"You want to do it to yourself?" Foster looked worried, as if this fell outside the remit that he had been given. "You sure?"
"Absolutely. You will be kaishakunin, my officer of death. You'll need both swords."
Shrugging, Foster took both swords from their ebony stand and followed Lasche back over to the other side of the room where he had stopped, just in front of the large cannon.
"Traditionally, I would be wearing a white kimono and in front of me would be a tray bearing a piece of washi paper, ink, a cup of sake, and a tanto knife, although the wakizashi will suffice. I would drink the sake in two gulps — any more or less would not show the correct balance of contemplation and determination — and then compose a fitting poem in the waka style. Finally, I would take the sword" — he took the shorter sword from Foster and unsheathed it, throwing its black lacquered scabbard to the floor—"and place it against my belly, here." He pulled his shirt out of his trousers and exposed his soft, sagging stomach on the left-hand side, pressing the tip of the blade against it. "Then, when I was ready, I would push it in and slice across from left to right."
Foster had already discarded the scabbard from the longer sword and was feeling its weight in his hand, tapping his foot impatiently as he stood behind him.
"Then you," Lasche continued, "as my kaishakunin, would step in and take off my head. This was intended to—"
Lasche never finished his sentence. With a flash of steel Foster decapitated him, the impact knocking his body out of the wheelchair so that he slumped forward onto the cannon, his head rolling across the floor.
"You talk too much, old man," Foster muttered.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
They're here," Tom shouted as he jumped down from the table between two of the skeletons and walked around the table behind them, flicking his light from one corpse to the next. The heads of a few had rolled onto the floor, but most were remarkably intact, peaked hats perched on white skulls, empty eye sockets seeming to follow Tom's every movement like some grotesque Mardi Gras carnival float. "They're all here," he whispered to himself, not sure whether he should feel exhilarated or horrified by the discovery. "Who?" Archie shouted from the floor above. "The Order." He noticed a small hole in the right temple of one of the skulls, saw the same wound in the others, then a gun on the floor next to one of the chairs. "Looks like they killed themselves in some sort of suicide pact."
"I'm coming down," Archie announced. A few seconds later, his large frame momentarily eclipsed the small circle of light from the crypt above before sliding down the rope and landing in the center of the table.
"Christ!" he exclaimed as his flashlight picked out the Nazi skeletons, the silver plaques behind their heads winking as the light caught them. "You weren't joking." He sounded genuinely shocked. "I wouldn't have thought it possible, but they're an even creepier bunch dead than when they were alive. Gathered together for a last supper like the twelve apostles."
"They must have lowered themselves in here, got someone else to replace the stones upstairs, then pulled the trigger."
"And assured themselves of a much more pleasant death than they had ever allowed anyone else," Archie said with feeling as he jumped down to the floor, shaking his head in disgust. "See anything else?"
"Not yet. Let's take a look around, see what was so important about this place."
"Wait for me—" Dominique had noiselessly lowered herself down the rope onto the table behind them, clutching a lantern.
"I thought you were meant to be watching our backs?" Tom admonished her.
"And let you two have all the fun?" She grinned, holding up her lantern so she could get a good look at the corpses. "Look at them. It's almost like they're waiting for us."
"For us or someone else," Tom agreed, realizing that he should have known better than to assume Dominique wouldn't want to get stuck in alongside them. "Come on, let's see what else is down here."
She hopped off the table, and all three of them turned their attention to examining the chamber itself. It was about thirty feet across, and the walls were rounded as if they were in a large stone barrel. A brief survey confirmed that the only way in or out seemed to be the hole above them, for the walls were uninterrupted by any kind of opening. They reassembled near the middle of the room.
"Well, if there's something down here, I can't see it." Archie shone his flashlight disconsolately around him.
"Agreed," said Tom. "But there's one place we haven't looked."
"The bodies," Dominique whispered. "You mean the bodies, don't you?"
Without waiting for an answer, she turned toward the table and walked slowly around it, her forehead creased with concentration. The flickering light from the lantern threw rippling shadows across the skeletons' faces, until they seemed almost alive, the occasional glint of a tooth or a shadow dancing across a vacant eye socket suggesting that they might be on the point of waking from their long slumber. Finally she came to a halt behind one of the chairs. "Let's try this one first."
"Why that one?" Tom asked. The skeleton looked no different from the others, although arguably slightly more grotesque, the lower jaw having fallen into its lap, with one eye socket covered by a frayed silk patch.
"Look at the table."
Tom directed his light where she was pointing and saw that the table's surface had been divided into twelve equal slices, one opposite each knight. And each slice had been inlaid with a different type of wood.
"Oak, walnut, birch…" She pointed each one out in turn, her lantern moving around the table like a spotlight. "Elm, cherry, teak, mahogany…" She paused when she came to the segment of table facing the chair she had stopped behind. "Amber."
"It's worth a try," Archie agreed.
Her jaw set firm, Dominique gingerly unbuttoned the skeleton's jacket, two of the silver buttons coming away in her hand where the thread had dissolved. Then, pulling the jacket to one side, she began checking the pockets, inside and out. There was nothing in any of them.
"What about around his neck?" Tom suggested. "He might have hung something there."
Keeping her face as far away from the skeleton as possible, Dominique unbuttoned its shirt, the material clinging to the desiccated rib cage underneath where the flesh had rotted and then dried. But again, there was nothing. Just the empty void of the chest cavity and the remains of his heart where it had fallen through to the chair and dried like a large prune.
"No, nothing," she said, sounding disappointed. "I must have got it wrong."
"I'm not so sure," said Archie, peering down at the glittering array of medals pinned to the jacket Dominique had just unbuttoned. "He's wearing a Knight's Cross."
He pulled on the remains of the red, white, and black striped ribbon and drew the medal out from under the uniform's collar.
"Does it have any markings on the back?" asked Tom.
Archie flipped the medal over. "Just like the others," he confirmed with a nod.
"Dom, have you got the other two?"
She nodded and removed them from her coat pocket, placing them facedown on the table so that the markings were visible. Archie laid the one they'd just found alongside the other two.
"They must mean or do something," Tom said. "They must go together somehow."
"Maybe it's a picture," Dominique suggested. "Maybe the lines meet up to show you something that you can't see when they're apart…"