Victor realized he’d followed Aubrion into the main room, where rows of chairs had been arranged before a low stage. It was all so Teutonically precise that it was nearly a parody. Aubrion made a joke about how the Germans had occupied the chairs. The professor didn’t hear it. His mouth had gone dry. This was how his fits usually began, with a blank mind and a dry mouth—but Victor forced himself not to think about it, to think of nothing but the mission.
“Everyone has a champagne flute,” said Aubrion.
“No, Marc.”
“Hey, pal, no need to snap. I’m just wondering where the Ahnenerbe buys party supplies.”
Victor stopped, curious, in spite of himself.
“A good question, right?” said Aubrion. “I wonder whether the Reich has a supplier in each country, or one large supplier in Germany that exports at a discounted rate.”
“Perhaps some combination of both. Or maybe they’ve signed a contract with—” Victor pulled off his spectacles. “Why do I let you drag me into these bloody stupid things?”
Aubrion laughed as Victor made his indignant way to the second row. Rather than following him, Aubrion took a seat near the back. It was a vibrant crowd: the air was humid with German, streaked through with Russian and some French. Pulling off his fedora, Aubrion propped his feet on the seat of the chair in front of him, prompting uncharitable comments from the surrounding patrons. He looked out of place anyway; there was no reason not to tempt fate.
The first item up for bid at the auction house was the auction house. As the auctioneer explained, the Ahnenerbe “desired some charitable contribution” from the “community’s upstanding members” as a “show of their devotion” to the Nazi cause. It was all a roundabout way of saying rent was high and the Ahnenerbe no longer felt like paying. To Victor’s surprise, and to the clear surprise of the auctioneer, an old woman eagerly bid on the red building.
“Danke, madam.” The auctioneer’s gavel connected smugly with its gold plate.
With the venue sold, the auctioneer proceeded to the next item up for bid. “Lot 002 is an antique—” he said, but Victor could speculate on the identity of Lot 002, for the auctioneer was interrupted by a shout. The professor turned around, clutching at the pistol tucked away in his tweed.
“Get your hands off me!” said the man—said Aubrion, for two men in Nazi uniforms were throwing Aubrion against the wall, dashing his forehead against the wood. Aubrion cried out as they snapped handcuffs around his wrists, the tears in his eyes visible even from the front of the room.
As the shouts grew louder and less coherent, Victor had to clench his teeth to keep from drawing his weapon. “Everyone remain calm,” said the auctioneer, which, of course, caused more patrons to rise from their seats in alarm. Though he was taller than most, Victor had to crane his neck to see over the blur of panic.
The professor’s fist closed around the handle of his pistol, still concealed in his coat. They had a plan, and this was not part of it, this was not meant to happen. For a second, Martin Victor, the first man to visit Auschwitz and return alive, contemplated rushing the Nazis. There was an alleyway behind the auction house with a gate, a sewer entrance most people wouldn’t notice. If he and Aubrion climbed into it and walked for a bit, they’d emerge eight blocks east of the place. No one would suspect the paunchy fellow in thick spectacles and tweed; he could take them out, put his bullets in the Nazis’ brains before they knew what they were about, kill them now among the artifacts and dreams they’d stolen and sold and lost.
Instead, Victor let his pistol go, feeling it sag against the fabric of his coat, as heavy and wretched as Aubrion’s screams. It was not worth compromising the mission. For Faux Soir to proceed—Victor found himself mouthing these words, reminding himself of his mission, as he always had—for Faux Soir to proceed, he had to get the distribution list. He and the others could go on without Aubrion, Victor knew; Aubrion had put in motion something that could not easily be stopped. And so, as the Nazis dragged Aubrion out of the auction house, he locked eyes with Victor, and Victor, ever a good Catholic, turned the other cheek.
The auctioneer struggled to restore order to the room. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “please, there is no cause for alarm!” As the ladies and gentlemen (who believed there was, in fact, cause for alarm) made for the doors, men in Nazi uniforms appeared at the exits. Though they seemed unarmed, their presence reversed the trajectory of anyone who tried to leave.
Gradually, the room quieted. “Thank you,” said the auctioneer. “We received word earlier that a member of an underground organization had infiltrated the auction.” Victor snorted. They never mentioned the Front de l’Indépendance by name for the same reason that the Front de l’Indépendance had started wearing those stupid uniforms with the insignia patches: it legitimized them to a dangerous degree. “But the man has since been removed. Come, come, ladies and gentlemen, let’s not allow a bit of rabble to disrupt our auction.”
That did the trick. Victor watched everyone return to their seats, more flushed and disheveled than they’d been before. He drifted over to his chair in the second row, lowering himself on shaky legs. Mopping at his forehead with a handkerchief, Victor removed a flask from his jacket’s inside pocket. He took a gulp to steady his nerves, aware he was conspicuously pale and sweating. Victor tried to remember a prayer; there must have been a prayer for such moments of weakness. But he could not summon one.
“Now,” said the auctioneer, “Lot 002 is a fine piece of Roman pottery—” the vase was Carthaginian, Victor noted “—from the eighth century before the modern era.” Victor shook his head; it was about six hundred years younger than that. “Do I hear twenty francs?”
“Twenty francs,” someone called out from the back of the room.
The vase was sold for seventy francs, and then the auction was off: a parade of gold and dust the likes of which rarely escaped the historian’s imagination. Clutching the bottom of his seat, Victor begged himself to focus, to listen to the auctioneer. The world separated itself from him, or so it felt, as though Victor were viewing things from behind a fogged glass. Despite his growing dissociation, Victor was horrified at the way these artifacts were being handled. Victor grew apoplectic as a couple, delighted with their purchase of the old Bible, began flipping through the pages as if it were a penny dreadful. Though he was raised a Catholic, fact-gathering was Victor’s religion. In his youth, he would write down anything that interested him—overheard conversations, trivia, odd facts—in his notebook, trapping them like a hunter in the forest. No wonder, he thought, this auction was sponsored by the institute for the occult sciences: it was as false and unholy as anything Victor had ever seen.
He felt his palms grow clammy, his tongue turn to lead in his mouth. “No,” he murmured, “be calm, be calm—” This was years before anyone had given post-traumatic stress disorder a name, before anyone recognized it or studied it. Furious at his own cowardice, Victor clutched his wrists—
The bow ties become tattoo-scars, the wristwatches become chains, and Martin Victor is standing on a hill overlooking Auschwitz, staring down into the worst humanity could do. It’s the smell of the place, the sharp pang of urine and the tinge of blood and unwashed bodies and antiseptic and oh Lord in Heaven, he is just an academic, just a man of paper and pens, why have they sent him here, him of all people, and why did he agree to go? Martin Victor shut his eyes—“feeble-minded bastard,” he whispered—willing himself back to the auction house.
“Lot 044,” said the auctioneer, “is a list of locations where the six most prominent newspapers in the country are sold.” Victor’s blood pounded in his ears. This was the purpose for which he’d come. My mission, my mission, he may have whispered. “This sale has been graciously authorized by our friends in the German High Command. Think of what our enemies could do with that sort of information! We should try our hardest to keep it out of their grasp, should
n’t we? Do I hear sixty francs?”
The room took a breath. Then an older man in the back called out: “Sixty francs!”
“Do I hear sixty-five?” The auctioneer brandished the list, a slim portfolio with ragged corners. It would have been easy enough to mistake it as a businessman’s files, or an old batch of letters, something to be shoved aside on a desk or tossed into a trash bin.
As a second bidder cried out, Victor stood, clutching the back of his chair. The place was furious with sound. Victor’s body had started to betray him, his heart thudding in his temples and his breath coming in short, childish gasps. He was there again, at the camps, and the smell and the din of the place took his mind from him. Murmuring an apology to the denizens of the second row, he peered over at the exits. They were no longer guarded. The professor contemplated returning to his seat, completing the mission he was assigned—but he could not. Victor staggered out the door and into the streets.
The Jester
Marc Aubrion had always liked the idea of being wounded in action. He just thought it would be a tad more romantic, was all.
“Christ, Theo, did you have to hit my head so hard?” Aubrion fingered the knot on his forehead. “Shit,” he hissed. “Mother of Christ, that stings.”
“The boy left to get ice,” said Mullier, with a halfhearted attempt to help Aubrion into a chair. The lightbulb Aubrion had tried to fix the other day, the one that still hangs on a string in the hollowed-out corpse of the FI headquarters, flickered.
“The Americans give out medals to their wounded. All I get is a bag of water.”
“You can’t nurse a wound with a medal.” René Noël came downstairs with a stack of newspapers, his waistcoat speckled with ink. He tossed them on a table, whistling at Aubrion’s wound. “Damn, Marc, who did you irritate this time?”
Aubrion’s pulse pounded in his forehead. “Theo Mullier, apparently.”
“I was pretending to be a Nazi,” said Mullier. “At the auction.”
“And you accuse Spiegelman of pretending too well?” said Aubrion.
“I assume it worked,” said Noël.
“As far as we can tell.” Aubrion put his feet up on a table, knocking over an empty inkwell. “The auction seemed to be going swimmingly after Mullier hauled me out of there. No one had any reason to suspect Victor.”
“Good. I suppose we’ll find out soon enough whether Victor won the list. Does the Ahnenerbe run background checks on people who win auction items?”
“They do, but Victor’s background is airtight. As far as they know, he’s a mediocre professor who did some fieldwork in Germany and Italy. Which, now that I think about it, is not far from the truth.”
“When is Tarcovich having the books delivered?”
“You mean the pornography for der kinder Nazis or whatever we’re calling it? Tonight.” Aubrion tipped his chair back. “Do we award medals to the wounded?”
“How the devil should I know?” said Noël.
“Unlike me, you’re in charge of something.”
The Pyromaniac
It was then I ran into the basement with a bag of ice, my heart still thudding from my dash to the icehouse and back. I started to hand the bag to Marc Aubrion, holding it reverently, in both hands—but recoiled at the sight of his face. It was not his purple forehead that arrested me, or the blood-colored ring around his left eye; rather, it was the pain and exhaustion in Aubrion’s eyes that shook me to my bones. I had been hurt, and I had been tired, but not Marc Aubrion. He was not allowed.
“Good Lord, Gamin,” Aubrion said, laughing, “am I that close to the grave?”
“No, monsieur.”
“You’re a bad liar. It’s a quality you’ll have to shed if you want to stay in this business.”
Saying nothing, I stared down at the holes in my shoes. I was crying because I was sad, and then because I was ashamed. Without looking at him, I handed Aubrion the ice.
Sighing, he held it up to his head. “You were right, René. Medals be damned.”
“Is there anything else I can do for you, monsieur?” I asked.
“Not for now, Gamin.”
“All right, monsieur.”
“Buck up! Want to hear a joke? Eight men walk into a war...”
Aubrion’s eyes shone. I felt the laughter take hold of me and shake the sadness free from my chest. For an instant, just the one, I could see the world as Marc Aubrion did. I could count the constellations in the ink dots on Noël’s waistcoat.
The Dybbuk
Wolff followed Martin Victor from the auction house and through the streets. Though Victor had made eye contact with him shortly before leaving, Wolff had no reason to believe the professor had recognized him; Victor’s audible gasps and sweating pallor seemed to indicate he was experiencing an episode of his illness, and the professor’s eyes did not see the world as it was. Still, Wolff remained cautious. He stayed fifty meters from Victor whenever possible, guided by the heavy plod of the man’s footsteps—which turned into splashes as it began to rain.
Though the Gruppenführer never would’ve admitted it aloud, nothing made sense. Why would Aubrion and Victor go through the trouble of slipping past the Gestapo to enter the auction, only for Victor to leave before buying anything? How had they gotten past the guards in the first place? Was there any logic to the timing of Victor’s departure? And why would they stage Aubrion’s arrest—a brilliant ruse, Wolff had to concede—if they weren’t about to do something devious? The clear answer was that they had done something illegal, something so subtle it had snuck under Wolff’s attention.
Wolff’s boot slipped in a puddle. “Damn,” he muttered, catching himself before he toppled. A vagrant on a curb snickered, then sneezed. The rain had brought out the worst in Enghien: the stench of disease, the refugee families huddled around their fires. These things were evidence of the Nazi Party’s necessity, Wolff thought. The Nazis existed to cleanse the earth. The Gruppenführer hurried after Victor, his boots crusted in mud.
Wolff watched Victor pause at the entrance of the Front de l’Indépendance headquarters to give the password. Despite the FI’s precautions, the Nazis had known the location of their base for nearly a year. The FI was smart to have hidden it in plain sight, another slender building among the toy shops and markets, that old meatpacking factory that had looked abandoned for years, but people always slipped; there were always mistakes. Though Manning had suggested razing the building, Wolff knew the FI would simply make another home elsewhere, that it was better to keep an eye on them until necessity demanded a confrontation. Now was such a time. August Wolff raised his arm.
“Move in,” he said.
The Gruppenführer watched his men materialize from the fog. A group of them surrounded the squat brick building, kicking in the doors at the front and back.
“Against the walls! Against the walls!” the soldiers said, the last words so many people heard. They hurled the men and women of the FI against the stone walls, until the rooms were blanketed in screams.
The Pyromaniac
Aubrion managed to say “Wolff?” before a black-uniformed German grabbed him by the shoulders. Poor Aubrion was slammed into the wall for the second time that day, and his only consolation was that this time, Theo Mullier came with him. My head was pressed against a wall, so I could not see the fury written on Aubrion’s face. But I heard it when he shouted: “What the hell are you doing?”
“Checking on my operation,” said Wolff, approaching Marc Aubrion. He waved to a group of his men. “Search the basement. Round up anything suspicious. Send a battalion—”
“Jesus Christ.”
At this voice, we all turned—me, Wolff, Aubrion and Victor and Mullier and Noël, the soldiers and their guns—to see Lada Tarcovich standing in the entrance. She was accompanied by a dozen women in painted faces and short skirts. Each woman held a
wooden crate.
The Gruppenführer looked at Aubrion. “I gave you a chance,” he said, genuinely distraught, “to enter into a business partnership. You have taken advantage of my kindness.”
Wolff gestured at his soldiers. They surrounded Tarcovich and the prostitutes, ordering them to drop the boxes. As his soldiers pushed Tarcovich and her girls to the floor, Wolff pried open a box, the one Lada Tarcovich had been carrying.
“Books?” he said. “Tear them open.”
Wolff’s men ripped into the crates. I almost wept at how gleeful they looked. They gutted the boxes as if they were butchering pigs, spilling their contents across the floor. The Gruppenführer surveyed the carnage, his brow furrowing.
“The Wet Ones,” he muttered, “She Romances the Reich, A Big, Bad Love Story...” Reddening, Wolff turned on Aubrion. “What the devil is this?”
Laughing, Tarcovich glanced up at him from the floor, where she’d laced her hands obligingly over her head. The floor muffled her voice. “If you don’t know, Gruppenführer, it’s no wonder you’re so disagreeable.”
YESTERDAY
The Scrivener
“SO,” SAID ELIZA, leaning across the table, “you were caught.”
Helene’s lips twitched. “This surprises you?”
“I just didn’t know.” Eliza clasped her hands together, enraptured, breathing like she’d nearly drowned, like she was grateful for each breath of air that did not taste of water. When Aubrion used to tell his stories, Helene would look on that way, Gamin would sit marveling at each improbable twist.
“Of course we were caught.” The old woman laughed, her eyes dancing. She reached across the table as though grasping for someone’s hand. Using her walking stick to brace herself, Helene put her feet on the table. Her worn-out shoes had laugh lines on them, where the leather had met the streets one too many times. “Wolff was not stupid, was he? We were bound to be caught sooner or later. I’m surprised Aubrion didn’t anticipate it, though Noël probably did.”
The Ventriloquists Page 15
