A DULL BUT SUDDEN PAIN semi-roused me; the sting of the second – it might really have been the third or fourth – had my eyes opening. I wasn’t happy at what was before me, so I closed them again and another slap, this one on the other side of my face, convinced me to keep them open. I had to blink them several times though, partly because the light hurt and partly because they couldn’t believe what they saw.
The light was everywhere, shining from the massive chandeliers in the ceiling and the low lamps set around the great lounge area. Yet more brightness flooded through the glass doors and windows of the riverside restaurant at the end of the lounge, as well as from the direction of the foyer and main entrance. For a moment I thought I must be dreaming, that the grand old hotel had returned to its former glory only in my unconscious mind; and then I took in the rotted corpses, many of them still seated or slumped in elegant but dusty chairs, while others lay on the carpeted floor, pushed aside with the furniture so that there was a clear space near the vast room’s centre. Blackshirts were still busy creating more space, pushing back low tables and easy chairs, upsetting chinaware and cake-stands, throwing more corpses into heaps near the mirrored walls, shifting those already on the floor with their boots, not caring if skulls crumbled and skeletal hands broke loose.
I looked up at the person who’d struck me and groaned when I saw his death’s eyes, the dried blood around their darkened lids, caked like biscuit crumbs in the lashes, the ulcerations and cyanotic discoloration of the man’s cheeks and jaw. He grinned down at me, exposing bleeding gums, and when I tried to strike out at him I found my wrists were tied to the cushioned arms of a high-backed seat, the kind of formally comfortable armchair in which patrons of the Savoy had once taken afternoon tea or pre-dinner drinks.
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.’
The half-naked man, who was settling onto the tablecloth on the floor, gazed up at him like an acolyte at a god.
‘He’ll die,’ I promised.
‘He’s prepared to do so. But really, Mr Hoke, aren’t you aware that even centuries ago the South American Incas regularly carried out blood transfusions with far more primitive instruments than we have, and, so history informs us, most occasions proved successful. All we need to do is make two small punctures in the correct veins and allow gravitation to do the rest.’
Wilhelm Stern was close enough to be easily heard. ‘But it was also outlawed in Europe in the seventeenth century because of the many deaths transfusions caused.’
I was glad of his intervention, but wondered if it was for my sake, or because he didn’t like the idea of being the next guinea pig.
‘Nobody knew about blood types in those days. To them, blood was blood and there were no differences,’ he reasoned. ‘Transfusions were successful only between people who, by chance, belonged to the same grouping. Mein Gott, they even used the blood from pigs and sheep at that time. Muriel – Miss Drake – you must make this man understand, you must explain that what he is about to try is impossible.’
‘But I’m not a doctor. How can I tell him what I don’t even know?’
Cissie’s eyes were wide and pleading. ‘You saw for yourself what happened at the sanatorium, you know how their experiments failed each time.’
‘We didn’t know anything at all! They wouldn’t even discuss individual cases with us, they kept us in the dark about everything.’
‘If different blood types could be mixed, then the doctors would have saved themselves!’ Cissie reasoned.
Hubble, irritated by the squabbling, smacked the side of my chair with his cane. He got our attention.
‘There is one thing I’m sure they didn’t try,’ he said in that creepy faraway voice of his. ‘They did not take all of the donor’s blood and transfer it into the recipient’s empty system.’
It was breathtaking in its flawed logic and now I knew he was completely insane. I wondered if his mental state had always been shaky, or if the disease itself was rotting his brain.
‘That’s ridiculous, you fucking lunatic!’ Couldn’t help it, had to make him aware of my considered opinion.
This time his cane bounced off the side of my skull. The blow was too weak to hurt much, and I had the satisfaction of seeing him stagger, only McGruder at his side preventing him going down all the way. A chair was quickly brought over, and when they’d settled him into it, facing me, about two yards away, I noticed that every part of him – his hands, his legs, shoulders, head – was trembling. His chest was heaving as he tried to regain his breath.
‘No, it is not ridiculous,’ he insisted between gasps, as if I were the lunatic. ‘The recipient’s blood will be slowly drained as blood from the donor will be slowly used to fill the veins.’
I laughed. Maybe it was hysteria, but I honestly appreciated the humour of his twisted reasoning. It was so outrageously and brilliantly simple.
‘You will kill both persons.’
For once I didn’t mind the ‘vill’. After all, Stern was speaking up for my benefit as well as his own. They’d kill me anyway, whether they carried out the transfusion or not, but I preferred a fast bullet to a leisurely bleeding.
‘Your man will have died from blood loss before his body will accept the new blood.’ Stern spoke quietly, authoritatively, a teacher explaining a difficult problem to a child. ‘Conflicting blood types will not even be the cause: you will kill this unfortunate man just as surely as if you had slit his throat with a knife.’
‘His blood will be replaced as quickly as it is lost!’
The shout set Hubble wheezing again and McGruder watched over him anxiously. The Blackshirt leader held a handkerchief to his mouth, his body doubled-up in the chair, his shoulders jerking as spasms ran through him. When he straightened and took the handkerchief away I could see it was specked with blood. He took in a long, deep breath and I heard a peculiar faint whistling sound from inside his chest. His eyes were blurred with dampness now, the lustre in them dimmed.
‘We’re wasting time,’ he said weakly. ‘Let’s get on with it.’
Someone grabbed my shoulders from behind and the goon who’d been rummaging around in the bag on the floor held up both ends of the rubber tubing, a stupid grin on his face.
‘Wait, wait a minute.’ I was out of laughter and getting more desperate by the moment. ‘Listen. There are only four of us with the right kind of blood to resist the disease, five counting the fink here.’ I nodded towards Muriel, but she wouldn’t even look at me. ‘Don’t you get it? Even if the transfusions did work, you could only save a handful of your people. The rest are gonna die.’
‘Ah, then you admit the transfusions could be successful?’ The notion seemed to please Hubble.
I shook my head violently. ‘Not a chance in hell. I’m just applying common sense.’
He smiled at me. Bared his yellowed teeth and smiled. ‘This first transfusion will be our test, and it will be successful. By our second or third attempt, the procedure will be perfected.’
I understood now why Hubble was prepared to wait: let any mistakes be made on the first couple of mugs, so that any problems would be ironed out by the time it got round to his turn. Maybe he wasn’t so crazy after all.
‘After that we will move out of the city into the suburbs and surrounding countryside where we will find others like you. Eventually every one of us will be saved.’ He barked the order, eager to proceed. ‘Attach the tube to him! Miss Drake, will you be so kind as to assist – I’m sure you must have learned something about transfusions during your stay at the sanatorium.’
I wasn’t sure of the expression I caught in her downcast eyes as she leaned over me. Was it fear, or plain old-fashioned misery? Was she beginning to regret double-crossing her friends already?
‘Listen to me,’ I whispered as she turned my wrist beneath the rope, exposing the veins of my forearm. Our heads were close. ‘Tell them it isn’t gonna work. Think of us, Muriel, think of Cissie. D’you want her to be killed?’
Her voice was low too. ‘She’s a Jew, isn’t she?’ she said.
My head straightened, knocking against the high back of the armchair. I don’t know why, I should’ve expected it, but I was shocked. Under that sweet veil of English genteelness beat the heart of a viper. And in the three days I’d known her, telling her of my folks, the reason I’d joined in the bloody war long before my own country had been forced to come off the fence, making love to her, sleeping with her, I’d never once suspected the hatred she nurtured for her fellow man, the prejudices that had twisted her soul so that she believed her allegiance lay with a Fascist bigot who had been prepared to betray his own country. And I realized she hadn’t concealed a thing. The plain truth was that none of our conversations had ever drawn close to the darker side of her nature. I hadn’t asked – and presumably neither had Cissie in all the time she’d known Muriel – her opinion of Jews, niggers, gypsies, of Adolf Hitler and his Master Race ideology, Fascism, Nazism, hadn’t even mentioned it. And nobody had asked her if she’d be prepared to turn in her friends to the people who meant to steal their blood. You see, she hadn’t lied. She just hadn’t been honest
And then I wondered again about the look I’d caught in her eyes. It was fear, not regret, I was sure of that now. So what did she have to fear? I suddenly had the answer.
‘You realize it’s gonna be your turn sooner or later, don’t you?’
I’d kept my voice low, and I took pleasure in seeing her hesitate for a split second. I watched her push the unacceptable truth away, her expression hardly changing, just that remoteness returning to her eyes, and I knew there was nothing more I could do. I raged inside as she stretched the skin of my lower left arm, pushing the muscles aside so she could locate a particular vein.
Tin buckets were being brought in by other Blackshirts; they placed them close to the man lying by my chair, while the bag-man drew out a scalpel.
‘One more question, Muriel,’ I said to delay the inevitable. ‘How did you find these people? How did you know where to look? All the years playing cat-and-mouse with these creeps and I’ve never known where they came from. If I’d had any idea where their HQ was I might have taken the battle to them.’
It was Hubble who answered for her and, despite his poor condition, he did it with some delight. ‘One man against a fortress? I hardly think so, my bumptious American friend. You see, while you had your palace, I had my castle.’ He wiped moisture from his lips with his blood-flecked handkerchief. ‘But Miss Drake merely used her common sense and returned to the place where she had first set eyes on us. The National Gallery is one of our control centres, you see – at least, it was in our efforts to capture you. Didn’t you realize that some of my men had followed your mongrel dog to the palace? How do you suppose we finally located you? Fully aware of just how elusive you could be, we had vehicles waiting at as many main road junctions as possible, all controlled from the great gallery at Trafalgar Square. Miss Drake found several of my soldiers still at that control point just ten minutes after leaving this hotel. After that it was only a matter of waiting for the right moment, when you were relaxed with a good meal and perhaps a little the worse for alcohol. The plan worked very well, wouldn’t you agree?’
I felt a sharp pain as Muriel drove the hollow needle into a vein. She put a metal clip over the rubber tubing as blood began to flow. The man on the floor suddenly shrieked as the bag-man cut into his wrist and held it over one of the buckets. Muriel released the clip and blood quickly filled the tubing to emerge in a thin stream from the point of the needle at the opposite end; confident no air bubbles would be carried into the recipient’s veins, she pushed the needle into his arm.
‘You’re murdering me, Muriel,’ I said quietly, but she just turned away.
‘You can’t do this to him!’ Cissie had struggled to her feet, but one of the guards caught her by the hair and pushed her down again. Old Albert Potter was outraged by that and lumbered up to defend her, shoving the Blackshirt away. Wilhelm Stern also decided it was time to do something about the situation and grabbed the nearest guard’s rifle, using it to lever himself off the floor. Another goon quickly stepped in, smashing his club hard against the back of Stern’s head; the German went down on one knee, his arms raised to ward off the next blow. Cissie wheeled round, despite the hold on her hair, and jammed her knee into her attacker’s groin. He yowled with pain as he let her go.
But it was over in seconds. The Blackshirts swarmed over them, clubbing them with sticks and guns, knocking them down and kicking them as they lay sprawled on the floor. And there was nothing I could do to help my friends. As much as I struggled, I couldn’t break free from the ropes that bound my wrists. But I could use my feet.
Muriel swiftly stepped aside as I kicked out and the man behind me, who had held my shoulders all this time, fought hard to pin me down. I dug my heels into the carpet, rocking the chair, more Blackshirts rushing towards me, pushing past Muriel, the big guy, McGruder, among them. My right hand gripped the end of the chair’s arm and, as I jammed my heels into the carpet I lifted, pushing backwards, the guard behind desperately trying to stop me. The armchair tilted, overbalanced, began to topple.
The guard did his best to hold it, but my legs were straightening, calves and thigh muscles straining. The first Blackshirt stumbled into me and his added weight sent the chair completely over, so that it fell backwards, tilting to one side because of the obstruction behind. We went down with a crash, landing on the half-naked man lying on the floor, and I felt something loosen with the jolt.
We lay there in an untidy heap, the man beneath the pile feebly trying to push us off. For a short while there was silence, as if everyone had been taken by surprise. My head was against bare flesh, my wrists still bound to the chair. I could see the tubing lying a few inches away, the steel needle missing, blood oozing from the open end. The Blackshirt on top of me was trying to disentangle himself, the reek of him and the one underneath me filling my nostrils.
I was almost ready to quit Sick as these clowns were, their numbers were overwhelming. My body sagged, giving in to pain, giving in to despair. This time we really were sunk.
Then I heard a familiar noise. A kind of distant rumbling.