over Europe.”
Paris. 28 January.
Hands in pockets, face numbed by the wind, Marcel Slevin waited in a doorway on the rue Daguerre. Across the street, in an apartment owned by his uncle Misch, a Luftwaffe officer was getting ready to go out for the evening. A bomber pilot, a Nazi. Who would not see the sun rise again-if only he would get a move on before his assassin froze to death. Calm down, Slevin told himself, don’t let it get to you.
They had watched the German for three weeks-Slevin and the people who worked for Weiss. Learned where he went, and what he did. At one point, he’d disappeared. He was picked up by a friend at 8:32 and didn’t come home that night or the next. Gone to work, no doubt.
That had worried Slevin-maybe some Spitfire pilot had beaten them to it, setting Fritz on fire over Liverpool. Merde. But he was also secretly relieved. Lately he couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, maybe he just wasn’t cut out for murder. Or maybe just not this murder. For one thing, the German pilot wasn’t what he’d expected. Not young, and no blond superman. He was tall and spindly, with sparse hair and a hawk nose, and to Slevin he seemed more like a pilot for Lufthansa than the Luftwaffe.
The first night of surveillance, Slevin thought his prey might be going off to the nightclubs to meet “Bebe” or “Doucette,” but who he went to see was Lohengrin. And then, the next night, back for seconds. Ten days later it was Rigoletto. He would take the Metro to the Opera station, join a milling crowd of officers and diplomats, wives and girlfriends, all smiling and jabbering away in that godawful language. He would say hello to this one or that one, then take a seat in the balcony. And, when the opera was over, back he went to the rue Daguerre.
Slevin waited, stamping his feet to keep warm. In his pocket he had a small revolver, bought from a friend in the garment district who loaned out money at a very high rate of interest. He’d taken a long, careful look at his prey and had his escape route well planned out. The streets around the rue Daguerre weren’t so different from the Marais, passages and tunnels and alleys-some blind, some not. After the shot he would scoot, a ten-second sprint to a shed where he’d hidden a bicycle. A few seconds more and he’d be just one more Parisian on the street.
Slevin’s plan had been drawn up after careful study of the terrain, and depended on a particular feature of the pilot’s Metro stop, Denfert-Rochereau. The staircase went down twenty steps, to a landing hidden from the street, then turned back and continued down forty steps to the platform. That landing, once the crowds thinned out after 7:00 P.M., was invisible from above and below. The pilot would, for a moment, be alone and unseen. And then, no more Lohengrin.
Hurry up.
Slevin stared angrily at the door across the street. He was scared. He didn’t want to do this. Weiss and the guys in the FTP were tough-worth your life to fuck around with them-but he wasn’t, not really. He was all talk and he knew it. Well, now look what he’d talked himself into.
The pilot came out of the apartment and stopped for a moment as the door swung closed behind him. Topcoat, white silk scarf, tuxedo. He looked up at the sky and took a deep, satisfied breath, glanced at his watch, and strolled off toward the Metro.
Slevin waited a moment, then followed, moving among the last few shoppers and the merchants rolling down their shutters for the night. The pilot took his time, obviously enjoying the street life.
Denfert-Rochereau was a large, busy station, a major correspondance where several lines came together and riders could transfer from one to another. But this was not the main entry-the staircase simply led to the end of the platform, useful if you wanted to ride in the last car.
The pilot dropped a jeton in the turnstile and headed for the staircase. He was one of those people who run down stairs, letting their momentum do the work, sliding a hand down the banister.
“Hey.”
The pilot stopped on the landing, turned halfway around. Yes? A young Frenchman behind him. Short, a real monkey. What did he want?
Slevin drew the revolver from his pocket and fired. Down on the platform, a woman screamed. Slevin and the pilot stared at each other. What?
Slevin pulled the trigger again but this time, click, nothing at all. The pilot’s reflexes kicked in and he turned and ran, flying down the stairs toward the platform. Slevin took off after him, cursing under his breath, tears in his eyes. He skidded around the landing, ran halfway down the staircase, now in full view of the passengers below. They saw the pistol, some screamed, some ran, some went to the floor. The pilot leaped over them, head down, running with long, loping strides. Slevin steadied himself, aimed, pulled the trigger. The shot echoed up the tunnel, a tile in the wall beside him shattered as the cylinder was blown into it.
Slevin stared at the pistol, stared through it.
He turned and ran back up the stairs. Out the entrance, down a narrow passage between two high walls, and into a weedy yard behind a workshop. He reached into the shed, grabbed the bicycle, and pedaled for his life, throwing the pistol over a wall into somebody’s garden. He stood on the pedals, racing down a cobbled lane and out into the avenue. A few people were riding along in a group. He drew even with them and slowed down. Just then, the sirens started up.
The bicyclists looked around to see what was going on. A fire? An accident? Always something, around here.
Hour by hour, the barge pushed its way north. It wound through fields, always, it seemed to Casson, distant from houses and people. The sky stayed heavy, with thick, tumbled cloud rolling west, and gray light from dawn to dusk. Sometimes it snowed, a January that would never end.
He had almost nothing to do. He read a pile of old newspapers; the Red Army had been repulsed in its efforts to break the siege of Sevastopol. The Wehrmacht was fully engaged in the Mozhaisk sector, sixty-five miles from Moscow, where the temperature was?70° Fahrenheit. Sometimes he talked to Jean-Paul and his wife, who took turns steering the barge. They usually brought the kids, they said, but not this trip. Sometimes he talked to Henri. At night, a bottle or two of sour red wine broke the monotony. “We fill these up every fall at a little cave down in Languedoc. Not so bad, eh?”
They had gone through the German border Kontrol just north of Chalon. Twelve barges had to be processed, and the Germans didn’t get around to them until midnight. Then another hour, while the border guards poked around and looked under things. A German corporal drove a steel rod into the gravel, tried three or four places, and that was that. The barge was doing Third Reich business-the load en route to a French contractor working for the German construction authority-so the papers got a fast once-over and they were sent on their way.
Ten hours upstream, in Dijon, they docked for an hour and re-fueled. Jean-Paul went off to buy bread and haricots blancs, a little oil, and a newspaper. They turned west on the Langres plateau and then north, the next morning, toward Montbard, barges hauling fuel-Casson could smell it-headed south on the other side of the canal. “Gasoline,” Jean-Paul said. “Going across the Mediterranean, for Rommel’s tanks.”
At night, Casson slept on a burlap mattress stuffed with straw in the small cabin he shared with Henri. There was no heat, and, as tired as he was, the cold kept waking him up. Finally he went out on deck. No stars, just dark fields stretching out to the edge of the world, and willow trees along the bank, their branches hanging limp in the frozen air. He stared out into the night and thought about his movies, about Citrine, about Marie-Claire. His old life. Finished, he thought, he couldn’t go back. He’d played the part of someone else for too long, now he was someone else. He thought about Helene, about the things they did together in his hotel room.
He got up and walked back toward the pilothouse. Jean-Paul’s wife was heating water on the woodstove. “Come in,” she said. “At least it’s warm. I’m making chicory, if you’d like some.”
He waited at the table, lighting a candle and reading the newspaper they’d bought in Dijon. Attack in Paris Metro. An attempt on the life of a German flying officer had failed. In reprisal, a thousand Jewish doctors and lawyers had been deported.
31 January.
The Seine, south of Paris. A hard, bright dawn, the sun on frost-whitened trees. Factories and docks and sheds, half-sunk rowboats, workers’ garden plots-stakes pulled over by bare vines. The Michelin factory, one end of it charred, windows broken out, old glass and burnt boards piled in a yard. Bombed, and bombed again. The smell of burned rubber hung in the morning air.
The river Kontrol was at Alfortville, just upstream from the madhouse at Charenton. Very brisk, dozens of
