The Devil's Piper

by Sarah Rayne

  My grandfather’s master . . . The silence closed down, menacing, filled with creeping evil.

  At last, Kate, scarcely believing her ears, said, ‘Hitler?’

  ‘Hitler,’ affirmed Vogel. ‘My grandfather was one of his most trusted confidential aides. How quick you are, Kate.’ He sounded pleased, as if he was complimenting a particularly apt pupil. ‘Karl tried many times to find Ahasuerus and to raise him, but he never succeeded. He managed to acquire Ahasuerus’s music, but never Ahasuerus himself. But now I have done so. And in a very short time, I shall bring the two together. Ahasuerus will walk to the music’s bidding, and I shall have absolute mastery over the young minds I have spent so many years in drawing about me.’

  Kate said, ‘We’re in Eisenach Castle, aren’t we? Yes, I thought so. Complete with gas chamber and crematorium.’

  She glanced about her, and Vogel agreed. ‘Yes, Eisenach had the machinery for disposing of some of the subhumans.’

  ‘Subhumans?’

  ‘Jews,’ said Vogel, and Kate felt as if something had traced a cold, slimy path down her spine.

  She said, ‘At least you told me the truth about our destination. This is where Hitler’s people coerced Jude Weissman to work for them, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, Weissman needed no coercing,’ said Vogel at once. ‘He liked money and he liked women. He was very vulnerable to bedroom persuasions and easy riches.’

  For some illogical reason this careless dismissiveness angered Kate. Had Jude really bartered his marvellous shining gift for sexual gratification and wealth? But she only said, ‘If you want Richard, you can get him for yourself. I’m not going to make any fake recordings. In any case, phone calls can be traced, had you thought about that? Richard could have the police on to you within an hour of making the call.’

  ‘Not if he was told that to call in the police would be dangerous to you.’

  ‘Death threats?’ said Kate contemptuously. ‘You’ve missed your vocation, Conrad. You ought to be writing cheap thrillers.’

  ‘I’ve already said I shan’t kill you,’ said Vogel. ‘There are far more interesting things that I can do to you. And a short while ago you expressed a preference for being – dealt with by Ahasuerus.’

  ‘What about it?’ Kate glared at him, but a dreadful suspicion was beginning to form.

  ‘It’s a very intriguing idea,’ said Vogel. ‘The more I think about it, the more intriguing it gets. Ahasuerus is in here with us, you know. Or didn’t you know? Haven’t you heard him creeping along the unlit tunnels, dragging his mutilated body nearer and nearer?’

  ‘No. And I don’t believe you.’

  ‘The mutilations would certainly not prevent him from – finding you attractive,’ said Vogel, as if Kate had not spoken. ‘And women were Ahasuerus’s downfall more than once, if the legend speaks truly. He had a weakness for red hair, but I think he would find you attractive, Kate. And I think that after a night shut in here with him, you would feel very differently about sending that message to Richard. Assuming that is, you retained your sanity. If you didn’t, I should be forced to send for Richard on my own account – or perhaps the doctors would do it for me.’ He began to move back to the steel doors, still keeping the gun levelled.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ said Vogel, ‘my concert will be starting, and my musicians will play the music that has gone by so many names, but that you and I know as the Devil’s Piper.’ He paused, regarding her. ‘Once that begins, Ahasuerus will be forced to obey it. And so once it begins, he must be inside the castle. He must be within reach of the music.’

  ‘You’re really going to present him to Serse’s People as their Messiah?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Vogel softly. ‘Yes, I am. But before that happens, there is a whole day. And a whole night, Kate. And so I am going to leave Ahasuerus in here with you. He will take a little time to drag himself through the dark tunnels towards you, but he will find you, Kate.

  ‘I think that by the time I come back for him, you will have agreed to do what I want.’

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Night had fallen and Isarel had taken over the wheel again when they finally turned on to the carpark of the Black Duke, which was where Lauren, planning ahead with typical efficiency, had booked rooms.

  ‘Below the castle but near enough to be convenient,’ said Ciaran, stretching his cramped limbs and looking about him.

  ‘In its shadow,’ said Isarel, who had been silent for the last few miles. Moira glanced at him uneasily.

  Moira was not very used to hotels, but she thought the Black Duke struck an eminently satisfying note. It was a low, rambling building, with the rooms pleasingly scented by old timbers and centuries of woodsmoke, and with uneven floors and small windows with criss-crossed leaded lights.

  Ciaran said, ‘It’s eight o’clock. I don’t think there’s much we can do tonight, do you?’

  ‘The concert starts the day after tomorrow,’ said Isarel, nodding towards a familiar poster on the green baize board in reception, and Moira felt a chill.

  ‘So I see.’

  ‘Which means,’ said Isarel thoughtfully, ‘that we’ve probably got just under twenty-four hours to get Ahasuerus and find Kate before Eisenach is teeming with the faithful answering the call.’

  ‘The f—Oh. Serse’s People, yes, of course. Listen then,’ said Ciaran, ‘let’s unpack, meet up for dinner and discuss what we’ll do next.’

  In the end, they ate in the bar: ‘Where,’ said Isarel, ‘we might pick up a bit of gossip about the concert. How’s your German, Moira?’

  ‘Non-existent, I’m afraid.’ German had not been thought a necessary language by the nuns. ‘I did French at school,’ she said. ‘But I don’t suppose that’ll be much help.’

  ‘You never know. I’ve got some German,’ said Isarel. ‘But it’s rusty. Ciaran, do you have the gift of tongues, at all?’

  ‘Far from it. I might make out the odd phrase or two.’

  ‘We’ll have to do the best we can.’

  Moira enjoyed eating in the bar, which was full of local people and which appeared to be the focal point of the entire village. They were served home-made vegetable soup and huge puffy omelettes, with buttery mushrooms and crisply pink ham spilling out.

  ‘We’ll keep the dining room for when we celebrate Kate’s rescue,’ said Ciaran.

  ‘And Vogel’s downfall and Ahasuerus’s re-interment,’ put in Isarel.

  ‘You make it sound like a task of Herculean proportions. Do you have to be so sepulchral?’

  ‘Somebody’s got to keep the party sober,’ said Isarel, grinning.

  ‘If you’re keeping anything sober it’ll be the first time in recorded history. Are we having coffee? Oh no, we can make it for ourselves upstairs. More private for the council of war.’

  They held the council of war in Moira’s bedroom which was the largest. Father would have had a fit at the thought of his little girl entertaining two men in her bedroom. He would have had apoplexy at the sight of the bottle of whiskey which Isarel produced and poured into tooth mugs.

  ‘Do you mind, Moira? It helps me to think.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘If,’ said Isarel, perching on the windowsill where Moira had left the curtains open so that she could see the sweeping forests outside, ‘if the Serse Concert starts the day after tomorrow, we’ve got to get inside Eisenach beforehand.’

  ‘You mean – go up to the castle openly?’ Moira stared at him.

  ‘Yes. I don’t think we dare wait until the concert,’ said Isarel. ‘But if we go up tomorrow, there’ll be preparations going on – people setting up chairs and lights, people delivering things. Maybe even rehearsals for the orchestra – yes, that’s a thought, if there’re rehearsals going on, we might even manage to play the music – the Piper music. I mean – virtually unnoticed.’

  ‘Simply act as if we’re part of it all,’ said Moira thoughtfully.

  ‘Yes, exactly. Vogel might be expecting an att
empt to get Ahasuerus and Kate, but he’d probably think we’d wait for the concert to start. And even if we encounter him, he won’t recognise us, he’ll assume we’re Serse’s People. He can’t possibly know every one of them.’

  ‘He’ll recognise you,’ said Ciaran, looking at Isarel from under his lashes. ‘Jude reincarnated. Or hadn’t you thought about it?’

  There was a rather abrupt silence. Isarel looked as if he was about to say something explosive, and Moira, hoping to head him off, said, ‘Could we divide our strengths and two of us go openly into the castle as if we’re part of the concert, while the other goes in separately and secretly? Because even if Vogel’s expecting one attack, he probably won’t be expecting two, and whoever stays out of sight might find out quite a lot about the rest of the castle.’ The two men looked at her approvingly.

  ‘That’s a very good idea,’ Isarel replied. ‘A two-pronged assault. You and I had better be Serse’s People, because of luring Ahasuerus—’ He grinned at her suddenly. ‘Red hair and Jude’s shofar. My God, what a combination. Ahasuerus won’t stand a chance. Ciaran, how do you feel about searching for Kate while we do the luring? You’re maybe a touch – mature – to be an acolyte anyway—’

  ‘I wondered when someone would say that,’ said Ciaran. ‘I might have guessed it would be you. Yes, all right. I’ll do the dangerous, difficult part while you have the excitement and the limelight. But don’t blame me if they think you’re Jude’s ghost walking.’

  Isarel drained his whiskey abruptly. ‘Do you have the feeling of a pattern being repeated here?’ he asked. ‘The concert and Vogel and Eisenach?’

  ‘I do,’ said Moira, at once. ‘I feel as if we’re falling into a time warp. It’s Jude playing the Devil’s Piper all over again, isn’t it? The audience won’t be as grand, but almost everything else will be the same.’

  ‘And,’ Isarel added, ‘the intention behind it all seems to be sinisterly similar, have you noticed that as well?’

  ‘I have,’ said Ciaran. ‘And that’s the bit I like least of all. Conrad Vogel’s using the music to gather young people about him.’

  ‘Yes, but he only wants the best: the gifted, creative ones. That’s why his concerts have been aimed so strongly at students.’

  ‘He’s being selective,’ said Moira.

  ‘Exactly. And over half a century ago a man called Karl Vogel came to Eisenach Castle to set up a concert, and Karl was very close indeed to a madman who nurtured a warped plan of creating a Master Race,’ said Isarel.

  ‘Selective breeding,’ Ciaran commented. ‘Genetic engineering. Hitler’s Golden Aryan People.’

  Moira, listening intently, felt as she had felt before, the rapport between these two. They finish one another’s thoughts. And then: yes, but it’s Isarel who starts the thought. He pounces on your thoughts and understands them before you’ve even got them half framed in your own mind.

  ‘I think Conrad Vogel is trying to do what Karl did all those years ago,’ said Isarel. ‘But on a – a more spiritual plane. I think that’s what this Serse Cult is all about. The control of minds – young, gifted minds.’

  ‘Dear God.’

  ‘Don’t blaspheme.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  Moira, leaning forward, asked, ‘Who set that first concert up? Was Jude invited to Eisenach with an orchestra to – to perform, or what? I wouldn’t know how these things work.’

  ‘The story is that Baron von Drumm – the owner of Eisenach Castle – was so flattered at the request to use the Castle’s name for the orchestra that he asked Jude to give the orchestra’s first public official performance there. But in fact it was Karl Vogel who approached Jude while they were both in Vienna – my grandmother had letters from Jude describing the meeting, so it’s documented. There was some kind of fairly formal lunch I think, thick with Schutzstaffel including Himmler himself.’ He glanced defensively at the other two, and said, ‘He kept questionable company, didn’t he?’

  ‘So do a good many people,’ observed Ciaran. ‘Including monks and barristers and musicians.’

  Moira, who was making coffee, said carefully, ‘Would it help us to know about the lunch with the Schutzstaffel?’

  ‘You mean, do I mind talking about it?’

  ‘Well, yes, that’s what I did mean.’

  ‘Not if it will help us.’ Isarel paused, arranging his thoughts, and then continued, ‘Jude went to Eisenach like a shot. It was a very prestigious invitation, I should think, and the von Drumms were what would have been called part of the ancien regime. Angelika von Drumm was one of Jude’s mistresses.’

  He stopped, and Moira, drinking her coffee, glanced at him, hoping this was not difficult for him.

  Isarel was aware of Moira’s sympathetic glance, and he found it unexpectedly comforting. She was remarkably perceptive about Jude. She was perceptive about most things, in fact.

  Isarel had found the letters at the same time as he had found Jude’s scores, and he had read them seated on a broken chair in the attic of his father’s house, with swathes of dust and cobwebs all round him and only a single candle for light. He could still feel the shadowed stuffiness of the attic, and he could feel the brittleness of the old paper in his hands. There had been a musty scent of age about the letters, but there had also been a lingering drift of the dried lavender that the dead Lucy Weissman had sprinkled between the pages before shutting them away in a small cedarwood box. Lavender had ever afterwards smelled of sadness and pain for Isarel.

  Jude’s letter had been faintly mocking about the lunch at which he had met Karl Vogel; he had made rather a good story of how Vogel had earnestly assured him, over preprandial sherry, that all the food being served was kosher. Jude, who had a broad-minded view of all religions and would eat anything put before him, had taken a malicious pleasure in disconcerting his hosts by expressing a liking for oysters served in the English manner – which of course meant wrapped in lightly-fried strips of bacon. He had related this in his letter to Lucy with mischievous relish, but even then he had clearly been more interested in the renovations being done at Mallow. He had insisted that the Bluthner was to be placed precisely as he had instructed – ‘In the room on the left of the central hall, and angled so that the glow of the setting sun falls directly across the keys’. It was the shortest letter of the few that Isarel’s grandmother had kept, but he knew why she had kept it. It was the one that had ended with the words, ‘I believe I can’t refuse the invitation to Eisenach Castle, since it comes from fairly exalted personages, and anyway it won’t be for long. Light the lamps for my return, Lucy my love, because even if the world burns I will sleep in your arms at Mallow before the year ends.’

  The world had almost burned, and Jude had assisted in the burning of thousands of its people, and he had never returned to Mallow. That letter had left Isarel with a poignant vision of his grandmother seated in Mallow’s deep bow window, the lamps obediently burning, waiting for the return of the one who never came back . . .

  Isarel frowned and shook off the lingering ghosts, reaching for the whiskey bottle again.

  Ciaran said, ‘Isarel, I’m the last person to preach about the evils of drink, but—’

  ‘I’m drinking too much. Yes, I know. I’m drowning my glory in a shallow cup and selling my reputation for a song.’ He set down the glass. ‘You can lay the blame at Jude’s door. He might as well add responsibility for my drinking to all his other sins.’

  Moira said softly, ‘It’s like being haunted, isn’t it? It’s like being shadowed,’ and Isarel looked at her.

  ‘Yes. Because wherever we look in this thing, we keep coming back to Jude.’

  Jude had found the journey to Eisenach Castle unbelievably tedious, even travelling in one of the Party’s railcars.

  ‘Luxurious,’ Erich von Drumm had promised him, puffing out his cheeks with importance. ‘We look after our guests, Herr Weissman. You will enjoy the Castle, and Eisenach itself has many historic features. Links with Go
ethe and Schiller. And there is an ancient church where Bach played the organ.’

  ‘Really, Baron? Which Bach?’ Jude nearly said, ‘And whose organ?’ but von Drumm’s sense of humour was virtually non-existent, and his musical knowledge was such that he would only be able to grapple with one Bach at a time anyway.

  If the bone-rattling railcar was von Drumm’s idea of luxury, a week’s stay at Eisenach Castle was likely to be one of the minor tortures of the realm. Jude regretted agreeing to the concert already. It was remarkable what you would say yes to after a couple of bottles of good German hock. But the invitation had been persuasively and rather flatteringly couched. ‘Baron von Drumm and his wife will place the entire castle at your disposal for the orchestra’s inaugural performance,’ Karl Vogel had said at the absurd, pretentious lunch in Vienna. ‘A large house party: perhaps some hunting for the men, motor expeditions for the ladies. An al fresco luncheon. All the most influential people, my dear Weissman.’ A small smile, the knowing nod as of one man-of-the-world to another. Jude waited. ‘And,’ Vogel said, after a moment, ‘the culmination will be the performance of your own work.’

  ‘The Devil’s Piper? Yes,’ said Jude thoughtfully, ‘I assumed that was what you meant.’

  ‘But of course the Devil’s Piper.’ The smile that never quite reached Karl Vogel’s eyes showed. ‘What else?’

  ‘What else indeed?’

  ‘It will be the most glittering night Eisenach has seen for centuries,’ Vogel said, and added in a voice of muted awe, ‘even Herr Himmler may be able to come.’

  ‘That, of course, would ensure a very memorable evening,’ rejoined Jude politely.

  ‘Certainly.’ Vogel either did not hear or chose to ignore the edge of sarcasm.

  ‘Also,’ put in von Drumm eagerly, ‘Angelika will be very pleased to offer you hospitality.’

  Which meant that Angelika von Drumm was up to her old tricks again. She had offered hospitality to half of Western Europe if her performance in Jude’s bed three years ago was anything to judge by.

  ‘The hospitality would, of course, extend to your orchestra,’ said von Drumm, and Jude refrained with difficulty from observing caustically that if Angelika was prepared to take on his entire orchestra, it did not sound as if she had changed much.