this, arm tight to the body, pull the trigger - it'll fire a burst as long as you hold the trigger down. Aim low. The kick'll pull the gun up. And put down that goddam stick."
Rhion's hand tightened stubbornly around the smooth wood as Tom yanked on it, his eyes suddenly blazing. There was no time to argue so Tom let the matter drop, muttering, "Crazy bastard..." to himself as he dashed up the attic stairs to the room where he himself had been kept.
The doors up there were bolted, not locked with keys. He slammed the bolts back and threw the door open; only a residual burst of caution, like a sixth sense, stopped him on the threshold when he saw the room empty. The next second a chair swooshed down hard enough to have broken his shoulder - Sara had been hiding next to the door.
"Christ almighty..."
She saw who it was - she already had the chair coming up for another swipe - and her pointed pale face burst into a smile that stopped Saltwood dead in his tracks, as if he'd seen a striking snake unfurl butterfly wings. "Tom!" And, a second later, the child-nymph turned lynx again. "There's five, six guards in the house... I heard shooting..."
On the other side of a narrow hall was another locked door. Throwing it open, he saw a mirror image of the room where he'd been kept two nights and a day - like a cheap hotel with cot, chair, a few books and magazines, and a copy of Mein Kampf instead of a Gideon Society Bible. For a moment he saw no one. Then Sara yelled "Papa!" and a tall, gangly, bearded old man emerged from crouching behind the door of the tiny washroom.
"So is this the cavalry or the Indians?" he demanded in German with a thick Yiddish accent, cocking one wise dark eye at Saltwood.
"Cavalry," Sara said briefly, already helping herself to the spare pistol and SS dagger Saltwood had stuck through his belt. "There's a shed out back, I didn't hear them take out the staff car today."
A shot rang out somewhere below as they were racing down the attic stairs. Rhion was flattened behind the corner at the top of the next flight, the Schmeisser in one hand and his magic wand tucked awkwardly under his arm. Keeping his grip on the staff, he stepped quickly around the corner and let fly a burst from the submachine gun that knocked him staggering and ripped holes in every direction in the wall panels and ceiling before the gun juddered itself completely out of his hands.
Sara scooped it from the floor with a blistering oath in Polish and fired down the stairwell, ducked a returning burst, then fired again, her grip steady as if on a range. There was the sound of something falling at the bottom, then silence and the stench of cordite. She started to move, and Rhion shook his head violently, waving her back. Distantly, over the long, continuous ululation of the air-raid sirens, another siren could be heard, the grating two-note seesaw of the police.
Rhion made a gesture with his fingers.
There was a clattering below and Saltwood saw, past Sara's shoulder and down the stairs, a Storm Trooper leap out of hiding behind a door in the hall, spinning to point his gun away from them, toward the front door, as if startled by something there. Sara fired. The man flung out his arms as the bullets smashed through his rib cage, and went sprawling. The four of them barreled down the stairs. Oddly enough, Saltwood could see nothing in the downstairs hall that might have startled that last Trooper into exposing himself to Sara's fire.
"Check the shed out back for a car," he ordered, and Sara vanished through the rear door under the stairs while Saltwood methodically stripped every body he could find of weapons, spare clips, money, and papers. The police sirens were getting closer. Von Rath must have got to a phone. Rhion and Sara appeared at the back door again at the same moment Sara's father emerged from another door, carrying the sort of string shopping bag German housewives took to market, bulging with bread, cheese, bottled water, and beer.
"Car out back," Sara yelled. "We threw two spare gas cans in the trunk."
Tires crunched in the gravel out front. Saltwood made a dash for the back, hoping against hope they'd make it out of the alley before the inevitable flanking parties blocked both ends. Rhion paused in the doorway and made a gesture of some kind with his staff. From the front drive there was a shattering explosion, yellow and white light stabbing through the gathering twilight.
So there was some kind of radio-controlled bomb in the truck after all, Saltwood thought, as the Professor dashed to join them, the crystals in the staff head winking sharply in the reflected light of the fires. So much for Goering's expertise.
The car was an open staff Mercedes, gray, sleek, and well cared for. Despite the fact there were no keys in the fascia board, it was running. Somehow it was no surprise to Saltwood to learn that Sara could hot-wire cars. The fugitives piled in over the doors with their gear, guns, magic wand, and picnic lunch. Then Tom had it in motion, roaring out into the narrow, moss-cobbled alley in time to see two motorcyclists and half a dozen running Storm Troopers appear around the corner to their left and a earful of machine-gun-brandishing Luftwaffe to their right.
"Right!" Rhion yelled, half standing in the front seat and raising the gleaming Spiracle against the evening light.
"We'll have a better chance - " began Saltwood, jamming into first.
"RIGHT, goddammit!"
Not quite knowing why, but figuring the odds were really pretty much the same, Saltwood swung the wheel right and floored it.
For a second Tom thought the bang he heard was a bullet - single-shot auto - but then realized it had been the sound of the oncoming Luftwaffemobile's right front tire blowing out. The big car jumped, swerved frenziedly, then slewed sidelong into the brick wall of the alley. Saltwood scraped paint from his own right-hand door on the stone alley wall as he barely avoided the still-bounding vehicle and gunned on up the alleyway while the other car caromed into the foremost of the motorcycle's brigade, coming to a stop with one bumper against the alley wall and the other braced on the corner of the shed, effectively blocking all further pursuit from that direction.
"Well, I'll be - go to hell," Tom said, his eyes on the rearview mirror.
The flames rising from the front courtyard seemed awfully comprehensive for just one car, and there was no pursuit from that direction, either. If the pursuit cars were parked close around the truck, a spark could have jumped...
"We've got to switch cars." Sara leaned forward over the back of the seat. "They'll know we've got a staff Mercedes. Turn that way, down that alley..."
"You know Berlin?" Tom demanded, obeying.
"Don't you?"
"Just the main streets, from the maps."
In the gathering twilight it was growing hard to see, for every house was blacked out, every street lamp in this quiet suburb unlit, and Tom kept the Mercedes' lights off. No sense getting stopped for violating blackout regulations. Overhead, the droning of the bombers still filled the sky; the far-off thunder of explosions and glare of fire to the southwest marked where the RAF was still taking its revenge.
"I don't need a map to tell me this is a neighborhood where people can afford cars," Sara returned, gesturing to the monotonous brick villas, the occasional cottages, and countrified houses whose rooflines loomed against the flame-lit sky. "Most people put their cars up on blocks because of the gas rationing... We've got ten gallons in back and whatever I can siphon out of the tank, and I hope to hell you got ration cards."
"Do I look like an idiot?" Tom retorted.
She poked him in the back. "You're wearing an SS uniform, cowboy - what do you think?"
Then she leaned over to Rhion, put her arms around his neck, and kissed him a little awkwardly on his untidy brown curls. "God, am I glad to see you safe." She turned back to Tom. "Thank you." The gruff uncertainty in her voice was odd, considering her earlier sophisticated calm. "I - I don't know how the hell you managed to escape and get Rhion out of there, but thank you."
"It was an allied effort," Tom replied with a grin. "The Prof managed to break up their demo, and after that they were too busy dodging the bombs to follow us too hard. Once we switch cars we can head for Hamburg. There's enough farm tracks and country roads that run parallel to the autobahn that we shouldn't get too lost."
"As long as we don't get too found, we'll be fine. Down that alley there..." She nodded toward a deep gap between two gray-stuccoed walls - a line of sheds and garages loomed dimly out of the darkness as they turned, and beyond them were the roofs of a line of semiattached houses, eloquent of the hopes of real-estate developers, the pretentions of well-to-do shopowners, and the managers of banks. "That looks promising."
Several of the doors stood agape, revealing an assortment of garden tools and broken furniture - one or two were locked.
"My daughter the car thief," Rebbe Leibnitz sighed, as Sara crowbarred the padlock hasp free of the nearest door's brittle wood with a screwdriver from the Mercedes' tool kit and, a moment later, pushed it back to reveal a massive green American Packard saloon.
"Better your daughter the car thief than your daughter the deceased former hostage of the Reich," she muttered, opening the car door and perching on the seat with one graceful white leg dangling out the door for Saltwood to admire. "This heap still got its batteries or are we gonna have to jump it?" A moment later the engine coughed into life. The leg retreated into the car, and the Packard itself grumbled out into the narrow lane, shuddering with the effort of its long-silenced motor to stay awake. "Got a piece of tubing? Some hose?" She leaned out the door again. "What is this, the minor leagues?" she added, getting out and leaving the car to idle as she darted back into the utter blackness of the garage.
She emerged a moment later with her stolen SS dagger in one hand and a piece of rubber garden hose in the other, with which she siphoned most of the gasoline from the gray car's tank to the green's. "Which way are we heading?" she asked as she worked. "I'll drive ahead and you follow me for a couple miles, so they won't connect finding this buggy - " she kicked the Mercedes' tire, " - with the report of a stolen car and know what to start looking for."
"You used to do this for a living or something?" Tom inquired, closing the door once more and maneuvering the lock back into a semblance of its former appearance, while Rhion and Rebbe Leibnitz transferred their belongings from one vehicle to the other.
"Just brains, cowboy."
"And dating every gangster on the East Side," her father added glumly. " 'A tree shall be known by the fruit it bears...' And what's the date of your birth, by the way, Captain Saltwood?"
"Down this alley," Saltwood replied to Sara's earlier question, "two rights should get us back onto See Strasse. We can cut back to the Alt-Moabitstrasse and head for Hamburg that way."
"No!" Rhion said sharply.
The others looked at him, baffled.
"We can't go back the way we came! I left the Resonator in the temple at von Rath's headquarters. If we get too close, we risk it picking up the Void energies of the Spiracle and reestablishing the field."
"Dammit," Saltwood snapped, "I'm not taking a fifteen-mile detour around the other side of Berlin because you don't want to step on the cracks of the sidewalk! They're gonna have the dogs on us fast enough! Now get in the car!"
Rhion balked. "You don't understand."
"I understand we haven't got the time or the gas to waste. We've only got a couple hours' lead, if that, before they figure out where we're headed and get the whole SS on our butts, and I for one would rather risk all the wicked wizards in the world than half a squad of sore-assed Deaths-Heads, so get in the car and quit arguing!"
Rhion opened his mouth to protest further, but Sara reached out, grabbed the Professor by the arm, and dragged him into the Packard with her and set off down the lane. Muttering to himself, Saltwood slammed into the Mercedes and followed, hoping they wouldn't encounter any unscheduled pedestrians in the utter darkness to complicate matters still further. As they neared Berlin again the red light of fires illuminated their way, burning out of control among the endless blocks of workers' flats. Smoke stung Saltwood's eyes as he drove.
"Friggin' crazy - loony," he muttered to Leibnitz, who sat in the backseat of the open Mercedes like a king en route to his coronation. "When I tried to get him to let go of that silly stick I thought he was going to tear into me! He may be some kind of genius, but..."
"He surrendered it once three months ago," the old scholar said softly, "and has regretted it since. I think he would die rather than let von Rath have it again." The wind flicked back his silky white hair and the ragged strands of his grizzled beard. In spite of the plain gray Labor Service uniform he wore - like Sara's and Rhion's, stripped of all its emblems - he reminded Tom strongly of the old Jewish men who'd argue pilpul and politics on the stoops of Yorkville, thrashing the easy theories of communism and socialism and the Industrial Workers of the World into their component atoms and examining them one by one, as was the fashion of Talmudic scholars everywhere. "So what did he mean, field? What Resonator was he talking about?"
"Christ knows." Saltwood frowned, concentrating on keeping the Packard in sight. Its taillights had been removed to comply with blackout regulations, and, in blocks where intact buildings shielded them from the glare of the fires, it was difficult to see anything at all. The night was getting cold, too. In spite of having stripped a uniform jacket from one of the less gory corpses Saltwood felt chilled, driving in the open car. "He made this widget out of wire and glass and claims it lets him do magic if it gets within a couple miles of that - that Spiracle of von Rath's."
He heard Leibnitz gasp. The old man leaned forward sharply, white hair fluttering back over his shoulders. "Did he say how?"
The desperate earnestness in his voice made Tom remember Sara had described her father as being as crazy as Sligo. Just what I need - TWO of them! "I don't know. Some boruyo about drawing energy through the Spiracle and setting up a resonating field."
"Kayn aynhoreh," Leibnitz whispered in horror. "Chas vesholem, he can't have."
"He sure as hell thinks he has." And yet, unbidden, there rose again to his mind that half-obliterated fragment of memory: Rhion Sligo with one hand on that tangle of wire and crystal in the dim candlelight of his prison room, and the bluish drift of ball lightning floating upward from his other - empty - palm.
Hallucination, he thought, made uncomfortable at some deep level by the thought, as if, back in his socialist days, he'd stumbled across conclusive evidence that it was not economics but women's fashions - or sunspots - or maybe even God - that ruled history. Maybe some kind of electrical byproduct of the device, whatever it is, like the St. Elmo's Fire that burned on the horns of the cattle on the nights of thunderstorms, when they were thinking about stampeding...
"Stop them," Leibnitz ordered. His long, blue-veined hands, resting on the seat back beside Tom's head, were shaking. "He's right, we'll have to detour through the center of the city."
"Down Prinzalbertstrasse past SS headquarters? Don't you start!"
"You don't understand! We can't risk..."
They rounded a corner, and Saltwood jammed on the brakes just in time to prevent a collision with the Packard in front of him. They were in among the narrow streets of tenement warrens now, pitch dark save where they were lit by the yellow glare of fires. A bombed building had disgorged a vast talus spill of debris across the road before them. Beyond, the street was a chaos of flames, of firemen and tangled hoses, of brown water trickling down the broken asphalt glittering hotly in the reflections of the blaze. Men and women crowded around them, dazed and quiet. A little boy in the brown uniform of the Hitler Youth stood alone, sobbing in helpless pain and terror with blood running down the side of his face from a huge cut in his scalp. Above them loomed what was left of the tenement, the rooms ripped open as if by a giant knife, shabby wallpaper, dirty old furniture, and cramped, tiny chambers laid bare to the glaring orange inferno.
Saltwood set the brake and got out of the car. Rhion and Sara had already debarked. For a few moments the four of them stood together on the fringe of the ruin, unnoticed by the people coming dazedly from the shelter across the across the road or stumbling, bleeding and covered with filth and a hundred years' worth of coal and plaster dust, from the cellars of the buildings all around.
Aside from the boy, who couldn't have been more than seven - God knew where his parents were, or if they'd survived - there wasn't a Nazi uniform in sight but Saltwood's own.
Rhion whispered, "And I wondered why magic had been taken from this world."
Around them there was a mutter of voices: "The English... The English..." "Everything we saved..." "Maybe we can sleep at Aunt Berthe's... But she was down in Tempelhof, they were hit, too..." "Has anyone seen a little girl? Six years old - her name is Anna, she has brown hair..." "He won't let this go unavenged. Our Fuhrer won't let them get away with this..."
Rhion's hands closed tight over the staff he held, the crystals of its iron head glinting softly, as if with a light of their own, in the leap and jitter of the shadows. "Christ, what would they do if they had it?"
Over the city, the sirens were sounding the all-clear.
As they drove south again through the Moabit district, avoiding the fires and ruins and tangled traffic of the industrial targets, Rhion was silent, sitting beside Saltwood with closed eyes, head bowed and hands folded tight around the smooth, rune-scrawled wood of the staff. Leibnitz, leaning forward from the backseat of the Packard, was speaking to him in low, passionate German that lapsed frequently into Yiddish: "...Already you have endangered all the world in making the Spiracle... given them a chance to use magic, to call up the forces of the universe... open the windows to let through the energies of the Void into this world, where only the Most High knows what they will do..."
"I had to do something," Rhion whispered. "I had to get it back."
"At the cost of bringing to life again the magic they seek? And if he takes the Spiracle from you this time..."
"He won't." The little man did not open his eyes, but Saltwood could feel him shiver as if, beneath that quiet, the tension of fear, of dread, of grief were nearly unbearable. "He won't."
"And you grew up with this going on?" Tom threw a glance back to the seat behind him, where Sara was half turned around, watching through the small oval of the rear window for signs of pursuit.
She half laughed. "This and worse. We'd always have somebody staying with us: Kabbalists arguing until four in the morning whether the path between the Cosmic Spheres of Yesod and Netzach was represented by the Star or the Emperor; white witches cussing like fishwives at the Adepts of the Golden Dawn; pyramidiots and menhir-hunters pulling each other's hair about how many inches are in a megalithic foot and whether Easter Island lies on a ley... ay gevalt! And Papa making his little number squares and adding up the letters of everybody's names and birth planets while Mama hunted through all the pockets of all the coats in the house for enough kopecks to buy bread for the next day. And then like as not Papa would give whatever was in the cupboards to some crazy Rosicrucian who needed it to get to France where, he'd been 'directed in meditation,' he'd find the clues that would lead to the rediscovery of Atlantis... not that there was ever very much," she added, her voice turning small. "In the cupboard, I mean."
Tom was silent, remembering the pinched gray look on his own mother's face those nights after an oatmeal supper when she'd sit working on the bills. Though there'd always been food of some kind on the table, he'd always been hungry - especially in the spring, when they simply couldn't afford to lose what one steer would bring them toward the mortgage and the costs. Toward the end it had been the worst. "What happened to her?" he asked quietly. "Your mother?"
"She died." The words were like the chop of a kindling ax. In the dark of the backseat she turned her face away, a delicate shadow profiled against the blackness of the city, the occasional flare where a far-off blaze burned near a warehouse or factory. There were few of those here in the Charlottenburg district, amid the blocks of expensive flats with their pseudo-Assyrian cornices and their Hollywood-Gothic turrets and pillars. Every window was blacked out, but the very air around those eyeless monoliths seemed to seethe with suppressed life.
After a moment, Sara added quietly, "While I was in America. Of influenza. I should have gone back to Warsaw then and tried to make Papa come with me, but there just wasn't the money. I could barely make my school expenses, much less get passage for one over and two back. And anyhow the immigration quotas for Jews were jammed, and nobody was gonna let an extra one through."
He wondered how she'd gotten the passage money when she'd heard her father had been interned - much less the dough it would cost for the black-market identity cards she'd mentioned - but didn't ask. The lines around her mouth and in the corners of those coal-black eyes said things about where she'd been and what she'd passed through on her way, and he knew better than to touch those open wounds. He found her beautiful, with her dark, hard eyes and her crazy particolored hair, in the way he'd found the Spanish girls beautiful, who'd fought beside him in the hills, a beauty of voice and inflection, a beauty of toughness, like cats who fend for themselves and can only occasionally be coaxed to curl purring on a man's knee.
Beside him, Rhion seemed to have revived a little, eating bread and cheese out of Leibnitz' little string shopping bag and gesturing with it as he said, "...and in any case I had no choice. I could never have gotten the edge over him, even for the second I did, without magic of some kind, and by myself I didn't have the power to keep the field going. Everything here requires such a hell of a lot of power. The temple there was the only place to get it. There any fruit in there? Or chocolate?"
"Chocolate, ha! They all trade it for cigarettes, the Nazi chozzers... You still shouldn't have left it."
"As long as we stay away from that house we're safe. Outside the range of a couple of miles from the Spiracle the Resonator's inert. The way it draws power, it should be even less than that, by this time. We should be far enough away to be safe. By the way..." He turned to Saltwood, glasses flashing dimly in the darkness. "Where are we headed?"
But even as he spoke Tom was hitting the brakes, cursing, his stomach sinking within him. "Gestapo headquarters, it looks like," he said grimly, shifting gears and starting up again slowly, knowing there was no escape, no evasion. "Or hell. So hang onto your hats."
Ahead of them, in a line of flashing red lights, dark forms, and bobbing electric torches, stretched an SS roadblock.