Jules relaxed his old face into a smile. “As he hit you, I tried smashing him with everything I had. I thought I bashed him good when I surprised him. Clipping him behind his leg. Then jabbing a broken bottle into his face and yelling for the police. You should have seen me afterwards, stumbling away, gasping like death had taken hold. How my lungs burned. Would I presume too much if you called me Jules? We’ve been through a lot together.”
“And I want you to call me Stanislas.”
Jules brooded a moment at his hands folded in his lap. Then he looked across with his all-knowing sadness. “As you’ve probably guessed, I followed you around by taxi or walking whenever I could. Luckily for me, you have that limp. I’d hoped you’d quit your investigation. You’re one of the few people I’ve misjudged. You found me out. Mazel tov! Tell me, how did old Jules slip up?”
“You, sick, insisting on flying off alone and in this cold; there had to be something important that’d make you risk your health. Losing Officer Leclair on your side trip to the Italian Lake District; it took an expert to lose one. Your age; speculating what you did during the Occupation. Bits and pieces. Enough to make me wonder.”
“And dig around.” He tried another smile, but a coughing attack twisted his mouth into pain and heaved him about. “Age,” he mumbled, shaking his head, then pulled out of his pity. “I always feared I’d betray myself out of guilt. I’m tired of pretending, Stanislas. With what time I have left, I’d like the luxury of being myself. You’re right. I was a catcher. I helped entrap my own.”
The confession was surreal, Stanislas thought. A hollow-cheeked little man, looking lost in that armchair, as a police informer.
“I was part of that annihilation gang,” Jules continued. “Me. That Louis Boucher. That madman Théo Dannecker. And others. Only I was worse. I was part of the community. And for that betrayal, not a moment’s peace since.”
He paused several moments, eyes downcast, appearing to ready himself for what else he would relate. Then he gazed across. “My story begins long ago and with a murder. I killed a man in my youth. He’d raped my mother in Berlin where we lived, you see, and given the climate there my parents knew I couldn’t get a fair trial. So we fled to Paris just before France fell. Here, believe it or not, I played soccer and got to know many in our community.
“One morning some time later, two Black Coats came for me. Gestapo, of course. They took me to a dim room at the police prefecture, and behind this pretentious desk sat a man. Face in shadows, this man with no name came to the point. The police had a Central File with a card for each Jew in Paris and its suburbs. A hundred and twenty thousand names. Some figure like that. These Central File names were for humanitarian purposes, he claimed. To know how many families there were for food and clothing and coal during the winters.
“Well, someone, maybe a Communist saboteur, had messed with some cards in the A category and their duplicates. Erased a few of the thousands of names and addresses, and a higher-up’s deputed him to fix the damage.
“My, my, what to do? If the police nosed around, neighbors or the listees might get the wrong idea, you see. But me, why he had heard people trusted me. Find out where so-and-so families lived without telling who sent me because that would just increase their worries. In return he promised protection if the Germans caused the Altmanns problems. A quid pro quo was his phase for this arrangement, making it sound legalistic with rights and obligations.”
A righteous cheer exploded from the Streible rally. Stanislas ignored the bedlam. Though he had suspected what Jules would say, hearing his confession numbed him.
“I’m not dumb, Stanislas. I was aware these police had already arrested thousands in our community in past sweeps. These roundups were common knowledge, though where these French and foreign Jews ultimately ended up, only God knew. Maybe this official’s request was a trap. On the other hand, I should be partly responsible for people dying from lack of food and blankets during the upcoming winter? Especially families I knew? I explained I needed time to think.
“On his desk was this alarm clock with two huge bells. He set it, smiling at me as he did this, and said I had five minutes to decide and walked out.
“I was sixteen years old. I was sick with thinking what to do. Next thing I knew, those bells clanged with their alarm I hear to this day. He strutted in, smiling, because he knew my answer. Seeing me to the door, he said something very casually, ‘Oh, by the way, a deadline for these names, the fifteenth of July.’ Winter’s months away, but they had red tape to deal with, he claimed. I said okay and left.
“One night as usual, I went to the prefecture with names. It was the fifteenth of July, and these were the last ones. At headquarters police rushed around. Phones rang. There was this excitement like the eve of a great battle. A gendarme ordered me to wait for this man, who sat behind this important-looking desk, which I did. After awhile with nothing to do I wandered, being curious as to what was happening with this commotion business. I passed by this office I hadn’t noticed on past visits because it was in darkness. That night the prefecture was on fire with lights, and I saw it. No name plate or number on this door that was open. I passed by like I was searching for the WC and peeked inside. A very young Monsieur Boucher was there, though I didn’t know his name then. A rising star, no doubt, in the illustrious Interior Ministry, and he was arguing with this German officer. ‘We must proceed with determination with these lists.’ ‘We must not be squeamish.’ That’s how he spoke.”
“You’re absolutely sure the man was Monsieur Boucher?”
“A Frenchman in civilian clothes lecturing a German officer? Who could ever forget that?” He fell back into his armchair from the strain of making his point. “I delivered my names and went home, feeling sick, fearing something horrible was going to happen. Three days later, the eighteenth of July, rumor swept through the community. A terrible crime’s happened. Arrests far bigger than past sweeps—up to thirteen thousand innocents in Operation Spring Wind, we would later discover—and I thought, Oh no, what have I done?” He fumbled for a glass, cupped it with both hands, and gulped.
He hadn’t expected Jules acting under duress, Stanislas realized. He glanced at the television screen. The network now showed footage of Rudolph Fuchs stepping to the podium at a rally outside Vienna.
“The war ended,” Jules continued at last. “I needed respectability and heard about a refuge an Auschwitz survivor had started for death camp returnees. I went there and met this old-looking young woman, Gerti Steiner. A baby was there too, always by her side. Annie, of course. I became a volunteer.”
“No one suspected?”
“A fellow Jew as catcher? It was a taboo subject then. Besides people wanted to move on. I took no chances though and read the newspapers. Someone who’d made it back and wanted to ambush me with charges, that was my fear. It was better to anticipate, so I could account for myself.
“One day while reading I spotted in some sheet a photo with a name under it. Louis Boucher. He worked for a big corporation here in Paris. They built glitzy hotels in Spain and had promoted him and lots of money went with his new position. I decided to visit and reminisce.”
He looked across to Stanislas with an intensity that belied his frailty. “He was in the white pages; he was that sure the past was past. As he left his apartment one morning, I confronted him and told him Judgment Day had arrived. He denied everything, naturally. Then the names came: crypto-Communist, Resistance hooligan, avenging Jew, and ordered me away, or he’d call the police. I threw my hands up like he’d got me, and as I left I dropped a trail of details: the date, the fifteenth of July 1942; what he wore that night, his overcoat with its fur-lined belt; the hour he was in his office; the German officer he lectured, somebody named Kleist; those words uttered to Kleist that I’ll remember even on my deathbed, ‘We must not be squeamish.’ Suddenly his smirk vanished. He knew I had him.”
Jules chuckled. “He became my lifetime annuity. Payment yearly or so
oner if I wanted. Paris to Madrid. Paris to Milan. No matter. I always ended up in Zürich, waiting for his knock. After some financial reverses, he used a Londoner named Lenny as a conduit to sell possessions. I donated most proceeds to the Center.” His face flushed with bitterness that had come up from some reservoir of strength. “It was war. War without mercy. War without end. His side against ours. It still is. It always will be.
“The swine threatened to shoot me early on—he already had that scar. While in detention for his post-Liberation trial, another prisoner had slashed him. ‘Go on. Shoot me,’ I yelled. ‘I’ll be through with my misery, and your family’s will be starting.’ That’s when I told him about notes my lawyer would discover in my safety deposit boxes. That got him pleading. There he was, Stanislas, a major functionary in that infamous Big Raid of 1942, a murderer of thousands of innocents, helping plot their deaths without pity, begging for mercy.”
“Would you have exposed him?”
“For what that contemptible egoist did to me, for what he made me do to others, through that desk-man, with pleasure. He boasted once he had belonged to a clique of civil servants who had shown the Germans how to really act ruthlessly. It was pride. Frenchmen bettering Germans, so they could sit as equals in Hitler’s New Europe. All they did was corrupt and kill. I turned in the Attalis. There, I finally said it. I betrayed the Attali family.”
A cheek muscle twitched. Stanislas froze his eyes on him, stunned, wordless. He hadn’t expected this revelation either. It had come from out of nowhere.
“Finally, after all these decades, I admit it,” Jules confessed and sagged with shame deeper into the armchair as his breath left him.
“Did you?” Stanislas managed to breathe out and repeated himself so Jules could hear.
“Quid pro quo,” Jules answered, his voice also sunk to a whisper. “One more delivery of names, this desk-man said. One more to finish the job, and your family’s free from any intimidation. I brought them on 15 July 1942, hours before those French Nazis began their Great Raid, the names of Samuel; his wife, Hannah; and their daughters, Rachel, Lea, and Annie. My family’s neighbors, the Attalis. I was sixteen. How could I know? You’re smart. Tell me, please.”
Stanislas felt himself sway. Tears were in his eyes for Anna and Jules. You were young. You acted under duress, he wanted to say except his mouth felt dry, and he knew his explanation was too late. Jules had convinced himself otherwise for years. There was hope somewhere in this, he thought, fumbling for some reply. “And afterwards,” he asked at last, “this desk-man protected you?”
“He got his valuable names that filled those valuable cards. And no doubt his valuable promotion. My family’s with the six million others.”
An explosion of cheers boomed through his pause. “…and I don’t fear using the phrase, ‘invasion of the foreign hordes,’” Fuchs shrilled into his microphone.
“That night at the benefit,” Jules said, “that quarrel Annie and I had over mentioning collaboration in her remarks, I wanted that past kept in the past. No more reminders of what I’d become. I’d had enough of that, dealing with Boucher.
“Little good my protest did. She was headstrong like Gerti. She insisted on dealing with it. You know, I think she’d begun to suspect me. On her office desk once, I discovered a photo of myself in a book, Daily Life in Paris During the Occupation. More weight and hair. The same negligible neck, however. I wore a jacket with no Star of David stitched on. She might have thought I was defying the law that day as I left the bakery. But I doubt it. Know what I was really saying? I was already starting to separate myself from my own. I felt dirty, I think, because of what I was doing with those names.
“There you have it, Stanislas. Amazing, isn’t it? You started out with a murder investigation and along the way stumbled upon a blackmailer and participant in mass extermination. If I’d just followed my instinct. If I’d just disobeyed that desk-man. The Attali family….” The thought of what might have occurred choked off any further comment, and he could only shake his head at the possibility.
He cleared his throat as he pushed himself forward, then hesitated. “The Léon Pincus dossier became more than duty with you, yes? Clerks and secretaries and many careerists have duty. Not you. With this case, after a time you never arrived at work and never left. You were always there, no matter how tired or discouraged. You developed that look of obsession that frightens and fascinates. Annie was like that, too. She wouldn’t quit no matter what, if she wanted something.”
He struggled up while waving Stanislas to remain seated. “Sit, please. Old Jules can manage. He always has. This much talking has tired me. It’s time for my pep pills, that’s all. Through the door to your right. The phone’s in the kitchen for any calls you need to make. To the public prosecutor’s office or whoever.”
He plodded his way toward the bedroom off to the left, but near the doorway paused and glanced back. “She was very fond of you, you know.” Suddenly his pale features reddened, and his little-boy body jiggled from some thought.
He was blushing, Stanislas realized. He was definitely embarrassed about something.
“She always found energetic, intelligent men terribly sexy.” He turned away without saying more and shuffled into his bedroom.
“…and why invite more problems in? That is why I say, give our country back to the true Austrian.” Fuchs shot his hands upwards in a V as the camera pulled back for a dramatic view of the stadium.
Stanislas glanced beyond the television screen to the bedroom. He had tracked Jules’s progress by the sounds. The medicine cabinet creaking open. The rush of water from the faucet as Jules filled his glass. The cough as he trudged out of the bathroom, and after that silence, and that was minutes ago.
“Jules,” he called out. “Are you okay?” Not waiting for an answer, he pushed himself up, ignoring his cane that fell onto the rug. He limped quickly toward the bedroom. Something must be wrong, and he had engrossed himself in the coverage and hadn’t heard the cry for help.
“Jules, are you—” Jules lay on his bed, his head lolled to one side. He must have fallen asleep, exhausted, after talking so long. Stanislas gazed a little longer at that beat-up paradox, the strength beneath the frailty, the guilt under the hardness. At last he drew a blanket up to the man’s throat, gently pulled the bedroom door shut, and tiptoed out the apartment. He’d need his rest, too. The procession to the rally would begin in less than twelve hours.
CHAPTER 29
THE PROCESSION
8:30 A. M. according to the Fiat’s clock. 8:29 according to the one in the portable TV mounted on top of the dashboard.
Officer Leclair yawned as he switched off the engine. Here, tucked inside Rue Béranger, a sad excuse for a street as vantage point, they and the plainclothesmen in unmarked cars behind would wait out the hours, Stanislas decided. Several steps ahead crossed the wide Rue du Temple, barricaded to pedestrians and cars until eleven o’clock. On the far side of that avenue, a bank. Further to his right where Rue du Temple swept into the Place de la République, several riot control police stood watch over the empty square, their gloved hands relaxed over their machine gun barrels. Beyond them, the Place de la République itself and its statute in mist like the little merry-go-round to the left of it and across the street in a tiny park.
A woman clutching baguettes against her coat wandered toward one of the controllers and blocked Stanislas’s view into the square. The policeman motioned her to step back out of the way.
9:30. Next to the riot controllers at the intersection of Rue du Temple and the square now stood another policeman, and he fumbled behind his back, adjusting the straps to his bulletproof vest.
A sparse crowd had gathered in front of the bank, and a man with medals glinting down his jacket pointed skyward to his son who gazed up in wonder. Several helicopters hovered high above the mist, the police inside, Stanislas knew, eager to pick off any threat they spotted through their rifle scopes.
The fathe
r made playful sweeps of his hands like airplanes in a dogfight. The boy clapped in joy.
Officer Leclair, reaching behind for a thermos on the back seat, said there was nothing glamorous about war. His grandfather still suffered nightmares from that major world conflict in the 1940s. Would Monsieur Judge care for some coffee?
Stanislas shook his head. He returned once again to reading Luc Bressard’s deposition and what notes he had scribbled of the meeting with Danny.
9:45. Near the riot controllers, a man in overalls and jacket worked a matchstick around his mouth as he slouched against a street signpost. He looked like a worker, Stanislas thought, waiting for a May Day parade to start in a former Communist country.
In the closed-off Rue du Temple another controller, thumbs in his belt, right boot kicked out, scanned the thickening crowd for signs of trouble. Still another swaggered into Stanislas’s view from the sidewalk to his right. Up and down Rue du Temple he patrolled, smacking his riot club in his gloved hand.
The man in overalls chewed away.
10:09. Here and there, Stanislas could spot security lapses. In front of the bank, a few children, hoping for a better view, ducked under the crowd-control rope. They scampered across the street and onto the merry-go-round across from the square and statute.
A policewoman near the bank saw them and hurried across the street, screaming at them to get back on the sidewalk.
A curious few, disobeying police orders, peeked out from third-story windows on the distant side of the square. A husky policeman beside the statute grabbed his bullhorn from the steps and demanded they get back inside. They retaliated by tossing garbage over the balconies. The policeman indicated the insurgents to two subordinates, who trotted toward the building’s entrance.
10:17. Northward from Boulevard de Magenta, black limousines punched through the thick mist, one after the other, four of them in all as the procession’s permits had allowed. The entourage parked beside the statute. Rear doors were flung open. Several men in overcoats stepped out to little applause, to many jeers. With their accouterments of power, their briefcases, cell phones, and security detail, the advisors resembled, Stanislas thought, a threadbare government-in-exile.
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