Goodbye California - Alistair [27]
He said: ‘My name is Morro. I am the leader of this community here.’ He waved at the white-robed figures. ‘Those are my followers, acolytes, you might almost call them, all faithful servants of Allah.’
‘That’s what you would call them. I’d call them refugees from a chain gang.’ The tall thin man in the black alpaca suit had a pronounced stoop and bi-focal glasses and looked the prototype of the absent-minded academic, which was half-true. Professor Burnett of San Diego was anything but absent-minded: in his professional circle he was justly famous for his extraordinarily acute intelligence and justly notorious for his extraordinarily short temper.
Morro smiled. ‘Chains can be literal or figurative, Professor. One way or another we are all slaves to something.’ He gestured to the two men with rifles. ‘Remove their handcuffs. Ladies and gentlemen, I have to apologize for a rather upsetting interruption of the even tenor of your ways. I trust none of you suffered discomfort on our journey here.’ His speech had the fluency and precision of an educated man for whom English is not his native language. ‘I do not wish to sound alarming or threatening’ – there is no way of sounding more alarming and threatening than to say you don’t intend to – ‘but, before I take you inside, I would like you to have a look at the walls of this courtyard.’
They had a look. The walls were about twenty feet high and topped with a three-stranded barbed wire fence. The wires were supported by but not attached to the L-shaped steel posts embedded in the marble, but passed instead through insulated apertures.
Morro said: ‘Those walls and the gates are the only way to leave here. I do not advise that you try to use either. Especially the wall. The fence above is electrified.’
‘Has been for sixty years.’ Burnett sounded sour.
‘You know this place, then?’ Morro didn’t seem surprised. ‘You’ve been here?’
‘Thousands have. Von Streicher’s Folly. Open to the public for about twenty years when the State ran it.’
‘Still open to the public, believe it or not. Tuesdays and Fridays. Who am I to deprive Californians of part of their cultural heritage? Von Streicher put fifty volts through it as a deterrent. It would only kill a person with a bad heart – and a person with a bad heart wouldn’t try to scale that wall in the first place. I have increased the current to two thousand volts. Follow me, please.’
He led the way through an archway directly opposite the entrance. Beyond lay a huge hall, some sixty feet by sixty. Three open fireplaces, of stone, not granite, were let into each of three walls, each fireplace large enough for a man to stand upright: the three crackling log fires were not for decorative purposes because even in the month of June the thick granite walls effectively insulated the interior from the heat outside. There were no windows, illumination being provided by four massive chandeliers which had come all the way from Prague. The gleaming floor was of inlaid redwood. Of the floor space only half of the area was occupied, this by a row of refectory tables and benches: the other was empty except for a hand-carved oaken rostrum and, close by, a pile of undistinguished mats.
‘Von Streicher’s banqueting hall,’ Morro said. He looked at the’ battered tables and benches. ‘I doubt whether he would have approved of the change.’
Burnett said: ‘The Louis Fourteenth chairs, the Empire-period tables. All gone? They would have made excellent firewood.’
‘You must not equate non-Christian with being barbaric, Professor. The original furniture is intact. The Adlerheim has massive cellars. The castle, I’m afraid, its splendid isolation apart, is not as we would have wished for our religious purposes. The refectory half of this hall is profane. The other half – he indicated the bare expanse – ‘is consecrated. We have to make do with what we have. Some day we hope to build a mosque adjoining here: for the present this has to serve. The rostrum is for the readings of the Koran: the mats, of course, are for prayers.