The Cafe Girl

by Ian Loome

  'Anton Levesque?' Vaillancourt said. 'The communist editor?'

  'He is a friend...' Giraud said, realizing the implausibility of the words as they left his mouth.

  'The leading communist journalist in North Paris is a friend of a noted right-wing French policeman with a penchant for theft?' Vaillancourt's derision was evident.

  Muller smiled smugly. 'So you admit you funded the operation of the safe house for the communists, and that you have associated with the editor of a communist newspaper. Our intelligence suggested a great deal of resistance financing went through that location. To protect it, you had Isabelle Gaspard murdered.'

  'No!' Giraud said. 'That's not it; that's not it at all. There was this bank draft...but...'

  The pieces were coming together for him; the bank draft had been a ruse, he realized, a method for the fraudulent banker to gain his trust and access to his accounts.

  But it still did not explain the girl. 'I don't understand how she could have been dead; I tell you, I spoke to her yesterday!'

  Vaillancourt continued his circumspect scrutiny of the policeman. There seemed little doubt that Giraud believed his own nonsense. How was it possible, for a man so seemingly sharp-witted to be so dense? 'I have heard a great many men lie in my time, Damien, but you know, it's almost as if you think you're being genuinely honest with me. However, there is no doubt: she has been dead for at least three weeks, more likely a month. You slit her throat, Giraud. You learned that she was working for the Germans and you slit her throat.'

  'A month?' Giraud remembered the other waitress, the one who had been going south to visit her family.

  Martine.

  'No!' he exclaimed. 'They switched. Don't you see, Martine is Isabelle! Isabelle is Martine!'

  The major peered at him like he was mad. 'What on Earth are you saying, man?'

  'Isabelle was really Martine, who was really Isabelle.' Giraud felt his exasperation swell, his nerves overwrought. 'The resistance killed your informer at the cafe and Martine Fontaine switched places with her.'

  'The cafe that wasn't there. And this was after yesterday, when you claim to have seen her...' the officer said skeptically.

  'No, this was before, earlier. When I talked to her she was Isabelle. But she was really Martine and Isabelle was dead.'

  'Because you killed her.' Muller's confusion was growing. 'What are you blathering about, man?'

  GIraud thought back to the line of passengers boarding the Ju 52. He hadn't even paid attention. He tried to remember the passing glance, the mental image. There had been a woman in a broad hat, sunglasses.

  'Giraud?' The policeman had drifted off, his mind occupied.

  He could see it then, the entirety of the manipulation. He was targeted for his corruption and his access to Nazi money; how they'd used the boy to introduce him to the park; how he accepted Rousseau on face value, never bothering to visit him at the bank. They'd relied on his insular nature, his self-preoccupation. The bank draft had been a master stroke, a prize his avaricious nature could not ignore. Rousseau could never have asked for access to the Germans' pilfered funds without it. It had been left there for him, he realized, in the one place they knew he would insist upon searching alone: the room of the women with whom he had become obsessed.

  Or, as it now seemed, Martine's room.

  Muller was having none of it. 'You may play the dupe, sir, but I am nobody's fool and you will find the Third Reich is not easily misled. Surely, deputy divisional superintendent, you do not expect us to believe that a veteran policeman was somehow tricked into permitting a resistance hideout to operate as a business, murdering an informer, murdering a German soldier, stealing a small fortune from the high commission, and then obtaining transit passes for the head of the resistance and his entire family? Surely no man on Earth could be such a fool?

  The life had gone out of his fight. Giraud knew there was nothing he could do or say that would change their minds.

  'Only a fool in love, major,' he said. 'Only a fool in love.'

  'Only a greedy, vainglorious man who does not even know the meaning of the word,' Vaillancourt said. 'You are aware that you will not be able to prove any of this?'

  'I am.'

  'Unfortunate,' Vaillancourt said. He had been studying his former colleague throughout. 'I somehow believe you. Oh, not about the soldier. You were infatuated with the girl. She was seen on the bus near where he was killed. I suspect you were protecting her, is that right?'

  Giraud nodded silently.

  'But about the rest? The Giraud I know -- the greedy, thieving, conniving Giraud that I know -- would never have helped the resistance. And from what I understand from our German colleagues, this may actually be the salvation of the Maquis. It was falling apart, you see, ideologically fractured into too many entities. Now, Fontaine will be a symbol that they can be beaten, and the Germans' money will be used against them. Congratulations, Giraud. You have single-handedly dealt a blow to the Nazi war efforts of significant proportions.'

  'What's going to happen to me?' he asked somberly.

  'You will be moved to the detention camp near here,' the major said. 'I believe you're already aware of it. After you are tried, you will be hung from the neck until dead or face a firing squad. If you are lucky, the process will take a long time, and the war will end before the sentence is carried out. I find this unlikely; we have been most efficient at dealing with traitors, Monsieur Giraud. But it can happen. You will at least be able to claim to have helped the resistance like no other. Perhaps it will afford you a measure of fame and protection from the other inmates. Some are... quite unpleasant.'

  In his mind's eye she remained so vivid that he could shut out the world, sitting trance-like on the bus, oblivious to the attentions of the guard, or the bumps in the road, or his final destination. Her determined look, her dark brown eyes, her fine features; he had fallen in love with her completely, and the version of Isabelle -- the real Martine -- described to him by police was not the same person. And so he felt no less scorned, no less hurt, no less broken.

  He had always told himself that, as a stoic pragmatist, he would never allow the fairer sex to so affect him. But the image of her and the knowledge that she was never even real tore at his heart like the edge of a dull knife.

  He had spent the night trying to convince himself that she had been coerced somehow, that her affection towards him had been genuine, an unrequited passion that had merely gone unrealized before his untimely arrest. But Giraud did not have to look very deeply within himself to know it was not true.

  He wondered how long it had taken them to set him up. Pascal had begun chatting with him a few weeks before showing him the park. And their risk throughout was considerable: had he chosen to investigate Jean-Max or the piano player, Luc, he would have quickly discovered they were not whom they claimed to be.

  But he had not. He had been blinded by passion. And, he had to admit to himself, by greed.

  He supposed it had not been real love, just obsession. He did not really know her, and he had not tried to know her. Perhaps that was his mistake, Giraud told himself, his timidity in the face of her beauty. He had already assured himself that nothing he had done had been technically wrong, that he had only acted as anyone might in the circumstances. He had not forced the woman to come to him with her jewels; he had not dispatched the Nazis to Francois' door; he had been duped, he told himself. He was practically the victim of criminal intent.

  He hung his head and laughed gently at the insanity of it. Then the bus hit a rut and its back end bounced firmly, shaking him back to the present, and to reality. Giraud remembered what Levesque had told him, that the key in the camps was to get on the good side of each bunkhouses' designated leader. He tried to focus on it as the bus rolled through the double gates.

  The long, skinny vehicle was empty, save for the driver, Giraud and two guards. He'd thought about trying to make a break for it during the short drive from the fortress, but one look
at the guards' weapons and the mesh on the outside windows of the bus voided any such notion.

  His circumstances felt surreal, as if he'd stumbled into someone else's life. The nightmare of it weighed on him like a grotesque deformity, to be acknowledged and to horrify, but impossible to shed. He could still feel it in his bones, that sensation that he was meant for something better than this; that it could not possibly end for him in such ignominious fashion.

  He glanced around as they drove the straight dirt road that ran down the camp's spine. There was nothing remarkable about the place; a series of white barrack tents, what looked like some sort of garage or machine shop, a barracks for the Germans, some sort of concrete building -- latrines? -- and a one-story wood cube for an office. A few inmates in their striped garb watched the bus curiously to see who'd be joining their ranks; but most ignored it.

  At the barracks, he was escorted off the bus by one guard while the other stayed aboard. They led him into the small office, a shack splattered with whitewash; he was processed and handed his new clothing, a set of striped prison garb. All of his belongings were placed in a box labelled with his name and promised to be returned to him on release. He was handed a towel to wrap around himself and a pair of work shoes.

  They led him out of the office carrying his new outfit then made him put them on the ground next to the door of the small concrete building, the shared showers. He was deloused with soap, sprayed down with high-pressure water and made to scrub clean. Then he was told to dry and dress.

  Outside the shower, the guard handed him a metal dinner platter and a combination spoon/fork. 'You are in bed four, tent two,' he said in heavily-accented French. 'All inmates are expected to obey all instructions. Attempts to escape will result in you being shot on sight. Please follow your tent leader's instructions to the letter. Any matter to be brought to the attention of the camp staff or commandant must be directed through your tent leader. Are we clear?'

  And then he marched off, leaving Giraud standing in front of the bunkhouse in his new clothes and boots.

  'You are Damien Giraud, of the Saint Denis precinct?'

  He turned. The woman was standing to his right rear side, next to the tent. She was pale and small, with short brown hair and a female inmate's striped topcoat and skirt. She had a frail body type, as if the wind might catch under her frock and carry her away, and a yellow star was attached to the front of her coat.

  'Yes?'

  'Good. I am happy to see you here, monsieur. I understand we have a mutual colleague.'

  'We do?'

  'Ah yes. My friend Martine, who would bring me cigarettes and food. I was her Geography teacher once, you know. From what I understand, you knew her as Isabelle.' The waifish woman smiled smugly as she said it. 'I had a husband once, too, and he would have liked to have been here, I think, to see you pay for your behavior. And you will, Monsieur Giraud. You will pay.'

  'You know? You know what happened to me?' Despite her bitterness, he felt a rush of hope; it was the first thing anyone had said in two days that made any semblance of sense. Perhaps he could win this woman over, change her opinion with charm and promises. Perhaps...

  The woman fairly spat the words. 'I know you are a profiteer, a leech upon the suffering of the French people.' From somewhere distant, they heard a volley of rifles, timed so precisely that they blurred into a single angry clap. 'I know you were the last known associate of the fence Francois Lemieux to see him before he was arrested; I have many friends on the outside, monsieur, and they know much about you. I believe you delivered something of mine to Lemieux, a broach. A broach my late husband gave to me, shortly before I lost him; shortly before they took me away from my daughter. I know what happened to you, and I know what is going to happen to you.'

  Giraud's last nerve was gone, and he snapped at her, an angry petition for understanding. 'I did what I did to survive! To thrive when we were told it was not possible.'

  'At the expense of others. Always at the expense of others. Do you know why people suffer to stay in Paris, monsieur, rather than heading south, or even to America? So that they may suffer together. They could all take more, steal more, connive their way to more. They choose not to. They choose, instead, to stay together.'

  'Then they are fools.'

  'And yet, they are fools who are free; some are even happy. You are so wise, monsieur! Look at what your wisdom has brought you! What you do, monsieur... what you did, it was nothing more than what any common thief would do.'

  'That is hardly...'

  She did not wait for him to continue. 'As I said, I was a teacher before the war, M. Giraud. Occasionally there would be a child in my class, and he or she would be the same outwardly as the other children, but there would be no light behind their eyes, no spark of warmth or flicker of humanity. Was that you, M. Giraud? Were you that child? Who made you into this?'

  Giraud did not understand. 'God?' he replied. 'Certainly, I have not taken an easy road...'

  'I know I should pity you, monsieur, and everything you lack. But I cannot. I can only hate you; I can only consider how many of those wonderful children did not even make it to their adolescence, whether due to illness, or the war, or the vague intentions of a God I have never claimed to understand; and in that moment I know that every day we are here together I shall hate you even more.'

  'Madam, all that I can say... all that I can offer...'

  'Is the feeble excuse that war makes beasts of men. But then... what doesn't?' She craned her neck to listen to the rifle volleys. 'Do you hear the gunfire, Monsieur Giraud? There will be more in fifteen minutes. They always go off at quarter to, and at one o'clock, every day, right after the church bells in the nearby town ring. The Nazis are sticklers for being on time. You can just hear the rifle retort, if the wind isn't blowing too loudly.'

  'I should not be here...'

  'My mother had a saying she used to employ when she felt the weight of the world; when things were totally beyond her control; when things became as they are in France today. She would say 'we need to let the world go the way it goes.' I used to use the same phrase to comfort my daughter at bedtime. Perhaps you should take it to heart, Monsieur Giraud. It has offered me great comfort in here, separated from Genevieve. Perhaps it will make your days more tolerable to know that inevitably, one way or another, your stay here will end.'

  'I only did what I had to...'

  'When it does end, I believe it will be before a firing squad. They are merely waiting for you, Monsieur Giraud. And for once, they will perform a valued service. Oh... we all know. And we know we shall have to live with you until the process that the Germans insist on following is complete. It will take a few approvals, a few discussions. But you will face a final curtain. Until then, I would hope that you can find some friends in here,' the woman said. 'But I very much doubt it. I, certainly, shall not be one of them.'

  She turned and walked coolly towards the front of the camp. Giraud looked around, quickly feeling alone, more vulnerable than he could remember. He looked at the entrance to the tent. Perhaps the young woman's zeal at his situation would prove misplaced, if he could conjure up an ally or two. Surely, someone in the camp needed something and he could find a way to get it for them; it had worked outside, in the real world. It would work inside as well. He took a deep cleansing breath and walked into the tent. People were predictable, and weak, and those who took what they wanted were those who controlled their own destiny.

  There were cots lining each side. At a handful of tables in the middle, men played cards. The conversations stopped when he entered and he walked in awkward silence over to bunk four.

  Giraud slipped off his boots and put them on the chair next to the cot, then he swung himself onto the green canvas bedding and lay there, ignoring his new colleagues and staring at the bunkhouse ceiling as they went back to their game.

  He was not done yet, he told himself. I am Damien Giraud, a policeman and a survivor and damn proud of it, he told himse
lf. When others cower and suffer, I thrive. I shall take whatever time I have before they plan to execute me, and I shall ingratiate myself to these people, these prisoners. And they will help me get out of this place, so that I can start over. They will help me, whether they like it, or whether they know it.

  A pair of men approached his bed, one with a beard and a non-issue flat cap, the other a large man with stooping shoulders, along with greying hair. 'You are Giraud?

  Giraud propped himself up on his elbows, then swung his legs back off the bed so that he could sit up. 'Yes?'

  'I am the bunkhouse leader here in number two,' said the larger man.

  'I am pleased to meet you,' Giraud said, extending his hand to shake. It was providence; this was the one man who would have the Germans' collective ear, the person who, when it came time to decide his fate, could appeal on his behalf and perhaps make a difference.

  He knew he had to be prudent, offer him something early on in the relationship, make it seem free, only to look later for reciprocity.

  'And do you come to us as a repentant man, M. Giraud?' the man asked.

  An odd question with which to start. 'As many here would claim, I am nevertheless innocent. And so penance is not required.'

  The man nodded. 'I am not surprised. Do you know what I do here, Giraud, in my leadership role?'

  'Not really.'

  'I keep the peace. I settle disputes before they get to the point that the Germans are annoyed or nervous. I head a committee to maintain the highest level of civility between all camp inmates. One of the keys, I have found, to reconciling two warring parties is to get each side to forgive the other for their transgression. It is not enough for one party to say they are sorry; it must be accepted, and properly understood by both.'

  'I don't see...'

  'It is a moment of vulnerability, Giraud, an instant in which they give their security over to the rules of the group, and our promise to be loyal to one another; to protect one another from our captors. But a man such as yourself, with nothing for which to apologize...'