Victor squatted by the machine. “Noël? Could you spare a minute?”
“I’ll be right with you.” Noël’s voice rang hollow from the guts of the press.
The printing press had rusted out completely, its iron arms and cogs reduced to ghosts of what they were. We’d had an increasingly difficult time tracking down materials to maintain the FI presses. It was easy to convince the higher-ups we needed more guns, more bullets—but another wrench, or a can of oil, or (God forbid) some paper and ink to feed it with? Over the past year, Victor had started writing to the FI commanders to ask for money instead of materials, ostensibly “for the purpose of weapons and ammunition to defend ourselves in situations of attack.” The money, of course, went straight to the wrench in Noël’s hand and the screws in the printing press. But it was never enough.
“All right, then.” René Noël slid out from under the press, tossing aside the wrench. “What can I do for you, Professor?”
“I wanted to speak with you about printing. Now that the school caper is done with, we have the material we need to print Faux Soir. We remain, of course, limited by what we will actually be able to distribute on the eleventh, before the Gestapo figures out what we are doing and puts a stop—”
“There is no sense worrying over that yet.”
“I agree. But we do need to worry over our plans for printing. What is our capacity here?”
Noël rested a hand on the battered press. “Not enough for fifty thousand copies, heaven help us. We could print perhaps two hundred copies in a twenty-four-hour period—and I don’t think we’ll have much more than a day. For God’s sake, we haven’t even finished writing yet. We haven’t finished figuring out our distribution methods yet, how we’re going to distract the Gestapo, how we’re going to get the paper out into the streets. And even two hundred copies would tax our presses and personnel to their limits.” With a self-conscious glance upward, René Noël lowered his voice. “We’ve lost so many, since Wolff knocked on our door. What do you have in mind, Martin? Anything?” I was taken aback by the desperation in Noël’s voice. Even in our bleakest hour, I’d never heard him speak that way.
“I have a plan.” The professor put on his glasses, rifled through his pockets for a bit of chalk. “It’s a bit risky, perhaps, but I do believe it will work.”
* * *
Ferdinand Wellens, (accidentally) renowned businessman and architect of the Faux Soir school caper, was having a bit of a tantrum.
“No one does, or ever will, understand my plight.” He paced his office, throwing back his cape with every fourth step. “No one, I say.”
“Perhaps if you’d explain...” said René Noël.
“But it’s so simple.”
“Then surely it won’t take you very long.”
“All right, if you insist. People are fleeing the country, or the city. God knows why.”
“Indeed,” Victor said dryly.
“And printing is not the sturdy profession it once was. People work on assembly lines now. Assembly lines! As if we need any more automobiles with their smell and their noise.”
“They are noisy,” Noël agreed.
“Soon, I predict, I will no longer have the manpower necessary to operate this factory.” Wellens stamped his foot at the word this. “What am I to do then, I ask you? And that is not the half of it, I tell you. I am losing resources, too. The Nazis have contracts with so-and-so and that other fellow, and the FI—well, you have your own factories... The point is I have nothing to print and no one to print it. How am I to eat, I ask you?”
“A problem indeed.” Victor’s eyes went to Wellens’s paunch, and then pointedly (indeed, the word must have been invented for Victor’s expression)—his eyes went, pointedly, to René Noël. Noël returned his glance with a nod.
“We are very sorry,” said the director.
“As it happens...” Noël started. “On second thought, no. This would not interest you.”
Wellens stood up straight. “What is it?”
“It would not interest him, would it, Victor?”
“No, Noël, I think not.”
“What?” Wellens looked back and forth between the two as though he were watching a game of tennis. “What is it?”
Sighing, Noël said, “We have a project.”
“The FI?” asked Wellens.
“Indeed.” Victor closed the door to Wellens’s office, drowning the noises of the print factory. “We aim to produce a fake newspaper designed to look, at first glance, like Le Soir.”
“It’s meant to be a satire,” said Noël. “We are poking fun—of Le Soir, obviously, but the Germans, as well.” Noël had been play-acting at a commander’s detached confidence to keep Wellens’s attention, but he could not keep it up when speaking of Faux Soir. “Think of it, Monsieur Wellens. What do the people have to laugh at?”
“And you want to use my factory for this satire?” said Wellens, halfway between shocked and offended. “What about manpower?”
“We would bring over some of our workers to assist,” said Victor.
Wellens rubbed his beard. “How many copies are you thinking?”
“That, we cannot say.” Victor held out his hands, palms up. “We are still raising money. It could be as few as two hundred copies—”
“—but it could be as many as fifty thousand,” said Noël, who tried, in that instant, to breathe life into the skeletons of his words with all the conviction he had.
“Fifty thousand.” Wellens paced, tossed his cape over his shoulder. He tapped his foot, fixing the two of them with a bright glare. “This could be dangerous, yes?”
“It is dangerous,” said Noël.
Nodding, Wellens paced the room a second time. He stopped, turning in the direction of his factory floor. His voice took on a quality that Noël and Victor had not heard from the businessman, the sincerity of a man with wild, beautiful dreams: “But it could be something, couldn’t it?”
“It could be,” said Noël.
Wellens looked at Victor and Noël in turn. “My factory is yours.”
9 DAYS TO PRINT
MID-AFTERNOON
The Saboteur
I SAT AND watched Theo Mullier finish two things in turn: first, an apple, and second, the lives of half the famous people in Belgium. The former he accomplished with damp gusto; the latter he’d accomplished already—it was only a matter of taking stock of his success. Though I never learned the extent of Mullier’s work, I knew he’d spent the past days sabotaging the reputations of men and women across the country: planting scandal, architecting intrigue. To redeem themselves in the eyes of the Reich and their countrymen, these patriotic Belgians would have little choice but to attend our fund-raiser supporting the Society for the Prevention of Moral Degradation.
From my perch on a broken-backed press, I strained to see the list in his lap. The artist Paul Matthys made an appearance, as did Sylvain de Jong of Minerva Automobiles, their names written in tight, chunky letters. Gnawing absently at his apple core, Mullier circled the people whose reputations he’d compromised, underlining those who were still at large.
I accidentally kicked the leg of the press, startling Mullier, and I can still call to mind the anger that flickered in his eyes. While I didn’t understand it at the time, I know now that this anger was not intended for me: it was for those who had done wrong in the world, who were protected by their reputation and good standing, those who Mullier had not yet unmasked for the sinners they were. Mullier had come of age during the First Great War and had grown old during the Second. He was, in a word, jaded. The saboteur had no time for the boy who never grew up, who lent his name to La Libre Belgique du Peter Pan. This was a world for hypocrites and those who exposed them. Everyone else fell through the cracks.
In the days of Faux Soir, Theo Mullier frightened me. Unlike my dear Aubrion, Mull
ier did his work with a grim precision that made it all—our mortality, Le Soir, the FI, the war—so much more tangible than I wanted it to be. Though the others worried about having the manpower necessary to print Faux Soir, I believe Mullier was glad Wolff’s presence had inspired the less committed among us to flee. In his mind, only the most steadfast, the most loyal workers remained. And Mullier was old; that scared me, too, if I’m honest. He was old in the manner of a cathedral. I used to wonder whether he awoke one day to find himself in that state. I did not know the answer to that until much later, when I became old myself and young lads began to stare at me in wonder.
There came a commotion from upstairs as Martin Victor and René Noël returned from their meeting with Wellens. The base was quiet in those days, and any noise—any comings and goings—shook the body of our operation in a fevered tremor.
Mullier pushed his chair back to stretch out his leg. He hurt, I’m certain. But after a time, pain like that turns to white noise, like the sound of the drainpipe in the wall. Mullier’s head turned.
“You staring at me?” he said, squinting in my direction.
“No, monsieur.” I lowered my head, only to peek at him a second later. Mullier had his eyes closed, his thick printer’s hands kneading the muscles in his leg. As I peered at him with my head down, he opened his eyes and held up his list. He studied it with the eye of a soldier, a baker—someone whose hands and head were kept occupied by dirty, meticulous things. This was business to him, and Mullier did his job with an almost religious sense of duty. I did not see in Mullier any of Aubrion’s sense of fun, his childishness. I suppose that, more than anything, was what frightened me: the notion that someone could take what we were doing so seriously.
The Smuggler
Lada Tarcovich smiled as Aubrion studied the outside of the auction house-turned-fund-raiser-hall, waving at her girls. Gone was the building with its broken back, its hanging shutters and tilted columns. In its place sat a stiff little structure, attractive yet honest: a perfect location for a fund-raiser supporting the Society for the Prevention of Moral Degradation.
“Not bad, is it?” said Lada.
“I’ll say.” Aubrion shook his head. “Can I see the inside?”
“By all means.”
Inside, Lada Tarcovich’s girls were decorating. It did not have to be a palace, obviously, but the rooms needed to look clean and modern, a place where would-be donors could feel at home. Already, the girls had populated each room with tables and chairs, mirrors and paintings, the odd planter or light fixture where it seemed necessary. They were finishing up now, their excited chatter following Tarcovich as she gave Aubrion a tour.
“Where did you get most of it?” he asked.
“Most of what?”
“I don’t know, the stuff. The furniture, the watercolors—”
“Well, to start with, I borrowed a good deal of furniture from the whorehouse.”
Aubrion laughed. “So, our desperate powdered heads will be sitting in the same spot where a thousand Enghien country-boys lost their virginities?”
“I wouldn’t say a thousand—”
“It’s perfect, Lada.”
“It’s a miracle, really, that I was able to put this together at all, with René’s budget.”
“René never funds my projects.”
“When was the last time you finished one?”
Aubrion and Tarcovich wandered through the halls, one of which still smelled of mold. Tarcovich stopped a young woman carrying a feather duster.
“Give that hallway another scrub, would you?” said Tarcovich.
The girl protested: “We scrubbed it twice already.”
“Thrice it is, if you please. We’ll not be thwarted by a bit of mold.”
“I saw a group gathered in front of one of our posters for the fund-raiser,” said Aubrion. “Upper-class sorts, mostly.”
“Gamin did well, the little bugger.” Tarcovich adjusted a framed watercolor she’d snatched from the waiting room of the whorehouse. “Between the posters and Mullier’s...efforts, we should have a fine turnout. Should this be here, or somewhere closer to the front?”
“I think it’s fine there. You don’t want the placement of things to seem too intentional.”
“But it is intentional.”
“Exactly. Is Grandjean coming?”
Giving the painting a final look, Tarcovich hurried into the great room, which used to be the main floor of the auction house. She pretended not to hear Aubrion. He was rarely attuned to others’ feelings and goings-on, so she’d assumed he would not ask after Grandjean. She had hoped he would not ask.
“Lada?” he persisted. “Is Grandjean joining us tomorrow?”
“I’m not sure. We had a bit of a falling-out.” Lada fixed her eyes on the floor—spotless, she realized with pride. Her girls had done well, Grandjean’s reservations be damned.
“Over what?”
“Some nonsense. She did not want me using my girls to fix up the place.”
Aubrion scoffed. “Why the devil not?”
“She’s against prostitution.”
“So are your girls, I’m sure.”
“That’s what I tried to tell her. Andree has lived a rather charmed, sheltered life, Marc.” For all her talk of justice, Andree Grandjean’s life was defined and demarcated by rules. Tarcovich made up the rules as she went along. Their differences might spell their end, if Faux Soir did not spell Lada’s. Tarcovich added, “And she only just discovered herself, as it were.”
“What’s that?”
Lada gave Aubrion a meaningful look.
“Oh,” he said.
“Oh indeed. So, it’s a problem, you see.”
Aubrion thought. When he spoke, his voice was uncharacteristically soft. “Do you—”
“Yes, I do.” The words were out and in the world before Lada could cage them. They surprised her, even though she’d felt their gentle presence days before.
“Does she—”
“I can’t say.” Lada Tarcovich shook herself. “In any case, Marc, there’s nothing I can do. The rest is up to her.”
“Have you tried writing stories again?”
Closing her eyes, Tarcovich breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth. “This is not a discussion I am in the mood to have right now.”
“I was just asking. You might feel better, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“You could write something for Faux Soir—”
“I will,” said Tarcovich, unblinking, “when you write a damn obituary, Marc Aubrion.”
Aubrion closed his mouth, a first for all involved.
“Come.” Tarcovich put a hand on his shoulder. He shied away. “Let’s see the rest of the place. All right?”
“All right.”
“Cheer up. We only have twelve more hours to prepare, and tomorrow is our one chance to cheat these people out of everything they own. This is your favorite part, isn’t it?”
8 DAYS TO PRINT
EVENING
The Dybbuk
MANNING KNOCKED AND entered Wolff’s office, his impeccable posture at odds with his stained suit. The bureaucrat’s fastidiousness had been slipping of late. There were whispers about the Germans’ performance on the front, the Führer’s manic rages, the strange pills and opioids his doctors prescribed him. Wolff did not concern himself with such things—was it because he no longer cared to, or was he above these sordid rumors?—but the rumors had taken a toll on morale. Even staunch Manning looked shaken.
“Gruppenführer,” said Manning, “we’ve received word that a fund-raiser of some sort is taking place in the city today, for the Society for the Prevention of Moral Degradation.”
“I’ve not heard of it.”
“That’s the trouble, Gruppenführer.
It’s not a registered organization.”
“How interesting.” The Gruppenführer jotted down a note. Perhaps Martin Victor would know something of this fund-raiser. “Where is it to take place?”
“That’s another odd thing. At the Ahnenerbe’s old place, that building we were about to tear down.”
“Didn’t an old woman buy the building?”
“Elise van der Waal. She is no one important, just a townsperson whose husband died fifteen years ago. We have no evidence she’s for the Allies, but we have no evidence she’s against them, either.”
“Who said anything about the Allies, Herr Manning?”
Manning sighed. “No one, Gruppenführer. It’s just disconcerting, is all.”
“As always, we will avoid jumping to conclusions.” Wolff set a folder atop his first note so Manning would not see his handwriting. “It’s probably nothing. I’m sure we have a simple case of an old woman whose house was vandalized by some youths and who decided to do something about it.” To appease Manning, he said, “But I will send someone to inspect.”
The Jester
The guests milled about in front of the former auction house, smelling of wine and cologne and dwindling self-respect. The atmosphere was rather strange: somewhere between a wedding and a funeral. The guests who’d come of their own volition chatted excitedly, while the guests who’d come because Mullier ruined their reputations engaged in the somber calculus of reputations and charitable giving.
Holding baskets of brochures, Aubrion and Victor watched the guests from half a block away. “Baskets, it must be baskets,” Aubrion had said earlier, “not folders or anything else. Baskets are upstanding, unthreatening. What was her name, from the fable? Gretel? No, Goldilocks. Goldilocks carried a basket.” Tarcovich had replied: “Yes, and Goldilocks was nearly eaten—by a wolf, I might add.”
Victor took a leaflet from his basket. “I suppose these will have to do.”
Aubrion looked them over, stifling a laugh. “They are rather good, aren’t they?”
They were rather good. The cover said Society for the Prevention of Moral Degradation in small, modest letters. Under the name sat a photograph of a plain woman lifting her arms in prayer. Aubrion and Noël had spent hours choosing the perfect photograph—“She looks too strict, she’s not friendly enough, he’s a man and it has to be a woman, she looks like she’s rather unconventional in bed, he’s probably a man”—before settling on the woman with the face of someone’s neighbor.
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