“It was him,” said Renard.
“Write it up,” said Louis, “and send it in.”
“What will happen?” said Isabelle. She stood up and began to clear the dishes.
“I don’t know,” said Renard. “If I had to guess, I’d say nothing. My report—if I write one—would get buried. Nothing will happen.”
“Will he commit suicide?” Isabelle wondered. “Or is that too dramatic?”
“Why should he? He’s old. It’s his word against mine.”
“His type doesn’t commit suicide,” said Louis.
“You could release it to the press,” she said.
“I can’t do that,” said Renard. “You know that.”
“Anyway, he knows you won’t,” said Louis.
“He does? Why?”
“Because of your father,” said Louis. “You heard his version of your father, didn’t you? He knows you don’t want that being talked about.”
“If my parents weren’t still here, it would be different.”
“I’d say let it go,” said Louis. “You have a truth as definitive as you’re going to get. You won’t have any more certainty than you have now. De Gaulle gave Schneider a medal. He is a minister in the government. Even if it’s a lie, his version of history is bigger and stronger than yours.”
“I don’t have a version of history,” said Renard. “All I have is a mountain of contradictory facts. Facts that aren’t facts, and facts that are facts. All mixed together.”
“That’s history,” said Louis.
* * *
Yves was not old and he had not been ill. Yet his death did not come as a complete surprise. The winter had been hard for him. He had seemed diminished recently. “He did not suffer,” said the doctor.
A short time later Stephanie, Yves’s widow, was weeding in her flower garden and was suddenly unable to stand. The stroke was mild. She spent a week in the hospital in Tours and then a month in a recovery facility. When she came out she looked as good as new. All that remained of the attack was a slight hesitancy in her speech and tenuousness in her manner. “It changes you,” she said. “I’m no longer immortal.” She smiled. “I’ve lived in this house since I married your father—thirty-five years. I don’t want to live alone anymore.”
“You’re right, Stephanie,” said Renard. “You don’t have to live alone. And you shouldn’t.”
Besides her own house in Saint-Léon, Stephanie still owned the small house in Villedieu that had belonged to her mother. And, as it happened, her tenants had just given notice that they were leaving. Stephanie’s older sister, Lillianne, was also recently widowed, and after forty years in Nantes, she had been making noises about moving back home. She still thought of Saint-Léon as home. “Nantes is too big and too busy for me.”
“What about Mother’s house?” said Stephanie. “You always loved that house.”
“It’s true,” said Lillianne. “We always loved it, didn’t we?”
“It’s perfect for the two of us,” said Stephanie. “Two bedrooms; we can remodel the kitchen, put in another bath. Remember the garden?”
“Oh, yes,” said Lillianne.
“And the potting shed? And the fruit trees?”
“We can play hide-and-seek again,” said Lillianne.
“And climb trees,” said Stephanie. They both laughed.
Once the tenants were out, the remodeling was quickly accomplished. Lillianne arrived, followed by a moving truck. Lillianne and Stephanie embraced. They walked through the house arm in arm. Lillianne oohed and aahed at every turn.
“It’s perfect,” she said.
“It is, isn’t it?” said Stephanie.
It was clear that Stephanie would have to leave some furniture behind. “Just take the things you want with you,” said Isabelle, “and leave the rest behind. Renard and I will take care of sorting it all out.”
“Don’t let him throw it all away, Isabelle.”
“Don’t worry, Maman, I’ve already got my eyes on some things.”
Stephanie reached over and caressed Isabelle’s cheek.
The first time Renard walked into the house after Stephanie had left, which, after all, had been his home too until not too many years ago, he was shocked at its emptiness. The rooms, which had always seemed small, seemed cavernous now. The sound of his steps boomed through the house. There were shadows of things no longer there—lighter finish on the floor where chairs and lamps had stood, light squares on the walls where pictures had hung. The objects that remained—a china cupboard here, a small table there, a rug, a mirror—made the house seem emptier than empty.
Renard and Isabelle had removed the things they wanted. Louis’s house was still sparsely furnished, so Renard invited him to take what he might need. Louis looked things over and took two books from a stack in one corner.
“Books?” said Renard. “You don’t have enough books?”
“I have too many,” said Louis. “But I’m helpless. Flaubert. With illustrations. It will be the first book I try in French.”
Renard moved everything that remained to the front room. On the day of the next big rummage sale, he and Isabelle brought it all to the town square. What they didn’t sell they gave to a secondhand shop on consignment. When the house was empty Renard and Isabelle cleaned it from top to bottom to get it ready to sell. There were a few small repairs to make: a toilet that ran continuously, a door that needed rehanging, that sort of thing.
It was late in the evening when Louis’s phone rang. It was Renard. “Come to my mother’s house. Right away.”
Renard was waiting at the door when Louis arrived.
“What’s going on?” said Louis.
“I found something,” said Renard.
“What?” said Louis. “What did you find?”
“Answers. I think I found answers.”
Renard had been nailing down a loose board in a closet when a piece of the paneling at the back of the closet had pulled away. He was about to drive a nail through it to put it back in place when it suddenly struck him that this closet was shallower than it should be. He removed the panel and put his head through the opening. What he found was another closet, or rather a space that had once been part of this closet but had been partitioned off and sealed up. And forgotten.
“What’s inside?” said Louis.
“Look for yourself,” said Renard.
Louis got on his hands and knees and stuck his head through the opening. “My God,” he said. “Do you know what that is?”
“A mimeograph machine,” said Renard.
The two men extracted the machine from the secret closet. It was covered with a thick gray layer of dust. Renard began to remove the dust. It actually lifted off in thick, ragged scraps, like pieces of an old gray blanket.
“Wait,” said Louis. “Stop. Look. There’s a stencil on it. There’s still a stencil on it. A cut stencil.”
“Do you think it would still work?” said Renard. “Could we print whatever it is?”
“How could it work? Look at it.” said Louis. “But if it did … Let’s try. Let’s clean it.”
Louis did most of the cleaning. He had the time and the patience. It was painstaking work. He used cotton swabs and mineral oil to remove every grain of dust. Then he lubricated each joint of each moving part. The ink inside the metal bottle had dried decades earlier. But by reaching through the fill opening with a small spoon, he could scrape the ink into flakes. Little by little he shook it out through the hole.
In a print shop in Tours, Louis lifted the mimeograph out of the box in which he had brought it and set it on the counter. “What’s that?” said the young man at the counter. An older man came from the back of the shop and peered at the thing. “I haven’t seen one of those in a long time,” he said. “Where’d you get it?”
“In a closet,” said Louis.
“Must have been a deep closet,” said the man.
“Can you make it work?” said Louis.
The man squinted at Louis through the smoke from his cigarette. He shook his head. “This is a print shop, isn’t it? Of course we can make it work.”
“The difficulty is…,” Louis began. The man regarded Louis as though he had been challenged to a duel. “The difficulty is we want it to work with the stencil that’s on there. And that stencil is more than thirty years old.”
“And dry as a bone,” said the man. “Those stencils were made with a thin coat of wax so a typewriter would cut the letters into the wax and let the ink filter through. The bad thing,” he continued, “is it’s completely dried out.”
He removed his cigarette from his mouth and had a closer look. “The good thing is that stencil has never been run, so there’s no dried ink in the letters. We might, with the right viscosity ink, be able to run off one copy. But just one. I’m guessing that stencil will fall to pieces as it’s printing. What’s it about?” said the man.
Louis looked at the man. “A crime,” he said. “An ancient crime.”
The man raised his eyebrows happily and winked at Louis. “Then it has to work, doesn’t it?”
It went just as the man had predicted. After working on the machine for a while, moving the crank back and forth, checking all the moving parts, lubricating some more, he mixed a small quantity of ink and put it in the bottle. He put paper in the tray and gave the crank a slow, steady turn. The drum turned as it was supposed to. A sheet of paper slid under the drum and then out the other side. It was completely covered with the inky remains of the stencil. The man lifted the shards away with tweezers.
“Liberation,” he read. “June thirteenth, 1944, issue eighteen. Damn! Ancient is right.”
Liberation..….….….…….. June 13, 1944. Issue 18
Citizens of Saint-Léon, it is always darkest just before the dawn.
The Americans and British are crossing France. Nazi Germany is falling. The Russians are closing in from the east. The Americans and British from the west.
And yet late last night in Madolein’s hay field above Saint-Léon, our bravest freedom fighters were killed. There was no battle. It was a massacre at the hands of the fascist French militia. Some traitor planted a false radio message that enticed twelve brave citizens to their deaths.
They were shot down in cold blood. Anne Marie Josquin, Onesime Josquin, August Pappe, André Dessart, Jules Farge, Alexandre de Beaumont, Fernande Farge-Lefort, George Perrault, Marie Livrist, Jacques Courtois, Silvie Malleret, Jean-Pascale Benancourt.
Citizens of Saint-Léon, you knew these men and women. You loved them. They were your neighbors, your fathers and brothers and sons and mothers and sisters and daughters. Honor them and let their courage inspire you to great deeds. They died to free France from tyranny. Pick up the weapons from the fallen. See that their efforts are not in vain.
Some of the cowardly militia were killed, but some remain alive. They include Piet Chabrille, Michel Schneider, Yves Renard, Thierry Varrault, and Serge Passy.
Citizens, do not take revenge. The Americans are weeks if not days away. When they arrive, tell them who the cowards are who betrayed France. See that they are arrested, and, when France is restored, they will be tried and punished for their culpability.
Vive la Libération!!!! Vive la France!!!!
* * *
“I never saw this one,” said Stephanie. “He wrote it that night. He was sent off before he could print it.”
“Yves,” said Renard.
“Yves, yes, of course. Your father. He wrote all the pamphlets. From the beginning. He always named himself in them to divert suspicion from himself. It worked. Too well. He always thought he would be able to prove his innocence if he had to by producing the mimeograph machine.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” said Renard.
“It didn’t concern you. It shouldn’t have concerned you. We wanted you to have a life free of all that.”
“And yet it weighed on me.”
“I know. I’m sorry. You know, as odd as it sounds, your father loved writing those pamphlets. He had dreams.…”
“When he came back from Russia?”
“Before he went. He didn’t have many dreams when he came back, except bad ones. He brought Russia and the war home with him. For everyone else, it was long past, but for him it echoed around inside him. And yet. You know how he always feared intimate human connection? Feared something evil would come and destroy it?”
“I remember,” said Renard.
“Well, one day he announced he wanted a child. ‘An anchor,’ he said. An anchor in the real world, a first step into the good world that could be.” Stephanie took her son’s hand in hers and kissed it.
* * *
Renard submitted his report about the massacre of the twelve resisters in the Madolein hay field above Saint-Léon. In it he stated that, while it was obviously beyond his jurisdiction, evidence he had gathered indicated strongly that Michel Schneider, currently a deputy minister in the Interior Ministry in Paris and the former mayor of Saint-Léon-sur-Dême, had been one of the militiamen involved in the massacre of the twelve. Renard wrote that Schneider might also have plotted with the partisan code-named Savanne to plan the massacre of the Saint-Léon resistance group by planting false radio codes and misleading the partisans. The evidence for the latter crime was circumstantial, but it was nonetheless worthy of further investigation. Furthermore, there was the possibility that Schneider might have been a party to the recent murder in Tours of Piet Chabrille, who was a witness to his crimes.
Renard attached a photocopy of the recovered issue of Liberation, with Piet Chabrille’s and Michel Schneider’s names underlined in red. He attached a copy of the file on the unsolved murder of Piet Chabrille. He attached the recent news photos of Michel Schneider in Saint-Léon. And he included a copy of the tape of Louis’s interview with the minister in his office.
These items altogether made a substantial package, which Renard carried over to the post office. “I need a return receipt,” he said. He watched while the postage was affixed.
Three days later Renard was summoned to Château-du-Loir for a meeting with his commanding officer. “Shut the door,” said the captain.
“Are you insane, inspector?” he said. He leafed through the pages Renard had submitted. “Have you gone completely crazy?! ‘Beyond my jurisdiction’? You have no idea how far beyond your jurisdiction this is. ‘Circumstantial evidence’? What you offer is not circumstantial evidence. It is fantasy. It’s not evidence of any kind, circumstantial or otherwise. And if it were evidence, and if there had been a crime, it would be evidence of a crime on which the statute of limitations expired when you were still a boy. You have done absolutely nothing by the book in this case. Disregard that: It’s not even a case. It never was, and it never will be.
“I’ve already had inquiries from the Interior Ministry, inspector, from the office of Minister Michel Schneider, thanks to that little ‘interview.’ They want your head on a platter. And I am inclined to give it to them. There’s no case, Renard. There never was; there never will be.
“However, I am going to do you a favor. I am going to destroy everything you have submitted to me. And I suggest you do the same with your copies. This case—which never was—is closed.” The captain made a great show of throwing the entire stack of material into the wastebasket.
Renard sat silently facing the captain.
“Is there anything you want to say, inspector? No? Well then, I have work to do.”
Renard stood. He saluted. The captain did not return his salute, and Renard left the building.
Clouds had come in from the west, and big raindrops were falling all around him. The wind picked up. As it did, Renard imagined himself sitting at his typewriter and typing: Liberation, then all those dots like bullet holes, then the date, September 23, 1976. Citizens of Saint-Léon. Is history to be ignored? Are the culpable to be excused? Not if I can help it, citizens. Just the idea of doing it made him laugh out loud.
&n
bsp; Also by
PETER STEINER
Le Crime
L’Assassin
The Terrorist
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Earlier in his life, Peter Steiner taught literature for a living. Then he became a cartoonist for The New Yorker. He now writes stunningly good spy novels. He has published three previous books, The Terrorist, L’Assassin, and Le Crime (published in hardcover as A French Country Murder), in his series set in France and featuring ex–CIA man Louis Morgon. Peter Steiner makes his home in France and Connecticut.
Visit his Web site at www.plsteiner.com.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A THOMAS DUNNE BOOK FOR MINOTAUR BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.
THE RESISTANCE. Copyright © 2012 by Peter Steiner. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.thomasdunnebooks.com
www.minotaurbooks.com
Cover design by David Baldeosingh Rotstein
Cover photographs: man walking up stairs © Yolande de Kort/Trevillion Images; village by J-Phillipe Janez/Flickr
ISBN 978-1-250-00371-3 (hardcover)
ISBN 9781250011305 (e-book)
First Edition: August 2012
The Resistance Page 31
