The Sleepwalkers (28 page)

Arriving at the Gare du Nord, he took a cab directly to Hedda’s, desperate to see his boys’ expressions when he showed up unexpectedly.
“Mon Dieu!”
the great-aunt exclaimed at the door. “Why didn’t you let us know you were coming?” She kissed him noisly on each cheek, suffocating him in Chanel No. 5. Bracelets jangling, rings glittering, she led him into the parlor.

“But I’m afraid the children aren’t here, Willi. They’re off in town with their grandparents. Luncheon. Museums. And the Galeries Lafayette—to purchase lighter jackets. The ones they brought from Berlin were so heavy. We haven’t those nasty winds blowing from Siberia as you do.”

His mother-in-law’s sister had married a Frenchman decades ago and lived in Paris ever since. Despite her ridiculously thick accent in French, she considered herself a real grande dame now and insisted Willi take an aperitif at once, “to revive yourself.”

“You don’t look well,
mon fils
.” She fiddled with her strings of pearls. “Not well at all. So pale. And those eyes. But people never look well when they arrive from Germany. A few days here and you’ll be good as new. How long are you staying? We’ve plenty of beds.”

“Just a few days. I needed to see the boys.”

“Of course you did. But there’s no cause for worry.” She joined him for a tumbler of sherry. “Those darlings are having the time of their lives. Stefan told me the other day he could stay in Paris forever and ever. Such little angels. And so well behaved. Both of them.”

“Thanks to Ava. Is she with them?”

“I’m afraid Ava’s gone until Thursday.” One of Hedda’s tweezed eyebrows arched pointedly. “She’s off on holiday, in Provence.”

Willi’s chest constricted. “By herself?”

A wry smile drew across the grande dame’s lips. “No, of course
not, my dear. She went with a marvelously charming young maiden. Marianne. Or something like that.” Hedda’s dark gaze narrowed. “Willi, you must take a nap, dear boy. You look positively enervated.”

But the kind of fatigue weighing Willi down wasn’t relieved by naps. He opted for a long walk instead. It’d been years since he’d strolled around Paris, and he was surprised at his keen delight seeing the ladies on the ChampsÉlysées again strutting in their finery. Couples smooching on park benches. The animated conversations in cafés. Everything was so much less hectic, less tense, than in Berlin. So much prettier. He hiked across the river, wandering the narrow lanes of the Latin Quarter and into the Luxembourg Gardens. With its gleaming statuary and formal paths it seemed to him the epitome of civilization. Nature tamed. Earth’s and man’s. Slowly, imperceptibly, as Hedda predicted, he did begin to feel better. Happier to be a member of the human race.

Yet even in this oasis he couldn’t stop thinking about Paula, what they’d done to her. What
he’d
done to her. Could he ever forgive himself? Only perhaps . . . if he wiped that Nazi torture camp off the face of the earth. It wasn’t going to be easy. No less than his staunchest ally, von Schleicher, had been incredulous, hostile almost, to hear his report. “Such things simply cannot be!” He’d acted as if it were some sort of drunken fabrication. “Where is your proof? Your evidence, Inspektor!” Clenching his fists in his pockets now, Willi added another thing to prepare for Thurseblot night: a movie crew.

Hedda was also right about the weather, he acknowledged. It was warmer than in Berlin. The air somehow lighter, easier to breathe. He unbuttoned his coat and let his scarf dangle. One could almost forget things such as Nazis here. Strolling past the magnficent Fontaine des Médicis though, whom should he run into but his oldest school chum, Mathias Goldberg.

“Willi!” They embraced like brothers.

Goldberg’s success as a “high-volt” artist had made him a minor
celebrity in Berlin. Once upon a time Paris may have been the City of Light, but the torch had passed. Now, no place blazed like the capital of Germany. Its streets were afire with electric advertising, waving, flashing pageants of light that obliterated the night, and Mathias was one of its pioneers. In his most ingenious work he’d used four thousand bulbs over Breitscheidplatz to depict a dingy dress being cleaned: sparkling blue water, laundry powder dancing from bright green packets, a glistening yellow dress the result. How shocked he’d been to discover his name on the Nazi list of “decadent” cultural influences, a purveyor of Jewish merchandising.

“Thank God you made it out. Were the bastards after you, too,
Freund
?”

Willi realized he was being mistaken for an émigré. “No, no. I’m only here for—”

“There are so many others.” Mathias grabbed Willi’s sleeve. “You’ve got to see it to believe.”

He dragged Willi over to the famous Dôme café, where a gang of real German émigrés sat hunched around tables in the back. There had to be thirty. Jewish mainly, but not all. Willi felt obliged to join for at least a few minutes. There were artists. Social Democrats. A Protestant pastor. Several had received real death threats: “Leave Germany or die!” Others couldn’t bear another broken window or swastika on their doors. All had given up home and livelihoods, torn up roots, were adrift now in a foreign country. Lawyers without clients. Doctors without patients. Businessmen without a business.

“The European mind is capitulating.” They spoke in such dark, haunting tones.

“The sediments of the human soul are rising to the surface.”

“Human feeling counts for nothing anymore. Only brute power.”

The longer he listened, the more Willi filled with the desperate urge to escape, not from Germany but from them. Miserable shivers wormed down his spine. Could this be a glimpse of his
own future? Please, dear Lord, no. Thurseblot, he kept telling himself. It all comes down to the Feast of Thor.

“And such pleasure at suffering. Such outright sadism!”

A violent cough wracked his body and he leapt from the table, gasping for air. Excusing himself, he fled back into the Parisian sunshine, promising to get in touch with Mathias before he left, which he knew he never would.

Instead he spent three heavenly days with the boys. God, how he loved them!

“Your French is so improved.” He couldn’t help fussing over them. “And how you know your way around the metro.”

Their grandparents had purchased not only wide-cut Parisian-style jackets for them but matching berets as well, and they looked like real little Frenchmen now. They dragged him up the funicular to Montmartre. Posed for photos on the terrace of Sacre Coeur. Made him pay tribute at the tomb of Napoléon. But all the while the fatigue that had plagued him since his foray to Asylum Island attacked in earnest. His joints and limbs, his muscles, felt as if someone were pumping cement into them.
“Komm doch, Vati!”
The boys grew impatient. “You’re walking slower than grandma.” His cough appeared to worsen by the hour.

The day before he was to go back to Berlin, he’d promised to take the boys wherever they wanted to go in Paris. The kids had no trouble deciding. Somewhere they’d read about a large tunnel complex running underneath the city streets . . . so off to Les Catacombes they went. Back from holiday, Ava gladly joined, though she made no bones about their choice of destination. “
Mein Gott
. Out of all the beautiful places in this city!” The entrance on the Place Denfert-Rochereau was a simple door you could walk right past, but the boys knew exactly where it was. After paying a fee they found themselves on a long stone staircase spiraling into an abyss. “Isn’t this fantastic?” Erich cried, rushing ahead. At bottom, wet gravel crunched underfoot as they marched along a dark tunnel. Stefan’s face ignited as he pointed out a sign indicating they were twenty-five meters beneath the
street. When he grabbed Willi with one hand and Ava with the other, happily skipping between the two, Willi felt his chest constrict with a confusing sensation, which a moment later erupted into a deep, hacking cough.

“For God’s sakes.” Ava’s face darkened.

“This air.” He felt as if he were strangulating. “It’s so damned dry.”

Even though they could hear water dripping and see stalactites inching down from the ceiling, a gritty dust seemed to thicken the deeper they penetrated the tunnel. All this while, Willi’d been under the impression Les Catacombes had to do with the water system. Now as they entered a dimly lit chamber, a small exhibition hall enlightened him. Dating back to Roman times, these three hundred subterranean kilometers were originally limestone mines located far outside town. As the city expanded and real estate became scarce, the government reclaimed several centuries’ worth of cemeteries by carting the remains down here. Thus had the old system of mines now directly underneath Paris been turned into a vast ossuary containing the remains of some 5 to 6 million former residents, which workers had reinterred with honorific artistry.

Please Proceed with Caution.

Five to 6 million?

Arrête! C’est ici l’empire de la mort,
a sign above the next doorway warned.

“Stop! This is the empire of death.”

“Come on, Dad. You’re not scared, are you?”

Scared? Dad? How could Dad be scared? He opened the door.

The dust grew so thick it felt palpable on his skin.

Down another long, dark hallway from which there seemed no escape, they came at last to a large chapel-like room constructed entirely, Willi realized, of bones. Human bones. Walls, ceilings, everything—bones. Thousands and thousands of them, all meticulously arranged. Tibias and femurs piled one atop the next, bordered by neat rows of skulls. Collarbones and hip bones
formed into elaborate hearts and crosses. Ava grimaced and sighed with distress, but the boys could not have been more ghoulishly amused. Room after room, though, tunnel after tunnel, bone after bone, these displays began to wear on Willi until he saw skeletons rising up and dancing before his eyes. Around his head. Then everything began spinning around his head. His own skeleton refused to bear him a moment longer, and his legs just disappeared.

The next thing he knew a cool hand was on his forehead, gently stroking.

It required real effort to open his eyes.

“Ava—”

“Shhh. You’re in the hospital, Willi. With double pneumonia.”

A glimpse around confirmed it. How absurd. He’d never been sick a day in his life. But along with a rush of recollections came real fear.

“How long have I been here?”

“Shhhh.”

“How long?”

“Five days, Willi.”

Lord almighty. “What’s the date?”

“Come on, you need to rest.”

“The date, Ava. The date.”

“The eighteenth of January. Now really, Willi—”

He heaved a sigh, straining to lift his torso. Thurseblot was the twenty-fourth.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“I’ve got to . . .”

The whole room suddenly turned to bones—and jars of floating testicles and brains.

“You’ve got to stay where you are.” Ava’s dark eyes flared. “You’re running a high fever still. She squeezed his hand, her chestnut gaze mellowing with tenderness.

His head fell back but his blood boiled.

“Listen to me,” he heard himself say, not sure who or what was speaking. “I don’t want those boys going back to Germany. Do you understand? Not next week. Not next month. Never, Ava. None of you. Tell your father it’s time to pull out. Register the kids in school here. Find an apartment. Do what you have to, only—”

“Stop.” Her fingers fell on his lips. “We’ll discuss this later. When you’re well.”

She leaned and kissed his forehead, arousing a tender sigh from in his chest.

But there was no later. Just before dawn he sneaked from the hospital and dragged himself over to the Gare du Nord, where he boarded the first train back to Berlin.

A wicked wind danced across the river Havel. January’s full moon cast Spandau under a twilight spell. As the shadow of
The Third Eye
loomed across the Black Stag Inn, Willi gripped the iron bridge rail, his vision fixed on the dock below where the Great Gustave stood greeting guests, his black cape fluttering madly. It was Thurseblot—at long last. The air seemed alive with demons.

Townspeople were noisily clambering up the gangplank. Stifling one of the deep, hacking coughs that still wracked his body, Willi watched from the shadows. In the week since he’d fled the hospital, he’d all but willed himself back to health. Every time he thought of Sachsenhausen his fever had subsided. Now that the moment of truth was here, there was nothing to do but observe—like the Meistersinger of Wagner’s opera, knowing
that everything, all future happiness, rested on this contest he’d engineered.

How carefully he’d planned it, down to the finest detail. How many times he’d gone over it, making sure nothing could go wrong. But something always could, he knew. Like Paula. His throat clenched as he pictured her disappearing in that motorboat. All you could do was try to leave as little as possible to chance.

In the silver moonlight the Black Stag Inn with all its crossbeams and pointed gables looked like a fairy-tale illusion. Enjoying a pagan feast inside were six very real monsters. Devising a plan to capture them had given Willi a royal headache. Simultaneous raids in Spandau and Sachsenhausen were out of the question. He didn’t have the resources. But one raid at a time was too risky. Too much chance someone could escape. One doctor. One guard. A quick call and everything would be ruined. So he’d had no choice but to employ some of the famous Jewish cunning the Nazis were always complaining about.

The idea had come to him in the hospital while he was lying there delirious. He thought he heard singing again—that song from the morning in the forest with Fritz.
Valderi, Valdera-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha
. And the strangest image took shape in his head. The man with a many-colored coat, skipping down the streets of Hamelin playing a fife, all the vermin dancing.
River Weser, deep and wide . . . A pleasanter spot you never spied
. Of course. That’s what I have to do, he realized.
Lure
the rats out. Like the Pied Piper.

But how?