The Red Battle Flier

Richthofen kept him waiting well into the afternoon.

There was no reason for the delay. It was simply the habit of junkers to have vassals loiter. Poe supposed the flier had little interest in their collaboration. He must co-operate because he had been so ordered by General Karnstein. For Kaiser and Vaterland, Manfred von Richthofen would consent to be made immortal by Edgar Poe. To a physical immortal, perhaps the prospect was insignificant.

The Baron's private quarters were not quite spartan but hardly seemed the lair of a great warrior. There was an orderly desk where Richthofen sat to write terse, accurate, tedious reports of aerial exploits. In the last few days, Poe had examined numberless dreary documents. He understood why the Baron was not to be entrusted with the writing of his own memoirs.

Without permission to sit, he paced the room. On the mantel was a row of shining cups. Poe was drawn to the bright things. Each trophy bore a tiny plate, engraved with a formulaic notation: a number, the details of an Allied aeroplane, another number, a date. 11. VICKERS. 1. 23.11.16. Each commemorated one of Richthofen's victories. The first number was the running total of the hunting bag, the second indicated how many had died in the downed aircraft. Every twentieth cup was double- sized.

There were about sixty of them. That was incorrect. Richthofen's score stood at nearly eighty.

'A silver shortage. The manufacturer made a special case for some months, but there was a tightening of regulations.'

Richthofen had come into the room without Poe hearing him, no mean achievement. He stood in completely human shape, calm and compact. Poe would never have discerned godlike potential in this ordinary soldier but could not forget what he had seen in the tower. Inside the Baron nestled the leather angel of the skies, the perfected vampire form.

'The tradesman offered pewter as a substitute but I took the opportunity to discontinue commemorating my kills with gaudy things. I know in myself my worth. Trophies have come to seem vulgar.'

Poe touched a cup. His fingers stung.

'Real silver?'

'I should give up these baubles for scrap. I'd rather have silver bullets in my guns than silver cups in my den.'

Few vampires cared to have silver around them. It showed daring. If Poe were to grip one of these trophies firmly, his hand would shrivel.

Richthofen stood beside him and regarded the cups. Each marked one or more dead. Goring, the recording officer, impressed upon Poe the arcana of the 'score'. Strictly, only victories over aircraft counted, not the number of dead or downed. A flier could claim a victory by sending a vanquished pilot to a prisoner-of-war camp. Few of Richthofen's cups bore a zero. His victories were kills. Oswald Boelcke, who formulated the tactics of aerial combat, liked to aim for the enemy's engine and let the pilot live. Richthofen always went for the throat. For him, a bloodless victory was no victory at all. Only a kill counted.

'They do not blur and become one. I remember each. I have made reports.'

Boelcke was truly dead, though not in combat: his aeroplane had crashed in mid-air into one of his fellows' machines.

The Baron sat at his desk, at attention even in repose, and indicated a chair. Poe folded himself into it. He was conscious of his shabbiness beside the correctness of the flier. Richthofen's uniform was pressed to perfection, knife-edge creases and drum- tight jacket ready for inspection. Poe's trousers were almost out at the knees. The buttons of his old waistcoat were mismatched.

'So, it begins, Herr Poe. Your book.'

'Our book, Baron.'

Richthofen waved an indifferent hand. He had the short nails and stub fingers of a cowboy, not the languid extremities of an aristocratic idler.

'I do not care much for writing. Or for writers. A cousin of mine has formed an unsuitable attachment with an English writer of repulsive reputation. A Mr Lawrence. Have you heard of him?'

Poe had not.

'By all accounts, he is a horrid fellow, dirty from coal mines and animal habits.'

Where to begin? Perhaps it was time to borrow from that queer Jew, Freud. 'Tell me of your childhood, Baron.'

Richthofen began a recitation, 'I was born on the second of May, 1892. My father was stationed in Breslau with his cavalry regiment. Our family seat is an estate at Schweidnitz. I was named Manfred Albrecht in honour of an uncle, an Imperial Guardsman. My father was Major Albrecht, Freiherr von Richthofen. My mother was the former Kunigunde von Schickfuss und Neudorff. I have brothers, Lothar and Karl Bolko, and a sister, Ilse ...'

Poe interrupted, timidly. 'I have read your service records. Tell me about your childhood.'

Richthofen seemed to have nothing to say. In the depths of his eyes, there was (almost entirely veiled) drowning bewilderment.

'I do not understand what you want of me, Herr Poe.'

Poe did not expect to feel pity for the merciless hero. The Baron, though he would never let it show, was lost. Something was missing in him.

'What do you remember? A place, a pastime, a toy ... ?'

'My father told me I was different from the boys of the peasants who worked the land. They were Slavs. Orientals inferior to Prussians. Our family was Teuton, among the first to establish themselves in Silesia.'

'Did you feel different?'

Poe remembered his own childhood, estrangement from his fellows as an American in England.

Richthofen shook his head. 'No. I felt as I always have. I am myself. There has never been any need to question that.'

His backbone was a straight as a ramrod.

'What was your first passion?'

'That of any boy. Hunting in the woods.'

Richthofen was a hunter still. Was it too easy to deem him just a hunter, with no other light or dark to his soul?

'With my rifle, I shot three of my grandmother's tame ducks. I pulled a feather from each as a trophy. When I presented these to my mother, she scolded me. But my grandmother understood and rewarded me.'

'Like George Washington, you could not tell a lie?'

'I was admitting nothing. I was claiming my kills.'

'You saw no wrong in killing?'

'No. Do you?'

The drowning was gone from the Baron's eyes. There was a blue chill now. Poe thought of chips of ice in the streams of the Richthofen estate in Silesia.

'You were educated in Berlin, at a military school?'

Richthofen nodded curtly.'Wahlstatt. Its motto was "learn to obey that you may learn to command".'

'Very German.'

Not a smile.

At West Point, Poe had been desperately unhappy, deprived by his stepfather of the funds he needed to keep up with comrades.

'You must have loved Wahlstatt?'

'On the contrary, I detested the school. It was built as a monastery and furnished like a jail. Not caring for the instruction I received, I did just enough work to pass. It would have been wrong to do more than just enough, so I worked as little as possible. Consequently, my teachers did not think a great deal of me.'

'But you learned to command?'

'I learned to obey.' 'You command this jagdgeschwader.'

'I pass on orders I am given. Karnstein is commandant.'

It was like interrogating a prisoner of war. Richthofen would give away enough to pass, but no more. A lesson learned at Wahlstatt.

'When you were a boy, did you want to turn?'

'I was raised to know I would be turned in my eighteenth year. It is customary. Lothar, also, turned at that age. Karl Bolko, when he reaches manhood, will turn.'

'How was it done?'

'The usual way,' Richthofen said, brusquely.

'Forgive me, Baron, you must make allowances for my ignorance,' Poe wheedled, damping irritation by recalling the awesome winged creature that lurked within the cold fish. 'I turned in another age, when the change from living man to vampire was a rare, painful thing. I have known the grave and have been shunned as a beast of the night.'

'I did not die. My turning was hygienic. The results were satisfactory.'

New-born vampires usually described their transformations in the half-proud, half-ashamed, entirely excited manner in which the young men of Poe's warmth talked of their first visit to a brothel. To Richthofen, this miraculous metamorphosis was an uneventful appointment with a painless dentist.

'You turned in 1910. What is your bloodline?'

'It is of the highest. My family retains an elder, Perle von Mauren. Her line has become ours.'

This was a common arrangement. With Dracula established in Germany, the spread of vampirism was regulated. In theory, every vampire within the domains of Kaiser and King-Emperor was under the patronage of Dracula. A new-born could not be made without the Graf's permission. Vampirism was a condition to which the nobility were entitled by birth. Many aristocratic families made connections with elders of whom Dracula approved. Women like this Perle von Mauren were advisers, mistresses and governesses.

'How do you feel about your mother-in-darkness?' 'Feel? Why should I feel?'

'Your line is important.'

'Strictly, I am not solely of her blood. Under the supervision of Professor Ten Brincken, I have taken another as my father by proxy. I am of the Dracula line.'

He was not boasting but stating a fact.

'Are you greatly changed?'

'I am Manfred von Richthofen still. Most of those cups I won before I became a shape-shifter.'

'You flew in an aeroplane then?'

'An aeroplane is merely a gun with wings. Now I am my own weapon, my own instrument. Like the hunters of old.'

'Do you regret not living longer before turning?'

'I have never died.'

'But there are aspects of warm life lost to us. You set them aside before you could truly have known them.'

'War was coming. It was my duty to turn. Germany needed vampires of good lines.'

Maybe this empty man was the daytime shell and the giant Poe had seen was the real Red Battle Flier. This interview was like trying with thick gloves to pick up pins from a marble floor. Whenever a possibility was touched, it skittered away under a chest of drawers.

'After turning, you joined the lancers.'

'The First Regiment of Uhlans. I saw combat in '14, but the lancers were finished. This war has no place for cavalry.'

'So you exchanged your horse for an aeroplane?'

'I transferred to the Signal Corps and entered the Imperial Air Service as an observer. I made the decision to become a pilot. The position offers more opportunities for honourable service.'

'And sport?'

Richthofen considered a moment and gave a single nod. In a few minutes of unexpressive talk, he had disposed of an entire life up to the point when he found the vocation that made him famous. Poe had the bald facts of official record and tiny chinks of illumination that suggested a strange human story. It might be possible to frame the life of Baron von Richthofen as a tragedy. That was not what Dr Mabuse wished of the book.

'You spoke of dying, Herr Poe. As I said, I have never in truth been dead. But it seems to me now, looking back, that I was truly born not when I left my mother's womb, not when I drank Perle's vampire blood, but when I won my first victory. It was as an observer. I downed a Frenchman.'

Poe looked at the trophies.

'There is no cup. That aeroplane fell on the wrong side of the lines. The victory was not confirmed.'

'Does that bother you?'

Richthofen shrugged. 'One should receive credit that is one's due. An officer's word of honour should be accepted.'

'Why did you become a pilot?'

'So I could rely on myself. I lost kills because my pilot was not skilled enough to get me into position for a clean shot.'

Early in the war, observers - who were responsible for the guns -were the hunters. Pilots were in the same class as chauffeurs or beaters. Only after Boelcke laid down his famous dicta did the special skills of the flying warrior become generally appreciated.

'It is every man's dream to fly.'

Again, Richthofen was unaffected. 'As I believe I mentioned, I do not dream.'

'You are remarkably level-headed for a man on such intimate terms with the miraculous.'

The Baron had no answer.

'The world you were born into has changed beyond recognition. First, Dracula. Then, the war ...'

'The world is beyond my control. I have only myself. I have not changed. I have only become more myself.'