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Sorry, no update yet. But I'll try to write something today. I already know what the next couple chapters will be about. I hope I can do it; I want to write but lately its been kind of difficult for some reason. The words, phrases, sentences, etc. just haven't been coming to me quite like they use to. But I'm sure I'll get over it eventually, hopefully soon.
Onward then!!
Btw, the next chapter might a be little odd, but the one after that will hopefully explain a few things that have already occured.
Onward then!!
Btw, the next chapter might a be little odd, but the one after that will hopefully explain a few things that have already occured.
It is tough gettin into the flow again i know but just kick it and hey if it doesnt really get right the first time you can always edit it later when you have made a few updates and you have got it again
give it a go, okay?
give it a go, okay?
Chapter 23
Stockholm, October 31st
While Intelligence Minister Aldercreutz wearily yet ardently navigated his mysteriously rematerialized longship along Lake Vattern’s eastern shoreline toward the mysterious black smoke which rose from among a distant powdered grove among the lakeside pines, Admiral Charles de Champs, Sweden’s Naval Chief, was in Stockholm, approximately 250 kilometers away. It was his young daughter’s 6th birthday and the Admiral was suitably home for the occasion with the whole of his immediate family as well as his very elderly in-laws who had commuted to the capital for the occasion, with some difficulty, from their own home on the southern coast. The de Champs residence was relatively modest given his position, having only two stories and for the most part resembling closely the other well-to-do houses in the local vicinity of central Blasieholmen, not far from the city’s naval base at Skeppsholmen. Notably, a large portion of the stone base was encrusted with exotic honeysuckle leaves that appeared pale brown and dehydrated; terribly unhealthy due to the heady sea air. They were a reminder of the admiral’s intense gardening habits, one of his few true and ongoing passions outside of naval affairs. Perhaps needless to say, he never was quite apt for the work as his creative desires had often led him to import alien flora unsuited to the moderate cold of Svealand. For example, the particular species of honeysuckle around his home was native to the more temperate Yangtze River valley.
Curiously, the general quality of the day with its stinging salt gusts originating from the nearby Nybroviken strait and its dim overcast sky seemed in harmony with the Admiral’s inner passions; he was quite obviously not in a light or carefree mood though the true cause of his troubles was unknown to his present companions and the actual intensity of the same was very much kept from them; had they been fully aware of the maelstrom that raged continuously in his soul and brought raindrops in the form of shimmering melanoid ribbons as tears splashing soundlessly against a sea of black bile within, they likely would have interceded on his behalf in some form or another. However they did not know of this, but only took comfort in his occasional smiles which presented themselves only when he was in his daughter’s company. Actually, as they soon discovered, the mere mention of her name seemed to be enough to calm his spiritual waters ever so slightly, but only for a moment.
Mrs. de Champs had long known that her husband was frustrated with the Navy’s increasing irrelevancy within Sweden’s larger military organization; as that particular branch had been deemed to be of lesser importance than both the army and the relatively new air force because it couldn’t hope to compete with Kriegsmarine dominance in the Baltic. He had been troubled by it for the past two years and would routinely vent his dissatisfaction in front of her. But recently something else had vexed him even more, to the point that he was offering daily complaints of heart palpations and taking on the bony form of an emaciated slave, becoming increasingly gaunt and feeble. A few weeks previously, she had finally built up the courage to approach him about his troubles (they were not among the best-communicative couples). The Admiral instinctively attributed his anxiety to his aforementioned naval frustration, adding that the alliance with Britain had acerbated his anger as it now seemed that the Royal Navy had essentially usurped the Swedish fleet’s role as protector of Sweden’s national interests. His response was accepted without further inquiry from Mrs. de Champs, but she couldn’t help thinking that it was not an adequate response at all. Her husband was a man vulnerable to emotional sways, occasional bouts of depression and the like, but nothing as severe as his current state had ever afflicted him. Surely, she thought, his anger and trepidation over the Royal Navy’s “replacement” of the Swedish navy isn’t grave enough to merit such a debilitating reaction in him. There must be something more.
The HMS Gustav V, shown here on maneuvers in autumn 1938, formed the backbone of the Swedish fleet along with the other coastal battleships: the HMS Drottning Victoria and HMS Sverige. With further naval expansion rejected by the military and central government, these three vessel would be the most potent warships available in the event of war.
The Admiral glumly swashed a glass of gin and ice in his hand before finally downing a cool crystalline shot that partially flowed through his thickening grey facial hair in its descent, while his wife prepared the final touches on their daughter’s birthday cake. It was a single layer and covered with a thick blanket of white marzipan icing. Mrs. de Champs carefully smoothed the sides for some minutes and then meticulously inserted seven candles into the soft sugary coating.
“Inga’s only six, dear,” the Admiral muttered upon seeing this.
“Yes Charles, the cake has six candles and one more for our little girl to grow on,” his wife answered. Her voice teemed with such sympathy for him that his grief was instinctively repulsed. He felt like storming away, but forcibly kept his feet firmly planted atop the kitchen floor, looking at her expression change into a despairing sadness. She stared at him with a pair of big midnight eyes that bore such innocent beauty that he turned away in shame.
“I’m sure she’ll like it. You’ve done a good job.” He had forced himself to speak.
“Thank you. When mother and father and Inga come back from their walk, I’m sure she’ll be surprised. This is her favorite food.” She was a little alighted by his words, but the heartrending facade remained and she soon pointed it in the opposite direction, beginning to rummage through a cupboard for some dishes. Perhaps she simply had to turn away.
“This is absurd,” the admiral suddenly mumbled rather quietly but with a degree of fervor equivalent to the most desperate scream.
“What are you talking about?”
The admiral grimaced, wrung his hands and clenched his face between his palms in one continuous motion, and then stumbled into an awkward leaning posture against the wall as if fully overcome by his emotions.
“Nothing. It’s nothing,” he responded while still clutching his face.
“Tell me.” Mrs. de Champs still possessed those almost exuberantly childlike and saintly eyes that seemed to communicate something like clemency and compassion through their ebon portals.
The Admiral mumbled something unintelligible and slid to the floor; his face and limbs contorting with total anxiety. He then cautiously placed his left hand over his chest as if feeling his heartbeat, before finally collapsing as a limp rag-doll prostrate on the checkered tiles. This laying figure could be seen to slightly pulsate at very rapid intervals as his palpations had greatly increased in significance and appeared to be nearing intolerable levels. He was still conscious (perhaps throwing himself downward was a sign of his reluctant surrender to misery). Nonetheless, his wife was naturally panicked. She fled the house, returning shortly with her parents, little Inga and a doctor. By that time, however, Admiral de Champs was sitting calmly and slowly sipping his glass of gin, looking as fatigued as one who survives a heart attack yet receives a party of friends mere moments later.
“I’m perfectly fine,” he cried gruffly as the doctor approached him. “I don’t wish for you examine me sir.”
“Please let him,” called out his mother-in-law.
“Yes, please do Charles,” agreed his father-in-law whom the admiral suddenly noticed to be quite youthful looking in comparison with his own contemporary mirror image which reflected, of late, a perfect stranger of very old appearance. Perhaps Charles wasn’t as wrinkled as his father-in-law or as gray, but he looked older, as old as a timeless being who’s pitifully acquired no real experience or intrinsic knowledge within his infinite lifespan, or so he imagined.
“Charles?” His wife offered a tersely touching plea. But it was the vision of his daughter, Inga, who watched without words but not without understanding. Her pleading face was enough for him.
“Okay,” he sighed. The doctor moved in to examine him, ultimately finding no fault with his bodily functions. The party wouldn’t begin for another half-hour. But when it did, the quintet gathered, with a degree of fresh enthusiasm, around the glowing candles and the little white frosted cake underneath. They sang a birthday tune together and pleasantly sat down though it was clear to all, even little Inga, that the admiral’s troubles had been only temporarily expunged. Correspondingly, he said very little and instead spent a good deal of time attempting to ingest every last bit of icing that stuck to his plate using only his little dessert fork. Indeed, it seemed as though his mind were concentrated on matters far removed from his daughter’s birthday gathering with her little immature pronouncements the only thing capable of pulling it back to reality, at least for short periods. Eventually, his father-in-law chose to engage him directly.
“So Admiral, I suppose your boys are ready to fight the tyrants should the time come? You know, they say war may be on the horizon because of our joining with the French-Commonwealth alliance. Personally, I wish I was younger so that I could fight if war does come. What do you say, eh?”
Admiral de Champs responded tiredly. “I suppose my boys are. I just wish they were given the equipment and priority they deserve. As for your age, I should say you’re probably lucky to be out of the running for a conflict, should one arise.”
“Aw, I don’t think so. I’d be privileged to fight for Sweden.”
“In the army yes, but not in the navy.”
“Why is that?”
“The naval branch is underfunded and neglected,” he answered bitterly. “Surely, your daughter has told you. General Nygren, Hansson and all those fools in the Riksdag have betrayed us, and with their pathetic treaty they’ve replaced us with the Royal…”
“Charles!” cried his wife, beckoning him to utilize a moderate tone in his criticisms.
“Hmm, the Royal Navy: fine bunch of sailors. Hearty men indeed!” replied the admiral’s father-in-law with a sort of sage innocence.
“Indeed,” de Champs responded sarcastically. “Let’s just disband over fleet, scuttle our ships. We don’t need them with his majesty’s ships protecting us. While we’re on the subject, let’s disband our entire military and buy off the Brits at Aldershot as mercenaries.”
“I don’t think that would be such a good idea my boy. We need all the weapons we can get. No sense in scuttling perfectly operational ships and disbanding trained infantry formations and whatnot.”
“Of course, you know much more about such things then me. Don’t you, old man?”
“Charles!”
“The reality is,” the admiral continued, “that I am the nation’s chief naval officer, and because I hold that position, my thoughts on matters of war are infinitely more consequential and superior to yours regardless of whatever you say, pure drivel or no.”
“Charles!!”
“My only thought,” his father-in-law spoke very placidly. “is that you seem to be a bit center-thinking in your recriminations. Not everyone can be equally funded. To my foul brain, it seems logical that the army should be the top priority by a good margin. We just can’t compete with the Germans in the Baltic so why waste resources by trying?”
De Champs slammed a fist on the table. His face was ashen white. “This is unacceptable!” he screamed. “I’ve been burdened for many many months over this, and you add to that burden at an event that should be reserved for pleasantries and goodness! You’ve corrupted my daughter’s birthday celebration! Shame on you, you bastard!”
With that, the admiral stormed out of the house, his body beginning to writhe anxiously as he departed. His wife and daughter were left in tears, his in-laws somewhat dumbstruck at his behavior.
It was quite late by this time with traces of orange heavily illuminating the eastern sky, and the neighborhood’s lofty buildings casting a shadow over Blasiehomen’s network of crisscrossing streets since the sun was so very low. Within the next half-hour the entire area would be pitch black save for the resonance of the many streetlights which would glow like finely cut shards of fiery topaz within their tall wrought-iron columns, producing little rowed enclaves of faint daylight around their respective perimeters. Admiral de Champs trudged below a particular line that ran along Stallgatan. His face was held upward as he walked westward toward the Persian hued waters of the Norrstrom whose surface was incised by a startling vertical blaze disseminating from the horizon, yet his visage was perfectly still; his prior anxious jerking seemingly replaced with a detached calm of radical depression. It was as if he had surrendered to whatever force he had been battling within himself. The flag of resistance had been stealthily and almost without notice lowered, and a towering lantern of darkness raised in its stead across the landscape of his soul. This capitulation had brought with it a new and profound veneer, which presently graced the admiral’s withered face before eventually fading into the blackness of the oncoming night. His uniform, casual in appearance as it was, disappeared; the navy blue gently slipping underneath the obscuring black air until only his fair scalp stood out as something like a minuscule white banshee floating above the evening sidewalk. It shone brightly and hoary whenever the admiral ventured near a streetlamp, but for some reason, he sought to avoid traveling directly within the field of every lamp’s luminance. And he continued to shun the lamplight, practicing this evasion along Södra Blasieholmen. He swept with a quickening gait along the avenue, but kept himself directly adjacent the water so as to avoid the lights nearer the interior of the peninsula. He choose to travel only under the bare moonlight of the overhead crescent until a large building, which evoked ruminations of a grand mausoleum, rose upward on the left side of the street. He hurried until he was directly opposite this Florentine-styled 19th century brick building, and then sprinted noiselessly toward it making sure to avoid the guarding streetlights’ short-sighted gaze.
The building was Sweden’s National Museum, first opened at that particular location in 1866 and home to many national artistic treasures from as far back as the Middle Ages to as recently as the turn of the century. On most nights it was still; dead except for whatever exuberance the masterful crafts could lend to their particular dimmed gallery. Indeed, the state was as such on this night as well. The Gravue gallery on the ground level, for example, enjoyed an almost surreal silence relative to the continual drone emanating from the city beyond the outer walls; that is until an abrupt crash followed by the piercing clinks of glass flakes colliding against the floor sounded as an intrepid earth shattering bell. Immediately thereafter, the silence returned more marked than ever before. Then, soft thuds came from the same direction as the crash. Then vigilant footsteps. Then a hoary white banshee flowed across the chamber with the occasional streaks of moonlight from the opened windows catching a few strands of the admiral’s whitish hair and setting them ablaze before he took to the staircase, traveling upward in his odd little venture.
He lingered very shortly on the museum’s second level, only perusing for a few seconds before flying up the great upper staircase leading to the third story. It was here that he finally ended his swift movements and began to slowly and methodically inspect the various paintings exhibited in both the central and western parts of the structure. His whitish mane could be seen to hang for long periods in front of various canvases: Rembrandt’s dusky Conspiracy, Watteau’s sunnier The Love Lesson, and Roslin’s enigmatic The Lady with the Veil among others. But it was the later piece that seemed to entrance him more than the others. He glared at its surface for what seemed like hours. Then a chiming clock from a distant part of the city seemed to wake him from his thoughts and contemplations of the half-hidden face. And as the eight hours were counted in echoing bronze clangs, he retrieved a sharp but dully colored blade from his person and produced four deep incisions in the canvas just a centimeter or two within its lovely ornate frame. Before the clanging stopped, the prize was his. The veiled lady was tucked securely underneath his right arm and he started down the stairs even more speedily than he had come up. Upon arriving on the ground floor, he rushed toward the broken window through which he had entered, passing by a large medieval tapestry of King David and Bathsheba, the intricate pattern of which disappeared from his peripheral sight just as the cry of crude sirens exploded from beyond the front door. Perhaps the sound had been there for some time, but it was only then that his ears finally received its wailing signature. It was the police. He was certain of it. Obviously they know that someone is inside, he thought to himself, but had they seen the broken window? Looking out from a safe distance, it didn’t seem so as there were no officers on that side of the building. It sounded as if they were concentrated near the front doors, as if preparing to burst in at any moment. Thus, the admiral crept toward the window, eventually reaching it and climbing out as quietly as he possibly could while simultaneously carrying the stolen painting. Soon, he let his dangling legs fall a small distance to the ground and attempted to disappear within the shadows.
He reached no further than the Stallgatan intersection before coming into contact with a patrol of police officers. Fortunately for him, he had seen them from a distance and had thus set the Roslin portrait at the entrance of a nearby alley where it was masked from the blue moonlight by the towering apartments on either side.
Alexander Roslin's painting, The Lady with the Veil
“Excuse me sir,” the senior of the pair called out while still in stride. “Have you seen any other pedestrians wandering about the vicinity?”
“No sir,” de Champs answered.
His answer was satisfactory and the officer led his partner away with a slight tip of his hat. De Champs then retrieved the painting and decided to try his best to navigate back to his home through the local alleyways in order to avoid detection. Of course, he could not avoid having to traverse a few open streets but he would sprint across them rapidly, after first checking for the presence of policemen and pedestrians in general. His plan of elusion was effective and he was at his front door at precisely half past eight, portrait in hand. He was wary of going in directly for fear of his family being present in the main room and thus likely seeing the object of his theft so he waited for a minute or two, listening and idly staring at the honeysuckles which glowed like silvery fish scales or thick chain mail under the twilight. Some sullen leaves even reflected a few faints spots of moonlight, some of which touched the veiled lady’s surface, some of which so happened to fall upon her unhidden eye, seeming to animate her. Once convinced that he hadn’t heard a sound coming from within and seeing that the interior lights were dark, the admiral opened the door and went inside. The foyer and the parlor were indeed dark, but to his astonishment, the sound a crying child filled the room.
“Inga?” he cried with a mixture of terror and apprehension. He turned on the electric lights to better see her. His weeping daughter was sitting on the sofa in the center of the parlor. At that moment, three police officers followed by his teary wife and in-laws entered into the room from the kitchen.
“What have you got there Admiral?” one of the officers asked with a sly grin.
De Champs automatically sought to hide the picture, turning the back of the canvas toward his questioners. “Oh, it’s nothing.” He answer was like a whimper, and he offered no resistance when the officer stepped forward and wrenched the painting from his hands.
“Ah, what a masterpiece!” the officer teased. “Wouldn’t you agree de Champs? A beauteous figure! Huh, I never would have thought someone of your supposed esteem would stoop so low. I’m disappointed in you Admiral,” he said while playfully shaking his finger. “I’m sorry to say that your husband is a common thief, Mrs. de Champs. But at least you know the truth about him now. Say goodbye to your daddy,” he added mischievously while looking at little Inga, causing she and the remaining trio of his relatives to burst into heavier sobs. Meanwhile, the admiral’s face was as stone until he finally, and with great effort, spoke.
“I don’t understand,” he said with total resignation. “How did you know?” He was very detached at this point, not even willing to offer a glimpse to his family members who stood near.
“We found one of your little navy medals at the crime scene,” the policeman chuckled with a smug of feigned cheerfulness. “Now, will you tell us why you stole this?” He shook the canvas for emphasis, but no reply came. The officer’s brow dove into a frown at this, and he motioned for his partners to come forward. De Champs was then led away, handcuffed, impassive, and vanishing into the pitch; even the moonlight had fallen away, seeming, the de Champs family felt, to have carried the graces of mercy along with it.
Stockholm, October 31st
While Intelligence Minister Aldercreutz wearily yet ardently navigated his mysteriously rematerialized longship along Lake Vattern’s eastern shoreline toward the mysterious black smoke which rose from among a distant powdered grove among the lakeside pines, Admiral Charles de Champs, Sweden’s Naval Chief, was in Stockholm, approximately 250 kilometers away. It was his young daughter’s 6th birthday and the Admiral was suitably home for the occasion with the whole of his immediate family as well as his very elderly in-laws who had commuted to the capital for the occasion, with some difficulty, from their own home on the southern coast. The de Champs residence was relatively modest given his position, having only two stories and for the most part resembling closely the other well-to-do houses in the local vicinity of central Blasieholmen, not far from the city’s naval base at Skeppsholmen. Notably, a large portion of the stone base was encrusted with exotic honeysuckle leaves that appeared pale brown and dehydrated; terribly unhealthy due to the heady sea air. They were a reminder of the admiral’s intense gardening habits, one of his few true and ongoing passions outside of naval affairs. Perhaps needless to say, he never was quite apt for the work as his creative desires had often led him to import alien flora unsuited to the moderate cold of Svealand. For example, the particular species of honeysuckle around his home was native to the more temperate Yangtze River valley.
Curiously, the general quality of the day with its stinging salt gusts originating from the nearby Nybroviken strait and its dim overcast sky seemed in harmony with the Admiral’s inner passions; he was quite obviously not in a light or carefree mood though the true cause of his troubles was unknown to his present companions and the actual intensity of the same was very much kept from them; had they been fully aware of the maelstrom that raged continuously in his soul and brought raindrops in the form of shimmering melanoid ribbons as tears splashing soundlessly against a sea of black bile within, they likely would have interceded on his behalf in some form or another. However they did not know of this, but only took comfort in his occasional smiles which presented themselves only when he was in his daughter’s company. Actually, as they soon discovered, the mere mention of her name seemed to be enough to calm his spiritual waters ever so slightly, but only for a moment.
Mrs. de Champs had long known that her husband was frustrated with the Navy’s increasing irrelevancy within Sweden’s larger military organization; as that particular branch had been deemed to be of lesser importance than both the army and the relatively new air force because it couldn’t hope to compete with Kriegsmarine dominance in the Baltic. He had been troubled by it for the past two years and would routinely vent his dissatisfaction in front of her. But recently something else had vexed him even more, to the point that he was offering daily complaints of heart palpations and taking on the bony form of an emaciated slave, becoming increasingly gaunt and feeble. A few weeks previously, she had finally built up the courage to approach him about his troubles (they were not among the best-communicative couples). The Admiral instinctively attributed his anxiety to his aforementioned naval frustration, adding that the alliance with Britain had acerbated his anger as it now seemed that the Royal Navy had essentially usurped the Swedish fleet’s role as protector of Sweden’s national interests. His response was accepted without further inquiry from Mrs. de Champs, but she couldn’t help thinking that it was not an adequate response at all. Her husband was a man vulnerable to emotional sways, occasional bouts of depression and the like, but nothing as severe as his current state had ever afflicted him. Surely, she thought, his anger and trepidation over the Royal Navy’s “replacement” of the Swedish navy isn’t grave enough to merit such a debilitating reaction in him. There must be something more.
The HMS Gustav V, shown here on maneuvers in autumn 1938, formed the backbone of the Swedish fleet along with the other coastal battleships: the HMS Drottning Victoria and HMS Sverige. With further naval expansion rejected by the military and central government, these three vessel would be the most potent warships available in the event of war.
The Admiral glumly swashed a glass of gin and ice in his hand before finally downing a cool crystalline shot that partially flowed through his thickening grey facial hair in its descent, while his wife prepared the final touches on their daughter’s birthday cake. It was a single layer and covered with a thick blanket of white marzipan icing. Mrs. de Champs carefully smoothed the sides for some minutes and then meticulously inserted seven candles into the soft sugary coating.
“Inga’s only six, dear,” the Admiral muttered upon seeing this.
“Yes Charles, the cake has six candles and one more for our little girl to grow on,” his wife answered. Her voice teemed with such sympathy for him that his grief was instinctively repulsed. He felt like storming away, but forcibly kept his feet firmly planted atop the kitchen floor, looking at her expression change into a despairing sadness. She stared at him with a pair of big midnight eyes that bore such innocent beauty that he turned away in shame.
“I’m sure she’ll like it. You’ve done a good job.” He had forced himself to speak.
“Thank you. When mother and father and Inga come back from their walk, I’m sure she’ll be surprised. This is her favorite food.” She was a little alighted by his words, but the heartrending facade remained and she soon pointed it in the opposite direction, beginning to rummage through a cupboard for some dishes. Perhaps she simply had to turn away.
“This is absurd,” the admiral suddenly mumbled rather quietly but with a degree of fervor equivalent to the most desperate scream.
“What are you talking about?”
The admiral grimaced, wrung his hands and clenched his face between his palms in one continuous motion, and then stumbled into an awkward leaning posture against the wall as if fully overcome by his emotions.
“Nothing. It’s nothing,” he responded while still clutching his face.
“Tell me.” Mrs. de Champs still possessed those almost exuberantly childlike and saintly eyes that seemed to communicate something like clemency and compassion through their ebon portals.
The Admiral mumbled something unintelligible and slid to the floor; his face and limbs contorting with total anxiety. He then cautiously placed his left hand over his chest as if feeling his heartbeat, before finally collapsing as a limp rag-doll prostrate on the checkered tiles. This laying figure could be seen to slightly pulsate at very rapid intervals as his palpations had greatly increased in significance and appeared to be nearing intolerable levels. He was still conscious (perhaps throwing himself downward was a sign of his reluctant surrender to misery). Nonetheless, his wife was naturally panicked. She fled the house, returning shortly with her parents, little Inga and a doctor. By that time, however, Admiral de Champs was sitting calmly and slowly sipping his glass of gin, looking as fatigued as one who survives a heart attack yet receives a party of friends mere moments later.
“I’m perfectly fine,” he cried gruffly as the doctor approached him. “I don’t wish for you examine me sir.”
“Please let him,” called out his mother-in-law.
“Yes, please do Charles,” agreed his father-in-law whom the admiral suddenly noticed to be quite youthful looking in comparison with his own contemporary mirror image which reflected, of late, a perfect stranger of very old appearance. Perhaps Charles wasn’t as wrinkled as his father-in-law or as gray, but he looked older, as old as a timeless being who’s pitifully acquired no real experience or intrinsic knowledge within his infinite lifespan, or so he imagined.
“Charles?” His wife offered a tersely touching plea. But it was the vision of his daughter, Inga, who watched without words but not without understanding. Her pleading face was enough for him.
“Okay,” he sighed. The doctor moved in to examine him, ultimately finding no fault with his bodily functions. The party wouldn’t begin for another half-hour. But when it did, the quintet gathered, with a degree of fresh enthusiasm, around the glowing candles and the little white frosted cake underneath. They sang a birthday tune together and pleasantly sat down though it was clear to all, even little Inga, that the admiral’s troubles had been only temporarily expunged. Correspondingly, he said very little and instead spent a good deal of time attempting to ingest every last bit of icing that stuck to his plate using only his little dessert fork. Indeed, it seemed as though his mind were concentrated on matters far removed from his daughter’s birthday gathering with her little immature pronouncements the only thing capable of pulling it back to reality, at least for short periods. Eventually, his father-in-law chose to engage him directly.
“So Admiral, I suppose your boys are ready to fight the tyrants should the time come? You know, they say war may be on the horizon because of our joining with the French-Commonwealth alliance. Personally, I wish I was younger so that I could fight if war does come. What do you say, eh?”
Admiral de Champs responded tiredly. “I suppose my boys are. I just wish they were given the equipment and priority they deserve. As for your age, I should say you’re probably lucky to be out of the running for a conflict, should one arise.”
“Aw, I don’t think so. I’d be privileged to fight for Sweden.”
“In the army yes, but not in the navy.”
“Why is that?”
“The naval branch is underfunded and neglected,” he answered bitterly. “Surely, your daughter has told you. General Nygren, Hansson and all those fools in the Riksdag have betrayed us, and with their pathetic treaty they’ve replaced us with the Royal…”
“Charles!” cried his wife, beckoning him to utilize a moderate tone in his criticisms.
“Hmm, the Royal Navy: fine bunch of sailors. Hearty men indeed!” replied the admiral’s father-in-law with a sort of sage innocence.
“Indeed,” de Champs responded sarcastically. “Let’s just disband over fleet, scuttle our ships. We don’t need them with his majesty’s ships protecting us. While we’re on the subject, let’s disband our entire military and buy off the Brits at Aldershot as mercenaries.”
“I don’t think that would be such a good idea my boy. We need all the weapons we can get. No sense in scuttling perfectly operational ships and disbanding trained infantry formations and whatnot.”
“Of course, you know much more about such things then me. Don’t you, old man?”
“Charles!”
“The reality is,” the admiral continued, “that I am the nation’s chief naval officer, and because I hold that position, my thoughts on matters of war are infinitely more consequential and superior to yours regardless of whatever you say, pure drivel or no.”
“Charles!!”
“My only thought,” his father-in-law spoke very placidly. “is that you seem to be a bit center-thinking in your recriminations. Not everyone can be equally funded. To my foul brain, it seems logical that the army should be the top priority by a good margin. We just can’t compete with the Germans in the Baltic so why waste resources by trying?”
De Champs slammed a fist on the table. His face was ashen white. “This is unacceptable!” he screamed. “I’ve been burdened for many many months over this, and you add to that burden at an event that should be reserved for pleasantries and goodness! You’ve corrupted my daughter’s birthday celebration! Shame on you, you bastard!”
With that, the admiral stormed out of the house, his body beginning to writhe anxiously as he departed. His wife and daughter were left in tears, his in-laws somewhat dumbstruck at his behavior.
It was quite late by this time with traces of orange heavily illuminating the eastern sky, and the neighborhood’s lofty buildings casting a shadow over Blasiehomen’s network of crisscrossing streets since the sun was so very low. Within the next half-hour the entire area would be pitch black save for the resonance of the many streetlights which would glow like finely cut shards of fiery topaz within their tall wrought-iron columns, producing little rowed enclaves of faint daylight around their respective perimeters. Admiral de Champs trudged below a particular line that ran along Stallgatan. His face was held upward as he walked westward toward the Persian hued waters of the Norrstrom whose surface was incised by a startling vertical blaze disseminating from the horizon, yet his visage was perfectly still; his prior anxious jerking seemingly replaced with a detached calm of radical depression. It was as if he had surrendered to whatever force he had been battling within himself. The flag of resistance had been stealthily and almost without notice lowered, and a towering lantern of darkness raised in its stead across the landscape of his soul. This capitulation had brought with it a new and profound veneer, which presently graced the admiral’s withered face before eventually fading into the blackness of the oncoming night. His uniform, casual in appearance as it was, disappeared; the navy blue gently slipping underneath the obscuring black air until only his fair scalp stood out as something like a minuscule white banshee floating above the evening sidewalk. It shone brightly and hoary whenever the admiral ventured near a streetlamp, but for some reason, he sought to avoid traveling directly within the field of every lamp’s luminance. And he continued to shun the lamplight, practicing this evasion along Södra Blasieholmen. He swept with a quickening gait along the avenue, but kept himself directly adjacent the water so as to avoid the lights nearer the interior of the peninsula. He choose to travel only under the bare moonlight of the overhead crescent until a large building, which evoked ruminations of a grand mausoleum, rose upward on the left side of the street. He hurried until he was directly opposite this Florentine-styled 19th century brick building, and then sprinted noiselessly toward it making sure to avoid the guarding streetlights’ short-sighted gaze.
The building was Sweden’s National Museum, first opened at that particular location in 1866 and home to many national artistic treasures from as far back as the Middle Ages to as recently as the turn of the century. On most nights it was still; dead except for whatever exuberance the masterful crafts could lend to their particular dimmed gallery. Indeed, the state was as such on this night as well. The Gravue gallery on the ground level, for example, enjoyed an almost surreal silence relative to the continual drone emanating from the city beyond the outer walls; that is until an abrupt crash followed by the piercing clinks of glass flakes colliding against the floor sounded as an intrepid earth shattering bell. Immediately thereafter, the silence returned more marked than ever before. Then, soft thuds came from the same direction as the crash. Then vigilant footsteps. Then a hoary white banshee flowed across the chamber with the occasional streaks of moonlight from the opened windows catching a few strands of the admiral’s whitish hair and setting them ablaze before he took to the staircase, traveling upward in his odd little venture.
He lingered very shortly on the museum’s second level, only perusing for a few seconds before flying up the great upper staircase leading to the third story. It was here that he finally ended his swift movements and began to slowly and methodically inspect the various paintings exhibited in both the central and western parts of the structure. His whitish mane could be seen to hang for long periods in front of various canvases: Rembrandt’s dusky Conspiracy, Watteau’s sunnier The Love Lesson, and Roslin’s enigmatic The Lady with the Veil among others. But it was the later piece that seemed to entrance him more than the others. He glared at its surface for what seemed like hours. Then a chiming clock from a distant part of the city seemed to wake him from his thoughts and contemplations of the half-hidden face. And as the eight hours were counted in echoing bronze clangs, he retrieved a sharp but dully colored blade from his person and produced four deep incisions in the canvas just a centimeter or two within its lovely ornate frame. Before the clanging stopped, the prize was his. The veiled lady was tucked securely underneath his right arm and he started down the stairs even more speedily than he had come up. Upon arriving on the ground floor, he rushed toward the broken window through which he had entered, passing by a large medieval tapestry of King David and Bathsheba, the intricate pattern of which disappeared from his peripheral sight just as the cry of crude sirens exploded from beyond the front door. Perhaps the sound had been there for some time, but it was only then that his ears finally received its wailing signature. It was the police. He was certain of it. Obviously they know that someone is inside, he thought to himself, but had they seen the broken window? Looking out from a safe distance, it didn’t seem so as there were no officers on that side of the building. It sounded as if they were concentrated near the front doors, as if preparing to burst in at any moment. Thus, the admiral crept toward the window, eventually reaching it and climbing out as quietly as he possibly could while simultaneously carrying the stolen painting. Soon, he let his dangling legs fall a small distance to the ground and attempted to disappear within the shadows.
He reached no further than the Stallgatan intersection before coming into contact with a patrol of police officers. Fortunately for him, he had seen them from a distance and had thus set the Roslin portrait at the entrance of a nearby alley where it was masked from the blue moonlight by the towering apartments on either side.
Alexander Roslin's painting, The Lady with the Veil
“Excuse me sir,” the senior of the pair called out while still in stride. “Have you seen any other pedestrians wandering about the vicinity?”
“No sir,” de Champs answered.
His answer was satisfactory and the officer led his partner away with a slight tip of his hat. De Champs then retrieved the painting and decided to try his best to navigate back to his home through the local alleyways in order to avoid detection. Of course, he could not avoid having to traverse a few open streets but he would sprint across them rapidly, after first checking for the presence of policemen and pedestrians in general. His plan of elusion was effective and he was at his front door at precisely half past eight, portrait in hand. He was wary of going in directly for fear of his family being present in the main room and thus likely seeing the object of his theft so he waited for a minute or two, listening and idly staring at the honeysuckles which glowed like silvery fish scales or thick chain mail under the twilight. Some sullen leaves even reflected a few faints spots of moonlight, some of which touched the veiled lady’s surface, some of which so happened to fall upon her unhidden eye, seeming to animate her. Once convinced that he hadn’t heard a sound coming from within and seeing that the interior lights were dark, the admiral opened the door and went inside. The foyer and the parlor were indeed dark, but to his astonishment, the sound a crying child filled the room.
“Inga?” he cried with a mixture of terror and apprehension. He turned on the electric lights to better see her. His weeping daughter was sitting on the sofa in the center of the parlor. At that moment, three police officers followed by his teary wife and in-laws entered into the room from the kitchen.
“What have you got there Admiral?” one of the officers asked with a sly grin.
De Champs automatically sought to hide the picture, turning the back of the canvas toward his questioners. “Oh, it’s nothing.” He answer was like a whimper, and he offered no resistance when the officer stepped forward and wrenched the painting from his hands.
“Ah, what a masterpiece!” the officer teased. “Wouldn’t you agree de Champs? A beauteous figure! Huh, I never would have thought someone of your supposed esteem would stoop so low. I’m disappointed in you Admiral,” he said while playfully shaking his finger. “I’m sorry to say that your husband is a common thief, Mrs. de Champs. But at least you know the truth about him now. Say goodbye to your daddy,” he added mischievously while looking at little Inga, causing she and the remaining trio of his relatives to burst into heavier sobs. Meanwhile, the admiral’s face was as stone until he finally, and with great effort, spoke.
“I don’t understand,” he said with total resignation. “How did you know?” He was very detached at this point, not even willing to offer a glimpse to his family members who stood near.
“We found one of your little navy medals at the crime scene,” the policeman chuckled with a smug of feigned cheerfulness. “Now, will you tell us why you stole this?” He shook the canvas for emphasis, but no reply came. The officer’s brow dove into a frown at this, and he motioned for his partners to come forward. De Champs was then led away, handcuffed, impassive, and vanishing into the pitch; even the moonlight had fallen away, seeming, the de Champs family felt, to have carried the graces of mercy along with it.
Chapter 24
Just as Admiral de Champs was being led away, Aldercreutz’s Norse vessel ran up onto a little Lake Vattern beach, its lower bow slicing and hewing a straight faultless scar into the dark hardened soil beneath. The advent of nightfall was half an hour old, and the rising plumes that had once been his guide, his sort of paradoxically mystical lighthouse, were now masked within similarly colorless surroundings; camouflaged more perfectly and efficiently than one could hope for some precious treasure monumentally and benevolently cherished. It was as if daylight had been ordered suddenly ceased at some shady megalomaniac’s commanding whim; as if he had placed a seal over the entire vicinity either trying to lock Aldercreutz out or close some fanciful doors of shadow behind him. Perhaps, the Intelligence Minister was being drawn in at someone’s horridly beckoning call.
He placed a solitary boot atop the cool soil; the sole pressed a smattering of tiny pebbles into shallow little graves of frost. He was freezing, not only because he had neglected to put on heavy clothing but because he was still wet after having fallen into the water before departing. This made him all the more eager to find the source of the smoke. Warmth! Blessed warmth! A pile of white hot burning embers! He could feel minuscule drops of lake water adorning his nose. He wiped them off, but the supposition that his skin was fast turning a toxic blue could not be shaken and only intensified as the wind picked up and every gust penetrated into his torso like a cruel scalpel, prompting an ever intensifying refrain of twisting grimaces. He whispered curses, clenched his fists. His whole body hunched over and hardened in reaction to the gales. Trudging forward became more arduous as the legs’ joints began to stiffen. He braced himself against the short gnarled timbers in his painful advance, praying for survival and wondering how he could fall so physically low in so short a span of time; he had, after all, been out for a good deal less than an hour. But then it dawned on him; he saw a broad ray of wildly violet light penetrate through the naked canopy above and sparkle on a little bed of pine needles ahead, though the former wasn’t really there. He was being punished, he thought, and if not quite that then he at least deserved to undergo this trial given what he had done.
So he continued with this thought entrenched in his mind. In a way, it comforted him for he knew he couldn’t die; he hadn’t suffered enough. He could endure an entire hellish night of this torment and still, it wouldn’t be enough. Likely, a few limbs would be lost, perhaps some other debilitating condition suffered, but still it could not be sufficient to outweigh his secret shame, his miserable guilt which had been as a stone around his neck for so long. Nevertheless, he would accept this, but the burden soon became so intense that as he struggled mightily through the forest which seemed to have abandoned all vertical and horizontal norms in terms its dimensional makeup (it was like an utterly random maze whose passages shot outward and inward, haphazardly and in every direction) he asked himself: What does it matter whether I go further? I may as well collapse and bear this. I can’t go on anyway. Thus his weary form, no more visible than a shadow slightly more radiant than its surroundings, slipped to its knees, the black smoke’s source forgotten in spite of the blissful comfort it promised and the left profile of his face plunging headlong into the bitter ground. He lay there fully conscious. The frigidness became even more intense, though Carlos could not fathom how this was possible. He had never known cold to be so torturous. He couldn’t stand it. He had to walk. He had to escape. He stood erect, struggling as an advanced arthritic in the process, tears streaming down his cheeks and solidifying into ice before slipping from his chin. A few steps were covered painfully. Then a powerful sensation of abnormal, almost feverish, warmth took hold over his entire body. It gave him the desire to remove what little clothing he had, but alas! - he deduced it was only a ruse of nature; perhaps the temperature was so abysmally low that its affect now felt like fire!
He launched a plea toward heaven and pressed onward, wailing in pain as he lurched through a shallow layer of fallen snow that seemed to lead him along in the darkness. It formed a twisting path through the thicket and somehow coiled into a vast clearing where the clear sky tossed white starlight on a cottage, a quaint wooden house with a pointy roof only a few dozen meters away. Aldercruetz’s pains hindered him no more in his determination. Seconds later, he rapped loudly on the door, and collapsed on the porch as soon as he recognized the sound of locks unlatching and the brass doorknob being turned.
Carlos sighted, with the first indistinct reconnaissance of awakening eyes, a lumbering whale, soaked and teal green, flying in a precise mathematical arc above his weary head; the back of which, he felt, was resting sharply pained and generally ill at ease atop a feathered pillow. And then there was a peacock tail, stationary, resembling a lady’s fan sewn with the approximate pattern of a Russian taiga fatigue. Within an almost non-existent span, the tail bloomed and swept under a Turkish cat’s startled paws like a sliding green and brown carpet, its silken tendrils sweeping forward like thin flailing arms. The cat, quite snowy in coloration though capped with numerous swaths of evening fur, jumped with extended claws which seemed to graze Carlos’s arm though he felt nothing as if his limbs were characterized by terribly frozen nerves. Then the feline slunk quietly from view, uttering a slight meow upon exiting across the threshold of Aldercreutz’s sight, while the whale splashed through the peacock’s taiga screen causing everything to blur…
The whale transformed into a banana-shaped patch of uniformed paint with three triangular protrusions; the whole of it resting on the ceiling directly above and resembling a suspended puddle of green or yellow tea made thick by the cold. The Russian taiga faded into an intricate work of art, a scheme of an expansive impressionistic sky surrounding the patch, as if the freshest paint of the later section had peeled away. Finally, the blackish circles that had insinuated the presence of at least a single specimen of peacock if not more, morphed into four pairs of squalid human eyes, all of theme staring down at him, disturbingly unemotive. Their gaze, such as it was, struck him as nearly wrong enough to warrant an automatic cry of despair from his lips, given what he had already endured. But he was silent, and remained so as one of the onlookers thrust his own face in very close. Alderceutz’s eyes were still adjusting to the new light, but with the passage of every second he noted the mounting visual attributes of the stranger; all the while, he held a radically relaxed brow as if challenging this gradually emerging phantom by a show total aloofness in spite of his present situation. The man had a pear shaped head, capped with a medium-sized brown bowler, beneath which, several strands of rusty blond hair were extending like twisted sunbeams. His cheeks were exceptionally ruddy, his mouth a soft pink and his eyes a materializing blue. He was a man of great round girth, perhaps aged fifty years, and wore a classic back suit accompanied by a cream white tie that corresponded closely with his fair undershirt. Lastly, he was smiling unlike the others and doing so as a newborn babe. Oddly enough, his sentiment seemed genuine.
“Carlos,” he called out softly. “May I call you Carlos?”
Aldercreutz nodded without lifting his head from the pillow. He was disappointed to find that he could only make this slight movement with great discomfort. In fact, his entire body felt an overall tinge of numbness interspersed with sporadic flares of agony.
“Carlos,” the man resumed softly. “Don’t worry. You’ll be all right.” He spoke, Aldercreutz noticed, with a strong accent resembling that of either a Russian or a native of some other European Soviet republic. The man perhaps anticipated this realization, or at any rate, noticed it for his next words were:
“My name is Tymon Gorski. I’m a Byelorussian and your deepest friend.” As he said this, he took Aldercreutz’s frigid right hand between his own monstrous palms and squeezed as if attempting to will away the gnawing frostbite that the intelligence minister believed was rapidly setting in among his digits which were dyed a light blue.
“You are our contact, are you not Carlos?”
Aldercreutz winced at these words. A beige parchment stamped with a blood-red insignia, the image of a slithering eastern dragon, was then presented before his face; his eyes examined it briefly. “Somehow, you’ve led me here,” he said quietly. “Without even physically doing so, you’ve entrapped me and taken me to this place.”
It looked as if Mr. Gorski was about to throw a glance to the stern-faced trio, but an imperceptible flicker of the pupils withstanding, his gaze was fastened upon the man lying in his bed. He smiled more radiantly.
“Even if that is true, you wouldn’t be here if not for your own convictions and past deeds.” He spoke, as previously mentioned, with a foreign intonation, but somehow his voice exuded a distinguished mastery of the Swedish tongue. “I see by your drooping face, that you must undoubtedly acquiesce to this truth.”
Aldercreutz batted his eyelids as if to grudgingly say I do.
“You know, I have met with your ambassador to Japan, Mr. Westman is it? Mmm, he was quite elusive, wouldn’t tell me the slightest thing about how he discovered the German-Japanese connection regarding the Nazi influence that pushed the Japanese government to provide asylum to the Jaakons. Had he not realized I was up to something, I would have compelled him with greater force. Nonetheless, my organization must have the answer to that mystery. If there is a traitor within our ranks or those of our associates, he or she must be smoked out and destroyed. We will continue to pursue that matter as time and opportunity permits. But for now Carlos,” Gorski shouted, much enthused and with clap of his hands. “I will be content with having the information that you keep within the recesses of your grand mind.”
The bedridden man, suffering from numbness and likely more serious ordeals, was still.
“You know,” reminded Gorski pleasantly. "the military intelligence data that you’ve promised us in exchange for our organization continuing to keep the veil firmly tucked over your past. I wouldn’t like to open your closet of skeletons Carlos.” The last sentence was said with a contrasting gravitas and a grin communicating very subtle cruelty. The Byelorussian’s gaze had turned black.
“It’s true that I’ve allowed your people to blackmail me, but this ends now. I won’t tell you anything.”
“I you refuse, you know what our response will be. The Pandora’s box that is your early life will be opened for the entire world to see.” The Byelorussian spoke fairly serenely but with the essence of the nightmare in which Carlos presently found himself.
“I still won’t,” Aldercreutz moaned with such resolve that he startled himself, and he cowered and simultaneously soared at the thought of his defiance.
Gorski contemplated for a few seconds. “I am not a man who asks twice, at least not before the subject of interrogation has had some sort of new motivation offered to him.” The round man shifted his bulk so as to face his comrades, two men and a woman; Aldercreutz had great difficulty in distinguishing the features of any of them, and they were all strangers as far as he was concerned so what did it matter? Why should a man take note of his jailers when he can barely move and there seems no chance for escape?
“Strip him,” Gorski barked. “And open the window.” The trio began to move like militantly obedient ants. “Pour a bucket of ice water on him as well. Then we’ll turn out the light and let you sleep my dear Carlos. Shall I chant you a lullaby? If you survive the night, we’ll speak again in the morning.”
Save for the moonlight, which lay placidly as a little pool atop the rough wood of the windowsill, Alderceutz was shortly alone with his sufferings. The room, the strange ceiling, all the rest of it had vanished like a lost love; strange that he should miss it so. He was in an empty dimension. There was nothing there but he, his sorrowful physical torment, the moon’s luminance, and a bright Turkish cat which, at that moment, ascended to nearby the ajar portal without aural disturbance and sat within its reflection’s grasp, apparently impervious to the extremity of the outdoor air, watching him throughout the night like a benign guardian.
Just as Admiral de Champs was being led away, Aldercreutz’s Norse vessel ran up onto a little Lake Vattern beach, its lower bow slicing and hewing a straight faultless scar into the dark hardened soil beneath. The advent of nightfall was half an hour old, and the rising plumes that had once been his guide, his sort of paradoxically mystical lighthouse, were now masked within similarly colorless surroundings; camouflaged more perfectly and efficiently than one could hope for some precious treasure monumentally and benevolently cherished. It was as if daylight had been ordered suddenly ceased at some shady megalomaniac’s commanding whim; as if he had placed a seal over the entire vicinity either trying to lock Aldercreutz out or close some fanciful doors of shadow behind him. Perhaps, the Intelligence Minister was being drawn in at someone’s horridly beckoning call.
He placed a solitary boot atop the cool soil; the sole pressed a smattering of tiny pebbles into shallow little graves of frost. He was freezing, not only because he had neglected to put on heavy clothing but because he was still wet after having fallen into the water before departing. This made him all the more eager to find the source of the smoke. Warmth! Blessed warmth! A pile of white hot burning embers! He could feel minuscule drops of lake water adorning his nose. He wiped them off, but the supposition that his skin was fast turning a toxic blue could not be shaken and only intensified as the wind picked up and every gust penetrated into his torso like a cruel scalpel, prompting an ever intensifying refrain of twisting grimaces. He whispered curses, clenched his fists. His whole body hunched over and hardened in reaction to the gales. Trudging forward became more arduous as the legs’ joints began to stiffen. He braced himself against the short gnarled timbers in his painful advance, praying for survival and wondering how he could fall so physically low in so short a span of time; he had, after all, been out for a good deal less than an hour. But then it dawned on him; he saw a broad ray of wildly violet light penetrate through the naked canopy above and sparkle on a little bed of pine needles ahead, though the former wasn’t really there. He was being punished, he thought, and if not quite that then he at least deserved to undergo this trial given what he had done.
So he continued with this thought entrenched in his mind. In a way, it comforted him for he knew he couldn’t die; he hadn’t suffered enough. He could endure an entire hellish night of this torment and still, it wouldn’t be enough. Likely, a few limbs would be lost, perhaps some other debilitating condition suffered, but still it could not be sufficient to outweigh his secret shame, his miserable guilt which had been as a stone around his neck for so long. Nevertheless, he would accept this, but the burden soon became so intense that as he struggled mightily through the forest which seemed to have abandoned all vertical and horizontal norms in terms its dimensional makeup (it was like an utterly random maze whose passages shot outward and inward, haphazardly and in every direction) he asked himself: What does it matter whether I go further? I may as well collapse and bear this. I can’t go on anyway. Thus his weary form, no more visible than a shadow slightly more radiant than its surroundings, slipped to its knees, the black smoke’s source forgotten in spite of the blissful comfort it promised and the left profile of his face plunging headlong into the bitter ground. He lay there fully conscious. The frigidness became even more intense, though Carlos could not fathom how this was possible. He had never known cold to be so torturous. He couldn’t stand it. He had to walk. He had to escape. He stood erect, struggling as an advanced arthritic in the process, tears streaming down his cheeks and solidifying into ice before slipping from his chin. A few steps were covered painfully. Then a powerful sensation of abnormal, almost feverish, warmth took hold over his entire body. It gave him the desire to remove what little clothing he had, but alas! - he deduced it was only a ruse of nature; perhaps the temperature was so abysmally low that its affect now felt like fire!
He launched a plea toward heaven and pressed onward, wailing in pain as he lurched through a shallow layer of fallen snow that seemed to lead him along in the darkness. It formed a twisting path through the thicket and somehow coiled into a vast clearing where the clear sky tossed white starlight on a cottage, a quaint wooden house with a pointy roof only a few dozen meters away. Aldercruetz’s pains hindered him no more in his determination. Seconds later, he rapped loudly on the door, and collapsed on the porch as soon as he recognized the sound of locks unlatching and the brass doorknob being turned.
Carlos sighted, with the first indistinct reconnaissance of awakening eyes, a lumbering whale, soaked and teal green, flying in a precise mathematical arc above his weary head; the back of which, he felt, was resting sharply pained and generally ill at ease atop a feathered pillow. And then there was a peacock tail, stationary, resembling a lady’s fan sewn with the approximate pattern of a Russian taiga fatigue. Within an almost non-existent span, the tail bloomed and swept under a Turkish cat’s startled paws like a sliding green and brown carpet, its silken tendrils sweeping forward like thin flailing arms. The cat, quite snowy in coloration though capped with numerous swaths of evening fur, jumped with extended claws which seemed to graze Carlos’s arm though he felt nothing as if his limbs were characterized by terribly frozen nerves. Then the feline slunk quietly from view, uttering a slight meow upon exiting across the threshold of Aldercreutz’s sight, while the whale splashed through the peacock’s taiga screen causing everything to blur…
The whale transformed into a banana-shaped patch of uniformed paint with three triangular protrusions; the whole of it resting on the ceiling directly above and resembling a suspended puddle of green or yellow tea made thick by the cold. The Russian taiga faded into an intricate work of art, a scheme of an expansive impressionistic sky surrounding the patch, as if the freshest paint of the later section had peeled away. Finally, the blackish circles that had insinuated the presence of at least a single specimen of peacock if not more, morphed into four pairs of squalid human eyes, all of theme staring down at him, disturbingly unemotive. Their gaze, such as it was, struck him as nearly wrong enough to warrant an automatic cry of despair from his lips, given what he had already endured. But he was silent, and remained so as one of the onlookers thrust his own face in very close. Alderceutz’s eyes were still adjusting to the new light, but with the passage of every second he noted the mounting visual attributes of the stranger; all the while, he held a radically relaxed brow as if challenging this gradually emerging phantom by a show total aloofness in spite of his present situation. The man had a pear shaped head, capped with a medium-sized brown bowler, beneath which, several strands of rusty blond hair were extending like twisted sunbeams. His cheeks were exceptionally ruddy, his mouth a soft pink and his eyes a materializing blue. He was a man of great round girth, perhaps aged fifty years, and wore a classic back suit accompanied by a cream white tie that corresponded closely with his fair undershirt. Lastly, he was smiling unlike the others and doing so as a newborn babe. Oddly enough, his sentiment seemed genuine.
“Carlos,” he called out softly. “May I call you Carlos?”
Aldercreutz nodded without lifting his head from the pillow. He was disappointed to find that he could only make this slight movement with great discomfort. In fact, his entire body felt an overall tinge of numbness interspersed with sporadic flares of agony.
“Carlos,” the man resumed softly. “Don’t worry. You’ll be all right.” He spoke, Aldercreutz noticed, with a strong accent resembling that of either a Russian or a native of some other European Soviet republic. The man perhaps anticipated this realization, or at any rate, noticed it for his next words were:
“My name is Tymon Gorski. I’m a Byelorussian and your deepest friend.” As he said this, he took Aldercreutz’s frigid right hand between his own monstrous palms and squeezed as if attempting to will away the gnawing frostbite that the intelligence minister believed was rapidly setting in among his digits which were dyed a light blue.
“You are our contact, are you not Carlos?”
Aldercreutz winced at these words. A beige parchment stamped with a blood-red insignia, the image of a slithering eastern dragon, was then presented before his face; his eyes examined it briefly. “Somehow, you’ve led me here,” he said quietly. “Without even physically doing so, you’ve entrapped me and taken me to this place.”
It looked as if Mr. Gorski was about to throw a glance to the stern-faced trio, but an imperceptible flicker of the pupils withstanding, his gaze was fastened upon the man lying in his bed. He smiled more radiantly.
“Even if that is true, you wouldn’t be here if not for your own convictions and past deeds.” He spoke, as previously mentioned, with a foreign intonation, but somehow his voice exuded a distinguished mastery of the Swedish tongue. “I see by your drooping face, that you must undoubtedly acquiesce to this truth.”
Aldercreutz batted his eyelids as if to grudgingly say I do.
“You know, I have met with your ambassador to Japan, Mr. Westman is it? Mmm, he was quite elusive, wouldn’t tell me the slightest thing about how he discovered the German-Japanese connection regarding the Nazi influence that pushed the Japanese government to provide asylum to the Jaakons. Had he not realized I was up to something, I would have compelled him with greater force. Nonetheless, my organization must have the answer to that mystery. If there is a traitor within our ranks or those of our associates, he or she must be smoked out and destroyed. We will continue to pursue that matter as time and opportunity permits. But for now Carlos,” Gorski shouted, much enthused and with clap of his hands. “I will be content with having the information that you keep within the recesses of your grand mind.”
The bedridden man, suffering from numbness and likely more serious ordeals, was still.
“You know,” reminded Gorski pleasantly. "the military intelligence data that you’ve promised us in exchange for our organization continuing to keep the veil firmly tucked over your past. I wouldn’t like to open your closet of skeletons Carlos.” The last sentence was said with a contrasting gravitas and a grin communicating very subtle cruelty. The Byelorussian’s gaze had turned black.
“It’s true that I’ve allowed your people to blackmail me, but this ends now. I won’t tell you anything.”
“I you refuse, you know what our response will be. The Pandora’s box that is your early life will be opened for the entire world to see.” The Byelorussian spoke fairly serenely but with the essence of the nightmare in which Carlos presently found himself.
“I still won’t,” Aldercreutz moaned with such resolve that he startled himself, and he cowered and simultaneously soared at the thought of his defiance.
Gorski contemplated for a few seconds. “I am not a man who asks twice, at least not before the subject of interrogation has had some sort of new motivation offered to him.” The round man shifted his bulk so as to face his comrades, two men and a woman; Aldercreutz had great difficulty in distinguishing the features of any of them, and they were all strangers as far as he was concerned so what did it matter? Why should a man take note of his jailers when he can barely move and there seems no chance for escape?
“Strip him,” Gorski barked. “And open the window.” The trio began to move like militantly obedient ants. “Pour a bucket of ice water on him as well. Then we’ll turn out the light and let you sleep my dear Carlos. Shall I chant you a lullaby? If you survive the night, we’ll speak again in the morning.”
Save for the moonlight, which lay placidly as a little pool atop the rough wood of the windowsill, Alderceutz was shortly alone with his sufferings. The room, the strange ceiling, all the rest of it had vanished like a lost love; strange that he should miss it so. He was in an empty dimension. There was nothing there but he, his sorrowful physical torment, the moon’s luminance, and a bright Turkish cat which, at that moment, ascended to nearby the ajar portal without aural disturbance and sat within its reflection’s grasp, apparently impervious to the extremity of the outdoor air, watching him throughout the night like a benign guardian.
Well, I got in a couple updates before the end of the week! (in my California timezone anyway. It's about 10:30 here with the time change. ) There may be some errors, but I'll check for them later.
Btw, I think I'll add a continuation to chapter 24, since I think more explanation is required here, especially given all the mysterious stuff I've been tossing out in this AAR, most of which I haven't really explained yet, or totally thought through for that matter.
Somewhat of an explanation for chapter 23: For some reason de Champs suddenly stopped being my Chief of Navy around this time (Not sure why. He didn't die as far as I know) but he's still a general so I just came up with this storyline as a way to cause his demotion from that position, but it will tie in with the overall plot. I think.
) There may be some errors, but I'll check for them later.Btw, I think I'll add a continuation to chapter 24, since I think more explanation is required here, especially given all the mysterious stuff I've been tossing out in this AAR, most of which I haven't really explained yet, or totally thought through for that matter.
Somewhat of an explanation for chapter 23: For some reason de Champs suddenly stopped being my Chief of Navy around this time (Not sure why. He didn't die as far as I know) but he's still a general so I just came up with this storyline as a way to cause his demotion from that position, but it will tie in with the overall plot. I think.
So the mighty fall...
I always knew Aldercreutz was a shady devil, and now it appears I was right. But he seems to have taken an honest turn, which speaks well of him.
I always knew Aldercreutz was a shady devil, and now it appears I was right. But he seems to have taken an honest turn, which speaks well of him.
A very interesting AAR i have read it with much enjoyment. If you need some facts about Sweden during WW 2 do not hesitate to contact me since I have a great interest and knowledge about that timeperiod.