Astronomy (7 page)
Authors: Richard Wadholm
“The two gentlemen in the American car. Yes. The one in the passenger’s seat seems especially concerned for you. Why is that?”
She looked the man full in the face. “I’m afraid you have me confused with someone else.”
The black man looked genuinely pained. “How can he care for you?” He leaned close enough she could see the disappointment in his empty golden eyes. “He doesn’t even know what hurts you.”
Susan glanced back at the alcove. It glowed a pale green—bright with Angle Webs. One of them had to get her back to her own world. All she had to do was reach it.
“If you are planning to go home the way you arrived,” the black man said, “allow me to advise against it.” It was a suggestion, as one would give to a friend putting money down on a gimpy horse. “Some men have become aware of your presence. They are waiting for you in the alcove. I fear their intentions toward you.”
Susan looked toward the end of the bar. A pair of SS men were eyeing her with a certain ferocious candor. One of them smiled to her.
She tried to tell him there had been some mistake. The black man waved her objections aside with a sigh. “Really,” he sounded peevish. “You are so bad at lying, it grates a bit, you know? Why don’t you just stay here awhile with us?”
Susan noticed something in the alcove—a pair of shadows. In case she got past the two jokers at the end of the bar, they had a backup. She’d run right into their arms.
“Here’s another idea,” she said. “How about I turn this place of yours into a distressed property?”
The black man looked interested. “Can you do that?”
She pulled Bogen’s grenade from her pocket and, with a finger extended from the envelope in her other hand, jerked out the pin. “You ever see what one of these can do to a dump like the Four Winds Bar?”
“Really.” The black man did his best to look interested. “And what do you suppose it would do to Herr Kriene’s telescope?”
“I tell you the truth, I don’t know. Let’s say we find out.” She raised the pineapple a little higher, her hand white-knuckled over the lever.
The black man grinned. “We quail before such heedless fury. Very well.” He nodded toward the front door. A little portal appeared, like the portal on a luxury steamer. Through the portal, she saw the squat, beautiful little hump that was Charley Shrieve’s Plymouth staff car.
“Under normal circumstances, you would have to return to your world by the same means you left it. Rules of the house, you understand. But,” the black man raised his hands in an equitable gesture, “as it is my house, I make the rules. This one time, you may forgo the dangers of the Angle Web. You may return to your realm through the front door.”
Susan hesitated. “How do I know it’s real?”
The black man laughed. He had a generous laugh. Susan could almost trust a laugh like that. “I like you,” he said. “These gentlemen you see represent death, horror, apocalypse. They think they pay me in the coin of my realm. But my interest is not in destruction for its own sake, but in chaos. And you—” He looked into the back of her eyes and smiled. “You represent that in good measure.”
“You don’t know what I represent.”
The black man threw his head back and roared. “Just so,” he managed. “Just as you say.”
Somehow, she realized, she had made his very point. She pulled back from him.
If he follows me . . .
she said to herself, but the thought remained incomplete. Something in her ears was marching up and down like an Armistice Day parade. Clutching Hartmann’s envelope to her chest, she fumbled the pin back into the grenade, and made herself walk out deliberately.
The Plymouth swung around in the center of the street. It pulled up in front of her, smooth as a Dillinger bank job. Bogen was grinning at her from the driver’s seat. “What’s a dish like you doing in a dump like this?”
“You’ve been watching Cary Grant movies. We approve.” The back door was open, but she opened the front to toss the grenade next to Bogen, who pulled away with a choked cry. “Keep the strings tied on your carryall,” she advised him. She closed the door and got in back with Charley Shrieve. She didn’t feel like conversation.
Only Shrieve’s flaring nostrils betrayed his discomfiture; after swallowing deliberately, he asked if she were all right. She said nothing. She waited till the car pulled away to glance back.
The Four Winds Bar was shuttered and dark. The entire stretch of Münterstrasse from the warehouse district to Blauerwasser Bridge looked as if it had been unoccupied for years. Only as they turned the corner did she hear a heavy-lipped German chanteuse singing “My Special Girlfriend.”
She cracked the rear window to hear more clearly. The buttery smell of American cigarettes filled the car.
The fog over the ocean parted in big chunks, like puzzle pieces. And there in the reflected light of the crossed searchlights was the ribbed, silver belly of a great airship, a zeppelin.
She stared as the giant dirigible slid into the gap between two cloud banks, turned northeast toward the Baltic, and faded from this world.
Chapter Five
S
HRIEVE WAS UNEASY LEAVING HER ALONE
in her apartment for the night. Maybe he was feeling guilty about letting her try the Angle Web. Maybe he was simply worried about Hartmann’s package. Susan couldn’t tell.
He offered to bring her in tonight. They had a room waiting for her at the safe house on Berendstrasse. Susan thanked him, no. She could just see going through this stuff with fifteen post-graduate OSS kids bouncing around till two
A.M.
“I’ve been okay for the last three months,” she said. “I’ll be okay one more night.” If she was going to piece this mass of bureaucratic debris into a seamless whole, she needed time to sit in her dilapidated bay window and smoke and think.
“I’ll have a squad of OSS men down here,” he promised her.
“I’ll put up my blackout drapes,” she said.
Shrieve watched her all the way up the stairs. He waited while she fumbled with her keys and then while she got up to her apartment. Susan looked out the bay window to see him frowning at her, ignoring Bogen, who was punching his shoulder, going,
Come on
.
Susan had inherited her apartment from a girlfriend who had departed for an assignment in Washington. The arrangement was supposed to last a week, just till the Navy could find suitable digs for all its Spookworks. Here she was, three months later.
She put a kettle to boil on the stove. She had an old teapot, salvaged from the collapsed apartment building across the street. She filled it with something the U.S. Army referred to as “Tea, Earl Grey,” and moved her pile of documents over to the window.
She opened it carefully, with a little respect. Whatever was in here had cost the lives of twenty-three scientists and soldiers at Faulkenberg Reservoir—more than that if one included the members of Carl Leder’s Sparrow Group. Maybe these were Germans. It still bothered her—every smiling face in every photograph belonged to a ghost. Every person she saw had died horribly.
Some of this stuff was mystifying—a travel permit from Heinrich Himmler, dated from mid-June, 1942. The big fella had closed the Mittelland Canal—the most important east-west waterway in Germany—for three days during the height of the war. Nobody did that. What could have been more important than moving munitions bound for Russia? And then there was the requisition for 200 kilos of toothpaste. Toothpaste. She just put that one aside.
Some of it was intriguing in its implications. Here was a mathematical treatise from the Opal Group, detailing certain non-Euclidean metrics that had proved successful in the summoning of “Lesser Entities.” No explanation what “Lesser Entities” referred to, but there was an entire subset of figures devoted to sending them back in a hurry should the experimenter grow uneasy about their intentions.
Here were architectural blueprints from the Theodolyte Group, used in the reconstruction of an observatory and ceremonial tower. The designs were credited to a Charles Dexter Ward, late of Providence, Rhode Island, U.S.A. The blueprints were accompanied by a folder stuffed with photographs. These were dated from 1943 into early 1944.
Susan took them to be some sort of contractor’s proofs. They followed the conversion of a disused reservoir in the Franconian Wald into something sinister. Over the course of the photographs, the shore was subsumed by metal scaffolding, watchtowers, and searchlights.
Near the center rose the jewel-turreted ceremonial tower of Charles Dexter Ward. Susan remembered the original from her Watermark slide show. No one had quite figured out Charles Ward’s tower, except to note that researchers went in periodically, and did not always come back out.
Did that make the tower a weapon to turn around the war? That depended, she supposed, on how many Allied soldiers they thought they could entice inside it.
She found a picture taken from inside the construction area. It showed the tower just as it was finished, and beside it, a squat, turnip-shaped building with a sliding aperture—an astronomical observatory? That at least would explain the requisition for 200 kilos of toothpaste: polishing medium, to buff out precision optical gear.
But this photo presented a deeper mystery. Beyond tower and observatory lurked something so large she presumed it to be the shadow of some mountain beyond the camera’s vantage. But the light angles were all wrong. One picture was taken at midday, yet this one shadow continued to cross it in the background.
Susan’s photographer’s loupe was not much help. All the photos from Faulkenberg Reservoir were grainy and vaguely fogged, as if they had suffered some microwave penetration. The shadow appeared blurry even when the foreground was clear.
She shuffled through Hartmann’s paperwork for anything that might allude to the giant thing in the distance. Nothing did, save a single note dated in the spring of 1938. This was a geologist’s report of the rock being excavated on the shore to uncover an artifact of unknown age and origin.
The rock it was embedded in was 160 million years old. They had been digging it up with tons of dynamite, and were in fact asking for more. Whatever this thing was, it wasn’t made of leaded crystal. She tagged it with a paper clip and moved on.
At the bottom of the stack, there was a note tossed in, apparently as an afterthought. Her eyes were burning by this time, and her bladder was full of tea.
One more little bit,
she promised herself,
and then you can dump this all on Charley Shrieve in the morning.
She thought at first she was reading a personal note. It was handwritten, in an elegant and self-conscious penmanship. In fact, it was a directive to Carl Leder’s Sparrow Group. Leder was to increase the daily total of translated pages from the Kufic source manuscript into modern German. Special emphasis was to be placed on cataloguing the attributes of the Great Old Ones—their estimated mass, physical size, and surface temperature.
The note threatened “consumption” if Leder’s group failed. Susan felt a little prickle down the back of her neck as she read this.
She saw crimson eyes gleaming from just beyond a battered doorway. She swallowed something as hard as a stone. She heard a rattling sound, like a wasp batting at a window—surprise, it was the paper in her hand. Imagine that.
In the kitchen, the last tea water of the evening was coming to a boil. She thought to go take it off the stove, but something told her that if she got up now, she would never finish this particular note.
It took all her strength to read down to the bottom. It took more to read the eloquent hand that finished it off. It was the signature of a movie star, a man who wrote with an eye toward archivists a hundred years from now.
Yours Truly
, it read,
Stürmbannführer Krzysztof Malmagden.
Chapter Six
S
HE STUMBLED DOWN THE STAIRS,
still full of dreams of Russian Rockets. She almost didn’t see the two guys Shrieve had left across the street from her.
A car door opened up. She heard someone call out to her. “Hey, Green Eyes.” It was Dale Bogen, of course. Determined to be annoying. Perhaps using his hand grenade had gone a bit far? She walked on down the street as he tried out Sue, and then Suzy (
Suzy!
Oh, God). She’d never had a little brother. Even though he meant to be annoying, she found the experience rather novel. Was this what her girlfriends complained about? The car crept along behind her while Bogen worked his way up through “Princess.”
About the time he got around to “Miss,” she climbed in.
The Watermark group worked out of a two-story walk-up on Berendtstrasse. It was not a safe house in the classic sense. It had no false floors to kick out in case of a Gestapo raid. The wireless was on the kitchen table, rather than hidden away in a closet. Even this was going away as soon as telephone service was restored in Kiel’s waterfront district.
But it smelled right—that combination of homemade soup and gun oil and perfume and old socks. Every time Susan walked in, she closed her eyes and remembered all the little houses she had passed through during the last two years, the people she had known, the ones she would not see again.
The kitchen was in its mealtime hubbub. A couple of kids younger than Susan were arguing about how much garlic went into the communal omelet they were cooking.
The omelet filled a warped cookie pan from side to side. Pete DeLeone was scraping a mound of crushed cloves into the center of the morass. Young Betty Sharpe, his mentor and his tormentor, was offering the opinion that garlic was not, strictly speaking, a noontime sort of herb.
“I’ve got an appointment with a British Rear Admiral at two,” she said. “We’re going to be driving around the waterfront for most of the afternoon, in the back seat of a Very Small British Staff Car.” She leaned over his shoulder, just so there was no missing her serious eye contact.
Pete DeLeone scraped off another stinking mound and brushed his hands over the omelet. “Now you won’t have to stop for lunch,” he said, smiling agreeably.
Betty stood back, aghast, and Susan walked off. “Come back,” Betty called. “Help me stop this Philistine from ruining the meal!” Susan lowered her head and kept going.
She passed Bogen standing at the kitchen door, going,
“What’s wrong with garlic for breakfast . . . ?”
She slugged the back of his head. That, she figured, was doing her bit for sisterhood.
Charley Shrieve was on the phone when she walked into his office. The room looked like him—neat, quiet, a little more reserved than was maybe healthy.
He caught the weight of her gaze, cut the conversation short, and hung up the phone.
“You didn’t have to do that,” she said.
“Ike will call back if it’s important.”
“Ike—that’s a joke, right?”
She noticed a smile on his face, but it disappeared even as she watched. He cleared a spot for her on the edge of his desk. Susan had sorted Conrad Hartmann’s disorderly mess into a neat chronological story of the rise and fall of the Faulkenberg Reservoir weapons lab.
She set it aside. She’d get to that in a while. Out of all this stuff, she’d found just one photograph that mattered enough to show her case officer.
Three men stood in the foreground—a pair of German officers and a disheveled scholar she recognized as Carl Leder. They had a giant volume opened up in front of them, something that looked as if it had been bound in some exotic leather (which, you might say, it was).
The book was the source of the exposure. Indeed, the book itself was all but obliterated by lens flare—though no uplighting appeared under the chins of the three principals. Whatever light had burned the photograph must have been invisible to the men in the picture.
They were consulting like contractors working off of a blueprint; only there was no blueprint. They were checking the layout of their weapons laboratory against a diagram in the
Necronomicon
.
She directed Shrieve’s attention to the German officer on the right.
“See the tall, aristocratic one, nice smile, looks like he’d have the latest story about the Farmer’s Daughter? I, uhm, I know him.”
Shrieve had this expression of professional interest. He resettled his glasses on his nose; suddenly his eyes were as blank as a Nebraska sky reflected in chrome. It had been funny when Shrieve had looked this way at Carl Leder.
Wasn’t so funny now.
“This is ‘Galileo’? This is the guy who did the magic trick and disappeared?”
She dug in her shirt pocket for another Marlboro. The pack was empty. Shit.
“This is the guy I went in to find,” she said. “A Krzysztof Malmagden. He turned out to be a major in the SS. He was assigned to head security for Zentralbund der Geheimlehre’s
Totenstürm
program.”
Shrieve watched her pat her pockets a moment. “You looking for a cigarette?” Charley Shrieve had a cigarette. He even lit it for her. “You didn’t tell me your boy Galileo was Major Krzysztof Malmagden.”
Susan frowned at the familiar way Shrieve spoke of him. “You know Krzysztof Malmagden?”
“Let’s say I’ve heard the name. He’s a scary guy, even for a Nazi. How come you never mentioned him?”
“He must have slipped my mind.”
“You want to talk about him now?”
She laughed. She couldn’t believe she was letting herself in for this. She was a civilian. She was supposed to be in Stony Brook, New York. She was supposed to be introducing freshman lit majors to John O’Hara.
“I was sent into Berlin to check out the head of the German’s
Totenstürm
program, for a possible extraction. Only it turned out to be some sort of, I don’t know, practical joke? This Major Malmagden had never communicated anything to the Allies. The Gestapo was there and they wanted to know who I was. They wanted very much to know what I was doing there.”
“Did this Major Malmagden . . .” Shrieve resettled his glasses on his nose. “Did he abuse you?”
Susan loved the way guys asked her that—sort of compassionate and avid at the same time. Even the smart ones, like this Charley Shrieve. She’d let herself get angry the first couple weeks back from Berlin. Eventually she realized anger just fed their lurid imaginations.
“Oh. She doesn’t want to talk about it . . .”
Jesus.
“Not exactly,” she said. “Things got way out of hand. Things took an odd turn.”
* * *
Shrieve was silent for a long time after she finished her story. He seemed uncertain what she wanted him to do. “It was a goof,” he said. “He saw a handy American and realized you might be useful at his war crimes tribunal.”
“I feel terrible,” she said.
“Too bad. These Germans were dead whether you were there or not.” Shrieve looked down at his notepad. He spelled out, “ ‘K R Z Y S Z T O F’? That doesn’t look German.”
“I don’t think he is German. I think he’s one of those aspiring Nazis from the Balkans. I don’t feel right about this,” she said. “All those people dead and here I am, drinking tea in a nice little house in Kiel. This terrible thing happened and the world just goes on, you know?”
“Malmagden’s being charged with mass murder. Does that make you feel any better?”
“Mass murder,” she said. “Somehow that seems barely enough.”
“How about mass murder and loitering with intent to commit lewd acts?”
She looked at him, What? He explained. Malmagden had been picked up in Cologne. Turned out the other side of his Angle Web had been the cellar of a church the last time he’d seen it. But the church housed a U.S. Army logistical support group now, and the cellar had been turned to other purposes as well.
Malmagden had cooked up an elaborate story to explain what he was doing in Cologne. He had no explanation for what he was doing in a women’s restroom.
It hardly mattered anyway. Shrieve had unhappy news.
“This Krzysztof Malmagden was at Faulkenberg Reservoir right up to the time it got vaporized. He’s the only lead we have left who can tell us what this
Das Unternehmen
was supposed to be. You and I, we’re the only ones who know enough to question him.”
“ ‘Till we meet again,’ ” she said.
“What?”
“The last time I saw him, that’s what he told me:
Auf Wiedersehen
. ‘Till we meet again.’ ”
* * *
In her dreams, Krzysztof Malmagden was a sepulchral presence, a portrait by El Greco in spectral light and black SS uniform. As she watched him stroll across the soccer field outside Plötzensee Prison on this shimmering-bright July morning, smiling and looping his arms across his teammates’ shoulders, he looked like a favorite Lutheran Sunday School teacher.
She had to remind herself, here was the man who had thrown three of his own soldiers to a horrible death. Simply to make a point.
Susan touched the heel of her Walther, just to make sure it was still handy.
“Greetings from Boston College, Herr Malmagden. Class of 1941.”
He was confidential and cordial, happy in the good sweat of a morning spent with friends. He joked with an American private, and the kid was obviously enthralled.
Rank confers nobility, she realized, no matter whose army bestows it.
He excused himself all around and started across the field. Two of the other players stepped away with him—U.S. Army soldiers, she realized. Either they were guarding against his escape, or against his assassination. It was hard to tell. They smiled at Malmagden’s little asides as he came over. They gave Shrieve and Bogen hard looks.
Malmagden introduced them as sergeant Enders and Private Hobbs. He didn’t say which was which. He shook hands with Shrieve and Bogen.
Malmagden took her hand, just as she remembered. His smile held genuine warmth.
“Fräulein Berne, wasn’t it? Katje Berne?”
She found herself nodding dumbly.
“But of course, that wasn’t your real name, was it?”
“No.”
Malmagden laughed. “Please. We are no longer enemies. I confess, I found you enchanting.”
“Susan Gilbert,” she said. She managed to smile. She even managed to block the more egregious revenge fantasies out of her mind—the ones that involved setting him on fire just to see him run around. All in all, she thought she handled their introduction fairly well.
Shrieve extended a hand toward the interview room. They had reserved a room there for the afternoon. It was hardly a bistro on the Champs Élysées, but it had windows. It had a coffeepot. Malmagden accepted these small amenities with the grace of a dispossessed prince.
“Tell me,
Liebchen
. Do you still keep an L-pill inside of that silly fake wedding ring on your finger?”
She started to make some lame joke about keeping it around for the occasional blind date. It was a stupid joke. She dropped it.
Malmagden turned to the others. “The Gestapo harassed her briefly while I was attending to other matters. She thought I might let her be tortured for information.”
She laughed good-naturedly. “Silly me.”
Malmagden made an indignant sound. “As if I would harm an Allied agent when the Russians are fighting their way into downtown Berlin. Think what you will of me, Frau Malmagden did not raise no fool.” He gave her a wicked grin. “Did I get that right? With the double negatives, yes?” Malmagden shook his head in amazed good humor: You Americans and your double negatives.
“You did lock me in a cell in the sewers beneath Berlin.” She felt like a spoilsport pointing this out.
“The Russians were preparing to flatten every building on the surface. The entire
Volksstürm
was down there with you.”
“I might have been eaten alive by the undead.”
“I made sure you were not.”
Susan had to force her hand away from the butt of her pistol. “Have I neglected to thank you?”
They held each other’s gaze a moment. Somewhere in the dark, she could hear her partners shuffling their feet in an embarrassed way. Shrieve coughed into his fist. Malmagden chuckled and looked away.
“Rotekopfen,”
he chortled. “Redheads!”
* * *
Shrieve led off with a pack of cigarettes. This was the Allies’ standard interrogation tool.
Krzysztof Malmagden was not one of your steely-nerved Nazis, smelling of disinfectant and sanctimony. He eyed the American cigarettes enviously. It was all he could do to keep his hands on the table while Shrieve tapped one out for him.
Shrieve took his time. He blunted the end on the table, he smiled, he lit it for him, blew a puff of smoke his way.
“We want to know about a weapons laboratory in the Franconian Forest. You play straight with us, maybe we can help you out of the jam you’re in.”
Malmagden laughed. “Why would we put anything in the Franconian Wald? Do you know what’s there? Nothing! Someone has sold you a fish story, yes?”
“You were there, weren’t you? Just before it was destroyed? I hear you might even have played some part in that.”
Malmagden studied Susan briefly. He couldn’t lie in front of her as he could to Charley Shrieve. She was the witness to all of his crimes.
Malmagden waved his hand in a dismissive gesture. “Sure, I worked for
Zentralbund der Geheimlehre
. But I was
polizei
. I was a policeman. I cannot help you with anything of a technical nature.”
“What were you doing at Faulkenberg Reservoir,” she asked him. “Directing traffic?”
Malmagden winced at her tone. “Your brief encounter with the unknown has made you paranoid, Fräulein Berne.”
“Gilbert,” she corrected him. “Susan Gilbert.”
“Are you the one responsible for confiscating every writing implement in my cell?”
“You have access to a typewriter.”
“The keyboard is unfamiliar to me. I cannot use it.”
“Come on, Krzysztof. Even
I
can type.”
Malmagden gave her a disingenuous expression. “You will not allow me a writing implement so that I can compose my thoughts like a gentleman?”