Volk

by David Nickle

  “What have you done?” he demanded of Kurtzweiller when they shut up the window.

  “I’m sorry,” said Kurtzweiller. “Perhaps we ought to have simply gone to Wallgau—to the farm. Not tried to sneak around Munich. I’m not good at sneaking about, I am afraid.”

  “On the other hand,” said Lewis, “this does seem to get us to Wallgau, and the farm, and the valley.”

  “It does get us there,” said Dominic. “Not of our own volition though.” He looked at Andrew. “This is the calamity,” he said, “that Molinare speaks of.”

  “No,” said Andrew. “It’s a calamity, but no one speaks of it. Leave that out of your thoughts, Dominic. Come on—let’s put some coffee on.” He turned to Kurtzweiller. “You do have coffee here?”

  “Of course,” said Kurtzweiller, and opened a cupboard to find a tin of coffee. He filled a pan with water and set it by the stove.

  “We can’t go anywhere,” said Andrew. “So we’ll sit tight. We do need to get caught up.”

  “Of course,” said Kurtzweiller.

  “Let’s go through it then. You went to see the family that owns the farm. . . .”

  “Heinrich Visler,” said Kurtzweiller. “That’s right. I visited him at his house. A gracious man. Very much a supporter of the Nazi Party. Friend of Adolph Hitler, or so he told me.”

  “How did you manage to see him? What did you say?”

  “I said I was a friend of Muckermann.”

  “The eugenicist fellow who wouldn’t see you in Berlin?” asked Lewis.

  “The same.” Kurtzweiller lit the gas burner and set the pan atop it. “Visler likes Hitler, as I said. Quite a lot. Enough to give Hitler and the Nazis the run of his farm. ‘It is for the youth,’ he explained. ‘The youth are our future. But Herr Muckermann will know more about that than I. For he has visited the place since work began. It is best that I stay here.’ He knew about the Seckendorff property. But he said there was no point in talking to him.” Kurtzweiller tapped his temple. “Addled, for many years now. And it was long ago that the place was deeded to the spa, which in any case Visler understood was also under the control of the Nazi Party for the purpose of training the Hitler-Jugend.”

  “So far, nothing but what we already know,” said Lewis.

  “Quite so. But it was a pleasant conversation. And at the end of it, he called ahead and also wrote me a note on the back of a calling card—and so it was that I was able to visit the Nazis, as a guest at the Brown House.”

  Kurtzweiller peered out the window, through the bars of the fire escape railing and down into the alley. He made a tsk sound with his teeth.

  “So. Yesterday,” he said, “I visited Kurt Gruber in his offices.”

  “The belly of the beast,” said Andrew.

  “Indeed. It is quite a belly. It used to be a mansion. Owned by a British woman, if you can believe that. The Nazi Party bought it from her and renovated it. It is their offices and a shrine to their Führer too. Gruber showed me a room where they keep the flag they bore in 1923 at the beer hall. It stands on a pedestal, in a room by itself. They have not washed out the blood . . . which I suppose is the point of that flag. They had enough other ones hanging throughout that building.”

  “He gave you a tour?” asked Andrew.

  “Yes.” Kurtzweiller poured a measure of coffee into the water, as it was beginning to boil. “He had reason to be proud I suppose. Gruber was there with Hitler and the rest at the Bürgerbräukeller, the night they tried to take the government. He was very young then, barely twenty. I don’t think he fought in the War. So this was the moment that made him.” Kurtzweiller smiled. “The hall for the flag was also a more impressive room than the offices that they afforded him. He was in a small annex on the first floor, far from Hitler’s office and near to Ernst Röhm’s.”

  “The head of the S.A.,” said Lewis.

  “Yes. His superior now. We sat down there, with coffee that was far weaker than what I am making you now. And we talked about Wallgau.” Kurtzweiller raised a hand. “I was not being indiscreet, Andrew. He believed that I was there on behalf of Herr Muckermann. I did nothing to dissuade him. From the moment that we met, I was surprised to notice that he seemed more than a little afraid when we spoke, and I wondered if he might not be in some trouble—either with his superiors, or with Muckermann and some others. Indeed, before I could ask questions as to the state of the town, he raised the matter, with a tone of apology.”

  “Apology?” Dominic had gathered mugs from a cupboard and set them on the kitchen table.

  “He understood himself and the Hitler-Jugend to have let Muckermann down. The plan for the estate . . . and for the experiment . . . was twofold, you see. Muckermann was, for the most part, interested in finding the best among the young men and women of Germany. The strongest . . . the Übermenschen. But Gruber admitted that he had been persuaded to expand the experiment—in part because of his own promises and ambitions. ‘I was not convinced, you see, that we were finding the best of the German youth. Certainly not enough of them.’ That was what he told me. And that, he said, was why he permitted the introduction of . . . of the experiment. The Hitler-Jugend needed to grow. He had been under instruction to see to it, in fact, that its numbers doubled.” Kurtzweiller turned down the burner to a faint blue ring. “Absurd. The fool wanted to stage a recruitment drive like no other. And so . . .”

  “The Juke?” said Lewis, and Kurtzweiller nodded.

  “The Juke. Although Gruber did not name it, that’s what it was. Small wonder that Herr Zimmermann never met with Muckermann when he was in Wallgau. He had stopped attending the farm shortly after the work there began. And he had written of his worries in several letters to Ernst Röhm. He was convinced that it was ungodly. Not surprising. He is, after all, a Jesuit. I think that is why Gruber was so pleased to talk with me—he imagined that I might convince Muckermann of his remorse, if not his competence.”

  “By the Grace of God,” said Dominic. Kurtzweiller ignored him.

  “I also asked him about the missing children, particularly the ones that I’d learned of in Berlin. He showed me carbon-copied reports, in a file folder, of the investigations, of which there were twelve. ‘As you can see, Mein Herr, we are cooperating fully,’ he said to me. Those files were more than I had been able to obtain on my own visit to the Bayerische Polizei, so I read them through. And I saw . . . that it was not much more that I could learn from them than I knew already. They were dated in the summer months, most of them in July. Seven boys, five girls. Five of them were blue-eyed, two green-eyed, three hazel and two brown. Some blonde hair, some light brown hair. No red. No brunette. Ages between fourteen and twenty. Photographs were on file for six of them, but not in this file. All of them, missing in the vicinity of Wallgau, Bavaria.

  “All of them, members of Gruber’s Hitler-Jugend.

  “And then, I did something that you might call indiscreet. I asked him about Orlok. In the broadest of terms. ‘What news of Orlok?’ I asked. I imagined that this would draw him deeper, and he would reveal more of the true goings-on in Wallgau. It might have also given me away. But neither thing happened. Gruber looked puzzled, and stared out his window for a moment and became quiet. When I asked him again, he shook his head, and apologized once more for inattention. He said that Orlok was a name that he had not heard for some time. Then he laughed, and asked if I was talking about Nosferatu.”

  “He didn’t know who Orlok was?”

  “No, Andrew, he did not. He knew that the experiment in Wallgau had gone badly. He knew that steps needed to be taken, and he understood that they were out of his hands. ‘Men closer to the Führer than I are managing Wallgau now,’ he told me. Still. He apologized for any damages that might have happened to Herr Visler’s property, or might yet. And he apologized again through me, to Herr Muckermann.

  “But of Orlok? He knew nothing. I left his office not convinced of that: that Orlok had remained secret to the farm, and Wallgau. But I was also c
onvinced he was not lying to me. His reaction . . . it was consistent, with some of the things that Herr Zimmermann described to us, among the men who stood guard at the farm. Herr Gruber should have known about Orlok. He should have, given everything else, been worried that he didn’t. But I believe something was preventing him from knowing fully.”

  “Or he simply didn’t know,” said Dominic.

  Kurtzweiller found a ladle hanging by the stove, and used it to skim the top of the coffee. Then he dipped it in and filled each mug.

  “I am a terrible detective,” he said as he poured, and raised an eyebrow at Lewis. “I am a better transcendental biologist.”

  Andrew took a mug and sipped at it. It was very hot and ferociously strong.

  “When did Markus Gottlieb catch up with you? And how?”

  “He rang the doorbell,” said Kurtzweiller. “Yesterday evening. He introduced himself, and invited himself in.”

  “And how?”

  “I think I was followed. Probably by men—by boys—like the ones in the alley. They are all over, these . . . youth . . . if you look.”

  “But they are easy to overlook,” said Andrew. He thought about the pictures of the young people that Zimmermann had taken, without apparently knowing he had done so. About the photograph of Zimmermann, sleeping in the barracks.

  “I wonder if we might have met more of the children of Wallgau,” said Lewis, “at Stuttgart.”

  Kurtzweiller snorted. “The children of Wallgau! That is a good name for them.”

  “Why are we going to Wallgau?”

  Kurtzweiller looked to Dominic. “Such a scowl!” he said. “We are going as guests, Herr Villart.”

  “Prisoners you mean.”

  “We were going to have to travel there one way or another,” said Kurtzweiller. “It—” They all looked to the front hall as the doorbell rang, and Kurtzweiller nodded. “Ah. Perhaps our transportation has arrived.”

  It had not.

  They were met in the stairwell by three people—two young men and a girl. The men wore coveralls. Their hair was too long, and one of them had a fuzzy moustache such as a boy might grow. The girl wore a long skirt and a wool high-necked sweater. She had blonde hair that was tied in a bun, and her face was sunburnt. She spoke in English.

  “We have seen to the visitor,” she said. “No need to worry.”

  “Who was it?” asked Andrew.

  “It was a telegram. Not to worry. We have already sent a reply.”

  “May we see it?”

  The girl considered. She withdrew a piece of paper from a pocket in her skirt, waved it in the air and returned it to her pocket. Then she curtsied and turned to retreat down the stairs.

  “Soon,” she called over her shoulder. Her companions didn’t move, though, until Kurtzweiller shut the door.

  “Prisoners,” said Dominic, and looked to his right a moment, and then, stepping through the door into the sitting room, said to no one apparently: “That’s right, my love. You were right all along.”

  Andrew looked to the others, and motioned for them to wait in the hall, and he followed Dominic into the sitting room.

  “Who are you talking to?” Andrew asked, and Dominic pointed to the wing-backed chair, where Molinare sat, naked. His eyes were wide and round as a fish’s. His penis was rigid against his belly. He grinned and gave a nod at Andrew, and beckoned him over with one thin arm.

  “Calamity,” he said, and as he began to stand, Andrew drew a breath—and plunged his left thumb into his coffee cup.

  It was not quite scalding—but it was hot enough. Molinare sat back down, and as Andrew watched, he faded into the upholstery, and vanished.

  “Stuttgart,” he said as he stepped out of the sitting room. “Again.”

  Andrew laid out four syringes on the kitchen table, and the Société lined up and, one after another, rolled up their sleeves for a dose of adrenaline. Andrew administered the last shot to himself.

  Did it work? Did it drive away the hallucinations that that a Juke could bring about? Andrew and the Société had theorized that it might, in that intense and sharp pain had worked for Jason and Andrew in Eliada . . . but there had scarcely been opportunities to test it.

  And as for this test—Andrew couldn’t say, not at first. As he felt it work through his system, attenuate his nerves—with an almost electric shock—he leaned against the windowsill and looked outside into the bright alleyway—and watched as a half-dozen young men, no longer just three, stood around a seventh man, who lay bleeding on the ground.

  Andrew’s heart raced and he gasped, as he watched two of the men lift that seventh, and haul him to a doorway in the opposite side. One of them looked up and perhaps saw Andrew at the window, but may not have.

  The entire incident might have been a vision—a lie.

  Andrew summoned Lewis to the window and pointed, and asked him if he could see that too. But by that time the man—the body?—was obscured, as the men had gathered around the doorway. Lewis just laughed—high, mirthlessly—and stumbled away, into the hallway. Kurtzweiller, meanwhile, was occupied; Dominic had taken ill, and was vomiting into the sink, and Kurtzweiller held his shoulders.

  “It’s all right,” said Kurtzweiller, “it’s all right.”

  Andrew looked out the window again, and saw that now four other men had entered the alleyway. They were in uniform—not police, but with caps, brown shirts and swastika armbands. They carried batons.

  They used them, rushing at the six who stood there, hammering down blows on upraised arms, ribcages . . . a skull.

  Andrew could not look away. Although his heart still hammered, his breath felt short in him, he was struck then by the terrible quiet of the brawl below. The Nazis—the brownshirts, surely that’s what they were—came upon the men in the alleyway matter-of-factly, as though they were at work on a farm. And the men under attack did not cry out either, although first one and then a second fell.

  One of the men did manage to get around the brownshirts, and kicked him in the side of the knee, or more properly stomped. It’s broken, thought Andrew as the brownshirt collapsed sideways. And finally someone screamed.

  One of his comrades saw what had happened and swung his baton, but it was an awkward swing and it threw him off balance. He staggered away from the fight, and into the middle of the alley. He held the baton in front of him in two hands, and then stepped forward, swinging again, this time connecting with the man, once in the forearm, again on the shoulder. No screams this time.

  Andrew stood away from the window. His hand was cradling his right elbow—which twenty years ago, a man in a sheet had smashed with a tree branch . . . while Andrew Waggoner fell to his knees and watched others string rope, for him, and for a Juke. He hadn’t screamed either, or he didn’t remember it. He’d just taken it, and next to him, the thing called Mister Juke dangled from another rope, the same branch. . . .

  Andrew leaned over and opened the window. He had a crazed notion, for just an instant, that he might throw the pan of coffee over the fire escape, and he went so far as to reach for the handle, and then recoil at the burn. It wouldn’t help. And as he turned back, he saw that he might not need to.

  The girl from the hallway ran into view. Her hair had spun out from the bun at the back, and it flew behind her, along with her skirt. She had a long knife, and matter-of-factly, she plunged it once, and twice, and a third time, into the back of the brownshirt. When another turned to face her, she slashed his face, and he cried out again, clutching it. In the meantime, the remaining men in the alley pressed in on the remaining brownshirt. One grabbed his arm and pulled the baton from it, while the other took him by the throat. The girl turned on him and plunged the knife into his chest.

  Andrew fell back against the kitchen table—hard enough that the legs made a precarious groaning sound against the floor. Dominic was sitting on the floor, propped against the doorjamb. Kurtzweiller had left the room.

  “He is gone,” said Dominic. He was
bathed in sweat, and stared at his hands, which trembled. “He is gone.”

  Andrew stood away from the table. He was shaking too, and his throat felt raw, as though he’d been shouting.

  “He’ll be back,” said Andrew, and stumbled to Dominic’s side, but Dominic shook his head.

  “No,” said Dominic. “He is dead.”

  Andrew frowned, and then nodded. The test was a success; adrenaline worked, as well as any mountain-made potion in north Idaho. As well as pain and nearly as fast, and looking at Dominic, Andrew thought it might work nearly as deep.

  Because it wasn’t Kurtzweiller that Dominic was missing, that he mourned. It came upon Andrew in a flash of insight.

  “Ah,” said Andrew. “That’s true my friend. Molinare is dead.”

  He put his arm around Dominic, and held him tight.

  Manfred Kurtzweiller, alive and well, stepped over Dominic’s legs into the room a moment later. With him was Gottlieb, who wore a new overcoat, and carried a black leather folio under his arm.

  “Doctor Waggoner,” he said, “Herr Villart. We must find Doctor Lewis. A car waits outside, and under the circumstances, I think it best we leave Munich now.

  “Time, I fear, is short. And I think you will be interested in what awaits us at Wallgau.”

  Four

  The fighting had gone on for a day. There was a fire, in a dress shop that had spread to the floors above it and two neighbouring buildings on Rottmannstraße. Some looting too. And there were deaths. Fourteen members of the Nazi Party’s S.A. Seven Communists. One member of the Polizei. And fifty-three injured badly enough to require a physician. The Polizei were still rounding up suspects, which meant that they were at once very busy and also interested in speaking with the foreigners who wanted details about their missing friends on Rottmannstraße. Ruth Harper was able to speak with a senior officer, but not the most senior: Oberstabsfeldwebel Walter Fischer, originally from Nuremberg, readily agreed to sit with her and tell her what he could. The address that Kurtzweiller had supplied was in one of the fire-damaged buildings, and not accessible. The building had been evacuated along with the others. But visiting the apartment would not be necessary. He had at his desk updated lists of the dead, injured and detained.