Destiny

by Sally Beauman

  The café bore the name Unic, which amused the Baron, for there was nothing unique about it; it resembled exactly the other small restaurants in this area which had somehow managed to stay open during the Occupation. It served cheap meals to French workers employed by the Germans on the nearby railroad, and it smelled of boiled cabbage.

  Like the other men in the room, the Baron wore the anonymous blue overalls, boots, and béret of the ouvrier; like them, he smoked hand-rolled cigarettes made of pungent cheap tobacco, making each one last as long as possible, smoking it right down to the tip of the butt. He had come here this evening, as he always did, on a bicycle, and he would return the same way, changing his clothes where he left his vehicle, in a small shed in the warren of streets and alleyways of Les Halles. He was certain that the care he had taken had been repaid. He had not been followed. He had never been followed.

  And yet—there was something wrong.

  He looked carefully around the faces in the room. Three of the men were his age, two younger; they were all workers, originally of peasant stock; their faces were coarse, their accents and language coarser, and the Baron regarded them as his brothers. He was grateful to them for accepting him; he admired their innate restraint, their dour refusal at first to do more than simply work with him. He had had to prove himself to earn their friendship, and now that he knew it was won, he valued it more highly than any other friendship he had ever had. All the men in the room, and the one woman, were under sentence of death. Each put his life in the hands of the others; if any turned informer, they were all dead. That knowledge bound them, the Baron knew—but not because of fear, because of trust.

  It was due to these men and their work together over the past one and a half years that the Baron knew he had changed forever. He was harder, more ruthless—they had taught him to kill. He was also more angry, and angry with himself.

  When he looked back now on his past life, on the ease and luxury he had never questioned, he saw a stranger. How had it been possible for him to live like that, to think like that, to have been so blind? To have worried about his wife’s neurotic whims, to have placated her with gifts, one of which cost more than men like this earned in a lifetime of labor? To have fretted over the design of pieces of rock, to have enjoyed the intricacies of the stock market, to have worried whether a horse won a race. If he survived this war, the Baron sometimes thought he would abandon all that. He had no clear idea of what his new life would be; he just knew that it would be, had to be, different.

  Meanwhile, though he kept up the outward appearance of his former life, retained his house at St. Cloud, retained his servants, continued to frequent his workshops and the de Chavigny showrooms on the Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré, in private he lived very differently. No black market goods. Bad food—the same kind of food most Parisians had to eat. The men here were not aware of that, but to the Baron it was important. It was his private gesture of brotherhood.

  The mood of the meeting had been good, more optimistic than it had been for months. Paris was full of rumors, and the chief rumor now was that the Boches were taking a hammering on the Eastern Front, that they were being driven back, that the troops of the Third Reich would not take Moscow after all. Two fellow members of his cadre were Communists; this rumor especially pleased them. They were equally pleased by the other rumor: that America must enter the war soon.

  Meanwhile there was the day-to-day reality of their work, the small gestures that could do no more than nibble away at the hold of the occupying forces, but which meant so much to the cadre: the blowing up of a section of railroad; the bombing of a small power plant; the passing of information across France through the network, across the Channel.

  At best they halted trains for a couple of days, threw German communications into chaos for a few hours in one small region, killed a few, a very few, men. It was better than nothing—better than sitting scratching your ass while the jackboots marched over you, as Jacques said; but it was not enough. Every man in the room, the Baron included, hungered for something more, for something big, something that would really bust a hole in the smooth, relentlessly efficient German war machine. And some months ago, thanks to Jacques, thanks to Jacques’s young mistress, they had found it.

  Efficiency could be a weakness as well as a strength. Regimens, routines, punctuality, plans made well in advance, confirmed by a superb bureaucratic machine, and then rigorously adhered to—these, the tenets of the German High Command, made for precision and also, sometimes, predictability. That efficiency, the Baron hoped, was not only the High Command’s great asset, but also its Achilles heel.

  Once a month, always on the second Thursday, at precisely eleven A.M. a briefing was held at Paris Headquarters. It was attended by the overall commander of the German forces in France; his senior officers and aides; those men directly responsible to the commander-in chief of the German Army; and those on the French staff of the chief of OKW, overall head of all three branches of the armed forces of the Third Reich.

  The senior officers concerned were taken at high speed, with armed escort, in three Mercedes. They were collected from their different departments between ten-fifteen and ten forty-five A.M., and then driven to their headquarters by a variety of routes. The Baron smiled to himself. Not an infinite variety. Six in total. That was the weakness. That and the fact that one of the drivers was susceptible to young women, and Bernadette, Jacques’s mistress, was a very attractive young woman.

  The six routes were, quite simply, rotated. This coming Thursday, unless there was a change in plan, for which the cadre had contingency arrangements, the route would be the same route taken six months ago. Route “C”: south down the Boulevard Haussmann; left into the Boulevard Malherbes; left again into the narrower Rue Surène, and—there was the weakness! Jacques had cried, stabbing the map with one nicotine-stained finger—left into the very narrow Rue d’Aguesseau. There the cavalcade slowed, had to slow, and there, there was the place for the bomb.

  There was a small épicerie on the corner. For the last six months the van that made its weekly deliveries had called on a Thursday. After making his delivery, the driver took a café noir in a room behind the shop with its owner, Monsieur Planchon. The van remained outside for forty-five minutes, minimum. If it went up at precisely the right second, it would take the first Mercedes, and its occupants with it. The most senior officers always traveled in the first car.

  Planchon would be interrogated, there was no question of that. He was prepared for it, and he knew nothing. He would tell the interrogators the truth: that the van driver was a new man that day, a man he had never met before, that he had disappeared into thin air in the general fracas after the bomb went off. The van driver would not be found. The Baron profoundly hoped he would not be found, because the van driver was sitting across the table from him now, and the Baron had no illusions: if the Gestapo got him, he would talk, sooner or later. And then they were all dead.

  The Baron felt infinitely weary. They had gone over this again and again, for over six months; every person in the room knew the details by heart, but tonight, as they went over them again, the atmosphere was different: it was charged with excitement, the smoky air vibrated with it. The Baron looked at the faces bent over the map: Jacques, with his broken nose, the physique of a former fighter, tracing the streets on the map for the hundredth time; Leon, lighting another cigarette; Henri; Didier; young Gérard, Jacques’s cousin, who was only nineteen, and the most eager of the men; and Jeannette.

  The Baron’s eyes lingered on her longer than the others. She was twenty-one, small and dark, with a thin nervous face that lit up when she smiled, which she did rarely. A woman, in fact, without nerves, a woman of courage, fueled by hate. Her younger sister had been raped by a group of drunken German soldiers in the week Paris fell; her hatred of the occupying forces was personal and intense. Too intense, probably, the Baron thought—it was better to be without emotion as far as possible—but this woman was able to curb the
passion of her hatred when she needed. She had been with them for over two years now, broken in gradually, slowly given work of greater responsibility, just as they all had been. In another world, another life, the Baron knew he would have been attracted to her. Now he accepted her, as the others did, as a comrade, a member of a team. He looked away.

  He didn’t want her to die. He didn’t want any of them to die. They had been over these plans again and again, and they seemed perfect. He could not fault them. None of them could fault them.

  And yet every instinct in his body told him there was something wrong.

  Why? Because it was too perfect? Was that it?

  He shut his eyes tiredly. He was under strain, as they all were; he was physically exhausted, that was all. If he had had one good reason for his unease, one item of justification, he would have called this off. But he had none.

  He leaned back in his chair, betraying nothing of what he felt. They would find out, he thought. Tomorrow morning, at eleven.

  W hen he reached the house at St. Cloud later that night, he sat in his room for a long while, smoking and thinking. He knew he would not sleep. And he knew quite well when it was that this feeling had started, when he had felt the first sensation of alarm.

  Two days ago. He shut his eyes, drew on the cheap cigarette, stubbed it out in the Baccarat ashtray.

  The afternoon General Ludvig von Schmidt visited the de Chavigny showrooms in the Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré.

  The general was thirty-five, tall, fair, blue-eyed, the perfect Aryan. He came of an old German military family, and, like his father and grandfather before him, had risen rapidly through the officer ranks. He had attended Heidelberg University; he was an educated, intelligent, cultured man, who had reached senior rank before Hitler became Reichsführer, and who had joined the Nazi party unusually late in life. In another existence, the Baron thought, he might have liked this man. He liked him now, if he was honest.

  The general was interested in jewelry and knowledgeable about the history of its design. He had good and educated taste for music and for painting, and occasionally, when he came to the showrooms, he and the Baron would talk. First, it had been in the showroom itself. Then, one day, the Baron had invited him for a drink in the beautiful apartment he kept on the upper floors. It was something he often did with high-ranking German officers. Tiny items imparted over a cognac had often proved useful to him, and to his cadre, in the past.

  He obtained no information from General von Schmidt, and something prevented the Baron from seeking it. The two men would sit side by side and discuss Matisse, or Mozart, the works of Flaubert, the designs of Fabergé.

  The Baron sensed that General von Schmidt loathed the Nazis; he sensed his disillusion with the conduct of the war and its spiraling follies, sensed his disgust with the anti-semitic policies that, for the first time in France, began operating in 1941. He sensed all this, though none of it was ever discussed, and occasionally he pitied this proud, reticent man. If he had been a professional soldier in 1939, he thought, if he had been German, not French, what would he have done? Might he not have ended up like General von Schmidt, the unwilling but efficient servant of a régime he realized too late he detested?

  Two days ago, in that elegant salon, General von Schmidt had set down his glass of cognac. There had been a restlessness, a tension in him that the Baron had not seen before. He had risen and turned away to the windows.

  “You must miss your family. Your wife. Your sons—very much.”

  “Naturally.”

  “They left Paris at the right time.” He paused. Still he did not turn around. “Did it never occur to you to go with them?”

  The Baron tensed. “No,” he answered carefully. “No. It would not have been possible. I had too many responsibilities here.”

  “But of course. I understand that perfectly.” Again he paused. Then he turned around and looked the Baron in the eye. “Have you thought of it since? Recently, for instance?”

  The Baron wondered if he was being warned. He stood up with a smile. “It would be a little difficult now, don’t you think? There is the Channel to consider. I was never a very good swimmer.”

  General von Schmidt smiled politely at the little joke. “Of course. It was just a thought.”

  “Another cognac?”

  “Thank you. It is excellent as always, but no, I must leave you.”

  At the door, and this was not their custom, they shook hands.

  “Monsieur.” A half bow. The heels clicked together with military precision. “I am pleased to have known you.”

  “And I you, General.” The Baron paused. “You are leaving Paris?”

  “It is possible my regiment may be seconded elsewhere.”

  “Of course.”

  The Baron thought of the Eastern Front. He hesitated, then said the thing he had never expected to say to a German. “Au revoir, mon ami.”

  General von Schmidt did not smile.

  “Good-bye, my friend,” he said. Then quickly left the room.

  Two days ago. It could mean nothing. It could mean the end. The Baron lit another cigarette. Sometimes he felt so tired now that he was beyond caring what happened to him. But he still cared about the others.

  He stood up and put a record, much played, on the gramophone. The Magic Flute.

  If he could not sleep, he could at least think. He could go over the plans again. And again. And listen to Mozart, which always reminded him that it was good to be alive.

  On the morning of December 6, the motorcade containing the senior officers of the German High Command, France, drove down the Boulevard Haussmann at 10:50 A.M. It turned left into the Boulevard Malherbes at 10:56. Left into the Rue Surène at 10:58. Exactly on schedule.

  From the window of the small atelier down the street, the Baron and Jacques watched. Jacques leaned forward.

  “Come on, you bastards, come on…”

  At 10:59 the motorcade stopped, some one hundred and fifty yards short of the corner of the Rue d’Aguesseau. There was silence. Then the bomb went off. It blew in the front of the épicerie; it obliterated the delivery van; not so much as the tires of the first Mercedes were touched.

  The minute the sound of the explosion died away, there was the sound of running feet, the shouts of German commands. The Baron and Jacques were already on the stairs. They separated without a word being spoken. Jacques was sighted by a German foot patrol ten minutes later as he wove his way through the nearby back streets. He died in the fire of their Schermeisser machine guns as he reached for his pistol.

  The Baron was arrested at St. Cloud an hour later. He was interrogated and tortured by the Gestapo for longer than the others—for no reason he could understand, since they knew everything already. Jeannette died under interrogation; her questioners had particularly imaginative techniques when dealing with women. Leon cut his own throat in his cell, and the officer responsible for his safety was demoted. Henri, Didier, and Gérard were hanged. Jacques’s mistress, Bernadette, who had betrayed them, died slowly at the hands of the Resistance a few months later. And the Baron, as befitted his rank, was executed by a German firing squad on the night of his younger son’s birthday.

  Edouard was told of his father’s death when, in the first light of day, he finally reached the house in Eaton Square after the long walk from Madame Simonescu’s. Hugo Glendinning broke the news to him. It had come through that night to the information service at Free French Headquarters by radio transmitter. General de Gaulle’s senior aide had brought the news to Louise personally at eleven P.M., when she returned from a party at the house of an English banker. The general had sent his personal condolences for an old friend and a brave Frenchman. La lutte continue, the message had ended.

  It was some hours later that Jean-Paul learned that his father was dead, and that, on the two occasions the previous evening when he had claimed to be the Baron de Chavigny, he had spoken the exact truth. He discovered it when, after searching across London
with Hugo, Edouard finally found him.

  He was not at Madame Simonescu’s. He was not at any one of the succession of clubs and drinking holes he had visited that night. He was not at Conway House, and Isobel had not seen him. He was not at headquarters. He was asleep in the bedroom of a small flat in Maida Vale, and he received the news from Edouard in Célestine Bianchon’s sitting room.

  Célestine looked at the two brothers, one very pale and one very flushed, and said nothing. She knew it was the end. She knew he would never come back to her, her beautiful Edouard. She could see it in the way he stood, proud, upright, never looking at her once. She could see it in his eyes, whose anger frightened her, and whose pain cut her to the heart.

  She would have liked to explain, she thought sadly. Not now, naturally, but later. She would have liked to tell him the truth: that she loved him, and that because she loved him, she knew a sudden end was easier for her than a slow one. Jean-Paul, arriving on her doorstep very drunk at three in the morning, ready to make love after a brief sleep, had provided the means.

  That Jean-Paul hated her for her hold on his brother she had quickly sensed as she lay under him; that this quick violent thrusting into her body was his way of breaking that hold she also knew. She made no attempt to stop him, or to assist him, and it didn’t take long. Six or seven angry jabs, and he came, swearing. Her last love affair was over. Cochon, Célestine thought as Jean-Paul rolled off her, grunting. She was just getting up from the bed when the doorbell rang.

  Now she looked at Edouard, and she knew she had done the right thing. He was free of her, and even the pain of this was better than the inevitable alternative. To have watched Edouard tire of her, fall out of love, grow up; to have seen him guiltily trying to hide what he felt—no, she thought, she would not have wanted that.