Dirk Drechsler heard the church bells, and a swell of homesickness filled him with such pain that he drew his knees tight to his chest and turned his face into his pillow to stifle a moan. The bells, deep throated and mellow, reminded him of those that rang in the First Lutheran Church back in New Braunfels, Texas. His mother and father and little sister would be attending morning services today and sitting in the same pews they’d laid claim to every Sunday since Dirk had been alive. Saturday, his father would have stopped by Naegelin’s Bakery to pick up lebkuchen to take home for dessert to follow the Wiener schnitzel and potatoes and peas his mother always prepared for Sunday dinner. God, what he wouldn’t give for a plate of his mother’s sautéed veal and buttered paprika potatoes and a taste of that brown cookie with the pink icing that were his favorite foods in the whole world.
His taste buds watering, Dirk swung his legs to the floor and clasped his head in his hands. His decision to cut ties with America to join the German Army was the worst mistake he would ever make in his life, if he survived long enough to have a life. What in God’s name had he been thinking to chuck his family, home, country, and friends to live in a miserably cold, paranoid, unfriendly country run by a crazed dictator like Adolf Hitler? It hadn’t taken Dirk but a month of Abwehr training in Berlin to realize that he was first, foremost, and would ever be an American, fractionally a German, but never a Nazi. Obviously, the members of his intelligence unit believed the same about him. Rather than welcome him with open arms as Dirk had expected (he’d figured that an American would be quite a catch for the Abwehr), he was shunned by the other enlistees and treated with near contempt by the officers. They did not trust him. Disloyalty to a man’s country, even a foe’s, was foreign to the German chromosome system.
But to stay alive, he had borne his disillusionment with Hitler, the Abwehr, the government’s anti-Semitism policies, and the diabolical goals of the Third Reich without giving away the bitter regret of his decision and revulsion for his job. He had even risen to the grade of sergeant and been posted to the plum location of Paris, but he had no doubt that he would have already been transferred to the Russian front had he not possessed a special skill needed by the intelligence-gathering branch of the German Army. The Abwehr needed him as an English interpreter.
That job he could have tolerated. The Abwehr respected the rules of the Geneva Convention and treated the enemy and suspicious persons with relatively decent human conduct during interrogations. But no sooner had he arrived in Paris than he was loaned out part-time to the anti-Jewish section of the Gestapo. They were short of English-speaking staff.
Now he would live with the eternal shame and horror of what he’d been forced to do and witness. A steely eye, threatening pose, and menacing tone were not the techniques he’d expected would be employed to pry information from the poor sucker strapped in the chair of an interrogation room. Pry was not the word, either. Extract was more accurate. God, the deplorable acts of inhumanity those Gestapo bastards were capable of. The worst were the times he entered a cell to find an American in restraints, the look he received when Dirk was ordered to inform him that his interpreter was a fellow countryman. The Gestapo interrogators took great pleasure in that directive. “Sergeant Drechsler is from Texas in America,” they would say, bending down to speak into the anguished face of the downed U.S. pilot or the American OSS liaison to the French Resistance. He would then repeat loudly as if his American captive was deaf, “America! Texas!”
At such times, Dirk’s entrails would twist in self-revilement and another layer would be added to the hatred he felt for the whole German war machine and the country he’d volunteered to serve.
If only he’d listened to Chris, his best friend, who had not bought into the crap of a thousand-year reign of the Third Reich. Lucky Chris, to have been born with a missing thumb that guaranteed a military deferment. He was now safe in the land of the free, cozy in his Austin apartment, enjoying his teaching job and living in the city that he loved. He could work on his PhD, attend music festivals and rodeos, date girls, see his family, and eat Mexican food whenever the mood struck him—all without a clue of the loneliness, danger, cold, and deprivation his buddy was enduring over in German-occupied Paris.
If only he could find a way to get home. He had thought and thought about it. There ought to be a way to get across the border into Switzerland or Spain or across the English Channel into England. He had money hidden away—U.S. dollars—that the Abwehr didn’t know about. At least he’d not been dumb enough to leave home without funds on hand. He was growing desperate. He couldn’t sleep at night for fantasizing what it would be like to walk up to the front door of his house in New Braunfels and ring the bell. “Mater! Vater! I’m home!”
Although now he would say Mother and Father, maybe even Daddy, like everybody else’s son in Texas. He would be through with all things German if he should ever get out of Europe. If he ever made it home, he would take whatever was coming to him, like the prodigal son, willing to eat pig swill, not expecting the fatted calf.
But for now he had his hopes pinned on a new rumor that not only would the war not last forever, but that Germany would lose it. The German Army was losing ground on both the eastern and western fronts. German citizens were losing faith in their raving moron of a Führer. The French Resistance was growing, and rumors were flying that an Allied invasion of the continent was being planned for the near future. If he could hang on, Dirk Drechsler just might be able to make it home again.
Hurriedly, he dressed in his army shirt and pants, forgoing the jacket, since German soldiers were not required to dress in full uniform in their quarters on Sundays. It was so damn cold and only October 11. His floor heater did little to warm the room beyond a three-inch radius, but he was lucky that he could leave the pilot light continuously burning. The French boarders were rationed to the use of four hours of gas a night in their rooms, none during the day.
He heard his neighbor next door—Stephane Beaulieu—lock his room door. The French engineer puzzled him. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but he didn’t seem…well, as much French as the other frogs. French people, unless with friends and family, had struck Dirk as very posture and gesture conscious. They were formal in their conventions: how they dressed, how they spoke to one another, how they presented themselves at the dinner table, and how they greeted one another. They did not hug. They did not shout unless in anger. Neighbors calling to each other across the street in Texas would be taboo in France, and they never ate while walking down the street. The French were unbending around strangers, but Stephane Beaulieu seemed looser somehow, his mannerisms less stiff. He was polite and reserved without being aloof, proper without being prudish, but Dirk had noticed that he seemed inordinately careful and watchful, and once he had seen the engineer bite into an apple (one of a bag given to the boarders courtesy of Captain Achterberg on one of his more generous days) while setting off to catch the metro, but who wouldn’t break convention if there was no breakfast and you were hungry enough? Dirk noticed such anomalies, an asset in his job that had won from Captain Achterberg his only praise. He called him “sharp-eyed,” using American slang.
Stephane Beaulieu was the only one of the French boarders with whom Dirk had felt he could develop a cordial relationship. He took French lessons daily so that he could converse and had become fairly comprehensible, but the engineer had side-stepped his attempts to be friendly—not exactly shunned him as the other Frenchmen had, but avoided him. Dirk had noticed that difference, too.
He heard his neighbor pass his room and quickly stepped out, catching him at the head of the stairs. The Frenchman was dressed for the weather and in finer clothes than he wore to work. “Headed for church?” Dirk called in broken French.
His neighbor’s back stiffened as if he’d suddenly been caught with a hand in the till, and Dirk indeed caught a deer-in-the-the headlights expression when he glanced around.
“Oui,” he said.
“Well, then, say one for me.”
“Excusez-moi?”
“A prayer. Say a prayer for me.”
“D’accord,” his neighbor said and hurried on down the stairs.
Dirk went back to his room and grabbed his army overcoat. For something to do this Sunday, he’d go to church, too. He’d follow Stephane Beaulieu to whichever one he attended, probably the Catholic church on the corner. It would be nice to sit in a pew again and listen to organ music in a quiet, candlelit sanctuary with people not wearing Nazi uniforms, never mind that the church wasn’t Lutheran. Maybe he could entice the engineer to go to lunch with him, his treat. He knew a café that treated German soldiers especially well. But to Dirk’s disappointment and discomfort—he was shivering to his gonads even in his overcoat—Stephane Beaulieu did not enter the church on the corner. He hurried past it toward the metro as if late for an appointment.
Dirk never knew the source of the nudge that prompted him to follow Stephane Beaulieu. The engineer’s reaction when he hailed him at the stairs was definitely enough to rouse suspicions, but Dirk preferred to believe that the push came from the hand of God. He had not deserted him, after all, for when he successfully managed to tail the French engineer to his destination, he saw a way to get back home to America again.
Stephane Beaulieu’s metro ride took him to the port village of Honfleur, where he walked to a tall, narrow town house wedged between an automotive shop and fish market. Mingling among churchgoers attending services in the church opposite, Dirk saw a woman open the door to the engineer’s knock, and Dirk’s pulse raced when the Frenchman threw a furtive glance over his shoulder down the street. When Stephane stepped inside, Dirk had turned into the church’s walled cemetery, where he could keep an eye on the house through a chink in the ancient stone. After a couple of endless hours the door opened again, and Dirk beheld a scene that stunned his eyes unless they had deceived him: Stephane Beaulieu embraced by the most wanted man in France, the bearded leader of the Resistance, the former French Army general and Resistance leader Nicholas Cravois.