Buch lesen: «The Soul Of A Thief»

I

IN THE SPRING of 1944, I realized that I was not going to survive the war.

There was, upon this revelation resisted for so long, a sublime unburdening of tension, a sensation of relief and release I had not enjoyed since being expelled as a boy from a Catholic public school in Vienna. After all, my survival until this point had been predicated upon a carefully executed waltz of luck and deception. But now, rather like a skilled player of Chemin de Fer who wins too long at the table, my good fortunes could not but fade, and my fatigue was draining my abilities to deceive.

I should make it clear that I did not harbor what the famed Viennese psychologists then termed as suicidal tendencies. Quite the contrary, I was a survivor by strength of will and character. However, some factors made it clear that emerging in one piece from this worldwide conflagration, with myself at its epicenter, was highly unlikely.

I was the young adjutant to an SS colonel named Himmel, whose actions reflected exactly the opposite of his heavenly moniker.

I was also, on paper, a Catholic named Brandt, yet in fact the descendant of a great-grandmother named Brandeis.

And finally, I was in love with the Colonel’s fiancée, a magnificent creature of my own age, who had just informed me that in fact my emotions for her were well requited.

No, it was not likely that I was going to survive this war. But inasmuch as the practicalities of shelter, sustenance and personal security can so easily be spurned in exchange for youthful and mad romance, I no longer cared. It had become very clear to me in the early months of that year, that unless I plumbed the depths of my courage and found the well of a reckless swashbuckler, the postwar world would be a morbid and cold planet, unfit for living.

And so, since I was unlikely to survive, I would make my dash for the gates with my love in hand. And, if I could hone every one of my strategic skills and adopt the soul of a thief, I would be very rich, to boot. Yes, in all likelihood, a rush of bullets would bring me to ground long before my escape.

But, so be it...

* * *

Colonel Himmel was a war hero, which made my status as his adjutant an envious position, if one viewed such employ through the eyes of a dedicated Nazi patriot. However, I was merely grateful that I had come to fill my position late in the game, for at barely nineteen years old, until the previous year I had been ineligible for more than cannon fodder on the Russian front or service in the Hitler Youth. This fine, upstanding organization I’d been forbidden to join in Vienna, as my ethnic background was in question. As for the infantry, my number had simply not yet come up.

Upon my expulsion from Gymnasium, I had been employed as a physician’s assistant in a Viennese hospital, which delayed my being swallowed up by the Wehrmacht. Yet it was there, while visiting a trio of his wounded commandos, that Himmel spotted me. He was a pure combat officer, decidedly apolitical, and I believe that what struck him was my appearance. I was a fine youth then, blond and blue-eyed and wiry, genetic gifts owing to the Balkan Semitic lineage of my great-grandmother rather than to any inheritance of an Aryan bent. He whispered a few inquiries to the doctors whom I served, and I was promptly whisked away to a new position and adventures I had not dreamed of, or wanted.

I was thankful, however, for having come to Himmel’s side at this latter stage of his commando career, because throughout the war his résumé had been quickly filled up with daring raids against Allied troops, mountaintop rescues of captured officers, and the long-range executions of enemy generals. The Colonel had a tendency to reward his support staff by insisting they accompany him on most such ventures, and so, a long list of previous adjutants, company clerks and even cooks had been killed in action on a number of fronts. My recruitment to the Colonel’s staff in 1943 somewhat lessened the odds of my falling prey to foreign shellfire while shining the commander’s jackboots, but it was in any event a nerve-racking assignment.

You see, Himmel had been twice awarded the Iron Cross, as well as the Knight’s Cross for exemplary valor, on one occasion by Adolf Hitler himself. I shall briefly digress to say that I am not proud to have been in attendance for that ceremony, but it was most certainly a surreal dinner soirée I shall never forget, for it is seared upon my mind’s eye. The awardees, more than two hundred officers from various branches of the Wehrmacht, Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe, were invited to the Eagle’s Lair at Berchtesgaden. Of course, I use the term “invited” with tongue in cheek, for these weary men were ordered to appear on the given eve, despite their presently distant locations or battlefield predicaments.

Thus, the towering antechamber of Hitler’s Schloss was awash with men in dress uniforms, yet one must realize that so many of these previously perfectly tailored tunics and jodhpurs had been stowed now for years in Panzer tanks, Heinkel bombers or U-boats. The courageous officers had done their best to shine cracked boots, polish rusted buckles and steam the wrinkles from moth-eaten wools, yet even so, it all appeared much like a costume ball in the tenth level of hell. The submariners’ beards were badly trimmed, the Luftwaffe pilots’ eyes gleamed with fatigue, and some of the infantry heroes actually had caked spots of blood on their cuffs and lapels, as their most recent wounds still oozed. I hardly think now that many of them remained ardent worshippers of their Führer, yet like Roman legionnaires in the presence of Caesar, they managed to effect erect spines and the gunshot clicks of heels.

Hitler was customarily late, by I believe at least two hours, and I shall never forget his demeanor when he finally appeared. He seemed, quite frankly, completely surprised, and subsequently annoyed. He behaved like a man whose wife has invited guests to dinner without his consent, and it was only when Goering whispered a reminder in his ear that he dredged up the manners to stay the course. So quickly did he dispense the medals, with scarcely a complimentary word and absently offering that embarrassingly limp handshake of his, that I imagined his primary motive here was to finish with it and hurry to the toilet.

Of course, had I shared my view with a single soul, including any other young adjutant or even a castle cook, I most certainly would have found myself immediately en route to Smolensk, or worse. However, just after the Führer’s departure, I offered Colonel Himmel a champagne glass from a silver tray and congratulated him for his courage, which I had too often personally witnessed along with an accompanying clutch of my sphincter. The Colonel received his drink, nodded his gratitude, and very briefly rolled his single eye. He then smiled at me for a millisecond and quickly issued me an order of some kind, yet the moment had been shared.

For an assassin, a brigand, a tyrant and a thief, my master did have his good points.

To me, Himmel’s most endearing quality was that he never fully inquired as to my background. During the prewar years and throughout the conflict, it was incumbent upon elite Nazi officers to fully vet each member of their command, despite the assumption that the Gestapo had already done so. Yet Himmel had always been a career combatant, regarding Hitler’s anti-Semitic diatribes as nothing more than a rallying point around which to galvanize the populace. Having not a bone of fear in his body, he dismissed the regulatory racial codes with a snort, and assembled his company of Waffen Schutzstaffel based upon performance, and nothing else. Thus, his command was peppered with a number of racially questionable men of swarthy complexions and altered family names, and I would not be surprised if it included a gypsy or two.

Of course, having none of this information upon being fairly kidnapped by the Colonel, I spent my first two months quivering in his presence. I was waiting for him to summon me and wave a Gestapo document in my face, some horrendously accurate accusation that there was, in fact, a wizened old Jewess concealed among the many branches of my family tree. That, in itself, would have been enough for any other such officer to have me shot. The full truth, in fact, was worse.

My beloved father and mother were devout Catholics, which one might think a guarantee of my immediate lineage. However, one must also realize that devotion to God, under the Nazi reanalysis of religion, was not viewed kindly by the authorities. Adolf Hitler had become the New God of Germany and its protectorates, with Christ a poor third to the Führer and his pagan symbols, such as Albert Speer’s monolithic architectures and the towering iron statues of eagles, stag horns and the like. If you were a devout Catholic, you were expected to display your crucifix as nothing more than proof of your ethnic purity. In Vienna, the city of my birth and youth, the Anschluss had provided Germany’s Nazis with a pool of deeply fanatical followers. Those who claim that the Austrians were so much worse than the Germans themselves are correct, for there is no one more obsessive than a convert.

My father would not, however, relinquish his religious beliefs. And although he supported the economic and political precepts of Nazism, he refused to rein in his attendance of Mass, regular confessions or charity efforts for the Church. Such behavior greatly frightened my mother, of course, who was edgy enough given our genetic status and the questionable position of her only son. Yet the authorities, recognizing my father to be a man of some age and granted eccentricities, declined to rigorously pursue his conversion to Hitlerism. That is, until he strayed too far.

My father was, by trade, a book seller. Adolf Hitler was, by choice, a book burner. It required no more than one massive, flaming pyre of the classics to set my father’s inner rage alight, and thereafter he was a changed man. He quietly joined “O 5,” the Austrian anti-Nazi resistance movement. On the evening after Kristallnacht, during which every Jewish shop and synagogue in Vienna was burned to the ground by the Brown Shirts, along with approximately twenty thousand copies of both the Old and New Testaments, three members of that thugly gang were found murdered in the Tenth District. My father returned late that evening, exuding an odor of fear and adrenaline, and he packed a single suitcase, hugged myself and my mother to him, and informed us that he would have to leave immediately or endanger our lives.

I never saw him again. But still today, there remains etched into the exterior of the great St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, a white scrawled carving of defiance, the figures “O 5.” I have been told that my father was the very chiseler of that message from the underground.

So, you can well understand why my first few months with Himmel were so fraught with the constant urge to pee, even though he appeared to regard my history as irrelevant.

The second trait which so endeared my master to me, as it were, was his choice of women. I refer not, of course, to the long line of prostitutes and desperately widowed wives we encountered in our travels throughout Italy, the Rhineland or France. Some of these Himmel paid well as he invited them to bed, and some he spontaneously mounted in empty castle keeps and haylofts. These he regarded as the spoils of war and nothing more.

The true measure of his good taste was revealed in the selection of Gabrielle. We had settled temporarily near Le Pontet, a village beside the fabled French town of Avignon, for a spate of rest and recreation. Much of the small ville had suffered from errant Allied bombs, and a large German field hospital had been erected in the meadows as a sort of waypoint and triage center for the wounded from all fronts. The slim bridges of the Rhone were constantly awash in horse-drawn wagons, with the local French girls essentially enslaved as nurses to transport and tend the injured. It was there, above the bloody river waters that would someday be bottled and sold by the shipload to American supermarkets, that Himmel spotted her.

She was virtually a child, barely eighteen years of age, the daughter of Le Pontet’s mayor, who had been executed by the Gestapo. Despite the soiled appearance of all the other females employed by our army, Gabrielle’s skin was pure and translucent, her fingernails unbroken, the flaxen blond hair that framed her diamond blue eyes falling straight and true to her slim waist. As she sat upon the bench of a caisson that contained the writhing forms of three wounded panzer crew, her chin erect and her hands lightly snapping the reins of her horses, it was clear that she had inherited a strand of royal French genes. Himmel ordered the driver of his Kübelwagen to halt, and he immediately fell in love. He was done with whoring.

The rest of how I came to know her, I shall leave for later telling.

And finally, the Colonel’s third trait which I came to temporarily admire was his greed. Perhaps that is unfair, and a more generous description of his calculations might be called practicality. After all, his strategic assessments of any given situation were almost always correct, and his analysis of the war’s progress, despite his own personal victories, was untempered by emotion. By the time I joined him, Himmel knew that Germany was going to lose this war. He also knew that the Allies were about to mount a massive invasion of the continent, the furious tide of which would not be repulsed. Despite the erroneous hunches of Hitler and the endless arguments of the High Command, Himmel would regularly spread a map of Europe across any makeshift dining table or vehicle boot, jab a finger at the coast of Normandy and state, “Here. It will come here.”

Although I shall never be so immodest as to claim that I had become the Colonel’s confidant, practicality dictated that he place his trust in my circumspection. Someone had to safekeep the Colonel’s papers, plans and plots, and inasmuch as I was imprisoned by my Mischling lineage and apparently no threat to him, he chose to trust me implicitly. Of course, before actually doing so, he did remind me that any slip of my tongue would result in an instant and painful death, without benefit of a hearing.

Thus, I came to know that Himmel planned to finish out the war not only as a survivor, but as a very wealthy one. He surmised that there were other high-ranking officers who had made the same calculations, some of whom had access to the whereabouts of Nazi gold stores and caches of jewels and works of art accrued during various occupations. But as my supremely practical commander determined, gold and trinkets were simply too heavy and unwieldy a treasure; difficult to transport, impossible to conceal.

He reasoned that the Allies would storm ashore in France sometime in the summer of the year. He also reasoned that with so many hundreds of thousands of Allied troops on the march, their paymasters would not be far behind. With the end of the war nearly visible on the horizon, all currencies in Europe would become essentially useless, save the American dollar, or the British pound.

The Allied Army’s treasury corps would doubtless be following their troops in heavily armored convoys of some sort. This would be Himmel’s swan song, his epitomal target, his final mission.

He was going to steal it from them.

And I was going to steal it from him...