The Foundling's War

by Michel Déon

  ‘You know,’ Urbano had said at their last meeting, ‘I think you’re rather brave. You’re running definite risks. You could be murdered on the way; no one would ever try to find out where the shot had come from. With me at your side you’re in less danger, so long as my government doesn’t arrest you, but, as you must know, I don’t only work for my government. It’s a matter of material necessity. Dr Salazar is a great man and he intends to keep our country out of the war. Having said that, he’s also tightfisted. His prime ministerial salary is just enough for him to live on because he has very few needs, and he feels the servants of the state ought to follow his example. So everyone moonlights. I’ve resigned myself to it, like everyone else. A foreign power that I shan’t name asks me for information. When that information doesn’t compromise my country’s own affairs, I provide it. My superiors close their eyes, probably because they do the same. So I’ve been ordered to find out why you come here, and it may be that I know, but because I like you I’m taking this opportunity to warn you. I think it unlikely that you’ll complete a fourth journey. You probably won’t make it to prison; you’ll be liquidated before you get there. Who will protest? Not the Germans, you can be sure. Nor the Vichy government, who’ll know nothing about it …’

  They had had dinner at Peniche before reaching Lisbon after nightfall, and this time had eaten not cod but perfect rock lobsters and drunk a vinho verde from Minho that had stripped away some of Urbano’s reserve. Jean listened to him, careful not to give anything away. He had been lectured too often by Palfy and Julius to be unaware that a policeman, however charming, convivial and cultured, is still a policeman, and the innocent ways of picking up an indiscretion are infinite. Yet he did not dislike the Portuguese man and it would not have taken much to make him feel friendship for him, especially as Urbano was also a foundling, adopted by a family of minor civil servants. He had finished his schooling with the help of scholarships and learnt English and French on his own. His talents and intelligence had raised him in the ceremonial and complicated hierarchy of Portuguese bureaucracy. One day he would be someone, and he had no doubt of his future.

  From the restaurant terrace they watched the fishing boats coming ashore on the tide. Oxen towed them clear of the water and women with baskets on their heads unloaded their catch in an extended Indian file lit by acetylene lamps placed on the white sand.

  ‘It’s true that I’ve taken risks,’ Jean said, ‘but I’m just the messenger in these transactions. If anyone wants to take me out, that won’t make any difference to the people running the show. But … I hear what you’re telling me and I’ll give it some thought.’

  ‘I haven’t made you angry?’

  ‘No, no, not in the slightest. You’re doing your job, I’m doing mine. I absolutely have to have money … for reasons that might make a jury weep, but not a secret service. So I’m taking the risk. I’m too much on my own to have any other choice.’

  ‘Is it for your parents?’

  ‘No. It’s for a woman I love, who the Germans arrested and tortured. They drove her half mad and I’ve got no other way to protect her and help her get better than by putting her in a nursing home where she’s safe.’

  Urbano was thoughtful for a moment.

  ‘The rule of my profession is never to believe what people tell me, and I don’t know why I believe you. You trust me; well then, I shall trust you, Jean. You must settle your business tomorrow at the earliest possible opportunity and get away without delay. Don’t stay in Lisbon a minute longer than you have to. You’ll be picked up, and I shan’t be able to do anything for you. As soon as you leave the bank, call me from a public phone box on a number I’ll give you before I leave you. We’ll meet at a place I’ll tell you and I’ll find a way to drive you to Vila Franca de Xira, where you’ll be able to catch the express without being followed. I can’t do more than that …’

  ‘You’ll be losing a fat bonus.’

  ‘It’s too bad. There’ll be others. Lisbon is teeming with people with something to hide. Anyway, money isn’t everything for me.’

  ‘You’ve got no reason to behave like this towards me.’

  ‘Very true!’ Urbano conceded with a smile. ‘But I do a job I don’t enjoy every day of the week, so perhaps this evening I’d like to make amends to myself for the bad aspects of my life. You make a good hostage. So I’m not just a policeman, I also have a friend …’

  This had happened at the end of May, shortly before the events we recounted in the previous chapter. Jean had taken the card Urbano had slipped him under the table. It could have been a trap; it was like tossing a coin. But the man from the PIDE had been as good as his word and Jean had found himself back in France safe and sound, with a warning that a fourth trip would not be tolerated. Palfy was unsurprised.

  ‘You were lucky, dear boy. I didn’t think you’d come back from the last trip.’

  ‘I’m thrilled by your honesty. I suppose you’d have let me rot in prison, if nothing worse happened?’

  ‘I warned you of the risks.’

  Jean was reminded of the narrow margins within which he had to exist. The substantial sums he had put away in a numbered account were exactly what his life was worth. Without false modesty, he found the price derisory. He demanded to know the whole story. Palfy told him. For more than a year the Sicherheitsdienst had been producing counterfeit banknotes so perfect that even the Bank of England could not tell the difference. Somewhere in the Reich a printing press was operating. Envoys were selling the notes in Switzerland, Portugal and the United States, everywhere there was a free exchange rate. The funds thus acquired paid the SD’s foreign expenses. The Reich’s Finance Minister, Dr Schacht, although initially opposed to the operation because it lay outside the meticulous organisation of his own closed monetary system, was aware that he would be sidelined if he did not agree and had turned a blind eye on condition that there were no blunders. Palfy related all this with glee, since in his eyes it resembled an extraordinarily good joke. It filled the pockets of both intermediaries and sellers, while scarcely denting the already inflationary sterling exchange rate. Jean did not, strictly speaking, disapprove. In an appalling war from which he had been excluded it represented a tiny incident: spies and traitors being paid in funny money. In any case he had had no choice: he either accepted, or he let Claude die in hospital. He had absolved himself. It was an era of rotten morality. Bombing a defenceless town was a far greater crime. Neither Great Britain nor the United States appeared overly troubled by scruples. There were worse things than his racket. Even so, he would not go on. Palfy shrugged.

  ‘You’re putting yourself in a difficult position. For the sake of our friendship I shall try to extricate you. But if I’m not listened to, you’ll only have yourself to blame.’

  ‘The sake of our friendship? You’re weakening, Palfy!’

  ‘My life has changed greatly … love, you know …’

  He was not being ironic. He was in love. It occurred to Jean that if he revealed the truth to Geneviève, she might no longer see her Constantin in the same light.

  ‘And what if I talked to “Maman” about this business?’

  ‘You won’t. You’re a decent boy, stupidly honest, a chump through and through, and because you’re so fond of the high idea you have of yourself you are, quite simply, incapable of being such a rotter.’

  He was right. Palfy’s past would remain above suspicion as long as Geneviève kept out of the way of Salah, who knew some of the truth about Palfy, in the shape of the disgraceful Cannes affair in which he had attempted to launch a parallel network of call girls, with Madeleine as their coordinator. But Salah was a long way away and Geneviève remained without a protector. At the same time, however clear-sighted he was about his friend, Jean had no doubt either that Palfy loved Geneviève. She would never make a saint of him, but in any case she could not care less about saints, who made life impossible.

  Palfy was quick to guess the nature of any reflections t
hat concerned him and added, abruptly, ‘We’re going to get married.’

  He was trying to hurry things up. Papers were missing. Switzerland was refusing to allow him to stay longer than a month at a time. A highly placed lawyer had promised to solve the problem.

  ‘One is powerless in a country where the law is taken so seriously that they laugh in your face if you attempt to find a way out. Order is all very well, on condition that it’s full of holes.’

  But he was still in sincere mood.

  ‘We must see Julius,’ he said. ‘You can explain your situation to him in person.’

  ‘Is it absolutely necessary?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  Madeleine had lately begun holding musical evenings followed by a buffet supper. They were more sought-after for the buffet than for Mozart. German uniforms mixed with scroungers, music lovers and those cheerful crooks Paris was chock-full of. Jean recognised the Pole, whom people were starting to talk about a great deal: an associate of the Bessarabian Joanovici, who was also Jewish, he was plundering France on behalf of the occupying authorities. His wife, a cold, distinguished-looking German, was said to be the mistress of General von Z, head of the requisitions commission. Inside a year, people said, this physically ill-matched couple with such well-matched morals had made a fortune. The Pole’s name being unpronounceable, people called him Polo, a nickname he had quickly assumed to cover up his obscure origins and create an aura of familiarity around himself. Jean loathed him at first sight. In fact, he detested the whole tainted, dishonest, avid, self-satisfied world that had come to gorge on his country and sell it wholesale. The sozzled seriousness of the Germans listening to Sonata No. 40 in B flat major and No. 42 in A major for violin and piano was in stark contrast to the lack of attention of the French. A nation of music lovers? Then why had they started this war, and more importantly, how did they divide their lives between music and killing? It was said that Reinhard Heydrich, the Gauleiter of Bohemia and Moravia, who had died from the injuries sustained in an assassination attempt three weeks earlier, had played the violin to concert standard. The night before the attack, he and his wife had attended a concert. Yet the photograph of him that had appeared in Signal showed a man with the face of a dead salmon, already dead for twenty-four hours, a face so emblematic of cruelty one would never want to look such a person squarely in the eyes. Likewise the bevy of German officers sitting on Madeleine’s Louis XV chairs, lost in the music as if in prayer, reminded Jean of the grotesque farce mounted by Obersturmführer Karl Schmidt in June 1940.

  Palfy, it turned out, had not forgotten either. After the concert he came over to Jean.

  ‘When I think of that idiot of an Obersturmführer … Brahms! God, how boring. Now if he’d played us some Mozart, I’d have forgiven him for shooting us.’

  ‘Are you bored, Constantin?’ Madeleine asked, materialising behind them.

  ‘Not here, not ever. Jean and I were remembering an incident from our army days that made Brahms repellent to us for ever. I hope there’ll never be Brahms played here.’

  She looked upset. She knew nothing about music, and until her worldly career had taken off had never ventured beyond popular ditties. Julius had observed that she became bored at the concerts he took her to and, passionate about music himself, had engaged a teacher who came twice a week to introduce Madeleine to the great German composers, choose the programme for her supper concerts at Avenue Foch, and teach his very malleable pupil the basic vocabulary that she could use without danger in the company of genuine music lovers. Within months she had become known in Paris as a great patron of music. Her education was naturally patchy, and the name of Brahms unsettled her. She had not heard the name before, or perhaps had forgotten it. She was also scared of Palfy’s sarcasm and cutting wit.

  ‘Don’t worry, Madeleine, Brahms really existed. He looked like Karl Marx.’

  ‘I know I don’t know anything,’ she admitted. ‘Don’t make fun of me! Jean … Julius is waiting for you in his study.’

  The guests had left the drawing room and made a dash for the buffet. They had not noticed the absence of Julius, whom Jean found sitting at a Napoleon III desk, an annotated sheet of paper in front of him. It was not the same man. Where was his mask? Did the affable, benevolent, impassioned face of this great lover of the French way of life belong to the real Julius, while a false Julius, on duty, composed his features into a glacial, imperious frown? Jean, who had never liked him, was tempted to believe the opposite was true. At this moment he had the supposedly false Julius in front of him, with two lines suddenly appearing at the corners of his thin mouth and accentuating its true severity. Jean found him laughable, despite his cold, impenetrable stare. He sat down without being asked and crossed his legs.

  ‘I’m listening,’ he said.

  Julius, insensitive to such nuances, told him that one did not withdraw without risk from an undertaking such as the one he had been entrusted with. Of course he understood the young man’s motives, his scruples, his fear of arrest by the Portuguese police and handover to a foreign intelligence service, but that was part and parcel of the mission. He had not been chosen for an easy task. Since he had accepted the rewards, so he must one day accept the risks. Men of his age were dying in their thousands on the Eastern front to root out for ever the Marxist canker from Russia. Those who had the good luck not to be combatants owed it to the rest to possess strong nerves.

  ‘I’ve carried out the mission I was given,’ Jean said, ‘but not in the name of anti-Marxism. In any case I hardly know what Marxism is, and even less what anti-Marxism might be.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s time you started being interested in ideas.’

  ‘I occasionally have them. As luck would have it, they’re not usually generalisations …’

  Julius smacked the table. The conversation had taken a wrong turn and he regretted having shown so little severity until now that Jean felt able to make fun of him openly.

  ‘French irony has its charm, I don’t deny it, and I congratulate you on possessing it. But we’re dealing with something else here: you’re withdrawing from a mission whose secrecy is its strength. I’m warning you now: it’s impossible. If you withdraw I shan’t cover you. Not even knowing the affection Madeleine has for you.’

  Jean believed him. Julius’s bald statement might have thrown him into a panic. As it happened, it came at exactly the right moment. He studied Julius closely, as if wanting to imprint on his memory the features, hardened by severity, that so ill suited this supposedly decent man mixed up in serious affairs who this evening was at home, having invited everyone who was anyone in the occupation to hear a performance of his two favourite Mozart sonatas. He understood that the time for games was over. The reality of the danger had not yet sunk in, but he sensed it nevertheless, and decided he needed a day’s grace to ensure his freedom.

  ‘I’m expressing myself badly,’ he said. ‘I need to think, that’s all. I have an idea to put to you. I need twenty-four hours to see if it’s workable.’

  Julius was not easily deceived. There was too much at stake financially for him to allow Jean any leeway.

  ‘What is it, this idea?’

  ‘Give me till tomorrow and I’ll give you not just an idea but a plan.’

  ‘I can’t run that risk.’

  ‘In that case I’ll leave you.’

  Julius got to his feet, his face relaxed. The justice he had meted out satisfied him entirely. He stifled a surge of pride, came to Jean and put his hand on his shoulder.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘So am I. Will you do me a favour?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘If your guests haven’t cleaned out the buffet, I’d like to try your foie gras.’

  ‘With the greatest of pleasure!’

  They returned to the drawing room. Madeleine had been keeping an eye out for them. When she saw Julius smiling and holding Jean’s arm, her anxieties vanished.

  ‘Jean, I’ve kept yo
u a cold plate and a bottle of champagne.’

  ‘I’m leaving you in good hands,’ Julius said as he walked away.

  Jean tried to see who he was making for, who in this varied and chattering throng, released after the concert like a flock of birds, would detain him at the exit, but Madeleine was urging him towards the buffet, where several guests were still lingering. At a sign from her a butler bent down and extracted from beneath the table a plate attractively heaped with foie gras and cold veal.

  ‘Madeleine,’ Jean said after his first mouthful, ‘your Julius has just warned me I’m in danger. I need to leave here without being seen. He assured me you’d help.’

  She opened her eyes wide in astonishment. Her lover had never involved her in his affairs, and if a word out of place was ever uttered in her presence she pretended not to have heard.

  ‘What? You want to leave without anyone seeing you?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Madeleine’s face tensed. She did not understand. Colour flooded her throat. Suddenly she was afraid, a defenceless woman in a world where, until now, her safety had always been guaranteed. Was it about to start all over again, the way it had been before, a life of obscure threats like those that had oppressed her during her hard life as a woman of the street? Moved by her disarray, Jean tried to calm her. ‘It’s nothing, absolutely nothing!’ What good did it do to alarm her, to tell her the truth about the milieu in which she had blossomed so innocently, believing herself, in good faith, saved? The mirror over the buffet reflected a part of the drawing room in which the guests, glass in hand, spoke in small, languid groups, still slightly listless after the concert which, the Germans excepted, had rather bored them. In the centre of the mirror was Julius. He had taken Palfy by the arm and was speaking in his ear. When he looked up and caught sight of Jean and Madeleine together, acute annoyance appeared on his face. His expression hardened. Palfy seemed not to have noticed and had his head half turned, observing another part of the drawing room. Doubtless Julius had told Palfy what was going on. But what could he expect from Palfy? His friend’s present course of action allowed no room for error. He was accumulating a fortune and would not sacrifice his ambitions for anything.