Nazi Gold

Chapter 22 — Who was Petr Costita?

By the advent of the afternoon in Baciu the Kulich party was having a great time, having accepted Mihail’s invitation to stay for lunch before continuing on.

“I have to know, Mihail,” Sam dared somewhere between the fifth and sixth round, “what is with the name? The Eye.”

They all grew quiet, hoping the question was not inappropriate. But Mihail seemed unfazed by it. He shifted on the sawn off tree trunk he sat on. It was too low for him, giving him a peculiar spider-like look with his elevated knees.

“I see things.”

“Are you psychic?” Nina asked.

“I don’t think I am. I cannot see the future, I cannot see ghosts, I cannot see inside people’s heads. But I can see what happened before, in times before I was born. If I go to a place, sometimes I can see what happened there in a vision or a dream, but never right in front of me like those weird people who help the police. What I see is always very old, from long ago. I don’t know why,” he shrugged, and chugged back another stiff brandy.

“Can you do it by choice? Or does it just happen?” Petra asked.

“No, I never see unless I want to. When I want to see I just touch the ground or the trees, whatever is there. Then I see what those things saw,” Mihail explained.

“But if we don’t know where Petr Costita walked or lived, there is no way we can ask Mihail to help us, Stefan,” Professor Kulich complained.

“Petr Costita?” Mihail exclaimed, his face distorted in what looked like astonishment, perhaps fear. They nodded. He poured another drink, filling the glass halfway this time. Then he gave them a look a pirate captain would give his prisoners before execution, and drank it in one go.

“What is it?” Nina asked.

Mihail wiped his mouth.

“First, we eat.”

Throughout the whole meal they were all desperate to know what Mihail had to say, but they knew by now that he was not to be pressed. Plates full of goulash steamed on the wooden table outside where they had been drinking.

“Please tell your wife her food is delicious,” Nina told Mihail.

“I will. She was busy making for us anyway, so it was no extra trouble,” he said with his mouth full. Stefan did not look too pleased. He kept looking into the kitchen, scrutinizing the doorway as if he knew something they did not. When they were done eating, Nina quickly gathered up the dishes, having left most of her food untouched.

“You don’t have to do that! My wife can do it!” Mihail shouted.

“I insist,” Nina mumbled as she entered the kitchen with the empty dishes. She hated Machos, not just for obvious reasons, but any time someone was being bullied or enslaved it chewed at Nina’s pretty little ass. In the kitchen she found Mihail’s wife sitting with a crust of bread by the stove.

“Oh, hello,” the historian greeted the washed out young woman with the fatigue in her eyes.

“Hello,” the woman replied in a heavy accent. She tried to smile, but she did not speak English and felt terribly inept next to the beautiful modern stranger with the dirty dishes. Nina looked towards the door to make sure they were all outside, and then she removed her bowl from the top and placed it on the table. Mihail’s wife’s face lit up at the sight of the bowl of goulash the stranger saved for her. Nina winked at her and the young woman muttered something in her language with a smile and lots of nodding reminiscent of a beggar receiving alms.

Mihail’s wife saw the circular wound on Nina’s arm, the scar tissue damaged by the recent tissue samples taken by the hospital. She gripped the historian’s arm and spat on it. Nina winced, frowning in confusion, but she could not pull her arm away from the skinny woman who was as strong as a bear.

“,” she told Nina, but Nina motioned that she did not know what that meant.

“Eee-evil,” the woman repeated with difficulty, and then proceeded to pull her face to depict a demon.

“Yes!” Nina said. “It was done by evil.”

Mihail’s wife nodded and spat on it again.

“Enough with the spitting, lassie,” she mumbled by herself, while the woman opened a pewter jar and pulled some kind of moss from it. She crushed the herbs in a big mortar she used for bread meal and placed it on Nina’s wound. Then she removed a large handkerchief she wore around her neck and bound it.

“Thank you,” Nina smiled. She was grateful for the help, but thought to get going before the woman spat on her again.

Outside they all settled around the table to find out what had caused Mihail’s reaction before lunch. He lit a cigarette.

“You will not find Petr, my friends. And I hope by whatever god you pray to that you don’t find what he brought back here,” he said.

“What?” Petra cried out. She felt her heart sank, knowing she made the trip for nothing.

“Petr is in the forest. He is lost to Hoia Baciu. And you should be thankful, you all, that you will never know him. The devil, that man!” he sneered and spat on the ground.

“Wait; wait,” Petra said, “Tell me about him. Tell me what happened. Please.” Her face implored him, and since she came so far he decided to oblige her.

“He was born here in Baciu. Lived here all his life. He went to the Czech Republic to work at a beer brewery or some factory in the 1980’s somewhere. Made friends with a group of men who were soldiers in the war. Germans, Hungarians, Czechs — they all drank together after work, you know?” he casually narrated, taking a long drag on his roughly rolled cigarette.

The group sat in dead silence waiting for him to continue.

“One of the Czechs there, his sister was a fortune teller, you know, those women who read your palm, look in that crystal ball and stuff like that. Now that woman,” he said with one eye pinched shut, “that woman — she taught Petr about the cards. She taught him how to tell someone’s fate.”

“Tarot cards,” Nina noted, and Mihail pointed at her in affirmation.

“He came back here, using those cards in Baciu village. With those cards he foretold futures, gave advice and in the end…” he took another lazy drag that had Nina almost jumping out of her seat to prompt him, “…in the end old Petr discovered that he had power over people by using the cards. So, he starts using them to work ill will around, manipulate the people, you know? They listen to him with the cards, so he uses the cards to make trouble from here,” Mihail roared, patting his heart with his hand. “He made trouble for his own goals, you see?”

“So what happened to him?” Sam urged.

“That woman who taught him the cards in Czechoslovakia, her brother who he worked with told Petr in a letter about the Nazis looking for the Black Tarot in Prague,” he nodded.

“Hang on, wait, the Nazis? When was this? In the war?” Petra asked.

“No, Petr is a young man. He was born in the 1960’s, but the Nazis were all over Prague and Plzeň and Brno looking for the cards…that was…somewhere in 1993 or ’94, I don’t know,” Mihail drawled.

Petra and Nina looked at each other.

“The Order of the Black Sun.”

“Nazis. Of course,” Igor chimed in.

Sam perked up, “So how does this have anything to do with Petr and how did he disappear?”

“Wait, wait, I tell you,” Mihail said in his slow way. Stefan chuckled at the party’s impatience versus the mechanic’s slowness.

“Petr heard about excavations at Zbiroh from this man he worked with, and that the Black Tarot was in that well, you know? The well behind the castle that they were digging around in? So he went there and he stole a lot of things with the cards and he brought them back here!” he motioned wildly, his emotions running high with anger. “And with him came another man who chased him, a Czech from Plzeň, but just before he caught Petr the Nazis found him. We think he got away, but never got all the cards back, except for a few. Now you are looking for them, too,” he frowned.

Sam’s mind ran like a diesel engine where he sat by himself. The Czech man from Plzeň who had been chasing Petr — it was all beginning to make sense in a wickedly eerie way. He recalled how he had chatted with the Czech curator from Plzeň about the good beer they made there while they were looking for the Nazi bunker in Nohra, where his colleagues had been executed a short while later. He looked at Petra Kulich.

She was white as a sheet. He knew she was thinking the exact same thing. It had been her brother who he had been on the excursion with and whose execution he had been forced to witness — the man who left the documents to her in his will, begging her to find the Black Tarot.

“Now what happened to Petr, then?” Igor asked with Nina nodding zealously in agreement.

“Hoia Baciu happened to Petr.”

“The forest?” Nina asked. Mihail nodded.

“It is well known that you do not go in that forest alone. Actually, you don’t go there at all. It is a place of strange happenings and evil, a place where even the trees bend their trunks against nature,” he told them with no amount of drama attached. His words ran their blood cold. “Petr is still there, but he is now part of the forest. Just a ghost with a living soul.”

“He is dead?” Igor asked.

“What is dead, my friend? Dead is sometimes the repeating of time, and not being able to walk out of it. You don’t have to blow out your breath to be dead. The haunted forest is not haunted by ghosts alone. It is a vortex of time and space where devils come through as if it were a door. Not even nature goes there. Everything is upside down, inside out, and the people caught in the net of its evil will never come out,” he warned. “Petr took the wicked deck of cards into Hoia Baciu to hide it from the Nazis, those bastards who chased him for it, and…poof…he was swallowed by the forest.”

The party sat dumbstruck. Each had their own thoughts, fears and theories. But Mihail the Eye was not done yet.

“Now Petr Costita is caught, walking the same time over and over. But with the evil cards he is trying to change fate. A demon dealer. From the mouth of ob…ob-livion…” he sought the right word, “…he is constantly arranging the tarot to change events, hoping he will come out again. But you cannot fight the devil with his own works.”

“Sam,” Nina said almost inaudibly, “caught in time, living it over and over?”

“Aye? What about it?” he asked.

“I have been having this insane déjà vu driving me crazy, remember?” she said with her eyes wide and terrified.

“You too?” Igor asked her. “I have been having it too. Every time it happens, I know what is going to happen, but I can’t stop it.”

By Petra’s reaction is was clear that they had all been suffering from those unusual déjà vu experiences. They were all caught in someone else’s repetitive nightmare.

“That is why the Black Sun is after the Black Tarot,” Nina sighed. “With the deck they can alter world events to their favor. But they need all the cards and they need the Dealer!”

“Oh my god, that means they could already be here,” Petra gasped.

Igor put his hand on her shoulder and rubbed her arm in consolation.

“There is trouble everywhere, Professor,” Stefan said. “We just have to know where to look. Sometimes it is right in front of you, so take care where you tread, hey?”

“You’re not helping, Stefan,” Nina snapped at the grinning guide.

“I’m just making some light-hearted comment, Dr. Gould. It is just so far-fetched, all this. I cannot help but make a little fun at it.” He shook his head and lit a cigarette.

“Mihail,” Petra suddenly said, “how much would you charge to come with us? Name your price.”

“Where to, Professor?” he asked, surprised.

“Hoia Baciu,” she said firmly.

“Fuck no,” he smiled. It was a smile of uncertainty and terror that played on his lips, but he considered it for the money.

“Mihail, that Czech man who was here was my brother. He is dead now, killed by members of the Black Sun, I think. Please come with us. I need you to see for me, to see what happened when he was here,” she pleaded.

“Professor, with all due respect, you are out of your mind,” he replied seriously.

“I’ll pay you well. Better than you can imagine,” she insisted.

“It is not worth my soul!” he retorted.

“You are a superstitious fool,” Stefan taunted him quietly. “I’m going.”

“Then you can stay there forever…with your friends!” Mihail barked at him. Inside the house the baby started crying. It was an ominous wail that announced things to come.