Bomelburg took a bite of the flask and offered it to me. 'Swallow?'
'That's the best thing I've heard since I got into this tin pigeon.'
On the ground at Bayonne Airport there were four bucket wagons waiting for us, six SS storm troopers and the French lawyer. The SS were good-humoured and full of smiles the way men are when they've won a war in less than six weeks. The lawyer had a big nose, thick glasses and hair so curly it was almost absurd. To me he seemed like a Jew, but nobody was asking. Either way he was jumpy and nervous. He lit a cigarette inside the lapel of this jacket to keep the wind off his match and smoke billowed out of his sleeve.
It was a real bestiary that drove east from Biarritz. Something from the pages of Hesiod, with me in the leading bucket and moving at speed as if the beauty of the French countryside meant not a thing to any of us. On the road we saw demobilised French soldiers, who regarded us with neither hostility nor enthusiasm. We also saw piles of abandoned military equipment – rifles, helmets, ammunition boxes, even a few pieces of artillery. Just beyond the village of St-Palais we crossed the demarcation line into what was Vichy France. Not that there was much love for the French so close to the Spanish border, as Chief Inspector Oltramare – who spoke better German than I had supposed – now told me.
'The bastards hate us French even more than they hate you Germans,' he said. They don't speak much French. They don't speak much Spanish. I'm not even sure they speak Basque.'
Several times we overtook family cars heaped with luggage heading east along the main road to Toulouse.
'Why are they fleeing?' I asked Oltramare. 'Don't they know about the armistice?'
Oltramare shrugged, but as we overtook the next car he leaned out of the bucket and asked the occupants where they were going; and when these answered he nodded politely and crossed himself.
'They're from Biarritz,' he said. 'They're going to Lourdes. To pray for France.' He smiled. 'For a miracle, perhaps.'
'Don't you believe in miracles?'
'Oh yes. That is why I believe in Adolf Hitler. He's the one man who can save Europe from the curse of Bolshevism. That is what I believe.'
'I suppose that's why he signed a deal with Stalin,' I said. 'To save us all from Bolshevism.'
'But of course,' said Oltramare, as if such a thing was obvious. 'Don't you remember what happened in August 1914? Germany gambled on defeating France before Russia could mobilise and declare war. Which didn't happen. It's the same situation now, only the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact meant that attacking France was much less of a gamble than it was before. And you mark my words, Captain. Now that France is defeated, the Soviet Union, the true enemy of Western democracy, will be next.'
In the little town of Navarrenx we saw some German tanks and a couple of truckloads of SS and stopped to say hello and share cigarettes. Oltramare went to a shop to buy some matches and found there were none to be had. There was nothing to be had of anything – no food, no vegetables, no wine, and no cigarettes. He returned to the bucket cursing the locals.
'You can bet these bastards are hiding what they've got and waiting for the prices to go up so that they can gouge us,' he said.
'Wouldn't you do the same?' I said.
While he and I were talking many women came out of the local town hall, and it turned out that nearly all of them were German internees from the nearby camp at Gurs, where they'd been taken from locations all over France. They were pretty bitter about the conditions there but also because they'd been ordered to leave the area or face internment again as enemy aliens. And this was why the SS had stayed on in Navarrenx – to prevent this from happening. A truckload of SS and one of the women agreed to guide us to the camp at Gurs – which we were assured was not easily found – so that we might conduct our search for wanted persons. Meanwhile the French lawyer, Monsieur Savigny, began to argue with Commissioner Matignon and Major Bomelburg about the presence of these SS troops in the French zone.
'In my opinion,' Oltramare told Bomelburg afterwards, 'you should shoot that man. Yes, I think that would be best. Frankly, I am surprised you have not shot more. Myself I would have shot a great many people. Especially the people who were in charge of this country. To punish them would have been a mercy. To let them go was barbarous and cruel. Frankly, I don't know why you bother to take prisoners back to Germany when you could just shoot them here, by the roadside, and save yourselves a lot of time and effort.'
I frowned and shook my head at this display of pragmatic fascism. 'Why are you here, Chief Inspector?'
'I'm looking for someone, too,' he said with a shrug. 'A fugitive. Just like you, Captain. During the Spanish Civil War I fought on the Nationalist side. And I have a few scores to settle with some Republicans.'
'You mean it's personal.'
'When it involves the Spanish Civil War it's always personal, Monsieur. Many atrocities were committed. My own brother was murdered by a communist. He was a priest. They burned him alive inside his own church, in Catalonia. The man in charge was a Frenchman. A communist from Le Havre.'
'And if you find him? What then?'
Oltramare smiled. 'I will arrest him, Captain Gunther.'
I wasn't so sure about that. In fact I wasn't sure about anything as we left Navarrenx and headed south to Gurs. The SS troops in the truck now leading the way were singing 'Sieg Heil Viktoria'. I was starting to have misgivings about everything.
My driver and the corporal in the bucket's front passenger seat were more interested in the woman seated beside
Oltramare and me than in singing. Her name was Eva Kemmerich and she was extremely thin, which seemed to make her mouth too wide and her ears too big. Under her eyes were shadows like bat wings and she wore a pink handkerchief around her head to keep her hair tidy. It looked like the rubber on top of a pencil. In Gurs, she and the other women had suffered a tough time at the hands of the French.
'Conditions were barbaric,' she explained. 'They treated us like dogs. Worse than dogs. People talk about German anti- Semitism. Well, it's my considered opinion that the French just hate everyone who isn't French. Germans, Jews, Spanish, Poles, Italians – they were all treated equally badly. Gurs is a concentration camp, that's what it is, and the guards are absolute bastards. They worked us like slaves. Just look at my hands. My nails. They're ruined.'
She looked at Oltramare with ill-concealed contempt. 'Go on,' she told him. 'Look at them.'
'I am looking at them, mademoiselle.'
'Well? What's the idea of treating human beings like that? You're French. What's the big idea, Franzi?'
'I have no explanation, mademoiselle. And I have no excuse. All I can say is that before the war there were almost four million refugees living in France from countries all over Europe. That's ten per cent of our population. What were we to do with so many people, mademoiselle?'
'Actually it's madame,' she said. 'I had a wedding ring but it was stolen by one of your French guards. Not that it ever stayed on my finger after the diet I've endured. My husband is in another camp. Le Vernet. I hope things are better there. My God it could hardly be any worse. You know something? I'm sorry the war is over. I just wish our boys could have killed a lot more Frenchmen before they were obliged to throw in the towel.' She leaned forward and tapped the corporal and the driver on their shoulders. 'Christ, I'm proud of you, boys. You really gave the Franzis a well-deserved kicking. But if you want to put the cherry on my cake you'll arrest the criminal who's in charge of the camp at Gurs and shoot him down like the pig he is. Here, I tell you what, I'll sleep with whichever one of you puts a bullet in that bastard's head.'
The corporal looked at the driver and grinned. I could tell that the idea was not without appeal for him, so I said:
'And I will shoot whoever takes this lady up on her generous offer.' I took her bony hand in mine. 'Please don't do that again, Frau Kemmerich. I appreciate that you've had a rough time of it but I can't allow you to make things worse.'
'Worse?' she sneered. 'There isn't anything that's worse than Gurs.'
The camp, situated in the foothills of the Pyrenees, was much larger than I had supposed, covering an area of about a square kilometre, and was split into two halves. A makeshift street ran the length of the site and on each side there were three or four hundred wooden huts. There seemed to be no sanitation or running water and the smell was indescribable. I had been to Dachau. The only differences between Gurs and Dachau were that the
