Really the Blues

by Joseph Koenig

  Many beers later, the gendarmes went back out into the cold, spilling cocoa and fumbling for their weapons when they saw the Jews clustered at the side of the truck. Ordering them to back away, they advanced on a pool of blood in the gravel, and its source, the teenage officer sprawled on his belly. Brain matter was caked against the back of his head. His rifle, unfired, remained within reach. The terrified Jews stood by to continue the journey. The driver, also terrified, fled immediately. It was left to the third man to call in the report of what had happened, and he was long gone when help arrived.

  A head count revealed four passengers missing. Pressed to identify the political faction behind the cowardly attack, the Jews gestured with upturned palms. One man was responsible. In Yiddish he had announced under the guard’s nose what he planned to do, and called for the others to join him. While they argued against it, he worked loose a piece of metal from the back of the truck and used it to stave in the teenager’s skull. A few arguers went with him when he ran.

  Soldiers came with motorcycles, dogs, and searchlights to assist the police. Militia volunteers were told that the escapees probably would attempt to infiltrate back into the city where they had hidden before. Footprints in a centimeter of new snow pointed in that general direction before branching off, and hunters were commanded to run down each set of tracks.

  The militiamen discovered the most promising leads already assigned. Worse, they were instructed not to shoot, but to capture the fugitives for questioning. They had abandoned cozy beds in the middle of the night in anticipation of good sport, and were unable to conceal their frustration. Rather than chase after nothing, a squad retired to the auberge to drink themselves into oblivion.

  The innkeeper ushered them back into the night at a little before 3:00. Leaning on each other for support, two of them broke off from the main group in the parking lot and continued into some trees. They were zipping up when they spied a stranger in the shadows dressed poorly for the cold in a thin shirt and no coat. When they called to him, he took off.

  Under orders not to shoot, the militiamen made a quick calculation. If they were reproached for killing him, they could protest that they were heroes who had prevented a murderer’s escape. If they held fire, and he was rearrested elsewhere and recounted how he slipped away from them, they would be mocked as toy soldiers. In their condition it wasn’t easy to hit a zigzagging target in darkness. Three dozen rounds were fired into the woods before a slug glancing off a stump brought him down. The innkeeper, running to see what the gunfire was about, slipped off his apron and used the strings to fashion a tourniquet around the fugitive’s thigh before he bled to death on his property. Newspapers were spread in the trunk of a militia car, and he was arrayed around a load of political tracts. Within forty-five minutes he was back at 84 Avenue Foch.

  He was shivering uncontrollably when the interrogator was called in for a look at him. The room wasn’t cold. He didn’t seem afraid. Didn’t, for that matter, seem Jewish. Jews didn’t fight back. Few even ran to save their neck. Here was one who fought, ran, killed. A gift for the interrogator to bestow on Major Weiler, to redeem himself in his eyes.

  “Your name?”

  “You’ve already forgotten?” said the man. “It’s just a few days since we chatted.”

  “You Jews are all of a type. Nothing sticks out in my mind. Nevertheless, we must get to know one another, and I like to begin by being cordial.” A sudden blow to the side of the head knocked the man out of his chair. “We are done with cordiality,” the interrogator said. “Who are you?”

  “Moshe Pipik.”

  The interrogator had picked up enough Yiddish to know the name meant Moses Bellybutton. Other Jews who thought they were comedians had called themselves that until they learned that he was not to be trifled with. He picked up the Jew and reseated him, adjusting a slumping shoulder as though posing him for a portrait, and when the composition was to his liking, hit him again, putting him back on the floor.

  A puddle from the Jews’s leg wound spread over old stains in the carpet. The interrogator, a deliberate man, had plenty of time. The Jew, already slipping into shock, did not. “Get up,” the interrogator said. “You are making a mess.”

  The Jew rose to his knees, grabbed the chair, and clawed back onto it. The prosecutor kicked at his shoulder, and he toppled back onto the rug.

  “Didn’t I say to get off the floor?”

  The Jew dragged himself to his feet, tottered, and fell down on the chair.

  “Your name,” the interrogator said. “I didn’t get it.”

  “Rogers,” the Jew said. “First name Mark.”

  “You are too creative by half.”

  “Take it or leave it.”

  The interrogator raised his leg again, used his toe to prop him upright.

  “Jews don’t fight,” the interrogator said. “It isn’t in them. Yet you killed the soldier in the truck. How do you explain it?”

  “What’s in it for me if I tell you?”

  “Less pain before we’re done.”

  “I’m not afraid of pain.”

  “We will teach you.”

  Rogers, who knew he was dying, shrugged.

  He presented a rare case to the prosecutor, who complained that his work was dull. The Jews, a meek lot, offered no challenges. There was nothing to do with them but to record the same answers to the same questions and put them on the trucks. Confronted by a Jew who acted unpredictably, he missed the other kind. The interrogator wasn’t a monster. There were enough of those on hand at 84 Avenue Foch when the occasion called for one. He was a manipulator who valued subtlety over brute force. He was only human, though. If the Jew refused to cooperate, heaven help the Jew for making it personal between them.

  He picked at the tourniquet until the knot came undone, stepping back as Rogers’s femoral artery released large pulses of blood through his pants. He would need a bucket to clean up. Expecting fear from Rogers, he was disconcerted by a brief expression of triumph before the Jew’s eyes rolled back and he dropped off the chair.

  “Rogers?” the interrogator said. “Rogers!”

  Blood disgusted him, Jewish blood—the cheapest kind—in particular. But he placed his hand over the wound and clamped it as well as he could, shouting for help.

  A doctor was always on call at Avenue Foch to tend to the prisoners as a medical practitioner/torturer. It was one of these, Dr. Furtwangler, who had interrupted a residency as a neonatalist to come to France, who ran in in his pajamas and retied the tourniquet. When he was finished and both he and the interrogator were drenched in blood, he said, “Don’t think you will get anything out of him. He is barely alive. Throw him on the trash heap and start on another.”

  “You call yourself a doctor?” The interrogator broke off as the prisoner began to mutter. “Rogers,” he said. “Rogers, do you hear me?” Lifting the slumping head, he put his ear close to the Jew’s lips.

  “He is delirious, death will follow shortly,” Furtwangler said.

  “Save him.”

  “His life is worthless. He is. I am going back to sleep.”

  “Save it, or I swear I will have yours.”

  The interrogator shook the dying man’s shoulder, listened to him babble as Furtwangler went out and returned, bringing a jar and rubber tubing. Furtwangler rolled up the Jew’s sleeve, made an incision in his arm, and started an intravenous flow. Rogers’s color didn’t change. He did not appear to be stronger. His words remained indistinct.

  “You haven’t accomplished a damn thing,” the interrogator said.

  “Do you want to save him? Let him be. He needs rest now.”

  “I want his secrets. Those are what I want.”

  Furtwangler loaded a hypodermic needle from a glass ampule and gave Rogers a shot. Almost immediately his eyes fluttered open.

  “What is that?” the interrogator said.

  “Adrenaline.”

  “What will it do?”

  “In his condi
tion it will kill him,” Furtwangler said. “He will have moments of near lucidity first.”

  “Rogers,” the interrogator said, “we want to help you, but you must cooperate. Do you wish to live?”

  The dying man groaned. The interrogator thought he heard a yes.

  “Who are you?” he asked. “Where are you from? Why are you in Paris?”

  The Jew’s eyes snapped open, pink and glassy. Now the interrogator thought he heard a laugh. Furtwangler adjusted the knot on his thigh, and more blood ran out. To the interrogator it seemed the doctor was fine-tuning a device that he, himself, had been trying to operate in mittens. Rogers’s head drooped, and he babbled again. The interrogator had a hundred questions, a few answers before the Jew fell silent.

  “Transfuse him again,” he shouted at Furtwangler. “Give him another shot.”

  “Blood is precious. We can’t afford to waste any on a Jew.”

  “This is a special case,” the interrogator said. “I demand that you do it.”

  Furtwangler yawned, started back to bed. “A dead Jew in particular.”

  When Major Weiler arrived for work that morning, the interrogator was waiting outside his office. Weiler’s impression was of a brawler who had been up all night in a bar room in one of the working-class arrondissements, fighting for Germany’s honor and his own. He didn’t look like a winner. His hair was a clotted nest. Pale blue eyes were slits in bluer pouches. There was blood on his clothes, in the wild hair, on the back of his hands, and under his nails. “I have excellent news, Major, wonderful news,” he announced, so eager to dispense it that he followed Weiler to the toilet.

  “You have rearrested the woman, what was her name—Cartier—whom you allowed to play you for a fool?”

  “Not her, but—”

  Weiler ran water in the sink, and held a pocket comb under the tap. Either he had lost the knack for disparagement, or the interrogator was utterly obtuse. His good humor was undiminished.

  “. . . but an associate from whom we obtained the gist of their plans. You were right about her. She was—”

  Weiler pulled the comb across his head, refashioning a straight part on the left side. He plucked individual hairs from between the teeth of the comb, counted them before washing them down the drain, and pushing others still rooted in his scalp to the needy place that had lost them. Where did a minor functionary—an amateur—come off telling him that he was right about a criminal matter? Could he have been wrong?

  “. . . involved in an intricate conspiracy against the occupation. The plotter we captured was a highly placed member of her gang. There isn’t much we don’t know about them.”

  “Dispense with the preamble. What did you learn?”

  “It begins—”

  “I can listen just as well in my office. Do you intend to remain in the toilet all morning?”

  “If I may have a moment to freshen myself,” the interrogator said. “His blood is all over me.”

  In ten minutes he returned to Weiler’s office, looking the same. Weiler pointed to a chair. He pulled it close to the major’s desk, uninvited.

  “The man we captured was a Jew calling himself Mark Rogers, a nom de guerre, as the French say. The woman also assumed an Aryan name.”

  “You have their real identities?”

  “They didn’t reveal them even to each other,” the interrogator said. “They were illegals in the occupied zone, and before that in Britain, where they were recruited by the Special Operations Executive and trained in the use of explosives.”

  “It’s no secret that we’ve been hit with train derailments caused by bombs, and factories blown up by anti-German elements.”

  “They were after larger game,” the interrogator said, “less in the way of military targets than with political value. They hoped to stir the populace, and boost morale, build . . . resistance, I would call it, to the occupation.”

  “The attack on the Musee du Jeu de Paume was theirs?”

  “Rogers admitted direct involvement.”

  “How did they enter the country?”

  “They were flown across the Channel and dropped by parachute.”

  Weiler snorted. The way to keep an ambitious subordinate in his place was to treat him as an incompetent and tighten the screws when he was on to something. Ask Colonel Maier.

  “Rogers may have been lying,” the interrogator said. “Under the circumstances, I doubt it.”

  “How many in the cell?”

  “Four, at least. Perhaps as many as six.”

  “All of them French Jews?”

  “A Danish communist, Janssen, doesn’t seem to have been Jewish. He operated under the cover of a professional musician.”

  “Janssen was killed, his murder arranged to look like suicide,” Weiler said.

  “I’m aware of that. He was resident here when the others were landed. He found places for them to live. More than that I wasn’t told. Rogers was wounded during capture and unable to speak at length.”

  “Who killed Janssen? Was there a falling-out among the group? A mutiny? Conflict with a rival subversive faction? I must have answers.”

  “Rogers was in very bad shape,” the interrogator said. “There was no opportunity to develop a comprehensive line of questioning.”

  “Who was their leader? Did you learn that much?”

  “There was another musician, a piano player, a Dutchman, Dutch Jew, who Rogers held in high regard. Possibly him.”

  “Goudsmit? Was that his name?”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know more.”

  Weiler gazed away. How did he tell Maier that the Dutch Jew at the heart of the conspiracy had been in his hands, and disposed of without being drained of secrets?

  “As the gang members are dead or dispersed, we have nullified their threat,” the interrogator volunteered.

  “I will make that judgment when I know more. Ask Rogers about the pianist, and about Janssen’s death, and who the others are, and where they have gone to ground. Whatever it takes to obtain good answers, do it.”

  “I . . . I already have.”

  “Obviously not,” Weiler said. “I’ll draw up a list of questions for you to put to him.”

  “Under the circumstances, that’s impossible.”

  “I will conduct the interview myself. You will see what is not impossible.”

  “Rogers is dead.”

  Weiler said, “What?” Then, at the top of his lungs: “You killed him.”

  He was done shouting, his thoughts in too many places for the full show of outrage that was called for. He had underestimated the dimensions of this disaster, and its repercussions. Maier would have to be told that no fewer than three of the criminals had slipped through his net, two of them executed summarily without being squeezed dry.

  “He was too far gone,” the interrogator answered finally. “We did what we could to keep him going longer, but he resisted all efforts. He was determined to die.”

  Weiler knew the feeling.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Five days had gone by without a word from Carla, a record. After the biggest fight they’d ever had, when she insisted that he quit the band and move in with her, essentially give up his career to be her pet, she’d cold-shouldered him for less than seventy-two hours before turning up at the club as though nothing had come between them. He’d gone along with the charade rather than rub her nose in it, but didn’t think she would surrender her pride a second time. The first move was up to him.

  He got no answer when he called, tried again every hour till it was time to leave for work, picturing her beside the phone, listening to it ring, knowing it would drive him nuts. His own pride was on the line, although he had a way around it. Everyone would agree that in her condition something could have gone seriously wrong. As he started for Boulevard Victor Massé, he almost wished it had.

  The concierge didn’t seem unhappy to see him. Carla hadn’t declared him persona non grata.

  “I haven’t he
ard from her in days,” Eddie said to him. “It’s got me worried. Do you know if she’s been well?”

  The concierge rang her apartment. “You aren’t the only one who is concerned,” he said, holding the intercom to his ear. “Her parents came by yesterday, very upset, and went away more so when she didn’t come to the door. They told me they would be back until they caught her at home.”

  “I’m not going without a look inside.”

  The concierge had coached other tenants through lovers’ quarrels and was an authority on when they had gone on too long. Grabbing his keyring, he accompanied Eddie to the fourth floor. Eddie knocked on Carla’s door, pounded it while the concierge tried wrong keys until the fifth was a charm. A bad smell rushed out on stale air. Stepping around the concierge, Eddie was first inside.

  “Carla,” he called out, “Carla, it’s me. Where have you been keeping yourself?”

  There was no sound but the ticking of her Louis XVI mantel clock in the foyer.

  “Mlle de Villiers?” the concierge said. “Is anybody home?”

  She’d left the city without letting him know, Eddie told himself, nothing more ominous than that. But she never went anywhere without telling her parents. He was in the bedroom, pressing his fingers against the tight covers on the bed, when the concierge called out, “Monsieur Piron, don’t come in here.”

  Eddie ran toward the voice. The concierge stepped out of the bathroom to stop him, but Eddie pushed through his arms, brought up short by the body dangling from clothesline looped through a ceiling pipe above an overturned chair. The bad smell was concentrated here. It had been building since shortly after the last time he and Carla spoke.

  The pain etched in her face was replicated in his heart. A hanging resulting in quick death from a broken neck was not something she would have known to do. Carla had died agonizingly by strangulation, but he couldn’t say that hadn’t been her intent.

  The body had begun to deteriorate, the beautiful features losing the sharpness by which he’d read her moods so clearly that he knew them before she did. Her blouse was unbuttoned, her lower abdomen crosshatched with scratch marks deep enough to have drawn blood. A kitchen knife in the basin could only mean that she had tried to cut the baby out of her belly before stepping onto the chair. The concierge pushed him away. He didn’t resist or go home to wait for the police to call as he was admonished to do, but remained by the door like a dog standing guard over his mistress’s body till gendarmes arrived.