Children of the Dusk (23 page)

Standing, Erich drew his pistol. It felt extremely heavy, and he wondered, absurdly, if Hempel saw that he was shaking. "Where's Ernst Müller? I haven't seen him since...."

Hempel took a cigar and a wooden match from his breast pocket and lit the match by scratching it across the pistol grip of his holstered Mann. Biting off the cigar end, he spat it between Erich's boots.

"Where's Ernst!" Erich screamed.

"He had...objections...to our decision." Lighting the cigar, Hempel inserted the lit end into the mouth of the Zana-Malata, who encompassed it and inhaled deeply, a look of pleasure entering his eyes.

"
You murdered Müller because he wouldn't let you eat his dog
?"

"Don't have a tantrum, Herr Oberst." Hempel smiled reassuringly. "The worms are dining well. The balance has been maintained."

Erich aimed his Walther between Hempel's eyes and, leaning forward carefully, removed the major's weapon from its holster and tossed it toward the door. It hit the zebu hide with a
thoop
and fell outside. "I will give the free laborers an hour of prayer at sunset tonight and again tomorrow." A surge of power mixed with Erich's rage. "They'll thank God for delivering you into my hands."
 

He released the safety.

Hempel lifted an arm casually, as if to ease the pistol aside. "It is you who loves the Jews, Erich Weisser," he said sincerely, as if wondering why his commander could possibly be upset. "Unless you want your coming newborn similarly infected with Jewish contagion, I suggest that as soon as he is born you move mother and child here to the hut, where they can be safe."
 
He opened his hands with the charismatic innocence of a salesman. "Once we obtain the power of the Kalanaro, we'll burn out the Jewish corruption. Until then...."

A bullet's too clean a death for this monster, Erich thought, his finger tightening on the trigger.

Puuh
.

The Zana-Malata made a short puffing sound, and Erich swung around to face him, pistol raised. A halo of lavender flame rose from the syphilitic's gaping mouth-hole. The smoke ring fastened around the barrel of the Mann and tightened around Erich's hand, burning into the flesh as it had done the last time with the cold heat of dry ice.

Screaming, Erich got off one shot before he dropped the pistol. The bullet tore through the raffia a few centimeters from the Zana-Malata, who threw back his head and guffawed as Hempel stomped a jackboot down on the Walther.

"Don't you ever learn? Forget it,
Weisser
." Hempel picked up the pistol, fastened the safety, and tucked the gun in his belt. Placing the lit tip of his cigar in his mouth, he inhaled as deeply as had his mentor. With a triumphant
puuh
, he released a similar circle of lavender fire toward the ceiling. "We each have our units to command." He smiled obsequiously. "There's no reason we can't work together."

"We'll see about that!" Erich staggered through the doorway and, tripping on the steps, fell to his knees in the grass. Starting to rise, he reached for the Mann that lay at arms reach.

A black foot stepped onto the pistol; a speartip touched his jugular.

Above him stood two Kalanaro, eyes charcoal-rimmed, wiry bodies covered with mud dimly glowing an eerie white, hair streamed back and waxed and gleaming. He stared at the
assegai
, aware of a sickness starting up from his stomach.

The Kalanaro laughed, then one picked up the pistol, and both went into the hut.

Erich watched the whitewashed buttocks disappear behind the tanhide, his hatred and anger mingled with a fear that set his heart pounding. He felt as unsure of himself as an adolescent--unable to consciously steel himself against the world around him.
 

But he knew he must.

He pulled himself to his feet and, furiously brushing off his uniform, glared toward the door and fought to still his shaking. A
Hamster
...a man who pedaled his bicycle out into the countryside to buy produce from farmers, and pedaled back to Berlin to resell it. The boot and buttlickers of the earth. That's what his father had been, that was what Pleshdimer and the Kalanaro were.

The parlor magic he had witnessed in the hut might earn the loyalty of an idiot like Pleshdimer, but all it would earn the syphilitic was a place beside the major, before a firing squad. And the Kalanaro? They would make it five executions.

When Erich reached the compound gate, the guard was slow to salute. Erich grabbed him by the lapels. "When I so much as look at this gate, you get that arm up stiff as a cock in a whorehouse! Understand?"

With a look of dark timidity, the soldier raised his arm.

Erich knocked down the arm. "Don't waste the effort
now
, soldier! Just bolt the gate. No one is to come or go unless
I
say. That includes the Sturmbannführer. Got that?
 
Anyone tries to force his way in, shoot to kill."

The soldier nodded fearfully as he hurried to shut and lock the gate.

"Consider that a command directly from the Führer!" Erich said over his shoulder as he stalked toward his tent.

The man snapped his heels together and his arm shot up.

That was the way to treat the Totenkopfverbände, Erich told himself: ferocity plus patriotism. Hadn't Hitler similarly summoned the devotion of millions?
 
Now,
before
Hempel's arrest, was the time to re-establish command dominance.

For that, he had some magic of his own: eleven dark dogs and the barrel of his gun.

Johann yanked off his headphones and, looking confused, jumped to attention. He was trembling: eyes sunken, forehead wet with sweat.
Malaria
? Erich wondered.

"We just received a transmission, sir," Johann said. "The Russians have joined the Reich in freeing Poland. May I have the honor of informing the Sturmbannführer and the men of this glorious news?"

Fighting to control his own trembling, Erich poured brandy into his canteen cup and, gulping it down, slammed down the metal cup against the table. "First I have a message for Berlin." The sweet, burning liquor almost took his breath away.
 
"To Gauleiter Josef Goebbels."

It was the camp's first outgoing transmission--radio silence was to be maintained until the Antongil region was secured. The ill, excited youth virtually panted as he transcribed the heading.
 

Erich downed another brandy. The alcohol settled him enough so that his mind burned with a clean, cunning wrath; the words flowed effortlessly as he paced.
 
"Your worst fears confirmed. Stop. Officer in question indeed involved--make that intimately involved--with racial inferiors and guilty of murdering a soldier of the Reich. Stop. Treason no longer matter of conjecture. Stop. Possible sabotage attempt imminent. Stop. Will proceed per former instructions."

After several moments the youth set down his pencil, his sallow complexion dark with anxiety. "Is that all, sir?" he asked in a quivery voice.

"Isn't that enough?" Erich replied contemptuously.
 

His trembling now even more evident, the youth thumbed through
The German Dog in Word and Picture
for the page that corresponded with the date--figuring the numbers of the days of the year in reverse. He laboriously matched up the dictated words with those in the innocuous book Erich had chosen as his code book, each word having an in-text counterpart in a complex system based on the date and page, and tapped the coded message over the wireless to German contacts in Italian-held Ethiopia.

Laughing inwardly, Erich signed off with "Sachsenhausen" rather than with his own code name,
Hawk
. If the relayed transmission got through British jamming at Malta, Goebbels would hopefully believe the message had come from the major.
 

Meanwhile, the guards were sure to assume Hempel was the officer in question. Any loyalty to the major would be severely strained if not severed. For once, Erich was glad the man liked being surrounded by the young and the stupid--and had recruited accordingly.

"See the corpsman about those chills." Erich sat down at the table.
 
"Take the rest of the night off and get some sleep. I'll tend the wireless."

"Yes...
sir
!"

After Johann exited, Erich took a cheroot from the humidor Miriam had given him. He had to grasp one hand with the other to steady the match, but at last got the cigar lit and leaned back, sucking in the smoke deeply to calm himself. Well, he thought, the thing was done; the military shoring-up he would need to justify shooting a major would soon be firmly emplaced. HQ activities were top secret unless stipulated otherwise, but secrecy was the prerogative of old men and misers, not boys pretending to be soldiers. In an hour everyone in camp would know of the message. With luck, he would have little difficulty bringing the guards' always-simmering prejudices to a boil--against Hempel.

He reached into his foot locker for his MP 38 submachine gun and placed it across his lap. The metal with its light coating of oil felt comforting as he ran his hand from the barrel to the metal brace that served as a stock. He pictured himself squeezing off a round into Hempel's forehead. A powder-darkened hole between the eyes, the back of the skull burst open, a roar of approval from the men as he signaled for them to riddle the others. He would smile as the Zana-Malata screeched and Pleshdimer twitched and jerked, corpulent pig that he was. Blood would redden that eerily pulsing, whitish mud those shithole Kalanaro had smeared....

Glowing
mud?

Something about that triggered a memory and sent him scavenging among his manuals. There
had
to be something about the Kalanaro in the military literature or the supplemental guides that he had missed before.

Glowing
.

A memory tormented him, but he couldn't seem to recall it exactly. His mind felt fogged, and he kept seeing white buttocks and porcelain bowls. What was it? Something from physics, the only class he had liked at Goethe besides military history and biology--cutting up that calico cat. But what! He
knew
physics, and this was schoolboy stuff!

He remembered, and he uttered a triumphant chuckle as he leaned back and put his boots up on the locker.

Pitchblende
.

Reports of Congolese crazies who smeared themselves with luminous tar in order to look like ferocious ghosts during battle had led to the discovery of the world's largest uranium deposit and, indirectly, to the physics of Einstein and Bohr. Now uranium was bound up in the incredible energy and wartime potential of Heisenberg's attempt to achieve critical mass. But there was a hitch: only three mining areas existed. The Czechoslovakian uranium mine was nearly exhausted; Canadian uranium was unavailable; and--for fear of aiding Hitler or angering him by selling to the Allies--the Belgians had shut down their huge mine at Shinkolobwe in the Congo to
all
buyers.

Was that what Hempel had meant by the power of the Kalanaro? Was that why he had allied himself with the syphilitic?

Eliminate Hempel, Erich thought as he poured more alcohol, and play Gestapo with the monkeys. He had learned persuasion from the masters, hadn't he? That conniving Goebbels may have paper-shuffled him off to Madagascar, but Daniel was about to emerge from the den.

Find the pitchblende deposit, and he would be a force to be reckoned with. A man of means. Perhaps, given the war, a national hero. Like Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau had been, he told himself bitterly, and blew a stream of smoke.
 

"D
rink."

Miriam lay in the nearly airless medical tent, so torporous that her limbs seemed without life. It was all she could do to open her eyes.

Above her, grinning down with rotted teeth, hovered a fat, oily face.

"Time for medicine," the Kapo said. Drool bubbled from his mouth and clung to his teeth like sea scum.

"Get away from me."
 
She thought she had screamed, but the words emerged as a whisper.

"Drink," the Kapo said again. "Make the baby dream."

With a dirty finger, he pressed what looked like a liquid-filled thimble against her lips. She did not resist, because she could not.

Then he was gone, and she was staring at the knot where the netting gathered above her and thinking of Luna Park, where Solomon had won a music box for her. In the distance she could hear "Glowworm" playing, broken by the howling of dogs.

The shadows began to spangle.
Franz
, her mind said.
Franz
.

Slow fire suffused her veins as the liquid took effect. Perhaps though I die the baby will live, she thought as her body heated up. Her breathing was shallow, yet the sound roared in her ears. Each blink of her eyes required enormous effort until, with absolute clarity, she saw herself at the age of eleven. She was huddled on the back seat of a speeding convertible, the head of her sheepdog in her lap. "She'll be all right," Mama was saying from the front seat as Papa raced the car along the tree-lined road toward Zurich. "Don't worry, darling, she'll be fine, the vet's not far now." Miriam could not stop sobbing. What did Mama or Papa know, what did anyone except a vet or Heidi herself know about having puppies! Tires screeched. The car slid on the icy road and flipped upside down. She flew against a hillside and, landing amid rocks but without pain, watched the convertible flip again and land right-side up. As if she were seeing spinning pictures on a zoetrope, she saw a man, a woman, and a dog tossed from side to side like rag dolls inside the vehicle. The stench of gasoline permeated the air; even on the hillside Miriam could smell it. Then flames burst throughout the car like a flower suddenly in bloom, bright as a sun shining on...