Her sad blank eyes were turned on him, and now she had turned her whole body in his direction. With one hand supporting herself on the bed rail she was standing on her feet. The short white shift she wore came to just above her knees which seemed strangely bulbous and knotted. Sir Daniel gestured to her to come to him. Her rattling breath came in great convulsive heaves, distorting her face and upper body violently.
She took one step towards him, and another, then, taking her hand away from the bed rail, she took another step forward towards Sir Daniel. There was a crackling sound like the tearing of old cloth and I saw one of her legs begin to buckle, then the other. They did not so much break as disintegrate so that her whole body seemed to collapse into the ground like a dynamited building. The next moment she was on the floor, a puddle of desiccated flesh, no more. Jane screamed. The last thing I saw of Marda was her black eyes darting venomously about in her shattered head.
I felt nothing but revulsion and panic. I rose leapt off the dais and ran for the door, grabbing Jane’s arm as I passed. The long corridor outside the music room was deserted. I saw one old man in white shuffling along with a Zimmer frame in the distance. I shouted for help. A blue coated attendant emerged from the doorway. I pointed towards the music room and babbled something about there having been an accident. I turned to the stairs and bolted down them, dragging Jane with me. We nearly fell over a wheelchair which stood tenantless in the hall. The emptiness of the Grange enhanced my terror. Jane went with me unresisting. I shouted at her to give me the keys to the Rolls. She said they were in the ignition. I ran to the Rolls and opened the driver’s door. Jane hesitated. I dragged her into the passenger seat and started up the car, barely knowing what I was doing. In my blind fear it seemed to take an age before I had started the car. We drove ridiculously fast down the lime avenue; I had never known such power behind a wheel.
“Look out!” screamed Jane.
A lorry had turned in at the gate and was coming up the drive. There was no room to pass it. Too late I realised that this was the entrance and not the exit drive. I put on the breaks and turned the Rolls. There was a shriek of rubber and we collided with one of the lime trees, the full impact hitting Jane’s side of the car. I remember nothing after that and my mind is still in pieces.
***
“How much of this story of his is true, doctor?” asked the nurse.
“Why do you ask?” said the Doctor. “It is the truth as he sees it. That is all that matters. And it has given me an idea.”
“About what?”
“About how he might be possibly cured.” They peered together through the little window of the cell door. Within, an elderly looking man sat practising arpeggios on a dummy keyboard. He wore a white cardboard crown on his head. Occasionally he scrawled something with a pencil on a piece of music manuscript paper. When later examined the marks he made turned out to be meaningless scribbles.
“And what happened to the woman?” asked the nurse.
“Jane Fisher? The accident paralysed her. She’s still in a coma, I believe. Well,” said the Doctor, closing the sliding panel that obscured the cell door’s window, “that concludes our business with him for the moment. I wonder, nurse—may I call you Marda?—at about this time, I like to round off the day with a glass of champagne. Would you care to join me for one in my consulting room?”
Marda stared at the Doctor. Some people, though evidently not the doctor, might have seen disgust, even fear in her eyes. After a pause, though, she nodded her consent.
“Thank you, doctor,” she said. “I’d like that.”
The sharks that swam in the aquarium at Frog’s Cellar were not large enough to devour a man, but they swam eagerly to the surface to investigate the surprising sight of their human owner’s head intruding, up to the shoulders, into their watery realm. Nibbling an ear. Nuzzling curiously at his furiously blinking eel-eyes.
Oberleutnant Anger studied the print on the wall above Frog’s massive desk of textile block like a Mayan sacrificial altar. The ink drawing of a naked, supine female form, or tangle of forms, convulsed in ecstasy—a lesbian orgy, one form was rendered with bold lines, the others sketchy, faint double-exposure phantoms, of faces, hips, tits, cunts, as if the woman is being ravished by past and future selves, or the ghosts of her own lust.
Degenerate trash… and if their will to cleanse their culture of such sickness had been anything but hypocrisy and empty theater, would the Fatherland still be a garden of ashes, trampled by two invading armies? Perhaps not, he mused, but surely if its appetite for such perversity were not the very essence of the Reich, then certainly such men as Frog, and Anger himself, would have ended up on the same bonfire as this bit of filth, along with its no-doubt equally depraved artist, over a decade ago.
The Frog screamed a gush of bubbles, but Durst held him under until Anger closed his stopwatch and snapped his fingers.
Frog vomited brine down the front of his disheveled silk suit, gasping, “I don’t know who she is, I swear! Please, I beg of you… I don’t want to die over this…”
“Frog, I beg of you,” Anger chewed a hangnail. “Please don’t toy with me. It is well known you are so dead to conventional pleasure that you pay a dominatrix to torture you in a nun’s habit.” Fitting a cigarette into an ivory holder shaped like a cock, he stuck it in Frog’s mouth and lit it. “For all I know, we’ve only aroused you. Instead of answering me, you lie most tediously, and soil my name with talk of murder. It’s insulting, Frog. It’s rude.”
Still coughing up bloody phlegm and tooth fragments, Frog sucked gratefully at the smoke, letting it ooze from his lips as he became again the pimp who’d thrived under twelve years of SS scrutiny. “I most humbly apologize, Herr Oberleutnant. I meant no disrespect, but you must understand… a man in my position… must be discreet… or he is nothing at all…”
“Frog, have pity on me. My General regularly visits your club, not so? And he has extraordinary appetites, in keeping with his extraordinary position. He comes to you twice weekly, but he doesn’t stay here, does he? No, he leaves by way of your office, and goes elsewhere.
“Now… while the discretion of the Frog is legendary, so also are the tales of those who’ve crossed him, and been ruined. While even you wouldn’t dream of blackmailing a General of the Reich, you would not be the Frog of story and song, if you did not know every disgusting detail.
“All I would have from you… I beg… is to know where he goes, and where I can find this girl that he sees… this… Arora.”
Frog could not repress a sickly giggle. “If you are so close to your precious General, why ask me? Surely he will share her with you—”
At a frown from Anger, Durst plunged Frog back into the aquarium.
“I understand that a shark’s skin is smooth as leather if stroked from nose to tail, but the tiny scales, so like teeth, will tear flesh if you stroke it from tail to nose. Is this so, Frog? How would it change the tone of your voice if Durst were to insert that big one there into your mouth, and then forcibly remove it? If you have nothing to tell us, we have nothing to lose by passing the time in such a manner…”
Frog furiously kicked and waved in abject surrender. Durst let him sink to his knees, which were both broken when he’d tried to run from them. The little pimp sobbed with helpless agony and terror. He’d wet himself before Durst even laid a hand on him, and now he’d soiled himself, but he still smirked at Anger as if he’d successfully fleeced the adjutant.
Anger went over to pick up the curious shaving kit laid out on the desk beside a neat row of clear glass ampules. “You’re not a man accustomed to pain or deprivation. For what Nature has denied you, you have richly compensated yourself.”
Frog stared longingly at the kit. Anger noticed the card hidden under it. “Ah, so much unpleasantness could have been avoided, but here we are.” Studying the card, “So, this is where he goes?”
Frog nodded, stripped of his last assets. “A car meets him at the end of a tunnel… three streets over. I don’t know where it goes…”
“Is this a joke?” Anger tapped Frog on the forehead with the card. “This Dr. Kreislauf… it’s a very funny name, no? Does Dr. Run-in-circles make house-calls, I wonder…”
Frog crawled towards Anger. Durst lifted a boot, but his superior officer shook his head.
“Please, Herr Oberleutnant,” Frog rasped through broken teeth, “I am in such terrible pain…”
Anger took the steel syringe out of the kit and filled it from one of the ampules. “Frog has been most cooperative, after his fashion. Durst, let us give him something for his pain.”
Durst held Frog’s limp arm steady so Anger could stab one of the scabby veins in the crook of the pimp’s clammy elbow.
When Frog had settled into a restful nod, Anger reached for the telephone just as it rang.
He picked it up. “Who is this?”
A gulp and a gasp, and the caller disconnected. One of Frog’s clients or victims, which came to the same thing. Shaking his head, he took up the receiver again and dialed the number on the card.
The line opened, but no one spoke. Anger demanded to speak to Dr. Kreislauf immediately. Without remarking upon the hour, the colorless, sexless voice on the other end said only, “One moment,” and set down the receiver.
The connection worsened, alarming flurries of static and a somnolent tingle that might have been muffled chimes or a ringing in his ear, as from a nearby explosion. Behind it, he could just make out a silken, nasal voice speaking slowly and sleepily, seeming to fade away even as Anger strained to make it out. The faintest trace of an Italian Swiss accent, a sneering lilt to the blurred words that annoyed him but drew him deeper—
His ear swelled with blood, his hand trembled, but he blinked and bit his lip to stir his focus when the crackling chimes grew into a raging fire, and the voice brayed in his ear, “We are not receiving visitors. I am deeply involved with a patient. Please call at a suitable hour.”
The connection was cut.
Hanging up the phone, he waved to Durst, who had meticulously wiped all the surfaces they’d touched in the office, and they left.
***
When 2nd Leutnant Otto Anger was arrested for black market trading during the Belarus campaign, he was brought before General G_______, who gave him a proposition. He could be tried and shot, or he could accept a promotion to the General’s staff.
Anger had thrived in the bad years after the Great War, made a name for himself as a ruthless procurer of desirable goods. While most of his old associates had long since been arrested or conscripted, he returned to the old clubs as an untouchable, a power behind a sizable throne. Anger harbored no illusions about the mystical superiority of the Aryan race, but he had benefited enormously from their ascent.
But now, only the fools who clung to such nonsense as to insanity itself failed to recognize that it was no longer a good time to be German. While he and the General had always shared a healthy, dispassionate pragmatism, Anger was blissfully liberated from carnal desire, while his superior burned with it. He went through women and girls like a whiskey-cooled machinegun, but even he was cognizant of the swiftly changing situation. The Fuhrer was trapped like a rat in his bunker, and devouring his own. The Allies were closing in, a dreadful pincers that offered only the choice between the monstrous Slavic juggernaut and the barbaric cowboys grinding ever closer from the west. He even supported Anger’s plans for exiting through Switzerland and relocating to the Reich’s ultimate fallback position in Argentina, until last month…
When his visits to Frog’s Cellar began to deviate from his usual deviant pattern, and he all but stopped eating, sleeping or in any meaningful way leading the defense of the beleaguered fatherland. Anger’s pathway out of Berlin ran through the General, and the General no longer cared to leave, because of Arora.
What could be simpler, for a man of Otto Anger’s talents and connections, than to locate one working girl in the blackened ruin of Berlin? But nothing was so simple, now.
The Neue Psychologie Patientenklinik was on Xantener-Strasse, a tiny Charlottenburg avenue that might have escaped even a mapmakers’ notice until now, when it had miraculously escaped any heavy bombing. Aside from a single pension gutted by fire, the narrow, smoke-blackened buildings huddled closely on the short street like a copse of old forest on a bomb-swept plain, giving off a canny, carnivorous tension, as if they lay poised to spring back into hiding before the next air raid.
Each breath hung before his face in crystal clouds on the brutally cold but thirsty air, like a newborn thing, already dying. Such morbid fancies ill became an officer—no, a survivor.
Crooked dirty light bored through green shades on the second floor. Picking his steps with care on the ice-rimed pavement, Anger followed Durst up the stairs and paused with him before the frosted glass door.
It could well be that the General was secretly visiting a psychoanalyst. Though Freud’s Jewish parlor games were long since illegal and anathema, many Nazi-approved shrinks still preyed on the most exhausted of the war-wounded German public, using Jungian gibberish and idiotic race theory to explain the insanity that had claimed the rest of the world so that it conspired to ruin the Reich.
No matter.
Through the glass, Anger could just make out a silhouette seated beside a shaded lamp at the back of the office, the muted but bombastic strains of a romantic opera.
He turned the knob, found it locked, and nodded to Durst, who wrenched it off with a grunt and kicked the door wide.
Anger strode in with his hands in the pockets of his leather overcoat and stopped before the desk. “I will see the doctor now.”
Durst rounded the desk and spun the chair. The seated woman swooned out of the chair and into Anger’s arms.
He held a mannequin, but sculpted with fleshy curves that ran counter to the sleek, androgynous forms in department stores. Its limbs slid and pivoted on clever ball joints, entangling his arms and legs so its painted face pressed close to his.
The music from the next room was Offenbach’s Tales Of Hoffman. Kicking the thing away from him in sudden disgust, Anger ordered Durst to go through the door behind the desk. Almost immediately, the music was cut off with a satisfying crash.
He looked over the filing cabinets. They had combination locks, and wouldn’t yield to his efforts. He turned back to the doll on the floor. Something about the succulent curve of its torso, plaster and wood sheathed in rubber, struck him as profoundly unwholesome. This thing was not built merely to stand in for a living secretary. It silently invited his touch, to pose it and use it to enact his most private fantasies…
Nonsense. He had no such illusions. If he had need for a woman, he hired one. He was not a slave of his desires.
Kneeling over the doll, he tore away the champagne-tinted silk blouse. Its belly was hollow, a tiny theater, and within lay a perfect diorama of the doctor’s antechamber, with a miniature desk and cabinets and a tiny female doll with a tiny man straddling her…
Anger stood and stomped on the doll’s torso, ground his heel into its face. Only when he had exhausted himself and sat back to admire his correction did he notice the noises from the next room.
He pushed the door open and fumbled at the light, but the lamp lay on the floor, and did little to demystify what he saw.
A blind, staggering giant crashed from one wall of the office to the next, thrashing out and knocking down cabinets, books from shelves, a massive trove of phonograph recordings. Anger stepped into the room and slid to his knee on a frozen black lake of shattered platters. Brittle shards slithered under his feet.
He lunged for Durst, but the man shoved him aside, flinging him over the desk and into the shelves. A torrent of bound case studies rained down on him. Stunned, he was some moment
s gathering his wits, during which time, Durst continued furiously wrecking the room, like a broken automaton.
Reaching over, Anger righted the floor lamp. Durst had a letter opener inserted to the hilt in his left eye at an odd angle, so the jeweled hilt shoved aside his spastically blinking eye. His hands were bloody rags swaddled clumsily round exposed knucklebones. Someone had lobotomized the poor fellow, then slashed him with a razor or a scalpel. His blood painted a new wainscoting around the office, except for one corner of the room where a stretch of wall was almost untouched…
Anger went to it and pushed on the wall, then leaned on it, then, studying scuff marks on the floor, he pressed one corner and pivoted it into itself, exposing a back staircase.
A knife slashed at his face, catching the prow of his chin and laying it open to the bone. Anger fell back, going for his Luger in its holster, miles away, on his hip…
A giant taller than Durst loomed over him, a black cloud in a long, old cape and a top hat such as savants and swells wore in the days of the Kaiser. Turning away with a throaty groan, the giant stumbled down the narrow stairs.
Anger checked his pistol and went behind Durst and shot him once through the base of the skull. Then he sprang down the stairs, barely checking the urge to empty his clip into the bastard’s back.
“Kreislauf!” Anger shouted. Framed in the moonlight for just a flicker, the fleeing giant paused and twisted his head to look back. Only his bulging, manic eyes swelled out of the shadowy mush of his face before he skidded on the icy walk and vanished into an alley.
Anger took the corner wide so he wouldn’t be ambushed again, but the giant was in full flight, loping down the narrow alley with a curious gait like a gorilla’s. Anger cracked off a shot over the giant’s head, but didn’t faze him. His quarry reached the end of the alley and paused, framed in the light, when Anger shot him in the back.
THE MADNESS OF DR. CALIGARI Page 21
