Dear Aunt Mae,
Back in London now after about a week of frantic action, so I’m taking the time to write you before things heat up again. I’m still at the Imperial where the Ministry have a suite of rooms so I’m holed up here in the cellars waiting for the air raid to finish. My ears are all shot to Hell and I can still only half see out of my left eye from being a touch too close to a Kraut stick grenade a few days ago, but don’t panic, I’m all good. The Doc reckons I was lucky but should be right as rain again in a week or so.
So a few days back I headed out to the south end of France to a place called Renne le Chateau with an RAF crew in a bomber and a crumbly old professor. We were on the trail of a Merovingian crypt and to cut a long story short, we followed a couple of clues and wound up at a church in the village. A guy I know by reputation but had never actually met was digging out of town. Otto Rahn. Big time Nazi digger and card carrying member of the Party who’s spent most of the thirties crawling round the Pyrenees looking for the lost Cathar fortress of Montsegur.
We rumbled his dig site and wound up breaking into a citadel where the Nazis had made their base where I stumbled across a guy named Saxon who I hadn’t seen for months. Saxon is a Limey art thief who got busted in Paris in the summer of ’40 while I was helping him try and snatch an odd picture from the Louvre. He and the picture were grabbed by the Kraut security and I thought I’d never see him again, so for him to turn up in the dungeon of a Nazi castle a few hundred miles away fair set my spine tingling.
We broke him out along with Linton-Blake, one of the Airmen who were my taxi out of there who’d also been grabbed, and were on our way out when we stumbled into Rahn’s office. I left him tied to his chair and Saxon grabbed the picture which was hanging in pride of place on his wall.
We hightailed it to the local church and holed up to look for the crypt, which turned out to be a passage that lead to a Cathar tomb stuffed with gold bees. More about them later. They had the look of those old Egyptian Scarabs so I stayed well clear, but we grabbed a bunch of gold medals which were the mission. Turns out that not grabbing the bees was a smart idea, because as soon as the Krauts appeared following us, the bees came alive and helped us escape.
Back to the plane and up into the air and we thought we were home free, but a call came through that the RAF boys had a second mission to run a bombing raid on a train. So we headed East and hit a train with a 200 pounder before managing to get ourselves drilled full of holes by a squadron of 109’s. Well, I‘ve never jumped out of a plane before and I can honestly say I never want to again.
We got split up when we landed in the dark, but I managed to find Fisher, who’s a good ballsy London lad with a mean right hook, so we fronted up to the hotel we found and ran straight into Linton-Blake and Saxon, and also Cathrine Macini. You’ll remember me writing you about her a while back about that business in the Arctic with that big Indian fella ?
Well Cathrine works for the Ministry as well and had a list which I was on, along with most of the folks in our little gang. We soon learned that there was a connection straight from Renne le Chateau to here, the Hotel Mabire in Lichtenstein. Lichtenstein ? Yep, that’s what I thought as well. We spent ages looking for it on the map ! Pretty vicious gun control laws and some good beer.
Turns out that the Cathar bees were linked to old Lichtenstein in some way, I think because the Cathars also came here and buried five of them in the ground, four workers and a Queen Bee. An old sparring partner of mine Lucus Faber was digging in the area so I lost as little time as possible turning over his dig site and acquiring a gold bee off him. The bees were odd, definitely powerful. Gave me that buzzing feeling in my palms. Faber tore the ass off the local Komandant for his lack of security, which was pretty damn funny.
Next day we set out looking for the rest of the bees which an old tale told us were buried round the place, only to find that the Kraut archaeologists had already dug four of them up. We managed to get the Cathar medals and our painting back, only to lose it again, then managed to find a forgery of the same painting, which kind of made things confusing and curious all at the same time. We couldn’t fathom out what was special about this picture. It’s by a mediocre artist named Alexander Cross and is a modernist dog’s dinner of a mess. Me and Saxon did a quick switch job and managed to secure both the real one and the fake.
That night it turns out the story gets worse, though doesn’t it always when I’m around digging things up ? Umma the old Story Lady told us that the Cathars buried the bees to keep the original guardians of Lichtenstein safe underground. Variously called Trolls, Guardians and whatever else, these bad boys turned out to be walking corpses, though not of the Zombii kind I’ve met before. Something powerfully different about these fellas. But they still fell down flat when I shot them with Jean Lafyette’s pistol.
So after von Strondheim had gone, oh yeah, that German pimp showed up with a bunch of pretty young things and is still bitter about the laying out I gave him all those years ago. But he doesn’t see nothing of Gloria no more, so there’s always a silver lining. Anyway, after he went the zombie fellas attacked and carved up some of the Limeys, so we fought them off until the local Lichtensteiners, a guy named Marco and a tall chick named Lottie went out and buried the bees again. Less ceremoniously than I expected I have to admit, but it worked.
Next day Rahn arrived with a platoon of stormtroopers itching for some trigger action so we high tailed it out of the hotel trading lead. I got exploded on the way out along with Marco but we staggered to the cellar where we blew the hotel. Kaboom, and it came down on Rahn’s fat head.
There you go, and now I’m back in London listening to bombs drop overhead.
Take care Aunt. I don’t know when I can get back home. The skies are full of fighters and the seas are full of U-Boats and getting a ticket to the States is near on impossible, but I’ve got secure employment and am doing some good in the best way I know how.
Papa and the Loa look over you. Your loving kid,
Morton
