The Demi-Monde: Winter (29 page)

‘Surely this is nonsense, father: they can’t arrest you!’ Trixie protested. ‘You have been a loyal member of the Party. They would be insane to eliminate you simply on suspicion of your being a Royalist reactionary, just on a whim. You must appeal to the Leader. You must convince him there has been some dreadful misunderstanding.’

‘Unfortunately, Trixie, there has been no misunderstanding. You must realise that Heydrich and his cronies are mad.’ It was a simple statement but so replete with treason that Trixie was shocked into silence. Her father had always been so careful not to criticise the Party or its leadership in front of others. ‘But their madness,’ he continued grimly, ‘should not blind us to the fact that they are accomplished people, that their intelligence apparatus is the most efficient in the Demi-Monde.’

There was something in the way her father said the words that made Trixie look at him afresh. It was as though he had sloughed off a mask to reveal something different and far more deadly beneath. Whereas before she had only seen the dutiful Party apparatchik – a little dull and stuffy, it had to be admitted – now there was a man of action, determined and strong. It might have been the spark in his eyes or the resolute set of his mouth but suddenly he was different. Very different …

‘You’re a Royalist!’ Even as the words tumbled out of her
mouth, Trixie knew they were true. He was one of the people that Miss Appleton at the Academy had lectured them so fiercely to be on their guard against. He was one of them.

Dashwood nodded. ‘Yes, Trixie, I am a Royalist, I am one of the Silent Opposition. King Henry might have been unbalanced, but he was never as evil as Heydrich. Heydrich can’t be allowed to succeed. I and others like me have been planning …’ He stopped, looked up at Dabrowski and gave him a half-smile. ‘Perhaps it isn’t too late. The opening phase of Operation Barbarossa – the destruction of Warsaw and all the people in the Ghetto – by Clement’s SS-Ordo Templi Aryanis begins in three days. In three days the Party will take its first step towards seizing control of the Demi-Monde and imposing its lunatic ideas regarding racial hygiene on the whole world.’

‘Clement won’t find the Ghetto easy. We Poles will fight …’

‘And you will lose! What will you and your fellow Poles use to oppose the SS-Ordo Templi Aryanis: rocks and coarse language? The SS are the finest shock troops in the ForthRight, they are the mindless bastards selected for their brutality and susceptibility to thought reform. They believe that by killing anyone who isn’t an Anglo-Slav they are doing ABBA’s work.’

‘Get us the guns and we will fight.’

‘Get you the guns …’ repeated her father. ‘Yes, there might be a way.’ He pierced the Captain with a hard stare. ‘Answer me truthfully, Captain: if your Poles have weapons, will they fight?’

‘We will fight, Comrade Commissar, make no mistake of that. We will fight to the last man and to the last breath. We will die with our hands around the throats of those who seek to destroy us.’

‘You are organised?’

‘The Warsaw Free Army is ready. I have the honour of being a major in the WFA.’

‘Then know this, Captain: though I cannot offer you salvation, I can help you and your people die as a proud people.’ Her father turned to Trixie and smiled ruefully. ‘Trixie, you are my greatest love and my greatest treasure. I am proud to be the father of such a strong and independently minded girl, but now I implore you to display all this strength and independence and ignore what your heart might tell you. The Demi-Monde is faced with a great evil and it is the responsibility of everyone to oppose that evil, even at the cost of their life. My life is over …’

Trixie gasped with astonishment. ‘What are you saying, father? We can run, we can hide.’

Dashwood shook his head. ‘No, for me the die is cast. I cannot escape, Trixie. If I were to try I would be caught and then there would be no hope for you. And anyway, I have a higher mission.’ He turned back to Dabrowski. ‘Amongst your detachment here in the Manor, are there men you can trust implicitly, men you would trust with your life?’

The Captain thought. ‘My sergeant and four others.’

‘Not enough.’

‘Enough for what?’

‘There are two barges laden with rifles and ammunition moored just below the Oberbaum Bridge on the Rhine. These are obsolete weapons intended for export to the Quartier but though they are obsolete they are serviceable. A resolute and daring captain, with a company of soldiers equally uncaring as to whether they live or die, could board the barges and, under cover of darkness, sail them upriver to the Ghetto.’

The Captain could barely contain his excitement. ‘Give me an hour in Warsaw and I will have such a company of men. We will take the barges or we will die trying. All that I ask is that you tell me where they are moored.’

‘In a moment. First I need an undertaking from you, Captain.
I need to hear you swear an oath as an officer and a gentleman that when you escape from the Manor you will take my daughter with you.’

‘No,’ exclaimed Trixie. ‘I’m not going anywhere without you.’

She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. The man who had been the rock in her life, the man who had carried her through the loss of her mother, the man who had stood unflinchingly beside her when she had been Censured, the man who had taught her – convinced her – that she was the equal of any man, was talking of leaving her. That was impossible: she would live and, if necessary, die by his side.

But her father was equally determined.

‘You must. It is imperative that I attend the séance this evening. If I were to disappear before then there would be a hue and cry, but your absence, Trixie, can be explained more easily. I can say you’ve been overcome by the excitement of meeting the Leader: you are only a girl after all.’ Dashwood reached across and took Trixie’s hand in his. ‘There is no alternative, Trixie. If you stay we are both lost, but with the Captain’s help, you at least might survive. Do I have your word, Captain, that you will do everything in your power to save and protect my daughter?’

‘You have my word.’

Dashwood opened a drawer, extracted a file and passed it across the desk to the Captain. ‘This contains the details of the mooring location of the barges.’

The Captain took the file and flicked through the pages. ‘Thank you, Sir, thank you on behalf of the Polish people imprisoned in the Ghetto. This will give them hope.’ Dabrowski shut the file and looked sternly at Dashwood. ‘You should be aware, Sir, that it is my intention to try to make my escape during the séance. When Heydrich and his entourage are in the ballroom
the garrison will relax and its guard will be lowered. I will try to organise some form of distraction, some sort of ruse to draw all the guards away from their posts.’

‘I think I might be able to help you there, Captain. I had been hoping – planning – to disturb Heydrich’s Operation Barbarossa, but now it seems I must bring these plans forward. I have already sent word to Royalist exiles in the Coven warning them that the ForthRight will attack in early Spring but now it seems I must take more concrete action.’ Dashwood drew a small revolver from the drawer where the file had been lying. ‘Although, like my daughter, I am something of a RaTionalist and take Crowley’s talk of Spirits and Daemons with several grains of salt it is apparent that the Daemon, Norma Williams, is of great importance to the Party. Of course, all this talk of doppelgängers and infiltrating the Real World is moonshine but …’ The Comrade Commissar split open the revolver and checked that it was fully loaded. ‘At Heydrich’s insistence I am to attend the séance this evening in full-dress uniform and that necessitates my wearing a side arm. I will use this to assassinate the Daemon and, if I am able, Heydrich as well. That, I think, Captain, will provide a sufficient disturbance for you to make good your escape.’

‘And what about you, father?’ asked Trixie, a tear gently coursing down her cheek.

‘I, my darling Trixie, am a dead man. It is your responsibility to ensure that I don’t die in vain.’

The afterglow of Seidr ritual and of Lilithian worship is found in the WhoDoo magic practised by the mambos of NoirVille. Being so heavily suffused by Lilithian folklore, WhoDoo magic is a strongly sexual magic. Mambos (and all of the most powerful practitioners of WhoDoo are female) believe that the interregnum dividing the Spirit World from the Demi-Monde is most readily traversed when the body and the soul conjoin at orgasm. To the WhoDoo mambo at the point of orgasm all things magical are possible because that is the moment when they commune, albeit briefly, with ABBA, or as the WhoDooists know him, the Great Lord Bondye.

– Religions of the Demi-Monde: Otto Weininger, University of Berlin Publications

‘So waddya fink, Wanker? Fucking big, innit?’

For once in his life Burlesque Bandstand was guilty of under-statement. The hounfo wasn’t big, it was huge. When Vanka had designed it never for the life of him had he thought it would turn out to be so monumental. It was one thing, he had discovered, to put measurements down on a piece of paper but it was quite another to see those measurements conjured up in wood and steel. Black and menacing, the hounfo took up
over half of Dashwood Manor’s massive ballroom, the floor area of which must have measured a hundred feet by fifty. It was the biggest piece of flim-flam the Demi-Monde had ever seen.

‘Yeah, it’s big all right.’

‘Sumwun wos saying they thought it wos the biggest illusion thingy ever built in the Demi-Monde.’

‘How many times have I got to tell you, Burlesque, not to say it’s an illusion? It’s a hounfo, a temple dedicated to the practising of WhoDoo magic. I don’t want it called an illusion.’

‘Yeah, all right, Wanker. No need to get yer knickers in a twist. Only me an’ yous and, ov course, Miss Ella know it’s an illusion …’ a withering look from Vanka, ‘… a hounfo. The lads who built it didn’t ‘ave a clue wot it is, ‘cept, that is, for Alf and Sid an’ they’ve got to know ‘cos they’re working the levers. But go on, tell us wot yous fink, Wanker. Me and the lads ain’t done bad, ‘ave we?’

In Vanka’s judgement Burlesque and his gang of workmen had done very well indeed. In the space of a day they’d built something quite remarkable. But then, he supposed, the half-million guineas Ella had promised Burlesque for his help in freeing the Daemon bought a lot of enthusiasm.

The hounfo was made up of two forty-foot-long, ten-foot-high wooden walls arranged in a ‘V’ shape, with the widest, open part of the delta formed by the walls extending from one side of the ballroom to the other and the delta’s point almost touching the furthest end of the ballroom, where the room’s windows looked out onto the Manor’s grounds. It was within the open space enclosed by the arrowed walls of the hounfo that that evening’s séance would be performed.

‘No, you’ve done a good job, Burlesque: I’m impressed.’

Burlesque beamed. ‘But do you fink it’ll fool the nobs?’

‘It might,’ was all Vanka could bring himself to say.

He knew he was right to be cautious. Despite the strange emblems and decorations that Ella had had daubed over the hounfo and the black netting covering the walls it was still just a piece of stage magic writ large. He had the feeling that any illusionist worth his salt would see through the flim-flam in an instant. And Aleister Crowley was a master magician. All Vanka could hope was that its sheer immensity would persuade Crowley that it was simply too big to be just a prop in a vanishing act.

He began a slow walk around the structure, pushing and shoving at the walls as he went, testing them for strength. ‘I never thought it would look this big,’ he admitted, ‘or this strange.’

He gave the hounfo a kick. The walls were so heavy – it had taken five steamers to deliver all the timber used in its construction – that it didn’t even vibrate when he booted it. But was it enough to fool Crowley?

If Crowley should suspect for an instant …

There had already been one heart-stopping moment when Crowley and Archie Clement had come snooping around earlier that afternoon, but fortunately that had been before the hounfo had been fully erected. After that Vanka had made bloody damned sure that the ballroom door was locked and he had spread the rumour that anyone who came near it before the séance would be cursed by the mambo Laveau. There had been no more snoopers.

Vanka rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘Yeah, it might just do. And all this WhoDoo mumbo-jumbo Ella’s tricked the place out in is a distraction.’ He nodded towards the cabbalistic designs painted over the black walls of the hounfo. ‘And, of course, it’ll be evening and we’ll have the lights turned low.’

‘Miss Ella tells me she’s planning to ‘ave a couple of braziers at the sides of the ballroom burning stuff that gives off a lot of smoke.’

‘That’s good thinking. Lots of smoke and mirrors, that’s what we need.’ Vanka stopped alongside the gate that was hinged midway along the right-hand wall of the hounfo. ‘If you would close the left-hand gate, Burlesque, I want to check that the gates meet in the middle.’

The two of them pulled the gates closed, Vanka surprised by how easily the ten-foot-tall gates swung on their hinges. They met perfectly, enclosing the pointed part of the WhoDoo temple from midway along the hounfo’s walls. Now Burlesque stood in the triangular space formed on the inside of the gates and Vanka stood on the outside, but even with the gates closed they could see each other clearly through the gaps between the thick wooden bars. What had Ella said? The gates reminded her of a gigantic version of the picket fence that had surrounded her grandmother’s front yard. Vanka had trouble imagining a district where there was so much space that ordinary people could have gardens.

They reopened the gates and set them back ready for the evening’s performance. Vanka gave the hounfo a final pat and stepped back to admire the construction. ‘Yeah, I think it’ll do, Burlesque. It’s big enough to awe even the most dubious of cynics and clever enough to fox even the most hardened of disbelievers, including, I hope, Aleister Crowley. We’ll put the altar as far in as we can, right back hard against the pointed end of the temple.’ He glanced around the room yet again making sure that, except for him, Burlesque and Ella, the ballroom was empty. ‘That’ll make the vanishing easier.’