Tempting Fate (79 page)

As much as he wanted to be quiet, his attention stilled but for this one purpose, thousands of memories flitted through his mind. The Armenian spy dying under the pressure of his hands; the Coptic monks pursuing him with most unmonklike spears; the burning town on the road east of Damascus; the rush of water through Kali’s temple; the stone-visaged Czar with his lancers waiting at the gates of his castle in Lithuania; Laurenzo’s agonized voice asking, “If you were God, Francesco, what would you do with me?”; Le Grace tied to a singletree in Saint Sebastien’s stable; the spider in the mirror; his servants fleeing the mansion in St. Petersburg before the soldiers came to arrest him; Laisha lying under the straw in a chicken-coop, wearing an elaborate dress that did not fit. He closed his eyes in a useless attempt to shut out her face.

There was a soft thud in the courtyard, and Ragoczy guessed that one of the tenants had dropped some more refuse from an open window. Someone shouted unintelligible curses at someone else, who returned them with vigor. Two cats began to yowl and were silenced by the crash of a bottle hurled in their direction. From the tavern came the sound of loud greetings and an outburst of ribald laughter. The evening had begun on this warm August night no differently from most other evenings.

Ragoczy paid little attention to these sounds, for he had heard their like for nearly four thousand years. He supposed that soon someone would start to sing, and a little later there would be a quarrel and perhaps a fight. Most of the time he regarded these things with indifference, but tonight he was glad of them. Let them bray out their songs, scream their insults, he would welcome them all. He lifted his head as another altercation broke out in one of the dwellings behind the courtyard: a predatory smile curled his lips.

Half an hour later there was a great deal of friendly rumpus in the taproom so that Ragoczy did not at first hear the approach of the five men he was waiting for. There were sounds of quick military strides on the courtyard flaggings, and a deep voice shouted an order.

“Heinz, this is still a drill. Stand properly.”

“Don’t be such a martinet, Friedel,” one of those outside the door complained.

“Shut up, down there!” bellowed someone from a window above, the words echoing ominously in the narrow passageway.

“Keep to yourself, you old fart!” the one who had been called Friedel shouted back.

“I’ll have the police on you!” the upper voice announced.

“Go ahead!” one of the others taunted. “We’ve got three hundred policemen in the NSDAP already. Do you think they would act against their own party members?”

There was a resounding crash as a window was indignantly slammed down. The men in the courtyard chuckled.

“Very well, very well, you men,” Friedel said with gruff humor. It was not easy to hear him over the enthusiastic voices in the taproom. “Keep in formation.”

“But the meeting is over, Friedel. Röhm isn’t here to tell you if you’re doing it right,” a voice that Ragoczy had not heard before said in an injured tone.

“We’ve got to maintain discipline at all times,” Friedel insisted, plainly loath to give up the power he had, if only over four men. “That is the essential component of the SA. Every unit should be able to function independently, but have skill and discipline enough to be part of the larger groups.”

One of the men said something that Ragoczy could not hear because of the sudden increase in noise from the tavern.

“Do you hear that?” Friedel said loudly, remonstrating with his men. “That is what we must overcome. It will not happen if we relax our “discipline and our purpose every time we are out of sight or hearing of an officer. Remember that. You, Romuald, see how you are standing. That does not become a member of the SA. It is more fitting for those lax bastards in the taproom. Your belt is not tight, and the tail of your shirt is out. If I were as demanding as Röhm is, you would face disciplinary action for it.”

“For the sake of our feet, Friedel, let us stop this. I want a beer and a pipe.” The complainer was given support by the others.

“Then get into formation so I can dismiss you,” Friedel ordered them.

There was a loud crash as a bottle shattered in the passageway.

“Damned Spartacists,” one of the men in the courtyard shouted, and was immediately yelled at by a man in one of the buildings above them.

“Better Spartacists than Nazis!”

Ragoczy listened to the exchange of insults with a set, ferocious smile. He would not have to wait too much longer. His eyes were on the door, waiting for the moment when the five men would walk through and close it behind them.

“That’s better,” Friedel barked, and Ragoczy pictured him strutting around the four men he commanded. “Straighter there, Heinz.”

“Friedel!” one of the men shouted at him. “Finish up!”

“All right! You are dismissed!” He had to yell this to be heard over the song that resounded in the taproom.

“Well, that’s over, Gott sie Dank,” one of the men said as he opened the door to the added room.

“Did you notice that there’s to be a meeting about preparing for the elections? We want to get as many of our men working on that as we can.” This was Heinz, and he followed the first man down the stairs. “Get the lantern, why don’t you?”

“I don’t have any matches. Hey, Vincenz, did you bring matches?”

“And tobacco. You fellows always’ forget yours.” He had a rich, plumy chuckle, and Ragoczy watched him make his way cautiously to the center of the room, where one old brass-plated lantern hung from a hook.

Friedel was the last one in, and he slammed the door with vigor. “There, that shuts up those infernal radicals!” He made a contemptuous gesture in the general direction of the tavern.

Now that the men were in the room, Ragoczy recognized three of them. Heinz was the one who had grabbed hold of Laisha’s arm. Friedel had called her a Spartacist because of her accent. One of the others whose name he did not know had been the one to swing the rifle that killed her.

The match scraped and flame spurted at the tip. There was the hollow sound of the glass chimney being lifted, and then a low, cozy light spilled through the room.

“Good evening, gentlemen,” said Franchot Ragoczy, Graf von Saint-Germain. He did not stand, but this did not detract from his authority.

The five men stared at him, most in astonishment, but Friedel was outraged.

“Who the devil are you? This is a private meeting room!” He came stumping down the stairs, his face slightly flushed.

“So the landlord informed me,” Ragoczy said urbanely, choosing not to answer the first question. “But then, I wished to speak to you, so…”

“You have no business coming here!” Friedel blustered, but Vincenz laid a hand on his arm.

“Don’t be so hasty, Friedel. Look at the man. You know that we have instructions to be deferential to the hochgebornen, and he is one such.” He had reached into a pouch he carried on his belt, and extracted a bit of dried-out tobacco, and now he stuffed it into his pipe with the air of a man eager to be hospitable.

“What did you want to speak to us about?” Friedel inquired suspiciously with a truculent gesture to the others.

“The thirty-first of May.” His affability was unfailing but icy. “I hope you recall it. With all your various activities, it may not be foremost in your memories, but I encourage you to give it your consideration.” His lambent eyes went from one man to the other, and none of them could return his stare.

“There was a riot that day,” Vincenz said a bit uncertainly.

“Bravo.” Ragoczy folded his arms, determined to contain his rage until the men here knew what they had done, what they would pay for.

“It wasn’t much of an affair. Those Spartacists overturned our truck.” Heinz glared at Ragoczy as if he were responsible for this insult.

“Very good.”

“I didn’t know there was anything of note that came out of it,” one of the others said in a surly tone. “The police stopped the whole thing in less than two hours.”

“A mere two hours. What luck,” Ragoczy said with a sarcastic nod to the five men. “Do you recall any of the glories of that short … occurrence?”

“Nothing much happened,” Vincenz growled.

“Nothing much happened?” Ragoczy repeated, as fury coursed through him. His dark eyes glowed how, but the men did not notice this.

“A few broken windows,” Heinz said with a shrug.

Ragoczy got off the table and took a few steps forward. “How strange. I understood that there were five businesses ruined—”

“Jewish Spartacists,” one of them said, as if that negated the complaint.

“—and more than twenty men badly beaten—”

Friedel made a snorting sound. “It was a riot. What do you expect?”

“—more than thirty automobiles were wrecked or damaged—”

Romuald, who was the youngest man there, snickered. “Only a fool would leave an automobile in those streets. They’re fair game.”

“—and sixteen men were killed.”

The five SA Brownshirts were quiet.

“Oh, yes; and one fifteen-year-old girl.”

“What—?” Friedel began, but Ragoczy did not let him finish.

“She was my daughter.” Ragoczy looked at the men now with detestation in his face. “Perhaps you can remember, if you make the effort.” He waited. “No? I will describe her to you. She was tall, very nearly my height, with dark blonde hair and brown eyes. She was wearing a pumpkin-colored dress. You”—he pointed to Heinz—“held her by the arms while that … that
animal!
”—he swung around on the man whose name he did not know—“held his rifle by the barrel and bludgeoned her with the butt.”

“Now, now, now,” Friedel said with an indulgent smile, starting toward Ragoczy with a confident air. “I can see why you’re upset, Mein Herr, but there must surely be a misunderstanding here. It’s always easy to blame the NSDAP. If your daughter was … killed, you can be sure that no member of the NSDAP did it. The Spartacists, they’re different. You know how cheaply all Communists hold human life. If the girl was killed on the thirty-first, you should be looking for a Spartacist bully. They were the ones who started the riot, when they overturned our truck. The police will support us, I know.”

“I have no doubt of it,” Ragoczy agreed, letting the man go on, wanting to give him every opportunity to damn himself.

“You were wise to come to us, of course, because we can probably help you. We know where those men spend their evenings. It is in the interest of public safety that we know such things. Let us lead you to them, and we’ll help you to teach them a lesson they won’t soon forget.” His men made sounds of halfhearted encouragement, and one of them hooked his thumb into his belt. “The trouble is, those Spartacists are suspicious of their own kind. It’s not surprising, when you consider their background. It must have been that they realized your daughter was Russian, and they—”

“I did not tell you she was Russian,” Ragoczy cut in, his soft voice acidic.

“Of course you did,” Friedel insisted, looking to the others. “I remember.”

“No.”

Two of the men came closer to their leader, and one of them muttered a few words under his breath. Friedel glared at him, then looked back at Ragoczy, determined to brazen it out. “If you did not mention it—Romuald thinks you didn’t, but he is the youngest of us—then we saw it in the reports of the riot. That’s always the sort of thing you read about in the newspapers.”

“Her name was not mentioned; the only comment was that a young woman had been one of the victims that day. I know this is true, gentlemen. I paid enough to keep her name and nationality a secret.” He came a few steps closer to the men. There was now less than four paces between him and Friedel.

“Word of such things always gets out,” Vincenz informed him in grand tones, with a pugnacious set of his jaw.

Friedel took up the argument gratefully. “Yes, of course. The police may keep such things out of the paper, as you claim, but they gossip among themselves, and there are many of them in the NSDAP. Young Russian women are not that common in München that the police would not take some notice of her.” He was feeling his way with more confidence, less impressed with the man in black. He had been jarred by the stranger’s catching him in the matter of the girl’s nationality, but he was sure he could convince the man that he had learned of her being Russian from some believable source. “We of the NSDAP know and trust the family and hold it sacred; the most sacred institution in all Deutschland, and the foundation of all Teutonic culture. No one here would willingly harm a young person-Gott im Himmel! for that we would have to be monsters.”

Ragoczy’s smile was that of a condemned heretic to his Inquisitors. “You have chosen the word, not I.”

“A figure of speech,” Friedel insisted, and glanced uneasily toward the steps leading up to the door. The landlord would not like it if such a hochgeborn gentleman as this one was hurt in this room, but if he were to leave here, there was the narrow passage and no one could fix the blame on them if this man were found there, perhaps unconscious, around midnight. The police would not pursue the matter too pointedly, for the stranger was not Deutscher, and being elegant, he could only expect to meet, with difficulty in this part of the city. Little would be made of it.

“As you say,” Ragoczy murmured.

Sensing his opportunity, Friedel reached out as if to take Ragoczy by the arm. “Come, then. We’ll see to your aid—”

Two swift steps closed the distance between Ragoczy and Friedel. He could no longer contain his rage: it was just such a gesture that he had seen when these men surrounded Laisha. He reached out for the leader, his small hands, closing, inexorably closing around the base of the man’s jaw.

Friedel gasped in shock, and then his voice grated a sound that was intended for a yell, but was cut off as Ragoczy pressed through jaw, throat, and neck. A little blood dribbled from the corner of his mouth before Ragoczy let him drop to the floor. The whole attack had taken less than six seconds from the time Ragoczy first touched him until his head wobbled back as he lay, the lower part of his face sagging unnaturally inward.