by F. G. Cottam
There was a large painting of the Führer, attired as a medieval knight, bareheaded in silver armour in the saddle of a piebald warhorse. There was another, formal painted portrait of the Nazi high command in their uniforms and leather coats at a conference table in the open air in a forest clearing. They were being served refreshments on silver trays in the picture by blond children in folk costume. The painter had been technically skilled. There was sunlight in the forest. It played, making haloes of their fine and wavy yellow hair. There was the still clutter of weaponry about the room. There was a mounted machine gun and a row of carbines and a case of black, gleaming machine pistols. Hunter could smell the thin oil used to clean and service these weapons. Mrs Mallory had a retinue of course. That’s what Miss Hall had called it at Magdalena. She had a retinue. He had seen one of them at the airport and again down among the trees outside his hotel. He had left his faint stink in Hunter’s hotel room. He wondered, were any of them here, lurking in the shadows? It seemed more likely than not. Though Miss Hall had insisted he would find this place deserted.
In the centre of the room was a large wooden table bearing a film projector. At slightly above head height, about ten feet beyond the camera’s lens, a long thin metal drum, or more accurately tube, was suspended from the ceiling by chains. It was painted green. And Hunter knew it contained the canvas screen he would unroll should he elect to switch the camera on and watch the film sitting loaded on to its large spool. Actually, there was no decision, just as there was no decision to make about his eventual visit to the cellar. But he would not watch the film yet.
Over against the far corner, on top of a bookcase, were three objects he could not make out. They were domestic items, he thought, short, pale cylinders with some kind of decoration. He walked over to examine them. He held out a hand and then his fingers recoiled. They were the shades of standard lamps. They were mounted on short wooden stands. Their bulbs were dusty. Their decoration was tattoos and they were made of human skin. Next to them, weeping out of waxed paper, was a pile of bars of soap. They had become unstable over time of course. Even in the cold of Mrs Mallory’s keep, products rendered from human fat would decay. The leakage from the soap was a dark, tarnished yellow and it glimmered wetly in the light of Hunter’s head torch.
The bookcase on top of which these souvenirs sat was filled with gilt-tooled leather volumes. It was some sort of set, like encyclopaedias. But the titles on their spines were not etched in German. They were described in some runic script alien to him. There was an ornamental key locking the glass doors of the case. He twisted this, opened the doors and pulled a volume free. The pages were hand-cut but the book was not ancient. He glanced through it. There were trial scenes and scenes of torture depicted in vivid woodcuts. There were the strange, sly creatures which had shifted on the tapestries in the canvas cathedral at Magdalena. In the woodcuts, this lupine breed played the prosecutors and the torturers. Their victims were all people. The last scene he looked at was a moonlit panorama of mass burning and dismemberment. He closed and replaced the book. Perhaps now was the time for a movie after all.
He assumed the projector was battery powered. He also assumed cold had kept the battery from corroding and leaking and spilling over the rest of the mechanism over time. But what had prevented the film in the spool from perishing? Was that the cold as well? This was a spellbound place. That was the truth of it. It assailed and insulted Mark Hunter’s usual logic. But he felt the truth of it in every prickling pore of his body and each corner of his mind. He pulled down the screen and switched on the machine, extinguishing his head torch to watch the film as every cinema purist should, in the blackest of theatres.
The film flickered into life depicting the monochrome warmth of a summer city in Germany pictured long ago. The light suggested that the sun was shining strongly from somewhere near its zenith in the sky. The short shadows cast by trees and street railings and café chairs were very sharply etched. The cobbles were glazed with brightness. But this was not the Berlin of a homesick Rupert Brooke. It was not that far back in time. A war had been fought and lost since then. This was a summer that wore the physical trappings of that defeat and its cruel and solemn consequence. Figures in uniform sat at café tables. Most of the uniforms were black. When the camera panned, swastikas were draped heavily from the ornate frontage of some civic building. Hunter thought that it could have been Hamburg or Cologne he was looking at. There were no architectural landmarks famous enough for him to know for sure. He was not watching a travelogue. The footage was more intimate and less formally structured. But he had the suspicion that the city was Berlin. Mrs Mallory had had a fondness for Berlin, even an affinity with the place.
She sat at a café table and smiled in close-up from under the shade of a wide-brimmed hat. She wore sunglasses but the seductive mouth and sharply sculpted facial bones were unmistakeable. There was a small coffee cup on a saucer in front of her and a slice of coffee or chocolate cake she had left untouched. He did not think she had ever been a woman with a sweet tooth. Perhaps the cake had been ordered for her in jest. A cigarette was balanced on the edge of the ashtray next to her coffee cup. Smoke rose thinly from it and disappeared in the brilliant light above her head. She wore a rope of pearls around her bare throat and a satin shirt tailored with collar and cuffs like a man’s. She wore a man’s wristwatch on a black leather strap. She looked at once exotic and self-possessed. She did not wilt in the heat and the brightness of the day. She bathed in them and they embellished her.
The camera shooting this scene was on a tripod, Hunter realised. You did not get this level of stability and detail with a hand-held camera. There was an establishing shot, a long shot of the principal scene and then this close-up of the film’s undoubted star. And Hunter had begun to suspect he knew whose work this polished home movie was. One of his courses at Hereford had been in the creation and uses of propaganda. They had watched Triumph of the Will over and over, analysing the seductive power of Leni Riefenstahl’s lighting and editing and her selection and composure of images. Hunter had learned about the lenses and film stock habitually used by Hitler’s favourite director. He knew her cinematic style. And he was pretty sure he recognised it now.
It was not possible to see with whom Mrs Mallory shared her table. The camera angle was too high and acute for that. But there were some items laid about it that were easily recognisable. There was a silver cigarette lighter. There was a cigar cutter and a large leather cigar tube. There was a holstered Luger pistol on a coiled belt. And there was a field marshal’s baton, a polished bar heavily scrolled and filigreed like some priceless heraldic relic on the pure white of the starched table cloth.
Mrs Mallory had been talking to someone opposite her. Her words had gone unrecorded. The film had so far been silent throughout. Now she looked back up to the camera again and smiled. I move in illustrious company, the look seemed to say. And I do so very comfortably. She plucked her cigarette from the ashtray, took a drag on it and then ground it out exhaling smoke. For a moment her face was pale behind the smoke, insubstantial, like that of a ghost. Then it resolved itself again. There was a small black beauty spot to the left of her perfect mouth. She was the very embodiment of poise and glamour. She stood and someone out of shot opened a parasol over her head. Hunter thought the parasol an unnecessary precaution given the broad brim of her hat. But the Nazi high command had been a courtly lot, heavy on chivalric gesture and extravagant good manners generally. The Führer himself had introduced a fashion for the kissing of women’s hands in greetings and farewells.
The sorceress and her unseen party moved slowly in the sunshine. She was still the only figure in the frame. They moved on to an area covered in grass. This lawn appeared scorched and scarred in dark patches. It was why the party moved so slowly, Hunter thought. It was insufferably hot. Berlin, of all German cities, had endured these endless summers of soporific heat between the wars.
The camera was hand-held now of course. And bey
ond the lithe, sinuous figure of Mrs Mallory, it showed where she was walking to. Her destination was a copse of trees perhaps a hundred feet away. In its shade, Hunter saw a waiting car, its windows and headlamps sparkling in odd shards of light let through the heavy leaf canopy above. The car wore a sleek coat of black coach paint. He whistled to himself, recognising the model. And he now knew that what he was watching had taken place no earlier than 1935. The Nazis had come to power in 1933. There was a gloating certainty about the mood of the film that suggested no martial setbacks had yet taken place. There was no sense of military urgency. It was still peacetime. He thought that he was looking at a Berlin day in the summer of 1936 or 1937. That was the time of their complacency and pomp. But that was over seventy years ago. A decade earlier he had met the woman he was watching on the screen now. And he had put her age in Magdalena at perhaps thirty-five. He had been somewhat wide of the mark. And Miss Hall, as he had always known in his heart, had been telling him the truth.
The car was a Mercedes Benz 540K, the eight-litre-engine Swabian Colossus, and only three hundred of them had ever been made after they first rolled off the production line in 1935. Himmler and Goering had each owned one. Hitler had turned his into a fortress on wheels with bulletproof glass and bodywork capable of surviving a grenade attack. You had to be very rich or very high ranking or both to own one of these coveted cars. Or you had to be a very important guest of the Reich, in which case one would be placed at your service for the duration of your stay in Germany.
Mrs Mallory had arrived at the car. Someone reached across from her left and opened the rear door for her. There was a passenger already awaiting her inside. The parasol, still up, concealed his face. Hunter saw that he was powerfully built and wore the pale-grey uniform and insignia of the Death’s Head Corps and that his rank was SS-Gruppenführer. The parasol was collapsed. Mrs Mallory took off her sunglasses and climbed into the car. It was very gloomy under the tree canopy and what light there was spangled through the leaves above uncertainly. And in the moment between Mrs Mallory taking her seat and the door being closed behind her, the face of her fellow passenger was visible only for the fraction of a second in which Hunter saw features lupine and predatory grinning balefully at him from out of the car’s dark interior.
The Mercedes was shifted into gear and moved smoothly away. The film flickered and the reel reached its end as a grey blur replaced the image on the screen. The thing in the car had not been human. Hunter tried to make sense of what he had just seen. But he could not. He switched off the projector and the whirr of it stopped and the screen went blank. The Germans had lost the war. The Nazis had been defeated. There was at least one eminent historian who put the allied victory down to the fact that morality had played such a compelling part in the motivation of soldiers risking their lives. Just cause had prevailed. But all Hunter could think of now, as he shivered in the marrow-deep cold of Mrs Mallory’s keep, was her refusal to lift her curse and the reason she had given for it a decade ago at her house in Magdalena.
My curse makes the world, to me, a more interesting place, she had said. He thought he was gaining an insight into what Mrs Mallory thought made the world an interesting place. And there was no comfort in the suspicion that her curse and its repercussions and ambitions went far beyond its implications for his son.
Adam, who was no longer Adam now, was sitting at the table with his computer when she opened his bedroom door.
‘It’s courtesy to knock,’ the voice emanating from his small frame said. The voice was gruff, adult, the accent Canadian. Elizabeth thought she knew whose it was. She was more or less certain when she saw the watercolour Adam was completing with deft brushstrokes and his tongue curling in childish concentration over his upper lip. It was a representation of the sea breaking in great waves against the granite cone of a lighthouse in a storm. And it was better than merely good. The venting fury of the storm wrought in a child’s palate of paint was a small work of elemental wonder.
‘What a marvellous painter you were,’ Elizabeth said.
The thing that was no longer Adam looked up at her and frowned. ‘I was. There’s little point in false modesty any more. I was gifted, right enough. I could paint damn near anything that meant damn all to me.’
‘You’ve gone back to the sea.’
The painting was almost finished. Adam’s childish hand hovered with the brush over it. He looked up slyly with an expression that was not his. ‘I might as well, Elizabeth. A man can’t die twice over, after all. May I call you Elizabeth?’
‘Can you not leave the child alone?’
‘Not presently. Had I not died by my own hand, things would be different. But I did and they are not.’
‘Why? Why did you?’
‘I defied the curse. I couldn’t paint, you see. The impulse to do so seemed to have deserted me. So I defied the curse. I went back to Melville for inspiration.’
‘Billy Budd,’ Elizabeth said.
Adam looked at her through Daniel Peterson’s squinting expression. ‘He’s told you everything.’
‘I think he may have held some things back.’
‘I was homosexual. Queer. Gay. That was my orientaton and choice. And of course I kept it secret. I was deep into the Melville story late one evening. The phone rang. And Mrs Mallory laughed over the line and derided me as a faggot and said she was going to tell.’
‘Mark Hunter wouldn’t have cared.’
The thing occupying Adam seemed to muse on this. ‘Maybe he wouldn’t. He was an easy-going kind of a guy, for a Brit. He was cultured and intelligent. Maybe he wouldn’t have cared. But it wouldn’t have stopped with him. It would have been the end of my military career. It wouldn’t have sat well in my trade, with my comrades. It would have been the end of who I was. It would have been the end for me altogether.’
‘She offered you the rope. And you took it?’
The Peterson thing occupying Adam cocked its head. ‘You’ve got the hots for Colonel Hunter, haven’t you, Elizabeth?’
‘Who is that really in there? Is that you, Mrs Mallory?’
‘He finds you repellent, you know. The very touch of you repulses him. You remind him far too much of his dead wife. Lillian was always an enigma to poor, dull Mark. But she was a very similar type to you, physically. He tolerates your presence because of the good he mistakenly believes you might be able to do his son. But the sight of you makes him morbid and sorrowful and he detests it.’
‘You are not welcome in this house, Mrs Mallory,’ Elizabeth said. She could hear the shudder in her own voice. She was frightened and she was hurt. She believed the truth of what had just been said to her. She believed Adam was in danger at this moment from the thing possessing him. Miss Hall was dead and their protection had gone and the guardian of the house was absent from it and far away.
The voice was velvety now when it emerged from Adam’s throat. She had been right. It was not the dead Canadian occupying the boy. It was the living sorceress who had persuaded Colonel Peterson to so abruptly take his life. ‘We’ll meet, Elizabeth. Trust me on that. I am nothing if not a woman of my word. We’ll meet in time. But it’s an encounter only one of us will relish.’
Adam slumped on to the desk top. When she lifted his head there was a smear of sea green on his cheek from the painting, not yet quite dry. Elizabeth felt that she had to take from what had just occurred anything that was positive. If she did not do this, she thought she might be overcome by misery for Adam and terror for both of them. She had suspected the sorceress of the gift of mimicry and she had been right. She had suspected something of the character of Mrs Mallory and seen that suspicion proven. It was not much. But it was something, she thought, as she hauled Adam’s slumbering body from his chair and lifted him into bed. It was something. It was enough to slow her heart and stifle the scream in her throat she thought might waken and frighten the child she carried to his rest. She wet a flannel under the running hot tap in the bathroom and, when it had coo
led enough, wiped the paint stain from Adam’s cheek as his head lay on the pillow and he slept.
The first floor of Mrs Mallory’s keep, like the ground floor, was occupied by a single enormous room. This was a dining room. A long table divided it and the wood-panelled walls were decorated with carvings furtive with movement when they were not directly looked upon. There was an old-fashioned radiogram against one wall and when Hunter raised its hinged lid there was a record on the spindle waiting to play. He switched on the machine and the record began to turn. He lowered the tone arm and static at the edge of the disc surrendered after a moment to music familiar from his own contented past. It was Gustav Mahler. It was the Ninth Symphony. It was the recording by von Karajan with the Berliner Philharmoniker. There were banners in this room too. But they were not the blood banners of cobbled riots in Nuremberg and other strongholds in the years before the Nazis swept to power. They were embroidered instead with the anarchic geometric shapes he remembered from the banners under black canvas in Bolivia a decade ago.
The second floor was occupied by a single room just as spacious but much less stark than those beneath. There were couches here of soft black hide and there were animal skins stretched across the walls. There was, against the far wall from the door, a canopied bed. And there were deep-pile rugs scattered on the floor, he saw, as Hunter approached the bed. The bedspread was ivory but the canopy black gauze and the long bolster covered in black satin. He bowed from the waist and sniffed the bolster in the slight depression where a head had lain. It smelled very faintly of a classic scent. He thought it might be Jicky. It was a Guerlain fragrance, he was pretty sure of that. He knew about perfume because his wife had so loved to wear it. Aimé Guerlain had created Jicky in 1889. It had been a youthful scent when its glamorous wearer in this bed had already been a crone in mortal years.