Blood Ties Read online

  BOOKS BY WARREN ADLER

  Banquet Before Dawn

  Blood Ties

  Cult

  Death of a Washington Madame

  Empty Treasures

  Flanagan's Dolls

  Funny Boys

  Madeline's Miracles

  Mourning Glory

  Natural Enemies

  Private Lies

  Random Hearts

  Residue

  The Casanova Embrace

  The Children of the Roses

  The David Embrace

  The Henderson Equation

  The Housewife Blues

  The War of the Roses

  The Womanizer

  Trans-Siberian Express

  Twilight Child

  Undertow

  We Are Holding the President Hostage

  SHORT STORIES

  Jackson Hole, Uneasy Eden

  Never Too Late For Love

  New York Echoes

  New York Echoes 2

  The Sunset Gang

  MYSTERIES

  American Sextet

  American Quartet

  Immaculate Deception

  Senator Love

  The Ties That Bind

  The Witch of Watergate

  Copyright © 1979 by Warren Adler.

  ISBN 978-1-59006-084-1

  All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced

  in any form without permission. This novel is a work of fiction.

  Names, characters, places, incidents are either the product

  of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Inquiries: WarrenAdler.com

  STONEHOUSE PRESS

  Contents

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  For Sunny

  CHAPTER 1

  Spears of orange from the morning sun poked through the patches of mist that clung to the mountain peaks. From his poor vantage in the speeding Daimler, Albert von Kassel waited for the castle's watchtower to appear.

  Beside him Dawn dozed, her head resting on the red velvet pillow that Garth had provided after he had tucked away their baggage. Now Garth's bovine bulk in the front seat created further obstructions to the impending view. It was there, up there, Albert knew, waiting for the car to reach just the right position.

  "Slower," Albert commanded, replicating his father's inflection. It was not arrogance, merely the standard way of communication. Garth understood orders. He had been with the SS.

  Albert waited, squinting. The change in the Daimler's rhythm stirred Dawn. She mumbled something, then burrowed deeper into the pillow. She disliked annoyances that affected sleep, and Albert had quickly rejected the notion to shake her awake. He no longer felt a compelling need to share with her. More and more experiences, thoughts, were private. They hung together now by inertia, although it was too cruel an idea for him to impart directly. Not yet.

  He had been feeling vaguely annoyed for a long time now, the impending reunion only increasing his agitation. All those long memories to be confronted. That Teutonic obsession.

  "There," he pointed, as if it were a child's discovery. He felt an odd ripple in his heartbeat, a familiar clutch in his throat. Garth nodded and he could see the lips curl faintly on the old retainer's face, a shadow of a smile.

  Poking above the mist, he saw the watchtower of the citadel, stabbing into the sun's orange shower, deflecting rays on the ancient stone surface. Above the watchtower, plumed on its metallic staff, he could see the rippling banner, a field of white on which were emblazoned the markings of the Teutonic Order.

  They were still miles from the castle. But what was seen could raise the adrenalin, involve the living blood. Never mind that it was all a contrivance now. Never mind that the citadel with its bastions, ramparts, allures, baileys and barbicans, was only a prop for tourists to stimulate historical fantasies. Never mind that it was, after all, merely a hotel.

  "Damn, it's beautiful," he mumbled. Despite himself, he could not resist the historical magnetism.

  It was built nine hundred years ago by the Knights of the Teutonic Order, a von Kassel among them. A hundred years later the Knights moved eastward, bringing their version of a zealous God with them, determined that the primitive innocents in their acquisitive path would submit their minds, and lands, to the Knights' enlightenment. They did, not quite graciously, and they gave the Germans their "Ostland."

  The bloody migration deposited a von Kassel on the shores of the Baltic, Estonia. That would be about eight hundred years ago, thirty-two odd generations, a time frame perhaps worthy of his father's white-hot obsession. Such continuity deserved its myths and legends, he supposed, wondering why he could never really find the heat of this mighty flame inside himself. It was the old enigma again.

  The castle was theirs now, a von Kassel possession, another artifact in his father's collection of all things ever touched by an authentic ancestor. Only the Estonian lands remained to be reacquired, an impossible dream.

  Dawn stirred again, moved a gold braceleted wrist to his knee.

  "There yet?" Her voice had not yet cleared.

  The private moment had passed.

  "Soon." He pointed to the distant watchtower.

  She moved downward to catch the picture, blinking to clear her sleep-fogged eyes.

  "Like in a fairy tale," she said, moved, he suspected, by images of Grimm and Andersen.

  "Full of ghosts," he said.

  She clutched his knee. She was a child when it came to that, full of bad dreams, screams in the night. Sometimes she clutched him, ferocious in her fear, as if by holding tight she would dispel the weird creatures chasing her to imaginary horrors. Once, reasserting reality in his arms held a certain charm, exciting him. Now, like most things between them, it was gone.

  "Mumbo jumbo," she hissed, shaking her head, removing her hand from his knee to fish in her purse for a cigarette. He pulled out a lighter and flashed it while she breathed in the smoke deeply, forcing it dragon-like from her delicate nostrils.

  "You wanted to come," he said, settling back into the soft seat, pressing the button to move the glass, sealing their talk from Garth's ears.

  "He looks like Frankenstein's monster," Dawn said, showing the direction of her thoughts.

  "He's just ugly. He can't help that. He's been with Father for years." Why was he defending? More to the point, why had he brought her? He could tell the signs. As he withdrew she became more possessive. He wondered why he couldn't sustain these things. It had been two years and now it was faltering badly.

  "I'm tired. The trip has made me edgy," she said. It was a logical subterfuge on her part. She could blame it on the trip. He hated night flights as well. New York to Frankfurt was a long haul and they had drunk too much.

  The long bout of forced physical idleness and no sleep was thought provoking. Too much had thrashed about in his head. Vague suspicions had blown up into huge mental conflagrations, imaginary confrontations with his father, with his brother Rudi, with Dawn.

  In his mind Albert had used strong words. Betrayal. Death. Madness. Aside from other considerations, deal
ing in plutonium could be bad business. Atomic weapons, like nerve gas and bacteriological bombs, were not in the rules of the superpowers' games. Let their clients play with each other with more manageable toys: tanks, rockets, planes, guns, big and small. That was the business of the von Kassels, brokering for all sides. If a moral consideration nagged at him, he had, he thought, kept that hidden. Or had he? Did his refusal of Rudi's plan show a lack of courage, a weakness? It was sure to come up again at the reunion. He had tried to be tactful and considerate, for Rudi's abused ego mostly. Poor Rudi. The middle son. The clumsy one. The less gifted. Putting him, Albert, the youngest, in charge of the von Kassel enterprises was humiliation enough for Rudi, considering that their older brother, Siegfried, had chosen to abdicate his responsibilities. With his father's health waning, Rudi, goaded by his ambitious wife, might take this last chance to prove himself worthy to take his rightful place. Perhaps he was the worthier. Moral considerations were the enemy of the family business, a violation of the von Kassel code. Plutonium! My God, it could blow up the world. That is the world's problem, his father would say. What did such a detail matter to a von Kassel? His own reticence was a break in the pattern.

  And holding this family reunion six months before the scheduled event was another break in the pattern. Considering the Baron's health, that, at least, was understandable. They would come together every three years for this ritual restoking of the von Kassel myth. More than mere business, although that was part of it. Outsiders thought it eccentric. Like Dawn.

  His brother Siegfried had called him from London. Phone calls were rare, the talk guarded, cryptic. International wires had too many ears. But Siegfried, the family oddball, observed a poetic license, although he respected the von Kassel passion for secrecy and knew the code words. He had seen their father in the spring and the phoned report was ominous. Health problems. Weight loss. The Baron was slipping badly. In his heart he had yearned for the Baron to expire without another of these obligatory rituals. Not loving the old man seemed, somehow, a biological aberration, and he did not relish the confrontation so near the end. God, how he had longed to love him!

  "How much further?" Dawn asked irritably.

  "Not long," Albert said gently. He had hoped he could love Dawn forever.

  The Daimler gained speed. The watchtower darted in and out of sight as they moved closer to it.

  "Will they like me?" Dawn asked. It was her defenselessness that plagued him now. He should have broken it off before the trip.

  "Sure," he lied. When they sensed his waning interest, they would ignore her. In the world of the von Kassels, ingratiation had a purpose.

  "I hope so," she said.

  The Daimler had turned off the main highway and was climbing cautiously up the narrow road. The high watchtower loomed clearly now, the reddish brick, the arched lookout holes. Other watchtowers, lower ones, came into view. As the car moved upward, the mist thinned, the outlines of the great citadel seemed etched in the blue sky, a gothic masterpiece, perched on the commanding peak.

  "Now there is eloquence," Albert said. "That says it all." He wondered if he truly believed it.

  "Big," she observed. She reached out and clutched his hand. The sight was intimidating, frightening.

  Tiny sensors in his mind were touching the high brick enclosure, feeling the ancient texture of Westphalian brick, kilned over eight hundred years ago, piled and mortared with the sweat of feudal peons.

  Listen! Can you hear? It was his father's words, returning with the timbre and echo of twenty-five years before, when he was just ten, and had crossed the ocean from America for the first time since being sent away. They had been in the castle rectory. Albert had listened, had wanted to hear. But he could only catch the echo in the rectory, bouncing around in the brick vaults of the ceiling held there by slender granite pillars, a masterpiece of architectural engineering. How desperately he had wanted to hear this sound that rang in his father's ears. He had clutched the older man's hand as if the pressure might afford a clue.

  Hear what?, he had wondered, but had dared not ask, for his father's concentration was lost in some distant mist of memory. Voices. Prayers. The rectory was a religious enclosure, and the Knights knelt toward the East, toward Jerusalem, which had spawned their spirit. Perhaps his father had heard the clanking of their armor, the clamor of swords, as they shifted in their scabbards. It was something he could only observe, but never feel. Was there something missing in himself?

  His father, Charles von Kassel, Baron of the Teutonic Order, was not bound by time. His mind, like the castle's walls, enclosed more than mere historical fact. Locked in its ridges and tissues was the blood memory of all von Kassel generations.

  Vainly, Albert searched all of his life to breathe fire into the image that his father had tried to stamp into his consciousness. He could see the Knights of his father's litany straggle homeward after doing battle with the Infidels in the Holy Land. He could see them reform their ranks and push eastward along the bloody trail to bring the word of Christ and for themselves, of course, all the lands from Samogitia to the Finnish Gulf and from the Baltic to the Peipus. But he could not hear the rattle of armor and find the heart's beat within as his father had. He had never dared admit that. Not that.

  Historians, he had learned later, told a different story than his father. From the security of musty texts, they had called the Knights butchers, rapists, plunderers, who amassed their acreage by force and subterfuge.

  Lies, his father had ranted, when in a mood of youthful curiosity he had dared to broach the subject. The land belongs to him who takes it and holds it, the Baron had roared, his fist descending loudly on the nearest surface. Perhaps we didn't have the will or the courage to keep it, his father had responded finally after the tantrum had subsided. Besides, eight hundred years was a mighty record. We were always our own masters. They conquered our lands, Russians, Germans, Estonians. But they never conquered us. Not the von Kassels!

  If he secretly seemed misplaced within his father's obsession, Albert nevertheless admitted the magnetism of the idea which held them together, recognizing the power of the device. Because of that alone, the von Kassels were beyond boundaries, beyond governments. Arms brokerage had always been their business, even beyond the care of the Estonian lands, the feudal estates. When the Russians had threatened from the East they had bartered arms for survival. When the Germans threatened from the West, they had merely shifted customers with similar results. When the Estonians threatened from within, again the resiliency of the von Kassels triumphed. Others destroyed each other. The von Kassels survived.

  Even now, his father considered the moment only a temporary exile from their ancestral lands. Estonia. It was as foreign to him as Timbuktu. He smiled.

  "What's amusing?" Dawn asked. He had not been conscious of her eyes watching him.

  "I was thinking of the family," he lied. The dead, actually, he wanted to say.

  "They'll all be there?"

  "All."

  He had kept photographs from past reunions in gold-stamped leather albums lined up on the bookshelves of his New York penthouse. During those first days with Dawn, in the flush of loving, he had wanted to share them with her and they had sat before the fire turning the plastic coated pages, the inserted photographs neatly captioned. She had watched them all grow old.

  "And that funny, horsey lady?" she had asked, pointing a tapered, well manicured finger.

  "Aunt Karla, Father's sister. The wife of Count Wilhelm von Berghoff," he had explained stroking her bare shoulder.

  "Another von."

  "We are all vons."

  "It seems so..." she hesitated. "...archaic."

  "It is. But that is the point."

  "The point?"

  "Being archaic holds the whole thing together. It gives us continuity."

  "And that's your father," she had pointed again. "The Baron."

  "We are all Barons. Me. My two brothers."

  "But you never u
se the title."

  "Only when necessary."

  "When is that?"

  "For business, and perhaps to get a better table at a restaurant."

  She shivered lightly, pulling her silk dressing gown closer, tighter, outlining her full breasts.

  "How can you be in that business?" she had asked. Had the thought made her shiver? He shrugged, not wanting to explain.

  "Arms are a commodity like any other," he had answered, the intonation offering finality to the probe. The complexities would overwhelm her, he thought, his mind drifting lightly over details. Computerized inventories. Warehouses strung out across the world. The holds of ships. Mobility. Firepower. Tactical and strategic weapons. Vehicles. Planes. Obsolescence. The vocabulary would merely add to her confusion.

  "And your brother Rudi lives in South America?" she had asked pointing to Rudi, a florid face, high balding forehead, the vested paunch.

  "Buenos Aires."

  "And Siegfried lives in England."

  "Yes."

  Albert knew she was thinking how odd it was. Three brothers scattered over the world.

  "My father's hedge against chaos. He wasn't certain what would happen to the world. So he scattered us like seeds."

  "He must be mad." She had not the discipline to keep a thought controlled. Words were always popping out. "I'm sorry. You're not insulted?"

  He chuckled. He would have substituted eccentric for mad. But mad was more honest. He had let it pass. A frown clouded her forehead. It was a time when even her briefest pain mattered. He had gathered her in his arms and kissed her lips. But when they had disengaged, the frown continued. A puzzle.

  "What is it?"

  "No mother?"

  "She died," he answered, the old mystery intruding briefly.

  "Young?"

  "Just after I was born," he had said blandly. It still could induce pain. "Motherless waifs," he mocked. He had always dismissed it in exactly that way. We must not dwell on it, his Aunt Karla had admonished when the question was raised. For years he had hated his mother for dying.

  "Poor darling," she had said, shivering again. He had imagined it was simply softness and vulnerability, qualities that roused him. He had kissed her again, spreading the silken robe so that his mouth could find her nipples.