The Devil's Piper

by Sarah Rayne

  There was a soft footfall behind him, and a voice said coolly, ‘How very accommodating of you to walk up to the castle and save me the trouble of coming down to get you, Mr O’Connor. Or should I call you Brother Ciaran?’

  Ciaran wheeled sharply round to confront a tall, cold-eyed man with close-cropped grey hair, standing behind him. In his hand was a gun.

  It was clearly impossible either to fight or run. Ciaran considered it but knew at once it would be pointless. If this was Conrad Vogel, he would shoot unhesitatingly, and have an entirely plausible excuse for the incident afterwards. Or a means of disposing of the body so that suspicion would never touch him. Ciaran felt a shudder of fear, but he said quite calmly, ‘Good morning to you. Mr Vogel, is it?’

  ‘Of course.’ Vogel glanced at the hill structure, and said, ‘I see you are studying the place my grandfather caused to be built.’

  ‘Your grandfather, was it?’ Ciaran was trying to decide how much Vogel knew about them, but he did not let this show.

  ‘It was,’ said Vogel. ‘And you still haven’t told me how I should address you.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter in the least,’ said Ciaran. ‘If you are going to continue to point that gun at me, you can call me whatever you like, because I shan’t bother to answer you. But I would like to know what that place is.’

  ‘Were you thinking of trying to get inside?’ said Vogel. ‘How extraordinary. I was just thinking of taking you in there.’ A thin smile. ‘There are two doors and they can both be opened from the outside. But I am afraid that once inside, you will not be able to get out.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because the doors have bolts on the outside,’ said Vogel. ‘And I should have to bolt you in.’ The thin smile curved his lips again. ‘That is Eisenach’s own private death house,’ he said. ‘Konzentrationlager Eisenach. It has been disused for almost half a century.’

  ‘But it will be interesting to find out if the ancient gas machines still function.’

  Chapter Forty

  Jude had not been precisely disturbed by the sight of Burkhardt and Irma Greise going towards the hill after everyone in the castle had gone to bed, but he had been curious. He was very curious indeed about the smeary lights burning from within the hill itself.

  It would, of course, be the height of ill manners to follow them. Jude grinned and, turning away from the window, reached for a thick jacket. Life would be very dull indeed if everyone was perpetually well mannered.

  The castle was silent as he stole through it, the rooms empty and still. The door was half open into the dining room, and he glanced inside. The room was empty, but Angelika’s perfume lingered on the air, and he went swiftly down the elaborate marble and gilt stairway that led to the great hall, thinking that it was a florid monstrosity, but thinking as well that it might make a suitably dramatic background for his own entrance at the concert.

  The hill was just outside the castle boundaries, but a small door had been left ajar in the brick wall surrounding the castle proper. He went through, keeping to the shadows, and padded stealthily towards the lights. As he neared them, he saw that they were, as he had thought, coming from inside the hill itself, and this puzzled him for a moment, until he saw that someone had built immense steel doors that apparently opened straight into the hill.

  There was a faint drone of voices from inside, and Jude hesitated, looking about him. Nothing. He took a deep breath and went inside.

  It was dark and dryly hot inside the hill, and Jude stood waiting for his eyes to adjust, aware that he was in a kind of tunnel. The lights were ahead of him, and the voices were louder now. To spy or not to spy? But I’ve come this far.

  The tunnel was longer than he had first thought, and it wound down. Jude, keeping to the shadows, saw the inner chamber before he reached it: a long, coldly lit room with the doors ajar. If he stayed flat to the wall he could see in without being seen.

  Otto Burkhardt and the hungry-eyed Irma Greise were seated at a table with Karl Vogel, and even at this distance Jude could feel the authority irradiating from Vogel. Facing the table were two young men and a girl, none of them more than nineteen or twenty, all thin and beaten-looking, but all glaring at Vogel with angiy defiance.

  Vogel was speaking and Jude received the impression that he had been speaking for some time.

  ‘The regulations specify that any Jew can be killed in any manner considered most conducive to discipline and deterrence of further resistance,’ said Vogel. ‘That is why you are here. You are rebels and dissidents.’

  ‘Disruptive influences within the ghettos,’ nodded Burkhardt, with the eagerness of one keen to be identified with the sentiments of a superior.

  The elder of the two young men stared contemptuously at them. ‘You quote from the orders given to Heinrich Himmler’s sadistic sycophants,’ he said.

  ‘Is that because you have not the originality of mind to frame your own words?’ said the younger.

  Anger flared in Vogel’s cold eyes, but when he spoke again, he did so as if the interruption had not happened. ‘You are all members of the ghetto resistance group,’ he said.

  ‘Yes. The der schwarzer shtab. Human beings against the animals of the Schutzstaffel.’ The boy paused, and then said with angry pride, ‘We are members of the Hashomer Hatzair,’ and Jude thought in horror: Jews. The prisoners are Jews. But why don’t they at least attempt to escape? They don’t outnumber Vogel and Burkhardt and the Greise, but they match them.

  Vogel rapped impatiently on the table. ‘We shall not play at semantics. You are dissidents and you have been brought here to tell us the names of the other subhumans in the rebellion.’

  ‘Subhumans?’ asked the young man coldly.

  ‘The term Jew is synonymous with the term subhuman,’ said Vogel. ‘There is no difference.’ There was such icy dismissal in his voice that Jude’s fingers curled involuntarily into fists.

  The boy who had said, Subhumans? leaned forward, his hands flat on the table. ‘If you insult us we shall return the insult,’ he said with scornful hatred. ‘But since we are Jews, we shall repay the debt with interest. That is what you would expect of us. And that being so—’ He struck Vogel’s face with the flat of his hand and a gasp of shock went through the chamber. ‘That is for what you have said and that—’ The sound of a second blow rang out, ‘That,’ the boy continued viciously, ‘is for humiliating my sister.’ The marks of his blows stood out starkly on Vogel’s face, and Burkhardt half rose but Vogel waved him back.

  ‘I am unhurt, Otto. And the creature will suffer a little more as a result. His sister will certainly suffer.’ The light eyes looked at the girl and a smile curved his lips. Jude thought he had never seen such calculating cruelty in any face.

  Vogel pushed his chair back from the table and walked round to stand in front of the girl. From his hiding place, Jude saw him thrust his hand down the front of her dress. ‘I, also, can add interest to a debt,’ said Vogel, his voice thickened with lust, but as he spoke the girl’s eyes suddenly blazed with anger and she stepped back and brought her knee slamming up into his genitals. Vogel sprang back, doubling over and clutching himself.

  Burkhardt and Irma Greise leapt forward at once, overturning their chairs, and there was a flurry of metallic clicks from the corners of the room. Jude inched forward and understood then why the prisoners had not tried to escape. At the chamber’s far end stood six of the castle servants, all levelling guns. Guards, he thought. Not servants at all. And there are probably more of them inside the door, out of my line of vision.

  Irma was tearing aside the girl’s thin cheap dress, which Jude guessed to be some kind of prison garment, and her long painted nails raked the bare skin, drawing bubbles of blood. She moved behind the girl, hooking one arm about her throat from behind, jerking the girl’s head back.

  ‘For what you have just done, you should be forced to spend a night in my bed,’ she said, her eyes burning and intense. ‘And when I was surfeited, I wou
ld bite off your nipples and spit them on to the floor.’ Her arm was still circling the girl’s neck, but her free hand fingered the small high breasts, and then slid deliberately lower. The girl had been struggling, but as Irma’s hand went between her thighs she froze, and a look of shuddering disgust showed on her face.

  Irma pushed the girl to the floor, where she crouched for a moment, shivering and naked, her arms crossed over her breasts in the age-old female gesture of protection. ‘Weak,’ said Irma. ‘A cheap subhuman. Don’t bother to save her for me, Karl.’

  ‘Then,’ said Vogel sarcastically, ‘may we go on?’ Without waiting for a response, he turned to the prisoners, his lips a thin line. ‘Since we have seen extreme insolence from all three of these,’ he said, ‘and also violence, there is no alternative other than to extort the maximum penalty.’

  ‘Death—’ murmured Burkhardt.

  ‘The maximum penalty,’ said Vogel again, and looked at the guards. ‘You understand the order?’

  ‘Yes, Lieutenant General.’

  Lieutenant General. Jude felt his blood chill at the words.

  ‘Then,’ said Vogel, a slurry note of anticipatory pleasure in his voice, ‘proceed. Hang this insolent one and also the girl.’ He looked back at the younger of the boys. ‘But that one we will send back to his wretched ghetto so that he can describe to the other would-be rebels how we deal with their puny attempts to defy us.’

  He pointed to the roof of the chamber, and for the first time Jude saw the row of huge iron hooks, the spikes glinting blackly in the cold light.

  Jude thought that the people in the inner room were by now so intent on their grisly travesty of a trial that they would not have heard him if he had run down the tunnel in steel-tipped boots, but he was transfixed. He could see nothing he could do to help the prisoners but to leave was unthinkable.

  The guards had lifted the first boy and were tearing off the thin prison trousers. They glanced to Vogel and Burkhardt as if awaiting an order, and when Vogel nodded, two more winched down the hooks. Jude saw that there was a kind of pulley system affixed to the wall, with taut hawsers wound around wheels and secured to the floor. The hooks came down slowly and screechingly and with a dreadful inexorability. The spikes caught the light.

  Two guards grasped the boy’s ankles, and jerked them wide apart. A third dragged his hands behind his back and snapped thick manacles about his wrists.

  ‘Spread his legs wide,’ hissed Irma. ‘Let the other two see. Let the girl know what’s ahead for her.’

  ‘Let him feel all of it,’ echoed Burkhardt.

  The boy was writhing and trying to escape the guards and the other two prisoners were struggling against their own captors, but Jude could see that the struggles were futile and that the prisoners must know it. His mind was tumbling, but he thought: if I went out there I should only be one more against them. And if I go back to the castle—But there was no one in the castle other than Angelika von Drumm and Erich and he was no longer inclined to trust anyone in Eisenach. Could he trust Angelika, even?

  The boy’s thighs were being dragged impossibly wide; the thin tendons in the groin must be stretching unbearably. As the boy started to moan, the guards lifted him, two of them still grasping his ankles, two more taking his thighs, and hoisting him, still firmly upright, over the point of the huge iron hook. Jude saw with sick horror that the hook’s point was being forced upwards into the boy’s exposed scrotum. His head was thrown back in fear and panic, the cords of his neck standing out, and although he was still struggling, the guards were holding him so tightly that he could barely move.

  Karl Vogel leaned forward, resting his chin in one hand. ‘To leave you like this for a time would be what the Chinese peoples term exquisite agony,’ he said softly. ‘But we will be a little more merciful.’ He nodded to the guards. ‘Impale him.’

  The two guards lifted the boy higher and a third held the hook steady. Jude had the impression of a warped surgical procedure about to be performed. And then they jammed the boy down hard.

  The hook’s point pierced his scrotum at once and burst through the lower part of his stomach. He toppled over at once, in an ungainly tumble, and hung upside-down with blood welling out of the deep, dark wound between his thighs.

  The other two prisoners were crouching on the floor, shivering and helpless. The boy who would be sent back to the ghetto had managed to reach out a hand to the girl.

  The impaled boy was still moving, his hands flailing feebly upwards to try to dislodge the biting agony of the hook. As the hook swayed and turned, he swayed and turned with it, and Jude, sickened and appalled, thought he was beginning to resemble nothing so much as a huge carcass of beef on a butcher’s hook. Blood, streaked with seminal fluid and urine, poured down the boy’s body, running into his eyes and soaking his hair, and then spattered wetly on to the floor. Jude felt his guts contract with the agony of it.

  The boy had been panting and heaving in dreadful rhythm, but now he sagged and gave a choking gurgle. There was a whistling sound as air rushed out of his lungs and his eyes rolled up.

  ‘Dead,’ said Vogel dismissively. ‘Now for the girl.’

  It was at that point that Jude pushed open the door and walked into the lighted room.

  The effect on the two men and Irma was electric. They rose from their seats at once, and then Burkhardt turned to Vogel as if awaiting orders.

  Jude said coolly, ‘Good evening. This is an interesting gathering.’ He glanced to where the dead boy still swung gently from the hook. ‘I shan’t apologise for intruding, because if you really want to be uninterrupted you shouldn’t leave lights burning or doors unguarded.’ He paused, and then said very deliberately, ‘I think we may be of some assistance to one another.’

  Vogel and Irma exchanged wary looks. Vogel said, ‘Indeed?’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Jude, ‘because it seems—Do you mind if I sit down, by the way? And if that is cognac in that decanter—Yes, I thought it was. Thank you.’ He sipped the brandy slowly, resisting the compulsion to drink it in one gulp. ‘I suppose these are rebels?’ he said surveying the prisoners. ‘Well, it happens now and then. From one of the ghettos? Can I ask which one?’

  Again there was the cautious exchange of looks, but Burkhardt answered readily enough. ‘They are Lithuanian Jews. From Kaunas.’

  ‘I see. And,’ said Jude, ‘you intend to return the one whose life you have spared to his people with the story of the punishment in store for rebels.’ He leaned back in his chair, the fingers of one hand curled negligently about the glass of brandy. ‘What about the girl?’ he said in a drawl. ‘You will execute her by the same method?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Jude looked at the girl, and his eyes travelled over her unclothed body slowly and rather insolently. He looked back at Vogel and the two others. The silence lengthened, but finally, Jude said, ‘I will strike a bargain with you, Vogel. You want the music – the Devil’s Piper. We can stop playing games: I know it and you know it. Well, I will offer you a quid pro quo.’

  He stopped, and after a moment, Vogel said, ‘Go on.’

  ‘I could be persuaded into playing the music for you,’ said Jude. ‘But there would be two conditions.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The first is that you give me the girl.’ He caught an abrupt movement from the prisoners which he ignored.

  ‘Why?’ said Vogel instantly, and Jude made a brief gesture.

  ‘She takes my eye. These things happen.’

  Irma Greise regarded Jude hungrily and said, ‘And also, the line between extreme pain and sexual arousal is a very fine one, is that not so, Herr Weissman?’

  ‘As you say,’ said Jude coldly, and looked at Vogel. ‘Well?’

  ‘It might be arranged.’ Vogel glanced at Burkhardt and Irma, and then said, ‘But before we go any farther, there is a condition I will impose in my turn, Herr Weissman.’

  There was a silence in the room. Jude risked a covert glance at the two pri
soners. The girl was trembling, but the boy was listening closely.

  Vogel said slowly, ‘You are right when you say we want the music. We do. We believe it can further Germany’s plan for supremacy.’ He paused, his eyes assessing Jude. ‘But we also want to know how you came by it,’ he said. ‘And what you know about it.’

  ‘You want the provenance,’ said Jude thoughtfully, and helped himself to another measure of brandy. ‘I suppose it’s a reasonable request.’ He sipped the brandy, frowning, and then said, ‘The music came into my family during the early years of the nineteenth century. My great-great grandfather was given it in Eighteen-Fifteen or -Sixteen. I am not sure of the exact year.’

  ‘By Wolfgang Mozart?’ This was Burkhardt, his cold eyes avid.

  ‘Mozart was dead by then,’ said Jude. ‘It was his son who owned the music – the only surviving son. There was some kind of business transaction with my great-great grandfather – a favour to be returned,’ he said vaguely. ‘The music was part of payment of a debt.’ He saw Burkhardt and Vogel exchange sidelong glances.

  ‘That,’ said Vogel, ‘accords with what we have heard.’

  ‘Mozart is supposed to have acquired the music towards the end of his life,’ said Jude. ‘He bought it from a travelling musician whom he met while he was writing The Magic Flute.’

  ‘Shortly before he died?’

  ‘Yes.’ Jude made an expressive gesture with his hands. ‘It’s as likely a tale as any other. On the one hand it could be argued that Mozart never needed to buy anyone else’s music in his life, but on the other, he was generous to a fault. You can believe it or not, just as you like.’

  ‘Do you believe it, Herr Weissman?’ said Vogel.

  ‘Not especially. Although I don’t entirely disbelieve it.’

  ‘But – you wrote the Devil’s Piper around the music?’

  ‘Oh yes. And it was plagiarism in its purest, most unabashed form. If you are going to steal, you make sure the booty is worthwhile. The legend tells how the music is far older than Mozart, of course, although that depends on which version of the legend you have heard,’ said Jude offhandedly. ‘There are any number, you know.’