Tales From the Black Chamber (23 page)

“Oh dear God,” said Anne, her hand flying to her mouth.

“I know, right? Anyway, most of their bigwigs were found guilty of war crimes at Nuremberg—they hanged the boss—and the
Ahnenerbe
disappeared.”

“So what does this have to do with
B.C.
kind of stuff?”

“Well, here's the interesting thing. In 1942, in the middle of the war, the
Ahnenerbe
, a private organization—partially funded, get this, by royalties from a patent on a bike reflector that Himmler made mandatory on all bikes made in Germany—sets up a sort of branch office in Cologne, right across the square from the cathedral. To run it, they choose Joseph-Maria Wilhelm de Hódmezővásárhely-Csongrád.”

“Say that three times fast.”

“Not on your life. This is the first sign that something odd is up. JMW is no Nazi. In fact, he was a devout man who'd opposed both the Horthy regime and the Nazis on religious grounds, as well as an aristocrat of a very old Austro-Hungarian family. He'd been a colonel in the First World War and is widely credited with some brilliant maneuver warfare and guerrilla-like tactics in their Romanian Campaign. I'll take the peanuts, oh, and a glass of red wine,” Claire said to the stewardess, briefly confusing Anne.

“I'll take the peanuts too,” Anne said. “Coffee for me, please.”

“So, JMW returns to the ancestral estate after the war and finds himself a citizen of the new country of Hungary. When Admiral Horthy allies Hungary with the Axis in exchange for some lost territory in Romania, JMW resigns all his remaining ranks and so forth, and disappears into his manor house. Then, suddenly, in 1942, he's in Cologne, going to Mass at the cathedral every day, hanging around with Archbishop Frings—one of the loudest voices against Nazism—and working for this
Forschungsgemeinschaft Sankt-Dionysius-von-Paris
.”

“Wait, how's that possible? He's doing all these über-Catholic things on the Nazis' dime?”

“Apparently. Moreover, although the
Ahnenerbe
was an SS organization, this
Forschungsgemeinschaft
had no SS or Nazi Party members. And whatever he was doing, it never got him in trouble with the law after the war. Why the Nazis, to their doubtless chagrin, picked JMW to do whatever he was doing is the sixty-four-thousand
Reichsmark
question. The sole clue we have is that there was a novel privately published in Bratislava in 1919 by an infantryman who'd served under JMW. It told the story of an Austro-Hungarian unit in Romania in the First World War that took a position in an ancient castle and then was slowly decimated by a vampire whose castle it turned out to be until the colonel in charge managed to trap it with holy water and a crucifix, then impaled it with a saber, cut off its head, stuffed garlic in its mouth and burnt the remains. It's a pretty good read, though a little crude, stylistically. It was very popular in Slovakia and even made it into German in Vienna in the late '20s. We have an English translation in the Archive. It's generally considered an interesting, if minor, derivative of Bram Stoker's
Dracula
.”

“Let me guess, it wasn't a novel; it was a memoir.”

“Maybe. Also suggestive is the fact that there was a hideous series of murders in Cologne that stopped not long after he got there.”

“So this guy was
Freiherr
Buffy von Vampire Slayer?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. But he also manages to flip off the Nazis by naming his organization after the patron saint of France, St. Denis of Paris, whose name was a battle cry of the French, whose royal standard, the
oriflamme
, came from Denis's abbey and was supposedly consecrated in his blood.”

“Ick.”

“Ah, but it's a great story. The Romans decapitated Denis on Montmartre. He got up, picked up his head, and walked two miles to his grave, preaching all the way. They built a church on the spot, and that's where they buried the kings of France.”

“Heh. Good one, JMW,” said Anne, toasting him with her Styrofoam cup.

Claire tapped her plastic wineglass on it and said, “And there's another suggestive fact about St. Denis. He's a patron saint of the possessed, invoked against demons.”

“Ah, another coincidence.”

“So after the war's over and they set up the Federal Republic, the FGSDP, as it's known, kind of disappears. No one's sure what happened to it, exactly. However, there exist a couple photographs from the mid-1950s of the incredibly old JMW having lunch with Konrad Adenauer at the latter's house. Adenauer was a Rhineland Catholic and former mayor of Cologne who doubtless learned of JMW through Cardinal Frings, whom he'd known before the war.”

“So you think it's still around.”

“It's got to be. They're Germans, the best managers in world history. The initials FGSDP have appeared a couple times in German budget documents, and there is a JMW GmbH that's ostensibly a boutique management-consulting firm in Cologne, but we have our doubts.”

“That's pretty crazy,” said Anne.

“Yeah, but it's of a piece with what we do,” shrugged Claire.

“Can I ask you a sort of personal question?” said Anne.

“Well, I'm sort of a person. Fire away.”

“You're Jewish, right?”

“Yep. An
ekhte yiddische maydele
, as my grandfather used to say.”

“Do you believe in God?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. I've just been noticing that in all this stuff, there seem to be a lot of Catholics. What's the story with that?”

“Don't you watch horror movies? No one says, ‘My God, it's a vampire! Call that nice lesbian Episcopalian minister down the street to whip up some holy water!'”

“I'm serious. I mean, I'm not Catholic—well, not really religious at all—and it's always seemed a little weird. And now I'm surrounded by it. I mean, what's the deal?”

“Well, a couple of things. First, it's kind of their franchise. I mean, they've got a couple thousand years of teaching that supernatural evil exists and that it preys on people. Whatever the theology, that's sort of close to what we're doing: protecting people from weirdness. So I think they have less cognitive dissonance than a lot of people. You hear since you were a kid that you have to ‘reject the devil and all his pomps and works' and when some spooky stuff that looks like a devil pops up, you've got a frame of reference. Plus, on the demonic front, Jesus charged his apostles with going and driving out demons. So it makes sense that the organization they started would have some sort of institutional demon-fighting procedures. The fact that they seem to work does give me the occasional bit of pause that, you know, oh crap, the
goyim
may be right.

“But my theory is that they're just picking up where the great rabbis left off. They're worshipping our God, even if they're a little confused on His nature. But, although it doesn't come up a lot, there's a ton of rabbinical literature on all sorts of demons. Ashmodai and Samaël, Lilith, Agrat bat Ma
lat “the dancing roof-demon,” Ke
eb Meriri, Azazel, Sham
azai, Belial, Alukah the vampire, and on and on, down to garden-variety evil spirits. We had our own demon-fighters like Abba José of Zaintor. And Jews held, back to Egypt, that all magic was demonic. Miracles were from God, but magic was messing with malevolent forces. In fact, interestingly enough, the Pharisees accused Jesus and the Christians of casting out demons by means of demonic power, so that there always seemed to be more and more demons around. Still, it was never a central part of the Jewish worldview, unlike the battle between God and Satan for Christians, so my theory is that over the last couple centuries, it's slipped out of sight and out of mind, leaving the field to the Catholics, who seem to be a little more hard-headed about resisting the ontological claims of modernity.” Claire laughed.

“So who in the Chamber is Catholic?”

“John, Mike, and Joe. They usually go to Mass every morning at St. Matthew's, and breakfast afterwards. Wilhelmina is high-church Episcopalian. With a name like McCormack, Steve might be nominally Catholic, but good luck prying out personal information from that guy. Rafe's Jewish like me, and Lily's Presbyterian, I think, but I'm not entirely sure what her stance on the metaphysical is.”

“Okay, but there aren't any problems with not being Catholic, are there?”

“No. It's not a big deal. Although I have to say, having ins to a large, international organization that believes in the existence of the supernatural is awfully convenient for our purposes.”

“And you don't have any religious or philosophical problems with it?”

“I might if I thought too deeply about stuff, but this job isn't about deep thought. It's about staying sane and alive, and doing some bits of good in a very murky, very strange world.”

12

By the middle of the next day, Mike Himmelberg had found the deed for Clairvaux's Canadian property. His mother's family had made quite a lot of money in the lumber industry and owned an estate outside of a small town in north-central Ontario called Nicton. Joe McManus had a large satellite image of the house and ranging, wooded grounds up on a large flat-screen monitor in the conference room. Steve McCormack was alternately staring at it intently and scribbling notes on a yellow pad.

“You guys don't have a satellite, do you?” asked Anne, slightly incredulous.

“No, this is Google Earth. I've enhanced the image somewhat with some neat software they use over at the Navy Yard,” said Joe, “but the military and CIA don't do surveillance of rural Canada.”

“So what are we doing about the fact we can't legally go in there?” asked Mike.

“I think we've got to go anyway. We'll try and get in and out and not do anything to upset the Canadians,” said John. “Steve, you have a plan?”

“Yes. Shouldn't be hard, tactically, as the grounds of the house are so heavily wooded. Unless they've got heavy security or lots of armed guards, we should be able to get inside without much trouble. After that, we're probably through the looking glass, so who knows? Who's coming? Mike? You're our demon guy. You want to try and line up an exorcist, just in case someone starts spouting Aramaic and pea soup?”

“Yeah, fine, I'm in. Fuck, what am I going to tell my wife?” Mike muttered.

“Same as always, dude,” said Joe.

“You should tell her you're not going,” said Wilhelmina with a ferocious stare.

Mike put his head in his hands. “Wilhelmina, I know you don't think married men”

“Fathers. I don't care if your wife weeps on your grave. She chose you, so much the worse for her. But you got
kids
.”

Joe said peaceably, “We've had this conversation before. I don't think anyone's changed their mind.”

“Look, you can make me out to be the crazy old black lady, but dammit, you two should
not
be going out in the field. Hell, I don't go out there because I'd get myself or one of y'all killed. You should have at least that much regard for your kids.”