Maxim Jakubowski - Paris Noir

That’s enough. I have, as I mentioned, been drinking, and if I stay in any longer I will become maudlin, listen to more records I shouldn’t. Instead I shall go out, take a petite tournée around the bars. I’ll see if there’s a girl who would like some new shoes.

We must never let the new generations forget what happened here during the Occupation, in their own neighbourhood, the horrors, the deportations,’ Monique, the lycée teacher, said, her eyes sombre. ‘Your presentation on the Resistance will be so welcome… Your work is so important.’

Lucien had just handed the young brunette their Resistance Association pamphlet and smiled. ‘We’re proud to speak with your students,’ he said. ‘That’s our mission here.’

They stood in the small Association office overlooking Canal Saint Martin, with the carved woodwork ceiling, a non-working marble fireplace, and second-hand file cabinets. Mina, a widowed great-grandmother, sat at the worn metal desk affixing address labels on envelopes. Lucien combed back his white hair with his fingers, then gestured to her. ‘Mina and I do what we can. We’re the old-timers and have been doing this work for years. Call and we’ll arrange it.’

Lucien showed the teacher out, opened Le Parisien and sat down. Outside the window, bicycles sped along the cobbled Canal Saint Martin quai; an arched metal bridge spanned the dark green strip of water framed by the blue-washed sky.

‘Tant pis!’ Lucien’s age-sported finger stabbed at an article on the newspaper’s second page. ‘The redhead’s publishing her “Resistance memoirs”.’

‘Her lies, you mean,’ said Mina, shaking her grey-haired head. ‘As if she’d admit being a Jew who slept with a German soldier!’

‘According to this,’ Lucien said, ‘she implies we killed him.’

Mina dropped the volunteer labels on the desk.

‘But how can…?’ The words caught in Mina’s throat as she remembered that rainy July night in 1943. The Wehrmacht’s marching jackboots echoing on the street, below in the damp, dripping cellar, bricking the soldier’s body in the wall by sputtering candlelight. The image of his pink cheeks, the blond hair flashed in front of her.

‘Eh? I don’t believe it, Lucien.’ Mina pulled the sweater tighter around her thin frame.

Jews hid in the quartier to avoid deportation; in coal bins, in attics, in cellars. And in this one cellar, bad luck had it, Lucien’s mother, then the concierge, had hidden their Hebrew school teacher. But La Rouquine, their comrade who lived upstairs, hadn’t known. She’d arranged a rendezvous in the cellar with her lover. Her jackbooted soldier in Feldgrau, the green-grey hue that still sickened Mina.

‘Read that, Mina.’

Mina adjusted her glasses and read ‘nicknamed La Rouquine for her red hair, the author, widow of the former Interior Minister, reveals her exploits with the Resistance on Canal Saint Martin and new theories about her father’s wartime disappearance connected to the suspected murder of a Wehrmacht sergeant…’

Mina stifled the fear welling inside her. ‘Our names aren’t there, Lucien. Relax. That happened in wartime, more than sixty years ago. He was the enemy. What does a dead Nazi matter now?’

‘Keep reading.’

‘La Rouquine insists on setting the record straight concerning a Wehrmacht sergeant who, she claims, allowed Jews to escape and was murdered by Resistants ignorant of his true sympathies.’ Mina’s voice wavered. ‘La Rouquine will show the press Resistance hideouts in a network of cellars including the murder site, in her words, of “a noble” German, following her book launch on Friday.’

Mina crumpled the newspaper.

‘As if he were a Resistance sympathiser!’ she snorted. ‘He was her lover. It’s a publicity stunt, this web of lies. She can’t accuse us… mon Dieu, Lucien, she slept with him!’

‘Her word against ours. And she’s respected, reputed to receive the Légion d’Honneur. No one will believe us.’ He shook his gnarled fist. ‘The Association will be ruined, a scandal… prison, your grandchildren will know…’

‘Prison? We’re old. It was wartime. You make no sense.’

‘La Rouquine suspects we killed him. She’s made him out to be a hero, she’ll accuse us.’

‘He was her lover,’ Mina said. ‘And why after all this time? She knew where to find us, to confront us.’

‘Don’t you see? She’s planned this for years. Strikes out on the offensive, as usual, to bolster the grand illusion she’s a Resistance heroine,’ Lucien said. ‘Her politician husband died, no one’s left to protect her or her lies. She figures we’d never dare accuse her since…’

Mina stared at him. ‘ Tiens! A German soldier bricked up in a basement wall during wartime poses no threat to us. Let him keep mouldering.’

‘But you killed him, Mina,’ Lucien said.

Mina trembled. Why did he bring that up?

‘Or have you forgotten murdering the soldier like everything else that happened that night, Mina?’

As if she could forget.

‘But h… he attacked. It was him or me, Lucien!’

She’d tried to push it away after all these years. The real reason, the haunting past. Mina thought of their years of work supported by donations now at risk. But La Rouquine wouldn’t pursue this, she wouldn’t dare unless… something else incriminating lay in that cellar.

The telephone drilled. Lucien sat up startled. ‘The flics already! Questions…’

She had to act calm.

‘They won’t necessarily link this to us,’ Mina said. ‘Let me handle it.’

She picked up the receiver of the old black rotary dial phone, the tattooed numbers on her arm visible.

‘Resistance Association, bonjour .’ She listened. ‘A murdered Feldwebel … Sergeant?’ Mina’s wrinkled face sagged. ‘Sadly, many of our members who could provide insight have passed… concerning this memoir? Monsieur, the war spawned countless stories and rumours… I have no idea… an interview? We’re very busy… next week… call back and we’ll make an appointment.’

‘Who was that?’

‘A reporter sniffing a story,’ she said. ‘We’ll leave it alone, he’ll go away.’

‘La Rouquine won’t let it go away. You can’t bury your head in the sand now.’

Mina noticed Lucien’s stricken face. Once he’d been young, the ringleader of their Resistance youth group, and wore wooden-soled Occupation-made clogs like the rest of them. At the beginning, their meetings were innocent, Mina remembered. Politically ripe, they met with their friends after Hebrew lessons at Saturday- shut , collecting money for the Spanish Civil War, for the children in Madrid, determined to open people’s eyes. Lucien and the others came from families living in one room like hers. One bag of coal a month for heat. Always the smell of leather seeping from the factory on the heels of the cold. The one metal courtyard spigot, the only source of water for the five-storied building, carried up worn winding stairways. The toilet on the palier, in between floors, the buckets rimmed with ice on January mornings.

Now he was a frightened old man afraid of secrets. More afraid than she was.

She stared at him. ‘What aren’t you telling me, Lucien?’

‘They’ll find them.’

His tone sent a shiver up Mina’s spine.

‘Them? What do you mean?’ A quiver of unease ran through her.

‘Him. That’s what I mean, Mina. We have to check the cellar, make sure there’s no trace of him,’ he said, his thin mouth set in a determined line.

She shook her head. Her arthritis had kicked in, she was on blood pressure medication. No way would she budge.