Sun Cross 2 - The Magicians Of Night (34 page)

There was no dead creature, no ashes, no little trapdoor in the ceiling… not even the smashed remains of a hornet on the wall.

The room was precisely as it had been when he’d been brought here. His shirt, unburned, lay crumpled on the floor. He looked at his left arm, and saw the skin whole with its dusting of sunburn over the thick core of muscle and bone.

He went and got his shirt, because even the heat of the fire had died out of the room and it was unpleasantly chilly, but, as he put it on, he wedged himself in the far corner and waited without moving until an hour later, when the door opened and von Rath came in.

“You were apprehended in the uniform of a Storm Trooper, bearing Schutzstaffel identification papers.” Von Rath folded his arms and tipped his head a little to one side. “It makes no difference to me or to our experiment whether you are English or German, but as Reichsführer-SS Himmler will point out, the penalties attached to espionage are far less exacting than those for treason to the Black Order and to the Reich.” As he spoke von Rath nodded toward the two men who had entered the room in the wake of his little knot of guards. One was a golden giant of a man, like an overweight Norse god, with the left breast of his white uniform jacket plastered in medals—Saltwood knew his face from the newspaper photograph he and other members of the Lincoln Brigade had thrown darts at in their quarters in Madrid. It was Hermann Goering. Had it not been for the military gingerbread decorating the other man’s black SS uniform, Saltwood would have taken him for somebody’s clerk—small, mild, bespectacled, and self-effacing, clutching his clipboard with a slightly apologetic air and completely overshadowed by the splendid commander of the Luftwaffe. With a shock, Saltwood realized that was Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and the Gestapo.

After a moment he said quietly, “Captain Thomas Saltwood, Eleventh Independent Battalion.” He’d been promoted after the big raid on Boulogne.

“The Commandos,” von Rath said, and nodded as if pleased. “Not only the highest racial type, but trained.”

The air of smugness clung to him, radiated from him; Saltwood could see by the slight dampening of his ivory-fair hair that he had gone through some exertion, but there was no sign of it in the glowing pinkness of his face. Over his black uniform jacket he still wore his hoodoo beads. Looking at them more closely—for they were almost on level with his eyes where he sat handcuffed to the same chair that had appeared to burst into flames an hour ago—Saltwood realized with a shock of revulsion that several of the disks were made of human skin stretched over what must have been human bone. They were wrapped and trimmed in gold, and written over with the kind of weird magic signs with which Marvello had decorated his blue stage robe and pointed hat, a horrible juxtaposition of the gruesome and the absurd.

Oddly enough, even those didn’t trouble him as much as the iron circle, hanging alone upon its silver chain. There was some kind of disturbing optical effect connected with it, a sort of blurring, as if it were impossible to see it directly. And yet, when he looked again, he could see the buttons of the man’s uniform clearly through its ring, the texture of the jacket wool, and the links of the chain beneath.

“And yet he is an American,” Goering said thoughtfully.

Saltwood looked across at him. “Some of us don’t need an Anschluss to tell us who our brothers are.”

The big man’s eyes gleamed approvingly at this show of defiance, but von Rath said, “It makes no difference. Our purpose is not to gather intelligence but to conduct a psychological test. If you do not give us accurate answers about what you experienced we have thiopental available, but we would prefer an undrugged subject, as much as you, I am sure, would prefer to avoid being drugged.”

Saltwood glanced up at him. “You realize using prisoners of war for tests of any kind is against the Geneva accord?”

The cold face twitched in a smile that looked strangely automatic. “You are not a prisoner of war,” he pointed out gently. “You are a spy. If you prefer, we will turn you over to the Gestapo, whose methods, as you will learn, are also against the Geneva accords.”

No way out
, Saltwood thought. He might as well find out what the hell had been going on here. If Himmler and Goering—the second and third honchos of the Reich—had shown up to watch, this device of Sligo’s, whatever it was or did, was big stuff. He shivered, remembering the slashing, clawing thing chewing its way up his arm, and looked again down at the uncharred shirt sleeve, the uninjured flesh beneath, and the unburned wood of the chair in which he sat. His arm still hurt like hell. Impossible to believe it hadn’t been real.

“Fair enough.”

The door opened quietly, and the fat boy Baldur Twisselpeck entered, followed by white-bearded Jacobus Gall, both carrying clipboards similar to those held by the two Nazi bigwigs. Von Rath gave them an inquiring glance; Gall nodded and said, “You may question her after you are done with him.”

Von Rath turned back to Saltwood. He, too, held a clipboard, but didn’t bother to look at it; he spoke as if he knew it all by heart. “At ten forty-five today you looked up at the ceiling of this room, started striking at something in the air. What was it?”

“A—a hornet,” Saltwood said, after a moment of fishing the German word—
eine Hornisse
—from the disused memories of the high plains. “It struck at my face. I don’t know how it got into the room. I waited till it lighted, then crushed it.”

“Have you been stung by a hornet before, Captain Saltwood?”

“Yes.”

“And you suffered no extraordinary adverse effects?”

“I puff up and hurt like hell; I don’t know if you Aryans do it differently.”

“You are obviously of Aryan stock yourself, Captain,” Himmler said in his soft voice, looking up from his clipboard and blinking behind his round spectacles. “It grieves me to hear such treason to your birthright.”

“I’ll tell that to my Sioux grandmother,” Saltwood retorted. “She’ll be flattered.”

Very calmly von Rath struck him, an open-handed blow across the face that wrenched his head on his neck and brought blood from his lip. Saltwood jerked angrily against the handcuffs that held him to the chair and heard the guards behind him move, ready for trouble, but nothing came of it. He settled back, blue eyes glittering dangerously. After a moment’s silence, von Rath went on, “Then at ten fifty-two you started looking around the room. What did you seek?”

“The place where the hornet got in. I can’t swear to the exact time because your little cherubs lifted my watch… I wanted to know if there were going to be more of them, or if it might lead to some way out.”

“And did you find the place?”

“There was—” He paused, glancing up at the corner of the ceiling where the trapdoor had been—
It really had, dammit!—
and wondering how stupid this was going to sound. “I thought I saw a kind of trapdoor up there, the kind that gives access to…” He didn’t know the German for crawlspace, so finished with “… attics.”

Goering and Himmler looked quickly at one another. Himmler asked, “What part of the ceiling? What corner of the room?”

“Left-hand rear corner as you come in the door. It was about two feet square, painted over white. I know I didn’t see it when I came in.”

“And when did you first see it?” Himmler asked, leaning forward, fascinated.

“Only when I killed the hornet. In fact, I was looking at the ceiling when the damn bug was flying around up there, wondering how it had got in. I’m sure—I’m
almost
sure—there was no trapdoor then.”

Von Rath went on, “And you brought the chair over directly underneath the trapdoor as soon as you noticed it, presumably to attempt an escape.”

“To see if I could get out that way, yes.”

“This chair you’re sitting on now?”

“Yes.”

Goering was staring at von Rath with unbelieving awe; Himmler’s attention was fastened on Saltwood, his moist little lips parted with eagerness, his dark eyes bright.

“And what happened?”

Saltwood took a deep breath. “I—The chair caught fire.”

If von Rath had been a cat he would have purred and washed himself the way cats did when they knew they were being admired. “Did it?”

Hell
, Saltwood thought,
dammit, it did!
“Yeah. I don’t understand… I felt the heat. I threw it away—it hit the wall over by the door. The fire spread…” Once in Tulsa, Saltwood had had his boss’ car stolen from him by a troop of Cherokee teenagers on bicycles. He recited his story as he’d recited his explanation then, keeping his eyes straight forward and simply recounting the events as they’d happened, ridiculous and unbelievable as they sounded, but he was conscious of the two Reichsministers whispering together, comparing notes on their clipboards, gesturing with covert amazement.

“It is incredible,” Goering whispered, when Saltwood had finished. He was looking stunned. Himmler, throughout the narrative, had been gradually puffing himself up with the same kind of gratified smugness that characterized von Rath, and now looked so pleased Saltwood wished the bigger man would swat him. “Absolutely unbelievable. And the other subject…”

“I have no doubt,” Himmler purred, “that the results will be exactly the same.”

“Bring her in,” von Rath said, and Gall and Baldur, who had been standing listening, turned and left. To the SS guards von Rath said, “Take this man into the other room.” As Saltwood’s hands were unmanacled and he stood up, von Rath continued to his two distinguished visitors, “Other experiments can be devised, of course, using more subjects simultaneously, but I’m sure this proves…”

The closing of the door shut out the sound of his voice—the room was soundproofed.

Like the house out in the Jungfern Heide, this place—the house on Teglerstrasse, von Rath had called it—was a modestly isolated villa set in its own wide grounds, which were also walled; though, as far as Saltwood could tell from the glimpse he’d gotten by the combined moonlight and headlamps when they’d brought him here, without the fortresslike quality of the house where they were keeping Sligo. The district, where middle-class suburban villas had begun to encroach on country cottages, lay well to the northeast of Berlin’s sea of industrial slums, but it was more heavily built up than the Jungfern Heide. During the day, listening against the slant of the attic ceiling, he’d been able to make out occasional sounds of traffic on Teglerstrasse itself. He wondered why von Rath had wanted separate establishments. As part of this “demonstration” of theirs?

The place was smaller than von Rath’s headquarters, having, Saltwood guessed, four rooms downstairs and four, maybe six, up. His guards now escorted him to what had been an upstairs parlor, rugless, cold, and containing a plain wooden table and three more hard kitchen chairs of the pattern already familiar to him. Evidently all the better pieces of furniture had found their way into some Party official’s residence. Its window wasn’t covered, but it
was
barred; as soon as the guards had recuffed his hands in front of him and locked the door, leaving him alone, he strode over and looked out. Treetops were visible over a buff sandstone wall more decorative than functional, and the roofs of neighboring “villas.” On the gravel drive below were parked two large Mercedes staff cars, a three-ton Benz LG.-3000 transport with a tie-down canvas cover, and a number of motorcycles. Storm Troopers and two minor officers in the uniforms of the Luftwaffe stood by them, smoking. Beyond, he could see iron gates, backed with sheet metal, as were those of the house in the Jungfern Heide on the other side of town. It was broad daylight, by the angle of the cloud-filtered sun shortly after noon.

Escaping over the wall with six-guns blazing didn’t look like a real promising bet.

Nevertheless Tom began a meticulous examination of the room.

There were two doors—one into the hallway, the other, presumably, into another room. Both were locked—new locks, as in the Jungfern Heide house, set in the old oak of the doors. At a guess, he thought, looking at the scratches on the bare floorboards beneath the three chairs and the way they were grouped around the table, prisoners were interviewed here. A Gestapo safe house? God knew how many of those there were around the outskirts of Berlin. Easy enough for the Gestapo, or the SS, to acquire from those “enemies of the Reich” who disappeared into concentration camps.
Real nice property
, his mind framed an advertisement,
comfortable, detached, suburban villa; privacy, security, all the modern conveniences, and a place to put the kiddies when they’re bad
…

He thought, as he had many times during last night’s interminable incarceration in the attic cell, about poor Professor Sligo, locked in his windowless room and completely at the mercy of a fruitcake like von Rath. No improvement over whatever insane asylum they’d gotten him from.

But he’d sure as hell come up with something. Possibly not of his own free will, but SOMETHING.

He shivered again and rubbed his arm. Hallucinogenic gas?
Never spend your hard-earned cash on liquor again, folks—skip all that time-consuming drinking and go straight to the D.T.’s!
As he never had before, he pitied old Charlie the wino who’d hung around the West Virginia mines, screaming as he tore imaginary snakes from his clothing.
Christ, if that’s what it’s like I’m going teetotal
.

And he grinned mirthlessly.
Right—you’ll turn down the glass of brandy von Rath’s going to offer you before he shoots you as a spy
.

He had to get out. If he’d been shocked enough, panicked enough, to shove his own arm into what he thought was a fire to get rid of that thing eating its way up toward his face, God knew what havoc Sligo’s invention would work in the forces defending the roads up from the English beaches against the first Panzer divisions, the RAF boys going against the Luftwaffe in the Sussex skies.

No wonder Mayfair wanted Sligo destroyed—and no wonder Intelligence wouldn’t believe the rumors they’d heard.

Having made a circuit of the room, he went back to the second, inner door. Hinges on the other side, dammit—in any case he didn’t have so much as a belt buckle to pry them out with. He didn’t have a cigarette, either, and was feeling the need of one badly. As he knelt to examine the lock he became aware of voices in the other room, the feint creak of footsteps, and the dim, protesting groan of an overburdened chair.