`No,' said Gregory promptly. `We can do better than that. We'll hold a stance in the evening and invite the Blockfьhrer in to it. I will act as though I were putting you into a trance, you can mutter a few meaningless phrases of gibberish, then I'll pretend to interpret and announce your predictions. If only they are on the mark that will really put up our stock.'
Malacou willingly agreed and the sйance proved as successful as they could have hoped. Their fellow prisoners showed great interest and, although the Blockfьhrer regarded the performance with cynical amusement, he was obviously intrigued.
The sйance took place on September 10th. During it Gregory gave out a fuller account of Malacou's prediction. It concerned a great number of British parachutists being dropped too far behind the German lines for support from ground troops to reach them, so that they remained cut off and those of them who were not killed being forced to surrender.
Some days later the prediction was fulfilled by the failure of Montgomery’s rash use of airborne troops at Arnhem. Then Goebbels announced in vindictive triumph that after many weeks of desperate resistance the Poles in Warsaw had surrendered and that, as saboteurs, those who survived were to be shot.
As Gregory had foreseen, this double achievement of Malacou's made a great impression on all who knew of it, and S.S. men from all over the camp began to come to the hut in the evenings to have their fortunes told. But there was no reaction from the Commandant.
Meanwhile Gregory found that his new situation had both its advantages and disadvantages. He certainly fed better and lived in slightly greater comfort, but he found mixing cement and carrying hods of bricks for eleven hours a day so exhausting that he had difficulty in concentrating sufficiently in the evenings to do his best when reading hands.
Nevertheless, he drove himself to persevere with it and after a time became quite expert at reading character without having had any previous information from Malacou. He had, too, mastered the meaning of finer lines-little crosses, stars, squares, islands, offshoots and breaks-that indicated marriages, children, accidents, salaciousness, self-consciousness, a crooked mentality and other traits. On some points his subjects declared him to be wrong, but in the main they usually agreed that he was right about them; and he was interested to find that he could always do better with some guard or newcomer to the hut whom he had never previously seen than with a man whom he had come to know quite well and about whom he had formed an often erroneous impression from hearing what the man had said about himself.
With regard to the future, as a matter of principle both he and Malacou always endeavoured to cheer their subjects up by predicting their survival from the harsh life they led and better times ahead, with a safe return to wives who were remaining faithful to them and loved ones who had them constantly in their thoughts.
But one evening towards the middle of October Malacou took a very different line with one of the Capos. He told the man frankly that he was in grave danger of death by violence and, after obtaining from him his astrological numbers, that the third day hence could prove his fatal day unless he secured a release from duty. The man was one of the more brutal Capos and a cynic. He ignored the warning. On the third day one of the prisoners went mad, attacked him with a pickaxe and before he could protect himself had bashed in his skull.
As this prediction had been made in the hearing of two S.S. men who had come to have their fortunes told, it enormously enhanced Malacou's reputation as a seer; and from this episode there arose two developments.
It so happened that the man who had gone off his head was a bricklayer. Next morning he had been first flogged then hung from a portable gibbet in front of the whole section after roll call, after which Gregory had been given a trowel and ordered to take the place on the building site of the dead man. Having spent over three weeks as a labourer there Gregory had had ample opportunity to watch the bricklayers at work so he found no difficulty in putting up an adequate performance, and he was extremely thankful for being given this more skilled but much lighter task. Then, in the afternoon three days later, the Camp Commandant sent for Malacou.
That evening the occultist gave Gregory an account of the meeting. The Commandant was Oberfьhrer Loehritz, a gutterbred brute with a rat-trap mouth and eyes like stones, who had forced his way up to the rank of an S.S. Brigadier by the ruthlessness with which, under Heydrich, he had cleaned up the Jews and subversive elements in Czechoslovakia. Although the slave-workers were reduced by semi-starvation to a general state of servile obedience, at times small groups of them, driven to desperation, mutinied. Having learned of the warning Malacou had given the murdered Capo, it had occurred to Loehritz that the occultist might be made use of to give him warning of such outbreaks.
Malacou had replied that, though he might be able to give warning should a large-scale mutiny be contemplated, it would be next to impossible, owing to the vast number of prisoners in the camp, to predict attacks on individual Capos, which in most cases arose spontaneously as a result of some special piece of brutality. He had then offered to read the Commandant's hand.
Loehritz had consented and had been very impressed by Malacou's insight into his past; but the occultist had cunningly said that he could tell little about the Oberfьhrer’s future unless he drew his horoscope, and for that he would need sidereal tables. Like most primitive types, the Commandant believed in every sort of superstition and ways of attempting to foretell the future; so he had agreed to send for several works on astrology, a list of which Malacou had given him.
A week later Loehritz sent for Malacou again and gave him the books. Malacou then said that he would need time off to prepare the horoscope and that as he was not good at figures he wanted Gregory as his assistant, to check his calculations. This led to their being allowed to remain in the hut during the afternoons; so they had achieved their first objective of getting an easier life for themselves. But Malacou did not give much time to drawing the horoscope, and they employed themselves on a new suggestion made by Gregory.
His idea was that, during their dual act when Malacou pretended to go into a trance, it would be a great advantage if he could supplement the thoughts he conveyed by, instead of muttering gibberish, giving straight tips in Turkish. Malacou agreed that this would be a big help; so during the week they were supposed to be working on the horoscope they spent most of the time in Gregory memorizing certain Turkish phrases.
Early in November Malacou reported the horoscope to be ready and spent an afternoon explaining it to the Commandant. Now that winter was about to set in it appeared certain that the war would go on into the spring and this was confirmed by further astral calculations that Malacou had been able to make after receiving the astrological textbooks. He told Loehritz this and that he would not be Commandant at Sachsenhausen when the war ended but would soon be given another post. This was in accordance with the horoscope but he did not add that Loehritz would be sacked from Sachsenhausen and hanged for his brutalities in the following August. Instead, as Himmler was the Commandant's Chief, he predicted that the Reichsfьhrer would succeed Hitler and that after a period of difficulty, which should not last more than three months, Loehritz would be given an excellent job under Himmler supervising the return of displaced persons to their own countries.