Through War & Adversity - Chapter 3 - Part I

KRAUSE

3.

1940

PARIS

The Gestapo man took the 9mm Walther P08 out of his pocket.  He screwed a silencer fitted for a Luger (the manufacturers made no difference) to the muzzle’s front end, and flicked the safety catch down, and waited for some courage, courage to kill this woman.

Krause had never killed before.  He was uncertain whether to wake her up and do it or kill her in her sleep. With the Geheime Staatspolizei going the way it was, he couldn’t afford to look uncertain or worse, weak.  

His investigations into the disappearance of Marc d’Erlanger and his wife Madeleine had turned up trumps.  He had them now.  The whole affair had started when the Germans occupied the city on the fourteenth of June.  Otto Krause was one of many trained officers appointed to round up the remaining officials in the government.  Some had remained out of loyalty to their city and country and would fall on their own sword.  The Gestapo ordered these executions – real cloak and dagger stuff – with a view to quelling a possible future uprising.  The Parisians had already surrendered but they were taking no chances.  Philippe Pétain, the new head of the French Government, announced for the fighting to stop.  He realised it was futile to take the Germans on.

It had taken Krause ten days to find the decorated hero, Marc d’Erlanger.  In that time the French Prime Minister, a spineless politician in his early sixties named Paul Reynaud, had resigned and Pétain, a fossil of the First World War, was ushered in to surrender unequivocally.  He had told them to stop fighting in the streets – they were now completely open to occupation.  Krause saw them as cowards, more concerned with self-preservation than saving face.  General de Gaulle, rather than stand with his government as it burned to the ground, had flown to London.  That day the Führer, in a few hours’ time, would be touring the city.  Though he had worked into the small hours, Krause had no intention of missing the Führer on his first trip to Paris.  It may be a once in a lifetime opportunity.

That evening, once he knew the location of d’Erlanger’s hideout, he put in a fully-detailed report in with the office.  Krause’s station was based in an old post office in the tenth Arrondissement.  His report ended in a request for a kill order.  He expected it to take a couple of days, with the necessary signatures to be made and so forth, but it was granted instantly and with immediate effect.  A Lieutenant-Colonel in the SS had come from down his office on the fourth-floor to Krause’s.  He shared an office with three other men and two women.  The desks were separated by glass partitions and they tended to their own respective duties.  When the door flew open into the room, each of them leapt to attention, the Lieutenant-Colonel dismissed the pleasantries with a flick of the wrist and walked over.

‘We can’t have them thinking we’re soft,’ he said, handing the stamped document back to him. ‘Chuck it when you’re done,’ The Lieutenant-Colonel didn’t bother saluting, he marched out of the office and headed straight upstairs, he had a great many other things to attend to. 

Otto Krause left the building and didn’t return to it.

d’Erlanger was a very slick and very cunning man going into his late fifties.  He had once been totally ruthless and a man of power.  In the days before the war with Germany, he had the ear of de Gaulle.  He was one of the General’s most-trusted confidants.  He was also very wealthy and kept a number of properties on expenses throughout the city.  He let them out, which were mostly flats, to the upper and lower classes. 

When Krause conducted his investigation into d’Erlanger’s disappearance, he started by going door-to-door to see if he was hiding in one of the properties.  As he expected, the residents didn’t know who he was or had even heard of a d’Erlanger.  It was somebody else entirely who did the rounds.  Krause debated going after this person; the middleman, a chap in his forties with reddish hair who may or may not have been a friend of d’Erlanger.  But he decided against it.  What would he do if he caught up with him?  He only serves as a maintenance man – what if he didn’t know anything?  The d’Erlanger’s could be out of the city and on a plane by the time he found this man.  He couldn’t chance that, not with the French government breaking the land speed record to Vichy and further overseas.   

In his own research, he found out that the d’Erlanger family went back many years; a wealthy and very respected name in the French aristocracy.  Though they had their roots in Germany, they had spread across the French colonial empire in the sixteenth century to as far afield as Mauritius and the République d'Haïti. 

In the First World War, Marc d’Erlanger left the École Normale Supérieure in Paris for the Kingdom of Montenegro.  He went there armed with a considerable trust fund left to him by his mother.  He sold the government, based in Podgorica, artillery on behalf of the French.  He went back to the French and they accepted.  In short, the Montenegrins paid more and made him a profit.  It made a fortune.  When d’Erlanger returned to France in 1919, he greased a few palms and blackmailed ministers in the government.  He was presented with a medal of the Legion of Honour for his ‘involvement’ in the Battle of Verdun.  He was recognised as a hero, not an arms dealer. 

That being said, as Krause would later add in his final report, d’Erlanger assigned a dozen or so shipments to the Ottomans from the Montenegrins’ supply.  This was confirmed in a report leftover from the War.  Despite their own crushing debts and a struggling empire, the Ottomans had paid him in full.  They transported the weapons to Karkemish.  The telephone operator giving him this information referred to a footnote with T. E. Lawrence’s name at the bottom.  Before the operator could expand on it, a young woman with a homely Frankfurt accent (Krause having grown up in Darmstadt himself), the telephone on the other end of the line was disconnected. 

Krause compartmentalized his thoughts, storing the needless information in another part of his brain.  He wouldn’t need it to kill the man.  Orders were orders.  d’Erlanger was a bastard from what he knew, pure and simple.  He didn’t know who he was aligned with and how he had gotten so deep into the world of politics by a phoney war record, but the man appalled him. 

Krause saw himself as a representation of the man’s unatoned sins and once he was given the green light, on this or any other assignment, he would stop at nothing to see it through, even if it involved the possibility of murder.    

Now that Krause had found him.  Searching over a dozen properties and slums.  He had come to a two-storey building with whitewashed walls.  It was on the rougher end of the fourteenth arrondissement, the working-class district of Paris, but he recognised a certain charm and elegance to the place.  The roads were kept tidy and there were several odd-looking streets that branched out from the main ones.  He imagined one knew everybody’s business in such a community.  The exterior of d’Erlanger’s property didn’t impress him in the slightest.  It looked dirty and built on the cheap.  It was perhaps the grubbiest of the buildings he had seen over the ten days.  He opened the door and went up the flight of steps to the apartment. 

When he tried the door – seeing that it was locked from the inside by a chain in the door’s gap – he knew he was onto something.  None of the other properties had even a door-lock.  He went to his belt and took out his dagger – an embellished Postschutz with an ebony wooden grip – and lifted the chain up, pulling down on the handle in the same movement and going inside.   

Though it was dark inside he could still see.  He took a few moments for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, but he moved down the corridor slowly and confident that he had got his man.  Three doors zigzagged along the hallway.  He assumed that the middle one was a parlour room or some kind of living room, the one closest to the entrance was most likely to be the bathroom (the door was noticeably smaller than the other two) and the door at the end, which was opposite an antique mirror, would have to be the bedroom.  He watched himself open the door in the mirror, squeezing on the handle as gently as he possibly could, and turned the corner. 

He was right.

The door closed silently behind him.  His target slept in a king-sized bed without a wooden headboard.  His wife was at his side.  At the foot of their bed were several cases and a circular box which Krause presumed, contained Madame d’Erlanger’s best hat.  He was much fatter than Krause had previously imagined.  He expected a Cecil Rhodes-sort-of-type: hard, educated, but with an amount of self-respect.  The man before him had none – the oaf hadn’t bothered to shave in over a week.   

Leaning over d’Erlanger’s bed, his silenced gun at the ready, he realised that it was the wife who needed to go first.  Madeleine was laying on her side with the linen bedcovers pulled up to her chin and was fast asleep. 

She looked peaceful: in the morning she and her husband would be on a plane bound for Casablanca (according to the brown handwritten labels on their luggage) and very far away from occupied France.  Krause noticed that she was considerably younger than him, closer to his age than d’Erlanger’s, with full locks of brown hair curling down the sides of her face.  Krause wondered if she was annoyed at her husband, the man and the reason why she had to leave their lavish, old-fashioned townhouse on the other side of the city: fitted with Scandinavian curtains and thick carpets and servants.  Or was she the sentimental type?  Did she actually love this fat bastard?

He stared into the lightly sunburned face and smiled.  The nostrils flared in time with the rising and falling of her chest, expelling long, quiet snores.  She really was quite beautiful.  He thought back to what the Lieutenant-Colonel had said to him – being ‘soft’ would be to spare her, so he would kill her too – just to prove a point to his superiors.  Thankfully, the couple didn’t have children as far as he could gather, there was nobody else in the flat.

It was a warm night.  A soft breeze blew through the crack in the window and found Krause standing by the bed.

He could smell her, the hand soap she had washed her face with before undressing for bed.  The last traces of perfume from the night before.  Had they gone for a drink or dined somewhere nice?  Or was she just keeping up appearances?  In the silence of the room, Krause could hear himself breathing with a heaviness typical of an asthmatic or a chain-smoker.

Madame d’Erlanger began to stir in her sleep and it woke him out of his own.  Action, reaction.

Pointing the Walther at her head with his left hand, he leaned forward and smothered her squeals with his right.  Her eyes sprang open, wide and fearful, they were sea-blue in colour.  They appeared to know who Krause was, what he represented, and what he intended to do her and her husband.  It was impossible to breathe with his hand clamped down so tightly over her mouth. 

She saw him, a man bearing the Nazi insignia, wearing a cruel sneer, bearing a recent scar that cut his left eyebrow into two.  There was an almost loving look in his eyes, as though he were a parent putting his child to sleep.

‘Listen to me,’ he said in poor French.

She nodded, slowly.  She didn’t want to startle him.  She saw the man’s eyes looking over her body, the eyes of a wolf about to devour a stuck pig.  She nodded again, forcing him to return his attention back to her eyes.

‘I just wanted you to comprendre,’ he stammered.  ‘I want you to understand that it was your husband who did this to you, not me.’