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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
1942, Paris. Architect Lucien Bernard accepts a commission that will bring him huge wealth - and maybe a death sentence. He has to design a secret hiding place for a wealthy Jewish man, a space so invisible that even the most determined of Nazi soldiers won't discover it. When one of Lucien's designs fails horribly, the problem of hiding a Jew becomes personal, and he can no longer deny the enormity of his project. What does he owe his fellow man, and how far will he go to make things right?
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Seitenzahl: 502
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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THE PARIS ARCHITECT
CHARLES BELFOURE
Contents
The Paris Architect
CHAPTER ONE
Just as Lucien Bernard rounded the corner at the rue la Boétie, a man running from the opposite direction almost collided with him. He came so close that Lucien could smell his cologne as he raced by.
In the very second that Lucien realised he and the man wore the same scent, L’Eau d’Aunay, he heard a loud crack. He turned around. Just two metres away, the man lay face down on the pavement, blood streaming from the back of his bald head as though someone had turned on a faucet inside his skull. The dark crimson fluid flowed quickly in a narrow rivulet down his neck, over his crisp white collar, and then onto his well-tailored navy blue suit, changing its colour to a rich deep purple.
There had been plenty of killings in Paris in the two years since the beginning of the German occupation in 1940, but Lucien had never actually seen a dead body until this moment. He was oddly mesmerised, not by the dead body, but by the new colour the blood had produced on his suit. In an art class at school, he had to paint boring colour wheel exercises. Here before him was bizarre proof that blue and red indeed made purple.
‘Stay where you are!’
A German officer holding a steel-blue Luger ran up alongside him, followed by two tall soldiers with sub-machine guns, which they immediately trained on Lucien.
‘Don’t move, you bastard, or you’ll be sleeping next to your friend,’ said the officer.
Lucien couldn’t have moved if he’d wanted to; he was frozen with fear.
The officer walked over to the body, then turned and strolled up to Lucien as if he were going to ask him for a light. About thirty years old, the man had a fine aquiline nose and very dark, un-Aryan brown eyes, which now stared deeply into Lucien’s grey-blue ones. Lucien was unnerved. Shortly after the Germans took over, several pamphlets had been written by Frenchmen on how to deal with the occupiers. Maintain dignity and distance, do not talk to them, and above all, avoid eye contact. In the animal world, direct eye contact was a challenge and a form of aggression. But Lucien couldn’t avoid breaking this rule with the German’s eyes just ten centimetres from his.
‘He’s not my friend,’ Lucien said in a quiet voice.
The German’s face broke out into a wide grin.
‘This kike is nobody’s friend any more,’ said the officer, whose uniform indicated he was a major in the Waffen-SS. The two soldiers laughed.
Though Lucien was so scared that he thought he had pissed himself, he knew he had to act quickly or he could be lying dead on the ground next. Lucien managed a shallow breath to brace himself and to think. One of the oddest aspects of the Occupation was how incredibly pleasant and polite the Germans were when dealing with their defeated French subjects. They even gave up their seats on the Metro to the elderly.
Lucien tried the same tack.
‘Is that your bullet lodged in the gentleman’s skull?’ he asked.
‘Yes, it is. Just one shot,’ the major said. ‘But it’s really not all that impressive. Jews aren’t very athletic. They run so damn slow it’s never much of a challenge.’
The major began to go through the man’s pockets, pulling out papers and a handsome alligator wallet, which he placed in the side pocket of his green and black tunic. He grinned up at Lucien.
‘But thank you so much for admiring my marksmanship.’
A wave of relief swept over Lucien – this wasn’t his day to die. ‘You’re most welcome, Major.’
The officer stood. ‘You may be on your way, but I suggest you visit a men’s room first,’ he said in a solicitous voice. He gestured with his grey gloved hand at the right shoulder of Lucien’s grey suit.
‘I’m afraid I splattered you. This filth is all over the back of your suit, which I greatly admire, by the way. Who is your tailor?’
Craning his neck to the right, Lucien could see specks of red on his shoulder. The officer produced a pen and a small brown notebook.
‘Monsieur. Your tailor?’
‘Millet. On the rue de Mogador.’ Lucien had always heard that Germans were meticulous record keepers.
The German carefully wrote this down and pocketed his notebook in his trouser pocket.
‘Thank you so much. No one in the world can surpass the artistry of French tailors, not even the British. You know, the French have us beat in all the arts, I’m afraid. Even we Germans concede that Gallic culture is vastly superior to Teutonic – in everything except fighting wars, that is.’ The German laughed at his observation, as did the two soldiers.
Lucien followed suit and also laughed heartily.
After the laughter subsided, the major gave Lucien a curt salute. ‘I won’t keep you any longer, monsieur.’
Lucien nodded and walked away. When safely out of earshot, he muttered ‘German shit’ under his breath and continued on at an almost leisurely pace. Running through the streets of Paris had become a death wish – as the poor devil lying face down in the street had found out. Seeing a man murdered had frightened him, he realised, but he really wasn’t upset that the man was dead. All that mattered was that he wasn’t dead. It bothered him that he had so little compassion for his fellow man.
But no wonder – he’d been brought up in a family where compassion didn’t exist.
His father, a university-trained geologist of some distinction, had had the same dog-eat-dog view of life as the most ignorant peasant. When it came to the misfortune of others, his philosophy had been ‘tough shit, better him than me’. The late Professor Jean-Baptiste Bernard hadn’t seemed to realise that human beings, including his wife and children, had feelings. His love and affection had been heaped upon inanimate objects – the rocks and minerals of France and her colonies – and he demanded that his two sons love them as well. Before most children could read, Lucien and his older brother, Mathieu, had been taught the names of every sedimentary, igneous, and metamorphic rock in every one of France’s nine geological provinces.
His father tested them at suppertime, setting rocks on the table for them to name. He was merciless if they made even one mistake, like the time Lucien couldn’t identify bertrandite, a member of the silicate family, and his father had ordered him to put the rock in his mouth so he would never forget it. To this day, he remembered bertrandite’s bitter taste.
He had hated his father, but now he wondered if he was more like his father than he wanted to admit.
As Lucien walked on in the glaring heat of the July afternoon, he looked up at the buildings clad in limestone (a sedimentary rock of the calcium carbonate family), with their beautiful rusticated bases, tall windows outlined in stone trim, and balconies with finely detailed wrought-iron designs supported on carved stone consoles. Some of the massive double doors of the apartment blocks were open, and he could see children playing in the interior courtyards, just as he had done when he was a boy. He passed a street-level window from which a black and white cat gazed sleepily at him.
Lucien loved every building in Paris – the city of his birth, the most beautiful city in the world. In his youth, he had roamed all over Paris, exploring its monuments, grand avenues, and boulevards down to the grimiest streets and alleys in the poorest districts. He could read the history of the city in the walls of these buildings. If that Kraut bastard’s aim had been off, never again would he have seen these wonderful buildings, walk these cobblestone streets, or inhale the delicious aroma of baking bread in the boulangeries.
Farther down the rue la Boétie, he could see shopkeepers standing back from their plate glass windows – far enough to avoid being spotted from the street but close enough to have seen the shooting. A very fat man motioned to him from the entrance of the Cafe d’Été. When he reached the door, the man, who seemed to be the owner, handed him a wet bar towel.
‘The bathroom’s in the back,’ he said.
Lucien thanked him and walked to the rear of the cafe. It was a typical dark Parisian cafe, narrow, a black-and-white-tiled floor with small tables along a wall, and a very poorly stocked bar on the opposite side. The Occupation had done the unthinkable in Paris: it had cut off a Frenchman’s most basic necessities of life – cigarettes and wine. But the cafe was such an ingrained part of his existence that he still went there daily to smoke fake cigarettes made from grass and herbs and drink the watered-down swill that passed for wine. The Cafe d’Été patrons, who had probably seen what had happened, stopped talking and looked down at their glasses when Lucien passed, acting as if he’d been contaminated by his contact with the Germans. It reminded him of the time he’d been in a cafe when five German enlisted men blundered in. The place had gone totally silent, as if someone had turned off a switch on a radio. The soldiers had left immediately.
In the filthy bathroom, Lucien took off his suit jacket to begin the clean-up. A few blobs of blood the size of peas dotted the back of the jacket, and one was on the sleeve. He tried to blot out the Jew’s blood, but faint stains remained. This annoyed him – he only had one good business suit. A tall, handsome man with a full head of wavy brown hair, Lucien was quite particular about his clothes. His wife, Celeste, was clever about practical matters, though. She could probably get the bloodstains out of his jacket. He stood back and looked at himself in the mirror above the sink to make sure there wasn’t any blood on his face or in his hair, then suddenly looked at his watch and realised his appointment was in ten minutes. He put his jacket back on and threw the soiled towel in the sink.
Once in the street, he couldn’t help looking back at the corner where the shooting had taken place. The Germans and the body were gone; only a large pool of blood marked the spot of the shooting. The Germans were unbelievably efficient people. The French would have stood around the corpse, chatting and smoking cigarettes. Full rigor mortis would have set in by the time they had carted it away. Lucien almost started trotting but slowed his pace to a brisk walk. He hated being late, but he wasn’t about to be shot in the back of the skull because of his obsession with punctuality. Monsieur Manet would understand. Still, this meeting held the possibility of a job, and Lucien didn’t want to make a bad first impression.
Lucien had learnt early in his career that architecture was a business as well as an art, and one ought not look at a first job from a new client as a one-shot deal but rather as the first in a series of commissions. And this one had a lot of promise. The man he was to meet, Auguste Manet, owned a factory that until the war used to make engines for Citroën and other car makers. Before an initial meeting with a client, Lucien would always research his background to see if he had money, and Monsieur Manet definitely had money. Old money, from a distinguished family that went back generations. Manet had tried his hand at industry, something his class frowned upon. Wealth from business was considered dirty, not dignified. But he had multiplied the family fortune a hundredfold, cashing in on the car craze, specialising in engines.
Manet was in an excellent position to obtain German contracts during the Occupation. Even before the German invasion in May 1940, a mass exodus had begun, with millions fleeing the north of the country to the south, where they thought they’d be safe. Many industrialists had tried unsuccessfully to move their entire factories, including the workers, to the south. But Manet had remained calm during the panic and stayed put, with all his factories intact.
Normally, a defeated country’s economy ground to a halt, but Germany was in the business of war. It needed weapons for its fight with the Russians on the Eastern Front, and suitable French businesses were awarded contracts to produce war materiel. At first, French businessmen had viewed cooperation with the Germans as treason, but faced with a choice of having their businesses appropriated by the Germans without compensation or accepting the contracts, the pragmatic French had chosen the latter. Lucien was betting that Manet was a pragmatic man and that he was producing weapons for the Luftwaffe or the Wehrmacht. And that meant new factory space, which Lucien could design for him.
Before the war, whenever Lucien was on his way to meet a client for the first time, his imagination ran wild with visions of success – especially when he knew the client was rich. He tried to rein in his imagination now, telling himself to be pessimistic. Every time he got his hopes up high these days, they were smashed to bits. Like in 1938, when he was just about to start a store on the rue de la Tour d’Auvergne and then the client went bankrupt because of a divorce. Or the big estate in Orleans whose owner was arrested for embezzlement. He told himself to be grateful for any crumb of work that he could find in wartime.
Having nearly forgotten the incident with the Jew, Lucien’s mind began to formulate a generic design of a factory that would be quite suitable for any type of war production. As he turned up the avenue Marceau, he smiled as he always did whenever he thought of a new design.
CHAPTER TWO
Lucien checked his watch as he opened the massive wood door of 28 rue Galilée. It gave him a great sense of satisfaction that he was one minute early for his appointment. What other man could walk all the way across town, almost get shot by a German, clean a dead man’s blood off his jacket, and make it in time? The experience reinforced his belief that one should always budget an extra fifteen minutes to get to a client appointment. His prized Cartier watch, which his parents had given him upon his graduation from college, said 2:00 p.m., which was actually the time in Germany. The Germans’ first official act had been to impose the Reich’s time zone on occupied France. It was really 1:00 p.m. French time. After two years of occupation, the forced time change still annoyed Lucien, even more than the swastikas and ugly Gothic-lettered signs the Germans had plastered on all the city’s landmarks.
He stepped inside and was relieved to be in the dark, cool shade of the foyer. He loved these apartment blocks, created by Baron Haussmann when he tore down medieval Paris in the 1850s to recreate the city. Lucien admired the stonework and the strong horizontal lines created by the rows of windows and their metal balconies. He lived in a building on the rue du Caire that was similar to this one.
Since 1931, Lucien had abandoned all historical and classical references in his work to become a pure modernist architect, embracing the aesthetic of the Bauhaus, the style created by the German architect Walter Gropius that pioneered modern architecture and design (the one instance in which Teutonic taste definitely triumphed over the Gallic). Still, he admired these great apartment blocks that Napoleon III had championed. His admiration had grown when he’d visited his brother in New York before the war. The apartment buildings there were junk compared to those in Paris.
He walked to the concierge’s apartment, directly to the left of the entry. The glass door yawned open, and an old woman smoking a cigarette was sitting at a table covered with a garish yellow-flowered cloth. Lucien cleared his throat, and she said, without moving a muscle and still gazing into space, ‘He’s in 3B … and the lift’s out.’
As Lucien climbed the ornate curving stair to the third floor, his heart began to race – not only because he was out of shape, but also because he was so anxious. Would Manet have a real project for him, or would this meeting lead to nothing? And if it was a project, would it be a chance to show his talent?
Lucien knew he had talent. He’d been told by a couple of well-known architects, whom he had worked for in Paris after graduating from school. With a few years’ experience and belief in his ability, he then went out on his own. It was hard to build up a practice, doubly hard because he was a modernist and modern architecture was just beginning to be accepted. Most clients still wanted something traditional. Nevertheless, he was able to earn a steady living. But just as an actor needed a breakout role to become a star, an architect needed a career-making project. And Lucien, now thirty-five, hadn’t managed to land that one all-important project. He’d come close only once, when he’d been a finalist for a new public library but had been beaten out by Henri Devereaux, whose uncle’s brother-in-law was the deputy minister of culture. Ability wasn’t enough; one needed the right connections like Devereaux always seemed to have – that and luck.
He looked down at his shoes as they scraped the marble treads of the great staircase. They were his client shoes, the one good pair he wore to meetings. A little worn, but they still looked shiny and fashionable, and the soles were in good shape. With leather in short supply, once a Frenchman’s shoes wore out he turned to wooden soles or ones of compressed paper, which didn’t fare so well in winter. Lucien was glad he still had a pair of leather-soled shoes. He hated the sound of wooden soles clattering on the streets of Paris, which reminded him of the clogs worn by peasants.
Lucien was startled when he looked up and found a pair of very expensive dark brown shoes on the third floor landing right in front of his face. Lucien’s gaze travelled up the sharply creased trouser legs to a suit jacket, then to the face of Auguste Manet.
‘Monsieur Bernard, what a pleasure it is to meet you.’
Before Lucien reached the top step, Manet extended his hand.
Lucien pulled himself up the railing until he stood next to a lean, white-haired man in his seventies, with cheekbones that seemed to be chiselled from stone. And tall. Manet towered above Lucien. He seemed even taller than de Gaulle.
‘The pleasure is my mine, monsieur.’
‘Monsieur Gaston was always raving about the office building you did for him, so I had to see it for myself. A beautiful job.’ The old man’s handshake was strong and confident, something you’d expect from a man who’d made millions.
They were off to an excellent start, Lucien thought as he took an instant liking to this elderly, aristocratic businessman. Back in 1937 he’d done a building on the rue Servan for Charles Gaston, the owner of an insurance company. Four stories of limestone with a curving glass-stair tower. Lucien thought it was the best thing he’d ever designed.
‘Monsieur Gaston was very kind to refer you to me. How can I help you?’ Most of the time, Lucien was open to the usual small talk before getting down to business. But he was nervous and wanted to see whether a real job would come out of this.
Manet turned towards the open doors of 3B and Lucien followed. Even the back of Monsieur Manet was impressive. His posture was ramrod straight, and his suit was expensive and fit him impeccably – the German major would’ve wanted the name of his tailor.
‘Well, Monsieur Bernard, let me tell you what I’ve got in mind. A guest of mine will be staying here for a while, and I wish to make some special alterations to the apartment to accommodate him,’ Manet said as they walked slowly through the place.
Lucien couldn’t imagine what the old man would want. The vacant apartment was gorgeous, with high ceilings and tall windows, ornate wood panelling, huge columns that framed the wide entries into the main rooms, beautiful fireplaces with marble surrounds, and parquet floors. And all the bathrooms and the kitchen looked up to date with porcelain-on-steel sinks and tubs with chrome fixtures. The unit was large by Parisian standards, at least twice as large in floor area as a normal apartment.
Manet stopped and faced Lucien.
‘I’ve been told that an architect looks at a space differently from the rest of us. The average person sees a room as it is, but instinctively the architect envisions how it could be changed for the better. Is that true?’
‘Absolutely,’ replied Lucien with pride. ‘A man would view a run-down, out-of-date flat as very unappealing, but an architect, in his imagination, would renovate that space into something quite fashionable.’ Lucien was getting excited. Maybe the old man wanted him to redo the place from top to bottom.
‘I see. Tell me, monsieur, do you like a challenge? To solve a unique problem?’
‘Yes, indeed, I love to come up with a solution for any architectural problem,’ said Lucien, ‘and the more challenging, the better.’ He hoped he was telling Manet what he wanted to hear. If Manet asked him to fit the Arc de Triomphe in here, he’d say it was no problem. You didn’t turn down work in wartime. Any fool knew that.
‘That’s good.’ Manet walked across the salon and put his hand on Lucien’s shoulder in a fatherly way. ‘I think it’s time to give you a little more background on this project, but first let us talk about your fee. I have a figure in mind – twelve thousand francs.’
‘Twelve hundred francs is most generous, monsieur.’
‘No, I said twelve thousand.’
There was silence. Digits formed in Lucien’s mind as if a teacher were writing them methodically on a blackboard – first a one, then a two, a comma, and three zeros. After he mentally verified the number, he said, ‘Monsieur, that … that is more than generous; it’s ludicrous!’
‘Not if your life depended on it.’
Lucien thought this was such an amusing comment that he was obliged to let out his great belly laugh, the kind that annoyed his wife but always delighted his mistress. But Manet didn’t laugh. His face showed no emotion at all.
‘Before I give you a little more information about the project, let me ask you a personal question,’ Manet said.
‘You have my full attention, Monsieur Manet.’
‘How do you feel about Jews?’
Lucien was taken aback. What the hell kind of question was that? But before giving Manet his gut response – that they were money-grubbing thieves – he took a deep breath. He didn’t want to say anything that would offend Manet – and lose the job.
‘They’re human beings like anyone else, I suppose,’ he replied feebly.
Lucien had grown up in a very anti-Semitic household. The word Jew had always been followed by the word bastard. His grandfather and father had been convinced that Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer on the staff of the French Army headquarters back in the 1890s, was a traitor, despite evidence that a fellow officer named Esterhazy had been the one who’d sold secrets to the Germans. Lucien’s grandfather had also sworn that Jews were responsible for France’s humiliating defeat by the Germans in the Franco–Prussian War of 1870, although he could never provide any real proof to back up this charge. Whether one hated them for betraying the country, for killing Christ, or screwing you over in a business deal, all other Frenchmen were anti-Semites in one way or another, weren’t they? Lucien thought. That’s the way it had always been.
Lucien looked into Manet’s eyes and was glad he’d kept his true feelings to himself.
He saw an earnestness that alarmed him.
‘You’ve probably noticed that since May all Jews over the age of six are now required to wear a yellow Star of David,’ said Manet.
‘Yes, monsieur.’
Lucien was well aware that Jews had to wear a felt star. He didn’t think it was such a big deal, though many Parisians were outraged. Gentiles had begun to wear the yellow stars or yellow flowers or handkerchiefs in protest. He’d even heard of a woman who’d pinned a yellow star on her dog.
‘On July 16th,’ said Manet, ‘almost thirteen thousand Jews were rounded up in Paris and sent to Drancy, and nine thousand were women and children.’
Lucien knew about Drancy. It was an unfinished block of apartment buildings near Le Bourget Airport that an architect friend, Maurice Pappon, had worked on. A year earlier, it became the main detention camp for the Paris region, though it had no water, electricity, or sanitary service. Pappon had told him that Drancy prisoners were forced onto trains to be relocated somewhere in the east.
‘One hundred people killed themselves instead of being taken. Mothers with babies in their arms jumped from windows. Did you know that, monsieur?’
Lucien saw Manet’s growing agitation. He needed to redirect the man’s conversation to the project and the twelve thousand francs.
‘It is a tragedy, monsieur. Now what kind of changes did you have in mind?’
But Manet continued as though he hadn’t heard a word. ‘It was bad enough that Jewish businesses were seized and bank accounts frozen, but now they’re banned from restaurants, cafes, theatres, cinemas, and parks. It’s not just immigrant Jews but Jews of French lineage, whose ancestors fought for France, who are being treated in this way.
‘And the worst part,’ he continued, ‘is that Vichy and the French police are making most of the arrests, not the Germans.’
Lucien was aware of this. The Germans used the French against the French. When a knock came at a Frenchman’s door in the middle of the night, it was usually a gendarme sent by the Gestapo.
‘All Parisians have suffered under the Germans, monsieur,’ Lucien began. ‘Even gentiles are arrested every day. Why, on the way here to meet you, a …’ He stopped in mid-sentence when he remembered that the dead man was a Jew. Lucien saw that Manet was staring at him, which made him uncomfortable. He looked down at the beautiful parquet floor and his client’s shoes.
‘Monsieur Bernard, Gaston has known you a long time. He says you are a man of great integrity and honour. A man who loves his country – and keeps his word,’ said Manet.
Lucien was now completely confused. What in the hell was this man talking about? Gaston really didn’t know him at all, only on a professional level. They weren’t friends. Gaston had no idea what kind of man Lucien truly was. He could’ve been a murderer or a male prostitute, and Gaston would never have known.
Manet walked over to one of the huge windows that overlooked the rue Galilée and stared out into the street for a few moments. He finally turned and faced Lucien, who was surprised by the now grave expression on the old man’s face.
‘Monsieur Bernard, this alteration is to create a hiding place for a Jewish man who is being hunted by the Gestapo. If, by chance, they come here looking for him, I’d like him to be able to hide in a space that is undetectable, one that the Gestapo will never find. For your own safety, I won’t tell you his name. But the Reich wants to arrest him to find out the whereabouts of his fortune, which is considerable.’
Lucien was dumbfounded. ‘Are you insane? You’re hiding a Jew?’
Normally, Lucien would never speak so rudely to a client, especially an enormously rich one, but Manet had crossed into forbidden territory here. Aiding Jews: the Germans called it Judenbegunstigung. No matter how wealthy he was, Manet could be arrested and executed for hiding Jews. It was the one crime a Frenchman couldn’t buy his way out of. Wearing some dumb yellow star out of sympathy was one thing, but actually helping a Jew wanted by the Gestapo was sheer madness. What the hell had Lucien got himself into – or rather, what had that bastard Gaston got him into? Manet had some set of balls to ask him to do this for twelve thousand or even twelve million francs.
‘You’re asking me to commit suicide; you know that, don’t you?’
‘Indeed I do,’ said Manet. ‘And I’m also committing suicide.’
‘Then for God’s sake, man, why are you doing this?’ exclaimed Lucien.
Manet didn’t seem put off by Lucien’s question at all. He almost seemed eager to answer it. The old man smiled at Lucien.
‘Let me explain something to you, Monsieur Bernard. Back in 1940, when this hell began, I realised that my first duty as a Christian was to overcome my self-centeredness, that I had to inconvenience myself when one of my human brethren was in danger – whoever he may be, or whether he was a born Frenchman or not. I’ve simply decided not to turn my back.’
‘Inconvenience myself’ was a bit of an understatement under these circumstances, Lucien thought. And as for Christianity, he agreed with his father: it was a well-intentioned set of beliefs that never worked in real life.
‘So, Monsieur Bernard,’ continued Manet, ‘I will pay you twelve thousand francs to design a hiding place that is invisible to the naked eye. That is your architectural challenge. I have excellent craftsmen to do the work but they’re not architects; they don’t have your eye and couldn’t come up with as clever a solution as you could. That’s why I’m asking you for your – help.’
‘Monsieur, I absolutely refuse. This is crazy. I won’t do it.’
‘I’m hoping you’ll reconsider my proposition, Monsieur Bernard. I feel it can be a mutually beneficial arrangement. And it’s just this one time.’
‘Never, monsieur. I could never agree …’
‘I realise that making a decision that could get you killed is not one to be made on the spot. Please, do me the favour of taking some time to think about this. But I’d like to hear from you today by 6:00 p.m., at the Cafe du Monde. I know you need to make a closer examination of the apartment before you to decide, so take this key and lock the door when you finish. And now, monsieur, I’ll leave you to it.’
Lucien nodded and tried to speak, but nothing came out.
‘By the way, at 9:00 a.m. tomorrow, I’m signing a contract to produce engines for the Heinkel Aircraft Works. My current facilities are much too small to handle such a job, so I’m planning an expansion next to my plant at Chaville. I’m looking for an architect,’ said Manet as he walked towards the door. ‘Know of one?’
CHAPTER THREE
The room started spinning around, and Lucien became so disoriented that he couldn’t keep his balance. He sat on the floor and thought he was going to vomit.
‘Christ, what a day!’ he muttered.
Normally, Lucien would do anything to get a job, no matter how despicable. Like the time he slept with the very overweight wife of the wine merchant, Gattier, so that she would persuade her husband to select Lucien to design his new store on the rue Vaneau. It had turned out beautifully – not one change had been made to his design.
This, however, was a different matter altogether. Sure, he was broke, but were twelve thousand francs and a guaranteed commission worth the risk of dying? The money wouldn’t help him if he was dead. Actually, it wasn’t the dying part that troubled him. It was the torture by the Gestapo that would precede the dying. Lucien had heard on good authority what the Germans did to those who wouldn’t cooperate – days of barbaric treatment before death, or if the Gestapo was feeling merciful, which was a rarity, internment in a camp.
Parisians had quickly learnt that not all German soldiers were the same. There were three very different types. The largest branch, the Wehrmacht, was the regular army that did most of the fighting and had some sense of decency towards the French. Next was the Waffen-SS, the special elite army unit of the Nazi Party, which fought in combat but was also used in rounding up Jews. The last and the absolute worst was the Gestapo, the secret police, who tortured, murdered, mutilated, and maimed Jews – or anyone, including fellow Germans, for crimes against the Reich. The Gestapo’s cruelty was said to be beyond imagination.
People were even scared to use the word Gestapo. Parisians would usually say, ‘They’ve arrested him.’ The Gestapo headquarters at 11 rue des Saussaies was just around the corner from the Palais de l’Élysée, the former residence of the French president. Everyone in Paris knew and feared this address.
No, no matter how much he needed money and craved a new project, the risk was unfathomable. Lucien had never fooled himself into believing he was the heroic type. He’d learnt that in 1939, when, as an officer called up from the reserves, he’d been stationed for eight months on the Maginot Line, the string of concrete fortresses that the French government guaranteed would protect France from a German onslaught. Since no fighting had occurred in France after the fall of Poland, he’d sat on his ass reading architectural magazines his wife had sent him, designing imaginary projects. One fellow officer who was a university professor had used the time to write a history of the ancient Etruscans.
Then on May 10th, 1940, the Germans had invaded, but instead of attacking the ‘invincible’ Maginot Line, they’d swept around it, entering northern France through the Ardennes Forest. Meanwhile, Lucien had been stationed inside a bunker on the Maginot Line, never getting the chance to engage the enemy. Secretly, he’d been glad because he was terrified of fighting the Germans, who seemed like super-beings. They had crushed everyone they had invaded with incredible ease – the Poles, the Belgians, and the Dutch, plus forcing the British off the continent at Dunkirk.
After the armistice was signed on June 22nd, he was considered officially defeated and captured, but Lucien and other officers had had no intention of being herded into a prisoner of war camp in Germany. Uncle Albert, the brother of Lucien’s mother, had spent four years in a German prison camp during the First World War and as a result spent the rest of his life unhinged, doing weird things like chasing squirrels in the park like a dog. Lucien and many other French soldiers had simply taken off their uniforms, destroyed their military papers, and then blended into civilian life with forged demobilisation documents. Before the Wehrmacht had reached the garrisons of the Maginot Line at the end of June, Lucien had returned to his wife in Paris.
What he found was a ghost town. Even though Paris had been declared an open city by the British and thus safe from bombing, over a million people – out of a population of three million – fled. Lucien and his wife had decided to stay, believing that it was far less dangerous to face the Germans than the perils of the open road. It had turned out to be the right decision: with millions of other Frenchmen fleeing south, the roads became impassable and many people had gone missing or died of exposure. This mass exodus and the military’s quick surrender to the Germans humiliated France in front of the world. Lucien hated the Germans with all his heart for what they did to his country. He cried the day of the surrender. But all that really mattered to him was that he and his wife were still alive.
No, Lucien wasn’t a hero, and he definitely wasn’t a do-gooder, one of those guys who stood up for the downtrodden. Manet had do-gooder written all over him. And to risk one’s life to help a Jew? Lucien’s father would’ve laughed in his face. Having grown up in Paris, Lucien had been around Jews all his life, at least indirectly. He’d heard that there were something like two hundred thousand heebs living in Paris, although he’d never met one Jew at the École Spéciale d’Architecture, where he’d studied. There were hardly any Jewish architects. Lucien had always reasoned that Jews had an innate mercantile talent, so they went into business and professions like law and medicine that would make them loads of money. Architecture, Lucien quickly learnt, was not the way to go if you wanted to become rich.
But Lucien felt that Manet was right about one thing. The Jews were getting a raw deal. The Germans took away even the most basic everyday necessities – their phones had been disconnected and their bicycles confiscated. And not just the immigrant Jews from Poland, Hungary, and Russia, who lived mostly in the eastern arrondissements of Paris, but the native-born Jews too, the ones who didn’t have that ‘Jew’ look. Professional men like doctors, lawyers, and university professors suffered. And it didn’t matter how famous you were. Nobel Prize winner Henri Bergson had died from pneumonia that he had contracted while waiting in a line to register himself as a Jew with the French authorities. But what was happening to the Jews was a political matter that was out of his control, even if he thought it was unfair.
For a people that were supposed to be so smart, though, Lucien thought Jews had been acting pretty dumb. Since 1933, there had been reports in French newspapers of how the Nazis treated Jews in Germany. Didn’t they realise the Germans would treat them the same way here? Some had made it across the Pyrenees into Spain and Portugal, and others had got across the Swiss border early on. They were the smart ones; they’d realised what was in store for them and had saved themselves.
The Jews who had stayed were doomed. Since the fall of 1940, it had been impossible for them to get out of the country. Jews had even been forbidden to cross the demarcation line into unoccupied France. They had to escape the cities to avoid arrest and deportation by the Germans. There must be thousands of them hiding in the countryside, Lucien thought, whole families with kids and grandparents. The Jews who were so used to the good life now had to hide in haylofts surviving on a few grams of bread each day. Compared to a barn, Manet’s hideout would be a palace.
Lucien stood up and began walking through the apartment.
Granted, it was suicide to get involved in this.
But … if it was done cleverly, maybe the Jew would never be discovered, no one would know of his involvement, and best of all, Lucien would make a huge amount of money plus get a big commission out of it. Besides, Manet was a very shrewd, successful man. He might take a calculated risk, but he wasn’t reckless. The old man would’ve thought this all out to the last detail.
Then the image of being lashed to a chair at 11 rue des Saussaies, getting his face pummelled to a pasty red lump, came to mind. Lucien turned to walk towards the door. Still, he thought, with a little ingenuity there could be a place to hide a man in plain sight. He placed his hand on the door handle, then looked back into the empty apartment. Lucien shook his head and opened the great wooden door a few centimetres to see if anyone was about, and stepped out in the corridor.
Then again, Lucien reasoned, the commission alone would make the risk worth considering. To get such a huge project to design was an incredible opportunity that would never have come his way before the war. And God knows, he desperately needed the money; he hadn’t worked since the Occupation began. His own savings were long gone, and Celeste’s money wouldn’t last forever. It wouldn’t hurt to at least look around, he thought. He re-entered the apartment and began walking through the rooms.
First, Lucien ruled out the obvious hiding places, such as behind the bookshelves – a stock cliché of American mystery movies – or in a recess at the back of a closet. As if they were the lens of a movie camera, his eyes swept over every square metre of each room, taking in every detail. At the same time, he intuitively analyzed every surface by contemplating the construction of the space behind it – as if he was thinking with x-ray vision. Though Lucien didn’t know how big Manet’s ‘guest’ was, his mind placed an imaginary average-sized man within each possible space to see if there was enough room. Lucien examined the beautiful wainscoting along the walls. The wide recessed panels could be removed, opening up a space big enough for a man to fit through. But was that too obvious a hiding place? Probably. There had to be a twist. What if the person had to go through the panel opening and crawl down the length of the wall to hide within another hidden compartment? If the Germans found the removable panel, there would be just an empty space behind it. Unfortunately, as Lucien inspected further, he noticed the walls behind the wainscoting weren’t deep enough for a man’s body.
Then Lucien noticed how unusually tall the baseboards along the floor were. Using the small tape measure he always carried with him, he confirmed they were almost forty centimetres high. Maybe they could be hinged like a flap on a mail slot, so a man could pull them up and slide on his belly into a hollowed-out space. That would’ve been a solution if the wall had been the right depth. Too bad, the Germans never would’ve looked down there.
Lucien moved on. There was a wall along a corridor that curved out in the centre, creating a semicircular niche where a small bronze statue of Mercury sat on a metre-high base. A man could crouch inside the base, unless he was really tall. The statue and the wood top of the base would have to be lifted up then put back into place in order for the man to hide. That would be quite difficult to do. Even if the statue was fastened to the top from underneath and the top hinged to the base, it would be very heavy. Lucien picked up the statue and guessed it weighed around fifty kilos. Would Manet’s guest have the strength to open and close the top?
Lucien walked across the room to get a better look at the niche. Lighting a cigarette, he leant against one of the very tall wooden Doric columns that framed the opening between the salon and the dining area. He looked it up and down and saw its fluted shaft was made from one piece of exquisite chestnut. If only it sat on a tall pedestal, he thought, a person could fit inside the pedestal to hide. Then Lucien noticed how big the diameter of the column was and measured it – about fifty-six centimetres. An incredible wave of euphoria swept over him. Using his own shoulders as a guide, he calculated that the column was just wide enough to fit a normal-sized man upright, even accounting for the thickness of the column wall.
Lucien was giddy with excitement. The two columns, which he knew were non-structural and merely decorative, must be hollow. Smiling, he ran his hand over the column’s shaft; a narrow hinged door could be cut in, with its vertical joints hidden by the fluting. There couldn’t be any horizontal joints showing so the bottom joint would have to align with the base. The top joint had to line up with the column capital above. Though the shaft of the column was almost four metres high, a door could be made that tall if he used a piano hinge. Lucien had once designed a door with standard hinges that stood three metres high. If Manet’s men were as good as advertised, this could work.
He’d done it! It was such a brilliant, elegant, and ingenious solution.
He’d fool those fucking Nazi bastards.
CHAPTER FOUR
Two hours before meeting Manet and Lucien was already on his fourth glass of faux red wine. The euphoria of tricking the Germans had worn off, and the reality of being murdered by the Gestapo for getting involved in this scheme returned. A thousand things could go wrong. He knew that Parisians were betraying Jews to the Germans every day. Suppose someone tipped off the Gestapo about Manet’s Jew and the column didn’t work? The Jew would give up Manet, and Manet would give him up. He’d be crazy to do this.
Before he’d left the apartment on rue Galilée, Lucien had sketched out the details of the column on a scrap of paper. He turned it over now and began sketching out the building for the factory in Chaville, a suburb west of Paris. He imagined a sawtooth roof to let in light, with glass walls separated by steel mullions one metre apart. Every ten metres he added a brick wall. The entry would have a curving brick wall leading to a deeply recessed glass doorway. Maybe the whole thing could be built of poured concrete, with powerful-looking arches on the inside. He smiled as he drew the profile of the arches, each one with its own flaring buttress to resist the outward thrusts. He tried four different profiles until he settled on the one he liked best.
Lucien had visited Walter Gropius’s Fagus Factory in Germany in the ’30s and had been dazzled by the sleek, clean design. Since then, Lucien had always wanted to design a factory complex. Although it had come to him in a most bizarre way, this commission could be the opportunity he’d been looking for. To prove that he really had talent by designing a large, important building.
He drained the wine in his glass and stared out across the lifeless rue Kepler. The biggest shock he’d experienced when he’d returned to Paris was its surreal emptiness. The boulevard Saint-Germain, the rue de Rivoli, the Place de la Concorde – all were deserted most of the time. Before the war, even the rue Kepler would have had a steady stream of pedestrians in the evening hours. Lucien had loved to gaze out at the city while sipping his coffee or wine in a cafe, watching for interesting faces and especially beautiful women. But as Lucien sat by the window now, he saw very few people and it saddened him. The Boche had sucked the wonderful street life out of his beloved Paris.
Lucien never got the chance to fight the Germans. Though he hated their guts, he knew he would’ve been a terrible soldier in battle – he was scared of guns. Honour and service to country were ideals cherished by the French, although he’d always thought of them as a load of patriotic horse manure. But since his return to Paris, he’d had a gnawing feeling inside him that he was a coward. This was reinforced by the fact that there were so many women in Paris and so few men – most had been killed or captured during the invasion. But not Lucien. His neighbour, Madame Dehor, had a lost a son, blown to bits attempting to stop a Panzer tank. Six months after the boy’s death, he could still hear her wailing uncontrollably through the thick walls of the apartment building. Secretly, Lucien was ashamed that he was so useless to his country. Sometimes, he felt guilty that he was alive.
And Lucien knew he didn’t have the guts to join the Resistance. Besides, he didn’t believe in their cause. It was made up of a bunch of fanatical Communists who’d commit some stupid, meaningless act of sabotage that would trigger the Germans to kill scores of hostages in retaliation.
Lucien looked at the sketch of the factory. On the whole, Manet was offering him a pretty good deal – if you removed the possibility of torture and death by the Gestapo. One secret hiding place he designed in less than an hour, in exchange for twelve thousand francs, which could buy plenty of black market goods. Plus the factory commission. He flipped the paper over to the sketch of the column, which immediately brought a smile to his face. The sense of mastery and excitement he had felt in the apartment returned. He’d experienced such intense pleasure when he’d realised that the column would work. Maybe this was something he could do to get back at the Germans. Sure, he couldn’t risk his neck by shooting them, but he could risk it in his own way. And besides, given the solution he’d invented, was there really that much risk? The Gestapo would search and search the apartment and never find the hiding place. That image pleased the hell out of him.
This was suicidal. But something within Lucien compelled him to do it.
‘You’re what the Jews call a mensch, Monsieur Bernard,’ said Manet, who took a sip of wine. Lucien had made sure they had a table off by themselves.
‘What the hell does that mean?’ asked Lucien. It sounded kind of insulting, similar to the Jewish word schmuck.
‘I believe it means a human being, a person who stands up and does the right thing.’
‘Before I do the right thing, there’re a few conditions.’
‘Go on,’ said Manet.
‘I’m not to know anything … I mean anything … about your goddamn Jew,’ said Lucien, looking around him to make sure no one was listening in on their conversation.
‘I understand perfectly.’
‘What about the workmen who’ll be doing the construction? How do I know they won’t talk?’
‘They are men who have worked for me for over twenty years. I can trust them and so can you.’
‘The tenants will wonder what’s going on when they hear all the noise. Every one of them would be deported if a Jew was found in the building. If they suspected anything, they’d inform the Germans to save themselves.’
‘There’s a risk, I agree, but the concierge has been well paid to lie if need be. All the tenants are at work during the day. Besides, your solution is ingenious because it’s so simple – there won’t be that much noise.’
‘What about the owner of the building? What if he gets wind of the work?’
‘I am the owner, Monsieur Bernard.’
Lucien finally relaxed and sat back in his chair. With those concerns out of the way, it was now time to get down to business.
‘You mentioned a fee of twelve thousand francs, Monsieur Manet.’
Manet produced a thick hardback book out of the satchel he held on his lap. He placed it on the table and pushed it towards Lucien.
‘Do you like to read? This novel by the American writer Hemingway is most entertaining,’ he said with a great smile.
Lucien never read anything except architectural magazines. But he did go to the cinema and had seen all the American films based on great works of literature, so he could pretend he’d read the books.
‘Of course, Hemingway.’ Gary Cooper starred in A Farewell to Arms in 1932. It was a damn good film.
Lucien slowly picked up the book and examined the cover, then began to fan the pages. He abruptly stopped when he saw the first franc note nestled in the hollowed-out book.
‘It looks most interesting. I’ll start it tonight before I go to bed.’
‘I know you’ll enjoy it,’ replied Manet.
‘Now, did I hear you correctly when you said you’d be needing additional factory space for your new contract?’ Lucien asked, holding on to the book with both hands in his lap.
‘You did indeed. Why don’t you come to my office the day after tomorrow to discuss the project – say about two. I’ll have all my requirements written out for you. I’m sure you’ll need to go back into the apartment to take a few measurements for a drawing, so hold on to the key.’
The smile suddenly vanished from Lucien’s face. ‘But let me make one thing absolutely clear to you, monsieur. I’ll never do anything like this again.’
‘But of course, I understand completely.’
An awkward silence settled between the two men. Lucien took another sip of his wine. He wanted to get the hell out of there with his new book. Manet smiled and sipped his drink as if he were in no hurry at all.
‘You asked me why I was committing suicide.’
‘Yes, and you told me you’re a devout Christian who wants to help your fellow man,’ said Lucien.
‘Devout? Not at all. I attend mass on Easter and Christmas and that’s it. I do believe that as Christians, we have a basic duty to do what’s right, but that’s not quite the whole story. There’s more to it.’
‘Really?’
‘Monsieur Bernard, people think the aristocracy, with their money and privilege, have everything in life, but they’re dead wrong. The children of my class lack the most important thing: a mother and a father.’
‘You were an orphan?’
‘Not at all. I had a mother and father, but they, like others of their class, never had time for their children – attending endless social events, entertaining in the city and the country, overseeing their estates and investments. I’ll bet in an average week I never spent more than an hour’s time with my mother and father. They would often forget my birthday. When I was at boarding school, I didn’t see them for months or even receive a letter from them. They were simply too busy for me and my brothers and sisters.’
‘That’s a shame,’ said Lucien.
‘No, I was raised by Madame Ducrot. She was my nanny, but she gave me as much love and affection as the best mother could. And she was a Jew.’
‘A Jew? How did she …’
‘I have no idea how my parents picked a Jew to be our nanny. Maybe they weren’t as anti-Semitic as the rest of their kind. Oh, I still got the usual Catholic instruction from priests. But she never hid the fact she was Jewish; in fact, she told us all about it – the holidays, the synagogue, the Exodus – everything.’
Lucien found this fascinating.
‘Several times before the war, I was a house guest of Winston Churchill’s at Chartwell, his estate in England. I once asked him about a photo of an old woman on his mantle, and he told me it was Mrs Everest, his nanny. He called her Woomany. He said that when she died, he was crushed with almost unbearable sadness and grief, a thousand times worse than when his own mother died later. That’s how I felt when my nanny, who was my “real mother”, died. So you see, Monsieur Bernard, in a way, when I hide these people, I’m hiding Madame Ducrot.’
CHAPTER FIVE
Lucien couldn’t wait to get home to tell the news to Celeste. Well, at least the part about the factory. Telling her about Manet’s apartment would put her in grave danger. The apartment job must always remain a secret. As Lucien walked home, he held the book tightly against his chest. He soon realised that any Gestapo agent watching him would think something was up, so he moved the book into one hand and held it loosely by his side, as a person normally would. But because he was terrified that the book would slip out of his hand, hit the pavement, and disgorge all of his francs, he kept an iron grip on it.
As he walked by a telephone booth, an idea occurred to him. He picked up the receiver, deposited his coin, and dialled his mistress, Adele Bonneau. It had been a long time since he’d shared the news of a new commission with her, and she would be quite pleased. A successful Paris fashion designer in her late thirties (late twenties, if you asked her), Adele had a genuine interest in his architectural practice. She always wanted to see the designs and wouldn’t hesitate to offer her opinion, which Lucien loved, although he rarely took her advice. After they had had sex and were lying in bed smoking and drinking wine, it brought him great pleasure to argue with her when she disliked some aspect of a design. It was as sexually arousing to him as their foreplay. As was often the case with mistresses, Lucien felt that Adele was really the kind of woman he should’ve married in the first place. Adele also knew of the latest architectural work being done in Paris, whereas Celeste believed architecture was a man’s business and thus was of no interest to her.
The phone rang several times before Adele picked up. Lucien was thrilled to hear her deep, sexy voice.
‘Adele, my love, I’m going to be doing a new factory for Auguste Manet, the big industrialist,’ announced Lucien.
‘Why, how wonderful, my dear Lucien. That’s thrilling news,’ said Adele. ‘I just love it when you get a new job – you remind me of a five-year-old on Christmas morning. I’m so happy for you. Remember, you must show me the preliminary designs before you present them to Manet.’
