“My Leibstandarte saw it and told me with her muscles,” said von Cruewell, and Valkyrie growled as if in affirmation.
“It can make no difference to your mobility, Frau Doktor, and if the light makes me your equal in that respect, I believe it may also assist your dog.”
“This is your stateroom, Herr Raven, in which I have not been before. But I was thinking of your bride. The light may hinder her sleep.”
“Let me adjust it to its softest level.” He did so.
Lightning flashed outside, bright enough to reflect in von Cruewell’s motionless dark glasses. At least he still perceived those. “Very well,” she said. “That much light, I will permit. But you will not make any sudden movements, or my Leibstandarte may be disquieted.”
“You still suspect me of slipping the confounded whammy into the soup?”
“Nein, but of smuggling it. Today Herr Tolliver upset a tin of spice in the galley. Frau Lightouch sent him up into the cargo area for more of this spice. I suggest that the spice which he spilled was anise for tonight’s soup, and that the whammy was hidden in the new tin, mixed with true anise for its better disguise.”
“Tolliver!” Finding Angela in her frenzied state had driven the highwayman from Corwin’s mind until now. “My God, I think he’s lying dead in the bathroom!”
“What?” Von Cruewell could have come right past the body without suspecting its presence, though why her dog had not alerted her ... Too well trained, no doubt: too intent on the indicated quarry. Scent out “Comrade Raven,” ignore all distractions.
“I hope I am mistaken,” he went on. “But if not dead, Tolliver was certainly unconscious when I found him.”
“And you left him?” She flung open the door and gave her dog a new order in German.
Even as they disappeared into the bath chamber, Corwin was kneeling once again at the bed. Angela still lay quiet, as though in normal slumber, but glistering droplets beaded her face. He wiped them away with his handkerchief. Her skin, despite its glow, was slightly clammy to his touch. He felt her pulse. It seemed somewhat erratic, but strong. He began to smooth and rearrange the bedclothes around her.
“Herr Raven!” came von Cruewell’s voice from the bathroom. “You will come and show me this corpse!”
“In a moment.”
“At once!”
Feeling Angela’s heartbeat, and thinking it steadier, he rose and went into the bath chamber.
“Well, mein Herr?” said the obersturmbannfuehrerin. Her dog was sniffing, and she herself prodding with stick and hands, around the space where Corwin had left Tolliver.
The body was there no longer, neither on the marble ledge beside the pool nor anywhere else in the chamber.
Lightning flashed again, but farther distant. It took some seconds for the sound of the thunder to reach them, barely audible at all now through the sound-soak.
Chapter 12
“I am more struck, just now, with the supreme silence which reigns in the sea beneath us, notwithstanding its agitation, than with any other phenomenon presenting itself. The waters give up no voice to the heavens. The immense flaming ocean writhes and is tortured uncomplainingly. The mountainous surges suggest the idea of innumerable dumb gigantic fiends struggling in impotent agony. In a night such as is this to me, a man lives—lives a whole century of ordinary life ...”
—Attributed to Harrison Ainsworth as quoted in Edgar A. Poe, “Astounding News by Express ... Signal Triumph of Mr. Monck Mason’s Flying Machine!” in New-York Sun.
* * * *
The young bride screamed once more, and the groom hurried back to the bridal chamber. Smiling, Ilna listened to him go. She rose, went to the passage door, closed and bolted it again. Laplace-Rougier bolts were no barrier to her, but they should stop most of the other persons aboard.
She returned to the Honeymoon Suite. In his haste and preoccupation with his wife, he had again neglected to block the inner door. That was uncharacteristically incompetent of the Raven, but it was convenient for the She-Wolf. After listening a few moments to his ministrations, Ilna softly entered the stateroom, found a chair, placed it and sat down between the bed and the door to the bath, which she had left open. Her dog sat beside her. She kept one hand on her walking-stick and the other on Valkyrie’s head.
Very gradually, Frau Garvey’s cries and struggles subsided into moans and faint thrashings. Only then did the brash young husband speak to the Obersturmbannfuehrerin. “Dr. Junge, if you have medical training and some acquaintance with whammy, in the name of God isn’t there some antidote you can give her?”
“If there were, mein Herr, would you trust me to give it?”
That made him pause. He did not answer, and by continuing to listen closely she could tell that he did not move from the bedside.
“The effects should commence to wear off by midnight,” Ilna continued. “It could not have been a large dose they consumed. In the meantime, Gospodin Raven, what of this body you reported finding?”
“Isn’t it obvious? I was mistaken. Clearly, so far from being dead, M. Tolliver is still sufficiently alive, thank God! to have gotten up and walked away.”
“Or he is dead and was carried away.”
“And people call my world pessimistic!”
“I examine all the possibilities,” said Ilna. “It is also possible, for instance, that you invented this tale of a body to get me out of your stateroom.”
“Following which successful ruse, I shrewdly neglected to lock and barricade the door against you at once.”
“You would have made up the lie very hastily. Perhaps you had some thought at first of striking me from behind and drowning me in the bath, but you considered my little Leibstandarte and very wisely changed your plan.”
“I grow excessively weary,” he said, “of having your little Leibstandarte constantly thrown at me. Her aversion to me is totally undeserved on my part.”
“Jawohl?” Ilna said sarcastically, with a smile trained to be grim. “She smelled the whammy in our soup. And on your fingers, too, Gospodin Raven? Does Mother Russia send you on drug-running operations now? Or do you do a little, as they say, ‘moonlighting’ to line your own pockets?”
He sighed. “Why would I have wasted the contraband and given the operation away by letting it get into the soup? We were up there with M. Tolliver—Angela, the Musician, and myself—when he got his new supply of the spice this afternoon.”
“A dilemma for you that must have been, nein? You could not warn Tolliver to avoid that particular tin of anise, you could not even warn your pretty, innocent bride from eating the soup. Not without arousing suspicion. You could only abstain from eating it yourself, pretending that you did not like the flavor.”
“Confound it,” he said wearily. “Will you at least tell me this: has the entire crew been affected, or can we reasonably hope still to be airborne at midnight?”
“No one has been affected but the passengers, those officers who so fatuously ate with us for the sake of ‘passenger relations,’ our stewards and waiter and chef, who sampled it before serving us. The others ate mulligan soup or had not yet eaten. Offizier Altocumulus flies this zeppelin with a clear head and a clear-headed crew.”
“Thank God for that!”
His bride started again to moan and toss. Ilna waited while he quieted her. She could imagine him bending over the suffering fair one, wiping her face, holding her hands, stroking her hair as he murmured those tender reassurances. It was very pretty, and the Fatherland did not discourage a certain sentimentality in its leaders, provided that this never interfered with their functioning.
When Frau Garvey again lay quiet, the Obersturmbannfuehrerin repeated, “I examine all the possibilities, Herr Poe. Perhaps Herr Tolliver broke in upon your pretty bride and in her wham-trollies she beat him back.”
“What, and left him dead or d
ying? Good God, Frau Doktor, what do you take my wife for?”
“She has fought you tonight, has she not? Whammy sometimes makes murderous those who take it.”
“Not Angela! She fought me off, yes—but only in delirious self-defense. I grant that she might conceivably have fought him into the next room, and there could have been a slip, a fall on the marble floor—plastimarble, I mean, still possibly hard enough—but to turn on the water and leave him unconscious in a filling bath was the work of a clear and deliberate mind, and my wife would not willingly hurt a spider!”
“You did not tell me this, about the filling bath. The tap was not running when I came.”
“I turned it off when I pulled him out.”
“I see, Gospodin. The work of a clear and deliberate mind. We two, you and I, possess the only clear and deliberate minds in this part of the zeppelin tonight.” There were also the four crew members she had recruited to watch the passengers in the lounge and make certain that no one sustained injury; but she did not mention them yet to Poe. They were mere reliable mechanics, unimportant in themselves.
“But neither you nor I could have done it,” he said slowly. “It must have happened when we were together in the library, with the door closed. Closed on your insistence. M. Tolliver had not been in the bath when I first came through on my way to our meeting.”
“For that, I have your word only. But whether you are Gospodin Raven or simple Herr Poe, if you yourself had found him attacking her, I do not think you would need whammy to grow murderous. Nicht wahr?”
“If I had found anyone attacking her in this stateroom, Dr. Junge, I would never have left her at all to keep our appointment in the library.”
“Wohlan! Perhaps we will accept that, for the moment. And so we have either the work of an unclear and whammied mind, or you have told me lies about Herr Tolliver’s body.”
“I have told you the truth as I perceived it. M. Tolliver must have wandered in, turned on the water, and fallen into the pool in his drugged stupor. I came in time to pull him out. He revived while I was occupied with Angela, and left after you came through into this stateroom.”
“That is also a possibility. But he would have had to remain very still, to keep out of my Leibstandarte’s way and notice.”
“Your dog or no, it is the only possibility! I had locked the stateroom door from the bathroom side, and it was still locked after I found Tolliver. Perhaps, Frau Doktor, in addition to your other talents, you can relock a door from the wrong side, but Angela cannot!”
“For the locked door, as for the body itself and for the time when you found it, if you did find it, again I have your word only, mein Herr.”
He groaned. No, the groan came from his wife. It went on for several seconds, ending at last in a series of short, tiny shrieks. Valkyrie moved her head, ears pricked. Ilna stroked her, waiting while Poe soothed the troubled young woman.
“Why?” he whispered at length, when she breathed more easily again. “Dear Mother of God, why should it have given her wham-trollies? She who is all light, all purity, all happiness ... There’s nothing in her for nightmares to feed upon!”
“Nein, mein Herr, you are wrong,” Ilna said calmly. “We have all of us our shadow selves, every one. Even your sweet, pretty wife. You and I, Gospodin Raven, we bring out our shadow selves into the daylight. We observe them, study them, work them into our brighter selves, until we know and the world sees our best and our worst, both at once.” (Jawohl, Ilna thought, someday another Wagner will set my poetry to immortal music.) Aloud, she went on, “But your lovely wife, her shadow is so lost she could not find it herself, not with her waking mind. For many years it has been buried deep in the swamps of light and purity, choked and whining, a lonely, drowned, and neglected thing waiting there for the whammy to set it free. So that now it attacks her with all the force of those years when it festered unrecognized and unknown.”
“Are you suggesting that Angela Garvey Garvey is a Jekyll and Hyde?” His voice was low, but tinged with anger.
“Everyone is a Jekyll and Hyde, mein Herr. For that you must not complain to me. You must complain to the gods. But also thank them that her first whammy is a nightmare dose. She will be much less eager to try a second. Is the light on?”
“At its softest level.”
“Gut.” From her pocket, Ilna drew the clear plastic cylinder. She rolled it twice between her palms to hear the little thump of what it contained, and held it up by the heavier end. “Look at this, Gospodin Raven. No, do not reach for it. I see with my fingers, you with your eyes. What do you see?”
“I…assume that it is a finger cigar in miniature traveling humidor. Or a rubber stamp in its own inkpad tube.”
“You assume. But that is not what you see.”
“No,” he confessed. “I am far from sure what, exactly, it is that I see. Something in a small glass cylinder.”
“Plastic, Gospodin Raven. A specially treated plastic. It resists heat and acid both, and if struck, it does not break. What is inside it is a brand, a little iron swastika on a wooden handle.” Knowing her tools by long acquaintance and feel, she pointed to what he might see as a centimeter-deep brown residue. “And what is here at the bottom is a gummy compound of certain chemicals. A film forms on its surface and holds it in place. But strike it so—” She gave it a smart rap on the head of her walking-stick—”and you unbond the film. Then open the stopper and push the iron down into the gum ... so ... quickly, before the film bonds again, and the air and metal mixing with the chemicals make a reaction to heat the iron white hot within sixty seconds. Science is very clever, nicht wahr?”
By his sharp intake of breath she knew he saw what she told him to see. But he said, “It would be very clever—ingenious—as you describe it, meine Fuehrerin. And you describe it to a nicety. Nevertheless, I maintain that it is a rubber stamp or something equally harmless.”
“Shall we test whether it is what your mind reasons or what your eyes see that tells your hand what to feel?”
“To what purpose? And do you really suppose I’d give you my hand without protest or struggle?”
“Da, Gospodin. I think you will give me your hand very quietly before you will risk fighting with me and my Leibstandarte here in the same little room where your pretty Frau lies helpless.”
He did not reply.
“It is white hot, Gospodin Raven,” she said. “It will so remain for three minutes. I give you one minute to hold out your hand to me. If you try to fight us off, my dog and I, we may by accident hit Frau Garvey in the struggle. And if you try slipping away from us, she remains.”
“She would never mistake a rubber stamp for a torture device. Not even in her present—”
“And if it is not a rubber stamp, Gospodin?”
Ten seconds of silence, and then she heard him stand. “I refuse to reach across the bed. I am coming around to your side of it. Kindly inform your little Leibstandarte that I am not now coming with any malign intention. Malign intentions are your department entirely. But I register my protest that this is excessive, extravagant, and unnecessary, at least until we ascertain definitively that M. Tolliver is indeed dead or missing.”
“Perhaps. Perhaps not.” Stroking Valkyrie with one hand, she followed his progress around the bed by his footsteps and by the turning of her dog’s head. When she thus sensed that he was in front of her, she instructed him, “You had better sit.” Valkyrie began to tense and growl. Ilna soothed her with a few nonsense syllables in German.
“I am seated.” On the floor, clearly. There had been no noise of another chair brought over.
“Hold your hand six centimeters—that is, about two inches and a half—above my right knee.”
“In a moment. I am folding my handkerchief to tie round my mouth. In the meantime, may I ask your precise purpose in this charade? Do you want my promise to lead you to the co
ntraband, or will you be satisfied with a confession that I am your master spy?”
“You will tell me the true version of everything you have told me so far. I do not like it that you gag yourself.”
“There is precedent, even in the legal sense. In ancient China, for example, accused criminals were allowed blocks to bite upon for the protection of their tongues. And I do not intend to risk disturbing my wife.”
“Ach! Sweet sentiment! Very well, Herr Raven, but be quick. After one hundred and eighty seconds, the iron begins to cool. Or perhaps you prefer red hot to white hot?”
“Mmmm.”
She unstoppered and withdrew the swastika rod, holding it in her right hand while tucking the cylinder upright in her short pocket. Next she found Poe’s hand, waiting above her knee. It was his left hand, palm down, and it shook like the fast tremolo of an inexpert musician. He would be watching. His type always watched. Tightening her left fist around his fingers, she poised the swastika above his skin. His hand tensed. Thus she knew that he sensed the heat. “So, mein Raven, do you still believe it is only a harmless ink stamp? Grunt once for da, twice for nyet.”
“Mnh.” Once. For yes, he still believed, in spite of his perceptions, that it was harmless. Had it not been for this last defiance, she might have decided the test was sufficient for now. Mere sentimentality. She slammed the swastika down firmly upon his flesh.
He jerked back, making noises in his throat. A satisfactory reaction, so she let him pull away. Valkyrie had started up. Ilna calmed her with a few gentle strokes, then resheathed the swastika, all the while listening closely to the sounds Poe made, the strangled sobs choked down even before they could reach the muffling gag, the little chirring of a man’s weight rocking back and forth on the deep-pile carpet. Of auditory impressions Ilna von Cruewell was more than an experienced judge. She was a critical connoisseur.
Eventually she said, “Very good, Gospodin. You are not play-acting, but you have succeeded in not disturbing your pretty Frau. She slumbers on. I congratulate you.”
The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK Page 79
