Volk

by David Nickle

  “If they’re available,” said Ruth, “thank you.” Annie looked between the two of them, Ruth and Zimmermann, and blinked.

  “Oh,” said Ruth, “I am sorry. Mr. Albert Zimmermann, Mrs. Annie Waggoner. Mr. Zimmermann has provided us a great service.”

  Zimmermann gave a bow of his head and a little smile. “It is a pleasure to meet you.”

  Andrew offered his own apology. “It’s been a long drive and I’m feeling it,” he said, “but that’s no excuse for rudeness. Annie, Mr. Zimmermann probably helped save Ruth’s life.”

  “Something you and Mrs. Waggoner have in common,” commented Ruth.

  “And he knows where Jason is,” said Andrew.

  “In Africa?” asked Annie.

  Zimmermann sighed. “Would that it were so.”

  “We believe he’s in Germany,” said Andrew. “Bavaria.”

  Annie frowned, and shivered. “We’d best get indoors,” she said. “You can explain it all when they’re settled.”

  “Yes,” said Zimmermann. “Thank you for the lodging.”

  “You should save the thanks for after you’ve seen your room,” said Annie.

  None of the rooms in the Sanatorium de Vire’s five buildings were much to look on. But they were clean, and designed to be easy to keep clean, with walls and floors tiled, chairs hard-backed, beds steel-framed, tables made from steel too. The mattresses were wrapped in rubber, and the linens changed daily. The only added luxury at La Maison du soleil was in the views. All the rooms faced south, through a break in the trees that surrounded the sanatorium looking down the gentle sloping fields toward the rooftops of Vire, some three kilometres off. But even that was in service of the sanatorium’s singular purpose: to help the tubercular patients who rested here to defeat the bacterium that was otherwise slowly killing them.

  Sunlight, clean air . . . as matters improved, some limited exercise in the paths through the woods that enclosed the facility . . . most importantly, clean air . . . there lay the cure.

  Mr. Zimmermann didn’t complain about any of it but the last, at least as it related to his pipe and tobacco. But he understood well enough that he couldn’t smoke in a house where other patients were recuperating, and even neglecting their health, he couldn’t expect to hide very effectively either. And so, sighing, he surrendered his pipe and tobacco to Andrew, and set about to make himself at home in his tiny room, as Andrew explained to him the protocols of the sanatorium.

  Ruth Harper required no such explanation. She had, after all, financed the purchase of the land and the construction of the sanatorium six years ago, when Andrew and Annie finally decided to settle in France and resume their professions. . . . She had approved the plans, setting a generous budget which assisted in obtaining the necessary permits. She had in every respect seen them well-established here in lower Normandy, and knew the place as well as they.

  Still—Annie sat with Ruth for much longer than Andrew did with Mr. Zimmermann. He stuck his head in on his way out, and again to bring them meals an hour later. Stars were emerging, and the two had finished their dinners and were sipping tea by the time Ruth had finished telling about her improbable adventures in Brandenburg, along with Zimmermann’s more outrageous story of what had become of Jason near the Bavarian Alps, and how he had found his way to Ruth Harper.

  “Why didn’t you come right here?” asked Annie. “Why go to Paris?”

  “We couldn’t be certain that whoever is behind this wasn’t keeping an eye on Vire,” said Ruth. “Dr. Waggoner’s and your practice here is no secret—that was rather the point of it all—and if the people who tried to kidnap me and did kidnap Jason were on the hunt, they might well be watching this facility. The Société meetings . . . well, they are kept to a maniacal schedule. I knew that Andrew would be there. And I knew that the people who could best help . . . that they would be there too.”

  “In a public tavern.”

  Ruth shrugged. “In a private room. In a very discreetly run tavern.”

  “Who do you think the people . . . the ones trying to get you are?”

  “Nazis?” Ruth had been sitting on her bed, and now she fluffed a pillow and leaned back, setting it behind her head. “Certainly men associated with Nazis. A band of hooligans, that’s for sure.”

  Annie got up and drew a sheet to cover Ruth, then set Ruth’s discarded shoes by the door.

  “It does come around,” said Annie, “doesn’t it.”

  “How is that?”

  “I was just thinking,” said Annie, “about the Klansmen at Eliada. How they . . . how they tried to hang Andrew.”

  Ruth nodded. “Just before we arrived that spring. I remember.”

  “They weren’t truly Klansmen,” said Annie. “They wore those sheets, because they thought they needed to be something. But they weren’t nothing . . . anything. They weren’t anything.”

  “I’m not sure if it’s the same, precisely.”

  “The same as what?”

  “As the men who came for me. As Nazis in Germany. The men in Eliada . . . they were addled by Mister Juke. They thought they were in contact with God.”

  “Nazis don’t think that?”

  “That they’re talking to God? Oh no. I don’t believe that they do. From my time in Brandenburg . . . listening to Egon Dietrich and his friends . . . I think they have a very good idea of what they want and who they are. I don’t think they’re addled at all, and I don’t think they have anything to do with God.” She paused an instant, frowning. “They are hooligans, though. They’ve that much in common.”

  “I spoke with Jason before he left, you know.”

  “I know. Andrew told me so.”

  “He wasn’t well,” said Annie.

  “Albert . . . Mr. Zimmermann agreed with your assessment, when they met.” Ruth stretched and pulled the sheet higher.

  “But Annie, Jason has never been well. Not since Eliada, or just after. Do you remember how it was when we left the Thorn family?”

  Annie did remember. They’d remained there for just a month, and for most of that time, once Ruth was clearly going to recover . . . Jason kept away from them. From Andrew, from Annie. Even from Ruth . . . especially from Ruth. By the time he left, he spent all of his time at the Thorn farmhouse, and would barely make eye contact with Andrew, or Ruth. The rejection had left both of them brokenhearted, each in their own way.

  Annie thought she was able to see through what it seemed—the spurning of a fallen lover, the sudden shame in befriending a Negro—to what it was. Jason was collapsing on himself, finally . . . the death of his mother, the horrors of Eliada. . . .

  When he told them, at month’s end—as Ruth was preparing to return to her home and inheritance, and Annie and Andrew, to simply move on—she wasn’t surprised. Of course he would stay here on this farm, with Lawrence Thorn and his children. Of course he would abandon the Thistledown name once and for all, along with all its associations. The name was dangerous—the Eugenics Records Office, or the people who’d worked with Germaine Frost and Nils Bergstrom, would be more interested in their superman Thistledown more than ever. If not that—Thistledown was a killer’s pedigree. He needed to disappear.

  And he needed some time to heal. More time, really, than the onset of war would ever allow him.

  “I wanted to keep him here,” said Annie. “Like he was still a child.”

  “You didn’t know him when he was a child,” said Ruth. “It’s true to say that no one living did.”

  Annie nodded. That was so. Everyone Jason Thistledown grew up with, everyone he’d known, had been taken by the Cave Germ.

  “I hope that the Thorns were good to him. I think that they were,” said Ruth. “Maybe better than I would have been to him, if he’d let me. It hurt badly, leaving him behind, but I truly don’t think that I’d have been a good wife to him, if he’d joined me. For I was certainly a child then.”

  Annie didn’t disagree.

  “You’ll be fine for him now,�
�� she said after a moment, and then corrected herself: “I mean, assuming you still wanted to.”

  Ruth gave a little laugh.

  “And assuming there’s a chance,” she said, “at anything.”

  Annie found Andrew back at the house they kept adjoining the main hospital building. He’d cleaned away his dinner plates, but lingered in the dark sitting room with a glass of brandy that was certainly not his first. He had that jar of his out, set on an end table, next to a candle burning down to its base. In the murky formaldehyde, what remained of the Juke floated.

  “Is there any left for me?” she asked, indicating his glass. Andrew lifted the bottle from the floor by his chair so as to indicate yes, and she fetched a glass from a cabinet and let him pour.

  “I’m sorry,” said Andrew.

  “For what?”

  “I surprised you,” he said. “Maybe put us in danger.”

  “That’s true. You did, and maybe we are. But all’s forgiven,” said Annie. She took a sip of the brandy. “It is Ruth Harper we’re talking about. You couldn’t very well turn her away. Not after everything.”

  “And Jason,” said Andrew.

  “And Jason’s friend. Herr Zimmermann.”

  “She told you his story,” said Andrew. “I heard her going over it with you. Ruth likes a good yarn, always has.”

  “Yes,” said Annie, “she did. It’s quite a tale.”

  “Do you believe it?”

  “I think so,” said Annie. “Yes.”

  Andrew chuckled and drained his glass. “You’re one up on me, my love. I’m not entirely sure.”

  “You think Zimmermann’s lied? Or Ruth?”

  “No,” said Andrew. “No one’s telling things they don’t believe are true. But the Juke . . .” He lifted the jar from the table and let it swirl, so the flesh of the tiny thing inside caught the dim candlelight in turns. “The Juke spins lies,” he said.

  “That is so,” said Annie. “What are you meaning to do?”

  “We’re already doing it,” said Andrew. He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a little disk—it looked like a pocket watch.

  “Zimmermann took some pictures with this,” he said.

  Annie squinted. “That’s a camera?” she said, and Andrew unfolded the little rangefinder.

  “So I’ll run them through the lab, see what he got,” said Andrew. “Dr. Kurtzweiller is back in Berlin, or should be soon. He’s going to make some inquiries . . . about Wallgau, the things that might be going on there. Dr. Lewis is staying on in Paris, looking into this Desrosiers connection.”

  “And Molinare?”

  Andrew poured another glass for himself. “Molinare is dead. I thought I’d told you.”

  “Maybe you had,” said Annie.

  “He died,” said Andrew, “some time ago. But his assistant is with us now. Dominic. Good boy. You met him.”

  “Oh?”

  “Just now, driving the ambulance. I set him up in a spare room at the hospital, but he’ll be off in the morning back to Paris. He’ll be helping out Bobby Grady.”

  “At the Liberty? Doing what? Tending bar?”

  Andrew smiled and shook his head. “No. Planning some logistics.”

  “Logistics?”

  “For the event that Zimmermann’s story holds water. It’s not as easy as you’d think,” said Andrew, sniffing at his brandy, “for a Negro to cross over from France and into Germany.” He sipped, and then took a deeper drink.

  “Especially not these days.”

  Two

  The Sanatorium de Vire helped to ease two pressing health matters near to Annie’s heart. The greater of them was the tuberculosis epidemic, which was emerging as workers from Vire finished the first of the sanatorium’s structures, only to bloom to its full fury in France three years later, as money from Paris assisted in further modernizations, and the construction of the final two.

  The lesser was Andrew Waggoner’s. Since Eliada, Andrew’s capacity as a surgeon remained diminished—while his interest, and talent, as a researcher grew keener—and like Jason, like Annie, like Ruth Harper herself, the horror of Eliada loomed behind everything he did. The Sanatorium was no more a cure for that horror, that evil, than it was for the suffocating symptoms of the tubercular patients who came through their doors. But it was a salve for both. It helped.

  Annie also understood that the Sanatorium was a good place to hide . . . better than one might think. For within the hospital building, a massive structure partly made from the original manor house on the land, Andrew had hidden amid his microscopes and centrifuges the equipment he used to further his studies on the central mystery of their life: the Juke, and the strange biochemical means it used to bend minds and hearts toward its ends. The folk from Cold Creek Harbour and their friends had not yet visited here, not once—and if they did they would find nothing to indicate the work that Andrew had done over the years in parasitology, neurology—theology.

  If they came looking for Ruth Harper and Albert Zimmermann—Andrew and Annie, along with the Sanatorium’s small staff, would see to it they left still looking.

  Over the next day, Annie met with all of the staff singly and in pairs, to tell them about the new patients, who would be in her direct care. All were impressed with their need for privacy, and all of them said they understood. From time to time, the sanatorium hosted patients for reasons other than tuberculosis.

  Only one of them, Luc Curzon, learned their true names, and that was by necessity. Luc had maintained the gardens and grounds since before the lands were acquired—and he was the only one of the seven who worked the Sanatorium who had ever seen Ruth Harper in person, four years earlier when she visited the newly built hospital and hung a portrait not of herself, but her father Garrison.

  “She is in hiding, with a gentleman? Ah.” Luc smiled. “A scandal.”

  “Not exactly that. Not that at all in fact.”

  “I see. Well it doesn’t matter. I will not betray Mademoiselle Harper if she wishes to remain anonymous.”

  “I know you won’t,” said Annie.

  “If I may say, Madame Waggoner,” said Luc, “I don’t believe any of the people working here would. They are all worthy of your confidence.”

  “So they are,” said Annie. “But they don’t deserve the burden. I just didn’t want you surprised.”

  Luc said he understood, promised to keep the confidence and otherwise help any way that he could, and when he left Annie felt a momentary lifting of spirit—as though for a moment, she were not alone, the burden of this was shared. It was fleeting, though; the burden, all of it and like always, was square on her shoulders.

  Andrew spent the first day in his study—which is to say, that suite of rooms in the cellar of the main hospital building that he’d managed to rope off for his own purposes.

  The rooms were built for the eventual installation of an X-ray machine, but so far the only nod to such a use was a photographic dark room that Andrew and the Société used to process film from their far-ranging investigations. As Annie was speaking with Luc and the other staff members about discretion surrounding their visitors, Andrew was using that room and its equipment to unload and process the contents of Zimmermann’s novelty spy camera. There were fifteen exposures on the roll, and although only a few of them were useful he made prints of each of them. By the time they were dry and Andrew had returned to the residence with them, Annie was just back from making afternoon rounds and seeing as best she could to the needs of the legitimately ill patients at Vire.

  Andrew arrived clutching the prints in a leather folio, and when he established that it was just the two of them, he set them out on the dining room table. It was late in the afternoon and the sun hit the table directly, lighting the pictures with an otherworldly luminescence.

  “Look these over,” said Andrew. “I want to talk with you before I go see Zimmermann.”

  “All right.” Annie squinted. There were four photographs of what was surely the f
armhouse where Zimmermann and Jason had been held captive. It was big—bigger than Ruth had described, nearly the size of their hospital building. In one photograph, there was a truck parked out front . . . in another, a half-dozen figures, standing around the steps to the porch. A third photograph was likely the same building, from a different angle and farther off. It was nearer dark in that one, and a bright light shone from a window on the uppermost floor. A fifth photograph was darker still, and blurred by movement in the camera.

  There were photographs of what seemed like a high street in a small town. Definitively a German town, in Bavaria. The cobblestones were slick, as though it had just rained. “Wallgau?” she asked aloud, and Andrew said that it was likely.

  “But look more closely,” said Andrew, indicating an awning, under which a pale figure stood clutching its shoulders alongside another, seated on a bench. Annie squinted, and Andrew handed her a magnifying glass.

  “Oh!” They were two girls . . . or perhaps boys, with blond hair grown long like girls.

  They appeared to be nude.

  “Yes,” said Andrew. “I’d have thought that Zimmermann might’ve remembered seeing that. Might’ve mentioned it in the telling.”

  “Being as he took the picture, yes.” Annie drew the glass over the rest of the photograph. “Where was this picture on the roll?”

  Andrew indicated the top corner, where he had written “4” in grease pencil. Annie noticed that all of the photographs were numbered.

  “Four of fifteen. So before these.” She motioned to a set of photographs that were of people. Number eight was of an older, heavyset man in a cable-knit sweater, standing on the front porch. Bergstrom? There was a resemblance. Number six was of a man in a badly fitted uniform with a swastika on his left armband. Who was that? Annie wouldn’t be able to guess. Photograph seven was definitively of Jason. He was standing outdoors, looking at a map, with a small pack on his back. There was another man standing near him—not quite as tall as Jason, moustachioed and round-faced, losing his hair . . . he might have been smiling, or he might just have had the sort of face that feigns a smile even in repose.