Strindberg's Star (39 page)

“And Karl Maria Wiligut?” asked Don, who by now had begun to feel a bit dizzy.

“Karl Maria Wiligut”—Eberlein smiled—“was one of the key members of the foundation at the beginning of the thirties. He had experience in spy operations during World War One, and he laid out what he considered to be a brilliant plan. The goal was to seek a closer and more personal collaboration with the Nazis. Above all, with the true leader behind all the smoke-filled rhetoric, namely the SS commander Heinrich Himmler. When Wiligut first suggested to the foundation leadership that he would present himself as an Aryan man with kinship going back 220,000 years, the idea was thrown out as ridiculous. But soon it turned out that he had been right. His success with Himmler was so exceptional that Wiligut became the SS commander’s right-hand man. It was in this favorable position that the foundation got the idea of renovating Wewelsburg’s north tower. It was a place filled with psychic energy that they’d used throughout the years with good results. Now they wanted something more fitting to their position, and they naively believed that the Nazis and Himmler would turn out to be a reliable help.”

“I’d still have to say that their analysis was correct,” Don said, blinking into the darkness of the fireplace.

“Yes, the construction of the north tower went as they’d planned. But in 1938, Wiligut was murdered on a backstreet in Munich, and all collaboration with the Nazis was immediately discontinued.”

“But surely Karl Maria Wiligut wasn’t murdered?” said Don, who lacked even the strength to raise his voice. “He was kicked out of the SS because they discovered he had been in a mental hospital for a
long time. They got rid of Wiligut because that proved he was too crazy even for Himmler.”

“That was just the Nazis’ usual lies,” said Eberlein. “He was murdered, as I said, and the reason was that Himmler discovered by chance that, in addition to being openly homosexual, which was bad enough, Wiligut was also a Jew. Himmler could hardly imagine a greater scandal.”

“Karl Maria Wiligut. A Jew …” Don said. “So what you’re saying is that an infiltrating Jew designed the SS ring with the skull, the swastika, the S-rune, and the Germanic Hagal rune? The ring that was given out as a reward to the SS units that commanded the most effective concentration camps?”

“Wiligut never drew a Hagal rune,” Eberlein remarked calmly. “What he designed into the SS officers’ ring was a representation of the star that Sven Hedin had once found in the ruins in the Taklimakan Desert. Five bars from a hub, in the shape that the ancient Egyptians called
seba.
”

D
on couldn’t think of anything else to say and sat mutely. In the corner of the sofa, Eva was twisting a graying lock of hair in silence. Then Eberlein happened to cast a glance at the clock, and he let out a whistle.

“I think it’s time to go.”

The German stood up and straightened his suit pants. Don felt all his physical strength run out of him.

“No,” Eberlein said, extending his hand down to Don. “After 1938, the foundation is completely blameless for what happened. Besides, from a business standpoint, it was a good choice to leave the Nazis to their fate. Hitler’s military power was essentially fully equipped. The business opportunities for the sketches from the underworld were considerably larger on the other side of the Atlantic. The United States had hardly gotten their defense industry started.”

Eberlein pulled Don up so he was standing.

“What kind of diabolical help enabled Himmler, Hitler, and Goebbels to hold out for six years is truly a mystery. But in just a little while, Strindberg’s ankh and star, with one last contribution on your part, will rediscover the gateway to the underworld for all those questions that still lack answers.”

“One last contribution?” Don heard himself say.

But Eberlein had already come to the point where the entry hall opened out to the castle hall, and the Toad stood waiting. And soon they were all following the dim path that Don very well knew led to the north tower of Wewelsburg.

*

I
n the center of the black sun mosaic in the marble floor sat a bald man in an electric wheelchair. One of his eyes looked like a dead, gray stone, while the other was strikingly alert and sharp.

Outside the windows of the tower room hung a slender crescent moon, behind clouds that were as thin as smoke. A steep staircase led from the upper room down to the crypt, and from it came a puffing noise. The eternal gas flame had been lit for the first time in seventy years.

Elena was standing uncomfortably at Vater’s side, in a bloodred evening gown. Two young men with shaved heads were standing there as well; they were so stoical that they seemed to be made of porcelain.

A
s he began to move into the tower room, Don kept his eyes on the young woman in red to avoid looking down at the rotating sun wheel. Eberlein pulled him in the direction of the stairway that opened into the crypt to show him the glow of the gas flame.

When they had approached Vater in the middle of the hall, Eberlein cleared his throat and opened his mouth.

“Thank you, I know,” said Vater, and he extended his long skeletal fingers and nodded at Don to grasp them.

They were as thin as an insect’s feelers, and Don let go quickly.

“Don Titelman,” Vater said. “And here we have
kleine
Eva, of course …”

Eva did not accept the extended hand. Vater chuckled.

“You have traveled far to come here, and you have truly been a great help. Now there is just one thing missing before Strindberg’s spheres can come forth again.”

Vater pulled on the little joystick on his armrest. Then the hydraulics of the wheelchair lifted his body up until the sharp eye could look straight into Don’s.

“We need your help to fulfill a promise.”

“A promise,” Don whispered. “What will happen then?”

“We are going to fulfill a promise this evening, you see,” Vater continued, “or make a sacrifice, if you prefer. Something that was decided just after Karl Maria Wiligut’s death, in what was the foundation’s most dismal period. I imagine that with your background, you might even be able to see it as a tribute of some sort.”

Don shook his head in an attempt to wake up out of this dream. Vater misinterpreted his gesture and continued, irritated: “At a historical moment like this, there is no room for personal doubt. Down in the crypt that the SS and Heinrich Himmler called Walhalla …”

Vater spat out the words: “Down in the
crypt,
as you know, there are twelve pedestals along the walls, which will now finally be used for their true purpose. Right now, eleven—what shall we call them—key people from the foundation are sitting in a circle that forms a well-defined telekinetic field. The ankh and the star will be lowered on a chain into the hot flame of the gas pipe. When the objects reach the correct temperature they will fuse into Strindberg’s navigational instrument. The stars of the Milky Way will once again shine in the upper sphere, and the North Star’s ray will point out the opening of the underworld. And at that instant, Don Titelman, a new and much brighter time will begin.”

“Ich vintsh aych glik,”
Don said. “Then I wish you good luck.”

“Us? You will be down there yourself,” said Vater. “You can see it as a final favor for the foundation.”

Don looked questioningly at the young woman in red, who had taken Strindberg’s star from him one day earlier. She met his eyes briefly before she glanced away self-consciously.

“It so happens,” Vater continued, “that upon Wiligut’s death, the foundation promised a ceremony that honored the triumph of the Jewish blood over the Nazis. And it was intended to take place on the day that the ankh and the star once again fused, in the beautiful tower that was designed for this very purpose.”

“The Jewish blood, I don’t understand …”

Don lurched suddenly, and the young woman in the evening gown took a few quick steps forward to help him.

“
Your
Jewish blood,” said Vater. “We need to borrow your Jewish blood. The promise that was given was to fill the hollow down in the crypt. Elena … ?” Don could sense the woman hesitating.

“It’s time,” said Vater.

She didn’t move, but then she placed Don’s arm over her shoulders and whispered, “If you would be so kind as to come with me.”

H
e could smell the scent of burning gas even at the opening in the marble floor of the upper room. Don closed his eyes and rested against Elena like a rag doll as she helped him down the steep staircase.

When he looked up again, he was standing at the arch that led into the ochre-colored circular crypt. Eleven older men, lit from below by the bluish light that came from the gas flame in the round stone pool, were sitting in an incomplete circle on stone pedestals.

Their yellowed faces turned toward him as he moved toward the steps that led down into the depths of the stone pool. Don walked with support from Elena’s shoulder, and when he looked along the wall for help, he saw that both Eberlein and the Toad were among the men in the circle who were carefully following his steps.

The quiet murmuring in the crypt stopped when Don reached the hollow of the pool. High up on the ceiling, above the burning flame, he could glimpse the dirty yellow silhouette of the swastika. Thick chains now ran from the four openings that had been cut around its center. They were linked together into a square net, and on it lay Strindberg’s ankh and star.

“Give me your hand,” Elena whispered into his ear.

Don was now so close that he could feel the heat from the flame.

“Fall to your knees.”

He obeyed, feeling ill, and sank onto the stone slabs in the middle of the pool. There was a flash from some metal object in her hand. Then Don looked away and felt the sharp pain as the edge of the knife cut an incision through the veins along his arm.

“Soon it will be over,” Elena whispered, while she held him so he wouldn’t fall forward.

The red blood flowed in an arc toward the flame. When the liquid met the heated gas pipe there was a hissing sound followed by a faint scent of iron. Don looked up at the swastika on the ceiling and Strindberg’s suspended objects and thought,
So this is
Mittelpunkt der Welt.

H
e remained on his knees until a pool of blood had formed around the protruding gas pipe. By this point, Elena seemed to have had enough of the ceremony, and there was a disappointed murmur when she helped him get up again.

The last thing Don saw inside the crypt, just as he passed the archway, was Eberlein giving him an appreciative nod. Behind the nonreflecting glasses, the yellow-gray eyes were filled with a peculiar light.

O
n the stairs up to the upper hall, the woman fastened a bandage around his injured arm with careful fingers.

“I am not to blame for what happened,” she whispered.

Don felt himself nod, though he didn’t believe her words for a second.

Then he lifted his bandaged arm to his chest and continued unsteadily up to the Obergruppenführersaal, where he collapsed in front of Eva Strand’s high-heeled boots.

As though in a fog, Don saw the black-clad, bald men lift Vater out of his wheelchair and carry the spider-thin body down to the crypt.

The woman hesitated, as though she didn’t know whether she should follow them or remain in the upper room of the north tower. Finally she made her decision and took a few steps down the stairs. Don opened his mouth to shout a warning. But perhaps he hesitated too long, or else his dry lips couldn’t form any words.

*

D
own in the crypt, Vater had just taken his place on the twelfth pedestal.

“Raus bitte.”
He waved at the men who had carried him, and they immediately hurried away.

They stopped in the arched opening next to Elena to observe what was going to happen. Eberlein said a few words into his earpiece, and then the chains began to descend from the swastika on the circular ceiling.

The
seba
star, which lay on top of the ankh’s crossbar, trembled slightly with the downward movement, and it made a mournful clinking sound. When the wire gauze with the objects only had a few feet left to go to reach the flame, the tension in the crypt increased.

Elena pushed her way closer to see Strindberg’s objects fuse together for the first time since 1917, the spheres that Vater had told her about, and the North Star’s searching ray. Everything she had only seen pictures of, the unknown reaction that made up the empty center of her life.

A
bit lower now.

E
lena and the two uniformed men stood crammed on the stairs next to the archway. Eberlein’s red mouth and the Toad’s eyes, where the
gas flame flashed with a distorted, glaring shape. The last thing Elena heard was Vater shouting something about Karl Maria Wiligut and the triumph of the Jewish blood.

In the next instant, she was blinded by the explosive flash that was unleashed from the ankh and the star. The detonation tore the crypt to pieces, a roar that was cut short, and she was thrown headlong backward by the violent force of the shock wave.

I
n the instant when Elena happened to wake up out of the fog that the narcotic drip had immersed her in, she woke to screams for help and running footsteps. Then she noticed that everything she heard came from the left, while the right side of her face was paralyzed, disconnected, and stiff. She sank peacefully back into the darkness with the hope that she would never again have to wake up.

T
he pain was like scissors cutting, clumsily clipping their way in through her right ear canal. With a clenched fist, Elena pressed the bandage as hard as she could to her temple, but whatever was cutting her up in there was impossible to reach.

After the nurses had forced her to wake up, the pain locked her into this spasmodic position. Curled up on the short end of the bottle-green stretcher, she had been able to see them clatter by with emergency carts in the hall of the hospital. The majority of the most serious burns had already been transported to intensive care after the explosion in the north tower of Wewelsburg.