V.

Weissmann favored him with a smile. "You just convicted yourself. They send you instructions. I may not know electronics, but I can recognize the scrawlings of a bad cryptanalyst."

If you can do any better you're welcome," Mondaugen sighed. He told Weissmann about his whim, the "code."

"You mean that?" abruptly almost childlike. "You'll let me see what you've received?"

"You've obviously seen everything. But it'll put us that much closer to a solution."

Quite soon he had Weissmann laughing shyly. "Oh. Oh, I see. You're ingenious. Amazing. Ja. Stupid of me, you see. I do apologize."

Struck by an inspiration, Mondaugen whispered, "I'm monitoring their little broadcasts."

Weissmann frowned. "That's what I just said."

Mondaugen shrugged. The lieutenant lit a whale-oil lamp and they set out for the turret. As they ascended a sloping hallway, the great villa was filled with a single, deafening pulse of laughter. Mondaugen became numb, the lantern went smash behind him. He turned to see Weissmann standing among little blue flames and shiny fragments of glass.

"The strand wolf," was all Weissmann could manage.

In his room Mondaugen had brandy, but Weissmann's face remained the color of cigar smoke. He wouldn't talk. He got drunk and presently feel asleep in a chair.

Mondaugen worked on the code into the early morning, getting, as usual, nowhere. He kept dozing off and being brought awake by brief chuckling sounds from the loudspeaker. They sounded to Mondaugen, half in dream, like that other chilling laugh, and made him reluctant to go back to sleep. But he continued to, fitfully.

Somewhere out in the house (though he may have dreamed that too) a chorus had begun singing a Dies Irae in plainsong. It got so loud it woke Mondaugen. Irritated, he lurched to the door and went out to tell them to keep quiet.

Once past the storage rooms, he found the adjoining corridors brilliantly lit. On the whitewashed floor he saw a trail of blood-spatters, still wet. Intrigued, he followed. The blood led him perhaps fifty yards through drapes and around corners to what may have been a human form, lying covered with a piece of old canvas sail, blocking further passage. Beyond it the floor of the corridor gleamed white and bloodless.

Mondaugen broke into a sprint, jumped neatly over whatever it was and continued on at a jogging pace. Eventually he found himself at the head of a portrait gallery he and Hedwig Vogelsang had once danced down. His head still reeled with her cologne. Halfway along, illuminated by a nearby sconce, he saw Foppl, dressed in his old private-soldier's uniform and standing on tiptoe to kiss one of the portraits. When he'd gone, Mondaugen looked at the brass plate on the frame to verify his suspicion. It was indeed von Trotha.

"I loved the man," he'd said. "He taught us not to fear. It's impossible to describe the sudden release; the comfort, the luxury; when you knew you could safely forget all the rote-lessons you'd had to learn about the value and dignity of human life. I had the same feeling once in the Realgymnasium, when they told us we wouldn't be responsible in the examination for all the historical dates we'd spent weeks memorizing ....

"Till we've done it, we're taught that it's evil. Having done it, then's the struggle: to admit to yourself that it's not really evil at all. That, like forbidden sex, it's enjoyable."

Shuffling sounds behind him. MondaugEn turned; it was Godolphin. "Evan," the old man whispered.

"I beg your pardon."

"It's I, son. Captain Hugh."

Mondaugen came closer, thinking possibly Godolphin's eyes were troubling him. But worse troubled him, and there was nothing remarkable about the eyes, save tears.

"Good morning, Captain."

"You don't have to hide any more, son. She told me; I know; it's all right. You can be Evan again. Father's here." The old man gripped his arm above the elbow and smiled bravely. "Son. It's time we went home. God, we've been so long away. Come."

Trying to be gentle, Mondaugen let the sea captain steer him along the corridor. "Who told you? You said 'she.'"

Godolphin had gone vague. "The girl. Your girl. What's-her-name."

A minute passed before Mondaugen remembered enough of Godolphin to ask, with a certain sense of shock: "What has she done to you."

Godolphin's little head nodded, brushed Mondaugen's arm. "I'm so tired."

Mondaugen stooped and picked up the old man, who seemed to weigh less than a child, and bore him along the white ramps, between mirrors and past tapestries, among scores of separate lives brought to ripeness by this siege and hidden each behind its heavy door; up through the enormous house to his own turret. Weissmann still snored in the chair. Mondaugen laid the old man on the circular bed, covered him with a black satin comforter. And stood over him, and sang:

“Dream tonight of peacock tails,

Diamond fields and spouter whales.

Ills are many, blessings few,

But dreams tonight will shelter you.

Let the vampire's creaking wing

Hide the stars while banshees sing;