The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,13
falling over themselves to repatriate those of us who’d been antifascist enough to go to Spain and get shot at, so I figured somebody who’d been in trouble over labor unions would stand even less of a chance. So when one of my old chess-playing buddies in the Brigade took a bullet in Madrid I sort of appropriated his papers.”
“I see.” By the shrewd glance in his black eyes Tom wondered exactly what he did see. “And were you involved with the labor unions in the United States?”
“I was on the fringes of them, yes,” Tom lied, folding his hands over the buckle of his Sam Browne belt and doing his best to look like a dumb, blue-eyed farmboy, something he had always been good at. “After Pa died and our ranch went bust, I spent a lot of time on the road. Working in the mines and the factories, you couldn’t hardly help running across them.” From the corner of his eye he saw Hillyard sigh and shake his head, but, after all, his old commander said nothing. Considering Tom’s rowdy and violent career as an organizer in the IWW, that was probably just as well.
“Well,” Mayfair grunted at length, “least said about that the better, perhaps. And you arrived in this country last September and volunteered... again.”
Tom felt himself blush as if Mayfair had unearthed a stint with a ballet troupe in his past. After Spain he really should have known better. “Hell—begging your pardon, sir. But nobody back in my country seemed to be standing in line to do anything about Hitler.
“You need hardly apologize, Sergeant Saltwood.” The old man closed the folder again and looked across at him from under jutting brows. “Will you take it?”
Tom hesitated for a long time, all the topics that the old man had not brought up—like, Who is this man REALLY and, for that matter, who are you? and Why don’t you get somebody from regular Intelligence? and What’s scared you into sending someone at a time like this?—combining in his mind into a strong odor of rat. He’d gotten Hillyard’s telegram asking him to come back to London for “family business”—a code between them from their days with the Brigade that had meant “I’ve got a job for you...”—two days before the panzers had come rolling out of the Ardennes Forest like a tidal wave of iron and fire. At least, he reflected wryly, I was already packed.
“There are, of course, a number of explanations as to what might be going on,” Hillyard said, in the deep, brocaded baritone that wouldn’t have disgraced an RADA performance of King Lear. “Sligo may very well be a confidence trickster, out to take the SS for whatever he can.”
“That’s not something I’d care to try, unless I had some way of getting out of that country real fast.”
“As you say,” Hillyard agreed. “But stupider things have been attempted—and have succeeded. In fact, he may know that Hitler has a blind spot where the occult is concerned. Then again, Sligo may be mad...”
“He’s definitely mad,” Mayfair put in. “According to one of our sources, he seems to suffer from a number of rather curious delusions, apparently without affecting his usefulness to the SS.”
“The third explanation,” Hillyard went on, “is that the occult group—composed of several genuine occultists from Paris and Vienna spiritualist and meosophist circles—is a cover for something else, some new weapon or device that is being developed, and that is what we’re worried about.”
He folded his hands on one jodhpurred knee—like Tom, he’d had a change of uniform, a wash, and a shave in that rented room in Dover, but then, he’d always managed to look neat, even when crouching in a Catalan sheep pen under Luftwaffe fire. “We still don’t know how the Germans took the fortress of Eban Emael—the key to that whole section of the Maginot Line. We only know that it was impregnable and that it went without a shot being fired.”
“Conversely,” Mayfair added, “the occult trappings could just as easily be for Sligo’s benefit as for ours or Himmler’s. From all we can ascertain, the man definitely believes himself to be a wizard. Whatever he has or may have invented, he may attribute to magic, just as our system of radio directional finders grew out of an attempt to invent a death ray—something the Nazis are still working on. The Nazis may have enlisted his assistance by humoring his belief.