Astronomy (14 page)

Chapter Eleven

S
OME PART OF HER WONDERED
if this was her penance for all those people in Berlin.

—But only a small part. Mostly, Susan was not thinking about much of anything but keeping the weight off her shoulders and wrists.

Two men were trying to find out what she was doing here. One of them—Florian from Plauen (he’d turned it into a little song at one point, and encouraged her to sing along. She had declined, politely) leaned back in a chair behind his desk and sniffed her socks whenever he thought the other one turned away.

Occasionally he would ask her a question, as if it had only just come to him that he should. Occasionally he would adjust a chain wound about a peg in the corner of his desk, and her wrists would ratchet another excruciating notch up behind her head.

The other one—a pimply-faced youth named Ralf Koehler—held a ball peen hammer over her feet, asking if she knew how they taught Jews to rumba at Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp (which apparently was some sort of alma mater). He would ask her this in a thoughtful way, as if her answer were a matter of some scientific interest.

She had already tried telling him to go screw himself. Ralf Koehler had responded by testing her reflexes with his little hammer. Her reflexes were good. She saw the gleam in his eye and moved at the crucial moment.

The hammer pulped a depression in the phone book a quarter-inch from her big toe and deep as a rivet head.

Ralf Koehler smiled. He raised a finger—ahh—an appreciation of style. If they ever turned this phone book dancing into an Olympic event, Susan had one judge in her pocket, no question.

She guessed she spent an hour after that, gaining the grudging admiration of her two dancing instructors. She had no time for pride. With each leap she took off the edge of the phone book, the odd popping and squeaking of her shoulders reverberated a little longer. The pain shrieked a little louder. The questions—
Who are you? Who sent you? How did you get here?—
grew a little more seductive.

She looked up at some point to see Ralf Koehler setting a second huge phonebook on his desk. He was soaking it in kerosene from a little tin cup, muttering something about teaching her the merengue.

This is when the man in the wheelchair rolled in.

“Has she said anything?”

“No, Stürmbannführer.”

“You were not persuasive.” The voice was churlish. Susan remembered a petulant doctor’s wife she had nannied for during her junior year at Boston College—“
You were not thorough with the silverware . . .
”

The soldier looked abashed. “She has been dancing on the phone books for over an hour. No matter, she hurls abuse at us.”

Susan heard a tongue cluck mockingly. “ 
‘Hurls abuse at you.’
 ” He turned to his companion, an angel-eyed kid who seemed to excel at lounging and looking disinterested. “There must be something in the conventions about that, ehh, Karel?”

The boy smirked up at her.

She heard the motor come closer, and rubber wheels on cold concrete. Light from the desk lamp passed across the lower part of his face as he turned his head around to look up into her eyes.

“How is your appreciation of fine reflecting telescopes now?”

“All right,” she guessed. “How is your appreciation of dancing shoes?”

Oh, she would have paid money to get that one back. As the man’s face darkened, Susan recalled a word of advice from her cotillion of 1938: One occasionally speaks out of turn, and invariably rues the moment.

No hammer this time. Ralf Koehler simply kicked the phone book away so that she hung in mid-air, listening to the ratcheting sounds of her shoulders, trying to adjust to a whole new geometry.

The kid with the blue eyes made popping noises at her. He grinned. He bugged his eyes out
this
big, and pressed his lips together as if he were trying to keep himself from screaming in pain.

Something really fatal needed to happen to this kid.

Kriene looked a little awkward. He
tsked
, shook his head.

“Any other time, we could simply have you shot.” He sounded almost apologetic. “But the time is too close and your associates can undo a lot of hard work. You see? I cannot afford to let my natural sympathy interfere with the demands of destiny.”

“It’s all right,” she said when she could speak. “Moral ambiguity is the opiate of the starving class.”

“Excuse me?” Kriene frowned up at her intently.

“Advice from a friend of a friend.”

“You wouldn’t . . .” Kriene laughed at the very preposterous reach of the idea. “You wouldn’t know a colleague of mine?”

“I don’t think we hang in the same circles.”

The kid snickered at her little joke. “She
is
funny.”

We share the same sense of humor, she realized. That’s nice.

Kriene leaned forward.

“Ha!” he cried. “You’re the Allied agent we draped about Malmagden’s neck.” He banged his knee. His mouth opened to an aspirated rasp, like a barking corgi. He might have been laughing.

“You were supposed to be arrested by the Gestapo,” he said. “You were supposed to give up Malmagden’s name to them, so that they might shoot him as a traitor.” A disappointed sigh. “You never were, were you.” It was a statement.

“Sorry.”

“It should have worked. Lenz assured me we could use one of you Watermark people to get rid of Malmagden forever . . . Phahhh.” He made a face of distaste. “Lenz.”

This, she realized, was the same Jürgen Kriene that Malmagden had spoken of hanging from a lamppost by his testicles. Susan could see where he might have that effect on people.

“No matter. We have much to talk about, you and I. We know the same people.” Kriene seemed genuinely pleased to make her acquaintance. He ordered Florian to let her down. “We will be friends for a little while, yes?”

Florian did not try to hide his disappointment. He dropped her from the hoist unceremoniously. For a few moments, the release was almost worse than the tension. Her muscles finally relented. Florian unlocked the handcuffs and went back to his desk, twirling them around his finger like he’d no doubt seen Gary Cooper do with his six-guns.

Jürgen Kriene smiled at her indulgently. “Was Malmagden the one who sent you to me now?”

She rubbed her arms until the cramping ebbed a bit, and then tried out a story she’d been working on for the past twenty minutes—the U.S. Navy had sent her. In fact, they were out there in the fog right this minute, making fifteen knots to the point of her last transmission. This transmission would be what she was doing in the observatory as they broke in on her.

Kriene smiled, amazed. “How did such a terrible liar ever qualify for intelligence fieldwork?”

How could she answer? This was a question she had asked herself with ever more urgency for the last few years.

“Herr Malmagden told you something about saving the world?”

“Maybe,” she admitted. “Something like that.”

“We play this game, Herr Malmagden and myself. Malmagden denigrates my research before Reichsführer Himmler. I use an American agent to plant the idea that Malmagden is a traitor looking to defect. Herr Malmagden returns the favor—”

Kriene became emotional. “Herr Malmagden returns the favor by sabotaging certain indicia necessary for the summoning of Great Azathoth, leaving myself and twenty-two of the Reich’s finest scientists at the mercy of the Daemon Sultan.” He took a moment to steady himself. He waved his hand across his lap, indicating his useless knees, his wheelchair, his shattered life. “As you see, leaving me ruined.”

Susan was empathy personified.

“I pursued my own vengeance. I sent my operatives into Berlin, right under the Russian rockets. They sought to avenge my fallen comrades. Herr Malmagden had accumulated a brigade of living dead to unleash on the Russian advance as they entered the heart of Berlin, the Zitadel. My agents let them loose to find Malmagden and rip him to pieces.”

Karel nudged the man in the wheelchair. He nodded as if Kriene were leaving something out.

Kriene looked at him in fond annoyance. “Not now,” he said. “She doesn’t need to know that.”

The boy pouted. Kriene sighed.

“If it hadn’t been for Karel here, I doubt I could have carried on. He nursed me to health. He gave me the courage to face the new day, yes?”

“More than I ever did for Krzysztof,” the youth murmured.

Susan just looked at him. She looked at Kriene. Kriene looked a bit awkward. It took a moment for things to register.

“You—you were responsible for the massacre of the
Volksstürm
?”

“Hardly that. Herr Malmagden and myself have been rivals over many things.” Kriene patted the boy’s hand. “It only makes sense we take our rivalries as seriously in the areas of personal relationship as we do in the areas of professional accomplishment.”

“You caused all those people to be killed because you were jealous of Krzysztof Malmagden?”

“Who are you? Telford Taylor?
Bitte
, we are wasting time.”

“I had friends who were torn to pieces.”

Kriene looked aggrieved. “What do you care what Germans do to Germans?”

Like an old-time faith healer, Jürgen Kriene had worked his miracles upon her. Suddenly, Susan discovered that though her shoulders hurt like a son-of-a-bitch, they worked. And her hands were still strong enough she could grasp this Karel by his cute little neck and choke the living shit out of him.

It took both of Kriene’s henchmen to pull her off him. They shoved her back in her chair. Ralf Koehler pulled back to break her nose.

Kriene stopped him. “That will not be necessary,” he said. He had something better. He nodded toward the air, something in the air he wanted her to notice. “Do you hear that?”

It was the metronomic chant of Azathoth’s summoning—louder now. She could make out the words, despite the distance between the Summoning Tower and Kriene’s basement office suite.

“That is the death knell of your world,” Kriene said. “The alignment between Earth, Yuggoth—Pluto, that is—and Sirius will be optimal. The sacrifice will be made, and it will be too late for anyone to stop.”

Kriene smiled an unnerving smile. “You have some knowledge in these matters.” He could see it in her face.

“What about you?” she said. “When Azathoth comes, you die like the rest of us.”

She noticed Ralf and Florian were quiet at this point. They were more than a little curious to hear how Kriene was planning for the survival of his loyal staff.

Kriene made a dismissive gesture of the whole business. “Survival is not so impossible as we once imagined,” he said. “Indeed, we have kept men alive on Pluto for as long as twenty-one days before they ran out of air. Obviously, in our case, we plan something more permanent. As for you”— Kriene leaned forward to touch his finger lightly to the tip of her nose—“I see a future for you as a consort for Yog Sothoth.”

Susan thought of the woman in that hut on the shores of Faulkenberg Reservoir. Suddenly, that woman had a face.

“You have seen the results of our experiments at Faulkenberg Reservoir. Such interdimensional congress is somewhat mysterious to us still, but apparently not impossible. All the old goat needs is a healthy young uterus.” He gave Susan an encouraging smile. “I’m sure yours will do fine.”

He motioned to his men. “Take her to Yog Sothoth’s bridal chamber—and clean it before you use it. We do not want our guests to think ill of us.”

Florian looked worried. He started to complain, time was short.

Kriene made a preemptory gesture. “Time is always short for the lazy and disorganized.” He had further instructions for his men: “Get a camera. I want pictures this time. We owe a photographic record to science.”

With that, Jürgen Kriene gave Susan the best farewell bow he could manage, and wheeled himself out of the room.

A moment of silence followed. The chanting from the sacrifice site had taken on some disturbing harmonic, as if it had been joined by the voice of the Earth itself.

Susan saw the two men discuss her immediate future with quick, furtive glances. It occurred to her that—soldiers being what they were—Yog Sothoth might not receive an unsullied bride.

The two men loaded her onto a service elevator. They could barely contain their glee. Things at the V-Werke must have been slow indeed.

They tried to make conversation with a couple of white-uniformed sorcery corpsmen standing quietly at the back of the elevator. They were in a sharing mood. She heard them ask, Wasn’t she pretty? They were taking her now to a spot that Florian had used for similar purposes in the past. (Similar, she thought, except he’d been alone at the time.) And then she was off to the Research Center for Breeding Studies, and they were off to the Summoning Tower to greet the new masters of the earth.

The two white-uniformed men from the Sorcery Corps stared at her. The shorter one made a small sound of exasperation, or embarrassment. He looked away.

The taller one with the sad eyes said not a word. He appeared to be waiting on something. She could tell he was anxious. His cheek muscle jumped.

The soldier glanced at her quickly and then away again. Susan realized she was staring. She forced herself to face the door.