The Last Days of New Paris

Around them all the factions are gathering. “You heard me,” she says urgently. “In a moment they’re going to make some stupid plan and probably attack a petty local Gruppenführer, which I suppose is at least a distraction, and they’re going to confront you and me and find out you’re Main à plume. Which will not go well. And believe me, you’re worth far, far more to me than any of them are. So, hate me as much as you want, and you and Trotsky and your fucking lost Pope Breton and whoever else can bring your worst to bear to bring the whole of capitalist imperialism or whatever crashing down when this is over. But if Fall Rot happens, it’ll be over for both of us.”

“So call for help, spy.” He should kill her right now. He is sure if he tried she’d kill him first. He looks again at the face still on the screen.

“There’s a dampener over this city, even beyond the twenty,” she says. “I can’t call out. Most of the time no one can. Something’s happening, and I need to know what, now. Christ, you have instincts. Are you telling me you can’t feel it? And even if I could call out, you think it would help? If someone’s carrying a bomb you don’t disarm it by blowing them up. You know why Drancy’s buildings are in a horseshoe shape? They’re a focus. There’ve been many, many sacrifices there.

“Alesch and Mengele are calling something up,” she says, “and we need a scalpel, not a shotgun.”

“I’m no scalpel,” he says.

The raucousness and fury in the room are increasing. Thibaut considers terrible plans coming to pass just beyond the arrondissements, in the occupied zone.

“No indeed,” Sam says. “But I think I could use that.” She jerks her head toward the door, toward the exquisite corpse outside. “And it does not like me. And you want to go. You want to get out, but not to betray your city. Well, this is your chance to serve Paris by leaving it, Thibaut. So shall we not waste any more time?

“I can’t call for backup. For the cavalry.” She thumps her own chest and stands taller. Thibaut steps back at the sight of her expression. “That,” she says, “is what I am. I am what’s been sent for.”

Chapter Eight. 1941

Raymond Couraud smelt of sweat. He scowled in the heat and wiped his thin face on his shirt. He walked fast through country that, he supposed, a person might believe was simply spring fields and roads, little villages, churches, the mumbled greetings of locals. That was not the truth. There were the squadrons of Vichy militia. The border of the occupied zone, where the patrols became those of German soldiers.

Raymond did not know what it was he had taken from Parsons’s room. It was contraband, though, something with no business in this world. The trembling little box made his skin prickle and his eyes dry. It had taken next to nothing to push open the door, to watch the American’s stupid face wheezing in sleep. Raymond had been gone before dawn. He blew a kiss down the road behind him. Sorry, Mary Jayne. Raymond could always sense a thing worth money. He recognized a commodity.

He passed churches, their weathervanes twisting too fast. A dead bird was embedded in the bark of a tree. Raymond knew an offering when he saw one. One night he heard what sounded almost like cows. But there was too much irony in the lowing: something was mimicking cattle. There were things in France now he did not want to understand.

His job was to take this thing, whatever it was, to Paris, and sell it to anyone who hated Nazis. He would go to Britain. He would cross the channel with his money and join the Free French. He would kill as many Germans as he could, and he would do so a rich man.

—

Paris: swastikas and Germans. Raymond walked past Nazi officers chatting in a pavement café just as if he were a harmless man. He crossed between bicycles under the Arc de Triomphe, watched a woman flirting with a young German officer and imagined killing them both. Shooting the man first, once in the head, then several in his dead body to make it dance while the treacherous woman screamed.

There were not many places more dangerous for Raymond than Paris, but he was not afraid. He paid for a cheap room near the Tuileries. On a burning hot day he entered a chemist by avenue des Ternes and waited seemingly engrossed away from the counter among the packets and powders until the last of the other customers left. He turned and smiled at the shopkeeper.

“Oh my God,” the man breathed. “Killer.”

“Relax, Claude,” said Raymond. “I just need some contacts.”

“I don’t have any! It’s too risky right now…”

“Please. I don’t believe you. And even if it’s true, I need you to get back into it and spread the word. I have something to sell. I’ll be at Les Deux Magots. Usual cut if anyone comes through you.” Greed took hold of his old contact’s face.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Killer,” Claude pleaded.