‘We had in our hands the means to create the master race of which Hitler had always dreamed, a race of pureblooded immortals who would rule the world with force and wisdom.’
‘So what stopped you?’ asked Lloyd.
Otto’s eyes followed a blowfly as it droned across the room, and the tip of his tongue ran across his lips. ‘Wagner had taken many liberties with the original chants. He hadn’t understood their importance, you see, and he had made many changes, for the sake of his opera. It was necessary for musical experts to work through the opera, note by note, in comparison, with Wagner’s diaries, and with what we had managed to salvage from the Book of Salamander, in order to recreate the original ritual music.
‘Otherwise, our dream would have been totgeboren, you understand? Born dead.’
He stood up. He swayed a little, as if the Asbach brandy had made him drunk. He seemed taller than before, a giant ash-grey stick-insect. Thin and tall and long-legged. Lloyd watched him with apprehension. He walked over to the window where the blowfly was furiously bizzling against the glass.
‘Our work was still not complete when the Russians entered Berlin. I was in the Führerbunker with Hitler and those who remained. Goebbels, Bormann, and the rest. On Hitler’s instructions, I was still working with Helmwige on the opera. We burned alive two young volunteers from the Hitler Youth, without success. They simply died in terrible pain. Then on the night of April 29, with the Russians only hours away from us, Helmwige volunteered to be burned. Hitler’s chauffeur Erich Hempka went to fetch two hundred litres of petrol, and two SS men dug a sandy pit in the Chancellery garden.’
He paused for a second, then scooped the blowfly into his hand. He held it up, and Lloyd could hear it furiously buzzing.
‘We chanted the ritual chant, and then we drenched Helmwige with petrol and she set fire to herself with a lighted rag. She said nothing. Didn’t scream, didn’t protest. At last the fire-chants had worked. Her smoke and her soul arose, and although her body remained, her spiritual essence became a Salamander, a creature of fire and spirit. It was amazing to watch. Hitler witnessed it for himself, and he was in tears.
‘Helmwige and I escaped from the Führerbunker along with Martin Bormann, and we were helped by SS officers to obtain International Red Cross passports, and to make our way to America. We arrived in New Orleans in time for the summer solstice, and we were able to complete the ritual in a room at the Pontchartrain Hotel. Helmwige then became what she is today. A living example of the master race.’
Otto held his fist close to his ear, so that he could hear the blowfly’s desperate struggles. He smiled in anticipation of the tiny treat that he was going to give himself.
‘What about Hitler?’ asked Lloyd. ‘If he saw what happened to Helmwige . . . didn’t he want to try it for himself?’
Otto gave a non-committal shrug. ‘The Führer was, of course, deeply impressed with what I had achieved. I was immediately put in charge of all genetic and racial experiments, including those of Mengele and von Harn. Not that it counted for much, of course. By that time, the Russians had already reached Potsdamer Platz, and the Reich was obviously at an end.
‘Hitler told me to leave Berlin with Helmwige and with a young Aryan boy whom Mengele had bred . . . the father of the young man who acts as our servant now.’
‘But Hitler didn’t take to the idea of setting fire to himself?’ Lloyd persisted.
Otto turned and stared at him narrowly, although the curved shadow from the mock-parchment lampshade made it difficult for Lloyd to see his face.
Otto said nothing for a while. Then he looked away. ‘What happened to the Führer will always remain a secret,’ he said.
‘Did you turn him into a Salamander?’
Otto shook his head. ‘Ich weiß nicht. If the Führer went through the ritual, he did after I left the Führerbunker. Helmwige and I and the boy escaped from Berlin in the early hours of April 30th. Later that same day, Hitler’s body was burned, yes, that is a matter of historical record. But the historical record does not say whether he was alive when he was burned, or whether he was already dead. He was supposed to have shot himself in the mouth, but when they carried his body out of his room, his head was covered with a blanket, so that none of the eye-witnesses could tell for certain.’
‘But if he did go through the ritual . . .?’
Otto shrugged. ‘If he did go through the ritual, then the probability is that he is still alive. But where . . . who knows?’
He opened his hand, and lifted out the blowfly by one leg. He picked off its wings with the concentration of a man picking the stalk off a raisin. Then he popped it quickly on to his tongue, and held it in his mouth for a moment, so that he could feel it vibrating against his cheeks. He sucked, and swallowed. ‘Helmwige,’ he said, ‘switch on the television.’ The conversation appeared to have ended.
They watched 21 Jump Street for a while. Then Otto switched over to the eight o’clock news. Lloyd looked at Kathleen but there was nothing that either of them could do. Otto watched a long item about crack dealing in San Diego schools, frowning and muttering to himself. Then the news turned to the accidental death of San Diego Detective Sergeant Houk, and the disappearance of Detective Gable and Deputy Bredero.
‘Sergeant Houk and Detective Gable were assisting State police in their investigation of the death by burning of thirteen men and women in the Anza Borrego State Park . . . While Sergeant Houk’s death appears to have been an automobile accident, state and metropolitan police are still unable to account for the complete disappearance of Detective Gable and Deputy Bredero . . . Deputy Bredero’s patrol car was found abandoned at the Five Flags shopping centre close to Highway I–5, with no fingerprints on it apart from his own . . .’
‘You’re very thorough,’ Lloyd remarked.
‘I had a scientific training,’ said Otto. ‘Besides, what we are doing here is too important to allow any margin for mistakes.’
‘You don’t think the police are going to track you down?’
Otto used his thumbnail to pick something black from between his teeth. ‘You are talking to someone who escaped from Berlin on the very last day of Hitler’s Reich,’ he said. ‘You are talking to a man who discovered an opera which had been hidden for sixty years, and who was able to revive a mystic ritual which had been lost for eleven centuries. Now . . . I have work to do, letters to write. I would appreciate it if you and Mrs Kerwin would retire to your rooms. And, please, make no attempts to leave the house. Our young man had been instructed to use physical force if necessary, to keep you here, and you have seen for yourself what I can do.’
‘But you’re not one of these Salamander people, are you?’ asked Kathleen. ‘How come you can set things on fire?’
Otto closed his eyes. He remained silent for such a long time that they thought that he wasn’t going to answer. But then he opened his eyes again, and said, ‘I have told you quite enough. Some secrets must remain secrets. On your dying day you will remember that you once knew me, and you will shudder in awe.’
Lloyd retorted, ‘I’ll shudder with something, but it damned well won’t be awe.’
Otto flicked him a look as sharp as a whipcrack. ‘Don’t tempt me, Mr Denman. It’s growing cold, and I’m sure we’d all appreciate a fire.’
The young man escorted them wordlessly up to their rooms, opened their doors for them, and then locked them in. Lloyd sat down on his mattress, eased off his shoes, and then lay back, feeling exhausted and grimy and shocked, as if he had just survived a minor but unpleasant automobile accident. His hands were sore, and his thought that it was probably time his bandages were changed, but at the moment there was nothing he could do about it. He watched the nodding fang-like shadows of yucca fronds on the sloping ceiling. There was still so much that he couldn’t accept, even though he had heard Otto’s cruel and lascivious confessions with his own ears, and se
en with his own eyes how remorseless Otto could be.
All those grey-skinned people on the garage floor—how could they really be composed of nothing more than smoke and spirit? How could a ritual change transform an agonizing death into a fiery rebirth? How could anyone live for ever?
He thought of Celia lying there; and wondered what she was thinking, if she was thinking anything at all. Out on the road at Escondido, she had said that she still loved him. But could he still love her? How could you love somebody who had died and come back to life—somebody who wasn’t really flesh any more? Most difficult of all, how could he accept her back into his life when she had so readily embraced a creature like Otto—a man who had burned alive thousands of innocent people for the sake of one insane ideal?
Beneath everything that Otto was doing, Lloyd could feel the terrifying legacy of the Third Reich moving like a black silently thunderous glacier. Hitler had reawakened something in the human mind that would take more than guns and bombs and forty-five years of economic reconstruction to destroy. When he had claimed that his Reich would last for a thousand years, he had been right. And if Otto was able to transform all of those Salamanders sleeping on his garage floor, it would be even more than a thousand-year Reich. It would be a Reich that dominated mankind for ever.
Lloyd had read plenty of books and articles about the war. But until now he had never felt the real fear of war, the fear of living under somebody else’s will. It was more disturbing than he had ever imagined possible, and he suddenly began to understand why people were prepared to risk their lives for political freedom. Without political freedom, life was simply not worth living.
He fell asleep, and almost immediately he dreamed of Celia again. He dreamed that he was wading across a glossy-green meadow, through varnished grass and huge wide-awake daisies, under a sky the colour of tarnished bronze. Celia was standing naked on a distant levee, beside a gnarled and whiskery plane tree. Her hair was alight, and a plume of orange fire was rising from her head. He tried to shout out, but his voice sounded as tiny and ineffective as the blowfly buzzing in Otto’s fist. He tried to run, but the grass was too deep.
The key turned in his door. He opened his eyes. For a moment he could hear nothing but the insects in the yard outside, and the soft chattering of his wristwatch. He thought for a moment that he must have dreamed the sound of the key, but then he heard a floorboard creak.
‘Who’s there?’ he demanded, his heart racing—knowing all the time that he couldn’t do anything to defend himself, no matter who it was. The nameless young man was obviously powerful enough to break his neck. Helmwige could fry him alive just by touching him. And Otto could turn him into a human incendiary bomb simply by looking at him.
The door slowly opened. He lay still, although every tendon in his body was pulled tight. A single second passed as slowly as the world turning on its axis. Then the young man appeared, and stood beside the open door, watching him.
‘What do you want?’ Lloyd asked him, at last.
‘I came to see if you were asleep.’ The young man’s voice was soft, and curiously distorted, like the voice of somebody deaf, somebody who has learned to speak only by watching the movement of other people’s lips.
‘I was asleep, until you came in.’
‘I’m sorry. I wanted to ask you something.’
Lloyd propped himself up on one elbow. The young man’s apologetic tone was in direct contrast to Otto’s dry-voiced hectoring. ‘Does Otto know that you’re here?’ he asked him.
The young man glanced quickly behind him, as if the mere mention of Otto’s name could somehow invoke Otto’s presence. ‘No. Otto is working. He . . .’ making a scribbling gesture with his hand ‘. . . writes, you know? Always writing.’
‘What did you want to ask?’
The young man closed the door behind him, and knelt down next to Lloyd’s mattress. Although he was so muscular, he had the gentlest of airs about him. A boy, rather than a man. Uncertain, anxious, unexpectedly shy.
‘They have always hated me, Otto and Helmwige. They have always told me that I am nothing but an animal. They hated Mengele, you see, because up until the very end, Mengele was always the Führer’s favourite. They talk about it over and over, as if it happened only yesterday.’
Lloyd said nothing, but waited for the young man to carry on.
‘I have no name. I have nothing,’ the young man told him. ‘I asked Otto what was my name, and he said, you’re not even a person, you deserve no name. Do I give names to cabbages, or eggs, or chairs? That’s what he said.’
Lloyd said, ‘Otto isn’t exactly the most sympathetic person I’ve ever met.’
‘I have to do everything for them, everything. I have to clean, I have to do everything. Helmwige expects me to have love with her, any time that she wants to. They told me that to work for them was my punishment, because so many people had died so that I could live. I was made by Josef Mengele, and this is my punishment for having been made.’
‘Nobody’s to blame for their own existence,’ said Lloyd.
‘I am to blame for myself.’
‘Bullshit, you were born because somebody else wanted you born, for whatever reason. It doesn’t matter what the reason was, you had no hand in it. It’s not your fault.’
The young man raised his head so that the light from the corridor fell across his face, and shone in his eyes. Eyes like crystal-clear marbles, young and hopeful and innocent. ‘I wanted to ask you if you would like to leave this place, and take me with you.’
Lloyd sat up. ‘You’re going to help us to escape?’
‘Only if you wish to.’
‘Only if we wish to? Are you kidding? You think we’re here because we felt like an early vacation? We’re here because Otto threatened to burn us alive.’
The young man nodded. ‘He has done that many times, to many people. He does not say so, but burning people is Otto’s pleasure.’
‘But you’re going to help us get away?’
The young man nodded. ‘Very early in the morning, when Otto sleeps his deepest. I will come to your room and guide you away. We can take Otto’s own car, that will prevent him from following, for a while. None of the other cars is working.’
‘What about Celia?’ asked Lloyd. ‘He won’t do anything to her, will he? He won’t harm her in any way?’
The young man shook his head. ‘Your Celia is most important to him. Celia is the only one who can understand the music. He will never harm Celia.’
‘You’re sure about that?’
The young man nodded. ‘I heard him talking to Helmwige. He said that Celia was his Godsend . . . his saviour. When they escaped from Germany, you see, they lost many of their notes, and Celia was the first person they had found who was able to play the music for them.’
‘Okay, then . . . it’s a go,’ Lloyd told him. ‘Wake me up whenever you’re ready, and I’ll be right behind you.’
The young man checked his wristwatch. ‘Three o’clock . . . that will be the best time.’
Lloyd said, ‘You’re sure I can trust you?’
The young man lowered his head again.
‘Supposing I give you a name?’ Lloyd asked him. ‘Can I trust you then?’
‘A name?’ the young man asked him, incredulously.
‘Sure, a name. Your very own name.’
‘How can you give me a name?’ the young man asked. ‘You’re not my father.’
‘For Christ’s sake, I don’t have to be your father to give you a name. What do you want me to call you?’
The young man shrugged. ‘I don’t know any names.’
‘All right, then . . . we’ll call you Franklin, after Franklin Roosevelt. How about that? Franklin Free, because you’re going to be free.’
The young man pressed his hand to his chest. ‘And that can be me? That name? Frankl
in Free?’
Lloyd nodded. ‘That can be you.’
Never in his life had Lloyd seen anybody lifted so quickly from his own lack of self-importance as Franklin Free. He quivered with new strength, like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis; he breathed more deeply, and knelt up straight. ‘That can be me? Franklin Free?’
‘That is you. You’re a human being, every human being has a name, and your name is Franklin Free.’
Franklin stood up. He didn’t seem to know which way to turn. Softly, he repeated the incantation, ‘My name is Franklin Free, and that can be me. My name is Franklin Franklin Free and that can be me.’
Lloyd checked his watch. ‘Listen, Franklin . . . it’s way after eleven. Let me try to grab some more zees. If you’re planning on breaking out of here at three o’clock in the morning, we all need to be fresh and alert and ready for anything.’
‘Franklin,’ Franklin repeated, in awe.
He reached out and grasped Lloyd’s hand, and squeezed it with the trembling restraint of someone who would dearly love to have hugged him, but knew that he couldn’t.
‘Franklin,’ he said. ‘That’s good.’
‘Glad you like it,’ Lloyd told him. He felt genuinely touched, more touched than Franklin could have understood.
Just then, they heard Helmwige calling from downstairs. ‘Bath! Come on! I want my bath!’
The newly-named Franklin gave Lloyd’s hand one last squeeze, and then said, ‘I have to go. Helmwige wants me.’
‘I’ll see you at three,’ Lloyd replied.
Franklin said, ‘If it doesn’t work out . . . if we don’t get away . . .’
‘We will get away,’ Lloyd assured him. ‘Don’t even think about it.’
‘But if we don’t, if he burns us . . .’
Hymn Page 25
