Sun Cross 2 - The Magicians Of Night (35 page)

“Damn it, Captain, it’s unbelievable!” came a booming voice he recognized as Goering’s. “I wrote out those instructions myself! Even Himmler didn’t know what they were going to be until I made them up! And you on the other side of Berlin, miles away… For him to see them in that kind of detail…”

“It is… quite commonplace,” von Rath’s soft voice said.

“I only wish you’d had this perfected a month ago! Because of the damned British air cover, Hitler’s been vacillating on the invasion plans for weeks! We’re down to the last possible days—and if he puts them off again we might as well forget it until next spring! Dammit, I keep telling him I only need four clear days…”

“You shall have them now.” Von Rath’s voice was clearer, then softer as if he were pacing; Saltwood bent his head, listening, knowing if he could only get this information back to Mayfair somehow… “And as you see, you will no longer be troubled by the RAF. I am sorry about the delay—it was a question of accumulating—ah—sufficient strength. We came to Berlin as soon as we could. If the invasion itself can be launched on the twenty-fourth—”

“The day after tomorrow?”

Holy Christ!
He wondered if he could make it to Hamburg, get in touch with the radioman there—to hell with getting himself taken off, if he could just warn them…

“Is it possible? Is that time enough?”

There was a long pause. “Just,” Goering said at last. “The forces are assembled, the landing barges are ready… We’ve been on standby, then standdown, then standby again since July. All we need is to convince our Führer that such an enterprise will, in fact, succeed.”

“After the demonstration you will have this afternoon, believe me, you need have no fear.”

“Damn it, Captain…” The chair creaked again, and Goering’s voice got louder. Saltwood could almost see them standing together, overweight Thor and darkly shining Loki.

“You will have your four days of clear weather,” von Rath promised again, his voice sinking low, “and the wherewithal to blast the RAF from the sky. And in return…”

Boots thudded in the hall. Saltwood was on his feet and over to the window in one swift move as a key rattled in the lock. He had a brief glimpse of three Storm Troopers, guns pointed, in the hall as the door was opened and a woman shoved unceremoniously in. Then the door banged, and the lock snapped again.

Not a woman
, he thought, taking another look—a
girl
.

She looked about twenty-two, her pointy white face framed in hair that was frizzed electric from her red ears to her slender shoulders, and above that, along the part, dark and luxurious brown-black with highlights of mahogany. Her eyes, taking in the black uniform pants and boots he wore, the clay-colored regulation shirt with its Deaths-Head emblems, were soot-dark and filled with spit-cat hate.

“Don’t jump to conclusions,” Saltwood said. “I’m an American—a Captain in the MO9.”

In English she said, “Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah,” he replied in the same language with as flat a mid-western accent as he could still conjure to his tongue. With a shock he realized she was American, too.

“So who pitched for Cincinnati in ’thirty-eight?”

Saltwood stared at her, appalled. “I don’t know, I always thought baseball was a Christly dumb game! I mean, Jesus, paying two bits to watch a bunch of guys in knickers stand around in the sun all day and scratch and spit?”

She perched one slim haunch on the corner of the table and shook back her particolored hair. “Some American!” But the hate was gone from her eyes.

She dug in her pocket for cigarettes and a lighter—she wore some kind of ill-fitting uniform, short-sleeved white blouse, gray skirt, and sensible shoes wildly at odds with the voluptuous figure beneath. As he took the smoke she offered him he saw her nails were bitten to the quick.

“You have any idea what’s going on around here?” he asked, raising his manacled hands to take a thankful drag. “Those hallucinations… That—that hornet, and the fire… that thing that flew at me through the air . .

“What?” She blew a line of smoke. “You missed the trapdoor?”

“
YOU GOTTA REMEMBER I GREW UP WITH THIS
stuff.” Sara crossed one knee over the other—she had beautiful legs, shapely, strong, and slim-ankled, and to hell with the black stubble that sprinkled them and the white ankle socks of the League of German Maidens—and drew on her cigarette while Saltwood prowled, for the fifth time, from the window to the inner door to the outer door, checking, testing, trying to put something together before it was too late. The guards were always there outside.

“I don’t know
how
many reincarnated ancient Egyptian priests I met when I was a little girl, or travelers from other dimensions or other astral planes, and they were
all
wizards or used to be, but they couldn’t practice in this dimension for one reason or another. You might as well sit down and take a break, cowboy. I’ve been over this room half a dozen times in the past week or so. You could fill it up with water and it wouldn’t leak.”

“That’s how long you’ve been here?” After one final glance out the windows at the guards standing around the vehicles, he came back to her, but remained on his feet beside the table where she sat, unable to conquer his restlessness.

She nodded, setting her cigarette to burn itself out on the table’s edge. “Eleven days—I kept count, scratching marks on the inside of the dresser drawer in my cell.”

Tom had seen the marks when he’d gone over the room where he’d been kept. “Why inside the drawer?”

She shrugged, long black lashes veiling her eyes as if embarrassed at the childishness of her impulse. “If they knew I was keeping track they’d erase them, add to them, or change them when they searched the room, just to make me crazy—to make me—I don’t know, feel helpless, feel off guard, like nothing was my own. Papa says they did that a lot in the camp.”

“Hell,” Tom said, feeling the old anger heat in him. “And I thought the special deputies were bad, the ones the fruit growers hired to chouse the migrants from camp to camp.” He settled on the edge of the table, his handcuffed hands folded on his thigh. “Your father’s here, too?”

“Yeah. I bunked in his room last night, sleeping on the floor.” She glanced up at him, and he saw, in spite of the cynical toughness in her eyes, how close she was to tears of sheer exhaustion, worn down by the bitter grindstone of being always watched, always helpless, and of never knowing what would happen next. Her brows, heavy and unplucked, grew together in a dark down over the bridge of her nose; there was a fine little pen-scratch line on either side of her mobile red mouth that emphasized each wry twist and each smile.

She shrugged again and made her voice offhand. “One more strike against that momzer von Rath. They kept us in the solitary cells at Kegenwald when Rhion was still at Schloss Torweg. They’d bring him in once a week to talk to us, once he was on his feet again. They—hurt him pretty bad after they caught him,” she added slowly. “There was a limit to what they could do if they wanted him to go on working for them, but I don’t think he ever really got over it. But he insisted on seeing us, talking to us, to make sure we were all right and hadn’t been taken away.” Her gaze returned to her lap, where her small, hard fingers traced over and over again a seam of her skirt.

Great
, Saltwood thought.
And after all that, I come along and try to assassinate the poor stiff for being a Nazi. And I may have to yet
, he reflected. “So what is it he’s doing?” he asked gently. “What is it he’s made?”

Her mouth twisted, and the old gleam of ironic humor came back to her eyes. “Like I said.” She grinned up at him. “I’ve met
dozens
of wizards in my life, and they were
all
working on some kind of
shmegegeleh
that let them do magic—or would, once they got it perfected, usually out of the damnedest stuff—cardboard pyramids, ‘sympathetic vibrating generators’ made out of old colanders and copper wire, hoodoo amulets with stuff I didn’t want to know about wadded up and stinking to high heaven inside. But none of them gave me the creeps the way that Spiracle does. Old Pauli’ll stand there fingering it, either on the chain around his neck with all his other damn filthy
tchotchkes
or fixed on the head of a wooden staff, and the look in his eyes is the same as I’d see in the eyes of the real crazy ones, the ones who claimed to hear God or the Devil whispering at them.”

She shook her head again, her dark brows pinching together; then she dismissed the fear with a dry chuckle. “Rhion—and Papa, who’s just as bad—claims it gives von Rath magic powers.”

“Great!” He made a gesture of disgust with his manacled hands. “That gets us exactly nowhere.”

“You’ve got to remember Rhion believes it himself.” She swung around at the sudden throb of engines in the driveway below. Tom was already halfway to the window to look—she scrambled leggily down and followed. Shoulder to shoulder, they watched through the bars as Storm Troopers and Luftwaffe bodyguards clambered into cars and truck and mounted the phalanx of motorcycles. Foreshortened almost directly below them, von Rath exchanged crisp Heil Hitlers with Goering and Himmler on the gravel of the drive.

“You heard about the new system of National Socialist weights and measurements?” Sara asked absently. “A ‘goering’ is the maximum amount of tin a man can pin to his chest without falling over on his face. God knows what’s really going on.” She turned her head to look up at Saltwood, pale noon sunlight glinting in her coffee-black eyes. “What happened to us could have been nothing more than posthypnotic suggestion…”

“I was never hypnotized!”

“The hell you weren’t.” She stepped back a pace from the glass and regarded him, hands on hips. “They could have hypnotized you and told you not to remember it—that’s one of the oldest ones in the book.”

Tom was silent a moment, considering that. He could remember everything clearly, except for a certain patchiness in his recollections immediately preceding Rhion smashing him over the head with the lab stool. At least he
thought
he could remember everything. “Maybe,” he said slowly. “If von Rath was supposedly sending those—those hallucinations—from his h.q. on the other side of town, I suppose Goering’s instructions could have been transmitted here by some kind of code words over the phone, the way the carney magicians do. But what would be the point, if they couldn’t repeat it in a combat situation? And that invasion starts Wednesday—the day after tomorrow…”

Sara swore in Polish. “You sure?”

“I heard Goering talking about it in the next room. He and von Rath are cutting a deal of some kind. Von Rath claims he can give Goering four days’ clear weather, which is a hell of a promise over the English Channel this time of year, plus this hallucination thing, and God knows what else. You don’t…” He paused, uncertain. “This is going to sound stupid, but you don’t think there’s some kind of—of thought-amplification device involved, do you?”

“What the hell do you think magic is supposed to be, if not the action of thought waves on the material world? But I ‘m here to tell you, cowboy, in four years of analytical chemistry, I have yet to see anybody circumvent the law of conservation of energy, or make two things like hydrogen and ethylene combine without throwing in some platinum as a catalyst. It just doesn’t work that way.” She frowned. “What scares me is that there obviously
is
something going on. It doesn’t hook up with any of the stuff Heisenberg and Einstein have been doing—or at least not with anything they’ve published—but once you get unpicking atomic structure, who knows? But there’s got to be instrumentality of some kind. Anything else is like trying to change gears without a clutch. And whatever the hell Rhion
did
come up with—whatever he
thought
he was doing—von Rath’s going to be able to use it.”

“I was with the Eleventh Commandos when they hit Boulogne in July,” Saltwood said quietly. “I saw the landing barges the Germans have ready. And whatever’s going on, I have to get the hell out of here and let London know the balloon’s about to go up.”

Sara started to reply, but before she could, boots thudded outside the door. Another woman might have edged closer to him, for the illusion of protection if for nothing else; she only set her fragile jaw, but he saw the fear in her eyes.

The door banged open. Von Rath stood framed against a black wall of Storm Troopers, gun muzzles bristling around him. A moment later, guards entered the room, keeping the two prisoners covered. As Sara had said, the German was fingering the Spiracle on its silver chain, absently and yet lovingly, his head tilted a little as if listening for sounds no human should hear. “It is time,” he said, “for the second part of our—ah—psychological tests.”

Sara folded her arms. “Does that mean I get my room back?”

The opal glance touched her without a shred of humanity. “You are welcome to it for the remainder of the day,” he said in his soft, well-bred voice. “But by tonight the question will be academic.”

Saltwood saw the impact of that widen her eyes as he was pushed through the door.

Soldiers were everywhere in the wide wire-fenced enclosure that encircled the house in the Jungfern Heide when von Rath’s little cavalcade rumbled carefully through the opened wire gate and off the drive. Sitting with half a dozen Storm Troopers in the back of the covered transport, Saltwood got a glimpse through its canvas curtains of the men who closed the gate behind them. They turned to look at him with stony hatred in their blue eyes.
Must have found the body of their pal in the downstairs hall
. A bad lookout when von Rath was done with him—always provided he survived this round of “psychological tests.”

As the truck pulled around he could see Goering, with his gray mob of Luftwaffe bodyguards, walking slowly back and forth across the flat, weedy ground of the field, pausing now and then to stamp the hard-packed earth. “Absolutely no hidden wires, ladies and gentlemen,” Saltwood said wryly to no one in particular in the voice of W. C. Fields. “You will observe that there is nothing up my sleeve but my arm.” Closer to, Himmler was making a much more cursory examination, which he broke off when von Rath’s car braked to a halt and came hurrying to its side.