“Impossible. Natzweiler was a men’s camp,” Franc said.
“Your sister, you say?” Marisol took the photo from Slim’s hand.
“Yes, her name was Marie Claire. Franc, did your father ever mention a woman brought to Natzweiler?” Slim asked.
“He stoked the fire. That’s all he did.”
“You mean for the crematorium?”
“Yes.”
“Would it be possible for me to talk with him?”
Franc looked at Marisol, annoyed. “My father is a drunk. He is barely ever lucid. He lives alone in a shack on the base of the mountain.”
“Will you ask him if he’ll talk to me?” Slim asked.
“No, but Marisol can draw a map for you, and you can try talking to him yourself.”
“Don’t you think you should go with her, Franc?” Marisol asked, this time a bit timidly.
“Marisol, I told you after the trial, I never wanted to see him again.” Franc walked into the kitchen with a handful of wood.
“What trial?” Slim asked curiously.
“There was a war trial in Wuppertal. Franc’s father testified against the doctors who worked at Natzweiler. They did experiments there. During the trial, Franc heard what went on in the camp, and even though his father did not kill anyone, he still holds him responsible. I’ll draw you a map, but you should not go alone. Franc’s father is—how should I say it?-unpredictable.” She took a pencil and began drawing on a torn piece of butcher-block paper.
Paris, 1943
Once on the street and out of the building, Amelie could not stop shaking. How could Françoise take up with Marie Claire? She tried to tell herself that Françoise wasn’t worth it and that a woman like that couldn’t be tamed, but she wanted to be the only one between her legs. To be cuckolded by a colleague, a fellow agent, that was just too much. Marie Claire needed to be gotten rid of; everyone knew her time was up. That’s why she was being sent home. If she got picked up by the SD, London wouldn’t be surprised. They’d kept her in the field much longer than they should have. If she turned Marie Claire in, she could have Françoise to herself again, and things would go back to normal-but could she betray a fellow agent? That was treason, and it surely meant death for Marie Claire. And what if Dennis found out she did it? How could she cover it up?
She could turn Marie Claire in and go to the unoccupied zone to wait out the war. No one would know what she’d done. Maybe she could convince Françoise to join her. They could hide out in the ochre hills of Roussillon, and Françoise would be hers and hers alone. Amelie never had anyone to herself. She had been born in the twenties to a wealthy absentee father, and her mother had died in childbirth. She’d been brought up by a series of governesses, none of whom had much personality, but several of whom had had a cruel streak.
When she’d refused to come out at seventeen at the Crillon Ball in Paris and instead enrolled at the Sorbonne, her father had reduced her once-generous allowance to a pittance. It was expected that she would make a brilliant match just as her mother had, but Amelie wanted something more for herself than to be chained to some anemic cad from the Ancien Régime. So she studied Sanskrit and worked part-time in Adrienne Monnier’s bookshop on the rue de l’Odéon to pay for her education. The chubby Monnier was imperious but kind. She was also a lesbian, and her lover, the irrepressible American Sylvia Beach, ran an English-language bookstore and lending library across the street from Monnier’s shop called Shakespeare and Company.
As a student and a clerk, Amelie had never felt freer—until the Germans marched into Paris. She knew she had to do something after she heard General de Gaulle broadcast from London, “Honor, common sense, and the interests of the country require that all free Frenchmen, wherever they are, should continue the fight as best they may.” He gave her hope that her country might one day shake off its Nazi shackles and be liberated. In the meantime, freedom was still a long way off for France.
In early 1941, Dennis had recruited Amelie through Michel for the Invictus Network. For a while, the network was deadly to the Germans. Bridges, electrical plants, and miles of rail track were blown up regularly, but then French and British agents began to get picked up. It was as if Germany knew when the drops of agents and weapons were occurring. From twenty agents, all that was left of Invictus were Michel, Amelie, and Dennis. (Bronwyn had been moved to the unoccupied zone.) London wanted to shut Invictus down, but Dennis had insisted that he could rebuild the network. Marie Claire managed to keep it running for six months longer. Then Amelie caught her with Françoise, and the betrayal was just too much to bear. If Amelie turned Marie Claire in, she not only ensured her death, she also put into motion the Funkspiel, and by doing so, jeopardized the lives of all future agents. Amelie knew this, but she also knew Marie Claire’s time was running out. They would find her sooner rather than later; Amelie just hastened the denouement of the cat-and-mouse game.
Natzweiler, 1949
The next morning, they found Franc’s father, Stefan, working in a small, unkempt vegetable garden alongside a small stone house not too far from the camp. He eyed them warily as they approached.
“Monsieur Lepin?” Slim asked.
“Yes, what do you want?” he said as he spit a mouth full of tobacco onto the ground.
“I’m looking for my sister, Marie Claire. Someone told me she wound up in the camp at Natzweiler. I heard you worked there, so I thought perhaps you might’ve remembered her since there were so few women in the camp.” She held out the photo to him.
He dropped the hoe and took a step forward toward Slim, who blanched when she caught a whiff of the fetid alcohol stench emanating from him. He reached out his dirt-caked hand and studied the photo she held out and said, “Wait here.” He moved away toward the stone cottage, dragging his left leg behind him.
“God, when do you think was the last time he bathed?” Amelie gagged as he receded. “Do you think he recognized Marie Claire?”
“He knows something, but I can barely understand him,” Slim said.
He came back out minutes later holding a wooden box, which he carefully handed to Slim.
“This is what’s left of your sister after she was burned alive,” he said, shaking his head.
Natzweiler, 1943
It was dawn when Stefan arrived for his job at the camp. He started every day at 5:00 a.m. and ended at 4:00 p.m. The populace of the village had been divided over what to do about the camp. Some ignored it, others provided supplies to it, but few would work there. There were all sorts of rumors about what went on there, especially after the dance hall of the Struthof Inn had been sealed off and the windows painted black. Entire Gypsy clans went in and were carried out dead, as were the transports of Jews from Greece. No, you only worked at the camp if you couldn’t do anything else, and with a bad leg from a logging accident, Stefan couldn’t find employment anywhere else.
His son, Franc, was furious when he found out where his father was working. “How can you help those animals?” he’d asked before storming off to aid the Resistance in the mountains. Stefan welcomed the steady pay. Stoking the fire for the crematorium may have been a distasteful job, but it was a job. Day after day, Stefan burned the bodies. Some of them had been hanged for the amusement of the commandant. Others died from typhus, and a handful from gassing. Every morning, Stefan stoked the fire, and with each body he slid into the oven, a puff of black smoke would be emitted from the crematorium’s chimney. The only dead he did not burn were the eighty-seven men who had arrived from Thessaloniki, Greece. He was told by Dr. Brandt that they were to be part of the Jewish skeleton collection, a macabre, anthropological study instituted by Heinrich Himmler that was designed to show the superiority of the Aryan race. The Greeks were gassed upon their arrival, and Stefan helped Dr. Brandt encase the bodies in plaster casts. Most of the wooden boxes containing the men were stored in the doctor’s offices, but when that ran out of room, the rest were placed floor to ceiling in the crematorium to be shipped t
o the Reich University in Berlin.
Natzweiler, 1949
The wooden box Stefan had handed Slim was a foot long and six inches wide. Inside was a woman’s shoe and a crumpled handkerchief with an embroidered faded-red swastika.
“This is what’s left of your sister,” he said.
The shoe had a stylishly hallowed wooden sole with a two-inch heel and uppers made of beige linen, but what made the shoe stand out was a blue-and-white polka-dotted bow on the toe.
“The woman, your sister, she was French, I think. I heard her speak French to Dr. Brandt. He brought her in late at night after taking the train from Karlsruhe. He was from there and would visit his wife and young daughter on weekends. That day, I was told that I had to stay late and have the oven prepared by ten p.m. When I heard Dr. Brandt arrive, I went to the infirmary and saw that he’d brought a woman with him.”
“Had you seen women prisoners at the camp before?” Slim asked.
“Never. I signaled to him that the fire was ready, and I heard him say to her, ‘We are giving you a shot.’ She asked him why he was giving her a shot, and he said it was to prevent typhus, but that did not make sense to me. I mean, why would he waste a shot for typhus when she was going to go up in smoke? So I knew it was not a shot for typhus.”
“What do you think he gave her instead?”
“It must have been carbolic acid. That’s one of the ways prisoners were killed. I went back into the crematorium to check on the ovens, and a couple of minutes later, Dr. Brandt dragged her in and said, ‘Is the oven ready? She’ll be dead in less than a minute.’ But after a minute, she was still breathing, and Dr. Brandt told me that I had to push her in the oven. But she was still alive, and I refused.”
“Did she know what was happening?” Slim asked, horrified.
“She began to wake up. She started to struggle. She scratched me in the eye. I was in such pain, Dr. Brandt ordered me to leave. He said he would take care of her. I went to the infirmary. From the crematorium, I heard chairs knocked over and then the sound of slaps; then it was quiet. Dr. Brandt came out twenty or so minutes later; his entire face had been clawed by her.”
“Are you confident that she was put into the oven?” Amelie asked.
“Where else could she go except up in smoke?”
“Do you think my sister was alive when Dr. Brandt put her in the oven?”
“I believe he got those scratches the same way I did, from trying to push her into the fire.”
What level of depravity does it take to burn someone alive? Slim wondered to herself.
“When I came into the crematorium afterward—” he continued.
“How much later was it?” Slim interrupted him.
“About an hour. I had a compress on my eye and needed to lie still for a while, but then I went in.”
“And what did you see?” Slim asked.
“A small pile of her belongings. I took the shoe and the handkerchief.”
“Why did you take them?”
“People who died in that camp were gone without a trace. It wasn’t like other camps where numbers were tattooed on people’s arms so that they could be accounted for. What they did was wrong. You don’t throw a living woman into a burning oven. I wanted them held responsible, so I took the shoe and the handkerchief. I needed something to prove this woman existed. I knew someday someone would come and ask me what happened.”
“Did you testify about what happened to my sister at the doctor’s trial in Wuppertal?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“No one asked. I testified about the experiments on the inmates, that’s it.”
“And yet, you kept the shoe and the handkerchief,” Slim noted.
“Yes, because I thought maybe someone like you would find me and ask.”
“What happened to Dr. Brandt?” Amelie asked.
“He was put on trial in Wuppertal after the war with the rest of the higher-ups. I testified against them.”
“And what happened to those who were tried?” Slim asked.
“They were all hanged except one. Dr. Brandt escaped.”
“How?” Amelie asked.
“I don’t know. One night he was just gone.”
“And he was never found?”
“No, I keep expecting him to show up and kill me for testifying against him.” Stefan ruefully smiled. Slim could see he was still afraid of Brandt. “I am sorry about your sister. If I could have done anything, I would have.”
“If you had done anything, you’d be dead. How much longer did you work in the camp?” Slim wanted to know if he’d witnessed what had happened to the other three women agents.
“I quit the next day. It was just too much.”
There was nothing more to say after that. Slim thanked Stefan for the box of meager belongings. He shrugged and opened his mouth to say something, but he thought better of it and then limped away.
On the walk back to the inn, Amelie said very little. Slim wondered if this was really Marie Claire’s shoe. It was clearly a woman’s shoe; maybe Françoise would know. But why would there be a handkerchief with an embroidered swastika among Marie Claire’s possessions?
Back at the inn, Marisol insisted they sit down in the dining room for lunch. As she brought out bread, wine, and cheese, she asked softly, “Did Stefan help you?”
“Yes, he was very helpful,” Slim replied, slicing the strong Muenster cheese to eat with the crusty, warm baguette.
“How was he? Is he OK?” Marisol whispered, looking about making sure Franc was not within earshot.
“He’s in very bad physical shape,” Slim answered.
“I want to help him, but Franc says no. He says his father doesn’t deserve help because of what he did in the camp,” Marisol said sadly.
“He testified against the doctors who used human beings as experiments. It was good that he was working in the camp. Someone needed to bear witness to what happened in Natzweiler. He saved some of my sister’s belongings in case someone came looking for her.” Slim raised her voice when she saw Franc coming out of the kitchen.
“But he operated the crematorium,” he said angrily.
“He burned the dead. And when he was told to burn my sister alive, he refused. Your father is not a monster. He is a very ill, brokenhearted man. As his son, you should help him.”
“Maybe. I don’t know. It’s been so long.” Franc shrugged uncertainly.
“When my father was dying in America, he begged me to stay with him, but I left him to come to France to see if I could find my fiancé, a pilot who was missing. I left him in his apartment tended to by nurses. I never found out what happened to my fiancé, and my father died alone—I regret that. And was my father a great father?” Slim shook her head no.
Franc looked as though he wanted to respond to what Slim said, but he just nodded and went upstairs. Marisol came over with two small tureens of lentil soup and whispered, “Thank you.”
Slim and Amelie ate for a while in silence, each lost in her thoughts.
“So we have our Sokolov box, I suppose,” Slim said, finally breaking the silence.
“Sokolov box? What is that?” Amelie asked, confused.
“The surviving Romanovs wanted to find out what happened to the tsar and his family. So they commissioned a former minister named Sokolov. He went to Yekaterinburg, where the Tsar and his family were believed to be murdered. He collected gruesome artifacts from a mass grave. A belt buckle, the tsar’s epaulets, the skull of one of the grand duchess’ dogs, and what looked like the tsarina’s finger. He brought the macabre collection to the tsar’s mother, the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, to prove that there could be no doubt that indeed the tsar and his family had been killed.”
“Did she believe him?” Amelie asked, intrigued.
“The tsar’s mother never accepted the Sokolov report or the contents of the report as proof that her son and his family were gone. But every Russian emigre in London did.”
>
“How did you find out about the Sokolov box?” Amelie asked.
“My grandmother’s friend is a Russian princess. She told me the story over tea when I was a little girl. I’ve always thought each case has a Sokolov box. However, I worry that Miss Chapman will be like the dowager empress, and she’ll refuse to believe that Marie Claire was burned alive in Natzweiler.”
“She wants this case put to rest,” Amelie said, “so she’ll believe it.”
“How can you be so certain?”
“Because she and I want the same thing. We want the only survivor to our guilt to be gone so that we can get on with our lives.”
“Are you still going to turn yourself in?”
“I have to. I don’t have forgiveness from Marie Claire. Without that, I cannot go on living my life as I do now. After all, I put all this in motion; now I have to live with the consequences.”
“Amelie, you did a lot of good for the Resistance. You can’t negate that.”
Amelie shrugged. “Whatever I’ve done has been negated by the fact I sent someone to her death, a very gruesome and painful death. The thing I don’t understand is, if the Germans knew she was a spy, why didn’t they shoot her?”
“Shoot her?”
“International law says all spies should be tried, but it doesn’t say what should be done with them if they’re guilty. Most countries hang spies or shoot them. They don’t give them a botched-up injection and then burn them alive.”
“Do you think the doctor had a problem shooting a woman?”
“Before the SS figured out how to gas the Jews, the Wehrmacht shot hundreds of thousands of Jewish women and children,” Amelie said, “so no, I don’t think a member of the SS would have a problem shooting a woman.”
“Maybe they didn’t want to do something so publicly.”
“Whatever the reason, I am going to have to live with this for the rest of my life. It was better not knowing what happened to Marie Claire.” Amelie stopped and then continued. “I was so frightened that you would find out what happened to Marie Claire, and now that you have, it is beyond what I could ever imagine. What I did led to this horrible death. When you commit a sin such as this at twenty-two, it defines your life. It haunts you. Until it ultimately destroys you.”
The Lost Spy (Slim Moran Mysteries) Page 13
