Petty Magic (13 page)

His face falls, but he quickly recovers himself. “Sure. How about eleven o’clock? We can have lunch there.”

“Perfect. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

It belatedly occurs to me that if my sister catches wind of our visit to the Met tomorrow then Justin and I will never see the back of her, but when I glance over she seems completely engrossed in the article on her screen. With any luck she never noticed he was here.

“Find anything juicy?” I ask as I lean over her shoulder.

“Perhaps. And have
you
come up with anything?” my sister says, arching an eyebrow.

All right, so she saw him. The Met is humongous, though—it should be easy enough to avoid running into her. “We do have time to deal with this,” I say as I appraise the state of my manicure. “Rome didn’t fall in a day, you know.”

“Don’t be glib, Eve! Remember, Helena’s reputation is at the stake.”

I look at her sidewise, but she doesn’t seem to have noticed her own little slip o’ the tongue. She forwards the film to the next entry on her list, a front-page article from the
Blackabbey Gazette
entitled “Orphan Shocked by News of Father’s Murder.” We both lean closer to examine the accompanying photograph and gasp in unison.

I
T IS
my heartfelt opinion that anyone who spells “magic” with a K ought to be nettle-whipped for a small eternity. All those tree-hugging “neo-druids” and their new-age twaddle, chirping “Blessed be!” every time somebody sneezes. If you are all that you claim to be, what need have you to advertise it?

“Belva was a dabbler!”

This revelation doesn’t have quite the dramatic effect I was hoping for. I glance round the dining room table to find my nieces all looking up at me expectantly. “You know what I think?”

“No,” says Helena, “but I have an inkling we’re about to find out.”

“I think Lucretia has it all wrong. I think
she
killed him. Belva. Oh, maybe she didn’t
mean
to. But it makes sense.”

“How do you know she was a dabbler, Auntie?”

“Oops, I skipped that part.” I pull out a photocopy of the microfilm so they can all see the picture. “Her father was murdered while she was still in her teens—”

“Oh yes,” says Helena. “I remember. Poor Julius.”

“And while they were interviewing her in her uncle’s kitchen, they took this picture.” I lay the photocopy on the table before the girls and they all lean forward to examine it. “Notice what she’s wearing round her neck.”

It’s a hag knot on a silken cord, worn snug like a choker, and the top two buttons on her blouse are undone as if she wants to show it off. There are two reasons to use a hag knot and two diametrically opposite types who would employ it: it can be a knot tied around a peculiar sort of stone or scrap of iron, one with a natural hole in it, and worn around the neck to ward off evil intentions; or it can be worn by one who
has
evil intentions
—maleficium
—and wants to protect them against benevolent counter-magic. (Dabblers have no inherent powers, being ordinary women, and they tend to think they can compensate by stirring up bad juju on anybody they don’t like.)

The thing about her neck is useless, of course, and this photograph was taken years before she could have fallen in love with Henry Dryden. But the nature of the knot is unmistakable, and it is unmistakable proof of her dabbling. To a keener pair of eyes the girl in that black-and-white photograph is the classic schoolgirl obsessive, one who would readily resort to meddling in things she knows nothing about, heedless of all consequence.

“Well,” Helena sighs, “it’s something, anyway. We’ll bring it up at the meeting.”

The Devil’s Snuff

15.

Paris, 1942–1943

T
HE CATACOMBS
of Paris were an ideal meeting place for the Resistance. New recruits were spooked by all the bones in the walls, but the old guard greeted the leering skulls as friends, gave them nicknames, and even pretended to offer them a fag or a bite of dinner. You’d never get through this without a bit of levity once in a while.

The Ossuaire Municipal connected every warren in Paris, and of course the only truly safe houses were those torn down years before. Now, I know what you’re thinking: if a warren is a safe haven, why couldn’t you gals hide the whole so-called “civilized” world in all your old tenements and opera houses to wait out the war?

Here’s the rub: if you let too many ordinary people into a warren, it starts losing its magic. How many is too many? Nobody knows for sure, but it seems you near the tipping point when the number of ordinary visitors nears that of the native population. Words disappear from books, beldames start suffering from arthritis and myopia, cats go dying in the streets. A warren stripped of its magic is dead space, like when you ride the loo flue to a place that’s just been bombed, and soon it isn’t only the cats. Believe me, you’d be better off living in central London in the heat of the Blitz.

Another problem with hiding folks in the warrens was the possibility, in Paris at least, that one might become hopelessly lost in the labyrinth of passageways. Say a man lost his way. If he lit a match he’d come face to face with a leering skull (or fifty), and it would be all he could do to keep his wits about him. These chambers and passageways were only a matter of meters from the streets and lampposts and bistros of ordinary Paris, yet he wouldn’t know it in this perfect silence, the darkness broken only by the hissing of the match about to burn his thumb and forefinger. One time the
maquisards
found a soldier who’d somehow wandered out of a Nazi bunker in the Sixth Arrondissement and apparently died of fright on the cold stone floor. Best way to go, all things considered.

Of course, it wasn’t always silent down there. You could often hear footsteps, muttered conversations in adjacent corridors, the rustling of maps, and the squeaking and scurrying of rodents—and, on occasion, the unmistakable sounds of
la petite mort
.

That said, I spent most of my time in Paris aboveground. After we returned to London for the last phase of training, Jonah himself briefed me on our mission. It was common knowledge, he said, that a prominent SS officer frequented a certain brothel on the Rue de Suffren. This man had knowledge of the locations of at least half a dozen Kuhlmann chemical plants owned by Vichy industrialists. It was also well known that this SS officer’s taste in whores was far more eclectic than the average customer’s, and so he would almost certainly be eager to engage a new arrival. The SOE agent would pose as a prostitute, working in cooperation with those
femmes de nuit
who were members of the Resistance. She would loosen his lips using one of that newly developed arsenal of truth drugs in order to discover the locations of the plants. The agent would probably not be required to play the role to its consummation, but she should be prepared for it nevertheless.

And she would be accompanied by another agent from SOE, Monsieur Robbins, who would pose as a clerk in the Australian embassy—which maintained diplomatic relations with both the Vichy government and the Free French—and transmit those coordinates back to London via wireless telegraph, the end result being the obliteration of each of the chemical plants by the RAF. Jonah knew I could do it without any need for “truth drugs” or other machinations, and he’d convinced the head of F-Section that I was the girl for the job.

Here is how it went—for we carried it out plenty of times, on nearly every German officer who passed through the doors of that brothel, and each time was more or less like the first:

He was rather young for his rank, with typical Teutonic good looks. Normally those blandly handsome men would blend into the wallpaper, so this would take a fair degree of acting on my part. “Is it true Hitler eats no meat?” I asked with a casual air.

I had draped myself over the bed in a black silk negligee and little else; he was unbuttoning his shirt and taking care to hang it neatly from a hook behind the door. “So they say.”

“No meat at all? What kind of a man is that?”

“It is not wise to talk so of the Führer,
Fraulein.”

“He is not my ‘Führer,’
monsieur.”

“Pah!” He went on muttering in German as he shrugged off his suspenders: “I suppose you cannot read a newspaper. Likely cannot read at all.”

I had to feign ignorance, of course, though it steamed me. I put on a colorless smile as I reached for him.

“Pauvre cher homme,”
I murmured, stroking his fine blond hair. “You have been so busy that you talk and talk and forget when it is time to hush.”

He reached out a hand to grab my arm, but I pulled away and gave him a teasing smile. “But no. I have a little something for you first.”

The Führer frowned on the use of recreational drugs, in particular that white substance they called “the devil’s snuff,” but his officers indulged whenever they could. It wasn’t the real thing, of course, but a powerful hypnotic formulated by a beldame chemist in Research and Development. It only looked and smelled like cocaine. I pulled out my snuffbox, opened the lid, and held it out to him. His eyes lit up.

“Will you have some?” I picked up a hand mirror off the vanity table and laid it on the bed between us, conjuring a razor blade from behind my back and dipping it into the box.

He did two lines in quick succession, then held out the box and looked at me inquiringly. Before I could answer, though, his eyes rolled back in his head and he slumped onto the pillows, the powder spilling all over the counterpane.

“Christ, that took long enough,” Jonah said as he swung a leg over the windowsill. With a disdainful glance at the figure in the bed, he seated himself at the vanity and opened the small suitcase he’d brought with him, taking care to undo the clasp as quietly as possible. He produced a fresh tablet of paper and laid it on the table. “How long do you expect this will take?” he whispered.

“Depends on how much he knows.” I laid my fingertip on the man’s temple, closed my eyes, and took a deep breath. In another moment the words would surface on the page, ink welling up out of the paper like blood from a hidden wound; sure enough, in another moment I heard Jonah’s muffled exclamation. I didn’t turn to him or open my eyes because then the writing would have stopped. The data scrolled across my consciousness and would have overwhelmed me if I let it, but I didn’t try to make sense of any pieces as they appeared, I just let the ink do its work. I’d turn it off like a faucet once the pertinent information gave way to litanies of boyhood humiliation.

Eventually I heard a soft rustling sound as Jonah pulled out his pocket watch. “Twenty minutes,” he whispered. “And I think we have all we need. How do you stop this thing?”

I opened my eyes as I withdrew my hand, then climbed into bed beside the sleeping Nazi. Jonah opened the false bottom in his suitcase, tucked the tablet inside, closed it again, and with one final knowing glance—“lucky bastard,” he whispered—he slipped out the open window as stealthily as he had come.

Then came the only really distasteful part of the operation—I had to trick his mickey into thinking it had actually seen some action. I turned back from the window and got the shock of my life: in the span of a blink, the soldier’s face had changed into another I knew all too well. A beldame doesn’t traumatize easily, but that day I came closer than I’d ever done.

T
HANKFULLY, AFTER
the second or third round, that particular portent ceased to appear. (It wasn’t as if I needed the warning; a Nazi in a brothel isn’t exactly long on virtue.) We kept on like that, two or three Jerries a week, for eleven months in total. It was brilliant. As I said, Jonah had been given a clerkship at the Australian embassy at Vichy, but he only had to turn up for “work” a couple of times a week. I slept in the attic at the brothel, and some nights Jonah would stay with me, though the circuit organizer would have been horrified if he’d ever discovered it. But I never found out where he kept the radio or where he passed the nights I slept alone.

In our circuit were many of Jonah’s contacts from his first mission to France, and they treated him—and, by extension, me—like a trusted friend. One of his old associates, Simone, was a beldame from Brittany who was working as a courier between the Maquis outside Lyons and Resistance leaders in the capital. We became thick as thieves immediately upon our hellos, and Jonah finally realized with a look of wonder just what she was.

Occasionally we had respites near Lyons, where we met the agents who were just parachuting in, and those were the nights we lived for. Provided the landing went off without a hitch, we were free to pass the night in some isolated farmhouse with conversation sprinkled with all the news from London along with heaps of food, fresh bread and goat’s cheese and sausage and omelettes. After a given night, we’d likely never see those agents again. Not that they were doomed, necessarily—an agent’s chances of surviving the war were fifty-fifty, believe it or not—but for the security of our own circuit we could never associate with them again once we’d seen them to their safe houses. We never traveled back to Paris by train; it was much too dangerous. Instead I took Jonah by flue to a WC on the outskirts of the city, and we made our way back on foot.

A
S I
say, we’d been directed to cooperate with those harlots who worked with the Resistance, but I didn’t actually have much to do with the other girls in the house; there weren’t any patriots among them, and so I spent my afternoons in basement cafés trading secrets with Simone and her friends, many of whom were engaged in the same work at other brothels around the city.

We might have gone on that way—drugging goons in uniform and relieving them of their secrets until the liberation—but in the fall of 1943, as Italy declared war on Germany, SS officers started turning up dead in brothels all over Paris. Their superiors showed up to investigate, and more than a few terrified madams were summarily arrested. Within two weeks the “trade” had dried up all over the city; now the only remaining customers were Parisian businessmen, none of whom were any use to me. We were soon recalled to London.