Major Markus Fredrick Böhm replaced the telephone receiver into its cradle. The call had been to tell him the final reports of the clearing of the Old Quarter would be waiting for him at his office in Rue Paradis in the morning, but it was clear the operation had been a success.
Before Böhm’s arrival in Marseille, it seemed every day the German occupying forces were losing men in that rats’ nest. Follow a suspect in there and you left, if you managed to leave at all, empty handed or covered in shit poured from an upper window to the delight of the loitering workers in the street. Böhm had listened to the reports and complaints of the men, and the excuses of the French authorities, then issued his orders.
Perhaps half of the inhabitants of the Old Quarter gathered together their blankets and pots and left when the official notices of eviction were posted up on the walls. Most of the rest found themselves arrested and loaded onto trains for processing at the camps. The large number of foreign or French Jews discovered still living in the Old Quarter provided final proof, as if any were needed, of the slapdash way the new laws had been enforced in the preceding months. Those who fought or ran or hid were shot. Böhm was a Hercules who had cleansed the shit out of the city in three days.
He glanced into the mahogany-framed mirror above the telephone table and smoothed his hair. Behind him in the reflection he saw the door to his daughter’s room was ajar. He crossed quietly to it, and looked in.
The telephone had not woken her. Sonia was curled under the blankets, a stuffed rabbit cradled in her arms, still dreaming. Her soft, pale features wore an expression of light concentration, the same expression she wore sitting at the dining table in the quiet hour before dinner as she drew, or wrote letters to her friends back in Berlin in her huge looping handwriting. The fragile innocence of a child. He took the risk of waking her and stepped into the room, smoothed her whisper-soft hair behind her ear and kissed her forehead. That she might be safe, that she might live protected and at peace.
He closed the door as quietly as he could and returned to the drawing room. On his arrival in Marseille, he, his wife and his daughter had been billeted in this neat apartment close to the Gestapo headquarters in Rue Paradis, and it was a luxury to be savored after the conditions he had endured in Poland. The little family shared five comfortably furnished rooms, a tribute to his successes smashing the foreign spy rings in Paris and enforcing some discipline on the Einsatzgruppen in the east and, he was not afraid to acknowledge, to his wife’s excellent connections in the party.
In the low light, sitting by the fire, at work on some elaborate piece of embroidery, his wife looked almost a child herself. She put her work aside as he came in and went to the dresser to pour him a drink. He took his seat in the armchair on the other side of the fireplace, admiring her slim figure and shapely legs in comfort.
“Captain Heller asked me to apologize for calling so late, Eva. He hopes he did not disturb us.”
She brought him his whisky, bending down to kiss him as he took it. “That is very good of him, but I do not mind at all. You know that.”
Her voice had been the first thing about her that he had fallen in love with; it was low and tuneful, confident without being brassy. He caught her hand and brushed her slim fingers lightly with his lips.
“What are you smiling at?” she asked as she returned to her place and picked up her workbasket.
“I am grateful that providence has sent me such a helpmate.” He tasted his whisky. Drinking it was a habit he had picked up while studying for his doctorate in England. Its flavor took him back to his college rooms, the late night conversations with his peers.
“Me or Heller?” She looked up at him under her eyelashes.
He raised his glass toward her. “You in this instance, my dear.”
She nodded, pleased with the compliment, then looked suddenly thoughtful. “Heller is a good deputy though, I think.”
Böhm considered his deputy as he sipped his drink. Heller wore little round glasses but was otherwise a healthy-looking young man. Clear skinned, and well muscled without showing a tendency to run to fatness. Böhm had been working with him since his arrival in Marseille, and he had so far proved extremely competent. Heller had learned excellent French studying the law in Grenoble and was, naturally, a staunch believer in the Nazi cause. His little round glasses gave him a scholarly appearance, but he was a fierce and inventive interrogator. Böhm admired that—a man who could seem so mild, yet had a well-spring of violence within him. The surprising discovery that this slight bookish young man could cause such terrifying pain had shocked some captives into talking, perhaps even more than the pain itself.
“He is. Very good.”
Eva snipped a thread and shook out the embroidery she had been working on. It was, he saw, an image of a little farmhouse with chickens in the yard and a backdrop of layered trees and hills. It reminded him of the landscape around Würzburg. Perhaps, after the war, if he did not return to Cambridge, he would complete his research there and take just such a modest home for Eva and Sonia.
“We should do something for him, don’t you think?” she said. “I’ll write to Uncle Gottfried, mention his name.” She realized her husband was looking at her handiwork. “It’s Sonia’s latest masterpiece, I’m just neatening it up. She is going to put it in a frame and give it to you, so remember to look surprised.”
“I shall.”
She began tidying away her work, and her voice took on a slightly hesitant note. “I had a letter from Gottfried today, as it happens. He says there is no hope for the Sixth Army at Stalingrad. You should see what he writes about their sacrifice. It’s terribly moving.”
Böhm drained his drink. What a terrible sacrifice it had been. He set his empty glass down on the polished side table. But Böhm had no doubt that the war would be won in the end. The British would eventually understand that their only hope of defeating communism would be to join with Germany against Russia. Any military setbacks in that vast and savage country could only be temporary. The Slavs were beyond redemption with nothing but a capacity for suffering to recommend them.
“Do you think it’s wrong of me,” Eva said, still not looking at him, “to be very grateful we are together in France, and not there?”
He felt a fresh affection for her. “No, my love. We can honor their sacrifice, without wishing to share in it.”
“Would you like another drink?”
Tempting. “No, thank you. I must keep a clear head, there is still so much to be done.”
He said it with a smile in his voice, but it was true. The clearance of the Old Quarter was an excellent start, but he knew the roots of the Resistance ran deep and wide in this city. Perhaps the French were not beyond redemption, but they had undoubtedly grown decadent and corrupt. The Germans had absorbed the wisdom of the Far East, and used it to fully comprehend their destiny, but the French had collapsed into luxurious visions of the orient—sensual, feverish dreams which had rotted them from within.
“Your supper will be ready. Do you think you managed to catch your mouse?”
That legendary mouse who had led so many escapees and refugees to Spain, nibbled so many holes in the net that the Germans had cast across southern France.
“Perhaps. Only time will tell.”