Cloud Castles Read online

  I’d rented a top-line BMW sport, and this late the roads were clearing; I made good time out of town and onto the byroads. They led me a curling way out to the little village that was the only material remainder of the once-vast Amerningen estates, squatting dourly beneath the shadow of their baroquely decorated gates. The men at the gates were in tuxedos, too, but there was no mistaking them for either guests or waiters, impeccably polite as they were; they were uniformly huge, great square-headed Prussian grenadier types. You thought they’d clump, but they moved with easy athletic grace. One of them chatted lightly in good English while the others gave me and my invitation the unobtrusive once-over, checking me against some invisible list; then they threw open the gates with enough ceremony to make anyone overlook the delay. Soft glows awoke among the shrubbery as I drove by, then dimmed again behind me to leave the long drive in shadow.

  You might have expected a Bavarian baron’s family home to be a Gothic extravaganza of towers and battlements, or a beamy old rustic Schloss full of stags’ heads and open fires. Instead I pulled up under the porte-cochère of a wide, sleek stately home which must have been the latest fashion for an eighteenth-century gentleman of leisure, glazed dome in the roof and all. Evidently Lutz’s ancestors were smoothies, too. If there was an old castle anywhere around, it was probably an artistic ruin in the gardens. This place suggested sips of Cointreau more than steins of beer, though by the din that rolled out as the tall front door opened, there was some pretty active sipping going on right now. A tide of flunkeys spilled out, headed by a fifty-fiveish Juno who must have been quite something in her youth and, despite the severe business suit, was still well worth a look. She greeted me like a favourite nephew, introduced herself, with a conspiratorial smirk, as Inga-Lise, the Herr Baron’s major-domo; and assuring me that the Herr Baron was expecting the Herr Ratspräsident, meaning me, she whisked me gracefully off into the depths of the house.

  Beyond the hall double doors opened on to a massive ballroom. Once its colonnades might have echoed gentle waltzes and quadrilles; now it was a swirling blur of decorations and coloured lights, strewn with couches and cushions and sprawling, giggling bodies. The air was thick and smoky, aromatic tobacco tinged with pot and an unholy mixture of expensive perfume and wealthy sweat. It glowed and flickered in the path of an occasional laser, overspill from the disco in the promenade outside, flaring and coruscating on swinging earrings and iridescent gowns, tracing a hot insubstantial finger over bare shoulder blades and into cleavages. As we picked our way down the side of the hall, over bodies recumbent or entwined, a side-door crashed open amid shrieks and shouts. Bare feet pattered on the marble floor, and we were momentarily enveloped in a warm crush of half-clad bodies, the girls looking hastily dressed, most of them, though one or two were in their knickers, the men in shirts, shorts, socks, rumpled and hot and glassy-eyed. Someone thrust a hand under my nose and cracked a little pod; I smelt the sweetish tang of amyl nitrate and jerked away, among shrieks of laughter. Inga-Lise smiled at me approvingly. Then they were gone, piling down some steps that evidently led to an indoor pool, judging by the splashes and shrieks. One or two thought better of it, and vanished, giggling, through another door ahead; with a look of guileless naughtiness Inga-Lise let it swing back a crack to shed a little light on the goings-on within. The two of us exchanged glances and chuckled.

  ‘Quite a show. I hope they’re not going to overdo those poppers, or you might be sweeping out the odd corpse in the morning.’

  She gave me that half-teasing, approving look again. ‘The Herr Ratspräsident doesn’t indulge so?’

  ‘Oh, I can be pretty indulgent. But I go for different highs, real ones. I think they’ll keep me younger in the long run.’

  She smiled, and handed me a tulip glass of champagne from a passing servant’s tray. ‘The Herr Ratspräsident looks younger than I was led to expect, for one who achieves so much. That is a good thing in a man.’

  ‘So does the Herr Baron. You must look after him really well.’ She dimpled, but seriously. ‘Alas, he is too good at looking after himself.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it.’ I grinned. But I wondered whether that expression was just her unwieldy English, or whether she really was giving me a gentle warning to watch my back. Nice of her, but I didn’t need it. Right from our early dealings with the Baron von Amerningen I’d decided that for all the Pan-European guff he spouted, the interests he was most devoted to were his own, a man of powerful survival instincts. My good friend Dave had simply commented that it took one to know one. I hoped he was right.

  I was looking out for Lutz right now, but there was no sign of him among his guests, and Inga-Lise seemed to be leading me somewhere specific. We moved through the great house, tripping over minor orgies here and there, and towards what must be the back stairs. They led us up and overhead, two floors up, to where even that deafening disco was just a minor thudding in our feet. There were other doors ahead, not as large as the ballroom’s but heavy and businesslike. Servants lounging on tilted chairs before them sprang up as we approached – no, not servants exactly. More of the types that manned the gates, but where they had been fairly personable, these were plug-uglies, quite extraordinarily so, all bulbous noses and cauliflower ears, and a malevolent gleam in their piggy little eyes. Inga-Lise handed me over to them with a faintly apologetic smile, saying, ‘I go no further,’ and taking her leave with that impish smile again, a little forced. I heard her footsteps hurrying away down the corridor, and it struck me that it was almost as if she wanted to be back at the stairs before those doors opened.

  When they did, though, it was almost an anticlimax. After the glitz and groping among the beau monde downstairs this inner sanctum looked absurdly peaceful, a sedate gathering radiating nothing more than the buzz of quiet conversation. At second glance, though, it seemed a little stranger than that, because though the talk was quiet, the talkers weren’t. As the doors closed behind me and one of the servants exchanged my champagne glass, I found myself eye to eye with a pair of wild-eyed rock musician types, middle-aged unisex Goths in two-tone hair, black PVC and laces straining with midriff bulge. What was probably the woman rolled black-rimmed eyes at me and demanded, ‘All aboard for the Brock, eh?’ in strident middle-class Cockney. I gave a meaningless smile and drifted aside, only to see somebody tall and camel-like gazing vaguely around and wiping thumb and forefinger over his dangling little moustache. That had to be Lino Mortera, one of our Italian board members and about my least favourite; and there was fat little Pontoise, for whom I had a lot more time, gesticulating furiously to a couple of hefty harridans who would have had a promising career as Russian trawler skippers or Belsen guards. I didn’t want to meet either man right now, so I steered hastily for the far side of the room. I rubbed elbows with other business types I vaguely recognized from the fair, hard, intense women with the gloss of TV producers or executives and slightly less glossy ones who might be their academic counterparts. A tall rangy woman who looked like a successful German executive was standing by herself, so I breezed in on her with a borrowed conversational gambit. ‘Well, it’s all aboard for the Brock, isn’t it?’

  She turned a very strange look on me. ‘Verzeih’n – ah. Dem Brocken. Ja, dauert’s nicht lang.’ She sounded heavy, depressed; yet even as she said the word her eyes narrowed and her tongue traced her lips slightly. She looked as if she was going to shiver. The Brocken. Yes, it will not be long.

  Brocken! So that was what they were talking about! I knew what it was, all right; I’d been there. A mountain in the Harz range, the highest if I remembered rightly, along what had been the old East German frontier, a long way from here. But I seemed to remember the name from somewhere else as well, somewhere that set the shadows gathering in my mind.

  ‘Listen,’ I said urgently, ‘about the Br—’

  Abruptly she turned away, pressed her forehead to the wall, and brushed me away when I tried to intervene. I slid away in case she attracted attention, past
a couple of German longhairs arguing about performance art, plastic form and Guernica. I took refuge among a knot of relatively normal types, mostly overdone jetsetters like burnt-out graduates from the set downstairs, sweating copiously into their collars and discussing the shortcomings of their brokers and their own idiotic ideas of what the markets were doing. I was injecting a little basic economics when two women converged on me, lean, fortyish types with bright nervy eyes, wearing fantastically expensive-looking polyester jumpsuits and puffing at one bloated joint. One leaned over and said, ‘I know you,’ in breathy accented English. ‘You are the capitalist, nicht wahr? You know, Putzerl? From the article, the man who makes parcels think.’

  They weighed me up with bright sardonic eyes, and giggled. ‘What have you come to peddle, Herr Kapitalist?’ enquired the other.

  ‘Your ass?’ suggested the first, and they shrieked.

  ‘No,’ I countered coolly. ‘Yours.’ The listening men cheered.

  ‘S’ist’s nicht z’verkaufn! Is not for sale!’ protested the second. ‘I buy it all up since years ago!’

  ‘Show her yours,’ whooped the other. ‘She’s always buying, the dirty slut!’

  ‘What’s point? I see it later, anyhow! I watch out for you, Herr Peddler! I like you!’

  ‘As long as you are not Jewboy!’ the other put in. ‘Putzerl doesn’t like nasty snip-snippety Juden, does she, mmh?’

  ‘I see that too!’ squealed Putzerl, and they doubled up, coughing great clouds of pot. It smelt like expensive stuff, but it left a bitter taste on my tongue – hellish bitter.

  One of the men wrapped a meaty arm around my shoulder. ‘You watch those two, they breaks your balls for you! Break them,’ he persisted, ‘crr-acck!’ in case I hadn’t got the point. ‘Like my wife does to me. Like my goddamn kids. You wait till later. He tames ’em! Tcherno, he tames those two, I’ve seen them crawl, just crawl. You know what I’ve seen?’ He shook his head, slick with sweat, and I looked down into his eyes, bloodshot and dark, very dark. It was like looking down into pools of pure terror. ‘You know what I’ve seen?’ he repeated. ‘Liebe Gott, you know …’

  His arm slumped, and he sagged and turned away, shaking his head. The men around him were talking louder as he lurched through them, heading for a side-door. They were sweating, too, though it wasn’t unduly hot here and they didn’t seem to be drinking much; there were only a couple of waiters, elderly types, and their trays were seldom touched. There was a lot of pot in the air, though, and I began to feel a bit lightheaded myself. The tensions I’d sensed in that last exchange – or was it just the pot, just that wrongness that can infect a party, leaping from one head to another like lightning and warping the whole ambience? Had that happened here? But there was another kind of agitation, too, an uneasy, unhealthy thing that was almost excitement – the emotion of a group of people about to do something that’s illicit and irresistible in equal proportions. I remembered the college climbing club as we prepared to make a highly illegal bungee jump from a local bridge, all bravado and Buck’s Fizz while the perspiration trickled down our spines into our shorts. That kind of feeling. The difference was that these people were hardly bothering to conceal it from each other, as if they’d been through it all before, and had little to hide, except perhaps from themselves. I found myself wondering if I’d strayed into some sort of really peculiar perversion ring – but there was that accusation of neo-Nazism, and that mention of the Brocken. It was a well-known place, it had been like the Brandenburg Gate, a point of German partition. Could the name have been borrowed for some sort of neo-Nazi Bund? Only too likely; or it might mean nothing. Except that I had heard it somewhere else, all right, in a voice I didn’t care to remember.

  Take me back to the pines on the Brocken, where the dark powers meet …

  So said a very discontented Le Stryge; and my friend Jyp the Pilot grew pale at the mention.

  A low rumble startled me out of my dark memories. Not far away an inner door was being locked back, to let some bulky furniture be carried out of an inner room. I looked through, and saw that the room beyond was much larger than this one and its ceiling was the great glass dome. Men in their shirt-sleeves were bustling around, evidently preparing for something; they were clearing the place, rolling back the carpet, even. Surely this could have been done earlier, before people arrived; so why wasn’t it? Unless it was something secret, so secret that it could only be prepared under the cover of the party. The floor beneath looked like marble, sounded like it as they laid out jugs and bowls – no, vessels and ewers, fantastically ornate things of gilt or gold with an indefinable air of age. There was gold in the floor, too, in mosaic patterns inlaid into the marble, one great central shape that looked familiar. Only familiar wasn’t friendly, given some of the things I’d seen; where had I ever run into that? The Nazis, now, did they have any other symbols beside the swastika? But as I sidled closer, straining to make it out, I almost jumped out of my skin. A hand landed on my shoulder, a great flipper of a thing, and turned me irresistibly around. A pair of slightly bulging blue eyes stared down into mine, and the glitter of rage was sudden and sharp.

  ‘Stephen? Teufelschwanz, was machst du Verfluchter in diese Stelle?’

  ‘Well, hold on a minute, Lutz – you invited me, didn’t you?’

  The eyes wandered an instant, and then his tone was mild; but in men like Lutz mildness doesn’t come naturally. ‘Yes. Yes, of course, I am sorry! To the party, gewiss natürlich! Though I had given up hope of your arriving! But to this? I am sorry, Stephen, but this is a meeting of a particular – what is the word? Of a Lodge. A private one, that it was convenient to hold in conjunction with the assemblage below. How on earth did you come to be admitted?’

  ‘Fraülein Inga-Lise brought me here to find you, that’s how!’

  ‘Ah …’ His whole countenance changed. ‘She had no call to do that. The silly girl! She must have assumed, because you were arriving so late, that it was for this alone. Hmph!’ He huffed a moment, rubbed his hands, and looked at me slightly askance. ‘I will have to have a word with her. The fact is, I am a little annoyed. You and she between you have somewhat deflated a surprise I was hoping to prepare for you. Specially for you.’

  ‘For me?’

  ‘Why, yes. I was hoping that I could invite you – and please do not laugh! – to enter this very Lodge! Perhaps even this very night! And here you have forestalled me!’

  I drew a deep breath. Time to tread very carefully. ‘Lutz … that’s a real honour. And extremely kind of you. Only … well, perhaps it’s for the best. You know how often I’ve been invited to join the Masons? But I’ve always had to refuse. It’s a company tradition – no fear, no favour.’ I thought of my old boss Barry, never joining any of his beloved Jewish societies, but somehow I didn’t feel like mentioning that to Lutz. ‘We stop short at the Rotarians, more or less. So …’

  Lutz snorted good-humouredly, though his eyes still glittered. ‘You and that company of yours! There you are, you see, I knew I vould need time to tell you about us, as much as I’m allowed to. For this could be very important to you, Stephen. The Masons, that is a petty thing, a local thing. We also are related to Freemasonry, Stephen, but in the much older tradition of the continent. Much older and more powerful, descended from Lodges that numbered among their members Mozart and the Emperor Joseph II. We have long been accustomed to number men of power among us, the more enlightened men of their time. Governments have been made or toppled in our salons, kings overthrown, fortunes made and destroyed. In times of turbulence or war we offer a shelter, an understanding, a constant mutual help that goes beyond mere national boundaries.’ His voice sank. ‘And to those with the imagination to grasp it we offer a knowledge of the forces that truly underlie the world. I say no more of that for now, but it is there.’

  I was walking on eggs. ‘It sounds fascinating, but principle—’

  ‘You?’ he woofed. ‘You are old enough to know that principle is what you mak
e it. And principle is not everything with you, is it?’ He chuckled, and passed me another champagne glass. ‘Veuve Cliquot, and not for my noisy young friends downstairs to gulp. Though you know, Steve,’ he chuckled, and I thought he was going to dig me in the ribs, ‘we could show them a thing or two. We who work hard, we also play hard – I already know that is true of you! Those girls I’ve seen you with – uh? Well, after hours here …’

  He raised his eyebrows, making those pop eyes look round and impish. ‘You take my meaning?’

  I glanced around, and he gave a chortle. ‘Oh, not with this lot, no, not these old Katze! They are just along for the ride – verstehn? So gut. But I can promise you an experience that will turn you inside out, Herr Ratspräsident – inside out. There are girls, beautiful girls who – words fail me. It must be experienced.’

  Internally I winced, but I still didn’t want to offend him outright. I sought for an answer along the right lines, a gentle turndown that wouldn’t give him any excuse for immediate offence. ‘Lutz, I … I’m impressed as hell. But, on the whole, you know how it is? I prefer to roll my own.’

  He stared at me for an instant, then let loose a thunderous guffaw. ‘Jo, g’wiss, und wer soll denn den papier lecken, hah? And are you careful always with the filter-tips, hah-hah-hah? Well, I can respect that. But you must be careful, Stephen, lest you turn down knowledge. For nobody has enough of that.’

  ‘Believe me, I know. Maybe if you feel able to talk to me some more about it. Some other time, maybe. Right now I’m kind of tired, harder to persuade about anything …’

  ‘Aber natürlich. But it is getting late, and—’ He glanced around. The men in the next room were looking at us uncertainly; so were the guests. ‘You understand? If you do not join tonight …’

  ‘Of course I understand, I don’t want to get in anybody’s way.’

  ‘Fine, fine. Of course you may join the party below, no? Then I will see you out myself.’ He turned and loosed a blast of instructions to the others – not in German, it sounded more like Polish or south Russian. The men scurried back into the next room, and I saw several of the guests, or Lodge members or whatever they were, moving as if to help, with a growing sense of urgency. I caught one last glimpse of that complex inlaid floor, but at once Lutz put his arm to my shoulders and shepherded me out. We took a shorter way this time, down darkened stairs and past closed doors, avoiding the row below, but just as I thought I would be ushered out of a side-door, Lutz suddenly diverted us through the main hall. He stopped there to introduce me to one or two people, not very relevant ones, it seemed, and then scooped me away. My car was already waiting, motor running and lights on, and as I clambered in Lutz stood over me woofing unnecessary instructions for getting back to town. He seemed determined to take care of me, and stood waving after me as I pulled away across the gravel forecourt to the drive. Again the lights rode with me as I moved through the grounds – some sort of sensor mechanism, I guessed, so as not to ruin the night with glare, but it made me feel exposed. Which was ridiculous, but the hair under my collar crawled. As if I was being watched … as if something was following me among the shadows. I couldn’t shake it off. I touched the brake, glanced around.