A Hero of France: A Novel

by Alan Furst

  “What? Oh, no, I don’t mind.”

  “Are you still cold?”

  “Not like before,” she said.

  As they lay quiet, he realized that the front of him was still thoroughly chilled. Of course, after a while, they could turn and face the other way, but this position would have been, inevitably, provocative. But, he thought, better not. In the world of the Resistance, intimate relations were known to be dangerous and—more than one story was told about it—often led to catastrophe.

  Apparently the hay was tickling her face, so she took her hand from his chest and brushed it away, then held him as before, her hand white in the darkness.

  Once again, thunder rumbled in the distance, the smell of the hay was sweet, moonlight poured in on the stable below, and Mathieu felt his heart grow warm, warm for life itself. He took a deep breath and let it out, a kind of sigh.

  She said, “What is it?”

  “Nothing. I’m trying to sleep.”

  “I thought you sighed, that you…I don’t know.”

  “I always do that before I go to sleep.”

  “Oh, I see. Well, good night, Mathieu. Pleasant dreams.”

  —

  20 April. A chilly day in Hamburg, a few April snowflakes drifting down from an overcast sky. On a tree-lined street near the river Alster, Senior Inspector Otto Broehm was sitting at the wheel of a much-dented Hamburg police car. Next to him was a certain Magda, in her forties with long hair dyed brick red and a pretty face marred by a knife scar on her chin. But that had happened a long time ago, when she’d been a doorway whore in the infamous red-light district of the Reeperbahn. Now she was the madam of a high-class brothel in one of the better neighborhoods—prominent politicians of the city were known to visit Magda’s, as were the wealthy men of the shipping trade, doctors, lawyers, and bankers. One of the latter, a vice-president in charge of commercial loans, could be seen some way down the street, coming toward the car as he took his schnauzer out for a walk.

  “Is that him?”

  “Yes, that’s him alright, the Herr Doktor Schmidt.”

  Schmidt was built of solid fat, with beady eyes set above plump cheeks. “Tell me again, Magda, what he asked of you.”

  “To hide money he’d taken from his bank. ‘A lot of money,’ he said. I could keep it in one of my bank accounts, and nobody would be the wiser.”

  Inspector Broehm turned on the car’s ignition and drove slowly down the street. “Head down, Magda,” he said. “We don’t want him to see you with me.”

  Magda crouched, her head beneath the windshield. When Broehm turned the corner she sat back up. “I have to ask you,” Broehm said, “why are you giving him to us?”

  “He is a pig, Inspector. You know my girls, young and fresh and not yet hard, they are essential to my business. Well, Herr Schmidt likes to spank.”

  “Is that so unusual?”

  “No, my customers have their preferences and that’s certainly one of them. We understand such desire, and provide for their pleasure a carpet slipper with a leather sole. The girls know to cry out for mercy and, when their bottoms turn pink, the spanking is over and the customers’ appetites sufficiently sharpened. But with Schmidt it’s different, he makes the girls scream, loud, no acting, and he doesn’t stop until he sees tears, real tears, and the girls are bruised. My customers don’t wish to see that.”

  “You’ve told him to stop?”

  “Oh yes, told him more than once.”

  “And what did he do?”

  “He laughed at me, he knows he’s too important to obey the wishes of a madam.”

  “Very well, thank you, Magda, we will work with the bank for a time, and, once we know what he did and how he did it, we’ll arrest him.”

  “Will I have to testify at a trial?”

  “You won’t. You have my word.”

  “That’s all I need,” Magda said. “We’re lucky to have someone like you in Hamburg, Herr Inspektor.”

  Broehm let her out of the car and headed home for dinner. At fifty-three he was of average height with a comfortable paunch, slumped shoulders, and thinning gray hair. His grandfather had been a policeman, so had his father, and Broehm had joined the force on the day of his twenty-first birthday. He was a good cop, no, better than good, he was—and this was often said—the Inspector Maigret, the Hercule Poirot, of the Hamburg police. He worked long and hard, was a glutton for details, and something about him encouraged people to speak openly, to tell him things.

  Stopped at a streetlight, he filled his pipe and lit it, then drove off when the light changed. When he turned into the pleasant little street where he lived he saw, parked at his door, a Grosser Mercedes automobile with swastika flags mounted on the front bumpers. “Now what could this be about?” he said to himself.

  Entering his house, he found two men in the parlor, older, well dressed, who were making polite conversation with his wife. They introduced themselves, saying they were “from the Foreign Ministry,” and told Broehm that they were taking him to Berlin for an important meeting. “Not to worry, Frau Broehm,” one of them said. “We’ll have him back later this evening.”

  Once they were under way, Broehm sitting in the backseat, the three talked as the car sped down the broad highway known as the autobahn. Berlin was a hundred and eighty miles from Hamburg, they would be there in three hours or less.

  “Berlin was bombed again last night,” the man in the passenger seat said.

  “Was it very bad?” Broehm said.

  “Not so bad, not as bad as April ninth, when they bombed the opera house and the Unter den Linden Boulevard. You know Goering’s remark: ‘If a single bomb falls on Berlin you can call me Meyer.’ Well, he was Meyer last August, or Isidore or Chaim. And the Fuehrer was enraged back then. Anyhow, yesterday’s attack was the last straw, and every ministry has to submit a plan of action.”

  “Nobody thought the RAF would do it,” Broehm said.

  The driver shrugged. “Over six hundred raids on Germany so far this month, but, Berlin, you know, that’s different.”

  Broehm was not shocked; when the civilians of Britain were bombed, what did the Reich expect in return? “Yes, Berlin is different,” Broehm said carefully.

  “We must propose some kind of action against the RAF—for the Foreign Ministry that’s not so easy, we’re not the Luftwaffe, we’re not the anti-aircraft battalions, thus we’ve determined to focus on the British aircrews. Those who are shot down over Germany are captured, if they survive, and put in POW camps. But when the flyers land on French territory, we can only get our hands on some of them, others escape with the help of people who call themselves ‘the French Resistance.’ And these criminals are the responsibility of the French police.”

  “Are the police effective?”

  “They say they are,” the passenger said. “They have penetration agents who infiltrate the escape lines, then, when the police are ready, they arrest the whole lot, try them, and send them to French prisons—that is the agreement between us and the Vichy administration in the Occupied Zone. But, in the French courts, different laws apply in different cases, and some of the criminals serve only a year or two.”

  “You must have someone who makes sure the French police are doing their job,” Broehm said.

  “We do,” said the driver. “A diplomat in Paris, who talks to his Vichy counterpart.”

  “Yes, they talk,” the passenger said. “They talk and talk, then it’s time for lunch, and they talk some more.”

  “This situation cannot continue,” the driver said. “The RAF airmen who escape back to England return to the skies over Germany and bomb us again.”

  For a time, there was silence in the car as the pine forest of northern Germany flew past the windows. Then the passenger said, “We have read your dossier, Inspector Broehm, and it appears that you speak French.”

  —

  At the vast Foreign Ministry on Berlin’s Wilhelmstrasse—the administrative heart of the Third Rei
ch—Senior Inspector Otto Broehm was shown to an office with walls of polished mahogany panels, a mahogany desk, mahogany chairs, a large portrait of Adolf Hitler, and a smaller portrait of Joachim von Ribbentrop, the foreign minister. Across the desk from Broehm, the vice-minister was sleek, smooth, and perfectly groomed, like a man, Broehm thought, in a magazine advertisement. Before him lay Broehm’s open dossier.

  “Ah yes,” said the vice-minister, skimming a page in the dossier as he ran his index finger down the margin. For the next page, a “Hmm” of approval, a vigorous nod for the third page, and a smile as the dossier was closed. “You are the man for us, Herr Inspektor. We need a bloodhound, not a lapdog. Do you really speak French?”

  “I studied it in school, and I can speak and understand it, but if the person I’m talking to speeds up and starts using argot, I’m lost.”

  “It’s the same with me—I speak the French of diplomacy, but, beyond that…Anyhow, I ask because we will be moving you to Paris.”

  “And what will I do there?”

  “Oversee the French effort to destroy the escape lines. This sounds like an administrative job, doesn’t it, but that’s not what we have in mind—we want you to work with the details, we want you to involve yourself at the most basic level, you know, get your hands dirty. Much as you have done, very successfully, in Hamburg.”

  “Will the French detectives take direction from me?”

  “Those who are serious about their work will. The others should be transferred.”

  Broehm pretended to think it over, but he knew it would not be wise to refuse officials in Berlin. “These investigations take some time,” he said.

  “We know they do,” the vice-minister said. “But you’ll have help. There is a small Gestapo office in Paris, on the Rue des Saussaies, not very active at the moment, which is as the Fuehrer wishes. He has, so far, been easygoing with the French—most of them have been asleep since the Occupation, why wake them up? We don’t need another Poland, with children shooting at us. But now we must tighten the screw, so we’ve begun to strengthen operations in France: more investigations, better security. You just cannot, in an occupied country, have people running about and doing whatever they want, so there will be arrests and interrogations, and, as we catch them, more criminals will be sent to camps in Germany. Of course you’ll find the Gestapo eager to take part in this effort.”

  Broehm disliked the Gestapo, the secret police of the SS, bellowing Aryan brutes who were torturing and executing their way across Europe. Broehm spoke carefully, saying, “I’m sure they will be useful.”

  “There if you need them,” the vice-minister said. “I should tell you that they were interested in recruiting you, but we told them you were going to work with the Feldgendarmerie, the army’s military police. You’ll have the rank of major, and retain your position and salary on the Hamburg force.” Then he said, “So, Inspector, what will it be? You can say yes, or, on the other hand, you can say yes.” Followed by a laugh—just joking. But he wasn’t.

  Broehm knew the Feldgendarmerie. Operating against resistance in occupied countries they were known as the Heldenklauer, hero-snatchers, but that was better than working for the Gestapo. “I will be pleased to accept the assignment…honored,” he said.

  The vice-minister stood, shook hands with Broehm, then gave the stiff-armed salute. Which Broehm returned.

  —

  It had been an uneventful journey from Nanteuil to Paris—Annemarie, Mathieu, and Kalisz were at the Gare du Nord a few minutes after nine in the morning. Mathieu led Annemarie and Kalisz to a small hotel near the station, then took a Métro to the Sixth and walked along the Rue Dauphine to the Saint-Yves. In his apartment, he prised up the floorboard and removed a thick wad of occupation francs as well as dollars for the long trip down to the border. He then picked up the Beretta automatic, and, after a moment of reflection—the possibility of being searched weighed against the means to fight his way out of trouble—decided to leave it where it was. Meeting Mariana’s gaze—she was alert to the floorboard, knew that something important was kept there and always watched intently when it was pulled up—Mathieu now changed his mind, and secured the Beretta in the waistband of his trousers, where it would be hidden by his jacket.

  Next he went to the office of his other life and spent the rest of the day there, a foreign place to him now, and dealt with business. The people in his office were good to him, solicitous, speaking in soft voices, assuring him, without words, that they could carry on until he returned. In a way, they knew what he was doing, well, they knew but they didn’t know, which was the best Mathieu could do to protect them—just in case. At five he said goodby to his employees, their adieux warm and sentimental, as though they might never see him again.

  —

  A note had been left at the Saint-Yves, asking him to contact Ghislain, so, when Mathieu left the office, he found a bureau de poste, called Ghislain at the Sorbonne, and found him still at his desk. “Can you meet me at the Notre-Dame de Lorette Métro station?” Ghislain said. “Outside the entry.”

  “I can be there in twenty minutes,” Mathieu said.

  The Notre-Dame de Lorette church, and the Métro that served it, were in the Ninth Arrondissement; a sombre, run-down quarter with low rents for the white-collar working class, and commercial buildings where long hallways were occupied by cheap travel agencies, confidential agents—private detectives, pebbled-glass doors that said IMPORT-EXPORT, and, on street level, narrow shops where the merchandise was new but looked used and was forever on sale. Daylight was just fading when Mathieu reached the Métro entrance, Ghislain showed up ten minutes later. Mathieu was glad to see him arrive because he’d caught the attention of a policeman. “Let’s walk,” Mathieu said.

  “Did all go well at Nanteuil?”

  “It did not. The plane crashed as it landed.”

  “Merde, what happened?”

  Mathieu told the story, then said, “The pilot and Annemarie are at a hotel, we’ll start out for the south the day after tomorrow.”

  “Where we’re going is across the street from the church,” Ghislain said. “We’ve now acquired what’s called a mailbox, a place where messages can be left and picked up.”

  “I see. What will we do with Lisette?”

  “She’ll continue to deliver things on her bicycle, but the mailbox will make it easier on her.”

  Mathieu nodded. “At one time we left messages with Jules at the Café Welcome.”

  “The café is just for recruitment, at the moment, and I should tell you that Jules is getting anxious. He worries about this and that, and now he says that some strange-looking fellow has been hanging around, asking to see Mathieu.”

  “Strange looking?”

  “That was all Jules said—you’ll have to see for yourself.”

  “Maybe tomorrow,” Mathieu said.

  The mailbox, across the street from the church, was a shop that sold religious articles. A bell over the door jingled when the two entered, and a woman called out, “A moment. I’m in the back.” The shop smelled like sandalwood incense, and displayed crucifixes, fancy and plain, Saint Christopher medals, candles, bibles of all sorts, religious paintings—saints with halos, Madonna-and-Child scenes, martyrdoms, crucifixions—and statuettes of Mary and Jesus. The proprietor appeared a moment later. She was bent over, hunchbacked, in her sixties, and radiantly beautiful, her long, thick white hair wound in a bun, her eyes a startling bright blue. “Mathieu, allow me to introduce our new friend, Madame Vigne,” Ghislain said.

  “Pleased to meet you, Mathieu.” The light in her eyes seemed to grow brighter as she looked at him.

  “And we are pleased that you are willing to work with us, madame. Is there any particular reason you agreed to help?”

  “Well, your friend Ghislain asked me to, so I said I would. After all, one must do one’s bit, I think, and it’s easier for me because the Nazis deny the spirit of God. That is an evil way to act, so…”


  “It could put you in danger, Madame Vigne, if you are found out you might be arrested.”

  “I would suppose so, they might even kill me.” She smiled and shrugged. What will be will be.

  “Madame Vigne,” Ghislain said, “may my friend and I speak in your office?”

  “You are welcome to it, messieurs, now, any time at all.”

  As the two walked toward the back of the shop, Mathieu spoke confidentially. “Ghislain, where did you find her?”

  “Her spirituality is not exclusive—she does tarot readings and holds séances. Before my wife died she became a regular attendee and Madame Vigne was a great comfort to her.”

  The office, cramped and dusty, had an easy chair with stuffing leaking from its cushion, while its single decoration was a yellowing astrological chart tacked to the wall. Mathieu took the easy chair, Ghislain sat behind the desk. “This mailbox arrangement will be easier for Lisette,” Ghislain said. “It was her mother who telephoned me, and said that Lisette was growing ill with exhaustion.” They had both known Lisette’s mother, a hospital nurse, before the war and it was she who had originally been considered as a courier, but she was a fervent leftist and known to the police, so her daughter had volunteered in her place.

  “Also,” Ghislain said, “Lisette worked so much that the other students had a good idea of what she was doing, particularly a boy who liked her, and kept asking to join up.”

  “Yes? Well, even so, I expect she wants to continue.”

  “She would not have it any other way, but using the shop will cut down the time she travels after school.”

  “She needs food,” Mathieu said. “Steaks. Calves’ liver.”

  “It was suggested, but she won’t even consider anything from the black market—why should she eat well when others cannot? Anyhow, the story goes on. Last week, the boy, Lisette’s friend, was summoned to the office of the directeur of the lycée and questioned about several students, Lisette included. That’s what her mother told me.”

  “What did the boy say?”