He stepped forward with the cards, but Marie-Élise snatched them up and threw them to the ground. She came down off the porch as if to stamp them down in the mud and he seized her wrists to stop her. She beat her fists against his chest and cried.
That day, he could only think of that day. The day they had walked hand-in-hand along the banks of the Cher. The chateaux were still open then, and they had visited Chenonceau and the gardens of Diane de Poitiers. It was a brilliant, sunny day and the flowers were in bloom in the garden. They’d perched on the stone wall overlooking the river and kissed like naughty teenagers. A pair of old French widows in black had clucked their tongues as they walked past.
A policier eventually tapped Helmut on the shoulder. “This is not Paris, monsieur. We behave properly in the Loire, n’est-ce pas?” Marie-Élise blushed and they shared a guilty laugh after the policier straightened his hat and continued on his way. That night they made love in the hay loft above the horses. He was certain Monsieur Molyneaux knew what the young lovers were about, but Helmut had not disguised his intention to marry Marie-Élise in a proper Catholic ceremony. Those were the days when many people still thought the war would be averted.
“I’m so sorry,” he said as she wept. “It was the war. The war.”
She looked up at him. “Go away, Helmut. Do not come back.”
They stared at each other for a long moment, then he nodded and turned to go. He did not look back until he got to the car. As he did, he saw Marie-Élise on her hands and knees, collecting ration cards from the mud and wiping them clean on her dress. Her shoulders shuddered.
Chapter Six:
Colonel Hans Hoekman picked up the gold coin in a pair of forceps. He’d removed the top of the lamp, and now held the coin in the direct flame.
“Does anyone know what the melting point of gold is?” he asked.
One of the young lieutenants answered. “A little over one thousand degrees centigrade.”
“That high? I never would have guessed, are you sure?”
“Ja, Polizeiführer. I’m sure. One thousand sixteen degrees, to be exact.”
“Now if you had given me the exact number to begin with, I never would have doubted you. You were afraid to say it, because you didn’t want to appear to be showing off. It sounded officious, an affectation. Can you be more precise, still?”
“One thousand sixteen point one-eight degrees, Polizeiführer.”
“Excellent.” Hoekman considered. “But that is interesting. You think of gold, it is so soft. You would expect it to melt like chocolate or butter. And look at that, it is not even turning red. How would you even know it was getting hot? Apart from the fact that I’m holding it in direct flame, of course.”
He smiled at his own joke. None of the other three people in the room seemed amused. The two lieutenants watched intently; they were wondering what he was doing. Perhaps hoping he would let them get involved, maybe scheming to get ahead. How best to please him, how to crush him in turn when the time came. There was always scheming.
The third—the boy—didn’t speak German, but no doubt the conversation and the coin in the lamp flame had focused his attention. He must have noticed Hoekman’s tone of voice.
Why was it that a calm, measured tone and perfect control—like a snake, never blinking, never agitated—inspired more fear than ranting, pacing, loss of temper, threats?
Hoekman was taking French classes, two hours a day, plus study when he had the chance. His French was coming along at a rapid clip and even the old man giving him lessons seemed genuinely impressed. Nevertheless, it was not yet strong enough to complete the interrogation.
“You will translate for me, now,” he told the younger of his two aides. “Bring him here.”
They dragged the third young man—Roger Leblanc—out of the chair and brought him across the room to where Hoekman turned the coin over in the flame to evenly distribute the heat. “Your French coins are very beautiful. I especially like the detail on this rooster. Where did you get this one?”
The lieutenant translated.
The boy was sweating, shaking so badly that he would have collapsed to the floor if the two lieutenants weren’t holding him upright. He muttered something.
“What did he say?”
“He doesn’t remember.”
“You had a gold coin in your pocket. What a strange thing to find on a seventeen-year-old boy in Paris these days. And you do not remember where it came from? Even more strange.” Hoekman removed the coin from the fire and brought it near the boy’s cheek.
“Non, mais no, s’il vous plait, non.”
“Look at you. A faggot, it is disgusting. And look at your clothes, your hair. A Clark Gable mustache, hair untidy. You have been watching too many American movies, it is not healthy.” He waited, while the lieutenant caught up translating. “You are a zazou, aren’t you? A disgusting little group of faggots. Very soon we will clean the entire city of this scum.”
He brought the coin closer. The fuzz on the boy’s cheek curled and smoked. A whiff of burning hair.
“I found it!” he blurted.
“You found it? I think you are lying.”
A frightened burst of French. “I swear, my god, please, you must believe me. I just found it, that’s all. Please, for god’s sake, please. You have to believe me.”
Hoekman pulled the coin back a few inches as the lieutenant translated this. “You found it. Where?”
“I was in the major’s car, looking for cigarettes. I suppose it had fallen out of someone’s pocket. I didn’t think it would be missed.”
“The major? Major Ostermann, you mean.”
“Yes.”
Now this was interesting. Colonel Hoekman didn’t trust Alfonse Ostermann. There was something underhanded about the man. At the least, he was a corrupt element within the Wehrmacht requisitioning department. But this business with the coin cast new suspicions on the major, assuming the boy was telling the truth.
Hoekman took the forceps and put the coin back into the fire. How long would gold hold its heat? He would have to ask the lieutenant later.
Could this have anything to do with the American spy they were trying to catch in Provence? There was something there about gold roosters, too. They’d raided a house near Marseille reputed to hold the spy. No American, but one of the items recovered was a small box filled with a few dozen gold rooster coins. It might just be a coincidence; there were a lot of these old coins in vaults and banks across the country. Even more had found their way to Germany, and not always by official routes.
In fact, one of Hoekman’s earliest successes as a Gestapo investigator had been catching a Wehrmacht captain who had robbed a bank vault during the invasion of France, smuggled its contents back to Germany in sacks of feed. A number of French roosters and British sovereigns and even American eagles had turned up mysteriously in and around Stuttgart. The captain’s house, when raided, had been filled with real coffee, chocolate, lemons, oranges, and other extremely expensive black market items. His wife had been wearing nylon stockings, like a cabaret girl.
After Hoekman had finished arresting and interrogating the captain and his co-conspirators, he’d received a curt telegram through official channels, ordering him to report to a castle in the Silesian highlands, near the old frontier with Poland.
This had been March 1941, before the war with the Russians on the Eastern Front, when Germany and the Soviet Union were, to all intents and purposes, allies. Suspicious, semi-hostile allies, of course, like two packs of wolves came together to bring down a wounded animal—Poland, in this case—and now circled each other warily with blood from the last battle still dripping from their jaws. Still, Hoekman had assumed war with the Soviets would be unthinkable so long as Britain remained unbroken and jeering on the other side of the English Channel.
But as he drove into Silesia, Hoekman couldn’t help but notice the trains, the military convoys, the massive movement of material. And endless lines of men
, thousands and thousands of them, all moving east, in excess even of what he’d see along the former border with Poland two years earlier. Hoekman had recognized at once the signs of a pending war.
So all the talk of peace and friendship with the Bolsheviks was a lie. And why not? Germany was surrounded by enemies. Germans had their superior organization and their brains, and if they needed to add a measure of cunning, so be it. He just hoped his counterparts in Department E were up to the challenge of rooting out and destroying the NKVD spies that no doubt infested Poland and would be watching and reporting to Moscow.
The guards didn’t lead Hoekman into the castle, as he’d expected, but onto a path into the wooded part of the estate. The sound of an animal came from the underbrush, grunting, primitive sounds. A wild boar, from the sound of it. Hoekman found himself wishing the guards hadn’t relieved him of his Mauser.
“Heil Hitler,” a voice said.
Hoekman turned, snapped off a reflexive Hitler salute of his own, and then found himself staring at the Reichsführer-SS, himself. Heinrich Himmler. The man had come from a side path and somehow approached without Hoekman hearing. He was out of uniform, in a pair of trousers with a matching khaki shirt. A hunting rifle lay draped over one arm.
“You must be Lieutenant Hoekman, the one who uncovered the gold smuggling.”
“Yes, Reichsführer.”
“Come, walk with me. We can talk.”
Himmler handed the rifle to his aide, then polished his round glasses on his shirt. He dismissed his aide and the two guards who’d brought Hoekman, then ordered him to report about the discovery of the gold coins. They continued to walk as Hoekman did so.
The Reichsführer interrupted several times in his Bavarian-accented German to ask pointed questions. Himmler looked thoughtful as he finished his recounting. “Hoekman, that’s a Dutch name, isn’t it?”
“My paternal grandfather was Dutch, yes.” He kept his voice neutral, neither apologetic nor defiant. “I am not in any way Dutch. I grew up in Munich and had never been outside of Germany before the war started.”
“And yet one could hardly claim that Hans Hoekman is a provincial man,” Himmler said. “I understand that you expended considerable effort learning Polish during the few months you were stationed in Warsaw. Why would you do that?”
“It is useful to know the language of the enemy. People tell you things in their own language.”
“A disgusting, unsophisticated language these Slavs speak, isn’t it.”
“No, Reichsführer, I didn’t find it so.”
Himmler’s eyebrows rose. “You didn’t? Well—” It was clear he was not used to being contradicted and didn’t quite know how to respond.
“The more Polish I learned, the more I liked it. Indeed, I found it surprising that such a degraded, inferior people could speak such a beautiful, sophisticated language. I can only surmise that the Poles were, at one time, a superior race to what they currently present. They have mixed excessively with Jews, Cossacks, and Mongols.”
“Ah, yes, of course. That only makes sense.” He chuckled. “I misunderstood you for a moment.”
“I apologize, Reichsführer, I should have been more clear.”
“Tell me. As a boy, did you ever suffer abuse from other children about your Dutch family?”
“No. I kept to myself and the other boys were mostly wise enough to leave me alone. When they didn’t, I made sure they learned their mistake.”
“And you joined the SS when?” Himmler asked.
“I joined the brown shirts in 1930, when I was eighteen. I started working in investigations in 1936. I report to Department D.”
D1, to be specific. Opponents of the regime in the occupied territories. He was not particularly interested in D2 business, except where he came across Jews and homosexuals and other deviants through the normal course of operations.
“Interesting. You have the file?”
Hoekman handed it over. Himmler thumbed through the pictures, the typed memos as they continued to walk. Hoekman was intimately aware of the contents of that file, having dictated most of the memos himself. He walked a pace back, feeling rather stiff.
Hoekman had felt vaguely disappointed by this encounter and it took him this moment of silence to realize why. He’d expected Himmler to be some superhuman in intellect and charisma, but of course he wasn’t. Instead, he gave the impression of a Prussian Junker out for a walk on his estate.
Himmler stopped at the sheet that cataloged the exact quantities of gold and black market goods confiscated and sent to Berlin. “That is quite a sum of gold. Were you at all tempted? It might have been easy to take some of it, but still claim the glory of discovery.”
“Money holds no particular temptation, Reichsführer. My goal is to serve the Fatherland.”
“Some might question your patriotism, that it’s a front to hide your Dutch ancestry. To prove that you are more German than the Germans.”
“I am aware of that interpretation, Reichsführer. I reject it.”
“An excellent answer. Perhaps a little too excellent, in fact. Everything about you is a little too perfect. Perhaps it is an affectation.”
Himmler gave a half-smile and Hoekman could see a grudging respect. Also, a touch of caution. Hoekman had often seen such caution before—how to deal with such a strong-willed, unbending man as Hans Hoekman?—but it still surprised him to see it in a man as powerful as the Reichsführer. If that caution turned to fear, Hoekman’s life would be in great danger. He was aware of that.
“You look very German,” Himmler continued, and his tone made it clear that this was a high compliment. “Your actions, of course, were correct in every way. Even down to the extreme measures taken with this Wehrmacht captain.” Himmler passed him a photo of the captain in his uniform. The young man looked arrogant, untouchable in the photo. He had worn a very different expression by the time Hoekman had finished with him. “Of course your captain looked very Aryan, too, but we have done some digging into his background and discovered a Polish grandmother. Sometimes it just takes a drop of impurity to contaminate the whole.”
“Polish. I did not know that,” Hoekman answered truthfully. Was this a dig at his own family background?
An animal exploded onto the path. It was a magnificent stag, with an enormous rack that looked almost too heavy to carry. The two men drew up short, Himmler letting out a startled gasp at his side. For a long moment, the two men and the stag stared at each other and then the animal was bounding into the meadow on the opposite side of the path.
“And to think,” Himmler said in a rueful tone after it had disappeared into the woods beyond the meadow, “I’d unloaded my gun.”
“It is probably for the best,” Hoekman said. “You might have killed it and that would have been a loss, I think. Those antlers look better on a live animal than hanging on your wall.”
The Reichsführer turned and fixed him with a frown that turned first to a smile, and then to a chuckle. “You know what, I think you might be right. Well said, Lieutenant, well said.”
#
Six days later, Hoekman received a promotion. The papers were signed ‘H. Himmler.’
Within ten months he had risen to the rank of Reichskriminaldirektor—a Gestapo colonel.
It was curious that he had come upon another case relating to gold coins. The government would be very interested; even the smallest amounts of confiscated gold would be sent directly to Berlin. Apart from the satisfaction to be gained by rooting out another conspiracy against the Reich, it was not lost on Hoekman that another big find might propel him to new heights in the SS hierarchy.
But this gold rooster now pinched between the forceps, heating in the lamp flame, was it the only one? Nothing more than someone paying Ostermann gold for black market goods? Or was there some sinister connection with the events in Marseille and the small cache he’d discovered? He was intrigued by the possibilities.
“Now,” he said to Roger Leblanc. �
��Is there anything else you would like to tell me before we continue?”
“I told you everything I know.”
“Maybe you have, maybe you haven’t. We shall find out. Lieutenant, drop his pants. Underwear, too.”
“Me, Polizeiführer?” the clever one asked, his tone reluctant.
“Yes, you,” he snapped. “He is not going to sodomize you, look at him, he is helpless.”
One man held the boy by the neck while the other stripped him naked from the waist down. They both looked revolted.
Hoekman felt a very different emotion than his two lieutenants. Hoekman hated this deviant because the state told him to hate deviants. If his superiors told him that French brie posed a threat to the Fatherland, he’d have arrested guilty dairy farmers, women queuing in front of cheese shops, and anyone whose breath stank in a certain way. Now obviously sodomites were a threat to the Reich in a way cheese that was unnaturally soft and smelly at room temperature could never be, but there was no need to get hysterical about it.
“Good, now hold him still.”
“For god’s sake, what are you going to do to me?” Roger asked.
“You are a faggot. There are punishments appropriate for such cases.”
“It’s a lie. I didn’t. . .I never would. . .”
“Lieutenant, bend him over.” The boy’s backside thrust into the air, hairy, disgusting.
The colonel removed the coin from the flame. Heat shimmered from the surface of the gold coin. He stepped up to the boy.
Roger twisted his head to look over his shoulder. His eyes bulged. He started to scream.
Chapter Seven:
Helmut von Cratz was a rich man, but the first time he’d ever carried a bag stuffed with money was the first time he’d visited Gemeiner in eastern Prussia, in a castle not far from the old Polish border. That was last spring, when the Americans had just entered the war, the eastern campaign had stalled, and smarter people began to realize just what the future held in store. He hadn’t fully understood his role in the conspiracy, or what, exactly, he was doing carrying so much cash.
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