B004U2USMY EBOK

by Wallace, Michael

  “You wanted me for something,” Christine said. “Did he ask you to arrange a menage a trois? I can be convinced.”

  A week earlier, that suggestion might have shocked Gabriela, but now she merely shook her head. “I need your help getting rid of Alfonse when he comes back.”

  “Get rid of him? Whatever for?”

  “I need to go back to Le Coq Rouge. We pulled up and he saw Colonel Hoekman’s car. Soon as he knew the Gestapo was back he wanted nothing to do with the place.”

  “Don’t blame him. What I can’t figure out is why you don’t feel the same way.”

  She considered how much to tell Christine, had been on the verge of confiding moments earlier, until the off-putting bit about the Germans. “I’m trying to help the patron find his son.”

  “You mean Leblanc’s note. I’d love to find him, too, but it’s been three days. Roger’s probably in a camp by now, or ’volunteered’ to work the coal mines. God help him if he really is a homosexual.”

  “Can you help me?”

  “Come on, Gaby, I don’t want to get mixed up in this. I’m here to go back with someone to the baths. It’s been so damn slow at the restaurant, I need to pay my rent. Look at that man over there, he keeps watching us.”

  “The fat, drunk slob?”

  “The rich, drunk slob,” Christine said. “And if I get him into the baths, lather him up, I won’t even need him inside me.” She held out her hands with their long fingers and their carefully groomed nails. “I’ve got everything I need right here.”

  “He’s old, bet he’s old enough to be someone’s grandfather.”

  “Old enough to be rich, you mean.”

  “How about this?” Gabriela said. “I have a little money in the car Alfonse gave me to buy a fur wrap.”

  “And what’ll you tell him when he asks to see your new wrap?”

  “If he bothers to remember, you mean. I’ll tell him I lost money buying some silly thing or other. You know, like girls do.”

  Christine seemed to consider for a moment. “No, I can’t take your money. That’s what the boches are for.”

  “I need your help.”

  “Help getting yourself killed? I don’t think so. God, you’re obsessed with that Gestapo bastard. Can’t for the life of me figure out why.”

  “I’m not obsessed.”

  “Just stay away from Hoekman. Why won’t you trust me on that?”

  “Everyone takes a risk,” Gabriela countered. “They threw you out of the Egyptienne, but here you are, you came back.”

  “That’s different. Worst thing happens, they throw me out a second time and my name gets dragged through the mud again. In case you haven’t noticed, my name wasn’t that clean to begin with. You mess up with Hoekman, how does that turn out? Not too damn well, does it.” She waved to the waiter for another glass of champagne.

  “Fine, I’ll do it myself.”

  “Oh, god.” A big sigh, then finally, a nod. “D’accord. You want Alfonse to go back with another girl? I know just the girl. And she owes me a favor, too.” She stood up, scanned the room. “I saw her here just a minute ago. Ah, there she is.”

  “How long do you need?” Gabriela asked.

  “Five minutes. Get your clothes, find the corporal and have him bring Alfonse’s car around. I’ll meet you out front.” She disappeared and Gabriela went to retrieve her clothes.

  Outside there was no sign of Alfonse’s driver, but the doorman knew just where to find him. He sent a boy off running and a few minutes later, the driver came around with the car. His clothes looked rumpled and one of his shirt buttons was still unfastened. Looks like she’d interrupted his own little party, wherever the enlisted drivers went to relax when they weren’t driving spoiled majors and their mistresses back and forth across Paris.

  She climbed in, said, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to spoil your evening. If you want, maybe—”

  “Je ne comprends pas,” he interrupted in heavily accented French.

  True to her word, Christine swooped down the stairs to the car a few minutes later, once again fully dressed. She got in the car and gave instructions in German to the driver, who sped off.

  “You’ll have to make up a convincing story,” Christine said, “but I think you’re good until morning. The private party I arranged will keep him occupied. What’s your plan?”

  “I need to get the colonel to take me home.”

  “Oh, Gaby.”

  “Think I can do it?”

  “A few nights ago I thought you were crazy for trying to seduce that boche, but you know, I think he was warming up. Too bad Roger had to steal the petrol and mess everything up.”

  “So you think I can do it?”

  “You’re so damn pretty and confident, too. Just keep doing what you were doing and ouais, I think so. But why the hell would you want to?”

  Gabriela leaned back in the seat. “I have my reasons.”

  Chapter Ten:

  Helmut’s train stopped at the vast Anhalter rail station. Papers changed hands; the prisoners shuffled off in different directions. Two hard-faced men in a difficult-to-identify uniform took custody of him.

  The station was chaos. Troops coming and going, supplies, civilians, work crews repairing bomb damage. Half a dozen beams of trickling snowflakes penetrated the station through holes in the glass skin thirty meters up. The main atrium was too cold to melt the snow and they formed white patches on the tile.

  Even as prisoners poured out of the train from France, soldiers herded a different group of men onto a Poland-bound train parked on the opposite platform. They shuffled along, putting up no resistance, and Helmut couldn’t see if they were Jews, communists, homosexuals, or merely enemies of the Reich.

  “May I ask where you are taking me?” he asked the two men as they led him from the station in handcuffs.

  “Just move along.” They loaded him into a car.

  The scene in Berlin reminded Helmut of the heady days after the Anschluss, when joint German and Austrian parades clogged the streets of the city and hundreds of thousands of people joined in celebration.

  Tens of thousands of troops paraded beneath the Brandenburg Gate and along Unter den Linden. Hulking, intimidating Tiger tanks rumbled through the streets, flanked by smaller Panzers and mechanized infantry in trucks. The air lay heavy with fumes.

  But even from his vantage in the military car—twice blocked and rerouted by the parade—Helmut noted important differences from those earlier spectacles. The crowds were thinner, the cheers defiant or anxious instead of jubilant. Half the marching soldiers looked like either fathers or boys, barely able to shave. Not the stiff-marching, cocky troops of a few years earlier.

  What would an observer of a similar scene in Moscow have seen? Were the Russians also pushed to the brink? Or were there endless supplies of fresh Mongolians, Turks, Cossacks, and other yellow-teethed, beady-eyed types from the vast hinterland of the Soviet Empire? Feasting on promises of rape and pillage in the German countryside?

  These thoughts fed his despair.

  The car took him to a nondescript concrete building on Bendlerstrasse, not far from Wehrmacht headquarters. They led him into a room with two chairs and a table and a single overhead light bulb. They handcuffed him to the table, then bolted the door behind him. It was cold in the room and he shivered in a cold sweat. A sharp chemical odor hung in the air, like the kind used to clean up after blood and shit and vomit. His fear grew with every passing minute until he thought he would faint. At last the door opened and he whipped his head around to see the face of his torturer.

  But it was a familiar figure who stepped through the door. He felt a flood of relief.

  “Gemeiner?” Helmut said. His relief turned to cold anger. “What the hell are you playing at?”

  “Very sorry about that,” Gemeiner said. “Here, let me get you out of those cuffs.”

  He was dressed in civilian clothes with no visible weapon. After uncuffing Helmut, he took a sea
t opposite and set a thick envelope on the table between them.

  “Please forgive the theater.”

  “Theater?” Helmut demanded. “Is that what you call it? Do you have any idea what your little show cost?”

  “Ah, yes, the attack on the train. You realize the train would have been attacked or not, regardless of whether you were on it. Of course, I was relieved to hear you were uninjured.”

  “I’m not talking about that. I’ve got a hundred and fifty men in France left unattended. No doubt word has spread of my arrest. If they think my business is defunct, the STO will round up some of them. The rest might be drafted into Todt work crews. The lucky ones. There are Jews, Poles, refugees. Do you have any idea how hard I worked to put together that team and hold it?”

  “Noted,” Gemeiner said. “I’ll put in a call as soon as we’re done.”

  “But why? Why not just send a courier? Or better yet, pick up the phone?”

  “You came to the attention of an overzealous SS agent. He called for advice.”

  The young captain at the border crossing near the Molynaux farm.

  Gemeiner continued, “It was only with the greatest of fortune that he called our man instead of going higher up to Berlin or calling someone who would have alerted Colonel Hoekman. But you see, we couldn’t do nothing. Instead, we had to pretend to take you into custody and continue the fiction all the way to Berlin.”

  “Ah, I see.” His anger began to fade. “So what now?”

  “Now we create a false file and send you on your way. You were investigated, found clean, and we’ll be sure to keep an eye on you just in case. In the meanwhile, take a few days, visit your wife, look after your affairs in the Reich.”

  “And Hoekman knows nothing?” Helmut asked.

  “No, not yet. But he’s getting close. How close, we don’t know, but if he keeps sniffing around, it’s only a matter of time. He’s smart as Satan, we can’t fool him forever.” Gemeiner folded his hands in front of him. They showed liver spots and extruding veins, but the old soldier’s hands still looked strong and firm. “It might be necessary to sacrifice your friend.”

  “Major Ostermann? No, I don’t think so.”

  “He is engaged in a number of petty illegalities. It wouldn’t be hard for you to forge a few invoices, make it look like he’s requisitioning more than he reports. Let them think they’ve found their culprit and they’ll move on to something else.”

  It was a repellant thought, especially in light of what Helmut had been facing just moments earlier. Things would go very badly for his friend if he fell into the hands of the Gestapo.

  “Apart from the obvious treachery of turning over an innocent to our enemies,” Helmut said, “there’s a flaw in your plan. Alfonse is a talker. He talks too much after a glass of wine. What’s he going to say when they rip out his fingernails?”

  “Nothing much, there’s a reason we didn’t bring him into the conspiracy. He knows nothing, he can tell them nothing.”

  “But he’ll say he does, if only to get them to leave him alone,” Helmut said. “And then they’ll have reason to dig into my organization and they’ll still find us out.”

  Gemeiner looked thoughtful. “You might be right. Any suggestions?”

  “We could have Hoekman killed. Make it look like the maquis.”

  “No, that’s impossible,” Gemeiner said.

  “Not at all, it’d be quite easy. I can probably arrange it myself. There’s a Jew who works for me, his brother’s family was recently—”

  “I’m not saying he couldn’t physically be killed. But when you kill someone like Hoekman you double the resources searching for you until pretty soon you’ve got someone you can’t kill. No, I can’t risk it, not until we’re sure Hoekman is looking into us and nobody else.”

  “Problem is, we need a man on the inside, someone to get close to Hoekman, and we haven’t got one.”

  “Not yet,” Gemeiner said with a smile that looked vaguely predatory. He unwrapped the cord on the envelope in front of him and removed some papers. “Tell me, what do you know about Gabriela Reyes?”

  Helmut frowned. “The prostitute from Le Coq Rouge? Gaby? How do you know about her?”

  “We have files on everyone who works in the restaurant and many of the clients as well. I’ve been trying to figure out who or what has drawn Hoekman’s attention. It’s not that young thief he collared last week. He was a nobody.”

  He wondered who fed Gemeiner his information. It could have been anyone from the dishwasher with the hook to one of the working girls, to one of the many Germans or French who dined every evening in Le Coq Rouge.

  “I figured out she was Spanish, but other than that, I have no idea.”

  “Her father was a Republican in the civil war. Fled to France a couple of years before the present conflict. Educated man. A little too bookish for his own good. Raised his daughter as an atheist, didn’t know how to keep his mouth shut about politics.”

  “Really?” He remembered how he’d dismissed Gaby as just another prostitute.

  Gemeiner slid a file across the table. “The French, bless their bureaucratic little hearts, made dossiers of half a million foreigners living in the country. They’ve been useful to a good number of parties, and not just the Gestapo. Go ahead, read.”

  The documents were in French, but not original; someone had retyped the file on a German typewriter and there were a number of spelling and diacritical errors. Gemeiner’s monolingual secretary? Or was there a warehouse-sized room somewhere filled with a thousand young women with typewriters, copying anything and everything that might be of use? His French reading skills were weaker than his speaking ability and he could feel Gemeiner’s impatience as he labored over the file.

  For a moment he suffered a shock to discover that Gaby was only sixteen years old, but then he saw that the uppermost document was from early 1939. She would be twenty now, but still. It was a hard world that turned a girl from a good family to prostitution. The rest of the story was all too typical.

  “I don’t see anything surprising here,” he said. “Her mother and older brother died in Barcelona. Killed by fascists. The girl and her father escaped to Paris, where the father supported himself by writing for a newspaper and giving Spanish and English lessons. The girl lived with her mother in France for several years as a child, that’s why she blends in so easily.” He thumbed through the last document, which included an arrest warrant. “And apparently the father was picked up as a communist sometime during the invasion and the girl is on her own.”

  “Read the signature of the arresting agent,” Gemeiner said.

  “Obersturmführer Hans Hoekman.” He looked up. “Is that our Hoekman? I don’t recognize the rank.”

  “Senior Storm Leader. Like a lieutenant, but usually Waffen-SS. I don’t know, but it appears that Hoekman was in an early military unit before transitioning to the Gestapo.”

  “Unusual to have risen so fast,” Helmut said. “He must have impressed someone with his cunning and cruelty.”

  “That you can say such a thing without a hint of irony is a certain indictment of what our nation has become, don’t you think?”

  “Quite.” Helmut considered. “So Gaby’s father was arrested by our own Hoekman. That’s a hell of a coincidence.”

  “That’s exactly what I was thinking.”

  Helmut looked at Hoekman’s signature, smooth and sure, a man who was supremely confident of his own judgment. “What about the girl’s father? He still alive?”

  “I don’t know, I haven’t been able to find out. Probably not. Let’s be realistic, he’s a communist and it’s been two and a half years. But I’m guessing the girl doesn’t know he’s dead, or probably dead.”

  “I’d noticed she’d showed up at Le Coq Rouge shortly after the colonel. I wondered for a minute if she were somehow working for him and the whole seduction attempt and then how she tried to help the young thief was an act to put Alfonse off his guard.”


  “It’s still a possibility,” Gemeiner said. “Stranger things have happened.”

  “I doubt it. No, she’s found him, she’s trying to get close enough to either figure out what happened to her father or get revenge, if she already knows”

  The older man collected the papers and returned them to the envelope, tied off the string. He pulled out a cigarette, offered one to Helmut who declined. He lit, took a drag and said, “Tell me what happened when the girl tried to seduce the colonel.”

  “Not much at first. But Gabriela is excessively pretty and even more persistent. I think she might have gone home with Hoekman, if not for the incident with the petrol thief.”

  “And that. Tell me how it happened.”

  He explained exactly what he saw and his impressions of the event. “Could be that Roger was working for the maquis, but mostly, I think he chose an unfortunate target for petty theft. In any event,” Helmut added. “Hoekman is still around. He left a message a couple of days ago asking if I wanted to join him at the restaurant.”

  “And? Did you go?”

  “That would have been tonight. Arrest and transportation to Berlin has a way of interfering with one’s social calendar.”

  “It occurs to me that Gabriela Reyes is not the only exceptionally attractive person you will find at Le Coq Rouge.”

  “They’re all pretty,” Helmut said. “Monsieur Leblanc has a good eye for talent. Although some of the girls have a hard look around the eyes, if you know what I mean.”

  “I’m talking about you, Helmut. You’ve got just the look that makes the frauleins swoon, or in this case, the mademoiselles.”

  Helmut couldn’t help the snort. “Assuming that were true, what does that have anything to do with anything?”

  “You’re only what? Twenty-eight?”

  “Twenty-nine. Thirty next month.”

  “But a young man, good-looking, and wealthy. From a prosperous family. Daddy left him the business, but he didn’t stop there, he doubled it, tripled it even. A kid like that is going somewhere. And as an important businessman, unlikely to be shipped off to reinforce the Sixth Army outside Stalingrad. Don’t underestimate the value of that in these hard times.”