He stirred as Horst lifted him effortlessly like a child; another thing that lurid fiction didn’t mention was that it took a solid three or four minutes of breathing through a pad to really put you out. A hypodermic was much better if you were in a hurry. His eyes fluttered open and he muttered:
“Loki . . . Hauch des Loki . . . Americans . . .”
That meant “Breath of Loki”; Loki, the trickster-god of the ancient Germanics, who ended up chained to a rock beneath the drip of venom from a serpent. Her parents had read her those stories, with many others, though her father had preferred the Ulster Cycle and her mother the Song of the Cid. Luz carefully didn’t react, and the sound died away to mumbles.
“They used a knockout mixture,” she said; she’d sniffed at the cloth before dropping it on the bodies. “Risky, but I think he’ll wake up fairly soon.”
“Good,” Horst said; they tucked the old man into the bed in their suite, making sure he wasn’t drooling too much or in danger of choking on his tongue. “It’s only a few hours until we leave for the train. Lucky that it’s right across the square!”
Luz nodded thoughtfully. “Horst, can you square the customs agents on the German side?”
He nodded. “Yes, if I must. We’ll be switching to a special train there direct to . . . where we’re going. Why?”
“Because if the French are this determined, I’d like some more firepower if they try again. And the Gabachos were all carrying carpetbags.”
His eyes lit. “Ah! Just-in-case gear!”
They slipped across again to the room the French had so briefly occupied; it might be her imagination, but she thought she could smell death under the sweet flowery odor of the bath oil they’d spilled over the bodies. The four identical carpetbags were all resting on the parlor table.
“Na, was haben wir denn hier?” Horst said as he opened one and his brows went up.
Which was roughly equivalent to What have we here? Or well, well, well, a phrase suitable for opening Christmas presents.
What they had here was an arsenal: two sawed-off shotguns, ammunition for them in the form of heavy buckshot and slugs, a half-dozen hand grenades shaped like miniature pineapples—
“English. Mills bombs, not as good as our Stielhandgranate, but a sound design,” Horst remarked.
“The gringos use a similar one lately, but what’s this rifle?”
Horst laid out the disassembled weapon, clicked it together, and took it apart again after running his hands over the join. Luz was familiar with it from briefing papers, but she let the German explain; in her experience most men derived considerable pleasure from explaining things, particularly to women, and it wouldn’t be in character for Elisa Carmody to be completely familiar with European military exotica. Luz liked a well-designed weapon as she did any other tool, enjoyed hunting, and was very competent with them for that or a fight, but she’d never derived that semi-sensual pleasure from guns that she’d seen often in others and of which Horst showed every sign.
“It’s a Meunier semi-auto rifle,” Horst said. “A specially made one for taking down and putting in a small case and assembling again rapidly.”
“Semi-automatic? Like the gringo Colt-Browning? Those have caused us hard problems.”
“Very much like, though it’s recoil operated rather than gas. A good weapon, much better than the Lebel, and a much better 7mm rimless cartridge too—which they stole from Mauser-Werk—though the action is a little delicate for the trenches. The French started producing it just before the war, but they never had enough for general issue. They give it to elite units and marksmen and raiding parties. And ten clips of ammunition, fifty rounds. Can you use a rifle?”
“Yes,” she said flatly. “Quite well.”
He nodded, taking her at her word. “Well, let’s take our gifts. Ah, and a coil of rope, always useful.”
They put the brass Do Not Disturb signs on their little chains around the knobs of the French agents’ door, and the Professor’s, with a one-guilder coin bearing Queen Wilhelmina’s rather plump face left in the helpfully provided slot in each for emphasis. The signs were recent inventions and the mark of a first-class hotel in a sophisticated city, but the thriller writers had already begun to note how they aided skullduggery.
When everything was packed they sat on the sofa together in their own suite to wait the remaining hours; Horst decided that they would ask for an invalid’s wheeled chair if the Professor hadn’t fully recovered by then. Luz shivered a little and leaned against the man’s shoulder. He gave her a surprised look and put a gentle arm around her.
“I don’t like killing men who’ve never done me harm,” she said. “I will if I have to, but . . . I don’t like it. Better them than us, but there may be children who can’t understand why their fathers aren’t coming home.”
After a moment he said with clumsy goodwill: “They were men fighting for their country and people, as I do for mine and you for yours. This was honorable war, with equal chances for us and them, blow for blow and shot for shot.”
“Yes,” she said, and they waited in silence.
FIVE
Maatschappij tot Exploitatie van Staatsspoorwegen
(Netherlands State Railways)
Eastern Gelderland Province
Koninkrijk der Nederlanden
(Kingdom of the Netherlands)
SEPTEMBER 6TH, 1916(B)
It was supposed to be six hours from Amsterdam’s Centraal to Cologne in Germany. Judging by where they were, across the Rhine and past Arnhem, just beginning to head south, it was going to be at least two hours more; in fact, they’d be lucky to make the customs house at Emmerich-am-Rhein by two o’clock. Horst grumbled, his tidy Teutonic soul offended by the irregularity; Luz thought he’d probably have gone mad if he had to live in Mexico or Guatemala or any of a number of places her father had built things.
But he allowed that it was probably the result of the war and the shortages of good coal in the Netherlands, which had to import every lump from combatants who needed it themselves. The engine up ahead was wheezing and making asthmatic noises now and then; even at the peaks between stations they were doing distinctly less than the fifty miles an hour a passenger express should, which meant there was probably duff and shale in every shovelful going into the firebox. The locomotive had looked like a toy to her anyway. European engines always did, compared to the massive brutes that roamed American railways.
At least the first-class passenger compartments were joined along the side by an interior corridor, what Europeans for some mysterious reason called the American Plan, despite it not being all that common in the United States. A lot of trains here still used the other, older type that had nothing but the exits on the side, showing the design’s descent from a string of stagecoaches stuck on a flatbed, which meant you could end up dying to pee while the train crawled between stations and no place to do it but the floor.
She’d left for the ladies’ toilet an hour out of Amsterdam at a hint from Horst, and when she came back the Professor—technically, he was Privatdozent Ernst von Bülow—was still chilly and aloof but at least minimally polite, mostly ignoring her. Luz assumed that Horst had explained to the older man how she’d helped save his wrinkled backside from the French, though he’d still been surprised, or seemed to be, when she spoke excellent upper-class German.
She assumed from the slight but detectable edge of a rough Brandenberger accent that he was a genuine Prussian and not one by historical accident and Frederick the Great’s ambition like Horst the Silesian. But then, nearly all Germans had some sort of regional tinge even when speaking the standard tongue, which had been more or less made up in the Reformation era and wasn’t something anyone sang lullabies in or shouted in play as a child. From the combination of an academic title and the nobleman’s von he was probably also the non-inheriting younger scion of a family with a minor en
tailed estate out among the pinewoods . . . an estate that in America would qualify as a biggish farm. In England only the eldest son of a noble had a title and the rest were commoners, but in Germany all the children were of the Edel caste, and they bred like rabbits.
His head probably feels like it’s going to explode, between being pistol-whipped and drugged, she thought with an attempt at charity by the young and healthy. It takes longer to spring back at his age.
They were into the eastern part of Gelderland now and had turned south, closer and closer to the German frontier, and the land passing by outside their windows was no longer pancake flat. By Dutch standards it was mountainous and thinly populated, meaning there were occasional wooded ridges or even low hills, one towering as much as two hundred feet into the sky. Wooden fences surrounded the fields, reaped and yellow and some with sheaves of grain still in pyramidal stooks, or bushy with root crops or green pasture thronged with fat-looking brown cattle with odd white bands from top to bottom in the middle of their bodies, like broad belts. Scattered farms stood with brick nogging between their half timbers under steep red roofs, and now and then a small castle or stately manor house dreamed amid formal gardens. The occasional, inevitable windmill clacked away, probably grinding the newly harvested grain, and the air through the half-open window smelled warm and sleepy-green and somehow had a hint of first frost soon, under the coal smoke. You could imagine a cotillion in one of those manors, and Mozart lilting softly out the French windows, or a mother in a lace cap spooning cheese soup out of a tureen for eager tow-headed children in a farmhouse kitchen of scrubbed wood and shining tile.
Hard to imagine it’s the edge of a continent tearing at itself like a mad wolf eating out its own guts, Luz thought.
Horst seemed to catch the thought. “There has been war here often enough,” he said. “This is where my ancestors broke the Roman frontier fifteen hundred years ago, and Charlemagne fought his long campaigns against the heathen Saxons and Frisians. Viking ships came far up these rivers with their dragon heads to burn and plunder and carry off captives. War in the Middle Ages, war in the Eighty Years’ struggle against the Spanish, war against the French of Louis XIV. And against Napoleon, in the time of our own grandparents and their parents.”
Luz smiled rueful agreement. “There is war where there are human beings,” she said.
“War is the locomotive of history,” von Bülow said a bit sententiously.
Luz was tempted to argue the point simply because she didn’t like him, though in fact the statement was pretty much true as far as she could see and a rather striking phrase. Instead she looked at the book beside him, Also sprach Zarathustra, and said:
“That bit with the old woman talking to Zarathustra is metaphorical, you know, Herr Privatdozent.”
Privatdozent meant an independent scholar with at least a doctorate who wasn’t formally appointed to a university post. It was often somewhat more prestigious than a regular academic position.
“And often misinterpreted,” she added.
“Which part? You have read Nietzsche?”
He sounded slightly indignant, as if she’d checked the book out of a library and kept it beyond the return date. She smiled sweetly and fluttered her eyelids.
“Well, of course. Hasn’t anyone who actually reads read the most influential philosopher of our time? I mean the part where the old woman says to Zarathustra: Du gehst zu Frauen? Vergiss die Peitsche nicht!”
Literally that meant: Thou goest to the women? Forget not the whip! If it wasn’t his favorite pair of sentences in the book, she’d stick jalapeño peppers up her nose.
“Metaphorical in what sense?” von Bülow said, his eyes lighting up despite himself; like most of his breed he simply couldn’t resist word chopping, or textual exegesis if you were feeling charitable. “There are many levels of interpretation possible, of course; this I grant.”
“Well,” Luz said, opening the Hotel Victoria’s lunch basket and handing around the sausage-and-cheese sandwiches, pickles and apples and bottles of flavored seltzer water. “Notice that the old woman has just given a wise reply to Zarathustra’s first statements about women in general. And that she addresses him with the familiar du as if he were her child, and the word she . . . which is to say, Nietzsche . . . uses for women is Frauen, not Weiber.”
Frauen and Weiber were more or less precisely equivalent to the English distinction between ladies and females . . . or between ladies and women-in-general. With malice aforethought she added:
“Possibly it helps not to have been born a native German speaker to appreciate exactly what he’s trying to do there.”
Luz continued as the professor sputtered:
“With Nietzsche precise word choice always matters crucially; he’s a poet as well as a philosopher, a philosopher who speaks in poetry—he says things that can’t be summed up in a simple declarative sentence, the way you can the price of apples. Hinting at truths whose meaning can only be approached allusively, recursively, because language itself creaks beneath the weight. Each word is surrounded by a penumbra of possible meanings that must be considered together rather than one being chosen and the others dismissed.”
Horst was leaning back, with a straitened expression on his face, as if he were fighting down a delighted grin.
Yes, there are times when it’s a bit of a struggle not to like him too much, she thought.
Luz spread a napkin across her knees. Von Bülow did likewise and took a bite of his sandwich and chased it with the fizzy water, frowning. Luz bit into hers; inside the crusty roll was ossenworst, a raw-beef sausage made with pepper, cloves, mace, and nutmeg and then slow-smoked at low temperature.
That, I have to admit, the Dutch do very well. And this Gouda is excellent.
Von Bülow looked past the wall of the carriage. “Granting the general principle of the allusiveness of Nietzsche’s prose for the sake of argument, particularly with respect to this work, what is your specific interpretation?” the academic said challengingly. “Can there be a new one of so seminal a work?”
“My interpretation would be twofold. First, the old woman is reminding Zarathustra of the whip the woman holds—her role as the maker-into-human of the wild-beast boy-man whom she mothers—and how more generally she uses the whip of restraint, of culture, to tame the male; so Zarathustra should take care when he goes to the ladies, lest they tame him with their whips. Him in this case, of course, being not merely Zarathustra in this passage but that screaming child he carries, the child of his mind surely, his truth that he fears is too loud.”
“Outrageous sophism!” von Bülow said. “Why so contradict the first reading . . . oh.”
“Oh indeed; and note that she does not say forget not your whip; she says forget not the whip. It’s a complete reversal of meanings, which is the theme of the work, isn’t it?”
“The inversion of morals is the theme! Well, that and eternal recurrence.”
“So shouldn’t we examine each statement in it in light of that? A reversal of both morals and meanings? And secondly of course the ‘whip’ is an expression of distance, of the Pathos der Distanz to which Nietzsche so often refers. With the whip, the woman requires that Zarathustra—the male Prophet—maintain a wary distance . . .”
“Superficially striking, but surely—”
Bless you, Miss Lucy Ganz, Luz thought, recalling her philosophy teacher kindly as von Bülow began his indignant refutation.
Twenty minutes later they were crunching the last of the apples and going at it hammer-and-tongs about the meaning of over in relation to the concept of the Übermensch and Luz was pointing out the fact that über could as easily mean “transcendent” as “superior,” and that mensch was used rather than man, conveying the more general sense of human being rather than specifically a male. Von Bülow wasn’t a professional philosopher any more than Luz was; she gathered from some c
asual remarks that he was a scientist, probably a chemist, and they were contending on nearly equal ground.
Horst was silent except for a little helpless wheezing, and had a hand clamped firmly over his mouth. She thought she saw a tear trembling at the corner of one pale gray eye.
Then his head came up, the amusement vanishing. “Quiet!” he barked in his officer’s voice. “Something’s wrong!”
Von Bülow did fall silent, for a wonder, with his index finger in midpoke toward her in the air. Luz listened too, and heard the scream of steel on steel and felt the swift hard lurch as the train’s emergency brakes locked. She stuck her head out of the compartment window in time to see rooster tails of sparks from the six driving wheels going into full reverse as the engine turned into a curve before a small bridge. She didn’t have time to check that the dark gap in the rails her first glance saw was really there . . .
But the locomotive driver certainly thought so, and he had a much closer view; she’d just seen him and the fireman jump for it.
“Sabotage!” she shouted, grabbing the leather straps above the seat and slamming her feet against the seat opposite her. “The train’s going to derail, brace for it!”
The engine started to take the curve, and then there weren’t any rails beneath the foretruck and then the driving wheels were biting uselessly into gravel and dirt. The sixty-ton weight of the locomotive plowed down the embankment and into the water of the little river, and there was a deafening, roaring bang when the cold water struck the boiler and firebox and the riveted seams yielded, then ripped open as the flaying steam within escaped in a huge whistle. Screams echoed in their wake as passengers were thrown across cabins, breaking bones and faces, and rivets and fragments flew like shrapnel.
Luz gave a shivering grunt as the impact wrenched at her, but the springs she made of knees and thighs and back held, despite the savage wrench of the forces trying to turn her into a tumbling mass of organs wrapped around fragile ceramic sticks and the strap that felt like it was cutting through her wrist. Horst managed too, and he had one iron arm braced across the professor’s chest. The carriage they were in was the fourth back from the coal and water cars, and it came off the rails and almost immediately rammed into the one before, twisting until it lay three-quarters over with the outer door of the compartment pointing down toward the damp ditch beside the track. The screams of humans seemed slight after the shriek of tortured metal.
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