The Kingdom of Shadows

by K. W. Jeter

  As Marte wept quietly, curled up in the chair on the other side of the desk, von Behren reached out and turned a few pages of the old book before him. He stopped at the woodcut print of the cloaked and hooded figure, stalking with a crossbow through a night-dark forest. The figure leaned forward, the hidden face intent upon its prey. Der Rote Jager. The story and the image had sealed itself into von Behren’s dreaming years ago, when he’d been a child and his grandmother had first read it to him as he’d sat in the safety of her lap. The red hunter, the hunter of men. The one from whom there was no escape, no matter where you fled. As the nobleman who’d broken the ancient laws ran through the entangling branches, seeking the shelter of daybreak, only to find an endless night and a red-cloaked figure barring the path before him, the same faceless image that had strode unstoppable behind him…

  Perhaps it was unavoidable, and always had been. Von Behren closed the book and let out a pent-up sigh. “We had better pack, then. You will only need to take a few things. I’m sure the gracious folk of the consulate will take care of all the rest.”

  Marte raised her head. “You would come with me?”

  He nodded. “Yes, of course.” He picked up the old book; that was one thing he would take with him, back to that land from which he had brought it. A rueful smile came to his face. “How could I not?”

  After she had hurried away, back to her little house to throw a few things into a suitcase, he went on sitting at the desk, mulling over answerless questions.

  He supposed he loved her as well. But he hadn’t realized it, until after he had given her to the eyes of other men.

  The forest snared him in its branches, as he closed his own eyes and ran toward the waiting figure.

  ***

  The house felt empty. Except for the man standing in the middle of the living room, the exact center of the little house with the other empty rooms echoing around. A man with necktie loosened and pulled askew, and a two-day stubble on a face trembling with anger.

  “Well?” David Wise turned, his fists tightened. “Any word?” His voice was a demanding bark.

  The head of security for the Wise Studios had left the house’s front door open behind him. With somebody in the state that his boss had worked himself into, Wilson knew it was best to keep his own options clear.

  “It’s pretty sure they went through Mexico, and probably on to Buenos Aires.” He glanced at a piece of paper he took from his shirt pocket, though he’d already memorized what was on it. “Apparently von Behren tried to cash a check in Tijuana. At a hotel – the clerk remembers a group of about six people speaking German, and one of them was a woman. He didn’t see her face; they hustled her in and out before he got a good look at her.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  The security head shrugged. “Three days. Possibly four.”

  “Damn.” Wise’s glare swept across the house’s doorways. “Those bastards kidnapped her.” His nostrils flared, as though catching a trace from a perfume bottle that Marte might have left open on her dressing room table.

  “Come on – we don’t know if that’s true or not.” Wilson folded the paper and put it back in his pocket. “I talked to the cab driver, the one who brought Marte home that night – he told me about seeing the man waiting inside. And that there’d been a sedan with German diplomatic plates parked across the street; you don’t see that very often. You gotta face the facts, David – they might’ve found some way to talk her into leaving. Why else would von Behren have been with them?”

  “I don’t know, and right now I don’t care.” Wise’s face looked as if it were about to explode from the pressure building up inside. “Look, you hire whoever you need, anybody who knows his way around down there. You can raise a goddamn army and send ’em if you have to. But I want you to find her and bring her back here. Got it?”

  “If that’s what you want. But the chances are good she’s already on her way back to Europe. She steps off a plane in Lisbon, or more likely, off a boat in occupied France, you really think I can have a crew waiting there to throw a blanket over her and freight her back here? If somebody thought she was important enough to sic their operatives in the consulate on, they’re not going to hand her over with a smile.”

  Wise raised a straining fist, as though he were about to cock it and throw a punch. His eyes were red slits. Wilson took a step back, getting his own hands ready to fend off the blow.

  “David… come on.” He kept his voice low and soothing as possible. “How much of a mess do you want to make this? You want to blow this up into some kind of international incident? This is already going to hit the papers pretty soon. We’ve already called in every favor we had on the books, to get all the gossip columnists and movie mags to play her up as a refugee. They’re going to tear into this like a pack of wolves, just ’cause we’ve made ’em look like fools now. And how’s it going to play when the Germans get Marte to lay out some cozy spiel about why she wanted to go home again? It’s going to be more raw meat thrown to that pack if you go carrying on like some kind of jilted lover.”

  “Screw that,” muttered Wise. “Look, I’m telling you, I don’t give a damn about any of that. I just want to find her and bring her back here, and I don’t care what it takes. And if the people I thought were my friends aren’t going to help, then fine, I’ll do it myself. But I’m not letting her go.”

  The other man shook his head. “And I’m saying you can’t do it. Don’t you understand? She’s already gone. They got something on her, they told her something to make her want to go. Even if you found her and talked to her, are you sure you want to find out what it is you didn’t know about her?”

  “The hell with you.” Tears welled up in Wise’s eyes. “Get away from me. I don’t want to hear any more crap from you.” He jabbed a finger at the security head. “You’re fired. I don’t want some disloyal bastard like you working for me.”

  “Fine.” Wilson stepped toward the door. “You want to talk to me again, you can call me at home. Or don’t; it doesn’t matter to me. But just don’t make a bigger fool out of yourself than you absolutely have to, okay?” He turned and walked.

  At the curb, pulling open the door of his car, he heard the sudden crash of sound from inside what had been Marte Helle’s house. He knew what was going on; he could see it unreeling on the screen inside his head. The overturned furniture, the lamps crashing against the walls, the manic fury pulling the heavy draperies from the windows, trampling them before smashing the glass panes themselves. David Wise was taking the place apart, stick by stick. Like a blinded, enraged Samson pulling down the temple, without benefit of two stone pillars to bring the whole thing crashing down upon his head.

  Nothing more he could do for the poor bastard. He slid behind the wheel, twisted the key in the ignition, and drove away…

  ***

  “I had the strangest dream.” Marte raised her head from the back of the airplane’s seat. She stayed curled up, legs tucked beneath her, the thin blanket sliding away. The only light came from the stars arrayed in the little window close by. “ Ganz befremdlich…”

  “Oh?” Von Behren stirred in the seat beside her, a thick book on his lap, his finger marking the spot where he had stopped reading. He raised his voice just above the drone of the airplane’s engines. “And what happened in it, child?”

  “I don’t know.” She looked out at the immobile night. Where were they? Somewhere above South America, she supposed. It didn’t matter. “I saw David.”

  “That would seem unsurprising. For him to be in your thoughts.” Von Behren rubbed his eyes; he had probably been asleep as well. “What was he doing?”

  “That was what was so strange.” Marte slowly shook her head. “He was just standing there. In that little house, the one he gave to me. Only everything… everything all around him… it was all in ruins. Everything was smashed and broken… in bits…”

  “Hmph.” Her director was unimpressed. “Perhaps it wasn’t a dream.�
�� A finger tapped the corner of his brow. “Perhaps you saw him, as he is. It happens. When you are, shall we say, close to someone. However far away.”

  She hoped that wasn’t true. Because there had been more to the dream, that she hadn’t told. When she closed her eyes again, she could see, from memory this time. The image seemed so real that she wanted to reach out to touch David, lay her hand upon his shoulder and draw him around to face her. But she knew she couldn’t. All she could do was watch him as he stood in the middle of the little house’s ruins, the palm of his hand slashed by the shards of a crystal vase. The trickle of red spattered drop by drop upon the polished floor, as he gazed numbly down at the wavering reflection of his own face…

  What does it matter? Marte pressed her face into the angle of her shoulder, trying to block out even the faint stars outside the airplane. It seemed so stupid now, so false and childish, to ever have dreamed of anything. She squeezed her eyes shut and hoped for sleep, letting the world below ebb toward wherever it might take her.

  GERMANY

  1943

  The world and its inhabitants pass before my vision like shadows; to myself I seem but a shadow playing a part, coming and going and doing without knowing why.

  - Ludwig Tieck (1773 – 1853), William Lovell (1796)

  FOURTEEN

  The guards pulled back the canvas flaps, and sunlight flooded the rear of the truck. Pavli blinked and squinted at the figures outside, gesturing with their rifles.

  “ Heraus -” The lead guard’s voice sounded bored. “You’ve arrived, time to get out. Come on, move along.”

  “Watch your head,” whispered the young man who sat next to Pavli on the truck’s splintery plank bench. “Don’t let them slug you with a rifle butt. And if they do, don’t fall down, no matter what. They’ll kick you in the spine until it snaps.”

  Pavli didn’t think any of that was going to happen. Only a handful of guards; two of them had slung their rifles back over their shoulders and now stood by the fence topped with barbed wire, idly smoking and talking to each other. The third one made little marks on a tally sheet as the Lazarene men and women began clambering off the back of the truck. The mothers handed the infants and smaller children to the fathers.

  “Don’t let them fool you.” The fellow sitting next to Pavli kept his head lowered, eyes darting quickly to follow everything that happened. He had grabbed Pavli’s arm, holding him back as the others had jostled their way out. “They act nice to you, so they can trick you into doing something stupid. Then they work you over until you’re all blood and bruises.”

  The warning, and all the others before, confused Pavli. “Why would they do that?”

  “Because they like to. They don’t need any more reason than that.” He jumped to his feet, jerking Pavli upright by his jacket collar. “Hurry – it’s best not to be the last ones out, either.” He shoved his way past the knot of elders awkwardly dismounting from the truck.

  Outside, in the middle of the fenced compound, Pavli kept close to his new adviser, the better to hear whatever came out of the corner of the fellow’s mouth. They worked themselves into the center of their crowded brethren, as far as possible from the lackadaisical scrutiny of the guards.

  “This is a new camp -” The fellow raised himself on tiptoe, to see past the others. “They’ve never brought anyone here before.”

  “How can you tell?” Pavli tried to keep his voice as low as possible, but still caught an angry glare from the other.

  “Idiot – can’t you smell it? The wood, the fenceposts. It’s all fresh stuff.”

  Pavli filled his lungs, and he caught the raw scent of new-cut lumber, like the odors that had spilled from the doorways of the carpenters’ shops back in Berlin. He hadn’t even noticed it before; he wondered how many other clues he missed, that his nervous, twitching companion seized on. Past the legs of the surrounding Lazarenes, he could see sawdust scattered around the fenceposts, that hadn’t yet been trod into the mud.

  “Is that good?” He lowered his whisper to hardly more than an exhalation.

  “I don’t know -” Pieces of the other’s face jerked, as though they had been snagged by fishhooks under the skin. “I don’t know, it all depends. If they brought the guards here from the other camps, or if they’re new as well… I don’t know, I don’t know -” His voice had risen, until the man standing in front had looked over a shoulder at him. He’d clamped his mouth shut, biting off the rush of words, and shrinking into himself where he stood, his dirty jacket swallowing him like a turtle’s shell. Pavli tried to ask another question, but the fellow just shook his head, a quick snap to either side as he anxiously watched the loitering guards.

  Pavli concentrated on keeping himself upright on his weakening legs. The long ride in the truck had tired him as much as the small children who leaned against their mothers’ skirts. He would have fallen asleep on the way, despite the jouncing of the truck as it had traveled over the rutted dirt roads, if it hadn’t been for the other’s string of murmured warnings and bits of advice. He’d latched onto Pavli even before they’d gotten onto the truck, back in the widest street of the Bayerisches Viertel, where the SS troops had rounded up the Lazarenes, turning them out of their beds into the grey morning light. The other had bumped into Pavli’s side as the uniformed men had squeezed the cluster of people tighter.

  “That won’t do any good,” the other had muttered, gazing scornfully at the few women who’d started crying. “They’ll just think it’s funny.” A nod of his head had indicated the hard faces of the soldiers.

  It had taken Pavli a few seconds to recognize the fellow, he’d changed so much. Der falsch Zigeuner. A Lazarene such as himself – the eyes of two colors told that – but one who’d always slipped away to spend days and weeks and even months with gypsies in the camps at the city’s wooded edges. With his darker skin, he’d even looked as though he’d had a tinge of those other tribes’s blood. That had been his misfortune, when the gypsies had been rounded up and sent southward in locked boxcars; he’d been caught with them. Only when his shirtsleeve had been ripped open, so that a number could be tattooed in the crook of his arm, had the error been realized. A doctor had seen the Lazarene tattoos, the blue markings of Christ’s stigmata, at the young man’s wrists, and had arranged for his release from the camp. But it had taken months for the order to work its way through the maze of paper between Berlin and the camp in Silesia, a camp near a little village that the Poles who lived there called Oswiecim. And in those months, the fellow had seen things, terrible things that he could darkly hint at, or that could be read in his haunted eyes or deciphered from the shouts with which he woke, struggling or cowering from invisible blows, while his one relation, a spinster aunt, wept and tried to soothe him, telling him that it was all right, he wasn’t behind the barbed wire any more…

  One time, a few days after the false gypsy had come home to the Lazarenes, the family in the flat next to his aunt had stupidly left a flame beneath a skillet with a scrap of fatty pork in it, and the smoke and stench of something burning, something that had once been alive, had rolled through the hallway. The fellow had run screaming into the street.

  When his keepers had let him go from the camp, they had warned him not to speak of the things he had seen there. To speak, to put into words the memories shouting inside his skull, would be crime enough. They would come for him again and take him back there. And he wouldn’t leave another time, except the way the others in the camp did, by way of the smokestacks. The birds of the sky would learn his name in the grey stormclouds. So he had kept silent, and Pavli and his brother Matthi and all the other Lazarenes kept their questions inside themselves, and let the trembling, hunch-shouldered figure pass among them like one who had returned from the dead.

  The lock of the fellow’s silence had broken underneath the canvas arch of the truck. In the moonlight that had angled through the truck’s canvas flaps, Pavli had seen the fellow’s hands clenching, the tendons drawing ti
ght beneath the skin. Then at last his sharp-boned fingers had clutched Pavli’s forearm, drawing him closer so that he could whisper his warnings, everything that he could no longer keep inside.

  “You’re lucky you look so young… that helps.” The fellow’s lips had brushed against the curve of Pavli’s ear. “But not a child. They get rid of children first, because they’re weak and cannot work. So you must always try to look strong and healthy. Throw your shoulders back when they line you up, and don’t start coughing no matter how sick you are.” The fellow’s breath had broken into panting, from the effort of imparting all the life-or-death information he had brought out of the camp. “When you grow pale, slap yourself, or rub your cheeks with little twigs, anything to get the blood up into your face. The pale ones are Muselmanner, they’ve already died, everybody knows it…”

  All the way, during the long night hours of the journey in the truck, the whispers had continued. Once the fellow had started, once broken the commandment to remain silent about what he’d seen, he couldn’t stop. Everything the false gypsy said made the assumption – a truth so obvious, like the dawning blue of the sky above the newly fenced enclosure, that it didn’t need to be spoken – that they had entered into a world ruled by murderers. The same as the world outside, but here, behind the keen-toothed wire, the murderers no longer had to pretend to be anything other than what they were. And one had to throw one’s shoulders back and rub blood up into one’s face, to please them and be allowed to live another day.