An Infinity of Mirrors

by Richard Condon

  “Veules-les-Roses, sir.”

  “Plane with you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Rhode, ten minutes ago your wife telephoned to say that the SS had taken your son—”

  “I beg your pardon, sir?”

  “Your wife will be in my office almost immediately. I suggest that you return to Paris at once, I shall send Blanke with her when we locate the boy, and Ernst will be standing by to escort you. I have nothing more to report now. Return to Paris immediately.” He hung up.

  When the confidential clerk ushered Paule in, Stuelpnagel put his arms around her, as a father would. “Now Germans know every shame,” he said. Crisply, he turned to Blanke. “Herr Blanke is our specialist,” he said. “He believes that he has located your son and he will take you to him now.”

  Blanke clicked his heels and made a short bow. “Does Madame have a picture of her son?” he asked.

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Over four thousand children were taken in the raids. Several photographs would be helpful in finding him.”

  “Four thousand children,” General von Stuelpnagel said in a cracking voice. “That is how we make war now.”

  The staff car shrieked to a stop behind the GFP weapons carrier at the main entrance of the Vélodrome d’Hiver. Six soldiers and one sergeant leaped out, machine rifles at the ready. Blanke tried to help Paule out of the car, but she streaked past him and sprinted across the sidewalk. The military police raced in ahead of her and opened a hole through the two layers of policemen barring the door. Two soldiers pinned the French police to each wall with their rifles and the sergeant pulled open the front door. Paule darted across the short foyer and into the arena. Ten feet inside she stopped, threw back her head and screamed at the top of her lungs, staring with utter horror at the seven thousand internees, smelling the sweat, urine, and feces, smelling and staring at death.

  “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!” Blanke said, his head turning slowly as he tried to see everywhere at once. He pulled Paul-Alain’s picture out of his pocket, and as Paule ran forward into the crowd of bodies laid out on stretchers in the infield, Blanke stumbled dazedly forward and began to look as systematically as possible among the crowd.

  Veelee had felt almost healed in the dark places of his mind since he had come to Paris and had rediscovered Paul-Alain. The boy had nearly cleansed him of the killing he had done and seen. Lately his mind could retain the things which seemed far more real than the real world. Paul-Alain allowed him to think of the future.

  In the hospital Veelee had been afraid that he had lost control of himself forever. He had wept helplessly at the sight of wounded men, and once he had become hysterical upon being introduced to a Colonel Poll, because the man’s name sounded the same as Paule’s. He had been badly frightened all during the journey to Paris, hardly able to control his conviction that the train was about to separate into its thousands of parts as it raced along the rails. At the Royal Monceau he had slept in a chair with a cocked pistol in his lap, because he had begun to imagine that he was those two British commandos in the desert, and he knew that Rhode was coming slowly over the rise to kill. Veelee had not been able to talk to anyone about these things because he knew that they would send him away from Paris and Paule and Paul-Alain. He had been as steady as steel when General von Stuelpnagel had received him, nodding affably and agreeing to everything, but he was not able to distinguish the words that the General was saying. Before his eyes, von Stuelpnagel’s eyes had seemed to fill with tears, and since this was impossible Veelee was sure the war was getting to him.

  Every night at six o’clock the General would saunter into Veelee’s office and take him across the street to the officers’ mess at the Hôtel Raphael and pour two whiskies into him. Still, Veelee supposed he was doing his work well enough. It was the work of a senior officer in a rear-area command, and that had become instinctive to him years before. After seeing Paule again and noticing the scars and changes in her face he decided she had suffered more than he; he had only endured the mutilation of his body, whereas she had suffered the murder of her hope. They were lost to each other in a billowing cloud of smoke of loss and regret, but they still had what their love had produced, Paul-Alain, to keep them together until somehow all things could heal. Paule loved him still—even he could see that, he told himself—and he loved her more than ever before. His mind and his body were shapeless and purposeless and no longer of much use, but in time their loss would be healed by Paul-Alain.

  His son. His Paul-Alain. The best of the goodness of both of them. What a fine boy. His father’s friend—his own friend—von Stuelpnagel had given the boy a decoration ribbon he had found in his desk; he had pinned it under the boy’s lapel with a great air of secrecy and then had beamed down at Paul-Alain because he was such a fine boy. But now Veelee was becoming confused again because he could not understand what the General had meant about the SS. Were they starting that Youth Movement nonsense in France? Had they taken the boy to some youth camp? Not that it would hurt him—outdoors all the time, cold showers, plain food.

  The car was on the main road to Paris from Le Bourget. Ahead of them, coming from Paris, a convoy of trucks was turning off, and as they passed he could see that the trucks were jammed with civilians.

  “What’s all this?” he asked the driver.

  “There have been very big Jewish raids, sir,” the driver said. “I think this convoy is taking them to the transit camp at Drancy about a half-mile up that side road.”

  “Poor devils.”

  “Pardon, sir?”

  “I said it’s a rotten way to fight a war.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Veelee reached the Hôtel Majestic at twelve-thirty P.M. to find Stuelpnagel waiting. He was very pale and his square jaw was held firmly outthrust. “The BdS has located the boy,” he said immediately.

  “Located?” A strange choice of word—one doesn’t locate a pupil in a classroom or a boy in a youth camp.

  “Rhode, I—”

  “What is happening, sir?”

  “A car is waiting to take you to fetch your wife so that both of you can—”

  “But what has happened to Paul-Alain?” The General saw that Veelee had not yet comprehended what the SS had done. “Rhode, something terrible has happened,” he said slowly. “Your son was taken in the widespread Jewish raids which began last Thursday.”

  “A Jewish raid? My boy?”

  “We thought he would be found at the Vélodrome d’Hiver, where your wife is now. But early this morning he was removed to the transit camp at Drancy because he has become ill.”

  Veelee turned away from him and ran for the door. “Rhode, wait!” the General said loudly. “There is no way for me to reach your wife at the Vélodrome. Pick her up and then go to Drancy. Ernst will see to it that you get the boy out instantly, but he’ll need his mother—his mother must be there.”

  As Veelee ran out of the room the horizon inside his head began to tilt again. The long corridor offered blank patches in his vision, and he walked unsteadily to the lift repeating his son’s name over and over again within his head. As he came down the steps Ernst took him by the elbow and guided him into the car. He fell as he was getting into the seat, but he pulled himself up at once as Ernst got in beside him and the car roared out into the Avenue Kléber.

  Ernst found Blanke and Blanke found Paule. Veelee stood on the board track under the barrage of sound from the loudspeakers, staring dazedly at the carnage all around him. Peering through the murk, he was unable to decide whether he was looking for Paule or Paul-Alain. “Sergeant!” he yelled, and the sergeant who had accompanied Paule came running up.

  “Sir!”

  “Bring the police officer in charge to me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Blanke found Paule high up on the stone tiers. Her dress had been soiled where she had vomited, and she was weeping silently and breathing in great shuddering gasps from the exertion of moving up row upon row of t
he stone steps shouting Paul-Alain’s name. She had talked to people in the five languages she knew and showed them Paul-Alain’s picture, but they had either stared back at her in bewilderment or had begged her for water.

  “We have located the boy, Frau General,” Blanke said.

  “Thank you, Herr Blanke. Where is he? Take me to him, please.”

  “He has been moved to Drancy.”

  “To the transit camp? My God, then we must go. What if they should ship him? What can we do if they ship him before we get there?”

  She began to pick her way down the tiers of stone. Blanke overtook her and went ahead of her so that she could support herself on his shoulder as they descended. “Your husband is here,” she heard him say, and as she looked down she saw Veelee standing on the board track towering over the police and the soldiers around him, his gray-white hair gleaming like a helmet, immaculate in his black uniform and boots, his left sleeve pinned neatly back, the monocle fixed in his eye. When she came close she saw that his single eye was wild and his face frantic to overtake what he was aware that everyone but him clearly knew. He put his arm around her and she clung to him. “My mind doesn’t take this in at all,” he said into her ear. “It comes, but then it slips away. It’s Paul-Alain, isn’t it? But Paul-Alain in such a place as this?”

  “He isn’t here, my dear,” she said. “Come with me. We will find him now.” She took him by the hand and led him toward the exit as the loudspeakers screamed, “Attention! Attention! Walking on the board track while wearing shoes is strictly forbidden. Attention! Those who walk upon the board track with shoes on will be immediately and severely punished.”

  Suddenly the GFP sergeant stood in front of Veelee. He was holding a gun in the back of a police officer. “The police commander, sir,” the sergeant said.

  “What about him?”

  “You sent for him, sir.”

  “Ah? Oh, yes.” He turned to the police officer. “Turn off that recording,” he ordered.

  “I cannot,” the policeman said. “That record is playing on Gestapo orders.”

  “Sergeant.”

  “Sir!”

  “Issue axes to your men and destroy this running track.”

  “Yes, sir.” The sergeant saluted as Veelee strode away and got into the waiting car beside Paule.

  Drancy, the transit camp from which Jews were shipped to the extermination camps in Poland, sat on a plateau in the northeastern section of Paris. Around it were vacant lots littered with rubbish and a few low cottages and high-chimneyed factories. The camp itself, a mass of dark bulky buildings, took the overall shape of a large horseshoe, and covered approximately eighteen acres. Originally intended to be used as workers’ flats, each building had four floors and a staircase whose landings opened into single large rooms which had been designed for twelve beds and into which either sixty adults or one hundred children were now crammed. They slept on planks covered with straw; in the winter, the police tried to steal the planks for firewood. Male internees were separated from female, and then the groups were sorted by the French Physiognomical Police. This was a special squad composed of experts who could spot Jews on sight without needing to check their papers, and could even separate them into social ranks.

  The camp’s black market, which was controlled by the police, was necessary for survival because each inmate’s daily ration was two ladles of soup, a quarter of a pound of bread, and two Jerusalem artichokes. For a price, food parcels could be sent in from the outside for people who could not help getting hungry while they waited to be shipped off to be gassed to death.

  The camp was guarded and administered by the French, and the commanding officer was an officer in the French army. The Germans dealt only with such exceptional matters as deportations and hostages, and the internal organization of the camp was left to the prisoners. For three years there were never fewer than five thousand Jews at Drancy; it was a small eddy in which they paused briefly before being whirled off centrifugally into the extermination camps.

  Paule and Veelee found Paul-Alain on the second floor of a room in Drancy’s great horseshoe, off the landing of Escalier Zazous. There were ninety-three other sick and dying children in the room, covered with lice and scabies and sleeping fitfully on urine-soaked straw. Paul-Alain opened his eyes as his mother and father knelt on either side of him, gave a cry of joy, and smiled. As Paule bent over him, murmuring her love for him, he managed to touch her cheek lightly with his hand. Then his hand slipped downward and clutched the lapel of her suit. As it slipped off and fell to the straw, he died.

  Fourteen

  Fräulein Nortnung, as naked as a coin and blonder than beer, her long hair falling free instead of woven in the tightly plaited schnecken which were usually coiled around her ears, was rubbing her splendid Nordic bosom with a rough towel. The towel felt good but it didn’t compare with the way Carlie could use a towel. When she compared Carlie to the men she had left at home, they seemed to have been carved out of liverwurst. She slipped into a pair of white pom-pom mules from Carlie’s Marseilles warehouse and, as fine a figure of summertime womanhood as any conceived by Rubens, thundered into the salon of the flat.

  It was hardly a typical apartment of the period. Three one-hundred-pound bags of coffee beans took up one corner of the salon; a bundle of new currency notes amounting to six hundred and twelve thousand francs were stacked on a bookshelf under a copy of the memoirs of François Paul de Gondi de Cardinal Retz, for which a general in the Luftwaffe Ground Supply Office had said he would pay extremely well because it was the perfect birthday remembrance for the Reichsmarschall. Along the wall, woolen blankets had been stacked five feet high. Three dozen tins of butter were on the low table in front of the sofa, and on the desk were piled eleven pads of signed Wehrmacht purchase authorizations. The far wall was lined with cartons of Players and Gauloise, amounting to perhaps sixty thousand cigarettes.

  Piocher was snarling French gutter argot into the telephone, telling someone that he did not want any advice on what to buy and at what price. How the hell should he know why there was a sudden market for mutton? He didn’t care either—get the mutton.

  As Piocher hung up, he looked at the spectacularly naked Fräulein Nortnung and smiled at her encouragingly with his atrocious teeth. “I like your hair up like that, pupchen.”

  “It is only for the bath this way, Carlie.”

  “No more. Keep it up. I like it that way.”

  “Ja, Carlie.”

  “What a beautiful ass you have.”

  She tossed a cushion at him in playful appreciation; had it hit him, he would have been knocked off his chair.

  “Well, what was new at the office today?”

  The happiness faded from her face and was replaced by an extremely complicated expression of indignation. “What happened today I think I could never believe if I had not been there taking notes on the extension phone so that Colonel Drayst can have his own record if there is a wire tap on us and they try to say we said something else.”

  “Really? What happened?”

  “General von Stuelpnagel, the Military Governor for France, himself called Colonel Drayst. Wehrmacht from the top of his head to his feet. He said straight out, no preliminaries, that Colonel Drayst had one hour to deliver this information or he would be shot. Shot! The BdS!”

  “Well!”

  “The idea of the Wehrmacht talking to the SS that way. Listen, if Colonel Drayst wanted to he could have General von Stuelpnagel shot. And maybe he will be shot—the Colonel sent that threat straight off to the Reichsfuehrer SS so that he could know which way the winds are blowing here.”

  “Oh, come off it, liebchen.”

  “It’s a matter of SS honor, isn’t it? And General von Stuelpnagel is no favorite of the Fuehrer’s—everybody knows that.”

  “Your Occupation would be in some mess if a colonel-general couldn’t threaten a lousy colonel.”

  “About a Jew?”

  “What d’you mean,
about a Jew?”

  “It was a ridiculous thing. He said he would have the BdS shot because of a Jew—not even a grown Jew, a child.”

  “What child?”

  “All right, I’ll tell you from the beginning. Because up to the time General von Stuelpnagel told Colonel Drayst that he would have him shot, Colonel Drayst felt very sad—personally sad. Over only a Jew. It was a mistake. Believe me, I can tell you he had nothing against the child.”

  “Whose child?”

  “The little son of General von Rhode.”

  “The Nachrichtenfuehrer?”

  “Yes.”

  “His child is a Jew?”

  “The wife is a Jew.”

  “What happened?”

  “The son was picked up in the razzias last week.”

  “A general’s child? The child of a hero like von Rhode? That was naughty. Maybe Colonel Drayst felt personally sad because he knows how the Fuehrer uses war heroes in his business. Come here. Don’t sit in that draught over there.”

  “There is no draught, Carlie.”

  “Come here.”

  “Oh, Carlie, it is so hot for what you want.” She leaped like a hippopotamus and lay down with her head in his lap. “You know, Carlie? You are the only man who never says it’s too hot to do it in the summer. Actually, the summers are much cooler in Germany.”

  He kneaded her right breast as though preparing dough for the oven. “How did Colonel Drayst happen to have a general’s child included in a razzia?”

  “The BdS is only human.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Don’t tease. He is so terribly in love with Frau General von Rhode, a Jew yet, that he can’t bear it that she won’t have anything to do with him.”

  “Ah. Pity.”

  “Yes. So he was destroying himself to think of some way he could make her change her mind. Then he decided that if he could rescue her little son from the razzias she would be so grateful that … you know.”

  “What happened?”

  “Well, everything went wrong. The boy was in that place for four days before the parents found out. Evidently they were out of town or something. Then, instead of going through channels, they went to General von Stuelpnagel.”