“Well, that was 1940, and when I left Paris I didn’t expect to see him again, and certainly never as soon as November 1941 in the Ukraine. Edgard was part of this French unit in the German army—not the SS, that was later, but the Legion of French Volunteers against Bolshevism, or some such nonsense. That’s what the French called it. I think we just called it the something infantry. The 638th. Yes. That was it. Mostly, the men were Vichy fascists, or even French POWs who didn’t fancy being sent to Germany as forced labor with the Todt organization. There were probably about six thousand of them. Poor bastards.”
“Why do you say that?”
I sipped some wine and helped myself to a cigarette from the packet on the table. Outside the window, in the central courtyard, someone was trying to start a motorcar without success; somewhere farther away, de Gaulle was waiting or sulking, depending on how you looked at it; and the French army was licking its wounds after getting its ass kicked—again—in Vietnam.
“Because they couldn’t have known what they were letting themselves in for,” I said. “Fighting partisans sounds fair enough back here in Paris. But out there, in Byelorussia, it meant something very different.” I shook my head sadly. “There was no honor in it. No glory. Not what they were looking for, anyway.”
“So what did it mean?” asked Eyebrows. “On the ground.”
I shrugged. “That kind of action was, quite often, nothing more than murder. Mass murder. Of Jews. All sorts of police actions and antipartisan activities were merely a euphemism for killing Jews. To be frank with you, the Wehrmacht High Command in Russia wouldn’t have trusted the 638th with any other kind of task but murder.”
“The name of the unit commander. Can you remember that?”
“Labonne. Colonel Labonne. After the winter of 1941, I lost touch with Edgard.” I clicked my fingers. “De Boudel. That was his name. Edgard de Boudel.”
“You’re quite sure of that?”
“I’m sure.”
“Go on.”
“Well, then. Let’s see. A couple of years later, I was briefly back in that theater to investigate an alleged war crime. That was when I heard that the 638th was now attached to an SS division in Galicia. And that it was pretty bad there. But I didn’t see de Boudel again until 1945, when the war was over and we were both at a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp called Krasno-Armeesk. As a matter of fact, there were quite a few French and Belgian SS there. And Edgard told me something of what he’d been up to. How the 638th ended up as a part of a French brigade of the SS and that kind of thing. Apparently, there was a recruiting drive here in Paris in July 1943. The French who joined had to prove the usual Himmler rubbish about not having any Jewish blood, and then they were in. A few weeks of basic training in Alsace and then at a place near Prague. By the late summer of 1944, the war in France was almost over, but there was a whole brigade of French SS ready to fight the Ivans. About ten thousand of them, he said. And they were called the SS-Charlemagne.
“The brigade got sent by train to the Eastern Front, in Pomerania, which wasn’t very far from where I was. Edgard said that as the train carrying the brigade pulled into the railhead at Hammerstein they came under attack by the Soviet First Byelorussian and were divided up into three groups. One group, commanded by General Krukenberg, made it north to the Baltic coast, near Danzig. Of these, quite a few managed to get themselves evacuated to Denmark. But some, like Edgard, fought on until they were captured. The rest were wiped out or fell back to Berlin.
“There were other French at Krasno-Armeesk who’d been captured at Berlin. I can’t say I remember any names. By all accounts, it was the SS-Charlemagne who were the last defenders of Hitler’s bunker in Berlin. I think they were the only SS happy to be caught by the Soviets rather than the Americans, because the Amis handed them over to the Free French, who shot them immediately.”
“Tell us about Edgard de Boudel.”
“In the camp?”
“Yes.”
“He was a decorated lieutenant colonel. In the SS, I mean. Easy to be with. Charming, even. Good-looking. Unscathed by the war, you might even say. He was one of those types who looked like he was always going to survive pretty much anything. He spoke good Russian. Edgard was the kind for whom languages are easy. His German was perfect, of course. Even I couldn’t have guessed that he was French if I hadn’t already known that about him. I think he might have spoken Vietnamese, too. It was his facility with languages that made him especially interesting to the MVD. In the beginning, they made life pretty difficult for him. And, of course, once they had got their hooks into you it was very difficult for any man to resist them. I know that from my own experience with them.”
“What specifically did they want him for? Do you know?”
“Well, it wasn’t K-5. That’s for sure.”
“That’s the forerunner of the Stasi.”
“Yes. I don’t know what they had in mind for him. But the next thing I knew, he’d been sent to the Anti-Fa School in Krasnogorsk for reeducation. As you know, I almost ended up there myself. They’d have got me, too, but for the fact that the MVD officer who interrogated me was a man I’d known from before the war. A man named Mielke. Erich Mielke. He was the German political commissar in charge of recruiting us plenis for K-5.”
The French asked me some more questions about Edgard de Boudel and then took me back to La Santé. It means “health,” but that didn’t have much to do with what went on inside the prison. It was called La Santé because of the prison’s proximity to a psychiatric hospital, the Sainte-Anne on the rue de la Santé, which was just east of the boulevard Raspail.
In La Santé I kept to myself as much as possible. I didn’t see Helmut Knochen, which suited me just fine. I read my newspaper, which reported that things in North Africa were as bad for the French as they had been in Vietnam. In spite of my new friends in the SDECE, this news was not displeasing to me. There were times when I was never very far away from the trenches. Especially given all the rats there were at La Santé. Real rats. They walked along the landings as coolly as if they’d been carrying keys.
Back at the Swimming Pool the next day, the French asked me about Erich Mielke.
“What do you want to know?” I asked, as if unaware of what my audience would best like to hear—or, to be more accurate, what it was best they were told. “It’s all ancient history. Surely you don’t want me to go over all that.”
“Everything you can tell us.”
“I can’t see how it’s at all relevant to my being here in Paris.”
“You should allow us to be the judge of that.”
I shrugged. “Perhaps if I knew why you were interested in him, I could be more specific. After all, it’s not like this is a story that takes only a couple of minutes to tell. Christ, some of this stuff is twenty years old. Or even older.”
“We’ve got plenty of time. Perhaps if you went from the beginning. How you first met and when. That kind of thing.”
“You mean the whole novel, with a beginning, a middle, and an end.”
“Precisely.”
“All right. If you really want to know this stuff. I’ll tell you everything.”
Of course, I hardly wanted to do that. Hell, no. Not all over again. So I gave them an edited, more entertaining version of what I’d already told the Amis. A French version. A smooth-tongued précis, if you like, that was not spoiled by the inclusion of too many facts and that, like the French themselves, was the result of an exhausted conscience wrestling with simple pragmatism and being very quickly overcome. A story that was the best kind of story being better told than believed.