The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,112
he and other members of the Lincoln Brigade had thrown darts at in their quarters in Madrid. It was Hermann Goering. Had it not been for the military gingerbread decorating the other man’s black SS uniform, Saltwood would have taken him for somebody’s clerk—small, mild, bespectacled, and self-effacing, clutching his clipboard with a slightly apologetic air and completely overshadowed by the splendid commander of the Luftwaffe. With a shock, Saltwood realized that was Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and the Gestapo.
After a moment he said quietly, “Captain Thomas Saltwood, Eleventh Independent Battalion.” He’d been promoted after the big raid on Boulogne.
“The Commandos,” von Rath said, and nodded as if pleased. “Not only the highest racial type, but trained.”
The air of smugness clung to him, radiated from him; Saltwood could see by the slight dampening of his ivory-fair hair that he had gone through some exertion, but there was no sign of it in the glowing pinkness of his face. Over his black uniform jacket he still wore his hoodoo beads. Looking at them more closely—for they were almost on level with his eyes where he sat handcuffed to the same chair that had appeared to burst into flames an hour ago—Saltwood realized with a shock of revulsion that several of the disks were made of human skin stretched over what must have been human bone. They were wrapped and trimmed in gold, and written over with the kind of weird magic signs with which Marvello had decorated his blue stage robe and pointed hat, a horrible juxtaposition of the gruesome and the absurd.
Oddly enough, even those didn’t trouble him as much as the iron circle, hanging alone upon its silver chain. There was some kind of disturbing optical effect connected with it, a sort of blurring, as if it were impossible to see it directly. And yet, when he looked again, he could see the buttons of the man’s uniform clearly through its ring, the texture of the jacket wool, and the links of the chain beneath.
“And yet he is an American,” Goering said thoughtfully.
Saltwood looked across at him. “Some of us don’t need an Anschluss to tell us who our brothers are.”
The big man’s eyes gleamed approvingly at this show of defiance, but Von Rath said, “It makes no difference. Our purpose is not to gather intelligence but to conduct a psychological test. If you do not give us accurate answers about what you experienced we have thiopental available, but we would prefer an un-drugged subject, as much as you, I am sure, would prefer to avoid being drugged.”
Saltwood glanced up at him. “You realize using prisoners of war for tests of any kind is against the Geneva accord?”
The cold face twitched in a smile that looked strangely automatic. “You are not a prisoner of war,” he pointed out gently. “You are a spy. If you prefer, we will turn you over to the Gestapo, whose methods, as you will learn, are also against the Geneva accords.”
No way out, Saltwood thought. He might as well find out what the hell had been going on here. If Himmler and Goering—the second and third honchos of the Reich—had shown up to watch, this device of Sligo’s, whatever it was or did, was big stuff. He shivered, remembering the slashing, clawing thing chewing its way up his arm, and looked again down at the uncharred shirt sleeve, the uninjured flesh beneath, and the unburned wood of the chair in which he sat. His arm still hurt like hell. Impossible to believe it hadn’t been real.
“Fair enough.”
The door opened quietly, and the fat boy Baldur Twisselpeck entered, followed by white-bearded Jacobus Gall, both carrying clipboards similar to those held by the two Nazi bigwigs. Von Rath gave them an inquiring glance; Gall nodded and said, “You may question her after you are done with him.”
Von Rath turned back to Saltwood. He, too, held a clipboard, but didn’t bother to look at it; he spoke as if he knew it all by heart. “At ten forty-five today you looked up at the ceiling of this room, started striking at something in the air. What was it?”
“A—a hornet,” Saltwood said, after a moment of fishing the German word—eine Hornisse—from the disused memories of the high plains. “It struck at my face. I don’t know how it got into the room. I waited till it lighted, then crushed it.”
“Have you been stung by a hornet before, Captain Saltwood?”
“Yes.”
“And you suffered no extraordinary adverse effects?”