Deadly Jewels (23 page)

“The New Order of the Black Sun,” Gabrielle said, “was first about recapturing the past. These boys—they felt that they had missed out, somehow, on not having been born earlier, on not having been part of the Third Reich. So at first it was all about secret meetings in basements, secret handshakes, Nazi salutes, flags with swastikas on them. Terrible, of course, but dangerous only to themselves. But as time passed, and they grew more angry—the decade was one of change, and they were being left behind by it—they started acting. Rocks through windshields. Defacing people's homes. Once, they knocked out an old Jewish man on the street.” She shook her head. “For Henry, this was all secondary. He accused them of playacting when they could do the real thing,
be
the real thing. So finally they listened to him.”

“Were you—married to him then?”

“We were married in 1980. I was much younger than Henry. I believed in him. I wanted something or someone to believe in, and I believed in him. Slowly he introduced me to the order, he indoctrinated me.” She made a gesture of finality with her hands. “I do not say that to excuse myself. I embraced everything that he offered me, wholeheartedly. I wanted to believe, and I believed.”

“In what?”

“This is why you must understand about magic,” Gabrielle said. “Like Hitler, Henry was a man who could play both with the elements and with people's minds. Ultimately, of course, he failed. Those around him did not want magic, they wanted action. They did not understand that magic could have delivered far, far more than their acts of vandalism ever could. Our friends drifted apart; some moved away. In the west, in Ontario and British Columbia, there were active skinhead groups far more to their liking.”

“And what happened to Henry?”

“It is really quite disappointing,” Gabrielle said. “He wanted drama so much, and yet he died so prosaically, of cancer. Such a suburban disease.”

This wasn't all there was to it, I thought. Something urgent had compelled her to tell me this story. Something that wasn't part of the past, or of this particular past.

Finally she spoke. “You asked what became of the New Order of the Black Sun,” she said. “It has been resuscitated, and by people who know what they are doing. People who understand focus. People who understand visualization.”

There was so much pain in her voice that it could only point to one thing. “Someone close to Henry is bringing it back.”

She looked at me, her eyes filled with tears. She didn't bother to brush them away. “Our son,” she said. “Aleister.”

*   *   *

There was a special showing of a Hitchcock movie at His Majesty's Theatre on Guy Street, which made a change from the opera and play performances that were usually on the marquee.
Suspicion,
it was called.

Probably, he thought later, not a perfect choice.

He met Livia at the dressmaker's, waiting as she turned off the lights, locked the doors, taking pleasure in just watching her simple movements. Tonight she was wearing a soft yellow dress; her hair was dark and lush against it.

They walked to the theater together, close on the sidewalk but carefully not touching. Once her sleeve brushed against his and he felt an electric jolt run all the way up his arm.

“We used to go to the cinema quite often when my mother was alive,” Livia told him. “This is such a treat; I have not been in years.”

“What were your favorite films?”

“
Trouble in Paradise
,” she replied at once. “And
All Quiet on the Western Front
. Oh, and
Grand Hotel
.”

“
Grand Hotel
? I know this one. It was originally German. I saw the play—” He stopped himself in time. “The play came to Amsterdam, where I used to live,” he finished.

She didn't seem to notice his flushed face. “They're wonderful, aren't they?” she asked and sighed. “Films, plays. They take you away from your regular life, from your problems, from your worries. You don't think of anything at all. You just are.”

They were seated in one of the boxes above the stage and Hans pulled a flask from his pocket. She looked a little shocked when he offered it to her, but accepted readily enough; and halfway through the movie he reached over, slowly, a very little at a time, and took her hand.

She didn't move hers away.

Hans tried to concentrate on the movie. Joan Fontaine was becoming more and more convinced that her husband was going to try to kill her. Lie after lie piled up between them, and even with the warmth of Livia's hand in his own, Hans felt more and more panicked. Lies echoing lies, he thought. His situation was untenable. What would happen if Livia ever found out his secret, saw behind his lies? He barely knew her and knew, already, that he couldn't live without her.

He was a German. A soldier in the Third Reich. A spy in an enemy country.

She could never know.

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

“Named after Aleister Crowley, no doubt,” I said. I couldn't think of anything else to say.

She nodded. “Henry's idea.”

“Of course.”

“It did not really become—problematic—for many years,” she said. “Aleister was in college, and he had ideas—well, everyone has ideas in college, don't they? But he seemed all right. He started working, as a journalist.”

“Which newspaper?”

“Freelance,” she replied. “He said it gave him more freedom to write what he wanted. He went out to the west coast, spent three years in Vancouver, and then went to Berlin for a time, a year, I believe. He said he needed to find his roots. When he returned to Montréal, he was very angry.”

“About what?”

“Me, primarily. How I had not honored his father enough. How I had failed to carry on his mission. That sort of thing. I can only guess at who he was associating with. You will remember than many of his father's associates went west, to British Columbia. No doubt he saw them there. No doubt the rhetoric was still in place. And in Berlin…” She lifted her shoulders. “Not everyone in the New Germany carries guilt. Not everyone believes that it should never have happened.”

I could just imagine. The remnants of fascism, licking its wounds. “And when he came back? What happened then?”

“He bought a building in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu,” she said, referring to a city just south of Montréal, twenty minutes away by car. “Right on the canal. Have you seen it, the canal? So pretty, I thought. A new life for him.” She sighed. “And it was, I suppose. First it was boarders—he rented out rooms, you see, it was an old warehouse. Or mill. Something of the sort. He said it helped him pay the mortgage. But all the people he rented to, they seemed the same as him. Very correct. Very clean, very articulate. Not like his father's friends at all.”

“The new face of fascism,” I said.

“Yes, I think it is so,” she said. “And more and more, he wanted me to be part of it. I was, I think, a link to his father—and, through him, to the rest of the past. For a time I stayed there. There was an appeal. You have no idea, Martine, of the energy of the perverse.”

“Perhaps I do,” I said, thinking of what had happened to me last year, of a lonely and deprived boy who had grown into a monster. Who was trained to become one. Evil was everywhere.

Gabrielle was talking. “All magic works through focus, through a harnessing of energy. When one person can do it, it is powerful. When more than one person does it, together, it becomes stronger, concentrated … dominant.”

“So he's gathered … what? A coven?”

“The New Order of the Black Sun,” she said soberly. “A group of people, with an identical focus, working with perfect synchronicity in a sympathetic environment—that produces amazing results.”

“So they're doing what, exactly? Manipulating elections?” If so, my boss was going to want a piece of that.

“Nothing so small.” She batted the idea away as she might an annoying fly. “You were close to it before, Mrs. LeDuc. Do not let your fear blind you.”

“When? What did I say?”

“When you spoke of transcending boundaries,” she said. “It was well known that Hitler and Himmler both could project themselves, for very brief periods, into a different space, a different dimension. It is not uncommon for people to be able to do it today, or so I understand.”

I blinked and didn't say anything.

“They had only really begun to explore it when everything came crashing down in 1945.” She caught my glance. “It is true that I have not told you everything,” she said. “Hitler's inner circle—they have been called the Devil's disciples, but as I said, Satanism only works if you believe that there is a God, and none of them believed such a thing. But they were involved in the rituals with him.” She sighed. “So. My mother was Hermann Göring's maid when he stayed in Bavaria. She was very frightened of him, and when she found she was pregnant, she ran away, to relatives who lived in Stuttgart. It was there that I was born. But even modern cities have long memories, and I preferred to emigrate to Canada. I did not understand, then, that you can never completely run away from the past.”

“But not your past, surely,” I said. “Just because Göring was your—father—that has nothing to do with you.” But even as I spoke, I knew I was wrong. How could it not?

“Unless you believe that it is in the blood,” she said soberly. “Henry believed that it was; it is why he married me. And Aleister believes it as well. He sees it as a magical connection, a connection between himself and his grandfather, between the past and the present. And he wants to connect them.”

“How, exactly?”

Gabrielle looked directly at me. “The New Order of the Black Sun in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu,” she said, “is planning to use the remaining crown jewels in order to summon Hitler—back from the dead.”

*   *   *

I waited until Gabrielle had left before starting up the path to the lookout myself. The clouds had moved on and the sun was painting the sky pink over in the west. Innocent, as though nothing had happened.

I wasn't ready to get back in my car and go home. I wasn't sure what I was ready for. My hands were shaking and I pushed them deep into my jacket pockets. Everything here was pleasant, ordinary. Tourists chattering together in a plethora of languages. The city, sparkling like a jewel—

A jewel. That was why she'd agreed to talk to me. I realized that even as I watched her move slowly up the path, her gypsy garb swirling around her, just another aging hippie. She thought I could get the diamonds back.

So what was I going to do?

I was standing looking out over the miles of Québec spread out before me when a voice at my elbow said, “So, you're a little late getting the rest of the tour in, eh?”

I looked up and into the eyes of François, my Gray Line tour guide. Of course; the overlook was a popular stopping spot for all the tours, and I could see his bus behind us. I laughed out loud, relief washing over me. François, so normal, so part of a different life. “I'm sorry I had to leave early, before,” I said. “It was my work.”

He nodded without speaking and we stood shoulder to shoulder, looking out, companionably. “It never gets old, this view, eh?” he said.

I smiled, allowing myself to be distracted, my dark fears to be pushed away. “You love the city.”

“With all its political corruption, its problems, its new buildings that are taking over …
eh oui,
even with all that, I love this city, eh?”

“François,” I said suddenly, “how did you know about the British crown jewels being stored in the Sun-Life Building during the Second World War? I'd always heard that to be a rumor.”

He looked at me curiously. “You have the advantage of me, madame,” he said.

“Oh, sorry!” I wasn't going to last much longer at my job if this was the best I could do in terms of
politesse
. “I'm Martine LeDuc,” I said, automatically putting out a hand to shake his. “I'm the—”

“—
directrice de publicité
,” he said, nodding. “I thought it might be so, eh?”

“So when you said that the jewels were being stored…”

“It is the narrative,” he said. “We're all trained with the narrative. We can say other things, yes, of course. You would be surprised at some of the questions I get.” He caught my eye. “Well, perhaps you wouldn't, but it is always entertaining. But as to your question, it is from the tourism center that the narrative comes. Are you saying it isn't true?”

“No,” I said and sighed. “I think you can rest assured that that part is very true indeed.”

*   *   *

They all had the same thin cotton clothing: striped shirts over workpants, shoes that might or might not fit. But there were ways to get more. A thriving black market flourished at Buchenwald, kapos and prisoners—and even the guards—all participating. The camp had its own currency and there were things you could buy—chocolate, an extra undershirt, or even a jacket, boots, or oranges.

Mostly the money was used to bribe kapos for better assignments. The quarry was the worst place to work; men didn't last there very long, even the youngest, even the strongest: it broke everyone. Most of the bodies hauled into the crematorium came from the quarry.

The factory was better: the work was indoors, and even though the building wasn't heated, it was better than being out in the wind. The only ones there who had problems were the Jehovah's Witnesses, who refused to do any munitions work, and their refusals earned many of them the quarry.