An Honorable German (20 page)

The nursing sister found them that way when she entered with Max’s breakfast tray. She immediately fetched the matron. “Do
you think this is a brothel?” the matron scolded when she came into the room. “Out, out with you, before I call the Feldgendarmerie,”
she said to Mareth. “Mon Dieu, there is nothing these fallen women would not do for a few francs.”

The nursing sisters were Ursuline nuns and partial to Max since he was a Catholic, but he had to laugh at the matron’s prudish
alarm. Mareth did not laugh. She returned that afternoon with an official pass allowing her to stay in Max’s room, signed
by General von Stülpnagel, the military governor of France. And she did stay, every night, until Max was discharged three
weeks later with ninety days of leave.

Mareth’s father, who had arranged for the pass, also arranged for Max and his daughter to remain in Paris for two extra weeks,
living “like gods in France,” as the men said, at the Hotel George

V. This generosity surprised Max. Perhaps Herr von Woller was just relieved they weren’t getting married. Marriage seemed
out of the question to Max. The horror of his ordeal in the lifeboat—of watching Dieter burn, of seeing
Meteor
go down, the uncertainty of the war—made running off on a lark to get married feel like an emotional impossibility. “It’s
not the right time,” he told Mareth. It hardly seemed right to her either, though people all over the Reich were jumping into
marriage precisely because of the war—since its promised end was always close but never arrived. You could even marry your
sweetheart by proxy over the radio or telephone, although the honeymoon wasn’t much fun—especially if the bride went back
to her ammunition factory and the groom went back to his muddy trench somewhere in Russia. Her dearest friend, Loremarie,
had finally married her artillery major by proxy over the radio, she in Berlin, he with his division outside of Leningrad.
Three other friends had done the same.

The months when Max had been sick had been difficult ones for the Reich. First was the inexplicable journey of Deputy Führer
Rudolph Hess, who had stolen a twin-engine Messerschmitt fighter and flown to Scotland alone for reasons no one could say.
Hess was a skilled pilot, but how had he managed to elude the radar and night fighters of the air defense of the Reich, then
slip unnoticed through the British radar and fighter net? Could that have been good luck? Max didn’t think so. The Führer
had been caught completely unawares, claimed that “Party Comrade Hess” had gone mad, as evidenced by his frequent consultation
with astrologers. But how could the number two man in the party have been a lunatic and the number one man not have known?
Mareth had whispered the latest joke to Max: Hess is brought before Churchill and Churchill says, “So you’re the madman.”
Hess replies, “No, I’m his deputy.”

While Max had been so ill, the Kriegsmarine won its greatest victory and suffered its worst defeat.
Bismarck
, the most powerful battleship in the world, attended by the heavy cruiser
Prinz Eugen
, had broken out into the North Atlantic and in a fierce battle with the Royal Navy had sunk the most famous British warship
afloat: H.M.S.
Hood
, which exploded and went down in two minutes, the result of a hit in her magazine. But the Tommies took their revenge not
three days later by pounding
Bismarck
into a flaming wreck. She fought bravely, went down with her battle ensign flying, but Max now realized that the men of Germany’s
surface fleet could do little to affect the war save die gallantly. Ascher of
Graf Spee
, so eager for glory, had been assigned to
Bismarck
after he slipped out of Argentina. He found his glory and a sailor’s grave when the battleship went down, killed along with
two thousand other German sailors. Their deaths accomplished nothing. Valor alone could do little against the overwhelming
might of the Royal Navy.

Yet being with Mareth again, spending two weeks with her in the Hotel George V in Paris, helped Max shut out the terror of
the war if only for a few weeks. He couldn’t get enough of Mareth, didn’t want to let her out of his sight. She modeled her
clothes for him; let him watch as she applied her makeup, bought on the black market for her by the ever-cooperative hall
porter—as long as she paid him in Swiss francs. Max was fascinated by the skill with which Mareth handled the pencils and
brushes. She seemed to do it recklessly, smearing her lipstick on with quick swipes, but the effect was always precise. Sometimes
they would put the radio on and dance naked around the suite. Every day she massaged coconut oil into his skin, which was
still coarse and irritated from the sunburn and fuel oil.

On the first morning of their second week at the George V, Max awoke on his stomach to the pressure of Mareth sitting on his
back. He felt her warm breath in his ear. “Herr Oberleutnant,” she whispered.

Max reached back and ran his hand along her silky calf. “The Oberleutnant wishes to sleep awhile longer.”

He heard her uncrumpling a piece of paper. “But Herr Oberleutnant, already this morning a telegram has arrived from the Oberkommando
der Kriegsmarine asking if you planned to take your lover to Printemps to buy a pair of shoes.” Max groaned. She slapped his
naked rump. “Naturally I had to reply immediately to such an important telegram on your behalf. I told them to rest easy;
the Oberleutnant will take me to Printemps promptly at zero nine thirty.” She rubbed his shoulders softly, then a little less
softly. “Max.”

“Fräulein,” he said, “obedience to orders is the hallmark of the German naval officer.”

“Very good, Herr Oberleutnant. Now achtung!”

Max, still on his stomach, stiffened in mock attention. Mareth rose to her knees. “About face!” she ordered. He rolled over,
his morning erection pulsing. She sank onto him with a wicked smile, bringing her mouth down to meet his.

Max waved the doorman away as they left the hotel. There were no more taxis in Paris; only the Wehrmacht could get gasoline.
The cabs had been replaced by bicycles pulling carts like rickshaws, but Mareth preferred to ride the Metro. She had learned
to get around the city on the elegant subway before the war, when her father had served for a time as commercial attaché of
the German embassy in Paris. She knew the French capital almost as well as Berlin, navigating with the assurance of a native
Parisian.

As ever, Max found her confidence and sophistication deeply alluring, but he did not care for the Metro. All the seats were
reserved for Germans, but that didn’t matter because the seats were always full, the subway cars packed, everyone standing
cheek by jowl, the French staring anywhere to avoid looking at a German. Max nodded to one elderly woman who had glanced his
way accidentally, probably confused by his naval uniform, taking him for French till she saw the eagle clutching the swastika
on his right breast. She turned away in contempt. Max scowled at the old woman’s averted face. If the French had any backbone
at all they wouldn’t have collapsed like a house of cards when Guderian hit them with his panzer divisions a year and a half
before. Sometimes he didn’t know who to despise more: the proud ones like her who were so open with their scorn, or the scores
of Parisians who seemed to regard their occupation with gutless equanimity, as if they cared nothing for their nation’s fate.
What was the joke the army officer had told him at the bar last night? “French rifles for sale. Like new. Never been fired.
Only dropped once.”

Mareth dragged Max off at their stop and he followed her up the stairs to the street, passing a poster of a fat Winston Churchill
smoking a cigar and holding a tommy gun with the legend:
ENGLAND—CURSE OF ALL EUROPE
. How true. A few people in the crowd hissed at them, taking her for a French girl running around with one of the occupiers—a
common sight in this defeated city. “There will be many little Germans born in Paris this year,” one of the hotel porters
had explained to Max, without rancor. “C’est la guerre.” Max nodded. “Krieg ist Krieg.” Mareth was unfazed by the scattered
hisses in any case; Max knew she enjoyed being mistaken for a glamorous Parisian.

Printemps was full of women, few of them French. Most were blitzmädchen—uniformed female auxiliaries in the telecommunications
service of the Wehrmacht. “I’ve never seen so many fat women,” Max said. Mareth elbowed him. They were everywhere, filling
the store in their drab gray uniforms with their identifying lightning bolt patches on their left sleeves, holding up stockings,
pawing at tables of evening purses, gawking over Coco Chanel’s latest designs. Parisians referred to the blitzmädchen as “gray
mice,” and no wonder. Max and Mareth pushed through the crowd to the shoe department. He sat in a chair while she surveyed
the selection. Whatever she picked out, the saleswoman would smile approvingly and say, “Oui, Fräulein.” Max shook his head
in disgust. These people had no character, no pride. Leather had disappeared, all of it consigned to the Wehrmacht, so every
pair of shoes in the store had wooden soles with cloth uppers—hardly high fashion, but leave it to the French to make such
a thing attractive. They had no character but plenty of style.

The shoe department was packed just as tightly as the rest of the store. The clucking gray-clad women swirled around Max as
he sat hunched in his chair, their number multiplied by the mirrors on all sides. The air became close and stale. Max felt
his pulse pick up; his palms started sweating. A trembling anxiety came on again—it had come on him before in crowds, in loud
places, twice at Café Scheherazade, the unofficial club in Paris for Kriegsmarine officers, and once in the Cathedral of Notre
Dame, where he had gone to mass to pray for his dead comrades.

He closed his eyes and tried to will himself to be calm. After escaping a warship as it burned, and surviving two weeks in
an open lifeboat, he was now being terrorized by a crowd of blitzmädchen in a Parisian department store. The doctors said
the attacks would pass in time, although that seemed their answer for everything: “It will pass in time.” Did they say that
to amputees? He started to hyperventilate.

“I’ll be outside,” he gasped to Mareth.

Breathe into a bag, the doctors had told him. One franc bought a copy of
Le Figaro
from a newsstand on the street in front of Printemps. Max twisted the paper into a cone and breathed in and out, the cone
filling with air and then collapsing. Slowly his breathing returned to normal and his heartbeat slowed. He leaned against
a post and watched the city stroll by. A woman turned the corner and came toward him in green slacks with a cream-colored
blouse, striding purposefully on thin heels, chest thrust out in front of her. What was it about these Parisian girls that
made them look so good? He stared at the woman so intently that he didn’t even notice the black Citroën creeping along the
curb behind her until it stopped and two men in dark overcoats jumped out, one of them wearing a gray hat.

They grabbed the woman roughly and she flailed her arms, shouting, kicking one of them in the balls. “Help!” she screamed.
“Help!” The other man punched her full in the face, splitting her lip and splashing her clothes with blood.

Max moved by instinct. He brought Gray Hat down with a knee to the gut, then turned and floored the second man with a right
hook. The girl darted across the street and was gone. Max froze when he felt the barrel of a pistol against his back.

“You ignorant swine!” Gray Hat hissed in German.

The second man picked himself up from the sidewalk, tenderly rubbing his jaw. “What have we here? A navy hero?” He punched
Max in the stomach. Then he opened his palm and displayed the warrant disc of the Geheime Staatspolizei: the Gestapo.

“Into the car,” his partner ordered, pushing Max forward with the pistol.

He covered Max in the backseat while the second man drove. As they pulled away from the curb, Mareth ran out of Printemps.

Max caught her eye for a moment through the window of the Citroën and then they were gone.

The driver said, “A navy hero, is that it? We’ll make you scream for helping that French whore. Are you a spy, too?”

“I am a German naval officer. You will address me as ‘Herr Oberleutnant.’”

“Do loyal German naval officers help French spies escape?” the man with the gun screamed into Max’s ear. “The navy is rotten
with enemies of the Führer!”

Max turned to face him. “Obviously I had no idea who that woman was, or who you were. How could I have known? I am a German
patriot and a combat veteran. I demand that you release me immediately.”

The pistol jabbed his ribs. “You will be released in a coffin, my friend.”

The car screeched to a halt at 72 Avenue Foch, Paris headquarters of the Gestapo. They pushed Max into the building, the gun
still at his back, and led him down a long hallway to a small room furnished with a metal desk and chair. A bare light bulb
hung from the ceiling, casting a harsh glare. The two men left, saying nothing, slamming the heavy door behind them. Max heard
the bolt slide into place. He examined the walls, running his fingers lightly over the beige plaster that was peeling in spots.
There was no window.

The Gestapo had one task: ferret out enemies of the Reich wherever they might hide—in universities, in factories, in unions,
even in the Wehrmacht itself. In the Kriegsmarine, rumor had it that people arrested by the Gestapo were never seen again.
Max shivered in spite of his thick woolen uniform. A spy? Was that French girl a spy? She didn’t look like a spy. Suppose
she was one. Still, to see a young woman assaulted on the street right in front of him, hit in the face like that, in broad
daylight—how else could he be expected to react? But if she was a member of the Resistance, they were right to arrest her.

Max’s confidence in his actions waned with the day. Perhaps an apology was in order. The Gestapo men had acted like a couple
of thugs, but he would buy them each a Beck’s and admit his mistake, one German to another. Clearly it had been nothing but
a misunderstanding. They could hardly shoot him for such a trivial mistake. If he were shot, important people would miss him.
Perhaps he should tell them that immediately. Indeed, the very next evening he was to dine with General Admiral Saalwächter,
commanding Marinegruppenkommando West. Admirals frowned on having their dinner guests snatched by the Gestapo, Max was sure.
Besides, couldn’t the admiral get him released? Could the Gestapo arrest you and keep you even if ordered by one of the highest-ranking
admirals in the service to release you? Had the Nazis gotten that powerful?