She whipped out the Glock. But he was gone. Only a whiff of lime lingered in the air.
She was shaking so much she couldn't keep her hands steady. She forced herself to take deep breaths and slip the safety back on. How deep had she waded in—and what kind of trouble was this anyway?
The indentations where Herve Vitold's fingers had pinched her wrists were still visibly white. She rewound the videotape and printed a photo of him. She remembered that Texas saying 'Not fit for dog meat,' and wrote that in red across Vitold's image.
After she grew calm enough to work, she sat back at her computer. She knew access codes changed daily in the security branch at La Defense. Within ten minutes, she had bypassed the 'secure' government system, accessed their database, and found Bourget Special Branch.
The Bourget chain of command, responsible for antiterrorism functions, only crossed municipal police lines in the event of attack bombings, hostage situations, and the like. Not cold bodies of old women with swastikas carved into their foreheads.
Then she checked BRI's files, but no Herve Vitold came up. She spent two hours logging into all government branches with corresponding security.
If Vitold was who he purported to be, then Aimee was Madame Charles de Gaulle, God rest her soul. She found no one named Herve Vitold existing in any data bank.
THE GRAVELLY VOICE DIDN'T sound happy.
'Consider this an order, Hartmuth. The chancellor is very set on this item of the trade agenda.'
Hartmuth kept his voice level. '
He clicked off. Briefly he wondered about Bonn's reaction if he didn't sign the agreement.
Hartmuth wearily set his briefcase down on the Aubusson carpet, collapsing into the recamier's brocade. All the rooms were furnished in authentic antiques, yet they were so comfortable, he thought. This silver-and-silk- threaded pillow was familiar, like the kind his mother embroidered on winter evenings long ago.
But that world had been shattered out of existence. Setting his stockinged feet upon the pillow, he lay back exhausted and closed his eyes.
Yet he couldn't sleep. He relived the journey, the one in which he returned to his father's home on the outskirts of Hamburg. Of ninety-one thousand taken at the defeat of Stalingrad he'd been one of the five thousand Germans limping back after the Siberian work camps.
At the end of the muddy road, rutted with bomb craters, he'd recognized the blistered paint and blown-out windows. Entering the doorless shell, now empty and deserted, he'd seen that even the fireplace bricks had been taken. He shuffled to the back, looking for his fiancee, Grete. His family had arranged their betrothal while they were in the Gymnasium, before the war.
A steady chopping and then a sound of splintering wood came from a dilapidated outbuilding in the crisp, bitter air. Red-faced, her breath frosty on a chill March afternoon, Grete was chopping down the back garden shed for firewood, using a rusty ax. She clapped a cracked and bleeding hand over her mouth, stifling her cries, and hugged him.
'You're alive!' she'd finally managed to say, her voice breaking with emotion. 'Katia, Papi is here. Your Papi!' Grete said, shivering in the icy wind.
A child, wrapped in sewn-together burlap sacks, sat in a nearby wheelbarrow. Oddly, he felt no affection for this hollow-cheeked, runny-nosed creature with yellow ooze dripping out of her eyes. The baby had been playing with a warped photo album and his father's violin bow, all that remained of his family. Grete assured him proudly that Katia was his, born of their coupling on his last furlough in 1942. Yes, he remembered that. He'd been so anxious, after his fiancee's doughlike legs and desperate embrace, to return to Paris and Sarah.
He knew Katia was his and he resented her. He wished he didn't. Guilt flooded through him for not wanting his own child.
Because of Katia he knew he'd have to stay and take care of them, marry Grete, and keep his promise. She deserved it, for bearing his child, protecting the house. She told him herself what had happened to his parents.
'Helmut, the snow hadn't melted by April and Muti and Papi couldn't stand to see Katia shiver so badly. They decided to investigate a rumor about black-market blankets in Hamburg. Only one tram was left running, painted white and red to resemble medical transport,' she said. 'I'm sorry.' Grete put her head down. 'I'm sure they didn't feel a thing, Helmut. We saw yellow-white light.' She pointed beyond the muddy, rutted road. 'After the explosion, smoke billowed into the sky and a rain of little red slivers fell on the snowy field.'
He wondered if she was telling the truth or was the truth too painful to tell? It sounded like the explosions in the Siberian oil field where he'd been a POW. Working at the camp in the frozen tundra, men had been burnt by eruptions of fire on ice into charred cinders before his eyes. He wore gloves to cover the skin grafts crisscrossing the old burns on his hands.
He sat up in a cold sweat. Loyal and steadfast Grete, she hadn't deserved his gift of an empty heart. But he couldn't very well go back to France then—he, an ex-Nazi just out of a POW camp, to search for a Jewish girl, a collaborator.
Postwar Germany had no services, no food. Grete cooked the roots and tubers he found by clawing under the snow. Scavenging in the forest, he dreamed of Sarah, seeing her face in the catacombs as they shared tins of black-market pate.
But all around him, people boiled and ate their shoe leather if they had any. He sold his mother's pearls for a sack of half-rotten potatoes that kept their hunger at bay. Gangs of children ran after the few running trains, fighting over burned pieces of coal that fell onto the tracks, hoping to find some only half-burned. They weren't allowed back into the basements under the rubble until they brought something to eat or burn.
Hollow and numb most of the time, he survived by his wits and by scavenging. At night, spooned between Grete and Katia for warmth, he'd see Sarah's curved white thighs, feel her velvety skin, and imagine her blue eyes.
Grete knew right away he didn't love her, that he loved someone else. But they married with no regrets. No one had time for regrets in postwar Germany, and he and Grete worked well together. They were a team of two dragging Katia along. Her eyes never seemed to heal. One eye stayed closed and continually dripped. There was no penicillin to be had and no money for the black market.
Grete appeared one day with tubes and packets stuffed in the pockets of her too-small winter coat. She pulled out a fat tube of metallic-smelling ointment.
'Helmut, hold her, please. This will help her eyes,' Grete said. Firmly she rubbed it around and inside Katia's lids as much as she could, while he held his squirming child. Then Grete pulled some huge yellow-and-black pellets out of a paper packet. 'Good girl, Katia, now just swallow these. Here's some cold tea to help them go down,' Grete said soothingly.
Katia made a face and spit them out. Grete stuffed them back in her mouth.
'Grete, Grete, what are you doing?' He thought Grete had gone crazy and was giving Katia dead bees to eat because she was so hungry.
Her eyes flashed angrily, 'It's medicine! She has to take them or she'll be blind,
And he did. He never forgot what those huge penicillin tablets looked like and how Grete's face had looked as they got them down Katia. Only the GIs had them. Katia's eyes got better and he never asked Grete how she had got the penicillin.
