What have I got myself into? Jay wondered. How can I be sitting here listening to a man who has done that and feel neither shocked nor revolted, but just concerned?
Merlin folded the map and poured himself another glass of wine. Jay covered her glass with her hand. ‘Except for his uniform,’ he continued, ‘there was no way you could have looked at one of those SS guys at Oradour in June ’44 and said: “That man’s a killer. This one’s a pathological sadist.” You know why? Because whatever women and pacifists like to believe, Jay, the seeds of violence that blossom as massacre are implanted in the psyche of most men. They germinate fast, given the right conditions, and they are in all of us – a part of our human inheritance, like walking upright.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ she said.
He laughed wryly, ‘Nobody does.’
Jay could see that the crisis was past.
‘That,’ he said tiredly, ‘is exactly why I have to write The Book of Blood to try and make people like you understand. Maybe, just maybe, it’ll help prevent some terrible event one day. So I think it’s worth a try.’
‘I think you’re very brave to go back to these places.’ Merlin, Jay thought, was a name like a seagull’s cry borne on the north-east wind: Merlin … Merlin … Merlin. ‘Aren’t you frightened the way it carves you up, each time you go mentally back to that day at My Lai? ‘
He grinned crookedly. ‘I’m actually pretty sane, considering. I’ve talked to shrinks, so I know. A lot of vets who went through what I did in ’Nam are still living on welfare twenty years later, in short-let rooming houses, married to a bottle or a needle.’
‘Perhaps your book will help them too?’
‘So they can live happily ever after? Yeah, wouldn’t that be nice for everybody?’
She ignored the sarcasm, wondering aloud, ‘How can a man who’s done what you have, bear to spend his life as a war reporter? Of all the jobs in the world … If it was me, I’d never want to be reminded of what had happened.’
‘There isn’t any choice,’ he said. ‘I’ve tried to break away, believe me. I’ve moved into other areas of journalism, done sport and politics, but each time …’ He paused. ‘Each time, something happens to drag me back to war and the pity of war. Do you believe in destiny?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then my destiny is to live with my memories and guilt.’
Jay stood up to tidy away the plates and cutlery. The dashboard clock read 2205.
‘I was going to find a hotel room,’ she said, ‘but it’s a bit late. Do you mind if I spend the night in your camper?’ For a moment she thought Merlin was going to say no. Instead he grunted: ‘There’s no privacy, but there’s a spare bunk and plenty of blankets, if you want to stay.’
‘That’s fine.’
He looked up at her, the lines etched deeper on his face. ‘You’re not worried at the idea of spending the night with a murderer? Or does it turn you on?’
She put the dishes in the sink and flinched as the hot water scalded her wrist. ‘You’re not a murderer,’ she said with her back to him.
‘That’s exactly what I am,’ said Merlin harshly. ‘And you better believe it.’
*
Kreuz looked magnificent. His black Sturmbannführer uniform fit him like a glove, the jackboots gleaming in the light of the huge candles which were the chapel’s only lighting, now that dusk had faded in the narrow slit windows. If some of the others present fitted their re-tailored uniforms badly when standing, seated at the table in the poor lighting they passed muster. And their voices had been lusty enough, belting out the territorial boast of ‘Deutschland Über Alles’, which had more meaning now than for forty years past. They had sung all the old marching and drinking songs and now it was time to blood the daggers they wore at their belts.
There were four young men to be sworn in that night. All were sons of old comrades who had died or could no longer be present. All wore black SS ceremonial uniform. Three were from the ranks of Kreuz’s guards, as blond and blue-eyed as their master. The other was a man in his late twenties whose hair hung over the collar of the uniform jacket. He held himself awkwardly; a civilian dressed as a soldier, who would have liked to be somewhere else.
In each case, the ritual was the same. The initiate pulled up his left sleeve and bared his arm. Kreuz’s razor-sharp dagger was drawn deliberately across the skin. The blood spurted and Kreuz gripped the wounded arm to rub it against the slash on his own forearm, mixing their blood.
Someone started singing the ‘Horst Wessel Lied’. Kreuz clasped each of the initiates round the shoulders in a rare moment of emotion. ‘Well done,’ he said to each man. ‘You are the young blood which renews our ageing corpus. Through you and your descendants the ideals of the SS will live a thousand years until destiny calls and we rise again to a new greatness.’
Chapter 7
There was sunshine and blue sky next morning. Jay drove into New Oradour – a village built so that the old one could remain a memorial forever – to buy fresh rolls and return to be greeted by the aroma of coffee wafting out of the open door of Merlin’s camping van.
‘I’ve got croissants,’ she called, ‘and pains au raisins and chocolatines…’
Merlin stuck his head out of the doorway. He had shaved and put on a clean bush shirt and khaki trousers. The haggard lines that had transformed his face the previous evening were gone. ‘A feast,’ he said.
‘And the newspapers you ordered, sir,’ she said, passing them up.
‘It’s an occupational disease,’ he apologised. ‘I have to read several newspapers each morning or I get withdrawal symptoms, even in a country where the headlines don’t mean a damn thing to me.’
He immersed himself in a copy of Le Figaro, from time to time asking Jay the meaning of a word. She ate a couple of croissants dunked in her coffee French-style and watched him surreptitiously. She had lived with a couple of lovers for short periods but could not recall feeling so peaceful and relaxed in the morning with either of them, despite the revelations of the previous day.
Above Merlin’s head was the shelf packed with research maps and books for his travels. Jay pulled down the green Michelin guide to the area and leafed through it idly.
‘Châlus,’ she said, surprised. ‘We’re very near. And I never even knew where it was.’
Merlin was concentrating on something in the paper. ‘What’s special about that?’
‘There was a massacre …’ She hesitated but he gave no reaction so she carried on reading aloud from the Michelin. ‘In 1199 Richard the Lionheart met his death there, below the castle ramparts.’
‘Châlus?’ Merlin looked up, searched his memory and drew blank. ‘What was an English king doing in a place like that?’
Jay put down the booklet. ‘Although King of England, Richard didn’t even speak English and only went to Britain twice, each time to raise taxes. To answer your question, at Châlus he was indulging two of his favourite pastimes: besieging a castle and trying to get his greedy hands on a treasure. He slaughtered the defenders apparently to the last man.’
Merlin shrugged. ‘And did good King Richard get the treasure?’
‘Now, there’s a mystery.’ Jay scanned the brief paragraph in front of her. ‘It apparently disappeared, but some scholars believe that his mother, the Duchess Eleanor of Aquitaine, buried the treasure at the village next to Châlus, which is called Oradour-sur-Vayre.’
‘I’ve heard of that place.’ Merlin put down the newspaper.
‘There are several villages called Oradour,’ Jay continued reading. ‘The name is a corruption of the Latin oratorium, meaning a place where the pre-Roman Gauls came to pray for their dead.’
Merlin was staring right through her. ‘You sound very knowledgeable,’ he said absently.
‘Blame Mr Michelin,’ she said. ‘But actually, I am more clued-up than most. I’ve done a lot of research of the twelfth century for my Early Music group. We sing several songs of the period.’<
br />
‘Why?’
She laughed. ‘I like the music of the Plantagenet period and I’m the boss of the Chinon Ensemble when it comes to selecting the repertoire.’
‘Go on.’
‘Plus, I did medieval history for ‘A’ level and got hooked on the subject.’ She paused, made uneasy by his unfocused stare.
‘And?’ he urged.
‘That’s all there is.’ Jay looked puzzled.
‘No!’ Merlin felt the buzz that comes when a story opens up right under a newsman’s nose. ‘It’s coming back to me. Listen. He grabbed a ball pen and started scribbling on a piece of typing paper. ‘One there has never been an adequate explanation of why the SS wiped out Oradour. Two there has to be some very compelling reason why the Das Reich Division was here from the tenth through the twelfth of June 1944.’ He underlined the dates on the paper. ‘For Christ’s sake, tenth June was the fourth day of the Allied invasion! Rommel needed every goddam German tank and every soldier he could lay hands on up north. So what the hell was an SS armoured division doing, wasting time here killing civilians when it should have been belting its way flat-out towards the Normandy beachhead?’
‘You tell me.’
‘I’m groping my way.’ Merlin looked up from the paper covered in cryptic notes. ‘Another oddity about Oradour is that most SS massacres of civilians were well publicised. That was the whole point of them.’ He circled the words ‘No publicity’ on the paper. ‘Two days before in nearby Limoges the Germans had hanged ninety-nine hostages from lamp-posts all over the town as a warning to the civilian population. Yet at Oradour the SS tried to conceal what had happened by burying a lot of the corpses in rough graves and imposing a news blackout.’
Jay was going to speak, but Merlin circled the word ‘Motive?’ and continued: ‘There was no reason for reprisals here, because there had been no maquis activity at Oradour-sur-Glane. In fact there was a rumour the SS picked the wrong Oradour on a map, that they had meant to take out Oradour-sur-Vayre, where there had been Resistance activity.’
‘Surely the SS could read a map?’ Jay interrupted. ‘They were professional soldiers.’
‘Ever heard of friendly fire?’
‘What’s that?’
Merlin laughed shortly and lifted the hair behind his left ear. Jay could see a scar several inches long where no hair grew. ‘Friendly fire is what the military call an own goal. The guys who did that to me were professional soldiers on my own side who couldn’t read a map.’ He changed tack. ‘I did a story on Lammerding a few years ago.’
‘Where’s that?’ Jay was lost.
‘Not a place, a man. SS General Lammerding was in command of Das Reich division at the time of Oradour.’ He circled the name ‘Lammerding’ on his sheet of paper. ‘He had been using his troops to harvest gold for several months previous to the invasion. Hitler and Goebbels may still have been ranting about ultimate victory, but the Waffen-SS generals knew which way the tide was flowing. Certainly Lammerding and his pals knew the writing was on the wall. So they were shipping gold from all over German-occupied Europe to Switzerland for use after the inevitable defeat. It was this gold which financed Odessa, die Spinne and die Kameradschaft – the organisations which funnelled the top Nazis out of Germany via Italy to South America.’
Merlin paused. ‘You with me so far?’
Jay smiled at his excitement. This is a third Merlin I’m seeing, she thought. I’ve known the smiling media man and the veteran weighed down by a burden of guilt. This is Merlin the reporter. I like him best.
‘You’ll see what I’m getting at, Jay.’ His voice was tense. ‘A few years back I picked up an item on a tape …’
‘A tape?’ She queried the word which obviously meant something else to him.
‘The agency tape in a newsroom,’ he explained. ‘I always notice anything to do with a massacre. This was a rumour that the true reason which drew Das Reich to this harmless village in June ’44 was that they were after a treasure buried here.’
It all came back to him. A book had been published suggesting that the real reason why the inhabitants of Oradour were killed and every house set on fire was because the SS were looking for a hoard of gold and wanted to conceal the evidence of the search in which they tore every home in the village to pieces.
Merlin leaned towards Jay. ‘Does history repeat itself so closely?’ he asked. ‘Two massacres due to two treasures at two places within a few miles of each other?’
‘Or was it the same treasure?’ Jay wondered, intrigued by the way his mind worked.
Merlin grabbed the paper in both hands and crumpled it into a ball. ‘You’re the navigator. Work us out a route,’ he ordered. ‘We’d better take both cars in case we don’t come back from Châlus.’
*
Exploring ancient sites was one of Jay’s favourite relaxations. She lost count of time as her imagination ran free, trying to picture who had trodden a Roman flagstone on which she stood or who had passed through a now ruined medieval doorway, wondering what the faint figures her imagination conjured from the past had worn and felt and thought and said. Aged fifteen, she had spent an entire afternoon lost in reverie, sitting in the colonnade of the temple of Hephaistos at Athens while her worried parents scoured the Roman forum and the Akropolis, looking for her.
Well, she thought, looking up at the remains of Châlus Castle, this place has none of the magic of Athens, but it’ll do. Any ruin is a place to dream and escape from the present for a while.
The tower that had claimed King Richard’s life was a squat, sullen pile of stone, like so many minor castles and donjons of the period dotted all over France, although ruin and decay had given it a melancholy charm that the builders never intended.
Jay scrambled up the uneven hillside where the Lionheart’s sap had fallen in eight hundred years before and collapsed the castle wall above. Much of the dressed stone from the damaged walls had afterwards been looted to rebuild the houses of the nearby village but, at the top of the mound, the blank face of the twelfth-century tower still towered intact, its only feature the arrow-slit from which the fatal arrow had been fired. It drew Jay like a magnet. She stumbled into some leafless brambles and found an old cobbled path beneath her feet. The thorns tore at her thick jeans. She was glad she had brought a pair of walking boots, her normal gear for exploring ruins.
There were no other visitors, which made conditions ideal. To savour the atmosphere of ruins, Jay needed to be alone, with no ice cream wrappers on the grass or coach parties posing noisily for photographs.
There was a shout from Merlin, a hundred feet below. No ruin-lover, he had opted to sleep off the five-course lunch they had eaten in a nearby workmen’s restaurant and now lay stretched out on a sun-lounger beside the camping van. Jay turned and waved back. Although the crumbling walls were obviously dangerous, she scrambled precariously higher and higher up the keep, making for the arrow slit.
At the top she clambered onto the narrow, wind-eroded ledge behind the slit and knelt where the bowman had taken aim that fateful day in 1199. Breathing hard from the climb, Jay tried to put herself into the mind of the unknown archer sighting on the English king far below, pulling the string back, loosening it and …
There was again the sound in her head of a door closing and the voice that had cursed Becket cut off in mid-speech before she could hear what it had to say. With the same ringing in her ears that had stopped her playing in the cathedral, Jay lost her balance as vertigo grabbed her. She felt herself leaning farther and farther out into space, unable to do anything about it. A hundred feet below her lay a pile of fallen stones and below that, at the foot of the mound, she could see the camper where Merlin was asleep, with her own car parked beside it.
She knew that he would never hear her cry until it was too late. At the last moment, Jay felt her left arm twist behind her as though someone had grabbed it, enabling her to find an awkward hand hold in the masonry. The scene below faded to blackness and remembere
d noises bore in on her. There were men shouting, a strange rhythmic thudding, the sound of arrows tearing the air, an injured horse screaming like a man. And there were smells of burning and the stink of putrefying flesh
Chapter 8
King Richard dumped the rotten carcase of a sheep into the bucket of the trebuchet and straightened up, wiping filth off himself. ‘Loose!’ he bellowed.
With a groan of twisted animal sinews, the trebuchet arm described an arc, hit the padded stop with a thud and catapulted the stinking putrid mass over the castle walls.
The king roared with laughter at his practical joke. ‘They want food, I’ll give it to them,’ he said to the sweating mercenaries who manned the battery of trebuchets and mangonels, catapults whose design had not changed much since Roman times.
Stepping deliberately clear of the protecting wickerwork screens, he shouted at the blank walls towering above: ‘Eat that, you bastards!’
Still laughing, he ducked back into shelter as a volley of arrows shredded the air, shew shew shew, and bounced off the screen. ‘Their aim is getting keener,’ he remarked to Mercadier.
‘They know there’s not long to go,’ the mercenary captain said dryly. It was common knowledge that the king intended to give no quarter on the morrow: every living soul in Châlus Castle was to be put to the sword.
From the mouth of the tunnel dug into the hillside came the noise of pick and shovel. The local peasantry, pressed into service at the point of a sword, had dug the sap far beneath the castle walls. Already men were piling huge faggots of twigs and branches smeared liberally with pig fat against the pitch-soaked timbers which supported the roof of the cavern. When this mass was fired, the roof of the sap would collapse and the wall with it. Into the breach would leap five score of Mercadier’s ruthless mercenaries, against whom the three knights defending the fortress with their men-at-arms would stand no chance.
The Spirit and the Flesh Page 8