by Alan Furst
Despite the crowd, Leila, in her slate-gray raincoat and black leather gloves, was easy to spot. Ricard got a coffee and sat down next to her on the bench. “Very public place you chose for a meeting,” he said.
“They told me I had to see you right away. It seems that your drawing has caused a great stir.”
“Well, I’m glad to be rid of it.”
“I think maybe they are not done with you. They asked me to give you this.”
This turned out to be a cinema ticket, a balcony seat for the following evening’s showing of Les Visiteurs du Soir—The Night Visitors, a fifteenth-century costume drama, directed by Marcel Carné and starring Arletty, with Jules Berry as the devil. “Have you seen it?” Leila said.
“I wasn’t sure I’d like it.”
“Well, now you’ll find out.”
* * *
—
Wehrmacht major Erhard Geisler, properly SS Geisler, woke at seven-thirty, reached out to stroke his mistress—sometimes she could be coaxed into lovemaking before breakfast—but found only a note on the dent in her pillow. “Sweetheart, I have early work this morning. See you tonight.” The message was signed “Kiki,” her signature followed by abundant X’s and O’s. Kiki was originally from Alsace and, before moving to Paris, worked as a stenographer at one of the numberless bureaux that administered the occupation of France.
Geisler’s suite at the luxurious Hôtel Crillon—the Germans had taken all the best hotels in Paris as their barracks—had two large armoires, and Gerhard opened one of them and stared at the neat row of suits. What to wear today? He had a choice: Civilian dress or uniform? In civilian dress he very much blended into the crowd: a pear-shaped fellow in his forties, bland and colorless, with clear plastic-framed eyeglasses. Had he been in the Gestapo, he would have had to wear the uniform, but he worked for the SD, the Sicherheitsdienst, the intelligence service of the Nazi party, and so could wear whatever pleased him.
Well, not really. This morning he had a meeting: representatives of all the German security services would have yet another discussion about the suppression of the French Resistance, and everyone would be in uniform. So would he, but he didn’t mind so much. His black SS uniform fit perfectly, well sewn by one of the Jewish tailors in German concentration camps, where all German uniforms were made.
From a row of shoes at the bottom of the armoire, he chose the well-shined black pair that accompanied his uniform. Geisler had a refined taste in shoes, having once worked as a salesman at a shoe store in Düsseldorf. That was in the bad old days, before he joined the Nazi party. He had a low, thus early, registration number, had joined up with Hitler in the 1920s, and this fact helped him in the eternal power struggles that went on in high party circles.
Now life went better. He made lists, using the endless stream of reports and denunciations that reached him from all over France, but particularly in Paris, where the citizens especially loathed the Germans and the occupation. From these lists he made other lists, and these unlucky people were arrested, interrogated, and sent on to concentration camps, or executed immediately. But Geisler never did any of this himself; he was what was known as a Schreibtischmörder, a desk-murderer: a pale, insignificant man, but deadly.
His job now, in occupied Paris, followed a certain doctrine, an old and honored tactic of those who occupied nations other than their own: Control the Culture. The Wehrmacht occupied France, now the French had to be taught to think in a new way. So, to control the culture, he needed the people who worked in that culture: journalists, radiobroadcasters, teachers, and writers. He had asked his secretary, a bright-eyed young lieutenant, to prepare a list, and on that list was the entry: Ricard, Paul J., Detective Novelist.
* * *
—
The following evening, Ricard attended a showing of The Night Visitors, using the ticket for a seat in the balcony that Leila had given him. Before the occupation, Ricard had liked sitting in the balcony, where it was dark and intimate, but no more. Now the houselights were left on, by order of the Germans.
Early in the occupation, the audience had been demonstrative once the theatre went dark and the newsreel, produced by the German propaganda department, came on the screen. Demonstrative was barely the word. From the audience, on those evenings, Hitler’s appearance in the newsreel was greeted with a great barrage of oral farts, some loud and extended, others brief and sibilant, you couldn’t find a public toilet in France with more variety. Meanwhile, on the screen, from a confident, smiling Hitler, a quote from yesterday’s speech. “We are winning the war,” said the subtitle. And a particularly loud chorus of flatulence had greeted that news. So the Germans decreed that the houselights must stay on. A very unwelcome decree to those who liked to kiss and hug at the movies. To the French, the Germans were harsh and relentless, but they were also very annoying.
As Ricard climbed to the well-lit balcony he thought, Theatres should not be seen in the light. The red cushions of the seats were stained and soiled, the carpeting on the floor no better—in some places ripped and sewn back together—and bore, beneath the seats, torn shreds of paper and old ticket stubs that the cleaners had ignored. An usher read his ticket stub, pointed out a vacant seat, and, a few minutes later, the newsreel began: German tanks crossing a bridge, girls in peasant costumes dancing in Wiesbaden. Then, leading another patron behind him, the usher beckoned Ricard to follow, climbed the stairs to the projection booth, and knocked on the door, which opened to admit Ricard and the other patron, who handed the projectionist a few banknotes folded together and nodded toward the door. Now the two of them were alone in the darkened booth, the unattended projector clattering away on its table.
The other patron said, “You are Monsieur Paul Ricard?”
“Yes, and you are?”
“A friend of your friends in London, I am known as Teodor.”
He spoke almost but not quite as a native Parisian, in an educated voice with, perhaps, a faint note of Eastern Europe in his accent. He wore a powder-blue double-breasted suit, a half size too large for him, and was clean-shaven, had strings of colorless hair plastered across his scalp, sunken cheeks, and crooked teeth. He seemed, to Ricard, obsequious, like a headwaiter seeking a generous tip.
“Monsieur Ricard,” he said, “you are a writer—is that correct? I believe I may have read a book of yours. A Season for War, did you write that?”
“I did.”
“It was very good, I thought, the intrigue especially. Do you have some practical experience in that area? Working as a spy?”
“None at all.”
“Well, here’s your chance to get some. The people—civil servants, we’ll call them—in London, who received the engineering schematic, need your help, urgently need it. They want more information: Who is doing this? Who got this to Paris? What are their names? How can they be contacted? Is it a Resistance cell? To the people in London, that would be a real treasure. You see, Ricard, you’ve struck a nerve. The detonator in your diagram is to be used in a torpedo, and the torpedo, once installed in a German U-boat, is meant to destroy merchant shipping, many lives lost, important cargo burned up or sunk. So you can’t blame the British for…pursuing the source of this. Wherever that drawing came from, there’s more to be discovered: maybe technology the British don’t know about, maybe people, Poles or others, who can help the British war effort. Do you see what I mean?”
“Yes,” Ricard said.
“I would be lying if I said it wasn’t dangerous—here you enter Gestapo country. I know you are a French writer, now you have a chance to be a French patriot.”
Ricard nodded and waited for more.
“You must begin with your friend Kasia; are you her lover? How did you meet her?”
“I am not her lover, she works with a gangster called Jacquot, who is a bank robber.”
“Well, when it comes to fighting Nazis
, nobody cares what Jacquot does for a living. But first comes Kasia.”
“I met her in the bookstore where she works,” Ricard said. “A small bookstore, on the Rue de Condé, just off the Rue des Écoles, close to the Sorbonne, so there are always students around. On the shelves, Sartre, Camus, all the existentialists, and plenty of books by radicals—of the left, of course. Kasia and I somehow hit it off, we liked each other, she’s a free spirit, you know, a tough Polish kid.”
“Well, it sounds to me as though she would be willing to do more.”
The man who called himself Teodor paused, took a cigarette from his pocket, lit it, and shook out the wooden match. “You’ll have whatever help you need. Somewhere, a long way west of this balcony, you will find the bombed city of London, where, whistling as they climb over the rubble on their way to work, are certain British civil servants, who have offices with obscure titles on their doors. They have, like the rest of their class, the most amiable and polite exteriors, but the work they do is secret, and often cruel. And the war, which at the moment Britain is losing, has made them desperate, so there is not much they won’t do. Really, nothing they won’t do. Now Hitler, in that lump of coal he calls a heart, believes he is fighting ‘a nation of shopkeepers.’ ” From Teodor, a brief and very cold laugh. When he continued, he said simply, “He is wrong.”
On the screen, the wandering minstrel Gilles was seducing the innocent ingenue Anne, while the devil, who wanted Anne for himself, watched from behind a drape. But then, in a close-up, the devil turned yellow, then brown, and started to disappear altogether, all this accompanied by the smell of burning acetate and whistles and offended shouts from the audience. Teodor quickly adjusted a lever on the side of the projector, and the movie began again.
As the film continued, Ricard said, “Of course I could try to get what these people want, but it would involve going to Germany, and first I would have to obtain press credentials, a travel permit to cross the border, and I would need a reason to go.”
Teodor crushed out his cigarette on the floor of the projection booth and lit another. “What is your opinion of the Vichy government?”
“They are traitors. Loathsome creatures, I have nothing but contempt for them—any honorable Frenchman would say the same thing.”
Teodor nodded. Yes, he agreed. But the nod meant more—it acknowledged that what he had heard from Ricard was what he wanted to hear. “Dreadful people,” he said. “Many are fascists, but most are opportunists, who would do anything to rise above their competitors now that the game has changed. Of course the Reich courts the Vichy sympathizers, treats them as friends, allies in the struggle for Europe. To get into Germany you could pretend to be one of them.”
“Why me, Teodor? I’m just a detective novelist.”
“Not quite. You are now Kasia’s handler, as the civil servants put it. So you are stuck with the job and, as a French patriot, you’ll do it well.”
Ricard hesitated, then agreed, with, as the French put it, un petit oui, a little yes.
“Good, Ricard. You’ll have help, the civil servants have a lot of money and a lot of friends, so you are not without resources. Go and serve the honor of your country.”
* * *
—
3 November. The morning after the robbery, Paulette, the teller at the Banque du Commerce who’d seen Kasia shoot the guard, was troubled from the moment she awoke. Turning to look at her husband, she saw that he was also awake. He was a mean, pompous man, a traveling salesman who sold dry goods in the Paris region. She said, “Pierre,” then the story came tumbling out in a rush.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure. I knew her at lycée.”
“And so, what do you intend to do about it?”
“What could I do?”
“Inform the authorities, ma douce.”
“You can’t mean…denounce her?”
“You must, it is your civic duty to do so.”
“I owe the Boche nothing.”
“Well, it is more what they will owe us, a thousand francs for this information, I would think.”
“Please, I beg you, Pierre, don’t make me do such a thing.”
“What if she’s arrested and interrogated? What if they find out you recognized her? What then, eh? I’ll tell you, then you’ll be in the soup.”
“You are telling me to go to the Boche?”
“Yes. We’ll go together, to the occupation people at the Hôtel Majestic.”
Paulette resisted for a time, but eventually she agreed—Pierre was her husband, and one had to obey one’s husband. Thus it happened that at dawn on the fifth of November, a squad of detectives, led by a German officer in civilian clothes, kicked in the door of Kasia’s room. The flics knew where she lived, because the flics knew where everyone lived.
Kasia sat bolt upright in bed as the lock gave way and the door flew open. She thought about reaching for her Browning, but it was wrapped in oiled paper and hidden at the bottom of a dead houseplant on her windowsill. The flics searched her room, but they never found it. They told her to get dressed, watched with interest as she did so, then pulled her hands behind her back and snapped handcuffs on her wrists.
* * *
—
They took her to the massive Fresnes prison, south of Paris, where she was locked in a cell with three other women. One of them was a young résistante who had been caught leaving propaganda leaflets on the Métro, one had fled with her lover, a chauffeur who had stolen jewelry from his employer, and the last was a prostitute called Olga, who had slapped an official when he’d demanded something she didn’t like to do.
It was she who befriended Kasia, who was in a bad way, facing years in prison for bank robbery. This was not the first time Kasia had been on the edge of catastrophe, and she had always managed to escape the final blow. But now she was never free from tears. Olga was a good soul, sometimes at night would climb to the upper berth of the bunk and crawl in beside her, would hold and stroke her and tell her everything would work out. On occasion the sympathy went beyond comfort, but this lovemaking was Kasia’s preference, and she responded eagerly.
Absolute silence was the rule at Fresnes for most of the day, but in the hours they were allowed to talk, Kasia told her cellmates some of her story. She had, in fact, been in jail before: eight months in a Bulgarian prison in Sofia, and five months at Antalya in Turkey. But now she faced a trial in the indefinite future to be followed by time in prison. She had had no word from Jacquot, who she thought was in hiding, having escaped with the wounded Antek from the bank robbery. Bad luck for Kasia that her old friend had been working at the bank, bad luck that Paulette had denounced her. Fate, she thought, it would find you.
But then…
“Prisoner 45042, come to the bars.” This from the wardress, in her blue uniform.
Kasia did as she was told.
The wardress inserted a key in the barred cell door and let Kasia out into the passageway. “You have a visitor,” she said, and led Kasia to the small room with a table and two chairs where visits took place. Kasia sat on the prisoner’s side of the table and waited, then a seedy man entered the room and sat across from her. He was not an appealing individual; he had sunken cheeks, strings of hair plastered across his head, and crooked teeth.
“I brought you a tin of sardines and an orange,” he said. “The guard has them.” He had, Kasia thought, a slight Balkan inflection in his speech.
“Thank you, monsieur.”
Teodor paused, then said, “Would you like to leave this place, Kasia?”
“More than anything in the world. Who are you, monsieur, a lawyer?”
The answer to this question was oblique, based on the probability that conversation in this room was being secretly recorded. “No, I am not a lawyer. My friends call me Teodor, and we have need of someone who spe
aks Polish. There is travel involved, would you mind?”
“It doesn’t matter, just tell me what to do.”
“That will come later. For the moment, expect a visit from a lawyer in a day or two. You will be released, probably at night, and I’ll be waiting for you outside the gates with a car.”
Kasia wanted to kiss his hand, an ancient peasant instinct that she resisted. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, Teodor.” Kasia had never felt such a surge of gratitude. At this point Teodor left the visiting room. As she was led back to her cell, Kasia asked the wardress about the tin of sardines and the orange, but the woman just shrugged.
* * *
—
That evening, Teodor met with Ricard, who had been directed, at the Café Albert, to a garage in the industrial suburb of Saint-Denis. It was a chilly, windless evening, with dry flakes of snow drifting down over the city, a thin slice of moon visible when the clouds parted. Ricard waited in the unlit garage, which reeked of gasoline and had the cold, dead air of a place that had never been heated. A third of the garage had been isolated by floor-to-ceiling wire mesh, with an ice-blue Bugatti sports car parked behind the wire. To Ricard, it looked like the car was in prison. After the Germans had occupied the country, they took all the cars, especially the fancy ones. Thus wise owners had hidden their automobiles; the writer Simenon famously parking his in a barn.
On the surface, Ricard was calm, a man doing what had to be done. He truly hated the loud, strutting Germans, and wanted to strike a blow against them. But in his heart what he really wanted was to run away—he’d been trapped, trapped by what now seemed a foolish desire to help the war effort. Idiot, he thought, naïve idiot. Why had he not understood that, in these times, the idealist would pay a stiff price. With a caustic eye, he looked back at Ricard the writer, who should have kept intrigue confined to paper. Now he was lost, moving down a labyrinth he didn’t understand. But it was too late; this was no plot that could be revised; this was his reality and he hated it.
