He tried to keep his spirits up. The fight against despair was, he told himself, just another way of fighting Germany. But as the life of the streets faded away, he began to wonder why anybody cared so much about flags and nations. An old, old city, everything had happened here, people loved and people died and none of it mattered very much. Or maybe it was just him—maybe he was just tired of life. Sometimes that happened.
He’d scheduled a dawn contact out in the nineteenth arrondissement, at the Canal de l’Ourcq, the home dock of a Dutch barge captain with knowledge of the production capacities of petroleum refining centers along the upper Seine. Not much point at the moment—every ounce of French gasoline was either in flames or pumped into government cars in full flight. But in the future it might be a useful thing to know.
At 2:00 a.m. he tossed and turned, unable to sleep. The silence of the little street was oppressive. He moved to an armchair, read The Radetzky March, dozed off, then woke suddenly—not knowing why until the fist hammered on the door a second time. He ran down the hall and looked out the judas hole. A Breton, he thought. Reddish hair clipped high on the sides, fair skin, a cold face, a silk tie, and a certain practiced patience in the way he stood. De Milja left him and walked silently to the back door. The one waiting there had his hands in his pockets, was looking aimlessly up at the stars.
He returned to the bedroom, struggled into pants, shirt, and shoes as the one in front knocked again. “Are you in there?” If a voice could be good at calling through doors, this one was: I’m being polite— don’t test my patience. “Allons, eh!” Let’s go! Last warning. De Milja opened the door.
The man made a soft grunt of satisfaction—at least we got that much done. “Captain de Milja,” he said, polite in an official way. “I am sorry to trouble you, but . . .”
But what? The Germans at the gates? The times we live in?
“Yes?” de Milja said.
“Perhaps you would get dressed, we’re ordered to escort you to our office.”
“Where is that, please?”
“At the Prefecture of Police.”
“Could you identify yourself?”
“Of course. Forgive me.” He produced a small leather case with an identity card of the DST—Direction de la Surveillance de la Territoire, the French FBI—and held it up for de Milja to see. “All right?” the man said.
“Come in,” de Milja said.
The man entered, whistling tunelessly, strolled through the villa and opened the back door. The one who’d waited there had a little mustache trimmed to the line of his upper lip. He looked around the villa curiously. “It’s quite a place here. Belong to you?”
“I’m just a tenant,” de Milja said.
“Ah.” A professional skeptic, it amused him to seem easily satisfied.
De Milja went into the bedroom; the man he thought of as the Breton stood in the doorway as he put on a tie, smoothed his hair to one side, put on a jacket. He had a weapon, he intended to use it, it was just a question of timing. “Now I’m ready,” he said to the Breton.
In the blue shadow of the street, de Milja could make out a blocky Citroen, black and well polished. The Breton opened the back door, then went around the car while the other waited by de Milja’s side. Now, he thought. The weaker one first.
“This is going to cause very serious difficulties,” de Milja said. The man looked at him sharply. Was he mad? “In scheduling,” he hastened to add. “I’m expected someplace else.”
“Well . . .” said the man, not unkindly. So the world went.
“The problem is, I’m supposed to deliver certain funds,” de Milja said. The Breton started the car, which rumbled to life, sputtering and missing. “It’s forty thousand francs—I’m reluctant to leave it here.”
The man was likely proud of his opacity—policemen don’t react if they don’t choose to—but de Milja saw it hit. At least two years’ salary. “I wonder,” he continued, “if you could keep that money for me, at the Prefecture. Then I’ll be along, later tonight, after my meeting.”
The man with the mustache opened the back door and said something to the driver. Then, to de Milja, “Where is it?”
“Inside.”
“Let’s go.”
He was on the streets for the rest of the night. They went out one door with a briefcase, he went out the other ten minutes later. He moved to cover, checked from a vantage point at 3:15, saw a car at each end of his street with silhouette of driver and passenger.
Au revoir.
He walked miles, headed east into Paris proper, and tried two hotels, but they were locked up tight, doors chained, windows shuttered. On the main thoroughfares, the stream of refugees flowed on; at the intersection of the boulevards Saint-Germain and Saint-Michel humanity collided and struggled as one column moved west, another south. On the north–south métro lines—Porte d’Orléans—Clignancourt— people fought their way onto trains that would never move. De Milja walked and walked, hiding in chaos.
At least they hadn’t killed him. But he had calculated they wouldn’t go that far. He was nothing to them, probably just somebody to lock up until the Germans arrived. Welcome to Paris—we couldn’t find any flowers but here’s a Polish spy. The Breton and Pencil-Mustache had gone back wherever they came from and reported, simply enough, that he wasn’t home, so the next shift came on and parked cars at either end of his street.
Dawn was warm, a little strange beneath a disordered sky of scudding purplish cloud. He saw a line of Flemish monks, faces bright red above their woolen robes, toiling along on women’s bicycles. A city bus from Lille packed with families, a fire truck from Caen, a tank—a few pathetic twigs tied to its turret in attempted camouflage—an ambulance, a chauffeured Daimler; all of it moving one mile an hour along the choked boulevard. Past an abandoned parrot in a cage, a barrel organ, a hearse with smoke drifting from its blown engine and a featherbed tied to its roof.
He was tired; sat at the base of a plane tree by a bench somewhere and held his head in his hands. Deep instinct, survival, got him on his feet and headed north, toward Clichy and Pigalle, toward whores, who had hotel rooms where nobody asked questions.
Then, a better idea. The neighborhood around the Gare Saint-Lazare railway station, deep in the ninth arrondissement, was a commercial stew of small, unrespectable enterprises of all kinds. A world of its own where the buildings, the streets, and the people were all a little crooked. You could get insurance from the Agence ABC at the top of the wooden stairway—who didn’t need every sort of official documentation in this complex, modern age?—but had you asked them to actually pay a claim they would have fainted with surprise and fallen over onto the packed suitcases that stood by the door. The leather in the Frères Brugger company’s chic belts and purses came, unquestionably, from an animal, and, frankly, who were you to demand that it be a cow? And probably you had no business being out in the rain in the first place. There was an agency for singing waiters, an import company for green bamboo, a union office for the drivers of wagons that hauled butchers’ bones.
Even a publisher of books—Parthenon Press. There, see the little drawing with the broken columns? That’s the Parthenon. They were proud, at the little suite of offices at 39 rue de Rome, to issue an extraordinarily wide and diverse list of books. The poetry of Fedyakov, Vainshtok, Sygelbohm, and Lezhev. The plays of Yushin and Var. And all sorts of novels, all sorts. October Wheat, which told of the nobility of peasant life in the Ukraine. The Sea, a saga which, through the lives of a family of fisherfolk in the eastern Crimea, suggested the ebb and flow of both oceanic and human tides. The Baronsky Pearls—a noble family loses its money and survives on love; Letter from Smolensk— experimental fiction about the machines in a tractor factory—no human character appears; Natasha—a girl of the streets rises to fame and fortune. There was Private Chamber, in English, by Henry Thomas; The Schoolmistress of Lausanne, about the need for discipline at a school for wealthy young women, by Thomas Henry; and Slender Birch, not, as you might imagine, about the romance of the Russian steppe, by Martin Payne. These novels in English had found an appreciative audience first among British and American soldiers after the Great War, then among tourists from those nations, pleased to find, during their trip to Paris, books in their own language about their own personal interests and hobbies.