B004U2USMY EBOK (13 page)

“Let’s hope not.”

“Oh, the Germans aren’t so bad. Big and dumb
and gauche, but do you remember what it was like when the English
were in town? No, probably not. The Germans are better behaved.
And if the Americans ever came, it would be like ten thousand
zazous in uniform. And this place? The only mistake I made was
getting thrown out.” A wry laugh. “They heard about me at the
One-Two-Two and the Sphinx, too. Nobody works harder than a whore
looking for revenge. Five whores looking for revenge? I’ll take a
Gestapo interrogation before I face that again.”

“What happened?”

“Oh, it was all my fault. A misunderstanding
about a wealthy German officer, but I should have known better. He
was spoken for.”

A roar of laughter from the Germans near the
piano interrupted Christine. One man, a brandy snifter in one hand
and cigar in the other, stood on a chair and shouted something
that brought cheers from the other Germans and tinkling laughter
from the girls, most of whom seemed to be laughing along without
understanding.

When the hubbub died down, Christine’s mind
had apparently turned elsewhere. “How is Alfonse? He can be
generous, no?”

“Yes, generous.” And brutal, in turns.

“You wanted me for something,” Christine
said. “Did he ask you to arrange a
menage a trois
? I can
be convinced.”

A week earlier, that suggestion might have
shocked Gabriela, but now she merely shook her head. “I need your
help getting rid of Alfonse when he comes back.”

“Get rid of him? Whatever for?”

“I need to go back to Le Coq Rouge. We pulled
up and he saw Colonel Hoekman’s car. Soon as he knew the Gestapo
was back he wanted nothing to do with the place.”

“Don’t blame him. What I can’t figure out is
why you don’t feel the same way.”

She considered how much to tell Christine,
had been on the verge of confiding moments earlier, until the
off-putting bit about the Germans. “I’m trying to help the
patron
find his son.”

“You mean Leblanc’s note. I’d love to find
him, too, but it’s been three days. Roger’s probably in a camp by
now, or ’volunteered’ to work the coal mines. God help him if he
really is a homosexual.”

“Can you help me?”

“Come on, Gaby, I don’t want to get mixed up
in this. I’m here to go back with someone to the baths. It’s been
so damn slow at the restaurant, I need to pay my rent. Look at
that man over there, he keeps watching us.”

“The fat, drunk slob?”

“The rich, drunk slob,” Christine said. “And
if I get him into the baths, lather him up, I won’t even need him
inside me.” She held out her hands with their long fingers and
their carefully groomed nails. “I’ve got everything I need right
here.”

“He’s old, bet he’s old enough to be
someone’s grandfather.”

“Old enough to be rich, you mean.”

“How about this?” Gabriela said. “I have a
little money in the car Alfonse gave me to buy a fur wrap.”

“And what’ll you tell him when he asks to see
your new wrap?”

“If he bothers to remember, you mean. I’ll
tell him I lost money buying some silly thing or other. You know,
like girls do.”

Christine seemed to consider for a moment.
“No, I can’t take your money. That’s what the
boches
are
for.”

“I need your help.”

“Help getting yourself killed? I don’t think
so. God, you’re obsessed with that Gestapo bastard. Can’t for the
life of me figure out why.”

“I’m not obsessed.”

“Just stay away from Hoekman. Why won’t you
trust me on that?”

“Everyone takes a risk,” Gabriela countered.
“They threw you out of the
Egyptienne
,
but here you are, you came back.”

“That’s different. Worst thing happens, they
throw me out a second time and my name gets dragged through the
mud again. In case you haven’t noticed, my name wasn’t that clean
to begin with. You mess up with Hoekman, how does that turn out?
Not too damn well, does it.” She waved to the waiter for another
glass of champagne.

“Fine, I’ll do it myself.”

“Oh, god.” A big sigh, then finally, a nod. “
D’accord.
You want Alfonse to go back with another girl? I know just the
girl. And she owes me a favor, too.” She stood up, scanned the
room. “I saw her here just a minute ago. Ah, there she is.”

“How long do you need?” Gabriela asked.

“Five minutes. Get your clothes, find the
corporal and have him bring Alfonse’s car around. I’ll meet you
out front.” She disappeared and Gabriela went to retrieve her
clothes.

Outside there was no sign of Alfonse’s
driver, but the doorman knew just where to find him. He sent a boy
off running and a few minutes later, the driver came around with
the car. His clothes looked rumpled and one of his shirt buttons
was still unfastened. Looks like she’d interrupted his own little
party, wherever the enlisted drivers went to relax when they
weren’t driving spoiled majors and their mistresses back and forth
across Paris.

She climbed in, said, “Sorry. I didn’t mean
to spoil your evening. If you want, maybe—”

“
Je ne comprends pas
,” he interrupted
in heavily accented French.

True to her word, Christine swooped down the
stairs to the car a few minutes later, once again fully dressed.
She got in the car and gave instructions in German to the driver,
who sped off.

“You’ll have to make up a convincing story,”
Christine said, “but I think you’re good until morning. The
private party I arranged will keep him occupied. What’s your
plan?”

“I need to get the colonel to take me home.”

“Oh, Gaby.”

“Think I can do it?”

“A few nights ago I thought you were crazy
for trying to seduce that
boche
, but you know, I think he
was warming up. Too bad Roger had to steal the petrol and mess
everything up.”

“So you think I can do it?”

“You’re so damn pretty and confident, too.
Just keep doing what you were doing and
ouais,
I think so.
But why the hell would you want to?”

Gabriela leaned back in the seat. “I have my
reasons.”

Chapter Ten:

Helmut’s train stopped at the vast Anhalter
rail station. Papers changed hands; the prisoners shuffled off in
different directions. Two hard-faced men in a
difficult-to-identify uniform took custody of him.

The station was chaos. Troops coming and
going, supplies, civilians, work crews repairing bomb damage. Half
a dozen beams of trickling snowflakes penetrated the station
through holes in the glass skin thirty meters up. The main atrium
was too cold to melt the snow and they formed white patches on the
tile.

Even as prisoners poured out of the train
from France, soldiers herded a different group of men onto a
Poland-bound train parked on the opposite platform. They shuffled
along, putting up no resistance, and Helmut couldn’t see if they
were Jews, communists, homosexuals, or merely enemies of the
Reich.

“May I ask where you are taking me?” he asked
the two men as they led him from the station in handcuffs.

“Just move along.” They loaded him into a
car.

The scene in Berlin reminded Helmut of the
heady days after the Anschluss, when joint German and Austrian
parades clogged the streets of the city and hundreds of thousands
of people joined in celebration.

Tens of thousands of troops paraded beneath
the Brandenburg Gate and along Unter den Linden. Hulking,
intimidating Tiger tanks rumbled through the streets, flanked by
smaller Panzers and mechanized infantry in trucks. The air lay
heavy with fumes.

But even from his vantage in the military
car—twice blocked and rerouted by the parade—Helmut noted
important differences from those earlier spectacles. The crowds
were thinner, the cheers defiant or anxious instead of jubilant.
Half the marching soldiers looked like either fathers or boys,
barely able to shave. Not the stiff-marching, cocky troops of a
few years earlier.

What would an observer of a similar scene in
Moscow have seen? Were the Russians also pushed to the brink? Or
were there endless supplies of fresh Mongolians, Turks, Cossacks,
and other yellow-teethed, beady-eyed types from the vast
hinterland of the Soviet Empire? Feasting on promises of rape and
pillage in the German countryside?

These thoughts fed his despair.

The car took him to a nondescript concrete
building on Bendlerstrasse, not far from Wehrmacht headquarters.
They led him into a room with two chairs and a table and a single
overhead light bulb. They handcuffed him to the table, then bolted
the door behind him. It was cold in the room and he shivered in a
cold sweat. A sharp chemical odor hung in the air, like the kind
used to clean up after blood and shit and vomit. His fear grew
with every passing minute until he thought he would faint. At last
the door opened and he whipped his head around to see the face of
his torturer.

But it was a familiar figure who stepped
through the door. He felt a flood of relief.

“Gemeiner?” Helmut said. His relief turned to
cold anger. “What the hell are you playing at?”

“Very sorry about that,” Gemeiner said.
“Here, let me get you out of those cuffs.”

He was dressed in civilian clothes with no
visible weapon. After uncuffing Helmut, he took a seat opposite
and set a thick envelope on the table between them.

“Please forgive the theater.”

“Theater?” Helmut demanded. “Is that what you
call it? Do you have any idea what your little show cost?”

“Ah, yes, the attack on the train. You
realize the train would have been attacked or not, regardless of
whether you were on it. Of course, I was relieved to hear you were
uninjured.”

“I’m not talking about that. I’ve got a
hundred and fifty men in France left unattended. No doubt word has
spread of my arrest. If they think my business is defunct, the STO
will round up some of them. The rest might be drafted into Todt
work crews. The lucky ones. There are Jews, Poles, refugees. Do
you have any idea how hard I worked to put together that team and
hold it?”

“Noted,” Gemeiner said. “I’ll put in a call
as soon as we’re done.”

“But why? Why not just send a courier? Or
better yet, pick up the phone?”

“You came to the attention of an overzealous
SS agent. He called for advice.”

The young captain at the border crossing near
the Molynaux farm.

Gemeiner continued, “It was only with the
greatest of fortune that he called our man instead of going higher
up to Berlin or calling someone who would have alerted Colonel
Hoekman. But you see, we couldn’t do nothing. Instead, we had to
pretend to take you into custody and continue the fiction all the
way to Berlin.”

“Ah, I see.” His anger began to fade. “So
what now?”

“Now we create a false file and send you on
your way. You were investigated, found clean, and we’ll be sure to
keep an eye on you just in case. In the meanwhile, take a few
days, visit your wife, look after your affairs in the Reich.”

“And Hoekman knows nothing?” Helmut asked.

“No, not yet. But he’s getting close. How
close, we don’t know, but if he keeps sniffing around, it’s only a
matter of time. He’s smart as Satan, we can’t fool him forever.”
Gemeiner folded his hands in front of him. They showed liver spots
and extruding veins, but the old soldier’s hands still looked
strong and firm. “It might be necessary to sacrifice your friend.”

“Major Ostermann? No, I don’t think so.”

“He is engaged in a number of petty
illegalities. It wouldn’t be hard for you to forge a few invoices,
make it look like he’s requisitioning more than he reports. Let
them think they’ve found their culprit and they’ll move on to
something else.”

It was a repellant thought, especially in
light of what Helmut had been facing just moments earlier. Things
would go very badly for his friend if he fell into the hands of
the Gestapo.

“Apart from the obvious treachery of turning
over an innocent to our enemies,” Helmut said, “there’s a flaw in
your plan. Alfonse is a talker. He talks too much after a glass of
wine. What’s he going to say when they rip out his fingernails?”

“Nothing much, there’s a reason we didn’t
bring him into the conspiracy. He knows nothing, he can tell them
nothing.”

“But he’ll say he does, if only to get them
to leave him alone,” Helmut said. “And then they’ll have reason to
dig into my organization and they’ll still find us out.”

Gemeiner looked thoughtful. “You might be
right. Any suggestions?”

“We could have Hoekman killed. Make it look
like the
maquis
.”

“No, that’s impossible,” Gemeiner said.

“Not at all, it’d be quite easy. I can
probably arrange it myself. There’s a Jew who works for me, his
brother’s family was recently—”

“I’m not saying he couldn’t physically be
killed. But when you kill someone like Hoekman you double the
resources searching for you until pretty soon you’ve got someone
you can’t kill. No, I can’t risk it, not until we’re sure Hoekman
is looking into us and nobody else.”

“Problem is, we need a man on the inside,
someone to get close to Hoekman, and we haven’t got one.”

“Not yet,” Gemeiner said with a smile that
looked vaguely predatory. He unwrapped the cord on the envelope in
front of him and removed some papers. “Tell me, what do you know
about Gabriela Reyes?”

Helmut frowned. “The prostitute from
Le Coq Rouge
?
Gaby?
How do you know about her?”

“We have files on everyone who works in the
restaurant and many of the clients as well. I’ve been trying to
figure out who or what has drawn Hoekman’s attention. It’s not
that young thief he collared last week. He was a nobody.”