they shoot they don’t hit anything.”
“It’s just the movies.”
The detective leaned forward in his chair and spoke quietly. “Tell me, Casson, why did you come back to France?”
“A woman.”
The detective nodded. “Not patriotism?”
“No, monsieur.”
The detective smiled-somebody had told the truth! He glanced at his watch, went to a window, took the brass handles and shoved it up a few inches. “The morning concert. Come and listen, Casson. It’s the latest thing from Vichy-a hymn to Petain.”
Casson went to the window. Down in the schoolyard, the children-eight- and nine-year-olds-were lined up in rows. Facing them, a music teacher, conducting with a stern finger: “And one, and two, and…” They sang with high voices, an angels’ choir.
All the children who love youand hold your years dearto your supreme callhave answered smartly, “Here!”
Marshal, here are webefore you, O savior of France. We your little buddies swearto follow where you advance.
For France is Petain, and Petain is France.
They began the next song, the detective closed the window, then went to the door and started to open it, giving Casson a nod of the head that meant let’s go. “Well, Casson,” he said, “perhaps you’re in luck. You may not have found patriotism, but it appears, God save us all, to have found you.”
STALIN’S ORDER
The struggle against Germany must not be looked upon as an ordinary war. It is not merely a fight between two armies. In order to engage the enemy there must be bands of partisans and saboteurs working underground everywhere, blowing bridges, destroying roads, telephones and telegraphs, and setting fire to depots and forests. In territories occupied by the enemy, conditions must be made so impossible that he cannot hold out; those helping him will be punished and executed.
Paris. 22 September, 1941.
Ivanic came out of the Saint-Michel Metro in the early evening, turned right at the first street, then right again to the little impasse they’d told him to look for, and the small door with the ironwork frame. He had the key in his hand but it still took a long time. He had to try it this way and that way, had to stand there and jiggle the thing until the lock decided to open. It was dark inside, he could just make out a stairway. He climbed one flight to a door at the head of the stairs, found a second key left on the molding that let him into a tiny room that seemed to be used as an office. Down below, in the restaurant Agadir, he could hear people talking and laughing, and throbbing oud music played on a wind-up Victrola.
There was a swivel chair at the desk but he didn’t sit down. He paced the office, checking his watch. Noisy outside, the rue de la Huchette, a North African souk around the steps of the church of Saint Severin. It smelled like the old streets in Marseilles, he thought, sheep liver grilled on hot coals, burnt cumin, and the damp air that hung over the river quais at dusk.
Not so bad, he thought-the crowds, jostling and busy, the dark-eyed women. He wasn’t in a hurry to try the food, but that was him. Food wasn’t something he liked. He’d done his prison time east of the Oder: in Lodz-for pamphlets, in Esztergom-just because, and then, worst of all, the Lukishki, in Vilna. Abduction. The Lithuanian police had been waiting for them. Two years of that. And it could have been forever, but in August ’39 the Hitler- Stalin Pact was signed and the NKVD came into the city and let Ivanic and his friends out of jail. Two years of that had done something to his appetite. He wondered if maybe it was the lentil mash they’d fed him in prison. Or maybe not. Maybe it was the work he did. He looked at his watch again, where were they? He was in his late twenties, tall and pale, with sleepy eyes. He’d grown up in Salonika but he wasn’t Greek, he came from farther up the Balkans. It was a long story.
In Vilna, he’d decided that he wasn’t going to prison again. But the people he worked for wouldn’t let him carry a weapon in Paris. Only for work. That scared Ivanic-even with the finest passports and Ausweis and all the other paper the Germans thought up, things could go wrong. He heard somebody coming up the stairs and hoped it was the man he was supposed to meet and not the Surete, or the Gestapo.
A key turned in the lock, Ivanic backed against the wall. The door opened slowly. “Hello? Ivanic?” Heavily accented French.
“Are you Serra?”
“Yes.”
They shook hands, both of them wary. Serra had dark hair, tousled and cut short, was perhaps in his thirties but he seemed much older than that. Ivanic knew he’d been a miner in Asturias-thus a specialist in dynamite-then, during the Spanish war, an operative for the Republican secret service. He had escaped over the Pyrenees, one of the last to get through after the fall of Barcelona in 1939, was arrested at the border, and spent the next year staring at an incomprehensible world through French barbed wire.
Serra had a little bag of tobacco. They tore strips off a page of Le Jour and smoked while they waited.
“Have you seen him?” Ivanic asked.
“Yes, I watched him. For a few days.”
“What is he like?”
“An athlete, perhaps. He stands very straight.”
“They all do.”
“Most of them.” Serra paused a moment. “Were you in Spain?”
“No.”
“I thought perhaps I’d seen you.”
“No. I wasn’t there.”
8:20 P.M. The phone in the office rang three times and stopped. Ivanic looked at his watch. Thirty seconds later it rang again. Ivanic raised the receiver from the cradle and put it back down. Another five minutes and they heard somebody coming up the stairs.
The man who stepped into the office was called Weiss. He had black and gray hair, combed back from the forehead, and wore a dark overcoat with the collar turned up. The world’s plainest man, Ivanic thought. A salesman? Teacher? Editor of a technical journal, something esoteric and difficult? Perhaps he’d once done something like that. Or maybe it was simply that Weiss became what other people thought he was. In a smoky Berlin union hall, he was a labor official. Later on, a Milanese intellectual, or a Dutch civil servant. Ivanic had once been on the edge of a conversation where a senior Comintern operative had said, “Of course Weiss is Hungarian- like all spies.”
He said hello to them, put his scuffed leather briefcase on the desk, unbuckled the straps, and hunted around inside. “Haupt mann Johannes Luecks,” he said. He handed Ivanic a photograph, a clandestine shot taken from a first-floor window, slightly blurred, the blacks and whites faded to gray. The officer, a captain, had his head turned toward the camera. He was hatless, fair-haired, in Wehrmacht uniform. “He commands a company of combat engineers,” Weiss said. “Joined the army in ’32, from Bremerhaven. Here is a list. Where he goes and what he does.”
Ivanic passed the photo to Serra and took the sheet of paper from Weiss. A twenty-four-hour schedule with daily headings. At the top of the page, an address. “The rue St.-Roch,” Ivanic said.
“Yes, only the best. He’s billeted with a French family.”
“St.-Roch. It runs off St.-Honore?”
