“When it involves the Spanish Civil War it’s always personal, monsieur. Many atrocities were committed. My own brother was murdered by a communist. He was a priest. They burned him alive inside his own church, in Catalonia. The man in charge was a Frenchman. A communist from Le Havre.”

“And if you find him? What then?”

Oltramare smiled. “I will arrest him, Captain Gunther.”

I wasn’t so sure about that. In fact, I wasn’t sure about anything as we left Naverrenx and headed south to Gurs. The SS troops in the truck now leading the way were singing “Sieg Heil Viktoria.” I was starting to have misgivings about everything.

My driver and the corporal in the bucket’s front passenger seat were more interested in the woman seated beside Oltramare and me than in singing. Her name was Eva Kemmerich, and she was extremely thin, which seemed to make her mouth too wide and her ears too big. Under her eyes were shadows like bat wings, and she wore a pink handkerchief around her head to keep her hair tidy. It looked like the rubber on top of a pencil. In Gurs, she and the other women had suffered a tough time at the hands of the French.

“Conditions were barbaric,” she explained. “They treated us like dogs. Worse than dogs. People talk about German anti-Semitism. Well, it’s my considered opinion that the French just hate everyone who isn’t French. Germans, Jews, Spanish, Poles, Italians—they were all treated equally badly. Gurs is a concentration camp, that’s what it is, and the guards are absolute bastards. They worked us like slaves. Just look at my hands. My nails. They’re ruined.”

She looked at Oltramare with ill-concealed contempt. “Go on,” she told him. “Look at them.”

“I am looking at them, mademoiselle.”

“Well? What’s the idea of treating human beings like that? You’re French. What’s the big idea, Franzi?”

“I have no explanation, mademoiselle. And I have no excuse. All I can say is that before the war there were almost four million refugees living in France from countries all over Europe. That’s ten percent of our population. What were we to do with so many people, mademoiselle?”