‘To be honest I find it vile, and I’m beginning to understand my father. We live in a shell here.’
‘The Japanese have just shattered the Americans’ shell. The Pacific will be Japanese within two or three years. It’s the end of the white man in Asia …’
But Jean could only think of one thing, of a G on a slip of paper hastily torn from a notebook. There was no longer any doubt. Another war was beginning this evening, a war that interested him far more than the war in the Pacific, an ocean apparently of infinite expanses of blue water sprinkled with ravishing atolls encircled by coral reefs that was really not like that at all.
Palfy handed him the telephone. He had his cup of coffee in the other hand and Le Matin open on his lap, screaming in banner headlines the destruction of the US Pacific fleet. The Japanese were landing in Malaysia and the Gulf of Siam.
‘Someone is asking for you. A charming Russian accent. Perhaps it’s Moscow. Stalin’s private secretary.’
Jean took the receiver and immediately recognised Anna Petrovna. Her voice was strained.
‘Hello? I need to see you. At once.’
‘Is there something wrong?’
‘I can’t tell you.’
‘Where do you live?’
‘I’m not at home. I’ll be at your office at ten o’clock.’
She hung up and he heard the click of a public call box. She was probably phoning from the post office.
‘How is Uncle Joe?’ Palfy asked.
‘Don’t joke. Something’s happened. It’s Claude’s mother.’
Palfy stopped smiling.
‘Is it serious?’
‘It must be serious for her to call me. I’ve only met her once and she made it very clear that I’m not her favourite person.’
‘What do you think’s happened?’
Jean thought again of the square of paper with a G on it that Claude had found under the mat the previous evening and of the way she had asked him to leave after putting Cyrille to bed.
‘I’ll come with you,’ Palfy said. ‘You know nothing. I can help you. We’re going into a stage of this war where those who are on their own will be defenceless. Appalling things will happen. They are already …’
Anna Petrovna had arrived early and was waiting in the secretaries’ office. Her pallor and the sharp, almost hateful look she gave him struck Jean.
‘I’m with Duzan. Call me when you’ve finished,’ Palfy said.
Anna Petrovna’s gaze followed Palfy with a suspicion she made no attempt to hide.
‘Would you like to come into my office?’ Jean said.
She stood up. Her lips were trembling. He took her elbow and guided her.
As soon as they were alone she said, ‘Claude was arrested last night.’
Two tears trickled down her face, which was puffy with fatigue and which, for the first time in many years, she had not bothered to make up. Jean, unable to say a word, seized her hand and squeezed it hard. He had hoped it would be something else, perhaps the threats of a mother who no longer wanted him to see her daughter.
‘Where is Cyrille?’ he said.
‘With my son … He’s asking for you. It was him who gave me your telephone number. You’re stealing my daughter, and now you’re taking my grandson from me too. I would like you to know straight away that I hate you, but I have nowhere else to turn. I know you have … powerful friends in Paris.’
‘You’re wrong.’
‘On Saturday you took my daughter to see a German!’
‘No, to see a Spanish painter. He has a mistress who’s German. He’s within his rights. His country’s not at war.’
She looked disconcerted for a second and wiped away the traces of her two tears.
‘When was she arrested?’ Jean asked.
‘Yesterday evening at eleven o’clock.’
‘Who by?’
‘Plainclothes inspectors.’
‘French?’
‘It seems so. But they’ll hand her over to the Gestapo. You don’t know them!’
It was true, he didn’t know them. Until that day he had managed to avoid the drama that was endlessly being played out. Now the noose was tightening. To begin with it was insignificant characters like Alberto Senzacatso, then La Garenne. Today it was Claude’s turn. The words ‘arrest’, ‘police’, ‘interrogation’ suddenly had a meaning. Laura Bruckett, Rudolf von Rocroy, Julius Kapermeister — even if they had nothing to do with Claude’s arrest — were on the side of this invisible authority that claimed the right to put an end to the freedom and even the life of beings he loved.
‘There has to be a reason for it, all the same,’ he said.
‘You know it as well as I do.’
‘Her husband?’
Anna Petrovna shrugged her shoulders contemptuously.
‘Yes, Georges. Even if they were going to divorce, he’s still her husband.’
Claude had never mentioned divorce. Jean lowered his head, gripped by a wild hope and a vast joy that lasted as long as a lightning flash before becoming no more than an intolerable anguish.
‘I suppose he’s in France.’
‘They were too late for him last night. They won’t catch him. They’ll never catch him.’
‘It’s not the first time he’s been to France?’
Anna Petrovna’s features closed up. She did not deign to reply.
‘All right,’ Jean said. ‘The situation’s becoming clearer. Wait here for me.’
She jumped to her feet.
‘You could have me arrested too!’
‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘I shan’t let you!’
‘You can’t let me do anything or stop me doing anything. Sit down.’
He found Palfy with Duzan and took him into the corridor to tell him what had happened.
‘Hell!’ Palfy said. ‘We have to act quickly. I’ll go straight to Rocroy.’
‘Why not Kapermeister? He seems more powerful.’
‘You don’t know how it works. Julius is Abwehr, the army. Gloves, honour, gentleman spies. Rocroy is from the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, the Reich’s central security agency, the SS, the Gestapo. We need to get to her before she falls into their hands. You look after the mother. Send her back home. Above all tell her not to move. If she starts shouting from the rooftops that they’ve arrested her daughter, she’ll never see her again. The most important thing is that the machine isn’t set in motion. I’ll ring you as soon as I can.’
He turned to walk away. Jean caught hold of his arm.
‘If you do this, I’ll never forget it.’
‘I’ll be glad if you do, because I’m sticking my neck out here, and for them that means there’ll be a big favour to be returned …’
‘Why are you doing it?’
‘You stupid boy … I’m thirty-four years old and it’s the first time in my idiotic — though by no means boring — life I’ve had a friend.’
He was gone, leaving Jean alone in the corridor lined with photos of Nelly Tristan — full-length, head and shoulders, diving into a pool in her swimming costume, on horseback, in a headband and driving a racing car, being presented with flowers as she stepped off a plane, dressed in crinoline or as Jeanne Hachette,21 her long and beautiful legs shown off in tights.
Anna Petrovna was sitting on the edge of an armchair, as though despite her tiredness she was determined to show that she was there merely for a few minutes and was now ready to leave. Her anxious features, however, betrayed a naive optimism that asked for only a word of reassurance to turn hope into reality.
‘Well?’
‘I have a friend who knows an important German. He has gone to see him immediately.’
‘The man with whom you arrived?’
‘That’s none of your business. Now there’s just one thing you have to do: go home and say nothing.’
‘You’re telling me that? When I have only one desire: to scream that my daughter has been arrested!’