An Infinity of Mirrors (33 page)

Fourteen

Fräulein Nortnung, as naked as a coin and blonder than beer, her long hair falling free instead of woven in the tightly plaited
schnecken
which were usually coiled around her ears, was rubbing her splendid Nordic bosom with a rough towel. The towel felt good but it didn't compare with the way Carlie could use a towel. When she compared Carlie to the men she had left at home, they seemed to have been carved out of liverwurst. She slipped into a pair of white pom-pom mules from Carlie's Marseilles warehouse and, as fine a figure of summertime womanhood as any conceived by Rubens, thundered into the salon of the flat.

It was hardly a typical apartment of the period. Three one-hundred-pound bags of coffee beans took up one corner of the salon; a bundle of new currency notes amounting to six hundred and twelve thousand francs were stacked on a bookshelf under a copy of the memoirs of François Paul de Gondi de Cardinal Retz, for which a general in the Luftwaffe Ground Supply Office had said he would pay extremely well because it was the perfect birthday remembrance for the Reichsmarschall. Along the wall, woolen blankets had been stacked five feet high. Three dozen tins of butter were on the low table in front of the sofa, and on the desk were piled eleven pads of signed Wehrmacht purchase authorizations. The far wall was lined with cartons of Players and Gauloise, amounting to perhaps sixty thousand cigarettes.

Piocher was snarling French gutter argot into the telephone, telling someone that he did not want any advice on what to buy and at what price. How the hell should he know why there was a sudden market for mutton? He didn't care either—get the mutton.

As Piocher hung up, he looked at the spectacularly naked Fräulein Nortnung and smiled at her encouragingly with his atrocious teeth. “I like your hair up like that,
pupchen.”

“It is only for the bath this way, Carlie.”

“No more. Keep it up. I like it that way.”

“Ja, Carlie.”

“What a beautiful ass you have.”

She tossed a cushion at him in playful appreciation; had it hit him, he would have been knocked off his chair.

“Well, what was new at the office today?”

The happiness faded from her face and was replaced by an extremely complicated expression of indignation. “What happened today I think I could never believe if I had not been there taking notes on the extension phone so that Colonel Drayst can have his own record if there is a wire tap on us and they try to say we said something else.”

“Really? What happened?”

“General von Stuelpnagel, the Military Governor for France, himself called Colonel Drayst. Wehrmacht from the top of his head to his feet. He said straight out, no preliminaries, that Colonel Drayst had one hour to deliver this information or he would be shot. Shot! The BdS!”

“Well!”

“The idea of the Wehrmacht talking to the SS that way. Listen, if Colonel Drayst wanted to he could have General von Stuelpnagel shot. And maybe he will be shot—the Colonel sent that threat straight off to the Reichsfuehrer SS so that he could know which way the winds are blowing here.”

“Oh, come off it,
liebchen.”

“It's a matter of SS honor, isn't it? And General von Stuelpnagel is no favorite of the Fuehrer's—everybody knows that.”

“Your Occupation would be in some mess if a colonel-general couldn't threaten a lousy colonel.”

“About a Jew?”

“What d'you mean, about a Jew?”

“It was a ridiculous thing. He said he would have the BdS shot because of a Jew—not even a grown Jew, a child.”

“What child?”

“All right, I'll tell you from the beginning. Because up to the time General von Stuelpnagel told Colonel Drayst that he would have him shot, Colonel Drayst felt very sad—personally sad. Over only a Jew. It was a mistake. Believe me, I can tell you he had nothing against the child.”

“Whose child?”

“The little son of General von Rhode.”

“The Nachrichtenfuehrer?”

“Yes.”

“His child is a Jew?”

“The wife is a Jew.”

“What happened?”

“The son was picked up in the razzias last week.”

“A general's child? The child of a hero like von Rhode? That was naughty. Maybe Colonel Drayst felt personally sad because he knows how the Fuehrer uses war heroes in his business. Come here. Don't sit in that draught over there.”

“There is no draught, Carlie.”

“Come here.”

“Oh, Carlie, it is so hot for what you want.” She leaped like a hippopotamus and lay down with her head in his lap. “You know, Carlie? You are the only man who never says it's too hot to do it in the summer. Actually, the summers are much cooler in Germany.”

He kneaded her right breast as though preparing dough for the oven. “How did Colonel Drayst happen to have a general's child included in a razzia?”

“The BdS is only human.”

“Is that so?”

“Don't tease. He is so terribly in love with Frau General von Rhode, a Jew yet, that he can't bear it that she won't have anything to do with him.”

“Ah. Pity.”

“Yes. So he was destroying himself to think of some way he could make her change her mind. Then he decided that if he could rescue her little son from the razzias she would be so grateful that … you know.”

“What happened?”

“Well, everything went wrong. The boy was in that place for four days before the parents found out. Evidently they were out of town or something. Then, instead of going through channels, they went to General von Stuelpnagel.”

“They got their son back?”

“Oh, they got him back all right. We were able to trace him. We found him for them. But in the meantime he got sick and he died.”

“Ah.”

“Yes. A terrible thing.”

“How old was he?”

“Seven or eight, I think.”

Piocher disengaged himself from Fräulein Nortnung in a manner reminiscent of a driver getting out from under an overturned truck. He walked to the large center table, lit a cigarette and chucked on his jacket.

“Where are you going, Carlie?”

“Out.”

“But it was so nice, what you were doing.”

“Go to bed and get some rest. I'll be back in an hour or two.” She pouted as Piocher left the apartment.

Selahettin was in the room behind the hidden door, two pencils stuck in her hair, her left hand gripping her forehead as she pored over the horoscope forms to conform them with the dossiers flown in from London. She was too absorbed to speak, so Piocher sat down quietly, put his feet up on a chair, and picked his teeth absent-mindedly.

After a few minutes Selahettin closed the pad with a slap. “My predictions get wilder every day, Jock. Not that my clients seem to think so.”

“Our predictions may be wild, love, but they'll all come true the day the invasion starts.”

“Can you have someone send me a case of Jameson's?”

“First thing in the morning.” He took a black notebook out of his pocket and made a careful note. “Who goes back to London next?”

“Gant. Tomorrow night, weather permitting.”

“I don't want any radio signals on this one, love. Lace it up in the best code and ask Gant to take it home with him. Your client, Drayst, has caused the death of the only child of Major-General Wilhelm von Rhode.”

She grunted. He told her what he knew, and though she tried not to show that she was affected, her hands trembled as she lit a cigarette. “That's one of the worst so far, I think,” she said judiciously.

“It can be a fine thing for us, love. Could be worth a hundred bombers, this.”

“How?”

“Let them tell me from London. But suppose you were the mother of that little boy and I came to you and told you I knew the name of the man who had ordered the death of your only child. What would you do?”

“It wouldn't bring the boy back, Jock.”

“Ah, we know that, love.”

She ran her thin hand through her hair. “I'm a spinster, Jock, and too gently raised to answer that as it should be answered.”

“But what do you think you'd do, love?”

“I would ask for his eyes under my heel,” she answered sadly. “And I'd want to see his heart steaming in a gutter.”

“That's what I thought. That's what I'd do. And that's what she and her husband will do when the proper time comes.”

“When?”

“Send the news to London, love. They'll tell us when.”

Fifteen

In the sixteen months that Paule remained alone at Cours Albert I she mourned the loss of her son, but as time evolved her grief for him diminished to make room for anxiety about her husband. Worry for the living lifted her out of the shadows of the life she had arranged for herself. She continued to work on the biography of her father, but with the difference that it became a tribute and an occupation rather than a refuge. She dressed herself again and studied herself in her mirror carefully, for she was convinced that she and Veelee would be together again soon.

She knew now that she would always love Veelee, and she accepted the fact joyfully because it counterbalanced the hatred which had almost capsized her. It was a strong, green, growing hate; if it had been vines it would have covered all of Germany and paralyzed all Germans, crushing the life out of them slowly and agonizingly.

Paule had spent the first months alone in the Cours Albert I, dressed only in a negligee and wandering from her bedroom to her study to lose herself in the work. She had sent all the servants away because of what all of them had not done to find Paul-Alain or to bring her running back to Paris to save him. She had spent the months thinking of how she might kill the children of all the Germans, how she might somehow pour her molten grief upon them as they had upon her. Time had passed, sixteen months had passed, but still she hated. She had narrowed her hope of retaliation down to the policeman who had signed that receipt for the living body of her son, and now she spent all her time hoping that Veelee would come back to her so that he could devote
his
time to finding the man responsible. Then she would act—then they would act together. She was not yet sure how, but some justice would teach that to her; she had the resources and she had the will.

She felt a patronizing disdain for Veelee's method of revenge. They had killed his son; therefore he would kill Hitler. He had explained his concept of the matter to her with some care, then had gone directly to General von Stuelpnagel. Within three days he was on special duty in Berlin as the General's confidential delegate to General Olbricht, coordinator of the assassination plans. This way of thinking was too remote for her, and therefore of no interest. The murders for which Hitler was responsible were so fantastic in number that they only diminished Paul-Alain's murder. If she and Veelee were to repay an eye for an eye by retaliating significantly, then she wanted two men to die—or rather not just to die; she wanted to kill the two men who had taken her son by the hand and led him to death and ordered that he be taken away to die.

Hitler's pervasive corruption had surrounded her. His contempt for moral laws had convinced her that there was no longer any law, moral or civil, criminal or protective. His screamed demonstration that force was the law and that force was on the side of wrong and that wrong was right had entered her pores with the hatred she felt. From Norway to Greece, he had brought this moral change and, in the end, it could be seen that murder was
not
the worst thing he had done; his most transcendent evil was the corruption with which he had contaminated the living.

She had been so sodden with her loss at the funeral that she had not yet begun to think of the things she must do. Veelee had been quicker. The direction he had taken was wrong, she knew, but he had told her his plans in the huge black car right after the funeral. Maître Gitlin, José Zorra de Miral, Clotilde, Mme. Citron, Veelee, and General von Stuelpnagel had come to the ceremony. The rabbi had spoken the final words just as she had requested: “We now put to peace, to join the lengthy civilization of his forefathers, this amiable child who loved with all his heart this world, and who laughed with the joy of being a human and a Jew.”

After the funeral, Veelee had driven her to the door of Cours Albert I, as preoccupied as any businessman about to embark on an important trip for his firm. When he had said goodbye to her, she was as absent-minded as he was. She considered him dead; she was certain that neither he nor anyone else would get closer to killing Hitler than to the bullets of his bodyguard, and she forgot about him as soon as she entered the apartment. She did not hear the servants when they spoke to her, and she walked into Paul-Alain's bedroom without removing her hat or gloves. It was just as it had always been: the slate over the bed still said:
BON JOUR MAMAN
in shaky chalked letters; the toy monkey still hung by its tail from the headboard. She sat on the bed and removed her gloves slowly as she stared at the spiked helmet which had been his grandfather's. Paul-Alain had enjoyed so much marching up and down in it, shouting commands in comical German and making her laugh whenever he wanted. It was then that she began to imagine that vines were growing from the ends of her fingers, moving across Germany, crushing and killing.

Miral telephoned Paule thirty times in the first two days, came to the house four times and forced his way inside the last two times. She would not be found, and as he roamed through the vast apartment looking for her, she moved silently ahead of him on bare feet, her face stained, her hair a tangle, wearing only a negligee, always two rooms ahead of his shouts of her name. He pleaded with her to come away with him while she hated him almost as much as if he were a German for taking her away from her son when she should have been there to save him. On the fifth day the Duke gave up and went away, and she did not think of him again.