Field Gray

17

I told myself I must have dreamed the whole thing. I was back in the dugout. Had to be, or else why could I smell wintergreen ointment? We used it as a winter warmer for weathered or chapped hands in the colder months, and in the trenches, that was nearly all of them. Wintergreen was also an excellent chest rub for when you had a fever or a cough or a sore throat, which, because of the lice, overcrowding, and damp, was much of the time. Sometimes we even fingered a bit of the stuff inside our nostrils, just to keep the smell of death and decay at bay.

I had a sore throat. And I had a cough. The cold was on my chest and so was something else, only it wasn’t wintergreen. It was a nurse and she was on top of me, and I was lifting her skirt so that she could mount me properly. Only, she wasn’t a nurse at all but a hotel maid, a nice homely girl from Bern, and she’d come to keep me company after all. I reached for her breasts and she slapped me hard, twice, hard enough to make me catch my breath and then cough some more. Twisting away from underneath her, I retched onto the floor. She jumped off the bed and, coughing herself, went to the window and threw it open and hung her head outside for a moment before she came back to me, hauled me off the bed, and tried to drag me toward the door.

I was still coughing and retching when two men in white jackets came and carried me away on a stretcher. Outside the hotel, on the boulevard Raspail, I started to feel a little better as I managed to haul some of the fresh morning air into my lungs.

They took me to the Lariboisière Hospital on rue Ambroise-Paré. There they put a drip in my arm and a German army doctor told me I’d been gassed.

“Gassed?” I said wheezily. “With what?”

“Carbon tetrachloride,” said the doctor. “It seems that the fire extinguisher in your room was faulty. But for the maid who detected the smell outside your room door, you’d probably be dead. The CTC converts to phosgene when it’s exposed to air, which is how it puts the fire out. It suffocates it. You, too, very nearly. You’re a lucky man, Captain Gunther. All the same, we’d like to keep you here for a while, to keep an eye on your liver and kidney functions.”

I started coughing again. My head felt like the Eiffel Tower had collapsed on top of it. My throat felt like I’d tried to swallow it. But at least I was alive. I’d seen plenty of men gassed in France, and this wasn’t anything like that. At least I wasn’t bringing anything up. You’ve got to see a man retching two liters of yellow liquid every hour, drowning in his own mucus, to know how appalling it is to die from a gas attack. It was said that Hitler had been gassed and was temporarily blinded, and if that was so, it explained a lot. Whenever I saw him on a newsreel yelling his head off, gesticulating wildly, beating his breast, choking with his hatred of the Jews or the French or the Bolsheviks, he always reminded me of someone who had just been gassed.

In the early evening I started to feel better. Well enough to receive a visitor. It was Paul Kestner.

“They said you had an accident with a fire extinguisher. What did you do? Drink it?”

“It wasn’t that type of a fire extinguisher.”

“I thought there was only the one kind. The kind that puts out a fire.”

“This one was the type that smothers a fire with chemicals. Takes away all the oxygen. That’s kind of what happened to me.”

“Someone catch you smoking in bed?”

“I’ve spent most of the day wondering that myself. And not liking any of the answers.”

“Such as what, for instance?”

“I used to work in a hotel. The Adlon, in Berlin. And I learned a lot about what they do and what they don’t do in hotels. And one of the things they don’t do is to put fire extinguishers in the bedrooms. One reason is in case a guest gets drunk and decides to hose down the curtains. The other reason is that a lot of extinguishers are more dangerous than the fires they’re meant to deal with. It’s a funny thing, but when I arrived at the Lutetia I don’t recall there being an extinguisher in my room. But there was one there last night. If I hadn’t been drunk myself, I might have paid more attention to it.”

“Are you suggesting someone tampered with it?”

“It seems so obvious to me that I wonder why you should sound surprised.”

“Surprised? Yes, of course I’m surprised, Bernie. You’re implying that someone tried to murder you in a hotel full of policemen.”

“Tampering with a fire extinguisher is just the sort of thing a cop would know about. Besides, none of us at the Lutetia has a room key.”

“That’s because we’re all on the same side. You can’t mean a German tried to kill you.”

“I do mean.”

“But why not a Frenchman? We did just fight a war with these people, after all. Surely if it was anyone—and I’m not convinced it was anything but an accident—it would be one of them. A porter, perhaps. Or a patriotic waiter.”

“And among all of the bastards he could have killed, he just chose me at random, is that it?” I shook my head, which seemed to provoke another violent fit of coughing.

Kestner poured a glass of water and handed it to me.

I drank it and caught my breath.

“Thanks. Besides. The kind of staff a grand hotel employs? It goes against everything they believe in to kill a guest. Even a guest they might despise.”

Kestner went to the window and looked out. We were in a fourth-floor room in the high mansard roof of the hospital. You could see and sometimes hear the Gare du Nord just a few blocks away.

“But why would any German officer want to kill you? They would have to have a damn good motive.”

For a moment I considered suggesting one: Anyone who had already denounced me to the Gestapo as a mischling would, I thought, have reason enough to kill me. Instead, I said:

“I wasn’t always held in such good odor by our political masters. You remember what it was like in Kripo before 1933? Well, of course you do. You’re about the one person in Paris I can talk to about this, Paul. Who I can trust.”

“I’m relieved to hear it, Bernie. But just for the record, I spent most of last night at the One Twenty-two. The brothel.”

“You forget,” I said. “Everyone has to sign in and out of the hotel. I could easily check if you were in the hotel last night.”

“Yes, you’re right. I did forget that. You always were a better detective than I was.” He came away from the window and sat on the edge of my bed.

“You’re alive, that’s the main thing. And you needn’t worry about Mielke. I’m sure we’ll find him. You can tell Heydrich that if he’s in one of those French concentration camps, we’ll find him as sure as there’s an Amen in a church service. You can go back to Berlin confident in the knowledge that when we fly down there tomorrow, we’ll take proper care of it.”

“What makes you think I’m not coming with you?”

“Your doctor said that it would be several days before you were fit enough to resume your duties,” said Kestner. “Surely you’ll want to get home and recuperate.”

“I’m working for Heydrich, remember? He’s a bit like the God of Abraham. It’s never a good idea to risk his wrath, because retribution is often direct. No, I’ll be on that plane tomorrow even if you have to tie me on the undercarriage. Not a bad idea at that. The doc says I need plenty of fresh air.”

Kestner shrugged. “All right. If you say so. It’s your luck that’s as black as pitch, not mine.”

“Exactly. Besides, what would I do here in Paris except go to Maison Chabanais or One Twenty-two? Or one of those other puff houses.”

“The car leaves the Hôtel du Louvre for Le Bourget at eight o’clock tomorrow morning.” Kestner shot me an exasperated, weary sort of look and smacked the side of his thigh with his cap. Then he went away.

I closed my eyes for a moment and submitted to a long fit of coughing. But I wasn’t worried. I was in a hospital. In hospitals people get better all the time. Some of them, anyway.