B004U2USMY EBOK (36 page)

A light breeze blew in off the Mediterranean.
It smelled of salt water with an occasional whiff of fish from the
docks.

They’d come down from the hills on winding
roads choked with cars, bicycles, motorcycles, and trucks. Goats
sometimes crossed the road
en masse
, blocking traffic.
Germans built concrete casements along the hillsides, mounted with
machine guns. More Germans were bulldozing a pasture for an
airstrip, others dug tank traps. One entire stone village,
clinging to the side of a cliff, had been emptied and turned into
a fortified camp. They were never stopped or challenged.

The Marseille safe house itself sat back on a
narrow lane, with a hillside view down toward the aquamarine blue
of the bay. Scrubby trees stretched up the hill behind them. The
hill sloped sharply down from the house to a small alley cut
through the scrub and along the edge of the hill. It twisted down
to some houses fifty or sixty meters below them. But no immediate
neighbors. A rooster crowed in the distance.

“I’m not turning over the gold until I meet
with the Americans,” Helmut explained as he double-checked the
Mauser, then handed it back to Gabriela.

She didn’t like it. “And you want us to stay
here, while you go off alone? How can you be sure it’s not a
trap?”

“If Philipe Brun were setting me up, he could
have turned me over to the Gestapo a long time ago.”

“Unless he’s just a bandit, then he’d want
you to come down and bring the gold before finishing you off.”

“Maybe. I’ll take that risk.”

“Then why not take the gold with you?” she
asked.

“I don’t know the man, so I’d be a fool to
blindly trust him. Just in case they really are trying to rob me,
I don’t want to make it too easy. Besides, a thousand things could
go wrong. It could be nothing more than running into a gendarme
who wants to inspect the truck. A thousand kilometers across
France and we could lose the gold in the last kilometer.”

He pulled out his own pistol, unloaded it,
reloaded, then aimed at a spot on the wall. He put the gun away,
then pulled it out again and aimed a second time.

“Tell me where you’ll be, at least.”

Helmut tucked the gun in his jacket pocket.
“I'm going to the
vieux-port,
near the fish market in
Quai des Belges
.
One
of the shops has a wooden sign painted with a blue dolphin. That’s
where I’ll be. But don’t come, it’s not safe.”

“And when you’re done, then what?”

“Then I’ll take you to Switzerland.”

Christine came down the stairs. “What about
me? Just go home?”

“You’ve done so much,” Helmut said. “We’d
never have got out of Paris without you. There are seventy
thousand roosters in those bags, more or less. Nobody would notice
if there were a few missing, do you know what I mean? A girl
wouldn’t have to go back to working nights if she had ten or
twenty gold roosters.”

Christine blinked, nodded. Ten or twenty gold
coins would be more than she’d ever seen in her life, but she had
to have been thinking about those heavy bags already. You didn’t
stand next to bags of gold coins without being aware of it at all
times.

“But you’ll be caught as quickly as anyone
else if you try to spend them, you understand. You have to wait
until the Americans are here, or. . .” He hesitated. “Or bury them
until the war ends, whenever that is.”

“I understand.”

“Just one more thing and you’re done,” he
said. “Stay with Gaby until I get back. You’ll be safer together.
Then go home, get your family away from the coast. Inland, at
least—I don’t know—forty kilometers, maybe. This will be the most
dangerous real estate in France if everything goes according to
plan.”

“And if it doesn’t go according to plan?”
Gabriela asked.

“If I’m not back by nightfall, you’ll know I
failed. Christine, take Gaby if that happens. Your family can
protect her. Don’t either of you go back to Paris, for god’s
sake.”

“But what about my father?”

Helmut chewed on his lip. “I don’t know. Find
David Mayer. Maybe he can help. Just. . .I don’t know.” He looked
at his wristwatch. “I have to go.”

The next few minutes proved to be a bitter
parting. She wanted to tell him that she’d forgiven him and to
thank him for finding her father. She wanted to tell him she loved
him. But there was no time, and the moment was too awkward, so
instead they exchanged chaste kisses to each cheek and best wishes
and then he was gone. She heard the crunch of his tires as he
backed the truck out of the lane.

After he was gone Christine sat in a chair in
the salon, tapping her foot. “The problem is,” she said at last,
“I don’t know anything else. My parents think I’m working as a
seamstress in Paris. I send them money and ration coupons. Imagine
a seamstress doing that. But they don’t want to think about it.”

Gabriela wondered about that. Probably they
helped Christine maintain her fiction, but they’d have to be blind
as well as stupid not to guess what she was doing in Paris.

“You’re not seriously considering going back
to the city,” Gabriela said. “Not after all that about being a
collaborator.”

“Do you think I’m a collaborator?” Christine
asked.

“No, but you do, that’s what matters. And why
would you go back anyway? Especially after what Helmut said about
the gold.”

“It’s not about the money. I told you, I
don’t know anything else, what would I do? Move home to Toulon and
marry the son of the
boulanger
, like my father says?”

“Those are your only two choices? Surely
not.”

Gabriela felt like she was going insane
waiting. She cracked the front window, then opened the front
shutters a fraction, looked down at the street at the bottom of
the hill. An old man on a bicycle, a dog trotting by with
something nasty in its mouth.

“What are you looking for?”

“This is crazy,” Gabriela said. “Sitting
here, doing nothing.”

“We’re guarding the gold.”

“We’re not guarding the gold. If someone
wants to steal 70,000 gold coins, will a couple of girls deter
them? I don’t think so. We’d be an added bonus. The only thing
keeping this gold safe is nobody knows it’s here. That’s it.”

“We’ve got guns.”

“Yeah, and we’re sitting on them, doing
nothing. We could be out there helping Helmut.”

“Helping him do what?” Christine asked.

“I don’t know, but you saw what he looked
like when he left. He’s expecting trouble. What if Colonel Hoekman
gets there first, he’ll be dead.”

“Helmut told us not to go.”

“And he also told us how to find the fish
market with the blue dolphin sign,” Gabriela said. “He wants us to
come or he wouldn’t have told us.”

“You’re just rationalizing. You don’t want to
wait is all.”

“No, I don’t want to wait. Do you?”

“I think we should stay here. We’ve done all
we can.”

“No, we haven’t. Listen, Helmut’s in trouble,
so what I want to know is are you coming, or staying? I won’t make
you. I understand either way.”

Christine sighed. “Oh, come on, are you
sure?” Finally, when Gabriela didn’t answer, she gave a firm nod.
“Fine, then, I’m coming.”

“You know how to find the
Quai des Belges?
”

“Of course. We can walk, it’s not far.”

“And the market with the blue dolphin sign,
would that be hard to find?”

“I wouldn’t think so.”

Gabriela nodded. She looked down at the bags
of gold. “How much did Helmut say? Four hundred kilos?”

“
Oaui,
something like that.”

“We can’t just leave it in the open.”

“What then?”

“If we’re going to hide this stuff before we
leave, we’d better get busy.”

#

Helmut walked along the Marseille waterfront.

Fishermen tossed their catch from boats and
into baskets. Other men waddled away with the heavy baskets
balanced on shoulders. A babble of language; French, Italian,
Catalan, Spanish, Arabic. Gulls wheeled overhead, screamed and
squabbled. The sun was bright, the air cool and saturated with the
smell of fish and seaweed.

He removed the cyanide capsule from his
pocket and tucked it into his cheek. The glass felt smooth and
cool. How easy to crush it between his teeth. He imagined the
sharp glass, the bitter taste.

And it was surreal, because apart from the
glass capsule, Helmut felt like he’d stepped out of the real world
and into the pages of a book. A book where there was no war, where
a German tourist with a battered copy of the Michelin Guide might
stroll the docks of Marseille, taking in the crisp spring air, the
sights and smells of the old port. Where he might stop for lunch
and eat oysters with mignotte sauce and a bottle of chenin blanc.

That had been his life at one time. School in
England, business in Germany, holidays in France. He’d met a
pretty French girl, held her hand, whispered sweet French things
in her ear. Marie-Élise was like a dream now, like a story he told
himself.

Offshore, hundreds of fishing boats with
sails skimmed the azure surface. A few steamers with varied flags.
He could see the Château d’If, fortress and prison, a kilometer or
so offshore on its island. German guns commanded the coast and a
pair of Messerschmitts buzzed the harbor, but military presence
was lighter than he’d expected. He knew the Luftwafte was
currently constructing a major airfield nearby and that several
thousand men of the First Army defended the city from American
attack across the Mediterranean, but Marseille looked nothing like
the ports along the French and Belgian coasts, subsumed as they
were in war.

As for the docks themselves, it was clear why
Philipe Brun had chosen this place to meet the American. There
were no Germans or French police patrolling the dilapidated piers.
Just fisherman dragging their catch from the sea, as had happened
on this very spot for thousands of years, since the Romans. Since
before the Romans, most likely. A few hang-abouts looking for food
or day labor.

He rolled the glass capsule to his other
cheek. It wouldn’t take much of a bite to break the glass.

It was gas that killed. A bit of cyanide
powder vaporized, you breathed it and it entered the bloodstream
immediately and then the brain. Death took two or three minutes,
Gemeiner said; unconsciousness was almost immediate. But there
would be something in those few seconds. Dizziness? Nausea?

But only if you bit the capsule, that was the
step Gemeiner neglected.

You coward. After all the warnings, you
didn’t take your own advice.

The docks grew seedier the further he walked.
Rotting piers, the overwhelming smell of fish guts and sewage.
Scavengers and rubbish-sorters picked through piles of refuse. Men
sat repairing nets with calloused, saltwater-blasted hands.
Pickpockets, Arabs, a man slumped drunk against a building. Women
queued in front of a fish stall, waving their ration coupons. An
even bigger crowd gathered around a man with a cart, illicitly
selling shellfish. A withered beggar held out a hand to Helmut and
muttered something incomprehensible. He handed over a few francs.

Helmut stopped on the docks between two piles
of ceramic pots. A man with a cigarette dangling between his lips
stacked pots, while his friend unloaded buckets from his boat.
Screens capped the buckets and here and there an octopus arm
reached through, probing for an escape route. The empty pots stood
in shoulder-high piles, pyramid-style. From here he could see the
sign with the blue dolphin opposite the pier.

The doors of the shop were closed. A man sat
on a crate in front, his face buried in a newspaper. Black hair
poked over the top. He had thick legs and hands with short
fingers. Didn’t look in any way like Gestapo or police, but the
man didn’t appear to be reading the newspaper either.

Helmut slipped his hand into his pocket. His
fingers wrapped around the grip of the Luger. He’d rather have the
familiar feel of the Mauser, but Gabriela had grown accustomed to
the weapon and it would be harder for her to adapt. In any event,
the pistol was probably worthless. He was alone; if it came to gun
play, he’d better crush the capsule in his teeth and be done with
it.

Once he’d studied the street and become
reasonably sure that none of the men were anything but fisherman
and dock workers, he made his way toward the closed door. The man
folded his newspaper and studied him.

The man nodded. “Von Cratz.”

Helmut felt a surge of relief as he
recognized the man. “Brun.”

“You’re late. I was beginning to wonder if
something had gone wrong.”

“Something is always going wrong, but I’m
here now. Is the American inside?”

“Yes.”

“And your men?”

“You have the payment?”

Helmut smiled. “Perhaps not on me. Didn’t fit
in my pockets.”

“But in the city? It’s somewhere we can get
to?”

“Yes. Your men?” he asked again.

“They’re ready. You work a deal with the
Americans, we can promise four days.”

Helmut stopped while two men walked by
carrying a length of heavy rope. “You said a week.”

Brun had promised a week and Helmut had hoped
for four days. If Brun promised four days, did that mean he’d get
two? The Americans, no doubt, would demand a month.

“Germans have reinforced,” Brun said. “A
fresh division within twenty kilometers of the city. Four days is
all we can promise. I told the American. He said they only needed
seventy-two hours.”

“Really?”

Brun gave a typically Gallic shrug.

The Americans were massing in England, but
hadn’t yet made a serious attempt to cross the Channel. That was
only fifty kilometers or so wide, depending on where you crossed.
It was several hundred from Algeria to Marseille.