Paris: The Novel
Page 94
“You’re my brother,” said Luc.
“But you have to tell me one thing. How did you know it was a trap? Who’s your contact? Is it one person, or are there many? I need to know so I can protect you.”
“I don’t think you can.”
“I can. Didn’t I always?”
Luc looked down at the floor. Then he took a deep breath.
“It’s just one man. Schmid. He’s Gestapo. Works out of the avenue Foch offices.” He still didn’t look up.
“Are you with others, or alone?”
“Alone.”
“And Corinne?”
“He asked me who it was. I didn’t know. I just made a list of all the possible people I could think of. Coco Chanel, Marc Blanchard … A whole lot. That was all. He didn’t seem very interested. But then he told me he was setting a trap. That’s all I knew. I didn’t even know if yesterday was the trap, but I thought it might be. So I told you not to go.”
Was it the truth? Perhaps. Probably not the whole truth. But it was enough. Luc had informed. He’d let the others walk into a trap, and made an attempt to save his brother. A feeble one. Not enough to blow his own cover.
“I’ll take care of Schmid,” Thomas said. “You don’t have anything more to worry about.”
“Really?”
Thomas smiled.
“We have to do something now. We need to move Charlie’s body. We can’t use the passage with it lying there. It wouldn’t be too pleasant. We should take it all the way down into the chamber at the end.”
“Now?”
“I think so. Then we’re going to burn it. It won’t smell so bad. I brought some petrol.” He indicated the knapsack. “Enough to get started.”
Luc shrugged.
“As you like.”
So they went into the garden, and Luc carefully opened the entrance into the passageway and lit a lamp, and led Thomas down to where the body was.
Then Thomas put the knapsack down and he took Charlie’s body under the shoulders, and Luc took his feet, and they slowly carried Charlie down to the chamber. They stopped twice to rest on the way. It took them nearly a quarter of an hour. Finally Charlie was laid to rest in the center of the chamber.
“Give me the lamp,” said Thomas, “and I’ll get the petrol.”
He moved swiftly up the passage and found the knapsack. He opened it to check that everything was in order. Then he started back down the passage again.
As he reached the chamber, Luc appeared in the lamplight, looking pale.
Thomas put the lamp down by Charlie’s head, then in the shadow, he squatted over the knapsack and began to open it. He looked up at his brother.
“You needn’t have worried, you know,” Thomas said quietly. “I’d never have let them hurt you.”
Luc nodded.
Thomas smiled.
“I love you, little brother.”
“I know.”
Luc never saw the big Welrod with its silencer in his brother’s hand. Thomas fired once. The shot went straight into Luc’s heart. Thomas stepped over and quickly put a second shot into the back of his head.
The shots made a sound in the cave, but not much. Outside the cave, there was no sound at all.
Fifteen minutes later Thomas met Max and handed him back the knapsack containing the Welrod.
“It was him. It’s done,” he said.
“The contact?”
“Gestapo. Schmid.”
If the Allies had hoped they would sweep across northern France, they had been disappointed. All through June the fighting in Normandy was intense. The western port of Cherbourg was taken on the twenty-first, but the Germans left its deepwater harbor almost inoperable. Reinforced, the panzer divisions at the old city of Caen held out, into July. Even a month after Cherbourg fell, the Allies had been able to take only the heights south of Caen. In the last week of July, the Allied forces in the far west began to swing around below the Germans, but the going was still tough.
Then, early in August, news came that General Patton’s Third Army had joined this forward swing. One of the divisions serving under him was French. Drawn from the Frenchmen who had managed to get abroad, and by troops from Algeria and other parts of North Africa, General Leclerc’s Second Armored Division had just landed, eager to fight for France.
But where would Patton and his Frenchmen go?
One thing seemed almost certain. They wouldn’t be coming to Paris. It made no sense. Eisenhower wouldn’t want one of his armies to get bogged down in weeks, perhaps, of bloody street fighting. He would sweep across to the Rhine and beyond, and deal with Paris later.
Meanwhile, for Schmid there was his regular duty to attend to.
There were still huge stores of pictures in Paris that had not been sent back to Germany. But when it came to the confiscations for which Schmid was responsible, he had impressed his superiors very much. On his own initiative he had contrived to get everything crated and sent back into grateful hands in Berlin, and his zeal had been noticed.
Apart from the drawings he had kept for himself, of course. Those he had sent through the mail to his sister to keep for him, together with a note saying that he had bought them in Paris. When he’d found Jacob’s pictures stored in Louise’s attic he’d done the same thing. That had been a rich personal haul.
And now, on the morning of the nineteenth of August, he stood outside L’Invitation au Voyage and supervised the last of the crates being loaded onto the truck that was to carry them away on their journey eastward.
As the men closed the back of the truck, he signed their papers and the truck left. He watched it to the end of the street, until it turned the corner.
Just then, from somewhere in the distance on his right, he heard a brief rattle of gunfire. Then silence. He wondered what it was.
He turned. A few paces behind him, an old man was standing. Evidently, he’d been curious to watch the truck with its crates of pictures depart. There was a bag of provisions at his feet, and now the old fellow stooped to pick it up. Schmid was just about to walk past him when the old man pulled something out of the bag.
There was a soft thudding sound. Schmid frowned. Something had hit him with huge force in the chest. He stared in surprise. His legs were giving way. The cobbles on the street were rushing at his face in the strangest manner.
Thomas Gascon put the Welrod with its silencer to the back of Schmid’s head and pulled the trigger again. Then he turned. No one had seen him. As he started walking down the street, he heard the sound of more shots. Nearer this time.
The Paris Rising had just begun.
The Paris Rising of August 1944 was not unexpected. They had all been preparing for many months. Yet all the same, when it began, Max was taken by surprise—not by the barricades, and the snipers, and the bombings, or the general strike which paralyzed the city for several days. What astonished him was the numbers of Resistance men who had suddenly materialized.
They were easy to distinguish. The uniform was simple. A black beret was all a sniper needed to show which side he was on. Some Max knew, loyal men who’d been helping the Resistance for a long time, and were only waiting for the moment to come out and fight. Many more had joined during the last twelve months. But large numbers, Max strongly suspected, seeing which way the wind was blowing, had hastily added themselves to the insurgency practically overnight.
The Germans were not overwhelmed. They were still formidable. But they were confused.
Soon the city was split into districts, some under German control, others controlled by the Resistance. The situation was fluid, chaotic. Sometimes the Germans were shooting Resistance men by firing squad only two streets away from an area under Resistance control.
Max was engaged all over the city. His father was busy producing the broadsheets that would be distributed when the moment came—though Max found him cheerfully manning a barricade with the younger men in Belleville more than once. But each evening they met in company with several
dozen other committed FTP men, communists and socialists, and reviewed the situation. The excitement was palpable. They were taking ground from the Germans all the time. Soon the Maquis would control the city.
Only one development threatened to throw everything in doubt. The Maquis received an urgent message from General von Choltitz, the commander of the city himself.
“The führer has given orders. If we have to evacuate, I’m to blow up the city.”
Frantically, with the help of the neutral Sweden’s envoy in Paris, the Maquis negotiated with the general. At last the German commander made his choice.
“He’s going to ignore Hitler’s orders,” Max reported to his father. “He knows what’ll happen to him if he obeys them.” Then he smiled. “It seems, Father, that the Paris Commune is about to be reborn.”
And then, on the evening of the sixth day, came the crushing news which put all their calculations at risk and, by the seventh day, destroyed all their hopes.
General Charles de Gaulle arrived to liberate Paris.
To be precise, the advance guard of General Leclerc’s Free French Division arrived at the western gates of the city. When Max first heard it, he couldn’t believe it.
“Impossible!” he cried. “Eisenhower’s not coming to Paris.”
“Eisenhower isn’t,” they told him. “But de Gaulle is.”
Within an hour, the advance guard had raced into the city, straight up its central axis and arrived at the Hôtel de Ville behind the Louvre by nine-thirty that night.
When the two Le Sourds met with their usual committee that night, the story was becoming clear.
“It’s all de Gaulle’s doing. Eisenhower didn’t want to go near Paris at all. But once the Rising began, de Gaulle badgered him, told him that if the Germans massacred us, it would be worse than the tragedy of the Warsaw uprising. In the end Eisenhower gave permission for Leclerc’s division, together with the U.S. Army Fourth Division, to divert up here. Leclerc actually disobeyed orders to wait and just drove straight through to Paris. He’ll enter with his entire force, and the American division as well, in the morning.”
“Then we’re screwed,” said Le Sourd bitterly. “We can’t organize the Commune overnight.”
With an entire division of well-armed and well-trained Frenchmen marching in to liberate Paris, not to mention another division of honest American soldiers to whom the very idea of socialism was anathema, the conservative patriot de Gaulle had not only the moral authority, but the naked power, to take the city over and impose his will.
The obstinate, lone officer who’d refused to give in, and gone to England to raise the Cross of Lorraine, had just shown himself to be a ruthless politician as well.
And so it came about. The following day, Lerclerc and the Americans swept into the city. The German general, probably secretly relieved, surrendered. And the following day, the twenty-sixth of August, a huge parade of troops, Resistance fighters and public men marched down the Champs-Élysées.
But it was one figure upon whom all eyes were fixed. Dressed in his general’s uniform, towering over his companions, the tall, unyielding figure of Charles de Gaulle moved with a stately stride down the center of the great avenue, knowing, as all who saw him knew, that he was the man of destiny that France would follow now.
Paris was liberated. The agony was over.
Max Le Sourd also marched, for old Thomas Gascon, and the Dalou boys, and his other comrades in the march would have been disappointed if he had not.
But his father remained at the side of the Champs-Élysées and grimly watched. And as the tall and lonely statesman strode past, Le Sourd could only shake his head.
“Salaud,” he muttered sadly. “You son of a bitch.”
It was the next morning that Thomas Gascon decided to gather all his family together for a celebration at the restaurant. “At least,” he pointed out, “we have some extra food stored here.”
During the morning, Édith sent him down on an errand into the Second Arrondissement, and at noon he was already returning up the rue de Clichy.
He was less than a mile from home when he saw the small crowd coming toward him. There were about fifty of them, and they were goading a young woman. Her shirt had been ripped, and they were chanting and taunting her for sleeping with Germans.
Thomas frowned. He’d heard that these attacks were starting to happen. They were absurd, of course. If every Frenchwoman who’d slept with a German in the last four years was going to be hounded like this, there would be no end to it. God knew how many thousands of children had been fathered by lonely German troops in Paris alone.
But the ritual rage of a crowd that feels guilty has a special viciousness.
The wretched girl was the same age as one of his own granddaughters.
They had just drawn level when one of the girls in the crowd ran up to the young woman, pointed at her and screamed: “German whore. Shave her head!” And she spat in her face.
“Fuck off!” the woman cried back. But the crowd was encircling them.
“Scissors!” someone cried. “Razors!”
Thomas wasn’t afraid to fight, even at his age, but half of them were women, and he wasn’t used to fighting women. There were too many people anyway. So he did the only thing he could.
“Mes camerades,” he cried, “I am Thomas Gascon from the Maquis of Montmartre, member of the FTP, Resistance fighter. It was I who cut the cables in the Eiffel Tower. Come with me to Montmartre, if you don’t believe me, and I will show you witnesses. Whatever her faults, I ask you to let me take this young woman home, on this day of celebration.”
They looked at him. Could this old man be telling the truth? They decided he was.
“Vivent les FTP!” somebody cried. “Bravo, old man!” And they started to laugh and clap him on the back.
For such is the strange and sudden sense of chivalry of the French mob.
“She’s free. She’s free,” they cried.
So Thomas Gascon took the girl home, before he went to his family celebration.
For Max Le Sourd, however, there was one duty still to be performed. When he explained to his father what it was, his father agreed to help.
Their first trip was to the cemetery. They needed to break some rules. After a little talk to the guardian, the matter was arranged.
So it was the corpse of Charlie de Cygne that was now placed in a simple casket and taken by Max Le Sourd, Thomas and the Dalou boys in a van to the cemetery of Père Lachaise. There the coffin was lowered into a small plot, pleasantly situated near the grave of Chopin.
Over the grave they placed a wooden cross inscribed with Charlie’s name, the description “Patriot,” and the fact that he had died for France.
There were no religious obsequies. “His family can do that,” Max said. But there was something else to be done. “You’re the writer,” Max said to his father. “I’ll give you the information, but you write it.”
The letter was a good one. It made no mention of the betrayal, but stated that Charlie had been wounded in an operation and died without pain. He had shown great bravery and dignity. His compatriots loved and respected him. Before dying he had spoken of his son.
It was simple and respectful.
“Shall we send it in the mail?” asked Max. But his father shook his head.
In early September, Roland de Cygne was surprised to receive a visit from Jacques Le Sourd at the château. Asking to speak with him alone, Le Sourd bowed his head, and told him: “I have the great sorrow, Monsieur le Vicomte, to bring you the news of the death of your son. But he died bravely.” And he handed him the letter.
Roland read the letter slowly.
“When he disappeared, we feared something might have happened. But one always hopes, you know.”
“I trust it meets with your approval, monsieur, but to honor him as best they could, his comrades buried him in Père Lachaise.”
“Père Lachaise? There are some great names there.”
“Of course.” Roland paused and thought for a moment. “Was he carrying anything?”
“No papers, monsieur. They preferred not to carry identification, on a mission.”
“I understand. There wasn’t perhaps a little lighter, made of a bullet casing?”
“Not that we found, monsieur.”
The letter from Richard Bennett did not arrive until the summer of 1945.
It explained the great difficulties he had encountered in tracing the benefactor he had known only as Monsieur Bon Ami.
But eventually, I was able to discover through a Paris lawyer that the owner of a Voisin C-25 coupe kept at a château in a certain part of the valley of the Loire was a Monsieur Charles de Cygne. I have learned with great sorrow that he died not long after he saved my own life. Please accept my deep condolences for your loss.
More than a hundred and sixty airmen, from Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand were betrayed or captured, many being sent to the camp at Buchenwald. Thanks to your son, I was one of the lucky ones to escape.
When I parted from your son, he gave me a little lighter, which I enclose, telling me it would bring me luck, which it certainly did. He told me I could return it after the war. Alas, he is not there to receive it himself, but I believe he leaves a son who, perhaps, might like to have it as a memento of a friendship, and with respectful gratitude from a Canadian airman whose life his father saved.
It was a graceful and charming letter.
“You know what’s worst of all,” Roland said. “If Charlie had kept that lighter, it might have brought him luck instead of the Canadian. He might be alive today.”
The next day they went to Père Lachaise. Roland de Cygne showed the little lighter to Esmé and told him that one day he should have it, as his father had before him. Standing together beside Charlie’s gravesite, they let a moment pass in silent remembrance.