The Keep by F. Paul Wilson
He had to get out of here!
Blow up the keep tomorrow—that’s what he should do! Set the charges and reduce it to gravel after lunch. That way he could spend Saturday night in Ploiesti in a bunk with a real mattress and not worry about every sound, every vagrant current of air. No more would he have to sit and shake and sweat and wonder what might be making its way down the hall to his door.
But tomorrow was too soon. It wouldn’t look good on his record. He wasn’t due in Ploiesti until Monday and would be expected to use up all the available time until then to solve the problem here. Blowing up the keep was the extreme measure, to be considered only when all else failed. The High Command had ordered that this pass be watched and had designated the keep as the chosen watchpoint. Destruction had to be the last resort.
He heard the measured treads of a pair of einsatzkommandos pass his locked door. The hallway out there was doubly guarded. He had made sure of that. Not that there was the slightest chance a stream of lead from a Schmeisser could stop whatever was behind the killings here, he simply hoped the guards would be taken first, thereby sparing him another night.
And those guards had better stay awake and on duty, no matter how tired they were! He had driven the men hard today to dismantle the rear section of the keep, concentrating their efforts on the area around his quarters. They had opened every wall within fifty feet of where he now huddled, and had found nothing—no secret passages leading to his room, no hiding places anywhere.
He shivered again.
The cold and the darkness came as they had before, but Cuza was feeling too weak and sick tonight to turn his chair around and face Molasar. He was out of codeine and the pain in his joints was a steady agony.
“How do you enter and leave this room?” he asked for want of anything better to say. He had been facing the hinged slab that opened into the base of the watchtower, assuming Molasar would arrive through there. But Molasar had somehow appeared behind him.
“I have my own means of moving about which does not require doors or secret passages. A method quite beyond your comprehension.”
“Along with many other things,” Cuza said, unable to keep the despair from his voice.
It had been a bad day. Beyond the unremitting pain was the sick realization that this morning’s glimmer of hope for a reprieve for his people had been a chimera, a useless pipe dream. He had planned to bargain with Molasar, to strike a deal. But for what? The end of the major? Magda had been right this morning: Stopping Kaempffer would only delay the inevitable; his death might even make the situation worse. Vicious reprisals on Romanian Jews would certainly follow if an SS officer sent to set up a death camp were brutally murdered. And the SS would merely send another officer to Ploiesti, maybe next week, maybe next month. What did it matter? The Germans had plenty of time. They were winning every battle, overrunning one country after another. There did not seem to be any way of stopping them. And when they finally held the seats of power in all the countries they wanted, they could pursue their insane leader’s goals of racial purity at their leisure.
In the long run nothing a crippled history professor could do would make the least bit of difference.
And worsening it all was the insistent knowledge that Molasar feared the cross…feared the cross!
Molasar glided around into his field of vision and stood there studying him. Strange, Cuza thought. Either I’ve immersed myself in such a morass of self-pity that I’m insulated from him, or I’m getting used to Molasar. Tonight he did not feel the crawling sensation that once accompanied Molasar’s presence. Maybe he simply didn’t care anymore.
“I think you may die,” Molasar said without preamble.
The bluntness of the words jolted Cuza. “At your hands?”
“No. At your own.”
Could Molasar read minds? Cuza’s thoughts had dwelt on that very subject for most of the afternoon. Ending his life would solve so many problems. It would set Magda free. Without him to hold her back, she could flee into the hills and escape Kaempffer, the Iron Guard, and all the rest. Yes, the idea had occurred to him. But he still lacked the means…and the resolve.
Cuza averted his gaze. “Perhaps. But if not by my own doing, then soon in Major Kaempffer’s death camp.”
“Death camp?” Molasar leaned forward into the light, his brow furrowed in curiosity. “A place where people gather to die?”
“No. A place where people are dragged off to be murdered. The major will be setting up one such camp not far south of here.”
“To kill Wallachians?” Sudden fury drew Molasar’s lips back from his abnormally long teeth. “A German is here to kill my people?”
“They are not your people,” Cuza said, unable to shake his despondency. The more he thought about it, the worse he felt. “They are Jews. Not the sort you would concern yourself with.”
“I shall decide what concerns me! But Jews? There are no Jews in Wallachia—at least not enough to matter.”
“When you built the keep that was true. But in the following century we were driven here from Spain and the rest of Western Europe. Most settled in Turkey, but many strayed into Poland and Hungary and Wallachia.”
“‘We’?” Molasar looked puzzled. “You are a Jew?”
Cuza nodded, half expecting a blast of anti-Semitism from the ancient boyar.
Instead, Molasar said, “But you are a Wallachian too.”
“Wallachia was joined with Moldavia into what is now called Romania.”
“Names change. Were you born here? Were these other Jews who are destined for the death camps?”
“Yes, but—”
“Then they are Wallachians!”
Cuza sensed Molasar’s patience growing short, yet he had to speak: “But their ancestors were immigrants.”
“It matters not! My grandfather came from Hungary. Am I, who was born on this soil, any less a Wallachian for that?”
“No, of course not.” This was a senseless conversation. Let it end.
“Then neither are these Jews you speak of. They are Wallachians, and as such they are my countrymen!” Molasar straightened up and threw back his shoulders. “No German may come into my country and kill my countrymen!”
Typical! Cuza thought. I bet he never objected to his fellow boyars’ depredations among the Wallachian peasants during his day. And he obviously never objected to Vlad’s impalements. It was all right for the Wallachian nobility to decimate the populace, but don’t let a foreigner dare!
Molasar had retreated to the shadows outside the bulb’s cone of light.
“Tell me about these death camps.”
“I’d rather not. It’s too—”
“Tell me!”
Cuza sighed. “I’ll tell you what I know. The first one was set up in Buchenwald, or perhaps Dachau, around eight years ago. There are others: Flossenburg, Ravensbruck, Natzweiler, Auschwitz, and many others I’ve probably never heard of. Soon there will be one in Romania—Wallachia, as you would have it—and maybe more within a year or two. The camps serve one purpose: the collection of certain types of people, millions of them, for torture, debasement, forced labor, and eventual extermination.”
“Millions?”
Cuza could not read Molasar’s tone completely, but there was no doubt that he was having trouble believing what he had been told. Molasar was a shadow among the shadows, his movements agitated, almost frantic.
“Millions,” Cuza said firmly.
“I will kill this German major!”
“That won’t help. There are thousands like him, and they will come one after another. You may kill a few and you may kill many, but eventually they will learn to kill you.”
“Who sends them?”
“Their leader is a man named Hitler who—”
“A king? A prince?”
“No…” Cuza fumbled for the word. “I guess voevod would be the closest word you have for it.”
“Ah! A warlord! Then I shall kill him and he shall send
Molasar had spoken so matter-of-factly that the full meaning of his words was slow to penetrate the shroud of gloom over Cuza’s mind. When it did…
“What did you say?”
“Lord Hitler—when I’ve regained my full strength I’ll drink his life!”
Cuza felt as if he had spent the whole day struggling upward from the floor of the deepest part of the ocean with no hope of reaching air. With Molasar’s words he broke surface and gulped life. Yet it would be easy to sink again.
“But you can’t! He’s well protected! And he’s in Berlin!”
Molasar came forward into the light again. His teeth were bared, this time in a rough approximation of a smile.
“Lord Hitler’s protection will be no more effective than all the measures taken by his lackeys here in my keep. No matter how many locked doors and armed men protect him, I shall take him if I wish. And no matter how far away he is, I shall reach him when I have the strength.”
Cuza could barely contain his excitement. Here at last was hope—a greater hope than he had ever dreamed possible.
“When will that be? When can you go to Berlin?”
“I shall be ready tomorrow night. I shall be strong enough then, especially after I kill all the invaders.”
“Then I’m glad they didn’t heed me when I told them the best thing they could do was to evacuate the keep.”
“You what?” It was a shout.
Cuza could not take his eyes off Molasar’s hands—they clutched at him, ready to tear into him, restrained only by their owner’s will.
“I’m sorry!” he said, pressing himself back in his chair. “I thought that’s what you wanted!”
“I want their lives!” The hands retreated. “When I want anything else I will tell you what it is, and you will do exactly as I say!”
“Of course! Of course!”
Cuza could never fully and truly agree to that, but he was in no position to put on a show of resistance. He reminded himself that he must never forget what sort of a being he was dealing with. Molasar would not tolerate being thwarted in any way; he had no thought other than having his own way. Nothing else was acceptable or even conceivable to him.
“Good. For I have need of mortal aid. It has always been so. Limited as I am to the dark hours, I need someone who can move about in the day to prepare the way for me, to make certain arrangements that can only be made in the light hours. It was so when I built this keep and arranged for its upkeep, and it is so now. In the past I have made use of human outcasts, men with appetites different from mine but no more acceptable to their fellows. I bought their services by providing them the means to sate those appetites. But you—your price, I feel, will be in accord with my own desires. We share a common cause for now.”
Cuza looked down at his twisted hands. “I fear you could have a better agent than I.”
“The task I will require of you tomorrow night is a simple one: An object precious to me must be removed from the keep and hidden in a secure place in the hills. With that safe I shall feel free to pursue and destroy those who wish to kill our countrymen.”
Cuza experienced a strange floating sensation, a new emotional buoyancy as he imagined Hitler and Himmler cowering before Molasar, and then their torn and lifeless—better yet, headless—bodies strung up for viewing at the entrance to an empty death camp. It would mean an end to the war and the salvation of his people; not merely Romanian Jewry, but his entire race! It promised a tomorrow for Magda. It meant an end to Antonescu and the Iron Guard. It might even mean reinstatement at the university.
But then reality dropped him from those heights, down to his wheelchair. How could he carry anything from the keep? How could he hide it in the hills when his strength could barely wheel him through the door?
“You will need a whole man,” he said to Molasar in a voice that threatened to break. “A cripple like me is useless to you.”
He sensed rather than saw Molasar move around the table to his side. He felt light pressure on his right shoulder—Molasar’s hand. He looked up to see Molasar looking down at him. Smiling.
“You have much to learn about the scope of my powers.”
TWENTY-FIVE
THE INN
Saturday, 3 May
1020 hours
Joy.
That was what it was. Magda had never imagined how wonderful it could be to awaken in the morning and find herself wrapped in the arms of someone she loved. Such a peaceful feeling, a safe feeling. It made the prospect of the coming day so much brighter to know she had Glenn to share it with.
Glenn lay on his side, she on hers, the two of them face-to-face. He was still asleep, and although Magda did not want to wake him, she found she could not keep her hands off him. Gently, she ran her palm over his shoulder, fingered the scars on his chest, smoothed the red tumble of his hair. She moved her bare leg against his. It was so sensuously warm under the covers, skin to skin, pore to pore. Desire began to add its own kind of heat to her skin. She wished he would wake up.
Magda watched his face as she waited for him to stir. So much to learn about this man. Where exactly was he from? What had his childhood been like? What was he doing here? Why did he have that sword blade with him? Why was he so wonderful? She felt like a schoolgirl. She was thrilled with herself. She could not remember being happier.
She wanted Papa to know him. The two of them would get along marvelously. But she wondered how Papa would react to their relationship. Glenn was not Jewish…she didn’t know what he was, but he was certainly not Jewish. Not that it made any difference to her, but such matters had always been important to Papa.
Papa…
A sudden wave of guilt doused her burgeoning desire. While she had been snuggling in Glenn’s arms, safe and secure between bouts of thrashing ecstasy, Papa had sat cold and alone in a stone room, surrounded by human devils while he awaited an audience with a creature from Hell. She should be ashamed!
And yet, why shouldn’t she have stolen a little pleasure for herself? She had not deserted Papa. She was still here at the inn. He had driven her away from the keep the night before and had refused to leave it at all yesterday. And now that she thought of it, if Papa had come back to the inn with her yesterday morning she would not have entered Glenn’s room, and they would not be together this morning.
Strange how things worked.
But yesterday and last night don’t really change things, she told herself. I’m changed, but our predicament remains unaltered. This morning Papa and I are at the mercy of the Germans, just as we were yesterday morning and the morning before that. We are still Jews. They are still Nazis.
Magda slipped from Glenn’s side and rose to her feet, taking the thin bedspread with her. As she moved to the window she wrapped the fabric around her. Much had changed within her, many inhibitions had fallen away like scale from a buried bronze artifact, but still she could not stand naked at a window in broad daylight.
The keep—she could feel it before she reached the window. The sense of evil within it had stretched to the village during the night…almost as if Molasar were reaching out for her. Across the gorge it sat, gray stone under a gray, overcast sky, the last remnants of night fog receding around it. Sentries were still visible on its parapets; the front gate was open. And someone or something was moving along the causeway toward the inn. Magda squinted in the morning light to see what it was.
A wheelchair…and in it…Papa.
But no one was pushing him. He was propelling himself. With strong, rapid, rhythmic motions, Papa’s hands were gripping the wheel rims and his arms were turning them, speeding him along the causeway.
Impossible, but she was seeing it. And he was coming to the inn!
Calling to Glenn to wake up, she began to run around the room gathering her strewn-about garments and pulling them on. Glenn was up in an instant, laughing at her awkward movements and helping her find her clothes. Magda did not find the situation even slightly
Theodor Cuza was finding his own kind of joy in the morning.
He had been cured. His hands were bare and open to the cool morning air as they gripped the wheels of his chair and rolled them along the causeway. All without pain, without stiffness. For the first time in longer than he wished to remember, Cuza had awakened without feeling as if someone had stolen in on him during the night and splinted every one of his joints. His upper arms moved back and forth like well-oiled pistons, his head freely pivoted to either side without pain or protesting creaks. His tongue was moist—he had adequate saliva again to swallow, and it went down easily. His face had thawed so that he could once again smile in a way that did not cause others around him to wince and glance away.
And he was smiling now, grinning idiotically with the joy of mobility, of self-sufficiency, of being able once again to take an active physical role in the world around him.
Tears! He felt tears on his cheeks. He had cried often since the disease had firmed its grip upon him, but the tears had long since dried up along with his saliva. Now his eyes were wet and his cheeks were slick with them. He was crying, joyfully, unabashedly, as he wheeled himself toward the inn.
Cuza had not known what to expect as Molasar stood over him last night and placed a hand on his shoulder, but he had felt something change within him. He had not known what it was then, but Molasar had told him to go to sleep, that things would be different come morning. He had slept well, without the usual repeated awakenings during the night to grope for the water cup to wet his parched mouth and throat, and had risen later than usual.
Risen…that was the word for it. He had risen from a living death. On his first try he had been able to sit up, and then stand without pain, without gripping the wall or the chair for support. He had known then that he would be able to help Molasar, and help him he would. Anything Molasar wanted him to do, he would do.