Lycanthropos (49 page)

Now he grabbed the hilt of the dagger tightly and stabbed its tip into his palm with all his strength.

Nothing. No wound, no blood.

Weyrauch dropped the knife and took hold of the revolver. He pointed the
weapon at his foot, closed his eyes and pulled his
head back as far as he could away from the weapon. He fired.
He heard the explosion, smelled the acrid smoke, and felt a
sensation on his foot like unto the impact of a falling acorn. Weyrauch opened his eyes and stared down at the hole in his shoe and at the bit of lead that had flattened against his foot and now lay on the floor beside it.

And in that instant, as if the curtain had just been
raised on the first act of an eternal, tragic drama, the future showed itself to him. He saw himself wandering the earth as Kaldy had done, wandering through the hundreds of years and the thousands of years, with no home, no family,
no peace, no rest, a slave to the cycles of the moon, a
slave to the spirit of the wolf. He saw himself forgetting who he was, forgetting his own name, forgetting everything,
becoming in the end a faceless, nameless, emotionless engine
of death...

…of death…

Death!

There was no salvation save in death. There was no redemption save in death.

Life was all he had wanted, life was he had needed, all he had desired. All he desired now was death.

Weyrauch took a deep breath, placed the barrel of the pistol into his mouth,
and fired it again and again and again. The bullets rattled around
his mouth harmlessly until he spat the hot bits of lead out
and they clattered loudly on the floor.

He tried to weep, but he had no tears, for a werewolf does not weep. He tried to pray,
but he had no words, for God's ear is deaf to hell.

He had the one thing which he had always wanted. He had life
.

He
had nothing.

Weyrauch burst from the building and ran from the camp, ran out into the
still,
peaceful morning, screaming madly at
the top of his lungs, "Kaldy! KALDY!
KALDY!"

The air was cold but bracing, and Louisa von Weyrauch pulled the ribbon from her long blond hair, letting it fall
freely so that the Alpine breeze could dance through it. She
sighed slightly as she gazed out over the green valley and
the small storybook village where she and the old Gypsy had
spent the past few months. Blasko lay nearby on his back, his hands folded behind his head, softly whistling one of the
melancholy melodies of his people.

They were only sixty miles from
Germany
, but the war and the bloodshed and the misery seemed a universe away. Louisa knew that even now the Allies were converging on the Reich, that the Russians had invaded
Poland
and were nearing
Prussia
, that the Americans and the British had raced through
France
and
Belgium
and were drawing nigh to the
Rhine
. She knew all this because the little storybook village was filled with literate, sophisticated, educated people…in other words, typical Swiss…and the newspapers and the radio and the conversations she heard at the inn where she worked told her all she needed to know about the mad
world which surrounded this little mountain oasis of sanity.

She looked over at the Gypsy and asked, "Blasko, would
you like some more wine?"

"No, Donna, thank you." Blasko replied, yawning. "At my
age I cannot drink wine the way I used to." He paused and
then took the earthen mug from its place on the fresh new grass of springtime. "Well, perhaps just a bit more."

Louisa laughed and poured the crisp white wine into his mug, and then poured some into her own. She relished each and every day, but none more than those days when she did not have to attend to the tables and the linen and the dishes at the small inn. It was good work and it was honest work,
but it was also hard work, and she sometimes wondered if she
would trade places with her earlier self if she had the chance. And then she would think of Gottfried and Helmuth, about Hitler and Himmler, about the S.S. and the Gestapo, about the mad dreams and the bloody reality which had destroyed her nation and had taken the lives of millions and had left
Europe
a corpse-strewn continent in ruins.

And she knew that her old life had been a purgatory of bitterness and shame and sorrow, and she was glad to be rid of it. It did not matter if the war ended next year or next week or tomorrow. She would never go back to
Germany
.

She sipped the wine and then lay down on the grass
beside Blasko, the old man whom she loved as if he were her
father, who had taken her by the hand that last night in Budapest and had led her through the plains of Hungary and
the hills of Croatia into the Alps of Italy and through the
mountain passes into Switzerland. He had held her when she cried, he had watched over her when she slept, found her food when she hungered and clothing when she was cold. He had used all of his Gypsy cunning, all of the skills which his people had learned from untold centuries of wandering amid hostile populations, to see her safely out from beneath
the darkness of the Third Reich into the light of day.

And Blasko loved her as if she were his daughter, even to the extent of pretending sometimes that she was his long
dead little Lura grown to womanhood. He knew what courage
it had taken, what faith, for her to stand in dungeon of the
Ragoczy
Palace
and release the two monsters from their chains. He had seen them and heard them and smelled them as they ripped the door from his cell, and his body had shaken with terror as the werewolves led him and Louisa up to the
streets of
Budapest
, killing soldiers at every turn. She was
a brave woman and a good woman, and he loved her dearly.

They had no way of knowing what else had happened that night, for as soon as they were out of the Palace the creatures ran off into the darkness, and they themselves began their long, furtive flight to freedom. As they sat now in peaceful security upon the Alpine hillside, Louisa was wondering, as she so often wondered, about Janos and Claudia, about Helmuth and Gottfried. She shook her head as if to dismiss the pointless speculation. They would never know if the two tortured souls had won release from their suffering, never know if Schlacht had at last killed Weyrauch, never know if Schlacht himself was living or dead.

But God is gracious, Louisa thought, and all things do
indeed work together for good for those who love Him.

"Brecht was wrong," she said softly in German, watching
the clouds drift lazily above her. "
Erst kommt das Fressen,
und dann die Moral.
He had the whole thing backwards."

"Pardona, Donna?" Blasko asked in Romansch.

"A line from one of our dramatists," she replied in Italian. "‘First you have to eat', he said, ‘and then comes morality'. He had it completely backwards. Right and wrong are all that matter. Right and wrong are everything, everything."

Blasko nodded, not wishing to waste his energy thinking about the point. "We have a similar saying, Donna."

"Really? What is it?"

"First comes the stew and then comes the whiskey."

She stared at him for a moment, startled and not knowing if he was serious. Then, as the impish smile danced around the craggy old face, she laughed and hugged him tightly.

And as Louisa von Weyrauch and the Gypsy Blasko reclined in ease upon the green grass of
Switzerland
, a thousand miles away Gottfried von Weyrauch was pacing impatiently back and forth in the office of the adjutant to the commanding officer of the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. "What the hell is keeping them?" he demanded.

"They will be here in due time, Herr Doctor," Major Kaufmann said curtly. "We are operating under great pressure against a serious deadline
at the moment, you know, and my men have better things to do
than arranging interviews with prisoners."

"Yes, yes, I know, I know," Weyrauch said angrily.

"We have very strict orders from
Berlin
, very strict orders indeed," the S.S. major went on. "It is clear at this point that the war is lost. Another four months, five
at the most
. Reichsführer
Himmler has told us that we must
exterminate as many Jews as possible before that time. As
such, we have been operating day and night." He paused. "In
fact, it is fortunate for you that you arrived when you
did. The man you are looking for is in the last group scheduled for the gas chamber. After that, we are evacuating whatever prisoners are still there and shutting down the camp."

"Yes, yes, yes," Weyrauch spat. "You have your concerns,
Herr Major, and I have mine."

The concerns of the S.S. major were shared by others of
his kind at camps all over Hitler's rapidly shrinking
empire. "If
Germany
is to
die,"
Himmler had said, "we must
not leave one Jew left alive to feast on the carcass." And
so the needs of the S.S. had overridden the needs of the army, and the Nazi elite had reserved for their own use dozens of trains and miles of track and tons of raw
materials,
all
serving to ship as many subhuman racial
enemies as possible to the death camps, to pack as many of
them into the gas chambers as they could
fit,
to slide as many bodies as possible into the ovens. At
Auschwitz
the need
to increase the output of corpses had already led the S.S. to dispense with the burning of the bodies. Corpses were just piled up and up and up and then pushed by bulldozers
into enormous mass graves.

But none of this was of the slightest interest to
Gottfried von Weyrauch. He did not care about the war or the Reich or the Jews. All that was of importance to him was that at last, at long last, after months of searching and a dozen moonlit nights in hell, he had located Janos
Kaldy.

Kaldy had shown up at the gates of the concentration
camp at Karolyi four days after the camp at Hunyad had been attacked and destroyed, presumably by communist partisans.
He had cheerfully announced to the guards that he was a
Jewish homosexual communist Gypsy, and had demanded that he be admitted. It had been obvious to the S.S. at the gates
that the man was a lunatic, but he was arrested anyway, just
to be safe.

And when the guards recounted the amusing incident to their commander, he recognized the name from an order circulated to all camp commanders from the office of
Reichsführer
Himmler. Himmler had been furious to learn that Schlacht's project had ended in a massacre at the Ragoczy Palace and in carnage at the camp at Hunyad, and
though he reported the official lie of partisan activity, he
also sent out search and arrest orders for Janos Kaldy and Petra Loewenstein and an old Gypsy named Blasko and both
Gottfried and Louisa von Weyrauch.

Weyrauch was located two months after the massacre, and was personally interrogated by Himmler. He told the S.S.
Reichsführer
most of the truth as he knew it, omitting any reference to his own situation. He had no knowledge of the whereabouts of his wife or the old Gypsy Blasko, of course,
and thought it prudent not to comment on the death of
Petra
,
reasoning that Himmler would not believe that he had not known she was a werewolf. The minister also impressed upon the
Reichsführer
his desire to be told if Kaldy were apprehended, using supposed concern about his wife as an excuse for requesting the information. Himmler promised nothing and promptly forgot about the minister, but when the commander of the Karolyi camp informed him of Kaldy's "capture," Himmler had ordered the Gypsy sent to him for interrogation. It did not take Himmler long to determine
that this was not the man he had seen in Schlacht's film, for when this man was cut, he bled, and when he was beaten,
he bruised, and when he was tortured, he screamed in pain. So Himmler, who was at the time on an inspection tour of what was left of Germany's Polish state, had sent him off to the nearest concentration
camp, which was
Auschwitz
.

Weyrauch knew nothing of this, but he had exploited his
family relationship with the dead hero, the posthumously promoted General Helmuth Schlacht, to keep in touch with as many high-ranking officers in the S.S. as he could manage,
and it was this effort that had enabled him to learn of Kaldy's incarceration
.

An S.S. private opened the door of the commander's
office and said.
"Herr
Kommandant, the prisoner is in the
guards' barrack."

Major Kaufmann glanced up from his paperwork and said, "Good. Herr Doctor,
go
with this soldier. He will take you
to your Gypsy." He returned his attention to his reports, ignoring Weyrauch as the minister followed the soldier from the room. Kaufmann was relieved to be rid of the pest.