Field Gray

19

Le Bourget was about ten kilometers north of Paris. And so was I. It’s strange how physically and mentally restorative one or two kisses can be. I felt like a new kind of fairy tale in which a sleeping prince gets himself rescued by a plucky princess. Then again, that could have been the dope.

At the entrance to the aerodrome was a statue of a nude woman taking flight from her gray stone plinth. It was meant to commemorate Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic, but the only memory that was alive in my head was the feel of Renata’s body and what it might look like if ever I saw her out of that maid’s uniform.

There were three of us—me, Kestner, and Bömelburg—pinned in the back of the staff car like a collection of taupe-colored moths. In the front was an SS driver and a handsome young chief inspector from the Office of the Paris Prefect of Police. As we drove toward the airport building, a four-engined FW Condor was landing on the runway.

“Who do you suppose that is?” wondered Kestner.

“It’s Dr. Goebbels,” said Bömelburg. “Taking his cue from the Führer to see the sights of Paris. Here to cause trouble, no doubt.”

We were obliged to remain in our car for reasons of security until the Mahatma Propagandi had left the airport in an enormous beige Mercedes. I caught a glimpse of him as his car swept past ours. He looked like a malignant goblin on his best behavior.

When Goebbels had gone our car made for a smaller, two-engined plane that was awaiting us. I’d never flown before. Neither had Kestner or the Frenchman, and we were all a little nervous as we walked toward the plane’s passenger door. Inside the fuselage we found another Frenchman waiting for us—an older, taller man with a Lautrec beard, pince-nez, and a quiet forensic manner. He was a commissioner of French police and his name was Matignon. The younger Frenchman was even taller than his commissioner. He wore an extremely well-cut charcoal-gray summer suit and a pair of thick rose-tinted glasses. His name was Philippe Oltramare. Neither of the two Frenchmen seemed to speak much German, but that was hardly a problem with French speakers like Kestner and Bömelburg on board.

The plane, a Siebel Fh 104, started its engines as soon as we were all aboard, and that was the cue for everyone except me to light a cigarette. Following the injury to my lungs, the insult of cigarettes seemed too much to bear, and it wasn’t long before another fit of coughing had me in its grip, which prompted the others, politely, to extinguish their tobacco, and I enjoyed a smoke-free flight down to Biarritz without further irritation to my noisy breathing. I sounded like the audience at a dirty movie.

Mostly the conversation was in French, but there were several names I recognized, among them Rudolf Breitscheid, the former German minister of the interior, and Dr. Rudolf Hilferding, the former minister of finance. Both men had fled Germany after Hitler’s election. I asked Bömelburg about them.

“We think the two Rudolfs are at a hotel in Arles,” he said. “The Commissioner here has already applied for their arrest. But he seems to be encountering some local resistance.”

I was pleased to hear it. The two Rudolfs had been the leading lights of the German Social Democratic Party, which I had voted for myself. Arresting a thug like Erich Mielke was one thing, but arresting Breitscheid and Hilferding was quite another.

“We trust the Commissioner’s physical presence in Arles will overcome any opposition,” added Bömelburg, and showed me a list he had compiled of other wanted men. Mielke’s name was second from the top, underneath Willi Münzenberg, a former Comintern agent and leader of Germany’s communist exiles. Other names were less familiar to me.

“I can’t help noticing that this plane has only five seats,” I told Bömelburg. “How am I supposed to get my prisoner back to Paris?”

“That all depends. If we manage to pick up Grynszpan and Mielke and some of these others, we may have to have the French deliver them first to Vichy and then apply to have them extradited across the border. At least that’s what Commissioner Matignon thinks. So he’s arranged for a French lawyer to meet us on the ground in Biarritz.”

“It’s already looking more complicated than we had supposed,” complained Kestner. “It turns out that this damned Kuhnt Commission isn’t supposed to go into the camps until the end of August. Of course, if we wait that long these commie Jew bastards might easily give us the slip. So we’re treading on eggshells at the moment. We’re not even supposed to be here.”

The flight, at least, was much less complicated, and for the last forty minutes of a journey that lasted just under two hours we hugged the coastline of France and the Bay of Biscay. From the air the city of Biarritz appeared to be exactly what it was: a luxurious-looking seaside town. It was a hot day and the resort was packed with people intent on having a good time in spite of the new German government. I hadn’t enjoyed the flight from Paris. There were too many potholes in the air for me to feel entirely comfortable with the experience of air travel. But when I saw the size of the waves rolling onto the banded agate that was the beach, I felt very glad I hadn’t traveled there by boat. Under the cliff tops that adjoined the sand the ocean was like the milk in one enormous frothy cappuccino. Just looking at it made me feel seasick, although in truth that probably had a lot more to do with what I’d just learned about the two Rudolfs. That really made me feel sick.

“Münzenberg I can understand,” I said. “Grynszpan, too. But why the Rudolfs?”

“Hilferding is one of these Jewish intellectuals,” said Bömelburg. “Not to mention the fact that he was the finance minister who was in league with other bankers who helped bring about the Great Depression. Anyway, it’s not our problem. It’s a French problem. A test of their Vichy government’s resolve to become a German ally. It’ll be interesting to see what happens. Why? Do you have any objections to his being arrested?”

For a moment the plane dropped like a faulty elevator car. I felt my stomach rise in my chest. I wanted to puke right in the major’s lap. He fumbled in his tunic and produced a hip flask.

“Me? No, I’m just an old-fashioned copper. You know? Shortsighted. I see all kinds of things and I never do anything about them.”

Bömelburg took a bite of the flask and offered it to me. “Swallow?”

“That’s the best thing I’ve heard since I got into this tin pigeon.”

On the ground at Bayonne Airport there were four bucket wagons waiting for us, six SS storm troopers, and the French lawyer. The SS were good-humored and full of smiles, the way men are when they’ve won a war in less than six weeks. The lawyer had a big nose, thick glasses, and hair so curly it was almost absurd. To me he seemed like a Jew, but nobody was asking. Either way, he was jumpy and nervous. He lit a cigarette inside the lapel of this jacket to keep the wind off his match, and smoke billowed out of his sleeve.

It was a real bestiary that drove east from Biarritz. Something from the pages of Hesiod, with me in the leading bucket and moving at speed, as if the beauty of the French countryside meant not a thing to any of us. On the road we saw demobilized French soldiers, who regarded us with neither hostility nor enthusiasm. We also saw piles of abandoned military equipment—rifles, helmets, ammunition boxes, even a few pieces of artillery. Just beyond the village of St. Palais we crossed the demarcation line into what was Vichy France. Not that there was much love for the French so close to the Spanish border, as Chief Inspector Oltramare—who spoke better German than I had supposed—now told me:

“The bastards hate us French even more than they hate you Germans,” he said. “They don’t speak much French. They don’t speak much Spanish. I’m not even sure they speak Basque.”

Several times we overtook a family car heaped with luggage heading east along the main road to Toulouse.

“Why are they fleeing?” I asked Oltramare. “Don’t they know about the armistice?”

Oltramare shrugged, but as we overtook the next car he leaned out of the bucket and asked the occupants where they were going; and when these answered he nodded politely and crossed himself.

“They’re from Biarritz,” he said. “They’re going to Lourdes. To pray for France.” He smiled. “For a miracle, perhaps.”

“Don’t you believe in miracles?”

“Oh yes. That is why I believe in Adolf Hitler. He’s the one man who can save Europe from the curse of Bolshevism. That is what I believe.”

“I suppose that’s why he signed a deal with Stalin,” I said. “To save us all from Bolshevism.”

“But of course,” said Oltramare, as if such a thing was obvious. “Don’t you remember what happened in August 1914? Germany gambled on defeating France before Russia could mobilize and declare war. Which didn’t happen. It’s the same situation now, only the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact meant that attacking France was much less of a gamble than it was before. And you mark my words, Captain. Now that France is defeated, the Soviet Union, the true enemy of Western democracy, will be next.”

In the little town of Naverrenx we saw some German tanks and a couple of truckloads of SS and stopped to say hello and share cigarettes. Oltramare went to a shop to buy some matches and found there were none to be had. There was nothing to be had of anything—no food, no vegetables, no wine, and no cigarettes. He returned to the bucket, cursing the locals.

“You can bet these bastards are hiding what they’ve got and waiting for the prices to go up so that they can gouge us,” he said.

“Wouldn’t you do the same?” I said.

While he and I were talking, many women came out of the local town hall, and it turned out that nearly all of them were German internees from the nearby camp at Gurs, where they’d been taken from locations all over France. They were pretty bitter about the conditions there, but also because they’d been ordered to leave the area or face internment again as enemy aliens. And this was why the SS had stayed on in Naverrenx—to prevent this from happening. A truckload of SS and one of the women agreed to guide us to the camp at Gurs—which we were assured was not easily found—so that we might conduct our search for wanted persons. Meanwhile, the French lawyer Monsieur Savigny began to argue with Commissioner Matignon and Major Bömelburg about the presence of these SS troops in the French zone.

“In my opinion,” Oltramare told Bömelburg afterward, “you should shoot that man. Yes, I think that would be best. Frankly, I am surprised you have not shot more. Myself, I would have shot a great many people. Especially the people who were in charge of this country. To punish them would have been a mercy. To let them go was barbarous and cruel. Frankly, I don’t know why you bother to take prisoners back to Germany when you could just shoot them here by the roadside and save yourselves a lot of time and effort.”

I frowned and shook my head at this display of pragmatic fascism. “Why are you here, Chief Commissioner?”

“I’m looking for someone, too,” he said with a shrug. “A fugitive. Just like you, Captain. During the Spanish Civil War I fought on the Nationalist side. And I have a few scores to settle with some Republicans.”

“You mean it’s personal.”

“When it involves the Spanish Civil War it’s always personal, monsieur. Many atrocities were committed. My own brother was murdered by a communist. He was a priest. They burned him alive inside his own church, in Catalonia. The man in charge was a Frenchman. A communist from Le Havre.”

“And if you find him? What then?”

Oltramare smiled. “I will arrest him, Captain Gunther.”

I wasn’t so sure about that. In fact, I wasn’t sure about anything as we left Naverrenx and headed south to Gurs. The SS troops in the truck now leading the way were singing “Sieg Heil Viktoria.” I was starting to have misgivings about everything.

My driver and the corporal in the bucket’s front passenger seat were more interested in the woman seated beside Oltramare and me than in singing. Her name was Eva Kemmerich, and she was extremely thin, which seemed to make her mouth too wide and her ears too big. Under her eyes were shadows like bat wings, and she wore a pink handkerchief around her head to keep her hair tidy. It looked like the rubber on top of a pencil. In Gurs, she and the other women had suffered a tough time at the hands of the French.

“Conditions were barbaric,” she explained. “They treated us like dogs. Worse than dogs. People talk about German anti-Semitism. Well, it’s my considered opinion that the French just hate everyone who isn’t French. Germans, Jews, Spanish, Poles, Italians—they were all treated equally badly. Gurs is a concentration camp, that’s what it is, and the guards are absolute bastards. They worked us like slaves. Just look at my hands. My nails. They’re ruined.”

She looked at Oltramare with ill-concealed contempt. “Go on,” she told him. “Look at them.”

“I am looking at them, mademoiselle.”

“Well? What’s the idea of treating human beings like that? You’re French. What’s the big idea, Franzi?”

“I have no explanation, mademoiselle. And I have no excuse. All I can say is that before the war there were almost four million refugees living in France from countries all over Europe. That’s ten percent of our population. What were we to do with so many people, mademoiselle?”

“Actually, it’s madame,” she said. “I had a wedding ring, but it was stolen by one of your French guards. Not that it ever stayed on my finger, after the diet I’ve endured. My husband is in another camp. Le Vernet. I hope things are better there. My God, it could hardly be any worse. You know something? I’m sorry the war is over. I just wish our boys could have killed a lot more Frenchmen before they were obliged to throw in the towel.” She leaned forward and tapped the corporal and the driver on their shoulders. “Christ, I’m proud of you, boys. You really gave the Franzis a well-deserved kicking. But if you want to put the cherry on my cake, you’ll arrest the criminal who’s in charge of the camp at Gurs and shoot him down like the pig he is. Here, I tell you what. I’ll sleep with whichever one of you puts a bullet in that bastard’s head.”

The corporal looked at the driver and grinned. I could tell that the idea was not without appeal for him, so I said:

“And I will shoot whoever takes this lady up on her generous offer.” I took her bony hand in mine. “Please don’t do that again, Frau Kemmerich. I appreciate that you’ve had a rough time of it, but I can’t allow you to make things worse.”

“Worse?” she sneered. “There isn’t anything that’s worse than Gurs.”

The camp, situated in the foothills of the Pyrenees, was much larger than I had supposed, covering an area of about a square kilometer and split into two halves. A makeshift street ran the length of the camp, and on each side there were three or four hundred wooden huts. There seemed to be no sanitation or running water, and the smell was indescribable. I had been to Dachau. The only differences between Gurs and Dachau were that the barbed-wire fence at Gurs was smaller and not obviously electrified, and there were no executions; otherwise, conditions seemed to be much the same, and it was only after a parade was called in the men’s half of the camp and we went in among the prisoners that it was possible to see how things were actually much worse than at Dachau.

The guards were all French gendarmes, each of whom carried a thick leather riding whip, although none of them seemed to own a horse. There were three “islets”: A, B, and C. The islet C adjutant was a Gabin type with an effeminate mouth and narrow, expressionless eyes. He knew exactly where the German communists were held and, without offering any resistance to our requests, he took us to a dilapidated barrack containing fifty men who, paraded before us outside, exhibited signs of emaciation or illness or, more often, both. It was clear that they had been expecting us, or something like us, and, refusing to submit to a roll call, they started to sing “The Internationale.” Meanwhile, the French adjutant glanced over Bömelburg’s list and helpfully picked out some of our wanted men. Erich Mielke wasn’t one of these.

While this selection was proceeding, I could hear Eva Kemmerich. She was standing in our bucket, which was parked on “the street,” and shouting abuse at some of the prisoners who were still held in the camp. These and a few of the gendarmes on the women’s side of the wire responded by laughing at her and making obscene remarks and gestures. For me, the sense of being involved in some nameless insanity was compounded when the inmates of another hut—the adjutant said they were French anarchists—began to sing “La Marseillaise” in competition with those who were singing “The Internationale.”

We marched seven men out of the camp and into the buckets. All of them raised clenched fists in the communist salute and shouted slogans in German or Spanish to their fellow prisoners.

Kestner caught my eye. “Did you ever see anything like this place?”

“Only Dachau.”

“Well, I never saw anything like it. To treat people this way, even if they are communists, seems disgusting.”

“Don’t tell me.” I pointed at Chief Inspector Oltramare, who was marching a handcuffed prisoner toward the buckets at gun-point. “Tell him.”

“Looks like he got his man anyway.”

“I wonder if I’ll get mine,” I said. “Mielke.”

“Not here?”

I shook my head. “I mean, this fellow I’m after almost ruined my career, the Bolshie bastard. As far as I’m concerned, he’s really got it coming.”

“I’m sure he has. They all have. Communist swine.”

“But you were a communist, weren’t you, Paul? Before you joined the Nazi Party?”

“Me? No. Whatever gave you that idea?”

“Only, I seem to recall you campaigning for Ernst Thalmann in—when was that? Nineteen twenty-five?”

“Don’t be fucking ridiculous, Bernie. Is this a joke?” He glanced nervously in Bömelburg’s direction. “I think that phosgene gas has addled your brains. Really. Have you gone mad?”

“No. And actually, it’s my impression that I’m probably the only sane one here.”

As the day wore on, this was an impression that did not alter. Indeed, there was even greater madness to come.