by Paul Watkins
“I guess we’d know if we showed up at her door,” said Pankratov. “The question is whether we should go.”
Fleury sighed. He took off his glasses, put them in the pocket of his jacket and gently patted the pocket to make sure they were in place. Then he walked over to the sink, pushing aside the red curtain that separated the living room from the kitchen. He turned on the tap and washed his face, letting droplets run through his fingers. “What if Madame Pontier finds out what we’re doing?” he asked through the cage of his hands.
“She might not have to know,” said Pankratov, as he stood up to leave. “You two need to talk it over. Whatever you decide, we will do.”
Fleury smoothed one hand down the length of his face. “I have already made up my mind,” he told Pankratov, “but if I don’t like the look of your forgery, the whole business ends there.”
We told him that was fair enough.
Fleury smiled, which was rare for him these days. It was a smile from the old days, before we knew how lucky we had been.
* * *
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, JUNE 6, Allied troops landed on the French beaches.
I didn’t learn about it until the evening. I spent the whole day tidying up Pankratov’s repair shop, cleaning out the fireplace, scrubbing down the work surfaces with soap and water and a wire brush. I swept months of dust from the floor. I had given myself the job mostly because I was too nervous to do anything else. I had been carried along, first by the whole idea of saving the Gottheim Collection, and then by the thought of saving Pankratov’s last surviving painting. Only now was I beginning to see how unlikely it would be for me to produce a passable forgery. I could only guess at the depth of Pankratov’s disappointment when Fleury refused to accept my work. I knew I wouldn’t blame Fleury if that happened. I was glad he had made us promise to give him the final say. It was true that Pankratov and I had allowed our minds to become clouded. Fleury had understood this before we could grasp it ourselves.
I didn’t leave the repair shop until after dark, sliding the heavy padlock into place, knocking it shut with the heel of my palm and then trudging off down the unlit alleyway, feet crunching on the gravel, hands in pockets, heading for home.
The first time I noticed anything out of the ordinary was when I stepped inside the Dimitri. There were no Germans tonight. The only customer besides myself was Le Goff, wedged behind his usual table. His piggy eyes were dull behind pasty, folded cheeks.
“Hello,” said Ivan cheerfully. He stood behind the bar, wiping out glasses with a cloth.
I took off my coat and hung it on a peg. “Quiet tonight.”
“It’s the invasion,” he said.
My whole body went numb. “Is it certain?” I asked.
“Oh yes,” said Ivan. “It’s for sure.”
“Where was it?”
“Normandy,” said Le Goff, butting in. “Those Germans you’ve been kissing up to for the past four years won’t be around much longer, will they?” He puckered up his fish-pale lips and made sloppy sounds.
I tried to ignore him.
But Le Goff wasn’t finished with me yet. “Your deeds have not gone unnoticed. Your friendships with the enemy.”
“That’s enough, Le Goff,” said Ivan. “The truth may be different than you think.”
“I doubt it.” Le Goff coughed up a laugh like a man hawking phlegm. “Some heads are going to roll before too long and I expect Mr. Halifax’s will be one of them.”
I glanced back at him.
“You know what you are?” asked Le Goff. “You are a son of a bitch. If I was any younger…”
“But you aren’t younger,” I said, cutting him off. “You’re old and slow. You’re a dead man who’s forgotten to lie down.”
Le Goff slumped back in his seat. He filled the air with obscenities.
I took the opportunity to leave.
* * *
I WENT STRAIGHT HOME and knocked on Fleury’s door.
He had heard the news, and all the rumors, too. German radio reported that the landings had failed, but the military in Paris had been put on full alert. Rumors were that German divisions were now, after a delay of many hours, advancing toward the coast. At first, the German High Command had been conviced that Normandy was a decoy, with the real thrust coming at the Pas-de-Calais. “I wonder how long it will be before the Allies get to Paris.” Fleury was tying and untying the black silk belt of his smoking jacket. “I hope we get a chance to explain what we’ve been doing for the past few years.”
“Old Le Goff down at the Dimitri took a few potshots at me just now. He didn’t seem too interested in anything I had to say.”
“Potshots with words I don’t mind,” said Fleury.
“Maybe the Vermeer deal is off,” I thought out loud.
“You’ll find out tomorrow,” answered Fleury. “Dietrich’s coming by first thing in the morning. If the deal’s still on, we’d better get hold of that painting as quickly as we can, before some artillery barrage flattens the Ardennes Abbey and everything in it.”
* * *
FLEURY AND I HAD planned to meet Dietrich on our usual street corner at the far end of the Rue Descalzi. But either Fleury got the time wrong or Dietrich decided to come early. He showed up when I was still getting dressed.
Dietrich had never been inside the building before. When he arrived at my door, swathed in his double-breasted leather coat, he couldn’t hide his surprise that my place was so small and the furnishings so spartan. “But this is even worse than Fleury’s!” he said loudly. “He was wearing some bizarre red coat when he came to the door!”
“That’s a smoking jacket,” I explained. “It’s his armor.”
Dietrich started to laugh, but realizing that I had not meant for it to be a joke, he stopped. “Well, I made him take it off before I sent him down to the car.” Dietrich continued to look around the room, baffled by what he saw. “So what do you two do with all the money from those paintings?” he asked. “I thought you’d be rich by now.” He turned a slow circle in my living room, his fingers dragging past the old red curtains. “What’s going on?”
My mind spun like a roulette wheel. I knew I’d have to offer some excuse. “We put our money in the same Swiss banks as Hermann Göring,” I announced. “There’s no sense flaunting it here.” Then I stood very still, waiting to see what would happen next.
Dietrich nodded slowly. “Good thinking.” Satisfied, he changed the subject. “Did you hear about the invasion?”
“Of course,” I answered, the wheel in my brain slowly clattering back to its normal speed.
“God knows what will happen to us now,” said Dietrich.
It felt strange to hear him grouping his own destiny with mine. “How are things with Valya?” I asked.
Dietrich’s features softened at the mention of her name. He unbuttoned his coat and sat down at the kitchen table. He looked like some large machine collapsing in slow motion, his bones folding in on themselves. “It used to be we always had time to make up, but now I don’t know anymore, the way things are going. We will have to leave.”
“Where to?” I asked.
“It won’t be back to Germany, that’s for sure.” He straightened up, as if suddenly ashamed of his dilapidated state. “I have in mind a little town in Mexico I once saw in a picture book called San Cristobál de las Casas. I think that might be far enough away. The Fabry-Georges boys are getting restless. They’re thinking they might have backed the wrong side. There’s about ten of them I promised I’d have shot if they ever turned on me. The irony is that it’s the Fabry-Georges people who used to do all the shooting. Do you suppose I could pay them to commit suicide?” He smiled weakly.
“What about that man who shot Behr?” I asked, and felt my jaw muscles twitch, as they did every time I thought back to Tombeau’s face on the night that Behr had died.
“Tombeau. He’s the worst of the lot,” said Dietrich. “Always stirring things up. He’s the first one I’
ll finish if I have to do any killing myself.” He breathed out slowly. Then he turned to business. “Do you have that Vermeer yet?”
“Does Göring still need it?” I asked. “Even now?”
Dietrich nodded. “He calls me almost every day. I tell you, we’re all dead if you can’t turn up that painting.”
“Why does Hitler want it so badly?”
“Who knows? Who dares to ask?” said Dietrich. “It’s an astronomer. A man pondering the mysteries of the universe. That’s how Hitler sees himself, I suppose.”
“We need you to get us some fuel,” I said. “A truck, too.”
“Done,” he said quickly. “We’ll do that right now.”
I had the feeling he would have given us just about anything to get the job done. I saw on his face the same intensity as I had seen in Göring when he mentioned The Astronomer, blind with the need to possess it.
Dietrich stood up to leave. “I won’t ask where you’re going, but if you’re heading toward the fighting, you ought to leave soon. Allied planes are shooting everything that moves along any road within a hundred kilometers of the front line.”
“So let’s go,” I told him. I hauled on my coat and headed for the door.
What Dietrich found for us was a military ambulance, which he kept at the Schneider warehouse. “The best I could do at such short notice,” he said, when we arrived, having picked up Pankratov from the Dimitri.
The ambulance was a requisitioned Citroën delivery van. The whole machine was painted dull field gray, except for the tires, and these were mismatched and almost worn out. On the sides and on the roof were neat white squares with a red cross painted inside. The headlights had been fitted with dampeners, which made them look like a pair of squinting eyes. Five jerrycans of fuel were lashed onto the roof. “We often use it to transport works of art around the city,” Dietrich explained. “No one stops an ambulance, least of all a military one.”
* * *
IN THE OFFICE, DIETRICH filled out passes that allowed us to travel by any roads we chose and to requisition fuel anywhere we could find it. He signed it himself, then pounded the pages with numerous eagle and swastika stamps. It would be enough, Dietrich said, to scare off any military policeman who might flag us down. He also had yellow armbands for each of us, on which was written in black Gothic letters—IM DIENST DES DEUTSCHEN HEERES. In the service of the German military.
Just as the four of us were walking out toward the ambulance, there was a flicker in the light around us, as if the sun had blinked. We looked up and saw the first of what looked to be hundreds of planes crossing the path of the sun. The planes were high, throwing the chalkiness of contrails behind them. If I looked closely, I could see they were four-engined, the streams of vapor merging into two, which merged with the other condensation paths until the whole sky looked like glass that had been scratched with a handful of diamonds. They were American bombers, coming over from England and heading deep into Germany. These days, the sky was never empty of contrails. Even at night, they stretched across the cloudless sky, lit up by the moon.
Dietrich stood with his neck craned back, tendons strained, his eyes almost shut against the brightness of the afternoon sun. “You’d better get going,” he said.
I drove Fleury and Pankratov out of Paris along boulevards as deserted as the ones we’d traveled four years ago, on our way to Normandy.
* * *
I KEPT TO MYSELF on the ride out.
Pankratov and Fleury’s conversations drifted in and out of my head. One time they were talking about food, and Pankratov was going on about some Finnish recipe for marinading raw salmon in vodka, dill and rock salt. Another time Pankratov was wondering who had painted the forgeries of his work in the Gottheim Collection and if the forger had done a good job. Later, when I heard them discussing what they would do after the war was over, I realized that I had done almost no thinking on the subject.
I was just opening my mouth to say something about it when we came over the ridge of a small hill and saw the wreckage of two German army trucks. I remembered what Dietrich had said about air attacks. One of the trucks was flipped on its side in the ditch and another was standing out in a field, just off the road. The one in the ditch had burned out completely and the still-smoking metal was dirty orange from incinerated paint. The windows had melted out. The tires were bubbled and smeared all over the wheel wells. Only the steel tube frame remained of the canvas-covered roof. The truck out in the field had been blown almost in half, the cab fallen forward from the rest of the truck, making it look strangely beheaded. All around the truck were pieces of soldiers’ equipment—German helmets, some with chicken wire bent around the rims for holding camouflage, unraveled white bandages, leather belts, mess tins and felt-covered canteens so twisted and torn that it looked as if they had been wrenched off the owners’ backs by a tornado. I saw white chips in the tarmac where bullets had struck the road.
We were now on the outskirts of Caen. The city was burning. Four separate pyres of smoke rose from the city and merged, dirty and black-brown against the sky. I could smell the smoke, even though it looked to be about a mile away. It tangled with heat off the fields, the smell of the warm earth, pink foxgloves and the tiny white blooms of elderflowers in the thick bocage hedgerows.
It was here that we met our first roadblock, but it was only a traffic diversion. Two military policemen, one of them standing on top of a fifty-gallon oil drum, pointed us down to the south. They wore half-moon chained breastplates across their chests and aimed the way for us with long-stemmed lollypop markers. They both wore camouflage jackets and had camouflage paint on their helmets. Beyond them, on the road, lay more burned-out vehicles.
The detour took us down through a village called St. André-sur-Orne, then crossed over the Orne River and up through the towns of Maltot, Verson and Carpiquet. By that time, we had overshot Ardennes Abbey by a couple of miles and had to double back.
Most of the old houses had their rickety, paint-peeled shutters closed up. There were very few people moving around in the little towns, and no vehicles at all. Neither were there any traces of German troops, except in the fields, where marks of recent encampments could be seen as fade marks in the grass and deep gouges of tank tracks across the muddied ground. They had all gone forward to the front.
I pulled into the shade of some large trees that grew across the road from the abbey. Then I cut the engine. For the first time in many hours, I took my hands from the wheel. I clenched them both, working the blood back into my knuckles.
Pankratov ran across the road to the gate. It opened before he reached it.
Marie-Claire came out to meet him. She looked as pretty as I had remembered. She gave Pankratov a big hug and then pointed back into the courtyard.
Pankratov stepped back from the hug, rested his hands on Marie-Claire’s shoulders and spoke to her.
She nodded.
Pankratov kissed her on the forehead and went inside the abbey.
Seeing Marie-Claire again brought back to me the almost forgotten lightness in my chest of being a stranger in Paris.
Marie-Claire walked across to where Fleury and I stood stretching our legs after so many hours of being cramped up in the ambulance. Her small feet crunched on the khaki gravel of the driveway. Above her, a warm breeze rustled the tops of the trees. “How are you, my darlings?” she asked, embracing each of us in turn.
I said how good it was to see her again. Then I asked if Pankratov had explained why we were here.
“My husband has already opened up the wall.”
“Has Madame Pontier called you?” I asked nervously.
“Pankratov swore us to secrecy,” she replied. “She can call all she wants. She won’t learn anything from us.”
“Thank you,” I breathed out. “I’ll go help with the painting.”
She shook her head. “There’s nothing for you to do. You must rest now.” She didn’t need to ask me twice.
I eased m
yself down beside the truck and let my head fall back against its chevronned engine grille. “I think it’s been about a million years since I sat in the grass and did nothing,” I said.
“Has it been terribly difficult for you in the city?” asked Marie-Claire. “I hear the most awful stories. The only thing that happened to us was that we had to move out because a German officer came to live here. His name was Generaloberst von der Schulenberg.” She made no attempt to pronounce the words correctly. “After a few months, he got bored out here in the country and took our apartment in Caen instead. That was in 1941. We’ve been back ever since.” She looked off down the shady road. “Wasn’t it sad about Artemis?” she asked.
“It was,” said Fleury.
I thought back to the day we found out he’d been killed. I wondered if Marie-Claire had convinced herself it wasn’t her fault. That he would have been conscripted anyway. That he would have been killed in the fighting.
She breathed in suddenly. “It’ll all be over soon. I just hope they don’t wreck this place on their way through.”
“All be over soon.” The words repeated in my head. I closed my eyes and felt the warm breeze coming off the fields.
Marie-Claire’s hand brushed softly against my face. “Why don’t you stay?” she asked.
“Stay?” My eyes opened wide.
“Yes,” she said. “The Allies aren’t far away. The whole of Normandy will be liberated soon.”
I said nothing. The idea had put me into shock.
“My God,” said Marie-Claire. “You didn’t consider this, did you?”
“There’s more work to do,” I mumbled. “It’s more complicated than you think.”
She turned to Fleury. “What about you?”
Fleury just stared at her.
It was the first time I had ever seen him at a loss for words.
Marie-Claire pointed down the shady road. “In about a week, the Allied armies will be driving their tanks down this little road, and they may blow a few holes in our house before they get here, but I don’t care, because I’ll be free. But God knows how long it’s going to take them to get to Paris. And who’s to say the Germans won’t destroy the city before they leave it? You don’t want to be stuck in the middle of that.”