The Woman From Saint Germain

by J. R. Lonie

  ‘Where is that copy of Finnegans Wake you had in the window, Miss Beach?’

  It was the German. He now spoke in English, and by the peremptory tone of his voice, this time he was Herr Major Krolow of the Security Service, not Gunther Krolow the civilised bibliophile.

  Maxim snapped his notepad with the map shut. ‘Thank you,’ he said, casually picking up a novel on top of a small pile of returned books on the table and putting it into his coat. ‘I’ll get it back in time, don’t worry.’

  ‘M’sieur,’ he said as he slipped past Krolow for the door, which tinkled his exit from danger out onto Odéon.

  ‘I put it away,’ Sylvia replied to Krolow, gasping momentarily because she’d been holding her breath.

  ‘For whom?’ Krolow demanded.

  ‘For me,’ Sylvia said easily, her courage recovered.

  ‘You would be wise to sell it to me,’ Krolow said. ‘I would give you a very good price.’

  ‘I told you,’ said Sylvia. ‘It’s not for sale.’

  ‘Then permit me to inform you that if you do not sell this book to me, I shall return and confiscate every book you have in this shop,’ said Krolow. ‘Now what do you say?’

  ‘You can’t,’ Eleanor said. ‘This is American property.’

  ‘I think your president has more immediate problems on his hands at the moment, Miss Clarke,’ he replied.

  ‘I’m sure you can confiscate me too if you want,’ Sylvia said coolly, ‘just like you confiscated that nice French car you get driven around in, but that still won’t get you my copy of Finnegans Wake.’

  ‘So be it,’ the German said crisply and he went to the door. ‘It would be very unwise to abscond,’ he added and then left.

  Sylvia ran to the window and watched Krolow drive away. ‘Quick, run after Maxim,’ she said urgently. ‘You’ll find him at his house above his father’s surgery, you know, up on the boulevard. If Hettie turns up, I’ll send her up there too. On your way, get Adrienne to come down straightaway with boxes.’

  She had already begun to stack books on the table.

  ‘I’ll help you,’ said Eleanor, but Sylvia said she could help once she’d organised her departure with Maxim.

  ‘If we’re still here,’ she added.

  ‘You’re staying,’ said Eleanor flatly. She was hardly surprised.

  ‘I’m staying,’ Sylvia confirmed.

  GARE DE LYON, PARIS XII

  6.15am, Tuesday, 9th December 1941

  German soldiers, rifles over their shoulders, walked in pairs past Eleanor. Ridiculous, absurd, she thought, always in pairs, like lovebirds in steel helmets and boots. But was it not also ridiculous and absurd that here she was, standing in one of the long queues for a train ticket at such an early hour, frightened and in shock?

  *

  Merely securing a scarce ticket on the train wasn’t the only reason for her early departure. Yesterday, after organising passages with Maxim for herself and, not without a sense of gloom, for Hettie, she returned to the bookshop, where she joined a small group of Sylvia and Adrienne’s friends to finish packing the books they were storing upstairs in a vacant apartment. Sylvia had even got someone to paint out the Shakespeare and Company sign. The move had taken them only two hours, with each minute, each second spurring them on lest the Nazi book thief return any moment to carry out his threat.

  Krolow would have been back within the hour had he been able to organise transport and the necessary squad of troops to take the books, but short of doing it himself, that had not been possible. It wasn’t Krolow’s demand to close down a mere bookshop that was out of the ordinary in the circumstances, far from it. Shakespeare and Company had been on a Gestapo list of undesirable places even before German arms allowed them into the city. Of all the literary bookshops in that city, it was one of the most infamous, and that it had survived was due entirely to the nationality of its owner and the red American embassy seal on its front door.

  But Krolow had more pressing concerns yesterday afternoon, yet further demands from higher-ups in Berlin, die da oben as they said in German, for artistic loot, two paintings by van Dyck. The Jews who owned them had been forced to hand them over. Organising the crating and shipping had taken Krolow all afternoon, and only after four pm was he able to devote his attention to his own looting. The bookshop wouldn’t go away, after all.

  But when he arrived, it had.

  Eleanor had watched with Sylvia and the others from behind the curtains of Adrienne’s apartment across the street as Krolow discovered neither bookshop, nor any sign one had ever been at 12 Rue de l’Odéon. The back door of Adrienne’s apartment was unlocked in case Krolow came searching, so they might escape into the stairwell and out through the back laneway. He wouldn’t find any books there.

  But he was interested in only one book.

  Sylvia handed it to Eleanor.

  ‘Take it with you,’ she said, and her eyes beckoned Eleanor to the back door and escape. ‘Now, while he’s making up his mind.’

  Eleanor pushed it into the bottom of her coat pocket.

  ‘While you’ve got it,’ Sylvia added, ‘he never will.’

  Eleanor had an inkling that this was a curse she was putting into her pocket, she who’d have sold the wretched thing for a dime, given it away as a doorstop.

  ‘Your Mr Joyce is even more trouble dead than alive,’ she said drily.

  ‘Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunn,’ said Sylvia. She didn’t have the energy to complete God’s cussing according to the Book of St James Joyce, but everyone got the general idea.

  ‘Amen to that,’ Eleanor said, and they all laughed. A sad laugh, but they laughed. And that was Eleanor’s last sight of Sylvia and Shakespeare and Company as she hurried to the back door and down the stairwell, which led to the courtyard and a passage through to the back laneway and away.

  After leaving, she’d decided it was not a good idea to go straight home. In any case, having committed herself to taking Hettie with her, she had to find her. Where was she? Why hadn’t she come to the bookshop as arranged? Eleanor had the address.

  The building, along a street not far from the Luxembourg Gardens, was of bare and shabby stone, four or five storeys high. In happier days, its shabbiness would have been even more marked, but now the façades of its grander neighbours were soot-blackened and just as run-down. Still, Eleanor thought tartly, the Luxembourg neighbourhood was hardly a statement of socialist solidarity.

  The entrance was behind a forbidding grille of ancient iron bars, but the gate was open and she went to the door and rang. No one answered. Nor did she see any light as she peered through the smeared glass of a small window. She wondered if Hettie had already skedaddled. She persisted with the doorbell and when that still brought no answer, she went back to the sidewalk and to the door of what looked to be an empty shop that occupied the other half of the ground floor. Behind a curtain covering the glass in the door, she was sure she detected a faint light. She rapped as hard as she could and eventually a voice from behind the veiled door rasped a ‘Go away’. It sounded like Hettie but she couldn’t be sure, so she decided to pester the old bat until she got her attention.

  ‘Open the door, Miss Rosen,’ she called out in English. ‘It’s me, Eleanor Clarke.’

  Her persistence won and the door opened, if only by an inch.

  ‘What do you want?’ the old lady asked. It was not Hettie.

  ‘Miss Rosen,’ said Eleanor with some urgency, ‘I need to see Miss Rosen. Do you know where she is?’

  ‘Ask at the morgue,’ the old lady snapped and Eleanor thought at first this was a sick joke, but it wasn’t a joke. ‘The old bitch topped herself this afternoon. Good riddance.’

  Eleanor gasped; she thought she’d faint. She grabbed the wall.

  ‘You’re American. You better not stick around,’ the old woman advised. ‘The Gestapo came. They’re coming back.’

  The woman shut the door. Eleanor tried to light a
cigarette but her hand shook so much it took ages. Her fury at the Germans boiled up, which at least stopped her shaking and propelled her all the way back to Sylvia’s. But Sylvia was no longer at home, nor over at Adrienne’s, which, absent her misery and fury about Hettie, would have worried her. She scribbled a note with the terrible news and a plea to call her the moment she got in, then pushed it into Sylvia’s letter box.

  She dragged herself home to discover that the Herr Major, after searching Sylvia’s and Adrienne’s apartments, had come to hers, terrifying the Teixeiras. It was proof the Germans had tabs on all Americans. But for some reason, he had not pushed past the red US embassy seal on her door, instead leaving a calling card that requested her to report the next morning at eleven sharp to his office on the avenue Foch. Everyone in Paris knew that address. Avenue Boche, they called it.

  Sylvia hadn’t rung and Eleanor wondered if Major Krolow hadn’t taken her in. Frantic with worry and frustrated by her inability to do anything, she distracted herself by writing letters to her bank manager and to her agent, who would have to look after her affairs now she was leaving. But she couldn’t sleep. At midnight, ear pressed to the radio, she’d listened to the BBC from London reporting that FDR had signed Congress’s declaration of war against Japan. She’d tried to read in bed but kept hearing unsettling sounds through the terrible silence of the night, imagined or real. At two o’clock, she got up for the news from London, which reported diplomatic activity in Berlin. Would Hitler declare war on the United States tomorrow? She hadn’t really concentrated – she was too overwhelmed by what had happened to Hettie. She wrote a long note for Sylvia, which she would get Mrs Teixeira to drop over in the morning. Only movement helped, so she took the risk of farewelling the Teixeiras before the curfew was raised. She could then catch the first train as soon as the metro opened at five. She needed to be early to secure a ticket for her getaway. Before she left, she rang Sylvia. Too bad if the SD minions of Herr Major Krolow were listening in. But she got no answer. Of her friends apart from Sylvia, she’d told only Madeleine. Next Sunday at the cathedral’s parish hall, her seat would be another of the empty ones.

  *

  The clock over the station concourse was on 5.35. She was still in the queue, which had been long even when she arrived. The sun was far from up, and even if it had been light, the vast glass canopy and its intricate beauty was grimy and neglected in defeat, with some panes gone or cracked, leaving the place open to the rain. Early-morning workers, vastly more women than men, arrived from the overground trains, their wooden-soled shoes clacking over the tiles through the strange and dense hush. From the moment the occupier had arrived, Parisians seemed to stop talking, at least in public. Yes, you could hear the locomotives and their hissing steam and the squeal of brakes and the slamming of carriage doors and the whistles for departure and the calls from the conductors, but all the starker for the silence they failed to fill.

  Another pair of helmeted Germans passed her, their suspicious eyes looking her up and down. Jew? American? Or so it seemed to Eleanor.

  She forced herself to stare vacantly right through them and willed the queue to move quicker, but it didn’t. She had been able to send her valise through to Lyon without any difficulty, a slightly larger one than she’d prepared for internment in order to cram in extra warm clothes, her large cosmetics bag and three cartons of Chesterfields. Around her neck, over her thick woollen pullover, she wore the crucifix that Mrs Teixeira had given her as protection that morning. This was ironic to an Episcopalian, who would never cross the Tiber to save her life. Faking it as an ordinary Catholic Parisian, off to visit a sick sister in the country, should be easy. Not many Parisian women these days would be wearing a perfume by Schiaparelli but Eleanor comforted herself with a current prejudice that if it wasn’t sauerkraut, no German would have a clue.

  The queue inched forward. The German pairs kept returning, although not the same ones each time. Eleanor was dying for her morning’s cigarette but smoking a Chesterfield right now might be asking for it. The bottom part of her rucksack was full of cigarettes. She was damned if she was going to leave them behind to get stale – or worse, fall into German hands. At one point last night when finishing her packing, she’d faced a choice: one of her own novels was tucked into her valise, but for her rucksack, it was either her Bible or Finnegans Wake, which was why that pest of a book was now stuffed tight into the left breast pocket of her coat like a brick. In the other was her travelling cosmetics bag with its far more precious contents. She’d kill any German who tried to take her cosmetics, but if he wanted the book, he was welcome to it.

  She was wearing Claude’s old woollen coat, a brilliant stroke, she thought. His was thicker than her own and more generously pocketed, a decided advantage given the load she was carrying. She’d noticed plenty of women wearing the shirts and pullovers and coats of their husbands, either killed or in German POW camp. Slightly outsize as it was, it helped her to fit in rather than stand out.

  As instructed, Eleanor bought a return ticket to Nevers. She asked for a seat on the express. The woman behind the ticket counter threw her a weary look. Seat? Express? She’d be lucky to find a place to stand and it was all-stops. Take it or leave it.

  ‘Delayed half an hour,’ the woman added for good measure.

  Eleanor had hoped she and the wretched book would be well away in a couple of hours’ time, when she was expected in the Herr Major’s office, but she could do nothing about that. As long as there was a train, she was content.

  She did not relish hovering for forty minutes around the entrance to the platforms, so she hastened to the famous buffet, which would be warm and where she could secrete herself. She had not been there since the arrival of the occupier.

  The gold leaf on the walls and ceiling of the Salle Dorée was so vivid in contrast to the grime outside that she gasped like some peasant arriving from last century. Really, she was stepping back only eighteen months or so, before the conqueror had burst across his foggy borders. It seemed a lifetime. She sought a table in the more discreet Tunisian Salon but found it full. The Algerian Salon was closed off for German officers and had a posse of guards at the door, so she sat in the Grande Salle. It looked, she thought, as one imagined the palaces of Saint Petersburg after the Bolsheviks had taken over: baroque cavernous rooms with painted ceilings and gilded mirrors and caryatids around the walls but now infested by tribes of peasants and their fleas, and she in her oversize coat, hat and boots was one of them. Foie gras? Steak tartare? She could have beans with sausage. ‘What a surprise,’ she said. And succédané de café, although there was something in the voice of the waiter that hinted at what might be possible if madame were more imaginative with her cash, something this madame was decidedly not in the mood to oblige.

  Walking down the steps from the buffet afterwards, she observed the helmeted guards stationed at the entrance to the platforms. But it was their officers who were looking at tickets and checking identity cards, although not those of everyone who passed. They were looking for fleeing Jews. Approaching the destination board, she kept reminding herself this was no game. Not only must she look French, she had to be French. American women in Paris, even the meekest, walked differently from their British and European sisters, as if they owned the world. Since most Americans who made it to Paris had ambitions they at least believed they could fulfil, they had that grab-the-world gait in spades. This morning, though, as she shuffled along with stooped shoulders, her gait was the only part of her that didn’t feel fake.

  At the entrance, she encountered a crush of people being held up by the French ticket inspectors and the German officers who were checking this one or that one. Who got checked seemed random, and it probably was, apart from those who looked like Jews. But most Parisians looked Jewish to the Germans, hence the crush. With her rucksack half full of cigarettes and that wretched book in her coat pocket, Eleanor felt obvious. German soldiers returning to their units or going for a day’s outi
ng were being waved past the cordon to the trains, their uniforms their tickets. Was there anywhere they weren’t going to? she wondered and joined the queue that was being checked by a French policeman.

  Directly in front of her, one young man in a coat, a local by his dark hair and beret, showed a pass. ‘Where’s your ticket?’ the policeman demanded. He wasn’t travelling, she heard the young man say in excellent French, he was only seeing his men off. She didn’t understand. His men? Then, to her dismay, the policeman called over the uniformed German officer. It was too late for her to join another queue. The major scowled as he looked at the man’s pass then barked at him in German before waving him irritably onto the platform. She hadn’t for a moment suspected the young man as a Boche but she couldn’t dwell on that. It was her turn.

  She already had her ticket and her unopened Paris residency card on display. If the German looked at it closely, he would see she was American. He waved her onto the platform without even a cursory glance. As she slipped past him, she saw the SD patch on his sleeve.

  TRAIN TO CLERMONT-FERRAND

  After 9am, Tuesday, 9th December 1941

  Once on board, Eleanor realised that buying a second-class ticket had been justified. The press of human flesh in the corridors alone guaranteed her anonymity. She pushed her way along the side corridor but found no seat free in any of the compartments, nor any man willing to give his up for her. She would be standing all the way. Even the superficially civilised manners of the station buffet were far behind and she wasn’t about to display her cash just to get a seat. The only space was in the vestibule near the toilet. The loudspeakers began calling remaining passengers to board. She looked at her watch. Just after nine. The door of the toilet opened slightly and a grey German uniform squeezed out, quickly shutting the door behind. It had insignia for rank on its shoulders and sleeves, a lance corporal. She was determined to think of ‘him’ as an ‘it’. But then ‘it’ slipped on a cap, which brought into focus a face as suave and darkly handsome as the young artist’s on the previous Sunday morning had been fair. ‘It’ thus became a ‘he’, a human being, despite the sinister black leather glove on each hand.