A Hero of France: A Novel

by Alan Furst

  “Major Broehm, I regret to say that there will be no future. The Fuehrer has determined that the French will never be our allies, so the time of coddling is over. The Resistance will now become the concern of the Sicherheitsdienst—the security service run by Himmler—and the Gestapo. You know their techniques, Major, unappetizing but they produce results.”

  “Thank you, Vice-Minister, for the opportunity to serve.”

  “A Gestapo officer from the Paris headquarters will be there to relieve you this afternoon. Again, my regrets. You will return to Hamburg in your old job of senior inspector. Have you any questions?”

  “The penetration agent, Stefan Kusar, what shall I do with him?”

  “Where did you find him?”

  “In Fresnes prison, on his way to Zagreb to stand trial for murder.”

  “Well, put him back there, and he’ll be off to whatever awaits him in Zagreb.”

  At three in the morning, they came for Kusar in his room at the Hotel Magenta. When they knocked at his door, he thought they might be bringing news of his next assignment. Previously, he’d been contacted by means of an anonymous slip of paper, and he thought this personal visit was simply a change of procedure. But it wasn’t and, as they forced his hands behind his back, he realized that the people who had saved his life had no further use for him.

  Earlier that day, the Gestapo officer had been ushered in to see Major Broehm. He was a tall, lean young man wearing a dark suit and crisp white shirt and, in his approach to Broehm, was formal, very courteous and correct. But his manners did nothing to soften what Broehm saw in his eyes: a fixed stare, cold and relentless, that suggested there was nothing he would not do to you. Clearly, he would get answers to his questions, though not from Jules, who was safe in Fresnes prison.

  —

  After the warning from de Lyon, Annemarie had sat in her quiet apartment, trying to figure out what to do. It was wiser, she finally decided, to heed the warning and, at least for a time, disappear. But where? How? And, particularly, for how long? She had some money in her apartment but not much, and she would need a lot of money, that much her work in the Resistance had taught her. Money from her family was paid, once a month, into her account at a private bank in Paris, but what if the police knew this? What if they had somebody watching the bank? How to disappear if you must return to the city every month? In time, she realized that there was only one way to acquire a large sum of money and called her mother.

  “I am thinking of dropping by this afternoon,” she said. This was not usual for Annemarie, she hadn’t seen her parents for months.

  “Any special reason, dear?”

  “No, simply to say hello.”

  “What’s wrong? I am your mother and I can hear it in your voice.”

  “Nothing, nothing at all.”

  The connection wasn’t the best—there was a low buzz on the line as mother and daughter did not speak. Then, finally, her mother said, “Your father and I are planning to come into Paris today, why don’t we stop by your apartment?”

  Annemarie’s parents lived in Chevreuse, an enclave for the rich on the outskirts of the city, thus Annemarie had time to change clothes, dressing for her parents, and soon enough her doorbell rang.

  Her parents settled in the parlor, Annemarie made tea. “Would you like to tell us what’s happened?” her father said. He was a tall man with waves of white hair above a hawkish face, one of the wealthy men who fully supported the Vichy regime, their barrier against the ravening Bolsheviks, and Annemarie loathed him.

  “I am in some difficulty and I need money,” Annemarie said.

  “You have money,” her father said.

  “I need more, just now.”

  “And so I should hand it over, is that what you think? We’ve provided for you amply, but now it seems you’ve gotten yourself into some kind of trouble. Some kind of trouble you don’t want to talk about.”

  Annemarie’s mother intervened. “My dear, the car is parked downstairs, why don’t you come home with us and spend a few days?” Annemarie’s father was allowed to have two cars, one of them the de luxe Citroën. “You can rest and relax, you do look a little tired, and we’ll talk things out. Please say yes, dear, I worry about you so, what with the…situation here.”

  She knows, Annemarie thought. Her mother was seated in such a way that her husband could not see her face and, for the barest second, flicked her eyes at Annemarie’s father. Trust me to get around him, the glance meant.

  “Very well,” Annemarie said. “Let me put a few things in my valise.”

  —

  Ghislain fled twice. First to Nîmes, in the Unoccupied Zone, then, three months later, to New York. There, with the help of a few words in the proper ear provided by Margaret Mead, he joined the anthropology department at Columbia University. He found American students very different than their French counterparts. The latter attended lectures, took notes, and volleyed back that information in their examinations, while the Americans sought insight, spoke up in seminars, and were instinctively curious—they were certainly curious about him.

  “Yes? Mr. Cohen?”

  “Professor Bernard, when you were living in Occupied France, did you join the Resistance?”

  “No, I can’t say I did. I had a few friends who took part, and now and then I helped them.”

  “Can you tell us more about it?”

  “Yes? Miss Bailey?”

  “In your book, you claim that the Kahwa people often…”

  —

  Madame Vigne wasn’t sure what to do. She dearly loved her shop—her beautiful white candles, her crucifixes, Saint Christopher medals, and paintings of saints with halos—and didn’t want to leave it. She could, she supposed, sell it and live on the money in some little place somewhere. Where she would be a hunchbacked old lady, eccentric, a little dotty, perhaps. No.

  Still, the telephone call from de Lyon had been frightening. Would they arrest the woman she had just described to herself? She wasn’t sure—would the French police do such a thing? Would the Germans? Well, she supposed, it would depend on the individual commanders—their personal politics, their commitment to the laws, or the quotient of good to evil in their souls.

  Her German customers were nice boys, from a country where the Nazis had attacked and suppressed religion, and they liked handling the religious articles, sometimes buying a small crucifix to hide away. She had also some older German customers, spiritualists like herself, who came to the shop for conversation and, rarely but it had happened, a séance—they wanted to contact the spirits of the departed, friends and loved ones, to make sure they were content and in a better place.

  These men would not want to arrest her, she thought. And, anyhow, arrest her for what? For receiving and sending messages for the Resistance. Oh no, she thought, the messages! She went to her office and looked in the drawer where she kept the messages. Yes, there they were, a dozen slips of paper awaiting delivery. For Chantal: They will be on the 8:30 train from Bourges. She crumpled them up, found a china-painted plate with the image of a shepherd holding a crook and a lamb, and set the papers alight. She greatly disliked the smell of burning paper so lit a stick of sandalwood incense. Much better, her shop now smelled as it should.

  It happened that there was a deck of tarot cards on a bookshelf next to her chair and, almost idly, she began to lay them out. Nothing was clear, of course. In tarot, all was implied, open to interpretation. So, here was the Fool, about to walk off the edge of a cliff, but it could be read as throwing caution to the winds. A few cards later, the Seven of Pentacles, which suggested that she was involved in an undertaking that would flourish and grow. Was that not her shop? She completed the pattern of cards but saw nothing of danger. So, the cards had told her what she needed to know. I shall stay in Paris, she thought. And, if she were arrested, then fate had spoken and there was nothing she could do about it.

  But fate had no arrest in store for Madame Vigne, neither was she questioned
nor summoned to a Préfecture, and, as the months passed, her heart eased and she was quietly elated that she hadn’t given in to panic, that she had saved her lovely shop.

  —

  For Daniel, the warning from de Lyon presented an opportunity, an opportunity to do something he had long wanted to do. On the evening of the seventeenth, he prepared to leave his tiny basement room in the Marais, throwing a few things into a pillowcase, including a Spanish Astra automatic with a wooden grip, given to him by a friend who was headed out of the country. Then he looked around at what was left, knocked on his neighbor’s door and asked her if there was anything in the room she could use. Graciously, she wondered if he would like to have a few francs in exchange. He shook his head and said, “Take what you want, you’ve always been good to me.”

  Later on, some German investigators found her standing on the corner of the Rue Saint-Denis where she worked, offering herself to the men who roamed that street, and questioned her about Daniel. There was little she could tell them; she had sometimes cooked dinner for him, and, before he left, he had given her a towel and a few dishes. When the investigators were done, they took down her name and address. As she was the last person known to have seen Daniel alive, they explained, they might need to question her further.

  Otherwise, rumors. It was said that Daniel had joined an assassination squad, all of them members of the Communist Party, all of them Jewish boys, fifteen and sixteen years old. The leader of the squad was called Binyamin. His photograph in the newspaper, when he was finally captured, showed a boy with curly hair, soft skin, and thick eyeglasses. Binyamin’s group was not the only Jewish gang in Paris, the exploits of a group led by Gilbert Brustlein were highly publicized: the shooting of seven German soldiers, each followed by massive reprisals, then other actions at Nantes. The gang was believed to have been organized and armed by a French Jew who had fought with the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War.

  Daniel had changed his nom de guerre more than once, and changed his appearance, which made tracing him almost impossible. Was he in the group that ambushed a French collaborator in Paris? Or the lone wolf who shot a Wehrmacht officer in Lille? Or among the teenagers who hurled a hand grenade through the window of a restaurant much patronized by German officers? Nobody could say for sure. Some people believed that Daniel had been killed during a gunfight in a garage, others that he had fled to North Africa, or gone to Palestine. There was no question that he had sought revenge against the Germans for killing Jews, but whatever might have happened to him in that mission was unknown.

  —

  At last, on the twenty-ninth of July, the storm that all Parisians, wilting in the heat wave, had longed for. It began after nightfall; lightning flashed above the city, illuminating the blacked-out streets, while the claps of thunder were sharp and explosive, the air was suddenly chill, and then, driven by a stiff wind, the rain pelted down, filling the drains at the edges of the sidewalks and flooding over the cobblestones.

  Joëlle reached the Saint-Yves in the middle of it, walking fast beneath a dying umbrella. She stopped in the doorway of the hotel, closed the umbrella, shook the water off, then entered the lobby. Sitting on a battered chair was a large man, perhaps a dangerous man, wearing a black rubber raincoat, hair pounded flat by the rain, drying his face with a handkerchief. As Joëlle passed the reception desk, he stood up. Apparently he was there to see her and, intuition told her, this visit was somehow connected to the missing Mathieu. The man approached her and said, his voice marked by a Slavic accent, “Pardon, madame, are you Madame Joëlle?”

  “Yes, that’s me. Have we met before?”

  “No, madame, I am called Stavros and I am sent here by a friend of yours, a very good friend, I think, and he want to see you.”

  Joëlle let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. He’s alive. “Is he well, this friend?”

  “You can see for yourself. I will take you where he is.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, now.”

  To reach the Mabillon Métro, they took the Rue de Buci and there, on the wall of an apartment house, was a poster that showed the drawing of Mathieu and offered a reward for information leading to his capture. Joëlle stopped dead and stared at it, transfixed, heart pounding. Stavros took her elbow, said, “Just keep walking, Madame Joëlle,” and led her up the street.

  They got off the Métro in the neighborhood of crumbling tenements near the Les Halles market, passed the giant doorman at the entry to the Le Cygne nightclub, then walked some way down the alley behind the building. Stavros opened the door, then pointed at the stairway and said, “It’s the room on the first landing, Mathieu waiting for you there.”

  Joëlle ran up the stairs, knocked at the door, and, when Mathieu appeared, he wrapped her in his arms and crushed her against him. She’d had only a glimpse of his face, but sufficient to see a pale and exhausted Mathieu with dark shadows beneath his eyes.

  It was a small room, the only furniture a straw mattress with a blanket thrown over it, while an open valise stood at the foot of the bed and served as a closet. As they sat side by side on the edge of the mattress, Joëlle ran her hand up and down his upper arm, nursing him as best she could. Although there was no window in the room, the storm outside was present: thunderclaps exploded one after the other, then echoed away, the splash of the rain loud on the pavement in the alley. “I had to see you,” Mathieu said.

  “I was afraid you were gone.” She paused, then said, “You look, so tired.”

  “I am tired, being hunted will make you tired.”

  “Are you going away, Mathieu?”

  “Yes, perhaps tomorrow, it will depend on the weather, and the moon.”

  “I shall stay with you until then.”

  “Two things I must tell you: later I will introduce you to a man named Max de Lyon, who owns this nightclub. If you need anything, money, anything, he will help you. Next, here is the key to my apartment, I would like you to stay there with Mariana.”

  “I keep her in my room, now. She was waiting for you all night by the door.”

  “She will do better in her usual place and she will read you, will trust I am coming back if you believe it.”

  “Are you coming back, Mathieu?”

  “Yes, someday, I will come back to you, to our city.”

  “I want to lie on the bed with you.”

  He lay next to her and she pressed herself against him. He sighed at the warmth of her and held her closer, then closed his eyes. She worked her hand between the buttons of his shirt so that she could touch the skin of his chest. “I think you must sleep now,” she said.

  He was fading fast and his voice was faint, but she heard him well enough when he said, “I love you, Joëlle.”

  —

  30 July. The storm had passed, leaving behind a deep blue sky. Good flying weather, Mathieu thought, and a clear sky for the full moon. It was Edouard who had arranged his escape, telling him he could no longer stay in France, thus he was to meet a contact in the town of Nemours who would take him to a wheatfield where a Lysander could land. In the second-class car of the train to Nemours, all the compartments were full, so Mathieu stood in the corridor, a dense crowd packed around him. A silent crowd: worn faces amid the scents of garlic, sour wine, and tobacco.

  Now it happened that Mathieu noticed a short man wearing a very expensive brown hat with a high crown, their eyes met for a moment, then Mathieu turned away, too aware that the wanted poster had been pasted to walls all over Paris. The crowd stirred, the man in the brown hat was trying to move to a position where he could get a better look at Mathieu, who glanced at him once again to see him smiling in a certain way, smug and sly, in control, invulnerable. Secret police, Mathieu thought and cursed his bad luck. The train would reach Nemours in fifteen minutes and then he would be safe, hidden away, but the man now moved closer.

  If he was trying to flush Mathieu from cover, he was successful. Mathieu decided to move to
the following car and, as he began to work his way through the crowd, was the recipient of a few sharp elbows and muttered curses. When he at last reached the entry to the next car, he turned sideways, to see his smiling pursuer patiently following him. Which secret police, he wondered, they were everywhere now, Vichy French, German, from this organization or that, and they were more than capable of recognizing a face despite a hat and eyeglasses.

  As he entered the following car, people in the crowd turned toward him with a look that said, We really don’t have room for you, where do you think you’re going? Mathieu pushed his way to the middle of the car, then, as he tried to move away from his pursuer he saw, looking through the windowed door at the rear of the carriage, railway track rolling away behind the train—he was in the last car. He would have to make a stand, he thought. Then the short man encountered a beefy, stubborn fellow who didn’t want to get out of his way, but the pursuer leaned toward the fellow and said a few quiet words that caused him to step aside in a hurry.

  Now on the run, Mathieu tried to wedge himself between a middle-aged couple who straddled two large suitcases. The man put his hands on Mathieu’s shoulders, gave him a hard shove, saying, “Mind your manners!” Mathieu shoved back, with enough force that the man toppled over backward, drawing gasps from the passengers. Mathieu stepped over him as the crowd, aware of the near brawl, made way for him. He was quickly at the end of the carriage, where he opened the door, stepped outside, and found himself on a small platform with a gate across it. He needed only a few steps to reach the gate—the sound of the locomotive now loud in the open air—then he turned to face his pursuer.

  The man didn’t follow immediately but waited on the other side of the windowed door, his smile now broad and beaming as he enjoyed the plight of his prey—cornered, nowhere to go. Next he paused to adjust his hat, making sure it hadn’t been knocked askew during his passage through the crowd, then opened the door.