Dracula's Ghost - Afterimage: Chapter 13

Part III: The Witch of Endor

Part III: The Witch of Endor

Curious, this feeling that came over me that such details would be more intolerable than those heads drying on the stakes under Mr. Kurtz’s windows. After all, that was only a savage sight, while I seemed at one bound to have been transported into some lightless region of subtle horrors, where pure, uncomplicated savagery was a positive relief, being something that had a right to exist—obviously—in the sunshine. The young man looked at me with surprise. I suppose it did not occur to him that Mr. Kurtz was no idol of mine. He forgot I hadn’t heard any of these splendid monologues on, what was it? on love, justice, conduct of life—or what not. If it had come to crawling before Mr. Kurtz, he crawled as much as the veriest savage of them all. I had no idea of the conditions, he said: these heads were the heads of rebels. I shocked him excessively by laughing. Rebels! What would be the next definition I was to hear? There had been enemies, criminals, workers – and these were rebels.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

My spirit is broken, my days are cut short, the grave awaits me.

Job 17:1-2

I.

Budapest

1956

The arc of fate is often visible only in hindsight, but when the revolution began, its arrival was heralded by a great portent, and none who bore witness doubted its significance.   On the far side of the Danube, a large crowd gathered at the statue of Józef Bem, the hero of 1848, for the reading of a manifesto. A republic of workers and peasants, the speaker asserted, should be run by workers and peasants rather than bureaucrats and secret police. The crowd was a quarter million strong by sunset, and when they crossed the Danube to protest in front of the Parliament building, a radio broadcast of the Hungarian Working People’s Party ordered the crowd to disperse. Shots were fired, and a few protestors were killed, but even at that late stage, the violence had not metastasized into a fatal illness.

The real trouble began when someone remembered the statue.

The crowds began to cry out that the Hungarian Working People’s Party should require no foreign armies, or foreign rulers, to keep the population in line, and they insisted that the statue be removed. When the government responded with a fierce denunciation, the protestors decided to take matters into their own hands – this demand, at least, would be met whether the government acceded or not. They procured ropes and cutting torches, and by nine-thirty that evening, the statue of Joseph Stalin lay in ruins, the head severed from the torso and only the bronze boots adorning the tribune. Everyone understood that a Rubicon had been crossed, for to desecrate the enemy’s idol was to call down the wrath of the enemy’s god, and they went home to arm themselves with weapons that had been stashed away during the war years.

Yuri Andropov watched through his office window as the crowd flowed past the Soviet Embassy. He felt weak and unsteady, as if the very earth was shifting beneath his feet, and his worries were heightened by the Major’s absence. Just before midnight, he placed a call to Moscow and spoke a few terse sentences.

By the next morning, the first tanks were encircling Budapest.

II.

The phone rang, and Yuri Andropov heard an unfamiliar voice in the earpiece.

“This is Captain Sokolov from the Fifth Directorate. She is here.” 

“It’s about time.” Andropov chided himself for the rare display of impatience, but the transport was two days overdue. “Give me thirty minutes, and I’ll be down to arrange transfer of custody.”

The stench of the prison - cigarette smoke mingled with stale sweat and decay, reminded him of the collective farms of Ukraine. One of the guards opened a gate, and Andropov led the captain into a long tunnel, which led to a separate wing of the prison.  The isolated row of cells was designed to hold the most dangerous enemies of the Revolution, and as of tonight, the basement held exactly one prisoner.  In accordance with Andropov’s orders, the guards that manned the tunnel were armed with flamethrowers. She fears nothing, but most animals retreat from fire.

“Did she give you any trouble?”

“None whatsoever,” Sokolov said, “although given the nature of her surrender, we kept a close watch on her.”

“I’m sure that you did.” Andropov winced, for he had seen the photos of the severed heads.

They passed through another doorway, solid steel with a window covered by heavy iron mesh, and when they reached the far end of the hall, Andropov peered through a peephole. Sarah Spencer sat on the concrete floor with her knees drawn to her chest. Her silver hair was disheveled but lustrous, and she was quite attractive for a woman in her fifties. He banged on the door.

“Sarah Johnova - can you hear me?”  The hunched form did not move, and Andropov wondered whether the captain had beaten or starved her – perhaps she had died in that position. He watched carefully until he noted the slow rise and fall of her chest.

“Your son is in Budapest - he has been searching for you for a long time. If you talk to us, you can see him soon. Do you understand?”

She remained perfectly still, and Yuri Andropov pondered his options. Acwulf had given him a plan, and though he had never fully bought into the idea, it was a gambit to be held in reserve for emergency use. “Give the spies a public trial, and they will discredit your enemies.”  It had worked when Stalin ruled in Moscow, but Stalin was dead, and they were running out of time. The Major’s disappearance had thrown another wrench into his plans, for a trial was of no use without a skilled interrogator to guide the prisoner toward a proper resolution.

The guard closed the peephole, and as they made their way back through the tunnel, Yuri Andropov decided to cross two items from his list of concerns. We have her son in custody, and that will be sufficient to ensure her cooperation. When he was back in his office, he would place a call to Békéscsaba and tell them to tie up any loose ends with Alexandr Plekhanov. Since Acwulf had gotten him into this mess, Andropov also resolved to have the German detained for further questioning with respect to his own loyalties.

Regarding Sarah and Archie Spencer, he would allow himself a few more days to make a final decision.

III.

Cologne-Bonn Airport

Rudolf Diels stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray and took a swig from the flask in his pocket. He had been smoking and drinking too much, and sleeping too little, since the events of Hof. He closed his eyes and saw the walking dead man, the dismembered corpse, the bloody runes that moved if one stared at them for too long. Beside him, the priest read quietly from a treatise on Aristotle.

“I suppose this is no surprise to you?” Diels’s foot jangled nervously against the floor, and he forced it to stop. “The powers of darkness and all that?” 

“Oh, I don’t know about that.”  The priest closed his book. “The Church teaches a great deal about supernatural evil, but I would have placed vampires into the category of superstition. I believe that what you’re really asking is whether I am afraid. True?”

“Well? Are you afraid?” 

“I spent the last years of the war in Budapest.” Cristofor held out a hand, and Diels passed the flask. “I helped a few of the city’s Jews – a pitifully small number – to hide as they made their way east to the Red Army’s lines. I was afraid every single day, and the feeling of pointlessness was even worse than the fear. Whether I lived or died, it would make no difference to the big picture.”

“Making no difference to the big picture,” Diels nodded, “is something that I’m well acquainted with.” 

“You’re talking about Cologne, aren’t you? What you did in 1940?”

Rudolf Diels looked up, startled. “You’ve heard that story?” 

“Herr Diels, the Church has been working at statecraft – diplomacy with an occasional touch of espionage – for two thousand years. When the former head of Adolf Hitler’s secret police disobeys an order to arrest the city’s Jews – the Prince of Darkness discovers his own conscience – people talk. It’s a remarkable story.”

“Not really,” Diels said. “They sent another man in my place, and every Jew in the city was rounded up and deported. I’d be surprised if one in a hundred survived the war.”

“Sometimes, there’s value in taking a principled stand. Even a fruitless one.” 

“A principled stand.”  Diels laughed with a bitter edge to his voice. “I was sure that Germany would lose a war with France and that Hitler would be deposed. Quite the prophet, wasn’t I? Six weeks later, France was defeated, and the English were kicked off the Continent. I could have been hanged as a traitor – and for nothing.” 

“Not for nothing.”  The priest stared at him, and Diels looked at his shoes to avoid the gaze. “Would you have traded places with your tormentors?” 

“I suppose not.” 

“Good.”  The priest closed his book, carefully marking one page. “Now, get some rest – we’ll need it when the plane lands.” 

IV.

Budapest

Archie was surprised, for Soviet prisons were rumored to be dreadful places, but this prison was a poorly-run, slipshod operation.  The guards barely paid him any attention as they wandered, distracted and listless, through the hallway, and – for Christ’s sake – they hadn’t even bothered to take his clothes. Archie was adorned in the same suit that he had been wearing at his arrest, and if he made it past the gates, he would blend in reasonably well with the Hungarians. They passed another prisoner as the guards escorted him to his cell – an older, buck-toothed man with a long-handled broom – who acknowledged him with a polite nod as their eyes met. Another mistake, Archie thought, for communication between prisoners should have been met with a reprimand. The brown eyes followed him, and Archie was struck by an uneasy feeling of recognition, as if the man with the broom were an old, half-remembered acquaintance.