Free An Infinity of Mirrors by Richard Condon

moustaches with soaring ends, a monocle, very naughty light-blue eyes, and a laugh like a lumber saw. Then Gisele pulled her husband into view. He was an important figure at the Foreign Office; thin, wore a pince-nez, a magnificent cravat and flashing stickpin, tons of cologne, and an English-cut suit and bowler. Then Paule introduced Maître Gitlin to everyone while Gretel told them she had secured the most wonderful apartment for them in Charlottenburg.
    It was a sunny, six-room flat, with high ceilings, on the second floor of a four-story building facing the Friedrich Karl Platz across the Spandauerstrasse from the Schlossgarten. Gretel lived two streets away; Gisele was on the same street, two doors down. Biedermeier abounded in the apartment: chairs and tables with curved underframes and legs, high-backed chairs with smooth wooden plats, gilded swans, cornucopias, griffins, and foliage carved out of birch, pear wood, and grained ash. The rolled horsehair upholstery under flowered calico made Paule happy; her new world also had old-fashioned reassuring comforts. The wallpaper shouted welcome in many shapes of fruits and flowers, and there were draped curtains, multicolored tablecloths and carpets. There were vases filled with flowers from a dozen of Veelee’s friends. Paule couldn’t wait to get to work and change it all; she decided to spare only the canary, the gramophone, and the prodigious collection of records.
    The marriage ceremony went off to Maître Gitlin’s satisfaction. Gretel, Gisele, and their husbands were official witnesses, and they all celebrated earnestly at Horcher’s afterward. Before he went back to Paris, Maître Gitlin explained to Veelee that Paule’s father had left her an income of fifteen hundred marks a month while she lived outside France. He did not elaborate on Paule’s fortune, nor did Veelee show any interest—he was overwhelmed at their combined riches. His pay was eight hundred marks a month, a very handsome sum; at a time when the economic crisis had caused all civilian salaries to be reduced, the income of army officers remained unchanged.
    On her third day in Berlin, while he was still on leave, Paule and Veelee went to Klein-Kusserow, where the von Rhode family had lived throughout their recorded history. Klein-Kusserow had eighty-six souls. The family’s second seat in Pomerania, Wusterwitz, had sixty-seven people. Everything was clustered around the large wooden main houses. There was a minister who had a tiny church, a schoolmaster, a blacksmith, a police constable; all the other people were tenants and farm hands. The crops were turnips, barley, rye, and potatoes, although Veelee said that as he remembered it the principal crop was fir trees. He said proudly that Pomeranian cattle could eat food from which goats turned away. The glacier had left eskers, kettles, marshes, and boulders. The highest point in the region was three hundred and two feet—hummocks tufted with green forests. Somewhere between the bogs and the hummock tops the people struggled to harvest crops from an acid, young, unfriendly soil.
    It was summer and barefoot peasant women wearing white kerchiefs dotted the fields. At harvest time the estate used seasonal workers from Poland, most of them female, and the whole countryside of sand dunes, heather, fir trees, and pastures would present a pattern of white handkerchiefs. Veelee remembered the Polish girls as being very pretty, and told Paule that it was the sub-steward’s right to choose any of them as mistresses for the season. The men of the Rhode family chose their mistresses from among the sub-stewards’ wives, but Veelee had been sent away to learn about the army at nine, so this was no more than legend to him. “It is all going now,” he told Paule wistfully. “Small farms are better for agricultural survival in this part of the world. But my family still clings stubbornly to the last two