A Hero of France: A Novel

by Alan Furst

  Broehm squared up the dossiers before him and said, “We will start with these, Madame Passot, and see what can be done. Don’t be in a hurry, take your time, I’m sure you took notes, but I will welcome all the details that occur to you as we go through the interviews.”

  “Yes, sir. I will begin with the wife of prisoner eight-four-six, Roche, Louis, who was apprehended while trying to pass through the document control at the Gare Saint-Lazare railway station.”

  —

  The following day, Major Broehm was driven to La Santé—a soot-blackened brick building erected in 1867, in the Fourteenth Arrondissement. His first impression on entering the prison was twofold: a strange, eerie silence, a silence that seemed to echo—talking was forbidden at certain times of the day—and the eye-watering smell of the disinfectant bleach known as Javel water.

  The prison administration had made available the basement room used for interrogation, a kind of dungeon—gray walls stained with moisture, a single bulb in a wire cage hung from the ceiling, and a table and three chairs, two on one side, and one, bolted to the floor, on the other.

  The first prisoner he would see that day was called Roche, a schoolteacher from a village on the southern edge of Paris, who had been caught taking an RAF tail gunner out of the Gare Saint-Lazare. Manacled at the wrists and ankles, Roche was escorted into the interrogation room by two prison guards.

  “Take those things off him,” Broehm told the guards.

  Dutifully, the guards did as they were ordered, left the room and closed the door. Broehm, reading over the prisoner’s dossier, let Roche stand there for a time. He was a small young man, pale from life in a prison cell, who, his eyeglasses stolen on his first night at the Santé, squinted as he stared at Broehm. Who was not an intimidating presence: he was of average height with a comfortable paunch, slumped shoulders, and thinning, gray hair. When Roche entered the room, Broehm was smoking his pipe. “Number eight-four-six?” Broehm said, looking up from the dossier. “That is, Louis Roche?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Monsieur Roche,” Broehm said—the usual form was “prisoner,” not “monsieur,” followed by a number—“please sit down. Would you care for a cup of coffee?”

  “Yes, sir, I would like a cup of coffee.”

  Broehm went to the door and asked the waiting guard to bring them a mug of coffee, with sugar. Then Broehm returned to the table, studying Roche’s dossier and making notes until, a few minutes later, the coffee arrived. As Roche took his first sip, Broehm said, “Did they put in the sugar?”

  “Yes, sir, the sugar is plentiful.”

  “Not so good to be in prison, is it, Monsieur Roche.”

  “No, sir, not very good in here.”

  “Do you regret what you did?”

  Roche nodded, but did not speak.

  “I understand patriotism, of course, but it can be costly. How is your family doing?”

  “Not too well, sir, they haven’t enough to eat, and they were cold in the winter—they had little money for heating.”

  “You know, I believe that’s the hardest part of serving time, the effect on the family. How long have you been here?”

  “Five months and a few days, sir.”

  “And how much time will you have to serve?”

  “Another three years…the sentence was forty-two months.”

  “Three years!”

  “Yes, sir, three years.”

  “Would you like to get out earlier?”

  “Of course, sir, who wouldn’t?”

  Broehm shook his head, slowly, a gesture of sympathy. “If there is such a person, I don’t know him. You are never the same, you know, after a term in prison, it changes a man.” Broehm’s pipe had gone out and he relit it with a wooden match. “Tell me, Monsieur Roche, do you suppose the English appreciate your sacrifice?”

  “I wouldn’t know what they think, sir.”

  “Well, there are those of us who find them cold-blooded—you helped them, but I doubt they would help you.” He paused, then said, “And do your friends come to visit you?” “Friends” was said in such a way that it suggested fellow conspirators.

  “No, sir, only my family.”

  “I’m surprised,” Broehm said. “Perhaps they don’t like the idea of showing their documents to prison officials, could that be it, do you suppose?”

  “I can’t say, sir, you would have to ask them.”

  “I’d be happy to ask them, if you’ll make a list of their names and addresses.”

  Roche looked down at the floor. After a time, he said, “I wouldn’t know who to name, sir—I believe the police interviewed some of the other teachers at my school, but I don’t really have many friends, I used to spend all of my spare time with my family.”

  “You said you would like to be released before your sentence is up. What would you be willing to do in exchange?”

  Now Roche seemed honestly puzzled. “What would you want me to do?”

  Broehm waited, letting the silence gather, giving Roche time to consider an answer to his question. But the prisoner simply sat quietly and stared down at the floor. When, after three or four minutes, Roche had found nothing to say, Broehm spoke again, his tone regretful but far from angry, almost affectionate—I’d like to help you but you refuse to be helped. “Finish your coffee, Monsieur Roche, then I’ll call the guard and you can go back to your cell.” He drew a business card from his pocket and handed it to Roche. “Louis, take some time to think it over, think about the people who need you, who suffer because of what you did. And then, think about the people who talked you into breaking the law—they can’t help you now but I can, and my offer stands. If you decide you want to speak to me again, give the card to someone in the warden’s office and simply say that you would like to meet with me.”

  Roche raised the mug and finished his coffee, holding the card in his other hand—the prison uniform had no pockets. Courteous and diffident, he said, “Thank you, sir, for the coffee.” Later that day, a guard found the card on the floor of a corridor.

  —

  Oh well, Broehm thought as he left the prison and its silence. He’d had hundreds of such interviews, most of them failed to produce results and over the years he’d become philosophical about that. In this instance, he’d been hunting for a wolf and had turned up a rabbit. But a brave rabbit, when all was said and done, who had acted on his ideals and resisted the Occupation. In fact, the information that Roche declined to give him didn’t matter; Madame Passot’s office had informed Broehm that the escape line Roche had worked for no longer existed, its leader, along with most of its couriers, had been arrested. Broehm had interviewed four other prisoners, from various resistance cells, with much the same results. One of them had wavered, tears in his eyes, but, in the end, held firm.

  Outside the prison, another world: everyday life in a busy neighborhood; work over for the day, Parisians went about their business, waiting in line at the markets, sitting in the cafés, pedaling home on their bicycles. Walking along the Boulevard Arago, he noticed that the people in the street did not look at the prison. Was there, in this crowd, someone he could use? Likely not, he thought. But I only need one.

  A certain type—he knew them all too well from years of experience as a detective, he knew how they acted, how they spoke, how their minds worked. These were people who would do anything to win at what they saw as the game of life, who had no allegiance to anyone or anything beyond themselves, who were gifted liars, who could scheme their way into almost anyone’s confidence, then betray them without hesitation. If they were criminals—and that species of the breed was the most familiar to Broehm—they believed in their hearts that everyone was a criminal, everyone was a hypocrite. To such people, the only thing on earth that mattered was their own existence; what happened to their victims, and they left a trail of victims, counted for nothing—it was their own fault, too bad for them.

  This was what Broehm needed, a predator, a monster. So then, wher
e was he?

  —

  The following day, Broehm drove out to the gendarmerie post in the town of Senlis, not far from the village of Nanteuil-le-Haudouin where, on the eighteenth of April, a Lysander aircraft had crashed as it attempted to pick up a fugitive RAF airman. A captain of gendarmes, a stolid, cautious, veteran officer, had been ordered to meet with him and together they drove to the wheatfield where the Lysander had crashed and burned. Broehm tried to secure the captain’s confidence but his attempts at amiable conversation were, politely, rebuffed.

  The burned-out airplane had been taken away soon after the crash and all that remained, as Broehm and the captain reached the site, was charred earth, plowed after the accident, with wheat stalks probing up through the ground. Walking across the field, Broehm saw a fragment of cloth half buried in the dirt and stooped down to pick it up. Old habit—there was nothing to be done with it, still, he put the bit of cotton into his pocket. When he looked up, he saw that the captain was faintly amused. “Tell me, Captain, did you take part in the investigation of the crash?”

  “I did, and a report was written. If you’d care to read it you’re welcome—it’s in a file at headquarters.”

  “And did you find out who was responsible for the escape?”

  The captain shrugged. “We had our suspicions, but the local paysans don’t really talk to us. An old tradition in rural France—they talk to the authorities but they say nothing.”

  “Yes, I know about that,” Broehm said.

  “In Germany, that would be.”

  “Yes, in Germany.”

  “Mmm.”

  And that said it all, that “mmm.”

  Still, Broehm persisted. “How was this managed, do you think? Who arranged the pickup of the pilot?”

  “Probably an office in London,” the captain said.

  “And the link between the local farmers and the English officials?”

  “We have no idea, Major. Obviously the London office was in contact with the chief of an escape line, but who the individual was, that we don’t know. And, I suspect, the local people don’t know either; a name was used, but it would have been an alias, a nom de guerre.”

  “Very well, there’s nothing further to see here. We might as well return to Senlis.”

  Together, they walked back across the field and, when they were seated in the captain’s command car, Broehm lit his pipe. They drove in silence for a time, bouncing along the rutted dirt path, then Broehm said, “Well, there wasn’t much to see, but I want to thank you, Captain, for your cooperation.”

  “I’m glad to be of help,” the captain said, with not a hint of sarcasm in his voice.

  He would, Broehm thought, read the report when they reached Senlis. That was his method—follow every lead, take nothing for granted. But he knew the report wouldn’t help him, just as he knew the captain wouldn’t help him, and, he now began to understand, the French police wouldn’t help him.

  —

  28 May. Deauville.

  There were twenty arrondissements in Paris, Deauville was sometimes referred to, in jest, as the twenty-first. It was, on the Normandy coast north of Paris, a magnet for the Parisian upper classes. Oh, we’ll be up at Deauville for the weekend, staying at the casino.

  As was Mathieu. He stood at a hallway window outside an office on the top floor of the Grand Hôtel et Casino Régence and looked out at the view: a version of the scene beloved by artists of a certain sort—La Plage à Deauville was a much-used title—that showed bathers, striped umbrellas, usually a dog or two, children with pails and shovels, and, almost always, the French tricolor flag flying in the wind so you could see the blue, white, and red. The view from the window was not unlike the paintings—seen from above, golden sand spreading into the distance—only there were no children, there was no flag, and these were not Parisians, splashing in the surf, these were Germans. Officers, he thought, tall and well built, lying on colorful beach towels, playing with a soccer ball, swimming as though in competition.

  “Hello, I’m Frankel, sorry to keep you waiting.”

  The voice came from behind him and Mathieu turned to discover the man he’d come to see, Monsieur Pierre Frankel, owner of the hotel-casino. He was a short man in his sixties, with thick-framed eyeglasses, who wore a tan summer-weight suit cut in a way that might be called sharp—too square at the shoulders, too wide at the lapels. Frankel, standing next to Mathieu, looked out at the scene and said, “Enjoying the view?”

  “Not much.”

  “How they love it up here! This is what they fought for, after all, la belle France.”

  “They won’t have it forever,” Mathieu said. “Only until somebody makes them go away.”

  “ ‘Somebody’ is a hundred miles across the water: England. That’s where it will come from, when it comes, the invasion. So the Boche is sensitive about their beach—if you’re not in uniform, best not to be seen with a camera.”

  “Where are the people who used to have houses here?”

  “They’re around, but they stay away from the beach. When the Occupation began, the Germans proclaimed a fifteen-mile Forbidden Zone along the entire French coast, but, you know how we work, this one wangled an exemption, then that one, so now they call it a Restricted Zone, and most of the people who owned homes before the war are back. But, only Boche officers at the Régence.”

  “Do they like to gamble?”

  “They love it. They get drunk, they gamble, they lose, what’s new. And some of the big losers connive at having their debts canceled. Which we’re happy to do, in return for the occasional favor. I am a Jew, as it happens, so I have to be exempt myself. And, since the Wehrmacht doesn’t run casinos, I’m a good Jew to have around.”

  “You were recommended to me, Monsieur Frankel, by the lawyer who works for us, a friend of a professor at the Sorbonne.”

  “Yes, he telephoned. Carefully, of course. Let’s go into the office—we’ll want a little privacy.”

  The office was spacious and airy, a sea breeze blowing in through the open window, Mathieu could smell the salt. Frankel opened a drawer in his desk and rummaged through the papers until he found what he needed. “You can take this to the local police station and have it stamped.”

  “I will need two more forms, for a man and a woman.”

  “Forms I have, so let’s start with you.” Frankel found a dotted line and said, “So, you are going to be a croupier, what name would you like to use?”

  Mathieu gave him the name he’d used on his false papers. “A croupier,” he said, smiling at the idea. “Pulling in chips with that little rake they have, calling out Banco!”

  “Are you a gambler?”

  “Boxing, bicycle racing, horses—I’m not much for cards.”

  “Just as well, it gets expensive…fickle Lady Luck, all that. You don’t plan to actually work at the tables, do you?”

  “No, I just need a paper to show if anyone asks.”

  “They might, they’re planning to build some kind of defensive system up here, I’ve talked to one or two of the engineers. And, lately, we’re seeing Gestapo, they’ve taken a house in the town, kicked the owners out and made themselves at home. Anyhow, these are people you want to avoid—any little thing and they’re liable to explode.”

  “Still, you can’t avoid them forever, can you?”

  Frankel shrugged. “They don’t come to the casino…and, truth is, for the moment I’m not at risk, my fix is high up. High enough, I hope.”

  “We’ll be here for several days, is there a place we can stay?”

  “We have a few shared apartments in town, some for men, some for women.”

  “That’s good—we’d rather not register at a hotel.”

  “As you wish. Let me fill out the papers for your friends.” When he was done he said, “I have no idea what you’re doing, I only hope you do it well, because if you are caught you will have to deal with the Gestapo.”

  “If things go as they should, no
body will ever know we came here. By the way, my understanding is that there is also a casino at the village of Ouistreham, down the coast from here, can we use these papers there?”

  “You can. It’s a small hotel and casino, but active. Your woman friend will be a secretary, and the man will also be a croupier.”

  Mathieu stood up and offered his hand to Frankel, who also stood, and said, “Give it to the bastards, Monsieur le croupier, give it to them with my best wishes.” Frankel, having shaken hands with Mathieu, patted him on the shoulder—good boy—saying, “I am proud of you, son.”

  —

  The couple—Mathieu and Chantal—had afternoon tea at the Ouistreham hotel. The restaurant was just across the hall from the gaming room, where German officers were playing roulette, shouting with glee or frustration as the silver ball rattled into a slot. “Ach! Verdammt Rot!” Someone had bet on red and lost.

  “Very frisky, aren’t they,” Chantal said. “And always in a group, have you noticed that?”

  “They are occupiers of someone else’s country, so as much as they swagger and strut they can never be comfortable, too much aware that the day may come when we rise up and cut their throats.”

  “Tell me when, Mathieu, I’ll be there.”

  “Then you’d better have the last petit éclair, you’ll need your strength.”

  Chantal used the silver tongs to put the éclair on Mathieu’s plate. “I can see it in your eyes, chéri, desire…”

  Mathieu smiled with gratitude and the pastry was gone in two bites. Then he finished his tea and said, “Well, my sweet, would you care for a little walk on the beach?”

  “You romantic old thing…what about my shoes? High heels not so good in sand.”

  “You shall carry them in your hand, that will make a tender impression on the local crowd.”

  They looked very much the couple at a beach resort; both wore newly purchased straw hats, Chantal’s cotton print dress floated around her, and she’d tied a pretty scarf to the strap of her sensible shoulder bag. They left the casino by the French doors that led out onto the beach, where the wind was blowing hard off the sea and, despite the late afternoon sun, Mathieu felt the chill.