The Sleepwalkers (13 page)

The Berlin Yacht Club was on Wannsee, the most fashionable of the many large lakes surrounding the city. Among the flotilla of polished vessels, the Great Gustave’s cabin cruiser,
The Third Eye,
stood out like a Taj Mahal, twice as long, twice as high, twice as full of flags and colorful bunting as the others. Armed SA guards checked the invitations of the well-dressed throng waiting to board.

“Don’t be upset, Willi, please.” Paula took his hand as they clambered up the gangplank. “Remember, we’re in this together.”

“Keep your nose out of it,” he said, angrier than he realized. “The last thing I need is for you to disappear, too.”

“My nose”—she coldly dropped his hand—“is already in it.”

At noon the yacht set sail. There had to be sixty people aboard, although with two enormous galley decks below, it hardly felt it. Paula hadn’t been kidding about the sort in attendance. In the first few minutes Willi recognized more aristocrats than at a diplomatic ball: the prince of Pomerania, the count of Koblenz, the baron and baroness of Brandenburg Saxony. Among the crowd also were representatives of some of Germany’s most powerful industrial families: Thyssen, Krupp, Porsche, plus a bevy of stage and screen actresses in gowns with décolleté that made Paula’s look modest. Dozens of waiters in tasseled turbans passed tall champagne flutes from silver platters or manned
buffet tables piled high with delicacies. The whole boat was decked out with boughs of holly and pine.

By now Willi had done enough research on Gustave Spanknoebel to know that the fortune amassed for such a lifestyle was not from his public nightclub appearances or even the many private clients who depended on his every word. No, the real money came from his publishing empire, which in addition to one of the most popular weekly newspapers in the nation, the
Clairvoyant,
produced countless books on the occult that outsold many of the titles by the country’s great novelists. His biggest moneymaker though was a topical ointment he’d invented called Viril Kreme, which millions of Germans, men and women, swore enflamed sexual passion. Some saw Spanknoebel as the greatest Svengali in German history. Even Adolf Hitler, it was said, took lessons in public speaking and mass psychology from him. Perhaps it wasn’t surprising the man had remained immune from the law all this time.

Also clear, as Paula had forewarned, was that this event was strictly couples only. A good thing he’d brought her. Not a man or woman appeared unescorted. He wound up having to tug her about as if she were handcuffed to him.

“Tell me the truth,” he whispered at one point, still furious with her, though for what he wasn’t even certain anymore. “Why is it you wear those black lace gloves all the time, Paula?”

She tried to pull her hand away. “Because I like them.”

Now he wouldn’t let go. Nor would he allow her to take any alcohol.

“You want to get involved? Keep your eyes and ears open then.”

“Yes, sir.” She frowned angrily. “Are you going to accompany me to the bathroom, too?”

He ignored her, yanking her through the star-studded crowd. Spotting two powerful scions of Germany’s steel industry, he kept her from speaking. “Shhh!”

“Unfortunately everyone’s losing faith Hitler can even gain
the chancellorship.” He concentrated on listening in on young Helmut Krupp, whose grandfather was probably the richest man in Germany.

“But we must make sure he does,” young Georg von Thyssen, whose grandfather came in second, replied through a mouthful of caviar. “God forbid the Reds take over—we’d all be shot the next day. Once the Nazis tear apart the Commies, we can lock the big baboons up.”

“Exactly,” Krupp snickered.

Pity Fritz wasn’t here, Willi thought, dragging Paula along again. These two were just the idiots he ranted about in his newspaper column, completely unwilling to see that the big apes they thought could do their dirty work would by nature turn from tearing apart “Commies” to tearing apart them.

After the yacht was far out in the Wannsee and most of the guests were good and soused, Gustave made his grand entrance, floating through the crowd in a full swami outfit: long white robes and red turban.

“Pardon me for such a late arrival,” he begged of them all.

Everyone gathered around to hear him speak from a small altarlike podium.

“I have been delayed by a most momentous task.” His voice trembled with import, his eyes widening with knowledge and mystery. “All morning I have been hard at work plotting an astrological chart of the greatest consequence to our nation . . . the chart of Adolf Hitler. And you, my most honored guests, will be the first to hear its astonishing revelations. Yes . . . yes . . . I have seen it all!” He held out an arm far in front of him.

The man, Willi thought, took theatricality to new dimensions of absurdity.

“We all know that in the past few months the Führer and his Party have faced exceedingly adverse conditions. This was because of the Uranus-Moon alignments settled in the First and
Twelfth Houses. But in the fourth week of the next year, this alignment will pass into Hitler’s Sixth and Seventh Houses. It will not come easily . . . not without subterfuge and perhaps even bloodshed . . . but all the planets will have reached the proper positions for him to achieve a great and lasting victory over his enemies!”

The crowd cheered.

“And won’t life be grand,” Paula muttered.

Willi felt a little better holding her hand.

“But there is more. Yes. Just a few brief weeks after this historic victory, in February 1933, I see a great conflagration burning through the House of Germany. A terrible fire that will shock the nation. But this is not something to fear,
meine Damen und Herren. Nein. Nein.
It is all as it must be. This will be the mystic cleansing from which the phoenix of a Great New Germany will arise!”

The audience erupted into applause. As if on cue a small brass band broke into a happy fox-trot. Couples began dancing. Top-hatted men with monocles and diamond cuff links. Elegant women with long cigarette holders. Laughing and dancing madly. What was this fever gripping Germany? Willi watched, aghast. Had things got so rotten that reality itself was now the enemy? Did the future seem so terrifying that even among the most privileged few, nonsense like this could pass for truth?

“The real action’s going to be on the lower deck,” he heard a baroness whisper to a friend. “Special invite only.”

Or was it all just a fad with these elite?

Only too happy to escape this spectacle Willi yanked Paula’s arm, determined to gain entrance to whatever was happening downstairs. But his name was not on the list, a burly guard advised. Sorry.

Willi had to think fast.

Among the VIPs on line to enter he noticed the same young von Thyssen he’d eavesdropped on earlier and gave the dice a toss.

“Why, Georg!” he exclaimed, holding out a hand to the bewildered twenty-five-year-old. “Don’t tell me you don’t remember me? I dated your sister several years ago, quite seriously as a matter of fact. Siegfried Greiber, Ruhr Coal and Coke.”

Willi staked all on the rich kid needing to feel in command of the situation, and not wishing to show he hadn’t the foggiest recollection of any Greiber dating his sister.

“
Ach,
yes. Of course. How are you,
Mensch
?”

The gamble paid off. Any friend of von Thyssen’s was a friend of the Great Gustave’s—and thus Willi and Paula gained access to the inner sanctum.

The small space for maybe twenty was dimly lit with flickering torches and draped in red damask. Thick Persian rugs covered the floor. The only furniture was a scattering of satin pillows and one thronelike chair up front, floodlit from below. The starlets, tycoons, and assorted nobility selected for this elite assemblage were busy pulling off shoes and propping themselves on the floor, readying for what was sure to be an experience to tell one’s friends about.

Willi looked them over.

Might one turn out to be Gustave’s next victim? His gaze fixed on a stunning brunette with a neck full of glittering diamonds. Without a doubt the King of Mystics was involved in the disappearance of dozens of foreign women. But Willi didn’t have enough evidence to win a search warrant on him. Of course, the son of a bitch was only a pimp, he knew—a procurer. But so far, Gustave was the only conduit to where the sleepwalkers wound up. All Willi knew for sure was that it was within floating distance of Spandau.

After what seemed an eternity, Gustave arrived, no doubt delayed by some momentous project for the future of mankind. In his flowing robes and absurd red turban he escorted the Duchess Augustina von Breitenback-Dustenburg on his arm, a true old Prussian aristocrat. The thronelike armchair at the front of the room everyone had assumed was his he gave to her. Not that
she was all that old, fifty-five or sixty at most. But her sparkling black evening gown, worn with white gloves practically to the armpits, looked generations out of date. Her face expressed not a ray of emotion, other than a grave flicker now and then.

“Hello to you all, my special friends and firmest supporters,” Gustave greeted in his stagiest voice. His whitened face, with its dark red lips, shifted from one Kabuki expression to another. “I’m sure you all know the duchess here. Well, she has a little confession to make. She wishes me to convey to you that she does not believe that I can hypnotize her, although she very much wishes I could. In her heart of hearts she told me she really would like to be commanded today to do something completely . . . how did she put it?”

“Outrageous,” the duchess filled in with a deadpan look.

The room broke into laughter.

“So. You do not believe that I can hypnotize you. Are there any other women who feel this way, too? Who believe themselves impervious to my powers?”

Willi, with his arm around Paula’s shoulders, could feel her muscles tense.

“Don’t even think it,” he whispered.

The dark-eyed brunette with the glittering diamonds stood from the floor.

“Madame.” Gustave held a hand to her. “Tell me, what is your name?”

“Melina von Auerlicht. This is my husband, Count Wilhelm von Auerlicht.”

“Countess, you are not German originally?”

“
Nein
. I am Greek.”

“And you do not think that you are susceptible to hypnosis?”

“
Absolut nicht
. My willpower is far too strong. Ask my husband.”

“Count Wilhelm, is that your opinion?”

“Is it ever!” the count, evidently quite drunk, replied loudly. “The woman is a total bitch. She won’t deny it.”

The crowd roared.

“And what’s more, I’m proud of it,” the woman returned. “Even you, King of Mystics, cannot exert your will over mine.”

But she was wrong. Within minutes both she and the stodgy old duchess were slaves to the Great Gustave’s commands.

“So there you have it,
meine Damen und Herren
.” He pointed to the two of them, sprawled like corpses on a pile of pillows. “Most people, most females especially, have no understanding of the depth of their own suggestibility. They think they can resist, that they are stronger. But what they don’t acknowledge is how very much they actually long to be mastered.”

“Duchess,” he said to the older one. “Sit up, darling. Open your eyes. Tell Papa . . . what is your wish. Now that I have you in my control, what ‘outrageous’ thing should I command you to do?”

The duchess sat up. Her eyes opened. But for what seemed the longest time, nothing came from her mouth. The whole audience leaned forward in tense anticipation. Had Gustave failed?

“I wish . . . ,” the duchess finally said quietly, “I wish to do an American-style striptease.”

She was greeted with absolutely stunned silence.

“Luigi!” Gustave motioned for his assistant. “Bring some musicians. The duchess wishes to dance the striptease.”

In seconds, it seemed, a snare drum with cymbals and a few brass horns were ready to one side of the room.

“Duchess,” Gustave cried. “Are you ready?”

“Yes,” she replied from her hiding place behind one of the thick red curtains.

“And now . . . the great Scala Theater of Berlin is proud to present . . . straight from America . . . that international sensation . . . Duchess Augustina von Breitenback-Dustenburg!”

The musicians struck up a hard-grinding beat full of trombone whines and sexy trumpet calls. The duchess emerged leg-first from behind the curtain, swirling her hips. Slowly, tauntingly, she began pulling off the fingers from one of her long
white gloves, until the whole thing was circling above her head. When it went flying to a gentleman in the front row, she leaned forward and wiggled her chest, growling in English, “Hey, big boy! Got dinner plans?” The audience shook with laughter and applause, and one of the assistants moved in to capture it all on a home-movie camera.

Gustave let the act proceed until the duchess was dancing in nothing but a long black slip, hoisting it to show off her flabby white legs and purple varicose veins. Then he stopped the music and told her that, at the snap of his fingers, she would emerge from her hypnotic trance feeling refreshed and in wonderful humor.

Snap.

The room was silent as the crusty old woman realized she was standing half-naked before them all.
“Gott in Himmel!”
she shrieked, breaking into a fit of laughter and throwing her arms around Gustave. “You did it! You wonderful, wonderful man, you!”

As for the feisty Greek, Gustave turned to the husband and said cheerfully, “Count Wilhelm, as long as we finally have her under control, is there something you’d like me to do with your wife?”

The count thought it over a moment, then raised a champagne glass. “Yes, master,” he called. “Make her climax. The frigid bitch never did with me!”

There were shrieks of shock and hilarity.

Gustave gave a small salute, as if glad to be of service. “Melina my love.” He propped the dark beauty up and sat her in the armchair. “Tell me something . . . are you hypnotized now, sweetheart?”

“No,” she replied, her eyes firmly shut.

“May I ask you a personal question?”