An Infinity of Mirrors (38 page)

Inside, he sought out the duty officer, who saluted him warily. “Issue a pick-up order for Yoka Karmo,” Strasse said. “She will either be at the night club Casino Latino, in the rue de Ponthieu, or at five Boulevard Mistier.” The duty officer noted the facts on his form sheet while Strasse rambled on. “I want her interrogated. I want to know if she is a Jew. I want her interrogated until she admits to either being a Jew or not being a Jew. After she makes her statement, I want it checked out in Amsterdam.” He stared at the duty officer blankly, trying to remember what he had just said, and then screamed into the man's face. “And I want action, do you hear that?” He pouted. “Get me a car.”

Feeling like a ruler of men but slightly tired, Captain Strasse went to his quarters on the Avenue Foch to try to get some sleep. It was four-thirty; he could sleep until nine. He scrawled a do-not-disturb sign, tacked it on the outside of his door, and was asleep, fully dressed, in seconds.

Strasse slept until five forty-five
P
.
M
. He thought of chewing out his people for letting him sleep so long, but he knew that he had needed it. He was still so tired that it took him almost five minutes to edge his hand to the table beside the bed and reach the bottle of pills. God bless Professor Morell. He rested for five minutes before unscrewing the cap of the bottle and swallowing a pill.

Exactly eleven minutes later Strasse was prancing from wall to wall under a cold shower, singing the Horst Wessel song at the top of his lungs. God, he felt good. What in God's name did that marvelous Professor Morell put in those pills? If the Fuehrer would only take four of them some morning, the war in the east would be over by nightfall. Well, he had shot a whole day. It was the first workday he had ever missed, rain or shine, in sickness or in health, for richer, for poorer. He was toweling himself when he thought of Yoka. Something about Yoka. What was it? Damn it, what was it? Each time he thought he had it, it would slip away again. Business. No use. He shrugged. It would come to him. He dressed in civilian clothes and a jaunty blue beret.

Yoka wasn't at her apartment and the bed hadn't been slept in. Or maybe she had made the bed. He prowled the room nervously, and when he heard footsteps on the stairs he poked his head out the door. But it was only Mme. Cardozo knocking a broom around on the stairs. “Did Mlle. Karmo go out?” Mme. Cardozo shrugged. “Did she come in?” Mme. Cardozo raised her left eyebrow. She hated Danes. He slammed the door shut and pushed past her down the stairs. Yoka must be at the commissary. But it turned out that she had not been there all day, and by the time he reached the Casino Latino, where they always met for Yoka's breakfast early in the evening, it was not only closed, it was a wreck. Every table in the place had been broken, and the big bar mirror was smashed. His first little joint, ruined. He was outraged. He heard voices in the back and found the porter with the barman, who had a split lip and a big mouse under his right eye. “Where's Yoka?” he asked.

“Jesus, M'sieu Strasse! Jesus, the Gestapo took her,” the porter said excitedly. “They came maybe half an hour after you left.” Both men had jumped to their feet deferentially when he came in and now they were looking at him apprehensively. “The Gestapo?” he said with some confusion. “The
Gestapo?”

Neither man answered him. “After I left?” he asked blankly. The two men glanced at each other quickly, and then the porter shrugged. They had been working for him for three years, so why should it be different now? “There was a riot, boss. SS and the Milice. Yoka called you. You came in with four cops and stopped everything.” He paused. He almost didn't say it, but then he took a deep breath. “You were in uniform.”

It all began to come back. As Strasse stumbled toward the front door he saw something red on the floor and bent over to pick it up. It was silk. It was the collar of Yoka's silk dress. He ran out the door and down the hill. At the bottom he stopped short, took the bottle out of his pocket, shook the last pill from it and swallowed it. He waited, leaning against the building for a few minutes, and then walked back to the club and into the office to telephone. “Get out there and clean up that mess,” he said to the two men as he passed them. They leaped to their feet.

He called Gestapo Paris headquarters and asked for his office. When the girl came on he said, “I am at Anjou forty-five ninety. I want information immediately on an arrest made this morning in the rue de Ponthieu at about four-fifteen. Name of Yoka Karmo. Call right back.” He lit a cigarette and considered things anew through the Morell space viewer. A girl like Yoka. Well, it was convictions plus principles. He had done the right thing instinctively. She wasn't a Jew, of course. He could spot a Jew at a thousand yards, upwind and in the dark. But for some reason she hated Germans. So what? He hated Jews. Mme. Cardozo hated Danes. The French hated everybody. Well, now she knew that he was a German and he must get her back. Must. They would cross-examine her and she would make a statement that she was not a Jew—which could easily be checked by telephoning Amsterdam, anyway. And it would probably turn out that the interrogation had been a very good thing. If she hated Germans, maybe she had to learn to be afraid of them so that she would need him to protect her. Everything was going to be all right.

The telephone rang. “Strasse.”

“We have no conclusive report here, Captain Strasse, but we have a call in to Major Rau in Amsterdam.”

“Where is the woman now?”

“They were full up here, Captain, so she was taken to the rue Lauriston.” Strasse shuddered involuntarily. “Send me a car, please,” he said. “Thirty-six rue de Ponthieu.” As he hung up he was feeling terribly nervous. The rue Lauriston was Gestapo-France headquarters, and the interrogators there were called the merry convicts. The pill bottle was empty and he flung it into the corner of the room. How could he let himself run this low? More pills would have arrived at Avenue Foch by now.

Strasse did not reach rue Lauriston until eight fifty-five
P
.
M
. and he went directly to Lafont's office, sweating hard; that damned woman was so stubborn that she could get herself into trouble. She was too damned independent. These convicts of Lafont's weren't Germans; they didn't care about the book of instructions for interrogations. He wished that Yoka had been interrogated at the rue des Saussaies.

Lafont was always glad to see him, for Strasse was his principal source of supply of customers. They greeted each other, and then Strasse asked about Yoka. Lafont called for the booking sheets and ran his finger down the list. “Here she is. We booked her at four forty-two this morning. A tough customer.”

“Did she make her statement? Is she a Jew?”

“I think she was a Jew,” Lafont said. “But Cassamondu is positive she wasn't.”

“Never mind opinions. What was her statement?”

“She refused to make a statement.”

“You mean they're still interrogating her? Seventeen hours?”

“Oh, no,” Lafont said. “That's all done. She died at”-he bent over the sheet again—“at five forty-one
P
.
M
.” He shook his head with admiration. “She was a tough customer, that girl,”

The mangling music started inside him and the gold line began to burn across his head, then down a space, then across again. The thoughts climbed to the top of the high ledge just behind his forehead, then chuted downward on a jagged course, gathering enormous weight and speed, and there was no place he could go to get away from it.

An axe clove him in two and the two halves went stumbling along the rue Lauriston down the hill toward the Etoile while the Gestapo car trailed after the two halves. He had become two men. One had committed
Rassenschande
, the most obscene act of which a human was capable. He had defiled his race, he had defiled the Corps, he had smeared filth over his honor and the honor of the SS. There was only one penalty. He would write a formal confession to the Reichsfuehrer SS that he had entered the unclean body of a Jew. He would only be shot when he deserved disemboweling.

Reeling along beside this ruined SS officer was the other half—the lost half. Yoka was dead. Yoka. How could he live? What was living? Stale bread and the smell of sweat in his night clubs, those filthy rat holes. Chasing after Jews as though they thought they could ever kill every one of them. There would always be more. Why should he live without Yoka? No one wanted him. She had wanted him, but she was dead. A Jew. How could there be a God who would send him such a woman after making her a Jew? She had to be a Jew; if she had been racially pure she would have shouted it out to the skies. She would have been defiant, but she would have told Lafont's men in the rue Lauriston before they … before … He could not bear to see it, but it came tumbling over the white-hot ledge behind his forehead and roared straight at him. He saw what they were doing to Yoka and he began to run, screaming steadily as he ran. He had to get to the pills, he must get the pills.

The Gestapo driver raced ahead, then jumped out of the car and caught Captain Strasse in his arms just before he reached the corner of the rue de Presbourg. He pushed the Captain onto the floor in the back, got in again and drove quickly to 31 bis Avenue Foch.

The pills had not arrived; transport had been delayed because of sabotage. The cramps started, and Strasse began to vomit steadily.

At eleven forty-eight
P
.
M
. Fräulein Franzblau called from the rue des Saussaies and he made himself take the call. “Strasse.”

“Captain Strasse, Major Rau in Amsterdam has just called us back. The Karmo birth records were available on parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. Karmo is not a Jew. She is one hundred percent racially pure, I am happy to say.”

Twenty

The Allied armies were advancing across France. All freight and railroad stations in and around Paris had been destroyed by bomber attacks and by the persistent sabotage of railroad workers. The problems of food, power, and water supply were close to insoluble. The power supply from the Massif Central had been cut off, and Paris had to depend for light and power on a switchover from the Kembs power station on the upper Rhine. The city depended for food upon the black market, and over eighty percent of the population was starving on less than minimum subsistence levels.

Fräulein Nortnung wasn't hungry, but she was very depressed when she reached the flat at midday on July 20th. The office of the BdS has been closed for half a day. Piocher took her shoes off and rubbed her feet while she drank twenty-five-year-old Scotch whiskey. “Why do you rub my feet?” she asked listlessly. “I am hardly ever on my feet. I sit down all the time. You should rub my ass.”

“Gets the circulation going all over,” Piocher said. “You're very down tonight,
liebchen
. What's the matter?”

“You know why I'm home?”

“No.”

“The office is closed for half a day.”

“Really?”

“You know why it's closed for half a day? Remember that sweet little guy, the four-four-b fellow, Captain Strasse?”

“A sweet little guy?”

“Yes, you know the one.”

“If he's a sweet little guy, what would you call Caligula?”

“I don't know him.”

“All right. What about Strasse?”

“I can't get it through my head. He killed himself.”

“Ah?”

“What a tragedy.”

“Why?”

“Why? Should I say it was a cute thing? That's what you say when people shoot themselves. What a tragedy.”

“I meant why did he kill himself?”

“Who knows? Did you ever see anyone with more to live for? He would have made Standartenfuehrer for sure. He was only about twenty-seven years old and he was marvelous at his job.”

“Go in and run a tub for yourself.”

“Why?” He stared at her with his hard eyes. “All right, Carlie. I'll run the tub,”

“Best thing for you. I'll be away all night and before I go—” She jumped up at once.

“I'll run the tub right now.” She thundered out of the room on her gorgeous and substantial legs. He waited until he heard the bath water running, and then telephoned Military Headquarters.

At twelve forty-seven
P
.
M
. on July 20,1944, Piocher picked Veelee up in his car at the Place de l'Alma and then drove slowly along the
quai
.

“The St. Quentin
reseau
has checked out your information and it is quite accurate,” Piocher said. “We will make the strikes tonight.”

“Very good. Give me the names of the two men.”

“All the locomotive shops and the tank assembly plants will go up. No bombers have ever been able to get in, but we'll make it on foot and make it stick, thanks to you.”

Veelee said nothing.

“There are no longer two men, General. The second man, the man who gave the order to the police to arrest your son, killed himself last night. He was Captain Strasse, head of Gestapo Section four-four-b.” Veelee moaned softly. “The first man, the man who had Strasse issue the order to arrest your son, is the BdS, SS Standartenfuehrer Eberhard Drayst.”

“Do you know why, Piocher? Does anyone know why?”

Piocher coughed, then pursed his lips as he stared carefully at the road ahead. “Drayst is somewhat unbalanced about your wife,” he answered. “He tried to rape her in Berlin during the November pogroms in thirty-eight.” Veelee grunted heavily, then turned to Piocher, his monocle glittering. “Your wife will confirm it, General,” Piocher said reassuringly. It began to rain lightly, and he started the windshield wiper. “If I can be of any help to you, General—”

“We have our own plans,” Veelee said, “but there are things I will need. Civilian clothes, for one.”