Free Carousel by J. Robert Janes

she touched it with a fingertip and, flushing with embarrassment, said quite shyly, ‘Excuse me.’
    For just an instant their eyes met and, Chief Inspector of the Sûreté that he was, he looked deeply into hers until the sparrow ducked away again. Ah yes.
    â€˜Wait for us. We won’t be long.’
    The anguished look the girl threw from the back seat troubled Hermann.
    â€˜Hey, it’s okay, chérie. Come on, Giselle. Everything is all right. It’s just a bit of business. There’s nothing for you to worry about. Louis and I just have to stop in to say hello.’
    To the Butcher of Poland, the Brigadeführer und Generalmajor der Polizei, the Höherer SS und Polizeiführer of France!
    Hermann touched the pale cheek and then the white, white crowns of her front teeth through the slightly parted lips that were so red.
    She knew he was thinking she had lovely lips.
    â€˜She’s really something, eh, Louis? Gott im Himmel , am I glad to see her again.’
    They left her then, and though she could not force herself to watch, in her mind’s eye she saw them hurrying between the jackbooted sentries who stood under the swastika flags that hung above the entrance.
    Merde! what was she to do? Press her knees together to stop from shaking? Grip her thighs and seek the other side of the avenue? Wait as Hermann had said and as she knew she must? Ah yes.
    Even the traffic avoided this place. The rush of bicycles pushed a little harder as the stream of them approached the dreaded Number 72. Those who were on the far side of the avenue Foch looked the other way when passing; those less fortunate came towards her with downcast eyes. Where once there had been so many cars, there were now only those of the Germans and their friends. And she did not know which were the worst, the Nazis or their friends …
    Occasionally the sound of a bicycle bell interrupted the agony of her thoughts, once the shout of, ‘Hey, there, look where you’re going!’ as if she were the one in the road, she the one with the shaky handlebars.
    Karl Albrecht Oberg was forty-five years of age and married, with a wife and two children in the Reich. A man from the north of that country. Tall, but not so tall as Hermann Kohler – really just a little over medium height.
    A man who had worn thick spectacles with wire rims and who had leaned well back in his chair when he had examined her.
    Had she been so offensive to him? Had he been near-sighted, had that been it?
    A man with a small paunch. A man who had looked as if the corset he had worn had been a little too tight.
    The Butcher of Poland … The Höherer SS.
    The pale blue-grey eyes behind those glasses had been round and bulging but not with hatred for her or anything like that, though they had frightened her at first. Terribly, ah yes. Not even with interest in her body, which had been fully clothed, she left to stand as if naked in front of that desk of his, that magnificent desk!
    Just the look of a middle-aged businessman wearing the field-grey of the German Army but with the flashes of the SS, a general. A man who had been impatient to get on with his work.
    The policing of France and the hunting-down of traitors and terrorists.
    The one who had been at his side, the one who had had her brought to this place from deep in her sleep this morning, had spoken French but with a German scholar’s accent. It had been he who had translated what he had judged fit for her ears.
    â€˜Okay. It’s agreed. You can go now. Please do not forget our little arrangement.’
    Our little arrangement. The brothel on the rue Chabannais should she fail. The largest of the forty or so that were reserved specifically for the common soldiers of the German Army who came to Paris for a few days’ leave and wanted to get it all out of their systems in a hurry. Bang, bang!
    Right from the Russian Front. Ah yes, that’s what he had said to her, knowing