A Hero of France: A Novel

by Alan Furst

  No sleep for Chantal, she was wide awake and thinking hard. The operation could not continue—someone else would have to retrieve the Canadian airman. But that had happened before: by the time Mathieu had made a second try to rescue the RAF photography specialist hiding in a Rouen hotel, the specialist had disappeared. And his lover, the woman who owned the hotel, had disappeared with him. What now lay ahead of Chantal was a night in a Provins hotel with Kusar, and then, when they returned to Paris, she would tell Mathieu what had happened, and that would be the end of Stefan Kusar’s service to the Resistance.

  —

  Provins had been an important trading center in the Middle Ages, so, to preserve its ruins—battlements, part of a tower—the railroad track had been routed around the town’s medieval center. Even so, the hotels were only a few minutes’ walk from the depot. “May I carry your valise?” Kusar said.

  “Thanks but you needn’t, only a few things in there.”

  At the first hotel they reached, Chantal had Kusar stand by the door, then she went inside, waited for a minute or so, and emerged looking disappointed and irritated. “Not there,” she said. “He left yesterday.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Fugitives are easily frightened, then they try to hide somewhere else.”

  “And now?”

  “Now we go to our hotel room, spend the night, and return to Paris in the morning.”

  “Will we try again?”

  “We might, we’ll let you know.”

  Chantal had reserved one room, the two were traveling as a married couple—she had intended to have a mattress brought up for the Canadian airman. Standing outside the hotel, she said, “After we register, you go to the room while I stop at the desk to see if I can get us something to eat.”

  “Too late for food, I would imagine.”

  “Oh, you never know…”

  When Chantal rang the bell on the exterior door, the propriétaire, in her bathrobe, let them in and wrote their names in the register. As Kusar climbed the stairs, Chantal asked the woman if there was anything, anything at all, to eat. The woman led her to the kitchen and chattered as she collected a piece of bread and some cheese. Meanwhile, Chantal, intent on surviving the night, snatched a small, serrated paring knife from a worktable and put it in her shoulder bag.

  In the room, two narrow beds were set against opposite walls, some ten feet apart. To change into her sleeping outfit, she went into the WC and emerged wearing a shirt that came down to midthigh and covered her panties, where she’d hidden the paring knife. During the brief walk from the WC to the bed, Chantal felt Kusar’s eyes on her and had to suppress a shiver. She believed that, rather than being exposed as a thief, he would try to kill her but first, making sure she didn’t scream, meant to rape her—why waste a chance to bed an attractive woman?

  Once the lights were turned out it was dark in the room, no light from the street, and very quiet. Meanwhile, Kusar prepared for sleep, got into his bed, and wished her good night. For what seemed like a long time, Chantal stayed awake, the knife in her hand beneath the pillow, but, in time, she fell into a fitful doze, then the brush of a bare foot on a wooden floorboard—a light, furtive step, followed by another, brought her fully awake. She could see him, a pale shape in the darkness, his body tense, prepared to strike. If he reaches the side of my bed, she thought, I will use the knife. However, Kusar the hunter was sensitive to prey, stopped halfway across the room, and whispered, “Are you asleep?”

  “No, go back to your bed and stay there, Monsieur Kusar.”

  With a whine in his voice, Kusar said, “I only wanted to give you a kiss good night…you are a beautiful woman, Chantal.”

  “Thank you for the compliment, but if you come anywhere near me you may be sure I will cut you, guess where.”

  Kusar muttered something deflective and went back to bed.

  —

  The following afternoon, Kusar received a message: he was to report to Major Broehm, in the back office of a men’s clothing store on the Avenue Kléber, not far from the Kommandantur. Broehm was waiting for him, sitting at a bookkeeper’s desk and smoking his pipe. “Well, how did it go…the operation in Provins?”

  “Not very well, Major. The fugitive had fled by the time we got there so we spent the night at a hotel and took the train back this morning.”

  “Did anything unusual happen?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Now I’m going to show you a drawing. When you met with the resistance operative at the bar by the Canal Saint-Martin, we had detectives there. They have worked with a sketch artist, who produced this likeness. Does it look like the man you met with?”

  Broehm handed Kusar a sheet of drawing paper and waited while he studied it. “That’s him,” Kusar said. “That’s his face. For the rest he is built like an athlete, with big shoulders and hands. And he carries himself a certain way, poised, confident.”

  “We believe this man is Mathieu, the leader of the escape line. When you go on your next operation, perhaps mention the name to the agent who accompanies you, this Chantal or anyone else, and see if you get a response. But, Kusar, go about this carefully, be your most clever self. Am I understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Very well, you can leave now. When you are given a new assignment, signal me immediately, day or night.”

  —

  Back at his office, Broehm met with Madame Passot. “We are making progress,” he told her. “We had detectives waiting for them at the Gare du Nord, and after the female operative left Kusar, we followed her home. Now we know where she lives, the woman who uses the name Chantal, we know her real name, and we have taken her photograph.”

  From Madame Passot, a rare smile. “Good news!”

  “It is, and there’s more: Kusar confirms that the drawing of Mathieu is a good likeness, now all we have to do is distribute mimeograph copies, and prints of the woman’s photograph, in case she tries to disappear, but only to dependable detectives, committed Vichy people, otherwise they’ll be warned.”

  —

  In the bar by the Canal Saint-Martin, Kusar had claimed that he heard about the Café Welcome from the night clerk at the Hotel Magenta, now Daniel went to the hotel reception desk and showed the clerk a detective’s badge. Daniel played the detective as world-weary, a flic trudging through yet one more night of routine footwork. Daniel asked the clerk, an old man with thick hair dyed reddish brown, a series of easy questions, then said, “There’s a fellow up in room seventeen, Kusar he’s called, from somewhere in the Balkans, ever talk to him?”

  “Kusar, you say, in seventeen? I’ve never spoken with him, is he wanted for a crime? Is he dangerous?”

  “No, don’t worry about him. He’s a witness in an important case, so we have to make sure he’s a dependable sort. Otherwise, well, you know, lawyers get up to tricks. And, if you ever do happen to talk to him, don’t say anything about our discussion, alright?”

  “You can be sure of that, I’m a friend to the police.”

  Daniel rode his bicycle to Madame Vigne’s religious articles shop and left a note for Mathieu: however Kusar heard about the Café Welcome, it wasn’t from the night clerk at the Hotel Magenta.

  —

  On the tenth of July, four men dressed as itinerant laborers stowed their bicycles in the baggage car of a local leaving the Gare de Lyon, then, sixty-five miles from Paris, left the train at the village of Esternay and pedaled off to the west. This location had been chosen because it was isolated and empty—the Île-de-France: tiny villages set far apart; fat, white, cumulonimbus clouds towering into the sky; and the endless wheatfields that had fed Paris for centuries.

  It was Fabien, formerly a Belgian mining engineer, now sabotage instructor, who led the line of bicycles. He was followed by two cousins, both stonemasons from one of the workers’ towns southeast of Paris, who had been recruited, just as the war ended, by clandestine British operatives. Last in line was Arnaud, the young, h
andsome radio operator. Just beyond Esternay, the fields sloped gently toward the horizon and Fabien toiled away, the ride not made any easier by a small suitcase roped to a shelf, a metal grid, behind the seat. Fabien was a tall, thin fellow, looking taller by way of a long, narrow head with flat ears and hair shaved high on the sides, who wore glasses and a close-cropped beard.

  They rode single file, sweating in the afternoon sun and silent, saving their breath. When the riders came upon a section of the road lined by plane trees, Fabien signaled a halt—they would stop and rest in the shade. The four sat on the ground, Fabien opened a packet of sausage sandwiches and passed them around, to be washed down by a few sips of water from the men’s canteens. The sandwiches had been delivered early that morning, by Edouard, to an abandoned broom factory at the far edge of the Nineteenth Arrondissement. Mathieu had found the factory—now both hideout and classroom—and bought it from the grateful widow of the factory owner.

  When the supper had been eaten, they lit cigarettes and relaxed. One of the stonemasons looked up at the rounded masses of cloud and said, “That will mean rain, maybe thunder and lightning.”

  “It’s about time,” Arnaud said. “I’ve had about all the heat I can stand.”

  “Did you hear about the escape?” the stonemason said. “Somewhere down below the demarcation line.”

  “We stay out of sight, at the factory,” Fabien said. “And we don’t talk to anybody.”

  “Well, you won’t read about it in the Vichy newspapers, now all the news is by word of mouth but it gets around. Seems the police captured an important resistance leader, a woman, who ran one of the big escape lines, served by former soldiers, mostly, and the flics grabbed her and put her in a cell at the local Préfecture.

  “That looked like the end of her, because the Gestapo was coming for her the next morning, but she did manage to get a note to her friends and, as night came on, a bribed guard brought her a bottle of olive oil.”

  A good storyteller, he made his audience wait for a time while he lit another cigarette. “So, she spent her last day at the window, which was just above the street and, as she’d been thin all her life and hadn’t been getting much to eat, she wondered if she could wriggle between the bars—she knew that if you can get your head through, the rest of you will fit. But the space between the bars was too narrow, until she decided to try them all and realized that two of the bars were set slightly, very slightly, wider than the rest.”

  Again he stopped, and his cousin picked up the story. “What she had discovered was ‘the mason’s bar,’ that’s what we call it. Since a long time ago, masons have been known to be anarchists—opposed to the state and its methods of control, like locking people up in jail cells.”

  “Not us, of course,” his cousin said with a certain smile. “We’re good boys.”

  “I’m sure you are,” Fabien said, with a similar smile.

  “When those anarchist masons set bars in the windows of prison cells, they made one space just a mite larger than the others, wide enough that a prisoner could get his head through. So, after midnight, the woman prisoner took off her clothes, covered herself with olive oil, and worked her way between the bars, then she ran down the street bare-ass naked to where her friends were waiting in a car.”

  Arnaud said, “Is that really true? It’s a good story, but…”

  “It’s the truth, my friend, it happened,” the first mason said. “I heard about the escape from people I know, people who can be trusted.”

  Fabien looked at his watch, stood up, and said, “Well, we’ve still got some riding ahead of us, so…”

  Slowly, the others got to their feet, climbed on their bicycles, and rode off through the wheatfields. By nightfall they were close to their objective, an abandoned branch line of railroad track that had once served a remote village where, years earlier, the village well had dried up and the people had gone away. Now Fabien stopped pedaling and, with one foot on the ground, lit a match, consulted his odometer, and said, “We’re close.” A few hundred feet further and there it was, not far from the road: well-rusted rails, the creosoted ties weathered by time but still in place. Following Fabien’s example, the men laid their bicycles on the ground and walked a way up the track. Fabien held a hand out, a gesture of invitation, and, producing a stopwatch, said, “Gentlemen…”

  Even with muscles stiff and sore, the masons moved quickly. Retrieved plastic explosive and time pencils from Fabien’s suitcase, molded the puttylike plastique into fist-sized lumps, pressed the explosive into the angle where a rail met a tie and pushed a time-pencil detonator into the center. Having practiced this operation at the broom factory, they moved efficiently, adding two more portions of the plastique with time pencils set to go off at five-second intervals after two minutes. Then they ran back toward the bicycles and all four men lay flat and waited. Two minutes later they were rewarded with three flashes, each accompanied by a low, flat sound, crump.

  They returned to the track to find the rails severed and twisted to one side and the ties splintered. Not spectacular destruction but enough—a train moving down the track would have been derailed. One of the masons, admiring the damage, said, “Were we fast enough?”

  Fabien consulted his stopwatch. “Not bad,” he said. “You’ll get faster as you work on real operations.”

  “When will that be?”

  “A few months, as the guerrilla warfare section in London gets organized. There’s nothing wrong with ripping a poster off a wall or helping an airman to escape, but tonight you’ve seen the future of the Resistance.”

  —

  For Mathieu, a note left in his mailbox at the Saint-Yves. Please meet me tonight at eight in the spare room in the student district. Urgent. That could only be Klara Zimmer, he thought. And this meeting had to have something to do with the French Communist Party changing sides and fighting the Germans. Mathieu walked over to the Fifth Arrondissement, then up the Rue Champollion to the building above a student restaurant. When he reached the spare room, a visibly agitated Klara, waiting for him at the open door, took his hand, said, “Thank God you’re here,” pulled him into the room and locked the door behind him.

  “What’s happened?” Mathieu said.

  As she waved him toward the sofa she said, “I’ll show you,” went to her desk and brought him a sheet of mimeograph paper and a photograph. Then she went to the window and looked out over the street. As Mathieu stared at the sketch-artist drawing of his face and the clandestine photograph of Chantal, Klara sat opposite him on the sofa.

  “Where do these come from?” he said.

  “I have a friend, a detective, who has been secretly a member of the party for years, and he isn’t the only one, in fact there are quite a few, both detectives and uniformed police. After the surrender, some of them were ordered to befriend their Vichyite counterparts on the force—they drank with them, they went to brothels with them, took their wives out for dinner with them. In time, they were asked to join their new friends in some sort of special anti-resistance squad directed by a German officer in the Kommandantur.”

  Mathieu studied the drawing and the photograph, found Chantal’s real name and address written on the back of the photograph. On the other side of the drawing, the single word Mathieu. He let his hands drop to his lap and swore.

  “I think you had better run for it, Mathieu. Before it’s too late.” Then she said, “Now. Tonight. Don’t go back to your hotel.”

  Mathieu sighed, “I can’t do that, Klara, I have to save my people.”

  “They are looking for you, Mathieu, and I fear there’s no hope for Chantal.”

  “She has some time, they’ll watch her, use her as bait in a trap. That gives me a chance to get her away. Then…the others…I’ll have to work something out.”

  Klara made a sound of exasperation and said, “You just won’t leave now, will you.”

  “I can’t.”

  She nodded, confirming to herself what she’d suspected.
“I knew what you would do…you don’t change. Anyhow, I tried.”

  “Klara, why are you doing this for me? Is it politics?”

  She did not answer him immediately, her eyes were glistening. “My reasons are not political, they are what the party calls ‘sentimental,’ and that word is said with contempt.”

  “Do they know that you are showing me these…things?”

  “They do not. And I would be in bad trouble if they found out and so would my detective friend. But when I realized what the police had, I couldn’t stand the idea of your being interrogated, probably by the Gestapo, couldn’t stand the thought of your being hurt like that.”

  Mathieu stood and kissed Klara on the forehead. “I will have to go away, when I’m able, but I will never forget what you did for me. You saved lives, Klara.”

  She closed her eyes for a moment, then said, “I’m going to watch the street when you leave, in case you are being followed. Just look up at the window and see if I’m holding a handkerchief. If not, you are safe.”

  Mathieu left, walked some way down the hill, then turned back. At the window, Klara’s hands were empty.

  —

  Now grateful for the darkness of the blackout, Mathieu made his way back toward his hotel, keeping an eye out for document controls. He would buy a hat, he thought, as soon as he possibly could, and eyeglasses—not exactly a disguise, but such differences from the drawing would make it harder to identify him. As would motion—thus he picked up his bicycle at the Saint-Yves and rode it over to the Hôtel-Dieu, the large public hospital on the Île de la Cité. Where he searched for, and eventually found, Lisette’s mother, Sonya—born in Russia, emigrated to Paris at age nine—who worked there as a nurse. To speak privately, away from the patients in their beds, the two stood in a corner by a window.

  Sonya was breathless, her hands clenched. “What’s happened? Is it Lisette?”

  “No, but she mustn’t go near Madame Vigne’s mailbox—she mustn’t work at all. They are looking for me, and Chantal is surely under surveillance.”

  “What will you do?”