B004U2USMY EBOK (9 page)

“Good, now hold him still.”

“For god’s sake, what are you going to do to
me?” Roger asked.

“You are a faggot. There are punishments
appropriate for such cases.”

“It’s a lie. I didn’t. . .I never would. . .”

“Lieutenant, bend him over.” The boy’s
backside thrust into the air, hairy, disgusting.

The colonel removed the coin from the flame.
Heat shimmered from the surface of the gold coin. He stepped up to
the boy.

Roger twisted his head to look over his
shoulder. His eyes bulged. He started to scream.

Chapter Seven:

Helmut von Cratz was a rich man, but the
first time he’d ever carried a bag stuffed with money was the
first time he’d visited Gemeiner in eastern Prussia, in a castle
not far from the old Polish border. That was last spring, when the
Americans had just entered the war, the eastern campaign had
stalled, and smarter people began to realize just what the future
held in store. He hadn’t fully understood his role in the
conspiracy, or what, exactly, he was doing carrying so much cash.

The money bags had held mostly reichsmarks,
but there were also several thousand French franks. Business
profits, reduced to cash. Helmut thought about his father when he
carried the bags through the portcullis, ushered in by Gemeiner’s
old butler.

When Helmut was still just a boy and realized
that his father was a wealthy businessman, he’d naively asked to
see all the money.

“What, you think I just keep bags of money
lying around?” his father had asked with a laugh.

“You don’t? Where do you keep all the money,
then?”

“I don’t keep it anywhere. I don’t actually
have very much cash.”

Helmut was disappointed. “But I thought you
were rich.”

“You think that way because you’re just a boy
and you don’t have any money. You’re thinking like a poor person.
Poor people have no assets except what they’ve got in their flat
and have no money except what’s in their pocket or tucked under
the mattress.”

“But if you don’t have any money, then how
come everyone says you’re rich?”

“I have money, or I can get it, at least,
with some effort. But that’s not how rich people work. It’s a
different way of thinking altogether that makes you rich in the
first place.”

That had proven remarkably true when Helmut
actually needed to raise money. It had taken a good month just to
convert ten percent of his wealth to the cash he carried into
Gemeiner’s castle.

Gemeiner waved off his butler and led Helmut
down a hall lined with suits of armor and into a huge library. It
smelled of old wood and dusty books. The coat of arms of an old
Prussian family hung over the fireplace, with the motto—near as
Helmut could make out with his school Latin—Hammer of the Slavs.

Gemeiner poured cognac and indicated they
take a seat in the wing-back chairs. “Thank you for coming. How
much did you raise?”

Helmut told him.

“Hmm, well that’s a start. It will convince
our contact that we’re serious about buying his hoard.”

“And what is this hoard,
Herr
von Haller?”

The man looked pained. “No, never that name.
Always Gemeiner.”

Gemeiner
was an old word that had
become slang for a naïve, stupid country peasant. Gemeiner was
from an old Junker family—those self-styled hammers of the
Slavs—of a similar aristocratic background as Helmut von Cratz,
and it was unclear why he’d chosen the pseudonym. Irony, perhaps.

Gemeiner fished out a key and opened a drawer
in his desk. He handed Helmut a small wooden box, very heavy.
Inside were fifty or sixty gold coins.

“French roosters? Where did they come from?”

“Unclear. Pillaged from France, no doubt. We
carried off the bank reserves of the French state when we won the
war, but it would appear that certain freelancers took advantage
of the confusion for their own personal enrichment.”

“In my estimation,” Helmut said, “there’s no
greater contraband than gold.”

Gemeiner’s pale, curved lips lifted into the
hint of a smile. “And why do you say that?”

“Official directives, for one. All gold must
flow to the center. There must be no secret caches of gold. The
only thing the National Socialists are more interested in
discovering than secret caches of gold are secret caches of Jews.
And that’s largely because you often find the latter in possession
of the former.”

“Yes, I know that, but I’m not a
sophisticated businessman like yourself. I don’t understand the
obsession with gold any more than I understand the obsession with
Jews. With all the gold they’ve already looted, I would think the
reichsmark would have sufficient reserves to back it.”

“But the regime needs to spend the gold
because the international currency market is dead,” Helmut said.
“We set rates with the French and so on, but outside of that, it’s
almost impossible to import anything not produced in the Greater
Reich, because nobody but the Italians will take our money. Even
the Swiss balk. So the government needs every scrap of gold it can
get its hands on. It’s the only convertible currency we’ve got
left. It flows out of the country and never returns.

“In short,” Helmut continued, “it’s a one-way
conversion from reichsmarks into gold. Outside of this room I
can’t even imagine how you’d liquidate a cache of gold roosters.
Not under present circumstances.”

“And strangely, this is exactly what makes
them so valuable,” Gemeiner said. “Short of American War Bonds, I
can’t think of anything that would suit our purpose so well. So
valuable and yet so illiquid.”

Helmut had no idea why that requirement was
so necessary. He expected that Gemeiner would now tell him, but
instead the man asked, “Tell me, how much cash can you raise
without bankrupting your business or otherwise drawing attention
to yourself?”

“I’ll raise every pfennig of my share, if you
give me time.”

“It’s a lot of money, even for men like you
and me. Eight months, is that enough?”

“Yes, it’s enough. War is good for business.”

As was fascism. Together war and fascism
drove up demand, eliminated rivals, created monopolies, and scared
away competitors. A few more years and he’d be richer than his
father had ever dreamed. Or would have been except that he had
volunteered to invest his profits in illiquid gold coins.

“Take these coins back to France, turn them
over to St. Claire,” Gemeiner said. “Tell him we’ve made contact
with the American.”

“And then what?”

“Then you’ll be an industrious little
businessman. Get rich.”

He had done so.

#

“We will reduce your rent,” Madame Demarais.
“Twenty francs. And you can help with the wash to pay the rest.”

“I don’t have twenty francs,” Gabriela said.
“I couldn’t pay you ten.”

She regretted paying Christine back so
quickly with the money Alfonse had left her. It was the first
thing she’d done after sitting down to a glorious breakfast of
eggs and sausage and real, fresh bread with butter. And real
coffee. A pair of the
Parisiennes
had been standing near
the door, gossiping, and had smirked when she entered the
restaurant to look for Christine. Gabriela could almost read their
thoughts.

Not so pure and innocent now, are you
cherie?

None of that from Christine. She even feigned
disinterest in the money. “Oh, you don’t have to give it back yet.
Go buy yourself a few nice things.”

There had been a time, nearly a year earlier,
when she’d borrowed money from a greasy man who lived in the flat
over the Demarais, so that she could bribe a secretary of the
sub-prefect, who had hinted to Gabriela that he could find her
father. He couldn’t. In fact, the secretary eventually stopped
looking. After she’d stopped asking about her father and merely
tried to recover the money, he pretended he’d never seen Gabriela
before, claimed to be outraged by her suggestion that he could
possibly be bribed, and threatened to turn her over to the
authorities.

The bigger problem turned out to be that
greasy man upstairs. He wanted his money back. Or perhaps, he’d
suggested darkly, she could work off her debt cleaning his flat
and providing other “services.” Gabriela rushed to the flea
markets and sold her father’s gold watch for a fraction of its
value. And paid off the bastard.

No, she didn’t like debts. Christine was
nothing like the man upstairs, but Gabriela wanted it paid off,
all of it. She’d get the last five francs as soon as possible, but
in the meanwhile, please, take it all.

Only now, at the apartment, she wondered.
Would it have been so bad to hold back a few francs? Christine
would have understood, and now she wouldn’t be standing in front
of the Demarais with her hands empty and feeling this horrid guilt
at seeing their desperation.

Monsieur Demarais was wringing his hands,
pacing back and forth in the tiny front room of their flat. At one
time, they had been reluctant landlords. She had begged them for a
room off the back, a storage closet, even a warm space in front of
the stove.

Madame Demarais pulled at a strand of gray
hair with fingers that protruded from fingerless gloves. There was
no coal at the moment to heat the flat. “Perhaps you have
something you could sell. That watch, what about it?”

“I sold it almost a year ago. My mother’s
ring seven weeks ago. The last of my father’s books two weeks ago.
That was the eight francs I gave you. I have nothing left.”

Gabriela held all of her remaining
possessions in a single carpet bag, which she clutched in front of
her. A few thread-bare clothes, some socks, a pair of shoes. And
the last few remembrances of her father. The first was a photo
with Papá and her brother Pablo, standing on Las Ramblas in
Barcelona. The second was a smooth green stone her father had used
as a paperweight. She couldn’t remember her father attaching any
special importance to the stone, and yet it was one of the
possessions he’d brought from Spain, while abandoning a thousand
other, nicer things. A man at the
marché aux puces
had
offered twenty centimes, a price that was more than an insult, it
was pointless. She wouldn’t part with it for so little.

And then, finally, his pipe. It might have
brought a few coins, but she couldn’t do it.

“What about that dress you wore last night?”
Madame Demarais asked. “That has some value. Maybe fifteen, maybe
even twenty.”

“I can’t sell that. I borrowed the money for
the dress to. . .to get a job.”
“A job?” Monsieur Demarais looked up. “With the
boches
?”

“Yes, with the
boches
. What else is
there for a girl without husband or family?”

“True, true. No doubt the job would be
clerical work or something similar,” he said.

“Yes, something similar.”

“You’re a good girl, I’m sure you will work
hard and do well.”

Marshall Petain was always going on about how
to renew France through
travail, famille, patrie.
Work,
family, homeland. It was the only way to restore the honor of
France, make it whole again. As avidly as they listened to de
Gaulle’s BBC broadcasts from London every night at 9:00, the
Demarais still worshiped the Marshall and kept up the fiction that
both they and their lodger were respectable folk, suffering a
rough patch.

Monsieur Demarais returned to his pacing. He
muttered under his breath. Reached absently for his breast pocket
and groped for a minute before seeming to notice that he had no
more cigarettes.

“And there’s nothing you could sell?” his
wife asked.

“Leave the girl alone,” Monsieur Demarais
said in a weary voice. “She has nothing. Look at the child,
practically starving.”

“We’ll put the rent on hold for now,” Madame
Demarais said. “You can pay us when you can. Sooner, of course, is
better, but I know the
boches
have their own pay
schedules.”

“I don’t have the job, not yet. And anyway,
my aunt has just returned to her house in the
banlieus
.
She left in 1940, in the
exode,
and just now got it back
from the Germans. She said I could live with her.”

“Ah, so your life is looking up,” Monsieur
Demarais said. He ran his fingers through his thinning hair.
“That’s good, that’s good for you.”

It was a lie. There was no aunt, no house in
the suburbs. She was packing up to move in with Alfonse. She had
no intention of ever returning to the little pit where she’d spent
the last eighteen months. Still, she couldn’t stand to see the old
couple’s desperation. She knew that Monsieur Demarais had searched
for months for a job. Once, during a horrible bout of hunger, she
had scoured their cupboards for something to steal. All she had
found was a little salt and eleven cans of beet soup, German
military issue. A year earlier she would have turned up her nose
at the beet soup, but upon finding it her stomach rumbled. Except
that the discovery of the pitiful state of the pantry had made her
feel too guilty to follow through with her planned theft.

“As soon as I get paid, I’ll see what I can
do to help you. You’ve been very good to me. Even when the police
thought I was a Jew, you vouched for me.”

“That’s right,” Madame Demarais said,
eagerly. “We never told anyone you were Spanish, not one. We
helped you as best we could.”

It had been a commercial arrangement, of
course. They had to protect her. If she were denounced or deported
or even arrested and held for a few weeks, they would have lost
their tenant. It was shocking to see their desperation, but she’d
never harbored any illusions that they could do without her
pitiful rents.

Monsieur Demarais was still pacing, and his
wife still pleading when Gabriela finally broke away. She made her
way from the flat and down the stairwell where she came across a
man passed out on the stairwell. Someone had stolen his shoes.