FROM THEN ON, WE dealt only with Dietrich.
When he brought along Touchard to authenticate, it seemed to be more for the amusement Dietrich could get out of the slippery little man than for the skill Touchard had to offer. I was left with the impression that Dietrich used Touchard only because he had been ordered to do so, and that he would rather have taken our word over the authenticator’s. Touchard was no expert, anyway. Often, he had no idea who was supposed to have done the painting, let alone whether or not it was authentic. Dietrich confided in us that Touchard had been forced upon him by the directors of the ERR, since Touchard was the brother of a prominent director of the Milice in the city of Lille, who had pulled strings to get him the post.
When it came to ridiculing Touchard, Dietrich couldn’t help himself. The two men disliked each other instinctively. Dietrich was tall and solid and jovial, while Touchard was frail and long-suffering. He returned Dietrich’s mockery with a martyred silence that made Dietrich like him even less.
“Come along, Sniffles,” Dietrich would say, since Touchard always seemed to be suffering from a cold that rosied his nose.
Dietrich’s legs were much longer than Touchard’s and Dietrich had a habit of striding quickly everywhere he went. This left Touchard trotting along behind, glaring hatefully at Dietrich’s back as he struggled to keep up.
By contrast, Touchard had grown very attached to Fleury. Fleury, too, seemed to find in Touchard a kindred spirit. It wasn’t hard to imagine the experiences they had in common. Both men were physically unimpressive. They had doubtless suffered the fate of all non-athletic boys in school, immediately reduced to second-class citizens, and too intelligent not to be insulted by the unfairness of it. I could see the same loathing on Touchard’s face when he spoke to Dietrich as I had seen on Fleury’s when he had to deal with Tombeau. Both men looked lonely, not just alone. They had built for themselves fortresses of arrogance from whose ramparts they could hawk and spit on the rest of the world that ignored them.
The result of this was that Touchard gave Fleury outrageously favorable terms whenever it came time to negotiate for paintings. All Fleury had to do was treat him with formality and respect, which left Touchard dizzy with gratitude.
“Why are you so hard on him?” I asked Dietrich one time when we stood on the landing outside Pankratov’s studio, while Fleury and Touchard were sorting out the details of another painting exchange.
“I don’t know, really,” said Dietrich. Then he waved his hand dismissively at the frosted glass door, behind which Touchard’s thin voice could be heard. “He doesn’t deserve the job. I don’t tolerate whining from myself, and I’m damned if I’ll tolerate it from him.” Dietrich was losing his patience as he spoke, revealing that Touchard annoyed him far more than he ever liked to show.
Valya often came along to these meetings. She made a point of having nothing to do with Fleury and me. I used to wonder why she bothered to come if she couldn’t stand the sight of us, until I figured out how important it was to her that we felt so completely ignored.
I kept waiting for some kind of admission from Fleury that he’d made a mistake in falling for her. But Fleury appeared to have an infinite patience for Valya, no matter what she said or did.
It was Pankratov who bore the brunt of Valya’s taunts. She flaunted how different her life had become. Pankratov endured it, never losing his temper. He knew that if he did blow up, she would tell him he no longer had the right. She would make Pankratov see the distance she had put between herself and him. That was why Pankratov stayed silent, refusing to part with the past, which only served to fuel Valya’s bitterness.
“What about you?” Valya asked me one day at the atelier, forgetting to ignore me.
“What about me?” I replied.
“Whatever happened to the days when you were going to be a great artist?” She pretended to look around the atelier. “I don’t see any great art being done here. How far you are from all your dreams, Monsieur Halifax.”
I brought my mouth close to her ear and whispered, “I’d rather live in a world where my dreams don’t come true than in a world where yours do.”
She slapped me in the face for that. Hard. My left ear buzzed and stung.
Dietrich saw this and laughed.
Valya turned to him. “You think that’s funny?” she shouted. “You don’t care what happens to me at all, do you?”
By now, Dietrich’s laughter subsided into a smile. “You don’t believe that,” he told her. “Not for a moment.”
Valya and Dietrich were always raging at each other, the anger subsiding as suddenly as it appeared. They lived in a world as bloated with luxury as it was with confrontations. From what I had seen of the two of them, I knew that Dietrich loved Valya, in spite or even because of the fact that she didn’t treat him well. She found fault with almost everything he did, at least in public. This didn’t stop him from lavishing on her all the luxuries he could find. Valya loved him, too, in her own strange way. She seemed to have convinced herself that any show of real affection would cause Dietrich to lose interest. Every gesture of her love was made with sarcasm or followed quickly by the announcement of some petty grievance. The two of them had grown so used to their peculiar balance that they seemed to have forgotten what life was like before chaos had brought them together. Now they could no longer live without it. They even seemed to look with pity on the rest of us, at the same time we were pitying them. They believed they were somehow more fortunate, somehow more alive, even in the midst of their fighting.
As the war dragged on, and hardship seeped into every facet of life, Fleury and I did not go hungry. Following a new set of instructions from Tombeau, designed to make sure we were seen more publicly as collaborators—collabos, the French called us—we drank real coffee and ate profiteroles stuffed with cream and topped with Belgian chocolate at the Soldatenkaffee Madeleine on the Rue St. Honoré, sitting amongst the Iron-Crossed officers and their too loudly laughing girlfriends. We were regulars at the cramped space of Ladurée on the Rue Royale, with its green walls, elaborate sconces and gilt-edged frescos of fat-baby angels on the ceiling. We went to the Gaumont Palace Cinema, and watched Jeanne Heriard perform at the Schéhérézade cabaret on the Rue de Liège. Fleury and I were expected to take what Dietrich offered us and to continue the charade. To refuse him would have aroused suspicion.
We also had to give the outward impression of wealth, in order to convince Dietrich that we were selling the paintings we received from him in exchange. There were plenty of avenues for moving these works overseas and fortunes to be made in doing so. The reality, of course, was that every painting went straight to Madame Pontier and into hiding. We lived off the allowance given to us by Tombeau, who also allotted us special funds to buy clothes. He told me to set up an account on the Boulevard des Capucines at the Heereskleiderkasse, which used to be called “Old England” until the Germans renamed it.
We accepted the special passes Dietrich had made for us, which the Germans called Sonderausweise. They allowed us to violate curfew, which a lot of people did anyway. They took off their shoes and walked home in their socks so as to make less noise. The punishment for violating curfew was not in itself very severe, but if you were brought in on a night that a German soldier was murdered by the Resistance, you might get yourself shot as one of the dozens they would execute as a reprisal.
If we needed to go some place, Dietrich would have his private staff car sent over. He had upgraded his old Mercedes to a Horch convertible, which had two sets of front-facing rear seats and hooded “blackout” lights mounted next to the regular lights, and extra horns and the same swooshing front cowlings as on the Mercedes. It was, Dietrich told us, an even better car than was being driven by the military governor of Paris and a hell of a lot better than what Abetz was puttering around in. Grand as this Horch was, Dietrich seemed to flaunt its grandness even more by refusing to have it cleaned. So the black sides and the chromed front grille were powdery gray with dust and showed the streaks where hands had touched the paint while opening the door.
None of this applied to Pankratov. Dietrich himself showed little interest in the old Russian. As far as he was concerned, Pankratov was a bad-tempered, unclean old man who hung around with us because he had no place else to go. But anyone who could have seen Pankratov in his workshop, consulting his notes on the properties of canvas, paint and paper, would have known there was a genius at work.
Dietrich never brought us to 54 Avenue d’Iéna, the headquarters of the ERR, in whose basement was rumored to be a torture chamber whose walls had been soundproofed with asbestos. Nor had we ever met Alfred Rosenberg, the head of the ERR. At first, I used to think that this was because we weren’t worth the bother. Later, I blamed it on Dietrich’s selfishness, taking all the credit for the paintings for himself and keeping the people who worked for him hidden safely in the shadows. Eventually, I realized that Dietrich kept us out of the way for our own protection. He knew how dangerous his own people could be. He made it clear to us that if we were ever harassed, by French or Germans, one phone call to him would bring down the whole heavy-handed brutality of the Fabry-Georges boys. The reputation of Fabry-Georges, and Dietrich’s ability to summon them like genies from a bottle, seemed enough to deter anyone who wished to do us harm.
I used to ask myself whether there was ever a time that I enjoyed these luxuries, despite everything they had come to represent. The answer was always the same. How could I enjoy myself when I knew that someone was watching me, all the time, obsessed with vengeance? Sometimes I would see these people and clear in their eyes was a simmering fury as they watched me eat and dance and walk in my warm coat, a grotesque Kabuki mask of pleasure bolted to my face.
A part of me was resigned to the idea that we would all be caught, sooner or later. I tried not to think about the luck we’d had so far. Instead, I thought about the work. We churned out a steady stream of paintings and sketches, feathered in amongst the real paintings grudgingly supplied to us by Madame Pontier. Day after day, I painted and drew in that damp space below the old viaduct. I distilled my life down to the simple equation of the job. I saw the forgeries go out and I watched the original paintings that Fleury brought back—the masterworks of generations, which might otherwise have been destroyed.
* * *
WHEN A GERMAN OFFICER was shot at the Barbes Métro station in mid-August 1941, I became convinced that Germany would win. Some people saw this as the exact opposite. They believed it was the beginning of serious resistance, but to me it had about as much effect as the barking of a chained-up dog.
The Germans arrested dozens of suspected Communists, hauled them off to Mont Válerin and shot them ten at a time. The gunfire echoed out of those stone courtyards. All those dead in exchange for one German soldier. Collaborationist newspapers like Je Suis Partout went into full gear, making it sound as if the Germans didn’t have a choice but to kill off that many people.
When America entered the war in December 1941, I was surprised at how little I felt. The event should perhaps have simplified my thoughts about the violence that was going on around me. It should have swept from my mind all doubts about the outcome of the conflict. But it didn’t. Maybe I had begun to believe what was written in that fake identity card which Tombeau had given to me—that I was no longer American. But it wasn’t as simple as that. I was caught up, as many people were, in the small details of life from day to day. I couldn’t stand back far enough to see the bigger picture.
Later on, when Germans were shot on train platforms or knifed while they were taking a piss in some restaurant urinal or beaten over the head and thrown in the river, the Germans did what they always did—rounded up hundreds of people, who were then tortured by the Milice or the Gestapo in chambers beneath the Rue des Saussaies. Even when the Resistance blew up the German-language bookshop on the Place de la Sorbonne, and the street was filled with glass and smoke and thousands of pages of torn-apart books, these efforts seemed hopeless to me. I had been dealing with the German authorities for several years now. I knew that they would pay back every strike against them with such efficient heavy-handedness that they would make the original act of violence look pathetically small. They would do this until not one Frenchman was left alive in France. They would not quit, if only to avoid the shame of quitting.
* * *
THAT ALL CHANGED IN early February 1943, with the fall of Stalingrad. The German army had been cut off and over one hundred thousand troops surrendered. This had been the Sixth Army, the same one that marched in a victory parade down the Champs-Elysées after the fall of France and the same one to which Behr was to have been transferred. At Christmastime, there had been a broadcast from troops in all the various places where the Germans were fighting, including Stalingrad. I remembered that part of the broadcast, and now that I was speaking a little German, I even understood what they were saying.
“Attention. Attention,” said the radio announcer. “I am calling Stalingrad.”
“This is Stalingrad,” came the scratchy reply. “The Front on the Volga.”
Afterwards, I heard rumors that the broadcast had been faked, and that the last German messages out of Stalingrad had ceased a week before. While the fake broadcast had claimed a victory, stories circulated across the whisper-dampened tabletops of the Dimitri that Germans were being killed in Stalingrad at the rate of one every seven seconds.
For the first time, people began to speak seriously of the Germans losing the war.
The acts of sabotage that took place all around Paris had not convinced me. But Stalingrad did. The whole unimaginable slaughter of it made even the German reprisals against the French Resistance seem like nothing. I understood, finally, that they could be defeated. That they would be. From now on, it was only a matter of time.
I started to notice a change in the appearance of the German soldiers in Paris, particularly among the lower ranks. Most of them no longer wore the heavy jackboots. Instead, they had ankleboots now, and these were often made of rough and mottled leather. They tucked their trouser legs into canvas gaiters. The clothing changed, too. You could tell that the quality of wool was going down. Particularly in bright sunlight, the dyeing of their field gray wool tunics seemed patchy, as if the wool had been recycled. I noticed a lot more young-looking soldiers, and a lot more older ones, too. But maybe none of that mattered, because they were still carrying the same Mauser rifles and the same Schmeisser burp guns, and the officers still had the same pistol holsters on their belts.
For us, the greatest change of all was that the market for trade in modernist paintings had begun to dry up. Apparently, Hitler himself had heard about collections of unapproved art being compiled by high-ranking German army officials, such as Foreign Minister Ribbentrop. The existence of abstract, constructionist and Expressionist works had been tolerated until now because it was assumed that they were only being used as trade items. But in late July 1943, as a response to the collecting, the SS took a number of paintings by Miró, Ernst, Léger, Picabia and Klee, among others, and burned them in the garden of the Jeu de Paume.
Business tailed off sharply. Tombeau urged us to sell paintings to Dietrich for gold bullion. He said the Resistance needed the money. But Pankratov and I refused, despite Fleury’s reasoning that it was time we started looking out for ourselves a little. I told Tombeau I wasn’t taking these kinds of risks for gold. With Pankratov supporting me, Tombeau and Fleury had no choice but to agree.
I used the free time to do some of my own pieces, the first I’d made in years. I did a sketch of Fleury one morning as he was sitting in his chair at the warehouse, reading the Sunday paper by the light of a candle.
Fleury didn’t care for sitting still. “I didn’t realize this was so difficult,” he said.
“It’s just difficult for you,” I told him.
I did a drawing of the candy-striped German sentry box at the Quai d’Orsay. I drew the line of vélo-taxis outside Les Halles. There were hardly any motorized taxis now. Instead, they were small, two-wheeled carriages pulled along by bicyclists. I did a series of drawings of German soldiers relaxing in the Tuileries. The one I liked best was of a general who had fallen asleep on a bench, while his deputy stood by, shading the man with an umbrella. The deputy grinned at me as I made the sketch, knowing how silly he looked with that umbrella. It felt good to be working for myself again, even just to be staring at the canvas, the way I often did before I began a painting, knowing that the painting would come from me, not cribbed from the mind of a stranger.
* * *
IN THE MIDDLE OF the night, I heard the car brakes squeak again. I knew from the sound that the car had stopped right outside our building.
I went to the window and had to lean out dangerously far to see the car and the two men who banged on the door until Madame La Roche came to open it.
At that moment, I knew that everyone on the Rue Descalzi was awake and holding their breath. Without thinking, I put on my clothes and my shoes. I fetched my coat from the peg behind the door and then I sat on my bed, hands sweating. It was easier than lying down and trying to pretend they weren’t coming for me.
I heard the whirring of the elevator. Heard it stop. Start again. The men bundled someone out into their car.
I put my hands to my face and felt the sting of salty liquid on my cheeks. “Oh, my God,” I said to myself. “Oh, that was close.” I got off the bed, my knees gone shaky, and hung up my coat on the peg.
That was when I heard the elevator start again.
I stayed frozen by the door, waiting for the machine to stop, but it kept going, right up to my floor. I felt bile splash into my throat as the accordion door creaked open. I saw the shadows of the men in a gap between my door and the floorboards. There was some muttering and then a knock on my door.
I lifted my coat off the peg. The weight of it was suddenly almost too much for me. I didn’t make them knock twice. I opened the door, and saw the two men in knee-length leather coats, one black, one brown. Under their coats they wore drab gray civilian suits. The man in the black coat held out his hand and in the palm was a bronze oval disc, on which were the words Staatliche Kriminalpolizei. Under the words was a serial number. They didn’t seem surprised to find me already dressed.
“You have thirty seconds to be ready,” said the man in the brown coat. In his hand, he carried a thing like a small looped pair of tongs.
“I don’t need thirty seconds,” I said, and stepped out into the hall.
They didn’t speak to me as we rode down to the level of the street. As we slid from floor to floor, I thought about the others in their rooms and the relief they must be feeling that they were left alone. This was the first time in my life that I got so scared I had to stop myself from throwing up.
I had forgotten about the other person. Under the circumstances, I was not surprised to find Fleury waiting in the backseat, while the driver of the car stood outside, in his shirtsleeves, smoking a cigarette. A gun in a shoulder holster was bunched under his armpit. There was nothing to say. We had both lived through this nightmare so many times in our heads that both of us now felt locked inside the same bad dream.
The man in the brown coat sat between me and Fleury. The man in black sat in the front with the driver. We set off through the empty streets. The headlights of the car had been hooded so that the beams were reduced to horizontal slits, appearing solid in the misty air.
The man who sat between Fleury and me still held the strange pair of tongs.
“What?” I asked, but then my tongue got stuck to the roof of my mouth and I had to start again. “What is that?”
“Hold out your hand,” he said.
I did.
He clamped the tongs onto my wrist. Then he turned his fist slightly.
Pain shot up my arm and halfway down my back. I realized he could have broken my wrist with hardly any pressure at all.
We pulled up outside 54 Avenue d’Iéna.
“We are friends of Mr. Dietrich,” said Fleury, out of breath with worry, but still trying to cram some measure of authority into his voice.
“Apparently not any more,” said the man who sat between us.
We were brought up the white steps, past two guards in black uniforms with submachine guns. I saw the SS lightning bolts on their collars. We went inside. There was a large foyer with a desk on which were three telephones. At the desk sat Grimm, staring at the phones as if daring them to ring. We were made to sign our names in a book. Then Fleury and I were led toward a staircase that ran up the right side of the wall and curved at the top. Before we reached it, however, a door was opened and we were ushered down a narrow stone staircase, which spiraled into the earth, like the path of all my nightmares, trodden down with repetition.
At the bottom of the stairs was another door, painted cream color and made of steel. It was opened and we were led into a room with a brick red linoleum floor and low ceilings, from which hung very strong unshielded lightbulbs, as well as a series of iron railings that were suspended horizontally about a foot below the level of the ceiling. The walls were dull white and made of a substance like pasteboard. The place smelled of disinfectant. In the middle of the room stood Dietrich, and behind him, as if trying to hide, was Touchard. Touchard was holding the first original piece of work we had given to Dietrich as an exchange. It was the drawing of the kneeling angel by Gianfrancesco Penni.
I realized that we were in the torture chamber. I’d heard so many rumors about this place that I had begun to wonder if it really did exist. I was surprised at the bareness of it. At how clean it appeared to be, and at the way these pasty walls seemed to drink the sound out of our voices.
Fleury was shaking. He looked as if he might collapse. His head hung down, as if he lacked the strength to raise it.
Touchard peered out from behind Dietrich’s broad shoulders. He looked as frightened as we must have.
Dietrich stepped to one side. “Tell them,” he ordered.
Touchard was left standing with the Penni drawing, holding it against his chest as if to use it as a shield. “It’s a fake,” he said. He glanced at Fleury. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered. “We just found out.”
Fleury raised his head sharply. “That’s an original!” He held out his hand, like a man introducing a distinguished guest who has just entered a room. “That is a Gianfrancesco Penni.”
“Fake!” bellowed Dietrich and his shout left no echo in the room. “What the hell kind of game do you think you’re playing?” He began to pace up and down in front of us, hands knotted into fists at his side. “Are you trying to make me look foolish? Is that it?”
“Of course not,” said Fleury.
“This is your doing,” continued Dietrich, twisting his head, almost cobralike, to glare into Fleury’s eyes. “This is your fault.” Now Dietrich stepped over to me.
I had just noticed the impressions of hands pressed into the soft, sound-drinking asbestos walls. For a moment, I couldn’t understand how they had gotten there. Then I realized that these marks must be from the people who had been tortured here. I began to shake. It seemed to me these walls had swallowed so many terrible sounds that some residue of the horror still remained, threaded in the fibers of asbestos, which might at any moment be released in a deafening chorus of screams. I felt a kind of resignation settling in me, heavy and thick, as if my heart had stopped and blood was already clotting in my veins.
“It’s not you I blame,” Dietrich told me. “No, you’re not the expert. He is.” Dietrich’s arm shot out, finger pointing at Fleury. He returned to Fleury. “I want those paintings back. The ones I gave you for this piece of junk.” Then his rage overtook him again. He snatched the drawing out of Touchard’s hands and tore it to pieces.
A dry rush of air passed down my throat.
Dietrich threw the pieces of the sketch into the air and let them flutter down around Fleury’s head.
“You don’t know what you’ve done,” said Fleury.
“It’s you who doesn’t know,” shouted Dietrich. “I swear, if you ever, ever, bring me another fake, I will show you what misery happens here. You owe me, Mr. Fleury. I saved your life and in return you have insulted me and I will not let that go away. I will not forget it. There will be a reckoning between us.” Spit was flying from his mouth. His neck bulged against the clean white collar of his shirt.
For the first time, Fleury looked Dietrich in the eye. Suddenly, he did not seem afraid. Instead, he looked as if he had gone away far inside himself, where nothing could touch him, and only the shell of his body stood there now, hollowly speaking these words. “You may have your paintings back,” he said. “You may always have your paintings back, if there is any doubt.”
When Dietrich heard this, he seemed to lose some of his anger. “Well, that’s good,” he said. “That’s a step in the right direction.” He walked over to the far wall, as if trying to extinguish the last reservoirs of his anger. Carelessly, he fitted his hand into one of the handprints on the wall. “You can go now,” he said, without turning around.
Touchard stepped toward Fleury. “Monsieur,” he said, “I beg you to believe that this was not…”
“Touchard!” shouted Dietrich.
Touchard shuddered and fell silent.
Back out in the street, it was still very dark. The cool air chilled my sweat. I hadn’t realized how hot it had been down in that room. The car that had brought us was gone. I went back inside and persuaded Grimm to write us passes to get home, since neither Fleury nor I had brought our Sonderausweise with us, and we didn’t want to get arrested for breaking curfew without permission.
On the way back, I wanted to burrow in the ground some place and hide. “It’s all right,” I said, more to myself than to Fleury, who paced in silence beside me. “It was just a foul-up. Just a temporary setback.” I didn’t believe any of what I was saying. I was hoping that Fleury would take up the chant and we would convince ourselves with lie upon lie, the way we had done in the old days.
We were passing a set of shoulder-high black iron railings that fenced in the front of a large house at the end of the Avenue d’Iéna.
Fleury turned suddenly and took hold of the tops of two railings, which were forged in the shape of blunted spearheads. He tried to shake the railings, heaving his body savagely against them. He swung his body back and forth, growling and thrashing, until he had run out of strength. Then he staggered back into the street.
“Fleury,” I said quietly.
“Get away!” He glared at me as if he no longer knew who I was. Then he ran off down the road.
I didn’t try to follow. There could be no reasoning with him now. I wandered home in a daze, returning again and again in my thoughts to the emptiness of the room in which we had met Dietrich. It was as if the emptiness itself created pain.
* * *
AT SIX IN THE morning, I was woken by the rattle of a key in the latch.
I rolled out of bed and hit the floor. Not again, I was thinking. I started to crawl under the bed, confused by half-sleep and helplessness.
“Monsieur Halifax!” It was Madame La Roche. She stood with a bucket and a broom, silhouetted in the doorway.
I got to my feet, still shaky in my knees.
“They took you away,” she said, astonished to find me here. “And Monsieur Fleury, too. I thought you were both gone. I had come to clean out your room.”
“Is Fleury all right?” I asked. “Have you seen him?”
“He is here,” replied Madame La Roche. “He is himself.” She dropped the broom and bucket, which fell with a clatter. She marched into the apartment and wrapped her arms around me. “My poor boy,” she said.
I put my arms around her and squeezed gently. It was like hugging a giant ripe plum.
“Poor boy,” she said again.
At that moment, I heard a sigh, like the swoop of a bird’s wing. When I looked up, I saw that the open doorway was filled with people. Everyone from my floor had gathered to welcome me back. There was Madame Lindgren, the dance instructor, with her slept-on red hair flowing down over her shoulders like molten lava. And Monsieur Finel, the Postillon bicycle man, his naked, hairy legs planted in a worn-out pair of workboots. And the Charbonniers and their son Hubert. They were all smiling at me, as if I had been gone for years.
I walked over to them and they put their arms around me and slapped me on the back and kissed me on both cheeks.
“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you. Thank you.”
* * *
LATER THAT MORNING, I knocked on Fleury’s door.
He emerged in his smoking jacket. “Have you been embraced by Madame La Roche?” he asked.
“I believe I have,” I replied.
“Quite something.”
I nodded. “It certainly was.”
Fleury looked around, as if tracking the flight of an invisible insect. “I got a bit carried away last night,” he said.
“Can’t say I blame you,” I replied. I leaned against the doorframe with my hands in my pockets. “All that stuff Dietrich said about paying you back. About you owing him. It was all just talk. You know that.”
“Do I?” he asked. “Do you?”
Conscious that someone might be listening, I stepped into his apartment. Morning sunlight filled the space. The bed was neatly made and the air smelled of the sweet-dryness of the soap he used. I could see through to his tiny bathroom, the shaving soap and mug and bristle brush all laid out on a towel, the way he liked to keep them.
“Well,” he asked again. “Do you think it’s just talk?”
“If he’d wanted us dead, we’d be dead by now.” I clicked my tongue. “The one time we give him an original, Touchard gets it wrong.”
“I wonder if Touchard is really that much of a fool,” said Fleury. “I think perhaps he’s not.”
* * *
WE SET UP A meeting with Madame Pontier at Pankratov’s warehouse for later that day.
Pankratov, Fleury and I had been waiting several hours when we at last heard a car pull into the alleyway. When the engine quit, I heard Madame Pontier swearing and the low murmur of Tombeau as he offered up excuses about his driving.
Pankratov swung the doors wide. Magnesium sunlight flared across the sloping walls of the warehouse.
Fleury and I shrank back from it, shielding our eyes.
Pankratov showed them inside.
Fleury explained the situation to her, while Pankratov switched on the electric lights. Tombeau and I hung back in the shadows. I kept thinking of him standing by the table at La Mère Cathérine, the gun in his hand. We had not spoken about it. I doubted if we ever would.
Madame Pontier stared hard at Fleury while she listened. She kept her arms folded, as if she felt the damp in this cramped space.
Fleury handed her a sheet of paper with the names of the two works we had received in trade for the Penni drawing.
I hadn’t seen the list or the works. All I had seen was the Penni, and each time I thought of it, I saw the shredded paper twitching in the air as it fell from Dietrich’s fingers.
Madame Pontier looked at the list. She seemed to be spending a very long time reading it. Then she raised her head suddenly and folded the paper in half. “These are valuable works,” she said. “They’ve already cost us that Penni drawing.”
“There are bound to be some losses,” said Fleury, his voice gentle and reasoning.
“I can’t just give back the works,” she told him. “It makes no sense.”
I felt my heart jump when she said this.
“You can, Madame Pontier,” replied Fleury. “It makes all the sense in the world.”
“No.” She shook her head. “I simply can’t. What I will do is give you some other paintings. Some things we are more able to spare. You’ll just have to make Mr. Dietrich happy with that. I’m sure he will be, given the right explanation.”
Fleury pressed his hands to his face, then slowly dragged his fingers down his cheeks. “You hand back those works this instant,” he said quietly, “and I’ll pretend I never heard what you just said.”
“That’s it!” she snapped. “Come along, Tombeau. We’re leaving.” She took three paces toward the door, then stopped.
Tombeau was not following.
“Tombeau,” she said, without turning around.
“Madame,” said Tombeau.
I felt his breath brush by my face in the still air.
“You must return the works to Monsieur Fleury,” said Tombeau. “I know this man Dietrich. I know what he is like. It isn’t the work he cares about. He feels that Fleury has insulted him. If Fleury tries to give Dietrich something different in return, it will only make the insult worse. You know what will happen then. We have already seen it happen several times.”
This was the first I’d heard about other cells being broken.
“Madame Pontier,” continued Tombeau, his voice stiff with formality, “in having to give back these works, I know you also feel as if perhaps you are being taken advantage of. But Madame Pontier, you will give them back, because you see more clearly than he does what is really at stake and what the consequences would be to you.”
She spun around. “What consequences are those?”
Tombeau did not reply. His eyes were gleaming in the sharp-shadowed lights.
“Choose your words carefully, Monsieur Tombeau,” she said. “They might be misinterpreted.” She walked out and kicked the door shut.
The slam of the huge-timbered door boxed our ears.
After a few seconds, Tombeau followed her out. He didn’t say good-bye to us. It was as if he’d been leaving an empty room.
In the silence that followed, Fleury fished out a cigarette from his old tin, the image of the Craven A black cat almost chipped away now by the coins he carried in his pockets. While he smoked, he polished his glasses with the end of his tie. He polished the lenses beyond the point where they would be clean. The strain was breaking him. He knew his job was the hardest. He had to do the lying and not blink. If anything went wrong, he would be the first to find himself in that basement on the Avenue d’Iéna.
The next day, Tombeau returned with the works. The drawings were both by Lautrec. One was of a black man in a cap dancing in a café, done in pen and watercolor. Fleury said the man had been a popular dancer named Chocolat. The other was also a café scene—a heavyset bartender with a handlebar mustache. This one had a tag on the back, which gave the title as La Caissière Chlorotique. As with most of the other works we received in trade from Dietrich, these showed ERR inventory marks, along with the small swastika inside a black circle.
“She didn’t understand about Dietrich,” said Tombeau. “About what kind of man he is. I explained it to her. It’s all been straightened out.”
“I wouldn’t mind hearing an apology from her,” I said.
“The fact that you have the drawings back is her apology.”
“Thank you for helping us,” I told him.
“It was not personal,” replied Tombeau.
I breathed out and looked away, wondering why I had bothered. But when I looked back, I saw Tombeau smiling. It was the first genuine smile I had seen from him. It creased his face like a sliver of new moon.
Fleury gave the works back to Dietrich, and all his anger seemed forgotten.
Two weeks later, after another exchange, Madame Pontier had the Lautrec drawings once again.