“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 nam
e. 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.
Riding back from the cemetery in the huge black Mercedes, while Veelee earnestly explained his simple solution, she had said to him in a very reasonable tone of voice, “I think you should all kill each other. That is your way, after all. Soon your army will want to kill all Germans as the only way to retain their honor. The Germans must be killed, your army will reason, because they voted for Hitler and gave him the power which has destroyed the Fatherland. And the SS will like that too. After all, they are engaged in the supreme task of murdering all Germans anyway, and it is their chance to die themselves in defending their Fuehrer and their loot. And every other German who is not in the Wehrmacht or in the SS knows his duty. Half of them should be lined up on the east of Germany and half on the west in long lines facing each other; then, at a signal from your Fuehrer, who will be seated upon a heap of decomposing children on the ground between them, they will all kill each other. Your Fuehrer will be very proud. It is the final solution for all of you, Veelee.”
He had been staring blankly out the window as she spoke. “Yes,” he answered. “You are right. I must kill the Fuehrer.”
For many months whenever Paule thought of Veelee, she heard the jackboots of the storm troopers who had paraded so many years ago along the platform of the Friedrichstrasse Station calling for the death of all Jews. Over and over again she felt the freezing fear she had felt then, and she could see that across all of those years she had been pulling that fear toward her, hand over hand, until she had found out what had been weighting the awful end of it—her son’s corpse. Paul-Alain was gone, forever gone. Dead because he was a Jew—incredibly, incomprehensibly dead because he had been a Jew.
After a long while she was able to concern herself with the happiest days of life, the days when she had been the daughter of the greatest actor in all of France, one of the four greatest actors of the world, most certainly including England. She sat in the study with the thousands of pages of newspaper cuttings and theatre programs and citations and letters and notes and began to write her father’s biography, as he had always intended that she do. She stopped bothering to dress. She would get out of bed at odd hours, not knowing the time because she had not wound the clocks nor opened the shutters, and walk to the study to begin her work. In a short time her hair grew gray and she became very thin because she did not think about eating. Clotilde brought her food on a tray but Paule ignored it.
She did not place as much blame upon Clotilde as she did upon José Zorra de Miral because she knew that Clotilde’s heart was breaking too, but she could not help thinking that there must have been some way for Clotilde to have found her after Paul-Alain had been taken away. Clotilde had known that they were using a Luftwaffe staff car, and she should have known that it was necessary for the driver to inform the Luftwaffe transportation officer where the car was taking them. She refused to believe that Clotilde was unable to get into the Hôtel Majestic or to reach General von Stuelpnagel in any way. She had not really tried; she was just another servant; they were all alike. Paule had dismissed Mme. Citron and all of the others on the day of the funeral, and when Mme. Citron had tried to object she had slapped her sharply across the face and told her to be out of the house within one hour. Maître Gitlin would give her all necessary information about her pension. It was too much for her to have to see this gabby old woman who had babbled to the police that Paul-Alain lived there. Everyone knew that when police came to one’s door in wartime one should deny everything. The police might have gone away and they could have hidden Paul-Alain until she returned to save him, to cherish him, to keep him.
In the spring, Clotilde had gone away. She had remained six months longer than any of the others, but she was deeply ashamed and bitter that Frau General von Rhode accused her, more and more each day, with the same eloquent eyes as her father’s. For two months Paule was alone in the huge flat, but she was almost unaware of it. In the summer, Clotilde suddenly reappeared, her chin outthrust, her eyes determined slits. She rang the doorbell again and again but when Paule did not answer it Clotilde waited outside the front door all day. In the evening she heard Paule’s slippers sliding across the marble floor and then she had pounded on the door with all her might. When Paule opened the door they stared at one another, and then Frau General von Rhode crumpled forward into Clotilde’s arms, sobbing like a child and saying over and over again how happy she was that Clotilde had returned.
Sixteen
On the evening after his talk with General von Stuelpnagel, Veelee was briefed at the Hôtel Lutetia Paris headquarters of Abwehr, the Wehrmacht’s military intelligence organization commanded by Admiral Canaris, whose sympathies provided the plotters with an excellent cover.
When the briefing was over, Veelee asked the officer who had come from Berlin for the meetings with Canaris and von Stuelpnagel to take a walk so that he could give him a message for Berlin. As they circled the Hôtel Lutetia, Veelee explained that it must be conveyed to the leaders of the army’s resistance that assassination was the only solution. Because this could not be done without involving so many conspirators of so many shades, he alone, Wilhelm von Rhode, must be chosen to carry out any attempts to be made on the Fuehrer’s life. To talk to his shorter companion Veelee bent his head downward and his monocle glittered sinisterly in the purple summer dusk as the two men walked through the tree-lined streets. He spoke rapidly of several methods he had in mind to remove the Fuehrer. Why waste a whole man? Furthermore, he pointed out, he had the rank to gain him entry anywhere.
In 1942 the objectives of the army resistance were based upon “isolated action”; that is, the marshals of the Eastern front would refuse to accept orders from the Fuehrer in his role as Commander in Chief. This nicety would allow them to believe that they were not violating their oath to Hitler, the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, but were only refusing to recognize him as Commander in Chief of the army. At that moment, the Home Army under General Beck would seize control of Germany, dissolve the Nazi States, depose Hitler and restore the independence of the army. Thereafter, all officers of the German armed forces could consider themselves honorably released from their oath of allegiance to the Fuehrer, and the true Germany would then be re-established. Unfortunately, the plan began and ended with the marshals in the east, and none of them were having any part of it.
By mid-1943 the leadership of the army resistance had fallen by default to junior officers. The powerful leaders of the army had been eliminated or had eliminated themselves: Colonel-General Hoepner had been publicly cashiered; Guderian had been removed from active command; Reichenau had died; von Witzleben had developed hemorrhoids and had immediately been retired; Beck was on the inactive list; Hammerstein and Franz Heller had rank but no troops. Von Rundstedt had replaced Witzleben as commander in the west, and while he was aware of the conspirators’ plans and might even have been sympathetic, he said he was far too old to become involved in such games.
In the east the marshals vacillated for various reasons. Paulus was servile, and von Kuechler was completely deaf to all arguments. Von Bock despised the Fuehrer, but he would not risk his marshal’s baton, and Manstein said that he was far too engrossed in the military problem of taking Sebastopol.
The weakest and most opportunistic commander in the east was Field Marshal von Kluge. He was a Hamlet-imitator, Major General Henning von Tresckow, his Chief of Staff, explained to Veelee. Von Tresckow was a Pomeranian; a boyhood friend and neighbor of Veelee’s who, like Veelee, had at first embraced the military promises of the Fuehrer enthusiastically. Unlike Veelee and many others, however, von Tresckow had seen his mistake and had moved into opposition, and then into resistance. The atrocities of the Polish campaign had shocked him into awareness of the crime he had been abetting, b
ut he was one of the few who had translated shame into action.
“For two years I have been battling for von Kluge’s soul,” Tresckow told Veelee. “I dominate him now, but only in a personal way. The moment he is out of my sight he lapses into doglike obedience to the Fuehrer. You can’t imagine such vacillating. I tell you, Rhode, each time that I have him nailed to a definite plan of action, when I am absolutely sure I have him, he fades away like smoke in your fist at the most critical moment.
“We have blackmailed him. Oh, yes, I swear to you. As you know, field marshals are paid thirty-six thousand reichsmarks a year, plus an allowance—which is all right for people who want money, but it cannot compare with what has been stolen by Germans who really worship money. So the Fuehrer hands out tips—little gratuities—the way you might give a coin to a men’s-room attendant. Yes, look shocked, my dear Rhode, but it is true. And he will say, no income tax on this little tip. Yes! He gave Kluge two hundred and fifty thousand reichsmarks on his birthday—plus a permit to spend yet another handsome tip on improvements for Kluge’s estate, with a copy of a letter to Speer, the minister in charge of buildings. When I saw that letter I said, ‘At last we have the son-of-a-bitch.’ I went and waved it in von Kluge’s face. I told him I would broadcast the bribe to every man in the Officer Corps of the German Army, and he knew I meant it. But he wasn’t in the least embarrassed or humiliated, you know—not at all. He adopted the air of a man who thinks he should at least pretend to be embarrassed in the event that I did broadcast it, so he agreed to a meeting with Goerdeler, the civilian politician of the movement. It was a tricky business to get Goerdeler admitted to the area, believe me. We could never have done it without Canaris and Oster.
“The meeting was held in the Smolensk forest and I was there, Rhode. Kluge at last agreed that he would lead a mutiny of the armies in the east at the moment word came from Berlin. Goerdeler was in such high spirits that I thought he’d break out singing. Before Goerdeler could get back to Berlin—you hear me?—before Goerdeler got back to Berlin, Kluge sent a letter to Beck, taking it all back, withdrawing, changing his watery mind again.”