The Wolf's Hour (37 page)

“Chesna! Over here! Please, sit with us!” Jerek Blok rose from his chair and waved them over. Boots, who might have taken up two chairs, was not in attendance, but Blok sat with a group of his dinner guests. “Move down!” he told them, and they instantly obeyed. “Please, sit beside me.” He motioned to the seat next to him. Chesna took it, and Michael sat on the aisle seat. Blok put his hand on Chesna’s and grinned broadly. “Ah, it’s a wonderful night! Springtime! You can feel it in the air, can’t you?”

“Yes, you can,” Chesna agreed, her smile pleasant but her voice tense.

“We’re so glad to have you with us, Baron,” Blok told him. “Of course you know all the membership fees go toward the War Fund.”

Michael nodded. Blok began talking to a woman sitting in front of him. Sandler, Michael saw, was sitting up on the front row with a woman on either side of him, talking animatedly. Tales of Africa, Michael thought.

Within fifteen minutes, between seventy and eighty people had entered the auditorium. The lanterns began to dim, and the doors were closed to shut out the uninvited. A hush fell over the audience. What the hell was this all about? Michael wondered. Chesna was still gripping his hand, and her fingernails were beginning to dig into his skin.

A man in a white tuxedo came out through the curtains, to polite applause. He thanked the membership for attending, the monthly meeting, and for being so generous with their contributions. He went on, about the fighting spirit of the Reich, and how the valiant youth of Germany would crush the Russians and send them fleeing back to their holes. The applause was more scattered, and some of the officers actually groaned in derision. The man-a master of ceremonies, Michael reasoned-continued, undaunted, about the shining future of the Thousand-Year Reich and how Germany would yet have three capitals: Berlin, Moscow, and London. Today’s blood, he said in a booming voice, would be tomorrow’s victory garlands, so we’ll fight on! And on! And on!

“And now,” he said with a flourish, “let the entertainment begin!”

The lanterns had gone out. The curtains opened, the stage illuminated by footlights, and the master of ceremonies hurried off.

Another man sat in a chair, reading a newspaper and smoking a cigar, at stage center.

Michael almost bolted to his feet.

It was Winston Churchill. Totally naked, the cigar clamped in his bulldog teeth and a tattered London Times in his pudgy hands.

Laughter swelled. The music of a brass band, hidden behind the stage, oompahed a comic tune. Winston Churchill sat smoking and reading, his pallid legs crossed and his etiquette hanging down. As the audience laughed and applauded, a girl wearing nothing but high black leather boots and carrying a cat-o’-nine-tails strutted out on stage. She wore a square smudge of charcoal on her upper lip: a Hitlerian mustache. Michael, his senses reeling, recognized the girl as Charlotta, the autograph seeker. There was nothing shy about her now, her breasts bobbling as she advanced toward Churchill, and he suddenly looked up and let out a shrill, piercing scream. The scream made everyone laugh harder. Churchill fell to his knees, his naked and flabby behind offered to the audience, and held up his hands for mercy.

“You pig!” the girl shouted. “You filthy, murdering swine! Here’s your mercy!” She swung the whip and the lashes cracked across Churchill’s shoulder, raising red welts on his white flesh. The man howled in pain and groveled at her feet. She began to whip his back and buttocks, cursing him like a blue-tongued sailor as the band oompahed merrily and the audience convulsed with laughter. Reality and unreality mixed; Michael realized the man was of course not the prime minister of England, just an actor who eerily resembled him, but the cat-o’-nine-tails wasn’t a fiction. Neither was the girl’s rage. “This is for Hamburg!” she shouted. “And Dortmund! And Marienburg! And Berlin! And-” She went on, a recitation of cities the Allied bombers had hit, and as the whip began to fling drops of blood the audience erupted in a paroxysm of cheering. Blok leaped to his feet, clapping his hands above his head. Others were standing, too, shouting gleefully as the whipping continued and the false Churchill shivered at the girl’s feet. Blood streamed down the man’s back, but he made no effort to rise or escape the whip. “Bonn!” the girl raged as the whip struck. “Schweinfurt!” Sweat glistened on her shoulders and between her breasts, her body trembling with the effort, moisture smearing the charcoal mustache. The whip continued to fall, and now the man’s back and buttocks were crisscrossed with red. Finally the man shuddered and lay sobbing, and the female Hitler whipped him across his back one last time and then put a booted foot on his neck in triumph. She gave the audience a Nazi salute and received a bounty of cheering and applause. The curtains closed. “Wonderful! Wonderful!” Blok said, sitting down again. A tight sheen of perspiration had collected on his forehead, and he dabbed it off with a white handkerchief. “You see what entertainment your money buys, Baron?”

“Yes,” Michael answered; forcing a smile was the most difficult thing he’d ever done in his life. “I do see.”

The curtains opened again. Two men were shoveling glittering fragments from a wheelbarrow, scattering them over the stage. Michael realized they were covering the floor with broken glass. They finished their job, rolled the wheelbarrow away, and then a Nazi soldier pushed a thin girl with long brown hair onto the stage. She wore a dirty, patched dress made of potato sacks, and her bare feet crunched the glass shards. The girl stood in the glass, her head slumped and her hair obscuring her face. Pinned to her potato-sack dress was a yellow Star of David. A violinist in a black tuxedo appeared from the left side of the stage, wedged his instrument against his throat, and began to fiddle a lively tune.

The girl, against all human reason and dignity, began to dance on the broken glass like a windup toy.

The audience laughed and clapped, as if in appreciation of an animal act. “Bravo!” the officer sitting in front of Michael shouted. Michael would have blown the bastard’s brains out if he’d had his derringer. This savagery surpassed anything he’d experienced in the Russian forest; this, truly, was a gathering of beasts. It was all he could do to keep from leaping to his feet and shouting for the girl to stop, but Chesna felt his body tremble and she looked at him. She saw the revulsion in his eyes, and something else there, too, that frightened her to the marrow of her bones. “Do nothing!” she whispered.

Under Michael’s tuxedo jacket and crisp white shirt, wolf hair had emerged along his spine. The hairs scurried across his flesh.

Chesna squeezed his hand. Her own eyes were dead, her emotions switched off like an electric light. On stage, the violinist was playing faster and the thin girl was dancing faster, leaving bloody footprints on the boards. This was almost beyond Michael’s power to endure; it was the brutalization of the innocent, and it made his soul writhe. He felt hair crawling on the backs of his arms, on his shoulder blades, on his thighs. The change was calling him, and to embrace it in this auditorium would be a disaster. He closed his eyes, thought of the verdant forest, the white palace, the song of the wolves: civilization, a long way from here. The violinist was playing frantically now, and the audience was clapping in rhythm. Sweat burned Michael’s face. He could smell the musky animal perfume rising from his flesh.

It took a massive effort of will to hold back the wild winds. They came very close to engulfing him but he fought them, his eyes tightly closed and the wolf hair rippling across his chest. A band of hair rose on the back of his right hand, which clenched the armrest on the aisle, but Chesna didn’t see it. And then the change passed like a freight train on dark tracks, the wolf hair itching madly as it retreated into his pores.

The violinist played a flurry of notes at satanic speed, and Michael could hear the sound of the girl’s feet sliding on the glass. The music reached its zenith and ceased, to cheering and more shouts of “Bravo! Bravo!” He opened his eyes; they were wet with rage and revulsion. The Nazi soldier led the girl offstage. She moved like a sleepwalker, trapped in an unending nightmare. The violinist bowed, smiling broadly, another man with a broom came out to sweep up the bloody glass, and the curtains closed.

“Excellent!” Blok said, to no one in particular. “This is the best presentation yet!”

Attractive naked women appeared, rolling kegs of beer and iced mugs on carts along the aisles. They stopped to draw beer into the mugs and pass them to thirsty Brimstone Club members. The audience began to grow raucous, some of them breaking into obscene songs. Grinning faces gleamed with sweat, and beer sloshed as mugs were cracked together in vile toasts.

“How long does this go on?” Michael asked Chesna.

“Hours. I’ve known it to go on all night.”

One more minute was too long, as far as he was concerned. He touched his pocket, and felt the key to their room that Chesna had given him. Blok was talking to the man next to him, explaining something with a hammering of his fist. An iron fist? Michael wondered.

The curtains opened again. At the center of the stage was a bed, its sheet a Russian flag. On that bed, her wrists and ankles tied to the bedposts, lay a dark-haired woman, nude, who might have been Slavic. Two naked, muscular men wearing Nazi helmets and jackboots goosestepped out from either side of the stage, to loud applause and excited laughter. Their weapons were raised for an assault, and the woman on the bed cringed but couldn’t escape.

Michael had reached his limit. He stood up, turned his back on the stage, and walked quickly up the aisle and out of the auditorium.

“Where’s the baron going?” Blok asked. “It’s the shank of the evening!”

“I… don’t think he’s feeling well,” Chesna told him. “He ate too much.”

“Oh. Weak-stomached, eh?” He grasped her hand to keep her from bolting, too, and his silver teeth flashed. “Well, I’ll keep you company, won’t I?”

Chesna started to pull away, but Blok’s grip tightened. She’d never walked out of a Brimstone Club meeting; she’d always been a loyal part of the group, and to walk out now-even following the baron-might cause suspicion. She forced her muscles to relax, and her actress’s smile surfaced. “I’d love a beer,” she said, and Blok motioned to one of the naked waitresses. Onstage, there was a scream, followed by the audience’s shouts of approval.

Michael unlocked the suite door and went directly to the balcony, where he breathed in fresh air and fought down his churning stomach. It took a minute or two for his head to clear; his brain felt infected with corruption. He looked at the ledge that ran from the balcony along the castle’s wall. Eight inches wide, at the most. Sculpted eagles and gargoyle faces were set in the cracked gray stones. But if he mis-stepped, or lost his handhold…

No matter. If he was going, it had to be now.

He eased over the terrace balustrade, set one foot on the ledge, and grasped the eye sockets of a gargoyle. His other foot found the ledge, too. He waited a few seconds, until he had his center of balance, and then he carefully moved along the ledge, a hundred and forty feet above Hitler’s earth.

8

The ledge was still slick with rain. The wind had turned chill, and gusts plucked at Michael’s hair and tugged his tuxedo jacket. He kept going, inch by inch, his chest pressed against the castle’s mountainous wall and his shoes scraping along the ledge. The balcony of the next suite was perhaps thirty feet away, and then there was another eight feet or so to the southeast corner. Michael moved carefully onward, not thinking of anything but the next step, the next finger grip. He grasped an eagle that suddenly cracked and crumbled, the fragments falling into the darkness. He squeezed himself against the wall with his forefinger and thumb hooked into a half-inch-wide fracture until he regained his balance. Then he went on, fingers searching for fissures in the ancient stones, his shoes testing the firmness of the ledge before each step. He thought of a fly, crawling along the side of a massive, square cake. One step followed the next. Something cracked. Careful, careful, he told himself. The ledge held, and in another moment Michael reached the next balcony and stepped over the balustrade. Curtains were closed over the terrace doors, but light streamed through a large window just on the other side of the terrace. The ledge went underneath that window. He would have to pass it to reach the corner, where a pattern of gargoyle faces and geometric figures ascended to the next level. Michael walked across the terrace, took a deep breath, and stepped over the railing onto the ledge again. He was wet under his arms, and sweat dampened the small of his back. He kept going, relying on the ledge and not on handholds as he passed the window; it was a spacious bedroom, clothes scattered on the bed but no one in the room. Michael made it past the glass, noting with some displeasure that he’d left his palm prints on it, and the corner was within reach.

He stood clinging to the southeast edge of the Reichkronen, wind slashing into his face and searchlights sweeping back and forth across the clouds. Now he would have to leave the safety of this ledge and climb up to the next level, using the sculpted stones as a ladder. Thunder rumbled in the sky, and he looked up, examining the gargoyle faces and geometric figures, judging where to put his fingers and toes. The wind was an enemy to balance, but that couldn’t be helped. Go on, he told himself, because this corner was the kind of place that sapped courage. He reached up, got his fingers latched on a sculpted triangle, and began to pull himself up. One shoe tip went into a gargoyle’s eye, the other found an eagle’s wing. He climbed the carved stones, the wind swirling around him.

Twelve feet above the sixth-floor ledge, he put his fingers into the eyes of a gaping, demonic face and a pigeon burst out of the mouth in a flurry of feathers. Michael stayed where he was for a moment, his heart hammering and pigeon feathers whirling around him. His fingers were scraped and raw, but he was only eight feet below the seventh-floor ledge. He kept climbing over the sculpted stones, got one knee up on the ledge, and pulled himself carefully to his feet. The ledge made a cracking noise and a few bits of masonry tumbled down, but he was still standing on something more or less solid. The next balcony belonged to Harry Sandler’s suite, and he reached it with relative ease. He quickly crossed the terrace, slipped over it on the opposite side-and faced a ledge between it and Blok’s terrace that had all but crumbled to pieces. Only chunks of stone remained, with gaping holes between them. The largest ledgeless space was about five feet, but from Michael’s precarious perspective it easily looked twice that distance. He would have to cling to the wall to get over it.

Michael eased along the decayed ledge, balancing on his toes, his fingers finding cracks in the stones. As he settled his weight forward, a piece of the ledge suddenly broke beneath his right foot. Legs splayed and his chest hugging the wall, he tightened his grip on fissures in the stones. His shoulders throbbed with the effort, and he heard the breath whistle between his teeth. Go on! he urged himself. Don’t stop, damn it! He listened to the inner voice, its heat thawing the ice that had begun to form in his knee joint. He went on, step after wary step, and he came to the place where there was no ledge.

“He asked for my advice, and I gave it to him,” came a voice from below Michael. Someone talking on a sixth-floor terrace. “I said those troops were green as new apples, and if he put them in that caldron, they’d be chewed to pieces.”

“But of course he didn’t listen.” Another man’s voice.

“He laughed at me! Actually laughed! He said he certainly knew his troops better than I did, and he’d ask for my opinion when he wanted it. And now we all know the result, don’t we? Eight thousand men trapped by the Russians, and four thousand more marching to prison camps. I tell you, it makes you sick to think of this damned waste!”

Michael didn’t feel well himself, thinking of how he’d have to cling to the wall to get across that hole. As the two officers talked on the lower balcony, he stretched out as far as he could, hooked his raw fingers into cracks, and tensed his shoulders. Now! he thought, and before he could hesitate he swung out over the ledgeless gap, his shoulder muscles bunching under his shirt and his fingers and wrists as taut as pitons. He hung for a few seconds, trying to get his right foot up on the next fragment of ledge. A piece of masonry cracked off and fell, smaller pebbles of stone following it down into the dark.

“It’s murder,” the first officer was saying, his voice getting more strident. “Absolute murder. Young men by the thousands, being torn to shreds. I know, I’ve seen the reports. And when the people of Germany find out about this, there’ll be hell to pay.”

Michael couldn’t get his foot up on the ledge, because the stone kept crumbling away. Sweat was on his face. His wrists and shoulders were cramping. Another chunk of masonry fell, and hit the castle’s wall on the way down.

“My God, what was that?” the second officer asked. “Something just fell, over there.”

“Where?”

Come on, come on! Michael told himself, and swore at his clumsiness. He got the toe of his right shoe wedged on a small piece of ledge that, mercifully, didn’t fall. Some of the pressure eased on his fingers and wrists. But small bits of stone were still crumbling, the pebbles making little clicking noises as they ricocheted off the stones below.

“There! You see? I knew I heard it!”

In another few seconds the two men were going to lean over their balcony’s railing, look up, and see him battling for balance. Michael slid his right foot forward, made room for the toe of his left shoe on the fragment of ledge, and then heaved with his straining shoulders and stretched so that his right foot found a stronger place to rest. Blok’s terrace was within reach. He unhooked his right hand, gripped the balustrade, and quickly pulled himself over onto the sturdy surface. He rested a moment, breathing hard, his shoulder and forearm muscles slowly unkinking.

“This whole damn place must be falling apart,” the first officer said. “Just like the Reich, eh? Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if this balcony fell under our feet.”

There was silence. Michael heard one of the men nervously clear his throat, and the next sound was that of the balcony door opening and closing.

Michael turned the knobs of the French doors and entered Jerek Blok’s suite.

He knew where the dining room was, and the kitchen beyond that. In that area he didn’t care to wander, since some of the waiters and kitchen staff might be around. He crossed the high-ceilinged living room, passing a black marble fireplace above which the requisite painting of Hitler hung, and reached another closed door. He tried the gleaming brass knob, and the door yielded to him. There were no lights in the room, but he could see well enough: shelves of books, a massive oak desk, a couple of black leather chairs, and a couch. This must be Blok’s permanent office when he visited the Reichkronen. Michael closed the door behind him, walked across the thick Persian carpet-probably stolen from the house of a Russian nobleman, he thought grimly-and to the desk. On it was a green-shaded lamp, which he switched on to continue his search. On one wall was a large framed photograph of Blok, standing under a stone arch. Beyond him were wooden structures and coils of barbed wire, and a brick chimney puffing black smoke. On the stone arch was carved FALKENHAUSEN. The concentration camp, near Berlin, where Blok had served as commandant. It was the photograph of a man proud of his child.

Michael turned his attention to the desk. The blotter was clean; Blok evidently was the soul of neatness. He tried the top drawer: locked. So were all the other drawers. The desk had a black leather chair with a silver SS embedded in its backrest, and leaning against it in the desk’s well was a black valise. Michael picked it up. The valise bore the silver SS insignia and the Gothic initials JGB. He put the valise atop the desk and unzipped it, reaching inside. His hand found a folder and drew it out.

Within the folder were various sheets of white paper-Blok’s official SS stationery-on which numbers were typed. The numbers were arranged in columns, designating amounts of money. Budget sheets, Michael reasoned. Beside the numbers were initials: perhaps the initials of people, items, or a code of some kind. In any case he had no time to try to decipher them. His overall impression was that a large amount of money had been spent on something, and either Blok or a secretary had written down everything to the last deutsche mark.

Something else was in the folder, too: a square brown envelope.

Michael unclasped it and slid its contents out under the lamp.

There were three black-and-white photographs. Michael flinched, but then leaned forward and forced himself to study them closely.

The first photograph showed the face of a dead man. What was left of the face, that is. The left cheek had collapsed into a ragged-edged crater, holes covered the forehead, the nose had rotted into a gaping hole, and teeth showed through the tattered lips. More holes, each one about an inch in diameter, were scattered over the chin and the exposed throat. All that remained of the right ear was a nub of flesh, as if someone had burned it off with a blowtorch. The man’s eyes stared blankly, and it took Michael a few seconds to realize that his eyelids were gone. At the bottom of the photograph, just below the corpse’s ravaged throat, was a slate. And on that slate was chalked, in German: 2/19/44, Test Subject 307, Skarpa.

The second photograph was a profile of what might have been a woman’s face. There was a little dark, curly hair clinging to the skull. But most of the flesh was gone, and the wounds were so hideous and deep that the sinus passages and the root of the tongue were exposed. The eye was a white, melted mass, like a lump of candle wax. Across the corpse’s cratered shoulder was a slate: 2/22/44, Test Subject 345, Skarpa.

Michael felt prickles of cold sweat on the back of his neck. He looked at the third picture.

Whether this human being had been man, woman, or child was impossible to tell. Nothing remained of the face but wet craters held together by strands of glistening tissue. In that gruesome ruin the teeth were clenched, as if biting back a final scream. Holes pocked the throat and shoulders, and the slateboard read 2/24/44, Test Subject 359, Skarpa.

Skarpa, Michael thought. The Norwegian island where Dr. Gustav Hildebrand kept a second home. Obviously Hildebrand had been entertaining guests. Michael steeled himself, and looked at the photographs again. Test subjects. Nameless numbers; probably Russian prisoners. But-dear God!-what had done this kind of damage to human flesh? Even a flamethrower gave a cleaner death. Sulfuric acid was the only thing he could think of that might have wreaked such horror, yet the tattered edges of the flesh showed no sign of being burned, by either chemicals or flame. He was certainly no expert on corrosives, but he doubted that even sulfuric acid could have such a savage effect. Test subjects, he thought. Testing what? Some new chemical that Hildebrand had developed? Something so hideous that it could only be tested on a barren island off the coast of Norway? And what might this have to do with Iron Fist, and a caricature of a strangled Hitler?

Questions without answers. But of one thing Michael Gallatin was certain: he had to find those answers, before the Allied invasion a little more than a month away.

He returned the photographs to the envelope, then the envelope and papers to the folder, the folder to the valise, the valise zippered and replaced exactly where he’d found it. He spent a few more minutes looking around the office, but nothing else caught his interest. Then he switched off the lamp, crossed the room, and headed for the front door. He was almost there when he heard a key slip into the latch. He stopped abruptly, spinning around and striding quickly for the terrace doors. He was barely out onto the balcony when the door opened. A girl’s breathy, excited voice said, “Oh, this looks like heaven!”

“The colonel enjoys luxury,” came the husky reply. The door shut, and was relocked. Michael stood with his back against the castle wall and darted a glance through the glass of the French doors. Boots had found a female companion, evidently bringing her up to Blok’s suite to try to impress her out of her dress. The next step, if Michael knew anything about seduction, was to bring her out to the balcony and lean her over the edge to give her a tingle. In that case this would not be the best place to stand.

Michael quickly stepped over the balustrade onto the treacherously gapped ledge. He slipped his raw fingers into chinks, held tight, and started back the way he’d come. The masonry cracked and crumbled under his weight, but he got across the gaps and reached the balcony to Sandler’s suite. Behind him he heard the girl say, “It’s so high, isn’t it?”