A Hero of France: A Novel

by Alan Furst

  Walking back to the van, Mathieu felt relief. The operation’s planners had directed him to find a hiding place for the containers and he had, after a lot of thinking, decided to use a greenhouse, then realized he had an old friend he could trust who worked at the public gardens, and Olivia had not disappointed him.

  It was sweltering in the greenhouse, with thick, humid air scented by dried manure used as fertilizer, and Mathieu, Jean-Luc, and Gerard, bathed in sweat, worked with their shirts off. The beds of blue violets, waiting to be planted by the gardeners, were divided by gravel paths. Mathieu chose one of them, used a shovel to break up the gravel, then was joined by the others as they raked it to one side and began to dig into the exposed ground; exhausting work—the earth, compacted for years, was hard as a rock. But, slowly, enough dirt was removed to allow space for the containers. Before they were buried, Jean-Luc opened one of them and removed a few packets wrapped in oiled paper, which he stowed in a small valise. “Enough to start with,” he said, “then we’ll have to come back for more.”

  “And do this all over again,” Gerard said, crumbling leftover dirt with his hands and scattering it over the violets. As they walked out the door, Jean-Luc said to Mathieu, “You’ll have to get rid of the van, you know, somebody will surely remember seeing it.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Mathieu said. “I have friends with a garage, they’ll repaint it and change the name, BOUCHERIE CHEVALINE maybe, and fix the holes, because Monsieur Borbal will need his van back.”

  Jean-Luc shook his head. “If that’s how you do things…,” he said.

  “I may need it again,” Mathieu said, rather than telling Jean-Luc that yes, this was the way he did things. “Now, where can I take you?”

  Jean-Luc gave him the address—the Hôtel de Quercy where he’d met with Edouard. At the gate of the wild garden in back of the hôtel particulier, Gerard and Jean-Luc wished him luck, then Mathieu headed for the garage.

  —

  At last, back at the Saint-Yves, Mathieu was lying half asleep on the sofa, Mariana stretched out beside him as the spring dusk faded away over the Rue Dauphine. Mathieu felt as though he had been away for a long time but it had only been a few days. Staring out his window, he went back over the operation and the people he’d encountered, especially Olivia. He missed her, he missed Frieda and other old friends, they had been important to him, as much as he had of family.

  He’d met Olivia and Frieda in his late twenties, on an August night when Paris steamed in its annual heat wave, at a party given by a famously dreadful artist. Dreadful perhaps, but he had a houseboat docked on the Seine and gave the liveliest parties: smoky and loud, with a dense crowd of poets, artists, models, slumming aristocrats, and strays from all over Europe. Now and again, couples would leave, hand in hand, for the privacy of the upper deck. As the party wore itself out, a few of the guests had been invited back to the apartment Olivia shared with Frieda. To Mathieu, it soon became evident that the two women liked to have a very good time: champagne was served, hashish smoked, cocaine snorted, and everybody laughed and laughed.

  In time, the guests staggered off into the night and Mathieu was the last one left. The three sat on sofa pillows on the floor, smoked and talked, had a little more of this, a little more of that. Eventually, Olivia, fanning herself with her hand, said, “I’m too hot, my friends, so…” and took off her blouse and skirt. In bra and panties, she had a mildly excessive low-slung rear end and small, shapeless breasts, but erotic energy flowed from her like scented smoke, like burning incense.

  “Well, why not,” Frieda said, and did what Olivia had done. She was Swiss, a heavy woman with coarse, curly black hair, a round face, and eyes that sparkled—lit by the pleasure of being alive. She patted the pillow in front of her and spread her legs so that Olivia could sit with her back braced against her. Frieda relit the hash pipe, held her breath, then coughed out the smoke. She smiled at Mathieu and said, teasing him, “Are you shy?”

  He wasn’t, and stripped down to his boxer shorts. A little later, Olivia dozed off. “Up, up, chérie,” Frieda said, taking Olivia by the hand and leading her to the bedroom. Looking back over her shoulder, she said to Mathieu, “There’s just enough room for you—it’s too late to go home.” Out the window it was already dawn, with the red-streaked sky of another hot day. Frieda pulled the cover and sheet off the bed, settled on the far side of the bottom sheet, clasped her hands atop her stomach, and closed her eyes. Olivia lay next to her, with Mathieu on her left, close enough so that Mathieu could feel the heat of her body. Lying still, he wondered what, if anything, would happen next. A few minutes later, Olivia’s hand came visiting but was not there long, being the recipient of a playful slap as an amused Frieda whispered, “Naughty girl!” From Olivia, a whispered response and a giggle, then Mathieu turned on his side and fell sound asleep.

  In the morning, the three went off to a fancy café where the croissants were crisped with honey and ordered café calva—coffee spiked with calvados, and they were fast friends for a long time after that, until the Occupation, when they became part of Mathieu’s other life. But no longer.

  —

  16 June. Otto Broehm—former senior inspector of the Hamburg police department, now major in the Wehrmacht’s military police—sat in his office at the Majestic Hotel and idly picked through a stack of papers left on his desk by his adjutant. Most of it meant nothing—the daily output of a grinding bureaucracy speaking to itself. Then he looked over at the telephone, which didn’t ring, but, he thought, give it time. Any day, the bigwigs in Berlin who’d ordered him to destroy the escape lines would be calling. Pleasant and courteous to be sure, yet in their voices a note of pleasant and courteous, for now.

  He returned to his papers: a long list from Madame Passot. She was his official liaison to the Vichy administration and had sent him a carbon copy of a list, originating from the office of the warden of Fresnes prison, with an underlined item: Prisoner Kusar, Stefan—448601, and a handwritten note in the margin, Major, may we discuss? Broehm looked up at the heading: Prison Transfers for the Week of 25 June. What, he wondered, has she found? He called her office and asked her to come and see him immediately.

  She appeared a few minutes later, a thin, sour woman who wore eyeglasses attached to a chain around her neck. “Please sit down, Madame Passot,” he said, and lit his pipe. “You wish to discuss this prisoner?”

  “Yes, Major Broehm. The warden at Fresnes is an old friend of mine, and I happened to mention to him that your office was seeking a penetration agent. A week later, this list arrived with a note that said, A candidate?”

  Broehm had a sudden policeman’s intuition—Here is the solution. The one thing he needed beyond all else was a penetration agent or, as he put it to himself, a predator.

  “So I telephoned,” Madame Passot continued, “and he told me that this Kusar is a Croat, wanted for murder in Zagreb, who’s been hiding out in Paris since April of 1940. Then he said we might want to take a look at him, in person, before he’s shipped back to Croatia, but it was no more than a hunch.”

  “How was he arrested?”

  “He tried to evade a passport control, then it turned out that the Zagreb police had a warrant out for him and had sent a copy to the Paris Préfecture—they suspected he might be hiding here—and, as you know, the Préfecture is efficient and found the warrant.”

  Broehm drummed his fingers on his desk, looked out the window at the leafy plane trees on the Avenue Kléber. “Call your friend the warden and have this man brought to my office, and better if he wears the clothing he had on when he was arrested. And, Madame Passot, please thank the warden for his suggestion.”

  Broehm had lunch in the hotel dining room, then returned to his office and began to respond, where needed, to items in the stack of papers on his desk. At three-thirty his adjutant knocked on the frame of his open door and, when Broehm beckoned him in, said, “Major, an inmate from Fresnes prison is here to see you. He is accomp
anied by two guards—shall they come in as well?”

  “No, I will see him alone. And close the door after he comes in.”

  Standing at the closed door, Kusar appeared to be in his thirties but was one of those men who is described as youthful, and was casually dressed in what he’d been wearing when he was arrested, a double-breasted, dark blue blazer, which would have suited an English country gentleman, and thin flannel slacks. As he stood waiting for Broehm to speak, his face betrayed no sign of tension, an amiable face but closed, not easy to read. His eyes met Broehm’s without fear or hostility. “Please sit down, Monsieur Kusar,” Broehm said, indicating the chair on the other side of the desk. “Would you care for a coffee? I can have it brought up here.”

  “Thank you, no, Major.”

  “You speak French easily, monsieur.”

  “I have been in Paris for a year, so I had the opportunity to learn it. Then too, in the Balkans almost everybody, of a certain class, speaks two or three languages…a necessity.”

  “You are wanted for murder, in Zagreb. Can you tell me how that came about?”

  “An accusation, Major. The police needed a suspect and they chose me.” His shrug was accompanied by a rueful, and rather charming, smile.

  “Can you be specific, about the accusation?”

  “It was said to have happened in a nightclub in Zagreb, one of the customers went to the WC and was standing before a urinal when he was stabbed in the heart.”

  “Was this a dispute of some kind? Over a woman perhaps, or some political argument?”

  “That I wouldn’t know.”

  “And who was the victim?”

  “The newspapers said that he was a journalist.”

  “I see,” Broehm said. He wondered if Kusar would now want to expand, to explain, to deflect guilt—Broehm had conducted hundreds of interrogations and this was often the case. But Kusar kept silent and waited, patient, ready to help as best he could. Finally Broehm said, “And now you are to be sent back to Zagreb, what will happen to you there?”

  “Oh, they will hang me. I suppose there will be some sort of trial, but it will be only a formality, the decision has been made.” He spread his hands and half smiled, So life goes.

  “What did you do to earn a living, in Zagreb?”

  “I sought out opportunities, advised people who wanted to invest in some enterprise or other. I have, or rather had, a wide acquaintance.”

  “Did you murder the journalist, Monsieur Kusar?”

  “No, Major, I did no such thing, why would I?”

  “For money.”

  “Ah, the professional assassin, that’s a good business in the Balkans, hatreds and feuds need to be settled. But not by me.”

  “Do you have any idea why you are here, being questioned by a major in the German military police?”

  “No, sir, no idea whatsoever.”

  “What is your opinion of the so-called Resistance, here in France?”

  “I don’t know much about it, but these underground conspiracies are nothing new where I come from, they raise hell but in the end nothing changes. In truth, I never met anyone in Paris who claimed to be part of it.”

  “The people involved here come from the former military, or they tend to be defiant intellectuals. Now, tell me, what would you do to avoid the hangman’s noose?”

  “Well, honestly, what wouldn’t I do? Nothing much I can think of.”

  “Some of these resistance cells aid fugitives to escape to Spain, would you join such a cell? And keep me informed as to who is involved?”

  Kusar thought it over, or pretended to think it over, then said, “Yes, I would.”

  “Because, if you agree, I can have you released from prison and I can pay you well for your efforts, and, because Croatia is a close ally of the Reich, I can have the charges against you withdrawn. Of course, it will be dangerous, you will have to be patient, and cunning, you will have to understand the people you are dealing with, you will have to say the right things, you will have to be an actor, a good actor.”

  “Nothing new, Major, I have been a good actor all my life. And I have studied people, their behavior, their desires, their weaknesses, with me it’s a kind of talent. I don’t like to be fooled.”

  “People will be arrested, you know, as a result of your work.”

  Kusar shrugged. “They gambled, they lost, life goes on.”

  —

  Now there was work to be done: Kusar’s papers, including his Croatian passport, retrieved from the Préfecture, his poorly forged permits replaced by official documents, arrangements made with the Fresnes prison administration for Kusar’s release, a detailed history of Kusar’s life taken down by Broehm’s adjutant. Meanwhile, Madame Passot’s French assistant rented a room at a hotel near the Gare du Nord, the Hotel Magenta—cheap, anonymous, meant for the traveler staying overnight.

  So it was late afternoon of the nineteenth before Kusar moved from the prison to his new address, where Otto Broehm, in civilian clothes, was waiting for him. It was a small room with a window that looked out over the busy Boulevard Magenta, its walls, bed covering, and curtains all some version of a nameless color somewhere between the darker tones of brown and gray. As for Broehm, he was both relieved and wary; relieved because he could now tell Berlin that his operation against the resistance escape lines was under way, wary because he’d worked with informers in Hamburg and he knew that Kusar was not to be trusted, none of them were. When Kusar entered the room, carrying the pasteboard valise they’d given him, he greeted Broehm, looked around, then said, “A room for a fugitive. Am I to be a fugitive, in my new role?”

  “We will go over your story, at length, until you have it all down, but the answer to your question is yes, you fled Zagreb a year ago in fear of Croatian fascists, the Ustachi, who didn’t like your liberal politics. Did you know such people?”

  “Perhaps a few, they were everywhere.”

  “Good, then you can describe them. Where were you hiding, in Paris?”

  “It’s in the history, Major, names, dates…”

  “Even so, I want to hear it from you.”

  “I managed to meet a woman, somewhat older than me, and injured in a railway accident when she was young so she had to use a cane.”

  “Does she know that you were arrested?”

  “No, I could have had her informed, but why. As far as she’s concerned I just disappeared.”

  “And how did you support yourself?”

  “She had a good job, working as a clerk in the office of the Renault plant and made more than enough for both of us.”

  “This for a year?”

  Kusar smiled. “There were two or three before her, women often fall for me…very useful, the way I see it.”

  “Could you go back to the woman you were living with?”

  “I suppose I could but now I prefer the freedom of being on my own—no explanations, no tears, you know what women are like.”

  “Then for the time being you will stay here. Your valise has a spare shirt and socks, toothbrush and so forth, as well as five hundred occupation francs. You may need more, because we have a lot to do: work on the details of your approach to one of the escape-line cells, which will require careful investigation. We will find them, but, until then, we want you to live quietly and, if some woman falls for you, leave her alone. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir, understood.”

  “And we will be in touch with you as to how you and I will meet. Meet in secret. Anything else?”

  “No, sir, I know what you need, and I’m ready to begin the work whenever you say.”

  —

  The following morning, Broehm telephoned the Zagreb police department and was eventually connected to a senior officer who spoke German and was familiar with Kusar’s activities in Zagreb. After a few minutes of professional small talk, Broehm said, “I’ve questioned this Stefan Kusar and he claims he had nothing to do with the nightclub murder. Could that be true? He was really
quite persuasive.”

  “Yes, persuasive is what he is.”

  “Then…”

  “He lies, Major, he always lies, he is an excellent liar, and he surely lied about this. There were eyewitnesses who saw him follow the journalist into the WC.”

  “Was this a business with him? Murder for hire?”

  “No, this was a practical killing. He got some rich fool to help him start a life insurance company in Zagreb—they never paid a claim, to our knowledge—and the journalist intended to expose him.”

  “Are you looking at his dossier, Commander?”

  “I am.”

  “Did he commit other crimes in Zagreb?”

  “Suspected, interrogated, but never charged. For fraud, mostly, but we could never get the evidence…he’s slippery as an eel, Kusar.”

  “Well, I appreciate your help,” Broehm said.

  “Call again, if you need us, and be careful with him, whatever you’re doing, he is very clever.”

  —

  21 June. At the Café Welcome, Jules, the proprietor of the café, watched the stream of Parisians passing up and down on the Rue de Tournon; watched because Mathieu had been true to his word and a new window had been installed. It was the late afternoon of a summer day, he’d had a good crowd for lunch, now there were a few customers standing at the bar, drinking whatever Jules could offer in the way of wine or beer, and Jules was relaxed and happy—life did get better, even in an occupied country. He stood before his new window, hands clasped behind his back, and enjoyed the passing scene.

  But then, a familiar face.

  The boy, who called himself the Spider, dark skin, dark eyes, pencil line of a mustache, who had attempted to intimidate Mathieu into trading money for silence. And he was, Jules saw, accompanied by two thuggish friends and, worse, was carrying something by holding it beneath one side of his overcoat—a spring overcoat now, buttoned up to a point where his waiter’s bow tie was visible.

  The three came through the door, walking quickly and with purpose. When they reached Jules, the boy put his hand on the window and said to his pals, “Oh look, a new window!”