The money bags had held mostly reichsmarks, but there were also several thousand French franks. Business profits, reduced to cash. Helmut thought about his father when he carried the bags through the portcullis, ushered in by Gemeiner’s old butler.
When Helmut was still just a boy and realized that his father was a wealthy businessman, he’d naively asked to see all the money.
“What, you think I just keep bags of money lying around?” his father had asked with a laugh.
“You don’t? Where do you keep all the money, then?”
“I don’t keep it anywhere. I don’t actually have very much cash.”
Helmut was disappointed. “But I thought you were rich.”
“You think that way because you’re just a boy and you don’t have any money. You’re thinking like a poor person. Poor people have no assets except what they’ve got in their flat and have no money except what’s in their pocket or tucked under the mattress.”
“But if you don’t have any money, then how come everyone says you’re rich?”
“I have money, or I can get it, at least, with some effort. But that’s not how rich people work. It’s a different way of thinking altogether that makes you rich in the first place.”
That had proven remarkably true when Helmut actually needed to raise money. It had taken a good month just to convert ten percent of his wealth to the cash he carried into Gemeiner’s castle.
Gemeiner waved off his butler and led Helmut down a hall lined with suits of armor and into a huge library. It smelled of old wood and dusty books. The coat of arms of an old Prussian family hung over the fireplace, with the motto—near as Helmut could make out with his school Latin—Hammer of the Slavs.
Gemeiner poured cognac and indicated they take a seat in the wing-back chairs. “Thank you for coming. How much did you raise?”
Helmut told him.
“Hmm, well that’s a start. It will convince our contact that we’re serious about buying his hoard.”
“And what is this hoard, Herr von Haller?”
The man looked pained. “No, never that name. Always Gemeiner.”
Gemeiner was an old word that had become slang for a naïve, stupid country peasant. Gemeiner was from an old Junker family—those self-styled hammers of the Slavs—of a similar aristocratic background as Helmut von Cratz, and it was unclear why he’d chosen the pseudonym. Irony, perhaps.
Gemeiner fished out a key and opened a drawer in his desk. He handed Helmut a small wooden box, very heavy. Inside were fifty or sixty gold coins.
“French roosters? Where did they come from?”
“Unclear. Pillaged from France, no doubt. We carried off the bank reserves of the French state when we won the war, but it would appear that certain freelancers took advantage of the confusion for their own personal enrichment.”
“In my estimation,” Helmut said, “there’s no greater contraband than gold.”
Gemeiner’s pale, curved lips lifted into the hint of a smile. “And why do you say that?”
“Official directives, for one. All gold must flow to the center. There must be no secret caches of gold. The only thing the National Socialists are more interested in discovering than secret caches of gold are secret caches of Jews. And that’s largely because you often find the latter in possession of the former.”
“Yes, I know that, but I’m not a sophisticated businessman like yourself. I don’t understand the obsession with gold any more than I understand the obsession with Jews. With all the gold they’ve already looted, I would think the reichsmark would have sufficient reserves to back it.”
“But the regime needs to spend the gold because the international currency market is dead,” Helmut said. “We set rates with the French and so on, but outside of that, it’s almost impossible to import anything not produced in the Greater Reich, because nobody but the Italians will take our money. Even the Swiss balk. So the government needs every scrap of gold it can get its hands on. It’s the only convertible currency we’ve got left. It flows out of the country and never returns.
“In short,” Helmut continued, “it’s a one-way conversion from reichsmarks into gold. Outside of this room I can’t even imagine how you’d liquidate a cache of gold roosters. Not under present circumstances.”
“And strangely, this is exactly what makes them so valuable,” Gemeiner said. “Short of American War Bonds, I can’t think of anything that would suit our purpose so well. So valuable and yet so illiquid.”
Helmut had no idea why that requirement was so necessary. He expected that Gemeiner would now tell him, but instead the man asked, “Tell me, how much cash can you raise without bankrupting your business or otherwise drawing attention to yourself?”
“I’ll raise every pfennig of my share, if you give me time.”
“It’s a lot of money, even for men like you and me. Eight months, is that enough?”
“Yes, it’s enough. War is good for business.”
As was fascism. Together war and fascism drove up demand, eliminated rivals, created monopolies, and scared away competitors. A few more years and he’d be richer than his father had ever dreamed. Or would have been except that he had volunteered to invest his profits in illiquid gold coins.
“Take these coins back to France, turn them over to St. Claire,” Gemeiner said. “Tell him we’ve made contact with the American.”
“And then what?”
“Then you’ll be an industrious little businessman. Get rich.”
He had done so.
#
“We will reduce your rent,” Madame Demarais. “Twenty francs. And you can help with the wash to pay the rest.”
“I don’t have twenty francs,” Gabriela said. “I couldn’t pay you ten.”
She regretted paying Christine back so quickly with the money Alfonse had left her. It was the first thing she’d done after sitting down to a glorious breakfast of eggs and sausage and real, fresh bread with butter. And real coffee. A pair of the Parisiennes had been standing near the door, gossiping, and had smirked when she entered the restaurant to look for Christine. Gabriela could almost read their thoughts.
Not so pure and innocent now, are you cherie?
None of that from Christine. She even feigned disinterest in the money. “Oh, you don’t have to give it back yet. Go buy yourself a few nice things.”
There had been a time, nearly a year earlier, when she’d borrowed money from a greasy man who lived in the flat over the Demarais, so that she could bribe a secretary of the sub-prefect, who had hinted to Gabriela that he could find her father. He couldn’t. In fact, the secretary eventually stopped looking. After she’d stopped asking about her father and merely tried to recover the money, he pretended he’d never seen Gabriela before, claimed to be outraged by her suggestion that he could possibly be bribed, and threatened to turn her over to the authorities.
The bigger problem turned out to be that greasy man upstairs. He wanted his money back. Or perhaps, he’d suggested darkly, she could work off her debt cleaning his flat and providing other “services.” Gabriela rushed to the flea markets and sold her father’s gold watch for a fraction of its value. And paid off the bastard.
No, she didn’t like debts. Christine was nothing like the man upstairs, but Gabriela wanted it paid off, all of it. She’d get the last five francs as soon as possible, but in the meanwhile, please, take it all.
Only now, at the apartment, she wondered. Would it have been so bad to hold back a few francs? Christine would have understood, and now she wouldn’t be standing in front of the Demarais with her hands empty and feeling this horrid guilt at seeing their desperation.
Monsieur Demarais was wringing his hands, pacing back and forth in the tiny front room of their flat. At one time, they had been reluctant landlords. She had begged them for a room off the back, a storage closet, even a warm space in front of the stove.
Madame Demarais pulled at a strand of gray hair with fingers that protruded from fing
erless gloves. There was no coal at the moment to heat the flat. “Perhaps you have something you could sell. That watch, what about it?”
“I sold it almost a year ago. My mother’s ring seven weeks ago. The last of my father’s books two weeks ago. That was the eight francs I gave you. I have nothing left.”
Gabriela held all of her remaining possessions in a single carpet bag, which she clutched in front of her. A few thread-bare clothes, some socks, a pair of shoes. And the last few remembrances of her father. The first was a photo with Papá and her brother Pablo, standing on Las Ramblas in Barcelona. The second was a smooth green stone her father had used as a paperweight. She couldn’t remember her father attaching any special importance to the stone, and yet it was one of the possessions he’d brought from Spain, while abandoning a thousand other, nicer things. A man at the marché aux puces had offered twenty centimes, a price that was more than an insult, it was pointless. She wouldn’t part with it for so little.
And then, finally, his pipe. It might have brought a few coins, but she couldn’t do it.
“What about that dress you wore last night?” Madame Demarais asked. “That has some value. Maybe fifteen, maybe even twenty.”
“I can’t sell that. I borrowed the money for the dress to. . .to get a job.”
“A job?” Monsieur Demarais looked up. “With the boches?”
“Yes, with the boches. What else is there for a girl without husband or family?”
“True, true. No doubt the job would be clerical work or something similar,” he said.
“Yes, something similar.”
“You’re a good girl, I’m sure you will work hard and do well.”
Marshall Petain was always going on about how to renew France through travail, famille, patrie. Work, family, homeland. It was the only way to restore the honor of France, make it whole again. As avidly as they listened to de Gaulle’s BBC broadcasts from London every night at 9:00, the Demarais still worshiped the Marshall and kept up the fiction that both they and their lodger were respectable folk, suffering a rough patch.
Monsieur Demarais returned to his pacing. He muttered under his breath. Reached absently for his breast pocket and groped for a minute before seeming to notice that he had no more cigarettes.
“And there’s nothing you could sell?” his wife asked.
“Leave the girl alone,” Monsieur Demarais said in a weary voice. “She has nothing. Look at the child, practically starving.”
“We’ll put the rent on hold for now,” Madame Demarais said. “You can pay us when you can. Sooner, of course, is better, but I know the boches have their own pay schedules.”
“I don’t have the job, not yet. And anyway, my aunt has just returned to her house in the banlieus. She left in 1940, in the exode, and just now got it back from the Germans. She said I could live with her.”
“Ah, so your life is looking up,” Monsieur Demarais said. He ran his fingers through his thinning hair. “That’s good, that’s good for you.”
It was a lie. There was no aunt, no house in the suburbs. She was packing up to move in with Alfonse. She had no intention of ever returning to the little pit where she’d spent the last eighteen months. Still, she couldn’t stand to see the old couple’s desperation. She knew that Monsieur Demarais had searched for months for a job. Once, during a horrible bout of hunger, she had scoured their cupboards for something to steal. All she had found was a little salt and eleven cans of beet soup, German military issue. A year earlier she would have turned up her nose at the beet soup, but upon finding it her stomach rumbled. Except that the discovery of the pitiful state of the pantry had made her feel too guilty to follow through with her planned theft.
“As soon as I get paid, I’ll see what I can do to help you. You’ve been very good to me. Even when the police thought I was a Jew, you vouched for me.”
“That’s right,” Madame Demarais said, eagerly. “We never told anyone you were Spanish, not one. We helped you as best we could.”
It had been a commercial arrangement, of course. They had to protect her. If she were denounced or deported or even arrested and held for a few weeks, they would have lost their tenant. It was shocking to see their desperation, but she’d never harbored any illusions that they could do without her pitiful rents.
Monsieur Demarais was still pacing, and his wife still pleading when Gabriela finally broke away. She made her way from the flat and down the stairwell where she came across a man passed out on the stairwell. Someone had stolen his shoes.
A few feet down, someone had written in charcoal on the concrete wall: “Du beurre pour les francais, de la merde pour les boches.”
Butter for the French, shit for the Germans.
Chapter Eight:
Helmut drove through the rural heart of France, stopping only when he reached the town of Valence, roughly a hundred kilometers south of Lyon. He’d studied his maps and knew when to depart from the main auto routes and onto narrow-shouldered country lanes that took him through small stone villages populated largely by dogs and old women in wooden shoes.
By the time he reached Valence, he hadn’t seen a German for hours and only two other cars. On the outskirts of town he had to pull over to let two lorries go past. The driver of the first truck was a German and gave him a nod of recognition. He fought his way through an increasing number of carts and bicycles as he entered the town. Most people hurried to the side of the road when they saw the German car, but other times he had to lay on his horn.
He pulled up to a warehouse where men were loading lumber. Huge piles of cut boards lay stacked around the perimeter, which was fortified with fences topped with barbed wire.
A man signaled for him to stop as he entered the yard. The man was dressed with a wool cap, a beaten jacket, old boots, but when Helmut rolled down the window and the man leaned against the car, the hands were not calloused.
“What you want?” he asked in broken French with a strong Italian accent.
“I am looking for Pierre.”
“There is not stone here. This is lumber yard.”
It was a deliberate mishearing. Helmut had asked for Pierre, not de la pierre. It was the sign that he had the right man.
“Philipe Brun?” he asked. At the nod, Helmut said, “Where should I bring the car?”
“Around back, behind the horse carts.” The accent had vanished, replaced by proper French. Even his mannerisms had changed and suddenly he looked very French, of a Mediterranean, thick-set type that was common in the south. “We can work without being seen from the road.”
Once he’d pulled around back, the two men opened the false compartment in the trunk and hefted out the box. Helmut had already pried off the lid to get to the ration coupons he’d given Marie-Élise, and Brun lifted the lid. He whistled.
“How much?”
“Five thousand roosters.”
Another whistle. “Where did they come from?”
“Do you expect an answer to that?”
“No, I guess not. But you say there are more?”
“It’s just the start. Question is, do you know what to do with them?”
“I do and so do my men,” Brun said. “You know this will kill a lot of people.”
“Killing is not my goal.”
“No, but it’s the end result. It’ll be bloody. If we’re lucky. If we’re unlucky, pure carnage. Frenchmen will die. There will be reprisals. More will die. What I want to know is if it will be worth it.”
“You’re French,” Helmut said. “You tell me. Is it worth it?”
“It would be worth it to buy France’s freedom. But this isn’t about saving France.”
“It isn’t just about France, no. But what does that matter to you? You’ll work with the English, with the Americans, with the Russians. Belgians, Arabs, Spaniards, whatever it takes. Don’t tell me you draw the line at Germans.”
“I’d deal with the devil himself if necessary.”
Brun looked sincere, he
sounded sincere. But thieves, traitors, and spies infested France.
“Why? Love of France? Is that your only motivation?”
“No motivation is ever that simple or pure. I’ve got other reasons. Hatred, for one. For the German bastards who did this to us.” Brun gave a half-smile. “With apologies to the present company, of course.”
“Of course.”
“And glory.”
“Glory?”
“It’s a fantasy I have. That someday there will be a statue of me on the Champs Elysees. A mounted statue, of course. A big war charger and me atop, holding out a sword to direct the attack.” He smiled. “And underneath, a placard that reads, ’Philipe Brun, Hero of France.’”
“Personal glory, that doesn’t sound very French,” Helmut said. “I thought it was glory for France. Never for one man.”
“I have to keep this little story running in my head, it’s what keeps me going. Otherwise I start to think about St. Claire and then I’m paralyzed. I’m a coward.”
Helmut thought about the lies he told himself, like practicing for the stage, and thought Brun’s method wasn’t so different in the end. “What happened to St. Claire, anyway?”
“Typical story. Caught by his landlady. Suspicious old bag. Aren’t they all? The French secret police have an army of fifty thousand agents, all working for free. Fifty thousand toothless, thin-lipped, shawl-wearing agents, waiting and watching and reporting. Landlady reported him to the secret police, who turned him over to the Gestapo.”
“And they tortured him?”
“No, thank god. They never got a chance. I thought he’d roll over and give up everything. But you never can tell what a man’s going to do. St. Clair killed himself before they could get anything out of him.”
Did he really? Or was Philipe Brun the very member of the secret police who had arrested Helmut’s previous contact? Was he now stumbling into a trap? Or being scammed by St. Claire’s less-scrupulous replacement? Again, no way to be sure.
Truth was, Helmut wasn’t sorry to see St. Clair gone. When Helmut handed over the first box of coins last summer, not long after the meeting in Gemeiner’s castle, St. Clair couldn’t stop staring at the gold coins, licking his lips. Helmut had half-expected him to start rubbing his hands together with a greedy cackle. How many of those coins had simply vanished into St. Clair’s pockets?
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