by Allan Massie
‘Probably.’
The captain moved his papers about again. His tone was indifferent. It was obvious he wanted rid of them.
‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘I advised the colonel against his recruitment. An obvious pansy, I said, they’re not reliable.’
Jérôme felt himself flush.
‘He was ready to risk his life,’ he said.
‘You’re not suggesting that Léon betrayed his comrades, are you?’ Alain said. ‘If you are, I must tell you the idea’s ridiculous.
He’s a patriot.’
‘So you say. A Jew also, however. Not reliable, as I told the colonel. Not that I’m implying anything, you understand. You know yourself, Lieutenant Lannes, networks get broken. They’re infiltrated. People disappear. That’s how it’s been. You’ve had experience of it yourself, I understand.’
‘Yes,’ Alain said, ‘I have, but I know Léon well. I would trust him with my life … ’
‘No doubt you’re right. But the fact is, I have no information and I can’t help you.’
***
‘He didn’t give a damn, did he? Bastard,’ Jérôme said as they left the office. Alain made no reply.
They stepped out into the sunshine of the Boulevard and went to join Vincent who was waiting for them at the Café de Quebec.
‘What do we do next,’ Jérôme said. ‘Somebody must know something. But think of it. They send him to France, into danger, and they don’t give a damn.’
‘We keep looking,’ Alain said. ‘That’s all we can do. People disappear, that’s true, but sometimes they turn up again.’
‘Léon was in love with you. You know that, don’t you.’
Alain frowned.
‘That’s got nothing to do with anything.’
He remembered that November morning when they had parted in an English mist, and how Léon had trembled when they embraced, and then forced himself to smile. Two years ago. Whatever has happened since, whatever they had both experienced, had made them different people.
‘You’ve been safe in London,’ he said. ‘You can’t imagine how it’s been here. We’ve all had to do things we’re ashamed of. There are things I can’t speak of, but I’ll tell you this, it hasn’t been like the Musketeers.’
Vincent was sitting in the corner of the bar, smoking.
‘Any word of your friend?’
‘None.’
‘That’s bad, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, it’s bad,’ Alain said.
‘And that captain wasn’t even interested,’ Jérôme said. ‘He couldn’t wait to be rid of us.’
Thirty years later, he would write: ‘It was when I looked at my friend’s face in the dark corner of that café I have never been able to enter since that I realised how the experience of war had so hardened him as to kill what both Léon and I had loved in him. I realised that he had walked with Death, looked Death in the face, conspired with Death, and learned things about himself that he would never speak of. I felt hollow and wanted to break down and weep. Instead I ordered coffee.’
***
‘We ought to get out,’ Baron Jean de Flambard said.
‘That’s ridiculous.’
They had been pulled out of the line, briefly of course, and were sitting in a Bierkeller in a small town with a German name that had once been Polish and would doubtless be so again.
‘That’s ridiculous,’ Michel smiled the smile of exhaustion as he repeated the words. ‘You know we can’t because there’s nowhere to go.’
‘Of course there isn’t. Nevertheless you must admit, kid, that we’ve been cheated. Who would have guessed that the Boches could make such an unholy mess of their war? Or that little Adolf could be such an idiot.’
‘Keep your voice down. There are things that are better not said.’
‘Oh sure, let’s pretend that we can still come through. Let’s pretend that the Ivans will get tired and go home. Which of these girls do you fancy?’
‘Neither much, they’re a pair of scrubbers.’
‘Beggars can’t be choosers. And don’t think you’re cheating on your true love in Bordeaux. You know as well as I do that you’ll never see her again. If she’s any sense she’ll be shacked up with someone else by now. I’ll take the blonde, she looks a nice armful and the other’s too young for a respectable man of my age.’
‘You respectable? Come off it. But why not? The little one’s really quite sweet, now I look at her more closely.’
‘That’s my boy. Take pleasure where it is to be found while you have the chance. There won’t be many more opportunities on offer.’
***
Maurice was wary. He felt out of place in a Paris he scarcely knew, out of place and afraid. He didn’t think of himself as a collaborator, and told himself he had no reason to be regarded as one, for in the years in Vichy he and Dominique had had no dealings, no direct dealings anyway, with the Germans. But service in Vichy was itself reason enough to be suspect. And his father had surprised him: that sudden panic – an expression on his face he had never seen before – his abrupt departure in the company of one of his grandfather’s bastards, a man he had never met but whose appearance stirred in him a disquieting memory which however he couldn’t place. Then the large envelope his father had given him with instructions to deliver it to Dominique’s friend or master, François, who had moved, it appeared seamlessly, from Vichy to the Resistance and now to de Gaulle.
The Brasserie Lipp was packed, every table occupied, a babble of conversation, a haze of cigarette smoke, a smell of wine and sauerkraut. He hesitated, uncertain, recognising nobody. A waiter approached, and he asked for Monsieur Mitterand, was directed to the back of the long room, where François and Dominique sat on the banquette with plates of oysters in front of them.
Dominique rose to lean across the table to embrace him. François, smiled, an aloof and superior smile.
‘So you’re your father’s emissary,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have thought he needed one. He should have come to Paris himself, he’s nothing to fear, I’m sure. Sit down. I hope you like oysters.’
Maurice handed him the envelope, glad to be rid of it.
‘Do you know what’s in this?’ François said.
‘Not exactly. It’s a copy of some list my father said you will find useful. That’s all I know.’
‘Good, good. And so your father has made for Spain? Is that right? He had no need to do so, I’m sure of that.’
After the oysters, they ate choucroute garni and drank two bottles of Sylvaner, then millefeuilles with coffee and kirsch.
François analysed the political situation, the balance of parties. There were frequent interruptions as men approached to shake him by the hand, and exchange expressions of goodwill.
François said, ‘Lipp used to be famous for having the best millefeuilles and the worst coffee in Paris. The millefeuilles are as good as ever, aren’t they, and the coffee is no worse now than it is everywhere else. Tell your father I’m grateful to him. This list is going to be invaluable, and you may assure him that I don’t think his exile in Spain need be of long duration.’
***
Later Dominique and Maurice walked up the hill to the Luxembourg Gardens. They sat in the shade of the trees by the statue of Le Marchand de Masques.
‘That’s François,’ Dominique said. ‘I like him you know but I never know what he is really thinking. He wears a different mask depending on the company. You’re worried about your father, aren’t you? He may be safer in Spain for the moment. Any idea what that list is?’
‘Won’t François tell you?’
‘Only if he thinks it useful that I should know. Not otherwise. So?’
‘I suspect it’s a list of members of the Cagoule.’
‘Was your father one?’
‘Probably. And François?’
‘Perhaps,’ Dominique said. ‘Perhaps. How’s Clothilde? You have seen her, haven’t you?’
‘Several times. I’m afraid she
’s sad. And I know what you are going to say, but the truth is she regards me only as a friend. I’m like that character in an opera who exists only to be on stage while the heroine pours out the anguish of her soul in a soaring aria.’
***
Léon stretched out on the bunk trying to think of nothing, but that was impossible. He was caught up in the Theatre of the Absurd, identified by two witnesses as a renegade Communist, turned Gestapo informant.
His companion in the cell in the basement of the house in the rue des Saussies couldn’t keep still. He paced up and down the narrow cell, weeping.
‘I was recruited in London by Colonel Passy of the Free French and flown into France to serve as a radio-operator,’ he had said, again and again. ‘Colonel Passy will confirm that. I’m not who you think I am.’
He had continued to say this even when they beat him up.
His companion, a middle-aged actor, said, ‘How can you just lie there? They’re going to shoot us, aren’t they.’
Léon made no reply. There was nothing to say. He had no idea if his cellmate was innocent of everything, guilty of anything. He had read this scene often, thought of Julien Sorel on the night before he was guillotined. Perhaps Anne would have found someone to help, but there wasn’t much time. It was stupid to hope, as stupid as it was absurd to be set up before a firing squad manned by men who were on the same side. Whoever he had been mistaken for was fortunate.
It was cold and dank in the cell and he didn’t want to be found trembling. They were no more than ten minutes walk from the Arc de Triomphe where he had once arranged to meet Alain on the day of Liberation.
His cellmate stopped walking, subsided to the floor, hugged himself and began to howl. Léon wished he would stop.
***
Alain left Jérôme and Vincent in the café, and walked down to the river. He leaned on the balustrade of the Pont Neuf, above the Ile des Juifs where they had burned the Knights Templar. Jérôme had asked him how his parents were and he had been unable to say that he hadn’t brought himself to telephone them. He should have done so. They must be anxious. They might fear he was dead.
But how could he speak to them? How could he pretend he was the boy who had gone away? In Lyon he had been tortured, had talked and betrayed others. He didn’t know the consequences. They might all have escaped. But he had talked, screaming in pain and terror, then whimpering where they were to be found, and it was no excuse to say, as the Gestapo officer, laying his arm around his shoulders had said, with sweetness in his voice, ‘Everyone talks in the end.’ That wasn’t true. Some died rather than speak. But he had spoken, and ever since he knew he was fuelled only by hatred. Shame and hatred. When his wound healed and he was with the regiment of Hussars to which he had been assigned, he would kill more Germans.
He hadn’t been able to speak of his war to Jérôme who had lived his own war safe in London and so knew nothing. He had been drawn to the boy Vincent because of his terror, but Vincent saw him as a hero. So he couldn’t speak to him either. Perhaps Léon would understand if they ever met, if Léon was still alive. Yes, Léon might understand. Being Léon and being a Jew, he would surely understand; he would be the only person he could speak to. He looked over the parapet to where the Grand Master of the Templars had burned, cursing France, cursing the French.
XXV
‘Of course you have to go,’ she said. ‘I understand that. Christmas is for families, not for your tart.’
‘Don’t call yourself that,’ Lannes said.
He leaned over and stroked her hair which had grown in again. His lips brushed against her cheek.
‘It’s what I am,’ she said. ‘A tondu and a tart. It would have been all right if you’d taken me before, as you wanted, as I wanted. But now I don’t know. Being under an obligation … ’
When Fernand had been as good as his word, rescued her and summoned him to his brasserie ‘for collection’, as he said, Lannes had brought her to the Pension Smitt, and installed her in the room once occupied by Aurélien and Marie-Adelaide.
‘I like the old woman,’ Yvette said. ‘She knows what I am, what I’ve done and what has been done to me, and she doesn’t give a damn.’ It was true. When Lannes visited, as he did now every afternoon, Madame Smitt opened the door to him, nodded, sniffed, and shuffled off in her down-at-heel carpet slippers. Some evenings Yvette drank white wine with her in the kitchen; others she watched Aurélien laying out the cards in his endless games of patience. As she moved slowly towards recovery she had no questions for Lannes, at least since he had failed to find the cat that she had inherited from the old Jewish tailor and had no name but Cat.
Lannes said, ‘I handed in my letter of resignation today.’
The last straw had been the decision of Bracal’s successor to drop the charge against the advocate Labiche of being an accessory to Fabien’s murder. ‘How,’ he had said, smiling, ‘can we charge someone with being an accessory when we have no murderer to charge and no evidence that Monsieur Labiche had any connection with whoever that murderer may have been.’ So the advocate had been released and had left Bordeaux, presumably for Spain. There was apparently no investigation under way concerning his role in the deportation of the city’s Jews.
‘And I’ll be glad to be out,’ Lannes said. ‘I can’t enter the office without feeling sick.’
Moncerre had greeted the news with a twist of the lips.
‘I never thought that bastard would go down,’ he said.
You could see that he thought Lannes a fool to be so disturbed.
‘You’ve no call to resign, chief,’ he said, ‘but the truth is, you’re a Romantic. Me, I’m a realist. So I soldier on.’
It was all Lannes could do to prevent young René from following his example.
‘You’re a good policeman with a career ahead of you,’ he said. ‘Mine’s broken. There’s no reason why this should concern you.’
It was the simplest explanation he could offer; a broken career, convenient too, and it would have seemed pretentious to have said that it was rather his belief in himself that was no longer tenable.
‘How will your wife take the news of your resignation?’ Yvette said.
‘She’s always hated my work, and now I hate it too.’
He leaned over to kiss her.
‘Will you be all right?’
‘Why not? I’ll have a Merry Christmas drinking white wine with the old woman. And, like I said, Christmas is for your family, not your tart.’
‘Don’t speak of yourself like that,’ he said again.
The trouble is, he thought, she feels the intolerable burden of gratitude. So it can’t last.
***
His mother-in-law was already ensconced in her favourite chair.
‘You’d think Monsieur Hitler would have had the sense to surrender and make peace,’ she said.
‘He’ll fight till Germany’s all in flames,’ her son Albert said. ‘To the last German. He’s demented, you see, Maman.’
Lannes heard the words ‘the last German’ and saw tears in Clothilde’s eyes. The last German, the last of the French volunteers against Bolshevism. It was madness indeed.
Albert had recovered his self-confidence. You wouldn’t think to hear him speak now that he had worshipped the Marshal. His job in the town hall was safe, thanks to de Gaulle’s order that functionaries should retain their posts and carry on with the necessary business of administration.
‘He’s a clever one,’ Albert said. ‘I’ve no doubt that he will see off the Communists. He’ll discard them all when they’ve served their purpose.’
The war was being carried into Germany. Alain would not be home for Christmas. But at least he had sent a card posted from Strasbourg a fortnight ago.
Lannes went through to the kitchen. Marguerite looked up from the stove. He kissed her cheek and she didn’t turn her head away.
‘Your mother seems well,’ he said. ‘Albert too.’
‘She’s indestructi
ble. They’re both indestructible. And of course she’s delighted we have Dominique home and safe, I’ve always thought it permissible for grandmothers to have favourites, unlike mothers. If only we had Alain here too.’
‘It won’t be long now. It can’t be long now.’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. “I’m like St Thomas, doubting till I see proof.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Alain will be all right, I’m sure of it. How long till we eat?’
‘Half an hour perhaps.’
‘Good.’
He took two bottles of Chateau St-Hilaire, premier cru Bordeaux, from the case that the Count had sent him for Christmas, with thanks, which he knew he didn’t deserve, for restoring Marie-Adelaide to her family, drew the corks and set the wine on the sideboard in the dining-room.
Dominique and Maurice had returned from a visit to Henri in the rue des Remparts.
‘How did you find your godfather?’
‘In excellent spirits.’
‘And Miriam?’
‘On the road to recovery. Henri says they will get married in the spring.’
Madame Panard sniffed.
‘Surely not,’ she said. ‘Miriam, that’s a Jewish name. Surely Monsieur Chambolley won’t marry a Jew.’
Dominique knelt beside her and took hold of her hands.
‘Nobody cares for that sort of thing now, Grandma, nobody should anyway.’
‘You’ve always been a sweet boy,’ she said, ‘but you don’t know the world as I do. You can’t trust the Jews. After all, they brought this terrible war on us, didn’t they?’
Dominique smiled and kissed his grandmother’s withered cheek.
Lannes said, ‘It’s about time to eat. Dominique, help your grandmother through to the dining-room. Your mother has cleverly laid her hands on a splendid boiling fowl, it’s almost a miracle to find such a thing.’
‘Well,’ Maurice said, ‘didn’t Henri-Quatre say it was his ambition that every French household should have a fowl in the pot on Sundays. Perhaps de Gaulle thinks likewise.’
To Lannes’ relief the meal passed off without incident, argument or embarrassment. There was even a mood of good feeling; it was as if everyone was holding their breath, aware that there was a moment of concord, fragile and dependent for its duration on restraint.
