Lycanthropos (37 page)

"Coincidence?" Kaldy asked innocently.

"Yes, that just after I enunciate a rather detailed introduction to Zoroastrianism, you have a memory in which
the worship of Ahura Mazda plays a part?"

Kaldy did not frown, but his voice was cold and steady
as he responded,
"I'm
not entirely certain what you mean,
Herr Doctor."

"Oh, it's quite obvious, I think," Weyrauch snapped.
"Schlacht was correct. You have been lying to me, you have
been fabricating this entire biography." He laughed bitterly. "So you were Barabbas, and your friend Claudia was Pontius Pilate's wife, and she was a Zoroastrian! How
fascinating! How convenient! How ridiculous!"

Kaldy sat up and drew his knees up to his chest, wrapping his thin arms around them. "I do not propose to debate with you, Herr Doctor. What I remember is what I remember." He frowned and looked down pensively. "But why
did I see a pentagram on her forehead? Why did I wound her and not kill her?" He shook his head. "I don't understand. I
don't understand at
all."

"Well, I understand," Weyrauch said. "You have put my
life in danger, and you have put my wife's life in danger."

Louisa, who had been listening silently from the moment that the regression had begun, spoke up. "Don't be absurd, Gottfried," she said, her voice trembling with the tears she
was struggling to repress. "It isn't Herr Kaldy's fault that
we live under the rule of murderers."

Weyrauch turned to his wife and shouted, "Louisa, how in God's name can you defend this man?! He has been laughing behind our backs from the first day! He can't die, he can't be killed, so he has nothing to risk, nothing to lose! He has been playing with us, amusing himself at our expense! And now what am I supposed to tell Helmuth? Am I seriously expected to report to him this...this...this fable?!"

"Tell him whatever you want!" Louisa shouted back,
weeping. "I think that I am beginning to prefer death to
this satire of life! My marriage is a farce, my leaders are
barbarians, my family is corrupt, and my nation glories in
its own shame! So tell Helmuth whatever you want, and let him murder us now, like he has murdered so many others!"

Weyrauch began to respond when he heard the sound of a key turning in the lock of the cell door. A guard pushed the
door open and Petra Loewenstein slowly entered the cell. She
fixed her eyes on Kaldy and did not look away from him as
she said softly to Weyrauch, "The formula works. The Colonel sent me to fetch you. The program goes into effect tonight."

"Tonight!" he exclaimed. "Surely he will want to wait for another three days! Tomorrow night is the full moon!"

"Tonight," she repeated. "He wants you immediately. I suggest you not keep him waiting."

"No, no, of course not," he muttered distractedly as he
walked toward the cell door. "But what am I going to tell him? What on earth am I going to..." He stopped and looked at
Petra
. "Fräulein Loewenstein, you are in the same room with Kaldy and you aren't wearing your surgical mask!"

"No," she agreed, never taking her eyes off the young
ancient.
"I'm
not."

Weyrauch nodded. "I suppose you've finally realized that
there's no danger of infection."

"I suppose so," she said in a deadly monotone.

"Yes...yes,
well...
well..."
Weyrauch had nothing further
to say, and so he left the cell. The guard closed the door behind him but did not lock it, knowing that
Petra
would
herself be leaving shortly.

Louisa stepped forward and stood before
Petra
. "Did you hear any of what Herr Kaldy just told us?"

"I heard," she replied softly, still staring at Kaldy. "I have been standing outside the cell for a long while. I heard everything."

"But you don't agree with Gottfried, do you?" Louisa asked, eager to have her husband contradicted, needing to hear
Petra
say that it was all true, that Kaldy was not lying. "It isn't all a fabrication! It simply can't all be a fabrication!"

Petra
ignored Louisa, moving around her and
walking over
to Kaldy. She looked down at him silently for a
few moments,
and then her face grew suddenly red with anger.
"So it
was
you, Janos. I was right. It was you all along!"

Janos Kaldy smiled up at her warmly. "Hello, Claudia,"
he said.

Du muss herrschen und gewinnen

oder dienen und verlieren,

leiden
oder triumphieren,

Amboss oder Hammer sein.

You must rule and win

or serve and lose,

suffer or triumph,

be anvil or hammer.

 

-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"A little exercise" and an oblique reference to the possibility of another autopsy was all Schlacht would say in response to Weyrauch's inquiry. The Colonel had not been
in his office when Weyrauch arrived, but the two S.S. soldiers who had been waiting for the minister had been left
quite specific orders, orders that caused Weyrauch to feel a sourness in the pit of his stomach and a numbing weakness
in his knees.

They had been ordered to see to his transportation from
Budapest
to Hunyad, a town some fifty miles from
Budapest
and less than thirty miles from the border of
Croatia
, the rump puppet state that Hitler had carved out of the conquered and dismembered
Kingdom
of
Yugoslavia
. But what had upset the minister was neither the distance nor the late hour. What had caused him such fear was the fact that the S.S., under Schlacht's direction, had recently established at Hunyad a new relocation center, which was to say a concentration camp, which was to say a city of death; and Weyrauch kept reviewing Schlacht's ominous warning in his mind as he sat
in the back of the automobile that was taking him thither.

Weyrauch had never been inside a concentration camp, had never seen a concentration camp, had done his best for a decade not to think about concentration camps, and as the heavy iron gates opened to admit his automobile into the
large open space that separated the buildings from the high
wall, he reflected that this was an experience he wished he could have postponed indefinitely. He looked at the sign on the iron gate as they drove into the camp
. Arbeit Macht
Frei,
the sign proclaimed. Labor liberates. Weyrauch
shuddered, knowing that ultimate liberation from life itself
was the prime function of these institutions of Hitler's
regime; that, and the slave labor ubiquitous in the empire of the S.S.

As the car pulled to a halt in front of the administration building and Weyrauch stepped out into the cool evening air, he noted with some surprise that the camp itself was extremely clean, immaculate in fact. In the dim light of the setting sun he saw a few prisoners engaged in ground patrol near the building. Their hollow, cadaverous faces were frozen into ivory masks of utter misery as they stooped here and there to pick up cigarette butts and random bits of paper. The extreme cleanliness and perfect order of the environment contrasted starkly with the filthy gray and white-striped uniforms which the prisoners wore, with the
shaved scalps matted with encrusted grime, with the cracked,
diseased lips and the festering sores on hands and faces and
God only knew where else.

They are already dead
, Weyrauch thought sorrowfully.
They are walking around, seeing, hearing, thinking, but these are the walking dead
. And then he felt a surge of
panic as he realized that he might have been summoned here
to join their company.

But Schlacht had greeted him cheerfully, perhaps a bit too cheerfully, when he was ushered into the Colonel's presence in the office of the camp commander in the administration building, and he had been partly but not
totally relieved when Schlacht made his cryptic comments
about an exercise and autopsies.

"Helmuth," Weyrauch asked, "Fräulein Loewenstein said that the experiment was a success. If so, what then is the
need for any more autopsies? I'm afraid I don't quite follow you."

"You don't follow me because I haven't really told you anything yet, my dear Gottfried," Schlacht grinned, as he
set above removing his dress uniform and began to don combat
garb. He took a neatly folded uniform and a helmet from a shelf behind the desk of the camp's commanding officer and tossed them to Weyrauch, who, not having been prepared to catch the apparel dropped it all to the floor. "Here, put this on," Schlacht said as he buttoned his tunic. "You'll
need
it,
the helmet in particular, where we are going."

"Going...? Where
we
are going?" Weyrauch stared at the uniform
which lay at his feet. "You are sending me into combat?!"

"In a sense, Gottfried," Schlacht smiled, "in a sense. Now put on the
uniform."

"But Helmuth," Weyrauch insisted nervously, "I am
exempted from military service! As a clergyman, I am not
legally obligated..."

Schlacht walked over to Weyrauch and grabbed him roughly by the lapels of his black coat. "Now, my dear old friend,
listen to me. You are obligated to do whatever I tell you to
do. You will follow my orders without question or debate, even as I obey the orders I receive from
Reichsführer
Himmler and he himself obeys the orders he receives from the Führer. Do you understand?" Schlacht's face was not four inches from Weyrauch's face as he made this quiet yet chillingly threatening statement, and his ice-cold blue eyes were boring their ways into Weyrauch's. The minister nodded a rapid assent. Schlacht smiled and added, "Of course, if you believe that I am violating the law, you have every right under the constitution of the Reich to bring
suit against me in the
Volksgericht
. Is that what you intend
to do, Gottfried?"

"Oh, n...no, Helmuth, no, c...c...certainly not," Weyrauch muttered. He knew as well as Schlacht that the German constitution had been a dead document ever since Hitler had been given "temporary" dictatorial powers eleven
years before, and that the
Volksgericht,
the National Socialist "court of the people," was well known to the entire nation
essentially as a ratifying instrument for the judicial murder of opponents of the regime. "I wouldn't dream of making any sort of legal objection to..."

"I'm pleased to hear
it,"
Schlacht interrupted amicably. "I would hate for anything so tawdry as a lawsuit to come
between us, cousin."

Weyrauch did not like the broad, friendly smile on the cruel, inscrutable face of the S.S. officer. It had an empty, reptilian quality to it which made his flesh creep.
But the minister, not believing for an instant that Schlacht
had any warm feelings for him whatsoever, had no choice but to behave as if he accepted the sincerity of his wife's
cousin's words. "Well, neither would I, neither would I. But
what are we doing here, Helmuth?"

Schlacht looked down at the uniform. "Put that on, and
I'll
tell you as you're getting dressed." As Weyrauch proceeded to don the battle clothes, Schlacht asked, "How much did Fräulein Loewenstein tell you?"

"Next to nothing." he replied. "All she told me was that the experiment had succeeded."

"Well, let me give the details," he said, sitting down in a chair and pulling on his high black boots. "She injected a Jew with the solution, and it did not kill him." He paused. "The Jew seemed to experience some discomfort, but that's beside the point. We waited for a few minutes, to make certain that the solution had been...metabolized, is the word, I believe...and then fired a machine gun at the Jew, not once, not twice, but three times." He paused and leaned forward toward Weyrauch as if to emphasize the significance of his words. "We emptied a machine gun into him three times, Gottfried. That's ninety bullets at close range."

Weyrauch swallowed hard. "And he was uninjured?"

"Oh, the Jew died," Schlacht smiled, "but the point is that we had to shoot him ninety times to kill him! That's invulnerability sufficient for our purposes, don't you
think?"

Weyrauch nodded. "It certainly is impressive." He began to pull on his tunic when he noticed the insignia on the lapels. "Helmuth…this…"