Free Clandestine by J. Robert Janes

Kaltenbrunner had ordered them to find the truck, the killer and that girl and settle whatever it was, or else.
    â€˜And Giselle?’ he asked, for he had to, and Oona would understand.
    â€˜The same.’
    Again Hermann tried to hold her but having lain with him, having come to love and accept, and to befriend his Giselle like a sister, had she not done the most hateful of things, no matter his having put himself at terrible risk to rescue and look after her?
    Pushing him away a second time, she said emptily, ‘When he went to pull the blackout tape from the headlamps and talk to the men in those trucks, he used the pinch-the-cat * he had kept in a trouser pocket, but when he returned, he didn’t put it back. He just tossed it onto the seat between us, and I heard it hit the little bottle he’d been using and then the tin of cigarettes, and every time those trucks made a turn, we did too, and it would roll toward me, only to roll away.’
    â€˜What little bottle?’
    â€˜Bitters for the stomach to help the digestion. Jägermeister. ’
    â€˜And?’
    â€˜Beneath it and the tin of fifty Lucky Strike, was a large flat envelope. Brown, as it turned out, and of stiff paper. Manila, I think, though it must now be so rare, few would ever get to use it.’
    â€˜Sealed?’
    Was Hermann beginning to understand? ‘Red wax impressed with a swastika signet, the writing in black Gothic lettering, the seals broken.’
    â€˜Geheime Reichssache?’
    Secret Reich business, but did this man whom she had come to love now understand how she must have felt and still did, that Kriminalrat Ludin, knowing she would look when he was away from the car, had silently dared her to? ‘Me, I was alone, for he had gone to meet you in that café, but had he really? Wouldn’t he wait to see what I did? Prisoner to him, I hung on for as long as I could.’
    â€˜And?’
    What a brief and final word that was, but Herr Ludin must have wanted her to tell him. ‘It had been sent from the Hague.’
    â€˜The SD’s Central Archive for the Netherlands.’
    â€˜Is that not my country, Herr Kohler?’
    â€˜Oona, I’m your Hermann. Please just tell me.’
    â€˜Maybe I don’t understand you anymore or myself. His following those trucks full of the deported to Drancy really upset me and he knew it. Two twenty-by-twenty prints of the same girl, the sliver of light I let escape reminding me of how I once looked at that age. Full of hope and joy, Hermann. She wasn’t any more than twenty or twenty-one, the hair like mine. Very fine and fair and braided into a short rope for convenience, the other photo showing her with a page-boy cut dyed jet-black to hide her identity­ from those who would then have snapped her photo anyway.’
    â€˜Taken when?’
    â€˜When do you think?’
    â€˜Oona, please.’
    â€˜Will you marry me like you’ve said often enough?’
    â€˜Yes, and as soon as possible.’
    Which, of course, would mean never. How could it be otherwise? ‘Imagine then, me drawing those photos out of that envelope knowing that at any minute he might return from speaking to you. 25 February 1941.’
    And stamped on the back. ‘The general strike and snapped by …’
    â€˜An NSB * probably. That’s all I really know.’
    But working hand and glove with the Occupier, just as did the home-grown fascists in France. ‘Did you get a look at the sheets the Hague would have sent?’
    How anxious he was, all else now set aside, even such thoughts for the future. ‘There were sheets and sheets of that grey office paper the war has given. Carbon copies so thin, I was terrified they would bunch up and betray me.’
    And badly faded because when used over and over again, the carbon paper would also have been reversed, the bottom fed into the typewriter first, as per Goebbels, the Reichsminister of