If only he could do something!
One final act to redeem his pride and—yes—his manhood. One last gesture to give meaning to his death.
Something!
Anything!
But all he could do was hang and sway and wait to be found.
Cuza looked up as a grating sound filled the room. The section of the wall that led into the base of the tower was swinging open. When it stopped moving, Molasar's voice came from the darkness beyond.
"All is ready."
At last! The wait had been almost unbearable. As the hours had edged by, Cuza had almost given up on seeing Molasar again tonight. Never had he been a patient man, but at no time could he remember being so consumed by an urgency such as he had known tonight. He had tried to distract himself by dredging up worries about how Magda was faring after that blow to the head ... it was no use. The coming destruction of "Lord Hitler" banished all other considerations from his mind. Cuza had paced the length, breadth, and perimeters of both rooms again and again, obsessed by his fierce longing to get on with it and yet unable to do a thing until word came from Molasar.
And now Molasar was here. As Cuza ducked through the opening, leaving his wheelchair behind forever, he felt a cold metal cylinder pressed against the bare skin of his palm.
"What—?" It was a flashlight.
"You will need this."
Cuza switched the flashlight on. It was German Army issue. The lens was cracked. He wondered who—
"Follow me."
Molasar surefootedly led the way down the winding steps that clung to the inner surface of the tower wall. He did not seem to need any light to find his way. Cuza did. He stayed close behind Molasar, keeping the flashlight beam trained on the steps before him. He wished he could take a moment to look around. For a long time, he had desperately wanted to explore the base of the tower and until now had had to do so vicariously through Magda. But there was no time to drink in the details. When all this was over he promised himself to return here and do a thorough inspection on his own.
After a while they came to a narrow opening in the wall. He followed Molasar through and found himself in the subcellar. Molasar quickened his pace and Cuza had to strain to keep up. But he voiced no complaint, so thankful was he to be able to walk at all, to brave the cold without his hands losing their circulation or his arthritic joints seizing up on him. He was actually working up a sweat! Wonderful!
Off to his right he saw light filtering down the stairway up to the cellar. He flashed his lamp to the left. The corpses were gone. The Germans must have shipped them out. Strange, their leaving the shrouds in a pile there.
Over the sound of his hurried footsteps Cuza began to hear another noise. A faint scraping. As he followed Molasar out of the large cavern that made up the sub-cellar and into a narrower, tunnellike passage, the sound became progressively louder. He trailed Molasar through various turns until, after one particularly sharp left turn, Molasar stopped and beckoned Cuza to his side. The scraping sound was loud, echoing all about them.
"Prepare yourself," Molasar said, his expression unreadable. "I have made certain use of the remains of the dead soldiers. What you see next may offend you, but it was necessary to retrieve my talisman. I could have found another way, but this was convenient ... and fitting."
Cuza doubted there was much Molasar could do with the bodies of German soldiers that would truly offend him.
He then followed him into a large hemispherical chamber with a roof of icy living rock and a dirt floor. A deep excavation had been sunk into the middle of that floor. And still the scraping, louder. Where was it coming from? Cuza looked about, the beam from his flashlight reflecting off the glistening walls and ceiling, diffusing light throughout the chamber.
He noticed movement near his feet and all around the periphery of the excavation. Small movements. He gasped—rats! Hundreds of rats surrounded the pit, squirming and jostling one another, agitated ... expectant...
Cuza saw something much larger than a rat crawling up the wall of the excavation. He stepped forward and pointed the flashlight directly into the pit—and almost dropped it. It was like looking into one of the outer rings of Hell. Feeling suddenly weak, he lurched away from the edge and pressed his shoulder against the nearest wall to keep from toppling over. He closed his eyes and panted like a dog on a stifling August day, trying to calm himself, trying to hold down his rising gorge, trying to accept what he had seen.
There were dead men in the pit, ten of them, all in German uniforms of either gray or black, all moving about—even the one without the head!
Cuza opened his eyes again. In the hellish half-light that suffused the chamber he watched one of the corpses crawl crablike up the side of the pit and throw an armful of dirt over the far edge, then slide back down to the bottom.
Cuza pushed himself away from the wall and staggered to the edge for another look.
They appeared not to need their eyes, for they never looked at their hands as they dug in the cold hard earth. Their dead joints moved stiffly, awkwardly, as if resisting the power that impelled them, yet they worked tirelessly, in utter silence, surprisingly efficient despite their ataxic movements. The scuffling and shuffling of their boots, the scraping of their bare hands on the near-frozen soil as they deepened and widened the excavation ... the noise rose and echoed off the walls and ceiling of the chamber, eerily amplified.
Suddenly, the noise stopped, gone as if it had never been. They had all halted their movements and now stood perfectly still.
Molasar spoke beside him. "My talisman lies buried beneath the last few inches of soil. You must remove it from the earth."
"Can't they—?" Cuza's stomach turned at the thought of going down there.
"They are too clumsy."
Looking pleadingly at Molasar, he asked, "Couldn't you unearth it yourself? I'll take it anywhere you want me to after that."
Molasar's eyes blazed with impatience. "It is part of your task! A simple one! With so much at stake do you balk now at dirtying your hands?"
"No! No, of course not! It's just..." He glanced again at the corpses.
Molasar followed his gaze. Although he said nothing, made no signal, the corpses began to move, turning simultaneously and crawling out of the pit. When they were all out, they stood in a ring along its edge. The rats crawled around and over their feet. Molasar's eyes swung back to Cuza.
Without waiting to be told again, Cuza eased himself over the edge and slid along the damp dirt to the bottom. He balanced the flashlight on a rock and began to scrape away the loose earth at the nadir point of the conical pit. The cold and the filth didn't bother his hands. After the initial revulsion at digging in the same spot as the corpses, he found he actually enjoyed being able to work with his hands again, even at so menial a task as this. And he owed it all to Molasar. It was good to sink his fingers into the earth and feel the soil come away in chunks. It exhilarated him and he increased his pace, working feverishly.
His hands soon contacted something other than dirt. He pulled at it and unearthed a square packet, perhaps a foot long on each side and a few inches thick. And heavy—very heavy. He pulled off the half-rotted cloth wrapper and then unfolded the coarse fabric that made up the inner packing.
Something bright, metallic, and heavy lay within. Cuza caught his breath—at first he thought it was a cross. But that couldn't be. It was an almost-cross, designed along the same eccentric lines as the thousands laid into the walls of the keep. Yet none of those could compare with this one. For here was the original, an inch thick all around, the template on which all the others had been modeled. The upright was rounded, almost cylindrical and, except for a deep slot in its top, appeared to be of solid gold. The crosspiece looked like silver. He studied it briefly through the lower lenses of his bifocals but could find no designs or inscriptions.