An Infinity of Mirrors (27 page)

They began the long walk to the train, in the hope that it would be running.

On April 2, 1942, Major-General Wilhelm von Rhode was named Nachrichtenfuehrer beim Militaerbefelshaber in Frankreich, commander of the Signal Corps installation under Colonel-General Karl Heinrich von Stuelpnagel, Military Governor of France. He was responsible for all wireless and telephone communication in Occupied France, the courier service of the German forces in the country, the maintenance of permanent broadcasting installations and mobile transmitters, and the defense of all telephone lines against attacks from commando and resistance units. From the hospital Veelee had been routed to Paris through the Fuehrer's headquarters at Rastenburg, in East Prussia, for ten days under General Fellgiebel, whose command was then the most complicated communications center in the world. Veelee was still quite weak and most of the time he had great difficulty in concentrating, but his lifetime of soldiering, his monocle, and his frozen face carried him through.

Veelee had two offices. The first was at the Hôtel Majestic on the Avenue Kléber, in the headquarters of the Military Governor; the other was at the headquarters of the Commander of Gross-Paris, at the Hôtel Meurice in the rue de Rivoli. As usual, Gretel's information was impeccable, and he was assigned quiet rooms on the court side of the Royal Monceau.

Veelee walked past Cours Albert I on his first evening in Paris, but he did not telephone Paule until the third day, a Saturday morning. He had not heard her voice for five years.

When Clotilde answered the phone Veelee tried to disguise his voice; Clotilde was a weeper. “Mme. von Rhode, please.”

“Who is calling, please?”

“This is the office of the Military Governor.”

“General von Rhode! It is you! Oh, how good to hear your voice again, sir.” Clotilde began to weep. “Frau General Heller wrote to me to say you would be here. Oh, when you see Paul-Alain! He is so handsome! And such a good boy. Madame will be so happy—” There was a pause, and then he heard Paule's voice.

“Veelee?” Her voice trembled.

“Why can't my sister mind her own—”

“Never mind. It doesn't matter. Are you in Paris?”

“Yes.”

“Please come now; Paul-Alain will be home from school in ten minutes.”

“Thank you. That is very kind of you.”

Veelee was perspiring heavily when he put the telephone down. He leaned back in his chair to rest, and then after a few minutes he walked slowly to the lavatory and washed his face carefully. He looked up slowly into the mirror and stared for a long time at his ruined face. Stiffly, he reached into the pocket of his tunic, removed the monocle and fixed it deeply into his right eye socket. The heavy gold leaves denoting his rank gleamed on the scarlet collar tabs of his gray tunic. The campaign ribbons across his left breast carried the emerald ribbon of die Italian Cross of St. Mauritius and St. Lazarus, two tabs of the Bronze Medal for wounds in action, four silver decorations for having been awarded the Iron Cross twice—both second and first class—in each World War, the gold and white of the Knight's Cross; and a tiny gold eagle on a royal-blue ribbon symbolizing twenty-five years of military service.

Veelee pulled on his black beret with its silver Death's Head pin as he re-entered the office, and an orderly held out his white silk scarf and his gray leather overcoat. A car was waiting for him in the porte-cochère. He patted the empty left sleeve of his coat and, sitting stiffly erect, told the driver where to go. The monocle glittered over his limp cheek and his chin was high.

Clotilde, Mme. Citron, the two chambermaids, M. Deboucoux-Piccolet, the
chef de cuisine
, the two scullery maids, Paule's personal maid, and Paule were all standing in the hall when Paul-Alain opened the front door to let his father in. Mme. Citron had pleaded that everyone be on hand to greet the General, and Paule had agreed because it would postpone for a moment longer that first instant when they had to be alone.

A very broad, tall, blond man stood in the door, his monocle glaring at them balefully.

“General von Rhode! Your arm!” Clotilde cried out. Paule turned and rebuked her silently, then turned again, saw the right side of his face and walked to him and kissed him on the right cheek. “Welcome to France, my General,” she said. She took his hand, led him forward, introduced him to the staff, thanked them, and dismissed them.

After a pause Paul-Alain asked about each one of his father's medals and decorations, and Veelee said, “I am going to take you to the park and tell you all about them,” but he did not look at Paule.

“He must be back at one o'clock for lunch,” Paule said.

“Will you be here for lunch, Papa?”

When Veelee did not answer, Paule said, “Of course your Papa will be here for lunch.” Clotilde was lurking in the doorway, and Paule sent her to fetch Paul-Alain's hat and coat.

“What happened to your arm, Papa?”

“I left it in North Africa.”

“In a battle?”

“I was riding in a car when a plane flew in and shot at the car, and we had a most spectacular smash-up.”

“That is the same as a battle.”

“The effect was quite the same,” Veelee said as Clotilde returned with the boy's hat and coat.

To Paul-Alain's chagrin he was taken off to nap after lunch. Paule and Veelee sat on the south terrace. It was a rare April day for Paris, neither rainy nor cold. Paule spoke lightly of the weather, of her luck in having such a cook, and of how frantic the black market made their existence, and as she talked she mourned the changes in his face.

Just as unobtrusively, he mourned the changes which had come into hers. “Paul-Alain is a fine boy,” he said finally, interrupting her. He spoke in German.

“He is a fine boy,” she answered, in German.

“He behaves well and he is not silly.”

“Oh, he can be quite silly.”

“I am grateful to you for his attitude toward me. When I reread your last letter to me this morning, I began to fear all over again that you would not have been able to keep from infecting him with the bitterness you felt toward me.”

“I feel no bitterness now, Veelee.”

“That letter shocked me. I haven't seen anything in the same way since the first time I read it. I—I couldn't comprehend what had happened—why you had changed and how you could change. It was sudden and cruel, because the letter of four days before had been the usual news-filled, loving letter. I didn't know what to do … I sent you a cablegram, but of course you didn't answer. Then, when I saw Miles-Meltzer seven months later he told me about that night and the bullet holes in the door and the terrible harm which had been done to you, but by that time I had settled so deeply into despair of you that I could not climb out again. I wanted to talk with you as we are talking now, but the war came and everything's changed, and now it's too late for what might have been.”

“They are still killing Jews, Veelee. Only now it isn't just Jews—it's everybody. Are you doing anything about it?”

His head pounded. Her voice sounded very distant and then very close, and he was thinking of what they had lost.

“Do you have another man now, Paule?”

“Yes.”

He had seated her to his left. At lunch she had noticed the care with which he had placed her, so that though his empty sleeve faced her, his slackened cheek could not be seen, and now she suddenly remembered him as he had looked ten years before, the morning her father had died.

He seemed to read her mind. “There are many worse off than I,” he said. “On both sides. This sort of thing is a privilege of my profession. Your hair seems shorter.”

“When I came back to Paris I had it cut short. The first year it was dyed blond.”

“You thought you could make yourself over?”

“I suppose so, Veelee.”

“And now the wounds from Germany are healed? Now you can permit yourself to look—”

“Not quite. But we do the best we can.”

“And now you can relax about being a Jew again.”

“Hardly. Paris is occupied by your countrymen, after all. They are killing Jews every day. I have lost all joy in being a Jew.”

“It is not the obvious changes that matter, is it?” Veelee asked gently after a long silence. “My arm, my eye, my face—they are nothing. My profession is all I have. I don't look at it as only a practice of violence, as you must see it. It is an intricate trade involving many skills which are hard to learn.”

“Such as obeying orders. Any orders whatsoever if they are issued by anyone above you.”

“We all do what we have been taught, you know, Paule. Even your father, the freest of free souls, obeyed his training. But we were talking about loss. We live apart in another country, but that is not what breaks our hearts, is it? It is the loss of the innocence of what we had. And so it is with my profession. In the olden days of my family, it was a gallant profession and it required faith and honor. Now there is no faith and no honor. No arm, no eye, no face, no wife, no son, no place—all of it a waste, my dear. And waste is the greatest sin of all.”

She stared at him sadly. “My profession, we might say, was to be your wife. I have been thinking about it for five years, and I suppose that any one of my father's wives might have happily exchanged my adversities for those my father gave them. I see that men must test women, as some women must test their men. My father tested them with his great weaknesses and you tested me with yours. As a German with faith and honor who could not dare to recognize what was happening to his country, you had to test me—and I failed you. I broke and ran, out of self-pity. I failed you.”

“It was a privilege of your profession,” he answered her, staring into her eyes. His voice shook and his hand grasped at the arm of the chair convulsively, and he stood up with an effort. “I must go now.”

“Veelee, perhaps if we try—”

“Let's not add to the waste, my dear. You have this lover you speak of, and we have been talking, don't you see, about a different woman, and certainly, about a different man.” He clicked his heels, made his military bow, and walked across the terrace, through the study, and out the door of the apartment.

Ten

Fräulein Nortnung, personal secretary to SS Colonel Drayst, was feeling nervous because SS Captain Meisters and his friend, SS Staff-Sergeant Heim, of the SD post at Lille, had been executed that morning on the order of the Reichsfuehrer SS. Captain Meisters and Sergeant Heim had withheld foreign currency, to the amount of four hundred thousand reichsmarks, from the security funds entrusted to them, and they had used the money to procure a life of luxury for themselves and others. In so doing, the order for their execution had read, they had transformed a sacred public office into a private commercial enterprise. The executions bothered Fräulein Nortnung because, with the help of Charles Piocher, she had gradually developed a sort of warehousing business, which, though it might not have been legal, was extremely profitable. In fact, she had already bought at a bargain price through her brother-in-law, a very good Swiss lawyer, a wonderful resort hotel in the Ticino canton of Switzerland. But of course, she had never permitted her warehousing business to interfere with her work for the SS. After all, in a certain sense the black market
was
her work. Certainly Colonel Drayst had enormous interests in the black market. She also happened to represent unofficially Fräulein Lorenz, a very sweet person and special secretary to the Reichsfuehrer SS. The things she had to find and ship back to the Prinz Albrechtstrasse could not exactly be done officially.

Yes, of course her case was different. Why, for one thing, she only warehoused her own property. One warehouse had furs-broadtails, sealskins, some sable and Persian lamb—and it should all be very saleable merchandise because there was going to be very little fuel in the coming winter. The second warehouse had coffee, canned meats, tobacco, textiles, leather goods, liquor, wine, and excellent confectionery. Charles Piocher had found her a reliable and talented Jewish convict whom she had been able to have released in her custody because she was always doing favors for the Gestapo, and he managed both of the warehouses for her very honestly, because he was so scared of Carlie.

Fräulein Nortnung had sent three silver foxes and three blue foxes each to General Wolfe and General Mueller as a token of her admiration for them and for the wonderful things they were doing. A cat could look at a king, she had said in her note to General Mueller, the head of the Gestapo, and his personal secretary had written her a very, very sweet thank you note, because General Mueller did not believe in signing anything himself. Sometimes she worried about employing a Jewish convict, but if Charles Piocher had found him it must be all right. They all took their hats off to Carlie.

Still, the execution of Captain Meister and Sergeant Heim made her nervous, and when Captain Strasse came a little early for his ten-o'clock appointment with Colonel Drayst, she decided to ask him about it.

“Did you hear about the executions this morning, Captain Strasse?”

“I heard.”

“Does that frighten you?”

“Why should it frighten me?”

“The night clubs.”

“So?”

“It's illegal to do outside business, and besides, you employ Jews.”

“Who says it is illegal? I run my night clubs on my own time. Who understands the taste of the German public in Paris as well as I do? I have Jews because they know their business, thus giving my German public greater value.”

“But the executions—”

“Achl They were killed because of some homosexual mess—the order was a cover-up. The Reichsfuehrer SS hates a scandal of any kind. He is a nut on honor—you know that. Besides, you are practically assigned to Paris to deal in the black market for the Reichsfuehrer SS alone, so why should he object if you happen to have two warehouses to store goods so that he can be served efficiently when he asks for something?”