Spook's Gold (15 page)

Boris continued switching his head from left to right over Lemele’s shoulders to glare at the group, who were perturbed neither by his hostility nor by the StG44 that he was mashing in his huge fists. Finally the insistent pressure of Lemele’s hand on his chest won and he reluctantly turned and continued on with them.

The hotel was almost empty and so it proved no problem to obtain an extra room for Lemele. Marner assured her that he would pay for it, knowing that he had plenty left in his illicit wad of money. Boris muttered that at least Josef had made it a decent hotel, even if the word ‘luxury’ was not applicable.

After conferring, Marner and Boris agreed to eat in the hotel restaurant, citing fatigue; in reality, neither of them was inclined to venture outside into the hostile streets. Lemele pleaded a headache and stated that she was just going to take a bath and sleep, going up to her room immediately that she received her key with just a cursory ‘good night’ as she departed. Marner and Boris looked at each other quizzically, not sure whether to believe her. Possibly she too was feeling the same fatigue as her travelling companions; or maybe she wanted to avoid being seen in their presence and thus be the subject of hostility from her fellow countrymen, with whom she undoubtedly felt more affinity than them.

----

They met an hour later in the bar, feeling refreshed from a bath and a change of clothes. Marner was shocked to see the machine gun propped against the side of the armchair in which Boris had installed himself. Boris saw his look and stated that he did not want to leave such a weapon in his hotel room. “Too many thieves,” he explained. Marner shrugged, too tired to argue and flopped into the chair opposite, peering around the bar that was currently only occupied by a couple of army officers and a bored barman reading a newspaper that was spread on the counter top. From his expression, the newspaper held no interest for the barman; most likely it gave him an excuse to avoid looking up and meeting the eye of anyone who might require him to move and work.

Marner looked at Boris and his nearly empty glass and asked what was required to obtain a beer. By way of an answer, Boris reached over the side of his chair, grabbed the StG by the end of the barrel and used it to thump the butt down twice on the hardwood floor. This succeeded in getting the barman to look up dolefully and Boris shouted, “Two beers, and make them proper sized ones, not these tiny things for women. And a question: what is the food like here?”

The barman ambled over and spoke quietly, as if the answer were a secret. “Actually it is pretty good now that the chef has departed. He took off without warning two weeks ago, reason and destination unknown. So the owner’s wife took over the cooking and it’s much better now. She’s not especially fast, but it is worth the wait. Or you have the choice of plenty of restaurants in town.”

Boris waved dismissively, “This will do just fine. Do we need to reserve a table for dinner?”

The barman looked at him, not sure if this was perhaps a joke or a trick question. He looked away from Boris and ran his gaze slowly around the room and then back again, as if his neck was stiff and could only rotate at a limited speed. The action seemed to invite them to see what he saw; a nearly empty bar. “That will not be necessary. Most of the usual clientele are the officers billeted here, but for some reason they all seem to be out working late tonight,” he finished, no trace of a smile or irony in his face. Maybe he was only as up to date as his old newspaper on the bar.

Boris waved him away and they sat silently until the barman finally returned with two large glasses of beers. These were in fact what appeared to be water jugs, based on the pouring spout at the front lip. Judging by the huge grin that lit up Boris’s face, he entirely approved of their size.

They sat quietly working on their beers, Boris draining his jug at a rapid pace. Marner finally broke the silence, asking if Boris had managed to get through to Paris on the telephone and, if so, what he had learned.

“I could not get through to any of my contacts at the Majestic, the telephone system seems to be overloaded, but I spoke for a couple of minutes to Rudi at OKW,” this being the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the armed forces high command situated in the Champs-Élysées. “He says that the situation is ‘alarming’, to use his exact word. Bayeux fell today to the British.” Boris could see that this meant nothing to Marner. “Large town, with the main military garrison and command for the Normandy area, about ten kilometres inland from the coast,” he elaborated.

“It doesn’t seem that they’re making that much progress then, even assuming that one of the past two days of the offensive was just getting themselves ashore,” suggested Marner.

“Au contraire, my friend. The
entire
allied front has pushed that far inland, more or less, allowing for the confusion. More importantly, that front is
one hundred
kilometres wide, stretching from east of Caen, all of the way across to south of Cherbourg. They have secured and are unloading on the beaches all along the length of that front and also dropping elite paratroopers behind our lines. I’ve seen the scale of forces, the firepower, the support required for that size of battle. Not just to hold it, but to actually push forward even at what seems a leisurely rate of ten kilometres per day. This is no half-arsed exploratory effort such as the ones they made at Dieppe or Dunkirk. This is the real thing and they intend to stay.”

Marner considered this. Despite having seen on many occasions the newsreels of action from battles, he still could not visualise what Boris was trying to describe. “But surely, on a relative scale, their gains are negligible. They have a narrow strip of coast a hundred kilometres long, whilst we have all of the rest of France and more. Once we bring the mass of our forces to bear on that tiny piece that they possess, they must crumble and fall back into the sea. Surely?”

“According to Rudi there’s a combination of chaos and incompetence right now. Apparently our reserve units, especially heavy armour, tanks and so forth, haven’t been committed due to our leaders all being away on holiday,” to which Marner shook his head in disbelief. “And now that they’re back from Bavaria or wherever it is they take their floozies, the Allies and Resistance are preventing anything from moving.”

“As we experienced first-hand for ourselves today,” observed Marner before draining the remainder of his beer.

“Yes. This leaves our forces up in Normandy isolated and retreating under a pounding, allowing the enemy to push hard to capture Caen and Cherbourg in particular because they are ports. Once captured, they will be able to bring in materiel on a far larger scale than they can on beaches.”

Marner had nothing to say to this. He entirely ceded to Boris’s superior knowledge and analysis of all things military. So he settled for banging the table with his empty glass to signal for more beers.

“So what do you think the outcome of all this is?” he asked. “Now that we are fighting in France too, we are retreating on all fronts, east, south and west. What would you do?”

Boris stared off into the distance and then dropped his voice, “Consider it this way. It is now Germany fighting against two huge countries – America and Russia, plus a host of others. To state it more bluntly, it is us against everyone else. Ignore Japan, they’re too far away to be of any support or use to us.”

He was interrupted by the arrival of fresh beers and the news that their meal was ready in the restaurant. Boris nodded but remained sitting; the barman shrugged at their indifference to their waiting food and shuffled off again. When he was out of earshot Boris continued, “Us against the rest. Our resources – fuel and steel etcetera – from those territories that we still hold and that haven’t had the shit bombed out of them, versus the combined resources of all of our enemies. Take a look at their domination of the skies as a clear example of their superiority in materiel. But that is not what will be the root cause of our downfall.”

Marner looked at him, nodding his head as a prompt for Boris to go on.

“Men. We only have the human resources of a single country. Minus what we’ve lost already, of course. Compare that to the populations of America and Russia.”

Marner sighed; the conclusion of what Boris was moving towards – defeat –was so overwhelming that it did not need putting into words. He rose, stretched and moved off towards the restaurant with Boris in tow. Once seated in front of their steaming bowls of soup, which smelt delicious, he asked Boris what possible best outcome they could hope for.

“Negotiated surrender. Germany still has considerable fighting strength and, mostly importantly, spirit. If I were in charge, I’d simply decide what we could capably hold with the resources we have. Once you reach a sufficient density of resources, you can dig in and defend and it takes a far, far greater number to defeat or dislodge you. Even if your opponents possess the materiel to do it, it also requires their willingness to accept large scale losses, which I’ll wager they do not have.” Boris took a pause to taste and approve the soup. “So ideally we should withdraw quickly and decisively to that line, faster than the enemy can mobilise and react to pursue you, and then we make a stand. To me, that would logically be the German border; German soldiers will fight harder to hold that symbolic line than any opponent will fight to take it. Then we negotiate for better terms of surrender than we got last time around.”

“But will that happen?”

“Of course not! The stupidity on the eastern front shows that logic won’t prevail. Instead of falling back to a solid and entrenched position that we can hold, our leaders are trying to hang on to each and every metre and we are paying for it dearly in blood. Literally! And yet we’re
still
losing that ground. We are bleeding away our essential fighting strength due to the pride and obstinacy, call it plain stupidity even, of our leaders.”

Boris was now on his favourite subject; his voice had risen sharply in volume and anger and the few other diners had stopped talking and were staring at them. Marner decided that it was time to change the subject and break the mood. “So what do we think about Loutrel as the culprit for Schull’s murder?”

Boris needed a few moments to drag his attention back to the new subject. He looked at Marner and snorted with derision, “It just does not add up on any level. Loutrel’s objective in shooting the officer here in Toulouse was to make a public display of his ‘dedication’,” Boris snorted with contempt. “Dedication, my great fat posterior!” to which Marner raised his wine glass and mumbled, “I’ll drink to that.”

Boris continued, “His dedication to the resistance movement. But in the case of the Schull shooting, whoever did it went to great lengths to try and cover up their identity. To put it simply, there is no common factor in either murder except for the fact that the victim was a German officer.”

“Quite right,” agreed Marner. “You are absolutely spot-on with what sets the two killings apart: motive. First rule of detective work: find the motive and you’ll find the culprit. In the case of Loutrel, his motive for doing it is saving his own skin, and doing it overtly and publicly. In the case of Schull’s murderer, we are still working on the motive of covering up a theft. Entirely different motives, so logically it is two entirely different perpetrators.”

They both receded back into their thoughts and fell silent. Marner was aware that he had consumed too much beer and wine to be capable of doing his best thinking. He did not have Boris’s years of dedicated practice nor bulk to soak up the alcohol. He was just about to get up and head off to bed when Boris spoke up again, “But you definitely have the Carlingue enmeshed somewhere in Schull’s murder. You can’t ignore that. We should hang around until Loutrel is picked up. If we have him on a hook, then maybe he will give up something important to help you. I’m sure that Hauger and his animals in the basement will be only too happy to help.”

Marner considered this, but it was a big ‘if’; if Loutrel were caught, if Loutrel actually knew anything, if he would give it up.

Boris saw the scepticism in his friend’s face and suggested, “Why don’t you consider following the Gestapo lead?” Marner looked blank, so Boris continued, “As you described it to me, the Gestapo are the only common element to all of the shipments because they were entrusted with organising and running the over-land transportations. It might potentially explain the Carlingue involvement.”

Marner acknowledged his agreement and approval of Boris’s logic. “Very good point and it is not as though I have so many other leads to work on right now. But I need to find whoever is responsible for organising and coordinating the shipments, which are probably managed out of Berlin. I could spend weeks getting the run-around; the information is probably highly classified anyway, so I’ll just get shut out.”

“Go via Odewald?” proposed Boris with a mischievous grin.

Marner saw what he was alluding to. “Oh, sure! First off, he already has Loutrel down for Schull’s murder, so I’ll be really popular when I tell him that I ‘respectfully disagree’. Then I’ll be telling him that I suspect our own organisation, based on nothing but circumstantial evidence and hunches.” Boris picked up his feed line exactly on cue, leaning forward to thump the table and mimic Odewald, “I don’t have hunches, I have dead bodies!” and they both set to laughing.

“Boris, I’ve had far, far too much beer and wine and now it’s time for bed. We’ll figure it out in the morning.”

Suddenly Boris fell serious. “Why don’t you just ask your contacts at Kriegsmarine?  They must know who the Gestapo contact is, since they have to coordinate the handover.”

Marner smiled with genuine warmth at his friend. “Boris, not only are you smart, but you’re still smart after all that beer. Good idea. But it can wait until the morning. I doubt if any of those sea-rats up in Paris are in their offices at this hour.”

Chapter Eighteen

Boris and Lemele were seated in the restaurant the next morning enjoying a silent breakfast together. They had passed Marner at the reception desk, where he was shouting into the telephone at someone. He had waved them on into the breakfast room and they had found a table in the window bay.