The Alice Factor

by J. Robert Janes

  They ran back toward the road. The wheels of the truck were still turning.

  As they scrambled up over the rocks, Krantz waited, held himself. The woman reached the road and he shot her first. She threw up her hands—wouldn’t even have cried out or anything.

  Just died as so many had. The fields of Flanders, the last advance on Ypres, and never mind the diamonds, never mind what Heydrich wanted. Just kill or be killed.

  Hagen held the woman in his arms and waited for it. Krantz lowered the rifle and buried his face in the earth. All his energy had suddenly left him. Drained, he lay there, knowing he should have killed Hagen while he’d had the chance.

  Part Three

  Fall 1939 – Spring 1941

  The little fishes’ answer was

  “We cannot do it, sir, because—”

  Eleven

  THE HUSH OF THE OFFICE was the hush of the times. In the wake of the appallingly savage destruction of Poland a quiet disbelief had settled over Western Europe and the British Isles. The world had changed and yet it had not changed. It held its breath. There had been no real fighting in the West.

  People had begun to think the unthinkable would not happen.

  Bernard Wunsch lit yet another cigarette, the fourth since arriving for work at 7:00 a.m. Richard’s office continued to haunt him as did Arlette’s vacant desk.

  The vault was all the more perplexing since it held the whole of Dillingham’s diamond stocks, even though both England and France had gone to war and there had been an immediate naval blockade of the Reich.

  The sound of the lift came to him, then the opening of its cage door. He gave it a few more moments, didn’t turn from the windows.

  “Ascher, I still cannot understand it. To all intents and purposes we are at war with the Nazis and yet we aren’t at war. In France they call it la drôle de guerre, in England the phony war, in Germany the Sitzkrieg. And here? What do we call it but neutrality!”

  “Bernard, Bernard, try to calm yourself.”

  “How can I? We stand like bewildered ducks before a dried-up pond awaiting the butcher’s knife.”

  Belgium had moved into its third stage of readiness. This was not a full mobilization but the call-up of some more reservists. The defenses of the Albert Canal and Fort Eben Emael were being manned. Antwerp was gradually becoming a fortress city—tank traps, bridges to be mined, areas in the countryside to be flooded, et cetera, et cetera.

  While the French General Gamelin, the commander in chief of the Allied armies, told his soldiers not to fire on German working parties for fear the enemy would fire on theirs, 158,000 soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force languished along the French border with Belgium. The soldiers, both French and English, fought boredom. Drunkenness was not uncommon, apathy legion. Like moths, their fighter planes ventured out only at night.

  King Leopold had denied the Allies transit rights across Belgium, though there were now some fifty German divisions on the borders of southern Holland and Belgium.

  It was suicide and they both knew it.

  “Has your visa come through from England?” asked Lev.

  Wunsch swung away from the window. “What visa? Do you think I could leave here at a time like this?”

  Lev ducked his head. “I was only asking. Some coffee? While we still have it.”

  “Coffee … yes, yes, that would be good. Ascher, our hands are tied. The export of diamonds is not strategic to Belgium’s needs, not like some vegetables and perhaps a little butter. Under article 9 of the Hague Convention neutral states must not deny the belligerents equal rights to whatever else they might need. So we ship to them and that stinking freighter sits in the port of Antwerp or out in the middle of the Scheldt. Churchill, he is Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty, but what does he do? Where are the destroyers Richard said they’d send? Where are the letters of guarantee from the British government?”

  “Churchill has other things on his mind.”

  “Ah, yes, but of course. On the high seas ships are being sunk, but in isolated battles. By mines, too, that have been sewn from the skies or by the silent arrows of their tin fish!”

  Lev clucked his tongue and shook his head. “You get better every day, Bernard. I swear this business will make a poet of you. Tin fish, seeds from the skies …”

  Wunsch slammed a fist down on his desk. “The ghost of war hovers over us while we wait for the grim reaper to sharpen his scythe!”

  “What’s got you into such a stew this morning?”

  Wunsch shrugged. “Our diamond stocks, what else? Belgium is fast becoming a haven for spies. The French kick Otto Abetz out of Paris, and where does he go but to Brussels? And what do we find but a German ‘economic’ mission wanting to have a look at our fabricating shop.”

  Bernard’s wastebasket had overflowed. Cigarette ashes were strewn about the floor. “A ‘trade’ mission?” asked Lev.

  The nod was there, the letter, too. “Richard’s former friend, the Baron Dieter Karl Hunter, wishes to see what we have.”

  Lev found it hard to speak. “Perhaps he will give us news of him?”

  Wunsch stubbed the cigarette out and crushed the butt. “Perhaps, perhaps, but I very much doubt it. As we are still under contract to supply the Krupp, he will, no doubt, bitch about the continued tardiness of our deliveries.”

  “Just don’t ask me to talk to him, Bernard. Let me have the day off. I’ll be too sick to work in any case.”

  “I will give him that new apprentice who knows nothing. I, too, will be otherwise engaged. Of course, if he should have news for us of Richard, we would not receive it.”

  “Then you’d better lock up that revolver of yours. I wouldn’t want to go to jail for killing a Nazi, not at a time like this.”

  Steep, heavily wooded hills clothed the ruined walls that surrounded the picturesque medieval town of Landsberg in Bavaria. Behind the turrets and broken ramparts of its fortress Hitler had been imprisoned for nearly nine months after the Munich putsch of 1923. It was here that he had dictated Mein Kampf.

  Otto Krantz was glad to be back in the Reich. Poland had given him a bad taste. The things he’d seen; the things they’d done.

  After Poland, dealing with Hagen would be a pleasure. And to think that Heydrich had locked him up here.

  So far he’d told the schmucks who’d been dealing with him sweet bugger all.

  As he drove up to the gates, the Berliner leaned on the horn and flashed his Gestapo badge. As always, the badge worked wonders. The iron-studded gates swung open and he was waved on.

  Hagen was in the cellars. Krantz didn’t like the room. The whitewashed walls were spattered with blood and too reminiscent of Poland. The dirt floor around the execution posts smelled of feces and mold. Behind the wooden posts, the stone wall of the dungeon was pockmarked with bullet holes.

  They’d beaten the shit out of Hagen more than once. The bugger was hardly recognizable.

  To steady his nerves, Krantz took out his cigarette case. Thumbing the dent that had saved his life, he asked about the prisoner.

  “He still refuses to talk, Herr Krantz.”

  You sadist, thought Krantz scornfully. “Take him back to his cell. Feed and water him. Turn the light off. Give him extra blankets and all the sleep he needs. He has to talk.”

  The four-door Cord sedan was forest green with big, handsome tires and lots of chrome. Twelve cylinders under the hood, and by God, she loved the throb of that engine.

  Cecile Verheyden stood in the laneway behind the club. She’d thrown the garage doors wide open. She’d told herself she had to come to some decisions. The car, the club, her flat above it and everything else she owned—the farm, for God’s sake. What the hell was she to do?

  Things could only get worse. Richard had made her choose sides, but Richard was gone, Arlette was gone. Each time she went upstairs, she thought of the two of them. Arlette lying in her bed. Richard making love to the girl. Fucking her, for God’s sake. Fucking her in
a bed that had meant so much to them!

  Richard saying, “Cecile, why don’t you get out while you can?”

  New York, Chicago … London. Shit!

  Even in the gray light of a blustery afternoon, the car’s paintwork gleamed.

  Richard and she had made love in the back seat of that car several times. They’d driven out into the country time and again, for a picnic, a swim, weekends at the farm. Shacked up and drunk on love.

  And now? What the hell was she to do now? What were any of them to do?

  Sell the car? Sell up and get out? The car would have fetched a good price if gasoline hadn’t been so hard to get, but by God, the thing drank it!

  And the club? No one would buy it. Not now. Not with the way things were.

  She closed the garage doors. She ran her eyes up over the cut stone walls to high gables and the dormers in the loft. She’d loved this laneway, had loved the old Antwerp feel of it. The bas-relief panels that gave a tracery all round, the leaded octagonal window above what was now the door to the kitchens.

  Nicolaas Van der Meer had once run a bookshop from here and had left a bust of himself, knowing art and beauty surrounded him because he and others like him had made sure it would be there for all to see.

  The stable and her car—to think that such places of beauty had once held horses.

  The Plantin-Moretus Museum was one of the private-house museums of Antwerp. Not open to the public, it allowed access only to the chosen few. The inner courtyard, like her back lane, was an exquisite example of Flemish architecture—something to be preserved, guarded, saved.

  Cobblestones, columned walkways, yew and boxwood hedges, a sundial in the middle, vines that climbed the lovely old stone walls, barren now but in early summer full of the delicate hyacinth blue and the perfume of wisteria.

  Decisions, decisions. One had always to make decisions. Richard had forced it on her. Richard …

  “Dieter, it’s good to see you. My God, you look well, but it’s been such a long, long time.”

  A thin black smoke drifted from the Megadan’s funnel. Stern down, the freighter rode at anchor out in the Scheldt. Hunter scanned the decks, but there was no sign of any armament. The rust was everywhere, the black hull looking more like a derelict. Her forward cargo booms hadn’t been used in years.

  Waves lifted the bow. The wind tore at her flag. What was there about that ship? “The pumps have stopped working.”

  Damas looked at the man Otto Krantz had sent. A Bavarian, but of the upper class. A baron no less, with dark hair, dark eyes and a superior manner that grated. Krantz had been angry over the loss of the Huysmans girl; the Berliner no longer trusted his competence, though he had continued to use him and his men. But this one …

  Damas had the idea the baron would kill him if things went wrong.

  “The pumps are often down for repairs. First the starboard one, as you can see, then the larboard. Believe me, Baron, there can be no thought of their using that freighter. The Jew Isaac Hond and the others of the Antwerp Diamond Committee have been to see the management of the Mercantile Company far too many times. Besides, they talk, and this we have heard.”

  Something wasn’t right. “See if you can’t get someone aboard her. I want that ship scuttled the moment we give you the signal.”

  “I will try, of course, Baron, but believe what I say about the Mercantile Company. I have five of my best men working there as drivers. They report that trucks are being kept in readiness at all times. My drivers and three others have been placed on call twenty-fours hours a day.”

  “Have they been told why?”

  “No, of course not. But there is the normal shop talk. The manager of the company has received a letter of instruction, but as yet I haven’t been able to get a copy of the route they intend to use.”

  “Get one. Get more men into that place.”

  Or pay the consequences? “Baron, this might not be wise, as we had to provide ‘accidents’ for two of the drivers my men replaced.” You’d think it had been easy.

  “Could one of your men stay behind to let me into that warehouse?”

  The Germans wanted the diamonds very badly, but did the anxiety stem from knowing the invasion would soon come? “Have we the time to arrange such a thing?”

  “Time enough. I give you three days.”

  Hunter took up the glasses again and concentrated on the freighter. “What has happened with the railway cars?”

  The Belgian turned away to search the quays. In spite of the grayness of the weather, there were still far too many people about for his liking. “We have plans to wreck the lines. Those are our general orders. Should the traders try to use the railways, they’ll find them in a shambles.”

  “And the airfields? Could they be planning to send the trucks to one of them?”

  Damas forced himself to smile. “The Luftwaffe, Baron. Have you forgotten? We are counting on them to stop all such traffic while it is still on the ground. Besides, we have organized major disruptions. As soon as the invasion starts, we will be out in force. First the telephones and radio towers, then the landing fields and railway tunnels, then the rest, all other things. They couldn’t possibly fly those diamonds out.”

  The Belgian had been thorough—no more mistakes—but Heydrich had given an ultimatum. Take the Antwerp diamonds or else. “Two Whitley bombers are all that would be required. Get men into every airfield within a sixty-kilometer radius of Antwerp. I want them watched.”

  “Ascher, this is the Baron Dieter Karl Hunter from Munich.”

  “Richard’s friend. Has he news of the boy?”

  Lev found himself shaking the hand of one of those who had been responsible for Arlette’s death and the loss of Richard. Forever afterward he would look at that hand and wonder why it had gone out so readily. Had it been impulse, something conditioned since childhood, a need to be polite, or something commanding in the baron’s youthful presence?

  “So you are the cutter whose skill Richard swears by.”

  The Jew was seventy, if a day. Those ancient eyes couldn’t be much good.

  “Have you news of him for us?”

  Hunter laughed good-naturedly. “But of course. He is well and very busy with our new diamond center. He’s married now to my sister. They have a child, a son. Yes, he’s turned into a family man at last. Who could have believed it?”

  “And eating well, is he?” asked Lev.

  Standing a little to one side and behind the baron, Wunsch shook his head to stop Lev, whose hand was still gripped by the German.

  “Very,” said Hunter. “Don’t believe all the stories you hear about the Reich, Herr Levinski. There’s plenty to eat.”

  “With Poland in the bag?” Lev shrugged. “I suppose there is. So, Bernard, what would you like me to do with this fellow? Show him around the shop or take him down to the Scheldt?”

  And drown him. Wunsch found the will to smile and play the good host. “Lev, please …”

  “Let him go, Herr Wunsch. For us he is of no consequence. Now, please, the shop, if you would be so kind? Richard went over our lists of equipment and we have modeled our center on your operations. He’s in the SS. Did I tell you that? Ah, I can see that I didn’t.”

  Richard in the SS? Wunsch felt himself trembling. “That cannot be, Baron. Not Richard. Never him.”

  Only the fussy would be convinced by papers and signatures. Dieter took out the forms and showed him. “Here is his membership card.”

  Somehow the day passed. Somehow Wunsch got through it, and when the inquisitor of industrial diamond processes had finally gone, he sat alone at his desk. Richard a member of the SS? How could that be? Had he fooled them all completely? Of course not.

  Then either the Nazis had forged his signature, or he had signed those papers under duress. In either case, it would be best to tell de Heer Lietermann.

  Getting his coat and hat, he went through to the shop to tell Lev where he was going. The diamond cutter’s ben
ch was empty. Back in the office, Wunsch gazed out over the street below. What the hell was happening to them? Lev had never left the place early in all the years he’d known him.

  “Don’t do it, my friend. Me, I know what you are up to but I would ask you to reconsider. They are experts at this, we but novices.”

  Lev pursed his lips in thought. The man who had come to ask about making diamond tools had now gone to the Red Cross depot, whose warehouse was along the docks and not far from the fabricating shop. Now why would a baron concern himself with such things?

  It was a puzzle, but then Belgians, like everyone else who cared, had been trying to send relief parcels to the thousands and thousands of Polish POWs in German camps. Perhaps the baron had something to do with that. Another little duty to perform.

  Ordering a cup of coffee, Lev pretended to read his newspaper. A second cup was called for. Finally the baron left the warehouse. Lev waited another twenty minutes—he’d have to give it that—then walked across the street. It was nearly closing time.

  Still blushing, the girl looked up at him from behind the information desk. “The Baron Dieter Karl von Hunter is an honorary director of the German Red Cross, mijnheer. He has come to inquire about the shipment of relief parcels from the Congo. And yourself? What can I do for you?”

  Relief parcels from the Congo. “A small donation. A hundred francs, that’s all the wife and I can spare at the moment. More next week, of course. Could I bring it here just to save on the postage?”

  He could. He paid up and thanked her. “We all like to do our bit, not just the German barons.”

  The Obersturmbannführer Ernst Laubach had the perpetual smile of a benevolent vintner with his glass raised. A native of Bernkastel, ruddy faced, tanned—a man of fifty or so—they had talked of the slaty schists beneath the Doktor vineyard high on the bank of the Moselle, of how the slate helped to create such superb wines.

  The Frau Ilse Dietsch, a stern, matronly woman of sixty who looked more pious and stern than SS or Gestapo, had come from a farm near Raisling in Upper Bavaria.