Sun Cross 2 - The Magicians Of Night (31 page)

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 Grünewald—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.