A Hero of France: A Novel

by Alan Furst

  A few minutes after five, it rang.

  Its ring, two short jingles—they never heard more because it was always answered immediately—had become a crucial sound in the lives of the airmen, who came crashing back to earth from wherever reverie had taken them and leapt to their feet. This telephone line was a direct connection to the air defense system: from coast watchers to radars to young women who kept track of the bomber flights as they headed toward England.

  The pilots, in leather caps, goggles, and Mae West life jackets, ran for their planes and were taking off moments later. The thunder of their ascent was deafening—the battle for the skies of Europe was fought with the most powerful engines to be had: BMW and Daimler-Benz for the Luftwaffe, Rolls-Royce for the RAF.

  Sgt. Jan Kalisz was second in line as the Hurricanes climbed for altitude—the goal of any flying predator was always the same: high above the prey. Leveling off at thirty-five thousand feet, Kalisz fired a few rounds from his 20-mm cannon to make sure they were working. Five minutes later, the flight commander came on the radio: Messerschmitt 109s at eleven o’clock, Dornier bombers in tight formation a thousand feet below. Kalisz had been ordered to attack the bombers while others in the squadron would take on the German fighter planes assigned to protect them.

  Kalisz had been a pilot in the Polish air force and then, when the Poles surrendered to the Nazis in 1939, had flown a trainer airplane to France. When France fell, he’d flown his Dewoitine fighter to England. He was twenty-seven years old and had nine confirmed kills to his credit, which earned him the title of Pilot Ace, one of two in the Kosciuszko Squadron, but he looked nothing like the handsome pilots on the war-bond posters. In fact he looked like a factory worker—the wise-guy welder who smiles for the girls when the photographer comes around—with an honest face and clipped, straw-colored hair, the type always ready to take part in a practical joke.

  Now, to work. As he dove at the bombers, targeting one at the rear of the formation, he heard a warning shout on his headphones and a 109 flashed past his cockpit. No chance to fire so he again closed on the Dorniers below him, stayed in the dive, engine screaming, until he was three hundred feet away. Then he fired a short burst and pieces flew off the bomber while its portside engine trailed a thin stream of smoke. Almost. He pulled out of his dive and banked the Hurricane into a tight turn, meaning to attack again and finish off the bomber.

  But now orange tracer rounds flew past his cockpit, coming from a 109 flying directly at him. As the 109’s gunports twinkled, Kalisz felt the impact of machine-gun rounds hitting the fuselage of his Hurricane and fired his own cannon, the rounds passing above the oncoming fighter. They would hit each other in seconds but the German pilot flinched first and, just as he sideslipped away, showed Kalisz a fist with a raised middle finger.

  Meanwhile, chaos. Aircraft everywhere, tracer streams glowing bright in the dusk, a Hurricane spinning nose down as it fell from the sky, two fighters speeding through the clouds—a Pole chasing a German, both planes on fire, while in the far distance a parachute was floating slowly toward the ground.

  From down below, Kalisz now heard the steady rumble of exploding bombs and, a few seconds later, the Dornier formation changed direction, turning away, their mission completed. Kalisz followed them and was about to start a new attack when he saw what he thought was the same 109, climbing away from him. Almost in range, he had a try with his cannon but the 109 kept flying. Kalisz had missed his shot.

  Or had he? The 109 banked right and began to lose altitude—a tactic of evasion? Or a damaged aircraft? As Kalisz pushed his engine to full throttle, the pilot in the 109 changed his course and flew south, heading for his airbase on the coast of France. But Kalisz wasn’t going to let him get away, saw that he was gaining on the 109 and again he fired, and was this time rewarded with a fiery flash from the fuselage just behind the cockpit. That did it. As the 109 descended toward the sea, Kalisz realized the pilot was dead or wounded, so all Kalisz had to do was make sure that the plane hit the water. Tenth kill, he thought.

  Then the French coast came into view. Kalisz, having once experienced the fierce anti-aircraft fire that awaited him there, banked into a tight turn and headed home to Northolt. The chase had taken him over the wide part of the Channel and he was alone in the sky. His mind wandered; soon he would be back at Northolt, he wanted a cigarette and a large vodka, and another. Such pleasant thoughts absorbed him, but then his engine missed, and missed again, and a glance at the fuel gauge revealed that he was almost out of gas, the needle quivering near EMPTY.

  “Kurwa!” Fuck. That dead Nazi had taken his revenge. Firing his machine guns as the two planes flew toward collision, he’d punctured the Hurricane’s fuel tank, so Kalisz wasn’t going back to Northolt. Then his engine cut out and did not come back to life, its roar replaced by the sigh of the wind, the plane’s propeller turning slowly with the momentum of the aircraft. Kalisz made sure of his parachute harness, slid the canopy back and stood on the seat. To the west, below tumbled masses of black cloud, the top half of the setting sun glowed dark orange above the sea on the horizon.

  —

  14 April. Mathieu waited in a café across the street from the Père-Lachaise cemetery, the wind blew gusts of rain against the window and by the cemetery gates the old women who sold bouquets of anemones, waiting in vain for a customer, chatted beneath their black umbrellas. Dusk at three-thirty in such April weather, the branches of the old trees at Père-Lachaise still bare, the deserted street shining black in the rain. The café was almost empty, the barman working at a crossword puzzle, his newspaper spread out before him.

  Mathieu was here to meet a young woman recruited, and highly recommended, by Chantal and the two of them had chosen the nom de guerre Annemarie for her. Ghislain had done the research: Annemarie came from the high aristocracy, an ancient family bearing titles bestowed for battles won in the Middle Ages, such titles accompanied by grants of gamelands, vineyards, and villages in Burgundy. The family then prospered further with the French Empire and now lived on income from investments, principally in the French colonies of Indochina—rubber, and Senegal—phosphates and sugarcane.

  Through the raindrops running down the window, Mathieu could see the blurred form of the young woman, their newest courier. She looked around as she entered, spotted Mathieu and nodded at him. She was wearing a mocha-colored raincoat tied with a belt at the waist and carried a silk umbrella, lime green, with a carved ivory handle. She shook water off the umbrella and slid it into the urn kept by the door.

  As she walked to his table she seemed self-confident and determined, perhaps in her midtwenties, with the look and bearing of an aristocrat. She had a fair complexion, closer to pale, a tip-tilted nose, her hair ash-blonde with white fuzz at the temples. At the base of her throat she wore a tiny gold cross on a gold chain, and, on the fourth finger of her right hand, a signet ring. Not a wedding ring—according to the concierge that Ghislain had questioned she was escorted to occasional social events by young men of good family but never spent the night away from home, and attended mass twice a week.

  Mathieu stood, they greeted each other, then she sat across from him, met his eyes with a straightforward gaze and rubbed her hands, delicate skin chilled and reddened by the wind. “Would you care for a brandy, mademoiselle?”

  “Indeed I would…what a day,” she said. “My dog really did not want to go outside this morning.”

  Mathieu called out to the barman and ordered brandy and coffee for each of them, then said, “Terrible day, Parisian spring at its worst, but at least you have a fine umbrella.”

  “Pretty, isn’t it,” Annemarie said. “My grandmother brought it home from Shanghai.”

  “Shanghai?”

  “Yes, that generation imported tea from China. Anyhow that’s the story we tell. For me, I suspect they were in the opium trade, but you can’t say such things.”

  The barman returned with the brandy and coffee and Mathieu had a sip of each: the fo
rmer was bitter to the taste and burned all the way down, the latter was National Coffee—ground chestnuts and chickpeas and a hint of the real thing.

  Staring out the window at the cemetery gates, Annemarie said, “We always came here on the Jour des Morts, after All Saints’ Day in November. We brought along soap and stiff brushes and scrubbed the family mausoleum—a little stone house with urns and an iron bench. It’s on one of the main avenues, a few feet from where Corot is buried. We used to see a young man, an art student, we suspected—thick glasses, a beret—who every year set a bouquet of anemones on Corot’s grave.”

  “Do you like Corot?”

  “I do indeed, particularly the roads, lanes, really, that he painted.”

  “We have that in common,” Mathieu said.

  “I suppose the portraits are favored, the one we have is a portrait, a woman holding a book, but I would like to have a road, someday.”

  “Is it still at your house?”

  “Heavens, no! When the Germans were approaching Paris we moved the art to a vault in Switzerland, along with some of the jewelry. We did what we could—we have a Bentley hidden in a village, parked in a barn.”

  “Did your family lose anybody in the invasion?”

  “Thankfully we did not—we’re a naval family, when the wars come, so I have an uncle with the fleet in North Africa. Chantal is from a military family, they lost all sorts of people in the 1914 war.”

  “Tell me, Annemarie, why do you want to take part in the Resistance? You will be in danger.”

  “Yes, I know. But I am from an old family, we have fought for France since the Middle Ages. And I am a Frenchwoman, so honor plays a part in my decision. Really, one must do something.”

  “So you shall. We will provide you with false documents—you should get photographs from the Photomaton at the Samaritaine department store, with your right ear visible.”

  Annemarie nodded, then took a polite sip of her coffee, placed the cup carefully back on the saucer and said, “Well, it has been good to meet you, Mathieu, but I must be on my way,” stood, and shook hands.

  Mathieu watched her as she retrieved her umbrella and stepped out into the downpour. Seen through the rainswept window, Annemarie walked vigorously, shoulders back, head high. Mathieu took another sip of his brandy, the gloomy day had worn him down, and, for a moment, he realized just how lonely he was, then drove the thought away: not good to be thinking too much about oneself, a doctrine firmly impressed on him by his mother as he was growing up. With a sigh in his heart, he paid the bill and left the café for his next meeting.

  He was late getting back to the Saint-Yves, where Mariana, the hotel’s Belgian shepherd, was waiting for him in the hotel vestibule. At such moments he would lean down to comb his fingers through her ruff and she would greet him with two fast licks on the cheek. But, that night, she did it twice.

  —

  The following morning, the giant doorman from the Le Cygne nightclub came to the Saint-Yves with a message for Mathieu. He delivered the message in a bass rumble of a voice with a strong Russian accent. “Monsieur de Lyon ask me to say that Monsieur K has a friend he wants you to meet. Eight-thirty tonight, at nightclub. It’s alright? You will come to the meeting?”

  “Tonight at eight-thirty,” Mathieu said and the doorman, casting a wary eye at the watchful Mariana, said, “Good dog,” and left the apartment.

  “Monsieur K” was S. Kolb, and the “friend” was, Mathieu guessed, the contact mentioned in the deal that Kolb had offered him. Mathieu had said he would think it over, which evidently meant yes to S. Kolb, and whatever secret service directed him. No time for dithering, do what we tell you. Thus spoke power. And how much more of this, Mathieu wondered, would there be?

  Mathieu was prompt, the nightclub empty but for a couple of waiters—one reading a newspaper, one sleeping in a chair—and an old man in an apron, pushing a mop around the floor. Later on, the cellar would be all darkness and candlelight but now, illuminated by ceiling lights, the seductive gloss was gone, the Art Deco chic no more. As Mathieu stood there, de Lyon came down the stairs that led to his office, said, “He’s waiting for you,” and pointed upward with his thumb. His tone and the expression on his face suggested that Mathieu might not be pleased with what he found in the office.

  Mathieu’s reaction to what he found was: Rich English bastard from Mayfair. Or some other posh neighborhood in London. Based on his former life, and nights at the cinema, Mathieu recognized the breed. Kolb’s “friend” stood when Mathieu entered the office, he was wearing an ordinary tan raincoat and an ordinary gray hat and, like the French businessman he meant to imitate, carried a buckled briefcase under one arm. His face lit with welcome as he said, in decent French, “Ah, here is the famous Mathieu!” From his pocket he produced a dim, out-of-focus photograph taken through a shop window that made Mathieu, hurrying down a street, look sinister and hunted. “A fair likeness, I’d say, don’t you think?” To Mathieu he seemed like an arrogant, supercilious jackass trying not to seem arrogant and supercilious by being cheerful. His handshake was firm as he said, “I’m to be called Edouard, please do sit down.”

  When Mathieu was settled, Edouard said, “Care for a cigarette?” Rather self-consciously he took a tin case from his pocket and held it out: rolled cigarettes, as smoked by almost everyone in Paris, but these were produced by a cigarette-rolling apparatus. When Mathieu had taken one, Edouard lit it with a wooden match. Mathieu inhaled—the usual occupation tobacco. He was sure that all of Edouard’s clothing had French labels.

  “My associate S. Kolb says you are a dependable sort of fellow, and that we can do business with you.”

  “Does he? Perhaps I am, but we’ll see about business.”

  This answer was not what Edouard expected. “Now look here,” he said, “we might have let our arrangement mature in a more natural way, but at the moment we have an urgent problem and we need your help.”

  “And the urgent problem is…?”

  “We understand that you are a specialist in exfiltrating fugitive airmen from France and back to Britain, is that true?”

  “Specialist? Well, we’ve done our best, worked hard…”

  “Yes, we know, very good. Our problem is a fighter pilot, a Polish fighter pilot in what’s called the Kosciuszko Squadron. An ace pilot, the sort of man we need back in Britain, where he will be put forth as a hero—war-bond tour, visits to arms factories, that sort of thing, good for the public morale, which could stand a boost, just now.”

  “You don’t need him to fly planes?”

  “Oh he’ll do that alright, but first a bit of propaganda.”

  Mathieu hesitated, sensing he should go carefully with this man, then said, “If your pilot is in France, can you tell me how he got here?”

  “He had a punctured fuel tank and ran out of gas chasing an Me-109 over the Channel and parachuted into the sea.”

  “And then?”

  “The French mackerel fleet from Saint-Malo was just about to head for port when somebody saw a splash and went and fished him out.”

  Mathieu raised his eyebrows. “So far as I know, all the fishing fleets are patrolled by German E-boats.”

  “They are, but fishing trawlers spread out as they work and it was almost night, so the rescue wasn’t seen.”

  “Still, brave souls, taking a chance like that.”

  “No doubt. Anyhow, at dawn the pilot was in the back of a truck, hidden under a load of mackerel, and headed for the Les Halles market. From there, he was taken to the American Hospital in Neuilly.”

  “Was he injured badly?”

  “Not a bit, the American Hospital has been hiding fugitives since the first day of the Occupation.”

  “I had no idea,” Mathieu said.

  “Music to my ears. It’s a well-kept secret, you see.”

  “Does he speak any French?”

  “Not a word. Almost all Poles at a certain social level speak French, but this man comes of a workin
g-class family.” With that, he unbuckled his briefcase, brought out a well-stuffed manila envelope, and laid it on the table in front of Mathieu. Who let it sit there.

  “Twenty thousand dollars,” Edouard said. “You may want to count it now, or wait until later.”

  Mathieu slid the envelope back toward Edouard.

  Shocked and puzzled by this reaction, Edouard said, “What are you doing? Is it not enough? I was led to believe that money was a part of our bargain…surely you need money.”

  “Yes, we need money, but not this money.”

  “Oh? Can you tell me why?”

  “This money would help us, but it’s meant to establish your influence over our resistance operations, is that not so?”

  “You have my word, Mathieu, the people in your cell will always see you as their leader, you are their chief, you give the orders. There may be times when we require some action taken, but nobody will ever know that. Now be a sensible fellow and take what we’re offering. Please.”

  “No.”

  “You won’t help?”

  “We will help, we will get your pilot down to Spain, because we are an escape line, it is what we do for the Resistance.”

  Now Edouard was angry and a pink flush spread across the skin over his cheekbones. “Let me tell you something important, Mathieu”—he emphasized the name, whoever you think you are—“with our help you may survive—may. The average life of these escape lines is about six months. If I count from December, you have a month left, then you and your people will be arrested, at best sent to prison in France, at worst taken to Germany, where you will be put in a prison camp—Dachau, Buchenwald—or executed. You know, le petit mur.” The little wall, in argot meaning the wall where one stood to be shot. “Can you see them? Your friends who trusted you? Your…” Warned by something in Mathieu’s eyes, he stopped there.

  “We know the danger, Edouard, and we are very careful.”

  Edouard was furious, his voice cold as he said, “Very well,” snatched up the envelope and shoved it back into his briefcase. “Have it your own way.” There was more, a threat perhaps, but Edouard left it unsaid. He stood, thrust his briefcase under his arm, said, “I wish you good day,” and left the office.