by Mathew Carr
“Pretty isn’t it?” Weygrand said. “Arenales had the estate modeled on his family’s estates in Cuba. He even has negroes, and the same breed of dogs they used to catch the slaves.”
He chuckled as they walked around behind the outbuildings. The barking immediately began again, as they came alongside a large cage, where two red-eyed Dobermans hurled themselves against the bars.
“Behold the Raval Monsters!” said Weygrand.
Even with the bars between them, Lawton flinched at the sight of the drooling red-eyed hounds. Arenales made some sucking noises and the dogs immediately fell silent and the dogs immediately fell silent and began to pace restlessly up and down the cage. They continued to walk around the back of the house, until Lawton saw what looked like a chapel or sanctuary some thirty yards behind it. Another armed guard was standing outside the doorway, and the two guards remained with him while Klarsfeld and his driver led Lawton into the building. At first sight the chapel looked like any other place of worship, with its altar, dusty pews, and mouldering hymn books. But now Lawton’s escort led him down a flight of stone stairs near the choir, and waited while Weygrand unlocked two large doors that looked as though they had been recently installed.
The driver pushed Lawton forward into a vaulted tunnel that might once have been a tomb or catacombs. The tunnel was longer than the chapel itself, and Lawton was surprised to see that it was dimly lit with electric lighting. He heard the humming of a generator and he also thought he heard the sound of voices crying out in fear or pain. The voices grew louder as they walked toward the end of the corridor, and seemed to be emanating from the floor itself. They were about halfway along the tunnel when he noticed the metal grill just ahead of him and the ladder lying next to it. As they came closer he stared down at the faces peering up at him through the gloom.
“Señores!” cried a male voice. “Help us! Por favor, señores!”
Lawton thought there were at least five people down there, but he had no time to look as Klarsfeld’s man pulled him roughly away toward a doorway at the end of the corridor. Weygrand opened the door and stepped inside. Lawton followed him into a large laboratory-like room of recent installation, with a linoleum floor and crisp white walls that had clearly been recently plastered. One wall was lined with cabinets, a sink, and a long counter, and directly opposite there was another counter containing measuring instruments of the type that Lawton had seen in Foulkes’s study, a shelf containing a small collection of skulls, and a display of Bertillonage photographs of frightened-looking men and women.
At the far end of the room he saw the same black sun-wheel painted on the wall, and immediately in front of it, two men in bloodstained white coats were bent over a man who was lying naked on an autopsy table, with a bloody bandage wrapped around his right thigh. The man looked as if he was dead or dying, and a bottle was hanging upside down from a tall frame containing a thick orange liquid, that was connected to his right arm by a rubber tube.
Lawton was so shocked by this that he did not immediately notice the two wooden restraint chairs, of the type that he had once seen in his mother’s asylum, standing alongside each other about two feet part, facing the far wall like seats in a theater. One of the chairs was empty, but as he came alongside the other he saw Esperanza Claramunt was sitting with her eyes closed and her head fixed in the wooden box, with straps tied around her feet, arms, and chest.
Lawton rounded on Weygrand. “What the hell have you done to her?”
“Nothing—yet. She was hysterical when she woke up so we gave her a sedative.”
“So she’s another of your ants? Like him?” Lawton looked at the wounded man in the chair.
“His name is Klimov. A Russian Ugarte brought us from the Raval. Now you can’t tell me that Bolsheviks are innocent. And Miss Claramunt has been troublesome—like you.”
“And those poor bastards out there?”
“The detritus of humanity, Mr. Lawton. Worthless mouths. All of whom are about to serve a useful purpose for the first and only time in their lives. So that something greater than they will ever be can exist and thrive.” Weygrand turned to the two men standing over Klimov. “Well?”
“Pulse stopped fifteen minutes ago, sir. Subject did not respond to plasma transfusion.”
“Well get him out of here then.” Weygrand opened a metal door onto a refrigerated room that gave off a strong smell of ammonia. At first Lawton thought it was a mortuary, then he saw the rows of bottles on the shelves. Most of them were empty, but some were filled with powder or transparent liquid. Weygrand opened a metal cupboard that looked like a large safe to reveal rows of bottles of blood.
“This is the future, Mr. Lawton,” Weygrand said proudly. “Imagine entire rooms like this. Filled with blood, donated in advance. All categorized according to type and ready to be distributed to whoever needs it. Imagine portable refrigeration units that can transport blood directly to our field hospitals.”
Weygrand was standing so close that Lawton could smell his eau de cologne and the tobacco on his moustache. Suddenly he jerked his head back and drove his forehead hard between the bulbous eyes. Weygrand let out a curse in German and put his hand up to his bleeding nose, as Klarsfeld’s driver yanked Lawton’s arms up behind his back, forcing his head downward.
“No!” Weygrand tilted his head back and dabbed at his nose with a handkerchief as Klarsfeld gripped his pistol by the barrel and prepared to bring the handle down on Lawton’s head. “Put him in the chair.”
Klarsfeld expertly flipped over the pistol and held it against his forehead. “One more trick like that and I’ll put one between your eyes. Just like I did with the fat man.”
Lawton stared back at him. “I think you should. Because if you don’t I swear I’m going to kill you.”
Klarsfeld gave a vicious jab to Lawton’s solar plexus that made him double over once again. His driver pushed Lawton back into the room and unlocked his handcuffs while Klarsfeld stood with the Parabellum pointed at Lawton’s head. By the time Weygrand came back into the room, Lawton’s hands, feet, and chest were securely strapped into the chair. The box only allowed him to see straight ahead and slightly to the side, and he watched the two orderlies carry Klimov’s body out on a stretcher.
“I hope you enjoyed that little moment,” Weygrand said. “Because I can assure you that you are not going to enjoy the rest of your day. And the next time blood flows in this room, it won’t be mine.”
The three of them walked away with the two orderlies and Lawton heard the door shut behind him. Once again he heard the moaning prisoners and then the voices and the footsteps died away, and the only sound he could hear was Esperanza Claramunt’s breathing.
“Miss Claramunt,” he said. “Wake up!”
There was no answer. Lawton pushed against the straps with his arms and legs, but he could barely move them. After a few minutes he gave up the effort and the fear spread through him, as he looked at the bloodstained dentist’s chair and the strange black cross. He had been sitting there for about half an hour when he heard footsteps coming down the corridor and the sound of someone whistling a tune he did not recognize. Once again the voices in the corridor began shouting and pleading, and then the door opened and he heard the footsteps squeaking on the linoleum floor, but it was not until they came alongside and in front of him that he looked up and found himself face-to-face with Randolph William Foulkes.
29
For a few delirious seconds Lawton thought his brain was playing tricks on him again, but the man standing in front of him in the blood-speckled coat looked exactly like the man in all the photographs he had seen. He had the same white Victorian sideburns, the same bushy eyebrows, and domelike forehead, the same remote expression in his eyes, as if he was gazing at some point beyond the present. But the Foulkes in the photographs exuded wiry strength and ageless resilience. The man in front of him looked gaunt and slightly ill, and as frail as he would expect any man in his late sixties to be.
“Mr. Lawton,” he said. “So we meet at last.”
Foulkes’s voice was soft and almost sorrowful, and there was a gentleness in his smile that Lawton found disconcerting, as he tried to reconcile the face that he remembered from so many photographs with the burned and almost faceless body that he had identified in Quintana’s autopsy room less than a fortnight ago.
“You seem surprised,” Foulkes said. “Can’t say I blame you. It’s not every day you find yourself speaking to a dead man.”
“But everything matched!” Lawton exclaimed. “The prints. The missing toes. Even the measurements.”
“I’m sure you were very thorough. More than anyone here would have been. But we were very thorough, too. The prints weren’t mine. And the toes were removed—under anaesthetic. And the measurements, well we were very careful in our choice.”
“Your choice?”
“The corpse you examined was a tramp by the name of Biggins. I knew him from my work. He looked a lot like me. Close enough not to be able to tell the difference after a bomb explosion at any rate. Dr. Weygrand brought him here under hypnosis. Poor chap never knew what was happening, not even when he died. We expected a coroner’s report and perhaps a visit from London, so we substituted his prints before I left London.”
“So there was no Marie Babineaux?”
Foulkes shook his head. “Afraid not. The money was mine and it went to me—to the work to be precise. There had to be some explanation for my presence in Barcelona. We knew the French secret service had taken an interest in the Explorers Club. It was only a matter of time before my government did the same. So Klarsfeld arranged the little incident at the Bar la Luna to ensure that I disappeared. So completely that no one would ever find me. Ah, I see the sleeping beauty awakes.”
Lawton looked over at Esperanza, who stared back at him like a frightened rabbit. “Harry?” she said. “What’s happening?”
“I don’t speak much Spanish, Mr. Lawton,” Foulkes said. “But tell this creature that she will have to be quiet or I shall have to give her another sedative. I have no patience for bleating women.”
“Her name’s Esperanza,” Lawton said.
“I know who she is. And I know what she is. One of Ferrer’s disciples. Polluting the children of the slums with nihilist ideas. Well not anymore. Her career is over—and so is yours.”
“What’s he saying?” Esperanza asked weakly.
“He says you have to be quiet,” Lawton replied, as Foulkes walked over to the counter and began to take out various objects from the cupboard.
“But what’s he going to do with us?” she insisted.
“I told her not to speak,” Foulkes said. “I won’t ask again.”
Lawton repeated the warning. Foulkes inspected a large cone-shaped bottle, with a glass tube that reached nearly to the bottom, and two more tubes fixed into the cork top, one of which had a little bellows attached to it.
“So you’re not dead, but you are a madman and a traitor,” Lawton said.
“I can assure you I’m not mad. And just because I have a loyalty to something greater than my own country does not make me a traitor.”
“The Kaiser, you mean?”
Foulkes shook his head. “Germany is merely a means to an end.”
“And what end would that be?”
“The race, Mr. Lawton! The race!”
“What race?” said Lawton scornfully.
“The Aryan race.” Foulkes turned around now, and Lawton saw that he was smiling faintly and holding a pair of scissors. “The children of the sun. The race that makes civilization possible. The race that has created everything good and beautiful in the world. That is responsible for every great step that humanity has ever made. Of course I would hardly expect someone with your lineage to understand that.”
“My lineage?”
“You are half-Irish and half-savage, Mr. Lawton. An unhealthy admixture. No doubt it accounts for your… condition.”
“I wonder what accounts for yours,” Lawton retorted.
Foulkes showed no sign of emotion. “I’ve spent much of my life studying people like you. Black men. Yellow men. Half-castes and weaklings. And I can tell you we are not prepared to lose the flower of our race in a fratricidal war, and see our people overrun by niggers and Chinamen so that the sons of Judah can profit. Of course they never fight—they merely make it possible for others to kill themselves so that they can feast on the ruins. And this coming war will kill more people than any in the whole of history. This is why our work is so important.”
“Harry?” Esperanza said.
“I told you to shut up!” Foulkes looked suddenly furious. “There are no equal rights in here.”
“Is that what you were doing when you were murdering mad people at Everdale?” Lawton asked. “Defending civilization?”
“You have been thorough.” Foulkes stepped away from the counter, holding a pair of scissors. “My wife chose surprisingly well. I didn’t murder them. I was experimenting with transfusions—injecting patients with my own blood or the blood of other patients to see what effect it had on them. I’d already carried out some transfusions with rabbits at my home, and it was a logical development to continue these experiments on humans. Some of them died in the process—it was experimental after all. It wasn’t until I met Dr. Weygrand that I heard of Landsteiner’s categorizations and began to understand the negative consequences of mixing inappropriate blood types.”
“And now you’ve turned Barcelona into your personal slaughterhouse.”
“A laboratory, Mr. Lawton. Do be civil. For some of the most important scientific work of the century. We are doing what any sane country should be doing. I would have preferred to carry out this work in my own country, had we not allowed ourselves to be held back by sentimental humanism. What else was Everdale but a pointless sop to the conscience? You know one of my subjects used to smear his cell with his own feces?” Lawton tried to pull away as Foulkes began to cut the sleeve of his shirt and jacket, but the straps held him fast. “There was also a woman who murdered her own baby because she thought Satan had impregnated her. Why should such people be kept alive? What purpose do they serve?”
Lawton thought of his mother and remembered how often he had asked the same questions. “You might like to think of yourself as a scientist,” he said. “But to me you’re just one more murdering bastard.”
“Of course you would think that,” Foulkes replied. “Because you’re a policeman. And the Irish are a sentimental race. Always fond of a drink and a song. But sooner or later governments will come to their senses.” Foulkes pulled back the cut material to expose Lawton’s bicep. “Nature always eliminates or dispenses with the weak and the superfluous. This is how some species survive and others decline. Nations and races are exactly the same. Even the Committee on Physical Deterioration recognized this, but they weren’t prepared to take the necessary preventive measures. In the future other governments will be less delicate. There will be laboratories just like this, eugenics laboratories sanctioned by the state, entrusted with the defense and preservation of the race. And they will look on us as pioneers—people who were prepared to act when no one else would.”
“You mean the Explorers Club?”
“Indeed. Though most of us had met before that—through the Institute for Racial Hygiene. That’s how I met Dr. Weygrand—a true visionary. It’s been a privilege to work with him.”
“So the Explorers Club wasn’t trying to reach the North Pole.”
“We were looking for the ruins of Thule, Mr. Lawton. The capital of Hyperborea. Where our race was born.”
“That explains the black sun and monk’s robes.”
“Correct.”
“Have you ever thought that you might be the ones who belong in an asylum—or a freakshow?”
Foulkes stiffened. “There are 30,000 blind people in Spain, Mr. Lawton, and 37,000 deaf mutes, 67,000 insane, and 45,000 morally deformed. The police are useless. The off
icials are corrupt. In England or even in Germany our work might have come to the attention of the authorities. Here we are able to work unmolested, and I can assure you that one day these rooms will be a place of pilgrimage.”
“And one day you will hang.”
“I doubt it.” Foulkes pressed on the vein just above Lawton’s elbow with his thumb. “You have good veins. Dr. Weygrand will be pleased. I have to admit I wasn’t enamored with the monster idea. My concern is science not politics. But Arenales believes his army friends will be sympathetic to our cause. And if his theater achieves its purpose and helps to bring about a more conducive and supportive environment for our work, then so be it. In any case we intend to be more discreet from now on. There will be no more bodies in the streets. And no more monsters.”
* * *
Lawton heard voices in the corridor now, and a moment later the door opened once again and Weygrand appeared, accompanied by Klarsfeld and his driver. Weygrand was wearing a white coat and a bandage over his nose, and he stared coldly at Lawton’s arm.
“We’re ready to begin,” said Foulkes. “Let’s take a sample, shall we?”
Lawton tried to look around as Weygrand and Foulkes walked out of his line of vision, but it was impossible to move his head. He heard the sound of running water and drawers being opened and closed, before Weygrand returned holding a needle. Weygrand expertly slid the syringe into his vein and filled it with blood while Foulkes, Klarsfeld, and his driver stood watching. When the syringe was full Weygrand withdrew the needle and walked away. He returned a few minutes later, holding a rectangular glass plate like the one that Lawton had seen in the mortuary.
“Blood type A, Mr. Lawton. As I expected.”