Paris: The Novel

by Edward Rutherfurd

  In the meantime, any French Jew who broke a regulation or stepped out of line could be taken instantly.

  He was just considering this when an orderly told him that Luc Gascon had come to see him.

  The Frenchman’s face was a mask, but Schmid sensed that he was quite excited.

  “You have something for me?”

  “I am not sure. I have a French Jew. He is an art dealer, so I assume he owns a quantity of paintings. Whether he has broken the law, or is planning to, I am not sure. But let me tell you what happened.”

  Schmid listened carefully as Luc described what had taken place at the Vel d’Hiv. When Luc had finished, Schmid asked him what conclusion he drew.

  “I think it’s possible that Jacob was so shocked by what he saw that he is going to try to escape from Paris, maybe from France. When I used the words ‘Cousin Hélène,’ his wife sounded so frightened that I think it may be a code word between them.”

  “I agree.” Schmid nodded. “It is possible. If so, there may be an escape route we know nothing about; and this Jew could lead us to it.”

  “Can you arrest him?”

  “I can pull him in on suspicion. After that, we shall question him. See what he says.” He smiled. “Give me the telephone number and leave the rest to me. You have done well.”

  The two plainclothesmen waited outside Jacob’s house the next morning. Schmid’s instructions to them were simple: they were to observe where the family went.

  Early in the morning they saw Jacob leave the apartment block where he lived on the rue La Fayette. One of the men followed him to his small gallery, where he remained until the end of the morning. Meanwhile, his wife went out shopping, and returned home. Late in the afternoon, Jacob returned home. Nothing else happened. “Watch again tomorrow morning,” Schmid instructed. “If he goes to the office again, pick him up and bring him in.”

  At noon the next day, they brought Jacob in. They didn’t take him to the avenue Foch, however, but to a house on the rue des Saussaies, just behind the Élysée Palace. It was well equipped for such encounters.

  Schmid conducted the interrogation. As he looked at the small, neatly dressed art dealer, he felt no particular emotion. He asked his questions gently. He could always use other methods if he chose.

  So he learned at once that Jacob had a wife and a single child, a little girl. That was easy. What was his business? Jacob explained that he was an art dealer. Schmid asked for the keys to the gallery. Reluctantly, Jacob gave them. Had he any other family?

  Not much. He had a cousin named Hélène.

  The first setback. Hélène was not an invention. She might still be a code word, of course. He asked for her address, so that he could check the story. How often did he see her? Quite often. He had planned to go around to her house with his family yesterday, but then changed his mind.

  Where had he been two days ago? To the Vel d’hiv. Why? To see what was happening. Was he afraid? Yes. Where did he go afterward? Into Montparnasse. Why? He had a friend whom he hadn’t seen for a while named Abraham. He’d been concerned he might have been rounded up and taken to the Vel d’hiv. And had he?

  “I don’t know,” Jacob said simply. “When I got to his place, they told me he’d moved a couple of months ago. That’s all I could discover. So I went home.”

  Schmid guessed that some of this story was probably true. But was it the whole truth? He took Abraham’s address.

  “We shall talk again,” he told Jacob, and sent him back to a holding cell.

  By evening his stories had been checked out. Cousin Hélène turned out to be a plump middle-aged woman of no account. Abraham had moved, but not registered his new address. He might be of interest.

  Meanwhile, Schmid had gone to the gallery himself. Its contents were quite intriguing.

  If the Third Reich confiscated art collections—especially Jewish ones—Schmid had started acquiring art as well. He believed he was developing an eye. He found many things in Jacob’s gallery—some of it degenerate art, which would have to be burned, of course—but many good things as well. No doubt there would be more in Jacob’s house. It seemed likely that Jacob’s art inventory was of far more interest than was Jacob himself. He stayed there until dusk. Before he left, he took a small sketch by Degas, rolled it carefully and put it in his briefcase. It would never be missed.

  On the way back, he called in again at the rue des Saussaies. He had them bring Jacob to an interrogation room and strap him in a chair.

  He explained to Jacob that he believed there was an escape route out of France, and he wanted to know about it.

  Jacob said that if there was one, he didn’t know it.

  Then Schmid took a pair of pliers and pulled out one of Jacob’s fingernails, which made him scream, and Schmid said: “It is painful, you see.” He asked him: “Did your friend Abraham know an escape route? Isn’t that why you were looking for him?” Jacob said no. So then Schmid did what he had done before, and Jacob screamed again. And as he was sobbing, Jacob looked up wretchedly and said: “If I could have escaped, do you think I’d be here now?”

  Then Schmid told them to take the art dealer back to his cell and to arrest Jacob’s wife for questioning the next morning.

  Laïla Jacob was seven years old and a bright little girl. When her father didn’t come home from the gallery, her mother went to look for him and came back very frightened. At first she wouldn’t tell Laïla what had happened, but then she changed her mind.

  A Gestapo man had been in the gallery when she got there, she told Laïla, so she had not gone in. But the people in the store next door said that her husband had been arrested.

  “They are coming to take us away to prison,” her mother told her. “All of us. No Jewish house is safe.” Then she hugged Laïla very close, but she didn’t say what they could do about it.

  The next day was fine, and Laïla wondered if maybe her father would reappear and everything would be normal again. But at nine in the morning, they heard heavy steps coming up the stairs to the landing where their apartment was, and her mother suddenly told her to hide and not to make a sound.

  “Wait a little while. Then go to your cousin Hélène,” she said. “She’ll look after you until I get back.”

  So Laïla ran and hid in a closet. She heard the door open and heard the men take her mother away with them. And then there was only silence.

  For about an hour, Laïla waited in the apartment. When she opened the door and looked out, the landing was empty. She went down the stairs and out into the rue La Fayette.

  She started walking up the street toward the Gare du Nord, because Cousin Hélène lived on a street behind the station. But before she reached the Gare du Nord, she passed a little square with a church, and a few benches; and she sat on one of these and considered what she was about to do.

  Although she was only seven, Laïla always thought for herself. She had a logical and practical intelligence. And the more she thought about it, the more the little girl wondered if her mother’s instructions were right. If no Jewish house was safe, she reasoned, then Cousin Hélène’s house wasn’t safe either. The only place she might be safe was a house that was not Jewish. And she tried to think of someone she knew who wasn’t Jewish.

  Then she remembered, a little while ago, her father pointing out a house to her and telling her: “There’s a very nice lady who lives in there. She’s keeping some things for me.”

  “Why?” she had asked.

  “Because I can trust her. She’ll keep them safe. Just remember that. You can always go there to get our things, one day.”

  She hadn’t known why he said this, but she had remembered the house.

  Now she wondered: Was the lady Jewish? Laïla had a feeling that she wasn’t.

  When the little girl turned up on the doorstep of L’Invitation au Voyage just before noon, Louise was quite astonished. She was just going up to her own apartment nearby to have lunch with Esmé. The little girl said who she was
, and did she know her father. Yes, Louise said, she did. Then the child wanted to know if she was Jewish. No, Louise said, she wasn’t.

  Then Laïla told her what had happened.

  Louise had to think quickly, then. Her first impulse had been to take the girl up to have lunch with little Esmé. But Esmé was with his nanny. The fewer people who knew about Laïla the better. So she took the little girl up to her office at the top of the house and closed the door.

  She quickly telephoned the nanny to say she’d been delayed, gave Laïla something to eat and sat down to think. After ten minutes, she telephoned Charlie. Fortunately he was in Paris. She asked him to come around. Then she told Laïla to stay where she was and not make a sound, and that she’d be back in an hour. Locking the door behind her, she made her way downstairs and went to see Esmé.

  “You can’t keep her here, the place is full of Germans,” said Charlie decisively. “If the parents show up, there’s no problem. But …”—he made a sad face—“they may not.”

  “I can’t keep going around to the parents’ apartment or even the gallery. It’ll look suspicious,” Louise remarked.

  “Don’t worry. I have men who can take care of that.” He smiled. Whomever he worked with in the Resistance, he never gave Louise any details. “If the parents appear, they’ll be told she’s safe, and I’ll get her back to them. If it’s what they want.”

  “But where will she go in the meantime?” asked Louise.

  “Oh”—Charlie grinned—“that’s the easy bit. Some country air will do her good. The last place anyone’s ever going to look for a little Jewish girl is my father’s château on the Loire.”

  “But will he agree?”

  “He’ll do it for me.” Charlie paused. “I’m busy tonight, though. I can have an alibi all ready by this time tomorrow, and I’ll drive her down in the car. But can you keep her until then?”

  “I wonder where.”

  Charlie considered, made a suggestion and departed.

  That evening, Schmid decided to celebrate. The Jacob woman had been panic-stricken. Though she didn’t exactly contradict her husband, she became so confused when he cross-questioned her about her cousin Hélène that the truth was obvious. Luc Gascon was right. Jacob had clearly used her name as a code. He’d been terrified by what he saw at the Vel d’hiv, decided that all the Jews were in danger, gone to a fellow who might, or might not, be able to provide an escape route and been unable to find him. The Jacobs didn’t know where this Abraham fellow was. Schmid was sure of it. They were of no further interest, therefore.

  But they could certainly be sent to Drancy. The big holding camp on the northern outskirts of Paris already contained all sorts of Jews, including some of the ones who’d been herded into the Vel d’hiv. From Drancy, in due course they could be sent on to meet their fate. He didn’t have to concern himself with that. There was a daughter too. He didn’t care about her either. But the Paris police had been informed that they should pick her up.

  Meanwhile, his chief had been delighted by the art haul. A few more neat operations like this, Schmid thought, and he might be in for a promotion. He also had a Degas sketch now, of his own.

  So he decided to pay a visit to L’Invitation au Voyage. He’d always heard so much about it.

  Schmid was not entirely pleased by the little interview with Madame Louise in her upstairs office. To be asked such questions was intolerable.

  “Do not interrogate me, madame,” he said sharply. He was the interrogator, he thought, not this brothel keeper in an occupied country.

  But his anger did not seem to faze her in the least.

  “Forgive me,” she replied calmly, “if I remind you that the Parisian establishments like this are the cleanest in the world, and many senior German officers regard my house as—how shall we say—a second home. Our clientele is very select. We take great care. People trust each other. If by any chance you had some little problem which were to be passed on, causing senior officers discomfort, or worse … Well, I’m sure you would not wish such a thing.” She paused. “Nor to be suspected by them as being the culprit.”

  He saw the point of course, at once. He could just imagine a very angry general, and the speedy end of his career. But he hated being obliged to answer to this cursed woman.

  “There are no problems,” he said furiously.

  He was also staggered by the amount of money she calmly demanded. It was more than a week of his pay. No wonder it was only senior officers who came here. No doubt that was how this infernal woman had been able to acquire the artworks he had noticed on the walls.

  Well, he thought, at least he was seeing how the game of life was played. He was more glad than ever that he had taken the Degas sketch from Jacob’s gallery. He should have taken more.

  An hour later, having enjoyed some refreshments and champagne with a most delightful young woman, and having also caught sight of some very senior officers, he felt somewhat mollified. This was an exclusive club. There was a softness, a scented luxury about the place that he had never experienced before. Whatever the irritations of his introduction, these were the prizes for those who rose high. Schmid had always been ambitious for success, but this was the first time he had ever smelled the fruits. And he knew that he wanted them. He wanted them badly.

  It was on the landing that the little incident occurred. His companion was conducting him to a room toward the back of the house. He had asked her about some of the various themed rooms, and passing a door he had asked her what was in there.

  “That’s the Babylon Room,” she answered.

  “I should like to see it,” he said.

  “I’m afraid it’s closed.”

  He would not have given the matter a second thought had he not seen Madame Louise coming up the stairs with an officer he recognized as Colonel Walter.

  A chance, perhaps, to put the woman in her place. Bowing politely to the colonel, he addressed Madame Louise.

  “I should be interested to see the Babylon Room, madame. I hear it is closed, but perhaps I might be allowed to view it.”

  “Ah, that room is a work of art,” Colonel Walter remarked, with a smile.

  But Schmid had noticed something else. Had he just seen a tiny flash of fear cross the woman’s face? It was gone in an instant, but he could have sworn he had detected it. Schmid already knew a lot about fear. Louise turned to Colonel Walter.

  “I thank you for the compliment, mon colonel,” she said. “But I am preparing a new room in there.”

  “Really?” Schmid cut in. “Will you tell me what? It would be interesting to see the work in preparation.”

  Again, the woman turned to the colonel.

  “You surely would not wish to ruin my surprise?”

  Colonel Walter stepped forward gallantly, and took Schmid’s arm.

  “My dear young man,” he said kindly, but with a trace of admonition, “one does not interrupt a great artist in the middle of their work.” He turned back to Madame Louise. “We shall look forward to seeing your next, astounding creation when it is ready.”

  So Schmid allowed himself to be conducted along the passage, and soon had other things to think about.

  And Louise wondered what on earth she was going to do with that room now.

  And, unaware of what had passed outside the door, little Laïla Jacob slept in Babylon that night.

  The following day, just after noon, Charlie de Cygne swept up to the guard post in his big car. The guards recognized him at once. Not many Frenchmen had such a car, or a pass to drive up and down from their family château, nor could they possibly get the fuel to put in the car to make the drive.

  But this aristocrat, whose family were such firm supporters of the regime, had all these things.

  As he pulled up, they noticed a small girl, swaddled in a blanket, huddled in the back of the car. She looked pale.

  “Our housekeeper’s granddaughter,” Charlie announced calmly, and waved a letter from a fashionable French
doctor in front of them. “Taking her down to the country.”

  The young officer glanced at the letter, which Charlie had procured that morning.

  “No doubt the country air will do her good,” he remarked politely.

  Charlie looked him straight in the eye and made a face the little girl could not see.

  “We hope so,” he said quietly.

  The officer waved them through.

  It wasn’t long before the reports came to Charlie. The police had been looking for Laïla. Schmid and his men had taken all the work from Jacob’s gallery. The Jacob apartment had been let to someone else. Clearly they weren’t coming back.

  For a small payment to one of the guards, one of Charlie’s men was able to ascertain that the Jacob parents were being held at the big camp at Drancy. Since they were French, they hadn’t been shipped east yet, although trainloads of foreign Jews had already gone that way.

  Meanwhile, though Roland de Cygne was a little astonished to find a little Jewish girl living at the château, he and Marie kept up the story that she was a granddaughter of the old housekeeper in Paris, and no one was any the wiser. To be on the safe side, she was called Lucie. As for the little girl herself, she understood very well what she must do.

  “Have they killed my parents?” she asked Marie, who told her no, not yet.

  “Shall we pray for them each night, just you and I?” Marie asked her, and Laïla nodded.

  She read with her each day, and Roland would take her for walks and taught her to fish in the stream.

  She was an enchanting child: small, very pretty. If she was a little reserved and watchful at first, that was only to be expected, but it was clear that once she learned to trust the inhabitants of the château, she was full of life.

  Charlie found a little bicycle he’d had when he was her age, cleaned it up and asked if she knew how to ride it.

  “Oh yes,” she told him. “Mama and Papa liked to ride together on a Sunday afternoon, all the way to the Bois de Boulogne. I haven’t been there yet, but they taught me to ride in the park near where we lived.” And she had taken great pleasure in riding on the paths around the château.