James Herbert - ‘48

My senses started to come together more rapidly and when I saw that my shirt had been ripped away to expose my left arm and shoulder, I began to suspect what I was in for. Panic hit me and I struggled to break free, the goon just leering over me, tickled by my efforts. I stopped when I noticed Stern, Cissie and Potter on their knees not far away, a bunch of Blackshirts covering them with an array of dissuaders – clubs and knives, as well as guns. And there came Hubble, just arriving, being helped down the carpeted stairway from the foyer by McGruder and another man, his decrepit body about ready to fail him. His smile when he saw me was no more than a tight grimace.

‘Aren’t the lights wonderful?’ he remarked as he approached, his red-flecked eyes gazing up at the ceiling. ‘It’s been so long since we’ve witnessed such splendour, so very long.’ He paused briefly to regard the kneeling prisoners, and he nodded as if counting their heads one by one before continuing his shambling journey towards me. Behind him, descending the stairs, was Muriel and there was a phoney kind of proudness to her, as though it took some effort to hold her head high and avoid the accusing eyes of her friend, Cissie. She passed by the kneeling prisoners without giving them a glance, even though Cissie called out to her.

Hubble came to a stop before me, both hands resting on his cane, fingers like blackened claws wrapped around its grip, the two aides standing close by in case he should falter. He had an old man’s tremble – and an old cadaver’s stench.

Still he peered around him, his bent torso twisting with each turn of his head, admiring the chandeliers before gazing across the huge lounge itself, his eyes half-closed as if to shut out the more gruesome elements.

‘If one didn’t look too closely it would seem the grand old days had returned to the Savoy,’ he mused. His speech had a high-pitched sibilance to it that was as thin and frail as his bones, and standing there in his loose black uniform, bent over his stick, flesh hanging from his scrawny neck like an empty sack, and with ‘carrion’ strewn all around him, he reminded me of an ancient buzzard. He went on, delighting himself rather than me: ‘The hotel’s own oil-fuelled generator was so easy to get running again – it took my men, the ones who know about these things, less than twenty minutes, even after all these years of disuse. I’m surprised you didn’t attempt to start it yourself, Mr Hoke; but then, I suppose the last thing you wanted to do was draw attention to yourself.’

Some of his words were hard to catch; it was almost as if he were speaking from another room. He deserved a reply and I gave him one.

‘You crazy bastard -’

He raised a shaky hand to shush me and, I have to admit, it did. What the hell could I tell him that deep down he didn’t already know?

Now he turned to me, his head leaning close, the odour making me want to gag. ‘It’s odd, isn’t it?’ he said between laboured breaths. ‘All this time chasing you and never once a moment for conversation between us.’

‘I didn’t think we had much to talk about,’ I replied, trying to avoid the foul air he was exhaling.

Muriel had joined us by now.

‘You happy, Muriel?’ I enquired, looking past Hubble. ‘Betraying your friends to these third-rate Nazis give you some kind of thrill? Like father, like daughter, I guess.’

‘My father would have gladly sacrificed his life for his country,’ she snapped back, her remoteness giving over to anger. ‘But he recognized the poison that was slowly crippling our land.’

‘Ah yeah, the Jewish poison, right?’ My head was beginning to clear, but that only made me more conscious of the throbbing pain in various parts of my body, results of the beating I’d received. Shit, I’d hardly got over the lumps and bruises from my last run-in with these people.

Hubble hadn’t liked my sneering tone. ‘Even England ’s abdicated king was aware of the Jewish threat, as were many others of influence. If our own government had not been in the pocket of Jew creditors and extortionists, and so fearful of the proletariat itself, which was forever whining, forever demanding, malcontents who despised the natural social order, then perhaps the world would have had a very different and glorious future.’

‘Oh Christ…’ I began to say.

‘The Jews murdered Christ, Mr Hoke.’

Some life had returned to those dead eyes of Hubble’s: they shone with a zealot’s passion.

‘The Duke of Windsor and others of nobility would gladly have aligned themselves with Adolf Hitler’s wondrous vision for mankind,’ he went on, warming to the sermon, his voice even notching up half a gear. ‘And they would not have been alone. Many leaders and eminent people – academics, industrialists, militarists, too – would have joined the crusade to purge our civilization of its insidious corruption and degenerative breeding, and indeed, discreet negotiations between ourselves and Hitler’s emissaries that would have benefited both Germany and the United Kingdom were well underway before that fool Chamberlain was tricked into declaring war on a nation that should have been our greatest ally.’

Something had occurred to me while he was ranting and once more I stared past him at Muriel.

‘Didn’t you tell us your own brothers fought against Fascism, one in the navy, the other in the airforce?’ I said to her.

‘It was their duty to defend their country.’ Some colour had returned to her pallid skin, brought there by her own anger. ‘It didn’t mean they agreed with our government’s misguided hostility towards Germany.’

There was probably some kind of screwed-up logic to her argument, but I wasn’t in the mood to figure it out ‘Just tell me why you turned us in to this bunch of madmen? I thought they, at least’ – I nodded towards the kneeling group – ‘were your friends.’

‘Isn’t it obvious?’ she replied, her rage controlled again, her coolness back. ‘Sir Max has to be saved. The irony is that I recognized him on the steps of the National Gallery when we helped you three days ago, but there was nothing I could do, everything was happening so fast.’

Out of the corner of my eye I saw an emaciated-looking man approaching, one of his cronies helping him remove his black shirt. His eyes were huge and kind of haunted-looking, as if the dark-smudged lids had shrunk around them.

‘The world, or what’s left of it, has to find a system again,’ Muriel was blabbering, ‘and we can only find the right kind through leaders like him, don’t you see that? Our lives are not as important as his.’

‘So offer him your blood,’ I suggested.

‘There’s no need when I can take yours,’ Hubble pointed out.

He shuffled aside to let the thin man through and I winced when I saw the ulcerations and bruises that covered the newcomer’s naked arms and upper body. His companions placed a small black case like a doctor’s bag (maybe it was a doctor’s bag) on the carpet by my feet and opened it As another Blackshirt spread a dingy tablecloth across the floor by the chair I was tied to, the one with the bag drew out a thin length of rubber tubing with what appeared to be flanged steel needles at either end, and some metal clips.

‘Don’t you understand?’ I appealed to Hubble. ‘It’s crazy. It won’t work. You have to be matched with the same blood type for it to do any good. You’ll just kill us both this way.’

Hubble turned back to me, that mad shine still there in his dark eyes. ‘But I have nothing to lose, Mr Hoke. If the transfusion fails, it only means a different sort of death.’ He might have chuckled then, or a small expulsion of blood might have gurgled in his throat, I couldn’t tell. ‘Besides,’ he went on, pointing his stick, ‘we will try the procedure on this noble volunteer first.’