16

FRANCE, 1940

At least it wasn’t a black uniform. But in the Anhalter Bahnhof, waiting to board the Reich Railways train early that July morning, I felt oddly uncomfortable dressed as a Sipo captain in spite of the fact that almost everyone else was wearing a uniform. It was as if I’d signed a contract in blood with Hitler himself. In the event the great Mephistopheles chose not to visit the French capital by train. The Gestapo got wind of at least two plots to kill him while he was in Paris, and the word aboard the train was that Hitler had already returned from a flying visit to the jewel in his crown of conquest via Le Bourget, on June 23. Consequently, although quite luxurious in many respects—there were, after all, several senior Wehrmacht generals aboard—the train we traveled in was not the Amerika, the special train carrying the Führer headquarters and, by all accounts, the last word in Pullman-class comfort. That curiously named train—possibly it was a pun based on the Herms Niel song I had sung in Heydrich’s office—was, it seemed, back at the Tempelhof Repair Depot in the southwest of Berlin. Since meeting Elisabeth again, I rather wished I could have been there myself, for although a small part of me was looking forward to seeing Paris, mostly I felt a distinct lack of enthusiasm for my mission. A lot of people in Sipo would have leapt at an all-expenses-paid trip to the most glamorous city in the world. And a little bit of murder along the way wouldn’t have bothered them in the slightest. There were some on that train who looked like they’d been murdering people since 1933. Including the fellow sitting opposite me, an SS-Untersturmführer—a lieutenant I half recognized from police headquarters in Alexanderplatz.

His little rat’s eyes got there ahead of me, however.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said politely. “But aren’t you Chief Inspector Gunther? From the Homicide Division?”

“Have we met?”

“I was working Vice Squad at the Alex when I think I saw you last. My name is Willms. Nikolaus Willms.”

I nodded silently.

“Vice isn’t as glamorous as Homicide,” he said. “But it has its moments.”

He smiled without smiling—the sort of expression a snake has when it opens its mouth to swallow something whole. He was smaller than me, but he had the ambitious look of a man who might eventually swallow something larger than himself.

“So what takes you to Paris?” I asked without much interest.

“This isn’t my first trip,” he said. “I’ve been there for the last two weeks. I only came back to Berlin to attend to a family matter.”

“You still have some work to do there?”

“There’s plenty of vice in Paris, sir.”

“So I’m led to believe.”