He could hear the main door to the study open, the men enter, conversing with each other.
Geneviève clutched at Daniel’s arm, her fingernails sharp, clawlike against the silk of his sleeve. If she heard the rustle of the stiff papers inside the lining of his jacket, she seemed not to notice it. “What now?” she whispered.
“You take the stairs down to the kitchen and return to the party.”
“But the servants—”
“They won’t know where you came from or why, and in any case, they’ll be discreet.”
“But if you follow, even a few minutes later—!”
“I can’t, of course. They’d figure it out, and then you’d be done for.”
“But where will you go?” She was whispering, but a bit too loudly.
“Don’t worry about me,” he said. “I’ll catch up with you soon. If your mother asks where I disappeared to, you have no idea, of course.” Daniel felt it necessary to spell this out for Geneviève, who wasn’t the brightest woman he’d ever met.
“But where—?” she began.
He put his finger to her lips. “Go, ma cherie.”
She turned to leave, but he touched her shoulder. She turned back, and he gave her a quick kiss on the lips. Then he straightened the neckline of her dress and rapidly made his way up the servants’ stairs. The soles of his shoes were rubber, which was even harder to get these days than leather, and almost noiseless.
His mind raced, going over what had just happened and where he’d go now. He had known he’d see Geneviève tonight, but he hadn’t planned on the opportunity to enter her father’s study—an opportunity he surely couldn’t have passed up. But now, with a thick sheaf of documents stuffed into his dinner jacket, it wasn’t a good idea to return to the crowded party, where anyone might bump into him, hear them rattle, detect what he was hiding.
Still, there were ways around that. He could look for the cloakroom, for his topcoat, pretending if anyone happened to ask that he was searching for his cigarette lighter. There he could transfer the papers to his coat. But there was a risk that he might be seen doing so; the cloakroom was probably not unattended.
And that risk was as nothing compared to the far more serious possibility that by returning to the party it would become known that he had been with Geneviève in her father’s study. The service stairs led directly into the kitchen, where the servants would see him enter, a few minutes after Geneviève had passed through. They would put two and two together. The servants weren’t discreet at all, despite what he’d assured Geneviève, and surely she knew the truth as well: they lived for gossip of this kind.
Eigen didn’t care a bit about whispers and gossip and rumors. Who cared if Marie-Hélène du Châtelet learned that he’d been furtively canoodling with her daughter? No, it was the chain of revelations that concerned him, for he could see all the way down the chain. The time would come when the Comte realized that certain papers vital to national security had gone missing from his study, and he would immediately ask his wife, his servants. Accusations would fly. One of the cooks, perhaps, in order to defend the household staff, was likely to reveal that she’d seen the young man coming down the stairs directly from the study.
And then, even if the master of the house couldn’t be sure that Daniel had stolen the papers, Eigen would be the most likely culprit. And his cover—his greatest asset of all—would be blown. That he most certainly could not jeopardize.
True, there were other ways out of the house. He could take the service stairs to the third floor or the fourth, and he could cross one of the no-doubt dark upper floors to another of the stairways. There he could climb down to the back courtyard, now a garden but once used to park carriages. The courtyard was walled in by a high wooden fence, which was locked. He could vault the fence, but he was certain to be seen doing so from the windows of the ballroom, several of which gave onto the courtyard. A man in a tuxedo running through the back courtyard and jumping the fence—no, he’d be spotted at once.
There was only one safe way out of the Hôtel de Châtelet.
In a minute he had reached the top floor, which was the servants’ quarters. The ceiling was low and sharply pitched, and the floor here wasn’t marble or stone but creaky old pine. There was no one up here: all the servants were downstairs at the party. The young man had done his advance reconnaissance—not that he expected trouble, far from it, but because he considered it crucial always to have an emergency exit. That was his modus operandi, and it had saved his life more than once.
He knew that there was a way to get out through the roof and that since this mansion was built right up against the neighboring town houses in a block-long row there should be any number of possible escape routes.
The Hôtel de Châtelet had a mansard roof, into which were set mullioned windows in arched dormers. He saw at a glance that all the windows that led to the roof were located in the front of the building, in the servants’ rooms. It was unlikely that any of the servants would lock their rooms; still, he was relieved when he tried the first one he came to and the door came right open.
The room was tiny, with little furniture in it besides a single bed and a dresser. It was illuminated by the pale moonlight that filtered in through the dusty window. He ran to the window, ducking his head as he squeezed through the narrow dormer, and grabbed the lever handle. These windows obviously weren’t opened often, if at all. With great force, though, he was able to yank one side of the window open, then the other.
As the frigid night air flooded in, he looked out and confirmed what he’d noticed when he’d studied the building a few days earlier. The window opened directly onto a steeply sloping tar-covered roof, which dropped precipitously down ten feet or so to a parapet. The parapet, a tall ornamented stone railing, would conceal his movements from passersby on the street below. At least, as long as he was maneuvering along the roof of this building. The neighboring buildings, built in other variants of the Second Empire style, didn’t have parapets. Well, he’d take whatever cover he could get.
The tar on the roof had rippled and bubbled from years, decades, of summer heat. Now it was dusted with snow, slick with ice. It would be treacherous.
He’d have to climb out feet first, which wouldn’t be easy, since his evening attire constricted his movements. Also, his rubber-soled shoes, though excellent for moving furtively through a house, weren’t meant for climbing. This was not going to be easy.
Grabbing the top of the window frame, he swung his legs up, then straight out the window. As soon as his shoes hit the tar roof, they slid on the ice. Instead of releasing his grip on the inside of the window, he hung there, his body half-outside, dangling. Meanwhile he scraped the soles of his shoes back and forth on the tar until he’d abraded away enough of the ice so that the surface was rough enough to allow him some traction.
But he couldn’t trust the surface of the roof, not enough to let go of the window. To the left of the window, a few feet away, was a tall brick chimney. He released his right hand, then swung his body around, using his left foot as a pivot point so that he was able to grab hold of the chimney while still holding on to the window sash.
The brick was cold and rough in his hand. The roughness was good, though. The mortar between the bricks was old and crumbling, enough for him to sink his fingertips into the cracks and grab on tightly. His body went rigid, his weight balanced, his grip on the chimney bricks secure enough to allow him to release his left hand from the window, fling it around, and grab the chimney, now with both hands.
Carefully shuffling his feet along the icy roof, one at a time, he scraped with his shoes until he had another reliable spot to stand on. Now he was close enough to the chimney that he was able to hug it, in an approximation of a rock climber’s grip. Daniel’s upper-body strength was considerable, and he needed all of it to pull himself up the chimney, scrambling his feet against the tar until he found another foothold.
He knew that in the last century thieve
s often traveled this way from town house to town house. He’d done it a few times himself and knew it was much harder than it looked. But he doubted any thief was insane, or suicidal, enough to clamber around this way in the ice and snow of a Paris winter.
Daniel scaled the chimney a few feet until he reached a low brick wall that separated this roof from the adjoining one. The next roof, he was relieved to see, was not tar but terra-cotta barrel tiles. They might be slick with ice, but their undulating surface would provide some traction. He found he was able to lumber up the tiles fairly easily. The ridge of this roof was not pointed, he saw, but flat, a curb about two feet wide. As he climbed up onto the curb, he tested his footing and found it secure. Now he was able to make his way across the roof, carefully balancing his weight, swaying slightly as if walking on a tightrope.
Far down below was the avenue Foch, dark and deserted, its streetlights extinguished in this time of electrical shortages. He knew that if he could see the street, anyone on the street could see him, since there was no parapet to obstruct the view.
And there were other ways he could be spotted. Anyone looking out the window of a flat on one of the higher floors of a nearby building would see him. People were abnormally vigilant these days, with talk of saboteurs and spies. Nobody who saw a man climbing across the roof of a building would hesitate to call La Maison, the Préfecture de Police. It was a time of the anonymous letter of denunciation, when the great threat bandied about by Frenchmen was to tell the Kommandantur. The risks of Daniel’s being spotted were real.
He moved more quickly, as fast as he dared, until he reached the low brick wall that separated this building from the next. The roof on the next was a mansard, like that of the Hôtel de Châtelet, but it was tiled in slate. It also had a flat curb at the ridgeline, though this one was narrower than the last, no more than a foot or so.
He advanced across it carefully, sliding one foot after another. He looked down at the avenue, and for an instant he was overcome with fear, but he focused his mind on the importance of his mission, and in a moment the scare passed.
In thirty seconds or so he’d reached the next dividing wall. This was a thick stone wall into which was set a row of clay vent pipes and chimney pots. Smoke plumed from a few of the vents, indicating that the occupants of the house below were among the privileged few in Paris who had coal to burn for heat. He reached up to grab a vent, which was cold to the touch, then the one next to it, and as he hoisted himself up, he noticed something interesting.
The stone wall projected a good ways out from the roof into the backyard of the town house. About ten feet from the roof eaves a line of iron rungs were set into the wall, going all the way from the top of the wall down to the dark courtyard below. The rungs were used as ladders by chimney sweeps to gain access to the flues.
For a moment, Daniel was stumped. The rungs were too far off. He couldn’t stand on the stone wall and try to maneuver among the vents: the wall wasn’t quite wide enough at the top. He had no choice but to reach back up to the clay pipes, grab hold of one and then the next and the next, his legs swinging, advancing laterally, bit by bit, across the face of the wall like an ape. The vent pipes were cylindrical and of a narrow enough diameter that he was able to hold on to each one securely.
He sidled this way for a few minutes until he reached the column of iron rungs. He grabbed the top one at the same time as he swung his feet over to a lower rung. Now he was able to climb down the rungs, slowly at first and then more quickly, until he’d descended to the ground.
For a moment he stood there in the deserted courtyard. The windows of the town house that overlooked the yard were dark. Judging from the smoke rising from the vent pipes, the house was occupied, though its inhabitants were probably asleep. He walked slowly, quietly, across the cobblestones. Set into the tall wooden fence was a gate, which was locked. Compared to what he’d just been through, this was barely a challenge. He climbed up the fence, vaulted over it, and entered an alley behind the avenue Foch.
Daniel knew this part of the city well. He sauntered down the alley, resisting the impulse to run, until he reached the narrow side street. He patted his jacket, felt the papers still in place.
This street was dark, eerily deserted.
He passed the darkened windows of a bookshop that had once been owned by a Jew and had been taken over by the Germans. A large white billboard covered its sign, the word FRONTBUCHHANDLUNG in black Gothic lettering nestled among swastikas. Once it had been an elegant foreign bookstore; now it was foreign in another way: it sold nothing but German books.
Traces of the Germans were all over the place, but strangely, they hadn’t demolished any of the famous landmarks, any of the beloved buildings. The Nazis hadn’t tried to eliminate Paris as it had always been known. Instead, they wanted simply to annex it—to make Europe’s crown jewel theirs. But there was something peculiarly slapdash and temporary about the way the Nazis had put down their imprint. Like the white FRONTBUCHHANDLUNG poster that had been hastily pasted over the bookstore’s engraved sign. All that big white cloth could be removed in an instant. It was as if they didn’t want to scratch their new jewel. When they’d first tried to put up the swastika flag over the Eiffel Tower, it had ripped in the wind and they’d had to put up another. Even Hitler had visited for only a few hours, like an abashed sightseer. He hadn’t even spent the night. Paris didn’t want them, and they knew it.
So they put up their posters all over the place. He saw them on the walls of the buildings he passed, pasted up so high they could barely be seen, but there was a reason for that: when the Germans put them at eye level, their stupid placards were inevitably torn down or defaced. Some angry Parisian would scribble on them: “Death to the Boche!” or “God bless England!”
He glimpsed a poster of a portly Winston Churchill smoking a cigar and grinning, while next to him stood a woman with a scrawny, screaming baby in her arms. “See what the blockade is doing to your children?” the slogan said. They meant the British blockade, but everyone knew that was nonsense. Even on this one, posted up so high, someone had scrawled: “How about our potatoes?” Everyone was angry: all the potatoes grown by French farmers were sent to Germany; that was the truth.
Another poster, this one just words: Etes-vous en règle? Are your papers in order? Or, Are you in order? You always had to have your papers with you, your carte d’identité, in case you were stopped by a French gendarme or some fonctionnaire—they were worse than the German soldiers.
The young man always had his papers with him. Several sets, in fact. In different names, different nationalities. They enabled him to make the quick changes he so often was forced to do.
Finally he arrived at his destination: an ancient, crumbling brick building in an anonymous block. A decrepit wooden sign hung from a forged iron bracket: LE CAVEAU. The cellar. It was a bar, located below street level, down a small flight of decaying brick steps. Blackout shades had been drawn in its single, small window, but light peeked out on either side.
He glanced at his watch. It was after midnight, just past the curfew that Ces Messieurs—the Nazis—had imposed on Paris.
This bar, however, hadn’t closed. The gendarmes and the Nazis looked the other way, allowed it to operate late into the night. Bribes had been paid, the right palms greased, free drinks dispensed.
He climbed down the steps and pulled at the old-fashioned crank doorbell, three times. Inside he could hear the buzzer sound, over the cacophony of voices and jazz music.
In a few seconds, a dot of light appeared in the peephole in the center of the massive black-paned wooden door. The light flickered, as someone checked him out, and then the door swung open to admit him.
The place was truly a caveau—uneven, cracked stone floor, sticky with spilled drink; buckled brick walls; a low ceiling. The place was thick with smoke, and it stank of sweat, stale tobacco—cheap tobacco, at that—bad wine. Tinny music played from a radio. Along the scarred wooden bar sat six or
seven rough-looking workingmen and one woman, who looked like a prostitute. They looked up at him, vaguely curious and at the same time hostile.
The bartender, who had let him in, greeted him. “Long time, Daniel,” said Pasquale, a scrawny old man as weathered as his bar. “But I’m always happy to see you.” He smiled, exposing an uneven row of brown tobacco-stained teeth and two gold ones. He leaned his leathery face close. “Still can’t get Gitanes?”
“I think I’ve got a shipment coming in tomorrow, the day after.”
“Excellent. They’re not still a hundred francs, are they?”
“More.” He lowered his voice. “For others. For you, the special bartender’s discount.”
His eyes narrowed suspiciously. “How much?”
“Free.”
Pasquale laughed heartily, a rattling, smoker’s laugh. Eigen couldn’t imagine what kind of merde the bartender normally smoked. “Your terms are reasonable,” he said, returning to his place behind the bar. “Can I get you a cocktail?”
Eigen shook his head.
“Le scotch whisky? Cognac? You need to use the phone?” He gestured to the phone booth at the far end of the bar, whose glass had been broken—by Pasquale, as a warning to his patrons to guard their tongues. Even here, where strangers weren’t admitted, you couldn’t be sure who was listening.
“No, thanks. Just the WC.”
Pasquale’s eyebrows shot up for a second; then he nodded, understanding. He was a coarse, cantankerous fellow, but he was the soul of discretion. He knew who really paid his rent, and he hated the Germans as much as anyone else. Two of his beloved nephews had died in the battle of the Ardennes. But he never, ever talked politics. He did his job, served his drinks, and that was that.
As Eigen walked the length of the bar, he heard someone snarl, “Espèce de sans-carte!” Cardless person—the standard imprecation uttered against black marketers. Obviously he’d overheard what Eigen and Pasquale had been discussing. Well, that couldn’t be helped.
The Tristan Betrayal Page 3