Sun Cross 2 - The Magicians Of Night (4 page)

In any case there was nothing to be seen. Only the bare oak planks…

…
bare oak planks
…

What was it, he wondered suddenly, about the oak planks of the floor that touched a chord of wrongness in his mind? As wrong as the backward-turning swastikas, as wrong as the eyes of the guards in the watch room, cold and caring nothing except to follow whatever orders they were given…

And then he remembered coming to in darkness, sick and freezing and exhausted to the marrow of his being, wondering with what strength was left in him that he was alive at all and thinking how the
stones of the floor would have been cold if any warmth had been left in his hands
.

The stones of the floor.

His eyes went back to the oak planks, naked and worn and scuffed with a thousand scrubbings.

Von Rath lied.

His heart jolted with a lurching surge of certainty, knowing that it was true.

Von Rath lied so that I’d think there wasn’t a way home. So that I’d be at their mercy. So that I’d do whatever I could to restore magic in this world, because only in restoring magic could I get myself home.

Excitement, rage, dread that he was wrong and bone-deep awareness that he was right swept through him in a confused wave, like the stab of needles and pins in a long-numbed limb coming once more to life. He began to shake, his breath coming fast with hope and blazing anger.

They drew up fake Circles here while I was unconscious, to make me believe them. Hell, they could have brought me here from another building, another place entirely, the way cars can travel…

They could have drugged me… I have only their word on how long I was out.

I have only their word on everything.

For a long time he stood there unmoving: a stout little man with his shabby, graying beard and thick-lensed spectacles, listening to von Rath’s quiet voice talking to Baldur in the hall by the library door, the crunch of car tires on gravel outside, and the distant, indistinguishable murmur of the guards exchanging greetings as they walked the barbed-wire perimeter of the fence. He felt exactly as if he had been crossing a floor that he had thought to be solid, only to feel it buckle suddenly beneath him and to hear the echoes of bottomless chaos yawning under his feet.

A floor enormously wide, he thought. And no way of knowing which way to run for safety.

If I have only their word on everything…

What else are they lying to me about?

“YOU WANT ME TO FIND A WHAT
?”
TOM SALTWOOD
tossed the slim dossier of photographs, maps, handwritten notes, and one or two cheesily printed magazine articles back onto the desk and regarded the man who had been his commander in Spain with mingled bemusement and uncertainty. “With all due respect, Colonel Hillyard…”

“I know.” Hillyard’s mouth flicked into its wry, triangular grin. “I’ll admit that’s how it sounded to me.”

“And to me.” The third man in the nameless London office, a stooped Englishman with very bright black eyes peering from a heavily lined face, reached across to the dossier with one arthritic finger and flipped free a snapshot that hadn’t been very good even before it had been blown up to eight-by-ten. Mayfair, Hillyard had introduced him to Saltwood, though Tom was pretty certain that wasn’t his name.

“But some rather strange rumors have come to us from some of the more secret bureaus of the SS, and this one we’ve had—er—independently confirmed. We think it bears looking into.”

“Not,” Hillyard added, settling his lean form back in the worn brown leather of his chair and reaching briefly, almost automatically, behind him to tweak the tiniest chink out of the bow window’s heavy curtains, “ that it would be easier to believe if we’d had it confirmed by personal telegram from Hitler, but there it is.”

Tom was silent for a moment, wondering what it was that was causing the alarm bells to go off at the back of his mind. A false note in Hillyard’s voice, maybe, or the way he tilted his head when he looked across at the man he called Mayfair—the suspicion and query in his eyes. Maybe it was just time and place. What three weeks ago—when he’d gotten the enigmatically worded request to report back to London—would have been normal or at least explicable now bore a staggering load of contextual freight.

Or maybe he was just tired. Several hours spent crammed in a corner of a destroyer’s gun deck with seven hundred filthy and exhausted British soldiers wasn’t particularly conducive to napping, even under the best of circumstances. The steady cannonade of shellfire and strafing hadn’t helped, nor had the unencouraging sight of slate-colored water, littered with hawsers, oil slicks, fragments of mined ships, and floating bodies visible every time he turned his head to glance over the rail.

But on the whole, it was better than the hell of exhaustion and death he’d left behind him on the Dunkirk beach.

And there on the docks at Dover, among all those nice British ladies with cups of tea and elderly blue-clothed policemen saying
Step along this way now
… had been Colonel Hillyard, tired, unshaven, and grimy as any of the troops, but with that old businesslike glint in his dark eyes as he’d said, “About time you showed up. I have a car.” Tom had barely had time to change and shave—he’d slept on the way up.

And now they were asking him to do… What?

He blinked, rubbed his eyes, and picked up the photograph. The reproduction was grainy. The building in the background might have been one of those big mansions rich folks built up the Hudson from New York a hundred years ago—heavy granite walls, peaked gables, crenellated ornamental turrets on the corners and pseudo-Gothic traceries on the windows—except that, judging by the number of men in SS uniforms standing around and the little swastika flags on the hood of the car in the foreground, it was obviously somewhere in Germany. A civilian was standing near the car: a bearded, tired-looking little man of forty or so with curly hair long and unruly and steel-rimmed glasses concealing his eyes.

“His name is Sligo,” Mayfair said in a voice crusty and plummy as eighty-year-old port. “Professor Rhion Sligo.”

“Sounds Irish,” Hillyard remarked from the depths of his armchair. “Gaelic form of Ryan, maybe.” He ran a hand over his sun-browned bald scalp. “Any Irishman working for the SS these days would be using the Gaelic form, of course.”

“Perhaps,” Mayfair agreed. “We have no record of anyone of that name graduating, teaching, or publishing at any university or college we have checked; but then, a false degree is as easy to assume as a false name, and both are rather common in occult circles.” He sipped his tea, which a secretary had brought in a few minutes before.

Tired as he was, Tom had to smile a little at the teacups. In an American office they would have been those thick white mugs reminiscent of every cheap diner from Brooklyn to Bodega
Bay. Here they were somebody’s second-best Spode that had gotten too chipped for company. The office, in one of those politely anonymous terraced squares so typical of London, likewise had the air of having been donated by a Duke in reduced circumstances. It had clearly started life as somebody’s parlor, with faded pink wallpaper framing a stained plaster mantel and a fireplace prosaically tiled over and occupied by an electric grate. The whole setup was straight out of Thackeray. The faded draperies were firmly shut over the bow window, the blackout curtain beyond them cutting out any possibility of a view. Now and then a car would go by outside with a soft swishing of tires, or he would hear the swift clip of hurrying shoe heels on the pavement. But few, Tom thought, would be abroad tonight.

Somewhere in the building, someone had a radio on. Tom couldn’t make out the words, but he didn’t need to. So many ships safely returned to Dover with their cargos of beaten, exhausted, wounded men—so many shelled to pieces or sunk by mines in the channel. And still more men trapped on the beaches, between the advancing German army and the sea.

No sign yet of an air attack on London.

No sign yet of landing barges setting out with German troops.

No sign yet.

Sitting here in this quiet, lamplit office, Tom experienced a sensation of mild surprise that he was alive at all. Twelve hours ago he would have bet money against it.

Mayfair
’s voice called his attention back. “…arrangements made, as you know, three weeks ago to transfer you from your unit in Belgium. What was important then, when the entire question was an academic one of if and when, is doubly important now in the light of an imminent invasion.”

Tom looked from the bent, grizzled old man behind the desk to the lean, browned one in the dull khaki uniform, and rubbed his hand over his face, trying to be sure he was completely awake and alert for all this. “With all due respect, sir… a
wizard
?”

“So he claims.” Mayfair produced a pipe from his jacket pocket and began the meticulous ritual of reaming, cleaning, stuffing, and experimental puffing that Tom had observed pipe smokers to treasure, probably above the actual taste of the tobacco itself. “And the SS seem to believe him enough to cherish him…”

“Yeah, well, they cherish Himmler’s slumgullion about a master race, too.”

“Perhaps. But Sligo’s claim is not only that he is a wizard himself, but that he can teach wizardry to others.”

Tom chuckled. “Hell—sir. Professor Marvello the Magnificent taught
me
magic in the carney when I was eighteen, but nobody from the government ever tried to hire me.”

“Well.” Hillyard smiled, brown eyes sparkling against a brick-red tan. “Now they have.”

Saltwood was startled. “You mean just because…”

“No, no.” Mayfair waved a dismissive hand and set his pipe down on the scarred leather blotter before him. “Although that is what you Americans call a ‘dividend’ for us—that you may stand a better chance of spotting a hoax. No. The reason I asked Colonel Hillyard to contact you—the reason we’ve arranged for you to be seconded from your regiment…”

What’s LEFT of my regiment
, Tom thought grimly, remembering the men who had fallen at the crossings of the Leutze and the Scheldt, remembering the men who had crouched in shell holes in the sand with him, who had not gotten up again.

“…is because you speak German like a native, because you look German, and because you’ve done a bit of intelligence work during the fighting in Spain. Is this correct?”

There was another folder, closed, at Mayfair’s elbow on the battered mahogany of the desk; Tom glanced at it, guessing it was his and wondering exactly how much it contained.

“A whole swarm of Germans and Swedes homesteaded the bottomlands along the Missouri near our ranch when I was a kid,” he explained. “My grandmother was German—she lived with us. I spoke it at home and playing with the German kids. For years I had this real hick Saxon accent—I boarded with a German family when I worked on the New York docks, and the wife said I spoke German like a pig and worked to straighten me out.” He grinned a little at the memory, not adding that his landlord had also been his cell leader in the Industrial Workers of the World and that most of his practice in the language had been obtained in endless summer-night discussions on the stoop about socialist political argument.

Mayfair
studied him awhile longer, taking in, Saltwood knew, the craggy bones of his face, the ridiculously baby-fine dust-colored hair, the blue eyes, broad shoulders, fair skin. His “intelligence work” in Spain had come about because he’d been the only man of their company in the Lincoln Brigade capable of passing himself off as a German. One night he’d  gotten three of the local Anarchists out of rebel hands with only some very unconvincing forgeries of Gestapo i.d. Their Russian military advisor had reprimanded him strongly, for the Anarchists, though officially Republican allies, were considered not worth the risk.

“You understand,” Mayfair went on after a moment, “that you’ll probably be impersonating an SS Trooper for part of the time—and the Nazis are not signatories of the Geneva accords.”

“Neither were the nationalists,” Tom said quietly. “I went through all that in Spain.”

“So I see.” Mayfair sat back and picked up his pipe again, puffing at it in the usual vain effort to get the thing to go. He nodded down at the closed folder. “A volunteer in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, later seconded to the Internationalist Front headquarters in thirty-six. You were listed as captured—”

“I escaped,” Tom said. “Nobody seemed to be trying very hard to get us out.”

“Ah.” Mayfair took a few more draws on the pipe, then gave it up as a bad job and opened the folder, turning over the pages with an arthritic’s careful deliberation. Presumably, Tom thought, it hadn’t been his department. At least he had the good grace not to say, as so many did, “Well, politically we were in an awkward situation with regard to prisoners…”

After a moment he resumed. “You returned to America, though we don’t have any record here of an official repatriation…”

“It wasn’t under my own name.”

The grizzled eyebrows took a whole ladder of parallel forehead wrinkles with them on their way up.

Saltwood shrugged. “They weren’t falling over themselves to repatriate those of us who’d been antifascist enough to go to Spain and get shot at, so I figured somebody who’d been in trouble over labor unions would stand even less of a chance. So when one of my old chess-playing buddies in the Brigade took a bullet in Madrid I sort of appropriated his papers.”

“I see.” By the shrewd glance in his black eyes Tom wondered exactly what he
did
see. “And
were
you involved with the labor unions in the United States?”

“I was on the fringes of them, yes,” Tom lied, folding his hands over the buckle of his Sam Browne belt and doing his best to look like a dumb, blue-eyed farmboy, something he had always been good at. “After Pa died and our ranch went bust, I spent a lot of time on the road. Working in the mines and the factories, you couldn’t hardly help running across them.” From the corner of his eye he saw Hillyard sigh and shake his head, but, after all, his old commander said nothing. Considering Tom’s rowdy and violent career as an organizer in the IWW, that was probably just as well.