He didn’t, however, go too high. He selected a plateau some fifteen hundred feet high on a mountain range some fifty miles from the ocean, and there proceeded to build his own Xanadu which he later christened ‘Adlerheim’ – the home of the eagle. The poet speaks of Kubla Khan’s pied-à-terre as being a stately pleasure dome. Adlerheim wasn’t like that at all. It was a castellated neo-Gothic horror, a baroque monstrosity that came close to being awe-inspiring in its total, unredeemed vulgarity. Massive, built of north Italian marble, it was an incredible hodge-podge of turrets, onion towers, crenellated battlements – and slit windows for the use of archers. All it lacked was a moat and drawbridge, but Von Streicher had been more than satisfied with it as it was. For others, living in more modern and hopefully more enlightened times, the sole redeeming feature was to be seen from the battlements, looking west: the view across the broad valley to the distant coastal range, Streicher’s first break-water against the inevitable tidal wave, was quite splendid.
Fortunately for the seven captives in the rear of the second of two vans grinding round the hairpins up to the castle, they were doubly unable to see what lay in store for them. Doubly, because in addition to the van body being wholly enclosed, they wore blindfolds as well as handcuffs. But they were to know the inside of Adlerheim more intimately than even the most besotted and aesthetically retarded admirer of all that was worst in nineteenth-century design would have cared to.
The prisoners’ van jolted to a stop. Rear doors were opened, bandages removed and the seven still-handcuffed passengers were helped to jump down on to the authentically cobbled surface of what proved to be a wholly enclosed courtyard. Two guards were closing two massive, iron-bound oaken doors to seal off the archway through which they had just entered. There were two peculiarities about the guards. They were carrying Ingram submachine guns fitted with silencers, a favourite weapon of Britain’s elite Special Air Service – despite its name, an Army regiment – which had two rare privileges: the first was that they had access to their own private armoury, almost certainly the most comprehensively stocked in the world, the second being that any member of the unit had complete freedom to pick the weapon of his own particular choice. The popularity of the Ingram was testimony to its effectiveness.
The second idiosyncrasy about the two guards was that, from top of burnous to sandal-brushing skirts of robe, they were dressed as Arabs – not the gleamingly white garb that one would normally look to find in the State of California but, nonetheless, eminently suitable for both the very warm weather and the instantaneous concealment of Ingrams in voluminous folds. Four other men, two bent over colourful flower borders that paralleled all four walls of the courtyard, two carrying slung rifles, were similarly dressed. All six had the sun-tanned swarthiness of an Eastern desert dweller: but some of their facial bone structures were wrong.
The man who was obviously the leader of the abductors, and had been in the leading van, approached the captives and let them see his face for the first time – he had removed his stocking mask on leaving San Ruffino. He was a tall man, but broad-shouldered and, unlike the pudgy Von Streicher, who had habitually worn lederhosen and a Tyrolean hat with pheasant’s feather when in residence, he looked as if he belonged in an eagle’s home. His face was also lean and suntanned, but with a hooked nose and a piercing light blue eye. One eye. His right eye was covered by a black patch.
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. For calling the faithful to prayer we have again been forced to make a most reluctant compromise. For Mohammedans those onion towers, the grotesque architectural symbol of the Greek Orthodox Church, are anathema, but we have again consecrated one of them and it now serves as our minaret from which the muezzin summons the acolytes to prayer.’