B004U2USMY EBOK (8 page)

The third—the boy—didn’t speak German, but no
doubt the conversation and the coin in the lamp flame had focused
his attention. He must have noticed Hoekman’s tone of voice.

Why was it that a calm, measured tone and
perfect control—like a snake, never blinking, never
agitated—inspired more fear than ranting, pacing, loss of temper,
threats?

Hoekman was taking French classes, two hours
a day, plus study when he had the chance. His French was coming
along at a rapid clip and even the old man giving him lessons
seemed genuinely impressed. Nevertheless, it was not yet strong
enough to complete the interrogation.

“You will translate for me, now,” he told the
younger of his two aides. “Bring him here.”

They dragged the third young man—Roger
Leblanc—out of the chair and brought him across the room to where
Hoekman turned the coin over in the flame to evenly distribute the
heat. “Your French coins are very beautiful. I especially like the
detail on this rooster. Where did you get this one?”

The lieutenant translated.

The boy was sweating, shaking so badly that
he would have collapsed to the floor if the two lieutenants
weren’t holding him upright. He muttered something.

“What did he say?”

“He doesn’t remember.”

“You had a gold coin in your pocket. What a
strange thing to find on a seventeen-year-old boy in Paris these
days. And you do not remember where it came from? Even more
strange.” Hoekman removed the coin from the fire and brought it
near the boy’s cheek.

“Non, mais no, s’il vous plait, non.”

“Look at you. A faggot, it is disgusting. And
look at your clothes, your hair. A Clark Gable mustache, hair
untidy. You have been watching too many American movies, it is not
healthy.” He waited, while the lieutenant caught up translating.
“You are a zazou, aren’t you? A disgusting little group of
faggots. Very soon we will clean the entire city of this scum.”

He brought the coin closer. The fuzz on the
boy’s cheek curled and smoked. A whiff of burning hair.

“I found it!” he blurted.

“You found it? I think you are lying.”

A frightened burst of French. “I swear, my
god, please, you must believe me. I just found it, that’s all.
Please, for god’s sake, please. You have to believe me.”

Hoekman pulled the coin back a few inches as
the lieutenant translated this. “You found it. Where?”

“I was in the major’s car, looking for
cigarettes. I suppose it had fallen out of someone’s pocket. I
didn’t think it would be missed.”

“The major? Major Ostermann, you mean.”

“Yes.”

Now this was interesting. Colonel Hoekman
didn’t trust Alfonse Ostermann. There was something underhanded
about the man. At the least, he was a corrupt element within the
Wehrmacht requisitioning department. But this business with the
coin cast new suspicions on the major, assuming the boy was
telling the truth.

Hoekman took the forceps and put the coin
back into the fire. How long would gold hold its heat? He would
have to ask the lieutenant later.

Could this have anything to do with the
American spy they were trying to catch in Provence? There was
something there about gold roosters, too. They’d raided a house
near Marseille reputed to hold the spy. No American, but one of
the items recovered was a small box filled with a few dozen gold
rooster coins. It might just be a coincidence; there were a lot of
these old coins in vaults and banks across the country. Even more
had found their way to Germany, and not always by official routes.

In fact, one of Hoekman’s earliest successes
as a Gestapo investigator had been catching a Wehrmacht captain
who had robbed a bank vault during the invasion of France,
smuggled its contents back to Germany in sacks of feed. A number
of French roosters and British sovereigns and even American eagles
had turned up mysteriously in and around Stuttgart. The captain’s
house, when raided, had been filled with real coffee, chocolate,
lemons, oranges, and other extremely expensive black market items.
His wife had been wearing nylon stockings, like a cabaret girl.

After Hoekman had finished arresting and
interrogating the captain and his co-conspirators, he’d received a
curt telegram through official channels, ordering him to report to
a castle in the Silesian highlands, near the old frontier with
Poland.

This had been March 1941, before the war with
the Russians on the Eastern Front, when Germany and the Soviet
Union were, to all intents and purposes, allies. Suspicious,
semi-hostile allies, of course, like two packs of wolves came
together to bring down a wounded animal—Poland, in this case—and
now circled each other warily with blood from the last battle
still dripping from their jaws. Still, Hoekman had assumed war
with the Soviets would be unthinkable so long as Britain remained
unbroken and jeering on the other side of the English Channel.

But as he drove into Silesia, Hoekman
couldn’t help but notice the trains, the military convoys, the
massive movement of material. And endless lines of men, thousands
and thousands of them, all moving east, in excess even of what
he’d see along the former border with Poland two years earlier.
Hoekman had recognized at once the signs of a pending war.

So all the talk of peace and friendship with
the Bolsheviks was a lie. And why not? Germany was surrounded by
enemies. Germans had their superior organization and their brains,
and if they needed to add a measure of cunning, so be it. He just
hoped his counterparts in Department E were up to the challenge of
rooting out and destroying the NKVD spies that no doubt infested
Poland and would be watching and reporting to Moscow.

The guards didn’t lead Hoekman into the
castle, as he’d expected, but onto a path into the wooded part of
the estate. The sound of an animal came from the underbrush,
grunting, primitive sounds. A wild boar, from the sound of it.
Hoekman found himself wishing the guards hadn’t relieved him of
his Mauser.

“Heil Hitler,” a voice said.

Hoekman turned, snapped off a reflexive
Hitler salute of his own, and then found himself staring at the
Reichsführer-SS, himself. Heinrich Himmler. The man had come from
a side path and somehow approached without Hoekman hearing. He was
out of uniform, in a pair of trousers with a matching khaki shirt.
A hunting rifle lay draped over one arm.

“You must be Lieutenant Hoekman, the one who
uncovered the gold smuggling.”

“Yes, Reichsführer.”

“Come, walk with me. We can talk.”

Himmler handed the rifle to his aide, then
polished his round glasses on his shirt. He dismissed his aide and
the two guards who’d brought Hoekman, then ordered him to report
about the discovery of the gold coins. They continued to walk as
Hoekman did so.

The Reichsführer interrupted several times in
his Bavarian-accented German to ask pointed questions. Himmler
looked thoughtful as he finished his recounting. “Hoekman, that’s
a Dutch name, isn’t it?”

“My paternal grandfather was Dutch, yes.” He
kept his voice neutral, neither apologetic nor defiant. “I am not
in any way Dutch. I grew up in Munich and had never been outside
of Germany before the war started.”

“And yet one could hardly claim that Hans
Hoekman is a provincial man,” Himmler said. “I understand that you
expended considerable effort learning Polish during the few months
you were stationed in Warsaw. Why would you do that?”

“It is useful to know the language of the
enemy. People tell you things in their own language.”

“A disgusting, unsophisticated language these
Slavs speak, isn’t it.”

“No, Reichsführer, I didn’t find it so.”

Himmler’s eyebrows rose. “You didn’t? Well—”
It was clear he was not used to being contradicted and didn’t
quite know how to respond.

“The more Polish I learned, the more I liked
it. Indeed, I found it surprising that such a degraded, inferior
people could speak such a beautiful, sophisticated language. I can
only surmise that the Poles were, at one time, a superior race to
what they currently present. They have mixed excessively with
Jews, Cossacks, and Mongols.”

“Ah, yes, of course. That only makes sense.”
He chuckled. “I misunderstood you for a moment.”

“I apologize, Reichsführer, I should have
been more clear.”

“Tell me. As a boy, did you ever suffer abuse
from other children about your Dutch family?”

“No. I kept to myself and the other boys were
mostly wise enough to leave me alone. When they didn’t, I made
sure they learned their mistake.”

“And you joined the SS when?” Himmler asked.

“I joined the brown shirts in 1930, when I
was eighteen. I started working in investigations in 1936. I
report to Department D.”

D1, to be specific. Opponents of the regime
in the occupied territories. He was not particularly interested in
D2 business, except where he came across Jews and homosexuals and
other deviants through the normal course of operations.

“Interesting. You have the file?”

Hoekman handed it over. Himmler thumbed
through the pictures, the typed memos as they continued to walk.
Hoekman was intimately aware of the contents of that file, having
dictated most of the memos himself. He walked a pace back, feeling
rather stiff.

Hoekman had felt vaguely disappointed by this
encounter and it took him this moment of silence to realize why.
He’d expected Himmler to be some superhuman in intellect and
charisma, but of course he wasn’t. Instead, he gave the impression
of a Prussian Junker out for a walk on his estate.

Himmler stopped at the sheet that cataloged
the exact quantities of gold and black market goods confiscated
and sent to Berlin. “That is quite a sum of gold. Were you at all
tempted? It might have been easy to take some of it, but still
claim the glory of discovery.”

“Money holds no particular temptation,
Reichsführer. My goal is to serve the Fatherland.”

“Some might question your patriotism, that
it’s a front to hide your Dutch ancestry. To prove that you are
more German than the Germans.”

“I am aware of that interpretation,
Reichsführer. I reject it.”

“An excellent answer. Perhaps a little too
excellent, in fact. Everything about you is a little too perfect.
Perhaps it is an affectation.”

Himmler gave a half-smile and Hoekman could
see a grudging respect. Also, a touch of caution. Hoekman had
often seen such caution before—how to deal with such a
strong-willed, unbending man as Hans Hoekman?—but it still
surprised him to see it in a man as powerful as the Reichsführer.
If that caution turned to fear, Hoekman’s life would be in great
danger. He was aware of that.

“You look very German,” Himmler continued,
and his tone made it clear that this was a high compliment. “Your
actions, of course, were correct in every way. Even down to the
extreme measures taken with this Wehrmacht captain.” Himmler
passed him a photo of the captain in his uniform. The young man
looked arrogant, untouchable in the photo. He had worn a very
different expression by the time Hoekman had finished with him.
“Of course your captain looked very Aryan, too, but we have done
some digging into his background and discovered a Polish
grandmother. Sometimes it just takes a drop of impurity to
contaminate the whole.”

“Polish. I did not know that,” Hoekman
answered truthfully. Was this a dig at his own family background?

An animal exploded onto the path. It was a
magnificent stag, with an enormous rack that looked almost too
heavy to carry. The two men drew up short, Himmler letting out a
startled gasp at his side. For a long moment, the two men and the
stag stared at each other and then the animal was bounding into
the meadow on the opposite side of the path.

“And to think,” Himmler said in a rueful tone
after it had disappeared into the woods beyond the meadow, “I’d
unloaded my gun.”

“It is probably for the best,” Hoekman said.
“You might have killed it and that would have been a loss, I
think. Those antlers look better on a live animal than hanging on
your wall.”

The Reichsführer turned and fixed him with a
frown that turned first to a smile, and then to a chuckle. “You
know what, I think you might be right. Well said, Lieutenant, well
said.”

#

Six days later, Hoekman received a promotion.
The papers were signed ‘H. Himmler.’

Within ten months he had risen to
the rank of
Reichskriminaldirektor—a Gestapo colonel.

It was curious that he had come upon another
case relating to gold coins. The government would be very
interested; even the smallest amounts of confiscated gold would be
sent directly to Berlin. Apart from the satisfaction to be gained
by rooting out another conspiracy against the Reich, it was not
lost on Hoekman that another big find might propel him to new
heights in the SS hierarchy.

But this gold rooster now pinched between the
forceps, heating in the lamp flame, was it the only one? Nothing
more than someone paying Ostermann gold for black market goods? Or
was there some sinister connection with the events in Marseille
and the small cache he’d discovered? He was intrigued by the
possibilities.

“Now,” he said to Roger Leblanc. “Is there
anything else you would like to tell me before we continue?”

“I told you everything I know.”

“Maybe you have, maybe you haven’t. We shall
find out. Lieutenant, drop his pants. Underwear, too.”

“Me,
Polizeiführer
?” the clever one
asked, his tone reluctant.

“Yes, you,” he snapped. “He is not going to
sodomize you, look at him, he is helpless.”

One man held the boy by the neck while the
other stripped him naked from the waist down. They both looked
revolted.

Hoekman felt a very different emotion than
his two lieutenants. Hoekman hated this deviant because the state
told him to hate deviants. If his superiors told him that French
brie posed a threat to the Fatherland, he’d have arrested guilty
dairy farmers, women queuing in front of cheese shops, and anyone
whose breath stank in a certain way. Now obviously sodomites were
a threat to the Reich in a way cheese that was unnaturally soft
and smelly at room temperature could never be, but there was no
need to get hysterical about it.