at the Paris Opera. He glanced over the railing again, then thought better of it. No use stretching his courage before he needed it. “I can do it,” he said, and then he smelled Chesna’s womanly scent, her beautiful face so close to his. Searchlights danced over Berlin like a ghostly ballet. On impulse Michael pulled Chesna against him, and kissed her lips.
She resisted, but only for a second because she also knew they were being watched. She put her arms around him, felt the muscles of his shoulders move under his tuxedo jacket, and then felt his hand caress the base of her spine, where the dimples were. Michael tasted her lips: honey-sweet, with perhaps a dash of pepper. Warm lips, and growing warmer. She put a hand against his chest; the hand made an effort to push him back but the arm didn’t agree. Defeated, the hand slipped away. Michael deepened the kiss, and found Chesna accepting what he offered.
“That’s what I want,” Michael heard the old goat’s nymphet say.
Another officer looked out through the balcony doors. “Almost time!” he announced, and hurried away. The goat and nymphet left, the girl still giggling. Michael broke the kiss, and Chesna gasped for breath. His lips tingled. “Almost time for what?” he asked her.
“The Brimstone Club’s meeting. Once a month, down in the auditorium.” She actually-it was ridiculous-felt a little dizzy. The altitude, she thought it must be. Her lips felt as if they were on fire. “We’d better hurry if we’re going to find good seats.” She took his hand, and he followed her off the balcony.
They descended in a crowded elevator, along with other dinner guests. Michael assumed the Brimstone Club was one of those mystic leagues the Nazis prided themselves on, in a country of orders, fellowships, and secret societies. In any case he was about to find out. He noted that Chesna had a very tight grip on his hand, though her expression remained cheerful. The actress at her craft.
The auditorium, on the castle’s first floor in the section behind the lobby, was filling up with people. Fifty or so Brimstone Club members had already found their chairs. A red velvet curtain obscured the stage, and multicolored electric lanterns hung from the rafters. Nazi officers had come dressed in their finery, and most everyone else wore formal attire. Whatever the Brimstone Club was, Michael mused as he walked with Chesna along the aisle, it was reserved for the Reich’s gentry.
“Chesna! Over here! Please, sit with us!” Jerek Blok rose from his chair and waved them over. Boots, who might have taken up two chairs, was not in attendance, but Blok sat with a group of his dinner guests. “Move down!” he told them, and they instantly obeyed. “Please, sit beside me.” He motioned to the seat next to him. Chesna took it, and Michael sat on the aisle seat. Blok put his hand on Chesna’s and grinned broadly. “Ah, it’s a wonderful night! Springtime! You can feel it in the air, can’t you?”
“Yes, you can,” Chesna agreed, her smile pleasant but her voice tense.
“We’re so glad to have you with us, Baron,” Blok told him. “Of course you know all the membership fees go toward the War Fund.”
Michael nodded. Blok began talking to a woman sitting in front of him. Sandler, Michael saw, was sitting up on the front row with a woman on either side of him, talking animatedly. Tales of Africa, Michael thought.
Within fifteen minutes, between seventy and eighty people had entered the auditorium. The lanterns began to dim, and the doors were closed to shut out the uninvited. A hush fell over the audience. What the hell was this all about? Michael wondered. Chesna was still gripping his hand, and her fingernails were beginning to dig into his skin.
A man in a white tuxedo came out through the curtains, to polite applause. He thanked the membership for attending, the monthly meeting, and for being so generous with their contributions. He went on, about the fighting spirit of the Reich, and how the valiant youth of Germany would crush the Russians and send them fleeing back to their holes. The applause was more scattered, and some of the officers actually groaned in derision. The man-a master of ceremonies, Michael reasoned-continued, undaunted, about the shining future of the Thousand-Year Reich and how Germany would yet have three capitals: Berlin, Moscow, and London. Today’s blood, he said in a booming voice, would be tomorrow’s victory garlands, so we’ll fight on! And on! And on!
“And now,” he said with a flourish, “let the entertainment begin!”
The lanterns had gone out. The curtains opened, the stage illuminated by footlights, and the master of ceremonies hurried off.
Another man sat in a chair, reading a newspaper and smoking a cigar, at stage center.
Michael almost bolted to his feet.
It was Winston Churchill. Totally naked, the cigar clamped in his bulldog teeth and a tattered London Times in his pudgy hands.
Laughter swelled. The music of a brass band, hidden behind the stage, oompahed a comic tune. Winston Churchill sat smoking and reading, his pallid legs crossed and his etiquette hanging down. As the audience laughed and applauded, a girl wearing nothing but high black leather boots and carrying a cat-o’-nine-tails strutted out on stage. She wore a square smudge of charcoal on her upper lip: a Hitlerian mustache. Michael, his senses reeling, recognized the girl as Charlotta, the autograph seeker. There was nothing shy about her now, her breasts bobbling as she advanced toward Churchill, and he suddenly looked up and let out a shrill, piercing scream. The scream made everyone laugh harder. Churchill fell to his knees, his naked and flabby behind offered to the audience, and held up his hands for mercy.
“You pig!” the girl shouted. “You filthy, murdering swine! Here’s your mercy!” She swung the whip and the lashes cracked across Churchill’s shoulder, raising red welts on his white flesh. The man howled in pain and groveled at her feet. She began to whip his back and buttocks, cursing him like a blue-tongued sailor as the band oompahed merrily and the audience convulsed with laughter. Reality and unreality mixed; Michael realized the man was of course not the prime minister of England, just an actor who eerily resembled him, but the cat-o’-nine-tails wasn’t a fiction. Neither was the girl’s rage. “This is for Hamburg!” she shouted. “And Dortmund! And Marienburg! And Berlin! And-” She went on, a recitation of cities the Allied bombers had hit, and as the whip began to fling drops of blood the audience erupted in a paroxysm of cheering. Blok leaped to his feet, clapping his hands above his head. Others were standing, too, shouting gleefully as the whipping continued and the false Churchill shivered at the girl’s feet. Blood streamed down the man’s back, but he made no effort to rise or escape the whip. “Bonn!” the girl raged as the whip struck. “Schweinfurt!” Sweat glistened on her shoulders and between her breasts, her body trembling with the effort, moisture smearing the charcoal mustache. The whip continued to fall, and now the man’s back and buttocks were crisscrossed with red. Finally the man shuddered and lay sobbing, and the female Hitler whipped him across his back one last time and then put a booted foot on his neck in triumph. She gave the audience a Nazi salute and received a bounty of cheering and applause. The curtains closed. “Wonderful! Wonderful!” Blok said, sitting down again. A tight sheen of perspiration had collected on his forehead, and he dabbed it off with a white handkerchief. “You see what entertainment your money buys, Baron?”
“Yes,” Michael answered; forcing a smile was the most difficult thing he’d ever done in his life. “I do see.”
The curtains opened again. Two men were shoveling glittering fragments from a wheelbarrow, scattering them over the stage. Michael realized they were covering the floor with broken glass. They finished their job, rolled the wheelbarrow away, and then a Nazi soldier pushed a thin girl with long brown hair onto the stage. She wore a dirty, patched dress made of potato sacks, and her bare feet crunched the glass shards. The girl stood in the glass, her head slumped and her hair obscuring her face. Pinned to her potato-sack dress was a yellow Star of David. A violinist in a black tuxedo appeared from the left side of the stage, wedged his instrument against his throat, and began to fiddle a lively tune.
The girl, against all human reason and dignity, began to dance on the broken glass like a windup toy.
The audience laughed and clapped, as if in appreciation of an animal act. “Bravo!” the officer sitting in front of Michael shouted. Michael would have blown the bastard’s brains out if he’d had his derringer. This savagery surpassed anything he’d experienced in the Russian forest; this, truly, was a gathering of beasts. It was all he could do to keep from leaping to his feet and shouting for the girl to stop, but Chesna felt his body tremble and she looked at him. She saw the revulsion in his eyes, and something else there, too, that frightened her to the marrow of her bones. “Do nothing!” she whispered.
Under Michael’s tuxedo jacket and crisp white shirt, wolf hair had emerged along his spine. The hairs scurried across his flesh.
Chesna squeezed his hand. Her own eyes were dead, her emotions switched off like an electric light. On stage, the violinist was playing faster and the thin girl was dancing faster, leaving bloody footprints on the boards.
