The Resistance

by Peter Steiner

  “The trouble was, Alexandre’s story … wasn’t a lie. It was true. Not the part about the German officer. But the affair—that was true. She was having an affair. I won’t say with whom. It doesn’t matter. I had been suspicious. But I knew from the way she said it at that moment that the affair was true. That was the moment I learned the truth, there in front of the Gestapo and everyone else. I was humiliated. And furious. I stormed off. I locked Alexandre out of the house.

  “Neither of us were actors. We couldn’t have convinced anyone if it hadn’t been true. Of course Alexandre couldn’t be blamed for having an affair. How could she be? I was simply not … disposed toward her. I was…” Maurice de Beaumont did not finish the sentence.

  Renard had recovered his equilibrium. “How was it, monsieur, that you and my father regarded one another with suspicion?”

  “I can only speak for myself, Monsieur Renard. And I hope you will forgive me for speaking frankly. I do not feel comfortable saying these things to you, his son. And as I said, I am fond of your father. I wish him only the best.

  “Your father was there that night. But he was not with the maquis; he was with the fascist militia. I believe it is true that he tried to save those who were killed. He said he killed some of the militia, and I believe him about that too. But I had to ask myself: Why was he even with the militia? And then when he attacked them, why wasn’t he simply shot down? A ‘treason’ of the sort he committed—killing members of the collaborationist militia—should almost certainly have resulted in his death.”

  * * *

  Renard and Louis drove down the gravel drive. Christoph closed the gate behind them. The two men drove in silence for a while. “I didn’t set out to convict my father,” said Renard finally. “I don’t know whether I can go on with this.”

  “Am I missing something?” said Louis. “Do you think that you know something you didn’t know before?”

  “Don’t play your Socratic games with me,” said Renard. “There’s every reason to believe that my father collaborated with the enemy.”

  “Maybe it is my faulty French,” said Louis. “But that doesn’t seem true. There are some things that point to your father as a collaborator, but they are not every reason to believe anything. They are suggestive or they cast doubt. That’s all. And there are many things that point the other way.”

  “You’re splitting hairs,” said Renard. “You’re trying to protect me.”

  “I have no interest in protecting you or anyone else.” Louis’s response was so immediate and so sharp that Renard turned and stared at him.

  “Watch the road,” said Louis. They drove on in silence. As they entered a village, they passed a café. “Let’s stop for a glass of wine,” said Louis.

  It was midafternoon, and they were the only ones inside. Louis held up his wine toward the window and marveled at the color. He held the glass under his nose and sniffed. “Very nice,” he said.

  “Stop it,” said Renard.

  Louis set the glass of wine on the table. “Watch this,” he said. He picked up a spoon and appeared to bend it, but when he opened his hand, the handle was straight.

  Renard started to speak, but Louis held up his hand to stop him. “It’s not magic, you know. It’s simply a matter of perception. You want things to be clear. Because it’s your father and you love him. But things aren’t clear. They never are. Even when they seem clear, they never are. When something is true, the opposite is usually at least partly true as well. Stop the melodrama. Stop thinking like Cecil B. DeMille, and start thinking like a cop. You know Jean Moulin?”

  “Of course,” said Renard. “Every village has a street named after him. The great resistance fighter…”

  “And collaborator,” said Louis. “I’ve been reading about him. He cooperated with the Germans while he was the prefect in Chartres. The Germans he worked for gave him glowing reviews. Some writers even say he collaborated at the end. But it doesn’t matter. Even if it were true, which no one can ever know, it takes nothing away from his brave and daring resistance or his terrible and courageous end. It just makes him real and human and all the more courageous.

  “Look at the two Beaumonts, Maurice and Alexandre. They were heroes. And they were failed, ordinary people at the same time. They betrayed one another but not the people they helped. It was a complicated time; good and evil were things everyone had to figure out for himself. Your father was a young man when he became a policeman—how old?…”

  “Twenty-one.”

  “Twenty-one?” said Louis. “Jesus. Don’t ask too much of him. Don’t require him to be more than a man can be. You know, I learned one useful thing in my sordid world. Which is: Nothing is as simple as it looks … and for that we can be grateful.” Louis stood and dropped several coins on the table. “Let’s go.”

  “Who is Cecil B. DeMille?” said Renard.

  * * *

  “Inspector Renard?”

  Renard recognized Maurice de Beaumont’s voice on the phone.

  “There is someone who may be able to help you, monsieur. His name is Richard Churchil. An Englishman. He lives in Tours. I have spoken to him, and he has agreed to meet you.”

  “How can he help?” said Renard.

  “He … I will let him explain that,” said Maurice.

  Renard dialed the number. After several rings a man answered. Renard identified himself and asked to speak with Richard Churchil.

  The man said that he was Richard Churchil. He said that he would be happy to meet with Renard and proposed a small café in Tours called Le Chapeau Rouge, The Red Hat.

  “But Monsieur de Beaumont said you were English.”

  Churchil gave a high, clear laugh. “Maurice has never gotten over the fact that I come from London. I’ve lived here for the past forty years. Except for my passport, I am French.”

  A painted sign in a narrow street near the river marked the entrance to Le Chapeau Rouge. As Renard looked around inside trying to adjust to the dim light, a short, bald, rotund man rose from a table by the window. He tugged at the bottom of his jacket and adjusted his necktie. He peered at Renard through thick glasses. He might have been an accountant or a professor, someone you would have overlooked in a crowd, except for the spotted handkerchief cascading from his breast pocket. Renard was sure the handkerchief would have told Louis something. He was glad Louis wasn’t there.

  “Monsieur Renard,” said Richard Churchil. “I’m pleased to meet you. I hope I can help you with your quest.”

  “Thank you, monsieur,” said Renard. “It is a case. Not a quest. Monsieur de Beaumont seemed to think you might know something about Simon and his whereabouts.”

  “Oh,” said Richard Churchil, “it’s been many years since I knew anything about his whereabouts. Although knowing Simon, I’m sure he knows about my whereabouts. And those of Maurice de Beaumont. Maybe even yours. He saw us all as his responsibility, his children almost, although he was younger than most of us.

  “His name, by the way, is either Franz Weinmann or Weizmann, I’m not sure which. And I don’t know whether he goes by either of those names nowadays. I somehow doubt it. Elusiveness was his career and his passion. I don’t know where he lives either, or even if he is alive, although I have reason to think he might be somewhere in the United States.

  “I’m afraid I have to disappoint you in one other thing as well. I am certain that he does not know who betrayed your father and the others that night they were gunned down.…”

  “How do you know that? And how can you be certain?”

  “Well, of course one can’t be certain of anything, can one? But I was with him when he tried to find out. And he couldn’t. Your father and the others were woefully betrayed. If Simon had found out, he would have exacted punishment.”

  “My father was not among those who were shot,” said Renard. “He is still alive. That night he was in fact with the militia.”

  “Was he, indeed?” said Richard. He took off his glasses and clean
ed them with the pocket square without removing it from his pocket. “Was he, indeed. Well, I heard good things about him, your father. I never met him, but I heard about him from several different people. He was crucial to the Saint-Léon contingent, according to Simon and according to others. Franz spoke highly of him. Do you know Franz? I don’t know his real name. As did Terrance. That was Maurice’s name…”

  “And you, Monsieur Churchil, what was your role in all of this?”

  “I’ve been rattling on, haven’t I?” said Richard. He motioned to the bartender, who came over to the table. “A beer,” said Richard. “And for you?”

  Renard ordered mineral water.

  “What a good boy you are,” said Richard, with a laugh.

  “I am on duty, monsieur,” said Renard.

  “I was a theatrical specialist in those days,” said Richard, and he made a flourish with his right hand. “By which I mean I served as a distraction during various operations. Sabotage, but mostly assassinations. Other things as well. My name was Shakespeare. How could it have been otherwise?” He smiled.

  “I wanted to be in the theater but ended up being an assassin instead.” Richard went on to explain, in what Renard thought was unnecessary detail, exactly how assassinations were done. “The trick was being unpredictable, being original each time. The police, the Gestapo, the milice: I would have been a prize catch for any of them. So I could not be obvious, or the operation would be destroyed and, not incidentally, my goose would be cooked.”

  “But it was dangerous work, monsieur.…”

  “Oh, yes, it was very dangerous. But I was very good at it.…”

  “But you were English. You didn’t have to do it—”

  “Oh, but I did.” Richard Churchil’s tone changed suddenly. “I had to do it. And precisely because I was English. Because of my name, you see? With only the one L, but otherwise it was his name. And he was great. And for a while he was entirely alone, trying to save the world, while I was living a jolly and dissipated life in France.

  “I had fled England, you know, for this more tolerant place. Even in London in those days a homosexual was stigmatized and despised. I suppose it’s different now. In any case, I drank, I caroused. I think I was slowly doing myself in. Back then The Red Hat was a homosexual cabaret. I was here every night, all night. Even after the Germans arrived, the party continued.

  “Then something changed for me. I’m not sure what. Witnessing some moment of casual brutality, I suppose. Well, I said to myself, let’s see what you’re really made of. I knew I was queer and homely and that I talked too much. But as it turned out, I was also brave. That was how I won Maurice’s heart.” He smiled at Renard. “I love to talk about it, which was why I agreed to see you.

  “Don’t misunderstand me; it’s not to boast. It’s because I need constant reminding that I did something good, something true in my life. Most of the time—before the war, and again now—it’s all comedy or farce, isn’t it? But in those few years it was tragedy, and I was one of the heroes.”

  XXVIII.

  IT WAS WINTER. Louis stoked the Godin stove until it glowed. He spent day after day at the end of the table close to the stove, working his way through one book after another. If only he had known earlier what a joy it was to read great writing.

  Instead he had occupied himself with intelligence estimates, strategic plans, appraisals, and assessments that circulated in an unending stream from one office to the next. Louis Morgon did his clandestine duty. He took this stuff seriously. He pronounced it useful and passed it on with his scribbled initials on the top-secret cover sheet.

  Worse yet, he wrote estimates and assessments of his own about problems, issues, intelligence in his supposed area of expertise, which was the Middle East. How could anyone imagine that he knew anything about something as complex as the Middle East, when he wasn’t even equipped to know his own heart? And then there were the reports on misfired and futile efforts in lonely outposts. The sheer pridefulness of it all made Louis dizzy now.

  Yet his work had been deemed brilliant by those who mattered, so of course Louis had considered it brilliant too. He was driven around in a black car, reading papers under that little lamp they always have over the backseat. He must have been brilliant and important, mustn’t he?

  It was what passed for thinking, but it was never even close. In that world, in that sort of thinking, you never started at the beginning, with wonderment and confusion, which are the prerequisites for all real thinking. You never abandoned your preconceptions so that you could see what was actually coming your way.

  On the contrary, you only used what came your way to buttress your standing, to seal leaks in your reasoning, to build a stronger, even more impenetrable, unassailable fortress of conviction. The goal was always something that only resembled knowledge and understanding but was nothing more than chewed-over and rearranged predispositions. A position. That was what you wanted. To have a position.

  Ah, but the great novels. And plays. And poems. They undermined the fortresses. They destroyed positions. They left it all in rubble and sand and took you elsewhere. Louis laid the book aside; it was Hard Times. He pulled on his overcoat and scarf and walked out along the farm tracks into the frosty fields. The houses of Saint-Léon were buttoned up against the cold. It was a still day, and wisps of smoke climbed straight up from the village chimneys. The air was pungent with wood smoke. Louis was alone.

  He stopped and turned in a complete circle. He still did this sometimes when he walked. Stopping and turning around reminded him how full the world was of things other than himself. And everything he could see from that spot was more complex than he could have ever imagined it to be.

  Louis tried to imagine the four years from 1940 until 1944, the dangerous aloneness that had confronted Yves Renard and the other people he had recently met. They were old now, but they had been young then. Their lives had been ahead of them. They had not asked for any of what came their way. They were not prepared for any of it. They lost their friends and family in the terrible and random lottery that decided who would be killed and who would not.

  * * *

  The door of Renard’s office opened, and Louis came in, along with a great gust of wind and a swirl of dead leaves.

  “I’m working,” Renard said, without looking up. But he let himself be talked into breaking for a cup of hot coffee at the Hôtel de France. “And a slice of your pear tart, madame,” said Louis to Madame Chalfont.

  “I can’t imagine any of it,” said Renard, “those terrible years, how they went on with life.”

  “Once it became reality, it was the only reality,” said Louis. “It was normal, everyday, even when it was horrible.”

  “Still, it’s impossible for me to imagine.”

  “You have to imagine it,” he said to Renard, “if you are going to make any sense of it.”

  “I can’t,” said Renard. “It’s too different from … this.”

  “But that’s it, don’t you see? It isn’t different. It’s almost exactly the same. They went about their lives as you do, as I do. Your father filled out reports and mediated disputes, as you do. Only the terror is missing.”

  “Only the terror? The terror was everything. It was a different world then. You’re American. You can’t understand.”

  “Maybe you’re right. In one sense, at least. It’s true: Terror makes everything different. And yet, Jean Josquin, Maurice de Beaumont, maybe even Churchil, from what you tell me—they’re all filled with the terror. Still. Now. They’re living it all over again.”

  The two men sat in silence for a while.

  “The tart is delicious, madame,” said Louis. “As always.”

  “We need to find Simon,” said Renard, “and he does not want to be found.”

  “At least that is what everyone says,” said Louis, “that he does not want to be found. But maybe they don’t want to find him.”

  “I have work to do,” said Renard. He dropped a coi
n on the table and left.

  “What’s troubling young Renard?” said Madame Chalfont.

  “I think his imagination is troubling him,” said Louis. “He said he can’t imagine some things. But I think he imagines too much.”

  “Ah, Monsieur Morgon. Do all Americans speak in riddles?”

  * * *

  It was late February. The forsythia was blooming. Louis heard a tractor coming up the driveway, the engine popping and chugging. He went outside and watched it come into view. The farmer stepped down and adjusted his cap. “Bonjour, monsieur,” he said. “Madame Lefourier said you need your garden plowed. I just finished doing hers, so I thought while I was here…”

  Louis stepped over to the tractor and shook hands with the man.

  “Payard,” said the man.

  “Morgon,” said Louis.

  “Over here?” said the man.

  “Exactly,” said Louis. “I’ll show you.” He walked off the edges and put stones where the corners should be.

  “A little more in this direction, I think,” said the farmer. “Those little lindens will grow fast. And in two years this corner will be in shade.”

  “Thank you, Monsieur Payard. As you say.” Louis moved the stones.

  Payard knocked a long ash from his cigarette. “A wise decision, monsieur.” He got on his tractor and began to plow. The ground had not been turned for decades, and the small tractor bucked and lurched up and down the plot, turning the stony, gray earth, then pulverizing it. The cigarette never left Payard’s lips. Louis could not help hoping that something interesting might be uncovered. Weapons, maybe, or bones. But nothing was.

  When the moon was right, Solesme showed up to help him plant. She brought seed she had saved from the year before—cucumber, tomato, squash, pepper, beet. “The rest you’ll have to buy.” She helped him space the rows, showed him how deep to plant them, and how to water them so they wouldn’t wash away.

  Soon it was warm enough that Louis could start painting in the barn again. He preferred not to call it his studio. The word implied that he was an artist. He opened the wide doors on the south side and let the sun stream in. “I thought artists preferred northern light,” said Solesme.