“How old are you, Gunter?”
“Seventeen,” he said.
I asked him where he lived and he pointed down the valley to the south-west.
“Down there,” he said.
“So, Gunter,” I said, “why were you watching us?”
“Wasn’t,” said Gunter. “I like to come up here and look at the city.”
“Is that the only reason?”
Gunter shuffled uneasily and glanced back towards the Mariensäule.
“There’s singing.”
“Singing?”
“Like a choir,” said Gunter. “Only, you know, not really a choir.”
“An invisible choir?” said Vanessa.
Gunter gave her the same look teenagers have been giving adults since the first parent said, “I don’t get it. How can marks on a cave wall be a mammoth.”
“Makes me feel peaceful,” he said. “So I come up here when things get tense.”
I asked whether anything weird had happened up at the Mariensäule recently, but Gunter said no. I prompted him a little bit, asking whether he’d seen someone up here more than once, someone who wasn’t a local.
“No,” he said. “But there were the wine drinking guys.”
“Oh, yeah?” I said as casually as I could. “What was weird about them?”
“Bunch of old guys,” he said. “Having a picnic up here—they looked weird to me.”
A bit of gentle questioning later and we established that the picnic had happened two months earlier, in August and definitely on a Saturday night, although Gunter couldn’t be sure which week. I took his home address and said that I’d be round for a chat later. This almost caused another panic attack, except Vanessa promised that we wouldn’t tell his parents how we met.
“We’ll say it’s just routine,” she said.
When we said he could go, he literally bolted. Across the road and into the trees. It was extraordinary how quiet and light-footed he was.
“How many?” asked Vanessa.
“How many what?”
“How many special people. In the whole country?”
“Thousands,” I said. “Hundreds of thousands, possibly as many as a million.”
“You don’t know?”
“They’re not all as obvious as young Gunter,” I said. “You could have gone to school with half a dozen special people and not known about it.”
“In my school?” said Vanessa. “I’d have known—trust me on this.”
“You were that nosey?”
“Where I come from knowing everybody else’s business is a competitive sport,” she said.
“Where are you from?”
“Sommerscheid,” she said, and sighed. “Where everyone is a Sommer.”
“Everyone?”
“Nearly everyone,” she said. “And anyway, that’s not the point. Surely we need to at least identify who they are?”
I’d asked the Director the same thing once.
“To what end?” she’d asked me, and now I asked Vanessa the same.
“In case they’re a problem,” she said, which was pretty much what I’d said.
The Director had slammed her fist on her desk hard enough to break her coffee cup.
“And then what?” she’d asked. “We keep files on them? Or why not make it simple and require them to carry papers or perhaps sew a symbol onto their coats. A scarlet pentagram perhaps. Would that satisfy you?”
“They’re just ordinary people,” I said to Vanessa. “Doing ordinary things.”
“And when they do extraordinary things?”
“Your boss calls my boss,” I said. “And here I am.”
Jason Agnelli's phone was waiting for us when we got back to the Post Office. There was a terse little note explaining that the lab hadn’t had a chance to run tests yet, so could we be careful not to contaminate any evidence. It was still in a clear plastic evidence bag and I picked it up and shook it. It made a noise like one of those rainmakers—like sand shifting around. The lab’s data retrieval team wasn’t going to get anything out of that phone.
Still, procedure has to be followed. So we got someone over from K17 to take photographs as I took the phone apart and laid it out on a big piece of sterile white paper. Most people don’t know what their mobile looks like on the inside, but even they would spot the fact that the main microprocessor set has been reduced to a fine white powder. To be candid, I don’t know what the microprocessors do either, but I do know what magic does to them—particularly the type cast by a human practitioner.
“What does it mean?” asked Vanessa.
“We have an unregulated practitioner on our hands,” I said.
Chapter 10:
The Toy
Museum
Officially there are only two active practitioners in the whole of Germany. One of them is the Director and the other is me. Before the Second World War there were thousands, but they either fled the country in the thirties or were exterminated, enslaved or co-opted into the Abteilung Geheimwissenschaften—the paramilitary magic wing of the Ahnenerbe. There was a whole secret dimension to the war that, according to the Director, had no overall effect on the course of the conflict.
“They cancelled each other out,” she’d said when she first briefed me.
The whole mess culminated in a British raid on the secret base at Ettersberg, which resulted in just about everyone dying on both sides. What the British did achieve was to get hold of all the Abteilung Geheimwissenschaften’s records, including a complete list of every surviving practitioner in occupied Europe. And what the British didn’t get in 1944 the Russians recovered at the end of the war. And any practitioners who’d collaborated with the AGW, or at the very least couldn’t prove they hadn’t collaborated, were tried and hung by the Western allies. Or just disappeared by the Soviets.
When the BKA was founded in 1951 the British, French and Americans refused to hand over any records, so the KDA spent a fun couple of decades locating practitioners and either recruiting, imprisoning or retiring them.
“Retiring?” said Vanessa. “You mean…?”
“They got a new identity and pension,” I said—at least that’s what the Director told me happened, and she really had no reason to lie.
“Are there any practitioners currently in my area?” asked Ralph Förstner.
Once we’d informed Ziegler of the good news, we’d rapidly escalated up the chain of command to Förstner’s office.
“Not that we know of,” I said. “It was the first thing we checked.”
After reunification it became clear that the Arbeitsgruppe Einhorn, the KDA’s counterpart within the Stasi, had managed to acquire not only the Russian lists but the British, French and American lists as well. These identified at least ten practitioners who’d been active during the war who’d successfully disappeared themselves into the general population—including, it turned out, into the upper echelons of the KDA. There followed a period of infighting and paralysis that continued until 2005, when the incoming Chancellor forced the retirement or reassignment of the upper management and appointed the Director as, well, the Director.
She was also, by that time, the only licensed practitioner left in Germany and the KDA was reduced to her, some non-magical support staff, Elton and his merry band and, of course, the Research Department. This was deemed perfectly sufficient to the KDA’s responsibilities right up to the day the Nightingale took an apprentice and we realised history wasn’t quite as dead as we thought it was.
I explained none of this to Förstner, Ziegler or Vanessa—of course.
The last estimate by the KDA’s historians was that, in the time they were unaccounted for, the wartime practitioners could have trained anything between forty and a thousand new practitioners.
I didn’t explain this either, but this time mainly because I suspected the Research Department had pulled the figures out of their arses.
“The glamour is not an easy technique,” I said. “To mak
e Jason Agnelli drink two litres of fermented grapes against his will would have required a highly trained practitioner and a great deal of ‘power’.”
“Is that what destroyed the mobile phone?” asked Vanessa.
I said that it was.
Förstner was worried about the risk to colleagues, but I assured him that the precautions I’d suggested would be sufficient.
“Particularly if our suspect thinks this is all routine,” I said. “When are the first of the interviews scheduled?”
“Markus Nerlinger is due in twenty minutes,” said Ziegler.
The rest of the Good Wine Drinking Association, Jonas Diekmeier and Simon Haas, would be coming in at staggered intervals. All except Uwe Kinsmann, who was not at his home address or work.
“Should we force an entry into his house?” asked Vanessa.
“Not without me present,” I said.
“You’d better get on with it, then,” said Förstner.
Uwe Kinsmann was definitely the wealthiest of the Good Wine Drinking Association, being in fact a gentleman of leisure. His family had been prosperous and although he had studied law at university he’d never practised. Instead, he’d chosen to eke out his inheritance by living frugally and hanging on to the family home in East Trier. This was a pale yellow three-storey terrace, part of a row that backed on to the hills that rose behind the city. It had a long thin garden that let out on to a lane behind—this was our way in.
Because Förstner was worried he’d wanted to wait and bring a Special Operations Commando down from Mainz, but I assured him that was overkill. Instead we compromised and I went in with the local intervention team, which is basically a bunch of ordinary PKs imbued with extra training, each issued with a helmet, ballistic armour and carrying a Heckler & Koch. Thankfully they didn’t wear balaclavas as well—a trend, according to my father, that comes from watching too much American TV.
Half of them waited with Vanessa outside the front door and the rest with me at the back gate. My half was led by Maximilian Uzun, whose enthusiasm for live fire exercises didn’t fill me with confidence. Still, while we were waiting for Ziegler to signal the go-ahead, I did get a chance to ask Max about his name.
“My papa liked the sound of it,” he said. “My grandfather had a fit though.”
Ziegler called us on the radio. “When you’re ready,” she said.
The garden was both neat and cluttered. Fifty metres long and only ten wide, it was crowded with a raised ornamental pool plus fountain, an arbour, and a white wooden rotunda that filled it from side to side. Uwe Kinsmann was either a keen gardener or he diverted a significant part of his inheritance to hiring a professional.
A large conservatory protruded from the back of the house proper and I tried that door first. As I touched the handle I felt the unpleasant wriggling sensation that had marked Jorg Koch’s body, the malignancy in Frau Stracker’s field and the Mariensäule.
I signalled the intervention team.
“Stay away from the conservatory,” I said.
I tried the back door, which was magic-free and unlocked. It led to a well-equipped but old-fashioned kitchen with solid dark wood cabinets, a lumpy white enamelled stove with rounded corners and a big farmhouse kitchen table. The room was clean but not sterile. The washing up had been done, but a box of cereal and a sugar jar sat on the counter with a clean bowl and spoon beside them. There was an old-fashioned serving hatch into the dining room. I had a look—a large polished mahogany table with matching dining chairs and an empty sandy coloured vase on a crimson mat in the centre. I passed quickly through a gloomily antique hallway into the dining room. There was a smell of overripe fruit which was definitely not a vestigium. I checked the heavy purple ceramic fruit bowl I found on a sideboard, but it was empty and smelt only of surface cleaner.
There was a connecting arch to the living room and a back door into the conservatory. Again there were vestigia at the threshold, so I left one of the intervention team on guard with instructions not to let anyone in.
It took me less than ten minutes to run through the rest of the house. The living room had antique armchairs with expensive floral covers and more mahogany in the form of occasional tables and glass-fronted bookcases. There was a modern flat screen TV and Blu-ray player and an expensive Bang & Olufsen stereo system that dated back to the 1960s. Upstairs was the bathroom, which seemed blindingly white after the gloomy stairs, a master bedroom that smelt like someone slept in it, and three other bedrooms that were definitely for guests who were never coming.
There were no other magical hotspots, so I told the intervention team they could stand down and let Vanessa and Ziegler in.
“There’s been some activity centred around the conservatory,” I said.
“Is it safe to go in?” asked Ziegler.
I said it probably was, but asked them to stay in the dining room while I opened the door. Vanessa sniffed as soon as she entered.
“That’s the crushed grapes,” she said. “Like Jason Agnelli’s stomach contents.”
The smell was stronger inside the conservatory. A bench shelf on one wall held a line of potted plants and a wrought iron garden table with a cream-and-tan marble top sat under the window. I touched the wrought iron frame and the vestigia was so strong that the metal itself seemed to squirm under my hand.
“Ah,” said Vanessa when she saw me flinch. “Then I’m not imagining the maggots.”
“Something wriggly, anyway,” I said, because you should always confirm a vestigium when a trainee gets it right. Otherwise they get confused. “This is where he was compelled.”
If Ziegler found this conversation strange, she gave no sign. I wondered if Vanessa had taken a moment to brief her on what exactly we were doing.
“And that’s where the crushed grapes come from,” said Vanessa, pointing to the far corner of the conservatory.
There, sitting on a layer of spread newspaper pages, were a pair of clear glass demijohns, one still full, the other empty but for a green slurry at the bottom. The newspaper and the floor were sticky with the same slurry and the pool definitely trailed towards the door to the garden. I heard Vanessa snap on her gloves and then she bent down to retrieve a round red object that had rolled behind a flowerpot.
She showed it to me—a rubber stopper sized to fit the neck of the demijohn. There was a hole drilled through its centre and the broken-off remnants of a glass tube.
“Aha,” she said, and squatted down to retrieve a blown glass tube bent into an S-shape with twin bulges along its length. “The airlock. Lets the carbon dioxide out during the fermentation.” She bent down again to examine the demijohns. “This is wrong. You only leave the pulp in at this stage if you’re making red.”
I put my hand on the tiled floor and felt twisty, burrowing vestigia again.
“This is definitely where it happened,” I said.
“Does that make Kinsmann our prime suspect?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m declaring Uwe Kinsmann a potential infraction hazard. Nobody is to approach him without me present.”
“He doesn’t fall within KDA guidelines,” said Ziegler, which impressed me because I always assumed that the local police never read them.
“I know,” I said. “But we’re definitely missing something. And I don’t want to take any risks.”
Ziegler nodded—that she could understand.
“We have our ‘play date’ in half an hour,” said Vanessa.
“Let’s hope Kelly knows something we don’t,” I said.
The creepy mechanical village occupied a whole wall inside the Toy Museum. The model’s main street and every window was crowded with toys rocking back and forth in repetitive mechanical cycles. Chimps cleaned windows and hedgehogs tended window boxes while, below, pedestrian dolls pushed carts full of pipes and a rag doll spun round and round on a ladder. The clanking of the machinery was so loud Kelly had to raise her voice to be heard.
“This reminds me of M
ainz during the Black Death,” she said. “Only that wasn’t as noisy.”
The Toy Museum was on the west side of the Market Square, less than twenty metres from the fountain where we’d first met Kelly and Morgane. Upstairs there were train sets and toys from all over the world and from all eras of history.
Morgane had grabbed Vanessa’s hand and dragged her off inside as soon as we met at the front door. Kelly and I wandered in, with the vague notion of keeping both of them out of mischief.
“So, when you were young,” I said, “what did you play with?”
“People mostly,” she said. “Sticks, stones, animal skulls. Mud is fun.” I asked about the mud, and Kelly gave me a funny look. “Are you likely to get to the real purpose of our conversation any time soon?”
“Yes,” I said. “But I’m curious about the mud.”
“You make a ball out of wet mud and throw it down on a flat stone so that it makes a funny plopping sound.”
“A plopping sound?”
“We didn’t have a whole lot to work with in those days,” she said.
Morgane skipped past us with a blond four-year-old boy in tow. Vanessa stalked after her, pausing only long enough to give me a black look before resuming her pursuit.
“Tell me about your lover,” I said.
“Did she tell you about that?”
“She said you tried to make him immortal and it went wrong.”
“That’s one way of looking at it,” said Kelly.
Morgane came back the other way, having now also accumulated a slightly older girl and what I suspected was the older girl’s teenaged sister, who was supposed to be keeping an eye on her. As they went past I heard Morgane say, “…but they had feathers on really.”
Vanessa pointedly ignored us as she walked past.
“His name was Christian and he was the love of my life,” said Kelly. “Or at least that part of my life. His family name was Stracker and his family was even more influential back then. In those days we hung around the Elector’s court because frankly that’s where the fun was.”
The October Man Page 11