This was almost beyond Michael’s power to endure; it was the brutalization of the innocent, and it made his soul writhe. He felt hair crawling on the backs of his arms, on his shoulder blades, on his thighs. The change was calling him, and to embrace it in this auditorium would be a disaster. He closed his eyes, thought of the verdant forest, the white palace, the song of the wolves: civilization, a long way from here. The violinist was playing frantically now, and the audience was clapping in rhythm. Sweat burned Michael’s face. He could smell the musky animal perfume rising from his flesh.
It took a massive effort of will to hold back the wild winds. They came very close to engulfing him but he fought them, his eyes tightly closed and the wolf hair rippling across his chest. A band of hair rose on the back of his right hand, which clenched the armrest on the aisle, but Chesna didn’t see it. And then the change passed like a freight train on dark tracks, the wolf hair itching madly as it retreated into his pores.
The violinist played a flurry of notes at satanic speed, and Michael could hear the sound of the girl’s feet sliding on the glass. The music reached its zenith and ceased, to cheering and more shouts of “Bravo! Bravo!” He opened his eyes; they were wet with rage and revulsion. The Nazi soldier led the girl offstage. She moved like a sleepwalker, trapped in an unending nightmare. The violinist bowed, smiling broadly, another man with a broom came out to sweep up the bloody glass, and the curtains closed.
“Excellent!” Blok said, to no one in particular. “This is the best presentation yet!”
Attractive naked women appeared, rolling kegs of beer and iced mugs on carts along the aisles. They stopped to draw beer into the mugs and pass them to thirsty Brimstone Club members. The audience began to grow raucous, some of them breaking into obscene songs. Grinning faces gleamed with sweat, and beer sloshed as mugs were cracked together in vile toasts.
“How long does this go on?” Michael asked Chesna.
“Hours. I’ve known it to go on all night.”
One more minute was too long, as far as he was concerned. He touched his pocket, and felt the key to their room that Chesna had given him. Blok was talking to the man next to him, explaining something with a hammering of his fist. An iron fist? Michael wondered.
The curtains opened again. At the center of the stage was a bed, its sheet a Russian flag. On that bed, her wrists and ankles tied to the bedposts, lay a dark-haired woman, nude, who might have been Slavic. Two naked, muscular men wearing Nazi helmets and jackboots goosestepped out from either side of the stage, to loud applause and excited laughter. Their weapons were raised for an assault, and the woman on the bed cringed but couldn’t escape.
Michael had reached his limit. He stood up, turned his back on the stage, and walked quickly up the aisle and out of the auditorium.
“Where’s the baron going?” Blok asked. “It’s the shank of the evening!”
“I… don’t think he’s feeling well,” Chesna told him. “He ate too much.”
“Oh. Weak-stomached, eh?” He grasped her hand to keep her from bolting, too, and his silver teeth flashed. “Well, I’ll keep you company, won’t I?”
Chesna started to pull away, but Blok’s grip tightened. She’d never walked out of a Brimstone Club meeting; she’d always been a loyal part of the group, and to walk out now-even following the baron-might cause suspicion. She forced her muscles to relax, and her actress’s smile surfaced. “I’d love a beer,” she said, and Blok motioned to one of the naked waitresses. Onstage, there was a scream, followed by the audience’s shouts of approval.
Michael unlocked the suite door and went directly to the balcony, where he breathed in fresh air and fought down his churning stomach. It took a minute or two for his head to clear; his brain felt infected with corruption. He looked at the ledge that ran from the balcony along the castle’s wall. Eight inches wide, at the most. Sculpted eagles and gargoyle faces were set in the cracked gray stones. But if he mis-stepped, or lost his handhold…
No matter. If he was going, it had to be now.
He eased over the terrace balustrade, set one foot on the ledge, and grasped the eye sockets of a gargoyle. His other foot found the ledge, too. He waited a few seconds, until he had his center of balance, and then he carefully moved along the ledge, a hundred and forty feet above Hitler’s earth.
8
The ledge was still slick with rain. The wind had turned chill, and gusts plucked at Michael’s hair and tugged his tuxedo jacket. He kept going, inch by inch, his chest pressed against the castle’s mountainous wall and his shoes scraping along the ledge. The balcony of the next suite was perhaps thirty feet away, and then there was another eight feet or so to the southeast corner. Michael moved carefully onward, not thinking of anything but the next step, the next finger grip. He grasped an eagle that suddenly cracked and crumbled, the fragments falling into the darkness. He squeezed himself against the wall with his forefinger and thumb hooked into a half-inch-wide fracture until he regained his balance. Then he went on, fingers searching for fissures in the ancient stones, his shoes testing the firmness of the ledge before each step. He thought of a fly, crawling along the side of a massive, square cake. One step followed the next. Something cracked. Careful, careful, he told himself. The ledge held, and in another moment Michael reached the next balcony and stepped over the balustrade. Curtains were closed over the terrace doors, but light streamed through a large window just on the other side of the terrace. The ledge went underneath that window. He would have to pass it to reach the corner, where a pattern of gargoyle faces and geometric figures ascended to the next level. Michael walked across the terrace, took a deep breath, and stepped over the railing onto the ledge again. He was wet under his arms, and sweat dampened the small of his back. He kept going, relying on the ledge and not on handholds as he passed the window; it was a spacious bedroom, clothes scattered on the bed but no one in the room. Michael made it past the glass, noting with some displeasure that he’d left his palm prints on it, and the corner was within reach.
He stood clinging to the southeast edge of the Reichkronen, wind slashing into his face and searchlights sweeping back and forth across the clouds. Now he would have to leave the safety of this ledge and climb up to the next level, using the sculpted stones as a ladder. Thunder rumbled in the sky, and he looked up, examining the gargoyle faces and geometric figures, judging where to put his fingers and toes. The wind was an enemy to balance, but that couldn’t be helped. Go on, he told himself, because this corner was the kind of place that sapped courage. He reached up, got his fingers latched on a sculpted triangle, and began to pull himself up. One shoe tip went into a gargoyle’s eye, the other found an eagle’s wing. He climbed the carved stones, the wind swirling around him.
Twelve feet above the sixth-floor ledge, he put his fingers into the eyes of a gaping, demonic face and a pigeon burst out of the mouth in a flurry of feathers. Michael stayed where he was for a moment, his heart hammering and pigeon feathers whirling around him. His fingers were scraped and raw, but he was only eight feet below the seventh-floor ledge. He kept climbing over the sculpted stones, got one knee up on the ledge, and pulled himself carefully to his feet. The ledge made a cracking noise and a few bits of masonry tumbled down, but he was still standing on something more or less solid. The next balcony belonged to Harry Sandler’s suite, and he reached it with relative ease. He quickly crossed the terrace, slipped over it on the opposite side-and faced a ledge between it and Blok’s terrace that had all but crumbled to pieces. Only chunks of stone remained, with gaping holes between them. The largest ledgeless space was about five feet, but from Michael’s precarious perspective it easily looked twice that distance. He would have to cling to the wall to get over it.
Michael eased along the decayed ledge, balancing on his toes, his fingers finding cracks in the stones. As he settled his weight forward, a piece of the ledge suddenly broke beneath his right foot. Legs splayed and his chest hugging the wall, he tightened his grip on fissures in the stones. His shoulders throbbed with the effort, and he heard the breath whistle between his teeth. Go on! he urged himself. Don’t stop, damn it! He listened to the inner voice, its heat thawing the ice that had begun to form in his knee joint. He went on, step after wary step, and he came to the place where there was no ledge.
“He asked for my advice, and I gave it to him,” came a voice from below Michael. Someone talking on a sixth-floor terrace. “I said those troops were green as new apples, and if he put them in that caldron, they’d be chewed to pieces.”
“But of course he didn’t listen.” Another man’s voice.
“He laughed at me! Actually laughed! He said he certainly knew his troops better than I did, and he’d ask for my opinion when he wanted it. And now we all know the result, don’t we? Eight thousand men trapped by the
