Dark Victory

by Michele Lang

  I shook my head in stark amazement. A headache had started between my eyebrows, as if a tiny imp were bashing me between the eyes with a ball-peen hammer. “You have no problem telling me this in a café full of demons?”

  It was Knox’s turn to shrug. “Demons care little for human affairs. They want chaos, misery, and their own freedom. You know this. You met my demonesses and set them free yourself. In some ways they are the natural enemies of the German Reich, if you consider the matter. So what do you say, Magda? The plane is waiting on the runway and it’s leaving Hungary within the hour, whether you are on board or not. What’s it going to be?”

  I translated the gist of Knox’s offer to Gisele and Raziel, and before they could ask any questions and cause me to hesitate, I said in French, “I will go and speak with the honorable Mr. Churchill. But only if there is room on the plane for Gisele and Raziel.”

  My thoughts turned to the paprika tin and the elemental demon trapped inside. Now that was a worthy gift for a man of Churchill’s stature, but I did not believe there was a wizard left in Britain with the wherewithal to keep him bound.

  Knox’s voice pierced my ruminations. “Absolutely not. There is only room for one, and the plane leaves immediately. I have a cab waiting outside. I need an answer, and I need it right now.”

  My headache abruptly got worse. I closed my eyes and rubbed at my eyebrows, but even as I considered the dilemma before me, Gisele sliced through it:

  “You must get on that plane, Magduska. And I mustn’t. You go, my darling, and I will stay.”

  With a groan, I forced my eyes open. “You are insane, my little mouse! What will you do here all alone as Hitler smashes Poland?”

  Gisele trembled under the storm of my words, but she did not back down. “Don’t you see? We can’t stop anything, we’re too late. But maybe we can tip the balance for the winning side. This Churchill fellow, he could use your magic, my darling. And someone needs to babysit Asmodel, no?”

  “Then Raziel must stay with you!” I could barely get the words out one by one past the lump in my throat.

  “I can manage the tin,” she said. Her face was mild and calm as always, but her voice was choked with tears. “All I have to do is keep up the wards you built. You did the hard work, Magduska darling. And the Germans are invading Poland, not here. Maybe…” Her face became dreamy for a long moment. “No, it is too much to hope. But Friday is not yet. September is not yet. Go, Magda. And you must take Raziel with you.”

  She did not say why; Gisele was innocent of the world’s dark and bloody ways, and that very ignorance would protect her. I was much less able to resist the siren call of the world to commit evil, to act with malice even while pretending to myself that I did good. Gisele would guard Asmodel, while Raziel would guard me. But at that moment I did not yet understand the price that Gisele would have to pay. In my own strange way, I was still an innocent too.

  I saw the two people I loved most in the world exchange a long look and nod in conspiratorial assent, and saw that I was doomed to do as they wished.

  “Knox, I will go to England,” I said, my voice full of a confidence I did not feel in the least. As I spoke I looked to Raziel, and it was his hand I clasped. “But I must have a bodyguard or I will not leave Hungary.”

  * * *

  The cab lunged across the city, to bring Gisele home and me to the airfield before it was too late. I held her close to me, and I could not help it—I cried into the crown of her head. It was too sudden, this separation, it was too sharp, and promised a finality I could not stand.

  I breathed in the clean smell of her hair as I spoke. “Swear to me you do not talk to Asmodel, you do not lift the top of that sifter for even a moment, Gisi!” I muttered fiercely into her curls.

  How could I leave her alone with that monster in the house, with war just over the border? It hurt to breathe, just thinking of the look on her face when I had found her in the kitchen.

  She opened my hand and planted a kiss on my palm, the way our mother used to when we were tiny girls leaving for school in our northern town of Tokaj: a kiss to hold in reserve.

  That was pure Gisele, able to demolish me with a single little gesture. “Magduska, he’s already done his worst. I swear I will not talk to him, Magda. I will not say a word, and I will not listen to anything he might try to tell me. Please, please, now I know why you are always begging me not to cry!”

  I tried to focus on practicalities instead of my heart breaking. “Knox says I will be back in a couple of days. I will leave a message with Gaston at the Istanbul if not.” We had no telephone at home, no other way to communicate other than the mail, and I did not believe a letter would reach her in anything like enough time to save her if disaster befell our plans.

  The cab screeched to a halt in front of our apartment building. A pair of boys leapt backward. They were Hasidic, their black coats reaching all the way down to their scruffy leather shoes. The older one twirled his earlocks as they resumed their progress toward the Great Synagogue a few blocks away, on the same side of the street.

  “Farewell, my darling,” Gisele said, and she gave me a final hug, so tight that for a moment I could scarcely breathe. “Be brave; do what you must.”

  That courageous admonition sounded strange coming from my little mouse’s lips, but I engraved every word of Gisele’s valediction on my heart. “Send a messenger to Eva if you need help. She would defy even the Zionists to help you, my love. Farewell, little mouse. I will see you again, I swear it!”

  Gisele’s face stilled. “Don’t swear to such things,” she said. “Such things we cannot foretell.” And something hidden in her words chilled me to the very marrow.

  I had no time to pry her worries out of her and fix them. Instead, I kissed her on both cheeks, whispered a few final endearments in her ears, and she untangled herself from my arms and tumbled out of the back of the cab. She leaned in the front window, where Raziel sat in the front passenger seat, and whispered something in his ear, too low for me to hear. He nodded, evidently too overcome by emotion even to speak, he embraced her through the open window, and then she was gone.

  The cabbie shifted into reverse and stomped on the gas pedal, careening the wrong way down Dohány Street back toward the Danube River and the Chain Bridge.

  “Will I ever see her again, Raziel?” I said. My tears had gone now; I spoke in an ordinary, casual tone of voice.

  “Don’t ask such questions, Magduska,” he admonished me in reply. The cab rattled so loudly on the cobblestones that further conversation became impossible.

  * * *

  The cab lurched to a stop outside the dusty airfield. I gaped at the sight of the Polish bomber perched like an enormous bird of prey at the end of the runway. With a roar, the twin propellers burst into life, and the gigantic plane began to taxi along the runway.

  The taxi driver, an emaciated-looking Pole, cursed in an impressive polyglot of languages and drove the cab to the edge of the wire fence enclosing the airfield. He screamed in Polish at the befuddled-looking guard, and the man unlocked the fence and swung it open.

  The cabbie shot the cab through the fence and directly into the path of the bomber. “Are you crazy!” I yelled over the unholy din of aeroplane engine, squealing taxi brakes, and unceasing cacophany of Polish curses. “You’ll crash right into the plane!”

  His chauffeur’s cap blew off and out the open window, just past his elbow hanging out of the driver’s side. He waved frantically at the pilot, perched high above us, and the plane slowed, then stopped. The propellers lost their power, turned more and more slowly.

  The door swung open way above our heads, and Knox himself stuck his head out to see what the commotion was about. “Get in!” he bellowed, waving his homburg wildly at us, then at the ground crew to bring boarding equipment back onto the runway. “We’ve got to go!”

  I stammered my thanks to the cabbie, got an incoherent growl in reply, followed Raziel up to the top, and for the first ti
me in my life stepped inside an aeroplane.

  A luxury airliner the PZL.37 Łoś was not. The pilot and passengers sat in a single area, the hard, unpadded seats were bolted in, and the floor beneath us was roughly girded metal. It seemed to me that if I stamped my foot hard enough, it would go right through the floor and punch through the skin of the plane.

  The other passengers stared at us blankly. One of them, an older, sinewy gentleman, shook his head and spat between his feet in what looked like a show of angry despair.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked Knox.

  “What’s wrong is that man’s assistant could not ride on the plane because your bodyguard would take us over the maximum weight. We removed the bombs, but we have … other cargo, very heavy cargo, and the pilot is extremely unhappy with all of us at the moment.”

  The entry door slammed shut, and the pilot yelled for us to take our seats—at least that is what I think he yelled, as I do not speak Polish.

  “How much can this gigantic plane carry?” I shouted over the roar of the engines as the plane again began to taxi to the head of the runway for takeoff.

  “About nine thousand kilos including the plane. Believe me, with the passengers, the extra fuel tanks, and the … well, the cargo, we are straining the limit of this bird.”

  I had never flown before, and I already hated it. But before I could say anything more, the bomber began bouncing along the runway, and directly after that, the plane fell upward, into the sky.

  * * *

  It is about a thousand-kilometer ride from Budapest to England’s Gatwick Airport, freezing cold, and by the time we all but crashed onto the airstrip outside London I had been nearly shaken to pieces. It took us almost nine hours to get there, with no stops for refueling, food, or anything else, and my legs had turned to rubber by the time I emerged from the back of the plane and stumbled down the stairway to the sweet stillness of Mother Earth.

  England. The air was cool and leafy; we had left at noon or so in Budapest, and it was only about 6 P.M. on the island of Albion. I had never seen such green, lush grass in my entire life, certainly not at the end of August.

  Knox gave me no rest, hardly a minute to take in the fact that I had alighted in the land of Beefeaters and kippers. “Let’s go, m’dear. Winnie’s waiting. He’s expecting us for a late supper, and miracle of miracles, the flight went faster and easier than I expected.”

  I shook my head; my teeth felt loose in my gums, and the roar of the engine still shouted, a ghost in my ears. “Easy? Fast?”

  Knox laughed then, a big belly laugh that I could not have imagined from him in Budapest. London, a free city with only limited magic to be had, suited this man well. “No one shot at us or tried to stop us. And we flew over German airspace! Try that after next week and see what happens, Miss Lazarus!”

  Poor Raziel looked rather shaken to pieces himself, but he said nothing, only adjusted the knot of his tie and ran his fingers through his hair. Knox folded the three of us into another cab, this one an enormous humpbacked creature, and we smoothly disappeared into the dusk, on the left side of the road.

  “What will happen to those Polish gentlemen?” I asked.

  “The diplomats? They will be meeting members of Chamberlain’s government tonight, without a doubt, begging for help from the English. Too late for that now. The British have promised to stand with them in case of war, but they will not antagonize the Russians before war officially breaks out.”

  I thought of those stiff, starved-looking men sitting hunched over in their cramped metal chairs bolted to the floor of the Polish bomber, looking like they had left their souls behind in Poland. They knew as well as I did that we all danced on the edge of the abyss.

  My plan was to dance and sing for my supper, as well as I could. I would give Mr. Churchill what he wanted, and in exchange I would get what I wanted—a safe haven for Gisele in England, and a place for me to hide from the Nazis while I figured out what we must do next.

  Surely that was not too much to ask? Surely England could spare a useful friend such a small compensation for services rendered? It was time for me to find out.

  4

  Mr. Churchill’s estate, Chartwell, was some distance outside of London proper. Its verdant opulence almost wiped my mind of language.

  That such a refuge could exist in the same world where I scrabbled for scraps in Budapest boggled what was left of my faculties. It began to dawn on me how august a personage was this Mr. Winston Churchill, and how dangerous in fact my pilgrimage could prove.

  Such powerful men as he did not have to repay favors made; they did not have to acknowledge the bare existence of one such as myself. I had magic of my own to be reckoned with, but it did not intersect with the money, nobility, and worldly power that Mr. Churchill possessed.

  The car pulled into the circular drive at the front of the grand old estate house. Huge leaded windows rose high above our heads, reflecting the light of the setting sun.

  “We’re early,” Knox said. “All the better.”

  A butler met us at the front door, his eyebrows beetling at the sight of us. Knox nodded at him, and the old man bowed and motioned for us to follow. We passed through an enormous pair of heavy wooden doors, then through a veritable warren of hallways to a back door.

  To my surprise, the butler motioned for us to follow him outside again. I all but had to run to keep pace with the old butler as he shuffled along at surprising speed.

  I was at the point of asking Knox where the devil he was taking us, when the servant led us down a gently sloping hill to where an old man worked with his hands on a muddy-looking brick wall. Knox tugged at the butler’s sleeve and they spoke quietly together as I pressed forward.

  The old man, dressed in canvas pants and a white workman’s shirt, straightened when he saw us and swiped at his face with a filthy handkerchief.

  When he saw Knox he smiled, and motioned to the butler for a cigar, which he lit with a flourish. As the smoke wreathed his face like a garland of victory I suddenly recognized him.

  The bricklayer, hands caked with clay, was none other than the English lion, Winston Churchill.

  I resisted the sudden urge to curtsey; instinctively I knew the great man wouldn’t like it. “It is a profound honor to meet you, Mr. Churchill,” I said in my best, most formal French.

  His eyebrows shot up, and he took a few puffs on his cigar before replying. “It is a flaming purple witchery I see,” he said, in very bad French, and he bowed deeply from the waist.

  I offered him my hand—I could not care less about the clay—and he kissed my hand most chivalrously. Knox appeared by my elbow in a flash, and cleared his throat.

  He whispered in my ear, in the worst Hungarian I had ever heard, “No. No. French. Bad. French. No.”

  Even if I could decipher Knox’s concerns, I was not so quick to accommodate them. My first imperative was to win over and even to befriend the great Churchill if I could.

  I continued in French. “I have come, Monsieur Churchill, from the east, to share with you what I know.”

  Churchill’s eyes widened, and he straightened up again to smoke his cigar awhile. The smoke rose, dancing between us. Knox said something to him, quickly and low in English, and Churchill’s laughter rumbled out of his chest and over the hill.

  “He says he wants more than that,” Knox said quickly, before Churchill could attempt a direct reply in French.

  Churchill patted my hand, and we began strolling back toward the great house as if we had known each other for years. Churchill and I led the procession, with Knox hurrying directly behind. Raziel and the butler brought up the rear.

  As we walked, I racked my brain for a way to bridge the language barrier, and sighed in frustration. As an angel, Raziel could have spoken with any creature, mortal or magical, without turning a hair. Now, he spoke only Hungarian and Hebrew, and I felt his loss of angelic speech more sharply than he seemed to.

  I turned around to look for him,
and instantly Raziel was at my side. I whispered in Hungarian under my breath, “This is impossible. I trust Knox, but he cannot translate well enough to satisfy me.”

  Raziel smiled back at me, unruffled and undisturbed by our epic rattling journey to the west. I clenched my jaw to keep myself from saying something unladylike.

  Raziel laughed and shook his head. “After all that we’ve been through, a little thing like this is what finally sends you over the edge? Peace, Magduska. Remember who you are, and what you can do.”

  The breath caught in my throat. His calm words were as good as a rebuke for shaking the nonsense out of my head. I was simply unused to gentleness as a goad, or to possessing any power myself.

  I had survived the last few dangerous years in Budapest, first as a penniless sixteen-year-old orphan, then as the loyal assistant of a courtly but murderous vampire. But now I was something more, a witch with magic manifest, and the possibility of gaining tremendous power, should I possess the power of the wayward Book of Raziel. So much had changed in a few short months; so much had altered inside of me. I needed to act more in keeping with what I had become.

  The procession had come to a halt, and we stood on a great patio overlooking the grounds. I looked at Knox and held up a hand. “I must speak with the honorable Churchill myself. I mean you no offense, kind sir. But our minds must meet, and it is difficult to accomplish such a feat through an intermediary.”

  His eyes widened, and Knox whipped a handkerchief out of his pants pocket and began to wipe his spectacles. “You cannot,” he finally said in a low, headlong stutter as he leaned to me, looking unsteady on his feet. “You speak no English, he speaks no Hungarian—and even worse, speaks a little French. You mustn’t! This is too important a mission!”

  I waved him away, studied the tips of my fingers, and concentrated on the problem. Englishman, words, letters, languages …