It was late afternoon before he sent for her again.
His uniform was buttoned now. He was wearing a field-grey greatcoat. His cap with its death’s head crest sat on the desk where Roberto’s parcel had been. He was reading from a brown cardboard file—a spread eagle clutching a swastika in its claws stamped on the cover in red—but the sense of imminent departure was all around him.
They were in transit.
The two of them.
“This will interest you.”
He looked up at her. His voice soft and friendly as though sharing a confidence with her.
“To know what informants say about them would surely fascinate anyone? A bit like reading your sister’s diary. For example . . . overheard in your local baker’s . . . ‘Herr Voytek is nothing more than a dreamer . . . a woolly headed man of woolly headed politics’ . . . and in the butcher’s . . . ‘Eva Voytek is a hard-faced bitch . . . a cryptofascist without the guts to come out of her closet.’ Does this sound accurate to you?”
Was this what the Nazis had done? Turned every marketplace gossip into an informant? Every street-corner layabout into a secret agent? A world in which everyone spied on everyone else?
“None of it . . . none of it mentions me.”
“Fair enough . . .”
He flipped over a page.
“Listen to this. ‘That child of theirs . . . a po-faced girl who’ll grow up to be a po-faced woman. Talk about a stick up the arse.’ Not a phrase I’ve ever heard before, but I think its meaning is obvious. Do you have a stick up your arse?”
Méret said nothing.
He slapped the file down.
“No, I wouldn’t answer that one, either. These people are pathetic. The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. They’d all rat you out for a threepenny bit. Let’s go.”