God's Formula

by James Lepore

  “Father?” Tolkien said.

  “Yes.”

  “The need for salvation…Surely this is something that mankind will never lose sight of.”

  The priest shook his head. “The battle now is between good men and evil men,” he said. “But one day soon, men, normal men who think they are good, will laugh at God, as if he were a joke. Salvation will be a joke to them. Then the last days will begin.”

  Chapter 17

  Paris, June 13, 1940, Noon

  John Tolkien sat alone in the last row right of the Cinema George V on Champs Elysee, watching the credits roll for All This, and Heaven Too. The boy in the blue shirt had pointed to a seat and disappeared. Except for a couple passionately kissing near the front, the theater was empty—dark and empty. Why it was open for business, with the Werhmacht encircling a ghost-like Paris, the professor could not guess. Perhaps its owner knew the man who would be meeting him—was doing his bit to thwart the Germans. Vive La Resistance. On the screen, Bette Davis and Charles Boyer had given way to secondary characters, their names in much smaller sized print, not unlike the way research assistants were credited in articles written by highly regarded professors. The Phamous PhD’s, Tolkien called them, when thinking about his meager scholarly output, which decidedly did not include The Hobbit. Oh, well…the sudden but very quiet movement of a person taking the seat next to him brought an abrupt end to these musings.

  “Professor Tolkien,” the man said.

  “Yes.”

  “The boys have left.”

  Silence, except for the opening scene of the movie—teenage school girls in pinafore dresses being introduced one by one to their new French teacher, the prim and proper and sad-looking Mademoiselle Desportes.

  “Who are you?” Tolkien asked. He stole a glance at the man, who was older than he expected, perhaps fifty, and who was large—he barely fit into the theater’s cushioned seat—and who wore a rough beard.

  “I am a friend of Father LaToure. You have no choice but to trust me, Monsieur Tolkien.”

  “Where are they? The boys?”

  “We had to get them away. The people in the neighborhood saw the Friedeman boy on the street ranting in German. They were asking questions. The Germans will be here tomorrow. We could not take the chance of someone talking to them.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Dentz has sent a deputation to St. Denis to negotiate the surrender of the city. There will be tanks and German soldiers marching on the Place de la Concord by seven tomorrow morning.”

  “Dentz?”

  “The military commander of Paris.”

  “We would have taken them.”

  “We only confirmed your mission this morning.”

  “Bloody hell.”

  “Yes, and worse. You must leave Paris. If you are caught, you will be hung.”

  “What about you, whoever you are?”

  “I am a national rail conductor. I will stay and work. The trains must run. Perhaps I will blow up one or two before it is over.”

  “Tell me where the boys are.”

  “They have been taken south.”

  “Where, exactly.”

  “Foix, near the Spanish border. They were entrusted to an elderly couple, originally from Foix, Jean and Paulette Foret.”

  “Who are they?”

  “They lost two sons in the fighting at the river Meuse. Rommel. They are going to join a resistance group in Foix.”

  Silence. On the screen, Mademoiselle Desportes, on the verge of tears, was rushing out of the classroom.

  “Is there really a French resistance?”

  “We will see. So far it consists of various groups of misfits.”

  “How will I find the boys in Foix?”

  “If you insist on trying, go to the Chapel of Notre Dame de Montgauzy. It’s at the foot of the Foix Castle. Ask for Father Raymond. But I must warn you, they are a strange breed in Foix.”

  “Strange breed?”

  “Have you heard of the Cathars?”

  “No.”

  “A twelfth-century heretical group. Fanatics. They trust no one.”

  “Do you mean to say they still exist? Is Father Raymond one of them?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t care to know. Everyone in Foix or from Foix is crazy, including the clergy. The Forets intend to seek the help of the priest. That’s all I know.”

  “I do remember reading about the Cathars. They were wiped out.”

  “Not completely, or so rumor has it.”

  “They put up a fierce fight.”

  “They were supposed to have some kind of secret weapon. The Treasure of Cathar. They killed thousands of the pope’s mercenaries with it. Many thousands.”

  “Which pope?”

  “Innocent III. He got a crusade going.”

  “This father Raymond…?”

  “Here, take this. It may help.”

  Tolkien looked down at the object that the Frenchman had pressed into his palm. It was a large, gold, oval locket, perhaps two inches by one inch. He opened it to see a beautifully-rendered enamel painting of the Virgin Mary holding an older Christ Child on her left side. In the Child’s hand was a thumbnail, its detail amazing, of a castle with three crenellated towers. A red flag bearing a bright yellow twelve-pointed cross flew atop the center tower. Both the Blessed Mother and the Child appeared to be smiling, their eyes a translucent blue, like the sky in the thumbnail, glowing.

  “What is this?” he asked.

  “Father LaToure gave it to me to give to you. That’s an image of Foix castle the Child is holding. Foix Castle was the last holdout of the Cathars. He said it may help with Father Raymond.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me yet,” the bearded man said. “The Germans will occupy Paris and the North. Petain will be their puppet in the South. Confusion will reign for a short while. You must take advantage and escape. Then you can thank me.”

  “How do you know all this?” Tolkien had learned as much from his nightly talks with Fleming in Fleming’s room. But Fleming was in touch with embassy personnel, who would be expected to know how the French were going to handle a German occupation. This bearded man…

  “We have people in certain places,” was the man’s response.

  “I can’t leave without the boys.”

  “You are on a fool’s errand. The Friedeman boy has no secret formula.”

  “Perhaps the Brauer boy has it.”

  “Professor, we searched them both. We interrogated them both. They were both incredule, naïve. It is clear, Friedeman sent his son away knowing he was going to blow up the institute where he worked. The Brauer boy is his protector. No more, no less.”

  “Young Friedeman, how is he?” Tolkien had a sixteen-year-old son, Christopher. He couldn’t imagine him in the Friedeman and Brauer boys’ situation.

  “He had a seizure. Le grand mal. He has recovered.”

  “Are you—was the doctor sure it was epilepsy?”

  “The symptoms are unmistakable.”

  “I know them. A neighbor’s boy in Birmingham had seizures. I was with him once.”

  “I am sorry I could not help you, Professor Tolkien.”

  “When did the boys leave?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “How are they traveling?”

  “In a refugee caravan.”

  “Slow as molasses.”

  “Yes.”

  “On foot?”

  “No, among a throng of Belgians, some in carts, some walking, some on bicycles, a few old cars and trucks.”

  “What route?”

  “There is only one way south. Nationale Route Six.”

  “Thank you.”

  On the screen, Miss Desportes, still sad, was telling a story of some kind, her face now composed.

  “Scandal, forbidden love, murder,” said the bearded man.

  “Pardon?”

  “The posters out front,” said the bearded man, nodding toward the s
creen.

  “What do the Forets look like?” Tolkien asked.

  “I don’t know, vraiment. They are friends of friends.”

  Tolkien nodded.

  “The Luftwaffe is strafing Route Six,” the bearded man said. “Be careful, my friend.”

  Chapter 18

  Paris, June 13, 1940, 4:00 p.m.

  “Ms. Chanel…” said Marlene Jaeger.

  “Why are you speaking?” Ian Fleming said, reaching for his belt buckle.

  “I—”

  “What have I said, over and over again?”

  “I—”

  Fleming, sitting comfortably in a plush chair in Marlene Jaeger’s room at the Ritz, had been interrupted while watching Marlene undress—slowly and timidly, the way he had trained her to do it—anticipating the moment, somewhere before she was quite naked, when she would hesitate, ashamed to be disrobing in front of her dear friend and mentor, the handsome wine merchant who had been so generous in tutoring her in the ways of the boudoir.

  “What about Ms. Chanel?” Fleming was really angry now, not playing.

  “Ian…she has abandoned us.”

  Now Fleming took his hand off of his belt buckle. Was she serious? His anger had brought on a massive erection. He looked at Marlene carefully and smiled. Still in her stockings and garter belt, she was covering her large and lovely breasts with her slip. “I should whip you now for talking,” he said. “But I’ll wait.”

  “Do it now,” Marlene said. “Then fuck me. Please, Ian.”

  “Ian?”

  “Yes?”

  “My father and I are leaving tomorrow morning.”

  “With Ms. Chanel?”

  “No, she really has abandoned us, but we have arranged to leave with a Jewish family we know. They are picking us up at eight am.”

  “You’re cutting it close, I daresay.”

  “Miss Chanel has…her lover is German. He said the German Army is scheduled to enter Paris on June 15. He seemed to know…”

  Fleming lay on his back in the room’s opulent bed, propped against an oversized pillow. Marlene was on her side in the crook of his right arm. The room’s tall windows were wide open to a beautiful late spring day. A breeze wafted over them. “We can have one last dinner tonight,” he said.

  “I cannot leave my father now. He is very worried. I must help him pack, and stay with him.”

  “Then it is adieu,” said the Englishman, stroking the welts on her buttocks where he had stuck her with his belt a few minutes ago.

  “I have something for you, before I go,” Marlene said.

  “Well,” Fleming replied, smiling. “Hand it over.”

  “I don’t have it with me,” Marlene replied. “In fact, I am still arranging to get it.”

  “How intriguing. I’m flattered.”

  “Can I call you later?” the dark-haired German beauty asked, propping herself on an elbow. “Will you be in your room?”

  “I will stay in the hotel. They’ll find me.”

  “Good. Thank you.”

  Fleming patted her rear end again.

  “Ian?”

  “Yes?”

  “I will miss you.”

  “You will have plenty of adventures.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “As am I.”

  “We are a good fit.”

  “In bed, you mean. La boudoir.”

  “Yes. You are so selfish. I love that about you.”

  “I’m serious about my pleasure, you have me there.”

  “You have taught me obedience.”

  “I don’t believe in sparing the rod.”

  Marlene, murmuring something unintelligible, licked Fleming’s nipple, then took it gently in her teeth.

  “You don’t want me to leave this minute, do you?” Fleming asked.

  “No,” Marlene replied. “We have time.”

  The Englishman nodded. “Good,” he said. “Do you remember our training sessions last week? Your responses to the leash?”

  “Of course. Are we…?”

  “Yes, we are. We will see how well the poodle, Miss Fifi, has learned her lessons.”

  Marlene, frowning, casting her eyes down like a cowed dog, got on her hands and knees and bit Fleming lightly on his inner thigh, nuzzling her mouth between his legs to gain access. “I will be a good Fifi, you will see,” she said.

  Chapter 19

  Paris, June 14, 1940, 5:00 a.m.

  Ian Fleming, in gabardine slacks, a collarless shirt and a short-waisted leather jacket, looked eastward, over Paris’ 18th arrondissement, toward central Europe’s dense heartland, where the sun’s first hazy light was clashing silently with the night sky at the horizon, a battle which Fleming had never known the rising sun to lose. This reminder that he was after all just a speck on a star orbiting another much larger star, comforted him when he thought of what he was going to do in a moment or two.

  Marlene Jaeger, her lustrous, long brown hair undone and wafting in the gentle breeze, stood next to him. She had on a knee-length flower-print cotton sweater over a casual white dress with a blue bow-collar. They both had empty wine glasses in their hands. An empty bottle of 1922 Romanee Conti rested on the ledge of the perimeter wall of the dome of the Sacre-Coeur Basilica at the top of Montmartre hill. Paris, dark and eerily silent, spread itself out some eight hundred feet below them.

  “I thought it fitting,” she said, “to come here.”

  “Yes,” Fleming replied, “the French do keep losing wars with the Germans.” He knew, from speaking earlier with Professor Tolkien, that the basilica was built to dedicate the city to a moral rebirth after years of debauchery culminating in the War of 1870, the fall of Paris in 1871, and the relinquishment of Alsace-Lorraine in humiliating “peace” talks with the Germans.

  “I’m glad you agreed to drink the wine,” Marlene said.

  “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  They watched silently as the false dawn gave way to a streak of red light at the earth’s dark rim.

  “I’m not really a wine merchant,” Fleming said after a few seconds, turning to her. “You know that.”

  “I do,” said Marlene. “And I’m not really a Jew escaping the Nazis with my father. You know that.”

  “You are looking for a boy named Conrad Friedeman,” said Fleming.

  “We both are.”

  “It always ends,” Marlene said. The morning breeze had stiffened and was blowing Marlene’s hair back, exposing her face, so that she looked to Fleming like Diana racing her chariot across the sky. No virgin this one, he thought.

  “Yes,” Fleming replied. “It does.”

  They had left their sadomasochist toys in their toy box when they met in Marlene’s room a few hours ago, making love the old-fashioned way, once in a great rush and the second time slowly, the way real lovers do. When Marlene had fallen asleep at three a.m., with the aid of a mild sleeping powder Fleming had put in her Champagne, he had found her compact Walther revolver and emptied it of its bullets. He reached now and touched to make sure they were still where he had put them, in his jacket pocket, next to his Navy Beretta.

  “I am sorry, Ian,” Marlene said. She was pointing the Walther at him.

  “I am, too,” Fleming said, reaching for his pistol. Before he could pull it out, he saw Marlene pull hesitantly on her gun’s trigger, as if it was something she really didn’t want to do. He heard the click of the hammer striking the firing pin, and then he heard a gunshot and saw a red blotch appear on the front of Marlene’s white dress, where her heart was. Turning, he saw a raven-haired woman, his age or a bit younger, pointing a nine millimeter Luger at him.

  “She was going to kill you,” the woman said.

  “Who are you?” Fleming asked.

  “I don’t know,” the woman replied.

  “You don’t know?” She had stepped closer to him, to within ten feet or so. In the lightening dawn, he could see her face, smooth like porcelain, her full lips, and slightly fla
ring nostrils—and her eyes, a startling, amazingly beautiful violet.

  “I thought I worked for Deuxieme Bureau,” the woman said. “But now we seem to have no government.”

  “Assigned to following me?”

  “Yes. For a man who has wandered aimlessly over Paris these past two weeks, you have drawn quite a crowd.”

  “Who else?”

  “Two German cells.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “Eliminated.”

  “I will put my gun away if you will do the same.”

  The violet-eyed woman looked at the pistol in her hand and smiled. “Of course,” she said, putting the gun into an inside pocket of the lightweight duster she was wearing.

  “What shall we do with her?” Fleming asked, putting his Beretta back into his pocket and nodding toward Marlene Jaeger lying dead on the dome’s stone pavers.

  “Leave her.”

  They both raised their heads as they heard a rumbling noise in the distance. The basilica, made of white stone that never discolored, would now be an easy target as it caught the slanting rays of the sun. There was nothing to be seen in the skies above them.

  “There,” the former French intelligence agent with the purple eyes said, pointing to the other side of the dome.

  They circled the walkway. On the opposite side, they could see the entire city. On the major boulevards heading east-west and north-south, thousands of German soldiers were marching into Paris. At the head of each column, was a trooper at point, carrying a red, black and white swastika flag. At regular intervals, tanks, hundreds of them, their engines churning loudly, were interspersed among the soldiers. Sunlight flooded the city now, the Seine shone like a silver ribbon, the white of the swastikas sparkled as they flapped in the freshening breeze. Paris had fallen without a fight. Its long night of German-occupied darkness had begun.

  “I have a car,” the woman said.

  “I have a colleague,” said Fleming.

  “Where?”

  “At the Meurice.”

  “We’ll pick him up, but we must hurry. We will be instantly killed if we are caught.”