She slipped off the bed and stood at its side looking down at me, and I was powerless to move. But as my mind slid across a sunlit stretch of shallow water, I was calling myself all the names under the sun. Knocked out by my own pills.... No, by Spiegel pills.... Spiegel pills.... Why hadn’t I worked it out properly? This was her whole philosophy. Wait and see where the profit lies. Maybe she had meant to go away with me, but an hour’s teutonic peep-show had changed her. She was German ... German, blonde, beautiful, chosen to be the bride of Alois Hitler.... The myth had taken her, possessed her, her eyes were dazzled with the golden future ... and it would be the same for thousands of others.
I struggled to get off the bed, but nothing would work. I went in and out of consciousness, each time going deeper and taking longer to come back. Once she was in the room, then gone, and then back again; and this time she held her dress in her hand and began to slip it on and she was speaking from far away....
“I am sorry, darling.... Sorry for you. You are so nice and exciting ... but not enough for Katerina....”
I tried to speak, just to call her a bastard, but all I managed was a grunt. She leaned over me and kissed me on the forehead and then was gone ... and I went too, but some hazy, crazy dream carried on, mixing me up and playing ducks and drakes with reality. I was back again, watching through the dome grille, listening to Alois talking away, explaining those last days in the Bunker ... telling how the body was taken away ... names, names, that meant little to me but would to others ... of Johannmeier, Lorenz, Zander, and Hummerich, and others, making their way to the Havel lake ... of a Junkers 52 seaplane that didn’t pick them up, and then of another ... of the body being shipped aboard, of men being abandoned, killed ... the trail obscured, and the long flight over a disorganized Europe to the Adriatic, to some Vadarci retreat, long established ... of embalming, secrecy, men being killed to iron-clad the secrecy ... and the questions, hard, probing, coming from the men assembled under the unearthly blue light of the dome ... lies and deceit and even then, so many years back, the planning beginning for this moment.... Then, the whole dream did a sickening whirl-about. I heard myself gasping and choking as I began to take the long back slide down into unconsciousness, fighting against the slippery slope. My eyes opened for a moment, and the last craziness came upon me – for I could have sworn that Howard Johnson stood at the bedside and said, “Bad luck, lover-boy – you really bought it. King-sized and gift-wrapped....”
There were four of them in the room. It was a little study affair, book-lined, cosy, deep leather armchairs, and on a marble mantel-shelf an elegant French ormolu clock that said half-past two. That had to be in the morning because the curtains were drawn and the lights were on. I’d been out about two hours. I was sitting in a swivel chair behind a low, walnut-veneered desk. There was a big bowl of gladioli on the desk. My head was pulsating like a chrysalis about to let out the biggest butterfly ever seen by man.
Madame Vadarci was there, fan waving, and – always something new from that source – smoking a cigar, probably to steady her nerves. Katerina was there in her yellow dress and gold shoes. I glared at her. Professor Vadarci was there, his face screwed up, as though he was sucking on a sour sweet, and he had a gun in his hand which I recognized as my Le Chasseur. And Alois was there black shirted and breeched, dagger still stuck in the top of his belt. He had a whip in his hand, and I’d seen the whip before, in Paris, a fancy affair with an ivory-banded gold grip. Greek key pattern on the leather stock and a long, four foot thong.
I was sitting, unbound, free as air, behind the desk, and for the third time I said, “There must be some aspirin in this place somewhere.”
And for the third time Alois pulled his fancy trick. The whip flicked in his hand and the long thong curled out and took a bloom from a gladioli spike four inches from my nose. He was no flower lover.
He said, “Answer the question.”
I said, “I can’t remember what it was. Headache, you know.”
Alois looked at Professor Vadarci and the old boy scratched his chin, and then said, “All right. We will come to an understanding with you. All the visitors are still here. You just name the two you know. After that you stay here for a few days and then we let you go. You and Fräulein Lottie Bemans. We give our word for this.”
“I want aspirin, not promises.”
Alois was angry then. I saw his mouth tighten and this time the whip snaked and the tip of the thong took me across the side of the neck. There was a heavy silver cigarette lighter on the
