Cave Dwellers

by Richard Grant

  “Myself, Mr. Lugan. In the singular. It seems we have, you and I, an interest in common. I believe this Kaspar, whoever he is, may lead us to something large and important—important to both our countries, possibly—and needless to say, I’ll be happy to share with you whatever I’m able to discover. In consideration of our mutual interest. Between just the two of us. As I’m sure you’ll do so as well, on your own part.”

  Lugan laughed. “That’s a deal with the devil if I’ve ever heard one. I’m sorry to say, Standartenführer, I don’t have a whole lot more to tell you. I just met him the one time. Then I saw him again on the boat.”

  Kohlwasser’s heart, not usually a sensitive organ, missed a beat. “On the boat?”

  “The boat, the ship—the Robert Ley. Wasn’t sure it was him at first. There was something different, but the more I looked…it was our boy, all right. Had a couple of pals with him.”

  Kohlwasser couldn’t help himself; the little notepad was already in his hands. “Did you recognize the other people? Had you seen them also before?”

  “Look,” said Lugan, “it’s not my job to keep track of who rides around on German boats, is it? More in your line of work, I’d have thought.”

  “It is not in my—” Stopping too late, realizing Lugan was baiting him.

  The American nearly smirked. “No, I expect you’re above all that. Matters of state security and all. Well, as I say, that’s all I’ve got for you.”

  “Perhaps, then,” said Kohlwasser, pushing the point gently, but pushing it, “you might describe them for me, Mr. Lugan. Kaspar and his ‘pals.’ All the details you can remember.”

  —

  The vampire did not disappoint. Kohlwasser had seen him in much better form, but the Americans weren’t to know that. A remarkable thing about this performer was that his time in the concentration camp had, if anything, only sharpened the verisimilitude of his act. Whereas before he’d needed a thick layer of white caking to give him that fresh-from-the-casket look, now he came by it more naturally. His body lurched unnervingly across the stage or balanced perilously as though he might, at the faintest puff, collapse in a heap of bones and bloodless flesh. The only thing substantial about him was his floor-length black cloak, lined in crimson—and even that was decrepit.

  He was a very good vampire. The best!

  Glewitz was afraid of him. The little sneak avoided the stage while he was on, making a rare circuit of the rear tables, inquiring into the health of petty bureaucrats and uncouth party louts in their bulging uniforms and goggle-eyed out-of-towners enjoying a nibble of forbidden fruit—or not, what did Glewitz care; it was past midnight and the bouncers were turning people away.

  Meanwhile, onstage, perspiring alone in the spotlight, safely out of his employer’s line of vision, Stav the vampire had wrapped up his opening shtick, delivered a few ominous messages to random members of the audience and now stood trembling in an unfathomable inner crisis of self-loathing and opiate withdrawal, hoping against hope for inspiration. Not having expected to be called out so early, he hadn’t had time to make his usual surreptitious survey of the crowd, so he was winging it—badly, he feared. So far it seemed no one had noticed—only the band and the whores working the tables—but Stav had a feeling, a terrible sick feeling, that some reckoning was at hand.

  And there was another thing. Something at table 4, the one behind the palm trees, kept tugging at his attention. Like a fly buzzing there, at the corner of his vision. He kept batting it away—literally so, to his shame, swatting at the thin air with a trembling hand—and after a while, even a crowd as thick and drunk as this one would notice something like that. Now he swatted again, and a few people laughed. Again, and the laughter spread more widely. Stav smiled back. It wasn’t what he was hoping for, but he could work with it. He raised his hand one more time, waggling his fingers playfully to titters from back in the room—and the world dropped out from underneath him.

  Stav was buzzing now: he’d become the very fly he’d been batting away at. He looked down through clouds of cigarette smoke at table 4, which was refracted into thousands of tiny facets by his fly eyes. The people sitting at the table were surprisingly cowlike. One of them was a bull, and another was perhaps a goat or something goatish. Oh yes, Stav recognized that one; it wasn’t a goat but a devil, the cause of all his personal torment. The others were just cows, and the noises they made were the ordinary mooing and farting. The bull was louder and larger and appeared somehow out of place. In fact, now that Stav looked more closely, trying to squeeze the thousand facets into a singular image, he was pretty certain the bull was Death himself. Evidently he put this realization into words, because suddenly other voices were repeating it—the bull is death, moo, fart, what does he mean the bull is death?—and at that Stav flew right off the stage and out of the Trigilaw, and if there is any more to tell of him, you will not find it here.

  BE CAREFUL ABOUT BREATHING

  HAMELN AND POLLE: 26 MAY

  Two hours past dawn on its third day out of Bremen, navigating a wide southward bend of the river, the Eulenspiegel passed through the small city of Hameln, where a festival was about to get under way. From the river, with the old city hulking in medieval slumber above, they watched the preparations along a cobbled waterfront promenade: horses being draped in colored ribbons, carts spilling over with cut flowers, a purple canopy being stretched between four tall poles, a bishop sipping coffee on a papier-mâché throne surrounded by acolytes, sleepy children in fancy spring clothes being spoiled with a tray of sweets, their faces smeared with jam, a quartet of horsemen dressed as knights smoking and laughing while grooms fussed over their mounts, painters adding the final curling adornments to opposite ends of a streetwide banner proclaiming HIMMELFAHRT 1938.

  Ascension Day. Oskar’s mental calendar clicked over. Spring was turning to summer. History was on the march, even if here, at the center of Germany, time seemed to have stopped or, rather, to be circling like the movements of a lovely Schwarzwald clock.

  Oskar had been to Hameln before. Twice, in fact: first as a child on vacation with his family, a day’s excursion to the home of the famous rat catcher. They’d admired the statue in the main square and heard the story recited, with musical accompaniment, by players on a balcony. Then they’d all toured the museum and Oskar had bought, with his own money, a little flute. Did he imagine himself playing it, dancing merrily through the streets, leading the other children on a delirious flight down old farm tracks into the mountains, the Weserbergland, where they would live without rules or lords or parents? He couldn’t remember. He couldn’t even recall whether, at that age, he’d understood that the story was meant to be a sad one.

  The second visit he remembered more clearly. The summer after he’d started Gymnasium, he’d joined the dj.1.11—a very exclusive group; all his friends were envious—and Hameln was a dot on the map over which he pored night after night, preparing himself for his first Great Trek. The main destination was a mountain near Kassel, the Höhe Meissner, two days south of here by footpath: a legendary spot, all but sacred in the lore of the Movement, the site of a youth summit in 1913 and another planned for that year, 1929. It had been a magical time, not just for Oskar but—he was still pretty certain—for Germany itself, and for young people everywhere. The end of the Golden Twenties, the dawn of a brilliant future, a time of comradeship that crossed borders and languages, when everyone in Oskar’s circle was quoting Rilke—stirring, if often murky, evocations of a neue Seite, which may have been a new leaf or a clean slate or a fresh direction but it was awfully alluring, whatever it was—and the impulse to wander, to plant your feet on new soil, had grown in everyone’s mind to something like a holy beckoning. On that second visit, the story of the rat catcher turned upside down in Oskar’s mind: now the children of Hameln were playing the tune and the grown-ups were dancing to it. Where would it lead them? No one seemed to worry about that. To someplace new—Rilke’s neue Seite, a fresh page of history—and
that was enough.

  Strange to think of that now. Strange to be here, on a boat chugging slowly through Hameln on Ascension Day.

  Clairborne was enthralled. The others had finally relented, to the extent of allowing the boy up on deck, even in daylight. It had become pretty clear that he wasn’t going anywhere without von Ewigholz, and equally clear that the prisoner was going to need a doctor again, soon. The new stitches were holding, but the surrounding tissue was inflamed and a white discharge had appeared around the exit wound, his skin now hot to the touch. Oskar wanted to act sooner rather than later, but the SOPADE women, Lena and Anna, took no counsel and were intent on making it to some destination they didn’t care to divulge. Not Hameln, evidently. And not Nienburg or Minden or Rintein or any of the promising-looking towns whose wharves the Eulenspiegel had all but brushed against on its long crawl upriver. Meanwhile the days were passing, Germany had entered its early summer glory and Oskar was growing mildly frantic. Clair, on the other hand, seemed to be enjoying himself.

  “Did you see that? Look, there’s a man on stilts, in raggedy clothes—he must be twelve feet tall! And he’s chasing after that little guy dressed in red, like the devil.”

  Von Ewigholz lay beside him on the foredeck, his torso propped against the sloping bulkhead of the forward hold. Even from where Oskar stood, roughly amidships, he looked terrible. Clair either didn’t notice or was laying on good cheer like a salve—ineffective though arguably touching, if one were susceptible to that. Oskar felt rather hard-hearted just now.

  “That’s the Trickster,” von Ewigholz said, speaking in English—his voice as precise and modulated as ever, though quieter than usual. “He tempts fate but always eludes it. Parents don’t approve of him. He teaches bad lessons, they say. He lies and steals and blames it always on someone else. But the people he steals from are greedy, and the people he lies to are liars themselves. Don’t you have these stories in America?”

  If he was in pain, which Oskar imagined he must be, he covered it well. Clair twitched beside him—anxious, helpless—but went on describing the scene along the waterfront as one might for the benefit of an elderly relative whose eyesight was in doubt.

  “Now the band’s tuning up. God, it’s terrible! Do these people practice at all, or just come out when there’s a parade or something? What are those things that look like little tubas? And yes”—he looked at von Ewigholz, the two of them sharing for that moment some mysterious sympathy—“we do have instruments like that in America. I just don’t know what they’re called.”

  Von Ewigholz laughed but then had to stop, pressing one hand against his wound, leaning on the other against the deck, as though he were trying to push himself back together.

  Oskar turned away when Lena climbed partway out of the passenger cabin, holding a piece of paper on which someone had drawn, in charcoal, a rudimentary map. Oskar couldn’t see it very well but it looked like a map of the river, with boxes to represent the town—some town, anyway—and lines crossing it to show bridges.

  “Here,” she said, reaching up to him.

  Oskar took it and half-lifted her to the deck. She found footing there beside him, their faces closer than they’d been in days. Her skin was damp and pink from having been rubbed with water out of a small, zinc-coated tub that served their bathing needs, or mostly failed to. Her scent—of lard soap, kerosene, sweaty clothes, last night’s cheese-and-onion soup, a splash of violet from a heart-shaped vial he’d seen in her bag—rose around her like a child’s impression of a cloud, and Oskar indulged the fleeting illusion that they were alone in it. Lena indulged him too, for the instant until this peculiar intimacy faded. Then she took hold of a rail and pulled herself more upright and distant, braced against the gentle rocking of the Eulenspiegel, her hair loose in the May breeze.

  Detached. That was the word he was looking for. Since coming back to Germany, she’d grown detached from him and also, he felt, from the previous editions of herself: the bright schoolgirl, the librarian, the suburban conspirator, the make-believe wife. In the latest edition she was Lena the revolutionary—a brave woman on a dangerous mission—and you could say this version was the best, the fullest expression of her character, the most exciting or revealing or rewarding. But the others had been pretty good, too. Oskar had been somewhat in love with one or more of them. Now he was unsure. Live your cover—he’d been trained in that, though it still gave him trouble. But become your cover—that was different. How did you invent a new persona and then somehow be that person?

  “Come with me,” Lena said. “We have to speak with the boatman. I’ll need your help.” She headed aft, running her hand along the railing.

  So…was he afraid of her? Was it as simple as that? Oskar set off behind her, finding the boat’s rocking gentle and predictable. He decided that, more likely, he and Lena had signed up for different causes and boarded different boats. Her journey was more adventurous, her footing less sure, so she needed to hang on. As for Oskar’s journey, this wasn’t even part of it, just an odd detour—a break, actually!—for as long as it took to see everyone safely to wherever they were going. Then back to the Nest, a new assignment, a new cover to live, real danger again. Anyway, what a beautiful day it was!

  The older boatman waved Lena’s map away. He’d planted himself on a tall stool bolted into the deck behind the ship’s wheel, a large and apparently sensitive apparatus that he constantly adjusted with short, quick tugs one way or the other. “I need no map for this river,” he said, in a sharp regional dialect that made his words sound clipped off—a good language, Oskar had always thought, for shouting in windstorms. It must have struck Lena as rude.

  “But we should take the right bend in the river—look here, see where it divides? The right, not the left.”

  The boatman gave the wheel a jerk—to the left—that sent Oskar and Lena grabbing for support.

  “It’ll be fine,” Oskar said. “Just leave the map with me. I’ll stay back here—really, it’ll be fine, don’t worry.”

  Lena scowled but passed him the paper, crumpled now, and glanced toward the boatman, who was conspicuously ignoring them. “And Oskar, look here, there’s a bridge, see? Someone will be waiting there. There may be a message. It could be in a package—something they’ll drop over. This is very important. I need you to catch the package—can you do that?”

  “They won’t drop it,” said the boatman, not bothering to look around. “It’ll be on a rope and you just need to cut it loose. My boy can do it. Anybody could.”

  “I need you to catch it,” Lena repeated, more loudly.

  —

  “I like that one,” said the boatman, a while after she’d gone. “The other, well. I knew her dad.”

  “You knew her dad…from the SDP?”

  “A good man, a brave man. Foolish. We’re all fools, aren’t we? Sailing head-on into this.”

  Oskar didn’t think it wise, or necessary, to ask, What?

  “That bridge is coming up soon,” the boatman said. “You can take my knife. In fact, you’d better keep it.”

  Oskar weighed the knife in his hand: ugly but useful-looking, short and fat-handled, the blade whetted sharp as a razor. “Thanks,” he said.

  “Yes, sure.”

  Hameln fell behind them, the river widened, streets turned to tracks and then to cropland. The fields were plowed and sown and tended with such precision as to look like painted scenery. Even the hedgerows had been pruned to uniform dimensions, though they varied in texture and color: wild roses blooming in pendant white clusters with purple ladybells and yellow-eyed daisies peeking out from beneath them. The air was heavy with the smell of roses and manure and freshly cut hay. As the river neared a bend, the Eulenspiegel moved out into open water and then seemed to cut sharply to starboard to avoid an outcrop ahead—only now it entered a separate channel that Oskar hadn’t noticed before, its opening masked by reeds and its narrow course squeezed from both sides by yellow-green sedges that squeaked agai
nst the old hull. The bridge came into view so suddenly it was almost overhead before he noticed it; there was no time to steer for the center or to maneuver at all. The figure on the bridge had to be waiting in just the right spot, and you had to have a knife ready in your hand, and the package had to be dangling right there, at the proper height for you to snag and cut it.

  The fact that these circumstances coincided perfectly, leaving Oskar with a lump of black wool in his arms, was the single most impressive thing he’d experienced in his dealings with the SOPADE. It gave him the sort of breathless aesthetic pleasure he’d felt in watching a precise infantry operation reenacted with models on a miniature battlefield. You couldn’t believe such a thing had actually happened, and yet it must have, because we were speaking German instead of French.

  He was still breathing this heady air while Lena and then Anna, who appeared on deck just in time to snatch the parcel away, tore at the wool wrapping and started pulling out an odd assortment of things—A mask? And what’s this, a stethoscope?—before discovering, at last, the document tucked in the center that made sense of it all.

  Anna ran her eyes over it, blinked twice, then went through it again, more slowly. “We’ve got to get ready,” she said. “There’s trouble ahead.”

  “There always is,” said the boatman.

  —

  About a dozen kilometers upstream, the Weser lost itself in marshland. There were dozens of islets, most only large enough to support a tangle of alders or a few birches with dull green leaves that snapped in the breeze like tiny pennants. Narrow channels ran between them, usually ending in bogs where runoff from the farms had mixed with rotting vegetation to create black, fertile and fetid soil that hosted a range of berries, brambles and fruit-bearing creepers with a ground cover of carnivorous sundews to feast on the insects they attracted. The main channel curled snakelike through this gurgling labyrinth; for a couple of hours, it felt like the boat was constantly turning in one direction or the other. The young boatman stood in the forepeak with a barge pole, though he seldom stuck it in, so apparently he was measuring the water depth or maybe just having fun. The sun grew hot and Oskar felt his nervousness blurring into lethargy—one turn after another, shadows sliding around over the deck like loose carpeting—until, in the middle of a slow, 180-degree swing to port, they came in sight of a village that seemed to be crouching there on the western bank, waiting to surprise them.