No Dawn for Men (7 page)

“Yes, circa 1400. I had it analyzed.”

“Father Adelbert’s incantation.”

“Yes. I should have told you sooner. I’ve performed the ritual. It works.”

“You mean . . . ?”

“Yes. When Billie was five, she had a cat that was dying. I brought it to Deggendorf. It died on the train. On that day in 1872, after taking the amulet and the parchment from Father Adelbert, I found the tunnel he used and used it to escape. I marked the entrance in my mind’s eye—it was on a hill behind the old Roman wall near the abbey orchard—and easily found it again. Everything was the same, the altar, the giant tree, except now the saplings were gone. Immediately, I performed the ritual, the cat jumped up and bounded off. I was stunned, as you can imagine. The air was suddenly thick and sulfurous. Until that day, my hair was brown. Frightened, I raced to the tunnel. Climbing up to the ledge to get to it, my foot got stuck between two boulders. I wrenched it free in my panic and damaged the ankle irreparably.”

“But you lived. Brother Adelbert died.”

“He died the
second
time he did it.”

“Franz . . .”

“When everyone was leaving this afternoon, Kurt Bauer pulled me aside. He told me that they were aborting the Externsteine expedition. Himmler wants a demonstration from me on Monday, as soon as you’ve left. He has a Nazi smile, young Kurt, a wicked smile. He seems to know, somehow, that the ritual will work.”

“Does Bauer know about the parchment?”

“Yes, I’ve shown it to him. I felt I had to show him a sign of progress.”

“And the amulet?”

“I’ve led him on several wild goose chases. But now I fear he knows I have it.”

“Do you think he knows about your hiding place?”

“I think he does, I fear that all of my movements are being watched. I sense a darkness, a coldness near me and around me all the time. I have removed the amulet and re-hidden it.”

Tolkien remained silent, recalling the chill in Shroeder’s study last night, the far-off look in the German professor’s eyes as he gazed at the fire, as if he were looking into an unhappy future, or a bizarre new world.

“I thought Bauer was a friend of your daughter’s?”

“He is a Nazi of the most vicious kind.”

“Then why . . . ?”

“She is blinded by friendship. They are college chums.”

“Or love perhaps.”

“God forbid.”

“Franz, if they are going to harm you, you can flee. I will help you.”

The old man’s smile was big and toothy, but rueful. “It is not me I care about, my life is over. It’s Billie. It is
her
life that is at stake.”

Professor Tolkien had written fiction. He knew that conflict was essential to a good story, that the more intense was the conflict, the more gripping would be the tale. But now here was real life. Billie Shroeder would die if Franz did not produce what Himmler wanted. But what Himmler wanted was an evil thing, likely to doom the human race.

“I do not sleep well,” Shroeder said.

“I do not doubt it.”

“I come up here at dawn sometimes. The sunrise is beautiful, wondrous, over the city. I forget for a few moments about the evil that is gripping my country, my beloved Germany.”

They gazed at the city in silence.

“I will take the figurine with me to England,” Tolkien said at length. “Separate it from the amulet.”

“No, my dear John, that would only delay the final dawn.”

“The final dawn?”

“The parchment and the figurine must be destroyed together. If they are not, there will soon be no more dawns for Berlin, no more dawns for men.”

“I will help you.”

“No, you must return to your wife and children.”

Tolkien did not reply. A few moments ago, at the horizon, the top rim of the setting sun had flashed elliptically for an instant between the rim of the earth below and a line of fiery red clouds above, a fierce, bloody eye looking pitilessly upon the world of men. The night was normal now, like any other mild autumn night. But that eye at the horizon, had it looked right at him? Into his soul? Edith, young John, Michael, Christopher, Priscilla:
you must never see that eye.

12.

Berlin

October 6, 1938, 8:00 p.m.

“We haven’t had a chance to talk.”

“No.”

“Dicey, all this spying. A bit steep for a banker and a university don.”

“I thought you were a reporter.”

“Only occasionally. The bank gives me leave.”

“Do you like beer?”

“
Bier gut
.”

Tolkien smiled. “Let’s pop in here then.”

They passed through an arched entryway into a large garden adjacent to a restaurant. A dozen or so vending tents with beer insignia on their sides lined the garden’s perimeter. In front of each tent stood rows of picnic tables filled with Berliners laughing, gesturing, talking, some singing, all enjoying foamy-headed German lager from large ceramic steins. In the center a noisy carousel—a menagerie of brightly painted horses, unicorns, and African animals—rotated slowly, its organ blaring a polka. Some of the people waiting for their turn on the carousel were dancing. The lights from the vending tents and the carousel lit the whole garden.

“You must find a seat where you can,” a buxom blond waitress in a dirndl, her breasts trying hard to break free from her ruffled white blouse, said to them in German. She was holding three full beer steins in each hand, smiling happily.

“
Danke
,” Tolkien and Fleming said in unison.

They found an empty table for four in a corner on the far side of the carousel. Another buxom, smiling waitress, this one brunette, brought them a pitcher and two glasses and left. They realized they were supposed to fill the pitcher at the vending tent of their choice. While Fleming went off to do this, Professor Tolkien lit his pipe and looked around. In the short few days since Arlie Cavanaugh had recruited him for this mission, he had been reading all he could about the current state of world affairs. He was a quick study, but nothing he had read had prepared him for the conclusion he reached after observing the people of Berlin for only two days. On the streets, on the trolleys, in the shops, in the restaurants, he saw it everywhere: the German people had sold their collective soul to the devil. Behind the smugness, the arrogance of easy victories, the contempt for the weakness of France and England, he saw not the slightest trace of bravado. They believed they were superior, above morality. They had abandoned the thing that made them human.

“So,” Fleming said, after returning and filling their glasses. “How did it go with Loening?”

“I turned him down.”

“Turned him down? Why?”

“He wanted me to sign an oath saying I wasn’t a Jew.”

“Ah, the Nuremberg Laws.”

“What are
they
?”

“You can’t marry a Jew, etcetera. Legalized discrimination.”

“I’m not marrying a Jew. I’m married.”

“The German bureaucrats are worse than the Soviets. They salivate over repressive laws. The Jews are allowed to breathe German air, but only until a way can be found to round them all up and kill them. Until then they will be harassed and tortured and killed off a few at a time, like rats. ‘
Judenrein
,’ the Nazi’s call it. Jew-free.”

“I daresay . . .”

“Yes?”

“There are too many.”

“That’s what Hitler says.”

Tolkien looked at Fleming and then at the crowd of Germans—mostly young but many older—laughing, smiling, dancing, their eyes made bright by alcohol and pride. And power and revenge. How many Jews were there in Germany? In Europe? He placed his hand on his shirt front and felt the outline of the St. Benedict medal he had worn since returning home from the war, the one he had purchased in Calais before boarding the hospital ship that would take him back to England, a hasty replacement for the one that Edith had given him the night before he shipped out.
Get thee back Satan,
he whispered to himself.

“Are you there, Professor?” Fleming said.

“Yes.”

“Good, we must work. You used the code for urgent.”

“Yes.”

“Go on.”

“Professor Shroeder has told me what he’s working on.”

Fleming smiled. “It’s simple, this spying business, no?”

“In this case, yes. And no.”

* * *

“Professor Tolkien, I’m not often at a loss for words.”

“But you are now.”

“Not quite.” Nevertheless, Fleming said nothing. The facts of the matter had taken Tolkien only a few minutes to narrate. The sinking in was the hard part.

“You are skeptical,” the professor said.

Fleming did not reply.

“A cynic.”

“I’m both,” Fleming said. “Do you believe Shroeder? When he says he raised the dead cat?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Bloody hell.”

“I haven’t told you everything. Billie Shroeder will be killed if Franz does not perform the ritual on Monday. Franz has asked me to help get her out of Germany.”

“What did you say?”

“I said I would.”

“What do you have in mind? A boat ride down the Rhine? They’ll never let her out.”

“I thought I’d ask you.”

“Bloody hell.”

“My sentiments.”

“You’ll all have to leave.”

“All?”

“You, Shroeder, and Billie.”

“Before Monday, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“But I can leave on Monday by myself. I have my plane ticket.”

“I can’t leave you behind. You’ll be arrested once they realize that Shroeder and Billie are missing. You are in Nazi Germany, professor, the epicenter of evil on Earth. They will crucify you.”

“And where do you think this evil comes from?”

“Pardon?”

“Where does this evil come from?”

“Hitler, Goebbels, Goering, the lot of them.”

“Who put it in them?”

“My dear chap . . .”

“I’m not your dear chap, Fleming. I’m your elder by sixteen years. I fought the Hun in France. I have asked myself since, how did that war happen, how and why does evil exist?”

“Did you come up with an answer?”

“No. But I will tell you this, after all the thought I’ve given it: the raising of the dead does not seem so farfetched given the evil spell that seems to have been cast on mankind from its very beginnings.”

Fleming smiled and leaned back in his chair. Leaning forward again, he lifted the pitcher and topped off their glasses. “I apologize,” he said.

“For what?”

“For condescending to you. You are far above me in all ways.”

“You are mistaken. You are upper crust. I am low born. I’ve meant to ask you, was your father Valentine Fleming?”

“Yes.”

“I met him once. He gave me a letter to send to your mother, which I did when I read Churchill’s eulogy in the
Times
.”

Fleming was almost instantly taken back to June of 1917, to the scene in the “large” drawing room (as opposed to the many smaller ones) at Joyce Grove, his grandfather’s sprawling, rather brutal-looking manor house in Oxfordshire that was his second home growing up. His mother, in black from head to toe, bereft of her usual brilliant jewelry, her face white but composed, had stood in front of the room’s cavernous fireplace and read the letter to him and his three brothers, whose nannies had been told to dress them for the occasion. He was nine at the time. If she had mentioned the name of the soldier who had sent it, Fleming had long forgotten it. But he did remember one line: remind the children that if another war comes, they must do their duty.

 
First metaphysics and now this,
Fleming thought.
Who is this fellow Tolkien?
“You met my father?” he said.

“Yes. In the war.”

“But . . . How? When?”

“I’ll tell you another time. There is other, more pressing business now.”

Fleming did not respond. He had few solid memories of his father, the great, heroic Val Fleming, made immortal by Churchill, but those he did have he had enshrined in a compartment in his mind that was like a church, so sacred were its precincts. He longed to add to this small trove. Instinctively, he put his hand inside his jacket and ran his fingers along the outline of his wallet, which contained his most treasured possession, given to him by his mother that day at Joyce Grove.

“I promise,” Tolkien said, interrupting Fleming’s thoughts. “But now tell me, what are your plans?”