A Portrait of Elga

A Portrait of Elga by Mark Newell

Look into my eyes...and I will own you.

The dry wizened branches of an ancient Wych Elm tapped on the window much like bony fingers picking at the leaded glass panes to gain entrance for something wicked in the darkness beyond. The full moon glimmered through the clouds, bursts of silver light casting shadows from the elm across the beam and plaster walls of the bedroom within.

A girl lay within the pillows and silken sheets of a great four-poster bed, tossing and turning, seemingly in the midst of a dream and a nightmare, wavering from lust to fear. Her hands wandered slowly from her neck to her lower stomach, one moment protecting her throat from some invisible menace, the next caressing herself, quenching the heat from within.

The shadows and the moonlight in the room began to dance and shimmer against the walls. A shape began to coalesce as the wind beyond the window began to still. A form, at first shapeless, then man-like, a tall muscled being, took form from the shadows. It was wrapped in a dark cloak. The face was angular and cruel set in a frame of blonde wavy hair, the eyes pale blue with a pinkish tint of albinism. The mouth was full but the lips were pale, slightly part, revealing extended eyeteeth. The figure stepped toward the bed, the cloak dropping to the floor.

The girl’s eyes half opened, she stared at the figure, momentarily transfixed as if in waking paralysis. She moaned softly, thinking of Mel Odom’s “Colmar” as she both feared and lusted for the coming embrace.

And then, from the bedside table, the Sherwood Forest ringtone from an Iphone broke the spell.

“Oh Shit!” The girl sat up. The naked figure by the bed moaned and angrily ripped off the dildo. “Crap! That’s an erection killer!”

The girl on the bed threw the Iphone at her partner, “Ever heard of silent mode, or vibrate even? Some Dracula you are!”

“Sorry babe, completely forgot,” she looked at the screen, “It’s Lenny, may as well answer it now.”

“Lenny, you know what time it is here in England?”

“No. It’s two here in San Francisco, I’ve finished my Friday lunch, I’m tight on Maker’s Mark and Ginger and I don’t give a shit about England. Your client wants you to go to Munich and Berlin to look at real paper there. Wants you to leave as soon as possible.”

“Lenny, I already know that, he called last night, I’m already booked, Jenny’s headed back home and you managed to call just as we were about to try and make up for a two, three week separation. You just killed the moment buddy – thanks!”

“Angelika, I told you not to take Jenny in the first place. This client’s is paying well and you should thinking about work, not sex. You are in England for Christ’s sake – they don’t have sex over there anyway!”

“Fuck you very much, Lenny.” She looked at Jenny laying in the bed, arms wrapped around her drawn up knees, face scowling at her and the phone.

“Thanks to you I’m gonna be English tonight for sure!”

Lenny was taking again. “Why are you lisping, Angelika, what are you coming down with?”

Angelika reached up and pulled the plastic vampyre teeth from her mouth, “It was my plug-in vampyre teeth, shithead.”

“Vampyre…oh, I think it’s time to end this chat, glad I could bring you the news my gay friend.”

“It wasn’t news and you’re no longer my gay friend,” Angelika Leopold pressed her off button with a flourish and look hopefully at Jenny.

She stared back, “No chance. Lost the moment. Besides I don’t think vampyre seduction is as good as it’s cracked up to be. Let’s sleep – I have an early flight in the morning.”

“Okay, in the morning maybe? A little something to calm you down for the flight?”

“A quickie breakfast down at the Fleece if you’re lucky. If I get desperate I’ll pull a handsome young steward into the head at thirty thousand feet. I promise I’ll think of you all the time though.”

Jenny splayed back her mane of black hair across the pillow as she lay down and she was asleep in seconds. Angelika, crest fallen in more ways than one, sat on the bed and looked out the window.

The house was supposedly haunted and she had jumped at the chance to rent it for a week after a stint in the Public Records Office outside London. Jenny had flown in from the States and she had stalled the client in order to buy a little time in the ancient village of Boxford. Jenny was ecstatic when she saw the place. She had a love for history and anything gothic and the old house with its half-timbered walls and leaded windows and the resident ghost totally filled the bill.

It had been a great two weeks and Jenny had even tempted Angelika with a sketchbook and a set of pencils. Angelika loved to draw and paint, but it all seemed so pointless. Her entire education at Yale, an M.F.A. with honors should have garnered her a career somewhere. It did not. She had started well, an accomplished portrait painter, she got early commissions and was even hanging in a few prestigious museums. Yet, in the age of Adobe Photoshop and digital photography it seemed that oil portraits were going in the direction of Kodak film. Still, she could have had a career of some kind in art, had it not been for Lenny.

Like anyone else her age, Angelika had no issues with computers, in fact they were an integral part of her daily life. Even in traditional art study, knowing your way around the Internet was essential to the educational process. Angelika had gone a few steps further and had discovered a knack for Internet searching, the ability to find something by coming not from one direction, like Google, but instead casting a net so wide and in corners so obscure that she was able to find things few others could. Coupled to this was the skill to hack into some places people were not meant to go. Angelika had realized early on that the rush to embrace electronic information technology was far ahead of people’s ability to protect their data.

It was as far from Fine Arts as an artist could go, but Angelika found that she was being paid to do research for fellow students. That led to being paid to do research for the companies those students were later hired into. And that is how Angelika and Lenny got started.

In a matter of a few years Angelika was being paid more to search the world electronically than she could ever earn painting portraits. Way more. Still, it was the rare assignment that would take her out of the chair in her Potrero Hill apartment office. This was one of them.

“You speak German, right? Or something close, “ Lenny had asked months ago.

“No, Lenny, my parents were Romanian-Hungarian, on both borders you could say. I spoke Romanian as a kid which is why my first name was Angelika Lupul and yes, I have a smattering of German.”

“I knew it, I have just the job for you. Have an author who is doing research on the Nazis and the occult. Needs a ton of Internet searches but also wants to pay for a researcher to work in the archives in Washington, UK and Germany. You’d like that wouldn’t you?”

“I can do that from home, and still walk down to the Mission for lunch every day.”

“Nope, he insists on some ‘field work’ he calls it – maybe you can do enough online to convince him it isn’t necessary.”

“Okay, Lenny, I’ll take it. But watch me, there’s no way I’ll need to leave San Francisco.”

Which was why she was sitting on the edge of an ancient bed in an ancient house in Boxford, Suffolk, England with a very frustrated girlfriend snoring away beside her.

Professor Hans Meier was a hard person to say no to. He was old, least over forty anyway, and he did not appear to be a fan of computers, computing or anything more advanced than a dip pen and paper. Angelika revised that last thought, she did at least get emails from Meier. One of them made it clear that he would have to go to the papers in the archives. It was within the first few hours of building her files that Angelika found the host of quasi-intelligent books of the Nazis and the supposed occult influences that drove Adolf Hitler’s unbalanced Third Reich.

The one scholarly volume was by Goodrich-Clarke and it seemed to provide everything Meier wanted to write.

“No!” Meier had responded in a rare phone call, “Clarke did excellent work, but he barely scratched the surface. I will direct you to papers and people whose records will tell us much more. Even here in Germany, Fraulein Leopold, you have thirty five thousand index cards on German witches compiled by Heinrich Himmler that have never been fully analyzed. There are people in those files I need you to find. Come to Germany. Soon!”

And so it was that Angelika left her perch overlooking the Mission District and headed to Washington and the National Archives. Three weeks and a mind numbing number of German atrocities later she was headed to the Public Records Office outside of London, England.

As in Washington, she had spent several weeks translating and copying documents that were sent on to Meier in Munich. Meier would respond with further demands for this or that file from individuals and official sources in the Nazi government. The Public Records Office, he insisted held records and files that were snatched from German sources by a British organization called “T-Force”. These men, a mix of marines and regular Army, often went ahead of the Allied lines and certainly right alongside them, in order to grab people, technology and files before they could be destroyed by the Germans.

Meier had a special interest in material that had been taken from the basement of the Four Seasons Hotel in Berlin. A T-Force unit had raided the hotel soon after the Brits and Americans had arrived in Berlin and long after the Russians had already scoured the city’s universities and research institutes for everything from technical papers to yellow cake.

The belabored staff at the PRO insisted that the Four Seasons files did not exist. Angelika suspected they had yet to be declassified, but in any event, Meier was to be disappointed. It was then that Jenny arrived for a vacation. They both toured the southern part of England from Tintagel to Canterbury, checking out every castle, and every dungeon from the Tower of London to the oubliette in the Keep at Rochester. The week bored Angelika but she indulged Jenny’s morbid fascination for places of death and torture. Their last few days were spent in the house at Boxford where the cool English fall evenings were spent cuddled in front of roaring logs in an Inglenook fireplace with a selection of sweet Rhine wine and passable French Merlot.

Now it was time to go to Berlin. The wind was rising again and Jenny seemed deeper asleep than ever. The wych elm began tapping on the ancient panes again as Angelika lay down beside her. She looked at the mass of black hair, the full so-red lips and dusky skin. She was way too beautiful to be a forensic accountant for the State of California. They had met a year ago in a small bar opposite the Metreon, both dashing off the street to escape a shower. A casual conversation turned into an hour or two that ended up around the corner at Mel’s Diner on Mission and 4th.

They exchanged numbers and parted with an agreement to meet again. She called the next day, got voicemail and it was a week before Jenny returned her call. She liked that. Angelika wasn’t a vain woman, but she knew she was incredibly good looking and as such there was no shortage of bedable women, much to her uncle’s chagrin. Jenny, it seemed, was going to more than a good lay.

Alin Lupul often complained, once urging “quality, not quantity!” When Angelika explained that her date the last weekend was a nuclear scientist from Berkeley, and that the next was a District Court Judge, the old man threw up his arms in frustration. Angelika smiled. She knew his Uncle was looking for a ‘grandson’ to carry the Lupul name into the future, but short of adoption she was not the one to provide an heir.

2. Berlin.