Down: Trilogy Box Set

by Glenn Cooper

  Another soldier pulled her down, feet first. She wiped the vomit from her lips with her forearm.

  “I am delighted to see you again, Doktor Loughty,” Himmler said. “Come, join me. You will be more comfortable on your journey back to Marksburg.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “Rainald van Dassel told me how you escaped. He said he wouldn’t talk but he did. They always do. It was a simple matter of following the farmer’s route back to Dusseldorf and being a little patient. And here you are. Would you like to see Rainald? I understand the two of you became fast friends.”

  “He’s here?”

  Himmler reached for something by his feet. At first the headlights blinded her to what it was but when she raised her hand to block the glare she saw it was Rainald’s bloody head, his lips twitching, his moist eyes staring at her.

  They were the most sorrowful eyes she had ever seen.

  20

  The steam car chugged along a coastal road and John and his companions crossed into Italia without encountering further trouble. Any people they met along their final stretch fled in panic at the unaccustomed sight and sound of their powerful machine. On the outskirts of Genoa, Luca had John drive toward a small hamlet, populated, he said with supporters of their master and there, a toothless old man opened a barn door and beckoned them to drive inside. The horses in the stalls strained at their ropes but settled down when Simon turned off the boiler.

  Luca shook hands with the man and in Italian, asked for some food and drink.

  “We will go the rest of the way by horse,” Luca told John. “If we enter Milano by motorcar we will quickly find ourselves in a world of shit.”

  They were provided with hooded cloaks and once again, John had to suffer the undignified precaution of having his cloak rolled through manure to mask his scent. Once they were fed, the four men rode north, and at dusk they were at the outskirts of Milan. From there, Luca led the way at a slow trot so as not to draw attention to themselves. Peering through his hood, John took in the cityscape. The streets were narrow, the buildings low and simple. It was much like the other cities he’d seen, monochromatic, utilitarian, without any soaring architecture. There were no spires to lift the soul, no edifices with a loftier purpose than basic habitation. There were few people about and those that were stuck to the shadows like rodents. The smoke of a thousand hearths filled the air. In the fading light, at the end of a lane, John saw an open square with a massive structure, a castle, likely. It was squat and sprawling behind a high, crenellated wall.

  “Is that where we’re going?” he asked.

  Antonio was the closest rider. “No, that is the one place we are not going unless we suffer a catastrophe, for once inside, we shall never return. King Borgia dwells there.”

  They kept to the small streets, giving the palace square a wide berth. They passed a shuttered inn but John could smell the ale and hear the muffled voices inside. He thought a pint or two would go down nicely about now but they rode on. Luca pulled up at a blackened, fire-ravaged wreck of a building and told the others to wait for him. In twenty minutes he returned and told them that the coast was clear.

  The house they had arrived at was the second largest John had seen in the city. It stood apart from other dwellings in the square, rising four stories with the general proportions of a cube, finished in a cream-colored plaster. It had small windows and a rather diminutive door for the size of the building. Several chimneys spewed smoke. The leaded panes on the main floor glowed with hearth light. The square was patrolled by guards with pikes and at the sight of Antonio and Luca, their horses were allowed to clop past and head for a rear entrance.

  They rode unimpeded through a guarded gate at the back of the square. They were inside a courtyard. Once dismounted, Luca, Antonio, and Simon greeted a well-dressed man who couldn’t seem to take his eyes off of John.

  “This way,” Luca said to John.

  “Was that your master?”

  “No, just a friend.”

  John happily shed his smelly cloak and entered the building through the kitchens, where a plump cook, a bald man in an apron, stopped stirring a large iron pot to sniff at John in amazement.

  “Keen sense of smell,” Simon said. “A good thing for a cook.” He shifted to Italian and said, “Keep stirring, signore, we’re starving.”

  They proceeded through a dining hall and at the door of a reception room, Luca asked John to wait while the others had a brief word.

  “Our master will not keep you waiting long,” he said, closing the door behind him.

  When John was summoned, he first entered a room furnished with simple but elegant trappings, the walls decorated with reflective candle sconces, and then a study with a good fire going, a large, decorative rug and several padded chairs and sofas. And against one wall was something that John had not yet seen in his journeys. A bookcase.

  “Books!” he said.

  A disembodied voice answered in accented English, “Indeed yes, books.”

  John approached the fire and saw an older man sitting in a high-backed chair, a blanket on his lap, flanked by two large hounds that growled but stayed obediently on their spots. His hair was white and shoulder-length, his beard, trimmed to a point. His brown skin was taut over a high forehead, his eyes, moist and probing. But perhaps his most distinguishing feature was his shirt, so different from the drab garments of most of the men in this place. It was a deep shade of red with white buttons done up to the throat and white piping at the sleeves. He began to rise in obvious discomfort and even though Antonio exhorted him to remain seated he insisted on finishing the act on his own.

  “I will stand to meet my esteemed guest,” he said, extending a hand. “I am Giuseppe Garibaldi, at your service.”

  John’s eyes narrowed at the name. He knew who Garibaldi was. He had studied his military campaigns at West Point.

  Garibaldi was their master.

  “I’m John Camp,” he said, taking the gnarled, arthritic hand in his and squeezing it gently. “It’s an honor.”

  Chairs were gathered and Garibaldi slumped back down, stroking one dog, then the other. John listened as the men exchanged hasty words about their journey—the sea battle in the channel, John’s escape from Maximilien’s palace, their passage through Francia by steam. All the while Garibaldi kept his probing eyes on John, as if wordlessly trying to measure him up. When this conversation was done Garibaldi called to his manservant to have supper brought to the dining hall and while he slowly and painfully became vertical again, he told John, with a youthful eagerness, that there was so much to talk about that he scarcely knew where to start.

  Supper was mutton stew over a bed of pasta, surely the best meal John had eaten since his arrival and since the oil of cloves was still doing its job, he ate with gusto. All save Garibaldi tucked in greedily but John had to eat in spurts because as soon as they sat down, he was called upon to explain his remarkable presence. Garibaldi showed a keen intellect and a glowing admiration for the technological marvels of the modern era on Earth. Though he had died in the steam age, he was keenly interested in the kinds of advances that John and others before him had described and he listened in rapt silence at the description of the supercollider that had miraculously transported John to his supper table.

  “You say these atoms travel full around London many thousand times every second?”

  “It’s the truth, Signore Garibaldi,” John said.

  “Giuseppe.”

  John bowed his head at the offer of informality. “It’s the truth, Giuseppe. I wish I could explain it better but, like I said, I’m not a scientist, I’m a soldier.”

  “As am I, John, as am I. A humble soldier.”

  John asked about his excellent English and Garibaldi reminded him that in between the first and second Italian wars of independence, he found himself in 1850, living at the Staten Island, New York house of the Italian inventor, Antonio Meucci.

  “I’d forgotten your New Wor
ld connections,” John said. “But it’s coming back to me. You were called the hero of two continents, weren’t you, for your work as a freedom fighter in Europe and South America?”

  Garibaldi put his wine down, his eyes dancing in pleasure. “You hear that Antonio and Luca? And you too Simon? This American who was probably born a century after I died knows of Garibaldi! How extraordinary and how delightful.”

  “I am not surprised,” Antonio said quietly. “You are a great man.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” Luca said and they all toasted their pleasantly embarrassed host.

  Garibaldi drifted into a reminiscence of his youthful days in Brazil and Uruguay. He had first fled Italy in his mid-twenties when, as a member of Mazzini’s revolutionary Young Italy movement, a failed insurrection in the Piedmont led to a death sentence from a Genoese court. It was in the jungles of South America that his newly assembled band of Italian freedom fighters took up the cause of Uruguayan independence and began sporting their trademark red shirts.

  He fingered the coarse, red fabric and said, “You know, it is no small thing to get the dye to make these shirts. It comes all the way from the Orient. But for me, it’s more than a way to remember times past. Everything is so drab here! It’s as if a painter only had two colors—brown and gray. A little bit of color is important, no?”

  John had taken the opportunity to clean his plate and mop up the gravy with bread. Now he said, “I recall studying your decisive battle during the invasion of Sicily when I was at West Point. You had only a thousand men and you employed the counter-intuitive tactic of launching an uphill bayonet charge against a heavily fortified, superior enemy force. I mean, who does that? And I remember imagining what it must have looked like, a thousand men in red shirts, charging uphill.”

  Garibaldi looked dreamy and unfocused, as if seeing the battle play out in his mind, the screams and shouts, red blood wetting red cloth. “The Neapolitans were, indeed, well fortified on that hill at Calatafimi, but I saw that the slope was terraced for cultivation and I correctly reasoned that those terraces would provide us with cover from their carbines. I said to my lieutenant, ‘Qui si fa l'Italia o si muore,’ here we make Italy or we die. And we did win that day, and we had our unified Italy.”

  John raised his goblet for another toast then asked, “Can I ask a delicate question?”

  “You may indeed.”

  “You’re remembered as an honorable man, one of the military heroes of the nineteenth century. I mean, how did you …”

  “How did I come to suffer this ignominious fate?”

  John nodded. “Obviously some strange force, which I don’t pretend to comprehend, determines what happens to a man when he dies. It’s like there’s some kind of moral standard in play that sends you up or sends you down.”

  Garibaldi laughed. “I don’t know about up. Perhaps there is a Heaven. The thought is nice. But I do know about Down, for here we are. As to this moral standard you speak of, I call it a moral absolutism. There are rules. How they are determined, how they are enforced, well, I cannot answer these questions and I dare say, no one can. We did not pass through a period of judgment. We did not pass through the gates of Hell, guarded by Cerberus the hound. We did not glimpse Satan or his minions. We simply arrived in this dismal place and that was that.”

  John had another gulp of wine. “I’m not name-dropping here but I sat with King Henry and King Maximilien and they were saying they never killed a single man by their own hand and they’re still here.”

  Garibaldi nodded. “One may nevertheless be a murderer even without blood on your hands. Murder by proxy. I have met many a soul here who committed such crimes.”

  John rolled his next question around in his mind a few times before saying, “Everyone I’ve spoken to here tells me that a soldier who kills in a war gets a pass, as if there’s a moral distinction between legitimate and illegitimate killing. But here you are.”

  “Yes, here I am. Of course, I’ve had a good long time to contemplate this myself and I will be frank with you, John. I know why exactly I am in Hell. You see, I did kill a man, as you put it, illegitimately. At the time, I have to say, I foolishly made no such distinction. Here is what happened. We were in Salto in Uruguay, supporting the Colorados in their civil war. There was a fierce battle on a day that was so hot, if a bullet or a bayonet didn’t kill you, the sun might. We redshirts lost many men, and I could always accept this, but as I was defending my own person against an onslaught, I saw my trumpeter, a boy, only fifteen, armed with nothing but his musical instrument, get cut down by a Blanco’s saber. The blow almost decapitated the lad. Afterwards, when victory was ours, I surveyed the line of prisoners we had taken and there, I saw the man who had killed the boy. I took him out of the line and to my infinite regret I put a bullet through his head. The rest of the prisoners, I disarmed and released, but that Blanco, he died by my hand. Executed, one could say. He had no right to kill my unarmed trumpeter and I had no right to kill him once he was my prisoner. And that, I believe, is the reason I am in Hell.”

  The room got very quiet. John fidgeted uncomfortably in his chair before reaching for the flask to refill his goblet, downing the wine in a series of gulps.

  It was Luca who broke the tension by declaring, “Well, I killed a dozen men, a barking dog, and thousands of flies. They all deserved it but here too am I.”

  “We all deserve our fate,” Antonio said, “but we have to make the best of it. That is what our master teaches.”

  “Master,” Garibaldi said, shaking his head. “I don’t know why they call me this. I am but a humble man, a sinner with an ambitious plan.”

  “Can you tell me about it?” John asked. “Your men keep it well protected.”

  Garibaldi rose slowly and reached for his cane. His hounds rose with him. “Please join me in my study. I have some brandy. It is not great brandy but it is not bad either. Do you drink spirits, John?”

  He made them laugh with his answer. “I’ve never turned down a drink in my life and I’m not going to start now.”

  While his servant stoked the fire, the men settled in and sipped at their brandies. Garibaldi was right—it was on the rough side but it was drinkable and John downed it quickly and was poured another.

  “Let me say this,” Garibaldi began, “I am pleased that these good men have kept our secret close to their breasts. On Earth, loose lips killed people. Here, it is worse. You see, John, we live in fear. All of us. On Earth, men dread it but here, we would give anything to taste its finality. Even though I did not wish to die, I thought death would bring escape from my crippled joints. Foolish me! I still suffer, but now it is for eternity. Death can bring no escape for me and for everyone condemned to this world. If a prince or a king would seize and torture us, maim us, we would suffer the pain forever. There is no escape.”

  “Grim,” John said, his head beginning to swim from the drink. “Fucking grim.”

  “Ha! Fucking grim, indeed,” Garibaldi said. “I’d forgotten how much I like Americans. So I will tell you this secret of ours, but only after you answer this question: can you die in Hell, John?”

  “I have no idea. Since I’ve been here, I’ve been shot and I’ve been clobbered in the head but so far no one’s dealt me the death card.”

  “Then let’s try to avoid finding this out, shall we?” Garibaldi said with a chuckle.

  Antonio was not as diplomatic. “Honestly, signore, it would be better for us if you could die and thus be prevented from answering questions posed to you under torture. I would deliver the fatal blow myself to protect our master.”

  John felt like punching the guy but instead he had another drink and said, “You know, Antonio, you’re no fun at a party, but I’ll tell you what. If you feel the need to try and kill me one day, go ahead and try your luck.”

  “Now, now,” Garibaldi said, “we’re all friends here. I am certain that when John hears what we are trying to achieve, he will wish to help us and in return, I
am certain we will wish to help him.” He turned to John. “With your lady friend. Yes, Luca tonight told me about your plight and your quest.”

  “I didn’t want to take a detour all the way to Italy when she’s in Germany,” John said sullenly. “I’m here now but let’s just say I’m impatient.”

  “I’m sure you are. I too am impatient. I am impatient for change. Hell, you see, is an astonishing place because its residents have universally abandoned hope. Here there are only masters and slaves and neither has hope. The master can only take some pleasure in having less daily pain than the slave. But both have been stripped of the joys of family life, the humanity of building something for future generations, the camaraderie of noble common purposes, the belief that death might at least be an escape from the suffering of the flesh, the solace that religion offered the masses.”

  “There’s not a lot you can do about that, is there?” John said.

  “Yes, and no. Do you like that infuriating answer? Let me explain. No, we cannot change the fundamental rules which seem to govern this place but yes, we can make the most of what we have and try to improve our lot.”

  “How?”

  “By thinking and acting collectively.”

  “Communists in Hell? Is that your big idea?”

  “Not at all. Unlike Karl Marx, who was a contemporary of mine, though we never met, and to the best of my knowledge he did not end up here, I am not talking about a political philosophy, but a pragmatic way forward given the cards we have been dealt. I fought many a battle when I lived. For some I used the gun and the sword. For others I used words and the power of persuasion. There were successes and there were failures. But I believe my greatest victory, and the one that I have been told has secured me the most meaningful legacy, was the unification of my homeland. So that is my goal, John, our goal, the unification of Hell.”

  Luca, Antonio, and Simon nodded solemnly while John, for his part, eyed the brandy. He had little patience for talk right now. He was farther away from Emily than he had been at any time in the past week and he felt like getting extremely drunk. But if he got too sloppy in front of his host he supposed he might regret it in the morning. So he opted for bland politeness.