by Richard Wake
“This is nothing,” he said. “Tell Leon I still owe him one.”
He took a typewriter out of a closet and rolled the paper into it. “A date, yes?” he said.
“Yes, tomorrow.”
He typed it in a minute, then handed me a pen.
“You do the honors,” he said, and I signed the fake captain’s name. I held up the sheet of paper and we both looked at it.
“Too plain,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“It needs something,” JJ said. He thought for a second and then rooted around in another drawer in his cabinet. He pulled out two stamps and two ink pads.
“The first one,” he said, “is my all-purpose Nazi stamp. It’s of my own design — an eagle, a swastika, and the words ‘be it so ordered.’ It’s not too big, though, not obnoxious, just matter-of-fact authoritarian bullshit. And if you smear it just right, well…”
He stamped half over the signature and turned the stamp as he applied it, ever so slightly. The result was, as he said. It looked official but hurried, just normal authoritarian bullshit.
“Okay, one more,” he said.
“Why?”
“It’s a bureaucracy,” JJ said. “All armies are. Paper gets passed up and down the chain of command. So we show that.”
“Are we passing up or down?”
“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Nobody will be able to tell either way, and the truth is, they won’t care.”
The second stamp had the ability to change the date. So he set it to tomorrow and stamped it in red, in a blank space in the upper right quadrant of the paper. It was a circle and the date. Again, he smeared it just a bit with a practiced hand.
JJ grabbed a different pen with different ink from a tray on his work table, and then he scribbled some initials within (and a little outside) the red circle. It looked like what it was supposed to look like, the hurried scrawl of a man who had just pulled a dozen forms from his inbox and was stamping them and initialing them while a secretary stood beside his desk and waited to take them away.
“There,” JJ said. He held up the paper and we looked at it again. “Much better. Bureaucracy come to life.”
43
I really wanted to avoid our flat, just because. I wasn’t sure if the Germans had connected me with this address, but it wouldn’t take long. If they were really interested in finding their escapee from Bassano, telephone calls to the city headquarters in each arrondissement, seeking a search of their ration coupon lists, would find my name and address soon enough. If they were lucky, it wouldn’t take a half-dozen calls, not much more than an hour. Even if they were unlucky, they would find me before lunchtime. So, best not to risk it.
Part of me wondered, though, if they would even bother. I mean, how would they explain it? I guess they could concoct a story about me sneaking up behind a guard, and hitting him with a broom or something, and then running. It was plausible, and I’m sure the guard would be happier with a small knot on the back of his head than with having to explain why he followed his nose into the kitchen and abandoned his post. Then again, why bother? It wasn’t as if there weren’t plenty more where I had come from.
Whatever. I just stayed away from the flat. But because I still needed a place to sleep, and because I was in the neighborhood anyway, I decided to stop in to The Flip and request the use of the illicit sex room for the night, just without the sex. And if I could borrow a razor, well, that was really all I needed to keep the plan moving forward.
Once inside, Henri the owner was more than accommodating. He told me there would be a razor on the basin and brought me a tumbler full of red wine, too.
“But, I—”
“When you can,” he said.
“But I’m really not sure—”
“Whenever,” he said.
I wasn’t half done the wine when Hannah walked in. I guess I always considered it a possibility, but I really didn’t feel as if I had much of a choice. What I never reckoned on was her decision to walk directly to my table, to sit down, and then to reach for my hand. I didn’t say anything, and neither did she, not until Henri brought her a tumbler of her own.
“I’m sor—”
“Stop,” she said.
“But—”
“I think we both have our regrets,” she said. “I know I do. But I don’t need to hear yours, and I don’t want to speak mine.”
We sat for about 10 minutes more, looking at each other some, scanning the cafe some — half-full or half-empty, depending upon your point of view; Henri, white apron down to his shins, wiping down the idle tables; four muted conversations taking place at the others. And Hannah and I, just being. We had said some terrible things to each other on the sidewalk outside the soup kitchen, and now the words had evaporated. Just like that. It had only been a couple of days and, just like that.
Eventually, she stood up and took her wineglass in one hand and my hand in the other, and led me to the illicit sex room that, as it turned out, would be used that night for its intended purpose after all. Once, twice, and then we finally talked. I told her about being captured at the soup kitchen, and Drancy, and Bassano, and my escape. I told her, too, that I was going to try to get Leon and Max’s father out of Drancy.
“I can help,” she said, almost too quickly.
“No,” I said, just as fast.
“But—”
“No.”
With that, there was a distance between us again. I didn’t know what to do, other than explain the plan and demonstrate that there was no role for her to play. I showed her the letter, and she read it and looked at it and handed it back with a look that suggested, “Not bad.” She listened as I told her the rest, and she nodded, probing a couple of the details.
“Maybe the part with the uniform?” she said.
“No,” I said. “I don’t see it. Well, maybe if my way went bad—”
“I could seduce a corporal and get him out of his clothes—”
“But then we’d have to kill him,” I said. “And, of course, he’d have to be a dead naked corporal with a vehicle.”
She pouted. “Well, it’s an option.”
“Okay, it’s an option if my plan goes wrong.”
Hannah’s face relaxed, just a bit. She fell asleep in my arms, well before I did. But she was gone when I woke up. I shaved, staring into the mirror above the sink, running through the details, again and again, glad to be alone.
44
Between Roland Garros and Parc de Princes sat the Molitor swimming pool, which was actually an entire complex of pools, saunas, steam rooms and locker rooms — with a hotel kind of attached at one end. They said it was built in the 1920s, the architecture so elaborate that it screamed money. But for my purposes, the colorful mosaics of tile were not the key feature. Instead, what mattered to me was the line of German military vehicles that was always parked out front along the curb.
The Germans loved the pools and the bathhouses. Leon said he noticed it not so much at the very beginning, but later. He once said, “By about 1942, once the weather started to turn even the slightest bit warm, they were in the pools. All of them. And you know why? Because when they’re in those uniforms, walking around our streets all day, all they see is people who hate them. But naked in a sauna? Or in a swimsuit by the pool? They probably think we can’t tell who they are. For a few minutes, they can blend in.”
“Sounds like psychological bullshit,” I said. We were drinking.
“Best I can do,” he said.
“But do you really believe it?”
“I kind of do,” Leon said. “I mean, think about it. We hate the uniforms, not the men inside of them. Hell, we have no idea who the men inside of them are.”
Whatever the reason, they were always at the pools, even on crappy days, if only for a sauna or a steam. From across the street and down a bit, I could see seven military vehicles along the curb. When an eighth arrived and parked at the back of the line, and when a sergeant emer
ged — a sergeant who was roughly my height — it was time to make my move.
I hurried across the street and entered the building right behind the sergeant. He held the door, and I said “Danke,” and he looked me up and down in my civilian suit and said, “Furlough?”
“Just a day,” I said.
“Shame it isn’t sunnier.”
“Not a worry. I’m just going to relax and clean up before a date.”
“Ohhhhh,” the sergeant said. What was true in the first war was also true in the second: women and sex were the universal conversational ice-breaker.
“Twenty-two,” I said. “Blonde. Hips from your dreams. And a mouth—”
“Lucky dog.”
“Dog, maybe,” I said. “But luck has nothing to do with it.”
He laughed and slapped me on the back. They handed us a towel at the front desk and we headed into the locker room, me following him. He stopped and turned and said, “I’m sorry. If you’re an officer, it was not my place —”
“No worries, sergeant,” I said. “There are no ranks when you are naked, am I right?”
He laughed, and we began to undress, him on one bench, me on another bench about 15 feet away. He took a little longer, given the helmet and the belt holding his pistol and the laces on his boots. I filled the extra minute or two with questions about what the pool was like during the summer, at which point he rhapsodized about French women in swimsuits. We needed to get out of the locker room quickly, though, because the arrival of anybody else would be a potential complication.
When we were ready, towels wrapped around our waists, we left the locker room and I was going to have to make my first decision. I followed behind and waited. We walked down a hallway, and he grabbed at the first door. Steam poured out, and he hurried in.
“You coming?” he said. I was hesitating.
“You know,” I said. “I might go sauna first, for a few minutes. Then steam.”
“Suit yourself,” he said, hurrying to close the door and keep the steam inside.
There was no window in the door, which was a break for me. I knew I had to move quickly. I thought about actually spending five minutes in the sauna, just for appearances’ sake, but decided to skip it. There was no way around avoiding a shower, though — at least a quick one. If somebody came into the locker room, it would be hard to explain arriving anything other than soaking wet.
So I showered — two minutes tops, I figured. But there was somebody else already in there, two faucets over. He saw how quickly I was cleaning up and said, “In a hurry?”
“Yeah, I kind of have a—”
“A date?”
“More of a promise,” I said, with the dirtiest smile I could muster.
“What kind of promise?”
My reply was wordless, just a gesture, the universal male pantomiming of a blowjob. To which, my new shower buddy asked, “Do you think she has any friends?” Then he laughed, and I laughed, and I got out of there. Soldiers. What would they talk about if they didn’t talk about sex?
The rest was as easy as I had imagined it would be when I practiced the scheme over and over in my head. First, I went to my original locker and snatched the fake letter from 84 Avenue Foch from the breast pocket of the suit. Then I walked across to the sergeant’s locker and stuffed it into the tunic pocket. I was into his uniform quickly, and it fit pretty well. With the boots laced up, and then the pistol belt cinched at my waist, I grabbed the helmet and slapped it on my head and headed out the door without looking back. My shower buddy was just arriving. He yelled, “Good luck,” and I raised a hand in acknowledgement and kept walking.
I counted eight vehicles back from the front door of the Molitor and jumped in. It started immediately. I wondered if the sergeant would be wearing my suit when he was attempting to explain to his commanding officer what had happened.
45
I drove up to the administrative hut on Avenue Jean Jaures and parked right in front, as if I owned the place. I was a sergeant sent from 84 Avenue Foch to scoop up a few Jews for questioning. I had my orders. I was a busy man. I would take no shit. I also didn’t give a shit. It was an interesting melding of viewpoints — take no shit/don’t give a shit — but it was what the good soldiers always managed. It was what war did to a man’s personality.
I burst through the door of the hut more than I walked through it. The door opened all the way, the knob banging on the wall behind. I approached the counter with long strides. I didn’t recognize any of the prisoners working as Drancy’s trusted clerks that day. There were four of them, heads all down in their ledgers. The banging of the door had startled them, I’m sure, but they were back to their lists and figures by the time I reached the counter. I didn’t stand at attention because, why would I? They weren’t military. Instead, I leaned over the desktop barrier and attempted to look menacing — which wasn’t that hard, in a uniform and a helmet and with a pistol massaging my hip. It wasn’t two seconds before one of the clerks looked up.
Without a word, I reached into my breast pocket and handed him the fake orders from 84 Avenue Foch. He read them, and then he poked the clerk next to him and the second guy read them. Then he got up and walked to the back of their area, back by the filing cabinets, and handed the paper to a third trusted prisoner. He looked at me, and then he read it, and then he walked over.
“All by yourself?” he said.
“I can handle three skinny Jews by myself.”
“How do you know they’re skinny?”
“I thought you were all skinny at this point.”
The clerk — he must have been the head clerk — smiled, but just for a second. He looked down at the paper again.
“But seriously, don’t they usually send two of you for transfers?”
“In case you haven’t noticed,” I said, “things are thinning out a little among my people.”
The clerk thought for a second but didn’t get it. One of the other clerks pointed to his left. “East,” he said.
“Yes, east,” I said. And then I leaned over and abandoned don’t take any shit/don’t give a shit, something I hadn’t anticipated having to do. But this early challenge, however trivial, seemed to lend itself instead to another favorite military posture, that of conspiratorial secret-sharing about the ineptitude of those in command.
So, I leaned in and half-whispered, “Let’s just say the flower of the German military have been sent east by the geniuses. Which leaves the 40-year-old sergeants behind to drive the Jew taxis.”
Again, the head clerk laughed.
“Forty?”
“Actually 37,” I said. “But with a bad heart. Backpedaling on the steppes in full pack isn’t quite my speed anymore. But look, buddy—”
“A minute, sergeant,” the head clerk said. He motioned for the other three to join him back by the file cabinets. They all had something to say, but the words were hushed enough that I couldn’t make them out. The very fact that there was a conversation, though, was a complication I had hoped to avoid.
In a minute, the four of them came back to the counter. The head clerk handed the fake orders back to me.
“I can’t authorize this,” he said. “That has to come from your people.”
“You don’t think 84 Avenue Foch isn’t my people? Do you know—”
“I know,” he said. “But this needs one more stamp and one more set of initials — from the command building here.”
“For fuck’s sake,” I said.
I stared at the clerk. He stared at me. It only then dawned on me how much power this man with the clipboard wielded, even if he was a prisoner. The truth was that the men with the clipboards ran everything. After about five seconds, I gave in.
“Where are they?”
The clerk pointed. “Small building. It’s the only one on that side of the camp. Just follow the wire till it ends, and make a left. It’s about a hundred yards down.”
“Whatever,” I said. “Fucking bullshit.”
46
The guard at the front of the Drancy command building directed me down the hall and to the right. The next guard stood outside a door with the word “Kommandant” stenciled in black letters on the frosted glass. He opened the door and pointed me inside. There were two desks in a reception area. The guard pointed me to the one on the left.
This wasn’t the kommandant. There was a closed door behind the two desks, which was where the man in charge undoubtedly worked. This was a captain, I was pretty sure.
I saluted and announced myself and slapped the fake orders from 84 Avenue Foch on the only bare spot on the desk. I waited for some hint of acknowledgement but, receiving none, I just stood there at attention and waited.
The desk was covered with all manner of bureaucratic shit — file folders in army green, ledger pages in lighter green, a map with red circles in a half-dozen places. Reading upside down was never my best skill, but I tried — eyes on the desk for a second, then back up to see if the captain was looking at me, then down on the desk again, then up again. In the 30 seconds or so that I stood there, I almost made myself dizzy.
I wasn’t able to see a ton. I wasn’t able to register many specifics — names, dates, like that — and the ones I could read, I wasn’t able to remember. Instead, I was left with an impression. There were names on lists in one pile of ledges. Off to the left, there was what appeared to be a list of buses and a roster of their availability. To the left of them was what appeared to be a train schedule — dates, times, number of cars. And the captain, working in his shirtsleeves, was alternating between them, poking at a place on one of them with the point of his pencil, then at another one, and then back to the ledger full of names, names he would circle and then cross-reference back to what seemed like a master schedule of some sort, directly in front of him. He would circle the names and write a code in the circle, like A26. Then he would write A26 next to one of the buses, and then he would write A26 next to one of the trains, and then he would write A26 on the master schedule and then look to his right and select a name. They were soldier’s names, accompanied by their ranks. And then that name and rank would be written on the master schedule next to A26.