Pierre Frei - Berlin - A Novel

'I'll take you home. Just let me call an official car.' He was making for the nearest public telephone.

Marlene beckoned to a bicycle taxi. 'Montmartre.' With a sigh of relief, she fell into the seat.

'Spy, traitor, sale Boche!' hissed Yvonne. Someone had seen Marlene with the major.

'You'll have to explain,' said Armand calmly.

'He spoke to me outside the Louvre the day I arrived, absolutely insisted on carrying my case. Name of Major Achim Wachter. I ran into him by chance at the Cafe de I'Opera today. Was I supposed to run away? I accepted his invitation to a coffee. It wasn't easy to get rid of him.'

'What do you know about him?'

'Only that he's a toy manufacturer in civilian life, and at present he's adjutant to the city commandant.'

'It's all a lie. She's working for the Germans,' cried Yvonne in agitation. 'Can't you see how cleverly she's wormed her way in with us? Joins in a couple of operations for the sake of camouflage. Then she'll turn us in to the Gestapo.'

Armand was thinking out loud. 'The German city commandant's headquarters are at the Palais de Verny. The Marquis de Verny built it in the fifteenth century. We have a plan of the layout of all the rooms from the cellars to the attics, got it from the city archives. We know from the French staff that the general works in the library. and his secretariat is in the music room next to it. Intelligence has its offices on the second floor. The Military Police conduct operations from the south wing. What we don't know is the precise location of the cells down in the vaults where they hold people they've arrested until they hand them over to the French or German police, which is to say the SS. Madeleine, I'd like you to meet the adjutant again. The success of an operation to free detainees might depend on the answer.'

So she drank her coffee in front of the Cafe de l'Opera every afternoon. She had to wait a week for the major to reappear. '1 was on leave, a quick visit home. use and the boys just didn't want to let me go. I hope you're not going to run away again today. I have the evening off. Would you give me the great pleasure of dining with me?'

He had ordered a suite in the George V hotel, with a silent waiter who poured the champagne and served dinner. There was freshly smoked Loire salmon, consomme of Limousin beef, and snipe with wild peaches.

There he goes spending a fortune, and I'd get between the sheets with him for nothing but a sausage! She grinned to herself. She had decided to take the direct route. The direct route was by way of bed, and she knew from experience that it usually got her where she wanted. She ate with a hearty appetite, ignoring the culinary refinements. As a child of Ri benstrasse she knew that you don't live to eat, you eat to live.

She let him seduce her for the sake of appearances. He fumbled and went to work on her as clumsily as most men. She gave in, with a sigh, as soon as she decently could. He didn't last long, and she was glad of that.

'Do you always entice ladies into such expensive beds?' she teased him.

'We're not allowed to entertain ladies at HQ.'

'Even during the day?'

'We could meet at a hotel in the day.'

She drew a line with her finger from his breastbone to his navel. 'What can you be thinking of?' she cooed. 'That's not why I asked. I mentioned that I've been sent to Paris to find a suitable building for our Women's Association, didn't I? I'm an architect, so I'm interested in historical buildings. I know the Palais de Verny, I've studied the building plans and countless illustrations. I'd just love to get a close look at the way they built their foundations five hundred years ago. The architects of the past were ahead of us in many ways.'

'Our safety precautions have been stepped up since we caught a burglar in the Grand Salon a few days ago.'

'Please, Achim.' She blew into the curly hair on his chest and then went down lower. Her lips aroused him again. She rode him, her pelvis circling, and this time she could be said to have earned her dinner.

'Come to my office on Tuesday,' he said as they parted. 'I'll see what can be done.'

Tuesday was cold and wet. Marlene wore her new raincoat and elegant rubber galoshes, both from the Galeries Lafayette, for the first time. She slung her bag over her right shoulder as usual. Bertrand took her to the commandant's HQ by bicycle taxi. He said he would wait — 'Just in case'and lit himself a Caporal.

An NCO took her to Achim Wachter, who was on the phone. 'What nonsense. Of course the man's not a British intelligence agent, just an ordinary burglar after the table silver. It's a bad mark for our Military Police that he got as far as the Grand Salon. The general's given orders for him to be handed over to the French police. No. of course we're not sending him over to the Gestapo. If you absolutely insist on interrogating the prisoner you'll have to come here, and make it nippy, if I may say so. The French are coming for him this afternoon. Your big boss in person, you say? You can send Himmler himself for all I care. Over and out.'

He slammed the receiver down angrily. 'Forgive me. Our friends in the Gestapo want everything handed to them on a plate.' He kissed his visitor's hand. 'Frau Neumann, how kind of you to come. I told the city commandant what you wanted to see, as a qualified architect, and he gave permission. Corporal Lehmann, take the lady to Gaston.'

'Yes, sir.'

'Gaston is the caretaker here: he knows every nook and cranny. Please excuse me. I have business to deal with.' He stood to attention and clicked his heels. 'When shall we see each other?' he asked quietly, so that the NCO couldn't hear.

'Soon.' She gave him a promising smile.

Gaston was a bent little man with silver hair and a big nose. 'Bonjour, madame. Je suis entierement a votre disposition.' He greeted Marlene with an old-fashioned bow. He had obviously been given his instructions, for he hurried assiduously ahead of her up the curve of the marble stairway.

It was a severe test of her patience. They had to go down the mile-long gallery of ancestors from portrait to portrait, and tour over forty rooms. Only after two hours was Gaston's repertory exhausted. 'Et maintenant j'aimerais voir le sous-sol. Les fondations m'interessent.' The oldest part of the foundation walls was beneath the south wing, she was told. They were Roman catacombs which later became part of the medieval fortifications.

In the south wing, an officer from the Military Police met them. 'Frau Neumann the architect? Major Wachter said you'd be coming. I'm Captain Grosse. Down here, please.' Worn stone steps led down into the depths, where a brick vault opened up with passages running into it from right and left. An iron grating had been let into the mouth of the right-hand passage. The cells for prisoners are in there,' the captain told her. 'There's an interrogation going on in one of them at the moment, but don't let it bother you.' The guard by the grating saluted. 'Stand at ease, lance-corporal. The lady's an architect, she's going to look around down here a little.'

'Yes, captain.'

'It's a real labyrinth. Don't lose yourself, ma'am.'

'I hope my tourist guide knows his way around. Thank you, Herr Grosse.' The captain disappeared up the steps. The young lance-corporal opened the grating for her. All going swimmingly, she thought.

'The Frenchman can't come in here,' the guard said.

'Monsieur Gaston, attendez.'

The passage went round a bend that took her out of sight of the guard. Three steel doors, as recently installed as the grating. The detention cells! She memorized their location. The door of the middle cell was halfopen.

A chair. A man sitting on it, his hands tied with a cord behind the back of the chair. A camp bed, and lying on it, carelessly tossed down, a dovegrey uniform coat, a peaked cap with the death's-head badge, and a belt with a pistol holster. Their owner was standing in front of the prisoner.