An Infinity of Mirrors (24 page)

“I shall tell him the flutter light is a psychic antenna for reaching the spirit world. When I let him know what it did for the Reichsfuehrer SS he'll go under like an anchor.”

“That's it, then. Thank you, love. I must be off.”

“Good night, Charles.”

Piocher left through the sliding door on the far side of the room, and Selahettin pulled out a pad of blank zodiacal charts and began to lay down Drayst's horoscope. She was as bored as a midnight bookkeeper; she found fortunetelling very dull. She had given up her practice of psychiatry in 1939 when the faculty of the German university which had trained her had been sent off to an extermination camp. She had felt badly enough about it to ask a few discreet questions and, because she had attended the right schools, and because her father was a peer, she had been accepted by The Old Firm. Its people had taught her palmistry, astrology, numerology, and sand reading. She had been drilled and tricked and pushed very hard, because she was the first qualified candidate who seemed to fit the cover, and whatever they taught her she was able to enrich with a few dozen psychological ploys of her own. She had arrived in Paris from Munich, with Egyptian papers, in the fall of 1939, nine months before France fell and, despite the fact that she spoke abominable French, within fourteen months she was the rage of Paris. Of course, The Old Firm and her family did have a few splendid connections to start her off nicely.

Piocher went home across the river to the seventeenth arrondissement, where he lived with Fräulein Nortnung, Colonel Drayst's secretary. This love match had been arranged by the authorities on both sides. The Gestapo thought they had planted Fräulein Nortnung on Piocher, whom they wanted under surveillance at all times because he represented such a large source of income for various officers. The Old Firm, on the other hand, was delighted by the alliance because Fräulein Nortnung was quite soft in the head about Piocher and would procure anything he needed from Colonel Drayst's files. Aside from being a loving companion, Fräulein Nortnung was as strong as an ox, and after a day's work for the BdS she would hurry home to do Piocher's bookkeeping, count his cash, and answer the telephone. She had a very good head for business.

Piocher had a way with women. He was an average-looking man, but he'd always had his share of loving friends and took it for granted. He was sent to Paris in 1937 by The Old Firm because of his knowledge of the dialects of the French-Asiatic colonies. He had known the
nha-pha
since childhood; his grandfather had been prison governor at Poulo-Condore. He had entered France at Marseilles from Saigon and had reported to the police on his first day in France. His language facility to one side—though it was of considerable importance—Piocher had been chosen as the British agent for this assignment because he was a brutal man who had been a sergeant-major in the Irish Guards for twenty-one of his twenty-six years of army service. He was forty-one years old and he had been a hard soldier since he was fifteen.

Piocher's orders were clear and effective; as it turned out, The Old Firm knew as much about pimping as they did about astrology. Piocher was on detached duty from the British Army but remained on army pay to protect his pension rights. He was told to set himself up as a pimp in Montmartre and to handle the women exactly as he had handled troops. In a month he had twelve women working for him, though it had been necessary for him to murder two rival pimps to gain acceptance and respect in the
milieu
. When the Occupation broke up his business—because most of his women had left him to go south in 1940, driven by fear of the German invasion—his newer enterprises quickly established him with the Gestapo. Early in 1940, he had branched out into narcotics as a wholesaler. This provided him with capital, and when the Germans set official, artificial prices on all commodities, he had the cash to move in quickly and to establish himself in the black market, which had sprung up overnight.

Within weeks, soldiers of all ranks in the German Army, which had an endless source of supplies, plunged into the black market. But to make really big money meant weeding out the amateurs and small operators so that the fewest possible traders could operate at the wholesale level. The SS accomplished this with ruthless effectiveness, and in exchange for benefits of partnership it gave strong protection, sure transportation, and all necessary signed permits to purchase anything whatsoever. “Unapproved” traders were thrown into prison or sent off to labor camps. By November, 1940, the French wholesale black market had been largely stabilized.

Piocher's textile business alone grossed tens of millions of francs. His meat-and-grocery supply, because of the regularity and speed of his deliveries to restaurants, made a daily profit of seven hundred thousand francs. Since business was on a cash basis, and there was no safe place to keep that much money, Piocher had to buy buildings, paintings, and real estate, in addition to adding weekly to a small burlap sack of diamonds.

Communication between consumer and supplier was remarkable. There was no advertising nor telephoning; yet everyone seemed to know when and where and what could be bought, and at what price. Petrol would be exchanged for coffee, coffee for shoes, shoes for wine, and the wine barrels would go back to the vintner filled with bacon or potatoes. Tailors sold eggs; jewelers sold artichokes. Goods had to be carried in small pareels; a train full of people might bring three tons of corn into Paris.

Approximately twenty-seven percent of everything bought or sold at the wholesale level was funneled through Piocher, and he operated his businesses as he had been ordered to do—like any British sergeant-major. His effectiveness and enormous success gave him an entree to the highest levels of the command of the German Army, and unwittingly the SS provided him with information almost daily which, together with other snippets of information, aided the Allied military command, sabotaged the economy of the occupied territories, and frustrated long-range German plans.

Piocher punished short-weighters with relentless public beatings across the length of Les Halles, and disciplined and marked thieves by shredding their cheeks to ribbons with a knife. Openly he shot to death two men who had moved into his territory in Lille. He dominated all the black markets of Europe the way he had run armies, and he was as punitive with SS and Wehrmacht mistakes as he was with anyone else's. He was a sergeant-major in His Majesty's Army and there would be no nonsense from anyone.

By December, 1942, Piocher had amassed twelve million seven hundred thousand francs in cash, plus jewels, real estate, paintings, and miscellaneous property—all to the embarrassment of the British government. If he tried to discuss the matter with The Old Firm he was silenced. No one was ready to talk about what should be done with money like that. Just the thought of future intra-Ministry arguments over the disposition of the money made many people ill. Certainly Piocher knew it wasn't his money. His army base pay, twelve shillings a day, was piling up in London, and though his present scale of living was more that of an emperor than a sergeant-major, those shillings were more real to him than the bushels of thousand-franc notes in his bedroom.

Piocher left a message at the drop in the rue des Bourdonnais to be transmitted by his radio operator to London sometime before dawn. Then he went home to Fräulein Nortnung, who threw off the blankets and wiggled her pink toes at him. Piocher's women would no more have asked where he had been than a green recruit would have asked a lieutenant-general where he had slept the night before.

“They are shipping too bloody much to Germany,” Piocher said in a brisk shout, “and it's all coming out of my frigging pockets.”

“Ja, Carlie,” Fräulein Nortnung said.

“I want you up an hour early in the morning,” he said, undressing with despatch. “We've got to get things organized.”

“Ja, Carlie.”

Piocher stood naked beside the bed and smiled down at her. “You've got nipples on you tonight like a pair of thumbs,” he said affectionately. “Move over.”

A Lysander aircraft brought the Drayst dossier and the handprints of Napoleon, Socrates, and St. Paul to a pasture near Fenton-Dormer on Tuesday night. The package was sent along to Paris at once in a bale of lettuce, and Piocher picked it up at Les Halles.

On Saturday, Selahettin was able to astound Colonel Drayst as they went over his horoscope together. She told him that it was so remarkable that she would do for him what she had done for the Reichsfuehrer SS. The Colonel was deeply grateful, though he had no idea what she meant.

Selahettin mounted the flutter light, with its spinning, gleaming aluminum disc, on the desk directly in front of Drayst and ordered him to stare into it and concentrate. She talked to him soothingly, and he went under in four minutes. When she brought him out of his trance she told him that the magnetic forces were unpropitious. They would try again in six months. They would see.

Selahettin met Piocher that night.

“He tried to rape her during the pogroms in Berlin in '38. She shot him. He is literally and clinically insane about her—that is my opinion as a psychiatrist, Charles. He has raped many Jewish girls and he has strangled three, but she is the most beautiful and desirable Jew he has ever seen, and also she is the wife of an old-line army general. The army makes him feel inferior, he says; the army is always looking down on the SS. She is the compensator. He says that he must have her, and while he has her he must kill her.”

Seven

His superiors at the Bendlerstrasse were relieved when Veelee's Jewish wife left him. His anxieties solved, he was now the model of a professional officer. Too driving perhaps, too silent, even dour, but the world was forcing Germany into war once again and a serious attitude was commendable.

Hansel had written twice to Paule in Paris, but he got no reply. Gretel wrote her sister-in-law eleven letters and Gisele five, but Paule did not reply. Once Hansel had mentioned Paule's name in Veelee's presence, but the savagery of von Rhode's response had silenced him instantly.

After the political meetings with the British, French, and Mussolini in 1938, Guderian had been made Commander in Chief of all Wehrmacht Mobile Forces. When he offered Veelee the post as Chief of the General Staff of the Sixteenth Army Corps, formed by the First, Third, Fourth and Fifth Panzer divisions and the Eighth Panzer brigade at Sagan, under the command of General Hoepner, Veelee accepted like a shot. The Sixteenth Corps was the first of its kind in the Wehrmacht and, the embryo of the future, mighty Panzerarmee.

In August, 1939, when war was declared, Veelee was transferred to the Tenth Army under the General Walther von Reichenau. Reichenau, a Nazi, was the most political of the generals, and he seemed to feel the need to compensate for this in the eyes of the Officer Corps. His military behavior so resembled Errol Flynn in mid-film that everyone was slightly dazed. He swashbuckled as though he were following the orders of a general staff of lady novelists, and while neither Veelee nor most of his fellow officers approved, they were impressed by Reichenau's ability to become so operatically Italian just because war had been declared. Once the man had even swum a river at the head of his troops.

During the Polish campaign—which made the eyes of all tank officers shine self-righteously after their nineteen-year fight with the mossbacks to employ mobile force—the Tenth attacked out of an area that reached from Kreuzberg to Gleiwitz in Upper Silesia. The Eighth was on its left flank and the Fourteenth on its right. Though the roads were bad, during the first days of the campaign they moved forward at an incredible rate of speed each day, and the hot summer dust lay around them in choking clouds. Then resistance stiffened momentarily. Veelee was awarded the Iron Cross, second and first class, for distinguished service in reinforcing and supplying an infantry battalion which had been cut off after capturing a village. The battalion had suffered heavy losses and was about to surrender when Veelee attacked with a rashly collected force of three tanks and one armored car after intercepting a radio message to the divisional staff. The division had replied that it would be impossible to send relief, but Veelee launched a cross-country raid and scattered the Polish force encircling the battalion. Of course Reichenau was pleased by this kind of initiative, and after awarding Veelee his decorations he sent him off to see the Fuehrer, who had stationed himself in the village of Praha to watch the siege of Warsaw.

Veelee found his Commander in Chief in a church tower, the command post of an artillery battalion, an instant before noon on September 22nd. As Keitel introduced him to the Fuehrer with cold disapproval, and as the Fuehrer began to shake his hand, the huge bells in the clocktower immediately overhead began to ring out the twelve strikes of the hour. Because speech was impossible, the two men were forced to freeze into a most unnatural tableau, each shaking the other's hand, each standing awkwardly bent forward as though life had stopped the instant they had touched, each smiling so broadly and showing so many teeth that after the seventh bong they appeared to be snarling at each other in an uncannily skillful taxidermist's display. At each new bong, each man would roll his eyes upward toward the bells imploringly, and the resounding
boinnnnggg
and
BONGGG
seemed to vibrate their bodies. At the moment of the last bong, just as the Fuehrer was about to greet and congratulate his brave officer, Keitel shoved between the two men a written message which announced that General von Fritsch had been killed in action at about ten o'clock that morning.

The Fuehrer was very pleased. “Good riddance,” he said, and, diverted by the blessed silence and the refreshing news, he turned away from Veelee and walked to the railing of the tower to observe the progress of the siege once more. Veelee stared with horror at the back of the Fuehrer's head. He could not believe what he had heard. Fritsch was the army.