Field Gray (20 page)

FRANCE, 1940

I
t certainly felt good in the summer of 1940. And there was no better place to be breathing air than Paris. Especially when I had the little maid from the Lutetia hotel to keep me amused. Not that I took advantage of her. As a matter of fact, I was rather scrupulous where Renata was concerned. It was one of the ways I had of convincing myself I wasn’t as big a rat as the field gray said I was. This wasn’t Onegin’s sermon. I mean, I wanted her. And eventually I had her. But I took my time about it the way you do when you like what’s between a girl’s ears as much as you want what’s between her legs. And when it happened, it felt like it was something shaped by a higher motive than simple lust. It wasn’t love, exactly. Neither of us wanted to get married. But it was romance: courtship, desire, fear, and dread. Yes, there was fear and dread, too, because Renata always knew I would go and slay my fire-extinguishing dragon just as soon as I knew why he’d sought to put me out for good.

While I’d been away in the south of France, Renata had searched Willms’s room and once or twice even followed him to discover that he ate at Maxim’s almost every other night. On a general’s pay this would have been unusual enough, but for a mere lieutenant it was nothing short of miraculous, and I resolved to visit the restaurant myself in the hope that this might provide me with some clue as to why he had tried to kill me. And, in this respect, it was fortunate for me that Maxim’s was now run by Otto Horcher, who owned a restaurant in Berlin-Schöneberg. In the spring of 1938, Otto Horcher had been a client of mine when I’d been running a successful business as a licensed private investigator. I’d worked undercover as a waiter in his place for a couple of weeks in order to find out who was stealing from him. As it turned out, everyone was stealing from him, but one man, the majordomo, was stealing a lot more than all of the others put together. After that we were friends, and even though he was a Nazi and a good friend of Goering’s—which was how he came to be managing the most famous restaurant in Paris—I could always count on him for a table when I needed to impress someone, because after Borchardt, Horcher’s was the best restaurant in Berlin.

Maxim’s was in the rue Royale, in the Eighth Arrondissement and a shrine to Art Nouveau, red velvet, and
grande cuisine
. Parked outside were several German staff cars, but you didn’t need to be German to eat at Maxim’s. When I went along there with Renata, Pierre Laval, one of Vichy’s leading politicians, was there; and so was Fernand de Brinon. All you needed was money—quite a lot of money—and some bismuth tablets. In 1940, Maxim’s was a good place for men and women who knew what they wanted and how to get it, no matter what the price. Probably still is.

We went through the door and were shown straight to a table—or at least as straight as the oleaginous and fawning waiter could manage.

“Can you afford this?” asked Renata, glancing over the menu with widening eyes.

“It makes me feel young again,” I said. “That was the last time I felt this poor.”

“So what are we doing here?”

“Looking for the one thing that’s not on this menu. Information.”

“About your friend Willms?”

“You know, if you keep on calling him that, even in the spirit of jest, I’m going to have to show you how much I dislike him.”

She shuddered visibly. “No, please. I don’t want to know.” She glanced around the restaurant. “I don’t see him in here.” She did a double take on Laval. “All the same, he should be. There are more snakes in here than in the whole of Africa.”

“I didn’t know you were so well traveled.”

“No, just traveled. Obviously, you haven’t seen Africa.”

“I’m beginning to think I made a mistake about you, Renata. I had the quaint idea that you were the girl next door.”

“Where my parents live, in Bern, if you’d ever met the girl next door, you know why I came to Paris.”

The maître d’ arrived with two menus and more attitude than a professor of aeronautics. Renata found him a little intimidating. Me, I’d been intimidated before, and usually by someone holding something more deadly than a wine list.

“What’s your name?” I asked him.

“Albert, monsieur. Albert Glaser.”

“Well, Albert, it was my impression that Germany had stopped paying France war reparations, but I can see from the prices on this menu that I was wrong about that.”

“Our prices don’t seem to bother most of the other German officers who come in here, monsieur.”

“That’s what victory does for Nazis, Albert. It makes them profligate. Careless. Arrogant. Me? I’m just a humble German from Berlin who’s anxious to renew my acquaintance with a certain Monsieur Horcher. Do me a favor, will you, Albert? Go and whisper in his ear that Bernie Gunther is in the store. Oh, and bring us a bottle of Mosel. The nearer the Rhine, the better.”

Albert bowed stiffly and went away.

“You don’t like the French, do you?” said Renata.

“I’m doing my best,” I said. “But they make it so difficult. Even in defeat, they seem to persist in the belief that this is the best country in the world.”

“Maybe it is. Maybe that’s why they didn’t have the best army.”

“If you’re going to be a philosopher, you’re going to have to grow an enormous beard or a silly mustache. Those are the only people we take seriously in Germany.”

Horcher arrived bearing a bottle of Mosel and three glasses. “Bernie Gunther,” he said, shaking my hand. “Well, I’ll be.”

“Otto. This is Fräulein Renata Matter, a friend of mine.”

Horcher kissed her hand, sat down, and then poured the wine.

“So this is you teaching the hen to be as clever as an egg, is it, Otto?”

“You mean me, here in Paris?” Horcher shrugged. He was a big man with a face like a German general’s. Bavarian or Viennese by origin—I forget which—he always had the air of a man in search of a beer and a brass band. “If Fat Hermann asks you to do something for him, then you don’t say no, right?” He chuckled. “He likes this place a lot. It’s the snooty French waiters he’s got a problem with. Which is why I’m here. To make him and the red stripes feel at home. And to cook some of their favorite dishes.”

“I’m interested in one of your lower-ranking customers,” I explained. “Lieutenant Nikolus Willms. Know him?”

“He’s one of my regulars. Always pays cash.”

“You can’t get many lieutenants in here. Did he win the German lottery? Must have been the South German and the Sachsen with a first-class ticket at these prices, Otto.”

Horcher looked around and leaned toward me.

“This place gets a lot of joy girls, Bernie. High-end. Courtesans, they call them here in Paris. But they’re whores just the same. Your pardon, Miss Matter. It’s not a subject to discuss in front of a lady.”

“Don’t apologize, Herr Horcher,” she said. “I came to Paris for an education. So, please, speak frankly.”

“Thank you, miss. This fellow Willms seems to know an awful lot of these girls, Bernie. So I ask some questions. I mean, I like to know the customers. That’s just good business. Anyway, it seems this Willms has the power to close down any
maison de plaisir
in Paris. Apparently, he used to be a vice cop in Berlin and can bounce the ball off all the cushions. The word I heard was that the ones that pay he leaves open and the ones that don’t he closes down. A good old-fashioned shakedown.”

“That’s a nice little gold mine,” I said.

“There’s more,” said Horcher. “You see, there’s a diamond mine, too. Have you heard of the One Twenty-two and the Maison Chabanais?”

“Sure. They’re high-class houses that only the Germans can go to. I guess they paid up.”

Horcher nodded. “Like it was the Winter Relief. But Willms was clever. There’s a third high-class house where you need a code word to get through the door and which is by invitation only.”

“And Willms is printing the stationery?”

Horcher nodded. “Guess who got an invitation when he was on a flying trip to Paris?”

“The Mahatma Propagandi?”

“That’s right.” Horcher sounded surprised that I had guessed. “You should have been a detective, do you know that?”

“Surely Willms can’t be doing this on his own?”

“I don’t know if he is or not. But I do know who he often has dinner with. They’re both German officers. One of them is General Schaumberg. The other is a Sipo captain like yourself. Name of Paul Kestner.”

“That’s interesting.” I let that one sink in a long way before my next question. “Otto, you wouldn’t happen to have an address for this puff house, would you?”

“Twenty-two rue de Provence, opposite the Hôtel Drouot, in the Ninth Arrondissement.”

“Thanks, Otto. I owe you one.”

After dinner there was still an hour before the midnight curfew, and I told Renata to take the Métro back to her tiny apartment in the rue Jacob.

“Be careful,” she said.

“It’s all right,” I said. “I shan’t go in. I’ll just—”

“I didn’t say be good. I said be careful. Willms has already tried to kill you once. I don’t think he’d hesitate to try again. Especially now that you’re onto his racket.”

“Don’t worry. I know what I’m doing.”

It would have been nice if this had been true. But I didn’t know what I was doing for the simple reason I still didn’t have a clue why Willms had tried to kill me.

I decided to walk to the rue de Provence in the hope that the exercise and the summer air might help me to figure things out. For a while I was racking my brains for something I might have said to Willms on the train from Berlin—something that might have made him think I was a threat to his nefarious little organization. And gradually I formed the conclusion that it was nothing I had said; it was what I was that might have alarmed him. At the Alex it was generally supposed that I was Heydrich’s spy, and Willms, who worked there for a while, would have known that; even if he didn’t, Paul Kestner would certainly have said as much. For his part, Kestner had hardly believed that I’d come all the way from Berlin to arrest just one man. If the two of them were partners, then getting rid of me might have looked like a wise precaution, and Willms was just the type to have taken the matter in hand. Of greater concern, perhaps, was how General Schaumberg was involved, and before my theory was complete I was going to need to know something more about him. This seemed more urgent when, arriving outside 22 rue de Provence, I discovered even more staff cars than had been parked in front of Maxim’s.

For several minutes I stood at a distance, in a doorway on the opposite side of the street, watching the comings and goings at what, on the face of it, was a smart address with a liveried doorman. Twice I saw a German officer arrive, utter a single word to the doorman, and be admitted inside, and it seemed obvious that unless I uttered the code word I had no chance of getting into the
maison
. I was just about to give up and return to my hotel when a staff car turned the corner and I caught a glimpse of the officer in the backseat. He was unremarkable in every way save the red and gold patches on his collar and the Blue Max he wore around his neck. The Pour la Merité—popularly known as the Blue Max—isn’t a common decoration and led me to think that this could be none other than the commandant of Paris, General Alfred von Vollard-Bockelburg himself. And seeing him headed to the
maison
gave me an idea. What you have to remember is that many of the general staff in Paris in 1940 were tremendous Francophiles, that relations with the French were good, and that German officers all went out of their way to avoid giving offense to the French or to tread on their administrative toes.

By now, the general, who couldn’t have been more than five feet tall, even in his boots, had got out of the car and was repeating the code word to the doorman.

I took off my hat and sprinted toward this diminutive hero as the puff house door opened. Seeing me near the general, an aide-de-camp blocked my path. This man was a colonel with a monocle.

“General,” I said. “General von Vollard-Bockelburg.”

I put on my cap and saluted smartly.

“Yes,” said the general, and returned my salute. His head was almost hairless. He looked like a baby with a mustache.

“Thank God, sir.”

“Willms, is it?”

This was better than I had hoped for. I glanced nervously at the doorman, wondering if he spoke much German, and risked clicking my heels, which, to a German officer at least, always meant “Yes.”

“I’m so glad I caught you, Herr General. Apparently, there’s a detachment of French gendarmes on their way here to raid this place.”

“What? General Schaumberg assured me that this establishment was beyond reproach.”

“Oh, I’m sure the general is right, sir. But the Prefecture of Paris has been given orders by the German Morality Commission that
maisons de plaisir
employing coloreds or Jews are to be closed down, the women arrested, and any German officers found on the premises checked for venereal disease.”

“I signed that order myself,” said the general. “That order was for the protection of the ordinary rank and file. Not for senior German officers. Not for
maisons
like this.”

“I know, sir. But the French, sir. It would appear that they didn’t appreciate that, sir. Or at least have chosen not to appreciate it, if you receive my meaning.” I glanced urgently at my watch.

“What time is this raid to take place?” asked the general.

“Well, that all depends, sir. Not everyone in Paris has bothered to set clocks to German time, as per your orders, sir. And that includes the French police. If the raid takes place according to Paris time, then it might happen at any minute. But if it’s Berlin time, then there might yet be time to get everyone else in the
maison
out before an embarrassing incident occurs.”

“He’s right, sir,” said the aide. “There are still a great many French paying no attention to official German time.”

The little general nodded. “Willy,” he said to the aide. “Go in there and discreetly inform all general staff officers you can find that the story is out on this place. I’ll wait for you in the car.”