by David Nickle
“Nein,” he said. “None of them were Neger. And among those identified: no Waggoner, no Kurtzweiller, no Villart . . . no Lewis. This is a very interesting mixture of friends, for a lady such as yourself.”
“How is that?”
“An African. A German. An Italian and an Englishman.”
“An American,” said Ruth. “Two Americans in fact. Both Waggoner and Lewis—”
“Right, of course,” said Fischer. “Well the happy news is they are not among the dead or the injured. Not those we have identified. And your . . . American friend Waggoner will not be among them. That is very lucky—I was not stationed here at the time, but this is the worst incident of its kind since 1923.”
“The Hitlerputsch,” said Ruth.
“No putsch this time,” said Fischer. “And the news appears good for you and your friends, gnädige Frau. With that said . . . we do have some photographs. There were four who perished in the battle that we cannot name.”
“Do you think . . . ?” said Ruth, in English, and Fischer shrugged.
“It is unlikely. They do not seem like a match from what you have told me. And the photographs are ugly,” he said. “If you would prefer—”
“No,” said Ruth. “I will look.”
It was mid-afternoon when Ruth left the Polizeipräsidium München headquarters and rejoined Annie, where she waited at a café. While Ruth was conferring with the police, Albert had gone off to check into the cabaret where Le Noir Qui Danse was to perform tonight. And Annie . . . well, she made it clear that she preferred not to deal with the Bavarian police if it could at all be avoided. When Ruth stepped inside, Annie was sitting in a corner booth, her hands warming around a tea pot, a plate of biscuits half-eaten beside it.
“Andrew wasn’t there,” said Ruth as she sat down. “Or if he was, he wasn’t hurt, and wasn’t arrested either. The same goes for the others.”
“Thank God.” Annie lifted the teacup and sipped from it, set it down and shook her head. “They are such idiots. My husband and his friends.”
“They’re not idiots.”
Annie smiled. “No. They’re suckers.” She looked at Ruth. “I’m sorry. That’s a private joke between Andrew and me.”
Ruth ordered tea for herself, and tried to order more biscuits but Annie said she could have the rest of hers. She had nearly finished both when Albert arrived, with news of the Cabaret Imperial.
“They didn’t show up,” he said as he sat down and shrugged off his overcoat.
“What?”
“The show is cancelled,” said Albert. “I managed to speak with the doorman. The management is quite angry about it. They did not send word—they simply didn’t arrive. He told me that it is likely the last time that the cabaret will let Neger musicians play there. What did you learn from the Polizei?”
Ruth told him.
“They are not here. Le Noir Qui Danse is not here either. Do you think they may not have arrived at all?”
Annie reminded him about the return telegram.
“And Kurtzweiller was certainly here,” said Ruth.
“Did you tell the Polizei about Wallgau?” asked Albert. “About Orlok and Jason and the rest?”
“Of course not.”
“Good,” said Albert. “Because I think we can all agree, that is where we need to go next.”
There was an electric train from Munich to the town of Kochel, which was most of the way to Wallgau, and it got them to the little lake town by lunch. It was still fourteen miles to Wallgau from there, and Ruth despaired of being able to hire a car given the recent goings-on. But it turned out not to be difficult at all. They found a driver at a lunch counter by the lake, and he agreed that once they’d all eaten, he’d take them south.
It was all very easy, and it made a part of Ruth feel deeply uneasy. She had to remind herself as she admired the blazing orange and red hues of the turning leaves, that she had until a few days ago expended considerable energies to keep clear of Wallgau, of the farm and the valley. Would Jason have wanted her now to drive up to it, in a taxi from a quaint resort town, along with Albert Zimmermann who he’d sent to rescue her?
Oh, hang it, she thought as they pulled out of town and onto the lakeside road to Wallgau.
It didn’t matter what Jason thought.
She wasn’t going to leave him to that place—not any more than Annie Waggoner was going to leave Andrew and his friends to their fate.
“Where will you be staying?”
They pulled in from the north, along a two-lane roadway through golden forest and foothills, that opened finally onto a broad, flat valley, and rows of low houses and stretches of farmland, and so it was they were in Wallgau.
“We don’t know,” said Ruth. “Can you recommend—”
The driver looked back over his seat. He was an older man, with thick mutton-chop sideburns that had gone entirely white. He seemed amused. “There’s an inn,” he said. “I will take you there. I will wait if they do not have rooms.”
The inn was called the Isar, after the river, and it did have rooms. Several of them had only recently been vacated, and the innkeep was delighted to see them occupied again.
When Ruth came back out to tell the driver he could leave, and they were fine, he had already gone. A young woman, blonde hair, very thin, was standing at the edge of the road.
“Je lui ai dit qu’il pouvait y aller,” she said when Ruth looked about.
“I am sorry? You told the driver to leave?” asked Ruth, switching to French.
“Yes. There were rooms, right?”
Ruth agreed that there were. The young woman—she looked no more than twenty in one sense, far older than forty in another—stepped close to Ruth for a moment, as though brushing by. She was wearing a long dress, down nearly to her ankles. Her hair was tied tight behind her head, in a bun. She seemed almost skeletally thin; her eyes were enormous.
“How did you know?” she asked, and the girl smiled wide.
“I was in the taxi with you,” she said. “All the way. Do you not recall, Mademoiselle Harper?”
The girl reached over and took Ruth’s hand. Her fingers were like sticks, like a tree-branch—cold, and rough—and her nails were black with dirt. Ruth’s blood went to ice as she realized: the touch was familiar.
She did recall.
“You were in Munich. In the café,” Ruth said. “When we checked into the hotel, you followed . . .”
“Nous avons dormi comme des soeurs!”
We slept like sisters.
“. . . to my room.” Ruth shook the girl’s hand off as she recalled: opening the door to the hotel, standing aside for her guest . . . going to the washroom to clean herself up . . . sliding between the sheets on the right side of the bed, feeling breath at her neck, her hair brushed aside, before she slept, as though she were alone, and safe . . . as though she were asleep with a sister . . .
She looked around for Albert, or for Annie, or for anyone on the street in Wallgau. But there was no rescue for her. She and this girl were alone.
They had travelled to the München Hauptbahnhof in one taxi—the three of them squeezing in the back, while she sat up front, plucking at her dress and humming—and Ruth had purchased four tickets, not three. The girl had followed them onto the train, wafting restlessly up and down the aisle. She hadn’t needed to present her ticket, no one else seemed to notice her either. It was a waste of Deutsche Marks to have bought it.
But Ruth had bought it all the same. Because while Ruth, like everybody else, had failed to notice her they had continued to account for her. Zimmermann had made accommodation for her on the train. The waitress had brought her tea at the café.
Ruth had made room for her in her bed.
“You are from the valley,” Ruth said, then repeated it in French, and added, “Orlok.” The girl nodded solemnly.
“Jason,” she said. “Jason too.”
“Jason Thistledown?”
“Oui! Le fils d’un tireur
!” She clapped and grinned. “He is like Orlok! A great fighter! I belong to him! Just like you, Mademoiselle Harper! We are Jason Thistledown’s!”
And that, God help her, was when Ruth knew she could hold back no longer. She made a fist and hit the girl, in the jaw, hard enough to knock her to the ground.
The girl had left a deep scratch across Ruth Harper’s forehead and down her right cheek, kicked her in the stomach hard enough to leave her gasping, and nearly bit through the skin of her left forearm before Albert and Annie were able pull her off. Annie finally got hold of her, arms wrapped through her underarms and clasped behind her head, so she struggled and kicked and swore, while Ruth regained her feet, and Albert looked at her curiously.
“I know you,” he said.
The girl spat. Albert turned to Ruth, and as he studied her injuries, told her. “I know her. From the mountain pass. And the farmhouse.” He ran a finger down Ruth’s scratch, not quite touching it, and produced a handkerchief. “Now she has marked us both.”
Ruth took the handkerchief and held it to the scratch. She looked around. The melee had attracted some attention—a pair of men on the other side of the street, one of them pushing a wheelbarrow, had paused and were watching with interest. Another woman watched from the first floor window above a butcher shop.
“I am all right,” she called, and said it again in German.
The girl struggled briefly and then glared.
“You may as well let me go,” she said in English.
“What is your name?” asked Ruth.
She looked to one side and shook her head—as though the question were foolish. “Call me Catherine.”
Ruth turned to Albert. “She has been with us since Munich.”
Albert blinked, and Annie’s grip weakened so that Catherine could shrug out of her grip—and could probably have run off, if that was what she’d wanted to do. Albert and Annie were distracted enough—just as Ruth had been—as the memories that had always been there sorted themselves. Ruth thought she would help them along.
“She spotted us at the checkpoint,” said Ruth. “She had been waiting at the polytechnical school, and saw us asking questions. She followed along as I visited the Polizei. She sat with us over lunch in the café. When we went to the hotel, she came too.”
Annie looked at her. “You went to sleep with Ruth,” she said. “I saw you go into the room together.”
“We only slept,” said Ruth.
“And then . . . you were there at the train station, on the train, with us. . . .” Albert chuckled and looked at Ruth. “It is all suddenly very clear. The Decameron System to the rescue.”
Ruth turned to Catherine. “Why did you follow us?”
“Jason sent me,” she said.
“Jason?” Annie looked wide-eyed. “Où est Jason?” she said. “Is he here?”
“No. He is at home. But not far.”
“Can we see him?”
Catherine put a bony finger to her lower lip, and looked first to the left and then to the right, as though trying to make up her mind.
“You have all travelled such a long way,” she said, and pointed at Albert. “Particularly this one. Back and forth so many times like a pendulum. I wonder how Jason would feel with him back in the fold?”
“Let me ask him myself,” said Albert.
“No, no,” said Catherine. “Jason told you what to do. You listened to your other master, did you not?”
“I came back here to see Jason.”
“You came back with Mademoiselle Harper,” said Catherine, “for your own reasons.”
Later, the three of them would agree that the roadway had been far more crowded than they’d thought, than they noticed: that all along, they had been surrounded by as many as two-score people . . . young people, Hitler-Jugend perhaps.
“There were five of them at least in here, watching while we booked our rooms,” said Annie. They were sitting in the dining room of the Isar, with tall mugs of pilsner in front of them, in full sight of the desk. “All men, or male. One of them was pretty young.”
“Yes,” said Albert. “He could not have been more than fourteen years old. Thin and soft. He was shirtless, and his chest caved in. He was watching from the door.”
“Two stood very close to me,” said Annie. “They were watching me sign into the guest book. I guess to figure out my name.”
“That makes sense,” said Ruth. “What were they wearing?”
“Which one?”
“The one looking at your handwriting.”
“A brown shirt,” said Annie. “Yes. That kind of brown shirt. But it didn’t have the armband. And it had a hole in it in the arm, and a browner stain. . . . I’m going to guess blood.” She nodded. “I seen enough blood in my time. So yes. Blood. Down about where the ribcage ended. It didn’t fit him so well. Think he took it from another one he killed?”
Ruth nodded. “There were more of those shirts outside. On boys . . . and men, I mean. They were there when we got out of the taxi. But not all close by.”
“Where were they?” asked Albert. “Details please.”
Ruth closed her eyes and rhymed off as many as she could name: the three of them who were sitting by a rain barrel next to the dry goods shop, another two who lingered in the doorway of a chemist’s . . . two of them, a boy and a girl who might have been siblings, sunbathing nude on the sloping roof of a house at the corner . . . and on. And on.
“Thirty-seven,” said Albert finally, who’d been marking off the descriptions down on a sheet of notepaper. “That was how many we saw before they moved on us. Agreed?”
“Agreed.”
“Now. Was that the same number as afterward? Were there more?”
Ruth looked into her beer and concentrated. “I don’t believe so.”
“I’m not sure,” said Annie.
“All right Albert,” said Ruth, “what do you remember?”
“We were in the middle of a crowd. They were humming a tune. Two of them—no, three—held me so that I would have to struggle to move. Looking around . . . I saw a man holding onto each of you, firmly . . . but not so as to hurt either of you. The girl, Catherine . . . she turned and walked away, surrounded by people . . . such as we had seen before. So in answer to my own question: I don’t believe there were many more than we had counted from our own memories. I don’t think there were any more. They were all humming. That I remember.”
“Good,” said Ruth. “But what did she say?”
“I’m sorry?”
“She said something,” said Ruth, “just before she turned away. Do you remember what it was?”
Albert frowned. “She said . . . to wait until the morning. That we could see Jason then. That he was . . . dealing with the others?”
Annie shook her head and frowned. “I don’t think that’s quite right,” she said.
“That’s what I remember,” said Albert, and Ruth nodded.
“I think that’s what she said,” she said. “And then the fellow let go of me, and the three people let go of you, Albert . . .”
“And I got loose,” said Annie.
“They walked off,” said Albert, “up the road in the direction of the farm. I’ve taken that road many times myself.”
Ruth nodded. “That makes a good deal more sense than Catherine simply vanishing.”
Annie frowned and shook her head.
“Not really sure about that,” she said.
It had been a clear day, and it was a clear night too, nearly moonless, and after dinner, the three of them stood at the banks of the Isar, and considered setting out for the farm then—before the youth returned for them. The only light was starlight, so it would be easy to lose themselves, even following a roadway. Albert thought he could manage it, having travelled the route before, and Annie was willing to try it. Ruth worried.
“They could be standing by right now,” she said, “guiding us to where they want us to go.”
“Ja,” said Albert. He
took a deep, crackling puff from his pipe. “They could be. But who do you think they might be ‘dealing with’?” He looked at Ruth. “Doctor Waggoner perhaps?”
They stood quietly for a moment, thinking about that.
“You’ve walked this before?” asked Annie, and when Albert said that he had, she nodded. “Let’s go,” she said, and that was that. The three of them set out under the stars for the house where Jason Thistledown now lived.
PART V
The Delirium Objective
One
Rain was sheeting down as the truck pulled up in front of the farmhouse. It had been raining since they left Munich, and water had leaked through the canvas covering and into the back, where Andrew and the Société were seated along benches surrounding their luggage—notably, Lewis’s trunk, which Lewis had opened to distribute the gas masks. Gottlieb sat up front with their driver, a young man he had introduced as Dieter, so it was only when the truck stopped at the farmhouse that he remarked on the masks, that each of them held in their laps.
“Did you think you were back in the war?” he asked. “Bad fumes from the engine?” And he laughed. “Come inside. Leave them here with the luggage.”
Andrew left the mask but brought his doctor’s bag, and held it over his head as he stepped out of the back, into wheel-rutted mud. The truck was not the only vehicle here. There were two other similar trucks, a larger truck that looked like a delivery vehicle . . . and a Ford town car, painted a deep red. The farmhouse was nearby: three storeys, with Greek-style columns at either side, and a mural, depicting what looked like a dragon, across the span of the facade just above the front doors. Gottlieb urged them to hurry, and they did—but when they stepped inside, they were all still drenched.
