by Tim Lebbon
This heavy-handed censorship wore her down, at last. Or perhaps it was the events of the day, which had been so far outside what she was used to. However it was, there seemed to be a dam inside her, with something pressing ever more heavily against it, until all at once it gave.
Herr Hartmann had mentioned the German-American Bund. Mr. Krug jumped in yet again to forestall whatever comment about the organisation might be forthcoming. And Betty jumped in likewise, full on his heels.
The Bund was not a secret. It was a group of influential men, both of business and of letters, who wished America to form a political and economic alliance with Germany. Taking it as an article of faith that a European war was coming, they wanted the USA either to remain uncommitted in that war or else to offer Herr Hitler’s fledgling fascist republic aid and support.
Only that February they had held a massed rally at Madison Square Gardens in New York. Some twenty-two thousand Americans had performed the strange, straight-armed salute, while young men dressed in quasi-military fancy dress marched up and down the aisles. A Jewish protester, one Isadore Greenbaum, had been badly beaten, and might have been killed had not officers of the New York City Police effected a rescue. The debased spectacle had been decried in every newspaper, and the Bund’s leader, Fritz Julius Kuhn, was now under arrest.
Betty reprised all this for Mr. Krug, concisely and perhaps a little smugly, although her father’s face told her very clearly that he wished she would not. It was not usual for her to defy him openly.
But then it was not usual for her to be attacked and almost abducted and for him not to believe her when she told him so. Aid and support, in the domestic as in the political sphere, should flow in both directions at once.
‘Your daughter is very forthright,’ Herr Hartmann said, with a weak laugh.
‘And very perceptive,’ Mr. Krug added. ‘I’m sorry, Miss Howard. I assumed these things were unfamiliar to you, and of no interest. Are you sympathetic to the philosophy of national socialism?’
‘Not sympathetic enough to describe it as a philosophy,’ Betty replied. ‘Daddy, might I be allowed to drink some wine?’
‘By no means,’ Adrian muttered.
‘I am of legal age.’
‘Nonetheless.’
‘Liberal democracy has failed both Europe and America,’ Mr. Krug said. ‘It has allowed the Jews to strangle the white race at the root.’
‘Is the white race a tree?’ Betty asked.
‘It’s a reasonable analogy, is it not?’
‘Possibly. But a tree’s roots are thousandfold. If you want a plant with a single taproot, perhaps you should liken the white race to a carrot or a turnip.’
‘Betty,’ her father interjected.
‘Or a burdock. I believe a burdock would also do.’
‘Betty, that is enough!’ Adrian’s furious yelp carried across the room. The mâitre d’hotel raised an eloquent eyebrow.
It was enough for all of them. The conversation finally wound down. Farewells were said, with more politesse than cordiality, and their two guests took their leave. ‘I will see you later, Mr. Howard,’ Herr Hartmann said, ‘as we arranged. And I will bring along those other friends I mentioned.’
Adrian settled the bill, leaving a meagre tip.
Riding up in the elevator, he berated Betty for speaking in front of her elders and betters. She would have been better, he suggested, remaining silent and profiting from their wisdom and experience. ‘Since we came to Europe, I hardly know you!’ he exclaimed. ‘I blame myself. I have given you too much license, since your mother died. You may depend upon it that when we are home again that license will cease.’
Betty did not reply. She might have told him that she was equally at a loss, but she was reluctant to show anything that might be perceived as contrition. Very much to her own amazement, she found that she was not contrite.
In avoiding her father’s accusing stare, her glance fell on the leather valise which he had brought with him from the table. Following the line of her gaze, he became anxious.
‘You are not to open it,’ he told her, ‘or look inside it. You are not even to touch it.’
Betty didn’t need to do any of those things. She had already seen what was in the valise. She refrained from saying so, however. She was tired, suddenly, of unspoken things and of pretence. Such as the pretence that they had come to Europe for the sake of her health, or her heritage, when in fact it was to service some tawdry intrigue that her father had initiated with Herr Hartmann and Mr. Krug.
‘I will be having some visitors in our shared sitting room this evening,’ Adrian said. ‘I assume you will prefer to stay in your bedroom.’
‘I will stay wherever I’m put, Father,’ Betty told him.
‘Impertinence does not suit you, Betty.’
No, she thought. And secrecy does not suit you. It’s exacting and you haven’t the constitution for it. She felt a vague movement of pity for him, and it took her by surprise. She had never thought of her father as someone to be pitied. But so much of his vitality had come to him reflected, as it were, from his wife. From Mhairi. Without her he seemed to her in many ways more dead than alive. The white race was not so very much like a tree, no matter what Mr. Krug might say, but a man was. Both could die without watering, and her father’s spirit was parched.
She turned away from the painful sight of him, and went into her room without saying goodnight.
The metal figure of the rider, with her sword and her whip, stood on the bedside table where she had left it. She picked it up and turned it in her hands, admiring the way it broke the light of the room’s three tiny electric lightbulbs into a boiling dazzle as it turned.
Is the heart always drawn to its own opposite? she wondered. Certainly that seemed to be true of Adrian and Mhairi. Betty’s own heart was as yet ungored, so she could only theorise.
Rebellion frothed up inside her, to an even greater height than it had reached at the dinner table. Why should she stay where she was put? She was in a strange city, full of strange sights. In two days’ time she would be back in Cincinnati, where she might shrink again into the tiny compass in which she had lived before.
She put on an outdoor coat and a pair of gloves. There was no need for either in the warm twilight of the city, but in her coat she would look like a woman on her way to an engagement and therefore would be less likely to draw attention. She took her purse for the same reason. On an impulse she dropped the metal sculpture into it. The delicate tracery of the rider’s whip might take some damage but she wanted it with her, as a talisman. A totem. She was suddenly certain that it had been left for her specifically, and for a definite purpose.
She slipped back out into the hallway, drawing the door shut behind her without making a sound. She locked it and took away the key, although she knew her father would not come looking for her. Nobody stopped her in the lobby. The doorman gave her the same astonishing, preposterous bow, and she nodded back at him, acknowledging it, as though being bowed to was something she knew all about.
She stood at the top of the hotel steps, drinking in the scene before her. A muezzin called from a nearby tower, a sweet and plangent sound. The sun was still on the horizon but the streets were a bowl full of thick, warm darkness spiced with sweat and cinnamon. Betty let it swallow her.
She went back to St. Sophia first. She didn’t go inside, but she visited the trinket-sellers again. Not all of them were still there, but she bought something from everyone she saw. A scarf from one, a matchbook cover from another, a silver necklace from a third.
In a teahouse nearby she ordered a coffee and sipped it slowly. Sweetness and bitterness swirled together on her tongue, as though they were fighting a skirmish there to see which taste would be the strongest.
She was aware that there were eyes on her as she drank. The waiter who had served her. A man sitting alone a few tables away. Another, no more than a shadow, watching from underneath an awning across the street. Perhaps sh
e was letting her pleasure show too obviously. If so, she didn’t care.
The Maiden’s Tower. The Blue Mosque. Taksim Square. Betty roamed the city with ravenous eyes, feeling that the darkness hid her perfectly—and fitted her perfectly, like some exquisite garment.
The Basilica Cistern was her favourite. She had stepped through a narrow door and descended an even narrower staircase only to find herself, a hundred feet or more below the street, in a vast cavern lit by dozens of burning torches. Towering columns held up the roof, extending into solid black far above her. No two were alike. According to the Baedeker one of these columns, with a pattern of teardrops on its side, would grant your heart’s desire if you touched the stone and spoke it aloud. Betty searched for it, and at last found it.
But as she reached out her hand to touch it, another hand gripped her wrist, tight enough to make her gasp aloud in pain. And then twisted it painfully, forcing her to turn.
‘Well,’ said Mr. Krug. ‘This has been quite a pilgrimage, Miss Howard. How bold you are, to brave Istanbul at night.’ His face was very close to hers. His smile openly mocked her.
Betty was not wont to waste words. Krug knew that he was hurting her, so there was no purpose to be served in pointing that out. Likewise, she did not plead or demand to be released. She confirmed with a glance that they had the enormous room to themselves. Nobody would hear her if she cried out.
‘Your business with my father will not be advanced by your forcing yourself on me, Mr. Krug,’ she said, bringing to bear what leverage she had.
‘I’ve no intention of doing so,’ he said. ‘Please be assured of that, Miss Howard. I’m not a man who takes amorous advantage of the weaker sex. But you saw, did you not, the contents of the valise my associate gave your father?’
‘Of course I saw it. I’m not blind.’
‘No, you are not blind. Nor are you stupid, so you divined what the money was for.’
‘American dollars to bribe American politicians,’ Betty said. ‘To buy American friends for Herr Hitler.’ It occurred to her a moment too late that she might have feigned ignorance on that score at least. Might have pretended, perhaps, that she thought only her father was being bribed. But there had been a great many notes, of high denomination, and in any case one did not have to purchase zealots. They suborned themselves.
‘Exactly. And at dinner you scarcely sounded like a friend.’
‘I might be persuaded,’ Betty said tightly. She was instantly ashamed of the lie. ‘If your Reich were less ridiculous,’ she added.
Mr. Krug smiled, perhaps at the neat alliteration.
Then he punched Betty in the face.
She felt the impact first, then the surprise, and only latterly the pain. The blow made her stagger backwards so violently she almost lost her footing. As it was she stayed upright only for a second longer. Mr. Krug’s second blow, to her jaw, felled her on the spot. When she was down on the cold stones it was more convenient for him to kick her, since it meant he did not have to bend. He kicked her a great many times.
The whole assault was so sudden and so overwhelming that it paralysed Betty. She offered no resistance, but curled in on herself like a baby settling to sleep as Mr. Krug’s booted foot sank into her stomach again and again. She folded her arms across her head to protect her face. Mr. Krug stepped down hard on her midriff and she felt bone grate against bone as something inside her broke.
Breathing heavily now, Krug broke off from his assault to pick up Betty’s purse, which she had dropped. He opened it and emptied its contents onto the stones. Betty was confused for a second. Surely he did not mean to rob her as well as murder her?
No. But it would do no harm if it seemed that someone else had robbed her. Her death might plausibly be an accidental side effect of an act of theft. He leaned down to pick up Betty’s billfold, which her mother had embroidered for her the year before she died.
Staring past him, Betty saw through unfocused eyes that they were not alone after all. Someone was leaning against a pillar a little way off. He swept the tails of his long coat away to left and right with a flick of his hands so that he could hook his thumbs in his wide leather belt.
‘Well this is a bad state of affairs,’ he said.
Krug did not turn, or seem to hear. He was taking the money from the billfold and transferring it to his pocket. Then he tossed it to the ground again.
‘Help me,’ Betty whispered.
‘Aye,’ the man in the long coat said. ‘I’d like nothing better. But I had my three sorties and now I’m forbid. The rules don’t bend for the likes of me.’
Three sorties, Betty thought. The first, of course, had been in Avoca, in the rain. When she hid like a child among the trees. This room was like another forest, with trees made of stone instead of wood. But if it was a forest she was down among the roots.
Thousandfold.
Mr. Krug trod down on Betty’s elbow, and shifted his weight. She screamed, which seemed to be the only point of the exercise. He was not merely killing her now, he was hurting her—surrendering to something in his soul that had nothing to do with National Socialism or the future of the Aryan race.
‘This might help you, though,’ the pale man said. Except that he was a woman again. She went down on one knee to point at the little metal figure of the horse and rider, which had spilled out of Betty’s purse along with everything else. ‘I left it with you for that purpose. If you touch it, you’ll be able give this unseemly man as bad a turn as he’s giving you. You’d better reach for it, deoraí. I’ve no other counsel to give you.’
Betty stretched out her hand. But Krug had gone back to kicking her in the stomach, and her own nerves betrayed her, making her fold inwards on the pain. With a supreme effort, and a great deal of pain, she used her right arm (which Krug had certainly broken) to roll over on her back. From this angle she couldn’t see the little metal figure but she knew it was within reach of her left hand.
She groped for it, even as Krug knelt and locked his hands around her throat, cutting off her breath.
Nothing.
Nothing again.
And then the touch of the smooth, cold metal against the tip of her little finger. She had hoped that power might flow into her at once, sufficient to break Krug’s fierce grip. She needed air. Her brain was buzzing and her eyes were darkening.
‘Ask her, so,’ the woman murmured urgently in her ear. ‘For the whip, or for the sword. It’s all one to her.’
The sword, Betty thought. Please, little spirit, locked in tin. The sword for me.
Of a sudden she felt the weight of it, lying across her outstretched hand. She closed her fingers around its hilt. She had no strength to swing, no room to thrust. She did the only thing she could do, which was to lift it up at an angle, her wrist twisted back on itself, and bring it down on Krug’s arm, near the shoulder.
The blade was almost invisible, just a rumour of movement in the air, but it sliced through Krug’s arm, severing it, and bit deep into his chest. His eyes went wide with shock and dismay. His mouth opened, but no sound came out: only a rush of blood, joining the torrent of the stuff that was gouting from his wound. He was dead before he fell. He sprawled forward onto Betty’s body, with the sword between them. The blade settled itself even deeper into his flesh, but where it touched Betty it swirled like smoke and did no harm.
He was too heavy for her to get out from under him, so she sliced him into smaller pieces and removed him a little at a time. When she was finally able to sit up she was boltered from head to foot in blood and gore.
The pale woman offered her a hand, but Betty did not take it. ‘I can’t stand,’ she muttered hoarsely. ‘I need a doctor. I think I might die.’
‘You might, if you wish it,’ the woman allowed. ‘You might do anything, if you wish it. But equally, you might change this flesh for something better. You could scarcely do worse. The iron country has used you badly.’
She showed Betty how to effect the transformation
. It was not difficult, but it was strange enough that Betty was slow and clumsy at first. While she worked she asked the pale woman her name. The woman said it was Ériu, and was at pains to differentiate herself from many other Érius she thought Betty might have heard of.
‘What does deoraí mean?’ Betty asked her as she went on repairing her broken bones. She asked mainly so that the woman would carry on talking. The sweetness of her voice both pleased and reassured her.
‘It means…’ The pale woman paused, her confidence dissipating. ‘I told you I had no skill with their languages. I make do, with a spell here and a charm there, but I’ve never studied them. Just as I’ve never studied the underside of stones. I suppose you might say exile, but it’s got a different turn to it. It means the exile coming home.’
‘I’m not,’ Betty pointed out. ‘Either of those things.’
‘No,’ the pale woman said. ‘Your mother was the exile, and you’ve never known the Land yourself. You will know it, though. And you’ll think of it as home as soon as you see it.’
‘My mother was born in Ireland.’
‘No, in Tír Tairngire. It comes quite close to Ireland, from time to time. It comes close to many places. But she left to go a wandering, as some will, and her heart involved itself with another place.’
‘With Cincinnati.’
‘Aye, possibly. The Queen sent emissaries there, but your mother was a stubborn one and wouldn’t go with them. It hurt her to admit that she was wrong. Even when she sickened, from being too long in the iron country. Even when she knew she would die there.’
‘What about me?’
‘We didn’t know about you. Not until ten days ago, when you stood in bare feet on soil that was friendly to us. The soil knew you and spoke out, and the Queen sent me off hell for leather to fetch you. But I’ve made only a bad fist of it, haven’t I?’
‘You saved my life,’ Betty pointed out. ‘I’m not inclined to complain about the terms on which you did it.’