The Demi-Monde: Winter (34 page)

Vanka took Dabrowski’s hand. ‘Pleased to meet you, Major. I am Colonel Vanka Maykov, late of the Fifth Revolutionary Regiment of Foot. And this is my friend and PsyChick, Miss Ella Thomas.’ The Shade, this Ella Thomas, offered her hand and Trixie was quite amazed to see Dabrowski take it without even the slightest hesitation. Presumably being brought up in the Ghetto deadened a gentleman’s sensibilities to matters of racial etiquette, that is if a Pole like Dabrowski could ever be truly regarded as a ‘gentleman’.

Indeed, such was her amazement that before she quite knew what she was doing she had also shaken the Shade’s hand. She masked a shudder.

Dabrowski looked at the Shade cautiously. ‘If you don’t mind me asking, Miss Thomas, just what part of the Demi-Monde are you from? I don’t seem to recognise your accent. It doesn’t sound NoirVillian.’

Without turning away from her study of the nightscape flashing by outside the steamer’s windows, Norma gave a sardonic laugh. ‘Yeah, Miss Ella Thomas, why don’t you tell them where you’re really from? That should raise a laugh.’

With a despairing sigh the Shade answered. ‘Like Norma, I’m from the Real World, from what you call the Spirit World.’

‘You’re a Daemon!’ gasped an astonished Vanka. ‘So that’s why you’re such a good medium. Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I’m sorry, Vanka, but it’s hardly something I could drop lightly into the conversation, now is it? If you’d known I was a Daemon, you’d never have hired me.’

Trixie was astonished. A few days ago she had been firmly of
the RaTionalist belief that there were no such things as Daemons and now she seemed to be surrounded by the bloody things.

‘So let me get this straight,’ said an equally bemused-looking Dabrowski, as his eyes danced back and forth between the Shade and Norma Williams, ‘you two are both Daemons.’

‘Correct,’ said Norma, ‘although I’m not big on being called a “Daemon”.’

‘Then what are you doing here in the Demi-Monde?’

The Daemons looked at one another, and reluctantly Norma gave an answer. ‘Ella’s here to help me get back home, to get back to the Real World. I was lured here by Aleister Crowley and Aaliz Heydrich.’

‘Why?’ asked Vanka, who still seemed to be reeling from the revelation of his PsyChick’s Daemonhood.

Norma sighed. ‘It’s a long and difficult story. Let’s just say that I’m the daughter of someone very important in the Real World and Heydrich believed that by having me brought here to the Demi-Monde, he could exert some control over my father. It’s a simple blackmail scam.’

‘It would appear from what I heard this afternoon,’ added Dabrowski, ‘that there was some danger of the Daemons “pulling the plug”, as Miss Williams called it, on the DemiMonde, of destroying our world. Heydrich had Miss Williams brought here as a hostage to prevent this happening.’

Norma shook her head vigorously and looked imploringly around the little group. ‘Look … guys … there’s no chance of that. I can guarantee that no one is pulling the plug on this little holiday haven of yours. No one in the Real World wants to harm the Demi-Monde … no one wants to shut it down …’

Dabrowski wasn’t so easily convinced. ‘I think it might be
better to keep you close, Miss Williams, until we establish the truth of that last statement.’

‘Guys … it’s imperative I get out of the Demi-Monde. Heydrich wants my place in the Real World to be taken by his daughter.’

Now it was the Shade’s turn to be shocked. ‘Heydrich’s going to substitute his daughter for you in the Real World? But why?’

Norma gave a rueful smile. ‘Heydrich’s sentient. He knows all about his previous existence in the Real World. He wants to get back there, to finish what the Nazis started eighty or so years ago.’

‘Jesus, I thought that bastard looked at me sideways when he saw me dancing tonight. He must have recognised me.’

For a minute or two everyone in the steamer’s cabin fell quiet, each of them lost in their own thoughts. It was Vanka who broke the silence. ‘Okay,’ he said wearily, ‘I’m getting a little confused here, but I have a suspicion that we might be missing the point. Surely the important thing, right now, is for us to avoid being captured by the Checkya. Call me a man of limited ambition but all I’m currently interested in is making sure Beria doesn’t have the opportunity to play Billy the Butcher on my body. So can we forget about all this nonsense about “portals” and “Dupes” and suchlike, and just concentrate on getting safely to the Ghetto?’

‘But I’ve got to get to NoirVille,’ persisted Norma.

‘You should listen to Vanka, Norma,’ the Shade said. ‘As of now we haven’t a prayer of getting to NoirVille on our own. I reckon our only hope of surviving will be to haul ass to the Warsaw Ghetto and then make a move to NoirVille when the heat has died down.’

Norma appeared less than happy with what her fellow Daemon was saying, but any further protests were silenced
when Wysochi turned around and addressed Dabrowski. ‘Looks like the Checkya have barricaded the road ‘bout a half-mile ahead, Sir. It might be a good time to start walking.’

The journey to the Warsaw Ghetto was one that Ella would rather forget. It was snowing heavily and without Vanka’s coat she would have frozen to death long before they got to the Rhine. As it was, the series of heart-stopping dodges and scuttles out of London and through the backstreets of Berlin that Vanka deemed necessary to throw off the Checkya was enough to leave her tired, cold and very, very frightened.

All the euphoria of actually pulling off the rescue had long since dissipated, now all she wanted was to get somewhere warm and preferably away from the ungrateful bitch limping and whining along behind her. Norma Williams had turned out to be a world-class complainer.

As Dabrowski had suspected, semaphore messages had already alerted the Checkya to be on the lookout for the escapees so when they finally got to the Oberbaum Bridge – the bridge that spanned the Rhine and linked Warsaw and Berlin – they found that it had been sealed off by the SS. No one was leaving the Berlin Sector for Warsaw without their papers being very carefully scrutinised. And Vanka pronounced the SS-Ordo Templi Aryanis to be ‘unbribable’.

They made it across the river in a boat rowed by a man who valued money more than his life. It was a scary, nerve-racking twenty minutes spent edging across the Rhine shrouded in the shadows cast by the bridge, sneaking in and out of the lumps of ice drifting along the near-frozen river and thanking the Spirits that the snowstorm that was blanketing the Demi-Monde had become even heavier. It was an unpleasant boat ride but, thankfully, they made it.

Once on the Warsaw side of the river, Dabrowski led his small band through the narrow, crowded streets to an inn standing close to the docks. Dabrowski seemed to be well known there and his appearance, with his bedraggled companions in tow, warranted not even a raised eyebrow from the landlord. Without a word of enquiry he led the six of them to a table by the fire, then bustled around organising the serving of a very palatable soup whilst simultaneously sending his maids scurrying off to make rooms ready.

Supper over, Ella sat warming herself by the fire and trying to make sense of what was happening. Considering that only a few days before all she had had to worry about had been paying the rent and scratching up enough money to put herself through college, the change was startling. Startling … but surprisingly stimulating.

Oh, it might be uncomfortable and dangerous in the DemiMonde but for the first time her life could be described as exciting. Loath as Ella was to admit it, she was actually enjoying the adventure of it all. Okay, so Norma Williams was a pain in the ass, but other than that …

She caught sight of Vanka as he strode across the bar, three large tankards of Solution in his hands. Yes, there were things that more than compensated for Norma Williams’s incessant moaning, Vanka Maykov being the best of them. The odd thing about Vanka was that though she knew he was a rogue and a rascal, she liked him. He made her laugh and there hadn’t been many men in Ella’s drab little life who had done that.

But he was just a Dupe. And a Dupe who since he had found out that she was a Daemon had become just a little distant, though he had at least muttered to her that Daemon or no, she was still the best-looking girl in all of the ForthRight.

She gave a rueful smile. Wasn’t life a bitch: Vanka wasn’t
nervous about her because of her colour but because she was real. She laughed to herself: maybe that made him not so much a racist as a realist.

Her ruminations on Vanka were interrupted by Norma. The girl slid herself down into the empty chair next to Ella and began trying to massage some of the fire’s warmth into her right knee. To judge by the amount of moaning the girl had done en route to Warsaw, the knee was giving her a great deal of trouble, but if she had come looking for sympathy she would be disappointed. Norma Williams was, in Ella’s opinion, a spoilt, arrogant snob.

‘Hi.’

‘Hi.’

‘Look … Ella,’ Norma began. ‘Truth is we got off to a bad start. Maybe I was a little hyper, a bit uptight after the session with Heydrich. Maybe this whole escape thing freaked me out. Anyway, I was hoping that we might start over.’ The girl thrust out her hand. ‘I’m Norma Williams, but you can call me Norma.’

Ella took the hand. ‘Okay. Forget it, Norma.’

‘So you’re the rescue party, right?’ she asked in a low conspiratorial voice. ‘You’re the cavalry sent by my father to get me out of this hellhole?’

Ella shook her head. ‘I wasn’t sent by your father. I’m here at the request of the US Military.’

This evoked a frown. ‘I thought they’d have sent an army unit to pull me out.’ Norma laughed wryly. ‘Don’t think I’m not appreciative of your efforts but …’

‘They couldn’t: they only managed to infiltrate me into the Demi-Monde by using a dormant Dupe jig. All but one of the Portals have been closed and even the last functioning Portal – the one in NoirVille – only works going from the Demi-Monde and not vice versa. I’m to get you to NoirVille and to escape using that.’

Norma gave a nod of understanding. ‘Then we’d better get moving as soon as we can. If I don’t get out pronto that bastard Heydrich is going to steal my body in the Real World and I’ll be stuck here.’

‘Steal?’

‘Aleister Crowley has perfected some piece of black magic called the Rite of Transference. Using that he’ll have Aaliz Heydrich take over my body and then … well, it’s curtains for yours truly.’

‘Jesus.’ All Ella could do was shake her head. ‘That’s terrible. You know, this place gets freakier with every passing minute.’ She took another comforting sip of coffee.

Norma Williams glanced over her shoulder to make sure no one was listening. ‘Yeah, the quicker we’re out of the DemiMonde and this place is shut down the better. When my father gets to hear just what a fucked-up hellhole the US military has been spending tax dollars constructing, he’s gonna go ape.’

The words ‘shut down’ gave Ella pause. She looked around the room at Captain Dabrowski and that dangerous sergeant of his sitting in a corner chatting over their flagons of Solution; at the rather subdued girl, Lady Trixie Dashwood, who was slumped in a fitful slumber against the chimney breast; and at Vanka as he paced impatiently up and down the floor of the inn; and she thought it would be a shame if these wonderfully real personalities were to be destroyed. Especially Vanka …

Norma seemed to read her mind. ‘Don’t worry about them, Ella. They’re just Dupes. They’re not real. It doesn’t matter what happens to them, all that’s important is what happens to us. We’re the only real people in this screwed-up shit-heap of a world. We’ve got to keep our eye on the ball. The only thing we should be worrying about is getting to NoirVille and clearing out of Dodge.’

Ella nodded. The girl might be a little cold-blooded but there was no denying her logic. The Demi-Monde was, after all said and done, just a computer game and the characters in it just figments of ABBA’s overfertile cyber-imagination. And there was five million dollars waiting for her at home.

Norma edged closer. ‘Somehow we’ve got to persuade one of these Dupes to help us. Maybe that Vanka person: he seems to be keen on you, Ella.’

‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous, he’s just a Dupe.’

‘Well, Dupe or not, he’s got the hots for you. I’ve seen the way he looks at you and the way he tries to look after you. You’ve gotten yourself a cyber-beau, Ella.’

Ella chuckled derisively to mask her disquiet. She gave Vanka a quick glance: he really was a good-looking man … Dupe. That was the problem: Vanka wasn’t real flesh and blood. If he had been …

Trixie was brought out of her sleep by a loud knocking on the inn’s door followed by a draught of cold wind whipping around her legs. She batted open her eyes in time to witness the arrival of six large and formidably well-dressed men surrounded by a company of green-jacketed soldiers. From the expression on their faces the new arrivals weren’t happy to be out so late on such a dismal night.

Unhappy or not, Trixie judged them to be important, that is if the way Captain Dabrowski leapt to his feet and went across to greet them was any indication.

‘Why have you called us here, Dabrowski?’ demanded a large, rotund man of about fifty wearing a huge, all-enveloping fur coat and an aura of pompous authority. ‘Who are these people?’

As the man drew nearer to the fire Trixie recognised him. She had seen his picture in The Stormer: he was Chief Delegate
Olbracht, the man the newspaper called ‘Warsaw’s Saviour’ but whom everybody else called ‘Heydrich’s Puppet Polak’. He was the man who, as head of the Warsaw Administration, was charged by the Party with ensuring that law and order prevailed in the Ghetto and that any dissidents or protesters were summarily dealt with. Trixie shivered: he was revolting and looked just as slimy and duplicitous as she had always imagined one of the GoldenFolk – one of the ersatz Aryans – would look.

Dabrowski crossed the floor to shake Olbracht’s hand. His usual poise and confidence seemed to have deserted him. As he stood nervously shifting his weight from one foot to the other, his cheeks red and his voice high and uncertain, he gave the impression of an overexcited schoolboy. His demeanour did not inspire confidence and neither, it seemed, did his reply to the plump man’s question.