by Alan Furst
—
Chantal let the next local pass, then took the one after so, by the time she and Sgt. Gillen reached Orléans, it was almost ten in the evening. They were met on the platform by a tall, lanky man with unruly white hair. He kissed Chantal on the cheek and shook hands with Sgt. Gillen. “I was beginning to worry,” he said. “You were due earlier.”
“We ran into trouble,” she said, “and had to change trains.”
“You can tell me in the car,” he said.
Dr. Lambert, Chantal explained, was allowed to have a car because he was a veterinary surgeon. He led them across the street to a dented, old Renault, its original red color faded to a pastel, that looked like it had been down too many dirt roads. After a few tries, the car started up and, with piston rods clattering and black smoke streaming from the tailpipe, they set off for the doctor’s house.
Chantal had been in Orléans years earlier and remembered that she had liked it; an ancient city, still beautiful despite a history of wars—its residents had helped to fight off Attila the Hun in the year 408, and the city had been taken from the English in 1428, during the Hundred Years War, the army led by Joan of Arc. As the doctor drove slowly on a stone bridge over the river Loire, Chantal recalled one of the better moments of her last visit: a meal in a side-street restaurant, morsels of young venison with griottes—dark, sour little cherries—in a peppery sauce, a local specialty. Had she been with her husband that night? Likely she had been, they were still together then.
“What happened to make you change trains?” the doctor asked.
Chantal described the salesman, and the young sisters.
The doctor listened carefully, his expression growing darker as Chantal spoke. When she was done, he said, “Poor France, denunciation has become a national disease. You didn’t happen to get a name, did you?”
“I didn’t.”
“Too bad.”
“What would you have done with a name?”
“I would have written it down.”
As for the two sisters, he said there were fugitive children running loose all over Europe. “Maybe, one night, the parents didn’t come home. Perhaps the parents had told them what to do in case that happened—go to your aunt’s house in Orléans. Or, at worst, the girls were scared of being put in some institution, so they took whatever money they had and got on a train.”
A few minutes later, they reached the doctor’s residence on the Rue Saint-Marceau, a three-story brick building with a walled garden—thus there were two entries, requisite for a safe house. Inside, Dr. Lambert led them to the kitchen and introduced the pair to his wife, sister, mother, and two RAF airmen, Flt. Lt. Hinton and Sgt. Wicks, also trying to make their way to Spain.
The doctor had made sure that dinner was saved for Chantal and the sergeant, a bowl of soup: potatoes, carrots, and onions, flavored by a few bits of chicken. Chantal was famished, and found the soup delicious. As for Sgt. Gillen, he finished his meal quickly and, more than happy to see fellow airmen, and happier yet to speak to people from his own country, asked the two what unit they’d been with.
“We were with the three-oh-eight squadron, Fourth Bomber Command, flying Wellingtons out of Biggin Hill,” Hinton said. He had thin, wispy hair, a mild face, and looked to be in his middle thirties.
“I was also in Wellingtons, the four-one-three, out of Croydon Field.”
“What did you do?” Hinton asked.
“Radioman.” Gillen said it with pride.
“I was the pilot,” Hinton said, “and Wicksy here was our bombardier.”
Wicks had wavy hair combed back from his forehead and, clenched in his teeth, a pipe with no tobacco. In the cardigan sweater and corduroy trousers that a courier had found for him, he looked like a schoolteacher, just about to work in his garden on a Saturday morning. Yet, Chantal thought, a bombardier, setting cities on fire.
“What happened to your throat?” Wicks asked.
“Not a bloody thing, the dressing is just an excuse not to talk because I can’t speak bloody French.”
“Nigel here speaks it pretty damn well,” Wicks said, “but the couriers won’t let him say a word.”
“School French, y’know, not French French,” Hinton said.
Hinton continued, “We saw plenty of tracer and we were damned lucky it didn’t hit us, but the evasion used up our air time and somewhere over northern France I realized we weren’t going to have the fuel to make it across the Channel, so I found us a field and landed. Tore the wheels off, no more than that. We all got out, then we saw flashlights and heard people shouting in German and made a run for the woods on either side of the field. The four who went left were caught, Wicksy and I weren’t. So, after two days of wandering about, wet and cold, we knocked on a farmhouse door.”
“We had an engine go bad,” the sergeant said. “Lost altitude, then we were hit by machine-gun fire. Two of us parachuted out but I never found my mate and…”
There was an old telephone on the kitchen wall—a wooden box with a receiver hung in a cradle on one side—and now it rang, two hoarse stutters, then rang again. As the doctor put the receiver to his ear, he held up a hand for silence. “Yes?” he said. Then, “I see, oh dear, poor Didi, I’m afraid you’d better.” He hung up and said to his wife, “That was Ronel, his poodle swallowed a bone, and he and his wife are bringing her over.”
“Dreadful people,” Madame Lambert said to Chantal. “Loyal to Vichy, more than loyal, and they don’t shut up about it.”
The doctor met Chantal’s eyes, pointed upward and said, “Now, please, Chantal.”
The doctor’s wife and sister hurried to clear the table, because the Lambert family surely didn’t have supper after ten. Meanwhile, the doctor herded Chantal and the airmen up the stairs, then used a key to open a door on the landing at the top of the staircase. Inside, an attic. There were two blankets on the floor and Wicks said, “Here’s where we sleep.” The doctor took two blankets from a pile in the corner and handed them to Chantal. “You cannot talk while these people are in the house. Not a word,” he said. “I’ll be back to tell you when it’s safe.”
The attic smelled of mildew and it was cold, the air damp and still, like the air in a room that hasn’t been heated for years. Chantal sat down, wrapped the blanket around herself and leaned against the wall. It was an old blanket that had, she soon realized, spent its earlier life on a horse. Next to her, Sgt. Gillen stared up at the beams, then his eyes closed and he went to sleep. It would help to know the time, she thought, but it was too dark to see the numbers on her watch. When a light rain started up, pattering on the roof above her head, the sound was hypnotic and soon had her asleep. Some time later, she woke to find the doctor squatting at her feet. “So, how is Didi?” she said.
“Very groggy at the moment, from the anesthetic, but she’ll survive.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“What time is your train tomorrow?”
“Midday.”
“The Ronels paid me with eggs, so there will be breakfast in the morning. And, as it’s after midnight, you may as well go back to sleep.”
“I will…I am tired all the time, now.”
“All of us, Chantal. It’s the work.”
—
Chantal and the sergeant reached the town of Bourges late in the afternoon, then took a two-car train to the tiny village of La Guerche-sur-l’Aubois, just to the north of the Unoccupied Zone, where, at the end of the village’s main street, Chantal found the small house she’d used before. She had told Sgt. Gillen what to expect, but he was still surprised. In the parlor of the house, ten people were waiting to be taken across the demarcation line into Vichy France.
From time to time, a passeur—a guide who led fugitives across borders—would appear and for a small fee, fifty francs, lead two or three people along a twisting route which left them in the Vichy Unoccupied Zone. Sometimes the local border guards would raid the house but they always made sure to let the passeurs know th
ey were coming. Most of them were related to the passeurs and they weren’t going to arrest family.
When it was their turn, Chantal and the sergeant followed the guide through an oak forest, across a rushing stream spanned by a tree trunk, then around a farmyard where the dogs barked at them but didn’t attack, and, at last, to the edge of a cow pasture. “Watch your step here,” the guide said. “Mind the cow flops. You’re in Vichy now, so I’ll go back for the next customer.”
Now Chantal and the sergeant walked a half mile to a cow barn, where the next courier would pick up the sergeant and take him into Spain. As they waited, Chantal said, “You will be on local trains down to the border. Crossing the mountain pass will require hard walking—I expect the smugglers will see your crutch and put you on a mule.”
They watched from the open door as a young man, dark and serious, made his way up a hill to the barn. Chantal said, “That is your courier, Ramón, a Spaniard who fought against Franco, then fled to France. I will go down there and talk to him, for I must be off if I’m to make the Paris train.” From Chantal, a tender smile. “Good luck, and safe journey.”
“Thank you, Chantal,” the sergeant said, “for all you’ve done…you risked your life for me.”
“For you, and for France, and I could go on, but your courier is almost here and it’s growing dark, so I will say goodby.”
—
Paris. 29 March. That afternoon the city wore its habitual colors—gray skies, gray stone—triste if you were melancholy, soft and inspiring when life went your way. Mathieu was meeting with Ghislain—the resistance name of his second-in-command—in an office at the Bibliothèque Nationale, the national library, that was made available to Ghislain for confidential meetings, its usual occupant arranging to be elsewhere for an hour. The office looked down on a courtyard and was apparently used by a senior librarian—there were books, some of great age, stacked on a long table with slips of paper inside their front covers, while the scent of old dust, old books, and the sweetish smell of library paste perfumed the air.
Mathieu and Ghislain had been friends long before the war, so their real names and circumstances were no secret, which was also true of Chantal and many others in their cell, trusted friends, acquaintances, and business associates, who had chosen to resist the Occupation. But, when they were engaged in clandestine work, in cafés, railway stations, even in private meetings, they used their resistance names: this was standard practice because it was safer—private meetings were sometimes not so private as you thought.
They had met initially when Mathieu attended Ghislain’s lectures at the Sorbonne, the latter a prominent ethnographer who, following Margaret Mead and Bronisław Malinowski to Melanesia, had published a book called The Kahwa People of the Trobriand Islands, and this much-praised publication had earned him a senior professorship at the Sorbonne. Mathieu had taken to the professor, fascinated by a view of culture directly opposed to the typical colonial assumptions—these were complex societies and their members were not “natives.” Mathieu would approach the lectern when the professor was done speaking and ask questions and, in time, he was invited to visit Ghislain’s office and the professor became a kind of father figure to the young student.
Ghislain was now in his sixties, with white hair, and eyeglasses in thin silver frames—the sort of eyeglasses that a priest might wear—his face set in a speculative, patient half smile, and, always, he paused before he spoke. Pear-shaped, and wearing loosely fitting gray suits, he seemed to be at peace with the world around him. A few months after the fall of France, Ghislain had become a counselor to the resistance cell, and second-in-command to Mathieu, who found his critical, penetrative mind to be of great value.
Both men lit cigarettes and, as they chatted about the news of the day, Mathieu counted out half of the five thousand dollars that Max de Lyon had given him. “This is much needed, right now,” Ghislain said. “It’s been three weeks since Bertrand was arrested, his wife was told she could expect help but it hasn’t come yet and she’s getting anxious. So I’ll have the lawyer convert the dollars into francs and bring some money over to her. Today. Then I’ll pay the expenses of a few couriers, and keep the rest for the future.”
“How is Bertrand doing?”
“Being in the Santé prison for two years will be difficult, but he’ll survive it. The lawyer will visit him every week, which will let the prison administration know that he has friends, and we paid to make sure he wasn’t sent on to a German camp.”
“And the English airman?”
“In fact a Scot. He is in a POW camp in Germany—there won’t be enough to eat but they’ll take decent care of him. There’s a kind of gentlemen’s agreement between the English and the Germans: the English treat their military prisoners well, which the Germans appreciate, so they don’t misbehave in their POW camps. Of course, if the war should begin to go badly for the Reich, that may change—Germans can be vengeful if they aren’t winning.”
“How is the wife taking it?”
“Not well. She has always thought of Bertrand as naïve and dreamy and she believes that we used those qualities to recruit him. She expected him to take over her father’s business, but he became a dramatist…to spite her, she suspects.”
“Might she go to some office and tell them stories?”
“Not as long as we pay her. Also, I think she knows there might be consequences.”
“We don’t do such things, Ghislain.”
“Not yet, we don’t.” Ghislain sat back. “That’s always the question with underground work—how rough do you play the game? I knew a man a few years ago, a Russian, he’d been to some training school for the secret services and he told me that his instructor had played a sort of game with one of the students.
“He asked him, suppose your country had been suddenly occupied, you never expected any such thing but it has happened. Then, one afternoon, your phone rings, it’s a man you’ve seen now and again, not quite a friend, who says he’s in your city for the day and needs a favor. It seems he has a heavy package, he can’t carry it around from office to office, can he leave it with you? It’s hard to say no, so you say yes.
“An hour later, a man shows up at your door with a package—your friend couldn’t come, so this man agreed to deliver the package, he’ll be back later to pick it up. You wait, and then, quite a bit later than you’d imagined, someone else shows up and takes the package. Now you sense you’ve been drawn into someone’s secret operation.
“A week goes by, and here’s your friend again, on the telephone. ‘Thank you for helping us,’ he says. Us? Which confirms what you feared—you’ve given them a hold over you. Now he needs one last favor, and makes it clear you don’t have a choice, do it, or they’ll give your name to the police. ‘I understand,’ your friend says, ‘that you know X, and that the two of you have lunch now and then.’ How do they know that? ‘Why not make a lunch appointment with him? For next Monday, say, at one o’clock, at such-and-such a restaurant.’ It’s only a lunch, so again you agree.
“Then, the morning before the lunch, your friend calls and says, ‘You are meeting X at one. At one-twenty, excuse yourself and go to the WC.” You follow orders, and the assassins arrive a few minutes later. You, and all the other customers, run like hell. From now on, you belong to them, whoever they are.
“Or, take a different view. You refuse to accept the package and, that afternoon, your friend is arrested, and shot. Well, you just avoided a serious problem. But you didn’t. Because the occupier is now expelled from your country and, a week later, somebody shows up and says he’s from some justice committee and you stand accused of causing the death of a patriot.”
It was quiet in the office, then Mathieu said, “Ghislain, are you suggesting that, sometime in the future, we will operate that way?”
“Tomorrow, no. But if the British lose this war, and there’s some chance they might, we may become desperate, and desperation leads to the actions described by the S
oviet instructor.”
“If the Americans enter the war, the British won’t lose.”
“That’s true. That’s why we listen to the BBC French service, that’s why we talk endlessly with friends, we want to know, when will the Americans save us? As they did in the 1914 war. And what we fear is that they won’t arrive, they’ll stay behind their ocean—there’s a good deal of powerful sentiment in the USA against intervention.”
“Let Hitler win?”
“They don’t say that, they say that Stalin is the real enemy.”
“And your Russian friend, what became of him?”
“Shot in the ’thirty-six purge, so I was told.”
—
When Mathieu left the library, he went for a walk on the Rue Vivienne, which ran from the Palais Royal up to the Bourse, a fancy street that featured the Galerie Vivienne, an enclosed passage with fancy shops beneath a glass dome. Walking along, his mind far away, Mathieu came down from the clouds and saw that he had just passed the Restaurant Maurice, an old favorite from before-the-war times. Mathieu was always hungry but today he felt it more than usual, and decided to have lunch at the Maurice and eat whatever rutabaga or sweet potato plat they’d cooked up for that day. At the maître d’ station he was asked, “Table for one?” As Mathieu opened his mouth to say yes, the maître d’ added, “Or does monsieur wish to dine in the upstairs room?”
He didn’t wink, a good maître d’ doesn’t have to wink, his voice and eyebrows do the job for him. Mathieu had plenty of money in his pocket, not resistance money, his own, and said, “The upstairs room, please.” Which meant he would be served real food, black-market food, at black-market prices. As he followed the maître d’ up the stairs, he smelled frites, thin-sliced potatoes deep-fried in beef fat, and thought, I would kill for a steak frites. The steak seared and running blood, the frites in a sizzling mound by its side. Dark gold. Crisp. And, if he were in luck, plenty of rich, brown sauce with peppercorns.
He was in luck. He tried to eat slowly, to savor the taste, ordered a second glass of red wine, but he was done before he knew it, swirling the last of the frites through what remained of the sauce on his plate. As he waited for his dishes to be cleared, he noticed a couple seated a few tables away, who had arrived just after he did. They were well dressed, in their forties, the woman, with an animated face and expressive hands, was amused by something her companion said and…