When we eventually stood before him, Oona in her rather flimsy stolen dress, we must have looked a wretched sight. We were half-starved. I was in rags. We bore incongruous weapons. I had not changed clothes for days and was desperately tired.
Lobkowitz laughed as he offered us drinks and told us to seat ourselves in his comfortable easy chairs. “I can get you out of Germany,” he said. “Probably to Sweden. But that’s about the limit of the help I can give you at present.”
It emerged that he was running a kind of “underground railway” for those who had aroused Nazi displeasure. Most went to Sweden, while others went through Spain. He regretted, he said, that he had no magical powers. No way of opening the moonbeam roads to those who sought freedom. “The best I can promise them is America or Britain,” he said. “Even the British Empire can’t stand against the Luftwaffe much longer. I have soldier friends. Another few months and Britain will seek an armistice. I suspect she will fall. And with the capitulation of the Empire, Germans need not fear American involvement. It’s the triumph of evil, my dears.”
He apologized for making such melodramatic statements. “But these are melodramatic times.
“The irony,” he continued, “is that what you seek is already at Bek.”
“But Bek is too heavily guarded for us to attack her,” said Oona.
“What is it that we seek?” I asked wearily. “A staff? A cup? Isn’t there another one that will do?”
“These are unique objects,” Prince Lobkowitz said. “They take different forms. They have some sort of will, though it is not conscious in the same way as ours. You call one object the Holy Grail. Your family was entrusted to guard it. Wolfram von Eschenbach speaks of such a trust. Your father, half-mad, had not easily accepted this story. When he lost the Grail, he felt obliged to get it back and in so doing he killed himself.”
“Killed himself? Then Gaynor’s accusations were true! I had no idea—”
“Clearly the family wished to avoid scandal,” Prince Lobkowitz continued. “They said he died in the subsequent fire, but the truth is, Count von Bek, your father was wracked by guilt—every kind of guilt—for your mother’s death, his own failings, his inability to shoulder the family responsibilities. Indeed, as you know, he found it difficult to communicate with his own children. But he was neither a coward nor one to escape the inevitable. He did his best and he died in the attempt.”
“Why should he place such importance on the Grail?” I asked.
“Such objects have great power in Teutonic mythology, too, which is why Hitler and his disciples are so greedy to possess them. They believe that with the Grail and Charlemagne’s sword in their hands, they will have the supernatural means, as well as the military means, of defeating Britain. Britain is all that stands in the way of the triumph of the German Empire. The cup is more important than the sword, in this case. The sword is an arm. It has no independent life. There should, in truth, be two swords on either side of the cup for the magic to work at its fullest. Or so I’m told. What Gaynor thinks he will achieve, I do not entirely know, but Hitler and his friends are convinced that something monumental will happen. I’ve heard a rumor about a ritual called Blood-in-the-Bowl. Sounds like a fairy story, eh? Virgins and magic swords.”
“We must try to get the Grail back,” I said. “That is what we are here to do.”
Lobkowitz spoke softly, almost by way of confirmation. “Your father feared Bek would perish once the Grail left your family’s safekeeping. He feared the entire family would perish. You, of course, are his last remaining son.”
This was not something I needed to be reminded of. The waste of my brothers’ lives in the Great War still made me despair. “Did my father start the fire which killed him?”
“No. The fire was a result of the demon who volunteered his assistance in fulfilling your family trust. A reasonable thought, I suppose, in the circumstances. But your father was at best an amateur sorcerer. The creature was not properly contained with the pentagram. Rather than defend the Grail, it stole it!”
“The demon was Arioch?”
“The ‘demon’ was our friend Klosterheim, then in the service of Miggea of Law. She was drooling crazy and feeling her power wane. Klosterheim served Satan until Satan proved insufficiently committed to the cause of evil and sought a reconciliation with God through the medium of your Bek ancestors. Through your namesake, as a matter of fact. Your ancestor was charged by Satan himself to find the Grail and keep it, until such time as God and Satan shall be reconciled.”
“Fanciful old stories,” I said. “They do not even have the authenticity of myth!”
“Stories our immediate ancestors chose to forget,” said the Austrian quietly. “But you have more than one dark legend attached to your family name—even into recent times with the Mirenburg legend of Crimson Eyes.”
“Another peasant fireside tale,” I said. “The invention of the undereducated. You know that Uncle Bertie is now doing a perfectly respectable job in Washington.”
“Actually, he’s in Australia now. But I take your point. You must admit, my dear Count Ulric, that your family’s history was never as uneventful as they pretended. More than one of your kinsmen or ancestors has reason to agree.”
I shrugged. “If you will, Prince Lobkowitz. But that history has little to do with our current problems. We must find the Grail and the Sword but need your suggestions as to how we might get them back.”
“Where else?” he said. “I have told you. Where the Grail has been for so many centuries. At Bek. That is why the place is so heavily fortified and guarded, why Klosterheim keeps permanent guard over the Grail chamber, as he calls it. You know it as your old armory.”
That place had always possessed an atmosphere. I cursed myself. “We saw Klosterheim go to Bek. Are we too late? Has he removed the Grail?”
“I doubt he would wish to do that. I have it on the best authority that Hitler himself, together with Hess, Göring, Goebbels, Himmler and company, are all making plans to meet at Bek. They can hardly believe their luck, I’d guess. But they wish to ensure it! France has fallen and only Britain, already half-defeated, stands in their way. German planes have attacked British shipping, lured fighters into combat and weakened an already weak RAF. Before they invade by sea and land, they intend to destroy all main cities, especially London. They are preparing a vast aerial armada at this very moment. For all I know it is on its way. There is very little time. This meeting at Bek involves some ritual they believe will strengthen their hand even more and ensure that their invasion of Britain is completely successful.”
I was disbelieving. “They are insane.”
He nodded his head. “Oh, indeed. And something within them must understand that. But they have had total success so far. Perhaps they believe these spells are the reason for it. Clearly whatever supernatural aid they have called upon is not disappointing them. Yet it is unstable magic—in unstable hands. And it could result in the death of everything. Like Gaynor and the rest of their kind, their ignorance and disdain for reality will eventually destroy them. They relish the notion of Götterdämmerung. These people seek oblivion by any means. They are the worst kind of self-deceiving cowards and everything they build is a ramshackle sham. They have the taste of the worst Hollywood producers and the egos of the worst Hollywood actors. We have come to an ironic moment in history, I think, when actors and entertainers determine the fate of the real world. You can see how quickly the gap between action and affect widens . . . Of course they are expert illusionists, like Mussolini for instance, but illusion is all they offer—that and a vast amount of unearned power. The power to fake reality, the power to deceive the world and destroy it under the weight of so much falsification. The less the world responds to their lies and fancies, the more rigorously do they enforce them.”
I began to realize that Prince Lobkowitz, for all his practicality, was a discursive conversationalist. At length I interrupted him. “What must I do when I have the Grai
l?”
“Very little,” he said. “It is yours to defend, after all. And circumstances will change. Perhaps you’ll take it back to its home in what the East Franconians called the Grail Fields. You know them by their corrupted name of the Grey Fees. Oh, yes, we’ve heard of them in Germany! There’s a reference to them in Wolfram von Eschenbach, who cites Kyot de Provenzal. But your chances of getting to those Graalfelden again are also very slim.”
I had the advantage, he said, of knowing Bek. The old armory, where the Grail was held, where I had received my first lessons from von Asch.
“Guarded presumably by these SS men,” I said. “So there isn’t much chance of my strolling in calling ‘I’m home,’ saying I’ve just dropped in to pop up to the armory, then tuck the Holy Grail under my jacket and walk out whistling.”
I was surprised by my host’s response.
“Well,” he said with evident embarrassment, “I did have something like that in mind, yes.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Traditional Values
W hich was how I came to be wearing the full uniform of a Standartenführer, a colonel in the SS, including near-regulation smoked glasses, sitting in the back of an open Mercedes staff car driven by a chauffeuse in the natty uniform of the NSDAP Women’s Auxiliary (First Class) who, with her bow and arrows in the trunk, took the car out of its hidden garage into the dawn streets of Hensau and into some of the loveliest scenery in the whole of Germany—rolling, wooded hills and distant mountains, the pale gold of the sky, the sun a flash of scarlet on the horizon. I was filled with longing for those lost times, the years of my childhood when I had ridden alone across such scenery. The love of my land ran deep in my blood.
Somehow we had gone from that pre-1914 idyll to the present horror in a few short bloody years. And now here I was riding in a car far too large for the winding roads and wearing the uniform which stood for everything I had learned to loathe. Ravenbrand was now carried in a modified guncase and lay at my feet on the car’s floor. I could not help reflecting on this irony. I found myself in a future which few could have predicted in 1917. Now, in 1940, I remembered all the warnings that had been given since 1920. Years of antiwar films, songs, novels and plays—years of analysis and oracular pronouncements. Too many, perhaps? Had the predictions actually created the situation they hoped most to avert?
Was anarchy so terrible, compared to the deadly discipline of fascism? As much democracy and social justice had emerged from chaos as from tyranny. Who had been able to predict the total madness that would come upon our world in the name of “order”?
For a while we followed the main auto route to Hamburg. We saw how busy the roads, raillines and waterways had become. We traveled for a short while on an excellent new Autobahn with several lanes of traffic moving in both directions, but Oona soon found the back roads to Bek again. We were only fifty kilometers from my home when we turned a sharp bend in a wooded lane and Oona stamped quickly on the brake to stop us crashing into another car, quite as ostentatious as our own, swathed in Nazi flags and insignia. A thoroughly vulgar vehicle, I thought. I guessed it to belong to some swaggering local dignitary.
We began to move again but then a high-ranking officer in a brown SA uniform emerged from the other side of the car and flagged us down.
We had no option. We slowed to a stop this time. We exchanged the ritual salute, borrowed, I believe, from the film Quo Vadis?, supposedly how Romans greeted a friend. Once again, Hollywood had added a vulgar gloss to politics.
Noting my uniform and its rank, the SA man was subservient, apologetic. “Forgive me, Herr Standartenführer, this is, I regret, an emergency.”
From out of the closed car now emerged an awkward, rather gangling figure in a typical comic-opera Nazi uniform favored by the higher ranks. To his credit, he seemed uncomfortable in it, pushing unfamiliar frogging about as he walked over to us, offering a jerky salute, which we returned. He was genuinely grateful. “Oh, God be thanked! You see, Captain Kirch! My instincts never let me down. You suggested no suitable car could come along this road and get us to Bek on time—and voilà! This angel suddenly materializes.” His eyebrows appeared to be alive. His eyes, too, were very busy and he had an intense, crooked smile on his puffy, square face. If it had not been for his uniform, I might have taken him for a typical customer of the Bar Jenny in Berlin. He beamed at me. Raving mad but relatively benign.
“I am Deputy Führer Hess,” he told me. “You will be well-remembered for this, Colonel.”
I recalled that Rudolf Hess was one of Hitler’s oldest henchmen. In accordance with the papers I carried, I let him know that I was Colonel Ulric von Minct and that I was at his service. It would be a privilege to offer him my car.
“An angel, an angel,” he repeated as he climbed into the car and sat beside me. “It is the von Mincts, Colonel, who will save Germany.” He hardly noticed the case containing the sword. He was too concerned with shouting urgent orders to his driver. “The flasks! The flasks! It would be a disaster if I did not have them!”
The SA man reached into the trunk of the car and carefully took out a large wicker basket which he transferred to our car. Hess was greatly relieved. “I am a vegan,” he explained. “I have to travel everywhere with my own food. Alf—I mean our Führer—” He glanced up at me, like a small boy caught in some forbidden act. Clearly he had been admonished before for making reference to the Nazi leader by his old nickname. “The Führer is a vegetarian—but not strict enough, I fear, for me. He runs a very lax kitchen, from my point of view. So I have taken to carrying my own food when I travel.”
The deputy Führer saluted his driver. “Wait with the car,” he instructed. “We’ll send help from the first town we reach. Or from Bek, if we find nothing else.” He sat back in the car beside me, a signal for Oona to put the Mercedes into gear and continue the journey. He was a mass of tics and peculiar movements of his hands. “Von Minct, you say? You must be related to our great Paul von Minct, who has achieved so much for the Reich.”
“His cousin,” I said. I found it very hard to be afraid of this man.
Hess insisted on shaking my hand.
“A great honor, sir,” I said.
“Oh”—he removed his elaborate cap—“I’m one of the old fighters, you know. Still one of the lads.” He was reassuring me. Sentimentally he continued, “I was with Hitler in Munich. In Stadelheim and everywhere—he and I are brothers. I am the only one he truly trusts and confides in. It was always so. I am his spiritual adviser, in many ways. If it were not for me, Colonel von Minct, I doubt if any of you would have heard of the Grail story—or understand what it could do for us!”
Confidingly he leaned towards me. “Hitler, they say, knows the heart of Germany. But I know her soul. That is what I have studied.”
As the huge Mercedes bowled along familiar country roads, I continued to speak with the man whom many believed the most powerful man in Germany after the great dictator himself. If Hitler were killed today, Hess would assume the leadership.
For the most part his conversation was as banal as that of most Nazis, but laced through with a mélange of supernatural beliefs and dietary ideas which marked him for a common lunatic. Because he understood me to have an affinity for the Grail and all the mysticism surrounding it, he was more forthcoming—about how he had read the Bek legends, how he had read books saying the Grail was the lost Holy Relic of the Teutonic Order. How the Bek sword was the lost sword of Roland, Champion of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charlemagne the Frank. The Franks and the Goths founded modern Europe, he said. The Norsemen were stern lawmakers, with no respect for the Old World’s superstitions. Wherever their influence was felt, people became robust, masculine, vital, productive. Latin Christianity weakened them.
The destiny of the German nation, he told me, was to lift its brothers back to glory—to rid the world of all that wretchedly bad stock and replace it with a race of superbeings—superhealthy, superintelligent, superstrong, supereduc
ated—the kind of breed which would populate the world with the best mankind could be, rather than the worst.
The more I listened to Hess, the more skeptical I became, the more convinced that he was a low-level lunatic with dull dreams and a psychological inability to consider any “truth” but that which he invented for himself.
However, as the man was so fundamentally amiable and clearly trusted me so completely, I had an opportunity to see what he knew of my father. Had he ever met old Count von Bek? I asked. The one who went mad and was burned alive. Killed himself, didn’t he?
“Killed himself? Perhaps.” Hess shuddered. “A terrible crime, suicide. Betrays us all. On a level with abortion, in my view. All life should be respected.”
I had discovered quickly the trick of steering him gently back to the subject. “Count von Bek?”
“He lost the Grail, you see. He was entrusted with it. Father to child—son or daughter—down the centuries. ‘Do you the Devil’s work!’ is their ancient motto. They were at the Crusades. The oldest blood in Germany—but tainted by decadence, madness, Latin marriages . . .
“Legend had it that the von Beks always protected the Grail, until such a time when Satan was reconciled with God. All stupid Christian nonsense, I know, and a corruption of our old, muscular Nordic myths. Those myths made us successful conquerors. It has always been our destiny to conquer. To bring order to the whole world. The myth still retains its power.” His eyes were focused on me now, burning into me. “The power of myth is the power of life and death, as we know—for we have restored the power of the Nordic myth. And again we are successful conquerors. We shall challenge that other Nordic race, our natural allies, the British, until they turn with us against the evil East and defeat the tyranny of communism. Together, we shall bring civilization to the whole planet!”