The Night of the Generals

by Hans Hellmut Kirst

  Hartmann humbly repeated his instructions. The crackle on the line became worse, forcing the speakers to continue their dialogue at a shout. There was a pause, and in spite of the interference Hartmann thought he heard Sandauer draw a deep breath before asking: “Is everything all right in other respects, Hartmann, or have you anything special to report?”

  Hartmann pondered on whether and how to answer this question, but the four or five seconds he spent deliberating proved to be four or five seconds too long. Before he could reach a decision the G.S.O.1’s disembodied voice broke in again, monotonous as ever but unmistakably tinged with relief.

  “All’s well, then, I take it. That’s all I wanted to know. Carry on—and all the best.”

  Hartmann didn’t know whether to be pleased, astonished or annoyed. Eventually, he shrugged his shoulders and gave up the struggle.

  Reporting to the Hotel Excelsior with his belongings, he found that he had been given a room on the fifth floor. His window gave on to a narrow air-shaft pervaded by a sweetish odour reminiscent of dustbins, lavatories and kitchens. If he leant right out he could just glimpse a patch of sky through a narrow aperture between the roofs.

  He took out his message pad and wrote a note.

  Am staying here in the hotel. How about that! My room number is 548. Will be in the usual place until 10.20 this evening. Looking forward to seeing you again.

  Yours, R.H.

  Tearing off the sheet he folded it up telegram-fashion and took it down to the foyer. “For Fräulein von Seydlitz-Gabler,” he told the porter. “For her personally, though. Please don’t give it to her unless she’s alone.”

  “Understood,” said the porter, taking the banknote which Hartmann pushed discreetly across the desk as though he were wiping a speck of dust off its polished surface.

  Somehow, this incident gave Hartmann a pleasant sense of anticipation. He had a sudden feeling that the world—and Paris in particular—was his oyster. And whatever life in Paris cost in the next few days it would all go down to expenses under the heading of General Tanz’s special leave.

  Hartmann slid behind the wheel of the Bentley and the engine purred into life, its hundred horse-power making no more noise than a brace of contented cats. He depressed the throttle, piloted the car rather dashingly round the few corners that separated the hotel from the Mocambo Bar and drew up outside the dimly-lit blue frosted-glass door.

  Hartmann entered the establishment, which he now regarded as his “local,” with something of General Tanz’s possessive air as he strode down the great steps at Versailles that afternoon. Unfortunately, he marred his entrance .by tripping over the last step, which was crumbling and uneven.

  The first person he saw was Raymonde, who raised both arms in greeting, bottle in one hand and glass in the other. The second thing he registered was a man in sergeant’s uniform dancing with two girls at the same time, rapturously but with the ungainliness of a bear. He was leading them through a sort of square-dance and his face was puce with exertion.

  The wildly gyrating figure looked familiar, but it was a moment or two before Hartmann realized to his unbounded astonishment that it was Kopatzki—Sergeant Paul Kopatzki, until that morning General Tanz’s No. 1 orderly and now a mere mortal once more.

  Deserting his two partners, Kopatzki lurched over to Hartmann and flung his arms lovingly round his neck, exuding a smell like a wine cellar. His hands beat a clumsy but welcoming tattoo on Hartmann’s shoulders. Kopatzki was evidently in the grip of strong emotions.

  “What are you going to have?” he croaked. “The drinks are on me. I’m celebrating my return to the land of the living, and I owe it all to you. What about some champagne? You can have a bucketful if you like.”

  Kopatzki embraced Hartmann in another access of remorseless bonhomie. He seemed to have as many arms as an octopus as he dragged the reluctant Hartmann over to his table. Sergeant Stoss sat there, grinning cheerfully.

  Stoss said: “So you’re still alive, young ‘un!”

  “He’s survived so far,” said Kopatzki, “but he may be at the top of the black list tomorrow. Whatever happens, we owe him a lot. Don’t you agree, Stoss?”

  Stoss nodded portentously and made room for Hartmann on the bench. Hartmann sat down and Kopatzki squeezed in beside him so that he was hemmed in by sergeants on both sides.

  “I’m glad I ran into you,” Hartmann told Kopatzki. “If I’m going to take over your job you’d better tell me what to watch out for.”

  “What to watch out for!” Kopatzki laughed until he was on the verge of asphyxia. “Just watch out you don’t get your teeth kicked in, that’s all.”

  “Bump the bugger off, that’s the only way you’ll get any peace,” Sergeant Stoss recommended succinctly. “I can’t say fairer than that.”

  “They say miracles happen,” said Kopatzki, draining every glass within reach, “but do you know the biggest miracle I can think of? That no one’s ever put a bayonet through his belly or hit him over the head with the butt-end of a rifle. Maybe you’re the right man for the job.”

  “You’re tight!” exclaimed Hartmann.

  “Yes, thank God!” said Kopatzki in a sodden voice. “A day without Tanz is a sunny day, and dead drunk is half-way to heaven. And we owe it all to you, my lad. Well cry all the way to your funeral, believe me.”

  Hartmann extricated himself and joined Raymonde at the bar. He toyed with one of her hands while she poured him a large cognac with the other. His gaze lingered on the enticing, velvety curve of her breasts, and he pictured the thighs he knew so well, now hidden by the bar counter.

  “I wish I could stay with you tonight.”

  “What’s stopping you?” asked Raymonde.

  “A general.”

  “Since when have generals been more important than women?”

  “Ever since war broke out.”

  “Couldn’t we try to sleep through the rest of it?”

  “Maybe we could start tomorrow, Raymonde.”

  “Whenever you like.”

  He drank his cognac and then glanced at his watch. Ulrike obviously wasn’t coming. He held Raymonde’s hand and thought of Tanz, Ulrike, the hotel and the Bentley. He hoped it wouldn’t rain. He dreaded to think of the work it would make.

  “You know where I live,” said Raymonde, deftly uncorking a bottle of white wine. “You know where the key is and you know where your pyjamas are. I won’t say any more.”

  Hartmann looked at his watch again. He pulled Raymonde towards him and kissed her affectionately. He felt the softness of her supple tongue, inhaled the fragrance of her skin and was tempted by thoughts of her bed—but he wrenched himself away. Climbing into the Bentley, he drove back to the Hotel Excelsior and went up to his room. There he flung himself on the bed and reached for a book, but found he couldn’t concentrate on it. He waited, without exactly knowing what for. Eventually the telephone rang. He answered it promptly, hoping to hear Ulrike’s voice, but it was the General.

  “Get the car out,” said Tanz—nothing more.

  Hartmann got the car out and the General climbed in. The sky above Paris was a deep luminous blue, as though the now languid and compliant city had wrapped itself in a diaphanous negligee.

  “A night-club,” said Tanz.

  Hartmann was prepared for this request. He drove to Montmartre and pulled up outside an establishment in the Rue Fromentin called the Don Juan. Advertisements in the press spoke of antique furniture, Spanish décor, rare paintings and “atmospheric” music.

  The General, still in his pearl-grey suit, got out of the car and entered the club, leaving Hartmann at the wheel. He was not gone for long. After half an hour he re-emerged and climbed in again. “I meant a night-club, not a women’s institute. Understand?” His tone was contemptuous.

  Hartmann thought he did. He drove on for a couple of blocks, this time to a night-club calling itself the Eve Discrète. The General alighted and swept through the doors like a tank. Hartmann saw his b
road shoulders disappear into the murky interior.

  This time he waited for three hours.

  Tanz emerged from the Eve Discrète like a granite monolith mounted on oiled wheels, his face the brittle grey colour of weather-beaten stone. Without a word he slumped into the back seat of the car, slipping sideways when Hartmann spun the wheel but sliding back into an upright position at the next convenient corner. Hartmann might have been chauffeuring a statue.

  Yet when Hartmann drew up in front of the hotel the block of granite began to move. It rose from the cushions, stood erect and glided towards the hotel entrance. Then it vanished, leaving the interior of the car filled with a throat-catching reek of alcohol.

  Hartmann went up to his room. His bed-clothes were rumpled, and curled up beneath them lay Ulrike von Seydlitz-Gabler.

  INTERIM REPORT

  DOCUMENTS FROM VARIOUS SOURCES, ALL RELATING TO THE EVENTS OF A SINGLE DAY: 18TH JULY 1944

  Extract from the diary of Frau Wilhelmine von Seydlitz-Gabler:

  “Am more and more inclined to the view that Paris is not a place of any particular merit. The Parisians regard pomp as greatness, confuse a disorderly past with historic immortality, and pass off light-mindedness as joie de vivre. This city has a detrimental effect on people with frivolous tendencies. Herbert, too, suffers from this realization. At lunch he said to me: ‘Paris sorts the sheep from the goats.’

  “How true, Herbert, how true! I have never found the worthy Tanz so profoundly Prussian as in these surroundings. He is also suffering, though he naturally doesn’t show it. No one notices it. Only I, with a woman’s intuition, sense it.

  “As a mother, I feel a secret current of happiness in Ulrike. The way her hand brushed Tanz’s when she passed him the salt during our animated little supper party this evening… Such an intimate, affectionate gesture! I looked at Herbert and Herbert looked at me—then we heard the glass fall. Could his hand really have been shaking? There was no doubt about it—Ulrike had actually put our battle-seasoned hero to flight.

  “Am still agreeably excited as I write this. Although it is approaching midnight I feel an irresistible urge to see my little Ulrike. I shall go to her room. Am sure she is longing for a confidential chat—woman to woman.”

  Taken from correspondence with Lieutenant-Colonel Sandauer, retd., formerly G.S.O.1 of the Nibelungen Division:

  “You inquire if I ever noticed anything exceptional about General Tanz, in one instance mentioning the word ‘peculiarities.’ You also request information about details such as trembling hands, tics, headaches, consumption of tobacco and alcohol, etcetera.

  “Before I reply—reluctantly, may I add—I would draw your attention to the following points:

  i While in action at Leningrad during November-December 1941, General Tanz and a small group of men were cut off and surrounded for three days and nights. He did not once close his eyes throughout that time. Only four men out of thirty escaped.

  ü During operations against the Resistance in Warsaw a mine exploded under the General’s car, hurling him into the air. He was unconscious for a considerable time and did not regain his hearing for twenty-four hours.

  iii During the Don crossing a temporary bridge collapsed and the General was carried downstream for some kilometres, several times colliding with rocks in the process. Once again he sustained no serious injury, but was almost insensible when rescued.

  “It is possible that these experiences may have resulted in certain very occasional nervous disorders, but I can only repeat that the General possessed an exemplary degree of self-control.

  “No one could pretend that the General despised alcohol, but he never drank on duty and only in moderation on social occasions. I know that he occasionally indulged in this not unsoldierly pastime out of hours, but to what extent I cannot say. I was never with him at the time.

  “You are therefore mistaken when you assert that I sounded worried when discussing the General on the telephone with subordinates. My sole concern was to maintain the requisite contact with those who were responsible for the General’s personal welfare. After all, he was in command of the division which at that time claimed my whole care and attention. Those were my only motives…”

  Report by a French friend describing his visit to Mme. Raymonde Gautier at Hossegor, a small spa north of Biarritz, during the last week in August 1961:

  “The local policeman, obviously a frustrated sergeant-major, herded us together like sheep. I wanted to get across the road junction—there’s only one in Hossegor—and tried to brush past his outstretched arms, but he pushed me back and waved on the only car in sight. To teach me a lesson he kept me waiting for another thirty seconds. A woman near me burst out laughing. It was such an attractive laugh that I turned to look, and immediately I saw the woman I felt I had known her for years.”

  EXPLANATORY NOTE:

  Our French friend’s report is almost a book in itself. To cut a long story short, the woman reminded him of a picture that had been sent him of Raymonde, the girl from the Mocambo Bar. He asked her if that was her name and received an affirmative reply.

  At a subsequent interview he asked her if she still remembered a man called Rainer Hartmann. To revert to the original report:

  “ ‘A young man like a spring morning,’ she said, and went on to make a lot of equally flattering remarks about Hartmann. She had obviously been in love with him. The fact that he was a German did not worry her, she told me. He was gentle and affectionate and there had been times when he was profoundly happy—not that it could have been much of an effort with a woman like Raymonde!”

  FURTHER EXPLANATORY NOTE:

  Other details about Raymonde follow, all recorded in an endeavour to convey the interviewer’s personal admiration of her charms. In brief: Hartmann must have been a lucky dog. If so, why was her married name Gautier and not Hartmann?

  “ ‘In those days,’ she told me, ‘I often asked myself what could be more important than love, but I didn’t know then what I know now. One day, and in my case that day didn’t take long to come, it was all over—like a dream. In the end you can’t even remember whether a dream was pleasant or not. It gets vaguer and vaguer as time goes by.’ “

  5

  “It’s five-thirty, Monsieur!”

  The voice seemed to bore a hole in Hartmann’s ear-drums, which roared as though he were submerged in a millstream.

  The voice came again. “Wake up, Monsieur. It’s five-thirty!”

  “So what?” It dawned on Hartmann that he was in a hotel room. Slowly, painfully, he began to remember the nightmare drive through Paris, the soul-destroying hours of waiting, the sight of Tanz swaying like a steel mast, the stark naked general’s daughter in his bed, the uncorked bottle in the leather case entrusted to him.

  The bottle now lay on his bedside table, empty. Undeterred, the porter gave tongue once more:

  “It’s five-thirty, Monsieur. You have to call the General at seven sharp.”

  “Damn it all. I can get in at least another hour’s sleep before then.”

  “Monsieur is forgetting the preparations.”

  “What on earth has that got to do with you?”

  “We have our orders, Monsieur.”

  Arrangements à la Sandauer were functioning perfectly. The night porter had received written instructions from the day porter, who had received them from the manager, who had in turn received them from Sandauer himself.

  The main points from “Special Directive regarding Suite No. l2 for the duration of its use by General Tanz (hereinafter referred to as “The Guest’)” were as follows:

  “No hotel employee is to enter the suite while it is occupied by The Guest except when expressly and directly requested to do so by The Guest or his personal orderly.

  “The Guest’s personal orderly (at present Lance-Corporal Hartmann) is to be woken at 5.30 a.m. and served with breakfast immediately.

  “Between 6 and 7 a.m. The Guest’s personal orderly will b
e allocated a manservant and chambermaid. They will take their orders directly from the orderly, who is the only person permitted to enter The Guest’s suite.”

  Hartmann was acquainted with these and other details when he joined the porter in the hall. The latter regarded him with grave concern.

  “I admire your composure, Monsieur.”

  “I feel absolutely ghastly,” Hartmann groaned.

  “Never mind, Monsieur, your coffee’s ready.”

  Hartmann was the only guest in the hotel to be up at this hour, so he breakfasted in solitary state. He filled himself with scalding coffee, plastered his croissant with butter and jam and devoured it, meanwhile studying the special instructions issued by Sandauer’s department. It didn’t need much imagination to grasp what lay ahead.

  Accompanied by a silent but curious valet and chambermaid, Hartmann betook himself to Suite No. 12. Here he gathered up the General’s scattered clothes and issued his orders.

  “Kindly brush and iron the suit and remove any stains. The shoes must be cleaned and highly polished—but make sure you take the laces out first. You, Mademoiselle, will carry out general cleaning duties.”

  Hartmann spent the next half hour cleaning and polishing an attaché case and two briefcases belonging to the General. He used two woollen cloths and half a tin of Glissando, a special high-grade leather polish which he found in a box marked “C”. A list headed “Cleaning Materials and Accessories” was pasted to the inside of the lid.

  On the stroke of seven Hartmann presented himself at the door of Tanz’s bedroom, having set his watch not by any old church clock but by the Grossdeutscher Rundfunk’s time signal. He knocked discreetly and heard the General’s low but penetrating voice bid him enter.

  Tanz was standing at the bedroom window, his sinewy frame swathed in a brown dressing-gown of some strong, coarse material. In one hand he held a lighted cigarette, in the other a pocket-watch. He nodded approvingly.