But then Helmut pulled back. “What?” she asked. “Is something wrong? We have time.”
He flushed. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that.”
“You mean Alfonse?” She was having a hard time catching her breath. “He’s just. . .that is, I don’t want to say he’s just a ration book, but you know I don’t love him. I was doing what I needed to survive and if we—”
“No, I know what that’s about. I’m sure Alfonse doesn’t feel any special attachment for you, either. Not that he’d be happy about what I just did, but frankly, I don’t give a damn about that. The thing is, I’m married.”
“Oh, of course. I’m so sorry, I can’t believe I forgot.”
“There’s so much distance between Loise and me, and there’s the war, and, well, it’s easy to pretend that I’m not married, or that it doesn’t matter. Circumstances, you know. I could do whatever, and she’d probably forgive me. She already has, and I haven’t even done anything. But it still matters, I still need to remember that. I’m married,” he repeated, as if trying to convince himself.
“I’m sorry,” she said again. “I forgot.”
“Don’t be sorry, it’s not your job to remember. That’s my job.” He stood up, made for the door. “I’ve got to get some air. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
She watched him leave, confused.
#
Helmut wasn’t much of a smoker, didn’t even carry a cigarette case, although he enjoyed a cigar when offered one, but he understood the appeal. He needed something to calm his nerves. And he was torn by guilt and desire.
“I can’t do it,” he muttered.
A man pushed by in the corridor. The train rattled and Helmut caught his balance against the wall.
Gaby was there, he had her. A few seconds longer and she’d have torn off her clothes. She wanted him, she was dying with desire.
It was probably good for his plans that he’d walked away. Her desire would build even in absence. God knows his own was about to explode. He could take her to her father, let her emotions climb until they left her wrecked, and then take her to a hotel room. Too late to return to Paris today. A glance, a touch, a sympathetic word, and the seduction would be complete.
They would make love, then make love again. By the time they left the hotel she would love him. And that love would be mirrored by the deepest possible hate for Colonel Hoekman. He would whisper his plan, she would agree, and then he would send her on a one-way mission. Gemeiner would be pleased.
What would his wife say? Nothing. She wouldn’t even imagine him contemplating such a betrayal. How about Marie-Élise?
Of course you would do it, Marie-Élise would tell him. Your precious war is more important than love or promises, or trust.
“I can’t do it,” he said aloud. “I can’t.”
But he had to.
#
Gabriela shuddered in recognition when she glanced out the window as the train pulled in the station in Strasbourg. It was raining and the droplets running down the window turned the industrial outskirts of the city into an impressionist painting in gray cement and steel.
A single factory stood out from the rest in its angular lines and twin smokestacks. She reached into her purse and unfolded Roger’s drawing. It was the same factory, no question, right down to the dark streaks on the windowless walls. The only difference was that Roger had wiped away the surrounding industrial zone and put the factory on a flat plain of dead trees. Here and there were stumps, or maybe the footings of other buildings, long since obliterated.
Helmut peered over her shoulder. “That’s creepy.”
“Look out the window.”
He did. The train inched past the factory. “Even creepier. What’s with the rooster with the human face?”
“You don’t recognize him?”
“Should I?”
“Roger Leblanc. This is his drawing. He put his own face on the rooster.”
“Whatever for?”
“I have no idea.”
Helmut looked out the window at the factory, then back to Gabriela with a frown. “How did you get this drawing?”
“Roger dropped it in the park and I picked it up. I’ve been trying to figure out what it means, especially that rooster on the wall.”
“Le Coq Rouge.” The Red Rooster.
“And why does the rooster have Roger’s face on it?” she asked.
“I don’t know. You say you found this in the park?” A frown came over his face. “But when? Hoekman arrested him weeks ago. If he’d seen this place already, then why—”
“Your timing is off,” she said. “I saw him two days ago, in the Bois de Boulogne. He was with his friends, a bunch of zazous. The JPF beat them and then there was a mass arrest.”
“Two days ago? You saw him in the Bois de Boulogne two days ago? How is that even possible?”
She told him how Christine had spotted Roger in the Bois de Boulogne and how they’d tracked him to an isolated corner of the park. How she and Christine had returned dressed as zazous and found Roger drawing by himself. And about the attack.
The train came to a complete stop and an official knocked on the door, checked their transit papers. He glanced at Helmut, studied Gabriela, then said something in German. Helmut nodded. The official left them alone.
“He says ten minutes, then we can get off,” Helmut said. He was silent for a long moment, looking out the window at the factory and occasionally glancing back to Roger’s drawing. “I’d heard the Gestapo arrested several dozen zazous. They’re being shipped off to work details. That must be the raid you saw. But this part about Roger, how is he free?”
“That’s what I’ve been asking myself.”
“There’s only one answer. You remember what I told you?”
“You said if I saw Roger Leblanc free, I should be suspicious.”
“I thought it was a rhetorical question. But you’d actually seen him, hadn’t you.”
“It’s Roger’s doing, isn’t it? Hoekman let him go and he promised to spy for the Gestapo in return. He told them about the secret zazous parties in the Bois de Boulogne and that’s how they arrested them. He was a collaborator. He’s denounced his friends.”
“I’m afraid so.”
It was one thing to guess, another to hear it laid out, naked and ugly. “How could he do such a horrible thing?”
“Who knows? We don’t know what they did to him or what they threatened. These are desperate times, Gaby. People resort to desperate measures.”
“You’re never so desperate as to betray people you love.”
Helmut fell silent with a troubled expression. She wondered what horrors he’d seen to make him doubt what she thought a self-evident declaration.
“Roger must have come through this train station,” she said, “but why would he draw that particular building?”
“They brought him here, that’s what must have happened.” He looked out the window. “It’s the same place they keep your father.”
She caught her breath. “My father’s working in a factory? And that’s what Roger was doing? What is it, work duty for dissidents?” She felt a rising hope. Her father, alive and on a labor crew. He’d be fed, at least. Probably healthy enough to keep working.
Helmut shook his head. His expression was grim. “It’s not a factory, Gaby.”
“It’s not? Then what is it?”
“It’s an insane asylum.”
Chapter Twenty-one:
The Strasbourg Center for the Criminally Insane.
The wording over the gate was in French, Alsatian, and German. Both the Alsatian and the German were decipherable only through their proximity to the French, but the German, with its Gothic letters, appeared especially menacing. One word stood out: geisteskrank.
Below: Deadly Force Zone - Unauthorized Access Forbidden.
A pall of coal smoke and a chemical smell hung over the town. It had stained the factories, and the windowless, cement thrust of the asylum was u
glier than most. Dark streaks down the side of the building. An oily smoke seeped from the stacks.
Gabriela and Helmut approached the gates. The feeling of dread had been swelling since they stepped off the train.
“Papá isn’t insane.”
“It does look like a factory,” Helmut muttered. “We’ve even industrialized insanity.”
“I’m telling you, there’s nothing wrong with him. He’s not insane, never has been.”
“That’s the wonder of the thing. We’re in a war and that’s what industry does in war, when faced with shortages. It finds substitute materials. You don’t have enough petrol so you make it from coal. Not enough grain, you invade Poland. There weren’t enough insane people in the Reich, so we had to make more.”
A pair of chain fences surrounded the building at roughly fifty meters. Curled bundles of razor wire filled the space between the fences and looped cruelly along the top. A guard post squatted outside the gates, with a second inside the second fence. A guard at the first post inspected their papers while a second kept his submachine gun trained on them. Helmut showed his papers and answered the questions curtly in German. The guards let them pass.
To enter the compound was to enter another world. A world of concentration camps, islands of suffering that dotted the landscape. She heard the whispered names in her head: Fort de Romainville, Le Vernet, Buchenwald. They devoured people.
The double barrier of chain link and razor wire blocked most of the view of the outside world, except for a handful of buildings that rose on the right side just high enough to see. From behind came the hiss of train brakes. In front, a desolate expanse between the gates and the asylum stairs. Bare dirt, without a tree or blade of grass. Two more guards stood by the door, alert as they approached.
Helmut showed his papers, but the guards waved them in without further inspection.
The smell of formaldehyde and harsh chemical cleaners assaulted her as she entered. The floors in the foyer were bare linoleum, alternating green and white squares, visibly worn from years of foot traffic.
A man in a white lab coat and rubber gloves to the elbow emerged from a door to the left. A nurse pushing a man in a wheelchair came from the hallway to the left and turned onto the main corridor. The eyes of the man in the wheelchair were bloodshot, vacant. He wore a dingy gray straightjacket and a leather mask that covered his mouth and strapped at the back of the head.
Gabriela stared, transfixed with dread. As they passed, the man’s eyes swung in her direction and she drew back in horror. The nurse snapped something in German and jerked his wheelchair around so he could no longer make eye contact.
Helmut took her arm. “You can do this.”
“Yes, I can. I can do this and I will.”
Helmut spoke with a doctor in a white lab coat, who pointed down the hall and gave instructions in German.
They passed through another locked and guarded door. Beyond lay a long hallway with doors on either side. Each door had a barred opening high up and a window lower down with a slider. The smell of industrial cleaners grew stronger the deeper they penetrated the building, mixed with the occasional sharp tang of something else from the rooms they passed.
Their footsteps on the bare cement were the only sound for most of the hallway and then someone stirred in a room to their right. A man hurled himself against the door and screamed in French, so high-pitched and babbling she could only pick out a few words. And then, as they continued, he lapsed into loud, shuddering sobs.
“Maman! Où est ma maman?”
Gabriela couldn’t help herself. “Who are you?” she asked in French. “What is your name?”
But he only screamed incoherently.
Her French woke the other inmates. The hallway filled with a clamor of shouting, moans, pleas. A woman cried in Italian. Begging, pleading.
“What?” she said. “I can’t understand. Do you speak French?”
Helmut pulled her along. “Gaby, listen to me. You can’t, you’ll just cause trouble. Only your father, that’s all we can see. These other people. . .there’s nothing you can do.”
“My god.” Gabriela resisted the urge to clamp her hands over her ears. “How long has my papá been here?”
“I don’t know,” Helmut said. “At least two years.”
Two years! Who could survive two years in such a place? Another doctor passed, pushing a cart. There were straps and electrical devices, forceps and long syringes. Something dark and greasy stained his white apron.
“Are they really doctors?” she asked. “Please tell me they’re not.”
“Real doctors, real nurses.”
“But doctors and nurses help people, they don’t. . .do they?”
“Sometimes they do.” His voice was grim.
“But so many, all in one place?”
“These people always exist. They’re everywhere in small numbers. What happens when cruelty is no longer proscribed? When sadistic behavior is not just tolerated, but sanctioned? Even enforced?” He shook his head. “It’s not hard to staff insane asylums. Doctors, nurses, guards, there are always volunteers.”
He started to say something else, but they pushed through another door and an orderly demanded something. Helmut pulled out his papers.
The orderly gestured for them to follow. “Kommen Sie mit mir.”
The man stopped in front of one of the doors and took out a ring of keys, counted through them one after another. This hall was quieter. In fact, Gabriela would have thought the cells empty, except for a solitary cough toward the end.
The orderly swung the door open and gave an expansive, almost ironic gesture for them to enter. Gabriela stepped through, heart pounding.
Dear god, let him be okay. Let him be healthy.
A man sat in a chair, his back to the door, facing the corner. He wore no restraints and rested his hands on his lap. There was a cot attached to the wall with a single, thin blanket. A metal chamber pot in the corner. One wall was scratched and gouged, as if by the claws of some animal, trying desperately to escape from its cell.
No books, no papers, nothing to occupy his hands or his mind. A bare stone wall, bare concrete floor. A single dim light bulb overhead. Two years in this place? Her father had once claimed it was impossible to be bored, there were too many things to read and learn. But he’d never imagined a room three meters by three meters, with nothing but a single light bulb to stare at day after hellish day.
“Go to him,” Helmut murmured.
His words jolted her from her stupor. “Papá? Soy yo, tu hijita. Ya vengo por ti.”
Her father didn’t answer, didn’t turn, even as she crossed to his side. She bent and took his hands. For a second she thought it was the wrong room; this couldn’t be her father. He looked so old. His face drawn, his hair gone gray, face unshaven for several days. There was no spark in his eyes, no upturned mouth like she remembered. But the nose, the jaw, the cheekbones; it was him.
His once strong hands and arms were weak and trembling as she picked them up. She kissed his face. He smelled old and sick. He didn’t look at her or respond to her touch or words.
“Papá, I came, I told you I would. I’m so sorry it took so long. Papá, it’s me, Gabriela. Papá?”
No response.
“Papá!” Gabriela let go of his hands, which flopped to his side, and took his face in her hands. “What’s wrong? Can’t you see me? It’s your daughter, me, Gabriela, Papá, for god’s sake, can you hear me?” She turned to Helmut in a panic. “What’s wrong with him? Why isn’t he answering?”
“Oh,” Helmut said. His face was pale. “I didn’t know.”
He stepped forward and touched her father’s forehead and she saw for the first time the scar traced in a curve above the eyebrows. Raised and pink, where someone had carved into him. A long, angry gash across the skull.
“What is it? What did they do?” She heard her voice as if from a distance, a high-pitched sound, like a scream from one of the asylum
cells.
“He’s been cut.” Helmut spoke with an audible shudder. “They cut through his skull across here and inserted something into the brain. I’ve heard of this, it’s called a lobotomy.”
“A what? For god’s sake, what is that?”
“They stick something in and they stir it around to break up part of the brain.”
“No! No, they couldn’t. Why would they do such a thing?”
“It’s to pacify the criminally insane. But he’s so non-responsive, they must have given him an especially violent surgery.”
“He wasn’t insane!” That distant screaming again. “He wasn’t insane!”
She couldn’t tell if she were screaming or if that sound came from her head. A tiny, distant part of her brain observed that this must be what it felt like to be actually, genuinely insane. Right before they cut open your skull and stirred your brains as casually as if they were a pair of egg yolks.
She felt violently ill. She turned, coughed twice as her stomach heaved and she tried to force it down. And then she threw up, not on the floor, but all down the front of her dress. Helmut caught her as she fell. She fought to regain her balance. He was wearing some of her vomit.
The door opened to their rear. The orderly stood there with a frown. “Fraulein?”
His face was a mask of perfect sanctimony, self-righteous priggery. She wanted to tear that look off his face, to gouge out his eyes. To smash his head against the stone wall again and again until he was the one with the senseless look.
Gabriela lunged at him with a cry of rage. He staggered back, seemingly caught unaware, and lifted his hands. She was about to catch him, her only thought to go for his eyes, when Helmut grabbed her arms.
“Gaby, no! Gaby, listen to me. Not like this.”
She tried to pull free, to hit him until he let her go. But he was too strong, he had her hands pinned and she couldn’t move, could only wail. “My father, look what this bastard did to him. Look!”
“No, Gaby. He didn’t, he’s not the one. He’s a functionary, a nobody. You can’t do anything by hurting him. You’ll just get yourself arrested.”
“I have to do something. They’ve destroyed my father, don’t you see? Can’t you understand?”
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