The Last Heroes (Men at War 1)

Actually, Eldon C. Baker was an intelligence officer. He had been left behind because, to an extraordinary degree, he enjoyed the confidence of his superiors, both in the upper echelons of the embassy hierarchy (where only two people besides the ambassador knew of his intelligence role) and within the State Department’s intelligence system itself.

The first time Eldon C. Baker saw Eric Fulmar was in Fouquet’s restaurant on the Champs-Élysées. Baker had been taking dinner there with an amiable German counterpart, Frederick Ferdinand ‘‘Freddie’’ Dietz, a junior Foreign Ministry officer assigned to the office of the military governor of Paris.

Fulmar was with two very pretty girls and a dark-skinned young man, an Arab of some kind. Baker’s attention had been split between the pretty girls and the Arab, between personal and professional curiosity. At a table across from the one with the two young men and the pretty girls sat three men, drinking coffee. One of them was black, a huge man whose flesh spilled over the collar of his shirt and whose belly pressed against the table. He was Senegalese, Baker decided, and he was certainly not in Fouquet’s league socially. Not if the two Frenchmen he sat with were doing what he thought they were doing.

Baker knew one of them by sight, not by name. He was a member of the Sûreté, the French security service, and he was normally assigned to the Colonial Office. All three of them, rather obviously, were assigned to protect the Moroccan, or Algerian, or Tunisian, whatever he was, sitting at the table with the pretty girls and the handsome young man.

‘‘Now, there’s a nice pair,’’ Baker said to his dinner partner.

‘‘Which pair?’’ Freddie Dietz had quipped. ‘‘Or, you mean both of them.’’

‘‘Yes.’’

‘‘The one on the left is the daughter of Generalmajor von Handleman-Bitburg. She’s in town with her mother for a short holiday with her father.’’

‘‘And the other?’’

‘‘Don’t know. I wish I did.’’

‘‘Who’s the Arab?’’

The first word that came to Baker’s mind, looking at the Arab, was ‘‘arrogant.’’ He was tall, thin, and very well tailored, in a dinner jacket with an old-fashioned high collar. He was sharp-featured, hawk-eyed, and had long-fingered, sensitive hands. When he shook his cuffs, Baker saw heavy jeweled gold cuff links, and both a bracelet and a heavy gold watchband. He had a ring with a stone Baker couldn’t identify on the pinkie of his right hand, and there was a large diamond—worth a fortune, Baker thought, presuming it to be real—in a heavy gold setting on what Westerners consider the wedding-ring finger.

As Baker watched, he snapped his fingers impatiently for someone to pour wine, and then a moment later, putting a cigarette to his lips, looked around impatiently for the lackey he obviously expected to provide an instant light.

‘‘I haven’t the foggiest, but the fellow is Eric Fulmar.’’

Eric Fulmar was blond, blue-eyed, lithe and tanned. He was wearing a dinner jacket, not nearly as well tailored as the Arab’s and with simple back studs in a modern, rolled-collar shirt. Baker felt enormous energy coming from this good-looking young man. Not nerves. Not craziness. Power. There was purpose to his gestures and self-assurance he had only rarely met in a kid so young.

‘‘Who’s he?’’

‘‘Fulmar Elektrische Gesellschaft,’’ Freddie Dietz said. ‘‘He was at Marburg with my brother.’’

Fulmar Elektrische Gesellschaft, FEG, was a medium-sized electrical equipment manufacturing concern in Frankfurt am Main. That explained why the young German, who looked like a recruiting poster for the Waffen-SS, was not in uniform. Baker noticed a tendency on the part of the Germans to excuse the sons of industrialists, particularly those who had early on supported the National Socialists, from military service.

As they left the restaurant, they had passed the other table. Dietz had spoken to Fulmar, and introductions had been made all around. Fulmar introduced the Arab as ‘‘His Excellency, Sheikh Sidi Hassan el Ferruch’’ and the other girl as a Fräulein Somebody.

In their cab on the way to the Left Bank, Freddie Dietz further identified the Arab.

‘‘I recognize him now. He’s the son of a Moroccan pasha, ’’ he said. ‘‘He was at Marburg with my brother and Fulmar.’’

‘‘What’s he doing in Paris?’’

‘‘Causing trouble.’’ Dietz laughed.

‘‘How?’’

‘‘He’s buying racehorses, in direct competition with some very highly placed people. There are, you know, some people who had hoped to take advantage of the . . . shall I say ‘depressed market’? . . . to improve their stables. Fulmar’s friend has destroyed many happy dreams. He has annoyed some very important people, one very important Hungarian in particular, but mostly Germans. I’ve also heard he’s into other things—of doubtful legality. But the word is out to leave him alone. The Foreign Ministry doesn’t want trouble with his father.’’

Baker could imagine what these doubtful legal things were. He had heard some very interesting stories about the German inability to stop the flow of privately held gold, Swiss and American currency, investment-quality precious stones, and fine art out of both occupied and Vichy France. It had been decreed that gold and foreign currency must be deposited in banks, where they were to be exchanged for French francs. The export of jewel stones and fine art was forbidden except by permit, which was rarely issued.

Short of conducting house-to-house searches of France, there was no way to make the French turn in their gold and hard currency for exchange. And many wealthy French, who hoped one day to leave German-occupied France, were trying every possible means to send their assets, which often included paintings and objets d’art, out ahead of them.

A highly placed Moroccan who could freely move in and out of France on some sort of official passport could move fortunes in his luggage if he was so inclined.

‘‘That being the case,’’ Baker said, ‘‘I suppose it’s a good thing we didn’t go after the girls.’’

‘‘A great pity,’’ Freddie Dietz said, ‘‘but it would have been ill advised.’’