A man in a white tuxedo came out through the curtains, to polite applause. He thanked the membership for attending, the monthly meeting, and for being so generous with their contributions. He went on, about the fighting spirit of the Reich, and how the valiant youth of Germany would crush the Russians and send them fleeing back to their holes. The applause was more scattered, and some of the officers actually groaned in derision. The man-a master of ceremonies, Michael reasoned-continued, undaunted, about the shining future of the Thousand-Year Reich and how Germany would yet have three capitals: Berlin, Moscow, and London. Today’s blood, he said in a booming voice, would be tomorrow’s victory garlands, so we’ll fight on! And on! And on!
“And now,” he said with a flourish, “let the entertainment begin!”
The lanterns had gone out. The curtains opened, the stage illuminated by footlights, and the master of ceremonies hurried off.
Another man sat in a chair, reading a newspaper and smoking a cigar, at stage center.
Michael almost bolted to his feet.
It was Winston Churchill. Totally naked, the cigar clamped in his bulldog teeth and a tattered London Times in his pudgy hands.
Laughter swelled. The music of a brass band, hidden behind the stage, oompahed a comic tune. Winston Churchill sat smoking and reading, his pallid legs crossed and his etiquette hanging down. As the audience laughed and applauded, a girl wearing nothing but high black leather boots and carrying a cat-o’-nine-tails strutted out on stage. She wore a square smudge of charcoal on her upper lip: a Hitlerian mustache. Michael, his senses reeling, recognized the girl as Charlotta, the autograph seeker. There was nothing shy about her now, her breasts bobbling as she advanced toward Churchill, and he suddenly looked up and let out a shrill, piercing scream. The scream made everyone laugh harder. Churchill fell to his knees, his naked and flabby behind offered to the audience, and held up his hands for mercy.
“You pig!” the girl shouted. “You filthy, murdering swine! Here’s your mercy!” She swung the whip and the lashes cracked across Churchill’s shoulder, raising red welts on his white flesh. The man howled in pain and groveled at her feet. She began to whip his back and buttocks, cursing him like a blue-tongued sailor as the band oompahed merrily and the audience convulsed with laughter. Reality and unreality mixed; Michael realized the man was of course not the prime minister of England, just an actor who eerily resembled him, but the cat-o’-nine-tails wasn’t a fiction. Neither was the girl’s rage. “This is for Hamburg!” she shouted. “And Dortmund! And Marienburg! And Berlin! And-” She went on, a recitation of cities the Allied bombers had hit, and as the whip began to fling drops of blood the audience erupted in a paroxysm of cheering. Blok leaped to his feet, clapping his hands above his head. Others were standing, too, shouting gleefully as the whipping continued and the false Churchill shivered at the girl’s feet. Blood streamed down the man’s back, but he made no effort to rise or escape the whip. “Bonn!” the girl raged as the whip struck. “Schweinfurt!” Sweat glistened on her shoulders and between her breasts, her body trembling with the effort, moisture smearing the charcoal mustache. The whip continued to fall, and now the man’s back and buttocks were crisscrossed with red. Finally the man shuddered and lay sobbing, and the female Hitler whipped him across his back one last time and then put a booted foot on his neck in triumph. She gave the audience a Nazi salute and received a bounty of cheering and applause. The curtains closed. “Wonderful! Wonderful!” Blok said, sitting down again. A tight sheen of perspiration had collected on his forehead, and he dabbed it off with a white handkerchief. “You see what entertainment your money buys, Baron?”
“Yes,” Michael answered; forcing a smile was the most difficult thing he’d ever done in his life. “I do see.”
The curtains opened again. Two men were shoveling glittering fragments from a wheelbarrow, scattering them over the stage. Michael realized they were covering the floor with broken glass. They finished their job, rolled the wheelbarrow away, and then a Nazi soldier pushed a thin girl with long brown hair onto the stage. She wore a dirty, patched dress made of potato sacks, and her bare feet crunched the glass shards. The girl stood in the glass, her head slumped and her hair obscuring her face. Pinned to her potato-sack dress was a yellow Star of David. A violinist in a black tuxedo appeared from the left side of the stage, wedged his instrument against his throat, and began to fiddle a lively tune.
The girl, against all human reason and dignity, began to dance on the broken glass like a windup toy.
The audience laughed and clapped, as if in appreciation of an animal act. “Bravo!” the officer sitting in front of Michael shouted. Michael would have blown the bastard’s brains out if he’d had his derringer. This savagery surpassed anything he’d experienced in the Russian forest; this, truly, was a gathering of beasts. It was all he could do to keep from leaping to his feet and shouting for the girl to stop, but Chesna felt his body tremble and she looked at him. She saw the revulsion in his eyes, and something else there, too, that frightened her to the marrow of her bones. “Do nothing!” she whispered.
Under Michael’s tuxedo jacket and crisp white shirt, wolf hair had emerged along his spine. The hairs scurried across his flesh.
Chesna squeezed his hand. Her own eyes were dead, her emotions switched off like an electric light. On stage, the violinist was playing faster and the thin girl was dancing faster, leaving bloody footprints on the boards. This was almost beyond Michael’s power to endure; it was the brutalization of the innocent, and it made his soul writhe. He felt hair crawling on the backs of his arms, on his shoulder blades, on his thighs. The change was calling him, and to embrace it in this auditorium would be a disaster. He closed his eyes, thought of the verdant forest, the white palace, the song of the wolves: civilization, a long way from here. The violinist was playing frantically now, and the audience was clapping in rhythm. Sweat burned Michael’s face. He could smell the musky animal perfume rising from his flesh.
It took a massive effort of will to hold back the wild winds. They came very close to engulfing him but he fought them, his eyes tightly closed and the wolf hair rippling across his chest. A band of hair rose on the back of his right hand, which clenched the armrest on the aisle, but Chesna didn’t see it. And then the change passed like a freight train on dark tracks, the wolf hair itching madly as it retreated into his pores.
The violinist played a flurry of notes at satanic speed, and Michael could hear the sound of the girl’s feet sliding on the glass. The music reached its zenith and ceased, to cheering and more shouts of “Bravo! Bravo!” He opened his eyes; they were wet with rage and revulsion. The Nazi soldier led the girl offstage. She moved like a sleepwalker, trapped in an unending nightmare. The violinist bowed, smiling broadly, another man with a broom came out to sweep up the bloody glass, and the curtains closed.
“Excellent!” Blok said, to no one in particular. “This is the best presentation yet!”
Attractive naked women appeared, rolling kegs of beer and iced mugs on carts along the aisles. They stopped to draw beer into the mugs and pass them to thirsty Brimstone Club members. The audience began to grow raucous, some of them breaking into obscene songs. Grinning faces gleamed with sweat, and beer sloshed as mugs were cracked together in vile toasts.
“How long does this go on?” Michael asked Chesna.
“Hours. I’ve known it to go on all night.”