Paralysis

“I’m disappointed; I could have sworn that one would be able to see the Brandenburg Gate from here,” said Colonel Farmer pettishly, leaning out of the bomb-shattered window. His artificial leg crunched on broken glass. Overhead, a flight of French Potez bombers droned over the devastation that had been Adolf Hitler’s Berlin.
“The Poles blew it up three nights ago, Professor,” replied Lieutenant Booth abstractedly, using the title Farmer preferred. He had been rummaging through filing cabinets in the anteroom to the huge office in the Reichsministerium, the German Interior Ministry. “You complained about the noise at the time, if you remember. And it’s not wise to lean out like that: there are still German snipers who think the war isn’t over.”
“Far too many damn bangs these days,” said Farmer, as if two years of war had made no significant impression on him. “When you get to my age, you appreciate uninterrupted sleep, Mr Booth. Now what, if anything, have you found among the ridiculous amount of papers Minister von Busch felt it necessary to keep?”
“Nothing specific, sir; appointments for three meetings with Ernst Auer at a house in Babelsburg at about the right time, some Abwehr, Military Intelligence, correspondence from Admiral Canaris’ office: but no minutes from the meetings, no details…” Booth had spent two days poring fruitlessly over this latest batch of records, and had to make an effort not to sound resentful. This posting wasn’t at all what he’d hoped for: Berlin in November was much colder, smellier, and windier than he’d expected. As well as being in ruins. As a fluent German speaker fresh out of university, he’d been sure he would be assigned to something more … glamorous.
“That’s disappointing as well; one would think that a nation as anally-retentive as the Germans would keep a proper filing system,” said Farmer, poking at a file with his walking stick. “You’re sure you know what to look for?” Nettled, Booth started to answer that yes, he, Booth, was perfectly clear what he was looking for, unless the professor-colonel’s two-month-long obsessive search, close – sometimes too close, for a small unit, unarmed except for a few pistols --on the heels of the invading British and French armies, for details on a German Army operation called Fall Tziganer, Operation Gypsy, had been suddenly terminated, when the clatter of nail-shod army boots interrupted him before he’d properly started.
“Y a quelqu’un?” asked a French corporal, sidling apprehensively into the office, followed by two equally scruffy and unshaven privates, rifles at the ready, obviously unimpressed with their grand, if ruined, surroundings.
“Of course there’s someone here,” barked Farmer in French. One of the Poilus sniggered at his accent. Farmer’s French was grammatically perfect, but his pronunciation considerably less so. “And weren’t you taught to salute an officer? What do you want here anyway? There’s nothing to steal here.”
“Yes, mon colonel,” said the corporal indifferently, coming to sloppy attention and saluting, a millimetre away from insubordination. “You are indeed the Colonel Far-meur? If yes, I have a message for you, from the Major Séguin.”
“The Polonais, the Poles, have taken everything worthwhile anyway,” muttered the sniggering private.

 
Paralysis 2

“You should learn Polish, Tom Booth,” said Major Séguin expansively. “You were taught Latin, and it’s no more complex than that. Have some more of this very nice German beer: much better than that brown watery stuff you get in England.”
Major Séguin was Farmer’s complete opposite: tall, burly, and sandy-haired, he looked far more English than the professor. He and Booth were talking German, but his English was equally fluent and colloquial. They had driven nearly two hundred kilometres, and were now sitting in the parlour of an inn outside Stettin; renamed Szczecin, the city was already being reabsorbed into Greater Poland. Two hundred metres away was a huge transit camp for ethnic Germans being expelled from former German territory. Chill winds blew off the Baltic, but inside a vast ceramic stove gave off waves of heat. Farmer had gone off earlier, to telephone Mr Hore-Belisha. He did this frequently, as if it was the most natural thing in the world for an army colonel to have regular conversations with the Prime Minister of Great Britain.
“No thank you to both, Major,” said Booth in French, smiling. “I’ve still got the scars from having Latin caned into me at school, and if I have any more beer I’ll be in no fit state to interrogate anybody.”
“Tom Booth, now that we have found him, it’s of the utmost importance that we get von Busch to tell us about Operation Gypsy.” Séguin was suddenly serious. “Forgive my portentousness, but I do not exaggerate when I say that the fates of our patries, our homelands, depend on it. Remember that you were assigned to us not only for your linguistic skills, but because you are seen as trustworthy.” His pale blue eyes searched Booth’s puzzled face, as if in search of a truth. Booth endured his stare as equably as he could, despite the puzzlement he felt at Major Séguin’s portentous phrasing. The Frenchman rose abruptly, crossed to the outside door and shouted in Polish: almost immediately, an immaculately-uniformed Polish captain entered, pushed a handcuffed man of about fifty into the room, scowled at them, and left without saluting.
“Herr von Busch, good afternoon! Come and sit down: you can have a beer if you want,” Séguin greeted him expansively, switching back to German. The prisoner sat down heavily, and held out his manacled wrists, not looking at either of his captors. At a nod from Séguin, Booth unlocked the handcuffs.
“My name is Stahlecker, Friedrich Stahlecker,” he said mulishly, staring at the table. “I’d…I’d like a cigarette, if you have any.” He spoke in a rough East Prussian dialect of German.
“Talk first, cigarette after!” shouted Booth, playing his pre-arranged part of the hard interrogator. “Your papers are forged: we know exactly who you are, Herr Reichsminister; save us all time, and tell us what we want to know.”
“I tell you, my name is Friedrich Stahlecker. I am – was – a carpenter in Tilsit.” And so it went on. It was getting dark, and the ashtray in front of Major Séguin overflowing, when the same Polish captain brought in a woman. She was considerably younger than her husband, but her face was pinched with pain and her lips had a bluish tinge. She darted a frightened glance at Stahlecker, and coughed convulsively.
“You are Frau Maria Stahlecker? When and where were you born? What year were you married? How many children?” Booth’s barrage of questions seemed to confuse her: she stuttered and started to cough again.
Bitte, meine Herren, please, sirs, my wife is very ill…” began Stahlecker. Booth spun the man’s chair away from the table, hating himself just a little for the brutality.
“I want your wife’s answers, not yours! If we don’t get them, she goes back into the camp, and there she stays, until she dies, which won’t be long, will it?” He stared into the man’s face, and as he did so, it changed, hardened, as the man met his eyes for the first time.
“No, damn you,” he snarled in Hochdeutsch, standard German. “Leave my wife out of this.”
Séguin sat back in his chair, and smiled beatifically. “Well done. I think the Minister will talk to us now, Lieutenant Booth.” Von Busch rubbed his mouth, still looking directly at Booth, with the worn-out remnants of a commanding stare. Booth withdrew a little, faintly ashamed at his new distasteful skill. “Have the goodness to ask Captain Poniatowski to take Frau von Busch somewhere comfortable. And get some coffee sent in, please.”


Think I haven't got the hang of this...
 
Your style somehow reminds me of 30's-40's science fiction, though I don't know why exactly at the moment.

Keep it up! :)
 
"Your style somehow reminds me of 30's-40's science fiction, though I don't know why exactly at the moment."

Good; aiming for late 1930s feel.
 
Oops : a small detail missed out of the first bit: it's Nov. 1939, Berlin has been captured by the French Brits and Poles. Russians? USA? Not this time...


“My name is Erich August von Busch, and I was Reich Interior Minister. Yes, as far as I know, all the higher echelons of the Reich are dead, except for myself. Nobody else had time to escape, except Ilse and I. No, I myself saw the Führer’s body after the air raid in Dortmund. Hess shot himself, and Dr. Goebbels… Yes, I know about Operation Gypsy: I never saw the Freja-apparat, the Freya machine that the paratroopers captured, but I used to receive one of the ten copies of daily abstracts of the information it gathered; the circulation was restricted to highest ranks only. That was what made us attack the French in 1937, when it seemed to be a moment of critical weakness. The Freya information didn’t confirm that the British would support them; it was never that conclusive...
“Time after time, I and others urged that the information on Allied troop movements be used to counter-attack, but Hitler wouldn’t have it. The generals all supported him: the time was never right; it wouldn’t do to compromise the source! One opportunity after another slipped by, because we were waiting for the critical moment, when one hammer-blow would ‘smash the Allies like cheap pottery’ as Hermann Göring put it (he’s dead, too: cyanide), and suddenly it was too late: everything fell apart. I knew in January 1939 that our defeat was inevitable, after your surprise attack through the Ardennes; and you were in Berlin less than nine months later. Unbelievable.” His voice had risen to a hoarse shout. “I served in the Great War: as a Frontsoldat, a soldier in the trenches, I know how important it is…”
The door crashed open, and a section of British soldiers burst in, Sten sub-machine guns alertly at the ready. Colonel Farmer stumped in after them. Booth, taken by surprise standing behind von Busch’s chair, stared at them owlishly. “Sergeant-major, kill that man, please,” said Farmer in a conversational tone, pointing in Booth’s direction with his walking-stick. Black gun-muzzles tracked towards Booth.
 
After two cups of scalding hot coffee, Booth’s hands had stopped shaking, though the adrenalin still sang in his head and creased his stomach. He dabbed ineffectually at the blood splashed on his tunic with a dirty napkin. Major Séguin had left, to supervise the soldiers taking von Busch’s body away. Ilse von Busch’s wails were fading as she went with her dead husband. “I’m frightfully sorry about that,” said Colonel Farmer, looking at Booth over his coffee-cup, “But you were in the line of fire, hey?” He squeezed Booth’s shoulder, with surprising strength. “Look here, my boy, perhaps an explanation is in order. First, do you want to join our charmed circle, Mr Booth? To understand what we’re doing here? Because if you do, I’ll need you to swear everlasting secrecy on a copy of Wisden’s Cricketers’ Almanac, and all that sort of mumbo-jumbo.”
Still beyond speech, Booth nodded, still staring at the bloodstains on the floor, appalled that this killing, among so many he had seen, should affect him thus. “I’ll take that as a yes, then,” continued Farmer. “Both Jules Séguin and I were Frontsoldaten, too, but unlike the late Erich and his Führer, it left us determined that something as terrible as the Great War should never happen again. I lost my leg, and may friends; Jules lost three brothers at Verdun, killed in four days. Your own uncle died at Passchendaele – did you think we wouldn’t examine your background? – And when the late unlamented Herr Hitler came to power, I corresponded with Mr Winston Churchill (killed by a taxi in New York: such a waste of potential) about the threat posed by the Hitlerites.
“So, when Professor Séguin’s research gave us the opportunity, we took the chance presented to us. Then, unfortunately, the Germans got wind of something very hush-hush being built for us at the Phillips Company in Eindhoven; Holland was a neutral country, but what did that matter? They wanted it, they took it: that was the start of Operation Gypsy. What the Germans got, in this Freya-machine -- a much better name for it than ours -- that we’d had the Dutch build for us, was a way to listen into any telephone communication, military or civilian, scrambled or not. (Major Séguin will explain it all to you, if you’ve a week to spare; he’s very proud of his brain-child, but it involves particle physics, which to me is indistinguishable from magic.) This was a total disaster, of course: for a fortnight, we went round in a daze, thinking we’d handed European domination to the Nazis, on a gold-rimmed porcelain plate! However, on reflection, things weren’t anywhere near as bad as we had first thought...
 
“It happened that I was acquainted with Mr Hore-Belisha, who had just been appointed Secretary of State for War; (he succeeded Mr Chamberlain as Prime Minister in 1938, as you know) we told him our sorry tale so that the British Government should know the worst,” continued Farmer, smiling beatifically. “It was he who pointed out that while it was true that the Abwehr, German Military Intelligence, could listen in to our communications, but, as they now possessed a similar machine, we could do the same to them, and they would never know.

“That’s how we British and French (with not a little help from the Poles) defeated the greatest army in Europe, in less than two years. You’ve just heard what happens when you have a weapon like Freya: it’s so all-encompassing that, far from helping, the huge mass of information it provides paralyses one’s decision-making – especially as we took great care that it would be doctored and skewed to our advantage. Now von Busch is dead, the last of the ten Freya recipients, our pet secret is just that: exclusively ours, and safe again. That’s why we were here, of course.
“I think you need a week’s home leave, to get over your little shock. After that, now that you’re in the club, Mr Booth, how would you like a trip to New York? Perhaps you could leave the Americans a Freya-machine in a taxi, hey?”
 
Top