by Marc Eden
She was screaming!
The Camera was useless, ringing metal split...it was because of the missing face. Terror clawed like a wingless bird, flopping helplessly at his feet. Peering up, a dreamer’s glimpse of his wide-brimmed hat. Now, too late, his cold eye counting, she felt herself rising and standing straight at the tunnel’s mouth where the trapdoor yawned. There, coming to claim her, and extending a black glove—The Spy was standing!
She backed away. He raised his hand...
The wind was blowing.
It was increasing.
Sinclair was running!
She tripped, sought desperately for balance, and found herself staring into the face of Marchaud, coming back the other way and who was fighting to arrive. The Spy flew at their heels! Into the entrance of the cave, through the trapdoor and down. Hurry! We must get there before the mission!
Turn loose! I’ll catch you!
We can’t take any cameras. No, not even reminders. You must leave all your memory in your body. Yes, leave it there, with the night that will have passed without us. This way, quickly, we have to go back:
Back.
All the way back, to when time was, before dreams. Arranged by The Spy, an evolutional duplication of the accelerated regression of her life, and of all the lives before her, Valerie Sinclair had just been swept away on a tide of terror; and whether she dreamt it, or would even be able to convince herself later that it actually happened, for this moment, for the longest moment of her life, she would not be able to say. Chased by the man without a face, the wall of what she had been taught to believe was reality, had cracked. Spilling through it, already spinning through her past, she had slammed into the surprised Marchaud along the way; and had grabbed the girl, to keep from falling herself.
“Est ce L’Espion?”
“Oui! Allons-y!”
Black is the air that claws about them in the physical tunnel of time. They move, and are moved, as if swallowed by a snake, whose bones are made of rock and timbers, worming under the sea-drowned land somewhere above them. Half-crouching and resting on knuckles, not knowing or seeing—departing from human, before there was human, before language; now limping and feeling, and before love:
Velocity was coining...
They had changed their hides and burned their hair with fire; and their weapons were metal, found, no one knew where, from the gods in their passing, for caves came before the world was, from the shattered plantations of stars. It would be a hundred million years before time would hint that they might count; up from the round bore hollowed for living food, rearing and reaching, deserted by rats that were yet to evolve.
Distance claimed, devouring, runic litter...
Past the passageways of graves where no one dies and no one lives, stooped loping on haunches, and cringing and waiting, because the floor made their muscles for growing but their bones were compressed from the crouching, and they ascended.
They were not supposed to be here...
The magnets of their bodies pulled them forward, and faster, and up to the Top, where the flatlands were; for in the timeless gulches that had cleaved around them, the Bipedal Block had formed; leaving ruts behind where life could crawl; and stand, at last, to seek among the killer stars the greater prey of war.
Two girls came bursting through.
A nightbird shrilled across the flats, an eerie coda to their skills, and spilling from the tunnel’s mouth, their clothing scorched, suspicions born, the earth released them from its grip. Tourists from the dark terrain, they stood on the shores of Brittany. They were in the future. Cones of light shone down upon them, aligned with the horizon, compressed below a distant river of stars.
Sunday, he’d said.
Had they landed undetected?
“Over here!” It is Pierre’s voice, uncertain. Something shimmers, moving through the trees. Framed as children, shadows emerge from the hedgerow. Whispers come, friends are parting, trading girl-things; and de Beck does not hear it. Nor does he know: Marchaud, escaped from the Gestapo, has been hiding in its future. But The Spy has known, that is why she is here. The girl approaches. De Beck, her partner, thinking her Sinclair, motions her over.
The French girl listens, she gathers close.
Pierre will leave for the farm. She is to stay, and hide. First contact, behind enemy lines, is a man’s job. Intending to kiss her, instead he grins. “Bonne chance, cherie.” He turns, and disappears into the darkness.
The French girl was home, in France. Could her English other find her way back?
Marchaud was twelve—n’est-ce-pas?—and she hoped to graduate. It was all right to travel—wasn’t it—she had all her papers.
A cloud scurried across the moon. The moonlight paled, and was gone. A darkness had come over the girl, and fear. The white cross with the gold chain, given her by Hamilton, was missing from her neck. Had he not given it to her yet? Was it not yesterday evening, on Saturday? Was it not the Cross of Lorraine?
She would put it on, and feel safe.
Dreaming...
Would the cross given her by Hamilton prove enough to protect her from the Bram Stokers of Hitler? Spawn of ghost and goblin, iron ghouls who tramped by night: Les Nazis, bobbing like Jack-o’-lanterns, across the graveyards of France.
Soldiers, smelling of rotted kelp.
Fiddler crabs were marching in blue moonlight, gliding in crackling swells of bone and claw over rocks as sharp as razors. They’d come pouring out of their holes, alerted by, and running from, the dark-eyed creature’s smell. It was the smell of bath powder, ferociousness, and sex: menacing spoor of the she-killer, who’d invaded their territory.
In the high reeds, Marchaud closed her eyes.
Valerie’s dream, her fevered sleep, was preceding against the background of what it would become. She stared at the Casablanca fan, and wet her lips.
Sinclair went back to sleep and had a second dream.
There were bluebells in Brittany, but they were brown.
France, she remembered, had changed.
She, too, was a part of that change, some insignificant mote of its memory. She looked up at the stars. Before, missing wonder, had she taken the world for granted? She loved it so. She looked about, evaluating, tongue wetting dry lips. Her hand flexed. She wished for a gun.
She had been following Pierre.
Dreaming, frightened, she thought of Hamilton. His words, like those of an owl, cut through the beams of sleep, bringing wisdom: to do what Pierre did. What he had told her, less than moments ago.
Pierre stopped!
Valerie did the same. Had something made him suspicious? She jumped behind a tree. Pierre listened. Protected, biting pillows, she watched him. What was he doing? Weren’t they partners? Anything he could do, she would do! If he turned, she would turn. If he ran, she would—
He was shaking the leg of his pants.
—run.
Valerie did the same. De Beck had turned, he glanced over his shoulder. Something? A face, he thought, back there on the shore. Shimmering. Just a tree, with a low limb. Valerie had stopped in midair when she saw him. He moved on, footsteps crunching into the sand. Dropping the leg that looked like a limb, she stepped from behind the tree. She followed, in step with his movements, arriving at the place where he had stopped. She looked down.
She could tell it was him, from the initials.
In the training film for the cross-country, the narrator had compared soldiers blazing trails to cats marking their territory. Seymour had borrowed this rare footage, she’d learned, from his own instructor, chap named Bridley. She bent down, like the soldier in the film, rolling sand between her forefinger and thumb. She sniffed, cataloguing the smell. Pierre, on his home ground, was obviously leaving a trail for her to follow: good to know, in case he got lost. She straightened up.
De Beck had disappeared!
A dark form was cutting across the field.
She distinguished the outline of a hedge, and a shadow, fas
t disappearing through it. On either side, blackened by war, lay the ruined ruts of wheat: the road to the farm. Damp red poppies bent low to the earth. In the dim light, they looked like drops of blood.
They were moving as a team...
Out of darkness, a VOICE that turns her heart to ice!
“Wer geht da?’
Still running, she skidded to her knees and froze! Through the branches, she could see it: the back of the Frenchman, his hands raised.
“Ami,” she heard him say.
A rifle bolt opened, it slammed shut.
“Freund. Ein Freund!” Pierre amended, seconds from death.
The shot was held.
Lucky Pierre. Not to die at dawn. When to die then? Was she next? Did they know she was here? How could they know! Her heart pounded wildly, like the heart of a bird.
Sinclair groaned, she kicked off the sheet. She was ripping at her gown.
Crouched, trembling, Marchaud became the grass.
She wished herself a shadow, she dreamt herself a tree. Something was at her window. She remembered she’d been playing with dolls. Dolls, without heads.
A twig snapped.
She opened her eyes.
“Vorwärts und weisen sie sich AUS!”barked the Bogeyman.
She closed them.
A pillow slid from the bed. Valerie felt herself falling. She fell into a ditch. De Beck was being arrested! Two men were talking: they were German. One of them was Pierre, he had an American accent. The second man, older, a Commandant, he was...?
Von Schroeder. He is a Banker...
A Banker?
The Commandant peered at the prisoner, studying the Frenchman’s countenance. A broad grin spread across his face. “Horst Liebeck! Wo warst Du? Willkommen zu hause!”
She grabbed for her camera! Where was it?
“—Horst Liebeck? The Commandant waved the guns aside. Gratefully, Pierre lowered his arms. “So, Liebeck! How is London? Still standing? Tell me about Marley Square!” For the past four years, it has been Pierre’s favorite place to go.
He has been expected...
Von Schroeder was showing Pierre a photograph. They were looking down, staring at the corpse of a British spy. Her face of white is wet with blood. Black tears, forming ruts, drip down onto the road.
Marchaud gasps, places her hand to her mouth. Sinclair, her other, will be shot by the Gestapo after extraction of the information in her memory: photographs arranged by von Schroeder. He will give them to de Beck. But what are they looking at! In darkness, she listens:
Rain is falling.
Beyond its echo in the summer night, comes a voice, frightening and faceless, yet clear, like stars and wind, and whispering.
Her name is Mary Gladstone...
“Wer ist Frau Mary Gladstone?”
She is you, unless you remember...
Her eyelids seemed glued together, bonded, as if from dead streams of tears. She tried to focus and found the bedclothes disarrayed. Why wouldn’t she remember? Because of her camera? Had she taken it? Dawn spread its thin film across her field of vision. Had she opened the curtains! Daylight came, the sun slipping through, hot on her cheeks.
Sinclair yawned...
She was awake.
IV
Saturday’s sun was hitting them hard.
Through the left rear window a comer chop of light flashed on braided felt, touching the unyielding shoulder of blue broadcloth, just under the epaulet. The driver lowered the visor. Commodore Blackstone, O.B.E., V.C., was sitting stiffly in the back of his personal car, as he had for some thirty years, eyes straight ahead, for all appearances cut from the same marble as Nelson. His driver, maneuvering the black Bentley through the Buckinghamshire traffic, shot past raised beds of blue and yellow flowers down early-morning lanes of red mercury gravel.
Once past the sentries, and into the welcome brick of Bletchley Park, Commodore Blackstone found solace. Equal to Mountbatten in pay, if not in public relations, Blackstone’s hatred of Lord Louis, the sponsor of Valerie Sinclair, engulfed him as he walked down corridors that smelled of cleansing solvents and into the large office where his Adjutant, Lieutenant Conrad Parker, had already arranged the morning’s dossiers. Fluent in German, familiar with Berlin, Parker had been recruited from the London School of Economics. Having personally seen to his Clearance, the Commodore considered the future banker, who was dark of thought and insidiously silent, a particularly valuable asset in the ongoing business with his European partners.
“By Jove! ‘Pronto,’ as they say, ah?”
Following their journey through the labyrinths of history, the thick stack of files had reached their final destination and were now awaiting one of the two hand stamps that would determine their fate:
KEEP, or DESTROY.
The decision was Blackstone’s.
In looking back over his life, he knew that people in high places were afraid of him. Yet he had come too far to let this influence his judgment. Controlling the ticket office on MI.5’s midway of recent attractions, a hot cup of tea at hand, the Commodore opened the first of the folders, turned it sideways and read the name: Erich von Schroeder. Their positions analogous, von Schroeder orchestrated Intelligence for Germany.
They had met, before the war.
He looked inside: J. Henry Schroeder Co., Schroeder Bankers, Hamburg. Present Rank: Commandant, Abwehr. Present location unknown: presumed France. Without glancing up, he said, “Good work, Parker.” He flicked through the rest of the tabs. “By the way, have Bridley call me, will you?” Not gone five seconds, there was a tap at the door. “Now what?” The Commodore looked up.
It was his Adjutant.
“Sorry, sir. I just remembered. About Bridley—?”
“Bridley, yes? What about him?”
“There was a cable early this morning, sir. I didn’t want to bother you.”
“Ay? Nonsense, Parker! Out with it!”
“Bridley is out of the country, sir. No one quite knows where, but the cable did state that he would be sending a message—to Commander Hamilton, sir.”
“Intercept it, Parker.”
“Yes, sir!”
So! David Hamilton, sucking up to Mountbatten, thought he had Bridley in his pocket, did he? That torpedo who worked for him, too! Lieutenant Seymour, wasn’t he? Marty Seymour’s kid. Why, the bounders were as clear as a spyglass! There was a new breed of blackmailer these days—but he still had a trick or two. Blackstone scribbled a note. Alone with his thoughts, Parker gone, he read:
Von Schroeder. Pre-military: Goethe University, London School of Economics. Present at meeting with Adolf Hitler, 4 January, 1933, Berlin. Schroeder Banks financed the debt incurred by Hitler’s private army. Represented by the London office of Sullivan and Cromwell (J.F. Rulles) rep. V.S. Bank.
Schroeder is listed among 17 Merchant Bankers who make up the Financial District of London. With Belgium Banker Franqui, #8 of the consortium, the Schroeder family financed the American President Hoover. Hoover, a mining engineer, serving Franqui’s copper interests in Singapore.
There was more, the print being small; and he finally reached the bottom of the page: In 1936, Schroeder merged with Rockefeller, #3, re-forming, in 1937, the Canadian Cartel of Bechtel-McCone International: Ottawa and London. Bechtel, accessed to Washington, is responsible for the favored selections of Chairmen of the Federal Reserve; and, often, other Government Posts. In 1938, the London Schroeder (Bank) became Germany’s Agent in Great Britain. In 1939 Schroeder Bros. Erich and Bruno, #5 and #6 respectively, arranged with Lord Docker exchange of Shares, Bank of England.
See Bechtel Construction.
“That would be Boer’s Bank,” the Commodore concluded, and jotted the note on a separate pad. All Rothschild Associates, himself included, owned Shares there—until Emily convinced him to go with National Westminster. Thinking of their future, she had started handling more of their affairs lately, what with the war.
Bloody nuisance, sometimes, these
dossiers.
He tore the note from the top of the pad, folded it carefully, and placed it in the side pocket of his blouse. A shareholder in what he was investigating, Blackstone’s own motives were above reproach. “Conflict-of-interest” was one of those American phrases. Among International Bankers, trained and recruited at the London School of Economics, the first secret was that there weren’t any.
The American Fed was a hoax. Had been, since 1913.
Purchased by Germany’s Paul Warburg—spelled Rothschild—with Congressman Carter Glass doing the selling. Name changed, from the Owen-Glass Act. Lights out, in Congress. The Bill’s sponsor, Senator Robert L. Owen, waiting in the wings. No further mention of Owen. Hmmm. Politics, that: somebody had to throw somebody a bone.
Pensioned quite well, was he?
Leave it to the bloody Yanks!
Cleaned up, as it were, and under its final name, the American Federal Reserve Act of 1913 had actually been authored and successfully lobbied by one Paul Warburg. Nice touch, that “Federal”. In the consortium, Warburg was listed as #4. Neither an American Agency nor the ‘Central Bank’ of the United States Government, the London officer had underlined, but a foreign-owned private credit monopoly. When Roosevelt was elected, he appointed James Paul Warburg, the son, as his Budget Director. Nephew of Max Warburg, Paul’s brother, and Germany’s top spy. Both brothers had attended the Paris Peace Conference: Paul Warburg as President Wilson’s Chief Financial Advisor; Max, #7, heading up the German delegation. John Maynard Keynes, the economist, representing England? Opposing German reparations? Had someone taken leave of their senses! Hmmm...let’s see, who were OUR chaps? Ah, yes! Lord Balfour and Baron Edmund D. Rothschild. Good thing the Bankers were there!