Volk

by David Nickle

  “All right,” she said. “Doctor Kurtzweiller—pour me a glass of that wine, would you?” She tugged the glove from her right hand by the fingers, then folded it and removed the left, and rearranged the wristwatch underneath. When she was finished, she accepted the glass and sipped, then took a bigger swallow and shut her eyes a moment and drew a breath.

  “Something has happened,” she finally said, “to Jason.”

  “Jason?” asked Kurtzweiller, and Lewis said: “Jason Thistledown,” and Andrew stepped around the table, scooped the jar with the Juke into his coat pocket, and said: “Thorn. Jason Thorn.” He pulled out a chair for Ruth, and tucked it back under her as she sat.

  “What’s happened?” he asked.

  “Tell me, Dr. Waggoner—Andrew. Did Jason visit you earlier this year?”

  “Not me,” said Andrew. “Annie mentioned he called on her. She said he’d taken a job, in Africa. He’d be gone for some time.”

  “But you were not available?” Ruth twirled the glass by the stem so that the wine curled up toward the rim.

  “No,” said Andrew.

  “That’s a shame. I was hoping he’d lied about that. You two have always had a special friendship. Much more so than he and your wife.”

  “Lied? To whom? What happened to him?”

  “Did he write you?”

  “He didn’t write me,” said Andrew levelly. “You know how things are, Ruth—pardon me, Miss Harper. Now please—what’s happened to him?”

  “I do,” said Ruth. “Well then. Mr. . . . Mr. Thorn has vanished. Not in Africa. And no, not dead—at least we don’t believe so,” she hastily corrected, perhaps reading the expressions of Andrew and the other two.

  “We?”

  She sighed at that, shut her eyes, and when she opened them, Andrew could see that they were damp.

  “We believe,” she said, “it is a Juke.”

  Andrew’s fist curled around the jar in his coat pocket, and he looked to Kurtzweiller, and Lewis, and then back to Ruth. “Where?” was all he could say.

  Ruth glanced down at her wristwatch, looked up again, and appeared to make a decision.

  “Won’t you all please sit?” she said. “I think the best way to proceed is according to your custom.”

  “Our custom?” asked Andrew.

  “Pardon me. Your methodology. The Decameron System, isn’t it?” She blinked. “I always thought that was a clever name for it. Don’t you call it that anymore?”

  They hadn’t called it that, not at first.

  But that was what got them through—Andrew and Ruth, Annie and Jason, in those days at the Thorn farm with the ashes of Eliada behind them . . . telling the story, the story of Eliada, in a rational order, in a way that made sense.

  It was Jason who’d got it rolling, quietly in that bunkhouse with Ruth, as she recovered from the surgery that cleaned her of the Juke. The story he told came in whispers in her ear as he sponged cool water on her fevered brow: How they’d met, before either had set foot in Eliada that spring, and how well he’d enjoyed their conversation on the riverboat up the Kootenai to Eliada—which was to say not a great deal, as she kept wanting to talk about his no-good father’s ill-gotten fame, a topic that he preferred to avoid. He told her a thing he never had before as her eyelids fluttered in the afternoon light—about how Dr. Nils Bergstrom had locked him up with a very young Juke in Eliada’s quarantine, and how it’d seemed to have her face along with sharp claws and sharper teeth. He even told her that he was afraid it was going to rip his privates to shreds before he escaped. He cut his hand in that escape, and it hurt like fire, and that was how he learned that pain could stop that Juke magic from taking hold, or at least keeping it.

  “So when you wake up, you’ll be all cured,” said Jason, “because I guess between your foot and your own privates, you’ll be howling.”

  Ruth wasn’t howling when she woke up. But she thought she might’ve been cured. She said she had remembered Jason’s story, and told him that it was very sweet of him, and that it just might have helped.

  “But darling, now that I’m on the mend, perhaps we could illuminate other mysteries than the legitimate reasons you had to put a bullet in my foot,” she said when he asked her if she’d like to hear more.

  She asked Jason if he might tell her what happened to her that night they decided to explore the quarantine, where they had become separated. Jason told her what he knew, but it wasn’t much. He lost track of her that night at the quarantine, and lost track of himself too. “I thought I saw my pa, and my ma—I met a fellow who I think helped try and hang Dr. Waggoner . . . I think I might’ve done a murder. That Germaine Frost. I know at a point, you ended up in my arms. I know that moment for sure. But as to all of it? The order of things? I can’t scarce make any sense of it.”

  By that time, Andrew Waggoner and Annie Rowe were hanging close, and Annie made an observation: “None of us are making a lot of sense of what happened, now, are we? Sometimes it feels like I came from that river, reborn. Now that’s foolish. I know that’s not so. I know my story. But there’s another story too. And it’s like it’s trying to write me over.”

  Andrew thought that was a good way to describe it, the effect of the Juke.

  “This thing tricks your mind into thinking it’s God,” said Andrew. “It needs you to worship. Not just fall down before it in a state of ecstasy. Not just to feel awe . . . but to worship, to deliver tribute. And how do you worship, without some Gospels to make sense of it?”

  “Let’s not say Gospels,” said Annie, “please.”

  Ruth agreed. “Gospels are dreary things. And it’s true. This Juke thing isn’t God. It’s a tapeworm.”

  “God is a tapeworm,” said Jason, trying and failing to bring levity to the discussion. “The Juke sure does spin lies, though, and for some those lies seem pretty fine. Maybe we need to lay it out.”

  “From the beginning,” agreed Andrew.

  “But not Genesis,” said Annie.

  “Not Genesis,” said Ruth. “The Decameron.”

  As it turned out, she was the only one in the room who had read Boccaccio’s book of tales, and when pressed she hadn’t the strength to explain it. But the next morning, when Ruth was feeling well enough to clarify, they all agreed that a system based on a crowd of Italians locked in a villa, telling stories to pass time as they waited out the Black Plague was a fitting way to describe their circumstance, there in the bunkhouse next to a river full of corpses.

  And so, the Decameron system it was.

  “I don’t believe,” said Ruth Harper, as Kurtzweiller refilled her glass and Andrew dug the cork from another bottle, “that any of us are in immediate danger. That is the first thing to remember, as the story I’m about to tell you might otherwise make you anxious. I have taken appropriate precautions coming here, and am fairly certain that no one has followed me. Your meeting place is safe.

  “I was in a bit for a time, but I don’t think that I’m in any more now. Of course, when I was in the worst peril, I’d no idea.

  “My hosts were gracious and had every reason to see to my safety, so why would I think the anything but the best? I had been visiting an old friend and associate of my father’s . . . Herr Egon Dietrich. Not to put too fine a point on it, he wanted money—in the form of a loan and perhaps investment, to bolster his textile manufacturing concerns in Potsdam. He needed that investment rather desperately . . . his American loans had come suddenly due, and like almost everyone in Germany he had no easy way to repay them. And of course you know that von Hindenburg, trying to help, only made things worse.

  “Egon needed money, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to request it in a cable. And so, I was the recipient of a handwritten invitation from his wife Bronwyn, to spend a few nights at their lake house. As it happened to be convenient—and as I recalled fondly the Dietrichs’ visits in Chicago when I was a girl—I accepted.

  “I should likely have known better. Egon and my father were gr
eat friends in the day—but of course . . . well, Andrew, you remember my father, his ideas . . . Eliada. Egon was a great admirer of Father’s notions of a good, utopian society—and he and father also shared a close acquaintance with the people at Cold Creek Harbour. . . .

  “As a girl, I didn’t pay much attention to their talk of eugenics and utopianism. It was harder to avoid at the lake house, dining with adults. The first night, Egon insisted on throwing me a small dinner party with some, ah, friends. They were dreadful people. Couldn’t stop talking about the Jews. The Jews who controlled the banks were strangling Germany. They were taking jobs and livelihood from good Germans. The Jews had ruined music, and art, and everything else that was right about the German Republic. They conspired with Freemasons.

  “‘Let us drink to Garrison Harper!’ cried Egon, late in the supper after all had really had too many toasts to too many different things. ‘And the great man’s motto: Community! Hygiene!’

  “‘Also compassion,’ I reminded him. ‘There were three things in my late father’s motto.’

  “‘Community—Compassion—Hygiene!’ said Egon. ‘For the lady.’

  “Egon’s friends were, so far as I knew, businessmen from Potsdam and Berlin and Frankfurt, who kept their own summer homes in the vicinity. That was for the most part true. But there were two who were something other. Arnold Hahn and Hugo Guttermuth were their names. I made a note of them so I wouldn’t forget. They both stood out—they were much younger than Egon, and all the way from Munich, staying for the time being in an apartment over the Dietrichs’ carriage house. I took it that they might have something to do with politics—Munich politics, if you take my meaning . . . as they seemed to approve rather too wholeheartedly of Egon’s unfortunate anti-Semitism. And I guessed—given the time that they spent together, the way they seemed to attend one another—that they were, pardon me, homosexuals. I’ve no idea if they in fact were, and it doesn’t matter now.

  “I saw a great deal of them over the next few days, but we spoke scarcely at all. If I were by the water, they would be at smoking at the dock; in my room, I might look out the window and see one or the other standing on the green. When I played cards with Bronwyn in the salon, I would hear their voices in the hall. A hundred other moments like that. One of them, I think, would have ended with one of their hands over my mouth, their arms around mine—and then a long drive in a truck, to an airfield. . . .

  “Well. I am here, not there. And why? I received a letter. It came on the morning post on my fifth day there. Let me read it to you:

  “Dear Ruth,

  “One day I hope I will see you and make good amends for the things my wounded soul has done. Right now you are in trouble. You have to get out of the house you are staying in. There are men there or not far from there with their eye on you. If I fail where I am, and I may, you must be well hidden for they will take you otherwise. Flee now. Do not tarry.

  “Yours—

  Ruth handed the letter to Andrew, so that he might see for himself.

  “Jason Thistledown,” read Andrew, and frowned. “That looks like his handwriting all right.”

  “It’s distinctive,” Ruth said, “isn’t it?”

  “You didn’t read the postscript,” said Andrew.

  “What does it say?” asked Lewis.

  Andrew read: “Do not contact Andrew Waggoner or anyone else. Lay low. I will find you at . . .” He looked up. The note finished with a drawing, a figure . . . of what, it was difficult to say.

  “Crete,” said Ruth.

  “Really?”

  “It’s the Minotaur,” said Ruth, and craned her neck and pointed. “See the horns?”

  “The boy still can’t draw. You went all the way to Crete?”

  “It was a near thing,” said Ruth. “But eventually, yes, I did.”

  “But he wasn’t there,” said Kurtzweiller, and Ruth shook her head no.

  “A near thing?” asked Andrew.

  “I did as Jason said,” said Ruth. “Not as stealthily as I might have. I went to see Egon first—told him very quickly that the Harper trust would provide him a sum of capital as he required, and gave him the address of my solicitor in London—but that I needed to leave on a morning train.

  “Did I not wish to at least know the sum, and to what use it would be put? asked Egon. When I told him that I trusted his sense of moderation to request only what he needed, he looked ashamed. Did I need to leave so quickly? Yes, I said. It was unavoidable. So he arranged to have me driven to the train station. With Herr Hahn and Herr Guttermuth, in their touring car.”

  “I can’t imagine you would have stood for that,” said Kurtzweiller.

  “I shouldn’t have. I had my suspicions about them—particularly given Jason’s letter. I did insist upon riding in the front seat, though—and that’s what saved me.

  “Because they were kidnapping me. Just as Jason had warned. Just as I should have guessed.

  “They turned off the main roadway to Potsdam a few kilometres away. A shortcut, said Hahn. I wasn’t convinced—we were following a road winding through thick woods and up into the hills. I wondered how they were so familiar with the backroads around the lakes, having lived in far-off Munich. Herr Guttermuth, who was in the back seat, leaned forward with his hand on my shoulder and told me not to worry, that it would be fine—and Herr Hahn, driving at my side, added that I was very safe.

  “In my experience, these are the things that men say to a lady when they well know that it won’t be fine, and she is anything but safe. They want to see that the lady believes them when they say things like that—and so I did my best to convince them I did.”

  Andrew shook his head and smiled. “How’d you get out of it?”

  Ruth allowed herself a little smile, extending her empty glass. Lewis poured as she explained: “It was absurdly easy. We were pulling through a small village. I simply reached over and turned the wheel—gave it a really good yank!—and Herr Hahn drove the car into the back of a beer truck stopped outside the petrol station. It made a frightful mess and a great commotion. No serious injuries, thank Heaven. While the men were sorting it out, it was a simple matter for me to go inside with a billfold of American dollars, and arrange a lift back to Potsdam. They didn’t dare stop me in front of so many witnesses—and their car was in no shape to follow.”

  The gentlemen of the Société de la biologie transcendantale sat still and silent, as Ruth Harper took a long drink of her wine, drew a breath, and drank as much of it again.

  “That was quite a leap you took,” Andrew said. “Those two mightn’t have been kidnapping you at all.”

  “You weren’t there.” Ruth’s tone shifted, suddenly sharp. “And in any event—I wasn’t wrong.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “—to say I was lying? Or a fool? Of course not.” She looked down at her watch. “In any event, that’s what happened to me and that . . . is what I did about it.” She nodded inscrutably, and then looked up from her watch. “Yes, good. I think that should be enough time to be sure, one way or another.”

  At that, Ruth put both hands on the edge of the table and pushed her chair back, and as she rose, she stumbled—the effect of her old injuries, endured twenty years ago, first at the hand of Jason Thistledown and then under Andrew Waggoner’s knife. Those injuries had saved her life. Maybe that car wreck, inspired by a letter from Jason Thorn, had done those things too: damage and salvation, all in one.

  Ruth righted herself quickly, impatiently waving off offers of help from Kurtzweiller—and without another word, made her way to the door, down to the Liberty. When the door swung shut behind her, Andrew stood.

  “She’s been through a lot,” he said.

  “Perhaps,” said Kurtzweiller, and he gave a little frown. “I don’t know her as well as you.”

  “Do you believe any of it, Andrew?” Lewis asked.

  “The escape story? Yes,” said Andrew. “I do. That is Jason’s handwriting. Ruth—Miss Harp
er—has proven herself strong and resourceful enough through her life. After she escaped Eliada . . . prevailed against this—” Andrew withdrew the jar from his pocket and held it forward “—she managed to prevail against her late father’s partners to seize back the Harper fortune. Of course she was able to crash an auto, and escape from men she believed meant her harm.”

  Kurtzweiller shrugged, and nodded toward the door. “One of us should go downstairs. See that she’s all right. Try and appease her.”

  “Or if she’s left, at least fetch poor Dominic,” said Lewis.

  “I was on my way,” said Andrew, a moment too late.

  The door opened again, and Ruth Harper stepped back through, followed by two others: Dominic Villart, carrying a fresh bottle of wine, and a tall, dark-haired man with a white-flecked beard, hauling a brown fedora hat in one hand, an oversized porcelain pipe in the other.

  “I passed the test!” said Dominic, grinning.

  “Yes,” said Ruth. “I was worried young Dominic might have been . . . a spy, I suppose. If he tried to leave, or signal anyone . . .”

  “You said you thought we were safe here,” said Andrew.

  “Safe enough,” said Ruth. “If Mr. Villart had tried anything, Mr. Grady would have intervened. And if not . . . Herr Zimmermann would have seen to things.”

  “Herr Zimmermann?”

  “Yes,” said Ruth,” I forget myself. Drs. Andrew Waggoner, Manfred Kurtzweiller, William Lewis . . .”

  The stranger half-smiled and nodded at each of them.

  “Albert Zimmermann,” said Ruth. “Perhaps the last man to have seen Jason. I think that you will have a great deal to talk about.”

  Three

  Albert Zimmermann took a seat next to Ruth Harper near the head of the table. Andrew asked if Ruth had explained the work of the Société, and he said yes: “You are hunting the Juke, correct?” which was near enough to true, although Lewis felt the need to add: “We are students.”

  “Of transcendental biology,” said Zimmermann, giving a tight smile and shaking his head. “What a name for it.”