The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,113
up and hurt like hell; I don’t know if you Aryans do it differently.”
“You are obviously of Aryan stock yourself, Captain,” Himmler said in his soft voice, looking up from his clipboard and blinking behind his round spectacles. “It grieves me to hear such treason to your birthright.”
“I’ll tell that to my Sioux grandmother,” Saltwood retorted. “She’ll be flattered.”
Very calmly von Rath struck him, an open-handed blow across the face that wrenched his head on his neck and brought blood from his lip. Saltwood jerked angrily against the handcuffs that held him to the chair and heard the guards behind him move, ready for trouble, but nothing came of it. He settled back, blue eyes glittering dangerously. After a moment’s silence, von Rath went on, “Then at ten fifty-two you started looking around the room. What did you seek?”
“The place where the hornet got in. I can’t swear to the exact time because your little cherubs lifted my watch... I wanted to know if there were going to be more of them, or if it might lead to some way out.”
“And did you find the place?”
“There was—” He paused, glancing up at the corner of the ceiling where the trapdoor had been—It really had, dammit!—and wondering how stupid this was going to sound. “I thought I saw a kind of trapdoor up there, the kind that gives access to...” He didn’t know the German for crawlspace, so finished with “...attics.”
Goering and Himmler looked quickly at one another. Himmler asked, “What part of the ceiling? What corner of the room?”
“Left-hand rear corner as you come in the door. It was about two feet square, painted over white. I know I didn’t see it when I came in.”
“And when did you first see it?” Himmler asked, leaning forward, fascinated.
“Only when I killed the hornet. In fact, I was looking at the ceiling when the damn bug was flying around up there, wondering how it had got in. I’m sure—I’m almost sure—there was no trapdoor then.”
Von Rath went on, “And you brought the chair over directly underneath the trapdoor as soon as you noticed it, presumably to attempt an escape.”
“To see if I could get out that way, yes.”
“This chair you’re sitting on now?”
“Yes.”
Goering was staring at von Rath with unbelieving awe; Himmler’s attention was fastened on Saltwood, his moist little lips parted with eagerness, his dark eyes bright.
“And what happened?”
Saltwood took a deep breath. “I—The chair caught fire.”
If von Rath had been a cat he would have purred and washed himself the way cats did when they knew they were being admired. “Did it?”
Hell, Saltwood thought, dammit, it did! “Yeah. I don’t understand... I felt the heat. I threw it away—it hit the wall over by the door. The fire spread...” Once in Tulsa, Saltwood had had his boss’ car stolen from him by a troop of Cherokee teenagers on bicycles. He recited his story as he’d recited his explanation then, keeping his eyes straight forward and simply recounting the events as they’d happened, ridiculous and unbelievable as they sounded, but he was conscious of the two Reichsministers whispering together, comparing notes on their clipboards, gesturing with covert amazement.
“It is incredible,” Goering whispered, when Saltwood had finished. He was looking stunned. Himmler, throughout the narrative, had been gradually puffing himself up with the same kind of gratified smugness that characterized von Rath, and now looked so pleased Saltwood wished the bigger man would swat him. “Absolutely unbelievable. And the other subject...”
“I have no doubt,” Himmler purred, “that the results will be exactly the same.”
“Bring her in,” von Rath said, and Gall and Baldur, who had been standing listening, turned and left. To the SS guards von Rath said, “Take this man into the other room.” As Saltwood’s hands were unmanacled and he stood up, von Rath continued to his two distinguished visitors, “Other experiments can be devised, of course, using more subjects simultaneously, but I’m sure this proves...”
The closing of the door shut out the sound of his voice—the room was soundproofed.
Like the house out in the Jungfern Heide, this place—the house on Teglerstrasse, von Rath had called it—was a modestly isolated villa set in its own wide grounds, which were also walled; though, as far as Saltwood could tell from the glimpse he’d gotten by the combined moonlight and headlamps when they’d brought him here, without the fortresslike quality of the house where they were keeping Sligo. The district, where middle-class suburban villas had begun to encroach on country cottages, lay