The German Half-Bloods (The Half-Bloods Trilogy Book 1) Page 15

  Max’s perfect command of the German language had allowed him to not only detect nuances and coded messages in conversations but also to mix socially with Nazis visiting Paris. He touted his watches, often making gifts of them to Germans in the diplomatic corps in return for their friendship. Hitler’s followers were suspicious by nature, tending to keep to their cronies and ringing themselves off to outsiders. They were well-aware of their unpopularity with almost all other European nations including a majority of the British public, but to his disgust, some fascist aristocrats praised the Führer, and one or two had gone so far as to attend Nazi weddings in Germany.

  MI6 knew exactly who the Hitler sycophants were and had taken steps to keep them in their sights. Its twenty-four-hour surveillance of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor had been viewed as unethical by a few people at the Foreign Office, but when it became clear that the ex-king was deepening his friendship with Hitler, the Intelligence Service infiltrated a spy into the duke’s inner circle in the guise of a security officer. That’s how much they trusted the abdicated king; the bloody traitor.

  Max spotted Klara walking into the lobby. She ignored him, as she’d been taught to do, and went directly to the lifts. Max waited for another five minutes and then followed her up to the room. She was already inside, sitting on the edge of the bed smiling mischievously at him when he closed the bedroom door behind him.

  “I see you’ve already packed,” she said, frowning at the open suitcase on the floor. “These two weeks have flown by, Max. Why does time have to move so fast when you’re with me and creep too slowly when we’re apart?”

  He pulled her to her feet and kissed her soundly on the lips, unwilling to waste a second. She stifled a sob as the kiss became hungrier and his fingers dug deeper into her flesh.

  “I love you, Max,” she said, breathless.

  He undressed her. At the same time, she attended to his shirt buttons until her trembling fingers gave up and she ripped the buttons and buttonholes apart.

  They fell onto the bed, their naked bodies entwined. She straddled him, pulling his face up to hers for another deep kiss. Max groaned as he entered her. “I want to remember this moment forever,” he whispered, fixing his eyes upon hers before moving his hips beneath her. She threw her head back as she arched her spine with pleasure, her moans drowning his.

  The explosion reverberated around the room. The glass from the windows shattered and showered their bodies; their lovemaking halting at its most fervent moment.

  Dazed and bloody, they leapt off the bed just as the second German bomb fell on Paris.

  Chapter Twenty

  The third bomb landed even closer to the Lutetia than the previous ones. Ornaments in the room vibrated or fell off the sideboard and coffee table. Klara squealed when a flash of light blanched the slate-grey sky outside and the bomb blast made the furniture wobble. Max, already on his feet, dragged her naked body off the bed and onto the floor.

  The shells, whistling as they fell, continued to strike Paris, but they seemed to be more distant now, concentrated in and around the western suburbs. Max and Klara lay underneath the duvet on the floor, relatively safe from flying objects and debris, but doomed all the same if the Germans made a direct hit on the building. Klara prayed in Polish while Max stroked her hair and silently plotted a route back to Chirac’s shop.

  Ten minutes later the bombing halted, and outside, panic set in. People were yelling in the street below and hotel guests ran along the corridor towards the stairwell. Alarm bells rang throughout the building. Unhelpful, and too late to warn the public about the initial attack, the unearthly racket only heightened people’s fear of further air raids.

  Klara pulled some shards of glass from Max’s shoulder, mopping the blood with the duvet. She wanted to treat his wounds, but he insisted on leaving the hotel at once. “You can patch me up when we get back to Chirac’s shop,” he told her as they got dressed. She nodded, but shock was setting in and she was beginning to shiver. Max grabbed a blanket from a high shelf in the wardrobe and then wrapped it around her shoulders. Blood trickled down her neck in a narrow stream, but she hadn’t noticed it.

  Paris’ shocked population was spilling onto the streets, but abandoned cars and buses blocked many of the roads and slowed down those on foot from getting to wherever they were heading. The blockages also made it impossible for ambulances to reach the fires visible to the west of Max’s hotel.

  As they ran, they bumped into a young couple. The woman was cradling a baby in her arms, her husband was pushing the empty pram. “How could this happen to us in Paris? What have we done to the Germans?” the woman sobbed to Max. “Nothing, nothing at all. Not in Paris!”

  The husband, waving a cigarette between his trembling fingers, apologised for his hysterical wife. “Pardon, Monsieur, she’s just seen an old woman die in the street – a heart attack, I think. I’ve never seen panic like this before. It’s like the end of the world is coming.”

  “I’m sorry,” Max replied, not knowing what else to say. Everywhere he looked, stunned people were weeping and yelling the same words, “Not Paris! Not Paris!” as though the grand city was too precious, too beautiful and too rich in history to be tarnished or destroyed by bombs. It was unthinkable.

  Monsieur Chirac’s shop was now only a couple of streets away, and against his better judgement, Max put his arm around Klara’s waist and held her tight, hoping to ease her shivering. Finally, when they reached the corner and the shop’s sign came into view, he let her go. Their affair was foolhardy, but he wasn’t daft enough to take the chance of Romek spotting them together. “Go on ahead, darling. I’ll be right behind you.”

  Klara clasped him to her. “Please, don’t leave tonight. Stay with me, Max. Please, I can’t bear it when you leave me.”

  As he searched her eyes, Max wondered if this would be his last trip to Paris and maybe the last time he would see the woman he loved. He had come to France for Chirac, but he’d always intended to take Klara home with him. His professional relationship with Romek would be over, for if their affair was discovered, Romek would demand another handler, and Heller at headquarters would rant about unprofessional conduct; but that was the price Max was willing to pay to have her.

  “Darling, leave with me. Come to England … please.” His face, white with shock and fear, searched her eyes. “We must do it, sweetheart. We’ve run out of time.”

  Her eyelashes were wet with tears. “I wish ... I want to ... but I can’t. My place is here. I told you in Warsaw, I won’t leave him. He’s my husband. He’s a good man who’s always been loyal to me. He loves me, Max … and I can’t … I will not abandon my duty to him or the country that has given me a home.”

  ******

  Later that day, when everyone was safely at the shop, Romek finally persuaded Monsieur Chirac and his wife to leave for Marseille. The Germans were nowhere near France’s southern border, Romek assured Chirac, but if the worse came to the worse they could slip into Spain. That country was a German ally but was still recovering from its Civil War and in no state to enter a new conflict.

  When Chirac finally agreed, he tried to telephone his niece in Marseille with the news that he and his wife were going to stay with her, however, the telephone lines were down. Romek, undeterred and afraid of a mass exodus from Paris, raced immediately to the Gare-du-Nord train station to purchase tickets for the Chiracs for the following day.

  On Romek’s return, he, Max and Chirac, held their final meeting together. High on their agenda were Romek’s two sub-agents. They were French-born but had both worked in Germany during its reconstruction period after the Great War. Builders and demolition experts by trade, they were too old to fight, but not too old to cause injury to the German logistics divisions. One of the men, experienced in working with explosives, had recently suggested that they should blow up roads and train lines to slow down the German advance, but Romek had been adamant that the French army and her allies would hold the massive enemy f
orce at bay and eventually push them back behind German lines. Max disagreed. German tanks and air power were far superior and more organised than anything the French had to offer, and he believed that the Nazis were going to march into the capital and call it home.

  Henri and Oscar, Romek’s sub-agents, took their instructions from Romek alone. Recently, he’d sent them to gather information on the German army’s manoeuvres on the French-Belgium border, and they’d returned only that morning with the disturbing news that British, Belgian and French forces had been pushed back to the sea by Germany’s mobile operations in Dunkirk. “We will get no help from the Expeditionary Forces,” Oscar had stated. “They’re fleeing to the beaches and trying to get back across the Channel to England.”

  Neither Oscar nor Henri had met Max, and they never would. His identity as Romek’s handler had to remain secret, especially now that France was officially at war. Nor did they know about Klara or Chirac’s photographic shop, and Max had warned Romek of the danger to Klara should the sub-agents ever find out she was also a spy. There was nothing worse than a spy knowing too much, Max had once told Romek. The latter had always considered that to be a contradiction in terms until Max explained that when being interrogated by an enemy, plausible deniability and ignorance was one’s best defence. “It’s one thing for an enemy to take your life, Romek, but when he takes your secrets as well it adds insult to injury.”

  When Max had gone to Paris at the end of the previous year it had been to assist Romek in his recruitment drive. He had followed the would-be spies over a period of two weeks, shadowing one then the other, getting to know their habits, to whom they spoke, where they lived and where they routinely went. He’d listened in on conversations between Romek and the men on separate occasions in the Hotel Lutetia, and through his observations had concluded that both Frenchmen were genuine with deep-seated hatred, not for Germans per se, but for the Nazi party. They had seen the harsh treatment of Jews in Germany and believed that Hitler would do the same to French Jews.

  On one occasion in Hotel Lutetia’s bar, Max had overheard snippets of conversation between Oscar and Romek. “Look, I’ll be honest. I’m not a do-gooder. I don’t like or dislike Jews,” Oscar had claimed. “I’ve never had many Jewish friends, but I’ve also never had any Jewish enemies. They’re greedy buggers, always thinking about money. I hate the way the men dress and the women screech, and how they work their fingers to the bone making the rest of us look lazy. You know, Romek, when I lived in Germany I didn’t speak out or do anything to help an old Rabbi who was battered with sticks in the street, nor did I go to the aid of a woman who was thrown out of a shop on her ear and told not to come back. I walked past her as she lay on the ground sobbing. She wasn’t my problem, you see. Jews didn’t affect my life, and I wasn’t going to get into trouble with the Gestapo on their account.”

  “So, what’s changed? Are you saying that you want to work for me because of a recent urge to save Jews?”

  “No, it goes much deeper than that. We’re civilised and liberal here. We drink wine, make love to our wives, dance and shout at our government on occasion when we disagree with their policies. We’re not like the Germans who look as though they’ve had wooden poles inserted in their arseholes and their lips sewn together to stop them from laughing. French Jews are our Jews, and for all their annoying idiosyncrasies, no Nazi is going to march in here and tell us who can and can’t live freely in our country.”

  Max had been shocked by the openness of the conversation in such a public place, even though it had been quiet at the time the discussion had taken place. He had taken Romek to task afterwards, berating him for being careless.

  While waiting for the reply to his latest radio transmission, Max huddled in Monsieur Chirac’s basement, and in that darkened space he considered his future. He and Romek had planned to set up a Resistance group should the Germans reach Paris. They drank wine together, chatted fondly about Poland, England, and how to beat the Germans, played cards and ate dinner upstairs with Klara. But when the lights went out at night, and she got into bed with Romek, Max was left alone to confront his bitterness and his futile love. And his reflections had brought him to a painful decision.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  On June 7th, Max’s extraction orders finally came through. Romek had left that morning on an errand and Klara was alone upstairs, giving Max the perfect opportunity to say goodbye to her in private.

  She was at the sink with her back to him, but instead of giving in to the urge to embrace her, he kept his distance by remaining in the doorway. “Klara, I’m leaving tonight, and this is the only chance I’ll have to talk to you.”

  Klara bit her lip, her eyes stinging with the tears she was desperately trying to quell. When she turned to face him, Max crossed the room and took her hand. “Look at you, my beautiful angel. When I got my orders just now I felt as though I’d been punched in the gut … as if my life would end if I lost you. Darling, let me send for you when I get to London. There will be paperwork to fill out and security checks to do but you’ll come through them with flying colours...”

  “Max, I can’t…”

  “Shh. Sit with me for a minute.” He led her to the couch in the living room, sitting as close to her as he dared. He gazed in her bright eyes, melting in the love he saw in them. When he wasn’t with her, his days were full of agony, yet also full of hope for a future together. She was bound to come to her senses, he’d often told himself. She’d eventually see that he was the man she should be with for the rest of her life. He’d always believed that she would ultimately break free of her marriage, but when she turned him down two days earlier, he’d admitted that he could no longer live with constant expectations and disappointments.

  “This has become unbearable, and it will become so very intolerable that I won’t be able to do my job without thinking about you,” he finally said.

  Disbelief sparked in her eyes. “Max, we love each other. What we have is beautiful, yet you make it sound like a painful, ugly wound. What are you saying to me?”

  “It hurts, Klara. I can almost feel myself being sucked into a pool of quicksand and suffocating every time I leave you, every time I put a stamp on a letter I write but never send, every time you say no…”

  “Max, please don’t say another word…”

  “Will you come to England?”

  “No, but...”

  “Then, whatever you meant to say, I don’t want to hear it. I’ve been thinking about us all night, and as hard as it will be for me, I need to let you go. You’re refusing to follow your heart because of your loyalty to Romek, and I understand that, I really do. So, from now on I’ll follow duty as well, and erase you from my heart.”

  “Can you really just erase me like I’m a pencil mark or a stain!” she snapped.

  Max closed his mouth, afraid of sounding even more idiotic and Shakespearian. He was like one of those scorned, naïve prats, trying to cause as much injury as he could to the woman who’d thrown him over. “You are my first and only love, of course I can’t just erase you, but I must. The pain of not having you in my life is too much … just too much to bear.”

  “You’re angry. You’re not thinking straight, she sobbed.”

  “I’m not angry with you, but I have come to a sensible decision. I think I was perfectly clear.” He got to his feet and stared down at her tearstained face. “When Romek gets back, tell him I’ve received my answer from London. We’ll have to leave in a couple of hours.” With that, Max strode out the door and back down the stairs to the basement.

  ******

  Max stood beside Romek at the front door with his duffel bag swung over his shoulder. He pecked Klara on both cheeks and then held her at arm’s length to take one more look at her. His gut twisted, but it might as well have been his windpipe, for he could hardly catch a breath or swallow. “Goodbye, Klara,” he croaked. “Take good care of yourself. Romek would fall apart if anything were to happen to you.” Max saw
her flinch at his churlish jibe.

  When they left the flat, Max and Romek drove in Monsieur Chirac’s old van towards the Paris suburbs. For the first few minutes, both men shared a comfortable silence until Romek said, “I can tell you’re worried about Klara and me, Max, but we’ll do a good job for you. You taught me well, and I’ll teach Klara to be a good spy because she’s got her heart set on becoming one whether we approve or not.”

  Max swallowed. He had severed his attachment to her. It was over. He’d rip up the photo by his bed and cut up the petticoat she’d given him as a reminder of their first time together. She loved him, but that brought no comfort. It was time to get down to the business of war without personal distractions. “I’m not worried about your abilities, or hers, Romek,” he said after a long pause. “I have every confidence in you. Just make sure you keep the ring tight, and your transmissions on schedule. If your operation is threatened, destroy everything you have on paper and smash the radios to smithereens.”

  “Will you come back to Paris?” Romek asked.

  “I don’t know. I’ll try. The next few weeks will be crucial. If the Germans reach this city, everything will change. Paris will be behind enemy lines, and our objectives will alter dramatically.”