“Why not?”
The other man looked at him. “Bullets are expensive,” he said. “Starvation is cheap.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
“If you can harness energy, like that, then you can transcend limits, boundaries,” I said. “You’re compelled to.”
Gabrielle Brand looked at me as she might an approving tutor. “Precisely,” she said. “And you can transcend natural limits as well as societal ones. Space, for example. Or time.”
I shivered. I didn’t want to go there. “And that’s what happened with Hitler?” I asked instead. “This magic?”
“Look. By all societal reckoning, Hitler should never have existed, ja?” Her German afterthought was oddly like the Canadian way of ending sentences with eh—both seemed to invite agreement. “Everyone knows this. He was neither particularly brilliant nor particularly well educated. His political platform lacked subtlety. He seemed to those around him at best odd—and at worst, insane. And yes, there were serious sociological and cultural reasons for his rise to power. But they cannot explain it in total. They alone would not have been enough.”
“Enter black magic,” I said flippantly.
That earned me a sharp glance. “You are the one who asked to see me.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” I shifted uncomfortably on the bench. “It’s just so—fantastic. So far removed from anything we normally experience. And so long ago.”
“So far removed from a murder in Montréal last Thursday?”
Point to you, I thought, and wondered if that was what we were doing, playing a game of chess, accumulating points against each other. To what end? And what would the winner receive? Looking at her face, one word came to mind.
Redemption.
“You’re involved with all this, aren’t you?” I asked. “You’re too young to have been part of it during the war, but somewhere along the line, you’ve been involved.”
She nodded. “I have been involved.”
We sat for some time in silence. I didn’t know what questions to ask, and I wasn’t even sure whether, if I could, I’d want them answered. The story was shot through with too many veins, the taboos Gabrielle had alluded to, the atavistic fears that we usually keep well under our beds, monsters we don’t ever have to look at in the light of day but whose breath curls round our nightmares and whose voices haunt our dreams. But I still couldn’t see how the threads connected. Or even if they did.
“So what happened?” I asked, quietly, gently.
She cleared her throat; she’d been waiting for me to ask the question. “So, as you see, Hitler was fully engaged with what we now call chaos magic throughout his dictatorship.”
“And yet in the end it failed him.”
She lifted her shoulders. “Who can say where the failure came from? It is not relevant to what I am going to tell you.”
Perhaps not, but I imagined the last days of the Third Reich, the underground bunker, the despair, killing the children, finally the stream of suicides that were the last proof that the magic hadn’t worked. It would have been very difficult to believe at that point. “What is relevant, then?”
“One of the secret societies, one of the lodges, was called the Order of the Black Sun,” she said. “And after the war, the Black Sun became a cherished symbol within the far right of several countries, including the Ukraine, which has a Black Sun Battalion. But that is not our business. Our business is the New Order of the Black Sun, begun after the turmoil of 1970.”
“Nineteen seventy—so you’re talking about here, in Québec.” It was coming home a lot faster than I’d anticipated. “The October Crisis.”
“Yes. It was felt by some that the government’s response to the crisis was inadequate.”
“Inadequate?” I was incredulous. “You’ve got to be kidding. The government invoked the War Measures Act, for heaven’s sake! Most people now think it was an overreaction, not an inadequate one.”
“We are not,” she said calmly, “dealing with most people here.”
Nor were we then. Québec’s October Crisis began with the kidnapping of James Cross, the British trade commissioner in Montréal, by members of the Front de Libération du Québec. It rapidly devolved into the most serious terrorist act carried out on Canadian soil after another official, Minister of Immigration and Labor Pierre Laporte, was kidnapped and killed by another leftist faction. The crisis shook the career of recently elected Liberal Premier Robert Bourassa, who solicited federal help along with Montréal Mayor Jean Drapeau. The FLQ wanted a separate Québec and saw itself as a colonial state rising against foreign imperialism.
Montréal was, then as now, divided as to whether this would be a good thing to do. “There were soldiers in the streets,” I said to Gabrielle. “Sounds like it would have been right up their alley.”
“Not far enough,” she said. “A group of disaffected and extremely disenfranchised young men, all of them right-wing, were unimpressed with the handling of the situation. They were, oddly enough, also in favor of a separate Québec, but only because that might ensure racial purity and keep immigrants away. They began meeting, and eventually one of the more intelligent among them, a young man whose parents had emigrated from Germany right after the war, who was named Heinrich Marke, this man was very attracted to the concept of secret knowledge that no one but them could possess, and to the idea that they could make change, not necessarily through overt violence, but through the manipulation of the natural world. Under his guidance, they began calling themselves the New Order of the Black Sun.”
I had the sense to stay silent. Something was happening here.
Another deep breath. “Heinrich Marke,” said Gabrielle, “was my husband.”
The wind kicked up again, as though the mountain itself had been holding its breath, waiting for that revelation. “He translated his name into English so as to simplify things,” Gabrielle said. “Heinrich Marke became Henry Brand, and that was what he was called when I met him. Of course I knew he was German; so was I. And I was so attracted to him, his strength, his utter and complete certainty about things. I was feeling lost and lonely, and he filled all the corners of my life.”
What could I say to that? “Tell me about the New Order of the Black Sun,” I said finally. Her personal life was her personal life. Women have approached monsters before, have touched the smoke and mirrors, have dared themselves to do the unthinkable, and all in the name of love.
“The New Order of the Black Sun,” Gabrielle said, “was first about recapturing the past. These boys—they felt that they had missed out, somehow, on not having been born earlier, on not having been part of the Third Reich. So at first it was all about secret meetings in basements, secret handshakes, Nazi salutes, flags with swastikas on them. Terrible, of course, but dangerous only to themselves. But as time passed, and they grew more angry—the decade was one of change, and they were being left behind by it—they started acting. Rocks through windshields. Defacing people’s homes. Once, they knocked out an old Jewish man on the street.” She shook her head. “For Henry, this was all secondary. He accused them of playacting when they could do the real thing, be the real thing. So finally they listened to him.”
“Were you—married to him then?”
“We were married in 1980. I was much younger than Henry. I believed in him. I wanted something or someone to believe in, and I believed in him. Slowly he introduced me to the order, he indoctrinated me.” She made a gesture of finality with her hands. “I do not say that to excuse myself. I embraced everything that he offered me, wholeheartedly. I wanted to believe, and I believed.”
“In what?”
“This is why you must understand about magic,” Gabrielle said. “Like Hitler, Henry was a man who could play both with the elements and with people’s minds. Ultimately, of course, he failed. Those around him did not want magic, they wanted action. They did not understand that magic could have delivered far, far more than their acts of vandalism ever could. Our friends
drifted apart; some moved away. In the west, in Ontario and British Columbia, there were active skinhead groups far more to their liking.”
“And what happened to Henry?”
“It is really quite disappointing,” Gabrielle said. “He wanted drama so much, and yet he died so prosaically, of cancer. Such a suburban disease.”
This wasn’t all there was to it, I thought. Something urgent had compelled her to tell me this story. Something that wasn’t part of the past, or of this particular past.
Finally she spoke. “You asked what became of the New Order of the Black Sun,” she said. “It has been resuscitated, and by people who know what they are doing. People who understand focus. People who understand visualization.”
There was so much pain in her voice that it could only point to one thing. “Someone close to Henry is bringing it back.”
She looked at me, her eyes filled with tears. She didn’t bother to brush them away. “Our son,” she said. “Aleister.”
* * *
There was a special showing of a Hitchcock movie at His Majesty’s Theatre on Guy Street, which made a change from the opera and play performances that were usually on the marquee. Suspicion, it was called.
Probably, he thought later, not a perfect choice.
He met Livia at the dressmaker’s, waiting as she turned off the lights, locked the doors, taking pleasure in just watching her simple movements. Tonight she was wearing a soft yellow dress; her hair was dark and lush against it.
They walked to the theater together, close on the sidewalk but carefully not touching. Once her sleeve brushed against his and he felt an electric jolt run all the way up his arm.
“We used to go to the cinema quite often when my mother was alive,” Livia told him. “This is such a treat; I have not been in years.”
“What were your favorite films?”
“Trouble in Paradise,” she replied at once. “And All Quiet on the Western Front. Oh, and Grand Hotel.”
“Grand Hotel? I know this one. It was originally German. I saw the play—” He stopped himself in time. “The play came to Amsterdam, where I used to live,” he finished.
She didn’t seem to notice his flushed face. “They’re wonderful, aren’t they?” she asked and sighed. “Films, plays. They take you away from your regular life, from your problems, from your worries. You don’t think of anything at all. You just are.”
They were seated in one of the boxes above the stage and Hans pulled a flask from his pocket. She looked a little shocked when he offered it to her, but accepted readily enough; and halfway through the movie he reached over, slowly, a very little at a time, and took her hand.
She didn’t move hers away.
Hans tried to concentrate on the movie. Joan Fontaine was becoming more and more convinced that her husband was going to try to kill her. Lie after lie piled up between them, and even with the warmth of Livia’s hand in his own, Hans felt more and more panicked. Lies echoing lies, he thought. His situation was untenable. What would happen if Livia ever found out his secret, saw behind his lies? He barely knew her and knew, already, that he couldn’t live without her.
He was a German. A soldier in the Third Reich. A spy in an enemy country.
She could never know.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“Named after Aleister Crowley, no doubt,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
She nodded. “Henry’s idea.”
“Of course.”
“It did not really become—problematic—for many years,” she said. “Aleister was in college, and he had ideas—well, everyone has ideas in college, don’t they? But he seemed all right. He started working, as a journalist.”
“Which newspaper?”
“Freelance,” she replied. “He said it gave him more freedom to write what he wanted. He went out to the west coast, spent three years in Vancouver, and then went to Berlin for a time, a year, I believe. He said he needed to find his roots. When he returned to Montréal, he was very angry.”
“About what?”
“Me, primarily. How I had not honored his father enough. How I had failed to carry on his mission. That sort of thing. I can only guess at who he was associating with. You will remember than many of his father’s associates went west, to British Columbia. No doubt he saw them there. No doubt the rhetoric was still in place. And in Berlin…” She lifted her shoulders. “Not everyone in the New Germany carries guilt. Not everyone believes that it should never have happened.”
I could just imagine. The remnants of fascism, licking its wounds. “And when he came back? What happened then?”
“He bought a building in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu,” she said, referring to a city just south of Montréal, twenty minutes away by car. “Right on the canal. Have you seen it, the canal? So pretty, I thought. A new life for him.” She sighed. “And it was, I suppose. First it was boarders—he rented out rooms, you see, it was an old warehouse. Or mill. Something of the sort. He said it helped him pay the mortgage. But all the people he rented to, they seemed the same as him. Very correct. Very clean, very articulate. Not like his father’s friends at all.”
“The new face of fascism,” I said.
“Yes, I think it is so,” she said. “And more and more, he wanted me to be part of it. I was, I think, a link to his father—and, through him, to the rest of the past. For a time I stayed there. There was an appeal. You have no idea, Martine, of the energy of the perverse.”
“Perhaps I do,” I said, thinking of what had happened to me last year, of a lonely and deprived boy who had grown into a monster. Who was trained to become one. Evil was everywhere.
Gabrielle was talking. “All magic works through focus, through a harnessing of energy. When one person can do it, it is powerful. When more than one person does it, together, it becomes stronger, concentrated … dominant.”
“So he’s gathered … what? A coven?”
“The New Order of the Black Sun,” she said soberly. “A group of people, with an identical focus, working with perfect synchronicity in a sympathetic environment—that produces amazing results.”
“So they’re doing what, exactly? Manipulating elections?” If so, my boss was going to want a piece of that.
“Nothing so small.” She batted the idea away as she might an annoying fly. “You were close to it before, Mrs. LeDuc. Do not let your fear blind you.”
“When? What did I say?”
“When you spoke of transcending boundaries,” she said. “It was well known that Hitler and Himmler both could project themselves, for very brief periods, into a different space, a different dimension. It is not uncommon for people to be able to do it today, or so I understand.”
I blinked and didn’t say anything.
“They had only really begun to explore it when everything came crashing down in 1945.” She caught my glance. “It is true that I have not told you everything,” she said. “Hitler’s inner circle—they have been called the Devil’s disciples, but as I said, Satanism only works if you believe that there is a God, and none of them believed such a thing. But they were involved in the rituals with him.” She sighed. “So. My mother was Hermann Göring’s maid when he stayed in Bavaria. She was very frightened of him, and when she found she was pregnant, she ran away, to relatives who lived in Stuttgart. It was there that I was born. But even modern cities have long memories, and I preferred to emigrate to Canada. I did not understand, then, that you can never completely run away from the past.”
“But not your past, surely,” I said. “Just because Göring was your—father—that has nothing to do with you.” But even as I spoke, I knew I was wrong. How could it not?
“Unless you believe that it is in the blood,” she said soberly. “Henry believed that it was; it is why he married me. And Aleister believes it as well. He sees it as a magical connection, a connection between himself and his grandfather, between the past and the present. And he wants to connect them.”
�
�How, exactly?”
Gabrielle looked directly at me. “The New Order of the Black Sun in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu,” she said, “is planning to use the remaining crown jewels in order to summon Hitler—back from the dead.”
* * *
I waited until Gabrielle had left before starting up the path to the lookout myself. The clouds had moved on and the sun was painting the sky pink over in the west. Innocent, as though nothing had happened.
I wasn’t ready to get back in my car and go home. I wasn’t sure what I was ready for. My hands were shaking and I pushed them deep into my jacket pockets. Everything here was pleasant, ordinary. Tourists chattering together in a plethora of languages. The city, sparkling like a jewel—
A jewel. That was why she’d agreed to talk to me. I realized that even as I watched her move slowly up the path, her gypsy garb swirling around her, just another aging hippie. She thought I could get the diamonds back.
So what was I going to do?
I was standing looking out over the miles of Québec spread out before me when a voice at my elbow said, “So, you’re a little late getting the rest of the tour in, eh?”
I looked up and into the eyes of François, my Gray Line tour guide. Of course; the overlook was a popular stopping spot for all the tours, and I could see his bus behind us. I laughed out loud, relief washing over me. François, so normal, so part of a different life. “I’m sorry I had to leave early, before,” I said. “It was my work.”
He nodded without speaking and we stood shoulder to shoulder, looking out, companionably. “It never gets old, this view, eh?” he said.
I smiled, allowing myself to be distracted, my dark fears to be pushed away. “You love the city.”
“With all its political corruption, its problems, its new buildings that are taking over … eh oui, even with all that, I love this city, eh?”
“François,” I said suddenly, “how did you know about the British crown jewels being stored in the Sun-Life Building during the Second World War? I’d always heard that to be a rumor.”
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