“That’s right.”
“Busy at lunchtime.”
“Yes, a commercial neighborhood, but quiet in the evening.”
“Home around six-thirty.”
“Yes. A pipe, a comfortable chair, a newspaper.”
“A pleasant life.”
“It is. The family is completely intimidated-they wait on him hand and foot.”
Serra shook his head. Handed the photograph back to Weiss and took the schedule from Ivanic.
“When do you want it done?” Ivanic asked.
“Up to you,” Weiss said. “But as soon as possible. The Wehrmacht is just outside Moscow. They are burning the villages around Mogilev, taking the men away for slave labor. The local officials are simply shot. The way we make them pay for that is partizan action, behind the lines, which means anywhere from Mogilev to Brittany.”
“This Hauptmann Luecks,” Ivanic said, “is he anyone special?”
“No,” Weiss said. “And that’s the point we want to make. He’s a German, that’s all, and that’s enough.”
They killed him the following Thursday. At four in the afternoon they met in a greenhouse in the Jardin des Plantes, where the weapons were buried beneath the gravel. 7.65 pistols, fine automatics from J. P. Sauer und Sohn in the town of Suhl, normally issued only to Luftwaffe officers. They rode bicycles with crowds of homebound workers in a light rain across the Seine, then along the avenues to St.-Honore. On the rue St.-Roch they waited until almost seven, when Hauptmann Luecks was dropped off by a Wehrmacht staff car, shoulders hunched as he hurried through the rain toward his doorway, carrying a paper-wrapped patisserie by its pink ribbon.
They followed him into the lobby. He didn’t like it-two men in caps with their jacket collars up. He turned to glare at them and they took the automatic pistols out and fired three or four times each. The shots were thunderous in the small space, echoing off the marble walls. Luecks was knocked backward. He tumbled to the lobby floor and tried to roll toward the door. The two men shot him again and he lay still, a cloud of blue smoke hanging in the air, the echoes ringing away to silence.
They heard the whine of a motor and looked up, saw the elevator cables moving in the small cage. The car stopped in the lobby. A well-dressed woman stared out at them, at the German officer on the floor. She reached out and pressed a button, the elevator went back up.
Paris. 2 October.
It continued to rain. Jean Casson sat in the parlor of a small apartment in Neuilly, reading a newspaper- COWARDLY TERRORIST ATTACK IN THE RUE ST.-ROCH-for the second time. On the eastern front, retreating Russian divisions had been forced to blow up the Dnieper dam, the pride of Soviet engineering in the 1930s. Casson reread the movie section, the sports, the obituaries.
“Stay here and wait,” the detective had told him. He slept on a narrow bed in a spare room, took silent meals with Monsieur and Madame Kerner, an Alsatian couple in their sixties. He had been saved, for what or why he did not know. The people who had found him hadn’t yet let him in on their plans but he had no doubt they would get around to it. Meanwhile, there was bread to eat, and soup, and long, silent evenings.
He was afraid of Kerner, a huge man with a tread that made the old floor creak. Kerner was his jailer-a courteous one it was true but a jailer nonetheless. A retired army officer. On the tables in the parlor there were photographs of Kerner in uniform-with brother officers, solemn faces staring into the camera-taken in Damascus, in Tunis, in Dakar. A colonial soldier, apparently, with campaign ribbons and medals on a framed black velvet cloth hung on the wall, and a tiny Croix de Guerre in the lapel of his blue suit. One of the pictures was inscribed: The Brotherhood of the IX Commando. Casson could see some sort of insignia on the uniforms, but he had no idea what it meant.
The suit was worn only on Sundays, when the Kerners took turns going to Mass-they would not leave him alone in the apartment. Even so, life had improved. From time to time he insisted on going out. He couldn’t go by himself, Kerner had to come along, but at least he could spend a few hours away from the stuffy apartment and its ticking clocks. The detective had supplied him with better identity papers, the real thing, made by the prefecture. Perhaps made “during lunch,” when the supervisors were not in the office, but the effect was the same. He remained Jean Louis Marin. He’d also been given some money and ration coupons, enough for cigarettes and a few small necessities.
One afternoon, special dispensation, he went to the movies, to the little Regence out by Auteuil. The second feature was his own Night Run. It was heaven to Casson to lose himself in the fragrant darkness of a movie theatre, even with Kerner sitting beside him. Three minutes in, Citrine, as Dany, a clerk in her parents’ drapery shop. She is sitting in a crowded train compartment with Valmas, the small-time hood who, eighty minutes later, will die for love of her. Dany: in her new suit bought in Auxerre’s best shop, hopeful, shy, burning.
They find each other immediately, as the train to Paris is leaving the platform. On Valmas’s face, the smile of a predator-If I want you, I can have you. After a moment, Dany looks away. Yes, I know. They pass a small station north of the town. The camera cuts to the passenger next to Dany: a middle-aged lady with a gimlet eye, a mouth tight with disapproval, and a hat laden with artificial fruit.
Bernadine Chouette, Casson thought. Who had disapproved of every imaginable thing in twenty films. How good she was, a stage actress with years of character roles. She’d been horrified when the director, old Marchand, had produced the ghastly hat. “Oh no, you can’t be serious!” But he was-serious, and right. She had the pickle face and the vinegar stare, but the hat made it all work. Of course real life didn’t play that way. Chouette, a cigar- smoking habitue of garter-belt parties at the Monocle Club, was famous for exquisitely filthy songs, music-hall routines that caused tears of laughter to ruin mascara.
Toward the end of the movie, a scene in a hotel room-a hide-out. For Dany and Valmas it’s the last time and they know it. Citrine sits on the edge of the bed, her lovely breasts in a soft sweater. “No one else,” she says, shaking her head, slow and resolute. “Not ever again.” Casson bit his lip. She’d been eighteen when Night Run was shot. Later she became an actress, but not that day, not that day.
As good as it was to be in a movie theatre it was just as bad to come out, into the brutal daylight. “Did you like it?” Casson asked.
“Well, that sort of thing…”
Casson nodded. He’d guessed that Kerner didn’t know who he was, just a fugitive that had to be hidden. “Would you like to walk? It’s not so far.”
“No,” Kerner said. “We must go home now.”
The rain had started again, it was a different city when it rained. They walked to the Metro. That day, Gestapo troops had begun to burn the synagogues of Paris; brown smoke drifted across the gray afternoon, sometimes visible above the rooftops.
Paris. 20 October.
Madame Kerner was knitting, her needles clicking as she worked. Casson stared out a window at the apartment across the way, whose curtains were always drawn. The boredom of being hidden gnawed at him, he was ready to escape. By now his life at the Hotel Victoria glowed in recollection-he’d been hungry but he’d been free.
The Kerners’ telephone was on the wall in the kitchen. It rang, for the first time since Casson had been in the apartment. Madame Kerner looked up from her knitting. Kerner went to answer it. From the parlor, Casson could hear the conversation.
“Who is it?”
Kerner listened.
“Very well. What time?”
Again.
“Yes, sir,”
And again.
“Yes, sir.”
And, finally: “At fifteen-thirty, you say. In Courbevoie.”
An hour later, Casson left. Madame helped him fold “his things”-two books from a secondhand stall, some socks and underwear-into brown paper, which she tied for him with string. “Adieu, monsieur,” she said. And wished
