by Rex Baron
“I wouldn't have mistaken you for an Englishwoman,” she said, peering over the edge of the cup at Lexi with questioning eyes. “I don't claim to be a linguistics expert in addition to everything else, but I'd judge you, from your accent, to be Austrian... no, Bavarian with a hint of the Eastern European or Hebrew.”
Lexi stopped what she was doing for a stunned instant, but kept her eyes lowered, away from the interrogating stare of her hostess.
“I hope I'm not prying,” Miss Auriel hastened to add, “but I would feel quite the fool if I were offering hospitality to a spy of some sort.”
She poured another cup of tea and broke a single biscuit in half, offering a portion to Lexi.
“Have a bit of cake, dear. Sorry there isn't more, but I'm afraid my ration of lard is used up.”
Lexi took the biscuit and consumed it without a word. Her hostess persisted.
“Even if you were a spy or the enemy, I wouldn't want to be thought rude, but it would make me out to be rather the fool.”
“I'm not the enemy,” Lexi said, prompting a sigh of relief from her hostess. “You are very clever and perceptive with language. I have been in England nearly six years. I escaped from Germany just before the war broke out and lived in France for a few months before escaping to Dover. Like you, I might be dangerously foreign to the locals, but I assure you, I am the farthest thing from a Nazi spy.”
Ellen's face brightened. She clapped her hands together as if calling the end to a game.
“I don't suppose that if you were, you would admit it to me in any event, so it makes infinitely more sense of me to take you at your word.”
Lexi rose from the carpet and appraised the various odd objects scattered about the room. Religious icons and likenesses of the saints clustered on fine mahogany tables, along with figures of angels, cast and cut from every sort of stone and metal imaginable. On the sideboard, amongst a stack of ancient-smelling books, she noticed a small tin plate with a photo of a young woman's face beaming forth, endorsing the merits of a throat spray.
“Lucy wouldn't sing without it,” Lexi read aloud with amusement.
“A dear friend who left me the money to come abroad for the first time. I never went back,” Miss Auriel explained with a sigh.
“You must be quite religious,” Lexi said. “All of these books on the ancient Hebrew Kabbalah and the Book of Solomon are not the everyday reading of a village librarian.”
“You're right, very perspicacious of you,” Miss Auriel answered without her usual mirth. “I'm afraid my life here is made up of a bit more than gathering old clothes for the church's jumble sales and making tea for the Red Cross. I, like you, have interests of loftier value.”
Ellen shot an incriminating glance at the wrapped painting. “I do not, by any means, consider myself an expert, but I could not help but notice that the painting you were struggling with in the street was, without question, an early eighteenth century French style painting, not unlike Watteau's Embarkation to the Mystic Isle of Cythera.”
“You could tell all that just by peering through a small tear in the paper wrapping?” Lexi scoffed. “It's a copy of a French painting that I am selling to a friend, nothing as lofty and worthy as you imply. It’s actually quite new.”
“Of course, how silly of me to be so presuming.” Miss Auriel sighed audibly, a subtle indication that the audience and her hospitality had come to a close. She extended her hand to say goodbye. “Let us begin by assuming that we are truly allies and hope that we can work toward becoming real friends.”
She closed the door behind her visitor and settled into an upholstered chair near the window. She would have been far more at ease with this foreign stranger, if she had insisted that the painting was of no importance but was of the period that she suggested. She had little doubt, from even the smallest glimpse, that the color distortion and viscosity of the varnish belied an early eighteenth-century work as she had surmised. There was no question of the painting’s chronological placement, but its worth and origins were far more mysterious. Why would this stranger intentionally lie about her painting, and where on earth did she get such a rare thing of such value?
She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. She let her mind clear of the anxious insinuations that churned inside her head. She tightened the unseen device inside her head, making the sound resonating there rise in pitch. The sounds increased in tone, like the ascending chords of a chromatic scale as her consciousness reached higher and higher. At last, a cool blue light filled the regions of her conscious brain and an image appeared of her mysterious visitor, surrounded by paintings and hundreds of other valuable works of art.
• • •
Lexi hurried away from the apartment with Winston hobbling along sleepily at her heels. She could still make the one o'clock train to Cornwall. Her helpful hostess had come unnervingly close to the truth about the painting. It was, in fact, of the period, and even created by the hand of the artist mentioned. It had been smuggled out of the Louvre in France, out of the hands of the Nazis, through the Underground to small boats that made their way across the treacherous Channel under cover of darkness.
There were far fewer such daring rescues in recent years, now that the war had progressed, but occasionally, a priceless masterpiece would land on the Suffolk coast from Hook of Holland or find its way from France to Dover. She had been sent instructions that the painting would arrive somewhere near the small village where she lived, and had waited three months before it was actually delivered into her hands. Now, it was to be routed to the western coast and a hiding place somewhere in rural England. It would be sent first to a contact in the South, who would treat the canvas with a synthetic resin, then paint an inferior and innocuous bowl of fruit or anatomically incorrect mermaid over the existing work, so that it could be hidden in plain sight in the breakfast room of a holiday hostelry or behind the bar at some local tavern.
Lexi had become involved after reaching England. She had learned the secret routes of escape that functioned as thriving thoroughfares, trafficking people and goods in flowing abundance under the very noses of the Gestapo. The flow had never stopped, but now, in the past year, had dwindled to a mere trickle of information and the infrequent movement of the American OSS, in and out of France and Holland through the narrowing channels of the Underground.
She had begun by searching for her brother Mischa, following the leads of those who had seen young men of his description traveling on foot, or asking among the renegade bands of freedom fighters if they numbered among them anyone who answered to his name. The years passed and all hope of finding him slowly diminished.
Instead, she found the need to save the great works of art that the Nazis had vowed to destroy as decadent expression against the new Reich. It was no longer just the modernists and the expressionists who the Nazis targeted for destruction, but the traditional masters of the countries they occupied as well. They determined to destroy the Rembrandts and Renoirs, the Bellinis and the Brueghels as a show of superior strength over the bonds of conventional values, clearing away cultures with a single burning stroke, erasing religious reverence for timeless images of God, in favor of a new Aryan view of classicism, designed to endure for a thousand years.
• • •
She would have to hurry to catch the train, Lexi told herself. It would be close to nightfall before she reached the station in Cornwall, and she would not rest until the painting was safely delivered and out of her possession. She could not run the risk of meeting any more Ellen Auriels, with her expert’s eyes and the snooping curiosity of a village spinster.
Chapter Fifteen
Munich
Helen pulled the sheet up over her breasts and sat up in bed. Kurt stared at the ceiling, silently smoking a cigarette. Helen laughed.
“You know it always makes me feel a bit like a prostitute when you do that.”
“Do what?”
“Just lie there without speaking, without touching, smoking a ci
garette, for what appears a respectable length of time, until you can scurry away free of me.”
“I've never said I wanted to be free of you now, did I?” Kurt answered unemotionally.
“I suppose not,” she sighed. “It's only that you seem so distant of late.”
“I shall never understand the priorities of women,” Kurt said, drawing in a lungful of smoke, then, hesitating in his speech to release the used smoke into the steamy night air. “The war is going badly for us. The Leibstandarte, Herr Hitler's own unit of fighting men, have been paralyzed at the Winter Line, and you worry about not having strawberries or enough attention from me in bed.”
There was no escaping the war, even in these fleeting private moments, Helen thought to herself. For all of the power her rank had given her, she envied the simple pleasures that even a barmaid or waitress held claim to.
She lay there next to the man she loved, breathing in the burnt smell of his cigarette and wishing that he could forget about the war for just a few fleeting moments to experience the kind of passion they had when first they met. Perhaps the effects of the philter, intended for the Prince, that he had inadvertently intercepted had finally worn off… Or perhaps there was never any real enchantment after all. She stared at the ceiling, enduring the silence, realizing that she was still beautiful but no longer young. She was past forty. Neither Kurt, nor anyone else knew her true age because she had used all the tricks of the Kraft to create the illusion of perpetual youth. But deep down, she feared that Kurt might have grown tired of her and had turned his attentions to the strategies of war instead.
“The men are failing us,” Kurt continued, thinking aloud as he always did after their lovemaking. “It's the Slavs and foreigners they allow into the S.S. these days. There are filthy Belgians at the eastern front and Bosnian Muslims, in their ridiculous Fezzes, denying their Slavic origins, pretending they are the offspring of Goths, who invaded five centuries ago in order to appear pureblooded Germans. What fools…these men are worthless.”
Helen did not have to look into his face to see the fire in his eyes when he spoke of the racial purity of the fighting force. She had seen it ablaze so often that she needed only hear his tone of voice and close her eyes to see the passionate madness of his expression. If only some small measure of that passion could be there for her, she thought.
He seemed frightened. His personal fear of failure had overtaken his reason and he showed himself, more and more in recent months, to be less than god-like, a mere mortal with fears that she wished in her soul he had kept to himself.
She reached out her hand from under the sheet and lightly stroked the planes of his forehead, watching the smoke curl from his lips.
“What does it matter if the armies are full of fools?” she whispered. “Those armies are of no consequence. The real army is our army on the other plane. They alone are the invincible ones. They alone will turn the tide of history.”
Kurt turned his body toward her and took her in his arms. He drew her toward him and kissed her.
She had told him what he needed to hear. She reminded him of his own faltering vision of greatness and bolstered his manhood with flattering whispers of encouragement. It had become the prelude to their lovemaking, a ritual-like act by which she created him as the conqueror and then surrendered as his willing captive. She had become the force behind the genius, in much the same way that he had been the words and passion behind the diminutive dictator who pounded his fists and shouted his threats to the rest of the world.
For a brief moment, she thought of Claxton, remembering how he had helped create her, how willing he had been to surrender himself so that she might be his whole creation. He had once told her that true love was simply the unselfish act of creation, a chemical bond between the creator and the created, by which the creator surrendered the essence of himself to his beloved, thereby destroying his own whole and separate self. She remembered her old mentor's words as she lay in the dark and moved to the rhythm of Kurt's body astride her.
There was no longer a need for her to surrender, she thought. She had become the creator and the created. She alone was both the conqueror and the conquered. She held her creation in her arms and merged their bodies into one, the alchemy of true and fatal union, the lovemaking of the damned.
Their bodies writhed and lurched in separate orgasms of consciousness, each holding some illusion of desire in their minds. Helen held the illusion that Kurt might come to want her as much as he needed her. And she saw in his mind that his thoughts turned only around his army and the sons of the other world that he might father from his own seed. He had become obsessed with the idea of fathering his army with wax images mixed with his semen alone. He could trust no one, he had told her. Genetically and intellectually, there was no one superior to himself. At first, she had laughed at the notion, but the violent rage it provoked in him forced her to reconsider her reaction and encourage him with tact and flattery.
She felt him pushing deep against her and let her mind drift away from the madness of the moment to the simpler time when she had first seen him and his beautiful rugged face had burned itself into her memory forever. She felt him cling to her, clutching her shoulders as his breath pounded in her ear. She arched her body under his weight to be closer still and clawed at the damp skin of his back, but he drew away without completion. Within an agonizing moment of withdrawal and betrayal, he was gone.
He rose from the bed without explanation and disappeared into the darkened opening of the bathroom. Helen lay back, drawing her knees to her chest, and waited for the screaming nerve endings of her body to quiet and the tremor of angry pain within her to subside. She drew the sheet up around her like a shroud of humiliation and prayed for the numbness of death.
A few moments passed before Kurt returned to bed. Swinging his feet under the comforter, he rolled toward her and kissed her brusquely on the forehead.
“I have collected a new crop of soldiers for the army,” he whispered ceremoniously. “Thousands of my unborn sons will march triumphantly for the Fatherland.”
Helen sighed and closed her eyes to sleep, but could not close out the image of Kurt, her creation... legions of him loose upon the world.
Chapter Sixteen
England
The late afternoon sun sprayed through the clouds of the Cornwall sky, like a fine shower of silver on the colorless fields of the solemn landscape. Lexi watched from the train as it moved slowly into the station past fields of motionless cows, like a mechanical serpent accustomed to making its way amongst them without threat. The train, which was usually overflowing with wartime troops and people on the move, had been unpopulated except for a local merchant or farmer traveling from village to village to save on the rationing of petrol for his auto.
The parcel containing the painting lay next to her on an empty seat. She had slept for most of the afternoon in the stuffy compartment as the train made its way through the familiar lower region of England, the region where magic and witchcraft were said to have their origins in the Western world. There had been no other passengers in her compartment to act as companions during the journey, an unsettling realization that opened in her a narrow doorway of foreboding. It was as if by crossing the imagined perimeter into this country steeped in legend, she had lost touch with the affairs and concerns of the everyday world, and wandered into a place that was, by some ancient agreement, lost in time.
She eyed the brown paper wrappings of the package on the seat and thought how glad she would be to be rid of it, to hand it over to Professor Arno in the village and be on her way.
It was logical for her to transport a priceless object in plain view, as conspicuously as possible, to avoid the suspicion that attempts at secrecy would arouse. But nonetheless, she found it exhausting to be in the possession of a painting of such enormous value. The fact that she had fallen asleep, while the package sat beside her unattended, made her blood run cold with apprehension of what might have happened to it
. She wound the string from its wrappings around her finger to provide a tangible link of her responsibility to its care.
The train came to a stop at the outdoor platform at Serpent Hill, and Lexi struggled through the narrow corridors to dismount with her package.
She tried to appear inconspicuous, but there was always the risk of being observed and questioned. There was also the dubious question of her nationality and the likelihood of prompt suspicion that she was a spy for the enemy. It was that fear of being exposed that made her hurry along the pathway up the hill to the postal station, where she caught the last bus of the afternoon to the farm where Professor Arno lived.
She chose a seat opposite a middle-aged woman, who tried to disguise the fact that she had holes in the soles of both of her shoes by resisting the natural temptation to cross her legs. After a time, Lexi’s object of scrutiny turned a black look on her and forced her to pretend to be occupied with the fields of cows outside.
A half an hour later, the unbroken landscape gave way to a small wooded area and a broken stone wall with a diminutive wooden shrine, erected there in reverence to some indistinguishable saint. She pulled the signal cord for the bus to stop and let her off.
The last warmth of the afternoon quickly gave way to the chill of evening as she hurried along the country road with only the sound of a barking dog in the distance to reassure her that she was not alone in the growing darkness of this mysterious country.
She turned up a side path that led to the professor's house and wondered about the wooden shrine and why the deity or figure of a saint which presumably once occupied the little edifice was missing. Perhaps it had been a simple victim of time and had fallen into ruin like the stone wall that supported it, or perhaps the empty shrine was meant to house some ancient and pagan god which the local sorcerers and witches only brought to the shrine on festival nights when the moon was new.