timing. “Now I’m ready,” he said to the Breton.
In the blue shadow of the street, de Milja could make out a blocky Citroen, black and well polished. The Breton opened the back door, then went around the car while the other waited by de Milja’s side.
“This is going to cause very serious difficulties,” de Milja said. The man looked at him sharply. Was he mad? “In scheduling,” he hastened to add. “I’m expected someplace else.”
“Well . . .” said the man, not unkindly. So the world went.
“The problem is, I’m supposed to deliver certain funds,” de Milja said. The Breton started the car, which rumbled to life, sputtering and missing. “It’s forty thousand francs—I’m reluctant to leave it here.”
The man was likely proud of his opacity—policemen don’t react if they don’t choose to—but de Milja saw it hit. At least two years’ salary. “I wonder,” he continued, “if you could keep that money for me, at the Prefecture. Then I’ll be along, later tonight, after my meeting.”
The man with the mustache opened the back door and said something to the driver. Then, to de Milja, “Where is it?”
“Inside.”
“Let’s go.”
He was on the streets for the rest of the night. They went out one door with a briefcase, he went out the other ten minutes later. He moved to cover, checked from a vantage point at 3:15, saw a car at each end of his street with silhouette of driver and passenger.
He walked miles, headed east into Paris proper, and tried two hotels, but they were locked up tight, doors chained, windows shuttered. On the main thoroughfares, the stream of refugees flowed on; at the intersection of the boulevards Saint-Germain and Saint-Michel humanity collided and struggled as one column moved west, another south. On the north–south metro lines—Porte d’Orleans—Clignancourt— people fought their way onto trains that would never move. De Milja walked and walked, hiding in chaos.
At least they hadn’t killed him. But he had calculated they wouldn’t go that far. He was nothing to them, probably just somebody to lock up until the Germans arrived. Welcome to Paris—we couldn’t find any flowers but here’s a Polish spy. The Breton and Pencil-Mustache had gone back wherever they came from and reported, simply enough, that he wasn’t home, so the next shift came on and parked cars at either end of his street.
Dawn was warm, a little strange beneath a disordered sky of scudding purplish cloud. He saw a line of Flemish monks, faces bright red above their woolen robes, toiling along on women’s bicycles. A city bus from Lille packed with families, a fire truck from Caen, a tank—a few pathetic twigs tied to its turret in attempted camouflage—an ambulance, a chauffeured Daimler; all of it moving one mile an hour along the choked boulevard. Past an abandoned parrot in a cage, a barrel organ, a hearse with smoke drifting from its blown engine and a featherbed tied to its roof.
He was tired; sat at the base of a plane tree by a bench somewhere and held his head in his hands. Deep instinct, survival, got him on his feet and headed north, toward Clichy and Pigalle, toward whores, who had hotel rooms where nobody asked questions.
Then, a better idea. The neighborhood around the Gare Saint-Lazare railway station, deep in the ninth arrondissement, was a commercial stew of small, unrespectable enterprises of all kinds. A world of its own where the buildings, the streets, and the people were all a little crooked. You could get insurance from the Agence ABC at the top of the wooden stairway—who didn’t need every sort of official documentation in this complex, modern age?—but had you asked them to actually pay a claim they would have fainted with surprise and fallen over onto the packed suitcases that stood by the door. The leather in the Freres Brugger company’s chic belts and purses came, unquestionably, from an animal, and, frankly, who were you to demand that it be a cow? And probably you had no business being out in the rain in the first place. There was an agency for singing waiters, an import company for green bamboo, a union office for the drivers of wagons that hauled butchers’ bones.
Even a publisher of books—Parthenon Press. There, see the little drawing with the broken columns? That’s the Parthenon. They were proud, at the little suite of offices at 39 rue de Rome, to issue an extraordinarily wide and diverse list of books. The poetry of Fedyakov, Vainshtok, Sygelbohm, and Lezhev. The plays of Yushin and Var. And all sorts of novels, all sorts.
The huge pair of ancient, ironbound doors at 39 rue de Rome was firmly locked, but de Milja knocked and refused to go away when nothing happened. Finally, in the first watery light of morning, a panel in the concierge’s station by the doorway slid open and a large eye peered out. Clearly he wasn’t the German army—just a man with his tie pulled down and sleepless eyes who’d been walking all night—and the door creaked open. The concierge, not a day under eighty, a Lebel rifle held in his trembling hands, said, “We’re closed. What do you want here?”
“Please tell Madame Beilis that a friend has come to call.”
“What friend?”
“A friend from the church of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, tell her.”
“A priest? You?”
“No,” de Milja said. “Just an old friend.”
14 June 1940. Dawn. It rained. But then, it would. Not a human soul to be seen in Paris. Out at the Porte d’Auteuil, untended cattle had broken through the fence at the stockyard pens and were wandering about the empty streets mooing and looking for something to eat.
At the northern edge of the city, the sound of a German motorcycle, engine perfectly tuned, approached from the suburbs. A young Wehrmacht soldier sped across the place Voltaire, downshifted, revved the engine a little—
From the northeast, from the direction of Belgium and Luxembourg and Germany, a series of canvas-covered trucks drove through the Porte de la Villette. One broke off from the file and moved slowly down the rue de Flandre, headed toward the railroad stations: the Gare de l’Est and the Gare du Nord and the Gare Saint-Lazare. The truck stopped every few blocks and a single German soldier jumped from the back. Like all the others, the one on the rue de Rome wore white gloves and a crossed white belt. A traffic policeman. When the armored cars and the troop transports rolled past an hour later, he waved them on.
At seven-thirty in the morning, the German army occupied the Hotel Crillon and set up an office for local administration in the lobby. Two officers showed up at the military complex just abandoned by Major Kercheval and his colleagues at Invalides and demanded the return of German battle flags captured in 1918. France had lost a war but it was still France. The battle flags, an officer explained, had been mislaid. Of course the gentlemen were more than welcome to look for them.
The Germans hung a swastika flag from the Eiffel Tower, and one from the Arc de Triomphe.
Over on the rue de Rome, Genya Beilis pushed a sheer curtain aside and watched the Wehrmacht traffic policeman at the corner. She lit a Lucky Strike and blew long plumes of smoke from her nostrils. “What happens now?” she asked.
De Milja came and stood by her, gently pulled the fabric of the curtain from her fingers and let it fall closed. “The fighting changes,” he said. “And people hide. Hide in themselves, or hide from the war in enemy beds, or hide in the mountains. Sooner or later, they hide in the sewers. We learn, under occupation, that there’s more rat in us than we knew.”
“They’ll get rid of us, won’t they,” she said.
