An Infinity of Mirrors (28 page)

“That's just what I was thinking.”

“You hear from Fräulein Lorenz every day. What do they need today, for example?”

Fräulein Nortnung shuffled through the papers on the top of her desk. “She is so sweet, that Fräulein Lorenz. Today she would like a gym suit for the four-year-old godson of the Reichsfuehrer SS, and a swim suit for his fourteen-year-old daughter. The last one was too small—she must have a forty-two. They liked the Lodenstoff material very much, and she wants six hundred more yards of it for the Reichsfuehrer SS. He also needs some antique silverware, a dinner service for eighty, and can we find for Fräulein Bergquist, the beautiful Swedish journalist, a Bessarabian housemaid.” She looked up. “Why Bessarabian, I wonder?”

“I am not sure, but I think there are no Jews in Bessarabia.”

“Also, the Reichsfuehrer SS needs twelve dozen silver frames, postcard size, one foal-fur coat—Fräulein Lorenz adds, this is so cute, also, can you please send one of these along to me—then forty pounds of floor wax, sixty pounds of bacon, lard, and smoked meat in equal portions—and that's all for today.” She sighed like a lunch whistle. “My God, think what the order every day from the Reichsmarschall must be!”

Captain Strasse shrugged. “So don't worry about executions this morning,” he said. “That's war,” he added.

Fräulein Nortnung's telephone buzzed, and she picked it up. “Yes, sir,” she said and hung up. “He's ready for you now, Captain Strasse,” she said. “And thank you very much for your reassurances.”

“Heil Hitler!”

“Heil Hitler! Oh, Captain, one moment, please. Colonel Drayst asked me to type up this police card and give it to you to discuss with him.”

Strasse was feeling more exhausted than ever, but freer and endlessly euphoric. Through a very good friend who was the nephew of Fräulein Manzialy, the Fuehrer's vegetarian cook at the Wolfsschanze, he had been able to buy a large supply of the special pills which Professor Morell prescribed for the Fuehrer to keep him so full of zest and optimism. The pills were absolutely wonderful, but it was necessary to take them without interruption because otherwise they left a person feeling desperate and almost suicidal, and suicide was the last thing he needed. He grinned happily to himself. He was in love with a beautiful girl who was as fascinated by the night-club business as he was. If he had searched the world he could not have found a girl more wonderful than Yoka, nor one more exactly suited to his future life. She was really a night person, Yoka; she wouldn't live any other way. She slept until six in the afternoon, lunched at nine, started work at eleven, finished at seven
A
.
M
. and went to bed at nine or ten. She was like an artist. There were so many restrictions in life, she said, that the least she could do to fight it was to refuse to live in the same way other people lived. What a wonderful girl!

The only flaw was his own schedule. His Gestapo work took so much time, and there was no way to duck it. As his extermination quota went up, the work became more demanding still, requiring his entire concentration from eight in the morning until six in the evening. He could not have kept going if it weren't for Professor Morell's pills. His eyes burned all the time.

He had never been in love before—mainly because no one had ever liked him. Yoka was crazy for him; she would do anything for him. She wouldn't even take presents from him—she just wanted to be with him. She was Dutch and therefore a good ice-skater, and she was a good cook and almost as good a housekeeper as a German. Also, she thought that all he did was run the eleven night clubs. She had never seen him in his uniform. She actually hated the Gestapo. She didn't like Germans, even—in fact, she hated Germans. She thought he was Danish, and she was crazy about the way he wore a beret. Well, what the hell, the war would be over soon and he could burn the God-damn uniform. She thought that he had to live with his dying mother, a sweet, little, sick old Danish lady.

Dr. Morell's pills sometimes gave Strasse long lapses of memory—not that he didn't feel well, just a little tired, but marvelous—and sometimes he wished he could take such a big dose of pills that he would lose his memory until the end of the war. Then he would take his discharge right here in Paris, and maybe he would have twenty night clubs by that time, and they could get married, and he could finally get a little of the peace and love and comfort that he was entitled to.

He told her that when he wasn't with his mother he was lining up supplies for the clubs. She was ecstatic in her admiration for a man clever enough to own eleven night clubs. They represented everything wonderful to Yoka, just as they did to him. She had never known anyone in Holland who could afford to take her to a night club. Then, after the invasion, there were no night clubs and her parents were killed accidentally in some SS operation and she had come to Paris and gone right to work in Au Toujours Noël.

Strasse knew how she felt; in Luebeck he could never afford to go to night clubs either. Then, after he had gotten his commission with Section IV4b, he had gone to a night club in Berlin and it had changed his whole life. He couldn't really explain it; though he and Yoka had talked about it a lot. But people who might have been weak or mean or nothing at all during the day—people who might not, say, be very nice people really—could walk into a night club and snap their ringers at a waiter and assume a power and a presence. They had a
meaning
in a night club. They even looked cleaner. They looked up to themselves, and that was why he put so much emphasis on service, the most obsequious kind of service, in his clubs.

At least all these things had happened to Strasse when he had gone to that club in Berlin, and so when he was in charge of the interrogation of the fourth Jew the Gestapo had arrested in Paris, on the fifth day after his arrival in the city, and he heard the man admit that he owned a night club in Montmartre, the idea of actually owning a night club had almost exploded inside his head, and he had sent everybody else out of the room.

The man was bleeding from one ear because he had fallen off the high stool where they made him stand, naked, between the artificial drownings. He was a knobby, short, skinny man with blue skin.

“You want to get out of here?” Strasse had asked sympathetically.

“You have the wrong man.” He had been saying that over and over again all morning. He was a Jew, and yet he kept saying they had the wrong man.

“That doesn't matter, sir,” Strasse had said kindly, “we'll kill you anyway.” That kind of talk was against regulations, but he wanted to make his point quickly and see this man's night club. “But if you want to get out to Switzerland or Spain, with real papers and no tricks, then just sign over your night club to me and away you go. I'll even give you five hundred francs.”

The man pretended to be confused. “My night club? It's nothing. Chairs and tables in a loft, a few spotlights and a bandstand. No stock. What do you want it for?”

Strasse hadn't even listened to him. “What is the name of the club?”

“El Casino Latino.”

What a name! The prisoner on the stool towered overhead, and Strasse reached up and took him by the testicles and squeezed very hard. The man screamed and swayed, and Strasse steadied him on the stool. “Do you want me to have that night club?” he asked. The man nodded. Strasse let go and said, “All right. Good. You can sit down now, sir. I'll go and make up some papers.”

Maybe the Casino Latino wasn't much of a club, but it was his first, and he would make it great. He got his supplies through Piocher. Piocher made sure the price was right and even lent him the money to get started. Coal was procurable from the
luxe
hotels accommodating officers. These hotels had worked frantically to get the army business because it was one of the most fabulously profitable in the whole war. The German Army paid them full rates, and kept the hotels open and running when there was no other business to be had. More importantly, these hotels were given purchase-order permits for food, wine, liquor, paint, textiles, wood, and coal. Each hotel was able to buy from five to eight times as much as they needed, and they resold the excess on the black market. Next to such controllers of the black market as Piocher, the operators of the
luxe
hotels earned the great fortunes of the Occupation. When Strasse appeared in his Gestapo uniform to buy coal, the hotels were happy to deliver it at cost. Heated night clubs did all the business to be had in Paris; they were among the few places people could go to keep warm, and there was much more room than in the bordellos.

Strasse's other night clubs were acquired in the same manner—or rather by the same principle, because the method changed. Why wait for night-club owners to be arrested by chance? After assigning his French police to investigate the ownership of all night clubs, he inspected those owned by Jews for their locations and potential capacity, and when he had made his choice he would have the owners brought in for interrogation. He was always meticulously fair. He had sent only one man to Auschwitz for extermination, and that was because the man had deliberately kicked him in the face with his knee when Strasse had grabbed him by the testicles. The others were given their freedom and exit papers—which of course they could always sell for a good price.

Strasse prided himself on being a fair man, and he was also proud of the strength of his hatred for Jews. He had only to remember the obscene, disgusting pictures of them in
Der Stuermer
to make himself sick. When he talked to Colonel Drayst he wished there was some way to measure how much he hated Jews, because he knew he himself hated them more than even Heydrich or Goering. Maybe he even hated them more than the Fuehrer himself. He had worked very hard to prove this point in Paris. It was a cushy assignment, and Eichmann had called him “you lucky dog.” The only trouble was that he was exhausted. Yoka had so much passion for him that he thought she would burn the life out of him, and apart from that he had never been so busy at IV4b. Thank heaven for Professor Morell and the pills.

From the beginning Strasse organized his work carefully, going partly by the book and partly by his own intuition and his hatred. He had offered money and power to the French anti-Semites to set up an Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question and had installed it on the Boulevard Haussmann, in a substantial building he had requisitioned from a Jewish business. Once they were his lodgers, such Frenchmen as Captain Sézille and Darquier de Pellepoix became the most active campaigners for total extermination. In 1941 he had been able to persuade Pucheu, Minister for Home Affairs, to set up a special police department for Jewish problems called PQJ. In addition, he had guided the amateurs at the Propaganda-Staffel in setting up the Young Front Headquarters. This consisted of a hundred young toughs who were given a complete wardrobe of dark shirt, tie, boots, badge, beret, crossbelts, and trousers, and a comfortable clubhouse at 36 Avenue des Champs-Elysées. The lads were used to smash Jewish shops, beat up their owners and, in general, work hand-in-hand with another of his inspirations, the anti-Semitic newspaper,
Le Pilori
.

On the 23rd of June, 1942, the Reichsfuehrer SS had issued an order demanding the evacuation of all Jews in France at the earliest date. The greatest pressures were put upon Strasse. Thank heaven he had completed his model index, entirely cross-filed, of all Jews by alphabet, streets, professions, and nationality. He would be ready in two weeks. But there were so many details to oversee! He even had to straighten out the Commander General of the Army about the proper wording of the directives. The Wehrmacht now understood that they must not refer to transports as being sent “to the East.” And the term “deportation” could not be used either, because it recalled the Tsar's infamous deportations to Siberia. In the future, the term would be “sent to do forced labor” and one hundred thousand Jews were the quota from France—with the French government paying for the transportation—and Strasse wanted them to go as quietly as possible. Because he did not want to interfere with the enlistment of genuine French forced labor, his directive to the army provided that in the future all deportations should be called “transplantations.” The term was an inspiration; the Jews might even begin to feel secure, to send for their children under eighteen and go more quietly.

Strasse had gone over the disposition of the children carefully with Eichmann, and they had decided that as soon as possible convoys should be dispatched with a ratio of five hundred children to every seven hundred adults.

But every irritation was put in his way. The damned French police had been so negligent in carrying out his orders that a great number of Jews had been registered as Turks, Armenians, and Greeks, and as far as certain police were concerned, the law forbidding Jews to engage in trade seemed to exist only on paper. He even had reason to suspect that certain French police intentionally furnished Jews with opportunities to contravene the law. In his circular letter of the 26th of June to the French prefects of police, Strasse carefully outlined once more his directions for the transplantation of Jews, based on pregrouping before departure so that each train must have at least one thousand Jews; and it was forbidden for transplantees to take anything with them except ration cards, wedding rings, and—as a sentimental gesture—pets. The railroad cars must be neat and clean on arrival in Poland, and a Jew in each car must be held responsible for this. All lists must be in quadruplicate, and Section IV4b must be notified by telephone at PASsy 54–18, or telegram, of the number of women in each transport, the name of the transport leader, and the nature and quality of the food included.

It was certainly bad luck, Strasse thought, that the greatest Jewish raids coincided with the arrival of hordes of furloughed soldiers as rich and wide-eyed as tourists. For the last ten days he had been getting along on two hours' sleep. Night clubs needed constant supervision, no doubt about it; there were a thousand details to such a profession. Recently he had discovered that his doorman at La Bonne Bouche was actually a leper, and the attendant of the ladies' room at La Petite Tahiti had been doing a brisk abortion business in Strasse's washroom until he had burst in on her in search of the cigarette girl whom he had just learned was selling narcotics to favorite customers.