Austin Pearce brought him back to the point where he had broken off his narrative.
“You were about to tell us something more about the sisters and what they did with the bank.”
“Yes, sorry. Where was I?-The Depression. Half the banks in Paris, half the banks in France, suffered losses or went under, but the four sisters not only kept their bank afloat, but, bankers to the core, had the foresight, and the nerve, to buy up everything they could get-other businesses, other banks,-at fire sale prices. They were able to do this, not just because they were smart and, to call things by their names, utterly ruthless in their dealings, but because they were extremely well-connected, as connected as you could get. The Valettes had for generations been one of the leading families of France. It isn’t widely understood, other than by the French themselves, that there are two hundred families in this country that through every change of government-and there isn’t any place you can think of that has gone through more changes of government than France-make sure nothing really changes, that they continue to have all the wealth and all the power. The Valettes have always been one of them, and at times one of the two or three most important of them. One of the sisters-the youngest one, if I remember right-was married to a Rothschild.”
Austin Pearce was not as interested in what the four sisters had done to improve the position of the bank as he was in their dead brother’s son.
“Jean Valette’s father, the boy the sisters raised-what can you tell us about him?”
Aaron Wolfe had sharp, quick-moving eyes, but at the mention of Valette’s father he stared straight ahead in an attitude of puzzled respect. It reminded Austin Pearce of the way he felt when he came upon some surprising fact in a history he was reading, a fact that made him see a famous figure in a new and surprising light, better and more complicated than he had thought before.
“You’re fascinated by him, I take it; there’s something about him that astonishes you, correct?”
Wolfe turned and looked at Pearce with that same look, admiration for the older man’s insight and intelligence.
“He did something that took more than just courage, something extraordinary. You wouldn’t have thought that about him early on, when he became one of the most prominent bankers in Europe. France, in the 1930s, was rotten to the core, determined not to fight another war with Germany, more afraid of Communism at home than of any threat beyond its borders. You know all that, I’m sure. Like a great many others in financial circles, Paul Valette was convinced that democracy, and particularly French democracy with all its different parties, none of them willing to compromise long enough to fashion a working majority capable of governing for more than a few months at a time, was doomed. A lot of people thought that then. What set him apart was his belief that what Hitler was doing in Germany was the wave of the future; that if France was to survive, it had to follow his example: find someone strong enough to impose a discipline, a unity on the country; someone who could keep France from destroying itself.”
Wolfe raised his eyebrows, a silent commentary on the inadequacy of words, the way he had, quite without meaning to, misled them at the beginning.
“The wave of the future-I should have said that he saw in Germany a way to restore something of what he thought the glory of the past. That was really what fascism was about: a rejection of the modern world, democracy, and a market economy, the whole concern with the rights of the individual, as opposed to the supposed greatness of the nation. This had a powerful appeal for someone like Paul Valette, who came from a family that could trace its origins in the origins of France. He became one of the leading figures in Action Francaise, a fascist organization headed by Charles Maurras, a classicist who, it was said, loathed the modern world and everything it stood for. It is important to know this about Paul Valette, but what makes him interesting is that once the war began, once the German occupation started, he did not support the collaborationist government of Marshal Petain and Pierre Laval. No, that same Paul Valette who thought France should follow Germany’s example, joined the French resistance.”
Wolfe fell into a long silence as he considered the strange futility of even trying to guess what might have driven Paul Valette, or anyone, to do something not just brave, but completely unexpected. History was full of examples, but while history could remind you that the exceptional case was possible, it could only tell you what had happened, not that it would happen again. Psychology sought to paint a broader picture, to find a pattern in human behavior, but psychology looked at things in terms of averages, and if there was anything that characterized every, even the most disparate, form of courage, it was that none of them were average.
“He was incredibly effective, the work he did in the French resistance. He was, in the eyes of the world, a notorious collaborator. The bank, his bank, the bank that had been in his family for years, handled most of the financial transactions the Third Reich made in occupied France. He was, to all appearances, as much a friend to the Nazis as they could want; and the whole time he was giving the information he gathered about what the Germans were doing to his contacts in the resistance and, through them, to the allies. Someone betrayed him, one of the people he worked with, probably forced to betray him under torture-everyone has a breaking point. Valette was arrested by the Gestapo in the last days of the war and put in front of a firing squad. It was one of the last executions the Germans did in Paris.”
Watching Aaron Wolfe, Hart was struck by the way he made it seem that he was talking about someone he had known-a friend or a relative he had respected and admired-rather than telling a story torn from a long forgotten page of history. It was unusual to come across anyone, especially someone still relatively young, who had the capacity to grasp in all its anguished uncertainty the moral dilemmas of the past.
“No one knew that he had been a hero of the war, a hero of the French resistance; no one except a few men in the French underground, not all of whom survived. All that the public knew was that this rich banker from one of France’s oldest families had been only too eager to take German money and, while others suffered, live as well, or even better, during the occupation than he had before the war began. When he was shot, lined up against a wall and executed, most people thought it was just another act of German barbarism and that, unlike most other German executions, Paul Valette had gotten exactly what he deserved.”
The head of the political section tapped his fingers together. A smile of something close to vindication, a shared sense of triumph, the decent human feeling for the kind of bravery we all wish we had, ran clean and straight across his mouth.
“It was only several years later, several years after the war ended, that the truth finally came out: that far from being the traitor everyone had imagined, Paul Valette had been one of the great French patriots. The effect was to cast his heroism, his sacrifice, in tragic colors. More than honored, the Valette name was almost worshipped in France.”
Austin Pearce was sitting on the edge of his seat, his hands clasped together on the gleaming hard finished table.
“He must have known, during the years he acted the part of a collaborator,” he said in a quiet, solemn voice, “that the truth might never be known, that he might be killed, taken out somewhere and shot in the back of the head, and that his family would go down in history tainted with what everyone would believe had been a crime.” Glancing across at Hart, he added: “Everyone likes to think they would be a hero, willing to die for what they believe. The world will know, and honor, what we did. But this?-” he asked, looking back at Wolfe as if to draw him into the conversation, “-Give your life for your country, knowing that there is every chance that you will be known forever as a traitor? How many of us would be willing to do that, I wonder? It is heroism of a different order than what we are used to.”