A Hero of France: A Novel

by Alan Furst

  “What do you want here?” Jules said.

  “It’s time to pay up, dad.” With this, he slid a hammer out of his overcoat and gazed meaningfully at the window.

  “Ah yes,” Jules said. “I almost forgot, Mathieu left an envelope for you, it’s in the kitchen so I’ll just go fetch it.” That had been the plan, never carried out, so there was no envelope. He did go into the kitchen, his mind working frantically on some way not to get his window broken, then he decided to go to the cash register and give the bastard whatever he wanted. Looking back through the porthole in the kitchen door, he realized the boy could see him, and was now, to the laughter of his friends, tapping on the window with his hammer, eyebrows raised in mock inquiry—Shall I break it here? Or would you prefer I break it over here? His friends laughed even harder: what an amusing fellow!

  That did it. Jules snapped. He came rushing out of the kitchen shouting curses, murder in his eye, a meat cleaver in hand, his arm raised and ready to strike. The boy’s eyes widened with fear, for a moment he froze, then dropped his hammer and ran for the door, followed by his friends. Jules chased them out onto the Rue de Tournon, still cursing, and running as fast as he could, face bright red, apron flapping, cleaver held high. A woman screamed, the boys ran faster. Finally, out of breath, his legs weak, Jules stopped. As he watched the boys running for their lives, there was pure joy in his heart.

  —

  Denunciations were usually made by mail—the unsigned letter, thus the Spider, humiliated before his friends, would have his revenge. He and his friends stopped at a tabac, where the boy bought a sheet of paper, an envelope, and a stamp. Next the three found an outdoor table at a café, where the boy wrote with difficulty, carving the letters into the cheap paper: the Café Welcome on the Rue de Tournon was being used by the Resistance, as a place where people could arrange to meet a resistance leader called Mathieu.

  Then he addressed the envelope to the Kommandantur at the Majestic Hotel, put the stamp on, and mailed it.

  23 June. A heavy, humid day, the Parisian sky pale, the surface of the river flat and listless. At one in the afternoon, Joëlle left work, returned to the nearby Hôtel Saint-Yves and took Mariana for a romp. From the street that bordered the Seine, where the booksellers had their stalls, a stairway descended to a cobbled quay at the edge of the water and there Mariana—tongue out and panting on a hot afternoon—and her dog friends took turns chasing each other about. Joëlle often chatted with a woman down there who had a collie called Charlemagne, Mariana’s favorite among the dogs that visited the quay. Joëlle said hello and complained about the weather, the woman said it would storm, come evening. At their feet, a terrier was pestering the two bigger dogs who, for the moment, ignored it. “I heard something interesting this morning,” the collie’s owner said. “The Germans have attacked Russia.”

  “Really? I thought they were allies.”

  “They were, but now Adolf has decided otherwise.”

  Joëlle shrugged. “Is that good for us?”

  “I really don’t know. Maybe.”

  The two women put their dogs back on lead and walked them up the stairway to a café across the street where a waiter brought them a bowl of cold water. On the corner, a crowd had gathered as a news vendor tacked the headline page of the latest edition to the side of his kiosk. All the newspapers in Paris were managed by the Germans, so nobody ever believed what they printed, but the headlines, thick and black, were likely true that day. Operation Barbarossa, the attack was called, and a man close to the kiosk read the news aloud to those too far away to see the print. There was a photograph, tanks crossing a field.

  —

  Mathieu knocked at Joëlle’s door at nine that evening, inviting her to share a large tin of sardines, a baguette, and two bottles of beer. The predicted rain had not appeared and the air, awaiting the storm, was thick with humidity, so Mathieu and Joëlle, accompanied by Mariana, went up to the roof of the hotel in search of a breeze. Mathieu rested his back against the chimney, Joëlle did the same. With patience and strong fingers, Mathieu inserted the metal lip of the tin into the key, then rolled the top all the way to the other end. “Bravo,” Joëlle said. Mathieu tore off a piece of the bread, used the blade of a clasp knife to spear a chunk of sardine, dipped the bread into the oil, spread the sardine on, and offered the open sandwich to Joëlle, hand-fed some sardine and bread to Mariana, and made himself a sandwich. He then found the protruding edge of a brick in the chimney and, using the heel of his hand, popped the caps off the beer bottles. He handed one of them to Joëlle, said, “To our roof picnic,” and the two clinked bottles. The beer was warm and thin, but he enjoyed it anyhow. “You know about the German attack on Russia?” he said.

  “Yes, it was in the papers. Is it true?”

  “I think so, we’ll go down and listen to the BBC at ten.”

  Joëlle finished her sandwich and let Mariana lick the oil from her fingers.

  “Another?” Mathieu said.

  “In a minute.” She sat forward and turned so she could face him. “I have been wanting to ask you a question,” she said. “A personal question, do you mind? I know you don’t much like to talk about yourself.”

  “Ask me…anything you want.”

  “There’s something you don’t want me to know about, you have some kind of secret, I can sense it, and it worries me when I think about you.”

  Mathieu was silent. He had known this would happen and now it had.

  “Very well,” Joëlle said. “I’ll mind my own business.”

  Mathieu lit a cigarette and offered one to Joëlle, who shook her head. “I think I have to tell you what’s going on, I don’t want to, much safer not to, but…the truth is that I have to live a secret life.”

  “Which means, I suspect, that you are in the Resistance.”

  “Yes, where I am known as Mathieu.”

  “I’m not surprised,” she said, “and if I can help, you only have to ask.”

  “Maybe someday I will, maybe I will have to, but my instinct is to keep you from danger, to protect you.”

  “To protect me, yes, that is your nature, that is who you are. But if the day comes when it all goes wrong and you can’t protect me, you should know what will happen, because on that day I will stand with you and, if need be, I will die with you, and that is who I am.” She sat back against the chimney and moved closer to Mathieu so that her shoulder was pressed against his. “And now,” she said, “I am ready for another sandwich.”

  Just before ten they returned to Mathieu’s apartment, where he turned on the radio and worked the tuner until he found the French service of the BBC. He had to keep the volume low, so rested the radio on the sofa, and the two lay on either side of it, heads close to the Bakelite case. On the stroke of ten o’clock came the first notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, corresponding to the Morse code dot-dot-dot-dash, which was the letter v, as in V for victory. There followed the voice of the announcer: “Ici Londres! Les Français parlent aux Français.” London here, the French speaking to the French.

  The French announcer was not dramatic—here were the facts. On the International Bridge, which spanned the river border between Germany and Soviet-occupied Poland, it was customary, at the changing of the guard, for the German and Russian sentries to salute each other. But, at three in the morning on the twenty-third of June, the German sentries didn’t salute, they shot the Russian guards. The following German attack was massive: three million troops, six hundred thousand vehicles, seven hundred and fifty thousand horses, more than five hundred tanks, almost two thousand aircraft, spread across an eighteen-hundred-mile front that ranged from the Arctic to the Black Sea. The attack was fast moving and successful, the Wehrmacht overwhelming all resistance and advancing at speed across the Ukraine. Winston Churchill had been quick to promise to do all possible to help the Soviet Union, Britain’s new ally in the fight against Hitler. When the announcer had signed off, there followed a program of swing music from Lon
don: Ellington, Artie Shaw. “Will the Russians surrender?” Joëlle said.

  “I doubt it. They will fight hard for their homeland, and it’s a long way to Moscow. Remember what happened to Napoleon; there is a two-sided sign in the Lithuanian city of Vilnius. On the western side of the sign it says, ‘In June of 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte passed this way with six hundred thousand men.’ On the eastern side of the sign it says, ‘In November of 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte passed this way with six hundred men.’ So, we shall see.”

  Later on, sometime after midnight, Mathieu and Joëlle were awakened by something going on in the Rue Dauphine, just down the street from the Saint-Yves. Mathieu went to the window and opened the blackout drapes, Joëlle followed, both still naked from the evening’s lovemaking. They leaned out of the window and saw two men, wearing the work outfit of Métro laborers, all of whom belonged to one of the Communist unions. They were swaying in the street, having drunk a good amount of wine that night and, arms around each other’s shoulders, they were singing La Marseillaise. A spirited rendition and, as they walked off in the direction of the Seine, perhaps for an encore on another street, people at the windows of the apartment buildings on the Rue Dauphine applauded.

  —

  24 June. In a note left at the religious articles store the previous day, Edouard had asked Mathieu to stop by the Hôtel de Quercy, the crumbling mansion that the Englishman used as a secret meeting place. They sat in the immense dining room, sun pouring in through the cloudy glass of the tall windows. “I have some bad news,” Edouard said.

  “Yes?”

  “About the men you picked up in Normandy, Gerard and Jean-Luc.”

  “Have they been arrested?”

  “They’re dead, I’m afraid, rotten luck.”

  Voice hushed, Mathieu said, “What happened?” He had been shaken by the news and he showed it.

  A little too much emotion for the stiff-upper-lip Edouard. “Now, now,” he said, in an English nanny voice. “They died bravely, they died to save the mission, they could have surrendered, but that would have meant Gestapo interrogation, so…”

  “Were they betrayed?”

  “No. A German wireless detection van was in the neighborhood while Gerard was sending messages back to London. From the power station the Germans turned off the electricity, block by block, until the sending stopped. As they searched the buildings in that block they discovered Gerard and Jean-Luc hiding beneath a stairway and, when the Germans demanded the two come out with their hands up, they came out firing their revolvers, but the Germans had those beastly machine pistols and that was that.”

  Mathieu shook his head, this war.

  “They will be replaced, by Lysander this time and you, and one of your people, will be the reception committee. Not the same chap as last time, the one with the, umm, wife, use somebody else. Your job will be to find the new agents a place to hide in Paris, and then lead them to where the containers are buried. I will have the details for you, place and time of the plane’s landing tomorrow. Meanwhile, since yesterday, the situation has changed…”

  “The invasion, you mean,” Mathieu said. “And now there will be a Communist Resistance in France.”

  “Well, it has begun,” Edouard said, lighting one of his machine-rolled cigarettes. “This morning, a machine fitter at the Renault works shot a German naval officer on the platform of the Barbès Métro station. The Germans are putting up posters announcing the reprisal, a hundred prisoners, ‘Communists, terrorists, and Jews,’ as they put it, to be shot.”

  “That won’t stop them for a minute,” Mathieu said.

  “Indeed. Reprisal doesn’t worry them—it is a recruiting tool, the way they see it, such brutality will inspire hundreds of people to join them. These workers are not like you and your cell, the Communist labor unions have spent years organizing clandestine activity, ever since the Bolsheviks took over in 1917. They are disciplined, are experts at sabotage, and they know how to fight.”

  “Will you, I mean Britain, arm them?”

  Edouard hesitated, smoke from his cigarette curling up the shafts of sunlight, then said, “To be decided.”

  From Mathieu, a quizzical stare.

  “When the Occupation ends, whenever that may be, there will be civil war here, the Communists mean to have France for their own, so if we give them arms, they will, in time, use them to shoot at us.”

  —

  Chantal left her apartment at six in the evening, rode her bicycle over to the Rue de Tournon, and locked it to a streetlamp. Lisette had brought her a message from Jules; some fellow asking about the Resistance at the Café Welcome, and it was her job to look him over and collect his name and address. He would then be contacted and told where to meet Mathieu.

  The café was crowded, air thick with cigarette smoke, conversation low and private—as it often was these days when the subject was politics, and that night the café’s patrons were trying to figure out what the German attack might mean for them—for France, for Paris, for a wife’s cousin in Kiev. Jules was working behind the bar. Chantal stood at the far end, greeted Jules, and congratulated him for the defeat of the boy who called himself the Spider. As Jules served her a glass of wine, he said, “I don’t know what got into me, maybe everything, the Occupation, the rationing, and this espèce de merde demanding money.” Smoothing his thin hair back, he said, “I’m not a violent man, Chantal, but I would’ve killed him.”

  “Has somebody been asking about you-know-what?”

  “At the table in the far corner, with the coffee and the book.”

  Chantal turned sideways, leaning an elbow on the bar, and had a good long look: somewhere in his thirties, hair neatly cut and carefully parted to one side, he was freshly shaved and had, she thought, used talcum powder afterward. When he looked up from his book to have a sip of his coffee, she saw that he had very dark eyes, almost black, and a rather prim mouth, and his face had no expression whatsoever, was curiously still. He was sitting down but Chantal could see that he was of less than average height, with narrow shoulders and a soft body. Beneath the table, his shoes were polished to a high gloss. Chantal, holding her wineglass, walked over to his table and said, “May I join you, monsieur? I don’t like to stand at the bar.”

  The man closed his book and, courteously, rose to his feet, saying, “You are welcome, madame, please,” as he indicated an empty chair.

  A nice voice, smooth and confident, French decent, not native. “A good book?” she said. “You seemed absorbed, I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

  “It’s by Honoré de Balzac, La Cousine Bette.”

  “Ah yes, Balzac, keeps you reading.”

  He sighed. “Hard for me, I have to work at the French, and I don’t have a dictionary, so I guess.”

  Now a sudden, charming smile. As a woman speaking with a man for the first time, Chantal sensed him reaching for her. “Are you a regular patron here? I don’t recall seeing you before.”

  “My first time. I live in a hotel room up by the Gare du Nord, so I do a lot of walking…well, that’s true, as far as it goes, but I came here…”

  Uncertain, not sure how to go on, tried to lie and failed. “Yes?” Chantal said, with a pretty smile.

  “How to say this…would you care for a cigarette, madame?” He took from his pocket a very thin, hand-rolled cigarette, bent slightly awry from its stay in the pocket.

  Taking the plunge, but hesitant. Scared? “I may have one later. You were saying…?”

  “I was told I might meet somebody here…somebody…somebody who is familiar with, opposition to the Occupation.”

  “You know, I’ve heard that too, people talk…”

  “Any idea who it might be? I’ve been observing the patrons, but it could be anybody.”

  Chantal thought it over. “Well, I have an acquaintance who is said to know about such things, if you were to give me your name and address, perhaps somebody will be in touch with you.”

  “My name and address…�
�

  “If you’d rather not…”

  “No, no, this is my adopted country and I’ve felt for a long time that I must stand by her. My name is Stefan Kusar, and I live at the Hotel Magenta, room seventeen.”

  Chantal opened her shoulder bag and hunted about in it, finally coming up with a small slip of a receipt and a pencil, then writing the address. “Can you spell ‘Kusar’ for me?”

  He did, then said, almost apologetic, “It is a name from the Balkans.” Then, “Thank you, madame, for your help.”

  For Chantal, time to leave. She glanced at her watch and said, sounding disappointed, “Oh dear, I fear I must be on my way…an appointment.”

  —

  29 June. On the Route N13, a narrow road lined with plane trees, a hearse drove slowly through the summer countryside, headed toward Paris, some twenty miles away. There was, as the chauffeur knew, a Wehrmacht document control at the edge of Saint-Germain-en-Laye and, when the hearse came to a stop at the lowered crossbar, the chauffeur rolled down his window. “Your papers, please,” the officer said. The chauffeur, in dark cap and suit, with a Vichy Francisque—Frankish battle-axe—pin on his lapel, handed the officer his documents, then reached over to the widow in the passenger seat and collected hers. She was attractive, with ash-blonde hair, wore a traditional black-crepe mourning dress and a black pillbox hat with a veil, a handkerchief held crumpled in her hand.

  As the officer scanned both sets of papers, he said, “Where are you coming from?”

  “From Évreux, sir, we are taking the deceased for burial at a cemetery in Paris. They were madame’s nephew and his wife, who died in a road accident.”

  The officer walked to the back of the hearse, opening the door to reveal two expensive coffins. He then returned to the chauffeur’s window and handed over the documents, saying, “You may go ahead,” and signaling that the crossbar could be raised. Once the hearse was well beyond the control, Mathieu said to Annemarie, sitting by his side, “I’m going to pull over and make sure they’re alright.” After he’d picked up the hearse and the coffins at a Paris funeral parlor, he had drilled two airholes in each of the coffins. Now he pulled off the road, parking the hearse between two plane trees, and began to loosen the lid of the first coffin, saying, “Are you getting enough air?”