The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,45
the table and pinched his lips.
“You’re right.” Poincelles grinned. “I had a Greek teacher at Cambridge who wore some like that, the strait-laced old quean. You’ve captured the look of him...”
“Ah!” Von Rath laughed again, plucked them off the Storm Trooper’s face, and adjusted them on Rhion’s. “Now that’s the thing for you. Distinguished and scholarly.”
The old man. The thought came to him instantly and whole, and was as swiftly gone, a half-familiar face glimpsed while crossing a crowded street. He touched the delicate frame hesitantly—the lenses balanced by pressure alone—and, though afraid of what he might find, closed his eyes and dipped within.
It was the same old man whose personality he had felt buried in the depths of the knife. But he sensed clearly here a gray old city, a basement room of stove, table, thick-crowding shelves of worn books, and a bed behind a faded curtain of flowered calico; grimy windows afforded only the view of passing boots. He saw bony hands using the ivory clasp knife to sharpen old-fashioned quills. The smells of cabbage soup, the sound of contented laughter, constant learned argument, droning chants—a little dark-haired girl with coal-black eyes...
And beneath the patina of pain and shock and dread, of hunger and the ever-present stinks of filth, degradation, and death, he tasted again the elusive wisp of magic.
Beside him Horst was laughing. “No, a monocle! Hey, Doc, any of those dung-eating Communist Jews wear a monocle?”
“You don’t look well.” Von Rath’s voice slipped softly under the younger man’s coarse guffaws. He leaned one flank on the table next to Rhion, stood looking down at him, head tipped a little to one side, dark, level brows drawn in a frown of concern.
Rhion removed the pince-nez and inconspicuously slipped it into his shirt pocket, and eased the rimless glasses carefully on over the swollen left side of his face. Though he felt as guilty as if he’d erased a plea for help written in a dying man’s blood, he knew he’d have to ritually cleanse them if he was going to wear them regularly.
Did von Rath know? he wondered, looking up at that beautiful face, delicate even with its sword scar—dreamer, wizard, as much an exile in this world as he was himself.
He’d been talking to Dr. Weineke with the casual intimacy of longtime partners.
He knew.
Rhion closed his eyes, fighting the tide of inchoate realization about what the Nazis did and were. “My head aches,” he said truthfully. “You have no idea how stupid I feel falling down the stairs like a two-year-old, but if you don’t mind, I’m going to go back up and lie down again. I’ll come back in a couple of hours. Maybe you and I can work through the Dee and the Vatican letters tonight, so the day won’t be a total loss.”
Von Rath shook his head. “It does not matter if it is. Baldur and I will finish them. Rest if you need to rest.”
Horst and Poincelles were still playing with Weineke’s collection of eyeglasses as Rhion mounted the stairs to his own room.
Nine
“WHO’S THE OLD MAN?”
Taken unawares by the question, the barmaid Sara turned sharply, slopping beer on the tray she had been about to lift from the bar; for a split second uncertainty and fear gleamed in those spitcat eyes before they melted into warmth as ersatz as the average cup of German coffee. Then she smiled and brushed her hip lightly against Rhion’s crotch. “Don’t worry about my old man, Angeldrawers. Old Pauli does the settling-up with him.” But he knew she was sparring for time.
“I don’t mean your pimp,” Rhion said quietly and took from the breast pocket of his shabby brown shirt the gold pince-nez. “I mean the old man who wore these—the old man who used to cut quills with the knife you tried to stab me with.”
Her hand shut around his wrist with the same startling strength he’d felt dragging him off-balance in the laundry room, and her eyes changed from a courtesan’s to an assassin’s. “Where did you get those?”
They were jammed shoulder to shoulder in a mob of black-uniformed men and locals in shabby serge around the bar; with the cessation of the newscaster’s staccato voice a few moments ago, the Woodsman’s Horn had returned to a chaos more characteristic of Saturday nights than of the normally quiet Thursdays. But with the triumphs in the West, the locals had all crowded in to listen to the broadcasts. Now men slapped each other on