#GenghizInLove: Episode 42

An unusual diffidence pervaded me as I got out of the elevator during my first afternoon back at the University of Truth and Justice. Through the glass doors of the large dining room I saw again a crowd of bright young faces, but, in the polished glass, darkly, I also saw the blurred reflection of my own drawn and melancholy face, and I faltered at the contrast. I was the shy stranger at a foreign feast, anonymous.

But then a hand waved at me and a friendly face smiled in in welcome. "Hi! Lord Hades told me you were here," a handsome young man boomed jovially. Perfect white teeth glittered through carefully groomed designer stubble. "How was Berlin? Glad to be back in Prague?"

I blinked. This person seemed to know me. How much did he know? "Oh, Berlin is Berlin as usual," I replied evasively, trying to remember his name. The olive eyes gleaming through incredibly long eyelashes seemed familiar. Had Anastasia and I blindfolded him with a silk scarf before whipping him silly? Had he pressed charges? "And Prague is Prague," I added, with a noncommittal nod. "Where is Otto?"

"Oh, he's taken up ice-fishing," the young fellow replied. "He's gone for the day."

"Would you do me a favor? Could you let Pipi von G and T know that Lady Rudolphine Bing needs her for a moment?"

"Sure thing!" the young man replied happily. "Pipi is that little blonde cutie, right? Did Lord Hades really murder her husband?"

A pudgy man at the end of the table looked up at me, gasped, buried his sallow face in his hands, and began to sob loudly, but I paid no attention because I was too pleased to see a face to which I thought I could attach a name: that bony leprechaun face and wild crop of thinning hair belonged to my friend, the philosopher with whom I had spoken so often about ethics at the end of the world... damn, what was his name? And that pretty woman with high color in her cheeks and short silky black hair, surely I had seen her before as well? I passed a hand over my icy forehead and sat down heavily: what had Lady Rudolphine's ointment, Lethe, done to my memory? I resolved to face the crisis with cunning. "Won't you introduce me to everyone?"

"Sorry," the young man said apologetically. "I thought you knew everyone here, but, that's right, you left before the University really began functioning. Well, you know Immanuel, of course, and Divka..." I grinned with relief at my old friends. "This is Hachek Katastrofski..." A gaunt young man with long greasy blond hair, a high forehead, and an immensely hooked thin nose smirked insincerely at me and immersed himself again in his plate. He was playing with his food with great absorption but not a single bite or sip passed his lips. I resolved to ask about it later. Hadn't someone (wasn't it that famous Polish ex-dissident journalist, what was his name?) mentioned that Katastrofski had Fascist leanings? I recalled that Hitler was vegetarian and a teetotaller, which might explain Katastrofski's odd behavior, but why should this bizarre repugnance for the best things in life extend to rice pudding?

I wasn't the only one watching Katastrofski play with his food. A very pretty girl with short blonde curls sat next to the young Fascist, biting her rosy lower lip as she stared at his ostentatious profile. "That's Delilah." My young host exhaled the name reverently. "She's Professor Masaryk's assistant. We work together," he added proudly. Then, noticing her obvious fascination with Katastrofski, he frowned. "Lila, wake up," he snapped rather tetchily. "I'm trying to introduce you." The girl started, blushed, shook my hand, and sank back again into worried contemplation of her neighbor's nose. I too felt that it was a disturbing object, so much so that, in the days to come, I was never able to look at Katastrofski for longer than five seconds at a time. His nose reminded me too strongly of a craggy peak I was once forced to climb in the desolate wastes of the Altai mountain range in Central Asia and I suffer acutely from vertigo.

"What work do you do with Delilah?" I asked ingenously.

"I told you when we met in Berlin. I'm the coordinator of the Department of Culture. It's a great responsibility but I feel ready for it. I am, after all, Benito! And I like my job!" he added, laughing uproariously. His sheer animal vitality was infectious and I found myself laughing along. The pudgy man at the end of the table raised his head from his hands and gave us a look laden with misery and hatred.

"Who's he?" I whispered.

"That's Nero Insanetti," Benito whispered back. "He's Lord Hades's assistant. He's been acting very strange lately..."

"I know you're talking about me," the pudgy man screamed hoarsely. "All of you. I see your smiles." Nero drew a hand across his eyes rapidly, leaving sweaty smudge-marks on his forehead. "I know your wicked plots. You are cold and heartless. It is the Anglo-Saxon mentality." His voice broke as he stared sadly at Benito. Tears brimmed in his puffy eyes. "But you, my young Italian comrade? Et tu, Benito?" He slumped off his chair and crashed onto the floor. The babble of happy young voices ceased for a moment as people turned to stare.

"There, there, Nero," Benito said soothingly. He crossed over to the huddled form lying shapeless on the floor, pulled out a little plastic tube from his handsome tweed jacket, forced open Nero's mouth, and dropped the pill in. "Take a vitamin. It'll make you feel better. You really ought to take them more often."

Nero shook his head feebly and spat the pill out. He sat up, drool running down his chin, and glowered at Benito. "Ah, you young fool," he cried weakly. "Do you even know what is in these vitamins?" I listened intently, wondering if this obvious psychotic was onto something. What did he know? In the event I was disappointed. Nero launched into a long, unoriginal, and rather repetitive diatribe against modern faith in science. "It all started with fluoride in the water," he screamed as the big men in white uniforms came to drag him away. "Contaminating our precious bodily fluids. It is a plot to destroy our European culture... I will never take vitamins! I will suffer instead... And you!" he screamed at me. "You are the Antichrist! Don't smile at me! We know who you are..."

"What a kook," Benito said, shaking his head as we watched Nero shake his fist at me from a distance. "What's there to suffer about?"

An image suddenly pierced my heart: the memory of Anastasia stabbing her portrait in the living room of her apartment in Berlin, her subsequent faint and my attempts to revive her, the mistrustful look on her waif-face as she came back to life in my arms... I staggered and clawed at my chest. Lady Rudolphine's lotion, Lethe, had brought me relief for some time, but the throbbing anguish told me that my wounded memory had been torn open afresh and my broken heart was bleeding, again.

"Are you all right?" Benito looked concerned. I nodded faintly. "It must have been a shock," he added sympathetically. "Nero screaming at you like that. Not very nice, really," he said primly. "Even if you were the Antichrist."

"Is he Katholic?"

"I don't know Nero that well," Benito replied prissily. "I never inquire into people's personal beliefs. Personally, I'm into Limboism."

"What's that?"

"Oh, we're the new world religion," Benito answered breezily. "We're a synthesis of all the others. We're very tolerant."

"Do you believe in hell?"

"Gosh, no." Benito looked shocked. "Our religious leaders talk about an after-life in which those who don't share our beliefs linger on. Without any pain, of course. They just don't make it to paradise."

"A kind of cocktail lounge?"

"Yeah, maybe," Benito replied, his eyes twinkling brightly. "Perpetual Happy Hour."

"So what makes heaven special?"

"Your drinks are on the house." Benito laughed heartily.

"In that case, this must be heaven," a husky voice drawled. I spun around, my heart drumming against my ribs in a staccato beat, its thunder reverberating in my ears... The voice sounded so familiar. I breathed deeply. A slim woman stood leaning languidly against a pillar. She smiled slowly at me. A fine flow of mahogany hair flooded past a pair of hazel eyes, two circlets of olive green flecked with streaks of burnt siena around two wells of impenetrable black. She was wearing a beautifully cut black suit. I noticed irrelevantly the adroitly applied makeup on her pale olive face. She was beautiful and yet there was something very wrong, as though she were missing some vital body part… "You're sweating," she said in an amused murmur. "Are you afraid already?" She leaned forward, sniffed my neck, and swiftly grazed my unshaven cheek with her lips. I caught a whiff of expensive perfume and something else besides, something green and over-ripe, rotting… "I'm Marya Madlenova. Forget everything you have heard about me. I'm much more dangerous."

"In what way?" I asked unsteadily.

"You'll just have to find out, won't you?"

"How will I find out?"

She looked at me for a moment, coolly, and then shrugged. "Not by asking." She turned to Benito. "When is this meeting?"

Benito looked at his watch. "Lord Hades has postponed it until tomorrow. You're supposed to be at this meeting too."

"Why me?" I asked in chagrined surprise. "Anyway, I can't discuss it now. Not on an empty stomach." Not having eaten in over thirty hours, I was famished, and, as I remembered it, the food at the University of Truth and Justice was very good. Saliva dripped down my bristly jowls as I thought wistfully of a platter of Prague ham with horseradish. Rumor had it that Hitler broke free of his vegetarian vice only once in his life, when he rolled into Prague at the head of his conquering armies, and strolling around a pub, slapping his men on their backs as they drank their beer (no doubt causing many a stolid drinker to choke, splutter, and turn purple), caught sight of a plateful of Prague ham which he grabbed from a waiter who ran after him demanding indignantly that he pay, but Adolf was too quick for him and he got away and wolfed down the ham in the privacy of the nearest toilet. I have always considered it incontrovertible proof of Hitler's fundamental degeneracy that he returned to being a vegetarian, although it is pleasant to think that the ham probably made him violently sick since he wasn't used to the luscious juiciness of meat. We will never know. There were no witnesses and Hitler looked green most of the time anyway. "I didn't come back to Prague just to go to meetings."

"Oh, come on," Benito coaxed. "Poor Professor Hohenstaufen had to interrupt his holiday in Rome at short notice just for this meeting."

"In that case," I said sincerely. "I will be glad to come to the meeting. After I've eaten several meals first." Having already witnessed Otto Hell decapitate one German prince, I was curious about Hohenstaufen's fate. Appetite grows with eating, and revenge is the best dessert.

#GenghizInLove: Episode 41

"All right. Off with those boxer shorts," Lady Rudolphine commanded briskly.

"Can't we just go to sleep?" I pleaded, covering my nakedness. "You can have the bed. I'll sleep in an armchair."

"Oh, do be quiet," Lady Rudolphine snapped. "You don't think I'm doing this for fun, do you?"

"You're not?" I asked, slightly affronted. "Why do you want me to get naked then?"

"I shall teach you how to sleep."

"But I know how to sleep," I cried. "It's practically all I've done since I was born! I'm an expert sleeper. It's what I do best!"

Lady Rudolphine sighed, gracefully subsiding into an armchair. "Look, dear, just go into the bathroom, take a shower, as hot as you can stand it, and come back out... without those absurd shorts." She shook her head in disbelief. "Were you a clown in the circus?"

I gasped in outrage at this gratuitous slight to my beloved boxer shorts. I vividly remembered that wonderful day in my first month at Oxford when I had finally been allowed to lay my greedy little paws on my monthly allowance from my mother. My bank had decided that the amount sent was far too large for a mere student and that I must be making money by pushing vast quantities of hard drugs and I was only saved from languishing behind bars by the direct intervention of the Amerikan Ambassador, whose children had trustingly played `Doctor' with me in my degenerate days as a diplomat's brat in El Salvador, and while I had almost entirely reformed after my mother caught us in a particularly ambiguous `hospital' scene, my other playmates all became ambulance-chasers, dentists, and hypochondriacs, causing their parents to feel a dazed respect for my mother and to wonder where they themselves had gone wrong. When Uncle Sam persuaded the British police that it was all right for me to spend my own (well, my mother's) money, I prudently went first to the local fine-wine shop and bought large quantities of premium Bordeaux, and only then, having paid my dues to the inexorable dictates of good taste, scurried around the corner to a dark little shop in whose windows I had greedily coveted many bolts of brightly colored silks. After an afternoon of fun, wallowing in yards of canary yellow and permanganate purple and arterial crimson and tropical green, a chance glance at my watch reminded me of the pressing errand yet to be done: throwing large bills at the shopkeeper, I marched into Oxford's staidest haberdashery, plunked down my brightly-colored silks beneath the twitching nostrils of the old geezer behind the counter, and demanded boxer shorts. It took a little while because of all the fuss, commotion, and delay caused in sending off the old geezer to the emergency coronary ward, but eventually a younger and more stout-hearted fitter took all my measurements imperturbably, shook hands with me respectfully, and, when I expressed concern for the old geezer, gravely replied, "Well, sir, if we had known of his heart condition we would have terminated his employment much earlier. A tailoring establishment in Oxford is no place for the faint-hearted, sir. As they say in Amerika, `If you can't stand the heat get out of the oven!'"

And so I resented Lady Rudolphine's slurs about my boxer shorts. Admittedly, they were yellow and purple and red and green and very dirty to boot, but they were mine, just about all I had in the world, I couldn't help reflecting.

"Just do what I say," Lady Rudolphine murmured wearily. "Don't you want Anastasia back?"

I turned on the shower to the hottest possible setting, and screamed as excruciating needles of steam pinned me to the slippery wall like St. Sebastian, except that the arrows with which he was martyred hadn't been heated red-hot first. But as a good martyr ought, I fixed my mind on my divinity, my idol, my Anastasia. Eventually I found myself slumped on the floor of the shower, muttering her name over and over again... I didn't know which hurt more, the stinging steam or my heart's anguish as I remembered the face of my lost love. I crawled out of the shower, patted myself dry, wincing at the touch of the towel on my boiled flesh, and walked back into the dark room.

"Here," a voice softly directed and I groped towards it obediently, too weary and sick at heart to resist. Covers were drawn over me. At first I could hear only the pounding of my heart. After a while I could distinguish the regular sound of soft even breathing. I tried to breathe to the same rhythm but it was no use, my breath sounded ragged and oddly squeaky. I began to shiver uncontrollably. A velvety hand gently caressed my forehead and temples. I began to cry. The tears sprang out of my eyes and coursed down my face as though a strange hand were pumping them forth from some deep arterial well of misery, some subterranean strata of my soul, a deep dark liquid reserve which had been discovered and tapped only now, only now...

I cried for a long time. In that dark warm moist place my tears were a salty river rushing past massive rocks, corroding the granite of my thoughts at their foundations. My conscious mind continued feebly to resist all this gushing emotion but the rocks swayed, tumbled, and fell into the dark swift current. The rumble of thunder, the unending noise of falling water, and then a warm red darkness...

And in that darkness I saw Anastasia, that heart-shaped freckled face framed by flaming curls. But the fire in her eyes was gone, she looked out at me as though blinded. I groaned and reached out to her, but my hands encountered a cool hardness, as though I were stroking glass. As in a mirror, I saw Anastasia's hands reach out for mine, and I felt a confused tumult in my soul. Then I felt a dark brooding presence behind me and I saw Axel appear behind Anastasia. He laid his hands on my darling's neck and I cried out in anger, reaching out to tear away his brutal hands. His hands were on my throat, squeezing and I was gagging, choking, struggling for air. But then an odd calm descended on me, and I realised that I was free. Axel could never hurt me. I dropped all resistance and when I stopped fighting, Axel's hands tightened vainly and he struggled and cursed hoarsely but to no avail. He rolled around the floor like a fool fighting with a ghost and I stood over him, smiling.

I felt weak as a kitten when I woke up, and as blind. The light flooding into the room dazzled my eyes. After a while I saw Lady Rudolphine standing by the window in an azure satin dressing gown. "How do you feel?" she asked gently.

"Axel!" I fought with the sheets for a moment, struggling for breath. "He was choking me…"

"Astral combat. Quite normal. How do you feel now?"

I didn't know how to answer. How does a new-born feel? "Hungry, I suppose," I replied solemnly.

Lady Rudolphine burst out laughing. "Good! We were supposed to meet Otto and Pipi for lunch about two hours ago."

"Whatever," I said, still dazed. I got out of bed and looked around. I recognized the room. I was in the building owned by the University of Truth and Justice in Prague. Had I ever left Prague? I suddenly realized that I had no clothes on. Lady Rudolphine burst out laughing again at the look of total confusion on my face. Strangely enough, I felt no embarrassment standing stark naked in front of this old lady who was, after all, by conventional standards, a total stranger. I did, however, look around for my clothes. They were lying on a chair, neatly folded. I picked up my boxer shorts and sniffed incredulously. They smelled clean. After consecutive days on which I had been kidnapped, freed, tied up, and trapped in strange confabulations, the smell of clean clothing wafted into my amazed nostrils like the aroma of freshly baked bread, like good dry champagne after a wine tasting orgy, like an unexpected blessing.

"They certainly are efficient around here," Lady Rudolphine remarked as I got dressed. "I gave our clothes to be laundered just yesterday afternoon and here they are, cleaned and pressed."

"Yesterday afternoon?" I asked, a sock in one hand. "But we only got here last night."

"The night before, my dear. You slept a whole day. Thirty hours to be exact."

"That's a new record!" I exclaimed, impressed with myself. "My longest sleep until now was sixteen hours."

"This doesn't qualify as a record." Lady Rudolphine smiled. "It was drug assisted."

"It was? What drug? Who drugged me? When?"

"I did. Before you slept. How does your forehead feel?"

I raised a hand to my head. "It feels frozen," I said in bewilderment. "It's like ice." I sat down again and mechanically put on my socks. "Did you inject me with a sleeping pill?"

"What an extraordinarily stupid thing to say. But I won't hold it against you," Lady Rudolphine promised kindly. "I just rubbed your forehead with a lotion called Lethe. You feel all right, don't you?" I nodded stupidly. "Good. Quite a few people have allergic reactions to it. I was taking a slight chance."

"What does this lotion do?"

"It does many things in the right hands. You have only just begun the river ride."

"The salty river!" I cried. "But the river was my tears..."

"Did you see Anastasia?"

"She seemed so blank. And then I was fighting with Axel but somehow when I stopped fighting, I won." I shook my head in confusion. "No, it doesn't make any sense... But how do you know what I felt in my sleep?"

Lady Rudolphine gave me a long cool stare. "You boasted yesterday that you were an expert sleeper. You merely meant that you lie in bed with your eyes closed and snore for too long. But I, on the other hand, really am an expert in in all kinds of sleep."

I hung my head for a moment. Then my instinctive inquisitiveness overcame me again. "Where did you get this drug?"

"In Amsterdam. But you cannot get it in any hashish bar or coffee shop even in that pleasant little town. Someone makes it to my specifications."

"Hans van der Annersvoort," I suggested, more out of curiosity than certainty.

Lady Rudolphine probed me again with her scalpel stare. I tried not to look away. After a while she smiled and shook her head. "Anastasia was quite right," she murmured. "You really are full of surprises. Where did you hear that name?"

"From a friend of mine," I replied. "He's an underground drug designer in California and he told me that this Annersvoort is one of the best in the world."

"Van der Annersvoort," Lady Rudolphine said, correcting me in the disinterested tones of someone who has just been reminded of a very distant mutual acquaintance in the course of idle chitchat at a cocktail party. I had obviously stumbled onto a secret of vital concern. "What is your friend's name?"

"Well, I call him Sleaze but his name is actually Luke Leazy."

Lady Rudolphine nodded almost imperceptibly. "What a very peculiar name. No more questions for now," she said, putting a restraining finger to my lips. "I too must dress. Be a dear and respect an old lady's modesty. Go upstairs and look around for Pipi, will you? I need her for a little while."

I obediently left the room although I didn't for a moment believe that Lady Rudolphine had ever had any modesty either in her wild youth or her dangerous old age: the only use to which she put her fig leaf was to tickle her lovers in unmentionable places. Why had she ended our conversation just then? I tried to think but I had more pressing concerns: I desperately needed to take a leak. Even though one doesn't drink anything in one's sleep, thirty hours in bed places a considerable strain on the bladder. It was with a sigh of relief that I found and used the facilities, but my relief was replaced by concern when I discovered that my scrotum had the same dry icy feeling as my forehead. Clearly Lady Rudolphine had other reasons besides hygiene for insisting that I remove my boxer shorts before I went to bed and I could only fervently hope that her mysterious lotion, Lethe, didn't make things shrivel up and fall off.

#GenghizInLove: Episode 40

Otto decided that we had to leave Himmelsberg before the Cardinal and his cronies returned with some evil new scheme up their clerical sleeves. Leaving Saure behind as a caretaker, Hell, Pipi, Lady Rudolphine, and I set off in Pipi's Range Rover, weary wanderers in the winter night, cascading down treacherously icy switchbacks, taking shortcuts straight down mountains when Hell was driving, because, showing a chivalrous side I had never suspected, he insisted on taking turns with Pipi at the wheel, or perhaps, he was just showing off to her, and it worked, judging from Pipi's ecstatic squeals when she was pushed up hard against the old rake as he accelerated through tight curves, oblivious of the blaring horns, audible curses, and angry glares of white-faced truckers forced to swerve out of the way of this maniac in the luxurious tank... And then the short wait at Munich airport, all glass and white metal pipes and frosty efficiency, and the plane ride back to Prague, back to the slovenly little terminal with its lackluster lighting and single creaking conveyor belt and luggage trolleys with stuck wheels and unsmiling customs officers in drab olive polyester, an hour by plane and forty years back in time, back to the dingy days of post-war, of black markets and the occasional luxury of an American cigarette or candy bar, and I began to understand why Hell, after a life misspent in the academic fleshpots of the West, might have wanted to return to Prague, to live again amidst these shabby baroque palaces and picturesque lanes, driven by a nostalgia for his youth, for the days when, as a young soldier, army cap perched cheekily on his brilliantined head, he wandered around the town, getting drunk, picking fights and picking up girls, already forgetting the adrenalin-laced boredom of the fight behind him, still ignorant of the long exile that lay before him, blithely unaware of the plots and struggles which would transform him into the grim terrible old man who sat before us now in his office at the University of Truth and Justice, having one last nightcap.

"Did the Cardinal really poison Ludi?" Pipi asked breathlessly.

"Through Dr. Dufarge and his Zurich clinic. Utterly unscrupulous man. Does whatever his confessor tells him to do. Ludwig began to suspect poison when his arthritis mysteriously turned into cancer."

"Why would the Cardinal want to get rid of Ludwig?" Lady Rudolphine asked reasonably.

"Wants to become Pope. Don't ask me why. Hotline to God and all that."

"But how was Ludwig an obstacle to the Cardinal's ambitions? What was all that about the Himmelsberg legacy?"

"Control over the lineage."

"Lineage? You mean..." Lady Rudolphine's eyes widened.

"The Cardinal and his friends have been playing the long game. Anastasia and her boy," Hell replied incomprehensibly.

"I don't get it. What does..." Suppressing a gulp, I continued, "What do Anastasia and her son have to do with the Cardinal's ambitions of becoming Pope?"

Hell and Lady Rudolphine exchanged meaningful glances. "It's a long story, dear," Lady Rudolphine replied gently. "Did Anastasia ever mention the circumstances in which she... conceived Ulrich?"

"She said that she had been raped. When she was sixteen," I said, faltering.

"Exactly," Lady Rudolphine said. "Her rapist and future husband, Axel von Schadenfreude, is, literally, a bastard. He is the natural son of Franz Jozef von Gapsburg. Does the name mean anything to you?"

"Professor Hohenstaufen mentioned him once. Something to do with the Holy Roman Empire. But what does that have to do with Anastasia?" I protested. "The Holy Roman Empire is history!"

"Some people don't think so," Hell observed quietly.

I gaped at him. "They want to bring the Holy Roman Empire back?" All my acquired Amerikan sensibilities were outraged. "But what about democracy?"

Hell barked a laugh. "Ask Hohenstinken what he thinks about democracy." He looked at me with irritated pity. "Look, young fellow, you're not in Kansas anymore."

"And you're not the Wizard of Oz either," I retorted hotly. I'd be damned if I'd let Hell treat me like some hayseed hick hillbilly. I cherished my cosmopolitan credentials almost as much as the clarity of my complexion. "So young Ulrich inherits Himmelsberg. How does that help the Cardinal restore the Holy Roman Empire?"

"What if we told you that Anastasia was raped on purpose?" Lady Rudolphine asked. "That Axel had been programmed to rape her?"

"Lady Rudolphine, I've heard a lot of weird things in the last two months but this is just too ridiculous! Why couldn't Axel just give her flowers and seduce her nicely?"

"You met Axel," Lady Rudolphine replied. "Did you feel that giving a girl flowers was quite his style?"

I grimaced as I gingerly touched Axels' shaving job on my chin. "I take your point. But still, why would anyone get Axel to rape Anastasia?"

"Fetch the Almanach de Gotha from the library," Hell abruptly ordered.

I shrugged sulkily. I hadn't slept in three days and my nightcap was already turning into a hangover. In my swimming head swam an excruciating vision, the freckled face of a young girl with curly red hair pinned under a hard heavy male body, struggling, squirming, screaming, trying desperately to break free. Bitter tears rose to my eyes and I dragged myself out of my seat: I did not understand the gibberish Hell and Lady Rudolphine were babbling, but I had to get to the heart of the matter if only so that I could recover the only person in the whole wide world who mattered to me anymore, my sad sweetheart, Anastasia. It was three in the morning and the library was closed but it didn't matter: I would coax, bribe, or kill to get in, to find this book, to force Hell to explain, to torture the Cardinal, to murder Axel, if anything could bring her back to me I would do it.

As it happened, Annichka was on night duty at the reception desk, Annichka of the short dark curly hair and the adorable dimples, and she was glad to see me, and trustingly she held out her porcelain cheek for me to kiss, and gave me the key to the library without any questions. I could steal as many books as I wanted. "Where have you been all this time?" she squealed. "Will you stay here now?'

"I don't know, Annichka," I answered heavily.

"Don't you want to play with crayons with me? You promised."

"I did, didn't I?" I sighed. A sudden longing almost bowled me over as I stood there: I desperately craved to lie on a floor with pieces of paper and brightly colored crayons spread out everywhere, a yearning for silly laughter and chocolate milk...

"And you were going to get drugs for me," Annichka pouted. But then she smiled, showing rows of shiny milk teeth. "It's okay. Whenever you get them. I'll wait. But hurry!"

I grinned back at her. "Don't worry. I haven't forgotten." I leaned over the counter and kissed her again out of sheer gratitude: embroiled against my will in these grown-up games of conspiracy, murder, and rape, I had almost lost touch with childishness.

I went to the library, found the heavy volume for which I had been sent, returned the library key to Annichka (and kissed her again), and then went back to Hell's office. Pipi was emitting lady-like little snores on the couch. Lady Rudolphine and Hell broke off an animated conversation when I entered the room.

"Took your time," Hell said grumpily as I laid the huge tome on his desk. "Look up the G and T's."

I flipped through the studbook until I got to the section on the higher German nobility. I whistled in surprise. I had never realized how many ancestors Anastasia had.

"Look for a Ferdinand von G and T who died around 1820," Hell ordered. I climbed up the intertwined branches of the interminable family tree until I found the name. "Whom did he marry?"

"Francizska von Gapsburg. But what does all this..."

"How many times after 1820 does a G and T marry a Gapsburg?"

I sighed and bent over the book. "Six. But what does..."

"See any pattern?"

I looked blearily at the book. "Every second generation," I mumbled. "But what..."

"Who do the G and T's marry between each marriage to a Gapsburg?"

I bent my head again. "Another G and T," I exclaimed.

"What was Anastasia's mother?"

"You told me that she was Prince Ludwig's first cousin. Lady Rudolphine left Prince Ludwig because he had an affair with Anastasia's mother. But was Prince Ludwig programmed too?"

Hell turned to Lady Rudolphine. "You answer that."

"I am not possessive," Lady Rudolphine said quietly. "One has affairs. And marriages come and go. But I had to leave Ludwig when he raped Agnieszka..."

"What?" My startled cry rang out like a scream. Pipi turned in her sleep and moaned, an oddly lascivious sound of torment and languorous delight that sent fragmented flashes flickering through my mind, the freckled face of another young girl with curly red hair pinned under a hard male body and when the man turned I saw that he was Prince Ludwig, younger, harder, and his handsome face was twisted in an arrogant snarl, and then they were riding in some verdant landscape, and there was a small child, and these pictures were like clips of a black and white movie I had never seen, odd images like memories which I had never known of a life I had never led, and I wondered dully why I once again tasted the warm salty taste of blood on my lips...

"I tried to understand why it disturbed me so much," Lady Rudolphine continued. "Incest holds no taboo for me. Agnieszka was only fifteen but I had made love when I was as young and I was hardly an innocent even before that. Nor was she, for that matter, as I later heard," Lady Rudolphine said drily. "I only realized years later what had disturbed me so. It was the look on Ludwig's face as he raped her..." I shuddered. Lady Rudolphine nodded again. Her eyes were fixed on my face but they seemed to see something very far away. "Ludwig was never a soft man, but his hardness was honest, even refined... But that day when I heard the screams and went to see what the matter was, I stood transfixed at the door because he wore a face I had never seen in all the years of our marriage, a face full of rage and cruelty and animal greed, positively bestial..."

"You saw the family genie," Hell growled.

"That was what I thought." Lady Rudolphine answered. "But after Anastasia was raped by Axel, I began to wonder..."

Hell shrugged. "Same blood."

Daylight was beginning to seep through the curtains in Hell's office and through my thick skull. "Otto," I gasped. "Is this all part of some program to breed..."

"The next Holy Roman Emperor," he confirmed. "The Cardinal and his friends have been at it for quite a while. Centuries. Ludwig began to suspect that he had been used. Made him furious." Otto yawned and rose heavily to his feet. "Talk about it tomorrow. Time for bed." He frowned at Pipi's supine form. "I'll take care of her," he said. "You sleep with Rudi."

I looked at Hell in confusion and then at Lady Rudolphine. She smiled at me invitingly. "I don't understand," I faltered.

Lady Rudolphine glided across the room and kissed me lightly on the lips. Her bright blue eyes probed mockingly into mine. "Don't worry," she purred. "You will."

"Do I have to?" I stammered.

"Why, of course you do." Lady Rudolphine raised an eyebrow. "It's part of the anti-plot. Don't you want Anastasia back? Well, then. Trust me."

I sighed and followed her meekly. Plots make strange bedfellows.

#GenghizInLove: Episode 39

After Anastasia's abduction and the dramatic events that had followed after, I still remained incapable of speech or deed: I was paralysed, a dull spectator in a tense theater.

"My dear, we really must leave now," Lady Rudolphine Bing said gently to me. "The Cardinal and his henchmen might come back at any moment. Drink some brandy."

I heard the words. I knew what they meant. I even knew that I was supposed to answer. But I was incapable of reply. I had to be very careful. The pain in my chest was so intense that I had to watch every breath. I was standing high, very high, precariously, on a tight rope, cradling an infinitely fragile and awkward object in my arms, and I could neither stand still nor walk, and if I fell and the object broke, something terrible would happen, because the fragile thing I was holding was my shattered heart...

I had never before realized that heartbreak is not a metaphor, a convenient figure of speech to use in chaffing conversation with old girlfriends, but that it is a literally true expression of a physical reality. The rending pain in my chest was certainly not metaphorical. It was all I could do to stop myself from screaming aloud at the agony. My head was spinning and I saw little stars before my eyes, cold stars, distant and cruel, mocking my anguish with their indifference. I felt oddly lucid. I knew I was about to faint.

"Drink this," a brusque voice commanded. I gritted my teeth and opened my eyes. Otto Hell stood before me, holding a tumbler full of brandy. With great effort I stopped myself from throwing up. I shook my head from side to side. "Goddamn it, you young fool, drink it, I say!" Hell shouted angrily. I groped for the glass and poured the brandy down my throat. The acrid fumes rose to my head and choked me. I spluttered and coughed. Tears ran down my cheeks. I felt slightly better when I opened my eyes. Hell was still standing there, scowling at me. "Thought I'd told you to follow orders," he said, still angry.

"I don't work for you any longer," I replied hoarsely.

"You'll do what I tell you and you know it."

I looked at Hell sullenly. A sharp anger rose in me with the last brandy fumes. "Who the hell are you to give me orders?" I asked wildly. I closed my eyes. "Goddamn murderer..." My voice trailed off drunkenly.

A strange grating noise roused me, like a rusty chainsaw rasping against sheet metal. Hell was laughing. "Shock therapy. How's your heart?"

I blinked. Hell was right. I was still in pain like I had never felt in my life, a dull bruised ache which permeated every tissue and muscle in my body as though I had been beaten to a pulp, ruthlessly, but the sharp vice around my heart seemed to have disappeared, at least for the time being. On the other hand, I no longer had the hopeful sense that I might die at any moment. I stared at Hell without gratitude. "Just who are you, Lord Hades?" I demanded again, coldly. "How do you know how I feel? And what makes it your business?"

"Told you to call me Otto," Hell replied, glaring at me. "And you know damn well who I am. At least you should. Maybe you would know if you could drag yourself for just a moment out of the nice cozy little mire of self-pity in which you are wallowing." I glared back at him, stung. "Young swine!" Hell bellowed. "Get out of the mire before you drown! There's work to do! Or have you already forgotten Anastasia? Don't you want to see her again? What were her last words before Axel took her away? `Unless'? Unless what?"

I saw the error of my ways and leaped to my feet. I wanted to salute but it seemed too ridiculous. Neither of us was wearing uniform. "What did she mean, Otto?" I asked eagerly. "Unless what?"

"Can't tell you," Hell answered moodily. "Got to figure it out for yourself."

I felt like hitting him. But then I realized that he was right. It was up to me to save Anastasia. What was I to do? Where should I even begin? I sat down and plunged my head in my hands again. It was all too hopeless. I wished I were back in Mongolia.

"Bet your grandfather would tell you the same thing. Begin at the beginning. First of all, stop whining and start thinking," Otto said grumpily. I gaped at him. How the hell did he know...

"What you were thinking?" Hell asked, a wicked glint in his nut-brown eyes. Pipi sidled up to her new fiance, curled about his elbow, and offered him another enormous snifter of cognac. "Later, girl," he said gruffly, taking the cognac without looking at her. "No time for fun. Yet. We've got work to do first." Pipi purred and rubbed herself against him.

I gazed at Hell as though I were seeing him for the first time. The stumpy bent old figure, the dewlapped wrinkled face, the deep grouchy voice, the careless eccentricities of dress, these features with which I had become familiar, and therefore blind, in the days when I worked for Hell at the University of Truth and Justice, stood out for me now in bold relief like a mask painstakingly wrought by the anonymous artisans of an ancient people, and I felt like one of those civilized nineteenth-century barbarians who wrote learned monographs about these peoples but who were too blind to feel the elemental potency of the tribal divinities whose images they took back to their sterile museums and condescendingly labelled primitive art. In that grumpy face, that crusty voice, those hooded eyes, I now saw to my awed amazement a spirit who could never be blinded by the illusory phantasms of desire and fear, untouched by cowardice or greed, ageless, stern, and very noble. Hell was a well too deep for me to plumb yet, but I was content to lower myself into its dark depths and to learn.

"You're already learning," Hell muttered.

I gaped again at the old devil. Ever since we had first met, I had uneasily suspected that Hell could read my mind. Of course, it made communication that much easier. But did I really want my life to be an open book?

"Otto, was that really Axel von Schadenfreude who abducted Anastasia?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"She's his wife, ain't she?"

"What will he do to her?"

"How the devil should I know?" Hell growled. "Only met the feller once. Too churchy for me. Probably make her wear ladylike clothing and drag her to mass every Sunday. Force her to kiss the Pope's hand at glittering Vatikan receptions and to be polite to everyone. Make her clean the house."

"Not that!" I was appalled. I could not imagine a worse torture for my darling witch. I was sure that Anastasia would have preferred to burn at the stake, suffering abominably and yelling foul curses at all around. "How do we get Anastasia out of Axel's clutches?"

"Probably clutching her body right now," Hell said viciously. "Making up for all the years of sexual deprivation ever since she left him."

I yelped in anguish at the thought. Lady Rudolphine looked concerned. "Must you be so graphic, Otto?" she chided.

"He'll make her wear modest cotton pyjamas," Hell continued remorselessly. "Force her to brush her teeth. First prayers. Then sex. She will be constantly pregnant."

"Stop it!" I shrieked, stopping up my ears. "Nobody could be so cruel!"

"He's a good Catholic. He can afford it."

"How can I save her?"

Hell shrugged. "Could try prayer."

"Never," I declared fervently. "But I'd sell my soul to the Devil..."

A broad grin creased Hell's old brown face. "You already have. Let's get to work."

I gulped down the rest of the brandy straight from the bottle and rubbed my hands. I felt the flush of energy which only anger and strong liquor can produce. I was ready for battle. "Where do we start?"

"Good question." Hell looked at me and stayed silent.

I scowled at Hell. He was obviously not going to make this any easier for me. I took a deep breath and dived into a churning whirlpool of feelings. My emotions jostled like snakes in a basket. I nearly gagged as I made contact with my worst fear but held on, drawing it out like a writhing eel, slimy, repulsive, terrifying. "Oh fuck."

"Go on."

"It's my fault, isn't it?"

"What is?"

"Anastasia's kidnapping. It's my fucking fault."

"How?"

"Axel didn't come here tonight to stop Prince Ludwig's suicide. He came with his men because he knew Anastasia was here. Who told Axel?"

"Ludi didn't," Pipi said helpfully. "He was talking to me about money all day long."

"None of the servants would have told Axel," Lady Rudolphine said slowly. "They are all devoted to Anastasia. And the Cardinal arrived too late to have given Axel enough warning."

"I made a phone call before dinner," I said in a strangled voice. "I called my friend Floss in England. I told her where I was. Godfrey must have overheard. He works for the British secret service. But why would he have told Axel?"

"Does this Godfrey work for Killjoy-Yuck?" Hell asked. I nodded. "Well, then. There we go. The circle squared, our question answered. That fellow has a great deal to answer for."

"Terence told Axel?" I was baffled. "But why? What's the connection between an Oxford don who works for the British secret service and an ultra-Katholic German publisher?"

"My enemy's enemy is my friend," Hell replied calmly. "Guess whom they both can't stand?"

I sighed. "Xox?"

Hell nodded. "Too many plots, too few targets," he replied mysteriously. "Let's get back to Prague and do a little research."

#GenghizInLove: Episode 38

"Ach, Lord Hades, don't worry," Pipi von G and T murmured consolingly. She gingerly placed one little paw on Hell's bowed shoulder. "We do not have the death penalty in Germany. I think. You will just go to jail for many years."

Hell raised his head from his hands and glowered at Pipi. "Don't be ridiculous, young woman," he snorted. "I'm not afraid of death. Too old for that sort of nonsense."

"What is the matter then?" We all looked at Pipi incredulously. Prince Ludwig's death had clearly unbalanced her: not content with having seen Hell decapitate her late husband, here she was, taunting the fierce old man, as though she wanted to get her own silly little head bitten off.

"Pipi, could we get some coffee?" Lady Rudolphine intervened hastily. "Wouldn't you like some, Otto?" Hell grumpily growled assent. "Your Eminence?" The Cardinal nodded mutely.

"I don't know if they will let us, Lady Rudolphine," Pipi answered timidly. We were huddled together in a corner of the magnificent throne room. A guard stood at the door watchfully guarding us in case we tried to escape. After Anastasia's abductors had flown away in their helicopters, we had untied Dr. Hans-Jurgen Gauss's bodyguards, who, after some confusion, decided to tie us up in our turn. Much to our amazement, Pipi threw a magnificent tantrum and refused to be tied up or to allow the rest of us to be tied up either. She was the mistress of Schloss Himmelsberg, she pouted, and we were her guests, at least until we were taken to jail. The nonplussed bodyguards had to content themselves with demanding to be shown a room in which they could keep us until they could fetch arrest warrants. Head held high, Pipi led our incongruous procession down the corridors of the castle, straight to the throne room. But here her nerve seemed to fail her, the sight of the empty thrones perhaps reminding her too much of her happier days as Cinderella, protected by Prince Ludwig's commanding presence, and she shrank away towards the furthest end of the room and began to whimper. Numbly we had followed her. Some time later, the guards roughly shoved poor Saure, wearing only a mauve g-string, long silk scarves still dangling from his wrists and ankles, in towards us and slammed the door shut. Rubbing his bewildered eyes, Saure begged us to tell him what was going on. He had heard nothing, he claimed. The bodyguards had interrupted Anastasia's old hairdresser in the middle of a little tete-a-tete with one of the castle chauffeurs, whom they had arrested on charges of gross indecency and thrown into a separate dungeon. We were, after all, in Katholic Bavaria.

"Olympia, you are the mistress of Himmelsberg," Lady Rudolphine said firmly. "What comes after dinner?"

"Coffee and liqueurs," Pipi replied mechanically, "And cigars for the gentlemen."

"Good girl. Which finishing school did you attend?"

"Miss Blandish's in Lucerne. But I didn't learn about liqueurs until much later." Pipi's face crumpled like a wet handkerchief. "It was Ludi who taught me everything." She burst into loud sobs. "What am I going to do without him? I'll never know which champagne to serve after which wine... Boo hoo hooo!"

Saure patted her arm sympathetically. "There, there, miss," he said soothingly. "You just have to hire a good butler, that's all. It's nothing to worry about. I'll be your butler until you get a real one."

Still sobbing, Pipi looked at him suspiciously. "What are your qualifications?" she demanded brokenly. "Did you go to buttling school? Do you have any references?"

"Very good, Olympia!" Lady Rudolphine exclaimed encouragingly. "That's the spirit. Just wait till you get the billion Ludi left you. Then you can hire a dozen butlers!"

Pipi looked up. A glimmer of hope shone faintly on her wet little face. "Do you really think I'll be able to manage, Lady Rudolphine?" she asked anxiously. Lady Rudolphine nodded reassuringly. The glimmer blossomed into a dazzling rainbow. Pipi smiled, stood up, and straightened her shoulders, pushing out her little breasts. "Which liqueur do you prefer, Lord Hades?" she asked in a sultry voice.

Hell looked up in surprise. "Can't stand them," he said gruffly. "Too sweet. Gives me indigestion. But if you could get a spot of old brandy... Actually, make that a couple of bottles." Pipi marched to the doorway and gave strident orders. Hell held his head in his hands until the brandy came. Then he gulped down his cognac, burped loudly, and poured himself another. Pipi curled up at his feet and looked up at him adoringly. She looked like a prize poodle. "First things first," Hell rasped. "How do we get out of this situation?"

"How did we get into this situation?" Lady Rudolphine asked.

"What is the situation?" Pipi chimed in.

Hell nodded at Pipi approvingly. "Good question. Why are we being held here?"

"You are being held on charges of murder, Lord Hades," the Cardinal said icily. "You murdered my cousin, Prince Ludwig, in cold blood. We are witnesses."

"I did it at Ludwig's request," Hell answered evenly. "As an old comrade in arms."

"Comrade in arms!" the Cardinal spluttered, a fine spray of coffee misting his robes. "You were on the other side in the war! He hunted you for years! And tonight you murdered him like you murdered Christ! You filthy Jew!" A deathly silence filled the room. Hell stared at the Cardinal, unblinking. The Cardinal flinched first. "You killed him," he repeated, averting his eyes.

"And I am a Jew," Hell said patiently. "Glad to get the facts straight. But I am not filthy. Took a bath just the other week. You, on the other hand, your Eminence..." Hell's voice changed suddenly. "How long have you been plotting against Ludwig, you filthy hypocrite?" Hell roared. He leapt out of his chair, grabbed the Cardinal's collar, and twisted it tight. Saure gasped and crossed himself. "For how long now have you been trying to replace Ludwig with your own little pet, Axel von Schadenfreude? And for how many silver pieces, Judas?"

Hell released the Cardinal and sat down again, breathing heavily. The guard came running up, genuflected before the Cardinal, and asked if he was all right. The Cardinal beckoned him away and sat still for a moment, fighting for breath. My head was reeling. What was this new plot development?

"What is all this, Otto?" Lady Rudolphine asked quietly.

"Ask this rat," Hell gestured contemptuously towards the Cardinal. "Ask him to vomit up some of his Vatikan conspiracies for us."

"How dare you insult the Holy Church?" The Cardinal's face was flushed magenta, mismatching unpleasantly with his purple robes, and his voice was going all over the place. Lady Rudolphine got up and firmly sat him down. Quite right too: one apoplexy for the evening was quite enough.

"Does the Pope know about your little scheme to sell the Holier than thou Bank to the Muslims?"

"It will be a merger," the Cardinal spat. "And none of your business, you infidel."

"How much will the Nectarini family give you if the deal goes through?"

"The money goes to a greater good!"

"And was it for the greater good that you had Prince Ludwig murdered?"

The Cardinal gained control of himself. He looked over at Hell and smiled, showing a row of crooked yellow teeth. I shook my head in disapproval. He obviously had bad tartar, and worse still, advanced gum disease. Nobody had taught him how to floss his teeth. "Axel is now master of the Himmelsberg legacy," the Cardinal crowed. "There is nothing you can do about it. We have won."

Pipi had been following this turbulent exchange like an engrossed spectator at a ping-pong match, her protuberant eyes moving back and forth between Hell and the Cardinal. "But the lawyers said that I could stay at Himmelsberg as long as I wanted," she quavered.

"What is the Himmelsberg legacy?" Lady Rudolphine wondered aloud.

The Cardinal laughed unpleasantly. "It is not the castle or the money, of that you may rest assured."

Hell did not take his eyes off the gloating cardinal. "I'd like to hang him up by his toes and make him talk..." he muttered.

The Cardinal reddened. "And I would like to break you on the wheel, you interfering Jew," he hissed.

"And I would like to..."

"Stop it, both of you," Lady Rudolphine cried, exasperated. "Honestly. Men!" Hell and the Cardinal both blushed, leaned back in their chairs, and looked away, like small boys pretending not to care about their nanny's rebuke. "Would you just tell us what you are talking about?"

"Politics," Hell grumbled.

"You're a woman. You wouldn't understand," the Cardinal added.

Lady Rudolphine rose quickly, the color high in her cheeks, pulled up the Cardinal's robes over his head, and reached into his trousers. She must have been squeezing awfully hard: I could hear the Cardinal's muffled wails even through the thick fabric. Hell watched wide-eyed as, still squeezing, Lady Rudolphine turned to him menacingly. "We're friends, Otto," she said grimly. "But don't count on it too much. Will you talk?" Hell nodded dumbly. The guard looked on curiously. From his position at the door he could see nothing to indicate that a prelate was undergoing an agony like nothing endured by so high a dignitary of the Church since the crucifixion of the first popes. Lady Rudolphine released the Cardinal, daintily rinsed her hands, wiped them with a napkin, went back to her seat, crossed her elegant legs, and sipped Benedictine as though nothing at all had happened.

When the Cardinal had finished retching, Hell spoke once more. "If your people arrest me I will talk openly about poison." Still wheezing, the Cardinal gaped in dismay. Hell nodded calmly. "Yes, I know all about Dr. Dufarge and his clinic in Zurich. I know all about the special cure for arthritis you recommended to Ludwig three months ago. A cure which wrecked even that hardy constitution. Ludwig was poisoned at your command. Because he was using his influence in the Church to delay your wretched plans to use the Holier than Thou Bank's money for your own twisted ends. Because he wouldn't let Axel von Schadenfreude give young Ulrich to the Jesuits for brainwashing. Because he defended his daughter Anastasia from Axel's clutches against all odds. Am I wrong, your Eminence?"

"There is no proof," the Cardinal wheezed but his eyes were glassy and contorted, a mirror in which we could all see the convexity of his warped little soul.

Hell laughed. I was beginning to like the sound of rusty chainsaws. "You always did underestimate Ludwig," he said easily. "We have his medical records. And tape recordings of your conversations. I didn't murder him. You did. And I can prove it. Good public relations for the Church, Your Eminence."

The Cardinal rose, clutching his genitals. A bestial spasm of hatred contorted his face. "We'll be back," he snarled. "You'll regret it." He hobbled to the doorway and spoke hoarsely to the guard. They disappeared. We sat in the throne room in amazed silence. Very soon we heard the sound of helicopter engines again, growing more distant, in the circumstances, a welcome whine, but for me, a hated din, a noise which I could never again hear without a rending pang of pain.

Pipi got up and tip-toed to the door. We could hear her high heels clacking down the corridors. After a while she returned to the room, an awed look on her face. She threw her arms around Hell's neck and kissed him, quite sexily for a freshly bereaved widow. "They really have gone. How did you do it?" she breathed. "You're marvellous. Will you marry me?"

Hell shrugged. "Why not. No fool like an old fool."

#GenghizInLove: Episode 37

"In nomine patrii et filii et spiritus sancti!" a bass voice boomed over the deafening roar of the hovering helicopters. In the glare of the searchlights, I saw the cardinal drop to his knees and cross himself. For a mad moment I waited to see the face of God. I was filled with curiosity: did he still have a long white beard and bushy eyebrows? The image didn't seem to fit with the technology. "Drop your guns!" the voice commanded. Dr. Hans-Jurgen Gauss's guards, devout Catholics to a man, hastily complied. I rubbed my eyes: Gauss's vast bulk was moving oddly in and out of focus. It took me some seconds before I realized that he was just trembling. In that eerie moment everyone else seemed frozen, as though the glacial light were an avalanche of ice, paralyzing sense and will alike, extinguishing the brightness of the moon and all thought of defiance. Even the fine hard faces of Lady Rudolphine and Anastasia seemed stunned: gone was the glimmer in their eyes, eclipsed like sapphires and emeralds in the greater glitter of an impossibly cruel diamond.

But where was Prince Ludwig? And Otto Hell? As if we had together at one moment realized their absence, we all moved in our chairs and looked around, and indeed, the searchlights mounted on the helicopters too shifted, uneasily grazing the snowy ground all around, in search of their escaping prey. A horde of masked men in tight purple jumpsuits reeled down from the helicopters led by a thick-set balding man with a drooping lower lip. His thuggish face bore an expression of extraordinary arrogance and cruelty. "Axel!" I heard Anastasia breathe. "Don't move!" the balding man shouted in a deep bass rumble, but the moment of awe had passed, Gauss bellowed and slapped the cardinal's shoulder, Lady Rudolphine smiled reassuringly at Anastasia, and I felt a sudden surge of wild elation and filial pride at the escape of the two grim patriarchs who would surely save us, somehow, from our desperate plight.

Just then Gauss gave out an odd little moan, his face turned bright magenta, his eyeballs bulged ready to shoot out of his head (and I reflected uneasily that my shirtfront was right in front of their line of fire), and shakily pointing one arm towards the corner of the garden, he collapsed noisily onto the table, his head slamming straight into a crystal decanter which shivered into knife-like shards, one of which stayed stuck through his bull neck, quivering. A dark pool of blood quickly formed on the table cloth, running along the white surface faster than it could be absorbed, dangerously near my trousers, but I had no time to spare for this imminent threat, so I hastily tossed a few starched napkins to dam the flow, and added some salt for good measure. I was rather hazily assuming that since salt is good for removing red wine stains, it might work with blood as well, but I have since learned through much trial and error that this is not the case, and that the only effectual remedy for fresh blood stains is the immediate application of thin slices of raw potato. However, even if I had known this at the time, I could not possibly have procured raw potato slices, or even another helping of the exquisitely creamed potatoes which had accompanied our dinner, because the attention of all the waiters was riveted to the sight which had felled Dr. Gauss, the spectacle of Prince's Ludwig's suicide.

Prince Ludwig had taken off his dinner jacket, and, bathed in the icy glare of the searchlights, his starched white shirtfront seemed luminous, pearly. His snowy mane of hair swirled in the wind and an expression of incandescent hauteur lit up his pale arrogant face. In one raised hand, he clutched a short blade which glittered coldly as though wreathed in white flame. As he stood motionless in the snow by the parapet, the dark valley behind him, he looked like a god who had stepped out from some rude myth, a fearsome figure woven from the dreams of wanderers in far northern lands, an apparition of shocking clarity. "It is time," he shouted in a voice so great that we heard him clearly over the impotent din of the machines above us. I squinted at the horrid plastic face of my disposable watch. It was midnight. "Time to die!" And even as I shivered with admiration at Prince Ludwig's impeccable sense of punctuality, he buried the sword to its hilt into his body. He staggered a little, but then steadied himself, and wrenching the sword free, this time ripped it across his body. The great gashes were clean and deep and, in that long instant (before the dark blood welled up to the surface and his coiled insides plopped out, grey and bloody), as he stood proudly before us, the Prince had erased his own identity, he had become one of his ancestors, a medieval knight-templar whose insignia of a hooked red cross on a field argent was traced upon his shirtfront in his own living blood. And then he sank to his knees. The snow sizzled around him and turned into a dark slush. I noticed now that Otto Hell was standing next to him, leaning impassively on a long curved sword. Hell watched Prince Ludwig's motionless form for a while, then leaned forward, and spoke into the dying prince's ear. Then he straightened up, raised his long sword with both hands, took careful aim, and brought it down fast. Axel and his men leaped towards Hell but it was too late. A swish, a snick, a thud, a woman's shrill scream and it was all over. Hell walked over slowly and sat down at the table. "Waste of a good dinner," he muttered moodily. "Never understood all that rot about giving a condemned man a hearty breakfast. Starving children!"

The helicopters had landed near us, unnoticed, as we had watched Prince Ludwig's ceremonial suicide, transfixed. The burly men in purple jumpsuits had disarmed and bound the late Dr. Gauss's bodyguards who had not put up much resistance in their shock at the death of their master. Now the men in purple were all around us, uttering peremptory commands to which none of us paid any attention. Pipi was too busy having hysterics. The cardinal had his hands folded in prayer. Hell was engrossed with his pipe, carefully filling, tamping, and lighting its stubby little bowl. Lady Rudolphine was staring into the distance, an oddly serene expression on her face. And I was watching in fascination as Anastasia rose, brushed off the restraining hand laid on her arm by one of the burly men, calmly walked over to her father's decapitated corpse, picked up the head which had rolled away a little distance, raised it to her face, and kissed its cold lips.

It was only when she came over to me, still holding her father's head, and kissed me hard, and I tasted the warm salty blood on her lips and tongue, that I shuddered, once, hard. She smiled mysteriously into my eyes, put the head down carelessly on the table, and kissed me again, slowly, caressingly, her tongue slithering around mine, its slippery friction like the scaly dance of snakes roistering in a hot cage of flesh, and an intense burning awakened deep within me and I responded with a passion I did not understand. "I like the taste of blood," Anastasia said in a husky whisper. "Remember?" I nodded. She kissed me again. My eyes were closed and I could not see her face but I was deluged in an ecstasy I had never felt before but which I instantly recognized. I felt myself drowning in honey, immersed in its slow lethargic weight, overwhelmed by the buzzing of bees on a drowsy summer day, imbued with the tangy sweetness of Anastasia. The last remaining barriers between us lifted and her essence mingled with mine, like oil and water, fluids of different densities and textures, swirling, overlapping, intertwining. "They have come for me." I did not so much hear her words as feel her hot breath inside my mind. "They have come to take me away. You will never see me again. Unless..."

I heard the crunch of heavy boots come nearer. "Unless what?" I pleaded urgently. "Unless what?" But by then the burly men had grabbed my arms and they were pulling them hard behind me and my kicks and shoves and struggle to put up a fight were as useless and pitiful as a small boy's attempts to wriggle free of a gang of older tormentors. Axel came up to me and smiled. His breath was hot and rank in my face. He caressed my throat with a razor-sharp knife and idly peeled away a thin layer of skin from my chin. "We have much to discuss, my interfering friend. You go back to Prague soon, nicht wahr? I will find you there," he whispered. "When you least expect me. But first I must take care of my wife." I saw Anastasia's pale blank face in the distance once more, as Axel and his men led her away towards the helicopters. The chatter of their engines started up again. "Unless what?" I screamed, desperately. But her words, if she spoke any, were blown away in that hateful din, lost forever, irretrievable, like bits of confetti, or the snow which blew untidily like a sad broken mist in the wake of the machines which took my beloved's body away from me.

#GenghizInLove: Episode 36

The ominous whine of helicopters grew to a deafening roar as they took off and landed on the roof of the castle. In our turret suite, Anastasia stamped her foot impatiently. The elderly maid looked up from her sewing and smiled at Anastasia. "Only five more minutes, Princess," the maid cajoled. "A few more rubies, my little darling."

"But, Nadia, I don't like spangles," Anastasia pouted.

The old woman looked up again, reprovingly. "All grown up now and you still don't like spangles?" She sighed. "Ach, all the spangled dresses you wore when you were a little baby. And you always flew into such tantrums. Remember when you ripped off the pearls from that pretty white dress I made for your first communion? And when your governess complained and His Highness ordered you to pick the pearls up, you picked them up with your toes one by one and then you swallowed them all and washed them down with a glass of neat brandy because you had read in a book about some Indian king who drank pearls and brandy every day to increase his sexual potency and you had such a bad stomach ache that we thought you were going to die and the cardinal had to be flown in all the way from Munich to give you the last rites but then you stuck out your tongue at him and skipped away because it was just a bad hangover? Are you still as headstrong? Just imagine what your nice young yellow gentleman will think about the way you're behaving," the old lady chided.

Anastasia looked at me and blushed. I grinned and kissed her bare shoulder. The old maid had already altered one of Prince Ludwig's tuxedos for me. Even so I was apprehensive that I might take off if exposed to even a mild gust of wind since the shoulders of the jacket stuck out about a meter on either side of me like impromptu wings. I felt even more ludicrous once Anastasia had been helped into her dress and I offered her my arm and we set off slowly to the party. A spectacular scarlet satin skirt sparkling with tiny rubies flowed out from a tight strapless bodice that clung to Anastasia's slender waist and a single immense ruby dangled between her full creamy breasts. I felt like a housefly perched on a luscious rose.

A full orchestra was playing in the landscaped gardens of the castle. Stacks of timber crackled merrily in immense porcelain stoves strategically placed in the snow all around a stone platform where a table was set for dinner. Prince Ludwig stood alone, staring at the dim lights of the little villages in the valley below. He did not turn around when we joined him. "They call me Ludwig the Mad down there," he said slowly. "Devil knows, my ancestors did all they could to prevent any misalliance in our family. And yet who can say? All it takes is one careless ancestress..."

"You're as bad as that dolt Max von Hohenstaufen," Anastasia retorted. "This fixation on the purity of blood is really too stupid."

"Ah, no, daughter, what is really stupid is this modern insistence that blood does not matter. Believe me, inbreeding always tells in the end." Prince Ludwig turned to me with a half-bow. "You should know."

"I can't say, I'm afraid," I confessed, thinking of my Scandinavian-Javanese-Jewish-Nigerian mother. Admittedly, she made every effort to be more Mongolian than thou, serving only real horsemeat in her chain of Mongolian fast-food restaurants, but she never could eat that ultimate delicacy, a sheep's eye, with quite as much relish as my father's side of the family.

"I can tell," Prince Ludwig affirmed mistakenly. "The practiced eye can always tell. Your ancestors were as careful as mine." He looked at Anastasia and I, standing side by side and nodded slowly. "Yes, you are both thoroughly inbred. You have the instinctive haughtiness, the tendency to alcoholic depression, the excessive touchiness. Do you have webbed feet? Is there not, perhaps, a record of imbecility in your family?"

I winced. The mad exploits of my great-uncle Taimur had always been a sore spot in my family, and as my grandfather was fond of saying in his usual enigmatic fashion, it really had been a quite miraculous coincidence that Stalin had died just before he could execute the blood-thirsty vengeance he had planned against our entire people, and all because Taimur had gone up to Stalin at the Opera in Moscow one evening, grinning in his usual imbecile fashion, and had tweaked Stalin's nose; of course, Stalin's bodyguards jumped out of their stunned immobility when they saw Taimur pull out a pair of scissors from his pocket in preparation for cutting off one half of Stalin's glossy black mustache, but still, the whole episode had been a ghastly embarrassment for all concerned.

"And yet," Prince Ludwig mused, "if the two of you were to have a child, the little mongrel would be boring. The complexity of your separate distinctive genes would collapse like a house of cards and one would have to begin the whole arduous process of breeding all over again."

"I don't like children," I said reassuringly.

Prince Ludwig stared oblivious into the distance. "But who can say?" he continued slowly. "Perhaps, such a mating would produce a mutant like the world has never seen, something fabulous and strange..."

Pipi came running out from the house. "Our guests will come down any moment," she announced breathlessly. She primped and preened for us. "Do I look all right?" Prince Ludwig stared coldly at his young wife's shiny skin-tight jumpsuit and grunted. "Oh, I'm so glad you approve," Pipi trilled, clapping her hands happily. "I knew black leather would be appropriate for the occasion!"

Hans-Jurgen Gauss, Lady Rudolphine Bing, and Otto Hell joined us shortly, accompanied by a tall man in rich purple robes. The Cardinal had a dignified flaccid face bearing a dull resemblance to Prince Ludwig. We all sat down to dinner. We raised our glasses and drank solemnly to our host. Servants brought crystal bowls of caviar packed tightly around the edges with snow. I piled the little black eggs onto hot buttered toast, sprinkled the toast with lemon, and chomped away with relish, between munches eavesdropping on all the conversations.

Prince Ludwig speaking quietly to Otto Hell: "…come back from the Tamato factory in Japan. In the shadow of Mount Fuji. Extraordinary facility."

"Everything painted orange, I understand."

"Fluorescent orange. Glowing in the dark. Not a single light in the whole place. Why bother? Robots building robots..."

"No humans at all?"

"Not in the factory. Engineers in the design area, of course. Led by young Luciano Shinola. Reports directly to Tamato himself."

"Saw Xox and Tamato-san at a conference last month. Got along remarkably well. Cyborgs…"

And then the Cardinal conversing with the Chief Minister: "...the class of people with whom we must deal that bothers me, my dear Gauss." The Cardinal's robes fluttered in dignified agitation. "I will not speak ill of a brother prelate but one does wish that His Holiness had not entrusted the financial security of our Mother, the Church, to..." His Eminence's thin lips puckered as though he were sucking a rotten lemon. "An Amerikan."

"But I have met Cardinal O'Greedy several times, your Eminence," Gauss protested. "He struck me as a man one can do business with."

"You cannot do business with the Church," the Cardinal said stiffly. "It is right and proper to pay homage to the Church. God's work requires a devoted laity. Our Savior did not object to Joseph of Arimathea's house or food or wine. However, if Joseph of Arimathea and Peter had drawn up a contract for Our Lord's sustenance, so many drachmas for twelve loaves of bread, so many silver pieces for a shroud, then it is fair to say that our Lord would have found such behavior displeasing."

"But does your Eminence object to the idea of Hotbank as such?"

"Don't misunderstand me, my dear fellow. I recognize that the Holier than Thou Bank is vital for the smooth functioning of the Church's worldwide operations. The Zurich Club analysis clearly demonstrates this. I am even prepared to collaborate with the Muslims. Hotbank and Bank Ripoff should indeed merge operations as that pompous little man at the Zurich Club suggests."

"The Zurich Club is involved in this?"

"Unfortunately," the Cardinal sighed. "They always poke their noses into these bank transactions. I am always having to talk to this annoying man Pickie." I grinned, recognising the name of Navel's father. "It does not matter," the Cardinal continued. "We can always launch a crusade afterwards, when the time suits us. However, I cannot agree when O'Greedy tells us that we must join hands with..." A shudder ran through the Cardinal. "With flashy upstarts whose hands are still dripping with blood. They could at least wash them first."

"But I thought the Mafia connection..." Gauss leaned forward and lowered his voice and I only caught a few more snippets of their conversation. "Suspended, yes, but for how long? I would infinitely prefer to deal merely with the Nectarini." "Trouble?" "Yes, that's all I ever hear these days, Nectarini this, Nectarino that." It would have been impossible to eavesdrop further without being too obvious. In any case, I was more interested in another conversation, on the other side of the table, between Anastasia and Lady Rudolphine.

"But why am I not afraid, Rudi?" Anastasia asked, leaning forward, elbows earnestly on the table.

Lady Rudolphine flashed her white teeth, leaned back, and sipped some more Taittinger. "Why should you be afraid, darling? Frankly, I'm disappointed. I thought I had brought you up better than that."

"But who is she, this dark woman in my dreams? And what does she want from me? Am I going to die? Is that it?" Anastasia persisted.

Lady Rudolphine shrugged a trifle contemptuously. "Anastasia, Anastasia," she chided. "You know who the dark woman is. And you know what she is offering you." Anastasia's eyes widened. Lady Rudolphine smiled again. "You know that Axel won't leave you alone as long as you keep this body. What could be a better solution?"

Anastasia shivered. "Now I am afraid," she said somberly.

Lady Rudolphine grinned at her. "I've changed bodies at least thrice in my life," she said lightly. She glanced casually over at silly little Pipi who was happily making eyes at a gruffly blushing Otto Hell. "And I'm planning to do it at least once more. All you have to do is to take a deep breath. Metaphysically speaking."

A passing rake of her blue eyes ran through me. She winked. I started. "Now take him, for instance," she said, pointing at me. "He's not afraid." I gaped. Not afraid of what? Fear was the only constant in my extensive experience of all moving objects from sheep through motor cars. In all honesty, I had to admit to myself that I was even afraid of most shampoos. "And he hasn't even had any training. Aren't you ashamed?"

Anastasia looked at me and blushed. For some reason, I was reminded of a moment much earlier in the evening, before the champagne and caviar, before the porcelain samovars in the sizzling snow, before the quails' eggs stuffed with roasted peahen and ground almonds and the astounding canard a la reine Margrethe, when her old nurse had scolded her for her dislike of spangles. A tremor of affection for this weird wicked witch ran through me, a feeling so strong that the earth shook beneath me, a vague terrestrial echo of an emotion beyond my experience, love, love unmixed, unadulterated by desire, longing, regret, or shame, a fierce adoration of the fiery curls on the bowed head opposite me, and my eyes filled with tender tears for the pure profile I saw now only in a white glare, for the full sensitive lips speaking words I could not hear...

And the earth shook harder and the noise grew louder and then I could see no longer in the hard brightness which enveloped us, the screaming luminosity of searchlights, the pounding vibrations of unearthly machines, and squinting up I could see nothing but a play of light emanating from dark hovering aerial menaces which I recognized only by the ominous whine of their engines...