Treasure of Saint-Lazare (26 page)

“I knew immediately of course that it was something the Nazis had stolen to finance their renaissance, the Fourth Reich. I thought the true believers were foolish, but I didn’t tell the Count that. And I did exactly as he said.”

The clock ticked loudly in the corner.

“Jacques, what was the name of your warehouseman?” Eddie asked.

“Eric Kraft.”

She was wrong on both. The limp was a gift from a fellow milicien in Toulouse who’d refused to arrest an old Jew — his former teacher —  during one of the weekly deportation roundups then backed up his point with an extremely sharp knife. The stabbing resulted in the limp as well as his separation from the Milice and a quick decision to move back to Paris, but he would neither forgive nor forget. Three months later he had slipped back into Toulouse under his own name and begun a search of the whorehouses favored by the miliciens. It was a short search — in the second one he found his nemesis puffing atop a tired-looking whore and very quickly, without ceremony, cut his throat. When the whore screamed for help he cut hers as well, then escaped out a back door and hid in a warehouse he’d picked out months before. Two days later he used the new papers arranged by a friend of his mother’s to hitch a ride back to Paris. The friend was a Frenchman with an inner Nazi struggling to get out, and the newly minted Eric Kraft hoped he never learned the first use of the new identity he’d so carefully constructed.

Up the stairs, slowly, and out of the métro station. He followed the exposed tracks of the suburban commuter line for a half-mile, then turned left into a small lane whose name sign had long been lost, more an alley than a street. Three doors down, he pulled open the cracked once-blue entrance of the Hôtel Saint-Paul, a crumbling six-floor building that had been a cheap residential hotel for as long as anyone in the neighborhood could remember. It had once sheltered French tourists from the provinces but now was home to impoverished workers who could, if they were careful, afford its rent and one meal a day at the cheap cafés in the neighborhood. He’d lived there two years, most of it in a tiny room directly under the roof that baked him in summer and froze him in winter, and had bad ventilation all the time. Only six months ago, thanks to his new job at the art gallery near the Champs-Élysées, he had been able to move to the relatively luxurious third, where the ceiling was higher and he had two windows. The job wasn’t bad and the owner was a decent guy despite his transparent pretense of being from a noble family. Jacques de whatever, that’s what his name should be. Jacques de Chose Truc.

Eric crossed the minuscule lobby in three steps, only once catching his dragging foot on a roll in the threadbare carpet, which long ago had been the color of the door. The owner sat glumly behind the splintering counter, frowning ostentatiously as he read one of the approved occupation newspapers. He handed over the key to Room 305, looked up briefly and grunted, something he normally did only if the rent were a day late.

The key turned wrong in the lock. He was certain he’d locked it that morning but it wasn’t locked now. If they were coming for him they would have been watching the lobby as well as the room, so he pushed open the door, unsure, and stepped inside.

A tall SS officer stood up from his only chair, folding a newspaper. He had stubbed out a Gauloise in the souvenir ashtray from Toulouse that had sat untouched on the table for six months.

“May I see your
ausweis
, please?” The officer, a major from the insignia he wore, was not unfriendly. His French struggled under the dead weight of a heavy German accent.

“Not a bad fake, but a fake nonetheless,” he said, shifting to German and returning the papers. “You were hard to find. It was only when I went to see your mother that I learned the name you are using now. How did you become Eric Kraft?”

“Long story, but there are people in the South — on both sides — who would like to do me harm. Eric Kraft was the name of a cousin on my mother’s side. He was killed in 1940 but his body was never recovered and officially he is still alive, as you can see.”

“Creative. You are going to need all that creativity and more.

“I am Major Steinhauer and I serve in your uncle’s headquarters in Cracow. You are to return there with me. He needs you for a special mission and I don’t believe he trusts anyone outside his family.” A thin smile.

“I took the liberty of packing everything I found. It fit easily into your small suitcase.”

“I don’t have much. No one does,” Eric responded.

“Then let’s go. My car is around the corner. We will go to the Hôtel Wilhelm, where you will receive new papers and a uniform. We will be together every minute until we reach Cracow.”

“Do you mind telling me what is going on?”

The major smiled a second time and said, “You’ll become Lieutenant Eric Kraft of the SS, on assignment. We will return together to Poland, and there your uncle will explain your duties further.”

“And if I refuse?”

“Either way you go into a German uniform, which you should have done the instant you left the Milice. If being a lieutenant isn’t your taste, you can be a private. You will still go to Poland, except that as a private you’ll go in a troop train and fight the Russians. It would not appeal to you. I know. I have been there.”

“Do you have orders for me?”

“I have better than just orders. Here is your authorization to travel anywhere you wish within the Reich and to call on all units of the German military for any help you need.” He held up a sheet of heavy paper covered in dense Fraktur script at the top, French at the bottom, and headed
Laissez-passer
. It was signed,

Heil Hitler!

Hans Frank

Obergruppenführer SS

Governor General of Poland

The next day they sat sweltering in a Wehrmacht train rattling east toward Germany. The trip passed in a blur of wounded soldiers evacuating in panic ahead of the Allied invasion forces, plus a few officers and sergeants on administrative missions. They changed trains first in the heavily fortified border zone near Stuttgart, then again in Dresden, where they mounted an ancient six-car train pulled by a wheezing steam engine from the Great War.

The first part of the trip was uneventful because all the cars bore large red crosses on their roofs, but the train from Stuttgart was unmarked. Within the last month, Major Steinhauer said, American and British Mustang fighters had begun strafing trains as they returned from bombing missions deep inside Germany.

“But where is the Luftwaffe?” Eric asked.

“It’s not very effective any more,” the major answered. In fact, the newly aggressive tactics of the fighters had nearly eliminated the Luftwaffe as an effective defense, with the exception of some of the new and very fast Messerschmidt jets, which had the speed to strike and run before the Mustangs could respond. Even so, some of them were shot down.

Two hours out of Stuttgart the train came to a sudden stop in the middle of an open field and the engine whistle sounded an evacuation alarm. Eric and the major jumped hastily from the first car and ran for a ditch 100 yards away. From there, they saw two silver Mustangs with bright red tails blow up their engine with machine-gun fire, sending shrapnel flying far over their heads, then fly off toward their airbases in western France.

“There is a rumor that all the Mustangs with red tails are flown by
noirs
,” the major said as they waited for a second attack. “That can’t be true. The Jew Roosevelt might want it, but the officers of the American Army would never allow it.”

They waited twelve hours for a repair crane and replacement engine, then resumed their trip.

Finally, after four days of interrupted sleep and meals of cold sausages, the old train came to a halt in Cracow’s main station, shabby after five years of war, with damaged engines and freight cars scattered about the yards like a child’s building blocks. But the tracks were clear.

The town swarmed with replacement soldiers on their way to fight the Russian army, threatening from the east.

“We’ll walk,” the major told Eric. Each picked up his single bag and they set out toward the looming brick hulk of Wawel Castle, a mile away toward the river.

A guard saluted as they approached its imposing main door. Eric offered his
laissez-passer
, which the guard looked at carefully. The major said, “Please tell the Governor-General I have returned with his nephew, who awaits his instructions.”

“Sir, I have orders to take you to him as soon as you arrive. Please follow me.” He turned and led them up the stairs. At the top Eric heard him tell another guard “… the Governor-General’s nephew…” and the door opened immediately.

The second guard beckoned for them to follow and led up a broad staircase to a double door, where a lieutenant sat behind a table. Soldiers stood at attention on both sides of the door. The lieutenant took the
laissez-passer
, then picked up a red telephone, waited several seconds, and said, “Sir, your nephew has arrived.” He then stood up and signaled to one of the guards, who opened the door and with a nod indicated they should enter. Several men waiting on benches — Eric spotted at least one general — glowered as they went in.

The major came to attention before the desk and saluted. “Herr Governor-General, I am pleased to have found your nephew.”

“Thank you, major. Please wait outside.”

Eric had not seen his uncle Hans since he was a schoolboy ten years before, and thought he looked worn. He had less hair, much less than Eric’s own father, who had a full head of lush brown hair at the same age. He could not easily identify the changes in his uncle, who still had the close-set eyes and pinched mouth of a small-town accountant but somehow looked meaner and at the same time soft and round-faced. He did not look like a man with life-or-death power over ten million people.

“So,” he said. “You are Eric Kraft. Did you have a problem with the Frank name?”

“Uncle, the Frank name would have got me killed. I was attacked by a colleague who wanted to excuse his old teacher from deportation and my leg still suffers from the stab wound he gave me. My mother sent me to a friend who created the new identity for me. Major Steinhauer says it’s a good fake. Of course I would prefer to use my mother’s name, and yours. I was pleased when she took it back after my father died.”

Hans Frank signaled to Eric to sit down. “And the old Jew. Was he deported?”

“I saw to that, Uncle.”

“Good.”

Frank had a reputation throughout the Reich for his zeal in purging Jews from the rump Poland that was now called the General Governate, the four districts that had not been absorbed directly into the Reich. Legend held that the governor of Czechoslovakia had once posted a sign announcing the execution of seven Jews, and Frank had responded with scorn that if he put up posters for every seven Jews he killed there would be no trees left in Poland.

Hans Frank sat still behind his large oak desk. As he waited, Eric looked around the room, his eyes stopping first at a painting hanging on the wall behind his uncle.

“Do you like that, Eric? I believe I shall call you Eric, so we can avoid confusion.”

“It’s very pretty.”

“It’s much more than pretty. It is one of the great treasures of western civilization, and it was wasted on the Polish peasants. It is called ‘Lady with an Ermine’ and was painted almost 500 years ago by Leonado da Vinci. One day, after this war is won, it will hang in the Führer’s grand new museum in Linz, to honor his birthplace and one day his memory. In the meantime, he has entrusted it to me, along with several others like it.”