A Hero of France: A Novel

by Alan Furst

  Mathieu sat there, staring at the wall, the nasty little twit had tried to scare him. No, had scared him. Hearing two light taps on the door he said, “Yes?”

  De Lyon entered the office, said nothing, but took a bottle of cognac and two glasses out of a cabinet. When he sat down, he looked Mathieu over carefully, poured two drinks and handed one to Mathieu, saying, “So? How did it go?”

  “Badly.” He drank off his cognac.

  De Lyon poured him some more and said, “Well, it had to happen. Now it has. What did you do?”

  “He went home with his money, is what I did.”

  “He’ll be back, or there will be another one. The sun, at one time, really did not set on the British Empire, they know how to deal with the natives.”

  “Quel connard.” Damn fool.

  De Lyon shrugged. “The British intelligence had good networks in France, professional networks, but they were badly damaged during the invasion. Enter Edouard, sitting around in his club in 1939, then Hitler goes into Poland and it’s war; so Edouard must join up, must find a job suitable to his station, a job he can brag about. He talks to friends, but nothing happens right away, then somebody learns he speaks French, perhaps was raised in France by British parents, and now Edouard has his job, a secret job, so he can tell his friends, ‘Sorry, old man, I really can’t say what I’m doing.’ Wink.”

  “I never expected somebody like that, not after meeting Kolb.”

  “I doubt very much that S. Kolb is an employee of the British service, he works for S. Kolb. And he would never involve himself with anyone like this Edouard creature. His job was to find you, and to see if you might accept their offer. After that, he went on to something else.”

  Mathieu described the meeting. When he mentioned the photograph, de Lyon was amused. “He was supposedly making sure that you were the real Mathieu, but, to their way of thinking, a little intimidation never hurts—‘We’ve been watching you,’ that sort of thing.”

  “But Max, we’ve been working with the British service for months, we depend on them, once we’re in Spain, to take the airmen the rest of the way back to Britain. And they’ve been nothing but helpful, grateful.”

  “Maybe a new section at work, a new strategy.”

  “What do the people behind Edouard want from us, specifically?”

  “My best guess? Possibly espionage, spying. Clandestine underground groups do one of three things: resistance—including propaganda and escape networks, espionage, or operations, meaning sabotage, assassination, all that. But you won’t find out what they want until you agree to work for them.”

  Mathieu was silent, unsettled by the day’s events. He reached for a cigarette and lit it.

  De Lyon could see how he felt and said, “Don’t take it badly, my friend. You own a business, which has prospered, now somebody wants to buy it. Way of the world.”

  —

  17 April. A tender scene: a young student from a nearby lycée walking her bicycle home while, by her side, her adoring papa spoke earnestly to his cherished daughter. The seventeen-year-old student was Lisette, the postmistress for Mathieu’s resistance cell, who, after school at three-thirty, rode her bicycle through the streets of Paris and delivered messages, sometimes written, usually spoken.

  The papa was Mathieu who, the night before, had received another visit from S. Kolb: the secret service was frantic, had now decided to send a Lysander—a speedy monoplane with fixed landing wheels—to pick up the Polish pilot. All Mathieu had to do was fetch him from the American Hospital and take him by train to a village north of Paris, and they had specified that Mathieu himself was to be the courier.

  Mathieu agreed, but, he told Kolb, two men of military age, traveling together, drew far too much interest at document controls—they had tried this twice in the early days of the cell and had nearly gotten caught both times. What worked was mother and son, uncle and nephew, or a married couple. “Do what you have to do,” Kolb had said. “Take someone along as camouflage, but be at that village in two days. Here are the details.” He handed over a few typewritten lines on a scrap of paper, then said, “What’s causing the flutter in the service is that the politicians have become involved.” The look from Kolb which accompanied this news was meaningful.

  Parting from Mathieu at a Métro station, Lisette pedaled along on the damp spring afternoon, weaving her way through crowds of bicyclists, ringing her bell when somebody got in her way, avoiding the gazogènes—taxis with wood- or charcoal-fired engines that had now appeared on the streets of the city.

  Reaching the Seventh Arrondissement, she found the tiny impasse, cul-de-sac, where Annemarie, the new operative, lived, locked her bicycle to a lamppost, and rang for the concierge who said, “Yes, ma petite?” Lisette, much too thin, with watery blue eyes, was doted on by the concierges. She asked to see Annemarie, using her real name, and was taken upstairs, where she delivered her message, which described where and when she was to meet Mathieu.

  Then Lisette was off again, carrying the next delivery in the student’s briefcase in her bicycle basket.

  —

  It was late afternoon on the eighteenth of April when Mathieu, Annemarie, and Sgt. Kalisz left Paris from the Gare du Nord, taking the local train north toward the Belgian border. There had been great scurrying around to acquire the proper documents but it had been managed, the process made easier because Kalisz, after eleven months with the RAF, spoke a rough-and-tumble pilot’s English, so he could communicate with Annemarie and Mathieu.

  Annemarie and Kalisz were now, according to their papers, newlyweds, he from the Polish émigré community that worked the coal mines up in Lille. Both blonde, they made a pretty couple: Kalisz in white shirt, tie, and blue suit—to impress his new bride’s relatives—while Annemarie wore her mocha raincoat, well-fitted flannel slacks, and lace-up shoes, looking prim and proper on her way to a family gathering. Mathieu sat in the same compartment but pretended not to know them, and would intervene only in an emergency.

  It was gathering twilight when they left the train at Nanteuil-le-Haudouin, set among wheatfields some thirty-five miles from Paris, and found themselves in a small village of stucco buildings and cobbled streets, with towering grain elevators on the railway track just beyond the station. A few steps away, the Café de la Gare, and the usual crowd: men in bleu de travail work jackets and trousers, women knitting and gossiping while their dogs lay at their feet, and two bulky men leaning on the bar and drinking beer. They were army veterans of the 1914 war, these two, once paysans, then soldiers, now paysans once more. Annemarie and Kalisz sat at a table while Mathieu joined the men at the bar and identified himself. After formal greetings, they went back to their beer and talk of the weather and the wheat crop.

  Twenty minutes later, from outside the café, came the heavy beat of an unmuffled engine that chuffed like a locomotive. The men at the bar drank up the last of their beer, called out goodbys to their friends, and went outside, followed by Mathieu and the newlyweds. Just beyond the door stood a very old tractor with black smoke pumping from a pipe on its hood and huge wheels with iron rims, hitched to a farm wagon with a flat wooden bed. Stacked at the forward end of the wagon, bundles of firewood cut into narrow staves. The two paysans greeted the driver, using his local nickname, Flamand, which meant the Fleming. Mathieu could see why—with thick black hair cut across a low forehead and ruddy coloring, he looked like a Flemish pikeman in the background of a seventeenth-century painting. When he invited the travelers from Paris to climb on, Annemarie did not hesitate, braced her hands on the edge of the wagon and hoisted herself up, now sitting on a thin layer of dirt and dried cow manure. The paysans joined them, Flamand pushed the gear lever forward and they were off, iron rims bumping hard over the stone cobbles. “It will take an hour or so, maybe more,” one of the paysans said to Mathieu.

  It was almost dark when they turned off the road onto a narrow path, the last of the setting sun trailing long, red streaks in the western sky.
By the time they reached the landing zone, a wheatfield surrounded by forest, night had fallen and one of the paysans used a flashlight so they could see to unload the firewood. Directed by Flamand, they carried the wood to one end of the field and built three piles, with kindling as the bottom layer, to serve as signals. When they were done they returned to the wagon.

  Now it was very quiet, rain had fallen earlier and the air smelled of wet earth. Mathieu sat next to Flamand on the edge of the wagon and, in low voices, they began to talk. He and the two paysans, Flamand explained, were all members of one family: two brothers and a brother-in-law. “This is our sixth landing,” he said, “but your man is a little different. The plane can take only one passenger and it’s always been a certain type: briefcase, raincoat, city hat. And they don’t talk much. Important people, no doubt, the English don’t send an airplane for just anybody.” He took out a pocket watch and squinted at the numbers in the moonlight. “We have some time to wait,” he said. “We won’t light the fires until nine-fifteen.”

  “Can we help?” Mathieu said.

  “No, we’ll take care of the fires, you three just get ready to run to the plane, the pilot won’t stay on the ground long, your man will climb aboard, then you can help us turn the plane around so it can take off again. You have somewhere to spend the night?”

  “We might stay at a house in the village, there was a pension sign in the window. Or we’ll sit in the station and wait for the morning train back to Paris.”

  Flamand nodded, then looked up at the sky.

  Precisely on time the fires were lit and minutes later they could hear the plane as it circled the field, then the sound of the engine grew louder and the Lysander came in for a landing. It hit the field hard and bounced, a gust of wind caught the wing and the plane came back down at an angle, sheared off the end of the wing, collapsed one of the wheel wells, spun halfway around and finally stopped, the end of the damaged wing resting on the ground.

  Mathieu, Annemarie, and Kalisz ran toward the plane. When they reached it they could smell gasoline, there was a starred hole in the glass of the windshield and the pilot lay still, his head against the side of the canopy. Kalisz ran up the wing and, teeth clenched with effort, forced the canopy open, grabbed the pilot by his flying jacket, hauled him out, dropped him to the ground and jumped after him as the first flames began to climb the edge of the cockpit. Mathieu knelt by the pilot, there was blood trickling from his hairline. “Merde,” Mathieu said, feeling for a pulse.

  “Is he gone?” Kalisz said, breathing hard.

  “No, he’s alive, but look at his leg.” The pilot’s foot was bent in an odd position.

  The paysans now arrived, running as fast as they could. “We better pull him away,” Kalisz said, and, with Flamand helping, they dragged the pilot into the field. Just in time. The plane blew up, orange flames shooting into the sky. One of the paysans said, “Well, they’ll see that in Nanteuil.”

  “Are there Germans in the village?” Annemarie said.

  “No, there’s a gendarme post in Senlis, about eight miles from here,” Flamand said. “They’ll hear about it soon enough and, come daylight, they’ll have to investigate.”

  They walked back to the tractor and laid the pilot carefully in the wagon, one of the paysans folded up his jacket and slid it beneath the pilot’s head. Annemarie took a handkerchief from her shoulder bag, tore it in half, then half again, knotted the pieces together and tied the improvised bandage over the wound in the pilot’s scalp. By the light of the burning plane they could see that he was very handsome, a matinee-idol type with ginger-colored hair. “Poor bastard,” Flamand said.

  Annemarie, kneeling next to Kalisz, sensed there was something wrong with him and he was trying not to show it. Slowly, wincing with pain, Kalisz started to take off his jacket, the inside of the left sleeve was charred and crumbling away.

  “Leave it on,” Mathieu said. “You’re burned, aren’t you.”

  Kalisz nodded, his face taut with pain.

  “That needs to be treated,” Flamand said. “We’re going to have to take the pilot to the doctor in Nanteuil, so we’ll take him too.” He paused, thinking things through. “And we’ll drop you two off at my farm. We can’t all go to the doctor’s house—we’re asking a lot of him as it is. And, after what happened tonight, better not to be a stranger in the village.”

  “It’s not so bad,” Kalisz said. “I’ve been burned before, all it needs is a bandage and some salve.”

  “That’s in Nanteuil,” Flamand said. He started up the engine and switched on a dim light mounted on the front of the tractor.

  —

  When they reached an ancient stone farmhouse by the edge of a plowed field, the paysans said goodby to Mathieu and Annemarie. At the house, Flamand introduced them to his wife and eldest son—there were four other children, already asleep—then left for the journey into Nanteuil. Flamand’s wife put out a ham covered in white fat, a heavy loaf of brown bread with a hard crust, a slab of white butter, a bowl of lentils, and an earthenware jug of red wine. “Come and sit at the table,” she said. “What happened in the wheatfield?”

  Mathieu told the story as he ate. He was very hungry, no surprise to him—he remembered how his tank crews had eaten everything they could get their hands on, despite what they’d experienced while fighting the Wehrmacht. When Annemarie and Mathieu had finished their supper, Flamand’s wife said, “You two will have to sleep in the barn, we don’t have room in the house.”

  “Very kind of you, madame, to take us in,” Annemarie said.

  “It’s cold out there, but you’ll survive the night. My son will show you the way.”

  —

  The barn was built of stone, with open squares serving as windows. Inside, moonlight flooded over the four cows in their stalls, while the air was heavily scented with soured milk and rotting straw. Mathieu and Annemarie had been warned about the ladder to the hayloft but, before Mathieu could volunteer, Annemarie had started to climb, slowly, testing each rung before she put her weight on it. Watching from below as he held the ladder steady, Mathieu was distracted by a cat, peering around a beam to see what was going on.

  It was much darker in the hayloft. When Mathieu reached the top of the ladder, Annemarie was standing on a thick bed of hay and taking her raincoat off, wearing, underneath, only a thin sweater. “This spot is as good as any, I guess,” she said. She settled on her back, the hay rustling beneath her, and used the raincoat as a blanket. Mathieu stretched out beside her, covering himself with his jacket. “Have you ever slept in a hayloft?” he said.

  “Played in them as a kid,” she said. “When we were in the country we used to go to one of the farms we had, to get fresh milk. I liked it there, the dairymaids wore aprons and bonnets.”

  “Are you too cold to sleep?” Mathieu said.

  “I’ll manage…we will get some heat from the cows.” Then she said, “Do you think the pilot will recover?”

  “I hope so, but, head wounds…”

  “What will we do, now that there’s no airplane?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Is there…someone you can telephone? Ask for help?”

  “No, there’s only you and me so we’ll have to figure it out, how to get the pilot down to Spain.”

  She sat up suddenly and whispered, “What’s that?” Something had scurried along the beam above their heads.

  “Probably a rat. Barns always have rats.”

  “Brrr, I don’t like rats.”

  “I don’t think they’ll bother us.”

  She lay back down and said, “I’m so tired,” then turned on her side, her back to Mathieu.

  Mathieu also turned on his side, facing away from her. “We may have to spend a few nights on the trains,” he said. “So we should try to sleep.”

  She yawned. “I won’t have to try very hard.” She moved around to get comfortable, drew the raincoat tighter and, moments later, Mathieu could hear the steady breathing
that meant she was asleep.

  Mathieu wanted to sleep but he couldn’t, he was too much aware of the woman lying close to him. He knew she had no desire to make love, but, even so, he wanted to see her with her clothes off and he surely wanted to touch her bare skin. Then he was distracted by the problems he would face in the morning: he needed railway schedules for the trip south but they would not be available at the Nanteuil station, the three of them would have to cross into the Unoccupied Zone, using the passeurs, and Kalisz had to have a new jacket, the doctor would cut away the sleeve and part of the shirt.

  Annemarie moved around in the hay, then went back to sleep. Far off in the distance he could hear thunder, and as one of the cows drank water he could hear her lapping at the trough and the bell around her neck clanked. Then, a brief commotion at the end of the loft. What was going on? It must be the barn cat, he thought, catching one of the rats. He hoped she wouldn’t bring it to them as a gift. Or part of it.

  At last he dozed. Then Annemarie turned over and touched his shoulder, whispering, “Are you asleep?”

  He mumbled, “No.” It was so cold he could see his breath, and the end of his nose was damp.

  “I’m freezing, Mathieu, my teeth are almost chattering. May I lie next to you?”

  “Of course. We’ll put both coats over us.”

  Annemarie moved until she was almost touching him, close enough so that he was aware of her breath on the back of his neck. Mathieu, using one hand, managed to rearrange the coats, making sure she had more than her share of the much thicker jacket, with the raincoat on top. “Oh, thank you,” she said. “Much better now.” A moment later, she reached around him and pulled herself closer—now he could feel her small breasts, moving around as she settled herself, then pressed against his back. His right hand was beneath his head, his left at first in front of him but this was uncomfortable so he rested it on top of her hip. “Do you mind if I put my hand there?”