Graham Masterton - Descendant

Corporal Little gave me a smile of growing understanding. “In that case, sir — we’d better double the watch on our rear ends, wouldn’t you say?”

“Go get the kit, will you?” I told him. Most of the time I couldn’t work out if he was a genius or an idiot savant.

The Kit was contained in a khaki tin box about the size of a briefcase. It was scratched and dented, but then we had been carrying it with us ever since we had landed in Normandy in June, and we had used it five times since then.

Corporal Little opened it up and together we inspected the contents. A large Bible, with a polished cover carved out of ash-wood and a silver crucifix mounted on the front. A large glass flask of holy oil, from St. Basil’s Romanian Orthodox church in New York. A pair of silver thumbscrews and a pair of silver toescrews. A silver compass, about five inches across, with a base that was filled with the dried petals of wild roses. A thirty-foot whip made of braided silver wire. A surgical saw. A small silver pot filled with black mustard seeds. Two small pots of paint, one white and one black.

I lifted out a roll of greasy chamois leather and unwrapped it. Inside were three iron nails, about nine inches long. They were black and corroded and each had been fashioned by hand. I had no proof that they were genuine, but if the price that the detachment had paid for them was anything to go by, they should have been. These were supposed to be the nails that had been pulled out of Christ’s wrists and ankles when he was taken down from the cross.

At the bottom of the tin box there was a circular mirror, made of highly polished silver, a large pair of dental forceps and a sculptor’s mallet. Hunting Screechers was always a combination of science, religion, common sense and magic, so you needed the apparatus that went with each. You also needed a willingness to believe that a human being can defy gravity.

“Running kind of low on garlic,” said Corporal Little, lifting up a bunch of papery-covered cloves. Frank came sniffing around, his pendulous jowls swaying. “See?” said Corporal Little. “Frank knows that we’re going out tonight, don’t you, boy?”

Frank gave one of those barks that can deafen you in one ear.

Just after six o’clock the deputy manager rang up to my room to say that Leo Coopman had been “unavoidably detained” on the northeast side of the city. However somebody in the lobby called Paul Hankar would be privileged to talk to me. I went down in the elevator alone and met him in the small dark bar at the back of the hotel.

Paul Hankar was a short, thickset man with a lumpy face like one of the peasants in a Brueghel painting, and rimless spectacles. He was wearing a black roll-neck sweater and a black suit with shiny elbows. I would have guessed that he was a schoolmaster in another life.

He stood up and shook hands. “ Aangename kennismaking , Colonel. Pleased to meet you.”

“Actually it’s captain. Captain James Falcon Junior, 101 Counterintelligence Detachment.”

We sat down and I offered him a cigarette. He took one and tapped it on his thumbnail. “I heard you were looking for some special information,” he said. His English was flat but barely accented.

“You think you can help me?” I asked him.

“It’s something we’ve been trying to keep quiet. Mainly because we didn’t want the Germans to know that we knew. And because we didn’t want to cause any panic. And because we didn’t want to look like fools, in case we were wrong.”

“Do you know a young woman called Ann De Wouters? She rents an apartment on Markgravestraat.”

Paul Hankar looked at me acutely. “I know the name, yes.”

“You can’t do her any harm by telling me about her. She was murdered last night.”

He flinched, as if I had reached across the table and tried to slap his cheek. But then he recovered himself and said, “I’m very shocked to hear that.”

“Her landlady said it was mensen van de nacht . Do you have any idea what she was talking about?”

A young boy in a long white apron came over to us and asked us what we wanted to drink. “What do you have?” asked Paul Hankar.

“Apple schnapps.”

“Anything else?”

The boy shook his head.

“In that case, we’ll have two apple schnapps.”

“One schnapps, one lemonade,” I corrected him. “I need to keep a clear head tonight, and I know what that goddamned schnapps is like. My corporal calls it ‘nuts-water.’ ”

Paul Hankar lit his cigarette and I noticed that his hand was trembling. “ Mensen van de nacht ?” he said, wryly. “That’s one explanation, if you believe in such things.”

“But you don’t?”

“I keep an open mind, Captain.”

“So tell me what’s been happening.”

He coughed and wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. “It started in August last year. We were having many successes against the Germans. We had infiltrated many of their administrative offices and also the power company and the water company. In July we were able to sink five barges on the Albert Canal which took them weeks to clear away.

“But then everything seemed to turn around. The Germans began to raid our hiding places and arrest our people by the dozen. Every time we planned to sabotage the docks, they would catch us before we had the chance to plant any explosives. They found our weapons and our wireless sets and our safe houses. It became clear to us that some of our own people must be betraying us.”

I didn’t say anything. Behind him, there was an oval window with crimson glass in it, and the branch of a tree was tapping against it as if some beggar were trying to catch our attention.

Paul Hankar said, “We noticed that some of our people were acting differently. They started to look ill, and to keep themselves to themselves. Also, they smelled . It’s very hard to describe. Not altogether unpleasant, but musty , like the inside of a closet in which a dead man’s clothes have been hanging.

“Gradually it became clear to us that every operation which was betrayed to the Germans was connected with one or more of these sick people.”

“What did you do about it?”

“Of course, we immediately isolated any of our people who showed any signs of illness or behaving in a strange way, and allowed them no contact with the rest of us. But even this didn’t stop the infection from spreading among us, and we couldn’t understand how this could happen. We have doctors who help us, but even they were mystified.

“It was Ann De Wouters who first discovered what the Germans had done. She had spent many months becoming close friends with a young German officer from the 136th Special Employment Division, who administered Antwerp during the occupation. When I say ‘close friends,’ you understand what I am saying to you.”

He paused, and took a deep breath, as if he were trying to stop himself from sounding too emotional.

“She is, she was , a very moral young woman. But her husband Jan was arrested and shot by the Germans in 1942, and I think she believed that this was the best way she could take her revenge.

“Anyway — one night this young German officer invited Ann to a party at Major General Stolberg-Stolberg’s house — he was the commanding officer of the 136th Special Employment Division. Some of the German officers got drunk and started boasting that they would soon exterminate all of the resistance in Antwerp.”

He turned around in his seat to make sure that nobody else was listening, and then he leaned forward and said, “They claimed they had brought in some kind of infection from Eastern Europe which would spread among the White Brigade and within six weeks it would kill us all.”