Final impact

It had been more than three and a half years since pastries had been legally sold in Paris, and about the same interval since fish, meat, chocolates, tobacco, and wine had been rationed almost out of existence. Nonetheless, sitting by one of the large windows in Maxim’s Le Bar Imperial, Major General Paul Brasch found himself adrift on the odors of fine French cuisine. The Parisians in the street below might have been getting by on starvation rations, but when Reichsmarschall Gцring was in town looting the art treasures of the Republic, he loved to dine at Maxim’s, and so the wartime restrictions did not bite as heavily here.

Brasch nursed his Kir Royale and wondered whether or not he would ever have set foot in this place-or any like it-had it not been for the war.

Not likely, he mused. And truthfully, it wasn’t the war that had delivered him to this stool at the end of a dark wooden bar. No, it was the Emergence. Without the miracle of the time travelers’ arrival, he would probably be a frozen corpse somewhere in Russia by now. Instead he sipped at a cocktail, enjoyed the sour look on the face of his latest bodyguard, Hauptsturmfuhrer Neumann, and wondered whether his data package would arrive before his dinner guest.

He would never know, really. The encryption software protecting his communications stripped off any identifying tags such as datelines. He alone would be able to read the file, and then for only ten minutes, before it disappeared from history altogether. And of course, he wouldn’t be cracking open his latest instructions from the British over a late supper with General Oberg, the SS commander in Paris.

Dining with human filth like Oberg was a necessary sacrifice. Brasch was a very privileged Nazi nowadays, one of the trusted few. He had even been invited to share a table at the Palais Luxembourg with the morphine-addled Gцring, resplendent in his white Reichsmarschall uniform, encrusted with jewels and medals over which the fat criminal had vomited during the dessert course. The engineer had long ago learned to control the sensation of his balls crawling up into his belly, his flesh seeming to swarm with lice, whenever he mixed with the likes of Gцring and Oberg. Since he had received word that his wife and son had safely reached Canada, he had even begun to revel in the double life forced on him as the price of their deliverance. It was a wonderful thing, mixing with these pigs, conniving in their downfall, and all the time knowing that the only people in the world he cared about were beyond their reach.

Indeed, as far as anyone in the Third Reich was concerned, Willie Brasch and little Manfred had been killed in a British bombing raid in November 1942. A tragic loss for a hero who had already given so much to the cause, and an explanation-as if any were needed-for his fanatical devotion to duty.

“Ah! So good to see a smiling face at last. We can always depend on you, Herr General.”

Brasch’s smile only grew wider as he turned on his bar stool and stood to salute Oberstgruppenfuhrer Karl Oberg, the man who would probably set Paris aflame in a couple of weeks to deny its liberation by the Americans. The room was crowded, and so thick with cigarette and cigar smoke that the patrons in the farthest corners were almost obscured. Oberg stood out, though. Even the Wehrmacht officers gave him a wide berth.

“Inventing some new V-weapon while you wait for dinner, I imagine,” Oberg said. He resembled nothing so much as a squashed, fattened caricature of Heinrich Himmler. He had been a fruit seller before joining the party and the SS, and he was the embodiment of all the poisonous irony inherent to the term master race. Nevertheless, the smile never left Brasch’s face as he opened his mouth to reply.

“No! No, don’t tell me,” Oberg interrupted, waving a hand. “I understand well that you cannot discuss such things.”

In fact, Brasch was imagining what it would feel like to take Oberg’s close-cropped porcine head in his hands and twist it so violently that the spinal cord shattered instantly. How many of the people in this bar would applaud?

Some, but not all. Neumann there would probably put a bullet into his head before Oberg hit the floor. And of the handful of Frenchmen and women who were taking an aperitif in the baroque splendor of the Imperial, how many would be pleased, and how many horrified?

It was impossible to say. Only the most significant collaborators were given entrйe to these rarefied circles, and with the invasion under way, only they would care to be seen with the Germans.