Léon and Louise

by Alex Capus

  And somehow – I don’t know why, my dear Léon – you’re the only man I’ve ever really fancied. Can you understand that? I can’t. Do you think we would have made a go of it if we’d had more time together? My head says no, my heart says yes. You feel the same, don’t you? I know you do.

  On the way to the station all the streets were choked with refugees. So many panic-stricken people! I don’t know where they thought they were going. There can’t be enough ships to hold them all or places far enough away for the war not to catch up with them. The station and the trains were overcrowded, and our train for Lorient made a certain amount of progress only because, being a Banque de France special, it took priority throughout the rail network.

  While I’m sitting writing in my cabin, soldiers are unloading our goods train. You won’t believe it, but my luggage includes the bulk of the gold reserves of the French national bank, plus thirty and two hundred tonnes of gold respectively from the Polish and Belgian national banks, which we’ve been holding for them for the past few months. Two to three thousand tonnes of gold in all, I estimate. We’re to take it to a place of safety.

  Our ship, the ‘Victor Schoelcher’, is a banana boat requisitioned by the Navy and converted into an auxiliary cruiser. It still looks a touch Caribbean for a naval vessel, with its green, yellow and red colour scheme. The only thing that’s navy grey is a silly little popgun in the bow. I’m the only woman on board, so my cabin is forward near the bridge, immediately aft of the captain’s.

  It’s as hot and stuffy in here as if we were already in the Congo or Guadeloupe. The condensation trickling down the lime-green steel walls collects into quivering lilac puddles on the red steel floor. Every ten seconds a plump, non-European cockroach crawls out of the plughole of my washbasin (I try to kill the creatures with my shoe). I’ll spare you a description of the lavatory I share with the captain. I’m told there’s a second lavatory below deck for the eighty-five members of the crew. God grant I never have to go anywhere near it!

  We’re supposed to be sailing tonight, or tomorrow morning at the latest. Everyone’s in a tearing rush. German tanks are said to be in Rennes already, and a few hours ago a Heinkel flew over us and dropped some mines in the harbour mouth to prevent us from leaving. The captain intends to wait for high tide at 4.30 a.m. and reach the open sea at dawn by keeping to the extreme edge of the fairway, between the mines and the mud banks.

  This is all top secret, of course – I shouldn’t be telling you any of it. But be honest, who on God’s good earth cares what a typist writes to a humble Paris police officer? Anything I tell you is very probably outdated already and consequently unimportant, and by tomorrow it’s bound to be over and forgotten and utterly irrelevant. What’s more, nothing I see can remain secret in any case. Or do you think it’s possible to conceal the existence of twelve million refugees? Can two thousand tonnes of gold escape notice? Can Heinkels zooming overhead remain a secret? What’s the point of all this mystery-mongering, when everyone can see everything and understands none of it? The bell is sounding for dinner, I must fly!

  It’s dark now. I had a bite to eat in the wardroom with the captain, the ship’s officers and my three superiors from the bank. We had perch and fried potatoes. Conversation revolved around the strength of the Wehrmacht, which is apparently bearing down on us in a great hurry and can be expected here tomorrow afternoon, if not before. I also learned that the man the ‘Victor Schoelcher’ was named after was responsible for abolishing slavery in France and her colonies in 1848. Nice, no? Over coffee the gentlemen flirted with me a little in a friendly way, though rather too perfunctorily and with insufficient enthusiasm for my taste.

  After that I went into town to buy some emergency supplies for the long voyage. We don’t know what we’re in for, after all. I had to walk the darkened streets for quite a while, the street lights being masked with blue paint and the buildings blacked out, before I found a grocer’s shop. Without much hope, I asked the grocer for some condensed milk. He pointed to a well-stocked shelf and asked how many tins I wanted. A dozen, I said on impulse, and you know what? The man sold them to me without turning a hair. I also bought some chocolate and bread and a sausage, and he didn’t even ask me for any coupons. That just shows you – everything’s in a state of flux and nobody knows what tomorrow will bring. So why all the secrecy?

  I’m now sitting outside on the gangway, where a cool evening breeze is blowing, looking down at the quayside. Like a vast swarm of bees, soldiers are busy stacking heavy wooden boxes on top of each other. Working in teams of four to a box, they heave them out of the goods wagons, whose sliding doors are open, and carry them over to the loading area. I’m wondering how many boxes there will be. They’ll be calling me any minute. Then I’ll have to go down to the freight gangway and begin my office girl’s night shift counting boxes of bullion. I shall spend all night seated at a little table with a well-sharpened pencil, and for every box that disappears into the ‘Victor Schoelcher’’s hold I’ll make a tick on a form I’ve personally designed and produced for the purpose.

  Perched on the wall behind the goods station are some boys in caps and short trousers, watching. Their faces are expressionless and they’re sitting quite still. It’s hard to tell if they guess what a fortune is lying under their noses.

  Officially the boxes contain explosives, but nobody here believes that. Standing behind me at this moment, smoking, are two young seamen. They’ve been bragging to each other that this is the biggest gold shipment ever to sail out into the Atlantic. They may even be right. I can’t imagine that the Spanish conquistadors ever collected two thousand tonnes of gold into one big heap. Or, if they did, their wooden ships would have had to sail back and forth a couple of dozen times to transport it all across the ocean.

  The wardroom radio is churning out music – no news broadcasts any more. Only the radio operator can listen to the BBC. His name is Galiani, and just to hear him roll his Italianate Rs makes you feel hungry for a bowl of bouillabaisse. He’s so hirsute, curly black hair escapes from every chink in his uniform. In his spare time he enjoys strutting around the deck in his role as the best-informed man on board. He’ll stroll past behind my back and say, ‘Have you hearrrd, mademoiselle? Norrrway has surrrendered.’ Then he screws up his face into an expression of disgust, sticks a Gauloise in one corner of his mouth and spits out of the other. That’s how he has kept me up to date with the course of world history in the last few days. ‘Have you hearrrd? Hitlerrr has bombed London.’ Gob. ‘Have you hearrrd? The Wehrrrmacht has marrrched into Parrris.’ Gob. ‘Have you hearrrrd? Rrroosevelt intends to rrremain neutrrral.’ Gob. And he pulls his disgusted face every time and expects me to express my admiration, which I do – or rather, overdo. And because, although he’s a show-off, he’s also a sensitive southerner, he sees through me every time and walks on looking offended.

  They’re calling me, so I must stop. This may be my last spare minute before we sail. Tomorrow morning I shall give this letter to the postman, and then we’ll be off. Strangely enough, and contrary to all reason, I’m feeling quite footloose and fancy-free. Just because I’ve no idea where this ship will be taking me, I have the deceptive sensation that the world is my oyster. That’s a misapprehension, of course; in reality, the whole world is closed to me – with the exception of some desk on whichever continent the Banque de France has decided to send me to. Whatever happens, it can’t be worse than dying. I love you and I’m very worried about you, my Léon – I haven’t said that before. I dearly hope the Nazis don’t do anything nasty to you. Take care of yourself and your family and steer clear of anything dangerous. Be as careful and as happy as possible, don’t play the hero and keep fit and don’t forget me!

  Yours ever, Louise

  P.S. Six hours later. It’s 4.20 a.m. All the boxes are on board after a long night’s pencil-ticking. 2208 of them, nett, gross and tare weight unascertained because of the sheer quantity and the rush, so not known, The ship has had
steam up for the past two hours, the postman is leaning against the gangway and drumming his fingers on the rail. It’s already getting light in the east, or is it my imagination? I must finish off this letter at once, right away, or it’ll never get to you. Into the envelope, lick the flap and stick it down. Au revoir, my dearest, au revoir!

  14

  A few days after the German occupation the surge in suicides abated and peace returned to Paris. But the invaders didn’t render themselves invisible, as Léon had supposed they would. On the contrary, they spread themselves all over the place: in the parks and streets, in the Métro and cafés and museums, and above all in department stores, jewellers’, art galleries and junk shops, where they spent their army pay, which had multiplied in value thanks to the new exchange rate, on buying up anything that could be had for money and wasn’t nailed down.

  It seemed in those days as if the Germans’ arrival in Paris had introduced an almost normal daily routine. The Wehrmacht presented public concerts in the Bois de Boulogne and distributed bread to the poor behind the Bastille, ensured that the streets were cleaned and, because all the municipal gardeners had fled, sent working parties to tend the flower beds in the Tuileries. The nightly curfew scarcely differed from the blackout imposed by the French government when in office, given that its start was put forward from nine to eleven p.m., and if some night owl failed to make it home in time he had little more to fear than a few hours’ polishing boots or sewing on buttons until dawn in a military police post.

  At the end of June the cinemas of Paris reopened their doors, newspapers remarkably similar in title and layout to prewar Parisian dailies appeared, and chorus girls high-kicked once more at the Moulin Rouge. Landlords, tailors and cabbies did good business, and more prostitutes than ever lay in wait for customers, most of them now in field-grey, between the Place Blanche and the Place Pigalle.

  In the absence of an apocalypse, refugees returned to the unscathed city, at first hesitantly and in dribs and drabs, embarrassed by the seeming futility of their precipitate flight, but then in whole hordes; by mid-July the population of Paris had doubled within a month. The first to reappear were shopkeepers unable to afford to let their businesses stagnate any longer, then workers and junior office staff summoned back by their bosses, Jews who hoped that things wouldn’t be so bad after all, and journalists, artists and actors who scented opportunities in the advent of a new era. The end of summer saw the return of pensioners hankering after their wing chairs, their family doctor and their favourite bench in the park around the corner, and finally of the children for whom the beginning of September marked the end of the longest summer holiday of their lives.

  Léon kept his head down and went on living as best he could. He didn’t read the new newspapers like Le Petit Parisien, L’Œuvre or Je suis partout because, although written in French, they were German in thought. He didn’t go to the cinema either, but spent his evenings listening to the radio. He heard Marshal Pétain’s speech on the French radio and General de Gaulle’s riposte on BBC France, and he heard the Swiss Press Agency’s reports of the fighting in Finland, North Africa and Norway; he pinned a map of Europe to the kitchen wall and marked the fronts with coloured pins, drew out nine-tenths of his savings, bought some gold bars on the black market, and concealed them beneath the living room’s parquet floor, and he hoped every day for another sign of life from Louise in whatever corner of the world her colourful Caribbean banana boat might have conveyed her to.

  But he didn’t receive another letter from her all summer, and newsreaders made no mention of the Victor Schoelcher or a Banque de France gold shipment. It was ironical, he felt, that the same girl should disappear without trace in both the world wars he had so far experienced. The longer his uncertainty lasted, however, the more he forced himself to interpret the lack of news as a good sign.

  In August it struck him that the plane trees were losing their leaves earlier than usual. It had been a hot summer; now autumn was coming early.

  It is a documented fact that the Victor Schoelcher succeeded in getting away at the very last minute on the morning of 17 June 1940. According to eye-witness reports, the Wehrmacht’s advance guard could still see the ship’s plume of smoke beyond the harbour mouth when it entered Lorient. Once out at sea, the Schoelcher linked up with three Marseilles-Algiers Cruise Line passenger steamers that had also been converted into bullion transporters and set a course for Casablanca. From there she was to sail on to Canada, where the French, Belgian and Polish gold was to be stored in the strongrooms of Ottawa until the end of the war.

  But the four vessels had only just crossed the Bay of Biscay when the news that France had surrendered came over the radio. That posed the question of who was now legally entitled to dispose of the gold: the Vichy government, which ultimately meant Nazi Germany; the French government-in-exile in London under General de Gaulle; or still the Banque de France, which came under the Ministry of Finance but was a limited company, not the property of the French state.

  This was how it came about, on the day of the surrender itself, that the German admiralty radioed the four ships threatening to torpedo them unless they headed at once for the nearest port in occupied France. Only hours later, General de Gaulle threatened to torpedo them unless they headed at once for London. No transatlantic voyage could be contemplated under those circumstances, so the convoy maintained its southerly course and, after an intermediate stop at Casablanca, reached Dakar on 4 July 1940.

  There it was safe from German destroyers for the time being, but a British fleet was lying off the coast of Senegal with the avowed intention of helping General de Gaulle to take possession of the French West African colonies on behalf of Free France. Consequently, the Banque de France authorities decided to load the 2–3000 tonnes of bullion entrusted to them – no one has ever discovered the exact amount – into goods wagons and transport them as far as possible into the African interior via the Dakar-Bamako line.

  The entire cargo was unloaded by four p.m., and three days later the last shipment left Dakar station. A preliminary check at Thiès revealed that one box had lost thirteen kilograms on the voyage. Another, from the bank’s branch at Laval, was filled with pebbles and scrap iron, and two or three had vanished altogether.

  On Sundays Léon went for walks with his wife and children as if nothing had happened. If a Panzer brigade paraded down the Boulevard Saint-Michel, however, he instructed his children not to stare, but to turn round and look at the shop window displays.

  ‘All right, so they beat us and they’ve behaved pretty well up to date,’ he told his eldest son, Michel, who couldn’t stand being cooped up in the flat any longer and was impatient to explore the occupied city on his own. ‘But if one of them speaks to you, you say bonjour and au revoir, and if he asks the way to the Eiffel Tower, you tell him. But you can’t speak German – you’ve forgotten what you learned at school – and even if he can speak French, that doesn’t obligate you to chat about the weather with him. If he spells his name for you, you’re entitled to have poor hearing and a bad memory, and if he asks you for a light, don’t hand him your lighter, offer him the end of your cigarette. And you never – never, you hear? – take off your cap to a German. You merely tap the peak with your forefinger.’

  Léon himself went to the Quai d’Orfèvres day after day, keeping his head down, and performed his work in the same old way. He didn’t exactly have a great deal to do because cases of poisoning with fatal consequences were now few and far between. It seemed that all the city’s murderers and suicides had put their plans into effect during the days of chaos and mass panic, so there was no one left to dispatch with the aid of poison.

  Léon used his spare time to embark on a long-cherished project and write a scientific article the length of a licentiate’s essay or shortish doctoral thesis. He had for some time regarded it as one of his life’s greatest failures never to have acquired an academic qualification, or even to have finished school.

 
; Although it would naturally have been impossible and absurd to try to make up for what he’d missed out on as a young man, he wanted to prove he was a serious person and prepared to use his brains. As the subject of his dissertation he had envisaged a statistical evaluation of murders by poisoning in Paris, 1930–1940. If there was any expert in this field, it was Léon. Equally, this was the only subject he really knew something about.

  His first step was to stack the laboratory diaries for the last ten years on his desk and embark on their statistical evaluation. He classified the perpetrators and their victims according to sex, age and social status and recorded their degree of relationship or form of acquaintanceship, the type of poison used and the way it was administered, the geographical dispersion of the cases across the twenty-one arrondissements of the city of Paris, and their seasonal distribution over the year. He planned to produce tables and diagrams, and he would sketch profiles of perpetrators and their victims and send his essay to the Journal des Sciences Naturelles de l’École Normale Supérieure, and perhaps, when the war was over, he would spend a few weeks making guest appearances at the police academies of France as a lecturer and expert on murder by poisoning.

  To Léon’s surprise, the early summer of 1940 followed a monotonous and uneventful course. The one date he would remember to the end of his days was 23 June, a Sunday morning when fleecy little pink clouds were glowing in the sky. Léon was on his way back from the baker’s to the Rue des Écoles with three baguettes under his arm when he heard the full-throated hum of a powerful car bearing down on him from behind. He turned to see an approaching Mercedes convertible with the hood down, and seated in it five men in German uniform and Adolf Hitler. The man beside the driver was quite definitely Adolf Hitler – there was no mistaking him. Followed by three smaller vehicles, the Mercedes drove past swiftly but without undue urgency, and it goes without saying that neither Hitler nor his companions took any notice of my disconcerted grandfather standing on the pavement with three baguettes under his arm as the wind of world history ruffled his hair.