“Who needs to annoy the Gestapo? I want them to leave us alone.”
But in fact, he had already decided that this young Gestapo officer might be useful to him.
Luc always found ways to make a living. His first task was to ensure there were provisions for the restaurant. Using the black market he managed to keep the restaurant going, despite the wartime food shortages.
But his income was down. Though he could still obtain a little cocaine, many of his clients had left, and the high-ranking German officers who used the drug had their own suppliers. He never saw Louise now, but it enraged him that she must be making a fortune at L’Invitation au Voyage, and was paying him nothing. There wasn’t much he could do; but he still vowed that one day he’d make her wish she hadn’t treated him like that.
In the meantime, however, he knew how to live by his wits. And it was natural that he had been wondering for some time how he should profit from the German occupation. People like Marc Blanchard and Louise met Germans at the highest levels. He did not. But young Karl Schmid the Gestapo officer might be just the sort of contact he needed.
Two days later, he went to his office.
Karl Schmid sat behind his desk and considered the world. He was twenty-eight years old and remarkably fortunate.
For a start, he was in Paris—a city he’d always wanted to visit, and never dreamed he would live in.
Not only that, his office was spectacular. Not his own, personal office exactly, since that was quite a small room. But the building was spacious and situated on one of the noblest avenues in the world.
After the Great War, the wide, stately avenue that ran down from the Arc de Triomphe to the Bois de Boulogne had been renamed after one of the war’s great French generals: avenue Foch. And the Gestapo had chosen well when they took over three houses at the avenue’s lower end. “My office,” he had written to his parents with satisfaction, “is on the Avenue Foch, which is a very good address.”
He was not entirely surprised when Luc appeared to see him. When he had first encountered him, it had seemed to Schmid that, by his demeanor, the fellow might be a potential informer, and he had been thinking of going by the bar again someday.
He was pleased that Luc didn’t waste any time.
“I could not speak in public, Lieutenant Schmid,” Luc said politely, “but I know many corners of Paris. If I can ever be of service to you …”
“Do you expect to be paid?” Schmid asked.
“If my services are useful. One has to live.”
Schmid had no intention of paying without results. It was a good sign that the man wasn’t asking for that.
“I can pay a little.” Schmid looked at Luc thoughtfully. “If you hear of any illegal activity, any terrorist plans …”
“I avoid that world myself,” Luc said carefully. “But I sometimes hear things.” He paused. “Is there anything else you need?”
“The Wehrmacht has already confiscated some art, as you will be aware, I am sure. But there is so much art in Paris, often in criminal hands. Paintings especially. I take a personal interest in such matters.”
“I understand. The owners have to be arrested. But then the work may be confiscated.” Luc nodded. “A valuable business.”
“I have said you will be paid.”
Luc inclined his head politely.
“I shall make inquiries,” he said. “They may take time.”
“Come to see me at the start of every month,” Schmid ordered. “Meanwhile, I know where to find you.”
Time would tell whether this smooth Frenchman of the streets would produce anything of value.
As Luc went about his business in the months that followed, one thing seemed very clear: his self-interest lay with the Germans.
True, only days after he had first met Schmid, news came that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, and America had entered the conflict. People were saying that the tide of war would change. It might be so. It might not. But any such change was far over the horizon.
By June 1942, the British were starting to bomb German cities. But that wasn’t stopping the Germans from launching a new offensive in Russia that was sweeping toward the mighty River Volga.
And in France, in Paris especially, the German grip was total.
All the same, Luc didn’t want to get on the wrong side of the Resistance. Successful or not, the Dalou boys and their friends could be dangerous. He’d be better keeping in with them. Besides, the more he knew about their activities, the more opportunities there might be, if he was careful, to sell information to Schmid.
More than once he’d said to Thomas, “I was wrong not to have come out with you when you did the job on the Eiffel Tower. Tell the Dalou boys I’d be glad to come another time.”
It was a dangerous line to walk. But he thought he could manage it.
He hadn’t yet been able to find an art collector for the German. He’d thought of Marc, naturally. But in the first place, Marc was a longtime customer—and Luc always looked after his customers. Besides, Marc was in high favor with the Germans, and he doubted very much that Marc was involved in any way with any Resistance groups.
But he’d been able to make himself useful to the Gestapo nonetheless. When Schmid had asked him to watch a French engineer who he thought might be running several wireless operators, he had done so, and the engineer had been arrested. Luc had been paid something after that. Once, when he overheard the Dalou boys planning a raid to steal explosives from a store down in Boulogne-Billancourt, he’d waited to make sure that Thomas was not involved, and then gave Schmid the tip-off. The next time he saw Schmid, the Gestapo man remarked: “We ignored that tip you gave us about the explosives.”
“And?”
“They stole them. Can you tell me who they were?”
Luc threw up his hands.
“Unfortunately no,” he lied. “It was two men I overheard, but I’d never seen them before. If I see them again, I’ll tell you.”
“Well,” Schmid said, “I shall listen to you next time. By the way,” he added, “there is something else I want. If you can find me some.”
“What is that?”
“Jews. But not just any Jews. I want French Jews. Find me a French Jew whom I can arrest, my friend, and I will pay you well.”
It was a hot day that July when Luc Gascon walked along the bank of the Seine past the Eiffel Tower.
He was going there because he made a point of seeing everything that was going on in the city. And this was certainly an unusual occurrence. He was going to take a look at what was going on at the large building that lay just a short distance downstream from the Eiffel Tower.
The old indoor bicycle stadium which had proved such a useful venue for the boxing matches during the ’24 Olympics was still in use. The Vélodrome d’hiver, the winter bicycle track, remained its official name. But everyone called it the Vel d’hiv. And for the last few days, the French police had found another use for the old place. It was a holding station for a large number of undesirables they had just rounded up. Several thousand of them. Jews: foreign Jews, mostly.
When Luc got there, he could see a number of police vans outside the stadium, but there didn’t seem to be any people going in or out. All the doors of the stadium were closed. In the strange silence, under the harsh sun, the scene reminded him of one of those surrealist paintings he had seen, as though he had walked in upon a dream. But as he got closer, something else struck him that wasn’t like a dream at all. It was the smell. Not just a smell, a stink, a terrible, sickening stench of latrines overflowing, of excrement warmed and putrefied. He pulled out a handkerchief and held it over his nose.
Luc didn’t especially like or dislike Jews. People who had strong beliefs said they were capitalist bloodsuckers, or Marxist revolutionaries. And they’d crucified Christ, of course. Personally, Luc never went to church and didn’t care whether they’d crucified Christ or not.
Most of the Jews he’d met weren’t so bad.
He supposed they were mainly French Jews, and they might be rather different from all the foreign Jews who’d been flooding into Paris in the last few years.
And it was the foreign Jews that the police had been rounding up.
He stared at the building with its terrible stench. Whoever those poor devils were inside, he considered, this was a terrible way to treat them.
He’d been standing there for a little while when he noticed another figure, a small, neatly dressed man, also watching the Vel d’hiv from a street corner. The fellow looked vaguely familiar, and he searched his mind, trying to remember where he’d seen him. He saw the man turn and look at him, then walk toward him.
When Jacob had told his wife he was going to see what was going on at the Vel d’hiv, he had felt a secret sense of dread, but he had not told her that. Now, as the art dealer gazed at the big building, he understood exactly what he saw.
The logic was simple: If they would pen all these people up in conditions like this—if they would treat them worse than animals being prepared for slaughter—then there was nothing they would not do.
Perhaps, if he had not known the long history of his people, he might have remained like so many in the Jewish community who refused to believe that a French government could be so evil. Perhaps, if he had not spent all his life in the company of works of art, and known their stories and the characters, sometimes, of the very men who commissioned such beauty, he might have been less keenly aware of the terrible possibilities that lie within the human spirit.
But Jacob knew these things, and foresaw what was to come, and knew he must get out, if he could.
Ever since he had given some of his paintings to Louise, Jacob had been preparing for the worst. If he could have, he’d have gone to England. But escape across the Channel was almost impossible. A few months ago, however, a friend named Abraham had told him of a new opening.
“We’re going to organize a route across the Pyrenees into Spain,” Abraham had told him. “It’s not in place yet, and it’ll be risky, of course; but we’re getting our people together.” He’d promised to keep Jacob informed. Jacob had told his wife about the conversation, and between themselves they referred to this option as “visiting Cousin Hélène.”
Abraham lived in Montparnasse. If Abraham could just get them to a safe house of some kind out of Paris, Jacob thought, that at least would be a start. He still had money to invest in the enterprise.
And he was so shaken by what he had just seen at the Vel d’hiv, so afraid that any delay might put his little family in danger, that he resolved to go straight to Abraham and, if possible, to flee at once.
He just needed to get a message to his wife. A couple of hundred yards away he could see a telephone kiosk. He glanced toward the police vans. A couple of policemen were standing beside one of them, watching him idly. That was a nuisance. As a Jew, he wasn’t allowed to use the public telephones. It would be ridiculous to get arrested for some tiny infraction like that.
But there was another fellow standing not far from the telephone. Perhaps he could be of help. It was worth a try.
Luc gazed down at Jacob. He remembered him now. Their meeting had been very brief. He’d called to see Marc Blanchard at his apartment, a few years ago, just as Jacob was leaving. Marc had introduced him as his dealer. They’d spoken for only a few moments before Jacob had to go.
Evidently Jacob didn’t remember him, and he was just debating whether to introduce himself, or whether it might be a bore, when the dealer started speaking.
“A terrible business,” Jacob said, nodding toward the stadium. He looked distressed, and agitated.
“I believe they’re all foreign Jews,” said Luc.
“Ah. Yes. Perhaps,” Jacob replied absently. “I wonder if you could do me a small favor,” he said suddenly. “I should like to tell my wife that I shall be home late. But you know I can’t use the phone over there. If I gave you a number …”
“But of course,” Luc spread his hands. “No problem.”
“Well then, my wife’s name is Sarina. If you could just tell her that I am delayed until this evening, but that I have not forgotten we are going to see her cousin Hélène in the morning.” He smiled. “She thinks I forget everything.”
“All wives think their husbands are forgetful.”
“You are very kind. Here is the number.” Jacob wrote it on a scrap of paper. “And the price of the call.”
“No payment, monsieur. It’s a pleasure. I’ll do it right away. If you stand over by that street corner, the police won’t see you, but you’ll be able to see me make the call.” He smiled.
“You are very kind, monsieur.”
Luc made the call.
“Am I speaking to Sarina?”
“Yes.” The voice sounded cautious.
“Your husband was just here, by the Vel d’hiv. He can’t use the public telephone, you understand? He asked me to give you a message.”
“I see.” She still sounded a little doubtful.
“He is delayed. He won’t be back until this evening.”
“This evening?” She sounded very surprised.
“That’s what he said. And something else. He said to tell you that he hasn’t forgotten he is going with you to see your cousin Hélène in the morning.”
“Our cousin Hélène? He said Hélène?”
“Oui, madame.”
“Oh my God.” Her voice sounded terrified. “Oh my God.”
“Madame?”
“Nothing. Thank you.” She hung up.
Luc glanced toward Jacob and nodded. He saw the Jew give a grateful nod in return, and hurry away.
Now what, Luc wondered, was that all about?
Sometimes Schmid despaired of the Vichy French. Not that the government of France was being uncooperative. Far from it. Pétain was a splendid figurehead. The respect he’d earned in the Great War meant that the French were glad to follow the old warrior. And it was evident that, as a realist, Pétain had decided the only way to save his country was to become a German satellite. The French police were keen to do Germany’s will. Almost too keen, sometimes.
Yet they kept missing the point.
Karl Schmid leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head and sighed. “It’s partly our own fault,” he murmured to himself. “We didn’t have a proper plan for the Jews.”
Nobody wanted them in Germany, of course. They were kicked out of there. But there was so much to accomplish that the problem of what to do with them had been rather shelved. And since they had been fleeing there from Eastern Europe anyway, France had, rather by default, become a dumping ground for the Jews of the Third Reich.
But now it was time to tidy things up. At the start of that year, Schmid knew, a final solution to the Jewish question had been secretly agreed, and this very summer the methodology was being perfected. Officially however, the Jews were to be sent as workers to the East, or kept in labor camps.
There was only one problem. The French did not understand the Jewish question. It had been glaringly apparent at the meeting the French police came to in the Gestapo offices here on the avenue Foch just a couple of weeks ago. Though he was only a junior fellow, they had allowed him to sit in on the meeting, and he had watched with fascination.
“We shall conduct the roundup, but we have two stipulations,” the senior Frenchman said.
The first was that they should wait until after the fourteenth of the month. To conduct the roundup on Bastille Day would seem unfortunate. This was easily agreed to. But the second stipulation was more tiresome.
They wanted to round up only foreign Jews. No French ones.
“It might provoke bad feeling in the city,” the French police chief said. “Stir up trouble. Just what we don’t need.”
“But why?” one of the SS men asked him. “This is not just a question of rounding up troublesome Gypsies who don’t belong here. That of course we understand. But the Third Reich does not make a distinction because a ma
n is a German Jew as opposed to a Polish one. That is not the point. What matters is that he is a Jew.”
“We have no objection to the statutes that rightly make Jews into second-class citizens,” the Frenchman answered. “Eventually, I dare say they may all be removed. But we should at least start with the foreign ones.”
“We make no distinction.”
“In France”—the police chief spread his hands—“when a man is a Frenchman, even a Jew …” It was clear that somehow the French, even now, were so proud of their nationhood that they considered it could somehow mitigate the most fundamental facts about a man.
His boss had turned to Karl.
“What is our capacity at present, Schmid?”
“We could take in a little over thirteen thousand.”
“Good.” The German turned to the French police chief. “We want thirteen thousand, whoever they are. And no children. Remember, these people are all going east as laborers.”
“Understood.”
But of course, though the French policemen had started at dawn and moved with commendable efficiency, they’d brought in all the children as well. Some people said it was because they couldn’t bear to part the children from the parents. It might be so. Schmid suspected it was so they wouldn’t have to deal with all these inconvenient children themselves.
Thousands of them were in the Vel d’hiv at this moment. It must be like an oven in there, he thought. Soon they’d be transferred to other holding camps. And then in due course, sent east.
But admirable as this was, it still did nothing to address the question of the French Jews. Some had been arrested, of course. Blum, the former prime minister, was being kept in detention—but a comfortable one. Jew or not, it would be foolish to treat a former prime minister of France without some show of respect. His brother, however, was in a holding camp already.
Patience, thought Schmid, patience would eventually do the rest. When they’d worked through all the foreigners, the French police would be obliged to start rounding up the Jews they so foolishly considered as their own.
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