“I hope,” Eddie said, “you’re not commenting on my performance last night.”
“What? No, you were okay.” They were in the kitchen, Roquentin looking around as though he had come to get something and forgotten what it was. “Terrific, actually. It slipped my mind.”
“That’s a fine compliment. Where is the incentive to play well when my most important critic doesn’t care?”
“Keep up the good work.” Roquentin opened the pantry and looked inside.
Eddie said, “Something missing?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Someone broke in early in the morning.”
“What did they take, rationed goods? Coffee? Sugar? Chocolate?”
“As far as I can determine, they didn’t take anything.”
“That’s good,” Eddie said.
“Unless they took something, and I don’t know what it is. That could be bad.”
“Money?”
“I locked the receipts in the safe as I always do. They’re still here. The safe wasn’t touched.”
“It must have been some poor, starving bastard looking for food.”
Roquentin shook his head.
“He was still here when I let myself in, and I got a quick look at him. He hadn’t come for a meal, but to rob.”
“Any idea who he was?”
“I’d say a teenager. I didn’t see his face, but he was slim, not tall, didn’t show a weapon or move aggressively. When he was aware he’d been discovered, he ran into the back and out a window.”
“That’s how he entered?”
“No, he had to force it to climb out,” Roquentin said. “If I didn’t have sixty-year-old knees, I would have caught him.”
“Where did he get in?”
“Another puzzle. None of the doors or windows were tampered with, and I distinctly recall locking up before I went home. It’s as if he hid here after the last show so that he could have the place to himself.”
“It’s a lot of trouble for some chocolate.”
Roquentin put up a pot of coffee. “Not if you want it bad enough.”
“There was a time,” Eddie said, “when I felt that way about fame and success.”
“Oh, when did it change?”
Everything had changed since the Germans arrived, but he refused to put all the blame on them. Carla had done her bit, and a sudden hunger for New Orleans that answered his fear of fatherhood and marriage to a woman with whom he hadn’t counted on spending his life. Other things were different, too, but he couldn’t say what they were. How could he, when he didn’t realize anything had changed till he heard the words coming out of his mouth?
An independent French Gestapo with headquarters at 93 Rue Lauriston near the Bois de Boulogne enforced the Aryanization laws with enthusiasm that not even the Nazis matched. Criminals and thugs, many of them Muslims from the North African Brigade, they took license for plunder, preying on Jews whose property they confiscated before turning them over to the SS. Wealthy Jews were the prize. Every Jew was fair game.
A band from the physiognomy branch, students of Nazi racial science, and self-proclaimed experts in spotting Jewish types, converged on Belleville, a working-class neighborhood bordering the 19th and 20th arrondissements, and raided an apartment house where Polish and Austrian Jews were hiding. Two dozen men, women, and children were handed over to the Germans. French Jews swept up in the net were kept for ransom. Of these, one presented a unique complication. With an olive complexion, almond eyes, and black hair to go along with an unidentifiable accent, she appeared to be something other than her valid French passport proclaimed her to be. Lacking the skill for interrogation that didn’t involve torture, which would make for bad publicity if she turned out to be a Frenchwoman, the Rue Lauriston Gestapo made a gift of her to their German counterparts. Incarcerated in the fifth-floor cells at the counterintelligence directorate at 84 Avenue Foch, she was summoned almost immediately for questioning.
“Your name,” asked her interrogator, who did not give his own name, which was Schiller.
“You have it in your hand.”
He opened her passport. “You are Anne Cartier?”
“That’s right.”
“A Jew.”
“Do I look it?”
“I don’t know,” said the interrogator. “I don’t know what all Jews look like.”
“Not like me.”
He tapped the passport against his knuckles.
“Is my passport not in order?” she asked him. “Return it, and I’ll be on my way.”
“It raises questions. Are you planning a trip?”
“Where would I go? I carry it in case I am stopped on the street and asked to prove who I am.”
“Which raises this one: Why should you think that?”
Fear took over, leaving her unable to answer. She was a sharp-witted girl. In the smallest part of a second, the interrogator knew, she would come back at him with a clever remark, but he would make less of it than the troubled look already fading from her face.
“That I’m here. It shows that I was right.”
“Where do you live?”
“My address is on the second page.”
“Tell me anyway. Have you forgotten it?”
“Now I am accused of feeble-mindedness,” she said. “You are being ridiculous.”
“I never am,” he said. “What is it?”
“Number 79 Rue des Tonneliers, Strasbourg, Alsace.”
“What are you doing in Paris?”
“Visiting,” she said.
“Visiting Jews in Belleville?”
“I didn’t know they were Jews. You, yourself, admitted that you can’t always tell who the Jews are, and recognizing Jews is your profession.”
“What were you doing with them?”
“I had the misfortune to be on the same street when they were seized, and was taken too. Misfortune compounded into farce.”
“Why were you there?”
“I was visiting my friend.”
“Her name.”
“It is a he—but can’t we keep him out of it? We broke up last night. My boy—ex-boyfriend threw me out. I won’t say I didn’t deserve it. It was a brutal breakup. Where delicacy is advised, I am frank. That’s why I was on the street alone in the early hours.”
“You came to Paris to be with him?”
She shook her head. “It began and ended here.”
“What brought you?”
“You’ll take it personally.”
“Everything is personal with me.”
“As with me,” she said. “After Alsace was returned to Germany, I did not want to remain. I am a Frenchwoman, France is my country. I have no desire to live under the Reich.”
“You will have to travel farther than to Paris.”
“Perhaps Germans won’t be here long.”
“Perhaps,” the interrogator said, “we will pull up your skirt and get to the bottom of things.”
It didn’t make her squirm. The fear he’d noticed before was still there to be exploited. It had to be, but she’d gotten it under control.
“Aren’t you overlooking one small detail?” she said.
“It will be revealing just the same.”
Did she know he was under constraint not to rape? His superiors conceded that it was a valuable investigative tool, but argued that it was bad for morale. In most cases he agreed. He considered himself a humanitarian, susceptible to natural feelings, and these damn Jewesses used sentiment and every other trick to impede him in the performance of his duties.
Real Frenchwomen presented problems of a different stripe. He would be careful that no mistake was made with Anne Cartier. Violations of the guidelines were not unknown at 84 Avenue Foch. Heaven help him if he was found guilty of one.
“We will get to it later,” he said, “or not. Convince me that you are who you say you are, and you can go.”
“What more,” she asked, “can I give you?”
She was flirting with him, a second meaning concealed in each innocent word. Warmth on his cheeks wasn’t a blush. He never blushed, wouldn’t have been promoted to senior interrogator and honored with commendations if he was easily embarrassed. He had been a student of religion at Freiburg University, regarded by classmates as cold and distant, a prig. It was impossible that this girl had caused him to blush. What he felt was a variation of what she had exhibited—fear. Sudden fear that he could be wrong about her.
“You say you are from Alsace, yet you speak with an accent that isn’t German,” he said.
“My family were colonials in North Africa; I was born in Algeria, in Oran. My father was the principal of the French high school, but things weren’t good for us. The Arabs sense weakness and would like to slaughter all the French. Therefore my family returned to France, to their old home in Strasbourg. I am Alsatian by history but have no connections there. I was thinking of leaving before I arrived. Of course I came to Paris. Who would live in Strasbourg when Paris beckons?”
Not he. He’d left Freiburg specifically because Paris beckoned. Here was his first reason to believe the girl: They thought alike. A colonial background would account for her accent. It might also explain her coloration, something she would not wish to be forthcoming about, not only with him. He was certain she wasn’t a Jew. Rather, he was certain that he didn’t want her to be one. His dilemma was how to dispose of her case at his high standard of diligence when he didn’t have one hundred percent of the evidence. She looked at him insouciantly while he settled on a solution. He would set her free. The next five suspects brought before him he would handle less generously, no matter how compelling their stories might be.
On the third floor, secretaries typed reports of the action in Belleville for distribution to investigative bureaus throughout occupied Paris. A copy transmitted to military intelligence was routed to the desk of Major Weiler, whose thoughts of lunch were interrupted. Moments later, they were disturbed again by martial music.
He looked out at a Wehrmacht band, all spit and polish, marching through the Tuileries. Sundays were days of entertainment for the high command, organ concerts for those who attended church, and the military serenading in the gardens. Paris made it easy to forget that he was posted here to do a job.
The list of arrestees contained no familiar names. Every Jew was a Shapiro, a Cohen or Kahane, a Levi, Levin, Levine, or Lewittes, and how was he to sort through that oriental stew? One name stood out. Anne Cartier. What a Frenchwoman from Strasbourg was doing on a roster of foreign Yids strained his imagination. An error must have been made, unless she was married to a Frenchman, and the error should be charged to her husband. Weiler was thinking of a charcuterie on the Île de la Cité when he was hit by another reason why the name stood out. Anne Cartier was the woman connected to the explosion on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Colonel Maier would want to know that she was under lock and key. He would, that is, if she was the right Anne Cartier. The French were also tasked with a shortage of memorable names.
Weiler fit his cap on his head, adjusted his uniform in the reflection of the window. Pleased with what he saw, he called for his driver and car.
Sunday traffic was light on the main avenues of Paris, although not much lighter than any other day. The occupying authority issued permits for only seven hundred civilian motor vehicles in the whole of the city. Millions of bicycles clogged the streets as a result, the cyclists as reckless as motorists, more prone to take risks. Half an hour went by before the car from military intelligence reached Avenue Foch.
The interrogator was out to lunch. A junior officer assured Weiler that all Jews turned over to the Gestapo in the last ninety-six hours remained locked up on the fifth floor. The interrogator would be back within the hour to answer questions. Weiler didn’t have an hour, wouldn’t spend it waiting if he had it. He demanded to be taken upstairs.
The Jews were a ragged bunch, thrown together in a cell unsegregated by sex, age, or social status, by any category other than Jewishness. Weiler barely could stand being near them. None of the women looked like an Anne Cartier, like anyone who could spend a single day on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré without drawing the attention of neighbors. He called her name. Everyone looked up. No one stepped forward. “Anne Cartier,” he said again. Tired of the game, the Jews retreated into their cage. Before he could say the name again, the junior officer told him that the interrogator he wanted had returned.
He was a tall man in a shapeless suit, gray at the edges of a haircut done by a butcher, and ungainly, swinging his arms exaggeratedly as a counterbalance with each step. The Gestapo was made up of men like him, outwardly unappealing, mediocrities in civilian life who seized the one chance for position and power they would ever have. The secret police spied on everyone, enemies of the Reich, loyal Germans, even the military. Even on each other. Weiler despised him on sight.
“You have an Anne Cartier,” Weiler said, “sought in an investigation of the utmost sensitivity. Release her to me.” He pulled him close to the bars. “Which one is she?”
“She isn’t here.”
“Bring her. I want her now.”
“She was freed ninety minutes ago.”
Weiler wanted to kill him. “This was your decision?”
“After a consideration of the facts, yes. The woman isn’t a Jew. As she had been arrested in error, there was no cause to keep her.”
“I’ll see to it personally that you take her place,” Weiler said. “Where did she go?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where was she arrested? Who are her associates? She will go back there, to warn them to go more deeply into hiding. I will send men immediately to return her.”
“She was living with a boyfriend,” the interrogator said. “He threw her out, and she was picked up on the street. She has no one, no place to go back to. I know where her family lives, though.”
“Where?” Weiler shouted.
“In Strasbourg. It isn’t as though we have lost touch completely.”
“I could murder you with my bare hands,” Weiler said.
“Had you been here during the interview, you would have seen that she is an innocent Frenchwoman. I did the correct thing. There is no purpose in keeping her with these cursed Jews. She is not like them.”
“She’s beautiful?” Weiler said.
The interrogator started to answer, but, catching himself, he shrugged instead.
“That’s different,” Weiler said.
“She is.”
“You fell in love,” Weiler said. “I would torture you before I killed you.”
The interrogator had had enough, and said so to Weiler’s back. Weiler was thinking of how best to tell Colonel Maier of the near-miss in having Anne Cartier, and what could be done to the fool who’d freed her. Probably nothing—the Gestapo looked after their own. What Weiler had in mind, Maier would want to do to all of France.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
At the Librairie du Jazz on the left bank Eddie was lost in the stacks of old records. U-boat attacks on shipping in the North Atlantic prevented American goods from reaching France, and there was nothing new on the shelves. It was just as well. Eddie had no fondness for the syrupy big-band arrangements that were the rage back home and threatened to displace him from the bandstand where he was king.
He selected several sides by Jelly Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers. Eddie wasn’t a fan of the Peppers’ cornetist, George Mitchell, but Jelly had gotten brilliant playing out of him, and Eddie was still stealing from it. He’d discovered the records when they were cut fifteen years ago and had brought them to France and played them till there was nothing in the grooves but hisses and scratches. Replacements were available for a few sous in the bargain bins at the Librairie du Jazz.
He was taking them to the listening booth that was furnished with a better phonograph than the old Victrola in his room when he was bumped from behind. The records slipped from his grasp. Bumpe
d again as he made a grab for them, he watched helplessly as they crashed to the floor.
“You break ’em, you buy ’em,” someone said in English. Eddie turned his head, and Simone smiled back.
Eddie had a sick feeling in his stomach. It wasn’t the cost of the records, which was negligible; more like he’d been carrying the Mona Lisa and dropped it in a sewer.
“What the hell?” Simone said. “It’s just shellac.”
Eddie got down on his knees to gather the pieces. “Steamboat Stomp” and “Sidewalk Blues” had survived intact, and he took them carefully in both hands and put them aside. A store employee wearing an indifferent expression came by with a broom and steered the mess toward a corner. Fatal crashes happened all the time at the Librairie du Jazz.
“I’m terribly sorry,” Eddie said to him. “Tell your boss I’ll pay for everything.”
“You can afford it,” Simone said. “You can afford to break every record in the store. Hell, you can buy the place out from under his boss.”
“I wish—”
“Boo hoo,” said Simone. “You got the jack. I seen your girlfriend at the Casino de Paris, and she is a luxury item. You can afford her on what you bring home from blowin’ a horn, it makes me sorry I didn’t listen to my mama and take music lessons.”
Eddie grabbed the records he wanted and started for the cash register.
“You don’t mean to say you ain’t payin’ for her, she’s payin’ for you?” Simone stepped quickly around him. “Gigoloin’ is a step up from what you were doin’ on Decatur Street in the old days.”
Eddie was ready to lay him out flat. But with his hands full of records, there was nothing he could do but try to squeeze by. Simone didn’t let him pass.
“French woman keepin’ you in clover don’t seem right. Strikes me as a violation of natural law, a colored boy from New Orleans livin’ high on the hog in Paris, France, better’n most white folk. I would like to discuss it with her. How you got the job spongin’ off of her. What you do to earn your pay.”
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