An Owl's Whisper (15 page)

But Weibel was not about to be put off the hunt. His reply was four words: “
Kein Tee. Eine Minute.
” For emphasis, he raised an index finger as he said
Eine
and glanced at his wristwatch after
Minute
.

There had been just forty-two ticks of the watch when the first shots and shouts rang out. Mother’s heart sank. Like a hunting dog, Weibel’s head cocked to the sound. He was still for an instant, listening, and then he shouted and ran into the darkness, with Bauer a few steps behind.

Mother Catherine called, “Sister Arnaude!” She flew down the steps to the walkway leading around the side of the convent. At the foot of the steps she stopped, bathed in the bright lights of the vehicles and, fingertips at her lips, she peered into the night’s murk. She heard more shouts and grunts and the sounds of branches breaking. She saw intermittent sweeps of a flashlight beam. For the first time in her life she thought she might faint. She took her beads and began to pray, all the while, peering, peering, peering.

Before she could finish half a decade, she heard steps coming toward her on the gravel path. The first figure to materialize out of the darkness was Weibel. He seemed even more gigantic, with the angular shadow his body cast on the convent wall. Then there were small figures, four of them. Huddled together. Mother could barely breathe. Next came Sister Arnaude. Finally, three SS soldiers—an older man with a limp, a giant as abnormally tall as Weibel and twice as massive, and Bauer. They held machine pistols at the backs of the children. Just as the parade came fully into the light, two more soldiers loped out of the headlights.

Mother Catherine swept over to the children. She enveloped them like a hen does her chicks. Eyes wild with fear, she searched Weibel’s face for a sign of his intentions. For a sign that there was still hope.

What she saw was a monster becoming ever more monstrous. She saw arrogance swept aside by rage. Rage, that she had dared interfere. That she would protect these little vermin. That she’d humiliate him before his men, implying that her interference now might somehow influence him. Rage, that in one with such power is a dangerous thing. He shouted an order, and the gimpy soldier shoved the muzzle of his weapon two inches from Mother’s face.

Is this the best you can do, ogre?
Mother thought, and she had her snip of hope. Until she saw Weibel’s confident smile.

As if to say,
I know your type and its weakness
, Weibel unholstered his sidearm, snapped the Luger’s bolt back to cock it, and sauntered up to one of the cowering children. He leveled the pistol at the space between her eyes. Then he conspicuously looked up to the second floor window of the dormitory, to the faces of the girls in their nightgowns peering down at them. A
your-move
grin slithered across his face.

Mother saw terror on each face in the window. But one of them, Eva’s, took the biggest toll, for it was there that she would have expected to see strength. Would have expected to draw strength. Instead she saw tears. Saw Eva shaking her head frantically and saw her mouth form a great
No
, silenced by the closed window. She saw the others pull Eva away. Away from her.

As Mother brought her gaze back to Weibel, she knew she had lost. No matter what price she paid in lives, it won’t be enough to sate the monster, and in the end he’d have the little ones anyway. She stepped back from the children.

Weibel gave an order and the terrorized children were hustled into the floodlights, to the small truck the SS men had brought. He waited a moment to relish his victory then bellowed another order. The hobbled soldier poked Mother’s back with his pistol and prodded her, too, into the flood of light, to Weibel’s staff car.

Prize Fight in Lefebvre

As Mother Catherine was being taken to the staff car, she thought,
If I’m nearby, I’ll be able to protect the children.
The hope buoyed her spirit. She was smiling when Bauer blindfolded her and pushed her into the back seat.

“You smile? Bauer sneered. “Why?”

“Because I intend to see that those children are not harmed,” Mother replied.

Bauer was quiet. The silence left space for Mother to recall Father Celion’s observation,
Ah, Mother Catherine. Such magnificent delusion—this belief of yours that by the very power of your will you can turn sour to sweet. Delusion because it isn’t always true, but magnificent because from it springs such spiritual energy and hope.

Finally Bauer spoke. “Forget those childrens. They come to the end. Worry on yourself.”

In the blindfold’s blackness, Mother felt her spring going suddenly dry.

The next morning, Mother awoke to a clock’s tock, tock, tock echoing from above. It had been a fitful night on a filthy mattress in a small, windowless room. Bauer’s words,
Forget those childrens
, haunted her. As did Eva’s face, dark with despair, looking down from the window. Then disappearing, as she was pulled by the other girls into the darkness of the dormitory. Mother couldn’t shake a murky sense of betrayal in their exchanged look. Surely Eva felt betrayed that she had given up the children without a fight. If she got another chance to make a stand—to set things right—Mother vowed she wouldn’t fail Eva again.

A light came on and Mother blinked at the sudden brightness pouring from the bare bulb, which hung by a spindly, black cord from the water-mottled plaster of the ceiling. Along the back wall were stacked chairs—folded, theater-style units of four seats. They were made of oak turned dark by the grime of many decades’ use. There was nothing with her in the room but the mattress, the theater chairs, and the bare bulb.

Mother knelt and prayed. “Lord, grant me hope, grant me strength. Today I’ll need both.”

She had just begun
Matins
when loud blows rattled the door. Pounding—a fist used as a hammer. The lock clicked. Mother continued with her prayers.

The door exploded open. Hulking just outside the doorway was the huge SS soldier Mother had seen the night before. He looked the type for pounding. She gazed at his head, the size and shape of a bucket, and its most revealing elements, the eyes. Small, dark eyes set well back in the skull, each obscured, protected, by a looming, massive crag of an eyebrow.

Despite his size, the giant didn’t frighten Mother. It was the childlike way he cocked his head as he peered into the room.
I can handle a little boy.

“
Kommen Sie mit, bitte
.” The soldier, whose name was Steckmann, put all the emphasis on the
kommen
and none of it on
bitte
.

Though Mother knew no German, it was clear what was being demanded. But she saw no reason to admit she understood. “Excuse me, could you say it in French, please?”

Steckmann understood no French. All he knew was that the nun wasn’t moving. He reached a paw in and clutched Mother’s arm at the elbow. Growling, he jerked her off her knees with a powerful yank, like a stevedore snatching stowage from a ship’s hold.

Mother stood in the doorway, massaging her shoulder and glaring in disbelief at the goon.

Steckmann pointed a fat finger down the hallway, a dimly-lit chute with paint peeling from cracked plaster walls and water-warped floorboards. Grabbing her elbow, he pushed her ahead.

As she was hurried down the long corridor, Mother was shaking. She had never been treated so brutally. Had never even seen such brutality. Her thoughts surged beyond fear for the children and herself to fear for civilization. Could the civilized British defeat these demons without becoming demonic themselves?

They came to a staircase done in the
Art Nouveau
style with florid, curvilinear ironwork steps and banisters. With its resemblance to the portals into Parisian
Métropolitain
stations, the stairs swept Mother back to happy, carefree times. Times when she skipped with her mother and sisters through the elegant, arched entry of the
Père Lachaise
station and descended its stairway to begin a day’s adventures: shopping, picnicking, promenading. Dreamy, soft memories of dreamy, soft times—before a shot in Sarajevo ignited the inferno of the Great War. And now there was the Occupation, with its ghoulish spawn, hunger and thuggery, stalking the countryside. For her, the difference between the worlds of 1942 Lefebvre and 1912 Paris was perfectly reflected in the contrast of the seedy corridor behind and the grand staircase ahead.

The pair went down a corkscrew flight of elegant stairs to a hallway much different from its one-up counterpart. The floor was carpeted with a thick, blood-red oriental runner and the walls were covered up to shoulder height with green and white stripe paper. Above the paper and a wooden wainscot, the walls and ceiling were a rich cream color. Photographs of Himmler and other Nazis hung on the right. On the left, a gallery of collaborating Belgians. At the head of the hallway, high on the wall as if overseeing everything, was a portrait of Adolf Hitler.

The soldier halted Mother at the last door on the right and knocked. Neat lettering read,
RSHA,
the initials of the political security branch of the SS. A shudder shot through the nun.

“
Herein
,” a voice from inside barked.

Steckmann turned the handle, and the door swung open. He pushed Mother into the room and eased the door closed behind them.

Before Mother was a wide table with four men seated facing her, their backs to a large window overlooking Lefebvre’s town square. The view confirmed she was in the city hall. Mother recognized Weibel, the one in command the night before. In the daylight she could see his eyes, pale and blue as mountaintop snow. He wore the tailored, silver-trimmed, black uniform of the
SS
and sat in the center with his hands folded on the tabletop and his riding-boots crossed underneath. In front of him was a large nameplate, fashioned from golden oak. In the center was carved, in
fraktur
lettering,
Weibel, M, OStF
. On the left of the name was the leering
Todenkopf
insignia and on the right the SS slogan,
Ehre ist Treue
(Honor is Loyalty).

To Weibel’s right sat a man whose face was familiar to Mother, but one she couldn’t quite place. He wore a double-breasted blue flannel suit with a white shirt and bright tie. On his arm was a swastika armband. To Weibel’s left was another soldier. And at the end of the table, behind a typewriter, was the fourth, a young soldier.

Weibel was first to speak. Squinting contemptuously at Mother, he spat his sentences in steel-cold German then turned to the soldier on his left and nodded. That soldier,
Feldwebel
Haansch, whose fieldgray uniform looked functional next to Weibel’s costume, spoke in French, “Sister Catherine, as a courtesy, I shall translate. The offense of harboring fugitives is a most serious crime, one punishable by death. That you should be derelict in your obligations to the fine young ladies of St. Sébastien disgusts
Obersturmführer
Weibel. He chides, ‘Shame on you for your dishonor.’”

During the entire translation, Mother fixed her gaze on Weibel. On his cold eyes. Snake’s eyes, she thought. Then, no, a dead man’s eyes. When the translation of Weibel’s indictment was done, Mother stood silently for a moment. She hoped her sleeves hid the shaking in her hands. She hoped she wouldn’t burst into tears. Then it struck her—accusations of “shame” and “dishonor” coming from those lips? Mother felt the poison of his words turn her fear into the armor and mail of resolve. “
Monsieur
Weibel, how dare you speak of shame and dishonor?” She felt herself growing large. “Yes, I do feel obligation. Obligation to my true authority, Jesus Christ. It is He who commands me to care for, to protect, His children here.” Her hands clenched to fists. “
All
His children
.
To protect them from the minions of ignorance and darkness that threaten them so. I most fail ‘the fine young ladies of St. Sébastien’ when I abandon those in need of my help. So—”

Haansch pounded the table. “Enough of your tired sermon.” He turned to Weibel and presented a watered-down translation of Mother’s response.

Even the diluted version pitched Weibel into a rage. He spat on the floor. “Do you imagine you are lecturing schoolboys, woman? Perhaps you fail to grasp the gravity of your situation. Did I not make it clear that yours is a
capital
crime? Do you think nun’s robes put you beyond my grip?” His wide eyes and pulsing temples made the translation which followed superfluous.

The blue-suited civilian rose and smiled graciously. “My dear Mother Catherine,” he said in calm French. With that smile and his first few words, she recognized him as Leon Le Deux, the turncoat she had seen on the dais welcoming the Nazis just after the invasion, over two years earlier. Le Deux thrust out his hands, palms up, in a messianic pose. “People make mistakes. We’re human, after all. Even nuns. In fact, I’ll even concede there may be room for differing opinions about what is right. Let me translate for the lieutenant.” He turned to Weibel and presented a German translation, the turned back and raised his index finger. “Now, while error is human, one must be accountable. Is that not the basis of religion?” He put both hands on the table and leaned toward Mother. “Listen, I want to help you. A show of your good faith is all I need to argue on your behalf. I’ll get to that, but first there is one thing I just have to say. You speak of loyalty to Christ. Yet you harbor Jew vermin? Weren’t they the ones who rejected Him? Had Him put to death?” Le Deux looked genuinely perplexed. “How can you dishonor Him whom you vowed to serve by supporting His enemies? His assassins?” He smiled, as if his vanity was whispering,
nice work
.