The Blood Lance (29 page)
'They don't have us yet, Josh.'
'They've got us, T. K. At this point. . . it's just a matter of time.' When Malloy didn't answer, he asked, 'You married?'
Thinking about Gwen, Malloy felt his eyes burn. 'Yeah.' How was Gwen going to handle this? Three, five years in prison. . .
'Kids?'
'I've got a grown daughter I don't get along with.'
'That's tough.'
'When I see her, it is.'
'I've got three girls and a wife who mean the world to me, T.K.'
'Listen, Josh, what Boy said about their charging us with murder probably isn't right. I mean they're going to throw that at you, but just for leverage to get you to talk. They're going to want to know about Dale and me. I want you to play dumb until you can get a lawyer - an American Embassy lawyer out of Berlin. Once you've got representation and can negotiate a plea you can handle, tell them everything you know. Don't hold anything back. Right now, we haven't hurt any cops and you weren't involved with kidnapping the man in the safe house. I'll tell them the same thing. That will get you maybe three-to-five.'
Josh Sutter seemed to calculate this new information. They were both coming to terms with surrender. 'Three years is a long time, T. K.'
'It's not as long as twenty.'
'Three years. . . a man can lose his family in that time. As far as my job is concerned, the bureau is going to cut me loose the minute they figure out I'm in the middle of this thing.'
'So you start over. Reconnect with the kids. Make peace with the ex-wife. Get a job and do what you want. Three years isn't the end of the world.'
'You think Jim made it?'
'I don't know, Josh.'
'Maybe they'd let Jim and me be cellmates. I mean so I'd have someone I could talk to. Kind of funny, if you think about it, giving a couple of FBI agents a cell together.'
Eighteen minutes after he left them Ethan returned. He was breathing hard - like a boxer in the last rounds. 'Come on!' he said, and took Josh Sutter up over his shoulder.
'Where are we going?' Malloy asked.
'I've found some decent cover for the two of you. Should keep you safe, at least until daylight.'
'So what's the plan?'
'I'll tell you when we get there.'
The spot Ethan had found required them to retreat from the tree line and cross a second meadow. After that, they followed a park road until they came to a sprawling rhododendron bush. He took a minute to cover their faces and hands with mud, exactly as he had done to his own face, and then helped them scoot under the heavy branches. At that point he swept leaves around them. Unless a patrol came wading into the bush they might stay safe for an hour or so - at least until sunrise.
'Kate wants your Berlin people to meet us east of the E22 - on the road leading north out of Hoisburg. Can you get them to do that?'
'Sure. Where's Hoisburg?'
'As close as she could tell, the middle of nowhere. We should be there around sun-up - give or take an hour. If we're later than that, we're not going to make it.'
'How are we getting there?'
'Just get
them
there; Kate will take care of the rest.'
Malloy called Jane, checking his watch as he waited for her to answer. It was three-thirty in Hamburg, only nine-thirty in the evening in Langley.
'Yes?' she said.
'Where are the Berlin people?'
'They're on the road. Why?'
Malloy gave her the instructions Ethan had given him. 'We're going to be bringing some wounded with us.'
'What happened?'
'Ambush.'
'I'll get a medical chopper moving.'
'Put them a couple of hours south of the extraction point. If the Germans even think medics are coming for us, we're done.'
'The police are after you?'
'Only a few hundred.'
'Great.'
'I'm going black for a couple of hours, Jane. I'll call you when I can.'
'How bad are the wounded, T. K.?'
'A couple are ambulatory. The other has a chest wound. It's not deep, I don't think, but it could be serious if we don't get it treated.'
'I'm here when you need me.'
Malloy disconnected and looked at Ethan. 'They'll be there.'
Ethan took Josh Sutter's NVGs. 'Keep your headset turned off until five-thirty,' he told Malloy. 'You're going to need to save the batteries.'
Fall 1932.
The affair lasted three weeks. In all that time it seemed to Rahn he was hardly ever away from Elise. That was not true, of course, but it seemed so because his thoughts never left her. Nothing but Elise mattered. They did not talk about the future. They lived either in the perfect present or the long-ago-past. As in their letters that previous winter, Bachman's name never came between them. They spent hours in melancholy adoration of one another. They drove into the mountains. They waded in cold streams. They explored the Sabarthès caves hand-in-hand. Everywhere they went, whether above or below the earth, they found some secret and quiet place to call their own. They kissed. They made love. He slept in her bed at night, coming late to it and then crawling out before dawn - lest the guests whisper. They would meet again a couple of hours later at breakfast. Over bread and jam and coffee they planned an excursion each day.
When they spoke it was always in praise of the moment. Had either of them ever been truly alive before this? Why did food taste so good? Was there any emotion equal to the feeling they got just by seeing one another? It was the stuff of newly- weds, the eternal language of lovers who never imagined something like this could happen and feel so perfectly wonderful. . .
Their only regret was not succumbing to their desires sooner.
Sometimes in their moments of silence they would imagine the
other was thinking about the coming storm, but neither admitted to such things. What were you thinking just now? How happy I am. Here. Now. Is it really true? Are you really, truly happy with me? Only kisses could answer such questions. Only lovers could be so blind to the inevitable.
When Bachman returned from Berchtesgaden he flew as far as Carcassonne and hired a driver to take him the rest of the way. It was a long day of travel, and he came into the village after dark. From the front lobby of the hotel, entering as stealthily as a thief, he saw them together at the bar quietly staring at one another. Bachman did not have to look at the bartender, whom he had paid to keep watch. He saw the truth in the flush of shame that washed over Rahn's face. He saw it too in his wife's fading smile.
Bachman's dark eyes shifted back to Rahn in accusation.
He
was to blame! Rahn sat frozen beside Elise, and Bachman knew it had been going on from the moment he had left. They had wanted only the opportunity and could not wait until he was down the road before they had turned him into a cuckold!
He thought he ought to kill them both. He might actually have done just that if he had been armed. As it was, he simply collected himself - his rage and humiliation - and he went up to his room. He got control of his passions.
He
could still manage such a feat! He felt a smile tearing out of him, cold, cruel and full of wise irony. This was what he had expected of them, of course! All the talk about purity, a perfect sham! How then could they disappoint him with their behaviour? He knew from the start this would happen! They wanted only opportunity! Where then was the betrayal if one never trusted?
Elise followed her husband to their room without a word to Rahn. In the morning, their bags packed, they left the hotel without explanation. Rahn watched them from his tiny, grim office to see how she behaved. Bachman did not seem to force her to go with him. Elise went willingly. She certainly gave no long, last look at
Des Marronniers
, not even a casual glance at the quaint village of Ussat-les-Bains, which she had told him only a week ago she loved because it was theirs. She waited for her husband to open her door. She watched the dirt at her feet. She climbed into the Mercedes and she studied her knees. As they drove away, the dust covered the road within a few seconds and seemed to erase the car from the landscape.
The days after Elise had gone were almost impossible to endure. He longed for the courage to kill himself. Later, trying to recall those first days of her absence, he remembered nothing at all. He might as well have died for a time. Almost a fortnight after they had gone and were surely back in Berlin, Rahn thought he must write some kind of letter, if only to explain. He got no further than dating the page. They had no future. Elise had made her choice. Besides, if he were foolish enough to write her what could he possibly say? What words had ever changed the past?
January 1933.
At the end of the season, only a few weeks after Bachman and Elise had left, Rahn closed
Des Marronniers
and, with the last of the receipts in hand, headed back to Germany. He left a number of unpaid accounts in his wake but he did not care. He had no intention of ever returning.
He knew he could still pick up work at a commercial school teaching languages, but it was hardly a career and he was sick to death of the work. He wanted. . . he did not know what he wanted. So he went home. His parents could see the change in him almost at once. They worried but kept quiet for a time. Finally his father reached his limit after a few sullen weeks and announced to his son, 'You are almost thirty years old, Otto! What are you planning to do with your life?' So full of dreams and ambition only a year ago, he could only manage to say that he did not know. 'Tell me that you do not intend wasting your life chasing after buried treasure!'
'I'm finished with that.'
'I should hope so! In the real world, son, men
earn
their fortunes. They do not dig them up!'
'I know.' And it was true. If nothing else, this much he had learned.
One morning a few days later, he sat down and began writing. He could not have said what motivated him, certainly not his father's remarks, but later Rahn would understand that loss and emptiness had stirred within him the impulse to celebrate a doomed world in the last days before a war came that destroyed it forever. He started with a description of the sky one saw in the south of France - a blue that he had only ever seen above the Pyrenees. A page later he was simply writing.
He wrote for long hours at a time, fussing with his notes and research later. He wrote not like the trained scholar that he was but as a poet. There were sources and citations, of course. This was not a fantasy of a world that had never been, but it was not quite the dry stuff of history either. It was full of passion, his style a synthesis of history, poetry, and outraged narrative. He called his book
The Crusade Against the Grail
without ever saying what he thought the Grail was. He spent no time speculating about buried treasure or the fate of the Grail - these matters were for writers who had not spent the hard hours it took to learn the truth. He painted instead intimate portraits of the aristocracy, their love affairs, the political intrigue, the economic conditions of the regions, and the heroic enlightenment that had blessed the land of the Cathars above all the rest of Europe at that time. He talked about faith and love, and about knights who wrote poetry. He described a world in which Jews were not only allowed to live freely but in which they taught Christian children and no one thought it strange. He talked about women who were priests and love affairs that were never consummated.
He described the contours of the land, the infinite caves beneath the Sabarthès range, and of course all the castles whose ruins still dotted the rugged landscape of southern France. He described the Blood Lance that he had seen painted in the
Grotto de Lombrives
, but he made no wild claims about it, not even a theory linking it to courtly love and the forever- potent desire of the spirit that it seemed to represent. He painted the world he loved in the last hours that it still breathed and, though it had all passed away centuries ago when the last fortress fell, it seemed to him that he wrote an autobiography.
Paris
1934-35.
It took less than a year between those first magic words pouring across the page and the printing of his book. As he had hoped, the book gathered some critical interest. His style was original. The depth of his knowledge was beyond anything ever written about the Cathars. Of course the proceeds hardly paid for the years on the ground Rahn had spent learning his subject, but that was to be expected. A book like this paid in other ways.
After finishing the manuscript and while he was still trying to sell the thing, Rahn went back to teaching in commercial language schools. He got some paying work as a translator and even flirted with the movies, writing the script for one of the new talkies in Berlin, working as a bit actor in another. With the publication of the book he began to aspire to greater things. He was only thirty. His life was still before him. He had always dreamed of becoming a literary critic at some point, but his years of tramping through the Pyrenees had not put him in the right circles. Good reviews and modest sales had not the force to pull him out of obscurity.
