by Glenn Cooper
A branch struck the top of her head with a crack. A moment later JoJo must have hit the same branch because she too said “oww,” and both women, despite their dire situation, started laughing. Seconds later, through the trees, Emily saw two bright lights and wondered if the head bashing had produced stars.
The horses made for the lights. They became brighter and brighter until the trail before them was perfectly illuminated and when they were so bright her eyes hurt, her horseman stopped, pulled the rope that joined them over his body and dismounted. Then he tugged her down onto spongy legs.
A male voice called out from behind the lights in a modern German, “Welcome to Germania, Frau Professor Doktor Loughty.” Then in English he said politely, “Forgive me, my manners. Do you speak German?”
She answered in German that she did and asked who he was.
He replied by gruffly telling the soldier to bring her closer. When he did, she was to suffer two shocks: the first, that the bright lights were the headlights of a boxy, open-topped automobile, the second, that the middle-aged, smallish man in the rear seat was dressed in a wide-lapelled, twentieth century business suit, his bony face framed by steel-rimmed glasses. There were two other cars behind the first one, their lights off. The men who got out were more archaic in appearance, wearing a mélange of uniforms of the centuries.
Emily was about to say something when Clovis dismounted and rushed forward, babbling rapidly in his guttural language and pushing her out of the way. He held out his hand, as if demanding payment.
The small, prim man no longer seemed polite. He began hurling epithets back at him in German then said something quietly to the driver, a hefty fellow in fairly modern clothes. The driver reached down then tossed a leather pouch that clinked onto the ground. Clovis reached for it, undid the drawstring and pushed his meaty hand inside. When he was satisfied that all was as agreed, he spat in the dirt and withdrew.
“Such a barbarian!” the small man said. “My apologies, but you see, Frau Doktor, he really is a barbarian.” Then he awkwardly chuckled at his own joke.
Clovis returned, dragging JoJo with him and he began shouting again. Emily listened to the small man say that he didn’t ask for anyone else, he had no interest in a Negress, and he refused to pay more. He and Clovis angrily went back and forth until the driver tossed a few more coins onto the ground and that seemed to settle it. Clovis spat again and rode off into the forest with his retinue.
“All right?” Emily asked JoJo.
“Yeah, who’s this creep?” she replied in French.
“I’m sure we’re going to find out.”
“Such unpleasantness,” the small man said. “Well, you can expect better treatment from now on, Frau Doktor.”
“You seem to know who I am but I don’t know who you are.”
“Allow me to introduce myself. I am Heinrich Luitpold Himmler at your service.”
Emily blurted out, “You can’t be serious.”
“But I am perfectly serious.”
“Who is he?” JoJo asked.
“He’s a bloody Nazi, that’s who he is. One of Hitler’s lot.”
Himmler smiled in delight. “I am pleased you know who I am. Do they teach about me in your British schools?”
“Oh, yes,” Emily said, shaking her head in continued disbelief. “You’re still in the curriculum.” It was one thing to meet historical figures like the Duke of Guise and Clovis, men she knew little to nothing about, but Himmler? Well, she knew a great deal about him. Suddenly, the evils of Hell filled her nostrils with a particularly vile stench. She seethed at him, “We like to remind ourselves over and over what your filthy gang did so we’ll be less likely to let it happen again.”
“I see,” Himmler said. “This sounds to me like a rather naïve approach to history. But please come. We have another journey ahead. It will be more comfortable than your night ride. You and your Negress friend will ride in my motor car.”
“JoJo.”
“I am sorry?” he asked with a squint of confusion.
“Her name is JoJo.”
“Excellent. She will sit beside my driver and you will sit beside me.”
“Where are you taking us?”
“Why, to Marksburg on the Rhine, near Koblenz. Frederick, the ruler of Germania, is most anxious to meet you, as I myself have been. If it were only for your scent of life that, I must say, is more fragrant than any blossom in Hell, you would be fascinating. But you are also a scientist, I understand. A physicist. My how I respect the mind of a scientist! Now come, get in quickly and we will be on our way.”
The women hesitated for too long prompting Himmler to advise them that they would do better to obey voluntarily than be coerced by his men. Once they had climbed into the automobile, the driver began furiously moving a lever at his feet, forward and back, forward and back, until the car began to make a moaning sound, like the resonant call of a whale, followed by a loud hissing which accompanied the release of plumes of steam.
Soon the hissing morphed into a whistle, like an exaggerated whistling of a kettle, and Emily exclaimed, “This is a steam car, isn’t it?”
“Yes, quite so,” Himmler replied. “It is extraordinary, is it not?”
When the driver was satisfied there was enough pressure inside the boiler, he put the car into gear and they were off, surrounded by a cloud of steam, chugging and choo-chooing away like an old-time locomotive.
Emily bounced violently on the leather bench-seat prompting Himmler to say, in a loud enough voice to be heard over the noise, that he was working to improve the rubber in the tires and the quality of the shock absorbers.
“You must appreciate the problems I have advancing the technology here,” he said, seeking her understanding. “The people who come here tend to be inferior in all ways. It is so remarkably difficult to find men who possess useful skills.”
Emily sat stiffly, her arms crossed angrily at the prospect of sharing the ride with this monster. “You mean to tell me there aren’t many Nobel prize-winning murderers and rapists about?”
This elicited a genuine belly laugh. He offered her a blanket that she passed over the seat to JoJo.
“We can put up the top if it rains,” Himmler said, “but it does little against the morning chill. I must say, it took me thirty years to find the men in Germania and elsewhere, each with a complementary skill, to produce a functional automobile. Of course, we do not have the ability yet, and I stress the word yet, to drill for oil and to refine petroleum into diesel, so I had to settle for steam power. On a good stretch of road, they will go over fifty miles per hour. Old King Frederick’s eyeballs nearly popped from his head when I rolled out the first prototype. It was like giving a caveman fire.”
She also had to shout to be heard. “Are you the only ones with this technology?”
“I think so, yes, but it is difficult to know for sure. There are rumors about Francia, rumors about Russia. Communication is one of our many difficulties. We have a few hundred miles of telegraph lines in Germania but they stop at our present borders. The English have this also. The French too. But most of our information about our enemies comes from spies. That is how we knew about you.”
“You seem pretty well plugged in for a man who’s only been here for seventy years.”
Himmler nodded earnestly. “Yes, you are absolutely correct in this regard. You are such an intelligent and perceptive young lady. This is a place that favors the men who have survived for centuries, men such as Frederick. Once a man has power, he is favored to retain that power. To do this he must surround himself with men who are content to bask in his favor and he must ruthlessly eliminate potential usurpers. That is why all successful monarchs have networks of men to evaluate new arrivals to their territories and spies to monitor foreign lands. In my case, when I arrived here I made a quick assessment of the situation. I told the ruffians who swept me up that I demanded to be brought to whoever was the leader of the realm and that failure to do so would pla
ce them in jeopardy, as I was no ordinary fish in the pond. I was passed up the food chain, as it were, to others who had heard of the Third Reich and within a short time I was standing in front of the king himself.”
“I imagine plenty of your Nazi pals wound up here.”
“We are not so scarce, that is true. I did not impress the king at first, as I do not cut an imposing figure. I think his first impulse was to eliminate me as he did with Hitler and most of our senior ranks.”
She curled her mouth in disgust. “What happened to good old Adolph then?”
“I understand he presented himself with great arrogance. This is a mistake with a man like Frederick who has encountered men far more fearsome than Hitler during his thousand-year reign. Hitler was a mouse who roared, a man who was physically weak and relied on others to do his bidding. Frederick, as I have been told, tolerated his rant for only a few minutes before rising from his throne and personally taking his head. He is in a rotting room somewhere. I have not visited.”
“But your head is right where it’s supposed to be, isn’t it?” she shouted over the din.
Himmler clowned around by probing his head with his hands. “Ha! So it is. Well, I was cleverer than Hitler, more intuitive, I would say. I appeared before Frederick only a month after Hitler did—yes, we died within a month of each other, both honorable suicides. I told the king that my only interest was to become his humble servant and to bring my skills as a wartime administrator to his court. I told him he was always a hero of mine and that my goal for the Third Reich was to recreate the glory of his bygone era. I sealed the deal by telling him that I had personally named our invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa, in his honor. He liked that immensely as it seems he hates the Russians as much as I do. But the larger issue is this: kings and führers require persistent and aggressive praise. This is something I understood completely. I asked him to indulge me for a time so I might inspect the state of Germania’s offenses and defenses and make some recommendations. He accepted this and gave me his protection. In the course of my investigations I found the realm lacking in certain command and control functions and with no comprehensive way to develop new weapons and capabilities. Hell has all the natural resources of Earth but it lacks intellectual capital. The growth of civilization is stunted here. I aim to change that.” He swallowed hard as if the exertion of all the shouting had strained his throat.
“How, pray tell?”
“Up until now it has been slow and incremental, finding a person here, a person there who has some special skills I can utilize. This steam car, as simple and archaic as it may be to modernists such as ourselves, is the pinnacle of what I have been able to achieve. This is pathetic although the steam engine was the precursor to many great achievements. Still, the pace is too slow. Look at this!” He parted his jacket to reveal his holstered pistol. “A flintlock! I can’t even find competent modern gunsmiths. But now I have something which I hope will enable me to leapfrog our enemies and allow Germania to reign supreme throughout our world.”
“And what is that?”
“You, Frau Doktor. It is you.”
She was already sitting as far away from him as possible on the short bench but she pressed herself harder against the side of the car. She decided to stop talking and he seemed content to rest his vocal cords.
The day brightened to its usual pale shade of gray and she got a good view of the road for the first time. It was level and fairly smooth, made of hard-packed dirt, graded to a gentle concavity to allow for the runoff of rainfall. She imagined that Himmler might have been the one to arrange for crews of forced labor to build it for his precious steam cars. He had a knack for organized labor, didn’t he? After all, he’d been the architect of the slave labor camps during the Second World War. She wondered whether she could ever find it within herself to stick a knife into a man’s throat, but if she could, Himmler’s would be a good place to start.
After a while he offered her some cold meat and bread from a hamper that she passed to JoJo. She had no appetite. She was desperately tired and as she dozed, she made sure to lean away from her seatmate, lest her head wind up on his shoulder.
It was a five or six hour noisy and bumpy journey to the Rhine and the heart of Germania. The convoy of three vehicles stopped a few times for the call of nature and for water to top up the boilers. Emily gave some thought to running away but she doubted it would serve any purpose other than getting herself into even more trouble at the hands of roving bands of heathens.
And then, after a two-hour final leg, Himmler nudged her awake and pointed his small, boyish hand. There, high on a green bluff over a mighty river was a towering, turreted castle, made of pale, almost flesh-colored stone.
“This is one of the king’s many castles,” Himmler said, almost proudly, as if he had played a role in its creation. “He favors it above all others. You know, on Earth, this was the precise location of the Marksburg Castle which was built a century or two after Frederick’s time. And as on Earth, it is a naturally defensible position. I believe it was perhaps inevitable that the king would decide to build his own fortress here. Who knows, maybe some of the same laborers who built Marksburg wound up in Hell to build this one, which, I can guarantee you, is an excellent facsimile to the castle I well remember from my youth.”
JoJo turned and asked Emily a question.
“What did she say?” Himmler barked irritably.
“She asked how we’re going to get across.”
“Ah, just upriver a way, there is a good wooden bridge, strong enough to support the motor cars, one at a time. The king was not so keen to allow invaders so easy a means to cross but I persuaded him that allowing passage of the steam autos offered a strategic advantage. We can always destroy the bridge if need be.”
When the time came to make the crossing, Emily held her breath and while the car chugged slowly across she sneaked a glimpse of the swift, murky waters of the Rhine gorge. Once across it was a matter of minutes until they navigated a windy, upwardly spiraling road to reach the castle walls. A massive drawbridge gate was winched down and the car rolled through a dark, vaulted tunnel through another gate. Soldiers waved them on and they entered a broad courtyard. The steam boilers decompressed.
Emily got out of the car and took some small pleasure in the sudden stillness. Above her, a lone bird of prey, a kite perhaps, soared on the thermals searching for food. Its solo quest made her melancholy. She felt so very far away from home. Then she caught herself and bore down. She needed to keep sharp, stay focused. To get back to Dartford and to overcome the daunting obstacles that inevitably awaited her, she couldn’t afford to succumb to melancholia.
Just as she registered this thought, a man appeared, not young, not old. He came gliding through a palace door in a monk’s robe, so pale and thin, he seemed like an apparition. He locked eyes on her, as if she were the only one in the courtyard and then he did something that was wholly unexpected. He smiled. It wasn’t a smile of evil or cunning or lechery, the usual fare she had become accustomed to, but a smile of kindness.
Himmler called to him but the man ignored him and went to Emily and bowed his head in a show of humility. He asked if she knew his language and when she nodded, he seemed pleased and launched into a speech, his German a mix of archaic and modern constructions.
“I welcome you to Germania. I am Rainald van Dassel, the king’s chancellor. I am sorry we seized you as we did but I can assure you, your treatment here will be better than what that scoundrel, the Duke of Guise, had in store for you.”
Himmler interrupted the welcome address. “Clovis dealt with Guise. One more French shark we will not have to contend with. Is the king well? I want to show him my trophy.”
Rainald’s countenance hardened. “She is not a trophy, Herr Himmler, she is a woman, who I imagine is bewildered, tired and hungry. Frederick will see her soon enough. First, we will offer our best hospitality.” He cast his gaze on JoJo. “Who is this?”
Rainald’s face softened again. “Ah, friendship. That is unusual here, something to be treasured.” He waved his arms at the massive palace and all the outbuildings. “We have room enough for one more soul.”
“Well, I am going to have a wash,” Himmler declared. “Make sure you send for me at the appointed time, Rainald. I am the architect of this operation, not you. You would do well to remember that.”
Rainald turned away from Himmler and asked the women to follow him. Soldiers and guards appeared, as if attracted by Emily’s scent, leering at the women as they passed. Rainald saw their stares and shouted at them, forcing the men to rush off, their eyes cast down. Emily realized the reason Rainald looked like he was gliding. It was his coarse robe that obscured his feet as it brushed the ground. They entered the palace through a small door that opened to a dark, empty hall. Rainald gave a shout and an enormous, pudgy man, with a bald pate and a long, scraggly fringe appeared, holding a torch.
“This is Andreas,” Rainald said. “He will attend to you. You do not have to worry about his intentions. Frederick made him a eunuch a very long time ago so he could safely shepherd his concubine.”
Andreas grinned. His few remaining teeth were brown as nuts. “No balls,” he said, pointing to his crotch. “No worries.”
The eunuch took them up several flights of stone stairs until they entered an ample room suffused with light, its window offering an expansive view over the river gorge. There was a bed, a chest, and a separate privy chamber.
“Above us is another room,” Rainald said, pointing at JoJo. “You will go there now.”