Descendant

An Oblique Conversation

Just after six o’clock the deputy manager rang up to my room to say that Leo Coopman had been “unavoidably detained” on the northeast side of the city. However somebody in the lobby called Paul Hankar would be privileged to talk to me. I went down in the elevator alone and met him in the small dark bar at the back of the hotel.

Paul Hankar was a short, thickset man with a lumpy face like one of the peasants in a Brueghel painting, and rimless spectacles. He was wearing a black roll-neck sweater and a black suit with shiny elbows. I would have guessed that he was a schoolmaster in another life.

He stood up and shook hands. “Aangename kennismaking, Colonel. Pleased to meet you.”

“Actually it’s captain. Captain James Falcon Junior, 101 Counterintelligence Detachment.”

We sat down and I offered him a cigarette. He took one and tapped it on his thumbnail. “I heard you were looking for some special information,” he said. His English was flat but barely accented.

“You think you can help me?” I asked him.

“It’s something we’ve been trying to keep quiet. Mainly because we didn’t want the Germans to know that we knew. And because we didn’t want to cause any panic. And because we didn’t want to look like fools, in case we were wrong.”

“Do you know a young woman called Ann De Wouters? She rents an apartment on Markgravestraat.”

Paul Hankar looked at me acutely. “I know the name, yes.”

“You can’t do her any harm by telling me about her. She was murdered last night.”

He flinched, as if I had reached across the table and tried to slap his cheek. But then he recovered himself and said, “I’m very shocked to hear that.”

“Her landlady said it was mensen van de nacht. Do you have any idea what she was talking about?”

A young boy in a long white apron came over to us and asked us what we wanted to drink. “What do you have?” asked Paul Hankar.

“Apple schnapps.”

“Anything else?”

The boy shook his head.

“In that case, we’ll have two apple schnapps.”

“One schnapps, one lemonade,” I corrected him. “I need to keep a clear head tonight, and I know what that goddamned schnapps is like. My corporal calls it ‘nuts-water.’ ”

Paul Hankar lit his cigarette and I noticed that his hand was trembling. “Mensen van de nacht?” he said, wryly. “That’s one explanation, if you believe in such things.”

“But you don’t?”

“I keep an open mind, Captain.”

“So tell me what’s been happening.”

He coughed and wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. “It started in August last year. We were having many successes against the Germans. We had infiltrated many of their administrative offices and also the power company and the water company. In July we were able to sink five barges on the Albert Canal which took them weeks to clear away.

“But then everything seemed to turn around. The Germans began to raid our hiding places and arrest our people by the dozen. Every time we planned to sabotage the docks, they would catch us before we had the chance to plant any explosives. They found our weapons and our wireless sets and our safe houses. It became clear to us that some of our own people must be betraying us.”

I didn’t say anything. Behind him, there was an oval window with crimson glass in it, and the branch of a tree was tapping against it as if some beggar were trying to catch our attention.

Paul Hankar said, “We noticed that some of our people were acting differently. They started to look ill, and to keep themselves to themselves. Also, they smelled. It’s very hard to describe. Not altogether unpleasant, but musty, like the inside of a closet in which a dead man’s clothes have been hanging.

“Gradually it became clear to us that every operation which was betrayed to the Germans was connected with one or more of these sick people.”

“What did you do about it?”

“Of course, we immediately isolated any of our people who showed any signs of illness or behaving in a strange way, and allowed them no contact with the rest of us. But even this didn’t stop the infection from spreading among us, and we couldn’t understand how this could happen. We have doctors who help us, but even they were mystified.

“It was Ann De Wouters who first discovered what the Germans had done. She had spent many months becoming close friends with a young German officer from the 136th Special Employment Division, who administered Antwerp during the occupation. When I say ‘close friends,’ you understand what I am saying to you.”

He paused, and took a deep breath, as if he were trying to stop himself from sounding too emotional.

“She is, she was, a very moral young woman. But her husband Jan was arrested and shot by the Germans in 1942, and I think she believed that this was the best way she could take her revenge.

“Anyway — one night this young German officer invited Ann to a party at Major General Stolberg-Stolberg’s house — he was the commanding officer of the 136th Special Employment Division. Some of the German officers got drunk and started boasting that they would soon exterminate all of the resistance in Antwerp.”

He turned around in his seat to make sure that nobody else was listening, and then he leaned forward and said, “They claimed they had brought in some kind of infection from Eastern Europe which would spread among the White Brigade and within six weeks it would kill us all.”

Still I didn’t reply. And still the branch kept tapping at the window. It sounded as if the wind was rising, and I prayed that it wouldn’t start to rain. The scent of Screechers was so much harder to follow in the wet.

Paul Hankar said, “They didn’t seem to know exactly what this infection was, but they were very excited about it. Apparently they had used it against the resistance in Poland and also in France. They said that it had come from Romania.”

“I see. Any mention of mensen van de nacht?”

“The night people? As far as I’m concerned, that was only a hysterical rumor. It started to spread when people were discovered around the city with all of the blood drained out of them. Sometimes a whole family would be found in their apartment, grandparents, mothers and fathers, even babies. cut open, and their hearts pulled out. But in many cases their doors were locked on the inside and nobody could work out how anybody could have gotten in or out.”

“How do you think they were killed?”

“I don’t know. I don’t believe in anything supernatural. Once or twice, some of our people who had gotten sick were seen by witnesses in the vicinity of these tragedies, but we never found any conclusive evidence that they were responsible.”

I said, quietly, “Ann was killed like that.”

“What?”

“They opened her up. Then they took out her heart and drained all the blood out of her.”

Paul Hankar’s mouth tightened, but he didn’t say anything. I watched him, and smoked, and eventually I said, “Is there anything else you can tell me? It doesn’t matter how trivial you think it is, it might help me to find out who killed her.”

“And then what, after you’ve found out who killed her? That won’t bring her back.”

“I know. But it might stop it from happening again.”

He blew out smoke, and shrugged. “I know very little, really. Ann kept her ears open whenever she was in the company of German officers, and once or twice she heard them discussing the killings, especially the one on Minderbroeder Straat, when twenty-three people died, including two nuns.

“The Germans never said anything to connect these massacres directly with their Romanian infection, but Ann told me more than once that she had a feeling that they might be associated. One of the SS officers said something like, ‘At last the Romanians are being of some use to us.’ And, ‘The sicker they are, the more blood they want.’ Also, one of our wireless operators managed to intercept some coded messages which were sent to Antwerp from the Sixth Army in Bucharest.”

“Really?”

“We could only pick up bits and pieces. But they kept referring to ‘carriers,’ in the sense of people who carry an infection.”

“These messages. did they contain any names?”

“What do you mean?”

“Romanian names. It could help us to find out what this infection actually is, and where it came from.”

“As I remember, only one Romanian name. Dorin Duca. It came up several times. It was not completely clear, because the messages were so fragmentary, but it appeared that somebody called Duca was supposed to be assisting the operation in Antwerp. However we never came across any Duca, so I doubt if he actually came here. We keep a very close check on who comes into Antwerp, believe me, and who leaves.”

The boy arrived with a bottle of apple schnapps and a bottle of lemonade, and two very small glasses. Paul Hankar immediately filled up his glass, knocked it back and filled it up again. “If the Allies hadn’t taken the city, there would have been no resistance left by Christmas.”

“What did you do when your people became infected?”

“I told you. We isolated them, broke off all contact. We couldn’t jeopardize any of our operations.”

“So I could talk to some of them, if I needed to?”

Paul Hankar shrugged. “I think many of them got very sick indeed, so maybe not.”

“How sick?”

Paul Hankar looked from left to right, avoiding my eyes. “Well, they are dead now,” he said at last. “You understand for our own protection that we had to dispose of them.”

“How many?”

“Altogether? Maybe thirty-five, thirty-six.”

“Do you want to tell me how you did it?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Do you want to tell me how you disposed of them?”

“Does it matter?”

“Actually, yes, it matters a great deal.”

He lifted his hand with his finger pointing like a pistol. “We shot them in the back of the head. Then we threw their bodies into the Scheldt.”

“OK. I was afraid of that.”

“We did something wrong?”

I shook my head. “You did what you thought was right. I can’t blame you for that.”

“You think this was possibly easy? All through the darkest times of the occupation, we had trusted these same people with our very lives, and they in their turn had implicitly trusted us. They were not only friends but relatives, some of them — fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters.”

“Sure.” I didn’t like to tell him that shooting a Screecher could only make things a thousand times worse. The only saving grace was that they had thrown their bodies into the river.

We sat in silence for a while. Eventually Paul Hankar picked up another paper napkin and blew his nose on it. “I am very sad about Ann,” he said. “She was always so careful not to compromise herself. I always thought that she and I would both survive.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I didn’t think that I was old enough to tell him how obvious it was that he had loved her.

He finished his drink and stood up. “I have to go now. I hope I have assisted you. If you find the people who murdered her — ”

“We will. But you won’t find out about it. Besides, what’s the point of telling an art-nouveau jewelry designer who died in 1901?”

He nearly managed to smile. “You know the name Paul Hankar?”

I nodded.

“I’m impressed. I didn’t know Americans had such culture.”