by Paul Watkins
The waiter appeared, long apron and short black jacket and the seriousness of a man expecting a big tip.
“Do you like coffee?” Behr asked me.
“Monsieur,” said the waiter with a slight bow, “there is only Café National.”
“I like real coffee,” said Behr. “And I like it at the beginning of a meal. It’s a strange habit, I know.”
“Monsieur,” said the waiter. He was about to explain again that there was no real coffee when Behr pulled a screwcap Bakelite box from his pocket. It was round and about an inch tall, just small enough to fit into my outstretched hand, and the Bakelite was orangey-yellow.
When he unscrewed the cap, I could smell the coffee inside.
The waiter was watching him. There was a gentleness behind his deep-set eyes and frowning, dark mustache.
“Bring us two cafetières of boiling water,” Behr said to the waiter.
The waiter disappeared back through the crowded restaurant into the kitchen. People shuffled by in the dark, silhouettes trailing cigarette smoke.
“Mr. Abetz thought you might appreciate not being in the stuffy surroundings where you normally meet him. He can be unstuffy, too.”
“What did you want to talk about?” I asked.
“First of all, Ambassador Abetz would like to apologize for his outburst earlier today. He would like you to know that he can match any favorable treatment you are receiving from Dietrich. Abetz means what he says, too.” Behr spoke as if he had memorized what he was going to say. “You could be a great asset to him, you and Monsieur Fleury, and believe me, a German ambassador is a good friend to have these…”
At that moment, everything seemed to stop moving. A huge crashing explosion surrounded me. Muscles clenched in bands across my chest. It sounded as if a truck had smashed into the restaurant directly behind me. I heard breaking glass. Then the explosion was gone. In its place came a ringing that blanketed all other sounds. It flashed through my head that I might be having a heart attack. I seemed to be falling over. Then I realized that it was Behr who was falling.
He tipped against the window. His head struck the glass so hard that the pane broke in bright lightning bolts up into the shiny black frame. His chair collapsed underneath him. He rolled onto the sidewalk.
The place where his head had struck the glass was bloody. Blood in the silver lines. There was more blood on the tablecloth and on the cutlery and the glasses.
I couldn’t understand where it had come from. I looked down at my chest, expecting to see some great gaping wound, but there was nothing except flecks of red on my white shirt.
People inside the restaurant were looking out into the dark, to see where the noise had come from. A woman pointed to the broken glass where Behr’s head had struck. Her husband jumped up, his chair flipping over. He grabbed the woman and pushed her down on the floor and then got down on the floor himself. Somebody shouted. Then somebody screamed.
I turned around to see a man standing in the street, almost on top of me.
It was Tombeau. His eyes were wild. He was holding a large revolver. Smoke drifted from the barrel and the chamber of the gun.
Only then did I realize that he had shot Behr.
Tombeau looked down at me. The gun was aimed right in my face.
I just sat there, staring back at him, too confused to be terrified.
“Courtesy of Mr. Dietrich.” Tombeau’s voice was thick and slow. “You’d better get out of here, before the police arrive.” He turned around and walked away into the dark, across the little park, right by the tables where people were eating their dinner. The gun was still in his hand and he made no move to put it away. No one tried to stop him. Some people dove under their tables. One man put his hands in front of his eyes. Others sat there in shock, watching him go by.
I stood, feeling shaky, and stepped around to the other side of the table.
Behr lay on his side. His mouth and eyes were half open and his head was wreathed in shadow. Beside him lay a white ashtray, which must have fallen off the table.
The waiter pushed his way through the crowd that had begun to gather at the door. He stepped carefully over Behr’s body. “Who did this?” he asked.
I didn’t answer. I had just realized that the ashtray was not an ashtray, but the top of Behr’s skull. In the lamplight by the door, it looked strange and pink and rippled, like the inside of an oyster shell. Blood spread out thick and dark as tar from under his body. It fanned out across the pavement, as if it knew where it was going.
The restaurant customers piled into the street. Others came over from the park. They all stared down at the body. A man in a bowtie caught sight of the Bakelite box of coffee, still open on the table. He leaned past me, avoiding my glance, carefully screwed the top back on the box, and put it in his pocket and walked away down the street.
I ran. I sprinted down the Rue Berthe and crossed over onto Rue des Trois Frères and across the Boulevard Rochechouart, and after that, I had no idea what streets I took except it was almost an hour later that I reached the river at the Pont Neuf. I stopped running then. My throat was raw and my shirt was stuck to my back with sweat. I forced myself to walk across the bridge onto the Isle de la Cité. Then I went down to the point that juts out into the Seine, the Place du Vert Galant, which in the daytime was usually crowded with people fishing. The place was deserted now. My watch had steamed up and stopped. I had no idea what time it was, except that it was long after curfew. I sat down by the water. I wrapped my arms around my knees and started shaking and when I finished shaking I wept for the first time in as long as I could remember.
I didn’t know if I was crying for Behr, or for myself, or the breaking strain of always wondering whether the paintings I did were good enough, trying not to think about what would happen if we were caught, and how if we were caught it would be my fault and Madame Pontier with her crumpled, unsmiling lips would say she had known all along that I would fail them. Fleury and Pankratov and I were just as likely to be killed by the French for doing our job well as we were to be killed by the Germans for not doing it well enough. Until this moment, I thought I had it all safely battened down inside me. The weight and measurement of risk. But I was wrong.
I remembered the dream I’d had of how Paris would be before I arrived. The picture-postcard views, soft-focused with the hope of what my time here would bring me. I glimpsed and felt it all suddenly and clearly, like remembering a dream from the night before as you fall asleep.
“Look at you now,” I said to myself.
The blood-dark river rushed by. The water seemed to pulse against the pale stone banks, as if threatening to flood and drown the city in its endless arterial flow.
* * *
IN THE NEWS TWO days later was a report about the shooting of Albrecht Behr, age twenty-two, holder of the Iron Cross first class. The blame was laid on a Communist group called the Front Populaire. In reprisal, twenty suspected Communists were shot up at Mont Válerin.
A bottle of champagne arrived from Dietrich, along with a note telling us not to worry.
There was nothing to do but get on with the work.
We never did hear from Abetz again.
Chapter Fourteen
FROM THEN ON, WE dealt only with Dietrich.
When he brought along Touchard to authenticate, it seemed to be more for the amusement Dietrich could get out of the slippery little man than for the skill Touchard had to offer. I was left with the impression that Dietrich used Touchard only because he had been ordered to do so, and that he would rather have taken our word over the authenticator’s. Touchard was no expert, anyway. Often, he had no idea who was supposed to have done the painting, let alone whether or not it was authentic. Dietrich confided in us that Touchard had been forced upon him by the directors of the ERR, since Touchard was the brother of a prominent director of the Milice in the city of Lille, who had pulled strings to get him the post.
When it came to ridiculing Touchard, Dietric
h couldn’t help himself. The two men disliked each other instinctively. Dietrich was tall and solid and jovial, while Touchard was frail and long-suffering. He returned Dietrich’s mockery with a martyred silence that made Dietrich like him even less.
“Come along, Sniffles,” Dietrich would say, since Touchard always seemed to be suffering from a cold that rosied his nose.
Dietrich’s legs were much longer than Touchard’s and Dietrich had a habit of striding quickly everywhere he went. This left Touchard trotting along behind, glaring hatefully at Dietrich’s back as he struggled to keep up.
By contrast, Touchard had grown very attached to Fleury. Fleury, too, seemed to find in Touchard a kindred spirit. It wasn’t hard to imagine the experiences they had in common. Both men were physically unimpressive. They had doubtless suffered the fate of all non-athletic boys in school, immediately reduced to second-class citizens, and too intelligent not to be insulted by the unfairness of it. I could see the same loathing on Touchard’s face when he spoke to Dietrich as I had seen on Fleury’s when he had to deal with Tombeau. Both men looked lonely, not just alone. They had built for themselves fortresses of arrogance from whose ramparts they could hawk and spit on the rest of the world that ignored them.
The result of this was that Touchard gave Fleury outrageously favorable terms whenever it came time to negotiate for paintings. All Fleury had to do was treat him with formality and respect, which left Touchard dizzy with gratitude.
“Why are you so hard on him?” I asked Dietrich one time when we stood on the landing outside Pankratov’s studio, while Fleury and Touchard were sorting out the details of another painting exchange.
“I don’t know, really,” said Dietrich. Then he waved his hand dismissively at the frosted glass door, behind which Touchard’s thin voice could be heard. “He doesn’t deserve the job. I don’t tolerate whining from myself, and I’m damned if I’ll tolerate it from him.” Dietrich was losing his patience as he spoke, revealing that Touchard annoyed him far more than he ever liked to show.
Valya often came along to these meetings. She made a point of having nothing to do with Fleury and me. I used to wonder why she bothered to come if she couldn’t stand the sight of us, until I figured out how important it was to her that we felt so completely ignored.
I kept waiting for some kind of admission from Fleury that he’d made a mistake in falling for her. But Fleury appeared to have an infinite patience for Valya, no matter what she said or did.
It was Pankratov who bore the brunt of Valya’s taunts. She flaunted how different her life had become. Pankratov endured it, never losing his temper. He knew that if he did blow up, she would tell him he no longer had the right. She would make Pankratov see the distance she had put between herself and him. That was why Pankratov stayed silent, refusing to part with the past, which only served to fuel Valya’s bitterness.
“What about you?” Valya asked me one day at the atelier, forgetting to ignore me.
“What about me?” I replied.
“Whatever happened to the days when you were going to be a great artist?” She pretended to look around the atelier. “I don’t see any great art being done here. How far you are from all your dreams, Monsieur Halifax.”
I brought my mouth close to her ear and whispered, “I’d rather live in a world where my dreams don’t come true than in a world where yours do.”
She slapped me in the face for that. Hard. My left ear buzzed and stung.
Dietrich saw this and laughed.
Valya turned to him. “You think that’s funny?” she shouted. “You don’t care what happens to me at all, do you?”
By now, Dietrich’s laughter subsided into a smile. “You don’t believe that,” he told her. “Not for a moment.”
Valya and Dietrich were always raging at each other, the anger subsiding as suddenly as it appeared. They lived in a world as bloated with luxury as it was with confrontations. From what I had seen of the two of them, I knew that Dietrich loved Valya, in spite or even because of the fact that she didn’t treat him well. She found fault with almost everything he did, at least in public. This didn’t stop him from lavishing on her all the luxuries he could find. Valya loved him, too, in her own strange way. She seemed to have convinced herself that any show of real affection would cause Dietrich to lose interest. Every gesture of her love was made with sarcasm or followed quickly by the announcement of some petty grievance. The two of them had grown so used to their peculiar balance that they seemed to have forgotten what life was like before chaos had brought them together. Now they could no longer live without it. They even seemed to look with pity on the rest of us, at the same time we were pitying them. They believed they were somehow more fortunate, somehow more alive, even in the midst of their fighting.
As the war dragged on, and hardship seeped into every facet of life, Fleury and I did not go hungry. Following a new set of instructions from Tombeau, designed to make sure we were seen more publicly as collaborators—collabos, the French called us—we drank real coffee and ate profiteroles stuffed with cream and topped with Belgian chocolate at the Soldatenkaffee Madeleine on the Rue St. Honoré, sitting amongst the Iron-Crossed officers and their too loudly laughing girlfriends. We were regulars at the cramped space of Ladurée on the Rue Royale, with its green walls, elaborate sconces and gilt-edged frescos of fat-baby angels on the ceiling. We went to the Gaumont Palace Cinema, and watched Jeanne Heriard perform at the Schéhérézade cabaret on the Rue de Liège. Fleury and I were expected to take what Dietrich offered us and to continue the charade. To refuse him would have aroused suspicion.
We also had to give the outward impression of wealth, in order to convince Dietrich that we were selling the paintings we received from him in exchange. There were plenty of avenues for moving these works overseas and fortunes to be made in doing so. The reality, of course, was that every painting went straight to Madame Pontier and into hiding. We lived off the allowance given to us by Tombeau, who also allotted us special funds to buy clothes. He told me to set up an account on the Boulevard des Capucines at the Heereskleiderkasse, which used to be called “Old England” until the Germans renamed it.
We accepted the special passes Dietrich had made for us, which the Germans called Sonderausweise. They allowed us to violate curfew, which a lot of people did anyway. They took off their shoes and walked home in their socks so as to make less noise. The punishment for violating curfew was not in itself very severe, but if you were brought in on a night that a German soldier was murdered by the Resistance, you might get yourself shot as one of the dozens they would execute as a reprisal.
If we needed to go some place, Dietrich would have his private staff car sent over. He had upgraded his old Mercedes to a Horch convertible, which had two sets of front-facing rear seats and hooded “blackout” lights mounted next to the regular lights, and extra horns and the same swooshing front cowlings as on the Mercedes. It was, Dietrich told us, an even better car than was being driven by the military governor of Paris and a hell of a lot better than what Abetz was puttering around in. Grand as this Horch was, Dietrich seemed to flaunt its grandness even more by refusing to have it cleaned. So the black sides and the chromed front grille were powdery gray with dust and showed the streaks where hands had touched the paint while opening the door.
None of this applied to Pankratov. Dietrich himself showed little interest in the old Russian. As far as he was concerned, Pankratov was a bad-tempered, unclean old man who hung around with us because he had no place else to go. But anyone who could have seen Pankratov in his workshop, consulting his notes on the properties of canvas, paint and paper, would have known there was a genius at work.
Dietrich never brought us to 54 Avenue d’Iéna, the headquarters of the ERR, in whose basement was rumored to be a torture chamber whose walls had been soundproofed with asbestos. Nor had we ever met Alfred Rosenberg, the head of the ERR. At first, I used to think that this was because we weren’t worth the bother. Late
r, I blamed it on Dietrich’s selfishness, taking all the credit for the paintings for himself and keeping the people who worked for him hidden safely in the shadows. Eventually, I realized that Dietrich kept us out of the way for our own protection. He knew how dangerous his own people could be. He made it clear to us that if we were ever harassed, by French or Germans, one phone call to him would bring down the whole heavy-handed brutality of the Fabry-Georges boys. The reputation of Fabry-Georges, and Dietrich’s ability to summon them like genies from a bottle, seemed enough to deter anyone who wished to do us harm.
I used to ask myself whether there was ever a time that I enjoyed these luxuries, despite everything they had come to represent. The answer was always the same. How could I enjoy myself when I knew that someone was watching me, all the time, obsessed with vengeance? Sometimes I would see these people and clear in their eyes was a simmering fury as they watched me eat and dance and walk in my warm coat, a grotesque Kabuki mask of pleasure bolted to my face.
A part of me was resigned to the idea that we would all be caught, sooner or later. I tried not to think about the luck we’d had so far. Instead, I thought about the work. We churned out a steady stream of paintings and sketches, feathered in amongst the real paintings grudgingly supplied to us by Madame Pontier. Day after day, I painted and drew in that damp space below the old viaduct. I distilled my life down to the simple equation of the job. I saw the forgeries go out and I watched the original paintings that Fleury brought back—the masterworks of generations, which might otherwise have been destroyed.
* * *
WHEN A GERMAN OFFICER was shot at the Barbes Métro station in mid-August 1941, I became convinced that Germany would win. Some people saw this as the exact opposite. They believed it was the beginning of serious resistance, but to me it had about as much effect as the barking of a chained-up dog.
The Germans arrested dozens of suspected Communists, hauled them off to Mont Válerin and shot them ten at a time. The gunfire echoed out of those stone courtyards. All those dead in exchange for one German soldier. Collaborationist newspapers like Je Suis Partout went into full gear, making it sound as if the Germans didn’t have a choice but to kill off that many people.
