He stopped and looked at the assembled acolytes. Their food sat in front of them, growing cold. The flames behind them devoured the logs and danced less brightly.
‘I shall need twelve of you tonight,’ he said, then reeled out the names of the men he wanted to help him.
They reached Sancraiu aboard three four-by-four vehicles, fitted with snow tyres and hunting lamps. Together, they drove into the main square and got down, leaving their powerful engines running. Aehrenthal had already given instructions. Each of his deputies was armed with an H&K G3 semi-automatic rifle.
They spread out through the village. Aehrenthal led two of his closest followers into a bar on the far edge of the square. It was filled with cigarette smoke, smoke from a beechwood fire, the sounds of men’s voices, a woman’s quick laughter, and the underlying smell of beer.
An old man was sitting near the fire, surrounded by his usual crowd as he dredged up memories. Aehrenthal recognised him right away. This was the town mayor, a much respected old soldier by the name of Bogdan Bogoescu. He held court in the inn every night, treating it as a sounding board for the opinions of local residents, and a place where they could listen to his recommendations on village affairs, together with his reminiscences about life as a soldier in World War Two.
Aehrenthal went up to him.
‘You,’ he said. ‘Old man.’
Eyes turned to examine the newcomer. Most of them knew or guessed who Aehrenthal was. He spoke Romanian with what they took for a German accent, and he faced them down with frigid contempt.
The old man looked up at Aehrenthal like someone who had better things to do with his time. He noticed the two men with him, the way they swaggered with their large rifles.
‘Can I help you?’ he asked.
Aehrenthal’s answer was crisp and to the point.
‘I want the name of the person responsible for keeping the man and woman in the hunting cabin west of my castle. I believe it’s a woman I’m looking for, and I want her name now.’
Bogoescu wasn’t particularly frightened of Aehrenthal or what he considered his pomposity.
‘Can’t think who you’re talking about,’ he said. ‘I never go up that way myself.’
Aehrenthal had expected this response. He didn’t hesitate. Lifting his rifle, he blew a hole through the old man’s head. Blood leapt in every direction, drops of it spinning like red wasps onto furniture, clothing, and skin. Fragments of skull flew back into the fireplace and rattled against the back. The woman screamed and threw up. The air was filled with exclamations. Aehrenthal stood stock still. No one here was going to attack him. He had nothing but contempt for the villagers, their way of life, their prejudices, their lack of concern for matters of higher importance, their lack of respect for someone like himself.
He turned his head and spoke to the first man he saw.
‘Perhaps you have a better memory than Grandfather here. I’m sure you understand that I’m impatient.’
The man trembled and wet his pants. His companions darted glances everywhere, wondering if there was anywhere for them to run, seeing Aehrenthal’s companions blocking their way on both sides.
‘Ilona,’ came a voice from further back. ‘Her name is Ilona. Her family name is Horváth.’
Aehrenthal spotted the man who had spoken.
‘Very good,’ he said, ‘come with me, take me to her house.’
The man made to shrink back, but the nearest of Aehrenthal’s assistants simply dived into the group he was with and dragged him out.
The house stood in a short street between the church and the Rózsavölgyi bakery. It had been freshly painted; a street lamp nearby cast a wash of dim light over its façade, as if varnishing the painted surfaces. There were lights behind the windows on one side, and from further in came the sound of a television. Someone was watching Te crezi mai destept? on Prima TV.
Aehrenthal had brought four men with him. One was a bodybuilder from Budapest, a tall man they called Samson behind his back. He seemed to do no more than lean against the door. It buckled under his combined weight and strength, and fell with a crash to the ground. He stood aside to let Aehrenthal lead the way, a pistol held in one hand.
The whole family was assembled in the living room. They had just finished dinner and were watching TV together: Ilona’s father, mother, two brothers and sister. The brothers were aged fifteen and thirteen, the sister, a pretty girl called Ecaterina, just nine. Aehrenthal killed the little girl first, with a single shot to the head. The room was instantly in uproar. Ilona’s father made to grab Aehrenthal’s handgun and was shot summarily in the throat. He staggered, choking on his own blood, while his wife, terrified beyond endurance, made to go to him, only to be thrown backwards onto the sofa. The two boys, seeing their sister and father killed, began to whimper. Aehrenthal snapped at them.
‘Shut up, you two! If I hear another peep out of you, you’ll be next.’
He went across to Mrs Horváth.
‘I want answers,’ he yelled. ‘If I don’t get them, I will shoot your boys. And if you give me any false answers, I’ll come back and burn this house down round you and these brats.’
The mother was close to hysterics, but the ice in Aehrenthal’s voice and the imminent danger to her two sons acted as rods to stiffen her.
‘Where has Ilona gone?’
No answer. She just looked wide-eyed at him, not knowing what would pacify his terrible rage. She was praying without words or the presence of God.
‘I asked you where your daughter is. She left Sancraiu earlier today. Where did she go?’
He pointed his gun at her youngest boy, and she looked into Aehrenthal’s eyes and saw no pity.
She could not answer. The words were trapped inside her, between fear for her sons and dread for her only remaining daughter.
Aehrenthal shot the young boy once in the head. The boy did not shake or jerk or fall backwards, but simply collapsed in a heap, like a toy whose string has been cut. There was no time for him to cry out. His brother shuddered and ran to hold the younger boy, talking to him as if he was still alive. He knew an end was coming. On the television, the programme that had been such a cause of mirth only minutes before rattled on like a tram down lines that would soon lead to a wreck.
Persuaded of the boy’s vulnerability, Aehrenthal trained his gun this time, not on him, but on his mother.
‘P-P-Putna,’ the boy stammered. ‘I heard her say it. That’s where she went. I wish I’d gone with her, I wish I was with her now.’
‘Where in Putna?’ But he had already guessed.
‘The…the mon-monastery.’
‘Who will she see there?’
There was no answer, but Aehrenthal knew the name already. Many years before, someone had whispered it in his ear. He had put it to the back of his mind and forgotten it until now.
He reached out and put his hand on the boy’s head. The boy flinched, fearing and despising him equally.
‘Well done,’ said Aehrenthal. ‘You did well to tell me this. I’ll see you are well treated. You and your mother. It is always best to tell the truth, especially when someone is angry. I have been very angry, and I apologise for it.’
He ruffled the boy’s hair, then turned and left the room. His men were waiting for him by the open doorway. One of them was a young hopeful by the name of Ferenc. Aehrenthal took him aside.
‘There are two left,’ he said. ‘Finish them off, then dispose of all the bodies. Do it all somewhere out of sight. Don’t trouble me with it.’
Ferenc saluted and took his pistol from its holster.
Aehrenthal stepped out of the house into a deserted street. His lieutenants followed him.
‘We leave for Putna tonight,’ he announced. ‘Get cars and half a dozen good men. You have one hour to make things ready.’
His own car drew up at the kerb. As he started to get into it, a shot rang out behind him. For a moment its echo sounded in his ears. Then a second shot cracked. Th
e silence that followed it was dreadful, and for a moment it seemed to hang over the town like the end of all hope. Then Aehrenthal’s driver snapped the ignition on and took the car roaring out into the empty street.
21
A Stranger in a Strange Land
‘You will not be surprised if I tell you that Egon Aehrenthal is an evil man. I think of evil in religious terms, perhaps you do not. But no one can deny he is a man of evil appetites and evil deeds.’
Father Iustin held a half-filled wineglass between his hands, but he did not drink from it. He had never had a need for liquor of any kind, though he enjoyed a good wine with his meals; but what he had heard tonight had so troubled him that he sensed danger in the wine, and in the oblivion he thought it might bring. Tonight, oblivion would have been welcome. But in the morning he would have to wake again and start the work ahead of him, and that he feared more than anything.
He sat with Ethan in the deserted dining hall, at the end of one table, still lit by candlelight. The great fires had died down, and it had started to get cold. In their cells, monks prayed alone, while others sang the divine liturgy in the church. Ethan wondered what had brought him to such a proper place, a place so quieted by centuries of prayer and meditation that it seemed as though polished by the hands of ten thousand monks. He had never set out for it. He was no pilgrim. But for now he was a stranger in a strange land, and he knew instinctively his journey would not end here.
‘Ethan, what do you know about Count Laszlo Almásy?’
‘Hardly anything at all. Wasn’t there a film about him?’
Father Iustin nodded.
‘The English Patient. Almásy was played by an English actor, Ralph Fiennes.’
‘Yes, I remember. There was a cave in the desert, a cave with painted swimmers.’
‘The Cave of the Swimmers. In Wadi Sura. In the Libyan desert.’
Ethan nodded.
‘I remember now,’ he said. ‘Almásy was born in a castle in Burgenland. I nearly visited it. Burg Bernstein.’
‘It was originally a Hungarian castle, before Austria took Burgenland from the Hungarians. Almásy was born there, as you say. He spent his early life there. And he became involved in a series of right-wing occult movements in his youth there. What do you know about the Nazis and the occult?’
‘Nothing,’ answered Ethan. ‘Surely they were just a political party.’
‘It depends what you mean by that. In their early phase, they were greatly influenced by a number of occult beliefs and organisations. There were movements like this everywhere: Germany, Austria, Hungary – even here in Romania. A lot of them were obsessed by the idea of a pure Aryan race, just like the Nazis themselves. Later, the party crushed as many of them as it could. But in the SS, there were two units that continued to devote time and resources to occult investigations.
‘Around 1900, two important ritual organisations were founded, the Ordo Templi Orientis and the more racist Ordo Novi Templi – the Order of the New Temple. Many years later, Burg Bernstein, Count Almásy’s castle which you nearly visited, became a centre for the Ordo Novi Templi. They regarded themselves as the descendants of the Templars, a heretical order of knights that was repressed by the Catholic Church in 1307. Some say the Templars possessed sacred relics such as the Holy Grail and the True Cross. You, I think, know better. But some occult-minded Nazis like SS Brigadeführer Karl Maria Wiligut went out to search for relics, including the Lance of Longinus, which they called the Spear of Destiny.’
Ethan took a sip of wine. The musky taste and the flickering of the candles brought back to him memories of Holy Communion in the church at Woodmancote. He had long ago given up on God and the dark mysteries of the Church. Yet now his life had been trammelled by godly weight.
‘What has this to do with Almásy?’ he asked.
‘Do you not see? Almásy and his brothers were adepts of the Ordo Novi Templi. They got to know Lanz von Liebenfels, an ex-monk who owned castles in Austria-Hungary, which he used for occult rituals. Some people call him the father of the Nazi movement. Some of the occult societies sent expeditions to different parts of the world to search for the origins of the pure Aryan race. One expedition went to Tibet, another to Nepal, one each to the Arctic and the Antarctic, to Neuschwabenland, where the Germans had established a very remote colony. But von Liebenfels and others also despatched expeditions to seek for the Grail and the Spear of Destiny.’
Ethan felt small fingers cross his scalp. Was this the connection he’d been looking for?
The priest smiled. His face seemed as though built from shadows, shadows through which his white flesh and green eyes shifted like smoke.
‘Almásy was the doyen of desert explorers. He knew the Egyptian and Libyan deserts like no one before or since. He travelled by camel, by jeep, by plane. The desert was his, it belonged to him, he possessed it the way a man possesses a woman, he made it his mistress. And it yielded up its secrets to him, it whispered sweet nothings in his ear, gave him all he ever wanted. It gave him caves painted with people swimming, breasting the waves of a sea that had long ago grown silent and dead, it gave him oases in an ocean of sand. But unlike what was shown in the film, he did not die, not then. He survived the war. British intelligence moved him to Trieste for a while, then to Rome, and finally to Burgenland, where he spent time in the castle, reading his occult texts, meeting with masters of ancient lore. Look, I know all this occult business is utterly ridiculous. I no more believe in theories of a hollow Earth than I do in their obscene notions of a master race. But such ideas have been powerful before, and they may become powerful again.
‘Not long after that, Almásy went back to Egypt. He contacted his old friends, the desert scholars. In 1951 he mounted an expedition to search for the remains of a great army the Persians had sent to the Siwa Oasis. Herodotus tells us that fifty thousand men went out into the desert, and not one of them returned. They say they’re out there still, their bones hidden by the desert sands. The official story is that Almásy became obsessed with the search.
‘But it turned out to be his last adventure. Before it could get properly under way, he contracted amoebic dysentery. He was invalided back to Europe, where he died in a clinic in Salzburg.’
The priest paused. He was coming close to the heart of the matter.
‘There is one strange thing about Almásy’s death,’ he said. ‘When his brother went back to his apartment in Cairo, he found it empty: all the papers were gone, all the desert diaries, all the maps. The plans for the Cambyses expedition were missing, the records he’d kept about the Cave of the Swimmers. Everything had gone.’
‘How does all this concern Egon Aehrenthal or, for that matter, me or Sarah?’ Though the Libyan desert was far away on the other side of the Mediterranean, Ethan could feel its warm breezes brush his cheek. How had this happened? he wondered. To have gone to midnight mass in preparation for the greatest Christmas his family had ever known and woken to carnage, to have seen relics of the man Jesus and followed them to a place he knew only from vampire movies…
Father Iustin answered.
‘I believe Almásy’s papers found their way to Burg Bernstein soon after his death, and remained there until many years later, when Egon Aehrenthal stumbled over them. He found books and papers that stirred his imagination. But one thing in particular drew his attention. He read a tale about relics. Almásy had met your grandfather Gerald in Cairo, and had made contact with the other members of the LRDP unit who had been with Gerald when they found the lost city. Somewhere along the way, Almásy got wind of a place where relics of Jesus had been found, and perhaps more than relics.
‘The hunt for the remains of Cambyses’s army was a bluff. Over the years, more than one expedition had gone in search of the lost soldiers, and no one had found them. The desert out there is vast, it might have taken a lifetime, and he still might not have found so much as a bone.
‘Almásy wasn’t in the least interested in dead Persians. He
suspected that out there, not so very far from the Siwa Oasis, he might find the bones of Jesus. In addition, he would be able to track down all the relics that had been taken from the city. He thought what this might mean to the Ordo Novi Templi and to the other semi-defunct orders and temples and cults and fellowships that held to the old beliefs. With the power of the relics, with the magic potency he thought rested in the sacred bones, there might be a revival. Not just of the occult demi-monde. He hoped for the revival of a belief system that had only recently terrorised the globe. A new Volk, a new Führer, a new Reich. I know he dreamt of it. But until recently, I thought his dreams had been buried with him in 1951.
‘But I was wrong. My sources tell me that Aehrenthal bought everything from a relative of Almásy’s while he still lived in Bernstein. Or perhaps he stole it, I would not find that surprising. In one way or another, he came into possession of the diaries and found a reference to your grandfather and what he had found. I don’t think he knew too much to begin with. He may have assumed the relics were still far out in the desert, in the City of Wardabaha.
‘That was when he shifted his interests to biblical archaeology and began to earn a living as an antiquary in that field. Stories came back to us from time to time, of certain searches he had made, of certain objects and manuscripts he had found.
‘A few years ago, some of us became more concerned than usual about Aehrenthal. It started when I spoke with a man in London, a scholar working for the British Museum in Middle Eastern antiquities. He had come across Aehrenthal more than once, and on several occasions he suspected he’d been cheated out of an important discovery by him. This man still frequents St Dunstan’s. He is not an Orthodox Christian, but an Anglican. However, he and I discovered that we had mutual interests. When I was a young priest, I studied Hebrew and Aramaic and took a great interest in biblical matters. We talked about biblical history and went from there to archaeology, about which I knew little.
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