The Soul of a Thief

by Steven Hartov

  “Take the men and go, Gans,” I said.

  “He wants the money,” Himmel growled, meaning me as he glanced down at the lockers.

  “I don’t care if it’s fucking coal in there, you swine,” I yelled, and my master’s eye blazed at me furiously.

  And then I calmed myself, to better offer reason to the men.

  “Be gone, Gans,” I whispered. “All of you. If you’re wise, you’ll soon surrender to the Allies, and become prisoners of freedom. But if you have to fight, then find our men in Caen and join them. There’s nothing for you here but dishonor now. Or the executioner, later.”

  I heard some murmurs, and then the gathering of weapons as they slung them, but my eyes and gunsight never left my master as I waited. Someone neared and touched my shoulder and I flinched, and Gans’s fingers squeezed my neck as he said quietly to me, “Find us, someday, Brandt.”

  “I shall,” I said, and they were gone.

  We stood alone, together, my master and I. My breaths poured from my nostrils like a bull’s, yet his posture remained relaxed and poised, and nothing moved around us but the ripples in the stream and the flames that danced up from our car. Himmel slowly raised his gloves to let the Schmeisser hang, turning to me very carefully.

  “Quite excellent.” He smiled. “That makes us all the richer.”

  But I said nothing as my finger twitched around the trigger, and though I tried to summon every reason not to kill him, they were so weak and few. His eye flicked over to our flank, the Kübelwagen’s flames glinting in his black orb.

  “My God, I don’t believe it,” he whispered.

  Yet I was not so foolish to be duped that way and kept my pistol sighted. And then I heard the beat of hooves, the snap of reins, a heavy snort, and some rider dismounting from a saddle. My heart began to pound even harder and my elbows trembled more, but I dared not turn my head away from him.

  “How in hell’s name did you find us?” Himmel marveled.

  “Edward told me where you would be.”

  It was Gabrielle’s voice, and it pierced me as no bullet could. I could not fathom why she’d come, and hearing her, I wanted just to crumble there and weep within her arms. Yet I did not turn to her or move, as the tears spilled over from my eyes and she still spoke, so evenly, to Himmel.

  “I summered here as a child, Erich. This place is half a home to me, and you are careless with your maps.”

  Himmel grinned and let his hands begin to lower. I quickly swiped my glove across my eyes and took another step, which he ignored. “And where is my errant driver?” he asked as if we’d rendezvoused here for a picnic.

  “Still asleep, I think,” she said. “The sisters’ wine is very strong.”

  I felt her touch me on my shoulder. I did not want her there. I feared so much she’d break this spell and there we’d be again, the three of us together, woven in eternal torture.

  “He killed our captain, Gabrielle,” I whispered hoarsely.

  “I see that, Shtefan,” she said, and she laid her fingers on my outstretched arm. I glanced to see she wore a German soldier’s tunic, likely from a corpse, and Edward’s field cap, her hair tucked up beneath it. And her hand stroked slowly toward the pistol, and I knew I could not fire with her there.

  “Our boy is having quite a nervous night,” said Himmel in conspiracy. “I think he does not understand our kind, mein Schatz.”

  “Perhaps not,” she said, as her small hand curled about my own, her fingers mirroring my grip. “But he does know one thing, Erich. That I promised you a night you’d not forget.”

  And I think he understood then, for his smile faltered just before she pulled the trigger. The barrel flashed lightning white and the bullet struck him in the throat, and his head snapped up as his glove snatched at the wound. But Gabrielle pulled once more, and then again, her finger welded to my own, and he stumbled back and fell into the stream.

  * * *

  Nothing of the world encroached upon us for some time. I had slumped onto my knees, and sat there looking at his body as the water lapped and turned him. I felt her arm around my shoulders and her fingers in my hair, and neither of us spoke until at last she rose and took my hand. We walked down to the pair of footlockers, and we looked at them and then at each other. I sighed and took my pistol from her hand, and she stepped back as I fired at one lock. She knelt and lifted up the cover, and she cocked her head, looked up at me, and smiled.

  Half the case was full of currency, yet of a type few souls had ever seen before that night. There were packs and packs of banded, freshly printed notes, of strange square shapes and hues of pink and green and black. They were all French francs, marked Serie De 1944, and as I plucked one free and turned it in my still-quaking fingers, I felt the heated flush of comprehension flood my face.

  They were, all of them, Allied Invasion Currency, intended only for the pockets of the troops who’d stormed ashore at Normandy. They had been printed strictly for this purpose, and useful only for barter with the grateful hands of liberated French. And they were worthless everywhere on earth, but here.

  I dropped the single note. I would not be found with such a thing in my possession. If I were captured, the Allies might assume that I had killed one of their own to get it, and it could become an ace of spades of death. It fluttered to the stream and floated off.

  The case’s other half was full of books. Many of them, classics of all kinds, English pocket versions meant for resting troops, packed spine to spine. I nodded, knowing now why so few guards had been upon the train, and wondering if Himmel’s brother had simply been misguided by his spies, or had secretly despised his older sibling. No treasure could have been more perfect, and even had it all been pure gold I would have left it there, just out of Himmel’s grasp. I reached into the box and took one book and put it in my pocket, knowing how my father would have smiled.

  And every year since then I read it still, and see and hear the flashes and the voices of that night...

  Afterword

  ON THAT SUMMER night in 1944, Gabrielle and I were captured close to dawn.

  We did not bury Noss and Friedrich, for I had no more strength for that. Instead, we laid them side by side beneath the gnarled tree, and used their bayonets to fashion crosses from its limbs, lashing them together with the leathers from their weapons. I pray that someone found them soon and put them properly to rest.

  We never mounted Blitzkrieg, for he was lathered still and spent. We took his reins and walked him northward, side by side in silence, over fields that rumbled underneath our plodding feet and turned from black to mossy gray as morning rose. I stopped beside a crater filled with rain and plucked my Iron Cross from off my tunic, and Gabrielle slipped Frau Himmel’s diamond from her finger. Perhaps those amulets still lay together underneath some flowered field.

  We climbed a hill and saw the English Channel, lying flat and silver, swathed in fog beneath a windless light, the masts of many warships tilting in its swells. And then my spirit crashed, as cresting from the other side came seven battle-hardened SS troops, who loped so quickly to the top I had no time to think. It was the opposite of what we’d planned, and the horror I had feared. So close to freedom, just to be imprisoned once again.

  “Was ist loss, hier?” their lieutenant snapped as he stopped before us, his finger tapping near the trigger of his machine pistol.

  He was tall and blond, and his uniform and those of all his men appeared so fresh, I thought they surely must have just been flown in from Germany. He eyed me, from my cracked and muddy boots to my soaked and blood-streaked tunic. And then he turned his gaze on Gabrielle, as did his men. She had shed the German tunic, revealing a cream sweater above her muddied trousers, her hair half tumbled down from Edward’s cap. My pistol was still loaded in my holster, and my right hand twitched, telling me that if they tried to take her, I would take as many of the
m first as I could manage. The lieutenant pointed over my shoulder.

  “Our lines are that way, Corporal.” He raised an eyebrow, perhaps because I’d forgotten my salute. “Who is your commander?”

  “Colonel Erich Himmel,” I said and felt my mouth tremble.

  He turned to look at his own corporal.

  “Kommandotruppe,” the lower rank informed him. “Das Reich.”

  The lieutenant nodded and looked at Gabrielle again from nose to toe, and then at me.

  “Are you deserting, my comrade?” he asked carefully. “Along with this French jewel?”

  He cocked his head, but Gabrielle stepped up to me and gripped my arm, and Blitzkrieg whinnied as she raised her chin defiantly.

  “He was a German war hero, but now he’s done,” she said. “And I am racially impure, so you’ll want nothing of me. This war is over soon, and you would be wise to let us pass.”

  I nearly fainted with her fatal outburst, yet knowing full well what was next, I snapped my holster open with my thumb. But the lieutenant was quick, and he stilled me with his Schmeisser jutted toward Gabrielle’s chest.

  “A Jewess?” His tone was disbelieving.

  “That’s right,” she said, and she reached inside her blouse and yanked a necklace out I’d never seen. It had a small gold Star of David dangling from it, and she thrust it forward as defiant proof.

  The lieutenant slowly grinned from ear to ear. I did not understand. He laughed and looked around at all his men, who also smiled as if party to a private joke. And then, he slipped his hand inside his SS tunic, and like some sadistic magician, produced a chain and silver star that nearly matched her own, and said in perfect British English, “It looks rather like mine.”

  My eyes must have been large as saucers. The heavens spun and the earth swayed, and nothing in my world made sense. And seeing my expression caused these men to roll and shake their shoulders with laughter.

  “We’re Brits,” the lieutenant finally announced, as he returned to speaking German. “We’re commandos with the Jewish Brigade, just newly minted. But our tailors are Berliners, as were all of us, once.”

  Gabrielle clamped her hand over her mouth and looked at me. Tears sprang from her eyes and rolled over her fingers, yet I remained in shock and frozen with this madness and good fortune. She gripped my tunic in her fist and announced, “He’s half a Jew as well!”

  “Now that I don’t believe,” said the lieutenant.

  “It’s true,” I whispered as I closed my eyes and nodded with impossible relief. And when I opened them, I found his gaze drifting down below my waist.

  “He isn’t cut,” said Gabrielle in my defense, raising a maternal finger.

  The lieutenant looked at her and blushed, and someone poked him from behind and said, “Neither are you, Froelich.”

  His cheeks flushed more, and then his eyes grew kinder and met mine as he gently reached out and gripped my shoulder.

  “Come,” he said. “Sometimes a man can find religion in strange places.”

  * * *

  We stayed with them, those seven men I’d never dreamed of. They kept us close, perhaps as amulets of luck, as if the bond of love we’d forged amid a charnel house engendered hope that someday they too might find a treasure such as Gabrielle, to mend their ravaged souls when all was done. Yet more than that, she was useful for her nursing skills, and I for what I knew. Throughout another year of war, so many times, her smile was the final blessed escort of an Allied boy en route to heaven’s peace. And my voice was often that which shattered the composure of a captured Wehrmacht officer, who sensed that I’d mined blacker hearts, and his was easy prey.

  Across the summer fields of France, the autumn battles in Alsace, a brutal Belgian winter and the springtime Rhine we flew. I’d shed my German tunic early, but it had stained my skin like purple wine, and sometimes when our seven British charges donned their SS smocks like Trojan horses, I gazed at them in longing cleaved with shame. There was no hiding it from Gabrielle, who knew and blessedly said nothing. In her eyes, and mine, judgments were for those who’d never tasted wars.

  I never found my father, although his name was always at my lips, and I hunted for his eyes in those of every elder Viennese I met. And when at last we learned the fates of millions of my mother’s kind, Lieutenant Froelich taught me something he called Kaddish, and she was placed to rest a stone’s throw from my heart.

  Blitzkrieg, at last, faltered in Bayern. We rode him one last time, and gently, across a field of summer grass powdered in white flowers. We kissed and hugged his chestnut neck and wept, then left his reins entwined between the fingers of a grateful, simple farmer. It was the hardest thing we’d ever done together.

  I do not know what fate befell the boys of the Commando, nor of Edward, without whose careful tutelage our lives would have been lost. Yet once, among a thousand prisoners cramped behind barbed wire, I saw Lieutenant Gans. He’d shed his SS uniform for the tunic of a simple Wehrmacht soldier then, and our eyes met across a skein of memories, and we nodded and I left him to his luck. They were not me, and I not them, and I knew that there would never be, nor wanted, whispers of nostalgia in some dark saloon of reminiscence.

  The war became another race for Gabrielle and me, against a clock of thundering cruelty and prayers to survive it. I had scant hope, and also thought that I had seen too much in Colonel Himmel’s care, visions that could never be undone. Yet these strange creatures, these Jewish commandos, neither fish nor fowl, painted scenes for us from their imaginations.

  They spoke of distant sun-drenched lands, of deserts they would make to bloom, of ships from Crete to welcome sands, and both of us learned once again to hunger for the future. The guns would still one day, they said, and those like us would find a place to live in freedom, if not peace. And so it was.

  It has been countless years since then, yet no day of that other life has faded with my age. I never touched the tools of war again, nor offered explanation, but they were printed on my palms, and Colonel Erich Himmel’s name stayed hushed behind my eyes. There have been many other trials, joys and sorrows, yes, but nothing like that tarnished trove which Gabrielle and I had locked away. Its truth, we chose, would not be told until our own eternities were imminent, and questions only whispered at our graves. Few, we knew, could understand, and all our children and theirs too have been respectful of our private pact, until this writing and this day.

  She left, at last, though not of her volition, no. And not before our eyes had met a million times upon some breeze that carried scents of smoke, or thunders of man’s making, or horse hooves in the fields that stirred a memory. Sometimes I wander up our hill in Galilee to sit near where she lies, and hold her hand once more, and hear her voice, and see her in the night.

  And then I surely know that the great privilege of my life was in the living. And yes, at last to tell it has been very fine as well.

  * * * * *

  Historical Notes

  IT IS ESTIMATED that approximately 150,000 partial-Jews, or Mischlinge, served in various branches of the German military during WWII. Over the course of the war, many were killed in action, or, as racial laws intensified, expelled from their units and sent to concentration camps. Those whose skills were considered crucial to Germany’s war effort were granted personal exemptions by Adolf Hitler, including a Wehrmacht field marshal and Kriegsmarine admiral. After the war, some of the survivors immigrated to what was soon to become the State of Israel and served in the Israeli army.

  At the time of the Normandy Invasion, Winston Churchill had just approved the formation of the Jewish Brigade, a branch of the Allied forces that quickly grew to 6,000 men. However, prior to that, Jewish German and Austrian refugees had already been operating in the North African and European theaters as commandos and intelligence agents, at times disguised as German troops. The most intrepid of these were
attached to the British Army’s No. 10 Inter-Allied Commando, including a top-secret contingent known as “X-Troop.”

  The German name Stefan is pronounced Shtefan. I have chosen to spell it thusly throughout so that the reader would hear it correctly.

  ISBN-13: 9781488079443

  The Soul of a Thief

  Copyright © 2018 by Steven Hartov

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