'Oh, my dear.' Mary embraced her. 'It's so good to meet you. Gary told me all about you in his mail.'
'All good, I hope.' She plucked at Gary's lapel. 'Though he didn't listen to me about this suit. A bit spiwy, don't you think?'
More flashbulbs popped as they talked. Gary Wooler, American veteran of the invasion, was now the poster boy of Himmler's crackpot breeding programme. It had all been perfect, Mary thought, immaculately set up by MI-14 and the resistance – a trap of publicity and achievement this vain, ambitious Josef Trojan couldn't resist falling into.
But Julia Fiveash was staring intently at them, her eyes narrow, her face expressionless. Trojan might have taken the bait, Mary reminded herself, but he wasn't the only player here.
Delicately Trojan approached them. 'I am delighted to have been the agent of this long overdue reunion,' he said. 'But now I must ask you to come with me. Mrs Wooler, I have a number of scholars eager to discuss with you their work on the implications for the medieval age of the Norman Conquest – I know that is an interest of yours. Many of our scholars are English, you know – indeed many have come into the protectorate specifically to work at this institute! And we have good links with several English universities, including both Oxford and Cambridge. As you remarked, there are bonds of scholarship which, eternal, transcend the petty political squabbles of the day. And then you must let me treat you to lunch…'
He walked on with Mary, with George, Doris and Gary following, the rest of the German staff and the patient photographers, on deeper into the bowels of his brand-new college, their footsteps echoing on the granite floor tiles.
XXVI
The space under the floor was only about three feet deep, and full of water and gas pipes and electricity cables. Gary had to climb through this jungle from joist to joist, ducking past the pipes and cables, fearful that at any moment he would put his foot through the basement ceiling under him and ruin everything.
Doris seemed able to squirm through it all with remarkable ease. By the light of the torch strapped to his head, Gary saw her wriggling away ahead of him, her legs bare save for her stockings, her skirt tucked up without self-consciousness into her belt. She wasn't even getting her white outfit dirty. 'Come on, keep up,' she whispered back at him.
'I haven't had your training.'
'What about all that tunnelling out of the POW camp?'
'That was for the English,' he said. 'The public school types. Anyhow the Germans kept a close eye on me. A Prominente, remember.'
'What a rotten excuse. We're close, I think.'
It hadn't been hard to slip away from his mother's group and out of sight of the various German guards. Once they were alone, in a kind of reading room, Doris had shown him the diagram the resistance spies had assembled of this Ahnenerbe facility. They knew that Ben was being held in a kind of laboratory tucked away in the basement. 'Of course it would be the basement,' Gary had remarked. 'Nazis like basements.' It had taken Doris only minutes to lift the carpet, prise up a couple of floorboards, and slip down into the space between the ground level floor and the basement ceiling.
'Here.' She came to a stop. With care she unscrewed a light fitting, pulled it back, and peered through the hole in the ceiling plaster. 'Bingo. And there's nobody around. Probably all watching the show upstairs…' She took a knife from under her skirt and briskly cut a circle in the plaster, a couple of feet across. She looked down again. 'Only six or eight feet. Piece of cake.' She grabbed a wooden joist and swung her feet down through the hole. She dangled by her arms from the joist. Then she let go and dropped, bending her legs so she landed without impact, and virtually no noise.
Gary came to the hole. The room below was brightly lit. He glimpsed mechanical equipment, a glass wall. Doris stood directly beneath him. He could see plaster dust on her hair. 'Now you.'
He landed heavily, with a noisy clatter, and nearly stumbled over.
'Idiot,' she hissed.
'Show-off.' He straightened up, brushing the dust from his suit jacket, and looked around. The room was a box, brightly lit, the walls whitewashed. The central area was walled off by glass, a room within a room. There were desks, work tables and chairs, mounds of paper heaped up – and, incongruously, a big bookcase that contained mouldering history titles. There was a hum of fans; the air was dry, cool.
But the place was dominated by a bank of mechanical gadgetry that covered one wall, side to side, floor to ceiling. It was as he imagined a telephone exchange might be, all relays and wires in an aluminium frame.
Doris asked softly, 'Is this Ben?'
He whirled around. She was looking into the glass-walled inner chamber. There was nothing much in there but a bed, he saw, with white sheets, and a table and chair and a washbasin, a piss-pot on the floor. And on the bed, over the sheets, lay a man in striped prison pyjamas, small, hunched over with his legs up by his belly, his arms folded, mussed black hair dark against the pillow. He wore a kind of cap of silvery metal, connected by the wires to a metal cabinet beside the bed. He was bathed in brilliant white light.
Gary hammered on the glass wall. 'Ben. Ben!'
The sleeping figure stirred resentfully, mumbling.
'Keep it down, for God's sake. Let's get him out of there.' The glass box had a door, a lock embedded in its transparent structure. Doris produced another tool, like a fine screwdriver, and began to work at the lock.
At last Ben opened an eye. When he saw Gary, he lurched up to a sitting position. His shirt hung open, showing his belly. He got out of bed and ran to the glass wall. The metal cap was ripped off his head by the trailing wires. His crown had been shaved, like a monk's tonsure, and his scalp was prickled by an array of crimson dots. He stood there flattened against the glass, his mouth open. 'You came for me.'
Gary was inches away, but could not touch him. 'I told you I would, didn't I? It's OK, Ben. We'll get you out of this fucking zoo. Christ, I think they've got him drugged up. His eyes-'
'Gary! Gary!'
Doris still worked at the lock. 'Try to keep him quiet.'
Gary made calming motions with his hands. 'Ben, it's OK, just take it easy.'
The door swung back soundlessly, and Doris, tucking away her lock-picking tool, hurried into the glass room. When Doris reached for him Ben flinched back, hammering his head on the glass wall. 'Christ,' Doris said. 'Gary, get in here, for God's sake.'
Gary pushed past Doris. Ben threw himself at him. 'Gary, oh my word, you came, I thought I would never, I thought…' He buried his face in Gary's chest.
Gary wrapped his arms around him. Ben felt almost podgy, with fat over his ribs and belly. 'They've been feeding you up. Christ, what have they done to you?'
Ben looked up, his eyes glazed. 'It's what they've done with me… Drugged up, asleep most of the time. Dreaming. Past and future, past and future. We're a bridge across time, a computing machine and my poor wandering psyche. You don't want to know, Gary, I mean it. Although your mother knows, I think, she might understand by now.'
'Never mind that,' Doris hissed. 'Come on. Out.'
Ben didn't want to let go of Gary, but they persuaded him to grab Gary's arm so that the two of them could walk, awkwardly, with Doris's help.