Deadly Jewels (22 page)

The clouds were still moving out in front of us, over the city. I shivered.

“Throughout the Nazi régime,” Gabrielle Brand said, “these lodges exercised almost limitless power over the politics and policies of the Third Reich. Because they combined old rituals with new people performing them.”

“Can't that be said of all religions?” I asked mildly.

She inclined her head. “But the rituals in mainstream religion are fixed,” she said. “They weren't, not for these people. Listen, when you create something new, you're free to put whatever you'd like into the mix. You can look at what works, what has worked, for other belief systems, and incorporate those elements into your own.”

“Religion à la carte,” I said.

“Precisely. And in that regard, though the term was not used until decades later, we can say that it was the beginning of the use of chaos magic.” She glanced at me. “In chaos magic, you take what you need for your purpose. What you use depends on what you are trying to do. And you can take it from any tradition, create customized rituals that don't have the inconvenience of elements you don't want, that aren't useful, within it.”

I didn't say anything. She sighed. “Do you follow a religion, Mrs. LeDuc?”

“Martine,” I said again, automatically. “Yes. I'm Catholic.”

She nodded as though I'd just confirmed something in her mind. “You are an intelligent, thinking person. And you are a Catholic. There are things about your religion that trouble you intellectually, yes?”

Well, that or the way some people chose to practice it. “Yes,” I said.

“When you attend Mass, there are parts of it that aren't quite right for you. But you're stuck with them. They're part of the whole. In chaos magic, that never happens. Everything is customized. There are no parts of any ritual that are uncomfortable for the participants, because they've taken what they need from all sorts of different traditions and fused them into something new—and, potentially, extremely powerful. They've gathered the magic, if you will allow the term, of every tradition from which they have borrowed something, then reduced it all as you would reduce a sauce on the stove. Making it more concentrated. Making it more powerful.”

“But the point of ritual,” I objected, “is that it's handed down through the ages—”

“The point of ritual,” she interrupted crisply, “is to find something that
works
. That is all. The beauty, if there is any, is window dressing. Organically, ritual is utilitarian.”

I shifted uncomfortably. “Maybe if you're talking about magic,” I said. “But religion is different.”

“Is it? So you do not pray to be given anything? You never ask your god for anything?”

“Of course I do. But I don't believe in God because of what he can do for me.”

“Of course you do,” she said. “You believe that he created the world, and gave you life. You believe that his son died a terrible death to free you from sin. You don't have to ask for a new Porsche to see that, already, before you even said your first prayer, you loved this God because of what he's done for you.” She shook her head. “Humans are utilitarian beings. We want to get things done. Some see religion as one way to do it.”

“While others see magic,” I said. I wasn't sure I bought her argument, but I didn't want to stop her.

“Magic is far more simple than you think,” said Gabrielle. “All it is, is training yourself to exercise your willpower and to harness energy. That is all. It is not creating something that has not already been there. It is capturing the wild and wanton energy of the planet and making it work for you.”

That phrase—wild and wanton—sounded like she was quoting something. But I didn't know what.

“The other component of chaos magic—and remember, please, that no one was using that term in the forties—is that it can easily become extremely violent. If ritual is customized, then nothing is forbidden. Indeed, taboos are seen as the efforts of a society to keep the wild energies in check; violating the taboos will release the energy. And it is all about energy.”

I turned in my seat and stared at her. “That means—”

She nodded. “Oh, yes. The more taboos you can violate, the closer you will become to the source of the energy, and the more you will take it into yourself. The perverse has an energy all its own. They weren't Satanists, Mrs. LeDuc. To believe in Satan, you must first believe in God. But evil? Yes: this, I think, is where you will find the root of evil.”

I was already way ahead of her.

*   *   *

Once they got him the sapphires to work with, it all went smoothly enough. Oh, they weren't perfect replicas, no, but they were respectable. “They don't need to be exact,” the commandant said, “they have to be close.”

And they were very close indeed.

Life settled into a routine. Every morning they assembled in the Appellplatz, the roll-call square, standing in lines and staring straight ahead. Kapos—the high-ranking prisoners, most of them Communists—were quick to beat anyone who stepped or fell out of line, and there were dogs.

Elias was mostly afraid of the dogs.

After everyone had been counted, the prison orchestra assembled itself and began playing music—Viennese waltzes, someone had told Elias they were. Such light music, such happy music. It accompanied the prisoners as they were marched off to their work details, either in the quarry or in the factory making munitions for the German war effort. But the music, Elias learned, was good; it allowed them to talk freely to each other.

Some of the prisoners stayed behind. Several of them had been assigned office work; there were cleaners; and there was Elias.

They gave him everything that he needed. They gave him two surly assistants. They gave him plenty of raw materials to experiment with. And he wasn't just to imitate the crown jewels; there were other uses for precious stone substitutes. But the most important were the three he was doing on Berlin's orders.

Food was distributed twice a day. Weak coffee, weaker potato soup, a hunk of bread. The bread was the consistency of clay, and the coffee made from acorns. Prisoners, Elias noted, were rarely mistreated, and when it happened, it was only at the kapos' hands. “Why?” he asked Franz, his German bunk mate.

“No wanton cruelty, that's the Nazi policy,” said Franz.

Elias stared at him. “Now you're making no sense.”

The other man lifted his shoulders. “Policy is policy,” he said. “Reality, that is something else.” He scratched his head, hard. “Look, we are here to work. We cannot work if we are injured. If they want us dead, they just stop giving us food. It is simple. No gas chambers at Buchenwald.”

“Gas chambers?” Elias didn't know what he was talking about.

“
Ja
. Other camps, they kill people with gas.” He glanced at Elias. “Jews, mostly. Then they burn their bodies.”

“They do that here,” Elias said. It hadn't taken him long to understand the meaning of the smoke that seemed to hang over the camp all the time, whether the crematorium was working or not.

Franz shrugged. “Prisoners here die every day,” he said. “But they are not executed.”

“Why not?”

The other man looked at him. “Bullets are expensive,” he said. “Starvation is cheap.”

 

CHAPTER TWENTY

“If you can harness energy, like that, then you can transcend limits, boundaries,” I said. “You're compelled to.”

Gabrielle Brand looked at me as she might an approving tutor. “Precisely,” she said. “And you can transcend natural limits as well as societal ones. Space, for example. Or time.”

I shivered. I didn't want to go there. “And that's what happened with Hitler?” I asked instead. “This magic?”

“Look. By all societal reckoning, Hitler should never have existed,
ja
?” Her German afterthought was oddly like the Canadian way of ending sentences with
eh
—both seemed to invite agreement. “Everyone knows this. He was neither particularly brilliant nor particularly well educated. His political platform lacked subtlety. He seemed to those around him at best odd—and at worst, insane. And yes, there were serious sociological and cultural reasons for his rise to power. But they cannot explain it in total. They alone would not have been enough.”

“Enter black magic,” I said flippantly.

That earned me a sharp glance. “You are the one who asked to see me.”

“I know. I'm sorry.” I shifted uncomfortably on the bench. “It's just so—fantastic. So far removed from anything we normally experience. And so long ago.”

“So far removed from a murder in Montréal last Thursday?”

Point to you, I thought, and wondered if that was what we were doing, playing a game of chess, accumulating points against each other. To what end? And what would the winner receive? Looking at her face, one word came to mind.

Redemption.

“You're involved with all this, aren't you?” I asked. “You're too young to have been part of it during the war, but somewhere along the line, you've been involved.”

She nodded. “I have been involved.”

We sat for some time in silence. I didn't know what questions to ask, and I wasn't even sure whether, if I could, I'd want them answered. The story was shot through with too many veins, the taboos Gabrielle had alluded to, the atavistic fears that we usually keep well under our beds, monsters we don't ever have to look at in the light of day but whose breath curls round our nightmares and whose voices haunt our dreams. But I still couldn't see how the threads connected. Or even if they did.

“So what happened?” I asked, quietly, gently.

She cleared her throat; she'd been waiting for me to ask the question. “So, as you see, Hitler was fully engaged with what we now call chaos magic throughout his dictatorship.”

“And yet in the end it failed him.”

She lifted her shoulders. “Who can say where the failure came from? It is not relevant to what I am going to tell you.”

Perhaps not, but I imagined the last days of the Third Reich, the underground bunker, the despair, killing the children, finally the stream of suicides that were the last proof that the magic hadn't worked. It would have been very difficult to believe at that point. “What is relevant, then?”

“One of the secret societies, one of the lodges, was called the Order of the Black Sun,” she said. “And after the war, the Black Sun became a cherished symbol within the far right of several countries, including the Ukraine, which has a Black Sun Battalion. But that is not our business. Our business is the New Order of the Black Sun, begun after the turmoil of 1970.”

“Nineteen seventy—so you're talking about here, in Québec.” It was coming home a lot faster than I'd anticipated. “The October Crisis.”

“Yes. It was felt by some that the government's response to the crisis was inadequate.”

“Inadequate?” I was incredulous. “You've got to be kidding. The government invoked the War Measures Act, for heaven's sake! Most people now think it was an
over
reaction, not an inadequate one.”

“We are not,” she said calmly, “dealing with
most people
here.”

Nor were we then. Québec's October Crisis began with the kidnapping of James Cross, the British trade commissioner in Montréal, by members of the Front de Libération du Québec. It rapidly devolved into the most serious terrorist act carried out on Canadian soil after another official, Minister of Immigration and Labor Pierre Laporte, was kidnapped and killed by another leftist faction. The crisis shook the career of recently elected Liberal Premier Robert Bourassa, who solicited federal help along with Montréal Mayor Jean Drapeau. The FLQ wanted a separate Québec and saw itself as a colonial state rising against foreign imperialism.

Montréal was, then as now, divided as to whether this would be a good thing to do. “There were soldiers in the streets,” I said to Gabrielle. “Sounds like it would have been right up their alley.”

“Not far enough,” she said. “A group of disaffected and extremely disenfranchised young men, all of them right-wing, were unimpressed with the handling of the situation. They were, oddly enough, also in favor of a separate Québec, but only because that might ensure racial purity and keep immigrants away. They began meeting, and eventually one of the more intelligent among them, a young man whose parents had emigrated from Germany right after the war, who was named Heinrich Marke, this man was very attracted to the concept of secret knowledge that no one but them could possess, and to the idea that they could make change, not necessarily through overt violence, but through the manipulation of the natural world. Under his guidance, they began calling themselves the New Order of the Black Sun.”

I had the sense to stay silent. Something was happening here.

Another deep breath. “Heinrich Marke,” said Gabrielle, “was my husband.”

The wind kicked up again, as though the mountain itself had been holding its breath, waiting for that revelation. “He translated his name into English so as to simplify things,” Gabrielle said. “Heinrich Marke became Henry Brand, and that was what he was called when I met him. Of course I knew he was German; so was I. And I was so attracted to him, his strength, his utter and complete certainty about things. I was feeling lost and lonely, and he filled all the corners of my life.”

What could I say to that? “Tell me about the New Order of the Black Sun,” I said finally. Her personal life was her personal life. Women have approached monsters before, have touched the smoke and mirrors, have dared themselves to do the unthinkable, and all in the name of love.