The Tiger Claw

This man, who had felt nothing since 1939, felt nothing even as he sent Émile to his execution, Prosper, Archambault, Professor Balachowsky, Monsieur Hoogstraten and Monique to camps, was pleading for her to help him, help him feel again.

  To call Vogel “Ernst” would betray all the love she’d ever felt for Armand, that precious love that bombs could not shatter nor bullets kill. To betray that love would be true zina, betrayal of her husband.

  And to call Vogel “Ernst” would invite his touch, and worse.

  Corpse-pale lips parted. A grey serpent appeared, wet her cheek, then moved to part her lips.

  Think. You are his weakness. Think!

  The Allies were near, even the Gestapo was in retreat. If Vogel wanted a hostage with American blood, he’d have to keep her alive. He could confine her in the dungeon again, he could rape her, even execute her, and she would resist till her appointed hour.

  She must love, continue to love. No other resistance, no other cure for Vogel’s perversions of love. Hold fast to real love, the potential of love, that love that will outlast all the Vogels of this world.

  Noor turned her head and shrieked, “Non!”

  The tongue snapped back behind the cage of his teeth. For a long moment Vogel’s eyes clenched shut. Then slowly his weight lifted off her chest, his hands released her body. He stood up, plucked the bright disc off the cot. Transparent blue eyes looked down on her.

  “Befehl ist befehl. I have my orders, Princess, and believe me, I will follow them.”

  PART EIGHT

  CHAPTER 39

  Munich, Occupied Germany

  October 1945

  READERS OF Paris Soir might believe that once Hitler’s body was found, the six-year-long night of war was over. But like so many other brothers, sisters, mothers and grandmothers, Kabir, Zaib, Mother and Dadijaan would have no peace till Kabir found some trace of Noor. General de Gaulle had returned to Paris and paraded all the way to Notre-Dame. And in Nuremberg, the Allies were charging Nazis with crimes against humanity.

  Kabir longed to be above it all. His squadron went on alert when the Allies prepared for the invasion of Japan, but was not deployed. Younger pilots were required, with training for advanced planes—he was assigned to flight instruction.

  And still no word from Noor. Not one telephone call, not a single Red Cross message.

  In August, American pilots, army and navy men one and all said the A-bomb had saved their lives and gave thanks to Mr. Truman. Did the crew of the Enola Gay have more trouble sleeping than Kabir? No one at the flight officers’ mess raised such questions. His mates had affection and awe for the bomb; one said its cloud rose “like a huge vase of flowers.” Men—maybe women too—had lost their reverence for the mystery of death. His mates didn’t mention nightmares filled with landscapes of desolation and ruin, the kind Kabir had had ever since that July motorcycle ride from Paris to Munich. He resolved to atone with better actions all the rest of his days for those his bombs had killed, but millions of dying curses continued to babble through his dreams. And in dreams his sidecar never came back empty—Noor looked up at him laughing, her black hair covered by a lemon silk headscarf that fluttered behind her like a pennant.

  Then Zaib’s letters and trunk calls from London to any and all American authorities who might have records seized in August 1944, after the Gestapo retreated from Paris, brought an answer. Forms, paybooks, passes, ration cards, reports, communiqués, directives and dossiers seized at the avenue Foch had moved several times. They had now arrived at the Office of De-nazification in the American sector. Yes, in Munich.

  And yes, one of the SS men who had worked at the avenue Foch had been traced. A low-level interpreter. His name: Ernst Vogel. He was assigned a cell in the barrack for Special Prisoners, the one called the Bunker. There was no lock on the door; he was free to come and go from the camp during the day. A meeting could be arranged, near the camp.

  “Which camp?” Kabir yelled into the mouth cup of the telephone.

  “It’s a place called Dachau,” said Zaib.

  After several telegrams Kabir boarded a couchette car in an “overnight” train from Paris, and alighted five days later at the Hauptbahnhof, Munich’s central station.

  Above him, cubist designs of bomb-blackened wood, iron and broken glass pierced the October morning sky.

  Here was where the damn war began, Munich, with Chamberlain, Mussolini and Daladier giving the Sudetenland to Hitler, agreeing to give away land that wasn’t theirs to give, someone else’s land, regardless of the cost in life and blood. The very tactic now being considered by the British for Arab Muslim land in Palestine; the divisions and schisms of this war would reconfigure there.

  From the station, umbrella held almost before his face against a pelting rain, Kabir walked full tilt through the rubble and remains of the city, past the twin towers of the Frauenkirche and the golden statue of Mary, back to the Rathaus.

  A blonde-braided woman a few years younger than Kabir approached, thumb-sucking child in tow.

  “You haf schokolade? I gif you one diamond, you gif me fifty Pall Mall? Haben sie zigaretten?”

  Kabir shook his head, walked past and up the stairs. Inside, he was directed by a very polite German with no name badge to a large, ornately carved door. Inside, Kabir came upon the same American captain from Chicago, as boyish as before, but sitting behind a new, file-laden desk that filled half the room.

  Kabir waited as the captain read telegrams and shouted messages at adjutants, clarifying American occupation forces policy on collecting firearms and cameras from “denazified Nazis.”

  “Here again, Flight Lieutenant Khan?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’d do the same, in your shoes. You know, your sister has one real nice voice on the phone. And she’s persistent.”

  “It runs in the family.”

  “Swell.” The captain searched through the files on his desk. “Don’t get your hopes sky high, OK? We have no idea if the man we have at Dachau—name of Vogel—ever knew your sister. I gave him all her names: Madeleine, Nora Baker, Anne-Marie Régnier, Noor Khan. He keeps saying the Noor Khan he knew was a princess. But all these krauts say they know some big shot who’ll get them out of trouble.”

  “Princess” could only have come to this man Vogel’s European mind if he had somehow learned of Noor’s Indian blood.

  “Vogel says he had no rank at the avenue Foch; he spoke English and French so they made him an interpreter. Spent a year in a French prison camp from ‘39 to ‘40, then says he had to work for the Nazis, had no choice. Following orders—that’s what they all say—I remembered you when I ran across his records, though. Meant to write to you right away. Good thing your sister Zaib called a few days ago, so I didn’t have to.” He grinned. “I’m not the best letter writer, my girlfriend says.”

  Kabir nodded his appreciation.

  “You ready, then?”

  “Yes, bring him in.”

  Minutes ticked by, then two white-gloved, helmeted MPs led a man who was surely Vogel into the room. He wore a navy worsted suit and brown bow tie. No handcuffs.

  A rush to avenge came over Kabir such as he had never experienced. He stood up, swaying on his feet a little. If he had had a bomb to drop at that moment, he might have vaporized the man. This man who might not be guilty of any crime at all. Who just might have information about Noor. Who was willing to share it with Kabir.

  Kabir sat down again, forearms on his knees, fists clenching and unclenching. The captain cracked his knuckles.

  Vogel peered at Kabir through round, wire-rimmed spectacles, like a schoolteacher. No trouble meeting Kabir’s gaze. Not as tall as Kabir had expected.

  A limp hand came towards Kabir. Kabir ignored it. His own was cold with sweat.

  “So I meet the brother of Princess Noor,” said Vogel in French.

  He had the voice of a mild-mannered academic. “Speak English,” said the captain.

  Vogel gave a slight bow. “You d
o not speak French?” he said to the captain with exaggerated puzzlement. “Or German?” He turned to Kabir. “I see the resemblance,” he said. “Prince Kabir Khan, correct?”

  “Not exactly,” said Kabir. “I’m a Sufi master’s son. A Pirzada, vous savez?”

  “But Noor, she was a princess.”

  Kabir wouldn’t argue the point, in favour of a far more important question. “‘Was’?”

  Vogel shrugged. “Was, is—who knows? I was the only one she could turn to in the last months of the war.”

  “And how did you meet her?”

  “She was arrested as an enemy agent. She was transmitting strategic information to England.”

  “The date?”

  “I can’t be sure—wait, October 1943. Exactly two years ago.”

  “Did you torture her?”

  “Oh, non, non, monsieur! She was interrogated. Many times. I was merely the interpreter. I found your sister charming.”

  “And from the avenue Foch? She was sent to prison?”

  “Yes, but I visited her, to verify her health.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “August, last year.”

  “August 1944. Where? Fresnes?”

  “No, no. The Princess wasn’t sent to Fresnes. She was sent to the prison in Pforzheim, Germany.”

  A slight pause. Kabir readjusted his thinking.

  Agents and resistants captured by the Gestapo in Paris, debriefed by Miss Atkins, spoke of being sent to the prison in Fresnes, France.

  “Why Pforzheim?”

  “I found her a cell there—it was on my way to and from Munich.”

  “Pforzheim is not ‘on the way’ between Munich and Paris.”

  “True. But each month, when I visited my wife and sons, I would visit the Princess and return to Paris.”

  A Nazi who went out of his way to visit a spy in prison “to verify her health”—Kabir hadn’t heard of any like Vogel. He was relieved, as Vogel probably meant he should be, by mention of a wife and sons; both gave a man respectability, were signals that his sexual urges were satisfied. Kabir’s own women should be safe before him.

  “I meant: why was she sent there?”

  “It has a section for Special Prisoners. Excuse me, I mean had a section. I don’t know if it is still there today, because”—he looked directly at Kabir—“the RAF bombed Pforzheim last February. She was sent there because we agreed to treat all the agents in her network as POWs. If we hadn’t, she would have been executed.”

  Vogel was editing and deleting information as he went; Kabir could feel it. He was being presented with the crème de la crème of selective recall. Why would Vogel and his superiors agree to treat British agents as POWs? But Noor might still be alive—that was all that was important.

  But for what reason had this man visited Noor every month? For how long? What had he done to her? Refuse to think the word “rape.” But it came to mind anyway.

  “May I sit down?” asked Vogel.

  “No,” said Kabir. “You may not. Continue.”

  “I kept Princess Noor at the avenue Foch as long as I could. I reserved the cell at Pforzheim, but I told Herr Kieffer she was injured—too weak to travel. Conditions were better at avenue Foch, she had a comfortable private cell. Food was plentiful. Many of her friends from the SOE were there … Even sometimes I would order dinner for her in my office.”

  He made it sound so benign, but Kabir had heard tales of La Gestapo at the avenue Foch. Too many to believe him.

  “Which ‘friends from the SOE’?”

  “They called themselves Prosper, Archambault, Phono, Jacques Viennot … who knows what their real names were. All partisans and revolutionaries.”

  Kabir tucked the names into the mezzanine of his memory; he would ask Miss Atkins’s help in contacting them.

  But then Vogel said, “Prosper and Archambault went to Sachsenhausen. Phono was executed at Buchenwald, by Herr Kieffer’s orders. Phono’s wife was equally dangerous, and she was sent to Ravensbrück. Viennot—wait … I can’t remember.”

  Kabir wrote in his notebook. The captain was also writing. Miss Atkins would tell the families of Prosper, Archambault, Phono and Viennot, whoever they were.

  “And my sister? Why Pforzheim?”

  “She had tried to escape—a punishment order was placed in her file.” Bureaucratese sheltered the doer of the deed beneath its passive voice. “I was wounded and in hospital, and when I came back, Herr Kieffer had sent her to Pforzheim. You must understand, I felt terrible. I had tried to protect her for as long as I could—”

  “I don’t believe that for a damn minute.”

  “Non, non, Prince Khan. I went to see her, I couldn’t stay away. I wanted …”

  “Yes?”

  Vogel squinted as if peering through a membrane. “I wanted her to call me Ernst. It was such a little thing.”

  A silence. Something had been blurted, something Vogel hadn’t meant to say.

  Noor would never have called him Ernst. No sister of Kabir would allow herself to be on first-name terms with someone like Vogel. He was beneath her. The way the Jew Rivkin had been beneath her.

  “You wanted more than that,” Kabir almost spat. “Admit it, you … you fornicator.”

  The word was archaic, anachronistic, Qur’anic, but it was the one that came to mind.

  “No, no. What are you saying? It was against orders to touch a non-Aryan woman. And she was a mischlinge—a mixed breed—I don’t know the word in French. Do you know that I could have been sent to a camp myself for that?”

  Kabir felt he was flying into the centre of paradox. Vogel called Noor Princess, yet by Nazi definition considered her a menial. If the non-Aryan and the mischlinge were equivalent to the dhimmi of Islam or the untouchable of Hinduism, it meant millions had become subhuman to the Germans.

  “I told Herr Kieffer I was just about to break her. I said one more visit and she would reveal whole realms of spies. Believe me, I tried to protect her, save her by visiting her.”

  “You were going to use her as a hostage.”

  Vogel seemed to consider. But was he trying to recollect his motives or to evaluate the possible consequences of admission or denial?

  “Yes, I was,” he said, as if the words wormed through a dyke inside him. “She was a princess and her mother was American—I was sure someone would want her badly enough to make an exception for me. Hitler had betrayed Fascism, and I could see we were destined to lose the war by then.”

  If Hitler betrayed Fascism, then Allah save the world the next time it surfaces.

  “I gave her pen, paper, ink. I allowed her to write stories. Children’s stories. I asked her to write children’s stories for my sons.”

  “And she did? Where are they?”

  Vogel took off his spectacles, leaving his face curiously vulnerable. He polished them with his tie and put them on again.

  “Yes, she did. But I no longer have them.”

  There was no way to prove it, but again Kabir knew this was a lie.

  “Why not?”

  “Because my house was bombarded, sir. By the RAF. When the Gestapo office closed in Paris, I returned here. I discovered my wife had moved from the apartment I had arranged for her. She put our older boy in an orphanage, took all our possessions—to this day I don’t know why. Even now I can’t find her. And she doesn’t know, yet—”

  “What doesn’t she know?”

  “One of my sons …” Vogel gave a deep sigh. “We had sent him to Dresden for the summer in 1944, for safety. But then eight months ago, his legs were crushed from the bombings.” A light-beam glanced off Vogel’s spectacles and hit Kabir squarely between the eyes. “He didn’t survive the amputation.”

  He appeared to be waiting for some expression of sympathy. Kabir couldn’t find a single phrase in his repertoire of standard responses.

  “So I now live alone at Dachau. Temporarily, you understand. I have become dependent on the Allies.
” He gave a small snort. “But then, they need me for interpretation.”

  “We have to translate five tons of documents before the Nazis get their trials next month,” the captain interjected. “We wouldn’t need his kind if we didn’t have thirty thousand arrestees awaiting trial at Dachau.”

  “The victor shows his justice,” said Vogel.

  The captain shot him a deadly look. “Fuck you and every Nazi, Vogel. In the last few months I’ve toured enough camps and met enough people like you. If we said screw all this legality, just gave all of you a taste of your own justice, you bastards wouldn’t suffer enough for the misery you’ve caused.”

  “The United States has set an example that will, I’m sure, be followed in future wars,” said Vogel’s smooth voice.

  The captain said to Kabir, “We’ve brought in interrogators from the United States, but reports and evidence are coming in faster than we can translate them. We don’t have time to prosecute thirty thousand krauts and be home by Christmas, so we’re only bringing the camp director and his henchmen to trial. And we’re leaving the crimes committed by Germans against Germans to their own courts, though how we’re going to figure out the nationality of corpses, I have no idea.”

  “When did you say you last visited Mademoiselle Khan at Pforzheim?” Kabir asked Vogel.

  “Shortly before we evacuated the avenue Foch.”

  “August of 1944.”

  “Yes.”

  “And your home was bombed—when?”

  Vogel shrugged off the question. “Orders from Berlin were to send all prisoners to camps. We had kept no record of her, so she could have remained at Pforzheim—but I happen to know she was sent to a camp. And I do know where she was sent.”

  “Where, damn it, where?!”

  “As it happens, I’m occupying her cell.”

  “Occupying her cell?” Kabir must have misunderstood.

  “Yes, I’ve been living there for a little more than four months. Sometimes I feel a trace of her spirit. At Dachau, I mean.”

  This man who had wielded power over Noor’s food, clothing and shelter, perhaps even her life, was now occupying the cell where she had been held at Dachau. And he “felt a trace of her spirit”? Words with a connotation of worship. It made no sense.