Michel Déon - The Foundling's War

‘You won’t. You’re a decent boy, stupidly honest, a chump through and through, and because you’re so fond of the high idea you have of yourself you are, quite simply, incapable of being such a rotter.’

He was right. Palfy’s past would remain above suspicion as long as Geneviève kept out of the way of Salah, who knew some of the truth about Palfy, in the shape of the disgraceful Cannes affair in which he had attempted to launch a parallel network of call girls, with Madeleine as their coordinator. But Salah was a long way away and Geneviève remained without a protector. At the same time, however clear-sighted he was about his friend, Jean had no doubt either that Palfy loved Geneviève. She would never make a saint of him, but in any case she could not care less about saints, who made life impossible.

Palfy was quick to guess the nature of any reflections that concerned him and added, abruptly, ‘We’re going to get married.’

He was trying to hurry things up. Papers were missing. Switzerland was refusing to allow him to stay longer than a month at a time. A highly placed lawyer had promised to solve the problem.

‘One is powerless in a country where the law is taken so seriously that they laugh in your face if you attempt to find a way out. Order is all very well, on condition that it’s full of holes.’

But he was still in sincere mood.

‘We must see Julius,’ he said. ‘You can explain your situation to him in person.’

‘Is it absolutely necessary?’

‘Absolutely.’

Madeleine had lately begun holding musical evenings followed by a buffet supper. They were more sought-after for the buffet than for Mozart. German uniforms mixed with scroungers, music lovers and those cheerful crooks Paris was chock-full of. Jean recognised the Pole, whom people were starting to talk about a great deal: an associate of the Bessarabian Joanovici, who was also Jewish, he was plundering France on behalf of the occupying authorities. His wife, a cold, distinguished-looking German, was said to be the mistress of General von Z, head of the requisitions commission. Inside a year, people said, this physically ill-matched couple with such well-matched morals had made a fortune. The Pole’s name being unpronounceable, people called him Polo, a nickname he had quickly assumed to cover up his obscure origins and create an aura of familiarity around himself. Jean loathed him at first sight. In fact, he detested the whole tainted, dishonest, avid, self-satisfied world that had come to gorge on his country and sell it wholesale. The sozzled seriousness of the Germans listening to Sonata No. 40 in B flat major and No. 42 in A major for violin and piano was in stark contrast to the lack of attention of the French. A nation of music lovers? Then why had they started this war, and more importantly, how did they divide their lives between music and killing? It was said that Reinhard Heydrich, the Gauleiter of Bohemia and Moravia, who had died from the injuries sustained in an assassination attempt three weeks earlier, had played the violin to concert standard. The night before the attack, he and his wife had attended a concert. Yet the photograph of him that had appeared in Signal showed a man with the face of a dead salmon, already dead for twenty-four hours, a face so emblematic of cruelty one would never want to look such a person squarely in the eyes. Likewise the bevy of German officers sitting on Madeleine’s Louis XV chairs, lost in the music as if in prayer, reminded Jean of the grotesque farce mounted by Obersturmführer Karl Schmidt in June 1940.

Palfy, it turned out, had not forgotten either. After the concert he came over to Jean.

‘When I think of that idiot of an Obersturmführer … Brahms! God, how boring. Now if he’d played us some Mozart, I’d have forgiven him for shooting us.’

‘Are you bored, Constantin?’ Madeleine asked, materialising behind them.

‘Not here, not ever. Jean and I were remembering an incident from our army days that made Brahms repellent to us for ever. I hope there’ll never be Brahms played here.’

She looked upset. She knew nothing about music, and until her worldly career had taken off had never ventured beyond popular ditties. Julius had observed that she became bored at the concerts he took her to and, passionate about music himself, had engaged a teacher who came twice a week to introduce Madeleine to the great German composers, choose the programme for her supper concerts at Avenue Foch, and teach his very malleable pupil the basic vocabulary that she could use without danger in the company of genuine music lovers. Within months she had become known in Paris as a great patron of music. Her education was naturally patchy, and the name of Brahms unsettled her. She had not heard the name before, or perhaps had forgotten it. She was also scared of Palfy’s sarcasm and cutting wit.

‘Don’t worry, Madeleine, Brahms really existed. He looked like Karl Marx.’

‘I know I don’t know anything,’ she admitted. ‘Don’t make fun of me! Jean … Julius is waiting for you in his study.’

The guests had left the drawing room and made a dash for the buffet. They had not noticed the absence of Julius, whom Jean found sitting at a Napoleon III desk, an annotated sheet of paper in front of him. It was not the same man. Where was his mask? Did the affable, benevolent, impassioned face of this great lover of the French way of life belong to the real Julius, while a false Julius, on duty, composed his features into a glacial, imperious frown? Jean, who had never liked him, was tempted to believe the opposite was true. At this moment he had the supposedly false Julius in front of him, with two lines suddenly appearing at the corners of his thin mouth and accentuating its true severity. Jean found him laughable, despite his cold, impenetrable stare. He sat down without being asked and crossed his legs.

‘I’m listening,’ he said.

Julius, insensitive to such nuances, told him that one did not withdraw without risk from an undertaking such as the one he had been entrusted with. Of course he understood the young man’s motives, his scruples, his fear of arrest by the Portuguese police and handover to a foreign intelligence service, but that was part and parcel of the mission. He had not been chosen for an easy task. Since he had accepted the rewards, so he must one day accept the risks. Men of his age were dying in their thousands on the Eastern front to root out for ever the Marxist canker from Russia. Those who had the good luck not to be combatants owed it to the rest to possess strong nerves.

‘I’ve carried out the mission I was given,’ Jean said, ‘but not in the name of anti-Marxism. In any case I hardly know what Marxism is, and even less what anti-Marxism might be.’

‘Perhaps it’s time you started being interested in ideas.’

‘I occasionally have them. As luck would have it, they’re not usually generalisations …’

Julius smacked the table. The conversation had taken a wrong turn and he regretted having shown so little severity until now that Jean felt able to make fun of him openly.

‘French irony has its charm, I don’t deny it, and I congratulate you on possessing it. But we’re dealing with something else here: you’re withdrawing from a mission whose secrecy is its strength. I’m warning you now: it’s impossible. If you withdraw I shan’t cover you. Not even knowing the affection Madeleine has for you.’

Jean believed him. Julius’s bald statement might have thrown him into a panic. As it happened, it came at exactly the right moment. He studied Julius closely, as if wanting to imprint on his memory the features, hardened by severity, that so ill suited this supposedly decent man mixed up in serious affairs who this evening was at home, having invited everyone who was anyone in the occupation to hear a performance of his two favourite Mozart sonatas. He understood that the time for games was over. The reality of the danger had not yet sunk in, but he sensed it nevertheless, and decided he needed a day’s grace to ensure his freedom.