by Sarah Rayne
It was his own fault that he was being jolted into the middle of nowhere like this. You should never drink beyond your capacity with Germans and you should not allow your former loves to sway your judgement, either. His father would have said, with a sad smile, ‘The heart dominating the brain.’ His grandfather, vulgar old sinner, would have said, ‘Cock ruling head.’ His grandfather would have been nearer the truth.
As they neared Weimar the scenery started to get unexpectedly interesting and Jude put down the book he had brought to pass the journey – a new Leslie Charteris – and stared through the window. Darkling forests and glimpses of brooding castles here and there. Marvellous. Was it stirring something up in his mind? He frowned, forcing his mind to yield up the burgeoning images. Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust? No, nothing so Mephistophelian. Something vaguely sinister by Paganini?
And then he had it. Of all things, it was Beethoven’s Pastoral that was so imperatively demanding recognition. But it was a Pastoral that owed nothing to the conventional rusticity of buttercup-splashed meadows and babbling brooks; this was a darker, much older concept. Jude was sitting upright now, his eyes sparkling, his mind awash with images. It could be done. He could do it. Next spring in Vienna? He would sweep aside the shepherds and the haymaking and put in their place the dark old gods: creatures who owed their being to wild woodland paganism: cloven-footed Pan creatures who walked not on all fours like beasts, but upright like men. Stone circles that beckoned with long-fingered branches . . . He forgot about the journey and the scenery, and tore open his briefcase, grabbing several sheets of the blank score paper which went with him everywhere, scribbling with impatient haste, and then finally flinging down the papers and sinking back into his seat, half exhausted, half exalted.
The critics would hate it – Jude grinned with mischievous delight at the knowledge – they would berate him for reading into Beethoven’s music things that Beethoven had not meant. But Beethoven, locked into his tragic silence. had known about the dark side of nature and he had known about the dark underside of music, as well, just as so many other great composers had known. What about Schumann swimming helplessly in and out of madness, writing some of his most remarkable music at the tide’s turn? What about Mozart, so volatile as to be regarded by some as unbalanced? Maybe you had to be a little mad to compose or to create. Was I mad when I composed the Devil’s Piper? Or – disturbing thought – was I even possessed? If it had not been for that scrap of legend: the two or three pages of musical score handed down within his family, would he have conceived the Piper suite at all?
Coming out here to give a concert was more than a little mad, of course. Nobody who was anybody was going to trail out here for a concert, although a good many people who thought they were somebody might be there.
Jude did not much like Karl Vogel or von Drumm, but Vogel was entertaining company and the Baron was influential and might be useful. Jude’s father would have said, ‘Make use of them both, my boy.’ His grandfather would have said, ‘Bleed the goyim white.’
Goyim was not a word you dared use any longer, of course, although Jude’s grandfather, fiery old rebel, would not have cared. But it was a word too tinged with Jewish contempt for these days. The Führer had a strong anti-Semitic streak, although Jude supposed that even Hitler could not expect the world to be purged clean of Jews just to suit his whim.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
After Conrad Vogel went out through the earth tunnel, Kate sank to the floor of the crematorium, shaking uncontrollably from the strain of pretending to be unafraid, wrapping her arms about her bent knees in an endeavour to force warmth back into her body.
She thought she could not have fought Vogel physically. He had had the gun and although he probably preferred to keep her alive, he would not have hesitated to use it. He had not used it, because he thought that shutting her away with Ahasuerus would make her give in and record his disgusting message for Richard. Like hell it will! thought Kate determinedly, standing up and pushing her hair back. I’ve survived this far and I’ll think of a way to survive a bit farther.
She glanced through the steel doors to the gas chamber. There was still very little light, but she could see the vents: like yawning black maws in the shadows. All the better to eat you with, my dear . . . All the better to spew gas into your lungs, my dear . . . Yes, but it’s not those things I have to fear, it’s Ahasuerus. The Devil’s Piper. Did Vogel mean that about him still finding females attractive? Yes, Kate, he meant it, it’s no good deluding yourself.
It was very quiet. It was so quiet that Kate could hear small breathy sounds from beyond the crematorium. There was a faint echo down here, magnifying the sounds.
Kate scrambled to her feet and crossed to the outer doors, listening. The sighing sounds came again, louder, nearer, and with them, dragging footsteps. Vogel returning? You’re deluding yourself again, Kate.
Because the sounds were the awkward footsteps and the ragged breathing of someone making a slow painful way through the dark tunnels. Someone who moved awkwardly because he was maimed, and someone who had to feel his blind, fumbling way because a mask impaired his sight.
Ahasuerus, coming to find her.
Kate moved by blind instinct. There was nowhere to hide, but she would have to find somewhere. She pushed the doors shut – they could not be locked from inside, but even shutting them might afford her a few precious minutes – and looked back at the room.
Three of the terrible ovens were open, dreadful yawning cavities, but two still had doors and Kate eyed them. They were roughly at waist height, and the bolts were steel and they had not rusted. But it must be five decades since anyone had tried to open those doors. She took a deep breath, and with her mind shuddering in disbelief, took hold of the nearest bolt.
It was harder than she had expected. She sobbed and threw her weight behind first one and then the second, forcing it back. Sweat trickled down her spine – partly with panic, partly with the frantic exertion – and her hands were scraping against the outer brick of the ovens, skin and nails tearing, but she was beyond feeling anything except mounting terror and a driving urgency to hide.
And then the bolt on the end furnace slid protestingly back and Kate gasped in relief, and dragged it all the way, prising the door open. There was a scream of sound and she winced again – would Ahasuerus have heard? A breath of stale, faintly warm air gusted out and something that had been piled softly against the door tumbled forward. There was a dry brittle sound, like twigs cracking. Bones. Brittle, charred bones. Kate stared at them and her stomach lifted with nausea. I can’t do it! But I’ve got to. You can do it, Kate, and you must do it because there isn’t anywhere else to hide. And after all it was only an empty furnace, long since cooled, and the poor incinerated bones could not hurt her. Poor dead creature, whoever it had once been. It had been huddled against the door, one skeletal hand raised. Trying to get out . . .? If I start thinking like that, I’ll be lost. I’ll keep remembering that gassing was appalling but it was effective.
But Kate still lost several seconds staring into the yawning blackness, knowing that hundreds – probably thousands – of people had burned in there. Yes, but they were dead when they were thrown in. I won’t believe anything else. And the limping footsteps were already crossing the outer chamber and in another minute he would be fumbling at the doors. Kate took a shuddering breath and, placing her palms flat on the oven floor, pulled herself inside. Easy. Like levering yourself on to a low window ledge. So far so good.
She reached out to pull the circular door closed, and heard thankfully the dull clunk. The faint light shut off and Kate crawled deeper in, going hand over hand and foot over foot. Several times her hands closed on recognisable bones: long arm or leg bones, or thin brittle fingers. But I’m not noticing any of it. And even if I am noticing it, I’m not minding. Poor murdered creatures. Jews, almost certainly. Persecuted and exiled and deserving of all the pity in the world. At least there aren’t any skulls. If I
touched a skull, I shouldn’t bear it. Yes, you would.
As she went farther in, there was a dreadful grittiness under her hands: like feeling little piles of instant coffee granules. Cinders, that’s all they were. Like charcoal in the bottom of an old-fashioned kitchen range. You drew out an ashpan at the bottom. Raking out, Kate’s grandmother had called it, except that whoever had been in charge of this oven had not raked it out the last time it had been used.
The oven smelt exactly the way an ordinary kitchen cooker would smell if it had not been cleaned for a long time. Greasy. Meaty. If I reached out to the walls they would be smeary, thought Kate; they would be larded with the cooled fat of roasted humans. This is unbearable. This is like something out of Grimm. The witch in the forest who put children into cages and fattened them for her ovens. Yes, but this is real. And the alternative is to face Ahasuerus and Conrad Vogel, and even if I could defeat Ahasuerus, Vogel’s armed and he’d shoot me.
There was only the thinnest spill of light in here, but Kate, going largely by feel, had the impression that the interior was larger than she had expected. But it would have to be large, of course. Hundreds of bodies would have been thrust in at a time. Concentrate on Ahasuerus. Is he in the furnace room?
But she had already heard him. She had heard the screech of the long-disused outer doors being opened, and the dragging gait coming across the floor. Would he guess she was here? Had Vogel told him? Would he sense her presence anyway? She crouched into the farthest corner, her knees drawn up to her chest, hugging her legs. It was like a childhood game. If I screw myself into a tiny ball in a dark corner and close my eyes tight no one can see me.
This would be a dreadful place to die. The smell was appalling; you could feel it and you could taste it.
The sounds from the furnace room were muffled by the thick door of the oven, but Kate’s nerves were stripped raw, and it was very easy to conjure up the image of Ahasuerus prowling around the bare room, peering inside each of the ovens. Would he reach in? She remembered the dreadful hands that had scrabbled at the stone tomb in the crypt and a wash of sick fear engulfed her.
There was silence, and Kate strained to see through the darkness. Was the door being slowly opened from the other side? Was that a faint rim of light showing around the edges? No, she was imagining it.
And then into the waiting silence, came the sound she had been expecting and dreading.
The teeth-wincing sound of claws against steel. Ahasuerus was trying to open the doors.
Jude was beginning to wish he had not come. Eisenach was a fairytale castle, but it was from one of the grislier fairytales – Grimm, or Perrault. Bluebeard’s lair, the retreat of Man-eating ogres. It reeked of ancient intrigues and blood-drenched legends and it was filled with whispery echoes and unexpected little twists of stairs. And draughts stirring behind the arras, thought Jude, amused. Have I fallen into a performance of Hamlet and not noticed?
There was an air of elegant decay as well, but this did not surprise him. Angelika von Drumm trailed with her an aura of casual extravagance, but Jude suspected that although the family might once have had old money, they were now nouveau poor. It had never stopped Angelika from being dressed by Schiaperelli, and wintering in Biarritz.
But for all that, Angelika – or someone – had got hold of a Bluthner which had been placed in the sitting room adjoining his bedchamber on the second floor, and which Jude observed with pleasure.
But it would have been so much better to have been in Ireland. Mallow and Ireland and autumn – oh yes! Golden trees and crimson sunsets and the smoky scent of peat fires and the lashing wild Atlantic coast. Lucy seated in the bow window with the light falling across her brown hair . . . Instead he was holed up in this hideous castle with his orchestra scattered in various billets all over the village. The woodwind section had been allotted the local tavern, the Black Duke, which was unfortunate in view of the woodwinds’ partiality for lifting the elbow.
And Jude himself was in a huge, brooding bedchamber with dark, red flock wallpaper and a massive tester bed and glowering mahogany furniture and a view over some kind of lumpen structure gouged out of the hillside on the castle’s western boundary.
He studied this as he dressed for dinner the first night. There was no reason to find it vaguely sinister. Probably it was only an ancient barrow or a hill fort that had been excavated in the recent past. That would explain the freshly gouged look.
But hill forts surely had never had jutting brick chimneys or doors cut into the side of the hill itself? The sun was not quite setting, but it was beginning to sink and great crimson swathes splashed the skies, giving the countryside all around a brutish sulky appearance and pouring over the hill structure like a crimson river. Jude frowned and turned away, straightening his evening tie impatiently in the smoky depths of the mirror over the dressing table. Everything in the castle was either worn or faded or tinged with the macabre.
Angelika von Drumm was not faded or macabre of course, and only a purist would have described her as well worn, and even then it depended on your interpretation of the expression. As Jude entered the tapestried dining room, she was standing directly beneath one of the crystal wall lights, her hair lit to a blazing aureole. He grinned inwardly. Still an eye for a good effect, Baroness. Knowing she had deliberately placed herself under the light did not stop him appreciating the effect it created.
She turned as he came in, holding out her hands, giving him the three-cornered smile that had once smiled up from his own pillow and drawing him into the small group standing about the fireplace.
‘My husband Erich you already know.’ A dismissive gesture as if von Drumm did not count, which as far as Angelika was concerned, he probably did not. ‘And I think you have met Karl Vogel.’
‘Baron. Vogel.’ Jude nodded acknowledgements.
‘You have had a good journey, Weissman?’
‘Abominable. None of your trains run on time, Baron.’
‘And,’ said Angelika, her hand still on Jude’s arm, ‘Irma, may I present to you Jude Weissman. Jude, this is Madame Greise, who is staying with us for the concert.’
‘Madame.’ Where on earth had Angelika found this hungry-eyed lady with the over-painted lips and the greedy hands? Jude took Irma Greise’s hand and dropped it as soon as politeness allowed. Harsh and dry. Like a claw. He disliked women who had fingernails like talons and enamelled them blood-red.
‘And here,’ said Angelika, ‘is an associate of my husband’s, Otto Burkhardt.’
‘Herr Burkhardt.’ Jude’s first thought was that Burkhardt was Angelika’s latest lover, but a closer look made him change his mind. Even in her wildest days, Angelika would not have gone for this cold-eyed, sparse-haired specimen. Burkhardt might have been asked to balance Irma Greise, or he might be exactly what Angelika had said: an associate of the Baron’s.
The food at dinner was indifferent but the wine was superb. Jude supposed von Drumm had inherited the wine but that the food had to be paid for. His orchestra would probably fare better than he would in that respect, then. The woodwinds would certainly fare better.
With the coffee and brandy, Karl Vogel steered the conversation to the concert and it afforded Jude a malicious pleasure to block his endeavours to discuss the Devil’s Piper. Vogel said, ‘I understand the inspiration was an old score that has been in your family for several generations.’
Jude smiled and said, ‘Music is a tradition in my family. These things are often handed down. This is a very good cognac, Baron.’
‘Will you have some cheese with it? Or perhaps a little fruit?’
‘No, thank you.’ The apples were puckered and the pears spotted with brown. The cheese looked as if it might crawl off the plate of its own accord.
‘It is also said,’ pursued Vogel, ‘that an ancestor of yours was a close friend of Mozart.’
Jude regarded him thoughtfully. ‘Mozart was prodigal with his friendship,’ he said. ‘But he died in poverty.’
‘And if Herr Hitler forms this alliance with Mussolini—’
‘Oh, Otto, don’t drag Mussolini into it—’
‘Well, at least he made the trains run on time—’
‘The only way I can endure anything Italian is when it comes in the form of silk underwear,’ said Angelika, and winked provocatively at Jude on the side the Baron could not see. Jude smiled rather perfunctorily and permitted the servant to refill his brandy snifter.
‘Do you know Italy, Madame Greise?’ he said politely.
‘I do not. Nor the Italian people.’
‘Oh. Irma has something of a yen for Hitler,’ put in Angelika. ‘Ever since she heard him speak in Berlin last summer. Personally I find him sinister, and just the tiniest bit bourgeois.’
‘He has come from modest beginnings, of course,’ put in von Drumm doubtfully, and Jude saw him glance uneasily at Burkhardt and Vogel. ‘But he is an enthusiast and a visionary.’
‘Master Races and stamping out people who aren’t pure Germanic – my dear, if that isn’t bourgeois, I don’t know what is.’
‘The mark of a parvenu,’ murmured Jude, and Angelika said at once,
‘Precisely. I told you at the time, Irma darling, it would be déclassé to sleep with somebody like that.’
Across the table von Drumm was looking even more uncomfortable, but Karl Vogel said smoothly, ‘Herr Hitler is a considerable patron of the arts, Angelika.’
‘Oh pooh.’
‘Also,’ said Vogel, watching Jude over the rim of his wine glass, ‘he greatly admires your work, Herr Weissman.’