The Kingdom of Shadows (25 page)

“We are both so close . . . to knowing.” Ritter spread his hands against the desktop, to keep himself from falling forward and knocking over the jar. “I have spent the better part of my life studying the Lazarene Community. Everything that could be learned, from the outside. The history, the legends, the lies. And you, Iosefni . . . you were born in it. You are of the Lazarene blood. Yet neither one of us
knows
. The secrets . . . the truth. Mysteries.”

The other man’s words sobered Pavli. He felt a touch of fear, as though he had been walking in a dark forest and had spotted, far off among the dense, moss-covered shapes, another shape, one that moved and then disappeared. “Perhaps . . .” Pavli spoke carefully, treading in silence, waiting to see if that distant figure would show itself again. “Perhaps there is nothing to know. Perhaps it’s all just . . . nothing. Nothing at all.”

“You show a commendable loyalty to your brethren.” A lopsided smile twisted Ritter’s face. “But you can’t fool me. My study of the Lazarenes extends to you as well, Iosefni. I can sense how you feel. How you look at the other ones, the words – or the lack of them – that pass between you and the rest. How it must feel to have been cheated that way . . . to have had the great pearl of knowing snatched away from you . . .”

He spotted the figure in the darkness again, closer. “They did that . . . they did it to protect me.” He stopped himself from saying the words
from you
.

“Yes . . . of course they would say that. Your brother would tell you that, wouldn’t he? Even if – let us say – even if they weren’t concerned about you at all. About what happens to you. Perhaps they’re just concerned about their precious secrets. The secrets of their faith. And if they thought that you were weak . . . that you couldn’t be trusted with those secrets . . . that you could be made to tell them . . . to me, let us say . . .” Ritter raised an eyebrow as his smile widened. “Then that’s different, isn’t it? From what they told you.”

He could almost see its face. “But . . . that’s not true. It’s not. My brother didn’t lie to me.”

“Very good.” Ritter nodded appreciatively. “I should have expected as much from you. This loyalty. Just like the rest of your tribe, you are a tough nut to crack, Iosefni. Come –” He stood up, grabbing the back of the chair to steady himself. “I have something else to show you.”

Pavli followed the doctor into the rooms behind the office. He had only caught glimpses of these before, through the doors opening, then swinging shut. Now he found himself surrounded by the white-tiled walls, the air itself smelling of disinfectant, the odor of asylums. Ritter turned on the lights, the sudden glare dazzling Pavli. He could just make out a narrow, chrome-legged table in the middle of the room, with a small tray next to it, filled with what at first seemed to be kitchen cutlery. When he blinked away his tears, he could see that the glistening objects were surgical tools.

“I had an airplane sent down there, to pick up the remains.” Ritter leaned over the table, parting a small cloth-wrapped bundle. “I didn’t want that fool Mengele to have any souvenirs to add to his collection. They brought the jar back – and this.” He gestured to Pavli. “Come and see.”

He stood at the edge of the table as Ritter folded back the last bit of cloth. A naked child, only a year or two old, lay there as though sleeping. On its side, legs drawn up – its skin seemed white as porcelain, touched with pink at the center of the little fist tucked against its cheek and in the creases of its elbows and knees. Beneath the fall of blonde hair across its brow, marks had been made around one closed eye with a grease pencil.

“Pretty little thing.” Ritter stroked a fingertip along one of the small corpse’s eyebrows. “A waste, really.”

Pavli wished that he were dreaming. That it were possible to be dreaming.

Ritter’s hand gently moved the fragile arm, exposing the underside of the wrist. “Unmarked, of course; as is to be expected in one so young. That’s what makes you so unusual, Iosefni – that you came of age and yet didn’t receive the ritual tattooing. So you are Lazarene and yet somehow not.”

He remained silent. There was too little oxygen underneath the cloying asylum smell for him to breathe and speak.

“I wonder . . .” Ritter drew his hand over the small breastbone. “I wonder how much more you know than I do. I wonder if you’ve seen the things that I have only heard about. The old stories about the Lazarenes . . . the secret that Christ or the Devil whispered into a pale gypsy’s ear . . .”

The figure in the dark forest stepped closer. Pavli could almost see the face beneath the hood made of ragged animal pelts. “I don’t know . . . I don’t know what you’re talking about . . .”

“Yes, you have; you
have
seen it.” The drunken slurring had ebbed from Ritter’s voice, replaced by a taut ferocity. A fingernail drew a red line down the center of the dead child’s abdomen. “You’ve seen the skin part like a suit of old clothes and the reborn life emerging. Like a snake wriggling free, like a chrysalis being torn open by the moth inside –”

“No . . .” Pavli shook his head. “I didn’t . . .” The white-tiled room and Ritter’s piercing gaze blurred in his sight. He saw instead the vision he had stolen, the figure surrounded by the elders of his blood, luminous silk peeling away from the youth’s arms and chest, his nakedness wrapped in a drifting smoke that bore the image of his face.

And then another memory. Of his own brother Matthi, drawing the same transparent substance away from the freshly tattooed markings on his wrists. And Matthi whirling around when he’d suddenly felt that he was being watched, his face angry, shouting at Pavli that he shouldn’t have seen those things, it wasn’t the time yet for him to know.

“Don’t lie to me – you’ve seen it –”

“No!” Pavli turned away from the table, reaching for the handle of the room’s door. “I didn’t! I didn’t see anything!”

Ritter’s voice called after him as he ran from the office into the corridor beyond. “You
will
see it, Iosefni – I promise you that. Together we . . .”

He couldn’t hear any more. He clapped his hands to his ears, blocking out everything. In the storage area behind the darkroom, he threw himself upon the cot, burying his face in the rough blanket. He squeezed his eyes shut, but the ghosts, the things of silk and smoke and memory, still battered his sight with their soft hands.

Even when he fell into exhausted sleep. Even then, in his dreaming.

* * *

Toward noon, one of
Herr Doktor
Ritter’s assistants gave Pavli his instructions.

“Set up the photographic equipment in the dissection room.” The assistant wore a white laboratory coat and a cold lack of expression. “You know where that is, I assume.”

Pavli turned away from the trays on the workbench and nodded. “Why?” The feeling of dread, that had been with him all morning, tightened in his stomach. “What’s happening there?”

The assistant’s glance turned harsher. “That’s not for you to ask. Just get your things there, and be quick about it.”

Ritter, also garbed in white, glanced up at Pavli as he came into the room behind the office. “There at the corner of the table should do fine.” His voice revealed no emotion. Whatever had been set loose during the night had once again been brought under leash. He turned his attention back to the object upon the table.

It wasn’t the dead child lying there – that much Pavli could tell. That was what he had been expecting. He lifted the tripod from his shoulder and set it in position. An adult’s bare feet, so much rawer and bonier than the child’s had been, protruded from beneath the sheet stretched over the body’s face. He took the lens cap off the camera and began adjusting its focus.

“Raise it as high as you can,” directed Ritter. “I want as much of an overhead angle as possible.” He turned back to conferring with his assistant.

Pavli watched over the top of the camera as the sheet was pulled back from the naked form. A woman then, or what had been one, now reduced to an object without sex. That was all right; he could control the sick, light-headed feeling he’d brought with him into the room.

The assistant finished marking the body, the black lines to direct the scalpel cuts. He straightened up and turned toward the chrome tray, from which Ritter was already selecting his tools. Pavli could see the dead woman’s face then.

“Is there something the matter?” Ritter’s cold voice cut through the nausea that distorted Pavli’s vision. “This is a simple enough task. If you are too squeamish for it, then perhaps I will be forced to find a replacement for you.”

“No . . . no, I’m all right.” Pavli tightened his grip on the tripod, to keep his balance. “I’m sorry. I’ll try . . . I’ll do my best. Please . . .”

Ritter and his assistant regarded him. Then both men turned and leaned over the body of the woman. The mother of the twin children, the woman who had accosted Pavli, screaming for him to tell her what had happened to her babies. As Ritter made the first incision between her breasts, his assistant leaned forward, watching with clinical interest.

The camera’s shutter clicked as Pavli pressed the trigger button. That was the first photograph; he closed his eyes and took another . . .

In the evening, when Pavli brought the new prints to Ritter’s office, the doctor spread them out upon his desk. He studied them for a moment, then looked up at Pavli.

“You needn’t harbor such suspicions.” Ritter smiled, pleased at his ability to tell what Pavli was thinking. “The woman’s death was at her own hands. She hung herself after receiving the news of what happened to her children. Perhaps we should have been more cognizant of the extent of her grief and taken greater precautions, watched her more carefully. But we are limited in our resources here, and such unfortunate incidents are bound to happen.” He straightened the edges of the photographs lying before him. “Though I do not abide such waste as that in which some of my colleagues indulge, nevertheless I must take advantage of any opportunities for my research.” He looked up at Pavli. “Does that disturb you?”

“No –” Pavli shook his head. “Whatever you wish, sir.”

Ritter nodded. “Exactly so.” He picked up a magnifying glass and leaned over the desktop, the better to study the details of the eviscerated carcass. In the last of the series of photographs, the images were no longer recognizably human. “You should think, Iosefni, upon those matters we spoke of last night. We have much work ahead of us. And . . . there is not much time.” His voice sank to a murmur. “There is never enough time . . .”

“May I go now?”

“Yes, yes,” said Ritter irritably. “Leave me.”

Resting on his cot in the darkroom’s storage area, Pavli wondered why Ritter bothered lying to him at all. The photographs had caught clearly enough the imprint of a man’s hands circling the woman’s neck. Her death had been written in the blood pressed beneath the surface of her skin. Why lie about it, when there was nothing that could be done? Such was the nature of this world. It wasn’t up to him.

He rolled onto his side, using his forearm for a pillow. Only a little effort was required to set aside the images of the woman and what was finally left of her. Beyond that was darkness and sleep.