Persuaded of the boy’s vulnerability, Aehrenthal trained his gun this time, not on him, but on his mother.
‘P-P-Putna,’ the boy stammered. ‘I heard her say it. That’s where she went. I wish I’d gone with her, I wish I was with her now.’
‘Where in Putna?’ But he had already guessed.
‘The…the mon-monastery.’
‘Who will she see there?’
There was no answer, but Aehrenthal knew the name already. Many years before, someone had whispered it in his ear. He had put it to the back of his mind and forgotten it until now.
He reached out and put his hand on the boy’s head. The boy flinched, fearing and despising him equally.
‘Well done,’ said Aehrenthal. ‘You did well to tell me this. I’ll see you are well treated. You and your mother. It is always best to tell the truth, especially when someone is angry. I have been very angry, and I apologise for it.’
He ruffled the boy’s hair, then turned and left the room. His men were waiting for him by the open doorway. One of them was a young hopeful by the name of Ferenc. Aehrenthal took him aside.
‘There are two left,’ he said. ‘Finish them off, then dispose of all the bodies. Do it all somewhere out of sight. Don’t trouble me with it.’
Ferenc saluted and took his pistol from its holster.
Aehrenthal stepped out of the house into a deserted street. His lieutenants followed him.
‘We leave for Putna tonight,’ he announced. ‘Get cars and half a dozen good men. You have one hour to make things ready.’
His own car drew up at the kerb. As he started to get into it, a shot rang out behind him. For a moment its echo sounded in his ears. Then a second shot cracked. The silence that followed it was dreadful, and for a moment it seemed to hang over the town like the end of all hope. Then Aehrenthal’s driver snapped the ignition on and took the car roaring out into the empty street.
21
A Stranger in a Strange Land
‘You will not be surprised if I tell you that Egon Aehrenthal is an evil man. I think of evil in religious terms, perhaps you do not. But no one can deny he is a man of evil appetites and evil deeds.’
Father Iustin held a half-filled wineglass between his hands, but he did not drink from it. He had never had a need for liquor of any kind, though he enjoyed a good wine with his meals; but what he had heard tonight had so troubled him that he sensed danger in the wine, and in the oblivion he thought it might bring. Tonight, oblivion would have been welcome. But in the morning he would have to wake again and start the work ahead of him, and that he feared more than anything.
He sat with Ethan in the deserted dining hall, at the end of one table, still lit by candlelight. The great fires had died down, and it had started to get cold. In their cells, monks prayed alone, while others sang the divine liturgy in the church. Ethan wondered what had brought him to such a proper place, a place so quieted by centuries of prayer and meditation that it seemed as though polished by the hands of ten thousand monks. He had never set out for it. He was no pilgrim. But for now he was a stranger in a strange land, and he knew instinctively his journey would not end here.
‘Ethan, what do you know about Count Laszlo Almásy?’
‘Hardly anything at all. Wasn’t there a film about him?’
Father Iustin nodded.
‘The English Patient. Almásy was played by an English actor, Ralph Fiennes.’
‘Yes, I remember. There was a cave in the desert, a cave with painted swimmers.’
‘The Cave of the Swimmers. In Wadi Sura. In the Libyan desert.’
Ethan nodded.
‘I remember now,’ he said. ‘Almásy was born in a castle in Burgenland. I nearly visited it. Burg Bernstein.’
‘It was originally a Hungarian castle, before Austria took Burgenland from the Hungarians. Almásy was born there, as you say. He spent his early life there. And he became involved in a series of right-wing occult movements in his youth there. What do you know about the Nazis and the occult?’
‘Nothing,’ answered Ethan. ‘Surely they were just a political party.’
‘It depends what you mean by that. In their early phase, they were greatly influenced by a number of occult beliefs and organisations. There were movements like this everywhere: Germany, Austria, Hungary — even here in Romania. A lot of them were obsessed by the idea of a pure Aryan race, just like the Nazis themselves. Later, the party crushed as many of them as it could. But in the SS, there were two units that continued to devote time and resources to occult investigations.
‘Around 1900, two important ritual organisations were founded, the Ordo Templi Orientis and the more racist Ordo Novi Templi — the Order of the New Temple. Many years later, Burg Bernstein, Count Almásy’s castle which you nearly visited, became a centre for the Ordo Novi Templi. They regarded themselves as the descendants of the Templars, a heretical order of knights that was repressed by the Catholic Church in 1307. Some say the Templars possessed sacred relics such as the Holy Grail and the True Cross. You, I think, know better. But some occult-minded Nazis like SS Brigadeführer Karl Maria Wiligut went out to search for relics, including the Lance of Longinus, which they called the Spear of Destiny.’
Ethan took a sip of wine. The musky taste and the flickering of the candles brought back to him memories of Holy Communion in the church at Woodmancote. He had long ago given up on God and the dark mysteries of the Church. Yet now his life had been trammelled by godly weight.
‘What has this to do with Almásy?’ he asked.
‘Do you not see? Almásy and his brothers were adepts of the Ordo Novi Templi. They got to know Lanz von Liebenfels, an ex-monk who owned castles in Austria-Hungary, which he used for occult rituals. Some people call him the father of the Nazi movement. Some of the occult societies sent expeditions to different parts of the world to search for the origins of the pure Aryan race. One expedition went to Tibet, another to Nepal, one each to the Arctic and the Antarctic, to Neuschwabenland, where the Germans had established a very remote colony. But von Liebenfels and others also despatched expeditions to seek for the Grail and the Spear of Destiny.’
Ethan felt small fingers cross his scalp. Was this the connection he’d been looking for?
The priest smiled. His face seemed as though built from shadows, shadows through which his white flesh and green eyes shifted like smoke.
‘Almásy was the doyen of desert explorers. He knew the Egyptian and Libyan deserts like no one before or since. He travelled by camel, by jeep, by plane. The desert was his, it belonged to him, he possessed it the way a man possesses a woman, he made it his mistress. And it yielded up its secrets to him, it whispered sweet nothings in his ear, gave him all he ever wanted. It gave him caves painted with people swimming, breasting the waves of a sea that had long ago grown silent and dead, it gave him oases in an ocean of sand. But unlike what was shown in the film, he did not die, not then. He survived the war. British intelligence moved him to Trieste for a while, then to Rome, and finally to Burgenland, where he spent time in the castle, reading his occult texts, meeting with masters of ancient lore. Look, I know all this occult business is utterly ridiculous. I no more believe in theories of a hollow Earth than I do in their obscene notions of a master race. But such ideas have been powerful before, and they may become powerful again.