Death of the Gods Read online

  Claxton let the paper drop to the desk and looked up into Michael's reddened face. “Why don't that filthy bunch of pornographers just sculpt the thing themselves. They're so damned specific with their bare bosoms and man-sized schlongs.”

  He handed the paper to Michael.

  “There, there,” he said, noticing the boy's shame-faced coloring, “We'll have to see about getting you some sophistication, some experience.” The boy nodded.

  “Take this over to your sister at the studio. I'd give it to Helen myself, but as ships in the night, we are seldom even passing. In fact, the ocean has all but dried up.”

  Chapter Three

  Munich

  Kurt and Helen climbed the steep stairs to the studio.

  “I would have brought you up in the freight elevator, but Lexi has the key and I sent her out to deliver a sketch,” Helen said, allowing herself to be gently pulled up the incline by Kurt's strong arm.

  “Freight elevators and back stairs rendezvous are an enticing luxury I have not indulged in for a long time,” he said with an intimate smile.

  Without provocation, Helen drew his mouth close to hers and kissed it. Kurt pulled away and suspiciously looked behind them, to be certain the kiss had gone unobserved. Helen sighed with discontent.

  Inside the studio, Kurt perused the works that lay about in varying states of completion. He lifted a cloth to discover a clay model of a face, not unlike his own, craggy and lean with beautifully sculpted planes. His reaction of mild amusement and pleasure caused Helen some embarrassment.

  Quickly, she snatched the drape from his hand and pulled it down to cover her half-finished creation.

  “I've been giving Lexi some extra practice in modeling clay,” she lied.

  In truth, she had lovingly formed the clay into a proximity of his likeness herself, working from memory, caressing the warm waxy substance, as she had remembered caressing his pained and beautiful features. She had trained herself to work in clay, following the examples that Lexi carried out in stone. At first, she had only pretended to understand the art, at which she professed to be an expert, in the event that Ziegler or one of the other officials happened to ask her a pertinent question. But after a while, she began to enjoy making things of her own, feeling the clay respond to her will. She had decided to shape the head of Kurt the day following their lovemaking in the Castle of Shadows. She had intended to adapt his face and use it for the statue of The New Germany, which had been commissioned for the great hallway of the Opera House.

  “Tell Lexi I am flattered,” he said, looking out from under a furrowed brow of suspicion, conveying to her that, once again, he had read her thoughts. He placed his hand eloquently on her throat and pushed back the wisps of hair that had fallen at the nape of her neck.

  “How long will your Lexi be gone?” he whispered, drawing her to him.

  “Not long enough,” Helen sighed, countering his persistence with a gentle push.

  She broke free of his embrace and poked at her hair, tidying the strands that had come undone. “So, at last you see where we work,” Helen said evasively.

  A kiss on the stairs was one thing, but she could not afford to be caught in a compromising position if Lexi walked through the door.

  “Have you brought me what I asked you for?” Helen said, getting down to business.

  Kurt nodded, and reaching into the front breast pocket of his jacket, produced a pasteboard envelope. He handed it to Helen. “I admit I found it an odd request, indelicate and difficult to explain away, but yes, I have what you asked for.”

  Helen snatched up the brown paper envelope and tore it open. Inside was a small glass vial filled with a cloudy liquid. She held it up to the light and examined the opalescent contents with a smile.

  “I told you that I would help you build your army on the unseen plane,” she said. “This is what I need to do it.”

  “You asked me for a quantity of semen from the officers of the SS. Do you realize how unorthodox that request was?” Kurt asked with a smirk that Helen read as a glimmer of embarrassment.

  “I thought you would just order it from them and they would produce it,” she said matter of factly.

  “I created a new requirement of the routine physical exam. It was the most efficient way,” Kurt added, as if to clarify his position. “Now, will you tell me what you intend to do with it?”

  Helen cradled the glass container in her hands.

  “You, of course, know far more about the unseen planes than I, yet I think there is a way, using the dark Kraft, that we can place thousands of beings in that astral world without sending them over one by one. I have a plan,” she said. “I will make tiny wax figures, thousands of them, each one containing the seed of one of your special elite. They will become your army in the other world. They will be as the homunculi of the Renaissance sorcerers, little people created by combining a mixture of ingredients. I shall contain the concoction in a jar or buried in the earth until the dog days of the moon have passed, or until the chiming of the bells for St. Michaelmas. By that time, each tiny lump of wax will contain a fragment of a human-like consciousness that can be commanded by its creator.”

  Kurt followed her words as Helen continued, her face glowing with inspiration. “Instead of the wax figures coming to life here in the physical world, they will spring into form on the astral plane, in the unseen world that you have already shown me. I shall be their creator and they shall do as I direct them. They will follow my will… our will.”

  Kurt was pleased with the description of her plan. He was told that the number of soldiers would be as countless as the seeds of life contained in the vial. The astral offspring would possess the highly-trained intellect and combat skills of the men who unknowingly had offered their seed as warrior fathers, but magnified a hundredfold, making them an invincible army of super beings, commanded by a single thought in the mind of their creators.

  Kurt took Helen in his hands and pulled her into his embrace. She resisted, ever mindful of the precious glass container and its contents. Carefully, she placed the vial in a locked drawer, and only then allowed his lips to find their mark.

  • • •

  Michael crossed the intersection, tapping the pocket of his new tweed jacket for the tenth time to be certain that he still had the green paper requisition for the statue. He welcomed the opportunity to have his sister see him carrying out his new and esteemed duties. He wanted her to see how serious he had become and how grown-up he looked in the suit that Claxton had given him. He had almost stopped thinking about the university in Stuttgart and the youthful and exciting life of a student that he had been denied. He had been forced to bypass his student days and had jumped straight into the role of a man, but at the moment, he no longer felt deprived. The humiliation of his rejection at the university, during the unreality of the night of book-burning, had left no apparent scars. He felt purposeful and attractive in a way he had never known before.

  An older woman smiled at him as she passed, and he managed a red-faced smile in return. His eye did not fail to notice, in the split second of passing, the quality of the gold earrings she wore and his mind turned to Uncle Jacob.

  The old man had taught him well. He had learned by the time he was six how to judge the fineness of gold according to its weight and color. He knew it had been the old man's dream that he might go into the business and someday take it over, as if he were Jacob's own son. But Michael had not wanted a life in the Jewish quarter, growing old behind the jewelry counter as his uncle had, marking holidays by the ebb and flow of merchandise through the shop, summing up one's life along with the weekly receipts. He had seen his sister leave the crowded rooms behind the store and create not only a new name for herself, but miraculously, an entirely new life to go along with it.

  He was pleased that somehow he had become part of that life, filled with diplomats and people far more important than any his uncle had ever met. He felt a twinge of guilt for his denial of the old m
an. He heard Jacob's angry words cursing him and Lexi for disloyalty still echoing in his head. He would remember to send his old guardian some money from his first paycheck, so that he could see that it had not been a mistake to change his name or to strike out on his own.

  He rounded the corner of the Hermann-Vogel-Straße where Lexi's studio occupied the space of an entire block, above a row of charming shops. How different this street and its shops were from the dinginess of the Ghetto where his uncle had his stall. Women in fur coats with jeweled clusters in their earrings, mysteriously shadowed by the veils of hats, strolled about shopping or languished, already fashionably late, on the way to luncheon. This was the life he wanted, and thanks to Claxton, it had already begun.

  He went through the door and started up to the loft, climbing the stairs, careful not to make a racket with his big feet on the wooden steps. As he reached the top and stretched out his hand to pull the bell, he heard voices.

  They were unfamiliar voices, but the subject of their conversation was not. He held his breath and listened.

  • • •

  “Claxton is beginning to be a bit of a problem,” Helen said.

  Kurt kissed her neck and laughed into her ear, a small humorless laugh, more an expression of physical pleasure than amusement.

  “The old boy is jealous. That's understandable, isn't it? He is supposed to be your husband, and I'd say you haven't made it very easy for him.”

  Helen broke free and walked to the clay bust of Kurt, pressing the sheet that covered it against the features with her fingertips, contemplating the shrouded, deathlike quality of the likeness through the fabric.

  “It's more than just that,” she said. “He's been jealous of everything I do and everyone I know for years. But now he has it in his head that what we are doing here is wrong, that we're endangering all that is good and honest in the world. The man's a fool. He insists that we return to America.”

  Helen watched the expression on Kurt's real face from the corner of her eye, hoping for some sign of his anxiety at the thought of losing her. She hoped for an imperceptible tightening of the jaw or an almost inaudible intake of breath, but there was no sign of a reaction from him.

  Sighing, Helen continued her ploy.

  “He thinks I've taken up with what he calls a pack of Nazi lunatics, bent on taking over Europe so that it can be ruled by a simple-minded, racist idiot.”

  Helen had repeated Claxton's sentiments with such venom that finally Kurt was forced to react.

  “What your pitiful husband thinks is of no interest to me,” he answered, turning on his heels and pacing angrily.

  “But unfortunately, he is in a powerful position. He has the ear of the Fuhrer, at least through the papers,” Helen said, moving closer, falling in step with his pacing. “He knows about us. ‘What would the Fuhrer think about you and Kurt?’ Those were his very words only this morning. I'm afraid it's not as simple as just getting him fired either. He would talk.”

  Helen stopped following in Kurt's footsteps and buried her face in her hands. She needed to do something to get his attention. You’re an actress, she said to herself… so act.

  “Perhaps it would be best for us… for you, if I went back to America with him,” she said plaintively. “It seems the clearest solution but I…I…”

  Helen got the reaction she had waited for. Kurt lunged across the space between them and enfolded her in his arms.

  “I cannot allow that to happen,” he said. “We have our mission to complete and I could not bear to think of you being with him, when I am not there to make you happy.”

  Helen continued her performance, weaving together a caricature of what was noble and brave with what she hoped would appear, at the same time, vulnerable and in need of help. She tried not to think, but pantomimed her performance, as she gestured and swayed under the weight of her despair. She could not allow him to read her mind as she skillfully manipulated his feelings with the silent movie acting she had nearly all but forgotten.

  Kurt responded as she had intended, rising to the occasion with a myriad of suggested courses of action. She listened as he calculated one option against another.

  He would create a scandal that would send Claxton back home alone and disgraced. He would have him committed to an asylum for the insane. Each new idea emerged, more complicated than the one before it. Then, unconsciously lowering his voice into a whisper of conspiracy, he suggested what Helen had hoped for all along. The one, true solution that would not only deliver them from his threats and the danger of being exposed as liars and murderers, but would free her from the clinging fibers of his emotional web forever.

  Kurt had only barely uttered the word when Helen's fingers pressed softly to his lips to silence him.

  “Yes,” she said, breathing in the exquisite air of freedom, if only for a second. “I too know that is the only answer. But I don't want to know what you decide to do. I don't want him to see it in my face. I can't afford to give it away, even in my sleep.”

  She locked her fingers together behind his neck and drew him close to her, sealing the deadly bargain with a kiss.

  • • •

  Outside the door, Michael's hand trembled with fear of being discovered as he fumbled in his pocket for a pencil. As quickly as he could, he scrawled his sister's name across the green paper and silently slipped it into the mail slot beside the door, then crept back down the stairs, barely touching them as he walked to the safety of the manicured world of Hermann-Vogel-Straße.

  Chapter Four

  Munich, Summer 1938

  Helen spent the morning in the city library, struggling to decipher the texts in an ancient form of a language that was not her own. She had become fluent in German in the years she had lived here, but these dusty tomes and bound folios were handwritten in an old-fashioned script, substituting the letter F for S and splitting complicated verb forms in a way that was no longer in usage. She found it necessary to rely on these texts that had been translated into this florid German, centuries before, because she had no training nor understanding of Latin or Hebrew, the languages in which the original transcripts of magic had been written.

  She remembered being told that all the secrets of the ancient world were in plain sight, accessible to anyone, on the shelves of the substantial libraries of any European city. Tucked into the forgotten corners of these halls, one could find, on the shelves with popular novels and unread volumes of Proust, the keys to controlling the universe.

  A large cloth-bound book cracked at the binding as she opened it, sending a cloud of rotted fiber dust into her face as she let the weighty cover fall to one side.

  “CLAVICULA SALOMONIS, the Key of Solomon.” Helen whispered the title aloud to the dust-covered shelves. She turned the pages, searching for a particular category in the index. She was looking for the ingredients necessary to formulate the spell for the invisible army.

  Under other circumstances, she would only have to ask Claxton, and he would either have the answer readily on his tongue or would fling himself into the task of finding it for her. But this spell was to be hers alone, her own secret pact with the forces, a risk with her very Soul, which would stand her in good stead with the powers for the rest of her days. It was her way of showing Kurt that she was worthy of his dream for the future.

  Hours passed as Helen pieced together familiar phrases and words, until she had made sense of the fading script. Page after page followed with halting descriptions of the splendor of Solomon, the king of the Hebrews. The text described his fourteen hundred chariots and forty thousand chariot horses, his dining tables of iron and wood and silver and gold, as well as the accounts of his majestic throne, flanked by lions on each of the twelve steps leading to his seat under the outstretched wings of eagles. Not only was he the richest and wisest of the kings of antiquity, but his knowledge of the unseen made him the most powerful of men.

  At last she came to a passage that introduced the disciplines necessary to comma
nd the forces of nature. She muttered the words aloud, filling the lonely corner of the dusty library with the low sounds of what could be mistaken by any chance passerby as religious devotion.

  Almighty and ever-living God, who has made all things so that they may be submitted unto Him, hath wished to bring His works to perfection, by making one being which participates of the Divine and the Terrestrial, that is to say MAN, whose body is gross and terrestrial, while his Soul is spiritual and celestial, unto whom He hath made subject the whole earth and its inhabitants, and hath given unto Him means by which He may render the angels familiar, as I call those Celestial creatures who are destined: some to regulate the motions of the Stars, others to inhabit the Elements, others to aid and direct MAN, and then, by the use of their seals and characters, render them familiar unto thee, provided that thou abusest not this privilege by demanding from them things which are contrary to their nature: for accursed be he who will take the Name of GOD in vain, and who will employ for evil purposes the knowledge and good wherewith He hath enriched us.

  Helen scanned the pages, stumbling over the archaic text. At last, she found the incantation for the homunculi. Most of the ingredients needed were simple, commonplace things or herbs that she might readily obtain from any chemist or country garden. But there were among them two items that she determined presented a bit of an obstacle. First was the wax needed to fashion the tiny figures. It was stated that the wax must be taken from candles, consecrated in church, that have burned for the funeral mass of an adulteress. The second ingredient, somewhat horrifying in nature, was referred to as the Hand of Glory and was described as the severed left hand of a convicted felon, used to impress the angels of the unseen world into carrying out the demands of its holder.