* * * * * * * * * *
MEMENTO VIVERE

- Sextus -
De Poenis Inferni



"Phileas!" Rebecca yelled, or tried to yell, but what came out was a garbled inarticulate cry. It lasted forever and an instant; both perceptions superimposed strangely on her reeling mind. Then she heard a crash, a groan, the scrape of soles on pavement.

And a very English curse that gave her back both breath and a heartbeat.

"Come on!" Phileas said from the darkness, and Rebecca realized that the building was maybe two stories high and that something had broken her cousin's fall. There were still noises behind her, the same sounds from a second and a lifetime ago. She hung from the gutter, fought the instant of sheer panic as her arms let go of her support, and fell a fraction of a second into a very unstable and uncomfortable pile of old boxes and half-rotten vegetables. She, too, stumbled from the heap into the alley, a cul-de-sac that opened to a narrow street. Phileas steadied her and they both ran.

Rebecca took the lead at once. During the trip she had been studying an old, but still reliable, map of the town. Maybe she couldn't name each and every street, but by Jove she could get to the oldest part of it and lose any pursuers in the maze of streets there. She started to run, but Phileas's hand on her arm stopped her.

"The morgue," he said.

"Phileas, no."

"The morgue," he repeated, "or I'll go alone."

"Phileas, it's madness. We can evade them easily in the dark and get to the =Aurora=. If we wait until morning it will be much harder. They will block every access."

"Then go. Get Brideshaw to England, and we'll rendezvous at the border in a week."

"You are talking nonsense," Rebecca said fiercely, but even as she spoke, she could see Phileas's face in the dim light of a nearby street lamp. Nothing would make him change his mind. Even if it killed him.

"Nothing has made sense since he died, Rebecca," he said, in a much different voice. Softer. Sadder. Broken. "Nothing has mattered. Nothing is worth doing, or starting, or keeping." There was a pause that Rebecca felt unable to fill; there was so much void there. Then Phileas straightened up and looked past her, his face set. "I don't care if the whole Prussian army comes after me. I'm going there and I'm bringing him home."

Rebecca swallowed her frustration and put a hand on her cousin's arm. He looked down at it and sighed: a little sigh of, maybe, regret.

"Then," Rebecca said, steel in her voice, "=I'm= bringing you both home. Let's go."

* * * * *

"We've lost them, General," one of the men said, holding his aching ribs.

"So I see," Von Kessler said, agreeably. "So I see. Ah well. Nothing we can do now without making a big fuss. Kreutzmer?"

"Sir?" Kreutzmer had been one of the men on the receiving end of Rebecca's punches and kicks. He had realized, vaguely, that his opponent was a woman, but he still couldn't believe that a woman could be so strong.

"We'll tell the police that there's a couple of dangerous criminals on the loose. Let them do the dirty work. Appoint some of our men to all the road blocks they set up, and make sure that nothing slips by. Understood?"

"Yes, sir," Kreutzmer said. Amazingly enough, Von Kessler didn't seem put out by their failure. But it was always difficult to gauge the Colonel's state of mind. He could explode in a second.

But he didn't. He put a friendly arm across Kreutzmer's shoulders and smiled broadly.

"Did you see her, Kreutzmer? Wasn't she perfect?"

"Er... Yes, sir. A very skilled young woman." =A murderous she-devil, more like. I wish I had seen her face. That way I could avoid her in the future=, Kreutzmer thought, and then realized that von Kessler was speaking again and he focused on his boss. It was extremely dangerous not to pay attention to what the Colonel was saying. Drastic things happened to your life and you didn't even realize it until all was over and you were facing the firing squad.

"The game has taken a very unexpected turn, Kreutzmer. And a delightful one, too. I shall enjoy this," von Kessler said, as he half-led, half-pushed Kreutzmer toward their carriage. "Call me at once when they are captured. I will personally conduct the woman's interrogation."

There was something deeply disturbing in von Kessler's voice as he said this, and for a moment Kreutzmer found himself wishing that at least the woman would escape them.

"No, no, no, no, no, my friend," the Colonel's voice hissed by his ear, and his arm grasped his shoulders in a grip of iron. "None of that, now."

"Sir, I didn't..." How could he know? There were rumors, among those who had worked with the Colonel, that von Kessler had sold his soul to the Devil, in return for the power to read men's minds. For one wild moment Kreutzmer was willing to credit it as truth. The Colonel's smile was feral and terrible in its cheerful way, as though he knew exactly what Kreutzmer had been thinking.

"You must be ready, Kreutzmer. You must be ready to give up everything for the Service, you see. Your time, your strength, your life. Yes, even your honor. Even your soul."

"I..."

"It doesn't work otherwise, you see? And I cannot afford," now the arm gave Kreutzmer's shoulders a sudden and painful squeeze, "I simply =cannot= afford someone whose heart is not on the job at hand, do you understand me?"

"You can count on me, Colonel," Kreutzmer managed to say.

"I'm sure I can. I'm sure I can. Now, see about those roadblocks, eh?"

The arm released him and Kreutzmer found himself standing alone in the street, reeling with a mixture of relief and fear.

* * * * *

The night was still young when Brideshaw reached the clearing, half-dead from the run, and he almost managed to lose what life he had left when a scale dropped from nowhere and hit him on the head.

"Master!" a faint voice with a strange accent came from the skies, "Coming up, Master! Miss Rebecca!"

"Er... Mister Passepartout?"

"Who is this?"

"It's, um. It's Brideshaw. Miss Fogg told me to..." The scale trembled and swung and suddenly a man dropped to the ground beside him. Brideshaw hiccuped in shock to find the dark mouth of a pistol pointed at his chest.

"Who is you? It is early for the rendezvous. Where is my Master?" the man said. He was short, but well-muscled, and the hand holding the gun didn't waver one bit. Brideshaw fumbled in his waistcoat pocket and produced the ring.

"Miss Fogg gave me this. She and Mister Fogg have been... um... delayed. They told me to come here and tell you to take me to England immediately."

The man's eyes widened at this. He took the ring with his free hand and squinted mightily to study it by the faint light of the stars.

"You are being the Brideshaw that found my Master's brother's body?"

"Er... I think so. More or less."

"What is happened to them?" The pistol was still aimed at his chest, but all the attention of the little man was now focused on Brideshaw's words. He described what had happened, as best as he could remember, which wasn't really very well. But he must have been convincing, because Passepartout withdrew the weapon.

"Go up, up," he said.

"We're going to England?" Brideshaw asked, relieved. Right now nothing looked better than returning to his country and leaving behind a world that had suddenly turned crazy.

"England! What England? Leaving my Master behind, and Miss Rebecca? You going up and telling me everything and we go looking for them, yes?"

"But Miss Fogg said..."

"Passepartout is very fooly. He not understanding the language, see? He is thinking that what you say is that we go look, yes?" the pistol reappeared briefly, suggesting that Brideshaw's options included either following a French madman back into a town swarming with Prussian military, or getting a permanent status as one of the anonymous corpses that were regularly found in the woods around the place. Brideshaw gulped and, clumsily, followed the crazy Frenchman up the scale.

* * * * *

"There it is," Rebecca breathed with relief at the sight of the ugly squat building. Phileas said nothing. He simply strode forward, throwing caution to the wind as he made a bee-line towards the door. It was a good thing that this part of the town was deserted. Rebecca growled to herself in frustration and followed him.

She arrived at his side as he knocked the door, hard, three times. Rebecca flinched.

"Not so loud, Phileas!" she hissed, as a coarse voice from the other side of the door asked who was it.

"We want to see one of your bodies," Phileas said clearly in flawless German. The door opened an inch and a cloudy blue eye looked at them suspiciously. Rebecca was suddenly conscious of her less-than-proper attire. Phileas was in his shirt sleeves; his collar was open, his waistcoat unbuttoned, and there was a huge tear in one of his trousers legs.

All this the eye saw, but the door opened nonetheless.

"Which one?" he asked. He was an old man, bent and scruffy, dressed in a very battered nightgown that may have been red sometime during the Dark Ages and that was now an ugly shade of brown. He carried a small oil lamp in one hand.

"The young man that was pulled from the river."

"Ah, that one. Yes. Who are you?"

"His brother." Whatever Phileas was feeling now, it wasn't showing either in his voice or his posture. His expression was totally under control.

"Hrm. Come in, then. You could have waited until morning. He's not going anywhere."

Phileas's fists, clenched at his sides, shook slightly, and Rebecca stepped forward.

"We leave for Berlin at dawn," she said. "We couldn't wait, you see."

"Everybody's in a hurry, always in a hurry," the old man grumbled, as he preceded them through a small corridor and into the vaulted cold space of the morgue. There were six stone slabs, four of which were occupied by forms covered in sheets. The smell of formaline and carbolic acid couldn't mask completely the sickly and familiar scent of decay. Grumbling, the old man hobbled to a small table by the door, where he shuffled some papers. The unsteady light from his lamp cast their deformed and jerky shadows against the stone walls and over the sad remains on the slabs.

"This one," the old man said, and went to the second slab, positioning himself near the head. Rebecca's stomach gave a painful lurch. It was one thing to embark on a mission looking for Erasmus's body. It was a very different one to stand there by a cold slab, dreading and anticipating the moment that the sheet would be lifted and the features hidden by the cloth reveal themselves as those of her beloved cousin. Without looking, she groped for Phileas's hand. It was colder than death itself.

"He was pretty tumbled about by the river, you see," the old man said. "And all that time under water, even frozen water, has not been good. And after being thawed, well, you know what happens to bodies, even here where it's cold. It's not a pretty sight, I have to warn you."

Phileas said nothing. He was looking, hypnotized, at the face still covered by the cloth. His lips were trembling slightly, but apart for that he could have been a statue. The old man was looking at him, waiting for his signal. But Phileas gave none.

"Go ahead," Rebecca said, finally, tightening her grip on his hand. The sheet was pulled and a whiff of the dreadful stench of death filled their nostrils. The body on the slab was still dressed in the remains of a brown tweed suit and coat. The river, and time, had damaged the face badly, but they had not completely disfigured it.

There was a long, long pause, as they both stared at the body.

Phileas closed his eyes. Rebecca averted hers.



* * * * * * * * * *
End of Chapter Six