Psychomech (17 page)

‘My memory really is—’ Garrison cut him short, only to gasp and clutch at his temples for a moment before he could continue, ‘—amazing, eh?’

‘Amazing, yes—if it really is
your
memory! But your head hurts. Forget about Charalambou for the moment. Perhaps we should stay here tonight, or maybe we can find a better place at Margarites, and go on to Rethimnon tomorrow?’

‘No,’ Garrison answered, shaking off Koenig’s now solicitous hand. ‘No, I’ll be all right. Let’s get on to Rethimnon today, right now. I have to know if—’

‘If?’

‘—If this Nichos Charalambou is really the man I seem to remember.’ He turned his pale face seemingly to stare at Koenig again. ‘And if so, where I remember him from!’

It was the same face, but that hardly answered Garrison’s question. In any case, the peculiar phase of pseudo-memories had worn off him by then, by the time he came face to face with this stranger he had thought he knew, whose names he remembered without ever having known them.

It was early evening when Garrison and Koenig arrived in Rethimnon, and knowing the way the big German drove straight along the shore road to the west side of town, turning down a track to the beach where the Sea of Crete washed blue (and just a little oily) on the gritty sands. Quarter of a mile along the beach stood Charalambou’s house, a fairly modern affair in the flat-roofed island style, in a walled garden of citrus and pomegranates. Not a particularly rich house, but one with charm and a deliberately contrived Cretan beauty, so that it would be perfectly obvious to any outsider that the owner must indeed be a Cretan, or certainly a mainland Greek come here to spend his retirement.

Koenig parked the car and led his friend and master into the garden through a carelessly constructed, vine-draped arch of brick and trellis. Seated there in the fast-fading sunlight, a tanned, shrivelled little man turned the embers of a raised charcoal fire under sizzling, spitted cubes of lamb. Beside him on the seat of a cane chair were side plates of sliced tomatoes, diced cucumber, shredded cress and other greens, and a large freshly halved lemon.

As Koenig and Garrison approached he looked up, smiled and called into the house:

‘Alexia, we have guests for supper—I think. A little more meat, if you please.’ He stood up and extended a shaky hand towards Koenig. ‘I believe I know you gentlemen… but perhaps I am wrong. In any case, what can I do for you?’

‘Gerhard,’ said Koenig, his voice very low. ‘I’ve brought a friend to see you.’

The old man’s jaw at once dropped. ‘Willy Koenig!’ he breathed. ‘And—’ he turned to Garrison, ‘Thomas?—but why are you so silent, my old friend?’

‘I am not Thomas, Herr Keltner,’ Garrison answered, his voice quiet as Koenig’s. He shivered despite the warmth of the evening. ‘My name is Garrison, Richard Garrison. Thomas was my friend.’ He turned to stare blindly, accusingly at Koenig. ‘Willy is also my friend—but he didn’t tell me that you, too, were blind.’

‘A little blind, yes, for many years now, coming on me slowly, and now more quickly. I can see now that you are not Thomas, but—here, let me take your hand.’ The hand that grasped Garrison’s was dry as old leather, but he felt a tremor of—what? Recognition?—in the fragile fingers. ‘Ah! Not Thomas Schroeder, no—but you
are
the one! No wonder I thought you were he…’ He paused. ‘You said Thomas was your friend. Was. Does that mean that he—’

‘Yes,’ Garrison answered. ‘He’s dead. But what did you mean by saying that I am the one? You… know about that?’

‘Certainly. I was with Thomas in the old days. I knew of the growing interest in these matters. He often spoke to me about it—his faith in reincarnation. Thomas could never be described as eccentric, and anyway I knew too much about their work. He intended to have a son, come back in his son. Apparently that did not work out…’

‘No, it didn’t.’

‘And so you came to an agreement with him—and it appears he was wrong after ail. You have a certain aura—but you are not Thomas.’

‘Do not be too sure, Gerhard,’ Koenig joined the conversation.

‘Please!’ Keltner whispered. ‘It’s better that you call me Nichos. Alexia will be distressed if you use that other name. It is one we have almost managed to forget. And after all, Nichos was my father’s name.’ He turned almost blinded, faded green eyes towards the house. ‘Alexia, come—come meet our guests. An old friend, yes—and a new one.’

He turned quickly back to the pair. ‘About Thomas: when was it?’

‘Six months ago,’ Garrison told him.

‘Ah!’ The word was a sigh. ‘I knew he had been hurt—the bomb—it was in the news. But somehow I seem to have missed his… his passing.’

Garrison gently squeezed his forearm, felt the trembling in the old man’s bones. ‘Don’t distress yourself. There has been enough of pain. It hurt all of us, and no one more than me. But it was also a mercy. His body was finished.’

‘So,’ the other nodded. ‘And poor Thomas, wrong after all, eh? He did not return. And yet—’ Dim eyes burned into Garrison’s face until he could feel them as an almost physical heat. ‘And yet—’

‘There is time,’ said Koenig.

‘Time, yes!’ Garrison was suddenly angry. ‘Oh, yes! My good friend Willy here can’t wait until Thomas joins me in this blind shell of mine—if I decide to let him in!’

Koenig, taken aback, made no answer; but the old man shoved his face close and whispered, ‘Ah! But you did not know Thomas Schroeder as I knew him. If he can come back he will, Richard—and what power could deny him then, eh?’

Three days later they were home. It was June now and the summer promised to be a good one. All the decorations and alterations in the rambling house had been completed and were much to Garrison’s satisfaction—not so the recently arrived mail. Koenig suspected that the latter was probably the cause of Garrison’s recent fits of depression; as his psychic powers increased, so his awareness of tragedy became more acute. And there had been a tragedy.

There were two cards from Vicki, both of them lucid and bright in their simplicity. Signed at Saul Siebert’s clinic in the Harz, the earliest said: ‘Richard, I know now that I left because I loved you. I believe that it was because you loved me that you did not follow. I thank you for that. I do not fear death. I
did
fear it greatly, until my body began to waste. That is the only thing that hurts: that this body you loved so well should now have grown so un-lovable…’

The other said: ‘Be happy. I don’t ever recall seeing you truly happy, and I can’t bear the thought of your being sad for my sake. And who knows? Maybe the Big Death is just like the Little Death, but lasting so much longer…’

And there was a letter, arrived that very morning, to say that Thomas Schroeder’s wishes (Garrison’s wishes, of course) had been carried out to the letter. Vicki Maler’s. diseased body was now in cryogenic suspension at Schloss Zonigen in the Swiss Alps. There it would remain, presumably preserved forever, or at least for all the foreseeable future.

T
hree months later, in the middle of a gorgeous Indian summer, another link was forged in the chain—a link that neither Garrison nor Koenig, nor even Thomas Schroeder himself, had he been alive, could possibly have recognized as such. And yet its source was right there in Sussex, not many miles east of Garrison’s English residence.

It began with the discovery of a tramp asleep in a garden shed at the edge of a country property owned by Dr Gareth Wyatt, the once-famous neuropsychiatrist. The discovery was made by one Hans Maas, formerly Otto Krippner, returning to his rooms in what was once a gatehouse of the Wyatt estate following his nightly constitutional.

Maas was attracted to the shed, which leaned against one wall of the old gatehouse, by the tramps snoring. The reek of cheap booze as Maas pushed open the creaking door was an almost physical force striking him in the face. There lay the tramp in one corner, a sack of half-spilled, sprouting potatoes serving as his pillow. An empty bottle hung from limp fingers, and grime was thick on him. He had put down some empty sacks for his bed, but the evenings were still warm and so he had not bothered to cover himself.

At first Maas tried to wake him, but when he was unable to do so he uttered a low curse in German, then left the shed and let himself into the gatehouse. There he took off his coat and hung it on a rack in the tiny hallway before reaching for the telephone. With the phone in his hand he paused and stared at himself in a full-length wall mirror. Wiry, sixty-seven inches in height and still smooth-skinned in the main, the years had not changed him much. Indeed, he could wish they had been less kind to him. He looked closely at his small, square-cut beard, once more registering surprise (as he invariably did) at the way it had altered his face. Yes, it still surprised him. And how long had it been now? Thirty years? And him still not used to his disguise! Still, not much of a disguise really.

Perhaps it was that his cheeks were a little hollower. Well, and wasn’t he an old man now? And his iron-grey hair, which had once been shiny-black. But these were the only real changes. And all external. Inside he had not changed at all. He shook his head and looked away from the mirror, stared for a moment at the telephone in his hand. Then he dialled Gareth Wyatt’s number in the house at the head of the drive.

While the number rang he thought back on the years flown since the end of the war. Thirty years in hiding, and for what? War crimes? Otto Krippner had committed no crimes. No more than a gardener who clears scum from the surface of a pool—or attempts to grow the perfect rose. Oh, yes, Krippner had cleared away scum, lots of it. And he had tried to grow a rose, too—though there were those who would see it as a monstrous, hybrid orchid. The master-race! Yes, he had once thought it possible, but now…

Gareth Wyatt answered the phone, his cultured voice not yet betraying his naturally scandalous and unscrupulous nature. ‘Wyatt here. Who is it?’

‘Maas,’ the ex-Nazi answered.

‘Oh, it’s you, Hans. Can’t it wait? I have… a guest.’

A guest, yes. One of Wyatt’s endless line-up of girls, no doubt. Attracted by his good looks, intelligence, charm—only to be seduced and dumped in short order. If the man would only pay as much attention to his business as he did to his womanizing…

‘It could wait, yes,’ Maas answered, ‘but on the other hand—’

‘Well, then, what is it, Hans?’ Impatience in the sharpness of his tone.

The German lowered his voice. An idea, vague at first but forming rapidly now, shaped itself in his head. ‘We needed a subject, Gareth. And right now he lies sleeping off a drunk in your garden shed. A tramp, unconscious on a pile of sacks, so drunk I could not wake him up.’

Wyatt’s voice grew quiet to match that of Maas. ‘A tramp? Are you crazy? What sort of subject would a tramp—’

‘The
perfect
subject!’ Maas cut him short, his German accent thickening as his excitement grew. ‘Think, Gareth. A tramp. If anything should go wrong this time—’

‘You assured me nothing would go wrong.’ Accusation.

‘I adjusted the machine as you ordered,’ Maas answered quietly, ‘—but cheaply. When one cannibalizes components, one takes a chance on being let down. More money would have bought better pans. But… I repeat, nothing should go wrong, not this time. If it did, however—well, would the world miss a tramp? I doubt it.’

‘This tramp of yours,’ Wyatt chuckled drily over the wire, ‘he’s not a Jew, is he? My God! AH these years and you still think and talk like a true Nazi. But I admit there’s some value in what you say.’ He paused, then: ‘Very well, but keep him out of sight. Let him sleep it off. If he’s still there in the morning we’ll talk some more about it. Right now I’m… engaged.’

‘Of course, Gareth, I understand,’ Maas answered. ‘But you shouldn’t go tossing that word Nazi about too freely. You helped me, yes, and you were well paid for your help. And you learned more from me than you ever did from your college professors. But always remember: if ever I am discovered then so are you. And there are punishments for traitors no less than for Nazis.’ His words were greeted with black silence. ‘Until the morning, then…’

Maas gently put down the telephone’s handset and went to the window. At the top of the drive there were lights in the big house. Some in the downstairs servants’ quarters and others in Wyatt’s study and adjoining bedroom upstairs.

And so to bed, Gareth
, Maas thought,
with your new whore. Ah well, men have their passions, their ambitions. Yours would seem to be money and women. The amassing of the first and the ruining of the second. Mine! Mine is a dream I’ve nurtured these thirty years. A race of supermen. A Fourth Reich!

In his darkened bedroom in the large and sumptuous house, in his bed with its black silk sheets, Wyatt’s mind turned over just such thoughts and ambitions as Maas had recently ascribed to him. Satyrish, he must have his women, and more often than not these days that meant money. Not for common little sluts like the one who shared his bed tonight, no, but for those rarer treasures whose positions often demanded long pursuits and secretive courtships. But then, surely that was the pleasure of it: the chase before the kill.

Wyatt sighed. The girl was asleep now, her blonde hair spread like a fan on her pillow, her flesh white against the black sheets—but soon he would wake her. Needs such as his were not satisfied easily. Nor were they satisfied cheaply. Again he thought of money, of steadily dwindling reserves. A certain debutante was demanding money he could ill afford; a recent female client demanded the expensive attentions and clandestine meetings he had once foolishly promised; even his servants were demanding higher wages. The first he would bluff his way around; the second he must politely delay, perhaps with more lies and spurious promises; and the third he would simply dismiss, not only from his mind but from his service. Labour was cheap. If they did not like the wages he paid, let them look elsewhere for employment. Others could be found to replace them.

As for Maas: something might have to be done about him, too. The man was forever issuing these veiled threats. Or if not threats, warnings. And what if the hunters should eventually track him down? It would doubtless be as the ex-Nazi said; Wyatt, too, would be made to pay the price.