The Devouring Read online

  The Last of the Magi

  The Last of the Magi

  Book I

  The Devouring

  Story by G.S. Eli

  G. S. Eli and Patrick Wiley

  ©2020 by G.S. Eli & Patrick Wiley

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  ISBN-13: 9780692848401

  ISBN-10: 0692848401

  This novel is dedicated to the countless Roma who lost their lives at the hands of the Nazis in the Porajmos.

  May we never forget those who were maliciously targeted in one of the darkest periods in history.

  Te aven yerto

  (Rest in peace)

  Dear Reader,

  Growing up a Romani boy in America, my parents kept me out of school, as is tradition, so I never formally learned how to read and write or about history for that matter. I did attend some school, but too little to be con- sidered fully literate by anybody’s standards.

  My only true education came from sitting in front of the television, watching movies, sitcoms, and the occa- sional newsreel, and that’s where I would see old black and white footage of Adolf Hitler and Nazis. Although I was too young to know what the Holocaust meant or to understand the Roma involvement, the images would deeply frighten me.

  As I grew up, always absorbing what was being projected on the screen, I learned more. I was taught that Hitler and the Nazi movement murdered some six million Jews and countless Roma, because he wanted a pure Aryan race, and believed in white superiority. Even as a child, this did not sit right with me. To better explain, being Romani, I was taught to be more religious than analyti- cal...and I always felt that this deep-seeded hatred that the Nazis felt toward non-Aryan groups was more spiri- tual than the academics and historians would believe.

  For years, I kept this “feeling” to myself, mainly because I did not have any religious or historical evidence to back this up, nor did I have any clear understanding of the Third Reich. All I knew were two things, that this was not solely about racial purity, and white supremacy, I was sure about that.

  One day I was more fed up than usual, and skimming through the TV, watching teenagers glorifying vampire cults and Vlad Dracula, this also disgusted me deep to my core. I remember saying to a friend, “This is crazy, Vlad Dracula was a real evil man who murdered many Roma just like Hitler,” and that was the moment my feeling turned from just a simple feeling, to a real spiritual awakening.

  I could not overcome the overwhelming sensation to put this into writing... However, I had no writing expe- rience, nor could I even read very well... Nevertheless, I sat in front of my laptop and began to type. I had no idea where I would start or what would wind up on the page, all I knew was to type! Forty days later, I had the first draft of the novel that you are about to read. I would very much love to take credit for the story and all its theories, however, I truly believe I became a vessel for a higher power. Believe me if you will, either way, I know that as you read, you will agree that this is eerily close to the truth.

  G. S. Eli

  Prologue

  Munich, Germany, 1919

  The young German corporal breathed in the sweet, exotic smell of incense as the Gypsy guided him into her parlor. She drew back a thick, red velvet curtain and gestured for him to pass through a narrow doorway into a small, dimly lit back room.

  Seating herself on the far side of a tiny round table, she gestured for him to take the chair opposite her. As he sat down, he could feel the heat from the half dozen candles that flickered eerily in ruby glass jars, like something in a church or shrine.

  “Give me your hand,” the Gypsy said.

  The soldier was suddenly filled with an indescribable fear. Ancient and frail as she was, this woman surely couldn’t hurt him. Yet he found himself terrified. He could hear his mother’s voice from long ago, telling the innocent child he had once been, “My son, beware of the Gypsies! Satan himself created them. He put Gypsies on the Earth to steal from good German people.”

  The soldier had never forgotten his mother’s warning. Nervously slicking his dark hair to the side and stuttering a bit, he told the old woman, “I … I didn’t come here for a palm reading.”

  “Yes, I see. You are here because you want something. You are a seeker,” she said with a piercing stare. “And what is it that you seek from me, an old Gypsy woman?”

  The corporal stared back at her. Taking a moment to survey her feeble frame, he reminded himself that she posed no danger to him at all. He made a manful effort to summon his strength and tell her why he’d come, what he sought. He looked down at his chest, glancing at the black metal cross he’d been awarded when wounded in battle. The medallion seemed to give him the courage to answer the crone.

  Adjusting his posture, he replied in his sternest voice, “I was badly hurt in the war. I nearly died. Then somehow, in almost no time, I was mysteriously healed. A woman in the hospital told me something I never forgot. She said, ‘Ask the Gypsies. The Gypsies carry special gifts within that provide the answers to many questions, the solutions to many mysteries, the keys to many conundrums.’ It is for this reason I am here.”

  The Gypsy paused a moment, sizing up the soldier. He had a strong jaw but a slight frame, and his eyes flickered with a sinister gleam that filled her with deep foreboding. She kept her expression guarded, not wanting to give herself away. “Whoever that woman was, she spoke the truth,” the Gypsy replied. “I can tell you how you were wounded in battle. I can tell you why you were mysteriously healed. But the consultation will cost you. Do you have money to pay?”

  “Not much. But if you answer my questions, I’ll pay you—after the consultation. Not before. After all, how can I trust a Gypsy woman to tell me the truth?”

  The old woman didn’t like to be tested by her clients, nor did she care to be called a thief. She’d heard many such insults in her long life, and now she tired of them easily. She glanced toward the door, then back at her would-be customer.

  “Young man, you are wasting my time,” she said curtly.

  She stood up with finality.

  Not wanting to be outdone, the soldier rose, too. He was taller than the diminutive woman, but not by much. He felt small. Trying to get the most from his thin frame, he puffed his chest and stood perfectly straight. Still, he felt small. He was desperate for the knowledge that this woman secreted within her soul, knowledge that should rightfully belong to him, not some thieving Gypsy. He looked into her searching eyes and knew she could sense his desperation. It enraged him. But it was from his rage that the soldier drew strength. Emboldened, he pulled out all the money he had and rebelliously tossed it onto the little table.

  “Here’s all I have. Take it or leave it.”

  The Gypsy’s practiced eye quickly counted five German marks on her tabletop. If she could just bring herself to answer his invasive silly questions, she could feed her family for two weeks or more. Yet the thought of communing with his spirit troubled her. There was something vile about the man, a darkness in which she did not want to partake.

  “I do not want your money. You have offended me. Leave my house,” she commanded, regally drawing herself up to her full height.

  “No! It is you who have offended me!” the soldier angrily shouted. “You and your hordes of zigeuner have infected our land for centuries!” he went on, using the insulting German word for the people who called themselves the Rom. “Yet we allow you to exist here among our pure race, like bloodsucking fleas
infesting a thoroughbred stallion.”

  Mortified and livid, the woman glared at him. She had faced this kind of racism, as well as persecution, all her life. She thought she had grown used to it. But something about this soldier deeply angered her. So, he seeks answers, does he? She thought. Very well! I will give him the knowledge he seeks, and much more. I will give him the future! The Gypsy sat down in the semidarkness behind the flickering candles.

  “The wounds you suffered in battle were much like those inflicted on Longinus, the Roman soldier who pierced the side of our Lord Jesus Christ. Longinus, too, was blinded, but he was healed by the grace of God,” she said. “But you were not healed by God. During the war, when you were digging your trench, you stumbled on an unmarked grave, and from that grave you stole something. That is what healed you.”

  The soldier was shocked at the woman’s magical powers. How could she know about his past and the exact wounds he’d suffered in battle? What’s more, how could she know about the artifact, the treasure he’d found lying among the bones, wrapped in a rotted red cloth?

  Though he was amazed by what he heard, the corporal realized that he was no better off than when he’d first walked into the Gypsy’s parlor. It was no help to him that the woman knew these things. What he wanted was to look behind the curtain into the other world, the world of the secret knowledge of the Gypsies, with their mysterious, perhaps Satanic, power. Where did this power come from? How had this withered old crone used it to divine things that should be out of her reach?

  Before he could ask these questions, she continued. “As for you, you are no Longinus, brave-hearted and filled with the love of God. No, your destiny is very different. Your heart is full of hate. The hate will blind you. Until you release that hatred, you will suffer from total blindness. And soon enough, you will surely die.” She stood up once more. “Now, leave my house!” she said, pointing a bony finger at the door.

  As the young man turned to leave, in a final display of her power, she called out his name, which he had never told her.

  “Never return here, Corporal Hitler.”

  I

  The Magician

  The past is never truly lost. Landscapes and ruins leave tales that can still be told. Visible reminders of what has transpired survive as scars on the land. Nowhere is this more true than in Berlin: a city haunted by its past. For a time, many Berliners were all too happy to see the last century end. Their evil part in three wars—two hot and one cold—had left them ashamed.

  But the citizens of Berlin felt different now. After all, they were seven years into a new millennium—and an innovative one at that. Hope was in the air. Berlin was now at the forefront of liberty, freedom, and equality. The only reminders of the evil, racism, and inequality of the past were relegated to museums and historical sites, relics wholly apart from this modern city and its denizens’ way of life.

  Or so they liked to believe.

  In truth, just four train stops from the city’s center lay not a museum or memorial but a living reminder, a scar on the land.

  Each morning, the first thing west-bound commuters would see as they passed on trains from their comfortable suburbs was filthy black smoke rising from the Strauss Rubber Company. Then, as the train continued, two run-down concrete buildings would gradually emerge from the smog. The abandoned, decrepit high-rises, known simply as Building A and Building B, once served as administration offices for communist government workers. The gray towers stood like tombstones of the old regime.

  Nestled between the two towering structures lay a shantytown of sorts. The slum was reminiscent of a time when the nation bowed down to acts of pure evil. It should have been a national embarrassment, but those who passed by barely gave it a thought. They cared as little for this place as they did for its inhabitants, for the slum was home to the most hated people in all of Europe. Most called them Gypsies, but they called themselves Rom.

  The nameless lot between Building A and Building B was a modern ghetto for the Rom. The slum was tightly packed with threadbare tents and shacks built from scrap wood. If the inhabitants were lucky, they’d have a rusted piece of corrugated metal for a roof, but more often than not, the Rom had only garbage bags to keep out the rain. Though abandoned, the buildings were far from empty. Each of the old apartments and offices could be home to as many as twenty people. Entire extended families lived packed into little concrete boxes.

  Outside of Building A, on a windy summer afternoon, a young Roma boy called Mila knelt before his rebuilt BMW motorcycle and finished installing the cables that had arrived in the post earlier that morning. The hulking ramshackle high-rises loomed over him like giant stonework shadows. The installation had taken two long, painstaking hours. Finally, it was done.

  He jumped up and folded his tiny pliers back into the base of his BMW key fob. The clever device looked like an ordinary key chain, but it contained everything from screwdrivers to Mila’s favorite toy, the lock pick.

  He took a seat on the bike, put the key in the ignition, and turned it slowly. He stepped on the kick-starter of the old motorbike and closed his eyes to pray.

  “Come on, baby.”

  He stepped down hard.

  Click

  Nothing.

  He took a deep breath and stepped down again.

  Click

  “Seriously!” he cried out. He stepped down a few more times. Still nothing.

  Mila chided himself for trying to do the job by instinct, instead of using the repair manual. If I believed in curses, I’d swear this was fate trying to trap me in these damn buildings, he thought.

  He climbed off the bike and looked it over, trying to figure out where his installation job had gone astray.

  The motorcycle was a ‘71 he found in the city dump while searching for scrap metal to barter. Since then, the bike had become his purpose in life. He had put every euro he earned singing on the metro line into restoring it.

  Its original color was dark blue. But with some spray paint, it was now a shiny black, which made the chrome seem to glisten even more by contrast. There was no doubt the bike was cool. The sleek, curved frame gave it a vintage look. The chrome tailpipes looked as if flames could spring from them instead of petrol fumes, even if they did need a little polish. And the BMW nameplate told the world that Mila mattered. This was his way of feeling less like a Gypsy, less like a captive of Buildings A and B. He was proud for that one moment when he hopped on the bike and thought, I matter. Now he just needed to get it running.

  Mila turned away and rummaged through the mess of tools and parts, looking for his repair manual. It was nowhere to be found. Suddenly, his instinct kicked in. He knew where it was, and who took it.

  Intent on finding his manual, he ran into Building A, weaved through the piles of rubbish crowding the ground floor, hurtled up the graffiti-spattered stairwell, and disappeared into a squalid labyrinth of hallways in the building’s upper reaches. He made his way to a small room and frantically ransacked every drawer and hunted under every piece of furniture, with no luck.

  His instinct convinced him that his mischievous 11-year-old twin cousins stole the manual. Not to read, of course. Mila knew that the twins could not read or write. Education had never been a priority to his community. They believed school was something for the gadje, the outsiders. Most certainly, the boys stole it to make paper airplanes, or perhaps to ignite a fire in the rusted barrel next to the football field.

  Just as hope was fading away, Mila remembered the old wooden chest that served as the family’s coffee table. Something about the chest roused his intuition. I bet the twins stash their bounty in there, he thought. He threw it open and dug through old pictures, knickknacks, and countless unopened eviction notices sent by the rubber factory that owned Buildings A and B. Sure enough, he came across some of the old comic books he once used to teach himself to read, along with his latest copy of the
American comic Whistleblower, which he’d been looking for all week. “So, the twins took that, too,” he said to himself, annoyed. Finally, he reached the bottom of the black hole of useless junk. No repair manual. By now, Mila had made a pretty decent mess in the already cluttered room.

  Suddenly, darkness filled the concrete room as the ambient hum of electricity died.

  “Damn it!” Mila shouted, fumbling through the dark room for the light switch. At last, he found the little plastic tab and flipped it. Nothing. The factory must have found our wire tie-in again, he guessed.

  “Jesus! Could this day get any worse?” Mila shouted.

  “Thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain,” his great-aunt Nasta replied from behind the closed door of a tiny side room. “And yes, it can get worse. You’re still a Gypsy,” she reminded him, both scolding and teasing her nephew.

  “Sorry!” he quickly apologized, realizing he should not disturb her while she was in her sanctuary. Mila figured the small nook must have been a walk-in closet for office supplies back in the days of communism. Nasta had converted it to a religious space, and as such it was the only place in the buildings that was peaceful.

  The old mystic emerged from the shrine and stepped into the darkened room dressed in her usual hand-sewn outfit. A long skirt brushed the tops of her worn-out house slippers, and she wore a long-sleeved blouse that kept her arms covered even in the heat of the summer. She had a smile on her wrinkled, eighty-year-old face and at least a dozen candles in her frail hands. She stood on her toes and kissed Mila’s cheek.

  Mila turned and slid open the drapes of the tiny rectangular windows, letting in some sun from the blustery summer day. I need to find that manual! Where could they have put it? he asked himself.

  “Don’t worry about the lights,” Nasta said. “I’ll send one of the twins to reconnect the cords later. Are you hungry?”