“Don’t give up hope, you’ll see. You’ll bounce back. All you need is some medicine.”
“I have no money.”
“I’ll find help.”
#
“Did they appreciate my precious Beaufort?” Helmut asked as she climbed into the car. He pulled away at once.
“I gave it to them.”
She didn’t want to face Helmut’s disdain. He’d just shrug and say it wasn’t his problem, it was a tough war, there were lots of hungry people, the Germans had it tough too, or some similar merde.
But what else could she do? She had no money; even Madame Demarais hadn’t thought much of the few coins she’d left. A meal, maybe two if they stretched it. Who, then? Alfonse would just laugh, she couldn’t borrow from Christine again. Maybe if Gabriela had kept working, Monsieur Leblanc would have loaned her a few francs. Or if she’d made any progress in locating his son. Could she lie to him, or lead him to believe she had something from Colonel Hoekman?
“How were they?” Helmut asked after a few minutes of silence.
“Hungry and sick.”
“How hungry?”
“Starving. And the monsieur has a horrible cough, down here in the chest.”
“Dry cough or wet?”
“Wet, like he breathed in some milk and it’s stuck down in his lungs.”
“Was he shivering?”
“Constantly,” she said, “but the apartment has no heat, so of course he’s cold.”
“And when he coughed up the phlegm, what did it look like?”
“I don’t know, I wasn’t looking at his snot.”
“I think he has pneumonia,” Helmut said.
“You don’t have to be a doctor to guess that, but so what? They can’t do anything about it. They can’t see a doctor, they have no money for medicine. I couldn’t even give them a few francs for food and coal.”
“Actually, a doctor would be time-consuming. I know a man in Dijon who could probably see him right away, but, well. . .”
“There’s no way to get to Burgundy.” She tried to stay calm, but his words gave her hope. “I think they’re going to die, first the monsieur, then his wife. Unless someone does something about it.”
“They don’t have to die. Let’s forget the doctor. What he needs is a chemist. Sulfite drugs are the surest treatment. They’re hard to get, but not impossible, if you want them badly enough. You’ll have to help them.”
“Helmut, I can’t help. I have no money and no contacts.”
“Yes, but I can and I do.” He took the next right, then a left. “We’ll make a quick detour.”
“Really? Thank you so much.” Her gratitude was deep and genuine.
“There are all sorts of things money and contacts can buy. Not just drugs and doctors.” He turned and fixed her with a significant look.
“Yes, so your friend is always telling me.”
“Alfonse is a braggart. You can’t believe everything he tells you.”
“You want me to move in with you instead, is that it? You have more money and contacts than he does, so you’d make a better lover. I should have known.”
“Gaby, give me a little credit. I’m trying to help you.”
“How.”
“I have friends and those friends talk to other people and sometimes this information can be quite useful. Tracking down missing people, for example. People taken by the Gestapo.”
“What? Do you know something about Roger Leblanc? Is he okay?”
“I have no idea. But I have heard about another of the Gestapo’s victims. He’s a Spaniard by the name of Ricardo Reyes.”
“Papá!”
Chapter Fourteen:
“I have to confide in someone,” Gabriela said. “I have no friends, you understand.”
“I’m your friend.”
“Yes, except you. And I have no family, except my father, and I don’t know where he is or even if he’s still alive.”
“Then go ahead and tell me,” Christine urged. “I’m your friend and always interested in hearing your problems, at least where a good piece of gossip is concerned.”
Gabriela sighed. “This isn’t gossip and you can’t act like it is.”
“Okay, I won’t. So what happened after you left your old landlords?”
“We got the sulfides, just like Helmut promised.”
“Wait, hold that for a second.” Christine turned to study a pair of bicyclists who passed on the left. They were two older men and whatever she’d been looking for on the path through the forest, this apparently wasn’t it. She turned back to Gabriela. “Go on.”
“Are you looking for someone?” Gabriela asked. “Is that why you dragged me out here?”
Two hours down the Champs Elysees and through the 16th Arrondissement on foot to reach the park of Bois de Boulogne. Her feet were tired; she wanted to sit on a bench and talk, but Christine insisted on walking up and down the paths through the forest. Mostly old people and kids who should have been in school.
“Ouai,” Christine said.
“Well, who?”
“You’ll understand when you see. Go on, tell me what happened.”
“So after I brought the drugs to the Demarais, Helmut took me to his office to translate something from Spanish. I kept thinking he was going to find some weak premise to stop at his flat. Try to seduce me.”
“If he did, it would be a first. He’s famously and faithfully married.”
“Alfonse reminds me that every time his name comes up.”
“If your friend looked like Helmut, you’d try to remind the girls of that, too,” Christine said.
“Hmm, well, he’s not my type. Too proud and Nordic looking.”
“Isn’t that like saying he’s too rich or too good looking?”
Christine’s grip tightened on Gabriela’s arm. Two young men came around the bend. They were smoking, laughing. Gabriela caught a fragment of conversation as they approached on foot. “. . .and the old man actually quoted Petain. Work is the duty of every Frenchman. ’No,’ I said, ’Bending over and taking one up the arse from the boches is the duty of every Frenchman.’”
The other young man guffawed. “And?”
“Bastard chased me out of the house with his cane. I barely had a chance to grab my sunglasses.”
The two men had slicked-back hair, carried rolled-up umbrellas over their arms even though the sky was clear, and slouched along in that idle gait so beloved of the zazous. Gabriela stiffened in memory of her last encounter.
But they merely smiled, gave an ironic tip of their non-existent hats. The one who’d been sharing the anecdote said, “Good day, ladies. It’s a lovely day to be idle and beautiful and French, n’est-ce pas?”
Christine turned to watch them go, then shook her head. “Maybe I was wrong.” She sounded disappointed.
“You came here to study zazous?”
“Not exactly, no. So Helmut didn’t seduce you.”
“No, he didn’t even try,” Gabriela said.
“Tant pis pour toi. Well, Alfonse is good enough for a Spanish girl. And a hell of a lot safer than that Gestapo agent.”
“Helmut offered me a job. Offered you a job, too.”
Christine frowned. “A job? What kind of job does he think we could do?”
“He didn’t say. He made it sound like there were a number of things. A little of everything, I guess. It was very strange, I can’t explain it.”
“There’s an explanation. I know the type. He’s trying to save us from a degenerate life.”
“Like how you rescued me that day in the flea market?”
“That was different. You were starving. We’re not starving. Helmut wants to save us from a degenerate life. No thanks for me. I prefer to earn my living lying in bed. It’s an easy living. You going to take the job?”
“Maybe. It will give me something to do while Alfonse is out. There’s something else.”
“Ouai?”
Gabriela took a de
ep breath. Here was the danger, when you opened your mouth and you confided in someone. And that someone confided in someone else and that someone else denounced you for an extra ration coupon or to get her POW husband assigned to an easier work detail.
Christine must have read her thoughts. “Don’t worry, I can be discrete.”
“Are you sure?”
“You’ve never heard me admit that Monsieur Leblanc is a captain in de Gaulle’s Free French, have you?”
“Christine!”
“I’m just joking.”
“That’s the kind of joke that gets people deported.”
“Why, are you going to report this conversation to someone?”
“Of course not,” Gabriela said.
“And neither am I.” Her voice held an uncharacteristically serious edge. “You can trust me one hundred percent.”
“I’ve got a problem. I got close to Colonel Hoekman and it turned out all wrong.”
“Of course it did. I warned you.”
“You did, but I had no choice. I had to do it, I had to get close to him.”
“For god’s sake, why?” Christine asked.
She took a deep breath. “I’m looking for my father. Hoekman is the man who arrested him.”
“Oh.” And then, a moment later. “Oh, I see.”
“I’ve been looking for my father for two and a half years. Two and a half years of nothing, of worrying and wondering, and dead ends. And now I finally had a chance to do something. But what am I going to do? He’s Gestapo and I don’t have anything to trade for my father’s freedom.”
“Except for a pair of tits and a nice wet spot between the legs.”
“Exactly.”
Christine looked thoughtful, and Gabriela could see her working everything out. Why Gabriela took the job at the restaurant, why she’d questioned the hostesses about the officers who’d come to the restaurant, why she’d eventually decided to take a job as a hostess herself. Reevaluating everything that had ever happened between them, just as Gabriela had reevaluated their initial meeting in the marché aux puces.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” Christine asked.
“You can’t just open your mouth and blurt these things out, not these days.”
“Yes, but I’m your friend.”
“I didn’t know that, I just knew that. . .well, that day in the flea markets.”
“You mean because I got you the job at Le Coq Rouge,” Christine said. “You thought I was just another hustler, trying to pimp you out for some favor with Leblanc.”
“Well, yes,” Gabriela admitted.
“Let me tell you something. I know what I’m doing, I’m not an idiot. Just because I’m trying to make the most of my situation doesn’t mean I never think about how things might be different. If this war hadn’t come, if I hadn’t gone into the One-Two-Two Club the first time. The thing is, you can either starve with dignity or you can forget about what’s good and proper and whether a girl should feel certain things or not. You can either die or you can find a way to stay alive.”
Gabriela thought about how her body had responded to Alfonse’s touch and how she knew it shouldn’t. There was some truth in what Christine said.
“I saw you that day,” Christine said. “And you looked so fresh and beautiful. So innocent.”
“Innocent. After everything I’ve seen?”
“You can be hit hard by the world and still be innocent.”
“So what, you thought you’d save me?”
“Well, help you,” Christine said. “Yes.”
Gabriela let out a laugh that felt more than a little bitter. “Isn’t that like Helmut’s plan, in reverse? You’re going to rescue me, but not by saving me from prostitution, but by pushing me into it.”
“We’re not prostitutes, and you know it. A prostitute changes sex for money. Do you really think that’s all we’re doing?”
“I don’t know,” Gabriela said.
They were silent for a moment as they continued along the path, then Christine said, “So Hoekman wants to trade sex for information about your father?”
“I’d make that trade, but the Gestapo doesn’t play nice. They don’t make a trade one for one. They take what you offer and they take something else, too.”
“You knew that already, but okay. What does Hoekman want?”
“What does he demand, you mean? There’s no wanting. He demands me to betray Alfonse.”
Christine stopped with a frown. “Really, how?”
Gabriela described how Hoekman had hauled her into the truck and made his demands, but left off the details about searching for someone called “the private.”
“It’s easy to see how Alfonse would attract Gestapo attention,” Christine said at last. “He spends too much, he talks too loud. No way the army pays him enough for that kind of lifestyle. He’s skimming the cream off the top and anyone can see it.”
“You’ve just described anyone and everyone in Paris who is living the good life. What makes Alfonse special?”
“Maybe nothing. He’s boastful and lives in a big, flashy way. Like a general. Only maybe a general can get away with that, but not a major. In fact, he might have just irritated one of those generals, who thought he was living a little too. . .loud, I guess you could say. Maybe the general set the Gestapo hounds on his trail.” Christine nodded, clearly liking her theory. “And about this sex. Did you give in to Hoekman already?”
“No, not yet. I made him promise to bring me something about my father, first.”
“That’s good. It’s your only tool, so don’t give it up easily.”
“I won’t.”
“But when the time comes, spread ’em and spread ’em eagerly, know what I mean? Moans, kisses, whatever the bastard wants. In the mouth or up the arse, it doesn’t matter. Give him the whole wheel of cheese and let him eat it. It’s just sex and you can pretend he’s anyone and you’re anything. Just get through it and live to fight another day. It’s just sex.”
“You said that already.”
“Tell yourself it’s just sex enough times and you start to believe it.”
“That was my plan all along,” Gabriela said. “Colonel Hoekman has been talking to Helmut, by the way. He told Helmut my father is still alive. Why would he do that?”
“They are friends of a sort, aren’t they?” Christine said. “They’ve come to the restaurant together more than once. So Hoekman talked, that’s good. It corroborates the story.”
“I don’t know what to think. I don’t like Helmut, and I don’t think he likes me, but he doesn’t scare me like the Gestapo. I asked him if he knew anything more about my father, but of course he said he doesn’t. I need to convince him to dig deeper.”
“So you are thinking of seducing Helmut. Well, good for you, if you can pull it off.” Christine’s voice abruptly changed. “Oh, my god, look at that. I knew it.”
They’d emerged from the woods to find themselves in a clearing in an isolated part of the park. There was a dry fountain, surrounded by benches. Dead, wet leaves lay unswept and blown into piles. The isolated corner was a perfect place for a meeting away from hostile attention. That’s just what they found.
There were at least twenty young people idling about the clearing. The teens slouched on benches, smoking and playing cards. Umbrellas, thick-soled shoes, boys with long, narrow ties, girls with bright red lipstick and sunglasses. Two more arrived on bicycles from the path on the far side. A girl sat on one boy’s lap and the two were kissing. The next bench over, the scene played out with two kissing boys.
Gabriela and Christine stopped at the edge of the clearing. A few faces glanced in their direction, then, apparently deciding they were neither friend nor enemy, turned back to what they were doing.
“I thought I was going blind,” Christine said in a low voice, “but I was right.”
“Yeah, so what?” Gabriela said. “The secret meeting of the International Order of Zazous? Lazy, shiftless youth
of the world unite? Come on, let’s go.”
“Look at those boys, kissing.”
“So what?” Gabriela asked. “They should just be glad we’re not informers.”
“Look!”
Irritated, she paid the kissing boys more attention. And stopped, shocked. “Oh, my god.”
“You see,” Christine said, triumphant. “You see. He’s not dead, he got out. My god, somehow he got out.”
And how was that? Could that even be possible? One of the kissing boys was Roger Leblanc, recently arrested by the Gestapo.
Chapter Fifteen:
Colonel Hoekman’s office in the 16th Arrondissement had an expansive view across the Seine toward the Eiffel Tower and the big Nazi flag at its top. There was a breeze today and the flag snapped arrogantly over the city. The first thing Hoekman did when his lieutenant led Gabriela into the room was draw the curtains.
There was a shelf by the window, but instead of books or photos, it held three glass cages. In each cage was a snake and a bowl of water.
The lieutenant gave Hoekman a Heil Hitler and left her alone with the colonel.
“Sit please,” he said. He locked the door behind him, then removed a bottle from the liquor cabinet. “You want a drink?”
“No thank you, Hans.” Gabriela took a seat on the couch.
“Drink, I insist.”
She fought the tremble in her hand as she took the offered drink, took the tiniest sip possible, then set the drink on the table. Hoekman sat down and put a warm, sweaty hand on her leg.
“So, my dear. The thing you need to understand about these things is they take time.”
“You’ve been practicing your French,” Gabriela said.
“Two months ago, I speak none of it,” he said. There was a hint of pride in his voice that Gabriela took note of. “Only two months, not bad, right?”
“Very impressive.” It was true. His accent was better, his vocabulary less searching. Who could learn a language in two months?
“Every day I practice, I learn new words. I have a tutor, he is best in France. The thing is, I cannot know this country unless I speak its tongue.”
“What brought you to France?”
His mouth tightened. “To serve the Reich.”
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