A Hero of France: A Novel

by Alan Furst

  “Maybe something happened…”

  “If they don’t appear, we’re instructed to try again tomorrow night.”

  “Well, dawn is—”

  Then, the signal.

  A light from the sea, farther out than Mathieu expected and very bright, it shone for three seconds, went out, then returned for another three seconds. As Mathieu confirmed the signal with the same sequence, he could just hear Émile’s voice, tight and emotional as he said, almost to himself, “Vive la France.”

  By the glare of the signal lamp, Mathieu had been able to make out a long, dark shape lying atop the water, a submarine. Something he’d never actually seen, only the cinema version, and he found the real thing sinister, clandestine, deadly. Then an inflatable rubber boat materialized from the gloom, rising and falling with the swells and paddled by two men, one in front of the other. The boat would make land to the west of the formation, so Mathieu and Émile slid down from their vantage point to meet it. Excited, they ran a little way out into the water and waved their arms. When the craft was almost ashore, they grabbed the rope line that circled the inflated pontoons of the hull and dragged the boat up the sand as far as they could.

  The two agents, faces darkened with lampblack and wearing rubber suits, climbed out quickly and one of them spontaneously threw his arms around Mathieu, who said, “Welcome home, monsieur, welcome,” his voice unsteady. The man who had embraced him said, “I am called Gerard, and this is Jean-Luc.”

  “I’m known as Mathieu, and my friend is Émile.” The four then shook hands as though meeting by chance in a café.

  There were two duffel bag–sized metal containers in the boat, Mathieu took hold of one of them and, at first, could barely move it. “Heavy, heh?” Gerard said with a grin, taking the other end and helping Mathieu roll the container out of the boat. Next to them, Jean-Luc and Émile had done the same thing. “Now the boat,” Gerard said, pulling a plug so that the pontoons began to deflate, while Jean-Luc jumped up and down on them, trying to force the air out. Both agents wore knapsacks with entrenching tools strapped to their sides and now began to dig, working fast until they had a grave-sized trench some three feet deep. Jean-Luc, breathing hard, threw the rubber shell into the trench, then both agents wriggled free of their rubber suits, tossed them on top, and began to fill in the trench. “We busted our balls practicing this, so last time and not sorry,” Gerard said as he worked.

  He was about thirty years old, Mathieu guessed, a short, thick-bodied fellow with sandy hair. Jean-Luc was older, balding and lean, and had close-set eyes and a certain cast to his features, as though he were about to become angry—you would not, Mathieu thought, ask him for directions in the street.

  They were almost done—they’d left enough space for the entrenching tools, threw these in last, then all four kicked sand over them. “This seems like the proper moment,” Émile said, taking the thermos from his jacket and unscrewing the cap. “Some Échezeaux, to celebrate your return to France.”

  Jean-Luc took a sip and raised his eyebrows in appreciation. “It is kind of you, monsieur, and very good.” When the thermos had been passed around, the two agents took cloths from their knapsacks and began wiping the lampblack from their faces. “Where are you gents from?” Gerard said, calling them mecs, a working-class usage.

  “We are both from Paris,” Mathieu said. At this, both agents seemed slightly surprised—they had not expected that the operatives awaiting them would be sophisticated Parisians.

  “I was born in a village near Nantes,” Gerard said. “But I’m a professional soldier, so I haven’t seen home for quite a while. I was in North Africa when the war ended and made a run for London to join the Free French. Jean-Luc is from Brittany.”

  “Long ago,” Jean-Luc said. “I was a colonial police officer in Saigon, when the war started. Served out there for twenty years. Some of the Indo-Chinese—communists, whatnot—didn’t want us there and resorted to sabotage. It was my job to learn how they managed their explosives and timers and I became a specialist.” After a moment he patted the container and said, “I’m the instructor—Gerard is the radio operator—so now it’s my turn to play on the other side.” Mathieu recalled Edouard’s description of what the agents would bring with them: time-pencil detonators, fuse cord, plastic explosive—and plenty of it, given the weight of the containers.

  With their rubber suits off, the agents were now in civilian clothes and had been, Mathieu saw, very carefully dressed—in plain, inexpensive outfits and much-worn felt hats and looked something like artisans of the upper trades, electricians perhaps, on their day off. “Shall we get moving?” Mathieu said, reaching for the strap at the end of one container.

  Jean-Luc looked at his watch and said, “Not yet. The patrol boat is due back in ten minutes, so the best place for us is behind the rocks.” They hauled the containers over the sand, then sat with their backs against the formation. They saw the light of the patrol boat from a long way east as it swept back and forth across the beach. Gerard swore at it, “Espèce de merde, I hate these bastards.”

  “You’ll see a lot of them,” Émile said. “They are all over the place, hard to avoid, particularly in Paris.”

  “Well, we will be based there for a time,” Gerard said. “Then we’ll travel…recruit and train, that’s our job.”

  “Will you find enough recruits?” Émile said.

  “The English spy service has been operating here for a long time, they lost some agents—that’s how this work goes—but they found plenty of people who say they want to fight.”

  In time, the patrol boat passed by and the four set off with the containers. They had to stop and rest twice—Émile was game and did his best but he was in no condition for this kind of effort. Eventually they reached the fishing village and, when the dogs started up, the old fisherman, a woman who Mathieu guessed was his wife, and his retriever stood and watched as the containers were stowed in the van. When Jean-Luc saw the name painted on the side he laughed and said, “A butcher! Well, that’s just right for us.” He climbed into the passenger seat while Émile and Gerard lay down in the back. Then the fisherman came to the window and said, with some gravity, “I wish you good luck, gentlemen.” Sitting beside Mathieu, Jean-Luc remarked on the condition of the road, then looked at his watch. “We’re supposed to be in Deauville before sunrise, which is at four-fifty.”

  “We won’t quite make that,” Mathieu said, “but it will still be dawn when we arrive. Then, the following morning, we’ll go down to Paris.”

  —

  Mathieu drove with full concentration, hands gripping the steering wheel, babying the van over the puddles and the potholes hidden beneath them. The rain had abated to a thin drizzle, blown against the windshield by the offshore breeze. Above, the sky was clearing, with light from a thin slice of moon reflected on the storm clouds as they floated inland.

  When they were almost at the Ouistreham casino, they came around a sharp curve and saw the sentry, standing by the side of the road and talking to an officer, who was leaning on the hood of a command car. The two were smoking and talking and appeared to be relaxed. “The officer’s come to pick him up,” Jean-Luc said. From the back of the van, having no view of the road, Gerard said, “Trouble?”

  “Maybe, we’ll see, but prepare to use your weapon.”

  Mathieu said, “That’s the sentry who stopped us on the way out.”

  “Slow down and wave to him, he might let you drive on.” He paused, then said, “But, with his officer there…Are you armed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where is it?”

  “In the waistband of my trousers.”

  The sentry ambled out onto the road and raised his hand. Mathieu put on the brakes. The sentry remembered him and said “Home?” as he pointed up the road.

  Mathieu nodded and said yes.

  The sentry started to move off, but the officer was curious. Still leaning on the hood of his car, some ten feet away, he said, i
n phrase-book French, “What do you carry?”

  “A horse that died,” Mathieu said. “We’re taking it back to the shop in Honfleur.”

  The officer thought it over, then stood up straight and walked toward the van. “I want to see. Open the doors.”

  Mathieu and Jean-Luc both got out on the road and followed the officer to the rear of the van. As the officer waited for the doors to be opened, Jean-Luc shot him in the back of the head and he collapsed without a sound. Mathieu ran around the van and fired twice at the sentry, who had frozen at the sound of the pistol shot. Mathieu had apparently missed, because the sentry aimed his rifle and fired two rounds. Mathieu shot at him again and this time he cried out and fell backward. When Jean-Luc reached him, knelt down and put his pistol to the man’s temple, the sentry mumbled the German words for “No, don’t,” but Jean-Luc pulled the trigger, next walked to the officer’s body and did the same thing. From the rear of the van, Mathieu heard an angry curse from Gerard and when he opened the doors he saw that Émile had been hit. Lying on his back he was lifeless: eyes closed, body completely still, while a thin trickle of blood ran from his hairline and down his face. Jean-Luc brushed Mathieu aside and put two fingers on Émile’s neck. “Still alive,” he said. “Now what? We can’t leave him here, to be captured and interrogated, we can’t take him to a hospital with a gunshot wound. We just killed two German soldiers—this area will be crawling with field police, Gestapo, SS, so then…”

  “Then what?” Mathieu said.

  Jean-Luc’s answer was silence, his pistol held by his trouser leg.

  “We’ll take him back to Deauville. There’s surely a doctor in Deauville we can trust.”

  “You know this for a fact?”

  “You are not going to shoot him, Jean-Luc,” Mathieu said. He had not put the Beretta away.

  “What are you going to do about it if I do?”

  “Get back in the van, we have to get the hell away from here, now.”

  Meanwhile, Gerard had taken a first-aid kit from his knapsack and was using a gauze pad to clean the blood away, then, to stop the bleeding, he pressed the gauze against the wound. “It wasn’t fatal,” he said. “He’s unconscious but not dead. Not yet. The sentry must have fired at an angle, both bullets went through the side panel, then hit the opposite side and ricocheted, and then one of them hit your friend. If he doesn’t go into shock he may survive. Do you have a blanket? Keeping him warm helps, with shock.”

  “We don’t,” Mathieu said. He gunned the engine and drove off as fast as the van would go.

  From the back, Gerard said, “Well, in the future, you should try to have a blanket with you, there’s a lot you can do with a blanket—carry a wounded man or a corpse, use it under the tires to get free of snow, all sorts of useful things.” His tone was casual, as though what had happened on the road was, to him, nothing new.

  In the passenger seat, Jean-Luc lit a cigarette and began to reload his service automatic. “He’s right, you should have a blanket.”

  —

  It was dawn by the time they reached Deauville, the early light was soft and gray and the birds had begun to sing. Jean-Luc and Gerard carried Émile, Mathieu knocked on the door. Claudette answered—still wearing the white sundress, she had stayed awake waiting for them to return—and, when she saw Émile, saw the bandage with a red bloodstain around his head, she screamed and burst into tears. “What have you done to him?” she wailed, then ran to Émile, fell to her knees and put her arms around him. “Oh God,” she said.

  “He’s unconscious,” Mathieu said. “He was wounded by a bullet that ricocheted inside the van—it’s important that he get medical help, as soon as possible.”

  Chantal took Claudette by the waist and gently eased her away. “Let’s go to the telephone, he needs a doctor, Claudette—is there a doctor nearby who’s a friend?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  As Émile was carried to the bedroom, Mathieu ran to the guest room and gathered up both toile-covered quilts. Meanwhile, Chantal held Claudette up and walked her to the parlor, where she opened a drawer in the table that held the telephone and found an address book but, hands trembling, had difficulty turning the pages.

  Chantal took the address book, saying, “Let me help you, Claudette, what is the doctor’s name?”

  “Laroux.”

  Chantal dialed the number, handed the receiver to Claudette, and, as they waited for the call to be answered, gave her a clean handkerchief. Dabbing at her eyes, Claudette said, “Oh Paul, thank God you’re there. Émile has been in an accident and is badly hurt, please come as soon as possible.” She waited the length of a brief answer, then said, “Thank you, thank you.”

  Mathieu, having dropped off the quilts in the bedroom, reached Claudette as she hung up the phone, put an arm around her and held her tight. “I want you to drink some brandy, to settle yourself, because you’ll have to deal with the doctor.”

  “On the wicker drinks cart,” Claudette said. “There’s cognac there. Hennessy.”

  Ten minutes later, the doctor appeared—another Parisian god with an apartment in Paris and a house in Deauville. Mathieu and the two agents hid in the cellar, Claudette stood beside the doctor as he examined the wound. “What did this? Something small, at speed. Could it be a bullet wound?” Claudette didn’t say a word and the doctor looked up at her; clearly, her silence meant yes. Next he cleaned the wound, sewed it up, put on a fresh bandage, then, preparing an injection, said, “I’m going to bring him back to consciousness, do you want to tell me what happened? An accident? A jealous husband?”

  Claudette put her hand on the doctor’s arm. “You can’t tell anyone about this, Paul. Émile could be arrested…by the Germans.”

  “Very well, then. I understand. Something secret, involving…Émile? I wouldn’t have guessed that he would…but life is changing here.”

  —

  31 May. Late that afternoon, Mathieu used the de Boisellier telephone to call Olivia Brun, an old friend from his former life, and asked her to meet him at her office early the next day. Then, at two in the morning, with Gerard and Jean-Luc, he drove south, timing the van’s arrival in Paris for five-thirty, the end of curfew, when they would join the procession that fed the city: farm trucks, vans, oxcarts, and wagons pulled by horses, all of them headed for the Les Halles market. Once upon a time, German officials had ordered the Paris police to control this traffic but, as much as the Germans liked to make rules, the French liked to break them—the farmers, fishermen, and market gardeners, great believers in order but anarchists at heart, knew how to create chaos and did so. Oh, look, a bullock has got loose and is running up the Rue Rambuteau! Thus the flics had given up and arranged to be elsewhere.

  As the procession moved, at the speed of an oxcart, toward Les Halles, Mathieu turned south, heading up into the Sixth Arrondissement until he reached the administration building at the edge of the Jardin du Luxembourg. When he rang the bell, a gardien came to the door, stood swaying for a moment, then said, “The hell do you think you’re going? There’s nobody here yet.”

  “Mademoiselle Brun is waiting for me in her office.”

  “Mmm, then, well, come in.” The smell of wine on his breath was overpowering.

  “I know where it is,” Mathieu said, climbing the marble staircase. Olivia was waiting in her office, with a big, excited smile for him when he walked in the door. She jumped up from her chair and kissed him on both cheeks, holding his head in her hands, turning it left and right. A mousy woman in her forties, she helped to manage the public gardens. She had thin hair pulled back and held by a clip, and wore tortoiseshell eyeglasses, her shoulders a little slumped as though by the weight of the world. She sat back down and said, “When you telephoned I was mystified. I couldn’t imagine what you wanted. At six in the morning, no less!”

  “Strange as it may seem, Olivia dear, I would like to use one of your greenhouses. And you can’t tell a single soul about it.”

  Sh
e stared at him, then said, “What are you doing? No, don’t tell me…if it’s something secret…have you become a résistant?”

  Mathieu nodded.

  “Oh my dear,” she said, putting a hand over her heart. “So now I will be one as well.” She sat back down and said, “Yes, it makes sense, you are the type. But, dangerous, no?”

  “Of course it is. Now, I am driving a van…”

  “Well, use the service road and pick any greenhouse you like, they’re all open. You won’t harm the plants, will you?”

  “I won’t touch them.”

  “Then, what…?”

  Mathieu closed his eyes and shook his head—Don’t ask, then said, “We will need shovels and a rake.”

  “There’s a shed that adjoins the second greenhouse with an open padlock on the door—the key was lost so often we no longer bother to lock it. All the tools you want in there.”

  “And I have friends who will be visiting the greenhouse, not often, now and then.”

  “Just at the end of curfew is best, there’s nobody around.” After a pause she said, “Or perhaps they are people who know how to evade the police.”

  “And the gardien?”

  “You won’t need to come into this building, and, anyhow…” She made a fist, extended her thumb, put it to her lips and tilted her head back, a gesture that imitated someone drinking from a bottle—“he’s always drunk, spends most of his time asleep. Your friends needn’t worry about him.”

  “Then, I’ll be going. Thank you for your help, Olivia.”

  “May I tell Frieda?”

  Frieda had been her lover for years, and the two had been friends with Mathieu for a long time. “Only her, nobody else, agreed?”

  “That will make it easier for me. We wondered where you were, the last year or so—we had such good times together, laughed and laughed, we miss you.”

  “These days I have to keep to myself, I hope you understand.”

  “Yes, of course, a secret life.” With a rueful smile—Maybe I won’t ever see you again—she kissed him goodby.