by Rex Baron
“Not easily come by,” Helen muttered aloud as she returned the crumbling book to the forgotten shelf where she had found it.
She stopped on her way out of the cloister of shelves to glance at the morning paper. On the obituary page, she scanned the small columns, searching for a single item. Halfway down the page, her eye fell on a short paragraph. She smiled to herself as she read the statement.
“Clara Schultz died Friday of heart failure, survived by three children, her husband, and a husband by a former marriage.”
“There's my adulteress,” Helen said aloud, breaking the enforced silence of the library reading room. The elderly librarian looked up disapprovingly from his book.
Technically, a divorce would not be recognized by the Catholic Church, so, in the eyes of the bishop, even if not in the eyes of God, dear Clara had been an adulteress. Helen folded the paper containing the address of the funeral announcements and strolled out of the library without paying for it. She whistled to herself, content in her ability to track down the solution. She passed a shop window and glanced at her reflection. She would have to go home and change into something black, she thought, something more appropriate for mourning the dead.
• • •
The chapel for Clara Schultz’s funeral was modest, but bright and charming in nature, fulfilling all the promise of the peacefulness of death.
Helen entered the hushed throng of working class well-wishers who had come to wish Clara a last farewell. She had worn no jewelry and crept up the aisle as quietly as she could in order to attract as little attention as possible.
Light streamed in through the high, narrow windows, descending to the polished floors in glorious shafts worthy of biblical description. On a raised platform, amidst heaping baskets of flowers, lay Clara, prominently displayed, deservedly the center of attention. A line of people filed past the casket, quietly sobbing.
Helen joined the line and passed the wax-like figure of an old woman laid out in a lace gown with flowers woven through her pale powdered fingers. She glanced indifferently at the painted face, then looked away, not wanting to forget her purpose in visiting poor Clara, the adulteress.
What a silly label, she thought, medieval in its connotation. The concept of the word had been lost in modern times, like the word alchemist or temptress. One was, in these modern times, indiscreet, a fool, or even a tramp, but hardly an adulteress. The word carried with it the heavy chains of punishment and damnation. She sighed as she passed by little Clara and wished her well on her journey.
At the foot of the casket, she spotted the object of her quest. Six tall tallow tapers burned reverently, illuminating the path that the old woman's feet need follow in the hereafter. They were the prize for which Helen had come, but she could not very well snatch them away under the very noses of the onlookers. She moved to a polished oaken pew and waited patiently for the first opportunity to present itself.
An hour or so passed, filled with sentimental organ music, “Ich küsse Ihre Hand, Madame” and other popular tunes, which it seemed Clara had preferred over the lofty strains of the Rococo classics.
Helen sat staring pensively into the light of the stained glass windows, wondering how Kurt's face would look etched in colored glass atop the body of Saint Michael astride his slain dragon.
The eulogy dragged on for what seemed an eternity equal to that awaiting Mrs. Schultz. The tallow candles grew visibly shorter by inches as the time passed, wearing away the precious substance that she needed for her spell. Helen quietly cursed the old minister for being so long-winded. She had begun to fear that the treasure of her little scavenger hunt was hopelessly out of reach, when the minister summed up his closing remarks and suggested that the mourners depart for the cemetery without delay.
In small pre-arranged groups, they clustered and filed out to the waiting limousines. The funeral director stood at the door, a somber man in a black frock coat, struggling to mask an air of indifference behind a heavily studied, but not fully convincing, countenance of sorrow. He consulted a small card nestled in his palm and checked the passengers of the various cars as they assembled and were efficiently dispatched by his assistant. Within minutes, the last of them had been shepherded out of his hands. Relieved and unaware of Helen's presence, he loosened his cravat and produced a cigarette from his heavy woolen coat. He lit the tobacco and breathed in with a luxuriant sigh, filling the room with the sound of his one pleasure in life.
Helen moved carefully toward the candlestick, opening her bag as she kept one eye on the undertaker. The sole of her shoe dragged against the heavy wax of the floor, sending a shrill squeal through the airless room, destroying the quiet reverie of the man in black. He turned an outstretched hand to Helen and motioned for her to follow the others.
“I didn't see you there,” he explained with mild annoyance. Hurriedly, he searched the cue card in his hand for the answer to this oversight. “I'm sorry, but I don't seem to have you on the list,” he said in a hoarse whisper tainted with cigarette smoke.
He stared at her accusingly as a wanton straggler, an untidy loose end, depriving him of his peace.
“I'm sure that I'm not on your list,” Helen answered. “I didn't know her well. I only came at the last moment.”
The brittle little man looked her up and down, appraising her height and coloring, as if surveying a prospective client and the possible problems she might present.
“Well, if you hurry, you might go in one of the last cars. They're not filled completely.”
His cold eyes sternly indicated the door, but Helen drew back. She held her handkerchief to her forehead and dabbed at her brow as if wiping away beads of perspiration.
“I don't think I'll go to the cemetery with the others,” she said. “I'm not feeling altogether well.”
The undertaker's mouth turned down in annoyance. Casting aside his formality, he drew on his cigarette, determined to have the smoke if not the peaceful pleasure of his habit.
Helen's legs trembled under her and she stumbled backwards. Awkwardly, she steadied herself against one of the elaborately carved pews. Carefully, she lowered the weight of her body into the pew and leaned forward, hiding her face in her handkerchief.
“Are you all right?” the man asked, venturing toward her inquisitively.
“I'm feeling a bit faint, I suppose. I didn't have any lunch and the room is oppressively hot. Have you any spirits of ammonia?” she asked, looking up frailly into his ashen face.
“They're upstairs,” he answered curtly. “Come, let's get you out into the air. The ride to the cemetery will be the best thing for you.”
As he tried to assist her to her feet, Helen swooned, collapsing the full weight of her body into his arms. Clumsily, he struggled to replace her on the bench, propping her head against the back of the pew and gently patting the side of her cheek in an effort to revive her. After a moment, he grudgingly started for the smelling salts, muttering to himself about the living being far more trouble than the dead.
When he had left the room, Helen's eyes snapped open. She jumped to her feet and snatched the candlesticks from the wrought iron stand at the foot of the casket. She glanced back at Clara, half expecting some reaction of disapproval, but the waxy face remained implacable.
As she approached the side door, six men entered, charged with the task of carrying the casket away. Helen slipped past the men without comment and hurried into the sunlit world of the living, exhilarated and hungry for lunch.
As she finished her cutlet and drained the last of the tangy Rhine wine, her self-satisfaction faded away and she contemplated the enormity of the task at hand. The Hand of Glory was not so easy an ingredient to find as the tallow wax from the funeral of old Clara Schultz. The ghoulish idea of searching the graveyards for bits and pieces of unsavory characters was well outside the limits of what Helen was willing to do for Kurt or anyone else. She determined that if she didn’t want to go through the process of procuring the lifeless hand of a
felon and curing it into the leathery talisman required for the spell, the next best thing to do was to find someone who already possessed one.
A parade of sleepless nights had passed before the solution presented itself, matter of factly, with an audible sigh of certainty. She had been motoring through the region of Bavaria near Ludwig's castles, when she drove past the quaint little Biergarten where she had first seen the gypsy, her attacker in the woods. A chill of fear ran through her body as she remembered the sound of his hoarse breath and his eyes glowing with lustful passion above her. She also remembered the place she had discovered that night, after she had run from him in fear, the place of the great bonfire and the circle of witches, their hands linked, spiraling in a conduit of power. Surely, if any in the region knew of this dreadful hand, it would be them.
Chapter Five
Munich
Two young men strained under the weight of a vendor’s wooden wagon as they struggled to load it onto a flatbed truck. An ancient-looking Jewish man with a long gray beard and a flat-brimmed black hat looked on in misery as he watched the Hitler Youth at work.
“How am I expected to make a living without it?” the old man asked plaintively. But his question fell on deaf ears.
Claxton was apparently the only one on the busy street who heard the old man’s plea and felt a pang of guilt in his chest for what he saw was happening. The Jew’s cart, with all of his merchandise, was being confiscated, because one of the new laws promoting racial purity prohibited people of Jewish descent from selling their wares on a public street.
Everyone else on the pavement passed the poignant scene that played out in front of them with lowered eyes and a look of grim determination on their faces.
“So, this is the great new Germany,” Claxton muttered, as he walked on toward his office.
He had made up his mind, after his conversation with Helen, that he wanted to return to America. He knew that if he didn’t create an exit plan from this place of madness as soon as possible, he might well be trapped in Germany for years. And if the war that seemed inevitable to everyone in all of the Ministries were to actually be put into motion, he would certainly find himself on the wrong side of the conflict. He had never thought of himself as a patriotic type… he was far too sophisticated and jaded for that word to ever apply to him. And yet, there was something so sinister and fundamentally distorted about the reality of the new Germany that he found himself unconsciously whistling American tunes and remembering his days in California with an uncharacteristic fondness.
It was all very well and good for him to think of leaving, he told himself, but what about Helen? In spite of her blatant dalliances and unmitigated harshness towards him, he had invested far too much of himself in her over the years to walk away and relinquish his interests now. After all, he had created her, and he was far from willing to surrender his greatest achievement, even to the wooden little Fuhrer himself.
What he decided he would do was to arrange for two steamship tickets to New York at the earliest opportunity. One of the new French liners, the Champlain, could get them home in only five days. There was a slim chance that he might be able to persuade Helen to return with him, but he knew that her ambitious quest for power was too strong for anything that he might say. Regardless of his arguments, she would more than likely laugh in his face and call him a fool for even thinking of abandoning what she saw as a golden opportunity in this new world of chaos and aggression. If he was unable to convince her of the impending danger in her precarious world, and she refused to see reason in what he said, he would go on ahead without her… only temporarily, until he had re-established himself as a big success in the movie business in California. Of course, he realized that he had been away for a while, but he had been a big star with thousands of fans, he reminded himself. And if the fans no longer clamored to see him on the screen, perhaps he might make a name for himself as a director. When Helen saw that he had created a small empire of his own, back on friendlier soil, she might willingly forsake the madness of this place of superiority and hatred and happily return to him.
Claxton sighed at the idea of a long separation as he opened the door to his office building and strode across the polished marble foyer and up the stairs to his office on the second floor. When he opened the door, Michael was sitting at his desk in the reception office and looked up with a businesslike, but nonetheless boyish, smile of expectation.
“You know you really are a most handsome and agreeable chap,” Claxton said, as he passed the boy and stepped into his office. “Anything urgent I need to know about?” he called back into the room where Michael sat.
“Nothing pressing,” Michael replied, choosing a word that he thought sounded professional.
“Very good… you sound more like my private secretary than an office assistant,” Claxton replied, poking his head back through the doorway to deliver the compliment. “That will free us up to go to the bank. I have a couple of errands I’d like to tick off my list.”
He rummaged in the top drawer of his desk until he found a book of bank drafts and tucked it into the inside pocket of his jacket.
“Is our intrepid leader, Heinzy, around?” he asked.
Michael rushed into his office, and in an agitated whisper scolded the older man.
“You mustn’t call him that. What if someone hears you?” he asked with a worried expression. “You could get in a lot of trouble by making fun of Herr Hessler.”
“Well, he’s short and stout and looks like a Heinzy to me… What else should I call him?” Claxton asked, more intent on entertaining the boy than supplying an answer to his question.
“You’re terrible,” the boy replied, followed by a laugh of wicked amusement.
“Come along… get your hat. We’re going around the corner to get some cash.”
Claxton had decided that he wanted to withdraw enough money to purchase the steamship tickets in cash, so that there would be no record of a cheque being run through his account at the bank, and therefore no possibility of raising suspicion as to why he might be contemplating travel abroad. In spite of his elite position at the Ministry, he was still a foreigner and thus was never out from under suspicion.
The two men entered the massive granite building with twenty-foot high Ionic columns flanking the doorway. It was the kind of building that had inspired confidence only a generation before, but now, represented all that had gone awry with the Weimar Republic and its hyperinflation and unstable financial policies.
Claxton approached a bank manager and asked to make a transaction. Michael held back at first, not wanting to appear to be intruding on Claxton’s private affairs, but the older man drew him up next to him and explained that he needed to understand the workings of business and finance if he were going to be successful in his new life. The boy happily accepted his tutelage.
As they stood waiting in one of the private offices, a frail-looking man wearing a pince-nez on the bridge of his nose appeared through a side door and greeted them with an archaic but traditional bow instead of a handshake. He inadvertently removed his eyewear and used it to motion them to take a seat.
“How may I be of assistance, Mister Claxton?” he asked in a formal, ingratiating tone. “It is always a pleasure to serve those who are in command of our glorious new Germany.”
Claxton eyed him coolly, not certain if he had meant the comment as an irony or whether he had proffered it sincerely, hoping to convince someone who he viewed as in authority that he, unlike so many of his age group, was a true devotee of the new way of thinking.
“I need to take out some cash,” Claxton informed the man, matter of factly. “I require the equivalent of four hundred American dollars in French francs.”
The banker raised his eyebrows, an action that caused his pince-nez to slide down his nose.
“I see,” he replied. “You do realize… better than anyone else I’m sure, that any transactions involving foreign currencies must now be recorded and forwar
ded to the Ministry of Finance. I am told that you are an American, and as such, you must know that all the accounts of foreign nationals are now redirected to the Ministry for scrutiny.”
Claxton shifted in his seat. The sole purpose of getting cash was so that his intentions to set an escape plan in motion would not be discovered.
“But surely, because of my position, those new restrictions do not apply to me,” Claxton replied, trying to sound as commanding and intimidating as possible.
The fragile elder shuffled through the papers on his desk until he located a slip of yellow paper and scanned its surface through his tiny oval spectacles.
“Your name is on the list,” he said flatly.
“But there must be some mistake,” Claxton insisted.
The man shook his head.
“Of course, that does not mean that I cannot complete the transaction that you require, only that now you will have to fill out a request form and wait for the Ministry to approve such a transfer.”
Claxton did not want to betray his feelings of uneasiness to the manager. He felt a rising sense of panic that he was being singled out, that his life and livelihood were in jeopardy, and that his future was suddenly being determined by others. He could not help but think of the old Jewish man whom he had seen only an hour ago, having his vending cart and his way of living taken away on the back of a flatbed truck. He did not want this unimportant man, this bank manager, who had obviously aligned himself with the New Order and could no longer be trusted, to suspect what he might intend to do with the money. So, he relied on his skill as an actor to put on a performance that would deflect the man’s suspicions and make him believe that all was well.
Claxton slapped his leg with his hand and laughed.