An Infinity of Mirrors

An Infinity of Mirrors

Richard Condon

MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

FOR
Red

Author's Note

The author wishes to acknowledge his gratitude for the expert professional assistance from researchers in many countries, the kindnesses of individual historians and archivists, and the authors of the various published accounts of the period in which this novel has been set. In Germany, the historian Studienassessor Eberhard Jeuthe, his wife Dr. Ursula Jeuthe, and Herr Redakteur Klaus Scheunemann of Frankfurt-am-Main, as well as the Institut fuer Zeitgeschichte in Munich. In France, Marie Dominique Mistier, journalist of the Paris newspaper
L'Aurore
, who undertook both French and Spanish researches, and Geoffrey Bocca of La Colle sur Loup. In England, Margot Pottlitzer, Roland Gant, and the chief librarian of the Wiener Library, Ilse R. Wolff, all of London. In the United States, Charlotte von Ihering, teacher of German at Georgetown University and Robert Wolfe, Specialist in German Language Documents, National Archives and Records Service, of Washington, D.C.; Virginia Street of New York, and Joseph M. Fox of Random House, New York. In Switzerland, Mr. James Nolan of Lausanne and Reading, Pennsylvania, and Evelyn Condon of Anières. In Austria, Turhan Bey and Countess Wassilko of the Austrian Astrological Society.

The books and references listed below, in alphabetical order by title, made significant contributions to this novel, an acknowledgment which I immediately feel is greatly understated:
A History of the Weimar Republic
by Erich Eyck (Harvard University Press, Cambridge);
Basic Judaism
by Milton Steinberg (Harcourt Brace, N.Y.);
Blood and Banquets
by Bella Fromm (Harper, N.Y.);
Curfew in Paris
by Ninetta Jucker (Hogarth Press, London);
Death and Tomorrow
by Peter de Polnay (Seeker & Warburg, London);
Dictatorship and Political Police
by E. K. Bramstedt (Oxford University Press, New York);
Eichmann in Jerusalem
by Hannah Arendt (Viking Press, N.Y.);
France, 1940–1955
by Alexander Werth (Holt, N.Y.);
The Germans: An Indictment of My People
by Gudrun Tempel (Random House, N.Y.);
Germany's Revolution of Destruction
by Hermann Rauschning (W. Heinemann, London);
Gestapo: Instrument of Tyranny
by Edward Crankshaw (Viking Press, N.Y.);
Hermann Goering
by Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel (Heinemann, London);
Grand European Expresses
by George Behrend (Allen & Unwin, London);
Great Houses of Europe
edited by Sacheverell Sitwell (Putnam's, N.Y.);
Histoire de la gestapo
by Jacques Delarue (Fayard, Paris);
Hotel Adlon
by Hedda Adlon (Horizon Press, N.Y.);
Human Behavior in the Concentration Camp
by Dr. Elie A. Cohen (Norton, N.Y.);
Insanity Fair
by Douglas Reed (Covici, Friede, N.Y.);
Paris Under the Occupation
by Gérard Walter (Orion Press, New York);
Laval
by Hubert Cole (Heinemann, London);
La vie des français sous l'occupation
by Henri Amouroux (Fayard, Paris);
Cheiro's Language of the Hand
by Cheiro (Jenkins, London);
Jews, God and History
by Max I. Dimont (Simon and Schuster, N.Y.);
Sword and Swastika
by Telford Taylor (Simon and Schuster, N.Y.);
The Dear Monster
by G. R. Halkett (Jonathan Cape, London);
The Destruction of the European Jews
by Raul Hilberg (Quandrangel, N.Y.);
The Development of the German Public Mind
by Freiderich Hertz (Allen & Unwin, London);
The Final Solution
by Gerald Reitlinger (Vallentine, Mitchell, London);
History of the German General Staff
by Walter Goerlitz (Praeger, N.Y.);
The German Generals Talk
by Basil Henry Liddel Hart (Morrow, N.Y.);
The Kersten Memoirs
by Felix Kersten (Macmillan, London);
The Masquerade in Spain
by Charles Foltz, Jr. (Houghton Mifflin, Boston);
The Nemesis of Power
by John W. Wheeler-Bennett (St. Martin's Press, N.Y.);
The Occupation of Enemy Territory
by Gerhard Von Glahn (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis);
The Police of Paris
by Philip John Stead (Staples, London);
The Professional Soldier
by Morris Janowitz (Free Press, Glencoe, Illinois);
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
by William Shirer (Simon and Schuster, N.Y.);
The
SS:
Alibi of a Nation
by Gerald Reitlinger (Heinemann, London);
They Fought Alone
by Maurice Buckmaster (Duell, Sloane & Pearce, N.Y.);
The Unpublished Diary of Pierre Laval
(Falcon, London);
The Vichy Regime
by Robert Aron (Macmillan, London);
The Von Hassell Diaries
(Hamish Hamilton, London);
What the Jews Believe
by Rabbi Philip S. Bernstein (Farrar, Straus, & Young, N.Y.);
When France Fell
by Harry J. Greenwall (Wingate, London);
The White Rabbit
by Bruce Marshall (Houghton Mifflin, Boston);
The Wilhelmstrasse
by Paul Seabury (University of California Press, Berkeley).

“God surrounded me with an infinity of mirrors which repeat my image again and again and again.”

The Keeners' Manual

BOOK ONE

1932
=
1938

One

He sent her a music box which played an aria from
Trovatore
while simultaneously emitting Chanel's wonderful new scent. He sang the words to her with his odd, endearing voice:

“And can I ever forget thee

Thou shalt see that more enduring

Love than mine, ne'er had existence

Triumph over fate securing

Death shall yield to its resistance.”

His voice was very deep and he faulted top notes. But when he sang the aria, he sang it as though he had commissioned this opera from Verdi to give her one small fragment from it and when she tired of that, its days would be ended forever.

He sent her three soft pink pearls every day, the pearls of his grandmother, the tragic wife of the greatest hero of his family, one of the greatest generals of the Royal Prussian Army. His grandmother had loved her husband, but because he could only master the art of useless death, she had left him when he had refused to leave the army. Paule had never seen such beautiful pearls. One morning he telephoned and asked her to bring them with her and they walked to the Place Vendôme, where before her eyes a master jeweler in a broadcloth tail coat strung the pearls together and cooed over them.

Veelee clasped the pearls around Paule's throat in the Tuileries before a round and tranquil pool—a clock without numbers, the timeless timepiece which saw children return to it with their children to float their boats, and then with their grandchildren. He asked her to marry him, but before she could reply he sang the aria softly in her ear in soulful and solemn Italian:

“Di te, di te scordar me!

Tu vedrai che amore in terra

Mai del mio non fù più forte

Vinse el fato in aspra guerra

Vincera la stessa morte.”

She had known him for six weeks. She was twenty-two years old; he was thirty-four. She was tall and slender, and she had the air of a delighted child who had need to amuse and give pleasure. When they first met at the Italian Embassy on the fifth day of May, 1932, Paule stood at the center of a radiance of beautiful women. She was wearing brown, apricot, and salmon: a scarf over the great lapels of that year; and her soft, dark hair fell down behind her. She was thinking about a musician named Masson, about her father's four sets of riding boots in four different tones of leather, and of her father's latest divorce while Dr. Monti explained the preparation of
Tacchino Ripieno alla Lombardia
to her, when the tall, blond, handsome man had appeared at her side, awaiting his introduction. His dark civilian clothes contrasted with the uniforms in the room: startling epaulets, blood-red collars with gold crustings, and heavy dress swords.

The Embassy reception was to honor the Bonapartists who had assembled that morning at the Invalides around the grave of the Emperor. It was the hundred eleventh anniversary of the death of Napoleon, and if there were dry eyes in the room, it was because the Italian Ambassador had been obliged to invite outsiders due to the extraordinary vigor of the social calendar that spring. The conversation in the room was safe and almost entirely devoted to such current events as the visit of the Emir Feisal, Viceroy of Hedjaz, whose entourage had exhausted three concierges with demands for more and more facile women. There was every ingredient to make that spring a great season. The National Lottery had just been introduced; Malraux had won the Goncourt; Mauriac had entered the Academy; Chanel had just launched the first of the dressmaker perfumes; a Manet exhibition was at the Orangerie; Baker was at the Casino de Paris; and Paule's father, Paul-Alain Bernheim, the greatest actor of France and one of the four greatest in the world—most certainly including England—was appearing in
Gifron
. Of his performance, François Winikus of
La Revue de Paris
had written:

He has proved once again that he is a great actor, as in every appearance, onstage and off, he has ever made. He is a regal ornament upon what is the most adorned on earth, Paris. He brings home to us with vast power that today the Frenchman dislikes war, but at the same time he does not wish war to be represented as a shabby and ridiculous thing. Does the author of this piece really believe that war is something which is only crazy and bloody? He seems to forget that the public is dominated by memories of war as a cataclysm which reaches to magnificence. If the author could have avoided showing war as a ridiculous and silly act this would be a much better play.

The tall, blond, handsome man's name was Wilhelm von Rhode. Dr. Monti said he was the military attaché at the German Embassy—except that everyone knew that since the Treaty, Germany did not maintain military attachés. He frightened her when he clicked his heels and bowed, but then he smiled and Paule liked him. She liked the smell of him, phermones which communicated before words. He was much taller than Paule, a new sensation for her. His body had power. His eyes were very blue and his hair was dark blond. He had the most wonderful smile: it paid compliments which no words could convey.

Dr. Monti had finished his recipe. Paule recovered. “It sounds heavenly, Dr. Monti,” she said. “My father could eat two of those.”

“Myself, in my lifetime, I have eaten two hundred. And I can tell you this: there is nothing the French have ever invented … in the kitchen”—and he paused to leer—“which can compare with
Tacchino Ripieno alla Lombardia
.” He lifted her hand and bent over it, then bowed to von Rhode, and left them.

Von Rhode took a deep breath and stared at Paule.

“When do you speak?” she asked.

“Let us go to dinner.”

“But … I was to meet my father here.”

“At what time?”