Free Tapestry by J. Robert Janes Page B

splash news of these blackout crimes across the papers and to emphasize during every wireless broadcast that progress is being made and a favourable solution but momentary. I’ve warned them that no pictures or interviews are to be taken here. I can’t have the restaurant being targeted. I simply will not have it!’
    ‘Rudi, what the hell are you trying to tell us?’
    ‘That no photographs are to be taken here of the two of you, but out there …’ He indicated the Champs-Élysées and streets too many. ‘Out there you are not safe from prying cameras and reporters.’
    ‘Us?’ blurted Hermann.
    ‘You, meine Lieben . You are to be watched and followed. Tracked—photographed while in action against these … these schweinigein Vergewaltiger und Mörder .’
    These dirty rapists and murderers but thank God Louis understood and spoke the language.
    ‘It’s not safe for my Helga, Hermann. You know how sweet she is on you. It’s not safe for my Yvette and Julie either, nor for those two women you cannot seem to leave for my Helga. Take care of these verrückter Sadisten . Get them by the balls and use the knife. Better still, bring them here and I will give them a fry-up they won’t forget.’
    The salt rolls that couldn’t be refused were again passed. ‘If I were you,’ said Rudi, ‘I would watch in places like that one across the road where, my Hermann, you questioned only the stage doorman when you should have paid a visit during a performance. The Cercle Européen is still being held there once a week no matter what anyone else says.’
    A gathering of the establishment to plan and discuss how best to do business with the Reich. Aircraft engines and airframes, synthetic rubber tyres, ammunition, lumber and aluminium and other things like wheat and potatoes, wine and horses, labour also and yes, cheese and submissive girls, cement too, of course!
    Rudi didn’t even ask if the police academy victim had been trafficking in women. He just took it for granted.
    ‘There’s an epidemic of VD among the men, Hermann, and this is preventing them from returning to the front as quickly as needed. These unlicensed girls we’re getting aren’t clean. The street roundups of women and girls are not working either.’
    Housewives, secretaries, shop- and schoolgirls, their teachers and librarians also—any French female in sight between the ages of fourteen and ninety, diseased or not, could be rounded up and carted off for a swab and a look by a doctor they didn’t know nor care to.
    ‘The Oberkommando der Wehrmacht estimates that there are between eighty thousand and one hundred thousand illegal prostitutes on the streets,’ said Rudi.
    The High Command always overestimated such things but still …
    ‘Only from five to six thousand have so far been licensed and issued the bilingual cards that show they are nur für Deutsche .’
    Registered for use only by Germans and how was one to stop the boys from seizing the moment, especially when forbidden to use the legal, French-only brothels?
    ‘Hospital maternity wards are full of girls having their love children, my Hermann.’
    More beer was taken, the salt rolls again passed. ‘Not even once-weekly visits by the doctor to each licensed house have lessened the VD plague. I tell you all of this, Hermann, so that should the Kommandant von Gross-Paris raise his voice, you will understand why.’
    ‘But, Rudi, wouldn’t the streets being terrorized at night help to lessen the VD?’
    ‘Paris is paradise, is it not? Besides, the Führer in his wisdom made a promise to all of our boys that they would each get to spend a little time here.’ Rudi gave it a bit of a pause. ‘Also,’ he went on, the puffy eyelids with their lashes at half-mast, ‘there is one girl, a Blitzmädel , Hermann, whose handbag was unfortunately snatched last Sunday at 1247 hours while she was washing up at a restaurant in the Buttes Chaumont Park. Near the carousel, I think. You know the