The huge pair of ancient, ironbound doors at 39 rue de Rome was firmly locked, but de Milja knocked and refused to go away when nothing happened. Finally, in the first watery light of morning, a panel in the concierge’s station by the doorway slid open and a large eye peered out. Clearly he wasn’t the German army—just a man with his tie pulled down and sleepless eyes who’d been walking all night—and the door creaked open. The concierge, not a day under eighty, a Lebel rifle held in his trembling hands, said, “We’re closed. What do you want here?”
“Please tell Madame Beilis that a friend has come to call.”
“What friend?”
“A friend from the church of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, tell her.”
“A priest? You?”
“No,” de Milja said. “Just an old friend.”
14 June 1940. Dawn. It rained. But then, it would. Not a human soul to be seen in Paris. Out at the Porte d’Auteuil, untended cattle had broken through the fence at the stockyard pens and were wandering about the empty streets mooing and looking for something to eat.
At the northern edge of the city, the sound of a German motorcycle, engine perfectly tuned, approached from the suburbs. A young Wehrmacht soldier sped across the place Voltaire, downshifted, revved the engine a little—here I am, girls—put the gear back where it belonged, and disappeared, in a rising whine, up the rue Grenoble.
From the northeast, from the direction of Belgium and Luxembourg and Germany, a series of canvas-covered trucks drove through the Porte de la Villette. One broke off from the file and moved slowly down the rue de Flandre, headed toward the railroad stations: the Gare de l’Est and the Gare du Nord and the Gare Saint-Lazare. The truck stopped every few blocks and a single German soldier jumped from the back. Like all the others, the one on the rue de Rome wore white gloves and a crossed white belt. A traffic policeman. When the armored cars and the troop transports rolled past an hour later, he waved them on.
At seven-thirty in the morning, the German army occupied the Hôtel Crillon and set up an office for local administration in the lobby. Two officers showed up at the military complex just abandoned by Major Kercheval and his colleagues at Invalides and demanded the return of German battle flags captured in 1918. France had lost a war but it was still France. The battle flags, an officer explained, had been mislaid. Of course the gentlemen were more than welcome to look for them.
The Germans hung a swastika flag from the Eiffel Tower, and one from the Arc de Triomphe.
Over on the rue de Rome, Genya Beilis pushed a sheer curtain aside and watched the Wehrmacht traffic policeman at the corner. She lit a Lucky Strike and blew long plumes of smoke from her nostrils. “What happens now?” she asked.
De Milja came and stood by her, gently pulled the fabric of the curtain from her fingers and let it fall closed. “The fighting changes,” he said. “And people hide. Hide in themselves, or hide from the war in enemy beds, or hide in the mountains. Sooner or later, they hide in the sewers. We learn, under occupation, that there’s more rat in us than we knew.”
“They’ll get rid of us, won’t they,” she said.
“Us?”
“All the—what? The little bits and pieces that always seem to wash up in Paris: Russians, Jews, the Spaniards on the run from Franco, Poles and whatnot. Castaways. People who dance naked in ateliers and wave scarfs, people who paste feathers and seashells on a board.”
“That ‘us,’” de Milja said. “The French, the real French, they’ll be safe if they mind their manners. But the others, better for them to disappear.”
She left the window, settled herself in a chair at the dining-room table. It was never clear where the office stopped and the residence began. The mahogany table was piled high with stacks of a slim volume in a pale-blue dustjacket—The Golden Shell. “You aren’t supposed to be here, are you?” she said.
“Why do you say that?”
“Monsieur Pavel, your, ah, predecessor. One saw him for just a moment. Here or there, in a museum or a big brasserie, someplace public.”
“That’s the recommended way.”
“But you don’t care.”
“I care,” he said. He started to qualify that, then shrugged.
She got up and went into a pantry off the dining room and started to make coffee, cigarette hanging from her lips. Her blouse was a very flat red and she wore little gold-hoop earrings. In profile, she spooned out coffee, liberally, then fiddled with a nickel-plated coffee urn. Smoke rose around her face and hung in drifts below the brass ceiling lamp. He couldn’t stop looking at her; the texture of her hair didn’t go with the color, he thought, so black it should have been coarse. But it hung loose and soft and moved as she did things with her hands.
He couldn’t stop looking at her. He had been in the apartment since the previous day, had slept in a spare room, had wanted her so badly it hurt. Anyone would, he thought; man, woman, or tree. It wasn’t that she was beautiful. More than that. Dark, and supple, with fingers that lingered on everything she touched for just a moment longer than they should. He wanted to carry her to the bed, put his hands in the waistbands of everything she was wearing and pull down. But then, at the same time, he was afraid to touch her.
On a wall above a desk hung a portrait of the publisher Max Beilis, her father, a small, handsome man with a sneer and angry, brilliant eyes. She would, of course, be his single weakness—anything she wanted.
She turned on the radio, let it warm up and tuned in the BBC. He moved closer, could smell a hint of perfume in the cigarette smoke. People who dance naked in ateliers, she’d said. Part of her world—the held breath of the audience, the brush of bare feet on cold floorboards. Her Parisian heart could not, of course, be shocked by such things.
On the BBC, modern music, atonal and discordant. Music for the fall of a city. It faded and returned, disappeared into the static, then came in strong. Not jammed, though, not yet—jamming came in rising and falling waves, they’d find that out soon enough. When the announcer came on, Genya leaned forward in concentration, lit a new cigarette, ran her hair back behind one ear.
“And now the news . . .”
The French government had left Tours and had set up shop in Bordeaux. Reynaud had stated that “France can continue the struggle only if American intervention reverses the situation by making Allied victory certain.” In the USA, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee suggested that, since it was hopeless for the British to fight on alone, they should surrender to Germany. Fighting continued sporadically in France, the Maginot Line was now being abandoned. German troops had crossed the Marne. German forces in Norway this, in Denmark that, in Belgium and Holland the other thing. This morning, German troops had entered Paris and occupied the city.