Village of Scoundrels

by Margi Preus

  Jean-Paul shifted from one foot to the other, impatiently rattling a small tin box of lozenges.

  Finally, after he’d paid for the lozenges, he got back onto his bike and headed for the drop-off spot. Almost immediately, the bike chain fell off, and he had to stop and fix it. Then he wiped the grease off his hands with a rag he kept for the purpose and checked his watch.

  The shrill whistle of the train announced that it was nearing the station.

  He stood for a moment, weighing the pros and cons. If he was going to catch the train, he did not have time to drop the papers. That was too bad, since it would be a couple of days before he had a break from classes and could get back—it was a long train ride to Clermont-Ferrand, and he’d arranged to stay with a contact there. It would probably be fine to deliver them later. It wasn’t ideal; he didn’t much like the idea of traveling with falsified papers in his jacket sleeves all the way to a city known to be seething with Germans. But now that he’d finally managed to fake his way into medical school, he wasn’t going to miss class—he had waited too long already.

  He wheeled his bike up the hill to the station and bought himself a ticket just as the train chugged into sight.

  PERDANT GOES HUNTING

  “The thing is,” Perdant said to Jules as he pulled the car over at the Mousset farm, “I should have paid more attention to what was on the sleds than what was going on inside that house.”

  Perdant had gone over in his mind all the people he’d met and the places he’d been these last six months. He’d gone all the way back to that first night in Les Lauzes when the kids came sledding down the hill and almost knocked him over. He probably should have arrested them all right then and there.

  That was the same night he gave that young man a ticket for riding his bicycle without a light, the one who had kicked up his heels afterward. Perdant had puzzled over that ever since. But now he thought he understood. Jean-Paul Filon, also one of the sled-pulling youths who’d sung verse after verse of “The Marseillaise,” was a highly suspicious character and not to be trusted.

  “I’ve thought about it and thought about it and now I think I know,” Perdant mused.

  “Know what?” Jules, unaware of the workings of Perdant’s memory, had no idea what he was talking about.

  “What was on those sleds.”

  “What sleds?” Jules said, as he and Perdant walked toward the farm.

  “The sleds those three kids were pulling that night. And I think I know where they were going.”

  “Sledding?”

  “No.” Perdant got out of the car and waited for Jules. “They were not going sledding. They had something on those sleds. What was it, and where did it end up?”

  “Maybe it was furniture,” Jules said, as he and Perdant walked toward the farm.

  “No,” Perdant said.

  “Or school supplies,” Jules offered.

  “Maybe,” Perdant murmured, “or maybe not.”

  »«

  Monsieur Mousset was sitting on the edge of the stone trough in the yard, mopping his brow and tossing pine cones for a puppy to chase.

  Perdant and Jules stepped into the yard, and Bonjours were exchanged.

  “Is there a Jean-Paul Filon living here?” Perdant asked.

  “Oui,” the farmer said.

  “Is he here?”

  “Non,” was the answer.

  “Do you know where he is?”

  “Non.”

  “Any idea when he will return?”

  “Non.”

  These people are maddening, Perdant thought. It was as if they feared their voices would wear out if they said more than one syllable at a time.

  “Can I take a look at his room?”

  The farmer casually lifted a hand to indicate the door to the boy’s room, across the yard.

  Jules said something to the farmer in the local patois. The farmer answered, also in patois.

  Perdant turned back to them. “Use French, please,” he said. “I want to know what is being said in my presence.”

  “The boy asked the puppy’s name,” the farmer explained.

  “And?” Perdant asked.

  “It’s Filou,” Jules said. “Trickster.”

  “You,” he said, taking Jules by the arm and striding toward the room the farmer had indicated, “come with me.”

  Perdant stepped into Jean-Paul Filon’s room and looked around. It was a simple room: A bed, neatly made. An extra shirt and pair of trousers. A writing desk.

  “What does he use the desk for?” Perdant called over his shoulder to the farmer.

  The farmer shrugged.

  Perdant tapped the desk, imagining a row of colored inks, stacks of stationery, blank ration cards. He could picture engraving tools, copper, rubber, linoleum. He thought he could almost make out the outline of a typewriter on the freshly dusted desktop.

  “And the sewing machine?” Perdant hollered to the farmer.

  “To sew feed sacks,” the farmer shouted back.

  There was nothing incriminating to be found. The young man’s room was so tidy, so wiped clean of everything, it was almost suspicious.

  Perdant prowled through the barn and the outbuildings, poking at the straw and peeking into bins and boxes. He scoured the yard and garden, even turning over stones. Finally he paused, staring at the bees buzzing around the dozen or so white beehives at the rear of the garden.

  “Come over here.” Perdant waved Jules over. Once Jules was standing next to him, he said, “Apparently they know what they’re doing, bees.” He pointed to the beehives. “They go out searching for nectar, then come back and do a little dance to tell the others where the nectar is. A kind of a code, you might say.”

  “Uh-huh,” Jules said.

  “All you have to do is stand back and watch the dance to find the honey,” Perdant mused. He stood as if watching, yet he was not watching, because there was a kind of buzzing in the back of his head, as if it were full of angry bees. Once again he had not made a successful arrest or found anything incriminating. And he supposed people were laughing, as usual, about him behind his back: Perdant is a “loser.”

  He shook his head hard as if to rid it of bees and resolved to do better next time. Better and bigger.

  JEAN-PAUL, MEDICAL STUDENT

  Jean-Paul loved everything about school: the old buildings, the smell of musty books, nervous sweat, pencil shavings, chalky chalkboards, even the apple cores moldering in wastebaskets. He’d been reading anatomy books and anything else like that he could get his hands on, but now he would really start learning.

  As he slid into his assigned seat and set his book and notebook on the desk, he could practically hear the whir of brains at work: new ideas, thoughts, philosophies, equations, theories, all flitting from mind to mind like songbirds in the trees. He felt good, knowing he was on the right path. He was meant to be a doctor. Maybe a surgeon, his friends had suggested.

  “Such a steady hand!” Sylvie had once remarked, watching Jean-Paul forge a signature. “Imagine how he’d be with a scalpel. I’d trust him to operate on me. How about you, Céleste?”

  “Not in a million years,” Céleste had said, returning to her book.

  The memory made him chuckle, which led to the tickle in the back of his throat that preceded a coughing fit. He quickly snapped open the box of lozenges and popped one into his mouth, feeling the chloromethylate numb his throat into submission.

  The professor began his lecture, and Jean-Paul set his pen to paper with a completely clear conscience. It was ironic that he had to break the law so that he could quit an illegal occupation—forgery—to pursue a legal one. Or legal for some people. Jews had been shut out of all the professions, including medicine, teaching, government jobs, journalism. Their businesses had been “aryanized,” meaning confiscated, along with their radios, telephones, even bicycles. They’d been barred from restaurants, movies, concerts, swimming pools, and forbidden to leave their houses between 8:00 p.m. and 5:00 a
.m. And those were the good old days. Now they were arrested, deported, and murdered.

  So, even though he was posing as an Algerian Frenchman from Alsace—a far cry from who he really was, a Latvian Jew from Nice—he did not feel guilty about anything. Far from it. What are you supposed to do when the law is morally wrong?

  He turned his mind back to the lecture. Perfectly aware of the high cost and scarcity of paper, he wrote in a very small hand all the way across the paper, filling all the margins. He was just turning the page to continue his notes on the flip side when a German soldier burst into the lecture hall brandishing a submachine gun.

  “Raus! Raus!—Out! Out!” he shouted, his voice high and raspy, sounding almost frightened himself.

  There were more shouts and scuffling outside—even shots fired—as the same scene played out in classrooms up and down the corridors. In Jean-Paul’s room, the students hurriedly rose and snatched up their books and papers.

  In the midst of all the noise of chairs scraping the floor, shuffling feet, and books closing, Jean-Paul glimpsed a couple of students tearing up papers. His thoughts went immediately to the documents in his jacket sleeves. It would draw far too much attention to try to retrieve them, and he spent no time chastising himself over it. There was nothing he could do about it now. He had to think of how to get away without being stopped, and definitely without being searched!

  The students moved out of the lecture hall, streaming toward the big staircase that led to the main floor. From the third-floor window, Jean-Paul looked down at the courtyard below swirling with hundreds of students and lecturers.

  His mind pedaled through options as he shuffled along with the crowd. Jump out a window? Too high. Try to disappear in the crowd of students? Unlikely to do any good. There would be a checkpoint through which students would be funneled.

  He recalled that, on the way to class, he had passed a small side stairway that probably led to a lesser-used door—at least he felt sure it didn’t lead to the main entrance. To get to it, he’d have to go against the tide of students moving toward the main stairway. So he turned around and began weaving his way through the crowd, catching snatches of conversation.

  “German military police . . .”

  “. . . looking for resisters . . .”

  “. . . searching for weapons and ammunition . . .”

  I don’t have any weapons or ammunition, he thought as he edged sideways through the crowd, but it hardly matters—the false documents I’m carrying are enough to arrest and probably execute me. If they were to find out I’m Jewish . . . Well, he didn’t want to think about it.

  Jean-Paul quietly slipped around the corner and down the stairs, taking them two at a time. Before he reached the first floor, he heard voices, one of them telling a joke—in German.

  “How do you confuse a Frenchman?”

  “I don’t know. How?”

  “Give him a rifle and tell him to use it.”

  Laughter.

  Hoping to slip away unnoticed, Jean-Paul took one backward step up the stairs.

  “You, there!” a German-accented voice shouted. The shoulders and head of a uniformed soldier appeared in the stairwell below. “Come down here at once.”

  »«

  Sooner than he would have liked, Jean-Paul was standing in front of the three smirking soldiers.

  “Your identification card, please,” said the one who either was in charge or who acted like he was.

  Jean-Paul handed over his card and reminded himself to look the soldier in the eye. Stay calm. Don’t do anything aggressive.

  “You are a student?” the soldier asked in bad French.

  “Oui,” Jean-Paul answered, pointing to the stamp on his ID that stated MEDICAL STUDENT. He hoped the ink was thoroughly dry by now.

  Starting at Jean-Paul’s ankles, the soldier patted his pant legs slowly, methodically, moving up, paying special attention to the pockets. The man lifted Jean-Paul’s arms straight out in order to pat his jacket. The contents of the pocket made a distinctive rattle—exactly the sound that pistol cartridges made in their metal box.

  The soldier plunged his hand into Jean-Paul’s pocket, pulled out the box, and without looking at it, triumphantly held it up for his comrades to see.

  They hooted with laughter. Only then did the soldier look at the box to see what he held in his hand: a tin of throat lozenges.

  His friends guffawed so hard they gasped. The embarrassed soldier handed Jean-Paul his lozenges, gave him a kick in the pants, and sent him on his way.

  PHILIPPE IN THE CAPTAIN’S OFFICE

  The door to the police captain’s office opened, and sunlight swept over Philippe like a searchlight picking out a prison escapee.

  The captain sat behind a big desk, slicing through envelopes with a brass letter opener that glinted from the light streaming through the window.

  “Shut the door when you go out,” the police captain said to the gendarme who had ushered Philippe into the room.

  The gendarme retreated, pulling the door shut behind him.

  Philippe stood alone in front of the big desk, feeling as if he were waiting to have punishment doled out by his father. He touched a bruise on his face and ran his tongue over his teeth, then clenched those teeth to prevent years of pent-up rage from spilling out of his mouth.

  He thought about the moment when he had hit his father. Lashing out like that, with fists, the way his father did—that was the coward’s way. He wanted to be better than that. Bigger than that. Stronger than that.

  So now he looked at the top of the captain’s head as the man sliced open another letter. Philippe wondered if he could relax his mind the way he had relaxed his muscles. He imagined himself standing in the ocean, letting the surf roll over him, feeling the cool water quell the fire that raged inside.

  Without looking up, the captain said, “I don’t know what you’ve done that’s brought you in front of me.” He looked up, his gaze at first hard, but softening as he looked at Philippe. He stared at the boy for a long moment, then said with a slight smile, “But I congratulate you.”

  Congratulate me? Philippe thought. Had he heard that right? Was the captain being sarcastic?

  “I’m going to release you,” the man said gently, “but I’m telling you . . .” He paused to aim the pointed end of the opener at Philippe. “I don’t ever want to see you again.”

  Philippe was so unprepared for this response that he simply stood in front of the desk, unsure of what to do next.

  “And.” The policeman stared intently at Philippe as he emphasized each word of the next sentence. “You must stop doing this kind of work.” Barely pausing, he said, “You are free to go,” and he waved Philippe away before slashing at another piece of mail. Philippe walked out in a daze.

  He stayed in the area only long enough to see that Lucile was also released and to make a contact for her—someone else would see her to Switzerland.

  Then he headed straight for the train station, planning to sleep the entire day it would take to get to Les Lauzes, and wondering . . . Would Céleste be there?

  »«

  Céleste was walking along the platform at the last train station before Les Lauzes when she felt some small sharp thing biting into the sole of her foot. She set her suitcase on an empty flatbed car attached to an idle train, then slipped off her shoe and found what had been irritating her: a little stone. As she was shaking it out, the train to which the flatcar was attached started moving—with her suitcase still on it.

  The suitcase that was no longer empty. The maquisards had filled it with . . . Well, she didn’t know, because she hadn’t dared to look inside since. But if that suitcase were to be intercepted and opened by the wrong people . . .

  One shoe on and one shoe off, her heart in her throat and her mind in disarray, she dashed away, chasing after the train.

  9.

  JUNE 30, 1943

  LES LAUZES

  THE YELLOW SUITCASE

  Céles
te couldn’t have said what had awakened her and drawn her to the window. There was little to see—only the faintest milky light leaking along the edge of the horizon and the morning stars trembling in the still-dark sky. She could just make out the familiar outline of Les Lauzes: the forested hill rising sharply from the river, and above that, stone walls and buildings, the steepled church. Everything looked right.

  But there was something . . . something not right. She unlatched the windows and opened them out. Disturbed by the sound, a couple of mourning doves scuttled on the roof above.

  Something had awakened her. Maybe it was the suitcase she currently had stashed under her bed that she couldn’t stop thinking about. The yellow suitcase that she’d brought from Paris three years earlier, filled with summer frocks for her vacation, was now filled with, well, Céleste didn’t know, but for sure it wasn’t dresses!

  It had been empty when she’d left Les Lauzes on her mission, but on her way back the suitcase was full—and heavy. On all the train rides it had taken to get back to Les Lauzes, she’d never been so nervous in her entire life. Then it had almost been carried away by that flatbed car. She’d had to run to catch up to it.

  The remainder of the trip, she sat on the suitcase, steadfastly refusing to take off her shoe to shake out yet another stone that had somehow wiggled its way inside. She resolved that, when she got home, she’d sleep for sixteen hours and do nothing dangerous ever again.

  Yet here she was, a scant six hours later, dreamily staring out the window in the predawn stillness. The other girls on her floor were still asleep—their hair spread out prettily on their pillows, open mouths breathing softly.

  And then it came to her—what was wrong. A sound. The hum of motors. Car engines. Now distinct as they emerged from around the hill: One, two, three dark sedans whizzed by so fast that once they were gone, Céleste doubted she had seen them. Next a canvas-sided truck lumbered past, then disappeared. She might have thought she’d imagined it all except for the reason her heart was still racing . . . swastikas.