The Devils of D-Day (20 page)

Madeleine came across the sidewalk. ‘Any luck?’ she asked me.

‘I don’t know. It looks as if it’s empty. Maybe they just
shut- the devils up here and left it.’

‘But that was thirty years ago.’

I shrugged. ‘We could always ring the bell and see.’

I looked back towards the Citroen, parked against the
kerb
in the softly-falling snow.

‘We have to get in here somehow,’ I told her. ‘Otherwise
it’s going to be cold cuts for lunch.’

‘Maybe the next-door
neighbours
know something,’ she suggested. ‘Even if the house is empty, it must belong to
somebody.
If we could only get ourselves a key, and take a
look round.
We could always pretend we wanted to buy it.’

I stepped back and looked up at the second and third floors
of the house, blinking against the snow that fell in my upturned face. ‘I can’t
see any lights. I guess it must be empty.’

I went back up to the porch and pushed all the bells. I
could hear some of them ringing in different parts of the house. Then I waited
for a while, shuffling my feet to bring the circulation back to my toes.
Madeleine looked at me tiredly, and I knew that both of us were pretty close to
the end of our tether. A taxi drove by, blowing its horn.

We were just about to turn away when we heard a noise inside
the house. I raised my eyes in surprise. Then there were sharp footsteps coming
along the corridor, the rattle of security chains, and the door opened. A lean
young man in a black jacket and grey business pants stood there, with a haughty
and enquiring expression on his face.

‘Did you want something?’ he asked, in that clipped voice
that immediately told you he’d been given a superior education and probably
read Horse & Hound.

I gave him an uneasy kind of a smile. ‘I’m not sure,’ I told
him. ‘Does this building still belong to the War Office?’

‘You mean the Ministry of
Defence
.’

‘That’s right. I mean the Ministry of
Defence
.’

The young man looked sour. ‘Well, that depends who you are
and why you wish to know.’

‘Then it does?’

The young man looked even sourer.

I said: ‘The reason I want to know is because I have some
property that belongs to the Ministry of
Defence
.
Part of a set of wartime equipment.
And what I’m doing is
bringing it back.’

‘I see,’ said the young man. ‘And would you mind telling me
what this piece of equipment might be?’

‘Do you have a superior officer here?’ I asked him.

He gave a
patronising
grimace. ‘I
haven’t even said this is Ministry property yet.’

‘Okay,’ I told him. ‘If it is Ministry property, and you do
have a superior officer, tell him we have
Adramelech’s
thirteenth friend. Right out here, in the back of the car ‘

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Just tell him.
Adramelech’s
thirteenth friend.
We’ll wait here for five minutes.’

The young man pulled a very disconcerted face, and then he
said: ‘I suppose you’d better wait inside. I won’t be a moment.’

He opened the door wider, and we stepped into a
musty-smelling hall with an olive-green dado that was worn shiny with age. I
lit another cigarette and passed one to Madeleine. She wasn’t an experienced
smoker, and she puffed at it like a thirteen-year-old with her first Camel, but
right now we needed anything that could steady our nerves. On the peeling wall
just behind us was a mildew-spotted photograph of Earl Haig, and if that wasn’t
an out-and-out admission that I8, Huntingdon Place belonged to the Ministry of
Defence
, I don’t know what could have been, apart from a
tank parked outside.

I took out my handkerchief and blew my nose. What with
losing two nights of sleep, and chasing around in the bitter winter weather, I
was beginning to show all the symptoms of a head cold. Madeleine leaned tiredly
against the wall beside me, and looked too drained to say anything.

After a few minutes, I heard voices on the upstairs landing,
and then an immaculately-creased pair of khaki trousers came into view down the
stairs, followed by a crisp khaki jacket with a Sam Browne belt and medal
ribbons, and then a fit, square face with a bristling white moustache and the
kind of eyes that were crows footed from peering across the horizons of the
British Empire.

The officer came forward with a brisk,
humourless
smile. He said: ‘They didn’t give me your names, unfortunately.
Remiss of them.’

I flipped my cigarette out into the snow. ‘I’m Dan McCook,
this is Madeleine
Passerelle
.’

The officer gave a sharp, brief nod of his head, as if he
were trying I0 shake his eyebrows loose. ‘I’m Lieutenant-Colonel
Thanet
, Special Operations Branch.’

There was a silence. He was obviously expecting us to
explain why we were here. I looked at Madeleine and Madeleine looked back at
me.

Lieutenant-Colonel
Thanet
said:
‘They tell me you have something interesting.

Something that belongs to us.’

‘I guess it does in a way,’ I told him.

He gave a tight, puckered smiled.
The kind
of smile that my grandfather, who came from Madison, Wisconsin, used to describe
as ‘a close view of a mule’s ass.’
He said: ‘Something to do with D-Day,
if I understand correctly.’

I nodded. ‘You can threaten us with the Official Secrets Act
if you want to, but we know what happened anyway, so I don’t think there’s much
point. We know about the thirteen ANPs that you British loaned to Patton, and
we know what happened to them afterwards. Twelve of them came here, and were
sealed up, and the thirteenth one was left in a tank in Normandy, and
conveniently forgotten. What we have out here, in the back of our car, is your
thirteenth ANP.’

The colonel looked at me with those clear, penetrating eyes.
I could see that he was trying to work out what kind of a
johnny
I was, and what official category this particular problem fitted into, and what
the correct follow-up procedure was going to be.

But what he said wasn’t army jargon, and he didn’t say it
like a man whose decisions are usually taken by the letter of the military
rulebook. He said: ‘Are you telling me the truth,
Mr
McCook?
Because if you are, then I’m very seriously worried.’

I pushed the door wider so that he could see the Citroen
parked at the
kerb
. ‘It’s in the trunk,’ I told him.
‘And it’s the real thing. Its name is
Elmck
, or
Asmorod
.
The devil of knives and
sharpness.’

He bit his lip. He was silent for a while, and then he said:
‘Is it safe. I mean, is it sealed up, in any religious way?’

I shook my head.

The colonel asked: ‘Do you know anything about it.’
Anything about it at all?’

‘Yes. It told us it was a disciple of
Adramelech
,
the Grand Chancellor of Hell. We took it out of the tank in France because it
was disturbing the people who lived near it, and because Mile
Passerelle
believed it was responsible for killing her
mother. But since then, it’s killed three other people, and it’s threatened to
do the same to us.’

Madeleine said to the colonel: ‘Monsieur
L’colonel
,
you don’t seem at all incredulous.

I would even say that you believed us.’

The colonel managed a twisted little grin. ‘It’s hardly
surprising, mademoiselle. It has been my particular brief for the last six
years to look into that ANP business after D-Day. I probably know more about
that special division of tanks than anybody alive.’

‘Then it’s true?’ I asked him. ‘The other devils are really
here?’

‘Who told you that?’

‘An American gentleman named Sparks. He was one of the
people involved in the special division during the war.’

Lieutenant-Colonel
Thanet
sighed,
as if he expected that kind of
behaviour
from
Americans.

‘Is it true?’ I questioned him. ‘Are they really here?’

Thanet
said: ‘Yes. They’re sealed
in the cellars.
All twelve of them.
It’s been part of
my job to work out
away
of using them again.’

‘Using them again? Wasn’t once enough?’

‘Probably.
But you know what
departments of
defence
are like. Anything cheap and
unusual and lethal always appeals to their sense of
humour
.
And these days, they particularly like nasty alternatives to nuclear weaponry.

So they dug out the file on the ANPs, and sent me here to
see what I could do.’

‘And have you done anything?’ asked Madeleine.

‘Not much so far. We’ve had a couple of beggars out of their
sacks and had a look at their bones and their general physiology, and we know
that as long as their seal is broken, they can take on flesh again, and live.
That was how it was done in World War Two, and that’s why we haven’t broken any
of the seals. But we’re planning on greater things, once we’re sure we can keep
them under control.’

‘Greater things?’
I queried. ‘What
does that mean?’

‘Well,’ said the colonel, with a furrowed frown, ‘we were
going to try to conjure up their master, because he’s supposed to be several
thousand times more powerful.’

‘
Adramelech
?’ breathed Madeleine,
her eyes wide.

‘That’s right.
The great and terrible
Samarian deity.
Well, I wouldn’t have believed it back when I was at
Sandhurst
, but once they showed me what that special
division had done under Patton . . .’

He looked at me with a meaningful inclination of his cropped
and white-haired head.

‘There were photographs taken after D-Day, you know,’ he
told us.
‘Photographs and even
colour
films.
They were quite extraordinary. I should think that, apart from
the H-Bomb, they’re unquestionably the most spectacular and most secret things
that NATO
have
got.’

I said: ‘How can we control something like
Adramelech
, when we can hardly control these thirteen
devils of his?’

Lieutenant-Colonel
Thanet
rubbed
the back of his neck. ‘Well, that’s a tricky one, and that’s why I’m rather
worried that you’ve brought our friend
Elmek
over. We
don’t know how to control these devils for certain, and we certainly have no
idea what to do with
Adramelech
. We don’t even know
what
Adramelech
could possibly look like, and that’s
always supposing one could actually see such a thing with the human eye.

One way we’ve kept the situation under control is by leaving
the thirteenth devil where it was, in France. Oh yes, we knew it was there. But
we wanted to leave it there, at least until we worked out a foolproof way to
prevent these other twelve beggars from setting fire to us, or giving us
leprosy, or strangling us with our own guts.’

I reached out for Madeleine’s hand. Her fingers were very
cold when I touched them.

‘Now they’re all back together, of course, there’s a
definite risk that they’ll summon up their master,’ said
Thanet
.
‘Patton’s men prevented such a thing from happening during the war because they
promised
Adramelech
some human sacrifices, and plenty
of blood. One could do such a thing in wartime. But now, well ... the only
blood that’s immediately available is ours.’

I took out another cigarette, and lit it. Outside the door,
the snow had stopped falling, but the sky was still a grim metallic green. The
Citroen stood silently by the
kerb
, and through the
reflecting glass of the rear window, we could just make out the side of the
copper-and-lead trunk.

‘I was afraid of that, too,’ I said hoarsely, and Madeleine
looked away with an expression of such sadness that even Lieutenant-Colonel
Thanet
noticed it, and half-raised his hand to comfort her.

T
hey
gave us tea in Lieutenant-Colonel
Thanet’s
upstairs
office, and we sat on uncomfortable folding chairs while he took out his files
on the special division of tanks – codename Stripes. He leafed through them
with the quick, concentrated frown of a speed-reader, pausing now and then to
study a chart or a graph, and to glance up at Madeleine and me and give a swift
apologetic moue for the time he was taking.

The office was cold, and the pale-blue walls with their
defence
maps of Britain and Western Europe made it seem
even colder. A radiator the size of a small pig rattled and steamed in one
corner, but it was all noise and no heat. There were three khaki tin filing
cabinets on the opposite wall, and these, apart from Lieutenant-Colonel
Thanet’s
desk and three collapsible chairs, were the only
furniture.

I stood up and took my cup of scalding tea across to the
window. In the dull, glistening street below, three British Army sergeants were
lifting
Elmek’s
box from the back of the Citroen. The
devil hadn’t spoken a word since our arrival, but we knew the risks of ignoring
it. It expected to be reunited with its twelve brethren, and if it wasn’t, then
God help any of us who were close to a window, or a knife, or anything that
could cut into human (
lesh
.