“It is only right for the under-man to serve the purposes of the higher,” von Bülow agreed. “And for the defeated to serve the victors.”
They passed into forest again; spruce plantations on the higher ground, oak and beech and other leaf trees lower down, and then a steep narrow riverside clearing with a little stone-built railway station that had probably been put up a generation ago to serve the Schloss and its dependent villages but already looking old. They climbed down and stood amid an orderly bustle of men in uniform, motorcars and horse-drawn wagons coming and going, and a very pink young lieutenant who strode up to them looking at a clipboard, his wispy mustache trained up into sad little points in what he probably thought was his monarch’s style.
“Hauptmann von Dückler?” he said, exchanging salutes. “Yes, we have transport and quarters in the Schloss laid on for you and the Herr Privatdozent and this Mexican who is expected. You are lucky! We’re quartering people as far away as the resort hotels in Marienberg!”
He looked down an aquiline nose at Luz, screwing in a monocle as he did so. Junkers used them the way ladies had wielded fans in the old days, to express emotion without words.
“Ah, there may be some difficulty finding space for your friend . . .”
Luz gave him a smile of poisonous sweetness. She hadn’t long to wait; Horst barked:
“My colleague the good Fräulein whose name you are not cleared to know is an important intelligence source who has come here, at considerable risk, from the Western Hemisphere to provide data crucial to the operation being discussed . . . which she is cleared to be briefed on, and you, I would guess, Lieutenant, are not. I am under instructions to bring her as rapidly as possible to Colonel Nicolai . . . Lieutenant, and I would be surprised if there was not documentation to that effect.”
The young man went from pink to pale at the name of the much-feared intelligence chief. The German concept of military rank was surprisingly flexible, in some respects; authority attached as much to function as title. Nicolai’s functions were manifold, mostly secret, and occasionally involved sending people to the Somme front where an inexperienced junior officer pitchforked into a strange regiment had a life expectancy that averaged about four weeks. Or just ordering that some individual disappear, now and then.
“You will act accordingly,” Horst finished.
Tone and inflection joined in a way that suggested gross inferiority on the lieutenant’s part and desperate consequences if he didn’t obey sometime in the next few seconds; German was a wonderful language for telling people what to do in fine shades of who-is-boss.
The lieutenant’s respectful but man-to-man demeanor shifted to ramrod stiffness and a heel-click as the flat, cold words continued. Von Bülow stared at him silently with a look like an entomologist about to pin a specimen to a corkboard for eternal display.
“Jawohl, Herr Hauptmann! At once, Herr Hauptmann!” the young man barked, eyes staring rigidly ahead, then departed with a brisk stride.
“German discipline is a fearsome thing,” Luz said, and laid a hand on Horst’s arm; he was virtually bristling. “You have a knightly soul, dear Horst, but don’t cut him into dog meat with your Glockenschläger just yet. I don’t want to attract too much attention. It might have been better to simply let him assume I was your mistress.”
Orders were called, and a blocky businesslike Stoewer staff car with a driver pulled up. Horst handed her in, laughing ruefully.
“I would have been gentler if that well-groomed puppy had showed any sign of front-line service,” he said. “Ones like him give the Edel a bad name, like a spoiled apple spreading rot in a sound barrel.”
Von Bülow nodded. “One such helps the Social Democrats more than a dozen dirty Jew agitators with egg in their beards ranting Marx-gibberish on street corners.”
“Ja,” Horst said. “I may be misjudging him, but considering how many platoons and even companies at the front are commanded by NCOs now, I do not think so.”
“I do not think so either,” von Bülow said. “The Fräulein is twice the soldier he is and has done the enemies of the Fatherland more injury, as I have seen with my own eyes.”
Luz felt a slight stab of guilt, of the type you couldn’t avoid in undercover intelligence work unless you were a complete reptile. Which many people in the business were, of course.
But I really don’t want to start to hiss cheerfully at my reflection in the mirror every morning with a flicker of a forked tongue to groom my scales.
“Thank you, Herr Privatdozent,” she said as she settled into the seat. “But please bear in mind that what I have done, I have done in my own country’s service, not that of the German Reich, to which I owe no national loyalty beyond our present alliance. I am willing to fight Frenchmen or Englishmen, or Italians or Russians for that matter, in the service of my country, but if—hypothetically, of course, ¡Dios me libre!—Germany were our enemy, I would fight Germans too.”
“Aber natürlich,” he said and nodded respectful acknowledgment. “You are a true patriot, Fräulein.”
Which is true, but not at all the way he thinks it is. Sometimes in this line of work irony becomes more pervasive than air.
Then he raised a hand as they turned south and west to cross the Flöha on an iron bridge.
“Schloss Rauenstein,” he said, pointing across the narrow valley and falling into an academic’s lecture tone. “First recorded here at the very beginning of the fourteenth century, but parts may be older; built to command the crossing of the Flöha and the road between Frieberg and Annaberg. The estate is currently a possession of the von Herder family, who have given the building over to the Reich for the duration of the war.”
The Schloss stood on a low hill flanked by more wooded heights on the western bank of the river. It didn’t have the naked stone or high curtain wall and multiple towers the idea of castle evoked in an English-speaking mind, but the lower parts were on an elevated terrace cut out of the hill crest and were made with white stucco over walls of either stone or brick that looked formidably massive and were pierced only by a few narrow slits.
Above, sitting on the older and grimmer part like a striped cloth cap on an armored knight’s head, was a rambling half-timbered country mansion, with white plaster over the noggin between the black oak beams and topped with steep slate roofs. One square tower rose from the central roof, but nips and tucks and little protruding bits showed centuries of building and rebuilding, as means and fires and wars allowed or changes of ownership demanded. Off a little and still mostly hidden was an annex, a biggish building in its own right, whose larger and symmetrical windows and hipped roof and yellow stucco showed that it had been built in a later age, evoking powdered wigs and minuets rather than Raubritter in bearskin cloaks feasting coarsely with their thuggish retainers.
Even that newest part was old by the standards she’d grown up with, probably older than the first of the California missions. She shivered a little; knights in chain mail had dwelt here, and might have left on Crusade—to the east, or to the wars against the Baltic pagans. Vastly bearded Landsknecht pikemen had marched by in puffed and slashed finery with two-handed swords across their backs, and cuirassiers with plumed helmets and wheel-lock pistols had trotted off to rescue Vienna from the Turks; those walls would have seen the mercenary hordes of the Wars of Religion, pigtailed musketeers of the Age of Reason when Germany was a maze of little courts and free cities . . . and all that time the lords of this place had held the surrounding lands in thrall.
We’ve had less time in America, but done more with it, she thought stoutly. Though . . .
“Is that a power line?” she said; wires looped up from the river through the woods on tall poles that were visible here and there amid the trees.
“Yes, the von Herders modernized extensively a few years before the war,” von Bülow said. “There is a small electrical station on the Flöh
a.”
“And we have put in more communications, of course,” Horst added.
The automobile swept up a forested gravel road and suddenly confronted a towering wall, real stone this time; she realized it must be the retaining wall that secured the platform on which the Schloss was built. An arched tunnel pierced it, leading up to the surface the actual buildings occupied. No doubt there had been iron-bound doors and a portcullis once, which would have looked more natural than the sandbagged Maxim machine-gun nest and moveable barbed-wire obstacles that did the duty now, or the electric lights and their cords stapled to the stone. A polite but implacable sergeant with the silvery gorget of the Feldgendarmerie around his neck checked their credentials; then the car swept up through the tunnel and on to a courtyard. That had a fountain and statue, and more windows showed on the inner side of the buildings.
Another aide was waiting, this one looking rather more businesslike.
“Colonel Nicolai will see you and the Mexican agent immediately, and the Herr Privatdozent,” the man said after exchanging salutes with Horst and a heel-click and bow with the scholar. “Everything is moving very quickly now, Herr Hauptmann, as you will understand from the news.”
Like most of the men in uniform he looked almost indecently cheerful, under his stiff propriety. He was also looking around for the Mexican agent he’d been told to expect.
“There seems to be some error, the agent is listed as being assigned joint quarters with the Irish—”
Probably expecting a barefoot, sinister indio in a serape with a tattered straw sombrero whose crest is two feet tall and a machete between his teeth and a long droopy mustache. Or possibly a dashing vaquero, dressed charro-style with lots of buttons and holding a lance, or a somber Don in a short embroidered jacket and long black cloak flourishing a rapier. Germans all read those adventure novels by Karl May, like our western penny dreadfuls but worse; I don’t think May ever crossed the Atlantic. He got his ideas from the penny dreadfuls. At least Edgar Rice Burroughs actually was a frontier cavalry trooper and a cowboy and a prospector.
“I am the Mexican agent, Herr Lieutenant,” Luz said flatly. “The name is Carmody De Soto-Dominguez? You’ll have it there, I suspect.”
This time Horst was simply amused. The aide did another expressionless heel-click at learning that the glamorous and stylishly clad young woman was a revolutionary emissary and led the way.
And apparently Horst and I are in separate quarters. That will be useful. Fun and frolic and putting him off-guard are one thing, but a spy needs to do night work, which is hard if someone on the other side is sleeping on the next pillow or fondling your buttocks.
The interior of the Schloss was crowded with uniformed Germans from staff officers down to messengers and orderlies, bustling about and carrying papers and talking earnestly with each other or into telephones whose lines were looped along brackets on the walls, or huddling together over tables and eagerly pointing out advances on maps that were a tangle of curving black lines ending in arrow points. Seemingly they were divided into those who’d been here for some time and those who’d just arrived in the train—literally—of some extremely exalted panjandrums.
Otherwise Schloss Rauenstein lived up to her expectations; whitewashed walls, lots of antlers and stuffed heads of bear and boar and wolf, huge gloomy halls down below and huge somewhat less gloomy ones above, and fireplaces big enough to walk into or roast whole oxen in or both, though apart from the ancestral portraits and suits of armor and the bits and pieces of animals the lords of Rauenstein had killed over the years, the furniture had mostly been removed and replaced with office gear. There was a continuous rattle of typewriters in the background, a smell of ink, ozone, tobacco and boot polish on leather, wool uniforms and clean male sweat, and the odd whiff of scented mustache wax used to make the points turn up in Kaiser Wilhelm’s style.
Though fewer of those than there used to be, I think, Luz noted. Perhaps that’s intelligence too.
“Colonel Nicolai’s office is currently in the top room of the central tower,” the aide said.
“So I would expect. Best for security reasons,” Horst agreed. Then, sotto voce to her: “And to prevent people of high rank wasting his time by dropping in.”
That location involved leading them up interminable narrow turning stairs; Luz and Horst and the aide, who was in his late twenties and wore spectacles, all took them without effort but waited courteously on several landings to let von Bülow catch his breath. Heavyset generals with gray hair might indeed find it a little inaccessible. Two of those landings involved pairs of hard-faced guards with machine pistols who insisted on seeing papers for all three of them, despite knowing the aide. Their uniforms showed no Waffenfarbe or unit designations at all, much like the Rangers who worked with the Black Chamber in the field sometimes.
Tsk, Luz thought, irritated but unsurprised. Everyone carefully following procedures really is inconvenient for a busy spy; it complicates everything and slows you down. Which is why procedures are important for security, of course. They don’t make things impossible, but they do make them a lot harder.
Colonel Nicolai rose from behind his desk as they entered, a considerable courtesy, and answered Horst’s salute; his office had probably been a study of some sort, since it was lined with bookshelves. Those mostly held document files and scrolled maps and reference works now, and the large desk had several telephones. Light slanted in from four small windows, one in each wall, but more came from a brace of electric lamps. The windows were open slightly, letting in a draft of mild early-fall air scented with forest, and also with horses and automobile exhaust.
There was another person sitting beside the desk, surprisingly a woman, but tensely silent in the intelligence chief’s presence.
That’s odd, Luz thought. And if it’s odd, it’s significant.
The American armed forces had uniformed women’s auxiliary corps now, volunteers handling noncombatant and clerical jobs, including things like driving field ambulances, to free up men for combat. So did the British. As far as she knew, the Kaiser’s army didn’t. The woman was in . . .
American clothes, Luz thought.
There were a dozen minor differences of cut and sewing technique that shouted that out immediately, and fabric of that quality hadn’t been available here since before the war. Rather full, frumpy ankle-length skirt and jacket and shirtwaist, made at home and not very recently, but made skillfully and skillfully repaired since. Straw hat with a ribbon and a silk flower, over long hair done up in a rather old-fashioned way and held with several amber-headed pins that were the most expensive things she was wearing.
She’s American too, Luz thought. Lower-middle-class, big-city.
Ways of sitting and holding yourself were as distinctive as clothes. Strawberry-blond hair, natural from the pale Celtic complexion and bright turquoise-blue eyes. The face was innocent of cosmetics and distorted by tension, but with the big eyes and snub nose and pointed chin probably had a cheerful open golliwog prettiness normally; her figure was fuller than was fashionable these days but perfect for a Gibson Girl a decade ago.
Nicolai gave Luz and von Bülow another of the inevitable little half bows, his rather ordinary-looking face expressionless; he was a man of medium height in his early fifties, with close-cut graying dark-brown hair and mustache, and his eyes were of some mixed color that might be hazel in better light.
“Gnädiges Fräulein,” he said to her. “You will pardon a necessary discourtesy,” he went on, and it wasn’t a question.
“Is this indeed Elisa Carmody?” he asked the woman sitting beside his desk.
Luz’s eyes had flicked over her as part of her scan of the room. Now they snapped back in horror, and she controlled her expression just in time. The one thing she couldn’t talk her way out of: someone who actually knew her cover identity’s real face.
Her first impress
ion had been a woman of about thirty. Now she saw that the other was younger than Luz’s mid-twenties if anything, but under some tremendous stress she was concealing well. There was a slight shock as their eyes met and locked for a long instant.
If I get Horst’s gun—
It was a Luger P08 parabellum, with an eight-round magazine.
I might be able to take them all, I know he carries it loaded but no round in the chamber, Luz thought with icy detachment as the blue eyes studied her solemnly; her own face bore a slight inquiring smile. Or at least make sure they don’t take me alive. Horst first, of course, I’ll draw it with my left hand and put two rounds through the body with the muzzle touching . . .
“Well, I seen her for years have not, six no seven,” the young American woman said, in fluent but slightly clumsy German. “And myself was a young then in among a crowd at a function of social, so she would not me probably know.”
American-born, the ear of Luz’s mind said automatically. Big-city, East Coast, Irish neighborhood. Boston, probably. Book-learned German, but also being around someone who spoke it . . . spoke it like a Bavarian peasant from half a century ago.
“Please think carefully, Fräulein Whelan,” Nicolai said. “This is of the very first importance.”
The other woman stood up, walking closer and studying her carefully. Then she smiled and stepped close, opening her arms.
“Elisa!” she cried, and went on in English. “I was just a brat then, but I’ll never forget you!”
Luz returned the embrace and felt a stab of thankfulness that she’d spoken in that tongue.
Which I am in turn glad Nicolai doesn’t speak well, because that is the most welcome and one of the least convincing lies I’ve ever heard! She knows perfectly well I’m not Carmody. It won’t matter with Horst; he knows I’m who I say I am, poor man.
Black Chamber Page 14
