An Infinity of Mirrors

by Richard Condon

  They calmed down after a while. The tremendous feeling didn’t go away, but they calmed down because nobody could go on that way without snapping a spine. She didn’t even answer him for two days; they just stayed in that great big bed. Then late one night she said, “I was married once to a guy who had more wives at one time than both of us have fingers, and I swore—I tell you I even took a razor blade and opened my vein a little bit so I could do it in blood—and I swore that I would never marry another son-of-a-bitch of a man if I lived forever. Oh, honey, oh, honey.” She began to cry again and she pressed her face so hard into his shoulder that he thought she would break her nose.

  “You won’t marry me?” he said hoarsely. His hands and feet felt as cold as death.

  “I will, honey. I will because I have to. And I’ve got to break what I swore. Because I love you, I love you, I love you.”

  “We’ll get married tonight,” he said eagerly, thinking at the same instant that he’d have to buy some faked papers from Piocher.

  “We get married the day they carry the last dead German out of this town,” Yoka said. “Maybe we won’t wait until this rotten war is over, but we’ll wait that long. Marriage is a holy thing, and I don’t want any Germans in the same country when it happens to me.”

  When he thought it all over later, he realized he should have known better. He had given her his private telephone number in his own quarters at the Avenue Foch, in case there was ever any emergency and she needed him. Nobody was allowed to answer that phone but him. Yoka didn’t know where it was; she had never had occasion to use it in over three years because there never had been a situation she couldn’t handle. Whatever happened in one of his clubs was all in a night’s work to her.

  Everything was going so splendidly. He had shipped out a little over six thousand Jews in two weeks, all to Auschwitz. It was a new record. Everybody in Berlin was purring at him. It was a rough time because the increase in the night-club business sometimes kept him up as late as eight in the morning, and then he had to go straight to the office. Too many pills, maybe, but it was the only way he could keep going. He’d been told that Professor Morell had said that a man had to go very easy with those pills, but he had such fatigue. The God-damn Jews. How could he keep the shipments moving out without the pills? But sometimes he would lose all the colors of everything for fifteen or twenty minutes at a time. No color—what a world that would be! And sometimes all the thoughts in his head would go way up to the top of his skull and then slide down at him in a crazy tilt, picking up enormous speed and threatening to slide down on him like a runaway piano on the deck of a ship in a storm. And the music he heard! If he had the skill to write it down he wouldn’t do it. Even if he did, no instrument could play it. It would have to be sung by screaming people whose feet were on fire. Horrible music.

  “Have you heard the way people scream when their feet are on fire?” he said to the French police inspector across the desk from him.

  The policeman stared at him blankly and said, “Now these lists of convalescent homes. What is your feeling about that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean they are sick people, mostly old people, so I suggest we jump over this list and go on to the next. No need to—”

  Strasse hit the desk with his fist so hard that everything on it jumped. Here it was, almost one in the morning, and he hadn’t been able to visit one of his clubs that evening, and these idiots were still splitting hairs about Jews. “Don’t you people ever learn anything?” he screamed. “You’ve been working with me for three years and eating pretty well. You’ve got a few deals on the side, so maybe you are even a rich man by now. And I did it for you. But when I try to teach you the way you have to learn to think, you just can’t do it.” The shifting liquid heat started inside his head and ran like molten gold across the top of his forehead, dropped imperceptibly, like a linotype machine, then started to burn its way back to the other side where it dropped and started again. “They’re Jews, aren’t they? It is that simple. They will be dead in exactly four days, won’t they? What difference does it make how old they are or whether they have a bad cold? Jews. Jewsl We are here to kill Jews. Will you ever, ever learn that?” Then the private telephone rang, and Strasse picked it up wearily. It seemed to weigh sixty-eight pounds.

  “Strasse,” he said into the telephone.

  “Baby? Yoka. We got trouble.” He sat up very straight.

  “Who? Where?”

  “The Casino Latino. I’ve locked myself in the office. It’s the fucking SS fighting the fucking Milice. They’re wrecking the joint, and I can’t raise any cops.”

  “Stay locked in there, you hear?” he said frantically. “I’ll be right there.” He hung up. “Come on,” he said to the four policemen. “And bring a few loaded sticks. They’re breaking up one of my night clubs.” They all charged out of the room, and in less than eight minutes they were at the Casino Latino. A full-scale free-for-all was going on, but when one of the inspectors blew a whistle the fighters paused as though a motion picture projector had stopped in mid-reel. Slowly eyes were raised to the small balcony where Strasse, with the Totenkorps Death’s Heads shining on his uniform, stood with the three cops.

  “Gestapo!” he screamed at them.

  The fighting stopped cold. They were all blind drunk.

  “You will line up in two files—SS to the right, Milice to the left.” He snapped his fingers and pointed. “You will give names, ranks, and serial numbers. Whatever the damages are to this place you will pay double, and whatever labor is required you will provide yourselves. Line up!”

  He had seen Yoka open the door of the office at the back and, knowing that she was watching, he began to hyperbolize. “You are filthy swine! You are low, rotten filth!” He turned to the police. “Get them out. March them to the nearest commissariat. I don’t want to look at them. Out! Out!”

  As the bruised and drunken men moved past him to the door, Strasse walked down the steps to the back of the room where Yoka was standing, waiting to tell him how masterful and wonderful he was. She was deathly pale, but of course it had been a frightening experience to be trapped in a cellar with wild men. Well, he had shown her how such matters were handled.

  “What is that uniform?” she asked in a shaking voice. He blinked, confused, then collected himself and looked down. He was wearing his uniform. Those damned pills! My God. Well, what the hell, it had to happen sooner or later. “Listen, Yoka. Maybe I should have told you. But who had the time, correct? I am not really a Dane. You know what I mean—I am a German, I am with the Gestapo. I am a German, you know?”

  She stared at him in horror. Her expression was so different that it upset him. “What’s the matter?” he said. She did not answer. “Yoka! Stop looking at me like that! I admit it, I should have told you. But you liked me to be Danish. You liked the beret. You said it many times. You like night clubs. You like night clubs as much as I do. Where do you think I got the night clubs?” She stuffed her shaking hand into her mouth. “Yoka! Answer me! I am the same man. Nothing has changed but the suit I wear. Nothing else. You are the same and I am the same.” Her legs gave away, and she sank as slowly as a fog, toppling sideways into a chair, still staring up at him with a look of the most unbelieving horror; and a terrible thought came to Strasse as he looked at her, a terrible, terrible thought.

  “Are you a Jew?” The sentence exploded out of him before he even knew what he had been thinking. “Is that why you always cursed Germans? Is that why you are looking at me like that? Yoka! Answer me! Tell me! Are you a Jew?” He leaned over and pulled her to her feet; when he shook her he could hear her teeth strike against each other. “Tell me! I won’t be angry. It is all right. There are ways to make it all right if you are a Jew. It has been done, Yoka. But you must tell me. Are you a Jew? I must know that. Are you a Jew? I have to know that.” She did not answer him with words, but from far back in her throat she spat at him. It splattered across his face and he let
her go and she fell again into the chair. He wheeled away from her, meaning to walk purposefully, but he found himself running out of the room into the deserted street.

  Dawn was beginning to show. He fumbled in his pocket for the pills, and took three instead of one. Within a matter of yards, he felt better. All at once he began to see things more clearly. He walked down the inclined rue de Ponthieu, and his mind formed itself in a perfectly circular pattern, permitting him to see almost all of the known world as though through a remarkable telescope. Then the juice-filled, pain-wild music began in his head, and he stood on the corner of the rue du Colisée and leaned against the building, waiting for it to fade away into giant patterns of black and white herringbone tweed. Then the bubbling-water effects began: churning round domes of red, breaking and then reforming. Moving mechanically, he walked through empty streets until he reached the Place Beauvau, and Gestapo headquarters for Paris. Like an automaton he saluted the guards and entered the courtyard.

  Inside, he sought out the duty officer, who saluted him warily. “Issue a pick-up order for Yoka Karmo,” Strasse said. “She will either be at the night club Casino Latino, in the rue de Ponthieu, or at five Boulevard Mistier.” The duty officer noted the facts on his form sheet while Strasse rambled on. “I want her interrogated. I want to know if she is a Jew. I want her interrogated until she admits to either being a Jew or not being a Jew. After she makes her statement, I want it checked out in Amsterdam.” He stared at the duty officer blankly, trying to remember what he had just said, and then screamed into the man’s face. “And I want action, do you hear that?” He pouted. “Get me a car.”

  Feeling like a ruler of men but slightly tired, Captain Strasse went to his quarters on the Avenue Foch to try to get some sleep. It was four-thirty; he could sleep until nine. He scrawled a do-not-disturb sign, tacked it on the outside of his door, and was asleep, fully dressed, in seconds.

  Strasse slept until five forty-five P.M. He thought of chewing out his people for letting him sleep so long, but he knew that he had needed it. He was still so tired that it took him almost five minutes to edge his hand to the table beside the bed and reach the bottle of pills. God bless Professor Morell. He rested for five minutes before unscrewing the cap of the bottle and swallowing a pill.

  Exactly eleven minutes later Strasse was prancing from wall to wall under a cold shower, singing the Horst Wessel song at the top of his lungs. God, he felt good. What in God’s name did that marvelous Professor Morell put in those pills? If the Fuehrer would only take four of them some morning, the war in the east would be over by nightfall. Well, he had shot a whole day. It was the first workday he had ever missed, rain or shine, in sickness or in health, for richer, for poorer. He was toweling himself when he thought of Yoka. Something about Yoka. What was it? Damn it, what was it? Each time he thought he had it, it would slip away again. Business. No use. He shrugged. It would come to him. He dressed in civilian clothes and a jaunty blue beret.

  Yoka wasn’t at her apartment and the bed hadn’t been slept in. Or maybe she had made the bed. He prowled the room nervously, and when he heard footsteps on the stairs he poked his head out the door. But it was only Mme. Cardozo knocking a broom around on the stairs. “Did Mlle. Karmo go out?” Mme. Cardozo shrugged. “Did she come in?” Mme. Cardozo raised her left eyebrow. She hated Danes. He slammed the door shut and pushed past her down the stairs. Yoka must be at the commissary. But it turned out that she had not been there all day, and by the time he reached the Casino Latino, where they always met for Yoka’s breakfast early in the evening, it was not only closed, it was a wreck. Every table in the place had been broken, and the big bar mirror was smashed. His first little joint, ruined. He was outraged. He heard voices in the back and found the porter with the barman, who had a split lip and a big mouse under his right eye. “Where’s Yoka?” he asked.

  “Jesus, M’sieu Strasse! Jesus, the Gestapo took her,” the porter said excitedly. “They came maybe half an hour after you left.” Both men had jumped to their feet deferentially when he came in and now they were looking at him apprehensively. “The Gestapo?” he said with some confusion. “The Gestapo?”

  Neither man answered him. “After I left?” he asked blankly. The two men glanced at each other quickly, and then the porter shrugged. They had been working for him for three years, so why should it be different now? “There was a riot, boss. SS and the Milice. Yoka called you. You came in with four cops and stopped everything.” He paused. He almost didn’t say it, but then he took a deep breath. “You were in uniform.”

  It all began to come back. As Strasse stumbled toward the front door he saw something red on the floor and bent over to pick it up. It was silk. It was the collar of Yoka’s silk dress. He ran out the door and down the hill. At the bottom he stopped short, took the bottle out of his pocket, shook the last pill from it and swallowed it. He waited, leaning against the building for a few minutes, and then walked back to the club and into the office to telephone. “Get out there and clean up that mess,” he said to the two men as he passed them. They leaped to their feet.

  He called Gestapo Paris headquarters and asked for his office. When the girl came on he said, “I am at Anjou forty-five ninety. I want information immediately on an arrest made this morning in the rue de Ponthieu at about four-fifteen. Name of Yoka Karmo. Call right back.” He lit a cigarette and considered things anew through the Morell space viewer. A girl like Yoka. Well, it was convictions plus principles. He had done the right thing instinctively. She wasn’t a Jew, of course. He could spot a Jew at a thousand yards, upwind and in the dark. But for some reason she hated Germans. So what? He hated Jews. Mme. Cardozo hated Danes. The French hated everybody. Well, now she knew that he was a German and he must get her back. Must. They would cross-examine her and she would make a statement that she was not a Jew—which could easily be checked by telephoning Amsterdam, anyway. And it would probably turn out that the interrogation had been a very good thing. If she hated Germans, maybe she had to learn to be afraid of them so that she would need him to protect her. Everything was going to be all right.

  The telephone rang. “Strasse.”

  “We have no conclusive report here, Captain Strasse, but we have a call in to Major Rau in Amsterdam.”

  “Where is the woman now?”

  “They were full up here, Captain, so she was taken to the rue Lauriston.” Strasse shuddered involuntarily. “Send me a car, please,” he said. “Thirty-six rue de Ponthieu.” As he hung up he was feeling terribly nervous. The rue Lauriston was Gestapo-France headquarters, and the interrogators there were called the merry convicts. The pill bottle was empty and he flung it into the corner of the room. How could he let himself run this low? More pills would have arrived at Avenue Foch by now.

  Strasse did not reach rue Lauriston until eight fifty-five P.M. and he went directly to Lafont’s office, sweating hard; that damned woman was so stubborn that she could get herself into trouble. She was too damned independent. These convicts of Lafont’s weren’t Germans; they didn’t care about the book of instructions for interrogations. He wished that Yoka had been interrogated at the rue des Saussaies.

  Lafont was always glad to see him, for Strasse was his principal source of supply of customers. They greeted each other, and then Strasse asked about Yoka. Lafont called for the booking sheets and ran his finger down the list. “Here she is. We booked her at four forty-two this morning. A tough customer.”

  “Did she make her statement? Is she a Jew?”

  “I think she was a Jew,” Lafont said. “But Cassamondu is positive she wasn’t.”

  “Never mind opinions. What was her statement?”

  “She refused to make a statement.”

  “You mean they’re still interrogating her? Seventeen hours?”

  “Oh, no,” Lafont said. “That’s all done. She died at”-he bent over the sheet again—“at five forty-one P.M.” He shook his head with admiration. “She was a tough customer, that girl,” />
  The mangling music started inside him and the gold line began to burn across his head, then down a space, then across again. The thoughts climbed to the top of the high ledge just behind his forehead, then chuted downward on a jagged course, gathering enormous weight and speed, and there was no place he could go to get away from it.

  An axe clove him in two and the two halves went stumbling along the rue Lauriston down the hill toward the Etoile while the Gestapo car trailed after the two halves. He had become two men. One had committed Rassenschande, the most obscene act of which a human was capable. He had defiled his race, he had defiled the Corps, he had smeared filth over his honor and the honor of the SS. There was only one penalty. He would write a formal confession to the Reichsfuehrer SS that he had entered the unclean body of a Jew. He would only be shot when he deserved disemboweling.

  Reeling along beside this ruined SS officer was the other half—the lost half. Yoka was dead. Yoka. How could he live? What was living? Stale bread and the smell of sweat in his night clubs, those filthy rat holes. Chasing after Jews as though they thought they could ever kill every one of them. There would always be more. Why should he live without Yoka? No one wanted him. She had wanted him, but she was dead. A Jew. How could there be a God who would send him such a woman after making her a Jew? She had to be a Jew; if she had been racially pure she would have shouted it out to the skies. She would have been defiant, but she would have told Lafont’s men in the rue Lauriston before they … before … He could not bear to see it, but it came tumbling over the white-hot ledge behind his forehead and roared straight at him. He saw what they were doing to Yoka and he began to run, screaming steadily as he ran. He had to get to the pills, he must get the pills.