Under Occupation Read online

  She beckoned him to sit on the sofa and, saying, “What filthy weather,” inclined her head toward the window, where droplets ran down the glass, while out on the Avenue Bosquet Parisians under black umbrellas hurried through the wet evening.

  Romany left the room, returned with two glasses of red wine, gave him one, sat on the other end of the sofa, and said, “Filthy wine, to go with the filthy weather.”

  “Occupation,” he said. “All the good bottles went to Germany.”

  “And may they choke on it.”

  He raised his glass, joining her in the toast.

  “So, how goes your life, Ricard?”

  “Well enough. Like everyone here, I improvise.”

  “Writing?”

  “As always, I just delivered the next. What are you reading?”

  She shrugged. “The usual dreadful stuff. In the 1890s, a young girl comes to Paris from the provinces, you know, filthy men with beards and ankle-length drawers.”

  “Only men, in this one?”

  “Heavens no! In one scene the girl wears a little maid’s costume.” Romany crossed her arms over her breasts and said, in the voice of a supposedly naïve maid: “Oh, madame, we mustn’t!”

  Ricard laughed, “You do that well.”

  She sat forward and said, “Ricard, my love, do you have a few extra francs? I’m collecting for Janine, the wife of the neighborhood pastry cook.”

  Ricard handed over some francs. “What happened to the pastry cook?”

  “Shot.”

  “Any reason?”

  Romany raised both shoulders and eyebrows in a brief shrug. “Who knows anymore.”

  “Romany, I need your help,” Ricard said. “You used to, maybe last spring, have a lover who was an army colonel.”

  Romany’s face softened. “Ahh, de Roux, yes, he was for years in the military intelligence, now he’s retired to the country, the Vichy generals didn’t like him, didn’t trust him, thought he was in touch with the English. So now he’s gone to his country house, in the village of Les Andelys, on the Seine. You can write him there, Colonel J. P. de Roux, Les Andelys, Eure, will do for an address. Care for another glass?”

  “Thank you, I would.”

  “I’ll have one too. It, ah, warms me up, if you know what I mean.” She returned with the wine, they touched glasses, drank, and talked for a time. Then she leaned over from her end of the sofa and rested a gentle hand on the side of his face. This gesture, of all that women did, had always reached him more than any other. “I’m cold, Ricard, let’s get under the covers.”

  Ricard spent the night at Romany’s. He didn’t have a choice, it was two in the morning, well past the eleven o’clock curfew, by the time they’d made all the love they could, but he didn’t mind at all, and he slept better with a woman beside him. In the morning, the two went to a café for coffee—“occupation coffee,” a few inferior beans with ground chicory added for volume—but at least it was hot. Ricard bought a sheet of paper and an envelope from a tabac across the street and wrote Colonel de Roux a brief letter: his old friend Romany had suggested they should meet, so would the colonel be so kind as to telephone him at this number on the fifteenth. The call was set three days in the future, but the French postal service was famously fast, even under the occupation.

  Ricard then determined that he had better stop carrying around an incriminating document so took the Métro to the Saint-Michel station and walked up the tiny—too narrow for cars—Rue de la Huchette to his apartment: two small rooms under the roof, a garret, with windows that looked out on the Seine, the Île de la Cité, and the Notre-Dame Cathedral. In one room: a narrow bed, a table that held a well-used Remington typewriter with a French keyboard, a stack of paper, a telephone, and a small radio. By the door stood an impressive walnut armoire next to a small stove that ran on kerosene. His other room was sparsely furnished: an old, sagging sofa, a hideous standing lamp with a lords-and-ladies scene on the shade, and a café ashtray on the floor: the perfect place to read. The garret was very much a sanctuary, where, when storms rolled in from the North Sea, he could hear rain drumming on the slate tiles of the roof.

  Ricard took the schematic from the German newspaper and buried it in the middle of his stack of paper.

  * * *

  —

  On 14 October, just after ten in the morning, Julien Montrésor left his umbrella in the urn outside his office and started work for the day. His office, at Éditions Montrésor—Montrésor Publishing—was a small room on the second floor of 9, Rue Jacob, one of the better streets in the Sixth Arrondissement. A few feet away from him sat Madame Anne Legros—war widow, sweet face, heart of gold—his single employee, editor and secretary, who just then gave a gentle sigh of despair and lowered her blue pencil toward a page of manuscript.

  As for Montrésor, this was a triumphant morning. Awaiting his attention was the new Paul Ricard novel, a pile of tattered, typewritten pages, its coffee and wine stains, its cigarette burns, testaments to a long journey from desk to café and back again. A detective novel, Minuit à Trieste—Midnight in Trieste—from a master of the form, the writer he thought of as the French Eric Ambler, an entertainment, but a smart one, written with a sharp eye and a big heart. The novel was set on a rusty old steamship, the Rosemarie, that sailed back and forth between Venice and Trieste in the year 1938. It had been an elegant ship in the 1920s, but the oak paneling in the staterooms was gray with age, the floral carpeting faded, the portholes cloudy, and the smell of the kitchen strong in the passageways as the ship crossed and recrossed the Adriatic, pitching and rolling in the spring storms.

  The cast of characters was the usual in such novels: secret police informants, spies, ruined aristocrats, sinister Balkan types, and lithe, exotic women with shadowy pasts. Traveling with them, the hero, the foreign correspondent Claude Verbain, a committed anti-fascist who smoked little cigars and wore tinted eyeglasses. So then, who stole the briefcase from the countess in stateroom 6?

  Montrésor was eager to publish this novel. The French, cities blacked out, apartments frigid, rationed food hard to come by, soap a rare treasure, were intent on reading their way through the occupation, the detective novel by far the genre of choice because it took the reader away from the grim reality of daily life. These books were not so easy to find. The first printing sold out immediately, then, secondhand, thirdhand, and beyond, they were bought at the bouquiniste stalls on the banks of the Seine as soon as they were put out for sale and, in time, read to pieces.

  On the night of 14 October, Ricard attended a salon given by his publisher in the wealthy suburb of Neuilly. The house, built of gray cut-stone block, virtually exhaled quiet money, and the room where the reception was held even more so: floors of blonde oak parquet set in dark walnut bands, peach-colored silk draperies, eighteenth-century paintings. Ricard wandered a little, took a glass of champagne, and looked for somebody he knew. That turned out to be the host himself, Julien Montrésor.

  “Ah, Ricard, so glad you’re here.” The voice deep, the words musically fashioned, the smile welcoming. Montrésor wore a certain kind of beard—salt-and-pepper aging toward gray—which crossed his upper lip, passed his mouth, and ended in a square-cut shape below his chin. There was, to Ricard, something Mephistophelian about this beard, as though Montrésor had just ascended to the stage in an opera, the effect heightened by glistening eyes, dark enough to catch the light. Montrésor took his elbow and said, “Lots of writers here tonight, Ricard, sadly not all mine, but let me introduce you around.”

  Montrésor led him past small groups of men and women in earnest conversation until he found a slim wand of a man with a close-cut beard. “This is Jacques Duchenne. You’ll know his book, Un Homme de la Cité—A Man of the City.”

  They shook hands, and as Montrésor moved away, Duchenne said, “Look at all this, where does the money come from? Surel
y not Éditions Montrésor.”

  “You never know, in France, a lot of people have money for all sorts of reasons,” Ricard said.

  “You’re right, there are more than a few whose families got rich in the slave trade.”

  “Well, it’s not like you can’t be rich from books—Gaston Gallimard does very well from Proust and Sartre. Simenon, for God’s sake, he must write a book a week and they sell like crazy.”

  “Always the same book!” Duchenne whined. “That boring Maigret!”

  “But people buy them, it’s an addiction.”

  “Well, I’ll never be famous,” Duchenne said. “My books are too serious, too intellectual, so I have to spend my life teaching in a lycée…”

  Before his tale of woe could pick up steam, Montrésor appeared with a tray of champagne glasses. As Ricard and Duchenne exchanged empty glasses for full ones, Montrésor said to Duchenne, “Have you met the journalist Bonaire? He writes about books for the Le Matin newspaper and he’s here tonight.”

  As Duchenne was led away, Ricard met Montrésor’s eyes, grateful for the rescue. Ricard then wandered through the crowd, which was getting louder as the wine flowed. Next, Ricard found himself facing a young man with dark curly hair and a dark curly smile. “I know you!” the man said. “You are Paul Ricard, I recognized you from your photograph on the dust jacket. I’ve read all your books, some of them twice.”

  “I’m glad you like them.”

  “I love them! Tell me something, what happened to Annabelle?”

  Who the fuck is Annabelle? Ricard said, “Umm…”

  “You know, Annabelle, in Rue Obscure—Shadow Street. At the end she’s going off to meet Michel, does she meet him? Or not?”

  “I guess she does, he’s her lover, after all.”

  “Her lover? I thought he was her rich uncle. Is she also his lover?”

  “Oh yes, of course, I suppose she meets him, but the book ends there, so the reader…”

  The man leaned closer and spoke in a confidential voice. “Ricard, what’s it like, being a spy?”

  “I’m not a spy.”

  The man laughed, an oh sure laugh. “How else would you know all that stuff, about the Deuxième Bureau and secret ink?”

  “I make it up. I’m a novelist. That’s what we do.”

  The young man was about to get angry when a single note, ting, drew their attention to the fireplace, where Montrésor stood holding a knife and a glass. He tapped the glass a second time, and the room grew quiet. “We are privileged to have music tonight. Here is Monsieur Louis Machet, the well-known nightclub violinist, and his accompanists on guitar and bass.”

  To polite applause from the guests, the three musicians began to play. Machet was a pink-faced gentleman with flowing white hair and wore a printed silk scarf knotted cleverly about his neck. It was easy to imagine him among the tables of a nightclub, serenading the couples seated close together. The trio began to play a version, sentimental and syrupy, of “Begin the Beguine” as the guests paired off and started to dance. Ricard discovered that Madame Anne Legros, the sweet-faced war widow who worked for Éditions Montrésor, was at his side. “Would you care to dance?” he said.

  “Yes, thank you, I would,” Madame Legros said.

  It was a tired old phrase, trite and corny, yet it happened: she melted into his arms. As they danced together, he held her close, felt the warmth of her body, took a step left, then another, and she followed him easily, holding his hand in a way that was both intimate and tender.

  “I know this song,” he said by her ear. “It’s ‘Begin the Beguine.’ Perhaps we should dance the beguine.”

  “Do you know how?” she asked.

  “No idea.”

  “Well, we’ll do the best we can.”

  Montrésor appeared from the milling crowd. “Ricard,” he said. “Louis-Ferdinand Céline just showed up, I need somebody to talk to him.”

  “He’s a fascist, Montrésor, a Nazi. I want nothing to do with him.”

  Montrésor sighed and said, “You’re sure?”

  “A German Nazi is bad enough, but a French Nazi…”

  Montrésor went off in search of a different guest. Madame Legros said, “Bravo, Ricard,” and then the two started dancing again.

  * * *

  —

  Kasia lived in a room above the La Villette stockyards in the Nineteenth Arrondissement; day and night the livestock trucks rattled in from the countryside and cattle cars arrived by rail, the beasts driven down ramps into the pens. At eleven in the morning of the seventeenth, wearing only bra and panties, she sat on the edge of the bed, a cigarette held between her lips, and, squinting through the smoke, worked at loading the clip of her .25-caliber Browning automatic. When she was done, she snapped the clip back in place, then yawned and stretched out on the bed smoking her cigarette and gazing up at the clouds that drifted past her window. She rested an idle hand between her legs and thought about past lovers, brief, exciting scenes that stayed with her. She could think of whomever she wanted, whoever stimulated her, some she’d never spoken to, too bad they didn’t know, it might have pleased them. In time, she found herself thinking about a girl she’d seen that morning on the Métro, young, perhaps a secretary, with a soft face and a shag of blonde hair across her forehead. A little bunny rabbit, she thought, in need of a stern hand. What would it be like with her? In her imagination she took off the girl’s blouse, her skirt, and her bra and panties. Then she touched the girl in a certain spot, between the shoulder and the neck. The girl liked that and let her know it. Maybe, tomorrow morning, Kasia thought, she would take the same Métro.

  But first she had to rob a bank. Her eyes wandered to the Browning she’d left on the windowsill. Pity, now I want to make love but it’s not going to be, I’ll likely get killed today. Hah, Kasia! The joke’s on you. Here’s some bank guard, an old man with his hat down on his ears, and he just made a hole in you, too sad, because you already have all of those you need, this one more is trouble, and why, you silly bitch, are you lying on the marble floor? It’s cold down here, and hard, and Jacquot is running away. Jacquot was her partner in crime, a small-time gangster, curly black hair, a knife scar through one eyebrow, a belted, black leather overcoat, big gold watch, gold bracelet, a gangster. Miserable, mean bastard, she thought. Running away when she was wounded.

  Jacquot—Jacky wanted her. He’d teach her to like men. Old story.

  Proud Parisian male, sure of himself, she wouldn’t have cared if she never saw him again, but he was a good bank robber, and he was in the milieu, the life of crime, and he knew people, people who stole cars, then rented them out to gangsters like Jacquot, people who bought stolen jewelry, people who had hideouts in the city. So she put up with him, let on that his seductive lines amused her.

  Suddenly, fast, heavy steps on the stairway. Jacquot. He was coming to collect her. So the bunny rabbit would just have to wait. Work to be done, tra-la, banks to be robbed, tra-la, Kasia to be shot. Tra-la.

  * * *

  —

  Colonel de Roux telephoned Ricard, on the afternoon of the fifteenth, from a cabinet at the Bureau de Poste in the village of Les Andelys, raising his voice because it was a long way to Paris. If Ricard would care to come to visit him on the sixteenth, there was a local train, the 2:36 from the Gare de Lyon. The colonel would send somebody to meet him at the station.

  This turned out to be a paysan wearing a tattered straw hat, sitting on a farm wagon pulled by a skinny nag. Ricard climbed up next to him and, not far from the station, the paysan turned onto a route départementale—the name for the rough, narrow roads—almost a car and a half in width and paved with ancient macadam. The road was lined with plane trees, trunks gray and knotted, crowns pollarded into round shapes, where the dying leaves rattled in the autumn breeze. On either side of the road the wheat had been harves
ted, leaving fields of brown stalks lit by the pale blue sky that followed a rainstorm. As the wagon passed a stone roadside marker—thirty miles to Rouen—a flock of geese flew overhead, migrating south in a vee formation, their honking loud above the quiet fields. It was famously beautiful here, in what was known as the Vexin, the Seine Valley: the valleys and hills in a perfect harmony of land. From time to time the road ran next to the river, flowing north, its surface churned by strong currents from yesterday’s rain. A gust of wind sent dead leaves rustling across the road, and Ricard felt, as the horse clopped along and one of the wheels squeaked, that he was home, Paris and its mobs of people left behind; the village of Saint-Denis quickly passed, he was now in France.

  * * *

  —

  As the paysan turned onto a dirt lane, also lined with plane trees, the horse quickened her pace, she knew she was home, and, around a gentle curve, a house appeared. At least a hundred years old. Colonel de Roux’s house, the curved terra-cotta roof tiles now crooked, the shutters’ green paint flaking away. When the paysan pulled up to the door, some French version of a border collie stood guard, barking at them and prancing about until the colonel appeared and reassured her. The colonel was lean and fit and stood erect, was clean-shaven and had gray hair cut in the military fashion. A retired warrior, Ricard thought, waiting for a call to duty that would never come. After they had shaken hands, Colonel de Roux said, “Welcome, Monsieur Ricard,” and showed him into the house.

  Inside, the ceilings were low, the furniture well worn, the floors covered with threadbare oriental carpets. Oil portraits of ancestors, many in uniforms long abandoned, hung on the walls. When the colonel had settled in an overstuffed chair, a servant entered the room with a tray of tiny glasses and a bottle of cognac. “Vive la France,” the colonel said, raising his glass, and Ricard echoed him. “My friend, Romany,” the colonel said, “she is well?”