by Philip Kerr
“General Heydrich has ordered us to provide you with all available assistance in visiting the refugee camps at Le Vernet and Gurs,” he said. “And in facilitating the arrest of a wanted communist murderer. But you will appreciate that these camps are still under the control of the French police.”
“I was led to believe that they would cooperate with our extradition request,” I said.
“That’s true,” said Knochen. “Even so, under the terms of the armistice signed on June 22 those refugee camps are in the non-occupied zone. That means we have to pay lip service to the idea that in that part of France, at least, they remain in charge of their own affairs. It’s a way of avoiding hostility and resistance.”
“In other words,” said Major Bömelburg, “we get the French to do our dirty work.”
“What else are they good for?” said Hagen.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “The food at Lapérouse is quite spectacular.”
“Good point, Captain,” said Bömelburg.
“We shall have to involve the Préfecture de Police in your mission,” said Knochen. “So that the French might persuade themselves that they are preserving French institutions and the French way of life. But I tell you, gentlemen, that the loyalty of the French police is indispensable to us. Hagen? Who’s the Franzi that the maison has put up as liaison?” He looked my way. “The maison is what we call the flics in the rue de Lutèce. The Préfecture de Police. You should see the building, Captain Gunther. It’s as big as the Reichstag.”
“The Marquis de Brinon, sir,” said Hagen.
“Oh yes. You know, for a republic, the French are awfully impressed by aristocratic titles. They’re almost as bad as the Austrians in that respect. Hagen, see if the Marquis can suggest anyone to help the captain.”
Hagen looked awkward. “Actually, sir, we’re not entirely certain that the Marquis isn’t married to a Jew.”
Knochen frowned. “Do we have to worry about that sort of thing now? We’ve only just got here.” He shook his head. “Besides, it’s not his wife who’s the liaison officer, is it?”
Hagen shook his head.
“All in good time we shall see who is a Jew and who isn’t a Jew, but right now it seems to me the priority is the apprehension of a communist fugitive from German justice. A murderer. Isn’t that right, Captain Gunther?”
“That’s right, sir. He murdered two policemen.”
“As it happens,” said Knochen, “this department is already in the process of drawing up a list of wanted war criminals to present to the French. And in the establishment of a special joint commission—the Kuhnt Commission—to oversee these matters in the unoccupied zone. A German officer, Captain Geissler, has already gone down to Vichy to begin the work of this commission. And, in particular, to hunt for Herschel Grynszpan. You will perhaps recall that it was Grynszpan, a German-Polish Jew, who murdered Ernst vom Rath here, in Paris, in November 1938, and whose actions provoked such a strong outpouring of feeling in Germany.”
“I remember it very well, sir,” I said. “I live on Fasanenstrasse. Just off the Ku-damm. The synagogue at the end of my street was burned down during that strong outpouring of feeling you were talking about, Herr Colonel.”
“A representative of the German Foreign Ministry, Herr Dr. Grimm, is also on Grynszpan’s trail,” said Knochen. “It seems that the little Jew was here in Paris, in the Fresnes Prison, until early June, when the French decided to evacuate all of the prisoners to Orléans. From there he was sent to prison in Bourges. However, he didn’t arrive there. The convoy of buses transporting the prisoners was attacked by German aircraft, and after that the picture is rather confused.”
“As a matter of fact, sir,” said Bömelburg, “we rather think that Grynszpan might have gone to Toulouse.”
“If that’s the case, then what’s Geissler doing in Vichy?”
“Setting up this Kuhnt Commission,” said Bömelburg. “To be fair to Geissler, for a while there was also a rumor that Grynszpan was in Vichy, too. But Toulouse now looks like a better bet.”
“Bömelburg? Karl. Correct me if I’m wrong,” said Knochen. “But I seem to recall that this French concentration camp at Le Vernet—where Captain Gunther’s quarry may be imprisoned—is in the Ariège département, in the mid-Pyrenees. That’s near Toulouse, is it not?”
“Quite near, sir,” agreed Bömelburg. “Toulouse is in the neighboring department of Haute-Garonne and about sixty kilometers north of Le Vernet.”
“Then it strikes me,” said Knochen, “that you and Captain Gunther should both get yourselves to Toulouse as quickly as possible. Perhaps the day after tomorrow. Bömelburg? You can remain in Toulouse and look for Grynszpan while Gunther here travels further south, to Le Vernet. Have the Marquis find someone to go with Gunther and Kestner to smooth over any ruffled French feathers. Meanwhile, I shall send a telegram to Philippe le Gaga in Vichy and inform him of what is happening. I daresay that by the time you get down there we will have a clearer idea of who to arrest and who to leave where they are.”
“Any trains running down that way yet, sir?” This was Kestner.
“I’m afraid not.”
“Pity. That’s rather a long drive. About six hundred kilo meters. You know, it might be an idea to take a leaf out of the Führer’s book and fly down there from Le Bourget. In a couple of hours we could be in Biarritz, where a motorized detachment from the SS-VT or secret GFP could take us on to Le Vernet and Toulouse.”
“Agreed.” Knochen looked at Hagen. “See to it. And find out if there are there any motorized detachments of SS operating that far south.”
“Yes, sir, there are,” said Hagen. “In which case the only question that remains is whether these men should be wearing uniforms when they cross the demarcation line into the French zone.”
“An officer’s uniform might lend us more authority, sir,” argued Kestner.
“Gunther? What do you think?” asked Knochen.
“I agree with Captain Kestner. In a surrender situation, it’s as well to be reminded that the surrender began with a war. After 1918, I think the French would do well to learn a little humility. If they’d treated us better at Versailles, then we might not be here at all. So I don’t see any sense in trying to sugarcoat the pill they have to swallow. There’s no getting away from the fact that they just got their arses kicked. The sooner they recognize it, the sooner we can all go home. But I came here to arrest a man who murdered two policemen. And I don’t much care if some Franzi doesn’t care for my manners while I’m doing it. Since I put on a uniform I don’t much care for them myself. I can take the uniform off again and pretend to be something I’m not in order to get the job done, but I can’t pretend to be diplomatic and charming. I never was one for French kissing. So to hell with their feelings, I say.”
“Bravo, Captain Gunther,” said Knochen. “That was a fine speech.”
Maybe it was and maybe I even believed some of it, too. One thing I said was certainly true: The sooner I went home, the better I was going to feel about a lot of things, especially myself. Mixing with anti-Semites like Herbert Hagen reminded me just why I’d never become a Nazi. And French victory or no French victory, I wouldn’t ever be able to overcome my instinctive loathing of Adolf Hitler.
That afternoon I went to see Les Invalides. It was a very Nazi-looking monument. The front door had more gold than the Valley of the Kings, but the atmosphere was that of a public swimming bath. The mausoleum itself was a piece of mahogany-colored marble that resembled an enormous tea caddy. Hitler had visited Les Invalides just a couple of weeks before. And I can’t have been the only person who wished that it had been he and not the Emperor Napoleon who was inside the six coffins that were contained in that overblown mausoleum. After his escape from Elba, I suppose they were worried the little monster might escape from his grave, like Dracula. Maybe they’d even put a stake through his heart just to be on the safe side. Burying Hitler in pieces looked like a better bet. With
the Eiffel Tower through his heart.
Like every other German in Paris that summer, I’d brought a camera with me. So I walked around and took some photographs. In the Parc du Champ de Mars, I photographed some German soldiers getting directions from a gendarme. When he saw me the gendarme saluted smartly, as if a German officer’s uniform really did command authority. But the way I saw it, the French police had an attitude problem. They didn’t seem to mind the fact that they’d been defeated. Back in Germany, I’d seen cops look less happy when they failed to get elected to the Prussian Police Officers’ Association.
I enjoyed another solitary dinner in a quiet restaurant on the rue de Varennes before returning to the Lutetia. The hotel was a mixture of Art Nouveau and Art Deco, but the swastika flag that appeared on the sinuous, broken-art pediment below the Lutetia’s name was the clearest indication of the neobrutalism that afflicted its guests, me included.
The bar was busy and surprisingly inviting. A Welte-Mignon pianola was playing a selection of maudlin German tunes. I ordered a cognac and smoked a French cigarette and avoided the eye of the reptilian lieutenant who’d been on the train from Berlin. When he looked like he was headed my way, I finished my brandy and left. I rode the elevator up to the seventh floor and walked along the curving corridor to my room. A maid came out of another room and smiled. To my surprise, she spoke good German.
“Would you like me to turn down your bed linen for the night, sir?”
“Thanks,” I said and, opening my door, complimented her German.
“I’m Swiss. I grew up speaking French and German and Italian. My father runs a hotel in Bern. I came to Paris to get some experience.”
“Then we have something in common,” I told her. “Before the war I worked at the Hotel Adlon, in Berlin.”
She was impressed with that, which was of course my intention, as she was not without her charms. A little homely perhaps. But I was in the mood to think well of home and homely-looking girls. And when she finished her duties, I gave her some German money and the rest of my cigarettes for no other reason than I wanted her to think better of me than I thought of myself. Especially the man I saw in the mirror on the front of the wardrobe. In some pathetic little fantasy I imagined her coming back in the small hours, knocking on my door, and climbing into my bed. As things worked out, this wasn’t so far from the mark. But that was later on, and when she left I wished I hadn’t given her my last cigarettes.
“Well, at least you won’t fall asleep with a cigarette in your hand and set the bed on fire, Gunther,” I said, with one eye on the brass fire extinguisher that stood in the corner of the room next to the door. I closed the window, undressed, and went to bed. For a while I lay there feeling a little drunk, staring up at the blank ceiling and wondering if I should have gone to the Maison Chabanais after all. And perhaps I might even have got up and gone there if it hadn’t been for the thought of putting on my riding boots again. Sometimes morality is just a corollary of laziness. Besides, it felt good to be back in the world of grand-hotel luxury. The bed was a good one. Sleep quickly came my way and put an end to all thoughts of what I might have been missing at the Maison Chabanais. A deep sleep that became unnaturally deeper as the night progressed and almost put an end to all thoughts of Maison Chabanais and Paris and my mission. The kind of sleep that almost put an end to me.
17
FRANCE, 1940
I told myself I must have dreamed the whole thing. I was back in the dugout. Had to be, or else why could I smell wintergreen ointment? We used it as a winter warmer for weathered or chapped hands in the colder months, and in the trenches, that was nearly all of them. Wintergreen was also an excellent chest rub for when you had a fever or a cough or a sore throat, which, because of the lice, overcrowding, and damp, was much of the time. Sometimes we even fingered a bit of the stuff inside our nostrils, just to keep the smell of death and decay at bay.
I had a sore throat. And I had a cough. The cold was on my chest and so was something else, only it wasn’t wintergreen. It was a nurse and she was on top of me, and I was lifting her skirt so that she could mount me properly. Only, she wasn’t a nurse at all but a hotel maid, a nice homely girl from Bern, and she’d come to keep me company after all. I reached for her breasts and she slapped me hard, twice, hard enough to make me catch my breath and then cough some more. Twisting away from underneath her, I retched onto the floor. She jumped off the bed and, coughing herself, went to the window and threw it open and hung her head outside for a moment before she came back to me, hauled me off the bed, and tried to drag me toward the door.
I was still coughing and retching when two men in white jackets came and carried me away on a stretcher. Outside the hotel, on the boulevard Raspail, I started to feel a little better as I managed to haul some of the fresh morning air into my lungs.
They took me to the Lariboisière Hospital on rue Ambroise-Paré. There they put a drip in my arm and a German army doctor told me I’d been gassed.
“Gassed?” I said wheezily. “With what?”
“Carbon tetrachloride,” said the doctor. “It seems that the fire extinguisher in your room was faulty. But for the maid who detected the smell outside your room door, you’d probably be dead. The CTC converts to phosgene when it’s exposed to air, which is how it puts the fire out. It suffocates it. You, too, very nearly. You’re a lucky man, Captain Gunther. All the same, we’d like to keep you here for a while, to keep an eye on your liver and kidney functions.”
I started coughing again. My head felt like the Eiffel Tower had collapsed on top of it. My throat felt like I’d tried to swallow it. But at least I was alive. I’d seen plenty of men gassed in France, and this wasn’t anything like that. At least I wasn’t bringing anything up. You’ve got to see a man retching two liters of yellow liquid every hour, drowning in his own mucus, to know how appalling it is to die from a gas attack. It was said that Hitler had been gassed and was temporarily blinded, and if that was so, it explained a lot. Whenever I saw him on a newsreel yelling his head off, gesticulating wildly, beating his breast, choking with his hatred of the Jews or the French or the Bolsheviks, he always reminded me of someone who had just been gassed.
In the early evening I started to feel better. Well enough to receive a visitor. It was Paul Kestner.
“They said you had an accident with a fire extinguisher. What did you do? Drink it?”
“It wasn’t that type of a fire extinguisher.”
“I thought there was only the one kind. The kind that puts out a fire.”
“This one was the type that smothers a fire with chemicals. Takes away all the oxygen. That’s kind of what happened to me.”
“Someone catch you smoking in bed?”
“I’ve spent most of the day wondering that myself. And not liking any of the answers.”
“Such as what, for instance?”
“I used to work in a hotel. The Adlon, in Berlin. And I learned a lot about what they do and what they don’t do in hotels. And one of the things they don’t do is to put fire extinguishers in the bedrooms. One reason is in case a guest gets drunk and decides to hose down the curtains. The other reason is that a lot of extinguishers are more dangerous than the fires they’re meant to deal with. It’s a funny thing, but when I arrived at the Lutetia I don’t recall there being an extinguisher in my room. But there was one there last night. If I hadn’t been drunk myself, I might have paid more attention to it.”
“Are you suggesting someone tampered with it?”
“It seems so obvious to me that I wonder why you should sound surprised.”
“Surprised? Yes, of course I’m surprised, Bernie. You’re implying that someone tried to murder you in a hotel full of policemen.”
“Tampering with a fire extinguisher is just the sort of thing a cop would know about. Besides, none of us at the Lutetia has a room key.”
“That’s because we’re all on the same side. You can’t mean a German tried to kill you.”
&n
bsp; “I do mean.”
“But why not a Frenchman? We did just fight a war with these people, after all. Surely if it was anyone—and I’m not convinced it was anything but an accident—it would be one of them. A porter, perhaps. Or a patriotic waiter.”
“And among all of the bastards he could have killed, he just chose me at random, is that it?” I shook my head, which seemed to provoke another violent fit of coughing.
Kestner poured a glass of water and handed it to me.
I drank it and caught my breath.
“Thanks. Besides. The kind of staff a grand hotel employs? It goes against everything they believe in to kill a guest. Even a guest they might despise.”
Kestner went to the window and looked out. We were in a fourth-floor room in the high mansard roof of the hospital. You could see and sometimes hear the Gare du Nord just a few blocks away.
“But why would any German officer want to kill you? They would have to have a damn good motive.”
For a moment I considered suggesting one: Anyone who had already denounced me to the Gestapo as a mischling would, I thought, have reason enough to kill me. Instead, I said:
“I wasn’t always held in such good odor by our political masters. You remember what it was like in Kripo before 1933? Well, of course you do. You’re about the one person in Paris I can talk to about this, Paul. Who I can trust.”
“I’m relieved to hear it, Bernie. But just for the record, I spent most of last night at the One Twenty-two. The brothel.”
“You forget,” I said. “Everyone has to sign in and out of the hotel. I could easily check if you were in the hotel last night.”
“Yes, you’re right. I did forget that. You always were a better detective than I was.” He came away from the window and sat on the edge of my bed.
“You’re alive, that’s the main thing. And you needn’t worry about Mielke. I’m sure we’ll find him. You can tell Heydrich that if he’s in one of those French concentration camps, we’ll find him as sure as there’s an Amen in a church service. You can go back to Berlin confident in the knowledge that when we fly down there tomorrow, we’ll take proper care of it.”
