The Night Watch

by Patrick Modiano

  Then one morning, everyone seemed to be in a particularly sombre mood. The Lieutenant cleared his throat: ‘Lamballe, we need you to carry out an assassination.’ I took this statement calmly as though I’d been expecting it for some time. ‘We’re counting on you, Lamballe, to take down Normand and Philibert. Choose the right moment.’ There was a pause during which Saint-Georges, Pernety, Jasmin, and the others stared at me with tears in their eyes. The Lieutenant sat motionless at his desk. Corvisart handed me a cognac. The last drink of the condemned man, I thought. I could clearly see a scaffold in the middle of the room. The Lieutenant played the role of executioner. His recruits would watch the execution, smiling mournfully at me. ‘Well, Lamballe? What do you think?’ ‘Sounds like a good idea,’ I replied. I wanted to burst into tears, to confess my tenuous position as double agent. But there are some things you have to keep to yourself. I’ve always been a man of few words. Not the talkative type. But the others were always eager to pour out their feelings to me. I remember spending long afternoons with the boys of the CKS. We would wander through the streets around the Rue Boisrobert, near Vaugirard. I would listen to their rambling. Pernety dreamed of a just world. His cheeks would flush bright red. From his wallet, he would take out pictures of Robespierre and André Breton. I pretended to admire these two men. Pernety kept talking about ‘Revolution’, about ‘Moral awakening’, about ‘Our role as intellectuals’ in a clipped voice I found extremely irritating. He smoked a pipe and wore black leather shoes – these details still move me. Corvisart agonised about being born into a bourgeois family. He wanted desperately to forget the Parc Monceau, the tennis courts at Aix-les-Bains, the sugarplums from Plouvier’s he ate every week at his cousins’ house. He asked whether I thought it was possible to be a Socialist and a Christian. As for Jasmin, he wanted to see France fight harder. He had the highest esteem for Henri de Bournazel and knew the names of every star in the sky. Obligado published a ‘political journal’. ‘We must bear witness,’ he explained. ‘It’s our duty. I cannot stay silent.’ But silence is easily learned: a couple of kicks in the teeth will do the trick. Picpus showed me his fiancée’s letters. Have a little more patience: according to him, the nightmare would soon be over. We would be living in a peaceful world. We’d tell our children about the ordeals we had suffered. Saint-Georges, Marbeuf, and Pelleport graduated from the academy of Saint-Cyr with a thirst for battle and the firm resolve to meet death singing. As for myself, I thought of Cimarosa Square, where I’d have to turn in my daily report. They were lucky, these boys, to be able to daydream. The Vaugirard district encouraged such things. Tranquil, inviolate, like some remote hamlet. The very name ‘Vaugirard’ spoke of greenery, ivy, a little stream with mossy banks. In such a haven they could give free reign to their heroic imaginations. They had nothing to lose. I was the one they sent out to battle with the real world, and I was flailing against the current. The sublime, apparently, did not suit me. In the late afternoon, before boarding the métro, I would sit on a bench in the Place Adolphe Cherioux and, for a few last moments, soak up the peace of this village. A little house with a garden. A convent or maybe an old folks’ home? I could hear the trees whispering. A cat padded past the church. From nowhere, I heard a gently voice: Fred Gouin singing ‘Envoi de fleurs’. And I would forget I had no future. My life would take a different course. With a little patience, as Picpus used to say, I could come through this nightmare alive. I’d get a job as bartender in an auberge outside Paris, BARMAN. Here was something that seemed to suit my inclinations and my talents. You stand behind the bar. It protects you from the public. Nor are they hostile, they simply want to order drinks. You mix the drinks and serve them quickly. The most aggressive ones thank you. BARMAN was a much nobler profession than was generally accepted, the only one that deserved comparison with police work or medicine. What did it involve? Mixing cocktails. Mixing dreams, in a sense. Antidotes for pain. At the bar they beg you for it. Curaçao? Marie Brizard? Ether? Whatever they want. After two or three drinks they become maudlin, they reel, they roll their eyes and launch into the long litany of their sufferings and their crimes, plead with you to console them. Hitler, between hiccups, begs your forgiveness. ‘What are you thinking about, Lamballe?’ ‘About flies, Lieutenant.’ Once in a while he would invite me into his office for a little tête-à-tête. ‘I know you’ll carry out the assassination. I trust you, Lamballe.’ He took a commanding tone, staring at me with his blue-black eyes. Tell him the truth? But which truth? Double agent? Triple agent? By this time even I no longer knew who I was. Excuse me, Lieutenant, I DO NOT EXIST. I’ve never had an identity card. He would consider such frivolity unpardonable at a time when men were expected to steel themselves and display great strength of character. One evening I was alone with him. My weariness, like a rat, gnawed at everything around. The walls suddenly seemed swathed in dark velvet, a mist enveloped the room, blurring the outlines of the furniture: the desk, the chairs, the wardrobe. ‘What’s new, Lamballe?’ he asked in a faraway voice that surprised me. The Lieutenant stared at me as he always did, but his eyes had lost their metallic gleam. He sat at the desk, head tilted to the right, his cheek almost resting on his shoulder, in the pensive and forlorn posture of Florentine angels. ‘What’s new, Lamballe?’ he asked again, in the same tone he might have said: ‘It really doesn’t matter.’ His eyes were filled with such gentleness, such sadness that I thought for a moment Lieutenant Dominique had understood everything and had forgiven everything: my role as a double (or triple) agent, my helplessness at being a straw in the wind and whatever wrongs I had committed through cowardice or inadvertence. For the first time, someone was taking an interest in me. I found this compassion terribly moving. In vain, I tried to say some words of thanks. The Lieutenant’s eyes grew more and more compassionate, his craggy features softened. His chest sagged. Soon, all that remained of this brimming arrogance and vitality was a kindly, feeble old grandmother. The crashing waves of the outside world broke against the velvet walls. We were sunk down into darkness, into depths where our sleep would be undisturbed. Paris, too, was sinking. From the cabin I could see the searchlight on the Eiffel Tower: a lighthouse guiding us to shore. We would never come ashore. It no longer mattered. ‘Time for sleep, son,’ the Lieutenant murmured, ‘SLEEP.’ His eyes shot a parting gleam into the shadows, sleep. He glanced one last time into the shadows ‘What are you thinking about, Lamballe?’ He shakes my shoulder. In a soldierly voice: ‘Prepare yourself for the assassination. The fate of the network is in your hands. Never surrender.’ He paces the room nervously. The hard edges of objects had returned. ‘Guts, Lamballe. I’m counting on you.’ The métro moves off again. Cambronne – La Motte-Picquet – Dupleix – Grenelle – Passy. 9 p.m. On the corner of the Rue Franklin and rue Vineuse, the white Bentley the Khedive had lent me in return for my services was waiting. The boys of the CKS would not have been impressed. Driving around in an expensive car these days implied activities of questionable morality. Only black marketeers and highly-paid informants could afford such luxuries. I didn’t care. Exhaustion dispelled the last of my scruples. I drove slowly across the Place du Trocadéro. A hushed engine. Russian leather seats. I liked the Bentley. The Khedive had found it in a garage in Neuilly. I opened the glove compartment: the owner’s registration papers were still there. It was clearly a stolen car. One day or another we would have to account for this. What would I plead in court when they read the charge sheet of the many crimes committed by the ‘Inter-commercial Company Paris-Berlin-Monte Carlo’? A gang of thugs, the judge would say. Profiting from other people’s suffering and confusion. ‘Monsters,’ Madeleine Jacob would write. I turned on the radio.

  Je suis seul

  ce soir

  avec ma peine . . .

  Avenue Kléber, my heart began to beat a little faster. The front of the Baltimore Hotel. Cimarosa Square. Codébo and Robert le Pâle were standing guard in front of No. 3 bis. Codébo gave me a smile, flashing his gold teeth. I walked u
p one flight and opened the living-room door. The Khedive, in a dusty-pink brocade dressing gown, motioned to me. Monsieur Philibert was checking file cards: ‘How’s the CKS doing, Swing Troubadour?’ The Khedive gave me a sharp rap on the shoulder and handed me a cognac: ‘Very scarce. Three hundred thousand francs a bottle. Don’t worry. There is no rationing at Cimarosa Square. And the CKS? What’s new there?’ No, I still hadn’t obtained the addresses of the ‘Knights of the Shadows’. By the end of the week, for sure. ‘Supposing we organise the raid on the Rue Boisrobert for some afternoon when members of the CKS are there? What do you say to that, Troubadour?’ I discouraged this plan. Better to arrest them individually. ‘We’ve no time to lose, Troubadour.’ I calmed their impatience, promising yet again to come up with more detailed information. Sooner or later they would press me so hard that I would have to keep my promises to get them off my back. The ‘round-up’ would take place. I would finally earn the title of informant – donneuse – the one that made my heart skip, my head spin every time I heard it. donneuse. Still, I tried to postpone the inevitable, assuring my two bosses that the boys in the CKS were innocuous. Dreamers. Full of fanciful ideals, nothing more. Why not let the benighted idiots be? They were afflicted from a common illness, youth, one from which they would quickly recover. In a few months they’d be much more tractable. Even the Lieutenant would give up the battle. And besides, what battle was there, besides a heated exchange of words like Justice, Progress, Truth, Democracy, Freedom, Revolution, Honour, and Patriotism? The whole thing struck me as completely harmless. As I saw it, the only dangerous man was LAM-BALLE, whom I had not yet identified. Invisible. Elusive. The true brains behind the CKS. He would strike, and strike viciously. The mere mention of his name at the Rue Boisrobert provoked whispers of awe and admiration, LAM-BALLE! Who was he? When I asked the Lieutenant, he was evasive. ‘LAMBALLE will not spare the thugs and traitors who currently have the upper hand. LAMBALLE strikes hard and fast. We will obey LAMBALLE without question, LAMBALLE is never wrong, LAMBALLE is a great guy, LAMBALLE is our only hope . . .’ I could not get any more definite information. With a little patience we would flush out this mysterious character. I kept telling the Khedive and Philibert that capturing Lamballe ought to be our prime target, LAM-BALLE! The others did not matter. They were deluded, they were all talk. I asked that they be spared. ‘We ’ll see. First get us details on this Lamballe. Understood?’ The Khedive’s lips curled into a menacing leer. Philibert, pensively stroked his moustache and murmured: ‘LAM-BALLE, LAM-BALLE.’ ‘I’ll deal with this LAMBALLE once and for all,’ the Khedive concluded, ‘and neither London, Vichy, or the Americans will save him. Cognac? Craven A? Help yourself, mon petit.’ ‘We’ve just made a deal for the Sebastiano del Piombo,’ announced Philibert. ‘Here’s your 10 per cent commission.’ He handed me a pale-green envelope. ‘Get me some Asian bronzes for tomorrow. We’ve got a client.’ I rather enjoyed this sideline work of looting works of art and bringing them to Cimarosa Square. In the morning, I would inveigle my way into the homes of wealthy people who had fled Paris in the wake of the ‘events’. All I needed to do was pick a lock or flash my warrant card to get a key from the concierge. I searched these deserted abandoned houses carefully. The owners, in their flight, often left numerous small items behind: pastels, vases, tapestries, books, manuscripts. That wasn’t enough. I searched storerooms, vaults, those places where valuable collections might be hidden in times of uncertainty. An attic in the suburbs rewarded me with Gobelin tapestries and Persian carpets, a musty garage at Porte Champferret was filled with old masters. In a cellar in Auteuil, I found a suitcase full of jewels from antiquity and the Renaissance. I went about this looting cheerfully and even with a sense of pleasure that I would – later – regret in court. We were living through extraordinary times. Theft and trafficking were commonplace these days, and the Khedive, having keenly assessed my talents, used me to track down works of art rather than precious objects of base metal. I was grateful. I experienced great aesthetic pleasures. As when I stood in front of a Goya depicting the Assassination of the Princesse de Lamballe. The owner had tried to save it, stowing it in the vaults at the Franco-Serbian Bank at 3 Rue Helder. All I had to do was show my warrant card and they turned the masterpiece over. We sold on the looted property. These were curious times. They made me into a ‘rather unsavoury’ character. Informant, looter, assassin, perhaps. But no worse than the next man. I followed the crowd, nothing more. I’m not particularly entranced by evil. One day I met an old gentleman covered with rings and laces. In a quavering voice, he told me that he cut pictures of criminals out of Détective, finding they had a ‘savage’, a ‘malevolent’ beauty. He admired their ‘unshakeable, lofty’ solitude. He talked to me about one of them, Eugene Weidmann, whom he called ‘the angel of the shadows’. This old fellow was a man of letters. I told him that on the day of his execution, Weidmann had worn crepe-soled shoes. His mother had bought them for him in Frankfurt. That if you truly cared for people, it was crucial to discover minor details of this kind. The rest was unimportant. Poor Weidmann! Even as I’m speak, Hitler is sleeping and sucking his thumb, I give him a pitying glance. He yaps, like a dreaming dog. He curls up, steadily growing smaller until he fits in the palm of my hand. ‘What are you thinking about, Swing Troubadour?’ ‘About our Führer, Monsieur Philibert.’ ‘We’re going to sell the Frans Hals shortly. You’ll get a 15 per cent commission for your trouble. And if you help us capture Lamballe, I’ll give you a five hundred thousand franc bonus. Enough to set you up for life. A little cognac?’ My head is spinning. It must be the scent of the flowers. The living room was almost buried beneath dahlias and orchids. A huge rosebush between the windows partly hid the self-portrait of Monsieur de Bel-Respiro. 10 p.m. One after another they filed into the room. The Khedive greeted them in a plum-coloured tuxedo flecked with green. Monsieur Philibert gave a curt nod and returned to his files. Now and then he would walk up to one of them, exchange a few words, make some notes. The Khedive was passing around drinks, cigarettes, and petits fours. Monsieur and Madame de Bel-Respiro would have been amazed to find such a gathering in their living room: here were the ‘Marquis’ Lionel de Zieff, convicted of larceny, fraud, receiving stolen property and illegally wearing military decorations; Costachesco, a Romanian banker, stock market speculation and fraudulent bankruptcies; ‘Baron’ Gaétan de Lussatz, professional ballroom dancer holding dual French and Monegasque nationalities; Pols de Helder, gentleman-thief; Rachid von Rosenheim, voted Mr Germany 1938, professional swindler; Jean-Farouk de Méthode, owner of Cirque d’Automne and L’Heure Mauve, pimp, persona non grata throughout the British Commonwealth; Ferdinand Poupet, alias ‘Paulo Hayakawa’, insurance broker, previously convicted of forgery and use of forgeries; Otto da Silva, ‘El Rico Plantador’, cut-rate spy; ‘Count’ Baruzzi, art expert and heroin addict; Darquier, aka ‘de Pellepoix’, shyster lawyer; Ivanoff ‘the Oracle’, a Bulgarian charlatan, ‘official tattooist to the Coptic Church’; Odicharvi, police informant in White Russian circles; Mickey de Voisins, ‘la soubrette’, homosexual prostitute; Costantini, former air force commandant; Jean Le Houleux, journalist, former treasurer of the Club du Pavois, blackmailer; the Chapochnikoff brothers, whose precise number, their crimes and their professions, I never discovered. A number of women: Lucie Onstein, alias ‘Frau Sultana’, exotic dancer at Rigolett’s; Magda d’Andurian, manager of a ‘refined, discreet hotel’ in Palmyra, Syria; Violette Morris, weightlifting champion, invariably wore men’s suits; Emprosine Marousi, Byzantine princess, drug addict and lesbian; Simone Bouquereau and Irène de Tranze, former residents of the One-Two-Two Club; ‘Baroness’ Lydia Stahl, who loved champagne and fresh flowers. All of these people regularly frequented No. 3 bis. They appeared out of the blackout, out of an era of despair and misery, through a phenomenon not unlike spontaneous generation. Most of them held key roles with the ‘Inter-commercial Company Paris-Berlin-Monte Carlo’. Zieff, Méthode, and Helder were in charge of the le
ather department. Thanks to their skilled agents, they could wagon loads of box caulk which was resold through the ICPBMC at twelve times the market price. Costachesco, Hayakawa, and Rosenheim specialized in metals, fats, and mineral oils. Ex-Commandant Costantini operated in a narrower but profitable sector: glassware, perfumes, chamois leathers, biscuits, nuts and bolts. The others were singled out by the Khedive for the more sensitive jobs. Lussatz was entrusted with the funds that arrived at Cimarosa Square in great quantity each morning. Da Silva and Odicharvi tracked down gold and foreign currency. Mickey de Voisins, Baruzzi, and ‘Baroness’ Lydia Stahl catalogued the contents of private houses where there might be works of art for me to confiscate. Hayakawa and Jean Le Houleux took care of the office accounts. Darquier served as legal counsel. As for the Chapochnikoff brothers, they had no definite function but simply fluttered around. Simone Bouquereau and Irène de Tranze were the Khedive’s official ‘secretaries’. Princess Marousi facilitated useful connections in social and banking circles. Frau Sultana and Violette Morris made a great deal of money as informers. Magda d’Andurian, an aggressive, hard-headed woman, scoured the North of France and would come up with quantities of tarpaulin and woollens. And finally, let us not forget the members of staff who confined themselves solely to police work: Tony Breton, fop, NCO in the French Foreign Legion, and veteran extortionist; Jo Reocreux, a brothel owner; Vital-Leca, known as ‘the Golden Throat’, hired assassin; Armand le Fou: ‘I’ll kill them all, every last one of them’; Codébo and Robert le Pâle, both scheduled for deportation, worked as porters and bodyguards; Danos ‘the Mammoth’, also known as ‘Big Bill’; Gouari, ‘the American’, freelance armed robber. The Khedive ruled over this cheerful little community which legal chroniclers would later refer to as ‘the Cimarosa Square Gang’. In the meantime, business was going well. Zieff was toying with plans to take over various film studios – the Victorine, the Eldorado, and the Folies-Wagram; Helder was organizing a ‘general holdings company’ to run every hotel on the Riviera; Costachesco was buying up real estate; Rosenheim had announced that ‘the whole of France will soon be ours for the asking, to sell to the highest bidder.’ I watched and listened to these lunatics. Under the glow of the chandeliers, their faces were dripping sweat. Their voices became more staccato. Rebates, brokerage fees, commissions, supplies on hand, wagonloads, profit margins. Chapochnikoff brothers, in ever-growing numbers, tirelessly refilled the champagne glasses. Frau Sultana cranked the Victrola. Johnny Hess: