by Philip Kerr
“The bastards hate us French even more than they hate you Germans,” he said. “They don’t speak much French. They don’t speak much Spanish. I’m not even sure they speak Basque.”
Several times we overtook a family car heaped with luggage heading east along the main road to Toulouse.
“Why are they fleeing?” I asked Oltramare. “Don’t they know about the armistice?”
Oltramare shrugged, but as we overtook the next car he leaned out of the bucket and asked the occupants where they were going; and when these answered he nodded politely and crossed himself.
“They’re from Biarritz,” he said. “They’re going to Lourdes. To pray for France.” He smiled. “For a miracle, perhaps.”
“Don’t you believe in miracles?”
“Oh yes. That is why I believe in Adolf Hitler. He’s the one man who can save Europe from the curse of Bolshevism. That is what I believe.”
“I suppose that’s why he signed a deal with Stalin,” I said. “To save us all from Bolshevism.”
“But of course,” said Oltramare, as if such a thing was obvious. “Don’t you remember what happened in August 1914? Germany gambled on defeating France before Russia could mobilize and declare war. Which didn’t happen. It’s the same situation now, only the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact meant that attacking France was much less of a gamble than it was before. And you mark my words, Captain. Now that France is defeated, the Soviet Union, the true enemy of Western democracy, will be next.”
In the little town of Naverrenx we saw some German tanks and a couple of truckloads of SS and stopped to say hello and share cigarettes. Oltramare went to a shop to buy some matches and found there were none to be had. There was nothing to be had of anything—no food, no vegetables, no wine, and no cigarettes. He returned to the bucket, cursing the locals.
“You can bet these bastards are hiding what they’ve got and waiting for the prices to go up so that they can gouge us,” he said.
“Wouldn’t you do the same?” I said.
While he and I were talking, many women came out of the local town hall, and it turned out that nearly all of them were German internees from the nearby camp at Gurs, where they’d been taken from locations all over France. They were pretty bitter about the conditions there, but also because they’d been ordered to leave the area or face internment again as enemy aliens. And this was why the SS had stayed on in Naverrenx—to prevent this from happening. A truckload of SS and one of the women agreed to guide us to the camp at Gurs—which we were assured was not easily found—so that we might conduct our search for wanted persons. Meanwhile, the French lawyer Monsieur Savigny began to argue with Commissioner Matignon and Major Bömelburg about the presence of these SS troops in the French zone.
“In my opinion,” Oltramare told Bömelburg afterward, “you should shoot that man. Yes, I think that would be best. Frankly, I am surprised you have not shot more. Myself, I would have shot a great many people. Especially the people who were in charge of this country. To punish them would have been a mercy. To let them go was barbarous and cruel. Frankly, I don’t know why you bother to take prisoners back to Germany when you could just shoot them here by the roadside and save yourselves a lot of time and effort.”
I frowned and shook my head at this display of pragmatic fascism. “Why are you here, Chief Commissioner?”
“I’m looking for someone, too,” he said with a shrug. “A fugitive. Just like you, Captain. During the Spanish Civil War I fought on the Nationalist side. And I have a few scores to settle with some Republicans.”
“You mean it’s personal.”
“When it involves the Spanish Civil War it’s always personal, monsieur. Many atrocities were committed. My own brother was murdered by a communist. He was a priest. They burned him alive inside his own church, in Catalonia. The man in charge was a Frenchman. A communist from Le Havre.”
“And if you find him? What then?”
Oltramare smiled. “I will arrest him, Captain Gunther.”
I wasn’t so sure about that. In fact, I wasn’t sure about anything as we left Naverrenx and headed south to Gurs. The SS troops in the truck now leading the way were singing “Sieg Heil Viktoria.” I was starting to have misgivings about everything.
My driver and the corporal in the bucket’s front passenger seat were more interested in the woman seated beside Oltramare and me than in singing. Her name was Eva Kemmerich, and she was extremely thin, which seemed to make her mouth too wide and her ears too big. Under her eyes were shadows like bat wings, and she wore a pink handkerchief around her head to keep her hair tidy. It looked like the rubber on top of a pencil. In Gurs, she and the other women had suffered a tough time at the hands of the French.
“Conditions were barbaric,” she explained. “They treated us like dogs. Worse than dogs. People talk about German anti-Semitism. Well, it’s my considered opinion that the French just hate everyone who isn’t French. Germans, Jews, Spanish, Poles, Italians—they were all treated equally badly. Gurs is a concentration camp, that’s what it is, and the guards are absolute bastards. They worked us like slaves. Just look at my hands. My nails. They’re ruined.”
She looked at Oltramare with ill-concealed contempt. “Go on,” she told him. “Look at them.”
“I am looking at them, mademoiselle.”
“Well? What’s the idea of treating human beings like that? You’re French. What’s the big idea, Franzi?”
“I have no explanation, mademoiselle. And I have no excuse. All I can say is that before the war there were almost four million refugees living in France from countries all over Europe. That’s ten percent of our population. What were we to do with so many people, mademoiselle?”
“Actually, it’s madame,” she said. “I had a wedding ring, but it was stolen by one of your French guards. Not that it ever stayed on my finger, after the diet I’ve endured. My husband is in another camp. Le Vernet. I hope things are better there. My God, it could hardly be any worse. You know something? I’m sorry the war is over. I just wish our boys could have killed a lot more Frenchmen before they were obliged to throw in the towel.” She leaned forward and tapped the corporal and the driver on their shoulders. “Christ, I’m proud of you, boys. You really gave the Franzis a well-deserved kicking. But if you want to put the cherry on my cake, you’ll arrest the criminal who’s in charge of the camp at Gurs and shoot him down like the pig he is. Here, I tell you what. I’ll sleep with whichever one of you puts a bullet in that bastard’s head.”
The corporal looked at the driver and grinned. I could tell that the idea was not without appeal for him, so I said:
“And I will shoot whoever takes this lady up on her generous offer.” I took her bony hand in mine. “Please don’t do that again, Frau Kemmerich. I appreciate that you’ve had a rough time of it, but I can’t allow you to make things worse.”
“Worse?” she sneered. “There isn’t anything that’s worse than Gurs.”
The camp, situated in the foothills of the Pyrenees, was much larger than I had supposed, covering an area of about a square kilometer and split into two halves. A makeshift street ran the length of the camp, and on each side there were three or four hundred wooden huts. There seemed to be no sanitation or running water, and the smell was indescribable. I had been to Dachau. The only differences between Gurs and Dachau were that the barbed-wire fence at Gurs was smaller and not obviously electrified, and there were no executions; otherwise, conditions seemed to be much the same, and it was only after a parade was called in the men’s half of the camp and we went in among the prisoners that it was possible to see how things were actually much worse than at Dachau.
The guards were all French gendarmes, each of whom carried a thick leather riding whip, although none of them seemed to own a horse. There were three “islets”: A, B, and C. The islet C adjutant was a Gabin type with an effeminate mouth and narrow, expressionless eyes. He knew exactly where the German communists were held and, without offering
any resistance to our requests, he took us to a dilapidated barrack containing fifty men who, paraded before us outside, exhibited signs of emaciation or illness or, more often, both. It was clear that they had been expecting us, or something like us, and, refusing to submit to a roll call, they started to sing “The Internationale.” Meanwhile, the French adjutant glanced over Bömelburg’s list and helpfully picked out some of our wanted men. Erich Mielke wasn’t one of these.
While this selection was proceeding, I could hear Eva Kemmerich. She was standing in our bucket, which was parked on “the street,” and shouting abuse at some of the prisoners who were still held in the camp. These and a few of the gendarmes on the women’s side of the wire responded by laughing at her and making obscene remarks and gestures. For me, the sense of being involved in some nameless insanity was compounded when the inmates of another hut—the adjutant said they were French anarchists—began to sing “La Marseillaise” in competition with those who were singing “The Internationale.”
We marched seven men out of the camp and into the buckets. All of them raised clenched fists in the communist salute and shouted slogans in German or Spanish to their fellow prisoners.
Kestner caught my eye. “Did you ever see anything like this place?”
“Only Dachau.”
“Well, I never saw anything like it. To treat people this way, even if they are communists, seems disgusting.”
“Don’t tell me.” I pointed at Chief Inspector Oltramare, who was marching a handcuffed prisoner toward the buckets at gun-point. “Tell him.”
“Looks like he got his man anyway.”
“I wonder if I’ll get mine,” I said. “Mielke.”
“Not here?”
I shook my head. “I mean, this fellow I’m after almost ruined my career, the Bolshie bastard. As far as I’m concerned, he’s really got it coming.”
“I’m sure he has. They all have. Communist swine.”
“But you were a communist, weren’t you, Paul? Before you joined the Nazi Party?”
“Me? No. Whatever gave you that idea?”
“Only, I seem to recall you campaigning for Ernst Thalmann in—when was that? Nineteen twenty-five?”
“Don’t be fucking ridiculous, Bernie. Is this a joke?” He glanced nervously in Bömelburg’s direction. “I think that phosgene gas has addled your brains. Really. Have you gone mad?”
“No. And actually, it’s my impression that I’m probably the only sane one here.”
As the day wore on, this was an impression that did not alter. Indeed, there was even greater madness to come.
20
FRANCE, 1940
It was late afternoon when our convoy took to the road again. We were headed to Toulouse, about one hundred fifty kilometers to the northeast, and thought that we could probably make it before dark. We took Eva Kemmerich with us so that she might look for her husband when we visited the camp at Le Vernet the following day. And, of course, our eight prisoners. I hadn’t really looked at them. They were a miserable, malnourished, smelly lot and little or no threat to anyone, let alone the Third Reich. According to Karl Bömelburg, one of them was a German writer and another was a well-known newspaperman, only I hadn’t heard of either of them.
Outside Lourdes, in sight of the River Gave de Pau, we stopped in a forest clearing to stretch our legs. I was pleased to see Bömelburg extend the same facility to our prisoners. He even handed out some cigarettes. I was feeling tired but better. At least my chest was no longer hurting. But I still wasn’t smoking. I had another bite off Bömelburg’s flask and decided that maybe he wasn’t such a bad fellow after all.
“This whole area is full of caves and grottoes,” he said, and pointed at an outcrop of rock that hung above our heads like a thick gray cloud.
We caught a glimpse of Frau Kemmerich disappearing into the rock. After a minute or two Bömelburg said, “Perhaps you would be good enough to go and inform Frau Bernadette that we shall be leaving in five minutes.”
Instinctively, I glanced at my watch. “Yes, Herr Major.”
I walked up the slope to fetch her, calling her name out loud in case she was answering a call of nature.
“Yes?”
I found her sitting on a rock in a leaf-lined grotto, smoking a cigarette.
“Isn’t it lovely here?” she said, pointing over my head.
I turned to admire the view of the Pyrenees that she was enjoying.
“Yes, it is.”
“Sorry if I was a bitch back there,” she said. “You’ve no idea how bad the last nine months have been. My husband and I were in Dijon when war was declared. He’s a wine merchant. They arrested us almost immediately.”
“Forget it,” I said. “What happened back there…You were justifiably upset. And the camp did look bloody awful.” I nodded down the slope. “Come on. We’d better go back. There’s still a long way to go before we get to Toulouse.”
She stood up. “How long will it take to get there?”
I was about to answer her when I heard two or three loud bursts of machine-gun fire, none of them longer than a couple of seconds; but then, it takes only five seconds to empty an MP 40’s thirty-two-round magazine. The sound and smell of it were still hanging in the air by the time I had sprinted down the slope into the clearing. Two storm troopers were standing a couple of meters apart, their jackboots surrounded with spent ammunition that looked like so many coins tossed to a couple of buskers. As well-trained soldiers, they were already changing the toylike magazines on their machine pistols and looking just a little surprised at their murderous efficiency. That’s the thing about a gun: It always looks like a toy until it starts killing people.
A little farther away lay the bodies of the eight prisoners we had brought from Gurs.
“What the hell happened here?” I shouted, but I knew the answer already.
“They tried to make a run for it,” said Bömelburg.
I went forward to inspect the bodies.
“All of them?” I said. “In a straight line?”
One of the shot men groaned. He lay on the forest floor, his knees collapsed under him, his torso lying back on his feet in an almost impossible position, like some old Indian fakir. But there was nothing to be done for him. His head and chest were covered in blood.
Angrily, I walked toward Bömelburg. “They would have run away in several directions,” I said. “Not all of them down the same slope.”
A pistol shot bored another hole through the still air of the forest and the groaning man’s head. I turned on my boot heel to see Kestner holstering his Walther P38. Seeing my expression, Kestner shrugged and said:
“Best to finish him, I think.”
“Back at the Alex, we’d have called that murder,” I said.
“Well, we’re not back at the Alex, are we, Captain?” said Bömelburg. “Look here, Gunther, are you calling me a liar? Those men were shot while trying to escape, do you hear?”
There was a lot I could have said, but the only thing that was true was the fact that I had no business being there. It wasn’t just the bodies of fallen heroes that the Valkyries carried up to Valhalla but also those of Berlin chief inspectors who criticized their senior officers in remote French forests. After I remembered that, there seemed little point in saying anything; but there was still plenty I could do.
For his face and my neck I even offered an apology to Bömelburg when the toe of my boot would have seemed more appropriate. In my own defense, I should also add that the two MP 40 machine pistols were now reloaded and ready for lethal business.
We left the bodies where they lay and took our places in the buckets, only this time it was Kestner and not Oltramare who sat with me and Frau Kemmerich. Kestner could see I was upset about what had happened, and after my earlier remarks about his membership in the KPD he was in the mood to press home what he now perceived to be some kind of advantage over me.
“What’s the matter? Can’t bear the sight of blood? And I tho
ught you were a tough guy, Gunther.”
“Let me tell you something, Paul. Although it’s none of your business. I’ve killed people before. In the war. After that I thought the whole world had learned a lesson, but it hasn’t. If I have to kill someone again, I’m going to make sure I make a good start by killing someone I want to kill. Someone who needs killing. So keep chirruping in my ear and see what happens, comrade. You’re not the only man in this bucket who can put a bullet in the back of another man’s head.”
He was quiet after that.
The evening turned to dusk. I kept my eyes on the trees above the road, and if I stayed silent it was because the noise inside my head was indescribable. I suppose it was the echo of those machine pistols. I would hardly have been surprised to find the ghosts of the men we had slain sitting in the buckets beside us. Silent and motionless, withdrawn into my own ego, I waited for the nightmare that was our journey to end.
Toulouse was called the Rose City. Almost all the buildings in the center of town, including our hotel, Le Grand Balcon, were pink, as if we had been looking through the chief inspector’s rose-colored spectacles. I decided to adopt this as a persona to help me achieve what I now needed to achieve. And my breathing was easier now, which also helped. So the following morning at breakfast, I greeted Major Bömelburg and the two French policemen warmly. I was even courteous to Paul Kestner.
“My apologies for yesterday,” I said generally. “But before I left Paris, the doctor at the hospital gave me something to help me carry out my duties. And he warned me that after it wore off I might behave in a peculiar way. Perhaps I shouldn’t have come at all, but as you can probably imagine, I was rather anxious to carry out the mission given to me by General Heydrich, at almost any cost to myself.”
Bömelburg was looking rather more thin and gray than the day before. Kestner might have spent the whole night polishing his bald head, so shiny did it seem. Oltramare said something in French to the commissioner, who put on his pince-nez and regarded me with indifference before nodding his apparent approval.
