An Infinity of Mirrors (37 page)

“Honor exists outside of us, does it not?” Paule asked. “Especially so, I should think, in the case of a man and a woman whose son has been murdered like an insect, without honor. Think of the years they taught you about soldiers' honor. Think of the lifetime that I have been taught in various ways about a Jew's honor. Then tell me whether your soldier's honor and my ruined honor have any meaning when we think of Paul-Alain dead. There is honor, and there is honor. What happened to us during the four days it took to murder Paul-Alain will live on forever, and now that we are about to learn the names of the two men who killed him I can tell you, at last, what honor is, Veelee. Honor is not being able to live if those men are to live. Honor is not being willing to live unless we kill those men in the most disgusting manner possible. It has come to this, dearest: you must become a traitor and we must become murderers, or else we lose all honor and all peace forever. That is our only duty now.”

“How is it to be done?” Veelee asked. “We must not wait.”

She lifted his hand and, her eyes closed, kissed it as though she was swearing upon a sacred sword. “I have thought of the way,” she said.

Nineteen

In July, 1944, Paris was the rear area behind the heavy fighting in Normandy and Brittany, and Captain Strasse discovered that this produced a thirty-eight percent increase in the gross volume of his clubs. In a sense, he said to Yoka elatedly; every night was just like New Year's Eve. “I never thought I would be hoping for the war to last forever,” he said, “but I certainly can't object to this one any more.”

“Just so long as it lasts until every dirty, fucking Boche is dead,” Yoka said.

Strasse touched her cheek and smiled at her lovingly. “Ah, they're not so bad,” he said expansively.

“Are you out of your mind?”

“I bet if we got to know them we'd find they're just like everybody else.”

“Up yours.” Yoka was definite about everything—no halfway stuff with her. It was a good thing she thought he was a Dane and that she couldn't speak Danish. Thank God. Everything she did excited him, and when he kissed her his ears buzzed. The amazing thing was that no one had ever
liked
him before, much less loved him. She loved. She was crazy about him. At first, he hadn't been sure that he wanted anything like that. Who wants to feel owned? He had always realized that he'd had a big edge in life because nobody liked him. No brakes, hit and run. But now that he had a taste of the feeling of being loved—and by the fiercest woman he had ever met—he knew what he had been missing.

“How come you like me so much, Yoka?” he had asked her once.

“I like the way you balance a beret, you little shit,” she had said; and she had grabbed him by his buzzing ears and pulled his mouth down to hers and made a meal of it. For her birthday in October—Yoka was a Libra and therefore sensitive to beauty—Strasse had given her a big diamond ring that Fräulein Nortnung had located for him,
plus
all of her police papers from Amsterdam, her entire record. Yoka had been very big-time; she had even been up for armed robbery. He simply could not imagine it—a beautiful, sweet little doll like this and she had the nerve of thirty Wild-West Indians and a strike on her for armed robbery. That was real aristocracy.

Yoka had gazed down at the police papers with awe. “Where the hell did you get these?” she gasped.

He shrugged, so delighted that he wanted to jig. “I gave a man some money and he gave them to me. And they aren't copies—you burn them and there won't be any record left.”

“Burn them? Are you crazy? Honey, they came from you. No man in the whole world but you would think of such a wonderful thing. You want to know why I love you, you sick little bastard? This is why I love you. You are so offbeat, you are so absolutely crazy, that I can't get it through my head that you belong to me.”

Well, that was the way it was. He had talked to her about getting married. It wasn't something he just said; he thought out every word beforehand so she would understand how difficult it was for him to say such a thing. It made her cry, but it was a helpless, grateful, defenseless, total, ecstatic kind of crying, and it made him feel like a giant. He had done more for her than he had ever done for anyone, and all the while this joy pierced his heart he was crying himself and didn't know it. He cried. He actually cried for the first time in his life that he could remember. Maybe it was the first time in his life he could remember feeling
anything
, because what he had felt for Yoka was nothing compared to what he felt after she had reacted to his asking her to marry him. He had offered her the only important thing he had to give, and she valued it.

They calmed down after a while. The tremendous feeling didn't go away, but they calmed down because nobody could go on that way without snapping a spine. She didn't even answer him for two days; they just stayed in that great big bed. Then late one night she said, “I was married once to a guy who had more wives at one time than both of us have fingers, and I swore—I tell you I even took a razor blade and opened my vein a little bit so I could do it in blood—and I swore that I would never marry another son-of-a-bitch of a man if I lived forever. Oh, honey, oh, honey.” She began to cry again and she pressed her face so hard into his shoulder that he thought she would break her nose.

“You won't marry me?” he said hoarsely. His hands and feet felt as cold as death.

“I will, honey. I will because I have to. And I've got to break what I swore. Because I love you, I love you, I love you.”

“We'll get married tonight,” he said eagerly, thinking at the same instant that he'd have to buy some faked papers from Piocher.

“We get married the day they carry the last dead German out of this town,” Yoka said. “Maybe we won't wait until this rotten war is over, but we'll wait that long. Marriage is a holy thing, and I don't want any Germans in the same country when it happens to me.”

When he thought it all over later, he realized he should have known better. He had given her his private telephone number in his own quarters at the Avenue Foch, in case there was ever any emergency and she needed him. Nobody was allowed to answer that phone but him. Yoka didn't know where it was; she had never had occasion to use it in over three years because there never had been a situation she couldn't handle. Whatever happened in one of his clubs was all in a night's work to her.

Everything was going so splendidly. He had shipped out a little over six thousand Jews in two weeks, all to Auschwitz. It was a new record. Everybody in Berlin was purring at him. It was a rough time because the increase in the night-club business sometimes kept him up as late as eight in the morning, and then he had to go straight to the office. Too many pills, maybe, but it was the only way he could keep going. He'd been told that Professor Morell had said that a man had to go very easy with those pills, but he had such fatigue. The God-damn Jews. How could he keep the shipments moving out without the pills? But sometimes he would lose all the colors of everything for fifteen or twenty minutes at a time. No color—what a world that would be! And sometimes all the thoughts in his head would go way up to the top of his skull and then slide down at him in a crazy tilt, picking up enormous speed and threatening to slide down on him like a runaway piano on the deck of a ship in a storm. And the music he heard! If he had the skill to write it down he wouldn't do it. Even if he did, no instrument could play it. It would have to be sung by screaming people whose feet were on fire. Horrible music.

“Have you heard the way people scream when their feet are on fire?” he said to the French police inspector across the desk from him.

The policeman stared at him blankly and said, “Now these lists of convalescent homes. What is your feeling about that?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean they are sick people, mostly old people, so I suggest we jump over this list and go on to the next. No need to—”

Strasse hit the desk with his fist so hard that everything on it jumped. Here it was, almost one in the morning, and he hadn't been able to visit one of his clubs that evening, and these idiots were still splitting hairs about Jews. “Don't you people ever learn anything?” he screamed. “You've been working with me for three years and eating pretty well. You've got a few deals on the side, so maybe you are even a rich man by now. And I did it for you. But when I try to teach you the way you have to learn to think, you just can't do it.” The shifting liquid heat started inside his head and ran like molten gold across the top of his forehead, dropped imperceptibly, like a linotype machine, then started to burn its way back to the other side where it dropped and started again. “They're Jews, aren't they? It is that simple. They will be dead in exactly four days, won't they? What difference does it make how old they are or whether they have a bad cold? Jews. Jewsl We are here to kill Jews. Will you ever, ever learn that?” Then the private telephone rang, and Strasse picked it up wearily. It seemed to weigh sixty-eight pounds.

“Strasse,” he said into the telephone.

“Baby? Yoka. We got trouble.” He sat up very straight.

“Who? Where?”

“The Casino Latino. I've locked myself in the office. It's the fucking SS fighting the fucking Milice. They're wrecking the joint, and I can't raise any cops.”

“Stay locked in there, you hear?” he said frantically. “I'll be right there.” He hung up. “Come on,” he said to the four policemen. “And bring a few loaded sticks. They're breaking up one of my night clubs.” They all charged out of the room, and in less than eight minutes they were at the Casino Latino. A full-scale free-for-all was going on, but when one of the inspectors blew a whistle the fighters paused as though a motion picture projector had stopped in mid-reel. Slowly eyes were raised to the small balcony where Strasse, with the Totenkorps Death's Heads shining on his uniform, stood with the three cops.

“Gestapo!” he screamed at them.

The fighting stopped cold. They were all blind drunk.

“You will line up in two files—SS to the right, Milice to the left.” He snapped his fingers and pointed. “You will give names, ranks, and serial numbers. Whatever the damages are to this place you will pay double, and whatever labor is required you will provide yourselves. Line up!”

He had seen Yoka open the door of the office at the back and, knowing that she was watching, he began to hyperbolize. “You are filthy swine! You are low, rotten filth!” He turned to the police. “Get them out. March them to the nearest commissariat. I don't want to look at them. Out! Out!”

As the bruised and drunken men moved past him to the door, Strasse walked down the steps to the back of the room where Yoka was standing, waiting to tell him how masterful and wonderful he was. She was deathly pale, but of course it had been a frightening experience to be trapped in a cellar with wild men. Well, he had shown her how such matters were handled.

“What is that uniform?” she asked in a shaking voice. He blinked, confused, then collected himself and looked down. He was wearing his uniform. Those damned pills! My God. Well, what the hell, it had to happen sooner or later. “Listen, Yoka. Maybe I should have told you. But who had the time, correct? I am not really a Dane. You know what I mean—I am a German, I am with the Gestapo. I am a German, you know?”

She stared at him in horror. Her expression was so different that it upset him. “What's the matter?” he said. She did not answer. “Yoka! Stop looking at me like that! I admit it, I should have told you. But you liked me to be Danish. You liked the beret. You said it many times. You like night clubs. You like night clubs as much as I do. Where do you think I got the night clubs?” She stuffed her shaking hand into her mouth. “Yoka! Answer me! I am the same man. Nothing has changed but the suit I wear. Nothing else. You are the same and I am the same.” Her legs gave away, and she sank as slowly as a fog, toppling sideways into a chair, still staring up at him with a look of the most unbelieving horror; and a terrible thought came to Strasse as he looked at her, a terrible, terrible thought.

“Are you a Jew?” The sentence exploded out of him before he even knew what he had been thinking. “Is that why you always cursed Germans? Is that why you are looking at me like that? Yoka! Answer me! Tell me! Are you a Jew?” He leaned over and pulled her to her feet; when he shook her he could hear her teeth strike against each other. “Tell me! I won't be angry. It is all right. There are ways to make it all right if you are a Jew. It has been done, Yoka. But you must tell me. Are you a Jew? I must know that. Are you a Jew? I have to know that.” She did not answer him with words, but from far back in her throat she spat at him. It splattered across his face and he let her go and she fell again into the chair. He wheeled away from her, meaning to walk purposefully, but he found himself running out of the room into the deserted street.

Dawn was beginning to show. He fumbled in his pocket for the pills, and took three instead of one. Within a matter of yards, he felt better. All at once he began to see things more clearly. He walked down the inclined rue de Ponthieu, and his mind formed itself in a perfectly circular pattern, permitting him to see almost all of the known world as though through a remarkable telescope. Then the juice-filled, pain-wild music began in his head, and he stood on the corner of the rue du Colisée and leaned against the building, waiting for it to fade away into giant patterns of black and white herringbone tweed. Then the bubbling-water effects began: churning round domes of red, breaking and then reforming. Moving mechanically, he walked through empty streets until he reached the Place Beauvau, and Gestapo headquarters for Paris. Like an automaton he saluted the guards and entered the courtyard.