Otto couldn’t resist the crane fly. His hand passed over it, and cupped it, and discreetly he pressed it into his mouth. Lloyd grimaced in disgust.
‘You shouldn’t rush to judgement, Mr Denman,’ Otto told him. ‘There are other ways of life, apart from nouvelle cuisine and the pursuit of custom homes with real brick fireplaces.’
‘Don’t you mock me, Herr Mander,’ Lloyd cautioned him. ‘Now get the hell out of here, and don’t come back.’
Otto raised his hand. ‘I’ve come to get you, Mr Denman, one way or another. If you don’t agree to stay with me until the solstice, you and Mrs Kerwin, then believe me, you will burn, too.’
Lloyd said, ‘You’re bluffing. Now take a powder, before I do something I might be sorry for.’
Otto stared at him. Almost immediately, Lloyd felt a sharp pain in the middle of his forehead, and heard the snap of burning skin. He shouted out, and lifted his hand to his forehead. Otto had burned a small circular mark on him.
‘You see that is “O” for Otto,’ Otto smiled. ‘You are branded now, Mr Denman, like a dumb animal. You belong to me.’
Lloyd took a cautious step back. His forehead felt as if it were still on fire. ‘You want us to stay with you? At your house in Rancho Santa Fe?’
‘Until next Wednesday, for the sake of my peace of mind. You wouldn’t want to disturb my peace of mind, would you, Mr Denman?’
‘I guess I wouldn’t,’ Lloyd replied. Helmwige laughed.
At that moment Kathleen appeared. Otto bowed, and clicked his heels together. ‘Guten Morgen, gnädige Frau.’
‘Lloyd?’ asked Kathleen. ‘What’s going on? What’s the matter with your forehead?’
They were driven to Rancho Santa Fe with the sounds of Die Walküre on the Mercedes stereo. Inside the car, it was like a black leather icebox, so cold that Kathleen shivered. Helmwige drove, Otto sat neatly in the passenger-seat with his knees together and smoked a cigarette with an amber holder. The music was too loud for sensible conversation.
Kathleen’s sister Lucy had been confused and worried by her sudden request to take Tom for a week, and she had obviously been suspicious of Otto and Helmwige. But Kathleen had explained that Otto was a grief counsellor with the psychiatry faculty at UCSD, and that she needed to spend a few days with him to help her get over Mike.
‘He’s a good friend, too,’ she had assured Lucy, as Helmwige had lifted their bags into the trunk.
‘You never mentioned him before,’ Lucy had replied, ‘and he sure doesn’t look like any kind of counsellor. Let alone anybody that you’d like.’
‘It takes all kinds,’ Kathleen had told her, and kissed her cheek. ‘I’ll be back Thursday morning. Take care of Tom for me.’
‘You know I will.’
They reached the house on Paseo Delicias and turned into the sloping drive, parking close to the Mercedes 380SL. Helmwige opened the door and they dutifully climbed out.
‘Helmwige will bring in your bags,’ Otto told them. ‘Follow me . . . I will show you where you can stay.’
‘Where’s Celia?’ asked Lloyd, looking around. ‘Is she here someplace?’
Otto turned to him, his face as crumpled as white tissue. ‘I will explain everything to you in due course, Mr Denman. And in due course, I will show you your bride-to-be.’
‘You’re sick,’ Lloyd told him.
‘History will be the judge of that, not you,’ smiled Otto.
‘How about that friend of yours?’ asked Lloyd. ‘The guy in the chains?’
‘What about him?’
‘Is he still here? I’m not sure that he’s exactly the kind of sight that Mrs Kerwin ought to be exposed to.’
‘He’s nothing. He’s not even a person.’
‘What do you mean, “he’s not even a person”? What the hell is he, then—two orders of eggroll to go?’
Otto stopped on the verandah and fixed Lloyd with a look that could have set fire to a lake. ‘Don’t joke with me, Mr Denman. Don’t think that you have that privilege. You have voluntarily and unwisely involved yourself in a matter which is no concern of yours, and now you are paying the price for your inquisitiveness. I could have burned you many times. Be thankful that I didn’t, but watch what you say. I can always change my mind.’
Lloyd said nothing. He could sense that he had pushed Otto way too far, and just because Otto didn’t have a gun, that didn’t mean that he wasn’t capable of killing him with all the effectiveness of a gun, and a hundred times more painfully. He allowed Otto to lead him into the house, and Kathleen followed a little way behind.
Otto showed them into the living-room. Lloyd noticed that the chain-rings were still in the floor, although the young man was gone. Inside, the living-room looked even more like a period piece from the 1930s than it had from the outside. The wallpaper was dull brown, the furniture was mostly laminated plywood and chrome. On the walls were dozens of sepia photographs of Germany before World War Two. Pretty girls in fur stoles, smiling young men, balconies and snowy mountaintops.
An old-fashioned gramophone stood in one corner, with a stack of 78 records beside it. The top record was Die Wacht Am Rhein.
Lloyd looked up at the huge drawing of the lizard on the wall. ‘Our friend the crosslegged gecko,’ he remarked.
Otto stared at him coldly. ‘That, my friend, is a salamander. The symbol of our Transformation.’
Kathleen came in, and looked around. She gave Lloyd a meaningful glance, but both of them guessed that they would be safer if they remained quiet.
Helmwige showed them upstairs to their rooms. Both rooms were small, with sloping dormer ceilings, and in Lloyd’s room the bed was no more than a mattress on the floor. He had a restricted view over the treetops, downhill toward the Fairbanks Ranch, but immediately he saw there was no prospect of escaping out of the window. Below the sill, there was a short slope of oak-shingled roof, and then a sheer drop down to the yard. He peered out and saw the young man who had been chained up in the living-room, digging in the yard with a shovel. The young man wore baggy shorts and a singlet, and the back of his singlet was dark with sweat. Lloyd wondered what he was doing gardening on such a blistering hot afternoon. At least he wasn’t naked. But when Lloyd looked again, he saw that the young man was still restricted by a long chain around his right ankle. Very bizarre.
‘You are free to do anything except leave,’ Helmwige told them. ‘You will be well taken care of. Otto is many things, but he is always a man of his word.’
‘Glad to hear it,’ said Lloyd. ‘What time’s lunch?’
Helmwige said, ‘He will tell you everything this evening. I know Otto. He talks about secrecy but he is so impatient to show the world what he has achieved. Your Celia is part of that achievement, Mr Denman. He won’t be able to resist the temptation to boast.’
‘He burns people and then he boasts?’
Helmwige smiled, almost friendly. ‘You still don’t get it, do you, Mr Denman? It is right in front of your eyes. You should try perhaps to see things for what they are, instead of what you would like them to be.’
She went back downstairs, and left them alone. Kathleen came up to Lloyd and held him close, without saying a word. Lloyd circled his arms around her and said, ‘Don’t worry . . . really, don’t worry. Everything’s going to be fine. So long as we play it cool and easy, and don’t lose our nerve.’
‘But what are they doing?’ asked Kathleen. ‘Are they spies, or what? And if it’s all such a big secret that we have to stay here, why does Otto want to boast about it so much?’
‘And what is it that’s right in front of my eyes, that I don’t see?’
Kathleen shook her head. ‘It’s all so strange. I feel like I’m going to wake up any minute and Mike will be lying in bed next to me and none of this will ever have happened.’
Lunch didn’t materialize, but by s
ix o’clock they began to smell the strong aroma of cabbage throughout the house. Shortly after seven, the young man knocked at their doors, and asked them to come downstairs to eat. He was wearing the same shorts and singlet that he had been wearing in the yard, and he smelled of sweat.
Kathleen said to him, ‘You like gardening, huh? I just love it!’
The young man looked at her without expression.
‘We saw you in the yard,’ Kathleen told him, trying to sound bright. ‘You were digging, yes? We saw you digging.’
Still the young man said nothing.
‘Looks like the lights are on, but there’s nobody home,’ Lloyd remarked.
‘You do comprenez anglais?’ Kathleen asked the young man. ‘I mean, you asked us to come eat. Or was that just something that Otto taught you?’
‘Come on, Kathleen, forget it,’ said Lloyd. ‘Let’s just go eat.’
The young man led them downstairs, and showed them through to a small dining-room furnished in dark oak. Otto was already sitting at the head of the table, Helmwige on his left. Around the walls hung lurid amateurish paintings of Bavaria, purple mountains and black pine-trees and lime-green lakes, although pride of place was given to a framed photograph of a stern, rectangular-faced man with acne-scarred cheeks and long bushy side-whiskers.
‘Wagner,’ said Lloyd, immediately. He had seen so many pictures of Wagner in Celia’s treatises.
Otto nodded. ‘Yes, Wagner, to whom we owe so much.’
‘Isn’t . . . he . . . eating with us?’ asked Kathleen, nodding toward the young man.
‘No, no,’ said Otto, quite surprised. ‘He doesn’t eat with us.’
Helmwige lifted the lid from a huge blue-and-white china casserole dish. A strong aroma of pickled cabbage and ham filled the room. ‘Choucroute,’ Helmwige announced. ‘I make it myself. Pickled cabbage with pork belly and liver dumplings.’
She heaped three plates high, and handed them to Kathleen, to Lloyd, and to herself. Otto ate nothing but a little dry bread, which he broke into tiny pieces. Too many bugs in between meals, thought Lloyd, but decided against saying it out loud. Helmwige’s food was fatty and unappetising enough without thinking about Otto eating insects.
Kathleen lifted up a huge slice of white vibrant pork fat on the end of her fork. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I can’t eat this. I’m on the F-Plan diet.’
Plainly irritated, Helmwige took the fork and shook the fat on to her own plate. She cut it up and ate it with gusto, juice running down her chin. ‘I’ve seen people kill each other for such food,’ she said.
Lloyd put down his fork. ‘I guess that must have been before the days of nouvelle cuisine,’ he remarked. Actually, if he had been able to eat the kind of heavyweight food that sustains Alsatian farmworkers, he probably would have found Helmwige’s cooking very good. He tried a little of the cabbage and it was strong and savoury and delicious.
Lloyd and Kathleen picked at their food in silence for a few minutes, while Helmwige noisily devoured fat and sausage and potatoes and pickled cabbage. Occasionally Otto fastidiously ate another small piece of bread, or sipped a glass of Alsace riesling, but most of the time he sat at the head of the table as if he were waiting for something, but didn’t know what. He cracked his knuckles one by one, and sighed.
Kathleen said, ‘Who is that young man?’
Otto turned to stare at her. ‘Are you speaking to me?’
‘Yes. I wanted to know who that young man is. The one who called us down to supper.’
‘He isn’t anybody,’ Otto replied.
‘What do you mean? Everybody’s somebody.’
‘Not him. He belongs to a genealogical line which should never have existed. He is . . . what do you call it? . . . a freak, a mistake.’
‘He looks all right to me,’ said Kathleen.
‘Of course!’ Otto smiled. ‘Physically he is flawless. But inside his mind . . . well, who knows what goes on inside his mind. When you ask him where he lives, he says that he lives inside of a black sack. You can’t take him out at night, because he keeps throwing stones at the moon, trying to hit it.’
‘Well, that’s terrible,’ said Kathleen. ‘He’s so good-looking.’
‘A master race is not made up of looks alone,’ Otto told her.
It was then that Lloyd raised his eyes from his half-finished meal and saw the symbol of the salamander inside the circle, and understood at last what it was that had been right in front of his eyes, and which he had failed to see. Master race. The salamander’s head was crooked, its feet were crooked. If he half closed his eyes, he found that he was looking at nothing less than a swastika.
‘Let me explain what we are doing,’ said Otto. ‘It won’t do any harm, since you will be staying here until the Transformation is over.’
Helmwige, with her mouth full, rolled her eyes up at Otto’s predictability. She gestured with her fork at Kathleen’s plate and said, ‘Mmm-hm, mm-hmm!’—encouraging her to eat up.
Otto said, ‘In 1936, as soon as he was appointed Chancellor, Hitler commissioned doctors from many different scientific disciplines to explore the possibility of creating a master race, based on the natural supremacy of the Aryan. Immediately these doctors set to work in their laboratories and their hospitals, trying to breed perfect little babies.’
He sat back in his seat, and interlaced his fingers. ‘Der Führer also asked me to contribute to this programme. I was very young in those days, a philosophy student in Basel, but already I had shown my interest in the National Socialist ideals, and come to the attention of Josef Goebbels. It was Goebbels who recommended me to Hitler.
‘I pursued other ideas, quite different from breeding babies. I was a thinker, not a farmer! Besides, I thought breeding was too slow, too uncontrollable! Der Führer wanted to change the racial characteristics of the world in a decade, not wait for the unpredictable results of several centuries!
‘How many generations does it take to produce children who are blond and beautiful and possess the required size of brainpan? And what guarantee would you ever have that these perfect creatures would grow up capable as well as beautiful?
‘No . . .’ he said, smiling as he sipped his wine. ‘I was searching for a master race that was guaranteed not only to be beautiful and mentally brilliant, but also to be ready within a matter of years, perhaps months, perhaps even weeks! That meant selecting people who had already shown themselves to have these desirable characteristics. Not breeding babies, you see, but transforming adults.’
He scraped back his chair, and stood up. ‘I spent years and years at Salzburg University, looking for a way. I searched right back in history and legend, right back to the days of the Vikings, looking for any kind of clue. At last I began to come across references to a Transformation ceremony in Northern Jutland, in which the bravest and most intelligent people in several communities were burned alive in order that they might never die.
‘If the proper ritual was observed, the fire did not destroy them, but transfigured them, immortalized them. In other words, the Danes were burning alive their best people to preserve them for ever, and to make them the founding members of a pure and immortal race. They had tried to preserve people before, by pressing them into their peat-bogs, but without success. The answer was fire!’
Kathleen looked across the table at Lloyd, but the expression on her face was one of apprehension, not disbelief. They had both seen enough of Otto’s abilities to know that at least some of what he was saying must be true.
‘In Salzburg I also came across previously unpublished diaries by Paracelsus, the sixteenth-century alchemist, who had proved to his own satisfaction that there is a direct physical and mystic connection between life and fire. Both life and fire fed on other lives, but if they were combined they created first a life that was fire, and then, at the moment of complete Transformation, a fire that
was life.
‘This was my breakthrough! I searched libraries in Leipzig and Dresden and London, too, and time and time again I came across references to the life-giving properties of fire. I discovered that when a living human being is burned, there is a Norse ritual which ensures that the soul and the fire combine, to form a half-being which I call a Salamander, after the legendary lizard which hides itself in the hottest recesses of blacksmiths’ forges.
‘Salamanders are highly volatile. They can be as cool as flesh or as hot as fire, according to their temperament. They are susceptible to spontaneous combustion, so they have to keep themselves masked from the air. Hence the scarves, and the coats, and the gloves. Too much oxygen, and they can burn like phosphorus. Like Walpurgis night!’
He paused, and cleared his throat. His snake-yellow eyes seemed to be focused not just on something else but on somewhere else. Another time, another place, when fires had burned at night, and black-and-red banners had flapped, and voices had roared like the sea.
Helmwige finished eating, and began noisily to clear away this dishes. Otto said, ‘The Transformation Ceremony must take place at the summer solstice, when the forces of the earth are at their strongest. I am not talking about magic here, or mysticism! These forces are gravitational and magnetic and psychokinetic—measurable forces, which have controlled the balance of the planet Earth for millions of years.
‘The ancient music must be played, and the ancient words must be sung. Then the Salamanders will become flesh. Not just flesh, but immortal flesh! And flesh that still has the power of fire!’
Lloyd nodded toward Helmwige. ‘Is she . . .?’
Otto nodded. ‘Immortal, and blessed with the power of fire. You felt her fingers on your wrist. But she is no use to me, as a propagator of the master race. She was a camp doctor of Ohrdruf during the war, and she caught some filthy Semitic disease which left her barren. It would have killed her, if she hadn’t agreed to be burned.’
Lloyd swallowed, in an effort to control the revulsion that Otto aroused in him. ‘So when somebody’s burned, with all the appropriate chants, they cheat whatever illness they have, and live for ever?’
Hymn Page 23
