The Night of the Generals (12 page)

"As a matter of fact, General, I came to bring you some news which I thought might prove of interest. General Tanz is on his way to Paris."

"Has he got another of his divisions cut to ribbons, then?" asked Kahlenberge bitterly.

"More or less," Grau gave a smile of concurrence. "General Tanz's division is to be quartered in the Versailles-Fontainebleau area for regrouping."

"And you get a kick out of the idea?"

'It always gives me pleasure to look back on our instructive times together in Warsaw."

On that note Lieutenant-Colonel Grau withdrew, strutting through the room--so it seemed to von Seydlitz-Gabler at least--like a peacock. He gave the impression of being on home ground wherever he went. Even the band, which had just struck up amusette waltz, seemed to match the rhythm of his stride.

The G.O.C. blinked at his Chief of Staff. "Surely he wouldn't dare to bring up that Warsaw business all over again?"

"We only got as far as the first act." Kahlenberge folded his hands Buddha-fashion. "The next act may prove superfluous if more important events intervene. I've no idea where the senior members of the Abwehr stand--whether our friends have won them over or whether Grau figures on their black list."

"Let's hope he does," said the G.O.C.

"Be that as it may, do you sympathize with what these men are trying to do?"

The G.O.C.'s face darkened as though he were straining hard to hear some inner voice. "Perhaps. All the same, I don't feel happy about it."

Shortly afterwards Captain Kraussnick reappeared, bringing word of "various charming creatures," well-developed and "anxious to please."

The General shot Kahlenberge a reproachful sidelong glance. "I just don't feel like it," he grumbled with the air of a disgruntled Jupiter. "I'm not in the mood any more."

The Mocambo Bar was packed. Inside, the temperature had risen to tropical heights. A saxophone howled its way up the scale, performed a few velvety somersaults and then plunged back, gurgling and choking, into the muddy depths of its lower register. Lance-Corporal Rainer Hartmann took his uniform jacket off.

"Why not your shirt too while you're about it?" asked the girl beside him.

"Maybe later on," said Hartmann, meaning it as a little joke, nothing more. He pulled the girl to her feet and prepared to push cheerfully through the packed dancers, but they stood aside for him.

Hartmann was saddened. He wanted to belong, to be just one of the pleasure-seeking crowd. The people around him were like himself--young, greedy for life, filled with a yearning for the scent and warmth of other bodies--but they avoided him. It was probably because he was wearing uniform, for almost all the other habitués of the Mocambo Bar were Frenchmen in civilian clothes.

"Something worrying you?" asked the girl he was dancing with.

Hartmann's reaction was almost violent. "I'm happy," he assured her. "I like it here. I come here often. I virtually discovered this place. Do you like it?"

"My name's Ulrike." The girl in his arms relaxed against him. "You're welcome to call me Ulrike."

"But do you like it here?" Hartmann asked hopefully.

"I like it because I'm here with you." Ulrike's lips were so close to his ear that he could almost feel them. "I've always wanted to be in a place like this--with you."

Hartmann recoiled instinctively. Ulrike was the G.O.C.'s daughter and his friend Otto was under instructions to look after her, but Otto was hitting the bottle at the bar. His broad hindquarters and amorphous back were visible across the dance floor.

The next time Ulrike von Seydlitz-Gabler pressed her body gently against his, Hartmann did not recoil. It must have something to do with the atmosphere, he reflected. Just the attraction of the unfamiliar--a meaningless game, that was all, but yet another proof of how wonderful Paris was.

Everything Hartmann saw and heard pleased him: the sparse lighting with its soft gradations of red, the solid brick walls and the hypnotic beat of the drums, like the pulsing wing-beats of a flock of birds on the rise. He also liked the people who frequented this modest place of entertainment.

"Where can I wash my hands?" asked Ulrike when the music stopped.

Hartmann showed her. He was no stranger to the amenities of the Mocambo Bar--kitchen, bottle store, office and solitary toilet--all of them the size of a pocket handkerchief. He wandered over to the bar. Otto, his friend, companion and guide was there, and so was Raymonde. Raymonde meant Paris to Hartmann, even if it was the Paris of suburbs and back-yards, short-time hotels and Métro entrances.

Raymonde rinsed some glasses and smiled at him.

"You're going great guns with Mademoiselle von Seydlitz-Gabler," said Otto admiringly, his suety, pig-like face beaming. "But don't go burning your fingers."

Without waiting for Hartmann to ask, Raymonde put acrème de menthe frappée in front of him. Jealousy was alien to her, probably because she felt confident of her own special qualities. She didn't regard Ulrike von Seydlitz-Gabler as competition, and lack of space did not prevent her from waggling her hips provocatively at Hartmann in the diminutive cubby-hole behind the bar counter.

"Why not hand Raymonde over to me for the night?" Otto suggested casually. "I'm sure Ulrike would make it up to you."

"Are you speaking from experience?"

"Heaven forbid!" Otto sounded shocked. "I'm not tired of living. I leave that sort of caper to you."

Rainer Hartmann felt a firm but gentle hand on his shoulder. It belonged to Ulrike. "Shall we dance again?" she asked.

He felt himself swept away by the music. The band was playing a blues--the Basin Street Blues--with a mixture of passion and attenuated melancholy. The extra-strongcrème de menthe, his seventh of the evening, hung about him like a heavy velvet curtain. His uniform jacket was draped limply over a chair somewhere.

"I feel wonderful," said Ulrike, hugging him. "I may even be happy too--I'm not quite sure."

"One can be happy here," Hartmann assured her. He was hopelessly enraptured, a condition which always afflicted him when he was being lapped by waves of private yearning. Out of spontaneous gratitude more than anything else, he pressed Ulrike von Seydlitz-Gabler to him. Glancing across at Raymonde he saw that she was still smiling at him. His happiness was complete.

Except for one thing. He wanted all the French people in the room to smile at him--not only Raymonde. He loved them, surely they could feel that, but there always seemed to be a vacuum round the Germans dancing there--round him too, even though he had taken off his uniform jacket. It began to get on his nerves.

"Why are they so prejudiced against us?" Rainer Hartmann asked sadly. He surveyed the solid wall of faces round him and had a violent impulse to smash through their cold indifference. "Something ought to be done about it."

"We'll just have to be patient and hope for better times," Ulrike told him.

"It's not good enough just to hope for better times. Why shouldn't we try and do something about it?"

Ulrike smiled at him. "Don't they say that when two people are happy it's catching? Or isn't that enough for you, Rainer?"

"What about humanity as a whole?" Hartmann's voice rose to a shout. The combined effects of sevencrèmes de menthe, the viscous heat and pulsating music had done their work only too well.

He left Ulrike standing, pushed his way through the jungle of dancing figures and climbed on to the platform, gently dislodging the saxophonist. He raised both arms as though in supplication. The music stopped, and a hundred upturned faces swam before his gaze like extinguished lanterns.

Hartmann stood on the stage in a rather obscure cellar bar in a street just off the Champs-Elysées. At that moment, the Eastern and Western fronts were threatening to collapse, men were dying by thousands in places no one had ever heard of, war material thundered against war material and the world seemed to be parcelled up into mass graves.

But Hartmann stood there, a figure clad in clumsy ammunition boots, crumpled wood-fibre trousers and a greyish-yellow shirt dark with sweat at the shoulders, the whole surmounted by an excited, perspiring face.

"Friends!" cried Rainer Hartmann passionately. He spoke French with difficulty. His "mes amis"sounded hoarse, but it seemed to have an arresting effect. At least no one shouted him down.

"When I say 'friends'," Hartmann continued in his wooden schoolboy French, "I mean it. I'm sorry, I speak your language badly, but I mean what I say."

"That's something, anyway!" a Frenchman called out encouragingly.

A number of people laughed, women mainly, but their laughter sounded almost affectionate. Raymonde, his beloved Raymonde, who was still behind the bar, clapped. Quite a few of the others joined in the applause--whether in fun or not it was hard to tell.

"I am a German!" Hartmann cried with enthusiasm. "You are French! But we're all human beings! I can't help this war--I didn't start it and neither did you. But we're all part of it, so we have something in common. We belong together. We want to live. Let's live as best we can!"

"Bravo!" shouted a number of Frenchmen.

The few Germans in the room stared at each other, more in amazement than anything else. One who sat near the exit seemed to be writing something down. Presumably he was taking notes. Ulrike von Seydlitz-Gabler stood rooted to the spot. Raymonde was still smiling, but Otto sat frozen to his bar stool like a hunk of ice.

"Are you completely off your rocker?" he asked Hartmann when things had returned to normal. "You could be shot for what you did just now--don't you realize that? You belong in a nursery school, not a war. You know, sometimes I have a horrible feeling you're dead but you won't lie down."

Just over half an hour later a military police patrol, duly alerted, marched in and arrested Hartmann.

Police Headquarters in the Quai des Orfèvres worked a twenty-four hour day. The more violent the age, the more violent the crimes committed in it. As Monsieur Henri Prévert--commonly known as "Henri le doux"--usedto say in private: "We'll soon be living in policeman's paradise. It won't matter what you do--you'll automatically be committing some crime or other."

Henri Prévert was a pear-shaped man whose hindquarters appeared to dominate the rest of his body. His face looked as though it had been hurriedly kneaded together out of baker's dough and his eyes were reminiscent of old, worn out buttons. Behind this façade, however, lurked an accurate and highly sensitive instrument, for Prévert had what was probably the best brain currently available to the Paris police force.

The telephone on his desk buzzed briefly three times. This signified the presence of a visitor--to be precise, the sort of visitor who could walk in unannounced. Under prevailing circumstances this could only be a member of the German counterespionage service. Prévert guessed that it would be Engel, the bloodhound who spent most of his time making life difficult for him, but he was wrong. The door opened to reveal Lieutenant-Colonel Grau himself.

Prévert's doughy features betrayed no reaction whatsoever. They never did--indeed, they seemed incapable of registering any expression other than indifference.

"This is an honour, Colonel Grau!" Prévert's voice sounded as if it had been filtered through absinthe, but his manner was cordial and welcoming.

Grau sat down with the easy grace of a cavalryman mounting a charger. He raised his chin inquiringly. "Have you got a bad conscience, Monsieur Prévert?"

"No, why should I have? After all, you've come to see me, Colonel. If I had blotted my copy-book you'd have sent for me."

Prévert had what was probably one of the most difficult jobs in occupied France. As chief of a newly formed department within the Sûreté Nationale, it was his duty to maintain the requisite contacts between the forces of occupation and the French police authorities. No one envied him his task, and his colleagues were convinced that his head sat lighter on his shoulders than any other in France.

Grau got down to business without any preamble. Empty courtesies and diplomatic shadow-boxing were superfluous with a man like Prévert. He said: "I want to make a deal with you."

Prévert nodded readily. He knew that it was not a question of silk, cognac or antiques. When people bargained with him it was for human Eves. "I shall do my best not to swindle you," he said.

"Monsieur Prévert," said Grau, "what I have to offer is something which will presumably interest you as a Frenchman: the lives of a few French patriots. I might be able to hand over half a dozen of your heroes, providing they're still in our custody and I can exert pressure in the proper quarters."

"And what is your particular interest, Colonel?"

"Not small fry, Monsieur Prévert, I can tell you that. I'm interested in bigger fish--really big ones, perhaps."

Prévert inclined his head and shoulders in a gesture of complete understanding. He was not particularly surprised by Grau's suggestion because Engel had already made hints in that direction. Grau was evidently after big game.

"A tall order, Colonel, but not entirely out of the question. Some of the necessary material may already be to hand. I'm thinking mainly of the work done by our special agents in the security section which I set up to represent your interests."

This "security section" was Prévert's own personal brainchild. Its official task was to give the Germans free rein and effective backing, its true function to record incidents, conversations and behaviour--in short, to register everything from petty misdemeanours to serious crimes. One extremely efficient team of operatives had been installed in the brothel in the Rue St. Honoré, which was frequented by senior officers. They employed listening devices of the highest technical precision--all, be it noted, for the benefit and protection of the Germans, who dreaded to think what might happen if a German officer fell into a pimp's clutches.

"It's not easy," Prévert went on. "There's always some reshuffling going on. For instance, a flourishing establishment specializing in perversions has sprung up in the Avenue Montaigne. Another new house just round the corner in the Rue François employs minors only. We've got all these establishments under surveillance, of course. There are German officers among the regular patrons of the Rue François and I could give you a sizeable number of names which appear on the books of homosexual houses--those of three members of your department among them."