The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,12
rubbed his hand over his face, trying to be sure he was completely awake and alert for all this. “With all due respect, sir... a wizard?”
“So he claims.” May fair produced a pipe from his jacket pocket and began the meticulous ritual of reaming, cleaning, stuffing, and experimental puffing that Tom had observed pipe smokers to treasure, probably above the actual taste of the tobacco itself. “And the SS seem to believe him enough to cherish him...”
“Yeah, well, they cherish Himmler’s slumgullion about a master race, too.”
“Perhaps. But Sligo’s claim is not only that he is a wizard himself, but that he can teach wizardry to others.”
Tom chuckled. “Hell—sir. Professor Marvello the Magnificent taught me magic in the carney when I was eighteen, but nobody from the government ever tried to hire me.”
“Well.” Hillyard smiled, brown eyes sparkling against a brick-red tan. “Now they have.”
Saltwood was startled. “You mean just because...”
“No, no.” Mayfair waved a dismissive hand and set his pipe down on the scarred leather blotter before him. “Although that is what you Americans call a ‘dividend’ for us—that you may stand a better chance of spotting a hoax. No. The reason I asked Colonel Hillyard to contact you—the reason we’ve arranged for you to be seconded from your regiment...”
What’s LEFT of my regiment, Tom thought grimly, remembering the men who had fallen at the crossings of the Leutze and the Scheldt, remembering the men who had crouched in shell holes in the sand with him, who had not gotten up again.
“...is because you speak German like a native, because you look German, and because you’ve done a bit of intelligence work during the fighting in Spain. Is this correct?”
There was another folder, closed, at Mayfair’s elbow on the battered mahogany of the desk; Tom glanced at it, guessing it was his and wondering exactly how much it contained.
“A whole swarm of Germans and Swedes homesteaded the bottomlands along the Missouri near our ranch when I was a kid,” he explained. “My grandmother was German—she lived with us. I spoke it at home and playing with the German kids. For years I had this real hick Saxon accent—I boarded with a German family when I worked on the New York docks, and the wife said I spoke German like a pig and worked to straighten me out.” He grinned a little at the memory, not adding that his landlord had also been his cell leader in the Industrial Workers of the World and that most of his practice in the language had been obtained in endless summer-night discussions on the stoop about socialist political argument.
Mayfair studied him awhile longer, taking in, Saltwood knew, the craggy bones of his face, the ridiculously baby-fine dust-colored hair, the blue eyes, broad shoulders, fair skin. His “intelligence work” in Spain had come about because he’d been the only man of their company in the Lincoln Brigade capable of passing himself off as a German. One night he’d gotten three of the local Anarchists out of rebel hands with only some very unconvincing forgeries of Gestapo i.d. Their Russian military advisor had reprimanded him strongly, for the Anarchists, though officially Republican allies, were considered not worth the risk.
“You understand,” Mayfair went on after a moment, “that you’ll probably be impersonating an SS Trooper for part of the time—and the Nazis are not signatories of the Geneva accords.”
“Neither were the nationalists,” Tom said quietly. “I went through all that in Spain.”
“So I see.” Mayfair sat back and picked up his pipe again, puffing at it in the usual vain effort to get the thing to go. He nodded down at the closed folder. “A volunteer in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, later seconded to the Internationalist Front headquarters in thirty-six. You were listed as captured—”
“I escaped,” Tom said. “Nobody seemed to be trying very hard to get us out.”
“Ah.” Mayfair took a few more draws on the pipe, then gave it up as a bad job and opened the folder, turning over the pages with an arthritic’s careful deliberation. Presumably, Tom thought, it hadn’t been his department. At least he had the good grace not to say, as so many did, “Well, politically we were in an awkward situation with regard to prisoners...”
After a moment he resumed. “You returned to America, though we don’t have any record here of an official repatriation...”
“It wasn’t under my own name.”
The grizzled eyebrows took a whole ladder of parallel forehead wrinkles with them on their way up.