Still, the loss of their contact had been a blow. Gemeiner had further segmented their operation after that. Too many people knew too much. It increased their vulnerability. So when the operation made contact with another official high in the Vichy regime, Helmut got the contact information via another route. Gemeiner didn’t want to know the man’s name or personal details.
Helmut was relieved to find in Philipe Brun a serious sort. Instinctively, he trusted him more than he’d trusted St. Clair.
“Now, this is very important,” Helmut told Brun. He replaced the lid and opened his briefcase. “You can’t actually spend the gold, not you, not your men, nobody.”
“I thought you said it was clean.”
“Clean? What does that even mean? I didn’t exactly use ration cards to get my hands on this stuff. And even if I’d pulled the gold from my private vault—and I didn’t—it still wouldn’t count as clean.”
“But if that’s the case—”
“I’ll tell you what I told St. Clair. There are dozens of Gestapo agents who are solely concerned with finding gold. The instant this gold starts to circulate, someone’s going to catch wind. More than a few coins and it’ll be someone very important. Then they’re going to look for the source. Do you understand?”
“Yes, I understand.”
“You spend this gold before we work things out with the Americans, sooner or later someone is going to get caught. And that someone will either bite a cyanide capsule or face torture, you understand that.”
Brun stood more stiffly. Good.
“Say it’s one of your men. When he’s tortured, he’ll talk. They always do. And he’ll finger the guy who gave him the gold. That’s you.”
“I understand.”
“You can’t give it to your men. Not yet. When we get closer, when it’s too late to do anything stupid or greedy. For now, you’ve got to hold onto it. Anything else is terribly dangerous.”
“I understand.”
He could see Brun working it through, coming to the same understanding that he had in those months after the meeting with Gemeiner in Prussia.
Helmut snapped shut the briefcase and handed it over. “Now let’s talk about legitimate business. Have you got my shipment?”
“I’ve got the picket rails and the round rails ready to go, and fourteen thousand of your 1.83 millimeters at a lumber yard near the rail station. All I need is the train and the labor.”
“Arranged.”
“Hmm, well the 3.6 millimeter boards will take another six weeks to complete.”
“I need them in four.”
Brun shook his head. “Six to get them all, but I’ll ship as they become available. You should have eighty percent in four weeks.”
It would have to do. He held out his hand and they shook. “Thank you, you have been helpful.”
A sardonic smile. “Anything for the Reich.”
#
Helmut drove all day and reached the border just before dusk. With his cargo deposited and not even the 25,000 reichsmarks in his briefcase to give suspicion, the only thing to worry about now was the discovery of the false compartment, now empty. But there were a million legitimate reasons why a man about the Reich’s business might have such a compartment.
The wipers flicked away the cold rain, now mingled with sleet. The car was low on petrol, but it would be easier to refuel on the other side. Two French officers slowed him down a kilometer south of the border, but when he held up his German papers, they nodded and waved him on. They looked relieved not to have to step out of their enclosed guard posts.
He was not so lucky when he returned to the border crossing. Two men with submachine guns took one look at his papers and ordered him out of his car. They led him back into the stone cottage. A man stood up behind the desk.
“Helmut von Cratz.” It was the young SS officer who had interrogated him on his initial crossing. “Glad to see you have returned so soon. Your absence might have caused me difficulties.”
One look at the hard edge to the man’s expression and a knot of cold fear formed in the depths of Helmut’s gut.
I am an enemy of the Third Reich. I am undermining it from within.
He took on an irritated air. “I don’t have time for this. What do you need?”
“I have orders to arrest you. You are wanted for questioning in Berlin.”
#
A pack of zazous assaulted Gabriela as she walked along the Boulevard Saint Michel, in the Latin Quarter. She didn’t see them coming until they were upon her, pulling at her sleeve and taunting.
“Hey, boche lover. Hey, you eat any German sausage lately?”
She turned, startled. She was returning to Le Coq Rouge for the first time since she’d left with Alfonse. In her handbag was perfume, underwear, lipstick, all bought with Alfonse’s money and for his pleasure. It made her feel dirty, and worse, when she passed hungry Parisians, standing sullenly in queues in front of the shops, she couldn’t help but notice the warm, full feeling in her stomach and feel like she should be suffering with them.
And so she distracted herself by thinking about Monsieur Leblanc’s note. “Please, find out what happened to my son.” She’d pulled it out of her bag at least twenty times.
Leblanc appeared to be laboring under the delusion that Colonel Hoekman was somehow friends of either Alfonse or Helmut, not, as Alfonse seemed to fear, that he’d come to investigate the major personally.
She was so distracted by her thoughts that the zazous caught her by surprise. “Leave me alone. I’m just passing through.”
“Oh, I bet you’re just passing through,” one of them said. “You’re passing through the entire German army, aren’t you?”
The zazous wore oversized jackets with multiple pockets, tied off with belts and half belts, long, greased hair. It was evening, but three of the four men wore dark glasses. Teenagers, really. The tallest of the four wore a colorful scarf around his neck and his hair turned up in a duck tail at the back. A pencil-line mustache, and he walked with a swaying jazz-step as he followed her.
They were passing one of the vegetarian restaurants of the Latin Quarter that were well-known zazou hang-outs. The sound of jazz music came from a pair of open doors that seemed to defy the winter chill.
He reached out and gave her left breast a tweak. She slapped his hand. “Go drink your carrot juice, swing boy.”
“I’ve got a carrot right here. Nice and firm and fresh. You can juice it yourself.”
The other boys laughed.
She’d been accosted by zazous before. Riff-raff. They weren’t political—they wouldn’t have survived so long if they had been—but they were still detested by the French police and the Germans alike. And ordinary Parisians, for that matter, had little use for them.
He reached out and grabbed her bottom. “Come on, boche lover. Ten minutes. That’s all I need. No?” He let out an exaggerated sigh.
Gabriela felt a surge of relief at the sound of disappointed boredom in his voice. Hopefully, this meant they would leave her alone. She wouldn’t come this way again.
A car squealed to a stop at the curb. Out jumped Major Ostermann and his driver. Alfonse grabbed the zazou accosting her, spun him around and punched him in the face. The boy fell back with what sounded like a startled laugh, completely at odds with the shocking violence of the major’s blow. His hands flew to his nose, which spouted blood.
Alfonse and the driver laid into him with their boots. The other three teens scattered. Two of them ran toward the staircase descending into the basement of the building to their right, the same vegetarian restaurant with the jazz music. The other fled down the street.
Alfonse screamed in German as he kicked. The young man curled into a ball and tried to protect himself. Boots to the ribs and head. A moment longer and they would kill him.
She grabbed Alfonse’s arm. “Leave him alone! It was harmless, I wasn’t in danger. Alfonse! Please!”
He snarled something at the
other German and the two men stopped kicking. The young man lay whimpering. Alfonse turned, saw the door swinging after the two who’d run for the building and took out his handgun. He aimed at the window and fired two bullets. The window shattered, screams from inside. The sound of overturning tables and chairs as people scrambled for whatever entrance lay to the rear. Such places always had a rear exit.
Alfonse turned calmly back to Gabriela as he holstered his gun. “Come on, the car is warm.” He took her arm.
She was shaking as she got into the car. She stared back at the young man lying on the sidewalk, groaning, barely moving. He was only a few years younger than she was.
“How was your day?” Alfonse asked in a casual voice. He draped an arm over her shoulder. “Did you buy the hats you were talking about?”
“Alfonse, he was just a boy. I can handle myself.”
“What?” He looked momentarily confused. “Oh, you mean the zazou. Forget about it. It was nothing.”
“You can’t do that, you can’t just attack people like that. He didn’t do anything, you should have just given them a hard word or something, not…what you did.” Her heart was still pounding and she fought to keep her voice from rising into a shriek.
“Oh god, don’t start in on that. The sooner the French deal with these zazous, the better. We had Swing-Heinis, too, you know. Listening to that degenerate negro music. Swing, jazz. It’s a moral rot.”
“But what about the music at Le Coq Rouge?”
“That’s different. You don’t see sexual dancing, moral degeneracy.”
She stared at him, trying to figure out if he was being deliberately ironic.
“Come on, it’s nothing. There won’t even be a police report.” He put a hand on her leg and slid it up under her dress. A raised eyebrow.
“Alfonse, stop it.”
But he didn’t stop. He leaned over and kissed her neck. His hand slipped higher, reached her panties. He slid his finger under the edge. She stifled a gasp and glanced at the driver. The young soldier kept his eyes focused on the road.
“Alfonse,” she whispered. She wanted to push his hand away, but couldn’t.
And then, abruptly, he did stop. He pulled his hand out and his entire body went rigid.
She opened her eyes to see that they’d pulled up in front of Le Coq Rouge. There was another car parked in the alleyway. A soldier wiped it down with a rag, buffing the glossy black surface with the same care one might devote to polishing a general’s boots.
“Alfonse, what is it? Is something wrong?”
The car stopped, but he made no move to get out. “To be honest, I’m not hungry.”
“But I am, I haven’t eaten since breakfast.”
“Fine, we’ll pick up something in Montmarte. I know a little cafe in Pigalle, and then we can go to the cinema.”
Montmarte was a grittier part of the city and full of the same jazz and swing clubs that he’d just been deriding. And Pigalle was the site of official brothels, for the girls en carte, as they said, inspected by the police to keep vice strictly regulated. She didn’t want to go anywhere near the place.
“I don’t know, that doesn’t sound very nice.”
“I’m sick of all these Germans,” he said. “I just want get away from war talk for a few hours. Did you know the Americans bombed Hamburg again? And the Sixth Army is about to give up the ghost in Stalingrad. They’re eating rats. The air drops have been completely cut off. They say by February it will be all over.”
She was pretty sure that such talk could get him in trouble for defeatism. For his sake, she hoped the driver spoke no French. You never knew who might denounce you. Not that she felt any sorrow to hear about the German troubles in Russia.
The major said something to the driver and he started to back the car out of the alley. “It’s all they’ll want to talk about, the war. And it will be so much scheiss, you know? Everybody knows how the war is going.”
He was trying to sound casual, she could tell, but there was an underlying strain that he didn’t seem able to disguise.
“You were fine a minute ago,” she said. “Did something happen?”
“That’s Colonel Hoekman’s car. I don’t want to see him.”
“Wait!” she said. It came out loud enough that the driver turned with a frown. He stopped at the head of the alley, asked Alfonse a question, but the major just gave him a dismissive wave and he pulled back onto Rue Saint Remy.
“We can’t leave,” she said. Colonel Hoekman was there; she had to talk to him. “I told Monsieur Leblanc I’d help at the restaurant tonight.”
“What, you mean you’ve got to work? Why didn’t you say anything before?”
“I do, I promised.”
“You don’t need that job.” He lit a cigarette. A little distance from Hoekman’s car seemed to put him at ease. “What does Leblanc pay you, anyway?”
Pay her? She was lucky he didn’t charge for the privilege of working the room.
Gabriela wasn’t stupid; within five minute of meeting Monsieur Leblanc three months earlier, she’d known exactly what he wanted from her. It wasn’t, as it turned out, the ability to clean and buff a fine Sarreguemines serving platter.
But first, he’d showed her to the back, explained the staff rules, warned her that she’d have to work out with the other dishwashers how to split up the leftovers. And no stealing from the ice box or he’d show her the door.
Meanwhile, Leblanc studied her as he might study cuts of beef brought by the butcher. How much could he charge for this piece, so nice and juicy? She’d felt a twinge of misgiving, tempered only by Christine’s earlier promise that Leblanc would treat her fairly. “He’s not going to corner you in the closet I mean,” she’d promised.
Christine listened to Leblanc explain Gabriela’s new job, and occasionally jumped in with a cynical comment like, “Turn the light on before you enter the kitchen to give the vermin a chance to run for cover,” or, “Keep the back door locked. There’s a pack of small boys who will come in and raid the ice box while your back is turned and Leblanc is too soft to turn them into the police.”
Leblanc permitted these intrusions with nothing more than a scowl. But after explaining how Gabriela should not expect money of any kind for her job, Leblanc now glanced at Christine. “Which sounds like it might be a problem. I understand you’re short of money.”
“I’ve been selling some of my ration cards,” Gabriela admitted, “so that I can afford to use the others. And it’s not like my rations were all that high to begin with.”
“You’ve come to the right place, then,” Leblanc said. “It’s true that our food loses something in presentation by the time our clients send back plates to the kitchen, but we cook with the best ingredients we can get our hands on. It still tastes fine. You’ll never go home at night feeling like a gorged lion, but it’s enough, while you figure out what to do. Job wise, I mean.”
“I don’t understand. Whether I keep washing dishes or not?”
“It helps if you think of dish washing not so much as a job, but as a stepping stone.”
Gabriela looked at Christine. There was a bruise on her cheek and love bites that crept above her high collar. She seemed more tired today, older. It must have been a rough night.
A stepping stone to what? Not onto dry land, that’s for sure.
“I don’t want to hostess,” she said. “I know that’s where the money is, but really, I can’t do that, so if that’s what you—”
“Nobody is going to pressure you,” Leblanc said. “You work in the kitchen, you work in the kitchen. You’re expected to wash dishes and wash them well and nothing else. If you ever change your mind—” He held up his hand. “I know, I know—but if you ever do, then I’ll change my expectations. But that’s your choice.”
True to his word, Leblanc left her alone once she started working. She’d had no money to pay rent or to buy new stockings or any of the other little expenses that added up, and so she’d co
ntinued to sell her ration cards. But she’d at least eaten real food (only slightly used) five nights a week and the work wasn’t strenuous.
More importantly, she’d discovered that Le Coq Rouge was a great place to watch for Germans. There were all types: businessmen, young officers on leave from the Eastern Front, pilots, Gestapo Agents. Practically everything except enlisted men.
She couldn’t see from the kitchen, but she asked Christine or Elyse about the officers, if there were any young, handsome men. Who were they tonight, regular army or maybe SS agents? Whenever it was SS, she’d make her way to the alleyway when they were leaving, to watch for her man. And one day, he’d come. And she’d discovered that his name was Colonel Hans Hoekman. Better yet, he’d be back.
“But what exactly does Leblanc pay you?” Alfonse repeated, interrupting Gabriela’s thoughts.
“It’s not much, but it’s still my job, and I promised.”
“The point is, it can’t be much, and it’s not worth it. If we go back there you’re going to run into Colonel Hoekman. He might still be angry from the other night. What if he wants to interrogate you?”
“I’m just a girl. Surely he won’t care.”
A snort. “He’ll care. You can be damn sure he’ll care. Hoekman never turns down an opportunity to interrogate someone.” Another drag from the cigarette. He offered a cigarette to Gabriela, but she shook her head. “And I’m not just talking about you. Worried about myself, too, goddammit. I didn’t want to sit at that table, but if that bastard says he’s your friend, what choice do you have? You’re French, you don’t understand.”
“I don’t understand about the Gestapo?”
“If you understood, you wouldn’t want to be anywhere near Hoekman. Just let him do his thing and then he’ll move on to the next hunting ground.”
“What’s he doing here?”
“I don’t know, but I guarantee he’s after bigger game than petrol thieves and faggots. That makes him rather eager. And there’s nothing more dangerous than an eager Gestapo agent.”
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