Astronomy(17)
Carl Leder looked at Shrieve in an accusing way. “I will if he’s the one who is going.”
This was a stipulation Shrieve readily agreed to. Who knows, he may have been quite sincere. Leder wrote a series of words on a sheet of legal paper. He handed it to Shrieve.
“Is this Das Unternehmen?” Shrieve asked.
Leder said nothing to Shrieve, but the alarm in his eyes said plenty.
To Susan, he said, “Whatever I worked on during the war, it is all finished now. Do you understand? It is all finished now. Everyone is dead.”
“You’re afraid, Carl. If it is all finished, then why are you so afraid?”
She nodded down at his cigarette. The cherry at the end was an oscilloscope that measured the tremor in Leder’s arm. Right now, it was pegging off the meter.
Leder looked uneasy. He mashed it out on the corner of his nightstand, as if burying the evidence of a crime. “I have told your Army investigators all about the literary group. We turned all of our notes over to Reichsführer Himmler. You must have them.”
“There are several tons of notes recovered from the ‘Reichsführer Himmler for Your Eyes Only’ vaults,” Susan said. “We’ll be going through this stuff into the 1970s. Why don’t you help us out?”
Leder became alarmed. His eyes came back from the door.
“Who is going through it? You are?”
“We have people. Archivists.”
“Watch them. Keep them unarmed. Keep them away from young children. Schlegel had such a beautiful daughter. She made me a card for my birthday. She drew a picture of the Führer wishing a happy birthday to Carl Leder.”
His lip trembled even as he smiled.
“Dr. Leder.” She leaned close. Establish rapport, she told herself. Let him smell the perfume. She dug her last Marlboro out of her purse, lit it for him.
Leder noted the red filter. “To hide the lipstick,” he guessed. “You Americans.” He shook his head in fond amazement.
“Dr. Leder,” she said. “We need your help. This is what I risked my life to bring you out for.”
Leder lowered his eyes. “I heard you were arrested in Berlin,” he said. “I heard it went badly for you.”
“I—” She felt the color rise in her cheeks. “Let’s never mind about that now,” she said. She noticed Shrieve was watching her out of the corner of his eye. Dale Bogen was studiously looking away.
“Tell me about your work with the Sparrow Group,” Shrieve said. “Tell me what you did for Das Unternehmen.”
And this time Leder needed no translation from Susan.
* * *
“There were three of us. Myself, Otto Bülle, who lectured in ancient Near Eastern languages, and Albert Schlegel, a professor of Indo-European root languages.
“We were brought together at the order of Reichsführer Himmler to translate an early Kufic Arabic text of a rather common pedigree. I remember Schlegel being utterly contemptuous of the task. We were all of the opinion this was work for a graduate student.”
Leder turned away to laugh. “Such arrogance! I marvel at it now. Our only excuse for the tragedy that followed was our ignorance. We were scholars, not sorcerers. How could we know what we risked to translate the Necronomicon into modern German?”
Shrieve put down his notepad. Necronomicon. That rarest and most cursed of books, written by a mad Arab sorcerer, described strange, godlike monsters: Azathoth, mindless churning chaos at the center of the universe; its night-black avatar Nyarlathotep; Yog Sothoth, which existed beyond time and space. “You translated the Necronomicon? To what purpose?”
“Spells, summonations. Evocations. They thought they could control the powers of that cursed book.”
“Himmler was looking through the Necronomicon for weapons? Something to turn the war around?”
“The things in that book went beyond any imaginable definition of warfare. Even in the despair at the very end, we knew this went beyond anything that a sane man would use as a weapon.”
“Did you complete the translation?”
“No. Not entirely. We encountered problems.”
“You said it was early Arabic,” Susan pointed out. “What sort of problems would you have with that?”
“The translation was simple work. It was the material itself that proved unbearable—the uses to which a human body can be put, the hungers of certain entities we might meet. It began to play on our minds.
“I knew we were in trouble. Otto Bülle asked me three times to be excused from the project. I had to refuse him. The day after our last discussion, I received a box, the size of box you would put cuff links in.”