A spy. No, I was something worse than that. I was a betrayer to all and everyone around me, and the smile I forced then trembled at its corners. I knew of Gabrielle’s true virtue, yet I would not defend her. I knew of my master’s obsessive love for her, yet I had slaughtered that bond. And here and now was the very worst of it, sitting there before my eyes, merry and hopeful and ignorant. The Colonel planned to betray these men, to lead them into crimes against their own convictions, these courageous souls who placed their beings and trust in his hands. And they had become my friends and comrades, yet I could not tell them, I would not save them.
I looked at them, and searching within my own character for its compass, found nothing about myself that was left for me to love.
Our convoy rumbled on, through Orange to Montélimar, toward Valence and Lyon. For one entire day and night, we drove astride the Rhone, its rushing waters always on the right, swollen by spring melts from the towering peaks of the Ardèche, always on the left. This route to Paris was indirect, yet it was as if Himmel had chosen the road for a final taste of peace, sheltered in the lee of fir-green peaks ablossom with spring flowers. He had made that decision, as he made all of them, on the basis of his instincts, on the scents of war winds inhaled by his commando pores. He could not have known then what we learned soon after.
As the Allies hurled themselves against the thorns of Normandy, the entire German army turned its ear to that distant thunder. The SS divisions, as always, were first to strain at their leashes. In Belgium, the Leibstandarte Division barked to be set free, yet Hitler had ordered that they not be released without his express permission, and on that day he simply forgot them, finding himself somewhat preoccupied. In Dreux, between Paris and Caen, the Hitlerjugend Division was not so shackled, and was the first to go into action. Technically, our Commando was an element, albeit detached and independent, of the Das Reich Division, all of which was stationed in Toulouse in anticipation of southern landings which never developed. And so, on that morning, Das Reich began a long march to Normandy, encountering heavy Maquis resistance with every step. The French captured and executed forty German troops and a high-ranking SS officer. Das Reich held summary hangings in Tulle, and slaughtered the entire town of Oradour-sur-Glane.
Somehow, Himmel spared us all of it, as if he smelled the blood of frenzy in the west, and so chose east.
We traveled day and into night, with scant respite, the flesh of our rumps bruised and sore, shifting from cheek to cheek as we groaned and cursed. Our spines compressed and we gnashed our teeth with each rutted hole in the road, and our bobbing heads bunched the muscles of our necks into fisted knots. Our early banter born of a change in venue turned to mumbling rails of complaint, interspersed with long stretches of silence and broken snores. When we slept, we did so fitfully, our heads upon each other’s shoulders, like virgin schoolgirls on an outing, unafraid to be close.
When at last we stopped, the convoy gathered on the road’s shoulder, in the lee of the mountains. The commandos, their muscles paralyzed and stiff, helped each other to the muddy roadside. The men shivered as they groaned and urinated in the dark, some limping off to relieve themselves further among scrawny bushes. With Himmel’s permission, Mutti quickly made a fuel fire and propped his steel basin above the flames. He deftly flooded his mix of carrots and potatoes with water from an Einheitskanister, or jerrycan, and even mixed in strips of boar meat he’d cooked up prior to our trip. The spirits of the men rose as they stood in line for the soup, scooping it into their metal mess tins and smoking to disguise the primitive and petrol-laced taste as they slurped.
Himmel strode along the ranks, from truck to truck. I waited near the tailgate of my lorry, sipping Mutti’s concoction with a spoon kept always in my trouser pocket. I watched as my master approached each cluster of men, and I could see his teeth flashing with his commander’s grin, and the postures of the troop straighten as they gratefully absorbed his encouragements. I did not turn to look for the Kübelwagen, though I longed to meet Gabrielle’s eyes, even as much as I feared the accusatory gaze of Edward. When I heard her voice in the dark, a hollow whisper from somewhere near, my heart raced with fear and joy.
“Are you all right, Shtefan?” She was standing near the cab of the truck, in the deep shadows of the moon. No one else was near, but I did not turn to look at her.
“I am,” I muttered through clenched teeth. “Are you?”
“Yes.”
“You should return to the car. We will be able to talk in Paris.”
I heard her small feet shuffle, and a long sigh.
“The invasion has begun, Shtefan,” she whispered urgently. “In Normandy. The Germans are saying nothing, but he listens to the radio and the Maquis are speaking of it, almost openly.”
“Go back to the car, Gabrielle.”
I heard her steps recede. I imagined her head lowered, her eyes filled with tears, and my heart was pounding and torn...
* * *
We drove on, and upon the break of dawn it grew cold and our teeth chattered, and we huddled against one another beneath coats and cloths of any kind. Every one of us smoked, as if that foul cloud might somehow trap the meager warmth emitted by our quaking limbs. Mutti, whose saving graces should well have earned him an Iron Cross he would never see, somehow fashioned a small cup warmer right there in the bed of the truck. He had filled an empty vegetable tin with dirt from the roadside, mixed it with cooking oil and strips of weapon cleaning cloth and set it alight. With fingerless gloves he poised a steel mess mug above the wavering flame, until a brutal mix of raw coffee and water and half an eggshell could be boiled enough to be sipped by all. It is a taste I shall never forget, and no gourmet caffeine shall ever surpass it.
As we neared Lyon, the road began to slowly fill. I squinted through the drawn flap of canvas, and it was as if the ghosts of France and all her conquerors had begun to filter from the trees. Country peasants, with their woolen caps and frayed long coats, led donkeys laden with beaten leather cases, blankets and stalks of bound hay. German infantry, a myriad of mixed battalions and uniforms unmatching, marched along with rifles slung, their tunic throats unbuttoned to release the heat their efforts made. Motorcycles coughed and sidecars bounced and rattled, and there were more than a few horses hauling caissons and snorting steam into the morning air. I thought of Blitzkrieg, then struck him from my mind, the certain knowledge that I would not see him again too painful to consider.
I heard a voice, a thin cry above the wind of our forward motion, and I pushed the canvas flap aside. From the cab of the truck behind ours, the driver was leaning far outside his window, and when he saw the pale orb of my face, he gestured wildly with a thumb toward the vehicle following his own.
“Brennstoff! Fuel!” he shouted, and then drew his fingertips to and fro across his throat.
The trucks had traveled far, and one of them was apparently choking on its final fumes. I waved at the driver, then quickly nudged Corporal Noss, who passed the message forward. Soon, I discerned our own driver calling out to Colonel Himmel, but we pressed on, passing a Tiger tank, its mottled fuselage bristling with panzer infantry slopped across its enormous hulk. We trundled by another monster, and another, and then there was a fuel truck with many drums laid end to end, and our convoy rolled to a halt.
I thrust my head from the rear and looked forward. Edward had pulled the Kübelwagen directly across the path of the lead Tiger of this panzer company. My jaw fell, as the steel treads of the tank had halted just a meter from the car, and perhaps its commander had only reined it in upon the sight of Gabrielle’s shimmering hair. Himmel was standing in the road, fists to hips, along the flank of the giant machine, looking up at the officer poking from its hatch. The man was a general, and I squinted hard, as if that might increase my ability to hear the harsh exchange between them.
“We’re dry,” Himmel growled. “And you have plenty, Herr Gener
al.”
“I also have a mission, Standartenführer.” The general smacked his hatch ring with a leather glove.
“These pigs will be on the road for days.” Himmel waved a dismissive hand at the general’s convoy of tanks. “My men and I can be in Paris by nightfall.”
“You can go to hell!”
“I intend to. And I am under the Führer’s direct orders to be there forthwith.” And with that, my master drew his pistol from its holster and calmly pulled back the slide. Yet he held the weapon astride his thigh, and called out with measured calm as I winced and waited. “The decision is yours, Herr General. However, I should think you might choose comradely generosity, over execution.”
The Panzer general stared at Himmel, bug-eyed, and then he suddenly dropped inside his tank, reached up for the hatch cover and closed it with a bounce and resounding bang. I was certain he intended to simply roll forward, smashing the Kübelwagen, and I nearly leaped from the truck. But apparently the officer had issued orders into his command radio, and soon the crew of the fuel truck were scrambling to disengage some drums.
I sank back into the truck, realizing that Friedrich and Gans and Noss had also thrust their heads outside to witness the exchange. Friedrich snatched up Mutti’s cup, shivering as he sipped the foul brew and shook his head.
“My Colonel, my Colonel,” he muttered. “He’d shoot his own mother for the sake of the mission.”
If only you knew the nature of the mission, I thought, and we trundled on...
* * *
The Arc de Triomphe presented itself in the distance, no larger than a gritty staple thrust into a maze of gray sugar cubes. By then, we had endured a frightening strafing which left us untouched beneath a copse of trees, but slaughtered half a platoon of infantry ahead. We had raced throughout the daylight, bypassing Dijon and praying for the night across the open plains that swept us toward the capital. It was as if where German boots had gathered here in numbers, there was a pox upon the land, for bomb craters blossomed and every Wehrmacht tent was set aflame. Dispatch riders lay in twisted death beside their motorcycles, where Maquis snipers had found them from the trees, and untethered horses, their harnesses set free by their masters’ deaths, ran wild over fields of char.
We did not enter Paris, but skirted her for Aubergenville, and in the deepness of night, we at last came upon the château.
It was a thing of beauty, that final castle of my youth. It rose from a sprawling meadow of unmanicured grass, its rough walls hued like pale mustard, its beams and window shutters creamy white. It climbed upon itself in steps of ever elegant squares, each climaxing in those sloping French roofs the shape of nuns’ hats, and with the clearing of the clouds, a spray of stars set the black tiles glistening beneath fresh rainwater. The château was ringed by a large horseshoe of stone fencing, its feet presenting an open gate to a drive of pebbles, and within those walls a garden of ancient trees dipped their heads in the wind, and their leaves whispered as if to welcome.
Our convoy halted outside the gate, still many meters from the château’s doors. Slowly, unfolding tortured arms and legs, we dismounted from the trucks, and it was as if the atmosphere of elegance demanded speech in mannered tones. The officers walked among the men and issued murmured orders, and equipment was lowered to the earth with care, and we behaved inexplicably like urchin boys invited to lodge with the generous family of some compatriot, embarrassed by our own appearance.
I stood in the road, within the deeper darkness beneath a large tree, carefully assembling a pyramid of ammunition boxes as they were passed along by a train of the men. I glanced forward as I worked, seeing that the Kübelwagen had also halted shy of the gate. In the distance, the château was the size of an upturned hand, yet I could see the flickering light as its doorway opened beneath a portico. A figure appeared in the frame, and by the diminutive posture and prim blond hair, I knew it was Himmel’s wife. Her small fists poked into her hips as she watched him stride, alone, his arms outstretched and his voice booming and carried on the breeze.
“Mein Schatz!”
The Kübelwagen suddenly backed away from the gate, its tires spinning up gravel as it swung around, its headlights blinding me. Edward cruised the car carefully between the men, and I knew he only stopped beside me because Gabrielle’s small hand was firmly clenching the crook of his elbow. Her side of the car was close, but the men were dangerously near to me as well. I set down a crate and stood erect and proper, as if that scant formality might still disguise familiarity. Edward was staring straight ahead, his jaw clenched. Gabrielle looked at me, her eyes wide with confusion and fear.
“He is sending me away, Shtefan,” she whispered.
Edward gunned the engine, hoping to drown our voices and our foolishness.
“What?” I was instantly alarmed, knowing full well that my master’s plans could never be outguessed.
“Yes,” Gabrielle hissed. “He does not want me here! I am to be shut away, like some royal concubine.” Tears glistened in her eyes, though I knew they were not sprung for separation from her captor, but of humiliation and shame and desperate uncertainty.
I looked at Edward.
“Brandt!” someone called out. “Are you still working? Or are you retiring from the SS?”
I raised a hand to still the voice, as I stared at Edward.
“To where?” I demanded.
“To the convent at Meulan,” he snapped, as he put the car in gear.
Gabrielle put her hand to her mouth, as if to hide the trembling there, and Edward stomped the gas pedal.
“I cannot seem to reason with you, Brandt,” he hissed as he drove off. “But maybe a priest can put the fear of God and Himmel into her.”
XIII
ON THE EIGHTH of June in 1944, there were tears in the sea and steel in the wind.
The invasion, although still many kilometers away, was nearly a palpable thing. It hunched like a gargantuan bear, just there beyond the edge of a darkened wood, and we could sense its heat and hear the snorting of its compressed rage. The skies were thick and purpled, roiling with the hums of iron swarms, and the turgid summer earth trembled with thunders not of heaven’s design.
The Château of Montre Temps, which had appeared to me so elegant and perfect from afar, revealed the pains of its ordeals within its arching rooms and spiral staircases. Its interior was no less impressive than its face, although the scars of passing battles had taken telltale tolls. The grand salon was magnificent, with an arching apse to equal any small cathedral, from which dangled a chandelier of many silver arms. At the center of the room, the polished claws of a splendid dining table curled into the nap of a huge Algerian carpet, and in one corner a grand piano of moorish hues raised its upper jaw toward towering windows of gleaming leaden panes. Above and all around, a curving walk with ship-like balustrades led off to freshly abandoned bedchambers.
Yet so many of the chandelier’s three hundred crystals had succumbed to rude reverberations, falling from their perches to shatter on the dining table, whose skin had already been marred by the feet of German typewriters. The boots of Wehrmacht officers had turned too often on the carpet, its gentle coat now scuffed and matted down. And those once carefully preened windowpanes had spidered here and there, and the photos of some French gentry, once ordered carefully upon the piano, had collapsed and lay this way and that in a film of dust from the high plaster ceiling. But it mattered not that the chandelier was broken, for its energy had long since ceased to flow, and the storm lanterns lit by us seemed more appropriate to what I regarded as a tomb.
I see those lanterns flickering now, in the late gray gloom of that day, hurling shadows of antique slat-back chairs upon the high cream walls. The silhouette of Colonel Himmel paces to and fro between those waving bars, while urgent German voices stammer from a large field radio, their orders issued and rescinded in the confusion of shift
ing battles. A huge mahogany desk, which I and others had dragged in from a study, sits with its flank to the dining table’s head, forming a conference “T” that would surely have no attendees. The desk is piled high with orders and communications, and as Himmel stalks and smokes and flips through every missive, I know that most of them are meaningless to him, for he has other plans. And there beyond him, her blond hair tight and gleaming upon her skull, Frau Himmel glories in the surviving fineries of a vast kitchen, humming as she turns her stew, the stench of pig and simmering entrails wafting toward me as I sit at the table, hammering my typewriter as if the machine has stubbornly refused to sprout wings and spirit me away.
The gramophone now hunches upon the piano, a platter spinning out the slowly building urgencies of “Vienna Blood,” and Himmel suddenly stops midmotion, looking ceilingward as the thrum of heavy bombers nears. The half-denuded chandelier shivers, and beyond the kitchen archway, Frau Himmel turns, a wooden spatula clutched in her small white fist, and as her eyes widen in alarm, my master glides to her and snatches her up. And they waltz, clumsily at first, his spine erect and arm outstretched in fine form, while she resists, frowning up at his impish grin. Yet he cannot be dissuaded, my master, and somehow, together, they recover the graces of their young courtship, and they begin to spin. Faster and faster they waltz, from the kitchen to the salon, around the massive dining table, prancing out more perfect pirouettes as the airplane engines roar above and the ordnance thunders near, and at last Frau Himmel’s coiffure tumbles loose and in unison they roar with laughter as I type, and type, and type.
To me, it all resembled a collection of grotesque Russian nesting dolls, one hell trapped within another, for I could think of nothing but Gabrielle. And although a single day had hardly elapsed, I longed to see her, or at the very least to know of how she fared. Yet I would be privy to no such information, for Himmel had broken with tradition and this time billeted me close, in one of the spacious chambers above the salon. It was as if he wished me to witness this ruse as he played it out with his poor wife, and I concluded that he wrapped me closer in conspiracy, to ensure against my treachery.
The Soul of a Thief Page 18