CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Foulerot, 2
A ROOM ON THE fifth floor right. It was Paul Hébert’s room, until his arrest, a student’s room with a woollen carpet spotted with cigarette burns, greenish wallpaper, and a cosy-corner covered with striped cloth.
The perpetrators of the outrage on Boulevard Saint-Germain on the seventh of October 1943, which cost three German officers their lives, were arrested the same day towards evening. They were two former serving Army officers who belonged to a “Davout Action Group”, and it soon became apparent that they were its only members; their gesture was intended to restore their lost dignity to the French: they were arrested as they were preparing to hand out a leaflet beginning: “That splendid sturdy fellow the Boche soldier is strong and healthy and thinks only of the greatness of his country, Deutschland über alles! Whereas we are hopelessly sunk in dilettantism!”
All those picked up in the raids made within sixty minutes of the explosion were released the following afternoon after identity checks, except for five students whose situations were not regular and about whom the authorities required further information. Paul Hébert was one of them: his papers were in order, but the inspector who interrogated him was surprised that he had been picked up at the Odéon crossroads at three P.M. on a Thursday when he should have been at the Civil Engineering College, 152 Avenue de Wagram, studying for the entrance examination to the Ecole Supérieure de Chimie. The thing in itself was not important, but the explanations Paul Hébert gave were not at all convincing.
The grandson of a druggist with a shop at 48 Rue de Madrid, Paul Hébert took abundant advantage of his doting and generous grandfather by relieving him of phials of paregoric elixir which he traded for forty to fifty francs each to the young addicts of the Latin Quarter; he had made his monthly delivery that day and was on his way to the Champs-Elysées to spend the five hundred francs he’d just made when he was arrested. But instead of flatly saying that he’d skipped classes to go to the cinema to see Pontcarral, Colonel d’Empire, or It Happened at the Inn, he launched into ever more contorted justifications, starting with the story that he had had to go to Gibert’s bookshop to buy a copy of Polishovsky & Spaniardel’s Course in Organic Chemistry, a weighty tome of 856 pages published two years previously by Masson. “So where is it, then, this book?” the inspector asked. “Gibert’s didn’t have it,” Hébert claimed. The inspector, who, at this stage of enquiry, no doubt only wanted a bit of fun, sent a man to Gibert’s who obviously came back a few minutes later with the aforementioned Course. “Sure, but it was too expensive for me,” Hébert mumbled, tying his own noose.
In so far as the perpetrators of the outrage had just been arrested, the inspector was no longer trying to find “terrorists” at any price. But out of ordinary conscientiousness, he had Hébert searched, found the five hundred francs, and, thinking he had hit upon a band of black marketeers, ordered a full search of his flat.
In the boxroom adjacent to Hébert’s room, in the midst of piles of old shoes, stocks of mint and verbena tea, dented copper electrical footwarmers, ice skates, loose-strung racquets, odd issues of magazines, illustrated novels, old clothes, and bits of string, they found a grey macintosh, and in the pocket of this macintosh they found a cardboard box, not very deep, about fifteen centimetres by ten, on which was written:
The only reliable inkeraser
KANSELL
Sold by Hely’s Ltd
85 Dame Street, Brussels
Inside the box was a green silk handkerchief, probably cut from a parachute, a diary full of sibylline notes such as “Stand up”, “Lozenge engraving”, “X-27”, “Gault-de-Perche” etc., which when deciphered after much trouble provided no conclusive evidence; a fragment of a map of Jutland, scale of 1:160,000, based on J. H. Mansa’s cartography; an unused envelope containing a sheet of paper folded in four: at the top left of the sheet there was a printed letterhead
Anton
Tailor and Shirt-Maker
16 bis, avenue de Messine
Paris 8e
EURope 21−45
above a silhouette of a lion which in heraldic terms would be described as passant or passant gardant. On the remainder of the sheet was a carefully drawn plan in violet ink of Le Havre town centre, from the Grand-Quai to Place Gambetta: an X in red marked the position of Les Armes de la Ville, a hotel just about on the corner of Rue d’Estimauville and Rue Frédéric-Sauvage.
Now it was in this hotel, which the Germans had requisitioned, that just over three months previously, on 23 June, Ordnance General Pferdleichter had been assassinated: he was one of the senior members of the Todt Organisation, and had supervised the fortification of the Jutland coastline, where he had had moreover two miraculous escapes from assassination attempts; and he had just been entrusted by Hitler with the supervision of Operation Parsifal, an operation similar to the Cyclops project, which had been begun one year before in the Dunkirk area. Its purpose was to build, about fifteen miles behind the main Atlantic Defence Wall, in the area between Goderville and Saint-Romain-du-Colbosc, a set of three remote control bases and eight underground silos from which V2s and multistage rockets capable of reaching the United States could be launched.
Pferdleichter was killed by a bullet at a quarter to ten – German time – in the main lounge of his hotel, whilst playing a game of chess with one of his executive officers, a Japanese engineer called Ushida. The marksman had taken up position in the attic of an uninhabited house just opposite the hotel, and took advantage of the fact that the lounge windows were wide open; despite having a particularly difficult angle of departure, he needed only one shot to wound Pferdleichter fatally, severing his carotid artery. Because of this it was assumed that the assassin was a crack marksman, and this was confirmed the next day by the discovery, in the bushes in the public gardens in the town hall square, of the weapon he had used, an Italian-made .22 sports rifle.
The investigation followed several tracks which all led nowhere: the registered owner of the gun, a certain Monsieur Gressin, from Aigues-Mortes, could not be found; as for the owner of the house where the marksman had hidden, he turned out to be a colonial civil servant in post at Nouméa.
The items produced by the search of Paul Hébert’s flat gave new life to the affair. But Paul Hébert had never seen that macintosh nor, a fortiori, the box and its contents; the Gestapo tortured him in vain, without learning anything from him.
Despite his youth, Paul Hébert lived alone in the flat. He was looked after by an uncle whom he saw barely more than once a week and by his grandfather, the druggist. His mother had died when he was ten, and his father, Joseph Hébert, a rolling stock inspector on the State Railways, was virtually never in Paris. The Germans’ suspicions were directed towards the father, from whom Paul Hébert had had no news for more than two months. It became quickly apparent that he had also stopped working, but all attempts to find him failed. There was no Hely’s Ltd in Brussels, any more than there was a tailor called Anton at number 16 bis of the Avenue de Messine, which was a fictitious number in any case, as fictitious as the telephone number which, they later realised, corresponded simply to the time of the murder. After a few months, the German authorities took the view that Joseph Hébert had either been killed already or had succeeded in getting to England, so they closed the file and sent his son to Buchenwald. After the torture he had been undergoing every day, it was almost a liberation for him.
Today, a young girl of seventeen, Geneviève Foulerot, lives in the flat with her son, who is just a year old. Paul Hébert’s old bedroom has become the baby’s room, a room that is almost empty except for a few pieces of children’s furniture: a white wickerwork crib on a folding stand, a changing table, a rectangular playpen with rims padded for safety.
The walls are bare. Only one photograph is pinned to the door. It depicts Geneviève, her face beaming with joy, holding her baby with her arms outstretched; she is wearing a tartan two-piece swimsuit and is posing beside a portable swimming pool of which the outside metal wall is decorated with large, stylised flowers.
This photograph comes from a mail-order catalogue for which Geneviève works as one of six permanent models. In it she can be seen paddling a studio canoe in an orange plastic inflatable lifejacket, or sitting in a tubular steel garden chair in yellow-and-blue-striped canvas beside a blue-roofed tent, wearing a green bathing robe and accompanied by a man in a pink bathing robe, or in a lace-necked nightdress holding small dumbbells, and in a host of working clothes of all kinds: in blouses for nurses, sales girls, infant teachers; in tracksuits for gym teachers; in waitresses’ aprons, butcheresses’ pinafores, dungarees, jumpsuits, jackets, pilot-coats, etc.
Besides earning a living in this unglamorous way, Geneviève Foulerot is studying drama and has already appeared in several films and serials. She will perhaps soon be the female lead in a television drama adapted from a Pirandello story which she is preparing to read, at the other end of the flat, in her bath: her madonna-like face, her large clear eyes, her long black hair got her selected from amongst the thirty who were auditioned to play Gabriella Vanzi, the woman whose glance, direct and depraved at the same time, drove Romeo Daddi mad.