Certain Demolitions
Chapter 36: Apogee of the Moon
"What were you expecting?"
Kristoph lowered his pen and gave Calisto a long look. "That is not helping."
She snorted with laughter. "You send your little brother away to America, against his will, and don't communicate with him at all for…how long has it been now? What year is this, 1943? So you're going on no contact for almost two years now." Calisto said, resuming her pacing up and down in front of Kristoph's desk in his office at his home. "Honestly, I'm surprised it took him this long to write."
"At least he had the good sense to write that von Metz girl, and not write here directly." Kristoph grumbled. The last time he was this displeased with his little brother, it had been when Klavier had come back from school with one of his ears pierced. That was the last time he had let Klavier go to school in Czechoslovakia, the better to prevent him from wandering the forests on the weekends and interacting with Gypsies who would pierce his ear for him.
"I heard that the send off was a little rough." Calisto said, and started to laugh.
"Yes, he seemed to think I was giving him an option to go to America, when it wasn't." Kristoph said, adjusting his glasses. Now that the German forces at Stalingrad had surrendered, he felt enormously justified in his decision to send Klavier away.
Calisto made a half-hearted effort to stop her laughing, then gave up and started to cackle. "I wish I could have been there to see you lock the door on him."
"I'm glad you're amused." Kristoph told her, his voice like ice. Klavier may have hated me for it, but I note that he is alive to hate me.
Calisto made a concerted effort and stopped laughing. "I don't know what you were expecting." She repeated. "Are you at least going to write him back?"
"That is what I was working on when you came in." Kristoph said. "And I'm going to tell him that if he must write again, he can direct his letters to Misham in Switzerland."
On a narrow side table against the wall near the door of the office stood a blue bottle of perfume with a gold atomizer on it. Calisto picked it up and turned it over in her hands. "Night? Where did you get this?"
"It was a gift." Kristoph said without looking up from his letter. "I was told it was very popular in France before the war."
Calisto squeezed that atomizer and released a spray of perfume in the air. She sniffed it as it dissipated in the air. "It smells nice."
"Was that really necessary?" Kristoph asked.
"I don't know why you would keep a bottle of perfume here." Calisto said, setting it back down.
"A reminder to stay out of Hammelburg until the war is over." Kristoph muttered. He finished the letter and folded it. "If I find out that you or Misham read this, I won't be happy." He warned Calisto as he pulled an envelope out of one of the lower drawers in his desk and slid the letter inside. He addressed it, sealed it and then handed the envelope to her. "Take that to Misham. Tell him to post it to the address written on it." From another drawer in his desk, he pulled out another envelope, this one with money in it, and handed it to her.
She took both envelopes and gave him a mock salute. "Until next time."
"Yes, until next time." Kristoph replied, already turning his attention to the next piece of correspondence on his desk.
(-)
Since the poisoning incident, for which three people had been shot but during which no information had turned up missing from any of the affected offices – for similar poisoning incidents had taken place during the same time at other vital war stations in Munich – Lt. Mander has come up with no evidence against Kristoph Gavin, and has started keeping his suspicions to himself. Well, to himself and Corporal Berger.
Information that should be private still keeps ending up in the hands of the British and the Underground. Mander is not happy about this.
Berger did not like hearing Lt. Mander's complaints about Kristoph, but he was outranked by the other man and out of luck on that front. Berger thought that Kristoph was a dedicated employee of the Reich, and he couldn't understand Mander's suspicions.
They were sitting at a table at a café. This café was frequented by many employees of the War Communication Office due to its proximity to the office. Workers of the Reich stopped by for anything from a lunch to a cup of coffee or a newspaper.
Mander and Berger are having lunch when the door opened and Kristoph walked in. They watched as he went to the counter and purchased a newspaper. "Someday, I'm going to prove that Pfalzgraf Gavin is the traitor who's selling us out." Mander said, watching Kristoph's actions with great interest.
"Why do you keep calling him Pfalzgraf? He doesn't go by the title. He goes by Herr Gavin." Berger asked. Kristoph hadn't even seen them. He departed the café a moment later.
"I know. And I would never call him Pfalzgraf to his face." Mander said. "But he is the type who holds great stock in the fact that his family was nobility. And he's the spy. Someone is still selling us out. Pfalzgraf Gavin is the main suspect."
"But why?" Berger asked, looking confused. "Do you have any proof?"
"Not yet." Mander said. "But I will."
"So you don't have any evidence but you think that Kristoph Gavin is the spy?" Berger looked something between confused and annoyed.
"There will be proof. I have had agents examining all of the Pfalzgraf's mail." Lt Mander pulled a strip of paper out of his pocket. "I have called you here, Corporal, because I intend to have you fill in for my work at the communications office while I'm gone."
"Where are you going?" Berger sounded genuinely curious.
Mander unfolded the paper and laid it on the table, and they both looked at the name of a town in Switzerland. "If I want to make Gavin confess, I have to find a way to make him squirm. Klavier Gavin, the Pfalzgraf's younger brother was going to be drafted into the Army. But before that could happen, he became a conscientious objector and fled to Switzerland."
"You have spent some time looking up the story of the pair." Berger said noncommittally.
Mander gave him a mean smile. "I know the story because I was the one who arranged for Klavier Gavin to be drafted and sent to the Eastern front. It was my way of making a point to the bourgeois nobility like Pfalzgraf Gavin."
"Why do you hate him so much? He comes in, he does his job, he's joined the party, and he works very loyally. So his brother was an objector. So what?"
"I was in school with Pfalzgraf Gavin, the man born under a lucky star. Rich, a success in school. He had everything, and I had nothing. He walked past me and never even saw me. Now that I have power and he doesn't, I intend to make sure he knows what that feels like."
"Oh, you're jealous of him. I thought you were going to say he kicked your puppy when you were both children or something." Berger muttered.
"What was that?"
"Nothing, Lieutenant! You were saying something about my filling in?" Berger said importantly.
Mander gave him a long look. "While I am out, I want you to fill in for me at the War Communications Office. I daresay you know the place well enough by now. Who knows, your success in this role might very well mean a promotion later on."
"Yes, sir!" Berger said excitedly. "I will do my best for the service of the Reich, sir! But, where will you be?"
Mander looked down at the slip of paper. "This was copied from a postmark of one of the letters we examined. I am going to take a vacation. I hear the Alps are beautiful this time of year." He smiled, and folded the paper back up.
It was time to arrange for a little family reunion for the Gavin brothers.
(-)
When he gets home that night, and after he's had dinner, Kristoph goes back upstairs to continue his work. He's been liquidating all of the family assets, and moving the money to banks in Switzerland. He had meant to do more of it yesterday but then he had ended up writing back to Klavier, trying to get the letter finished before Calisto arrived.
In a box in his dresser are all of the letters that Kristoph has received from Klavier over the years. Klavier used to write a lot when he was younger, and away at school. Kristoph had encouraged this, as a way to keep Klavier at school and prevent him from trying to come home. The box represented several years of correspondence between them that started to dwindle as Klavier got older.
Kristoph thinks as he sits at his desk that he should put the most recent letter in the box. Since the first bombing raid on Munich, he's moved the box and put it in the valise he keeps in the old scullery behind the kitchen. There's no real basement to the house, though there is a wine cellar, and the scullery is built into the ground and part of it sits under the present kitchen. It's where he goes when the news of incoming bombing raids is announced and the sirens go off. He prefers the scullery, mainly because there's a door that leads directly out of it and into the yard, as opposed to the wine cellar which has no way out but the one door that leads back into the house.
He keeps several other things in that valise: the family history, all the identification papers that he does not carry with him on a daily basis, a couple changes of clothes, the song Klavier had written for him when the latter was ten.
Kristoph looks at the bottle of perfume on his side table and decides that he will need to take that with him, too. He might need it after the war.
But for now, it and Klavier's most recent letter will remain in his office. He can always come get them if he needs to take them with him next time the air raid sirens go off.
Klavier's letter he wants to keep close and safe, and there's no safer place for it right now then locked away in his desk.
[A/N:] Finally, we reach the point in Certain Demolitions where Night officially crosses over. Woo hoo! Yes, if you want to know more about the perfume, and why Kristoph has it, there's a crossover fic that I mentioned several chapters ago called Certain Demolitions: Night. It's a Hogan's Heroes crossover with this story and the perfume is a plot point.
Realistically, for safety from bombing raids, Kristoph would have probably been told to use the wine cellar as it's definitely safer then the scullery, being fully underground rather then partially underground. Kristoph being himself probably smiled, and thanked the inspectors who pointed this out to him, and went back to doing whatever he pleased. Can't say I blame him for staying in the scullery. My fear in regards to being totally underground would be that if a bomb did land on the house, and I was underground, how would I get out if the place did catch on fire or blow up over head and bury the entrance under rubble?
In 1943 the German Army at Stalingrad surrendered. The Germans had not been kind to the Russians during the invasion of the country - some stories I've heard while researching said that the German army shot Russian peasants who were making presents to them of bread and salt, with is some kind of symbol of hospitality in Russia - and so Russia paid that right back to Germany when the opportunity came up. It was ugly, but war is ugly, and that's all we're going to say about that.
Mander complains about Kristoph a lot. (Where would the man be without his one-sided rivalry?) After the Wiemar Republic began, nobles could keep their titles by adding them to their surnames. In this story, Kristoph hasn't done that, and honestly it's not like Klavier cares enough about the fact he's ex-nobility to want to do it. But Mander is the kind of person who, if he had been nobility, would have wanted everyone to know it and would be demanding that everyone refer to him by his obsolete title.
Germany and England spent a lot of time bombing each other. (A famous reference to this is C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and Wardrobe, which leads off with this premise, since the Pevensies are sent to the country to escape the London Blitz.) Munich was especially a target because of its association with Hitler and the Nazi Party. I expect we'll touch on this more later because the bombing raids will become a plot point for a couple of upcoming chapters.
The chapter title is a reference to the moon's orbit around the Earth. When the moon is closest to the Earth, it's said to be at perigree, and when it's the farthest away, it's at apogee. The title is meant to allude to the fact that at this moment in the story, until he finishes that letter and hands it to Calisto to post for him, Kristoph is as far away from his brother as he can be. But now he'll start orbiting back.
I think that's everything, but you have a question about something that I didn't mention here, as always, let me know.
Please review.