Hans walked across to the bar, winked at Madame and said, “It’s morning here, but in Amsterdam I think it’s still Saturday night. Do you happen to have a beer?” Madame laughed, and pulled a good liter of Australian beer into a glass. Hans carried the beer across the room.
The rattan couch had comfortable cotton cushions, a little frayed and out of shape, but comfortable. Hans studied the reception area. There were a few calendars on the wall, both Asian and European, the same kind he had seen inside of military lockers, drugstores, and Indonesian restaurants. He returned his attention to the coffee table. A large ledger covered more than half of the tabletop. The lines were all written in different hands. Some were neat and precise, some scrawled, some hasty and some crooked, but all were legible. The columns were headed in French and English:
1) Name and nationality
2) Ship you are on
3) How many on the ship
4) How long will you be here?
5) Where will you be going from Noumea?
Each horny sailor had dutifully filled out the columns with all the pertinent information. Hans reached into his satchel. He sure hoped Mei would not be available soon. He pulled out some picture postcards and a pen. First he carefully addressed a Postcard to Amsterdam, and then began to write in Dutch. A couple entries fit onto each postcard, and then he took another from the stack. By the time Mei came downstairs, he had completed a page of entries and turned to the previous page of the ledger.
After he gave Mei her proof sheet, he sauntered back across the lobby to Madame Tutau who had been watching the two of them closely.
“I also have something for you.” He held out the carefully wrapped packet, with two layers of brown paper and string protecting additional layers of cardboard and the framed picture. Madame Tutau opened up the packet, one layer at a time – almost like a woman undressing in a film. The portrait peeked out from the last layer of brown paper. She picked it up, and then looked closely at the image – a face that looked like hers, only younger and fresher.
She took a deep breath, and closed her eyes, then pulled out a handkerchief. “Hans, you are artist. I buy you drink.” She poured another beer.
“Thanks, but I have to go pretty soon.” The postcards pulled at his trouser pocket.
“But wait, we have to put picture on wall.” She walked around the room, trying one location after another. There was a wall between two doorways, a space with nothing else to detract from the photograph. The houseboy came out, and the picture was mounted so that it could rule the game room while the lady herself ruled the bar.
***
Out of uniform and smelling of beer, Hank showed his ID and entered the Armed Services compound. It might be urgent that he report what he had discovered at 34 Avenue Fontaine.After a shower and a change of clothes, he went to the Office of Naval Intelligence at Admiral Halsey’s Headquarters. The only problem was that no one had notified the Admiral or the Naval Intelligence command of Army’s plans to infiltrate the South Pacific with “civilians” acting as tourists. His credentials looked legitimate, but this skinny man with a foreign accent did not. He asked to see Admiral Halsey. An officer at the front desk laughed.
“Not in.”
“Then I shall wait.”
“Nope. He’s out blowing up a bunch of yellow-bellied Japs. You could wait until eternity to catch him.”
“I have orders.”
“Tell you what. You can talk to Jenkins here. Hey Lieutenant, you got time to talk to some foreign tourist? What hell is that accent? You German?”
“Good God, no! I was born in Amsterdam and I’m an American soldier just like you.”
Lieutenant Jenkins stepped to the counter.
“Hank Burns, Sergeant, U.S. Army, sir.”
“Burns. We were beginning to wonder what you were up to. You AWOL or gone native? What’s going on?”
“I need to talk to Admiral Halsey.”
“Good luck with that one.”
“Here let me show you what I have, and then you can see if the Admiral should have a look at it.”
He drew out the first postcard. Jenkins took the first card, dropped it on the floor then picked it up. He began to read it, got confused by the Dutch address, then identified dates and names of ships in the messages. He looked back up at Hank, eyes narrowed, and handed the card to another officer who started to read. Jenkins shook his head and looked back up at Hank.
“You got any more of these?”
“I have three more cards. May I please see the Admiral?”
“Good God, man. Let me go see if he’s available.”
Within a moment, Hank stood at attention in front of the admiral. Halsey did not acknowledge his presence. His furrowed black brow, coupled with his sharp profile, enhanced his resemblance to that bird of prey. A downturned mouth, a slight squint and a total lack of movement in his face completed the image of the predator, ready to strike. There was no sound, no motion in the small office.
Silently, Hank placed his three postcards cards in a column on the desk, like a play in an Atlantic City poker game. Halsey picked up one, and then the next. Hank could not read any expression in the Admiral’s face. Resolve and discipline had molded a portrait that did not move. Then Halsey placed both elbows on the desk and covered his face with his hands.
Just as Hank was about to ask what he should do next, Halsey announced, “Those three troop ships are lost. We have no idea where they are, and we have had no messages from survivors.”
Jenkins touched Hank’s elbow, jerked his head toward the door, and led him out of the office to initiate a detailed debriefing.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Bergen Belsen
November 1942
“Axis in South France, France Is Overrun: Nazis Reach Marseille After Hitler Scraps Armistice Pact; Atlantic Fleet’s Fate a Mystery” ~ New York Times Headlines
Georg Lutz stared off into space, his gray eyes looking at everything and seeing nothing. Columns of prisoners stood waiting to be counted. The first frosts were on the ground, and the dark sky did not show a hint of sunlight. He shivered under his warm overcoat. The icy cold winds began to blow through the fences.
The prisoners had no overcoats or sweaters, no winter clothes at all. As the nights got chillier people were contracting diseases. Typhus, tuberculosis and dysentery were rampant. The stench was unbearable. Lice were everywhere. So many people were dying now that the German workers no longer removed the bodies. After roll call in the mornings prisoners had to pile the dead beside the barracks, first stripping off any clothing. Sometimes the pile of emaciated bodies was six feet high before a large truck would come and take them away to the crematorium or to one of the lye filled pits.
He had begun to care for Esther. She should have been just one more expendable whore, but he enjoyed her ability to make fun of the world around her. She was like a little cat, a bit temperamental, warm and cozy, and fun to watch. And she was carrying his child.
Could this child be born? Would it? If the father was a gentile…. No, specifically if the mother was Jewish the child was a Jew. Mortal sin was at the end of every path that he explored. Abortion was not possible and it could result in Esther’s death. It was unlikely that she could carry the pregnancy to term. One option had not yet been explored.
A few days later the women were lined up for work. Lutz was supervising, counting out the rows of ten haggard women, lined up for their day’s assignments. He pretended that he did not notice Esther and she ignored him. Then he turned around, smacking his riding crop, and came back through the line asking, “Who knows how to sew?” Esther and some others raised their hands and were selected to follow him. He took her to a large open room, where she met a matron in charge who handed her a large stack of uniform tunics. Some had holes in them that could be patched. Others had entire panels of fabric that neede
d to be replaced. They were not the black SS Uniforms. Instead they were varying shades of brown, gray and gray-green. Esther pulled a tunic out of her basket. The central panel over the chest was new fabric, machine stitched to a back and sleeves that still held an odd animal smell. Whose were they? Where had they been? All had been washed clean, but the smells of conflict were everywhere. Had men died in these uniforms? Or had they lived? Her task for the afternoon was to remove any insignia on the tunics and replace it with the SS Insignia, a death’s head to be sewn to the collar. First yellow stars, and now death’s heads marked the garments of ordinary people who faced extraordinary fates.
That night Esther lay exhausted in bed with Lutz. He began to caress her, but stopped and instead rested his head on her breasts. His urgency faded away into something gentler, and he instead stroked her abdomen. “What do you think you have? A boy or a girl?”
“What does it matter? It won’t even be ours.”
“The reports from Berlin are good. Maybe Germany can win this war before our baby is born.”
“And how will that solve this problem?”
Lutz pretended to sleep for a few moments, and then murmured, “Because I am Austrian…we could leave after the war.”
Esther lay there silently. She was not asleep – her heart had not quieted down. It was beating like bird. Now there were actually two heartbeats, trilling against each other in her body.
She did not dare speak. She did not even dare to breathe. She could not cry. The man beside her was participating in unspeakable horrors. He had ordered Greek prisoners to stack Jewish bodies for the trucks; he had been on firing squads; he had cruelly looked up and down lines of filthy starving people as they got off the trains and decided on the punishments for each. If there was a devil, he was a minion in its legions.
If she could pray, she would pray that she not feel anything. Perhaps to be a corpse in the lime pits was not the worst thing that could happen.
He broke her silence.
“Esther, I have something to tell you, something very private and very dangerous. Can you keep a secret?”
A wry grimace crossed her face in the blackness of the room.
“I am forced to be here. You know that Germany annexed Austria, right? I was an engineering student at university. They marked the honors students for the SS – the elite.”
She shuddered to think what the technical education might imply. The inner workings of the camp were a maze of pipes, some with water to sustain life, others with gases to guarantee a swift meeting with death. Everything was in a system, and the systems worked with the precision of an alternate universe, a black void of space and time. The stench from the furnaces was the only evidence of imperfection in the perfect world of the German exterminators.
“You were at University?”
“Esther, does it matter?”
“I guess not, except …”
“Except you didn’t expect educated people to … treat other educated people like stock animals?”
“I know nothing of farm life.”
Georg began to laugh. “Actually, neither do I. All farmers do is raise animals and then butcher them to feed other animals.”
“They dig up turnips and roots. The sugar beet fields stink like pig shit.” They began to laugh, and then Georg went completely silent. He rolled over and pushed her shoulders into the thin mattress.
“Esther, I must perform my duties or end up at the wrong end of a firing squad. I must salute and obey. After the war it will be different. We will go far away.”
She wrestled her way out from under his grasp and sat up. “Lutz, how many happy families do you see around here? I don’t think we will be allowed to have our child and explain all this to him.”
“Or her, if she is a beautiful little girl like you. There are some children, and some of them will live to grow up I’m sure. Even some of the guards have children.”
“And where do you think we will live?”
“Somewhere warm, and in a place where it will not matter that you were born a Jew. Far from Europe. Mallorca? Maybe the Canary Islands, where you can be an artist again. We will become a good Catholic family.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
New Caledonia
December 1942
“Knowing is half the battle.”
~ GI Joe, Guadalcanal
New Caledonia. This forgotten isle of France was its own land. The Pink House in Noumea and its fetching French girls traveled with unknown ghosts, men who had enjoyed a pleasant afternoon and then been sent to the bottom of the Pacific, their skeletons joining up with the millions of tiny bodies that comprised the coral reefs. Predators swam through the twisted darkness, seeking smaller prey. New Caledonia was one of the smallest fish in the war, a remote island far away from occupied France.
Hank Burns sat on his bunk and shuffled his thoughts. The guest registries from the Pink House raised new questions. Who used the registers? How did scribblings of drunken sailors become lost ships? Madame Tutau had not expressed any interest in the war except for the money to be made. Someone with money and purpose was in charge, and Hank would need to trap a lot of minnows before he could hunt a shark.
Someone on the island did not want the French allies to be successful. Was it a Japanese sympathizer, or a European with Nazi sympathies? Hans began on neutral ground. In the center of town was an office with a big seal over the door, “General Consulate of the Netherlands.” Faded notices in the windows and graffiti on the sign indicated that the offices had closed suddenly. No one knew where the staff had gone. Holland had not been an independent nation for two years and no one had seen the Dutch Consul in months, but it was unlikely that he had returned to a German occupied home. This was going to pose a problem for a young man presenting himself as a Dutch businessman. There was no reason for Holland to be trading anything.
Javanese traders were appearing on the island, opening their stalls in the streets. Officially they were Dutch colonials. Hans joined their social club as a trader with lucrative American contracts. Everyone planned to make money off of the Americans. A first invitation was to the home of the Javanese Consul. His secluded compound in the hills overlooked the activities at the harbor. The surrounding dark island pines contrasted with the glittering water and the hues cast by the sunset.
Memories of the palate overtook him as aromas of open fires and freshly ground spices wafted through the air. It had been years since he had enjoyed a Rijstaffel. The traditional Javanese banquet offered every kind of delicacy that the tropics could yield. One at a time the servants brought out plates of curried eggs, wrapped rolls of meats and vegetables, a delicious dish of lightly steamed vegetables in peanut sauce, and some of the hottest chilies he had ever encountered, the heat washed away with cucumber and mint. Exotic pickled vegetables and iced melons alternated with the warm dishes.
A buzz of polite conversations began over beers, anything from golf to the problems of getting qualified laborers. Words began to pop out of the discussions in the room, “Pan Asian” “independence” “failed empires.” These men were nervous. Hans looked over the head of a small Javanese man who lit an immense homemade cigar, and puffed on it until it glowed a brilliant red. Smoke drifted upward toward Hans’s nose and he began to cough. The little man was tired of the small talk, and the gin had loosened his tongue. “There is no way in hell that Java will join a ‘Pan Asian Empire.’ Why would we flee from one set of rulers to another?”
Hans nodded, shocked that this islander thought that Dutch colonial support and Japanese domination could be compared. His companion sucked nervously on the cigar, gasping like a small child whose words come so fast that it is hard to talk. “But of course, the Japanese can force islanders to go peacefully or as a vanquished people.” The little man stubbed out the cigar, and Hans continued to listen to him. “The Japanese talk of a great civilization,
but they are savages. They make the damned Borneo headhunters look civilized. Just ask the Chinese.”
This wasn’t the gossip he sought. Men were losing their lives daily to keep Japan from controlling the South Pacific islands. Other men had determined that if the Japanese lost control of the East Indies, an independent nation could emerge. These people were treasonous subjects of the Dutch Queen. No wonder the former consul was not invited to this party. He must find the consul and get a more civilized point of view. Loyalty questions were getting confusing but he was now an American, no longer a Dutch royalist.
Henrik Susilo, the Javanese host, did not support or disapprove the proposed action. Susilo continued, “After all, Holland does not actually exist any more. If we accept ourselves as Dutch, then we are German subjects. We might as well have stayed behind and become Japanese.” Hans picked up a skewer of meat and gnawed at it a little at a time, chewing all the pieces in silence and sucking on the stick to avoid grinding his teeth. With just a few comments the guests had upended his impression of the gentle Javanese who had hosted him as a teenager.
Susilo poured rich cordials – tastes that he had long since forgotten. Advocaat, cocoa and ginger liqueurs all gave a heady holiday aroma to the room. “Steen, is it? A Dutchman? Where are you from?”
“Amsterdam. We had a wholesaling business on the Herengracht.”
“I noticed your eyes during the conversations. Your smile said one thing; your eyes said that you were somewhere else. So what do you think of their plan for independence from Holland?”
Hans took an audible breath and stared at Susilo. He didn’t want to respond with an opinion, so instead he queried. “So much has changed. Do these people have what it takes to stand on their own? They did nothing with their land for generations, unless we gave it to them.”
Susilo pondered for a moment, then looked up into the face of this Dutchman who was present and absent at the same time. “Good question. Are they just feeling some power because the Allies have laid down a few roads and put up a Red Cross tent? They certainly do not understand what is needed to maintain an independent state.”
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