A Hero of France: A Novel

by Alan Furst

  My God it’s Klara!

  Yes, he was sure, it was his Sorbonne girlfriend from years ago, rabid communist, rabid lover. Klara Zeller came from an old Alsatian family, and looked Jewish but, technically, she wasn’t. In 1870, when the Prussians won a war with the French, they had absorbed the disputed province of Alsace-Lorraine. There had been a fair-sized Jewish population in Alsace but then many of them decided to emigrate across the new border to France, others changed religion, becoming Lutheran, hoping to be spared the tender affections of the Prussian government. Klara’s grandfather, who owned a department store—a profitable business that wouldn’t travel—had done that very thing, and the records were there to prove it, should the Germans inquire.

  Eighteen years old, Mathieu had been, and feverish, overheated, in a permanent state of arousal, and it was the same for Klara. She had aged: there were scowl lines between her eyes, some descent beneath her chin, and her abundant hair, once curly and wild, which she’d pulled back and tied with an Indian-print scarf, was now carefully cut below the ear and set. No more the cracked leather coat, now an ankle-length black wool coat trimmed with fur.

  And who had she married? A rather plain fellow, powdered and neatly barbered, a man of substance. Who squinted briefly at the addition, then produced a wallet from an inside pocket, drew out a few large-denomination bills, and handed them to the waiter. When the waiter reached for change, the man-of-substance stopped him with an imperious wave of the hand. Then he stood, pulled Klara’s chair back for her, and took her elbow as they left the upstairs room. Mathieu wondered if Klara had noticed him, and decided she had not. Anyhow, what did he want with her? This answer he knew—memories of the affair had manifested themselves beneath the tablecloth. Oh well.

  But, as Mathieu was served a green salad, she reappeared, went back to her former table and, from a chair, retrieved a pair of suede gloves, then hurried over to Mathieu’s table, kissed him lightly on the forehead and handed him a five-franc note—a telephone number written on it with a waiter’s pencil.

  —

  They had first made love twenty-two years earlier. Klara’s aunt and uncle had asked her to water their houseplants and, after making sure she had a key, they left for Cap Ferrat and she and Mathieu were in the maid’s room by late afternoon. It was the first day of August, hot and humid in Paris, and quiet, with the Parisians off for vacation, so when Klara opened the window there was only the sound of birds singing in the trees that bordered the street below. Klara unrolled the mattress on the narrow bed and covered it with a sheet she found in the linen chest.

  Facing each other, they began to undress—Klara had worn pink panties for the occasion and, after a moment of hesitation, pulled them down. After that, they just stood there and stared at each other, getting a long, hungry look at what they’d wanted to see for three months. Finally, Mathieu took her hand and led her to the bed. Klara was a virgin, cried out when he entered her, then spent the night with a towel between her legs.

  Mathieu was not a virgin, had been twice with prostitutes in cheap hotels, where he’d been shown how it worked—his early sexual education little more than a pamphlet with instruction on the order of “The daddy uses his penis to plant the seed in the mommy,” and the prostitutes had led him well beyond that.

  It had been a lengthy courtship; the first time he put a hand on Klara’s breast she took it off, the next time she let it stay. They danced at a summer pavilion and as they circled slowly her thigh accidentally pressed against him. When he called her a naughty girl, she submitted to a playful spanking. He rubbed oil on her back at the beach and she returned the favor, moving her hand slowly, babbling about God-knew-what as she caressed him, the soft pressure of her fingers like nothing he’d ever known—she was good at this, it was far more natural than artful. What else might she touch so sweetly? When, as he kissed her good night at the door, her parents snoring away in their bedroom, she guided his hand where it had never been before, he didn’t know exactly what to do so held it still until she said, breathing hard, “I think you had better go now.”

  After the night of the towel, they became serious lovers. Each time she undressed, he liked to look at her before he touched her: the lush body of an eighteen-year-old, silky skin a shade of ivory and, when she opened her legs for him, the color known as rose de dessous—the pink of underneath.

  Meanwhile, Klara read Ten Days That Shook the World, John Reed’s story of the Russian Revolution, and attended communist rallies as civil war raged in the USSR. She handed out leaflets in the street, she marched, calling out “Front de Gauche!”—Left Front, as she thrust her fist in the air. Mathieu was often at her side, but could not abide the meetings, and did not join the party. By autumn they were experienced lovers, and he’d discovered how much he treasured the moment when she gasped and quivered, and later realized that this was what he desired of women more than anything else. The affair lasted five months—she met someone she liked more than she liked Mathieu, someone far more passionate about politics than he was, also better looking. That was hard on him, he moped for a couple of weeks, but there was this girl he’d met and…

  —

  Mathieu telephoned the day after the meeting in the upstairs room. Klara was obviously not alone; when he said, “Klara, can we meet sometime?” she said, “It’s Michelle.” Then she paused and said, “Oh Michelle, an afternoon tea, that would be wonderful. At Monique Vallon’s apartment? I haven’t seen her for ages!”

  “And where does Monique live?” Mathieu asked.

  “Wait a minute, yes, twenty-two Rue Champollion, is that right?”

  Mathieu repeated the address and wrote it down.

  “Wonderful, then I’ll be there, Thursday at four.”

  “So will I,” Mathieu said.

  “À bientôt, Michelle. Until Thursday.”

  —

  Thursday, four in the afternoon. The Rue Champollion was in the Fifth Arrondissement, the student district, battered old buildings near the Sorbonne. Number 22 had a cheap restaurant at street level—Klara lives here? Nostalgia for student days maybe, but hard to believe that the Klara he’d seen at the Restaurant Maurice would be comfortable in this quartier. When Mathieu rang the bell at the exterior door, the concierge let him in and said, “Madame is expecting you, she’s on the third floor.”

  Klara heard him coming up the stairs and when he arrived on the third floor she was waiting at the open door. Polite greetings and Parisian-style kisses were exchanged, then, once more, they stood gazing at each other, twenty-two years had gone by but there is nothing quite like your first lover. She wore a silver-gray knit sweater dress with a belt, a long, lavender scarf tied loosely at the throat, and Chanel perfume. She said, “Won’t you come in?”—the formality relieved by a certain sparkle in her eyes. As he followed her into a large, airy room, he saw that she was rather more ample than she had been but to him that was no bad thing. On a coffee table in front of a sofa there was a bottle of wine and two crystal glasses.

  “This isn’t where you live, is it, Klara?”

  “Oh no, it’s a spare room I rent from a friend—it belongs to the adjoining apartment but it has its own door. It’s somewhere I can come when I want to be alone.”

  Mathieu’s professional interest asserted itself; to any resistance cell, spare rooms, often unused maid’s quarters, were like gold in the crowded city. You could hide three fugitives in here, Mathieu thought.

  She lowered herself to the sofa, legs together and swung to one side, and patted the cushion next to her. “Let’s have a glass of wine, dear, and talk about old times.”

  They talked, they flirted, her phone rang but she didn’t answer it. She asked him what he thought about the Occupation and he said this was no time to think about such things. She angled her face, moved toward him, and closed her eyes. It was a long, busy kiss, she put a hand to the side of his face while he stroked her back, and, when the kiss ended, they looked at each other with fond smiles. Now that
she was seated, the hem of her dress lay just above the knee and he moved it up a little further, and then more, to a point where the clips of her garter belt were fastened, which left a few appetizing inches of bare skin for his fingertips.

  “Slowly, dear,” she said. “We have the entire afternoon to ourselves.” She reached down and tugged her dress back where it belonged. “Would you care for a little more wine? I think I’ll have some.” She took the bottle from the coffee table and refilled their glasses.

  Perhaps, he thought, a pang of guilt. After all, she was a married woman, about to stray with an old boyfriend. “Klara,” he said, “the man who was with you at the restaurant, is he your husband?”

  “He is. A decent man, difficult at times, but we get on well together.”

  “But you do what you like.”

  “Yes, I always have, it seems to be my nature.” After a moment she said, “I try to live from pleasure to pleasure but that’s not so easy now. If only the horrid Boche would go away.”

  “We all wish for that, Klara.”

  “Is wishing enough, do you think?”

  “What else is there?”

  “Well, some people resist, you know. They write leaflets or deface the German posters or…other actions that oppose the Occupation.”

  “Yes, of course I’ve heard about it,” he said. “The Resistance.”

  “I have a few friends who are prepared, when the time comes, to do just that,” she said, determination in her voice. “Are you ever tempted? I remember you as a man who didn’t like to be pushed around, what happened to him?”

  Merde, she was recruiting him—this room was the equivalent of his apartment at the Saint-Yves, a safe house. “Klara, I’m curious, are your political opinions the same as when we were together? Are you still faithful to the party?”

  “Yes, I’ve never changed.”

  “But, the way things stand right now, with the Hitler-Stalin alliance, the party opposes resistance, no?”

  “For now, that’s true, but it won’t be forever. Hitler will invade Russia, and then we’ll be able to work against the Nazis. Will you join us?”

  Mathieu sighed. “Klara, this is all a little deep for me, I’m just trying to live day by day.”

  “Still, you should think it over. We would work together, you and I, with my friends.”

  Regret in his voice, he said, “I don’t think I would be very good at conspiracy.” The meeting at the Restaurant Maurice had been no accident, he realized. Klara and her husband, if he was her husband and not a fellow operative, had followed him, because Soviet spymasters, aware of their long-ago love affair, had determined to take advantage of it. Clandestine networks run from Moscow were nothing new in Paris—there had been a series of highly publicized trials during the thirties as the police uncovered espionage operations.

  “One learns conspiracy, in the same way that one learns a foreign language,” she said, her tone now challenging and hard. “And in time you’ll have to learn it, because the day is coming when we’ll all have to take sides—the old regime or the new, that will be the choice.”

  “Yes, I suppose it will be, but, for now…”

  “I would ask you, please, to keep our rendezvous a secret. My friends don’t like to be talked about.” Her eyes met his to confirm the threat.

  “From me, not a word,” he said, looking at his watch.

  “Do you have to be somewhere?”

  He nodded, rose from the couch, leaned down and brushed her cheek with his lips. “Another time, perhaps, we’ll see each other.”

  “Yes, I hope so,” she said, clearly disappointed. By an old love affair that would not have an encore? Or by a failed recruitment? Maybe both, he thought, but he was wrong and he knew it.

  —

  It was after six when he left Klara’s apartment, headed for the Saint-Germain Métro station. As he worked his way along the crowded boulevard, it occurred to him that this part of the evening, five to seven, l’heure bleue, had been much loved by Parisians, the time for love affairs, the time for discreet hotel rooms, but the people on the boulevard, Mathieu suspected, were going home to hide away until they had to go to work in the morning.

  Up ahead of him, Mathieu saw a German officer stride past a Parisian man—a small, unremarkable fellow, then the officer spun around and shouted, “You! Halt!”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you.”

  “What did…?”

  The German’s French was terrible, but the man understood what he ordered: “Stand at the edge of the sidewalk and face the traffic.” The man did as he was told but nothing happened right away, the German let him stand there for a few moments. From people hurrying by, sidelong glances, but nobody dared to stop. Finally, the officer drew his leg back and gave the man such a hard kick in the backside that he stumbled and went sprawling facedown in the street. The officer walked away.

  Mathieu hurried over to the man and, with hands beneath his armpits, helped him to his feet. The man, brushing himself off, said, “That sonofabitch could really kick.”

  Mathieu said, “What happened? Did you say something to him?”

  “No, not a word. But I stared at him, looked him in the eyes, and that made him mad.”

  “Are you hurt?”

  The man rubbed his bottom and said, “I’ll be sore in the morning.”

  There was an older woman who had stopped after she’d seen the incident. “May they burn in hell,” she said, voice trembling with anger. Some people gathered near her muttered in agreement.

  —

  It was one-thirty in the morning, rain beating down on the pavement outside the Le Cygne nightclub. Mathieu had received a hand-delivered note at the Hôtel Saint-Yves: Max de Lyon, the owner of the nightclub, had asked him to come and meet a friend—Mathieu could stay in a room above the club until the curfew ended. So, in time for the meeting, he descended the stairway to the basement.

  From the foot of the stairs, Mathieu looked out over the scene. What a zoo! Le Cygne was packed: Parisian underworld types, black-market royalty, German officers of high rank—some wearing monocles, some with sabre scars—and their showy girlfriends in glittering gowns, the whole crowd as drunk and merry as could be. Amid a haze of cigarette smoke, in darkness cut by theatrical spotlights, the floor show: to the accompaniment of a trio, saxophone, piano, and drums, a line of twelve naked dancers did the cancan, bumping, grinding, and kicking their legs high in the air. And there among them, Mathieu saw, the young woman he’d watched as she auditioned for a dancer’s job.

  Seated at his usual table, in suit, black shirt and pearl-gray tie, de Lyon waved him over, and Mathieu sat next to a man who’d stopped by to see the nightclub owner. “This is Stavros,” de Lyon said, nodding to a swarthy bear of a man with oiled hair who wore a baggy silk suit.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Stavros said, then turned to de Lyon and continued a conversation—with a glance at Mathieu, the outsider who’d joined them—saying, “So we think that Albert will, um, take care of it.”

  “Quietly?” de Lyon said.

  “With him? Always, you know Albert, and, uh, this kind of job is something he does well.”

  “And money?”

  “Don’t think about it—Albert is grateful, you know, for getting him out of…trouble. I will tell him it’s, the number we said, and he’ll nod, in that way of his.”

  De Lyon said, “Then we’ll go ahead, Stavros, and you’ll let me know when it’s going to take place.”

  Stavros stood and said, “I’ll be going back to my table,” then offered a hand to Mathieu—he had a grip like a steel vise—and said, “Glad to meet a friend of Max’s.”

  When he was gone, de Lyon said, “Good old Stavros, he is from Macedonia and, at age fourteen, was already fighting Bulgarian bandits. After that, being a gangster was easy.” De Lyon smiled. “Valuable, a man like Stavros, not much he won’t do…actually, nothing he won’t do.”

  A German officer, not so steady on
his feet, approached the table. De Lyon stood, Mathieu followed his lead. “Colonel von Hartz, allow me to introduce my friend Henri.” The colonel clicked his heels and, with a brief bow of the head, spoke through a fume of alcohol. “Honored to meet you, monsieur.” Then he drew a chair closer to de Lyon, sat down, and said, in an undertone, “Monsieur Max, I am enchanted by one of your dancers…the one at the end of the line, on the left.” He meant, Mathieu realized, the dancer from the audition.

  “Oh yes, you mean Lulu, pretty girl.”

  “Pretty, and more, her…she has a comely shape, such a comely shape, she has.”

  “She does, doesn’t she. A gift of nature.”

  “Would it be possible, that is…could one have…an introduction?”

  “I don’t see why not,” de Lyon said.

  “Ach, I would be so pleased to meet Lulu!” He smiled a great, beaming smile.

  “I will speak to her in the dressing room,” de Lyon said. “But…well, you ought to know, she is not entirely in good health, so, protection is always important, we men must be careful.”

  The colonel’s smile disappeared and he said, “I see. So…”

  “Shall I introduce you to Lulu?”

  “Perhaps later, Monsieur Max. Later on…Thank you.” The colonel said good night and staggered away.

  De Lyon sighed, then said, “I try to protect them—the ones who want to be protected, some of them are eager to sleep with the conquerors.” He paused, then said, “Did you see the medals on him?”

  “Yes, quite a few.”

  “Battlefield decorations, Mathieu, from the invasion of France.”

  Mathieu just shook his head.

  “Enough of that,” de Lyon said. “So tell me, Mathieu, how goes the war?”