Red Gold

STALIN’S ORDER

The struggle against Germany must not be looked upon as an ordinary war. It is not merely a fight between two armies. In order to engage the enemy there must be bands of partisans and saboteurs working underground everywhere, blowing bridges, destroying roads, telephones and telegraphs, and setting fire to depots and forests. In territories occupied by the enemy, conditions must be made so impossible that he cannot hold out; those helping him will be punished and executed.

Stalin’s Order of June 22, 1941

PARIS. 22 SEPTEMBER, 1941.

Ivanic came out of the Saint-Michel Métro in the early evening, turned right at the first street, then right again to the little impasse they’d told him to look for, and the small door with the ironwork frame. He had the key in his hand but it still took a long time. He had to try it this way and that way, had to stand there and jiggle the thing until the lock decided to open. It was dark inside, he could just make out a stairway. He climbed one flight to a door at the head of the stairs, found a second key left on the molding that let him into a tiny room that seemed to be used as an office. Down below, in the restaurant Agadir, he could hear people talking and laughing, and throbbing oud music played on a wind-up Victrola.

There was a swivel chair at the desk but he didn’t sit down. He paced the office, checking his watch. Noisy outside, the rue de la Huchette, a North African souk around the steps of the church of Saint Séverin. It smelled like the old streets in Marseilles, he thought, sheep liver grilled on hot coals, burnt cumin, and the damp air that hung over the river quais at dusk.

Not so bad, he thought—the crowds, jostling and busy, the dark-eyed women. He wasn’t in a hurry to try the food, but that was him. Food wasn’t something he liked. He’d done his prison time east of the Oder: in Lodz—for pamphlets, in Esztergom—just because, and then, worst of all, the Lukishki, in Vilna. Abduction. The Lithuanian police had been waiting for them. Two years of that. And it could have been forever, but in August ’39 the Hitler-Stalin Pact was signed and the NKVD came into the city and let Ivanic and his friends out of jail. Two years of that had done something to his appetite. He wondered if maybe it was the lentil mash they’d fed him in prison. Or maybe not. Maybe it was the work he did. He looked at his watch again, where were they? He was in his late twenties, tall and pale, with sleepy eyes. He’d grown up in Salonika but he wasn’t Greek, he came from farther up the Balkans. It was a long story.

In Vilna, he’d decided that he wasn’t going to prison again. But the people he worked for wouldn’t let him carry a weapon in Paris. Only for work. That scared Ivanic—even with the finest passports and Ausweis and all the other paper the Germans thought up, things could go wrong. He heard somebody coming up the stairs and hoped it was the man he was supposed to meet and not the Sûreté, or the Gestapo.

A key turned in the lock, Ivanic backed against the wall. The door opened slowly. “Hello? Ivanic?” Heavily accented French.

“Are you Serra?”

“Yes.”

They shook hands, both of them wary. Serra had dark hair, tousled and cut short, was perhaps in his thirties but he seemed much older than that. Ivanic knew he’d been a miner in Asturias—thus a specialist in dynamite—then, during the Spanish war, an operative for the Republican secret service. He had escaped over the Pyrenees, one of the last to get through after the fall of Barcelona in 1939, was arrested at the border, and spent the next year staring at an incomprehensible world through French barbed wire.

Serra had a little bag of tobacco. They tore strips off a page of Le Jour and smoked while they waited.

“Have you seen him?” Ivanic asked.

“Yes, I watched him. For a few days.”

“What is he like?”

“An athlete, perhaps. He stands very straight.”

“They all do.”

“Most of them.” Serra paused a moment. “Were you in Spain?”

“No.”

“I thought perhaps I’d seen you.”

“No. I wasn’t there.”

8:20 P.M. The phone in the office rang three times and stopped. Ivanic looked at his watch. Thirty seconds later it rang again. Ivanic raised the receiver from the cradle and put it back down. Another five minutes and they heard somebody coming up the stairs.

The man who stepped into the office was called Weiss. He had black and gray hair, combed back from the forehead, and wore a dark overcoat with the collar turned up. The world’s plainest man, Ivanic thought. A salesman? Teacher? Editor of a technical journal, something esoteric and difficult? Perhaps he’d once done something like that. Or maybe it was simply that Weiss became what other people thought he was. In a smoky Berlin union hall, he was a labor official. Later on, a Milanese intellectual, or a Dutch civil servant. Ivanic had once been on the edge of a conversation where a senior Comintern operative had said, “Of course Weiss is Hungarian—like all spies.”

He said hello to them, put his scuffed leather briefcase on the desk, unbuckled the straps, and hunted around inside. “Haupt mann Johannes Luecks,” he said. He handed Ivanic a photograph, a clandestine shot taken from a first-floor window, slightly blurred, the blacks and whites faded to gray. The officer, a captain, had his head turned toward the camera. He was hatless, fair-haired, in Wehrmacht uniform. “He commands a company of combat engineers,” Weiss said. “Joined the army in ’32, from Bremerhaven. Here is a list. Where he goes and what he does.”

Ivanic passed the photo to Serra and took the sheet of paper from Weiss. A twenty-four-hour schedule with daily headings. At the top of the page, an address. “The rue St.-Roch,” Ivanic said.

“Yes, only the best. He’s billeted with a French family.”

“St.-Roch. It runs off St.-Honoré?”

“That’s right.”

“Busy at lunchtime.”

“Yes, a commercial neighborhood, but quiet in the evening.”

“Home around six-thirty.”

“Yes. A pipe, a comfortable chair, a newspaper.”

“A pleasant life.”

“It is. The family is completely intimidated—they wait on him hand and foot.”

Serra shook his head. Handed the photograph back to Weiss and took the schedule from Ivanic.

“When do you want it done?” Ivanic asked.

“Up to you,” Weiss said. “But as soon as possible. The Wehrmacht is just outside Moscow. They are burning the villages around Mogilev, taking the men away for slave labor. The local officials are simply shot. The way we make them pay for that is partizan action, behind the lines, which means anywhere from Mogilev to Brittany.”

“This Hauptmann Luecks,” Ivanic said, “is he anyone special?”

“No,” Weiss said. “And that’s the point we want to make. He’s a German, that’s all, and that’s enough.”

They killed him the following Thursday. At four in the afternoon they met in a greenhouse in the Jardin des Plantes, where the weapons were buried beneath the gravel. 7.65 pistols, fine automatics from J. P. Sauer und Sohn in the town of Suhl, normally issued only to Luftwaffe officers. They rode bicycles with crowds of homebound workers in a light rain across the Seine, then along the avenues to St.-Honoré. On the rue St.-Roch they waited until almost seven, when Hauptmann Luecks was dropped off by a Wehrmacht staff car, shoulders hunched as he hurried through the rain toward his doorway, carrying a paper-wrapped pâtisserie by its pink ribbon.

They followed him into the lobby. He didn’t like it—two men in caps with their jacket collars up. He turned to glare at them and they took the automatic pistols out and fired three or four times each. The shots were thunderous in the small space, echoing off the marble walls. Luecks was knocked backward. He tumbled to the lobby floor and tried to roll toward the door. The two men shot him again and he lay still, a cloud of blue smoke hanging in the air, the echoes ringing away to silence.

They heard the whine of a motor and looked up, saw the elevator cables moving in the small cage. The car stopped in the lobby. A well-dressed woman stared out at them, at the German officer on the floor. She reached out and pressed a button, the elevator went back up.

PARIS. 2 OCTOBER .

It continued to rain. Jean Casson sat in the parlor of a small apartment in Neuilly, reading a newspaper—COWARDLY TERRORIST ATTACK IN THE RUE ST.-ROCH—for the second time. On the eastern front, retreating Russian divisions had been forced to blow up the Dnieper dam, the pride of Soviet engineering in the 1930s. Casson reread the movie section, the sports, the obituaries.

“Stay here and wait,” the detective had told him. He slept on a narrow bed in a spare room, took silent meals with Monsieur and Madame Kerner, an Alsatian couple in their sixties. He had been saved, for what or why he did not know. The people who had found him hadn’t yet let him in on their plans but he had no doubt they would get around to it. Meanwhile, there was bread to eat, and soup, and long, silent evenings.

He was afraid of Kerner, a huge man with a tread that made the old floor creak. Kerner was his jailer—a courteous one it was true but a jailer nonetheless. A retired army officer. On the tables in the parlor there were photographs of Kerner in uniform—with brother officers, solemn faces staring into the camera—taken in Damascus, in Tunis, in Dakar. A colonial soldier, apparently, with campaign ribbons and medals on a framed black velvet cloth hung on the wall, and a tiny Croix de Guerre in the lapel of his blue suit. One of the pictures was inscribed: The Brotherhood of the IX Commando. Casson could see some sort of insignia on the uniforms, but he had no idea what it meant.

The suit was worn only on Sundays, when the Kerners took turns going to Mass—they would not leave him alone in the apartment. Even so, life had improved. From time to time he insisted on going out. He couldn’t go by himself, Kerner had to come along, but at least he could spend a few hours away from the stuffy apartment and its ticking clocks. The detective had supplied him with better identity papers, the real thing, made by the préfecture. Perhaps made “during lunch,” when the supervisors were not in the office, but the effect was the same. He remained Jean Louis Marin. He’d also been given some money and ration coupons, enough for cigarettes and a few small necessities.

One afternoon, special dispensation, he went to the movies, to the little Régence out by Auteuil. The second feature was his own Night Run. It was heaven to Casson to lose himself in the fragrant darkness of a movie theatre, even with Kerner sitting beside him. Three minutes in, Citrine, as Dany, a clerk in her parents’ drapery shop. She is sitting in a crowded train compartment with Valmas, the small-time hood who, eighty minutes later, will die for love of her. Dany: in her new suit bought in Auxerre’s best shop, hopeful, shy, burning.

They find each other immediately, as the train to Paris is leaving the platform. On Valmas’s face, the smile of a predator—If I want you, I can have you. After a moment, Dany looks away. Yes, I know. They pass a small station north of the town. The camera cuts to the passenger next to Dany: a middle-aged lady with a gimlet eye, a mouth tight with disapproval, and a hat laden with artificial fruit.

Bernadine Chouette, Casson thought. Who had disapproved of every imaginable thing in twenty films. How good she was, a stage actress with years of character roles. She’d been horrified when the director, old Marchand, had produced the ghastly hat. “Oh no, you can’t be serious!” But he was—serious, and right. She had the pickle face and the vinegar stare, but the hat made it all work. Of course real life didn’t play that way. Chouette, a cigar-smoking habitué of garter-belt parties at the Monocle Club, was famous for exquisitely filthy songs, music-hall routines that caused tears of laughter to ruin mascara.

Toward the end of the movie, a scene in a hotel room—a hide-out. For Dany and Valmas it’s the last time and they know it. Citrine sits on the edge of the bed, her lovely breasts in a soft sweater. “No one else,” she says, shaking her head, slow and resolute. “Not ever again.” Casson bit his lip. She’d been eighteen when Night Run was shot. Later she became an actress, but not that day, not that day.

As good as it was to be in a movie theatre it was just as bad to come out, into the brutal daylight. “Did you like it?” Casson asked.

“Well, that sort of thing . . .”

Casson nodded. He’d guessed that Kerner didn’t know who he was, just a fugitive that had to be hidden. “Would you like to walk? It’s not so far.”

“No,” Kerner said. “We must go home now.”

The rain had started again, it was a different city when it rained. They walked to the Métro. That day, Gestapo troops had begun to burn the synagogues of Paris; brown smoke drifted across the gray afternoon, sometimes visible above the rooftops.

PARIS. 20 OCTOBER.

Madame Kerner was knitting, her needles clicking as she worked. Casson stared out a window at the apartment across the way, whose curtains were always drawn. The boredom of being hidden gnawed at him, he was ready to escape. By now his life at the Hotel Victoria glowed in recollection—he’d been hungry but he’d been free.

The Kerners’ telephone was on the wall in the kitchen. It rang, for the first time since Casson had been in the apartment. Madame Kerner looked up from her knitting. Kerner went to answer it. From the parlor, Casson could hear the conversation.

“Who is it?”

Kerner listened.

“Very well. What time?”

Again.

“Yes, sir,”

And again.

“Yes, sir.”

And, finally: “At fifteen-thirty, you say. In Courbevoie.”

An hour later, Casson left. Madame helped him fold “his things”—two books from a secondhand stall, some socks and underwear—into brown paper, which she tied for him with string. “Adieu, monsieur,” she said. And wished him good health.

Kerner led the way to the meeting. They took several Métros, waited on line at a Gestapo Kontrol, eventually reached Courbevoie, just across the Seine from Neuilly but a separate municipality. They walked to the Hotel de Ville, the town hall, a complicated maze of bureaux with long lines outside offices that handled taxes, licenses, ration coupons, marriage certificates, stamps, and attestations for nearly everything—all the bureaucratic witchcraft of French existence. At the entry to the building, Kerner told him where he was to go, and then they said good-bye.

“Thank you for letting me stay with you,” Casson said.

“You’re welcome.” Very formally, they shook hands. Casson entered the building and climbed a staircase to the second floor. The halls were crowded, people everywhere; some wandering lost, some grimly determined, some glancing from the address on an official letter up at the titles on office doors. Is this it?

Finally, Casson found the Department of Birth Registry, shuffled through the line, gave his name as Marin, and was directed to a small office at the end of the hall. He opened the door, and there at the desk, in a dark suit, was a man he had known as Captain Degrave.

In May of 1940, when Casson was reactivated as a corporal in the Section Cinématographique of the Forty-fifth Division, Degrave had commanded the unit. They’d taken newsreel footage of the French defense of the fort at Sedan, then headed for the relative quiet of the Maginot line, only to find the roads made virtually impassable by refugees from the fighting in the north. On a fine May morning, in a field near Bouvellement, a Stuka dive-bomber had destroyed both their vehicles and their equipment, and Degrave had disbanded the unit, sending Casson south to Maçon to wait out the end of the war at an isolated army barracks.

Wherever he’d been since that day, and whatever he’d done, Degrave was as Casson remembered him: a heavy, dark face, thinning hair, perhaps a little old for the rank of captain, with something sorrowful and stubborn in his character. Degrave had always been distant, a man not given to idle conversation. Still, they had served together under fire, in a blockhouse defending the French side of the river Meuse, and they were glad to see each other.

“So,” Degrave said as they shook hands, “we survived.”

“We did,” Casson said. “Somehow. What about Meneval?” Meneval had been the unit cameraman. Every day he’d called his wife from phones in village cafés.

“He returned safely to Paris.” Degrave smiled. “And to married life.”

“And then, you left the army?”

“I’m with the Office of Public Works, now, in Vichy. We’re responsible for the maintenance of roads, bridges, that kind of thing.”

“In the ZNO?”

“Yes, but we have projects in the German-administered region as well.”

Such as hiding film producers in Neuilly apartments, Casson thought.

Degrave put a packet of Gitanes on the table. “Please,” he said, “help yourself.” Casson took one and lit it, so did Degrave. From the offices around them they could hear a steady murmur of conversation.

Degrave shook out the match. “In fact, I remain what I always was, a captain in the army, and an intelligence officer.”

Casson thought that over, recalling what the unit had done. “Was the work we did—an intelligence mission of some kind?”

“Yes and no. It wasn’t clandestine, but in time of war there is a great need for documentation. It was a job I, well, the truth is they stuck me with it. You know France, you know bureaucracy, you know politics, so you will understand how I got sent off to make newsreels of forts on the Meuse. In the end it didn’t matter, we lost the war. But life goes on, and some of us continue to serve.”

“With de Gaulle?”

Degrave’s no was emphatic. “The public works office is a cover organization. We have reassembled the former Service des Renseignements, the intelligence service—the operational arm of the Deuxième Bureau.”

Degrave waited for a response, Casson nodded.

“As for de Gaulle, and the Gaullist resistance, of course we support their objectives. But they are based in London, they exist on British goodwill and British money. And they have close ties— maybe too close—with British intelligence, whereas our service acts solely in the interest of France. That may sound like a fine distinction, but it can make a difference, sometimes a crucial difference. Anyhow, the reason I’m telling you all this is that we want to offer you a job. Certainly difficult, probably dangerous. How would you feel about that?”

Casson shrugged. He had no idea how he felt. “Is it something I can do?”

“We wouldn’t ask if we didn’t think so.”

“What is it?”

“Liaison. Not the traditional form, but close enough.”

“Liaison,” Casson said.

“You would work for me.”

Casson hesitated. “I suspect you know I was involved with espionage. In the first year of the war. It was a disaster. One factory was burnt down, but British agents were arrested, and a friend of mine was killed.”

“Did the factory need to be burnt down?”

“It made war material for the Germans.”

“Then maybe it wasn’t a disaster, maybe getting the job done simply cost more than you felt it should.”

Casson had never thought of it that way. “Maybe,” he said.

“Tell me this, do you have a family? Are there people who depend on you?”

“No. I’m alone.”

“Well,” Degrave said. The word hung in the air, it meant then what do you have to lose? “You can turn us down right away, or you can think it over. Personally, I’d appreciate your doing at least that.”

“All right.”

Degrave looked down. “The sad truth is,” he said quietly, “a country can’t survive unless people fight for it.”

“I know.”

“You’ll think it over, then. Take an hour. More, if you like.”

There was no point in waiting an hour. He took the job; he didn’t have it in his heart to refuse.

Casson walked for a long time, his worldly goods in the brown-paper package under his arm. Degrave had given him a few hundred francs and the name of a hotel, and told him he would be contacted.

He crossed the Seine on the pont de Levallois. Barges moved slowly on the steel-colored water, swastika flags flapping in the autumn breeze. Leaning on the parapet, a few old men fished for barbel with bamboo poles. There was a market street at the foot of the bridge; long lines started at the doors and wound around the corners. Some of the windows had Entreprise Juive painted in white letters, two or three had been smashed, the shattered glass glittering on the floors of the empty shops. On the walls of the buildings, the Germans had posted proclamations: “All acts of violence and sabotage will be punished with the utmost severity. Acts of sabotage are held to include any damage to crops or military installations, as well as the defacing of posters belonging to the occupying powers.” An old poster, Casson saw, dated June of 1940, the heavy print faded in the sun and rain. Newer versions promised death for a long list of violations and, Casson noted with regret, they had not been “defaced”—no cartoons, no slogans.

There was a café across the street, he sat at the bar and ordered a glass of wine. Je m’en fous, he thought, fuck it. He didn’t want to fight. He wanted to hide, that was the truth. Find a woman, crawl up into some garret, and wait for the war to end.

He drank the wine, it burned his throat going down. “What is it?” he asked the man behind the bar.

“Sidi Larbi, fourteen percent. From Algeria. Care for another?”

“All right.”

Degrave had been a good officer, up on the Meuse. And when it was clear that the German tanks would cross the river, his friends on the general staff had pulled them out. He owed his life to Degrave.

He paid the bill and headed west, toward the 17th. It was almost dark. It had been gray all afternoon, the autumn grisaille settled down on the stone city. Now, just at dusk, the sun came out, lighting fires in the clouds on the horizon as it set.

PARIS. 26 OCTOBER.

The Hotel Benoit. It was a place, as it happened, that he’d visited more than once, though he’d never actually slept there. The hotel was a monument to the midday love affair. The proprietors were discreet, and had an ancient well-seasoned arrangement with the police, so identity cards were never too carefully scrutinized and generations of “Duvals” and “Durands” had found comforting anonymity at the Benoit. “Society must have laws,” his lawyer friend Arnaud used to say, “and society must have convenient means to evade them.”

Casson’s room looked out over the street and a small park—the sound of dead leaves rattling in the wind put him to sleep at night. The secret life of the hotel sometimes reminded him too much of his past—couples with averted eyes, the scent of perfume in the air, and now and then, in the afternoon, a lover’s cry.

Degrave left a message at the desk for him and on the night of the 26th they met in a nearby hotel.

“You’re comfortable?” Degrave said.

Casson said he was.

Degrave took his jacket off and hung it on the back of the chair. Casson sat on the edge of the bed. “What we are trying to do right now,” Degrave said, “is get in touch with the various resistance groups and establish lines of communication with them. Eventually, we will all have to work together. It’s now clear that Germany will not invade Great Britain, so Great Britain will have to find a way to invade occupied Europe. And they can’t win without aggressive resistance and intelligence networks on the Continent.

“At this moment, the most active resistance group is the FTP, the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, named for the guerrilla fighters in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. The FTP is the clandestine action group of the French Communist Party. We want you to make contact with them, on behalf of the intelligence network we’re operating in Vichy.”

Degrave paused, waiting for Casson to respond. “How would I do that?” Casson said.

“You’ll find a way. We’ll help you, but in the end you will do it by yourself.”

That’s madness, Casson thought. It would never happen. “You want me to pretend to join them?” he said.

“No, that won’t work. They’re organized in cells, units completely separated from each other, to make penetration agents virtually useless. You will have to approach them as Jean Casson, a former film producer, acting on behalf of the network in Vichy. Honesty is the only way in.”

Casson nodded—that much at least made sense. “Why me?” he said.

“It must be somebody neutral, apolitical, not a socialist, not a conservative. Somebody who has not fought in the political wars. You have certainly had contact with party members in the film industry—incidental, without problems. They will know who you are, they will know you haven’t worked against them.”

That was true. His screenwriter, Louis Fischfang, had been a Marxist—in fact a Stalinist. He wasn’t the only one. There was Fougère, from the electricians’ union; the actor René Morgan, who’d fought in Spain; many others. He’d never cared about their politics as long as they didn’t shut his sets down.

“The fact is, Casson, everybody likes you.”

From Casson, a very hesitant nod. First of all it wasn’t true, there were plenty of people who hated him. Second of all, a certain professional affability wasn’t, he thought, the key to being trusted by gangs of red assassins. But then, Degrave wasn’t exactly wrong either. People did like him—often enough because, when it came to money or social status, to sex lives or politics, he truly did not care.

“The more you think about it,” Degrave said, “the more you’ll see what we see.” He paused a moment. “It’s also true that you will come bearing gifts. What those might be I can’t say, but we know the party, we’ve had agents among them from time to time, and we know how they operate. They will demand concrete evidence of good faith—they couldn’t care less about words. Does all this make sense?”

“Yes.”

“We’ve been fighting the party since 1917, there is no question that their aim is to rule this country. All during the 1930s they established networks in France, particularly in the armament industry. There was the Lydia Stahl case, the Cremet case, operations of all kinds. Some of them made the newspapers, some simply died a quiet death, and some we never uncovered. They tried to steal our codes, they agitated on the docks and in the defense industries, they spied on the scientists.

“The party was declared illegal—driven underground—in ’38. They survived, they prospered—for them, secrecy is like water in the desert. And in 1940, when France was invaded and the Hitler-Stalin Pact was still in effect, they urged the workers not to fight their German comrades. After the surrender, the Germans allowed the party to publish Humanité, which labeled de Gaulle a tool of British imperialism. Then, when Russia was invaded last June, a somersault.”

“That I do remember.”

“Shameless. But, up to that point, there was virtually no French resistance to German occupation. Oh, you’d see things now and then. In the window of a bookstore on the rue de Rivoli, there was a china figurine of a spaniel lifting its hind leg—it just happened to be adjacent to a copy of Mein Kampf. There’d been a few student demonstrations, one of them, in the Bois de Boulogne, was bloody, but not by intention. We saw a few leaflets—‘Frenchmen, you are not the stronger side. Have the wisdom to await the moment’—but that was about it. The French people had adopted attentisme, the strategy of waiting. That was tantamount, as far as we could see, to collaboration.”

“I saw it firsthand,” Casson said.

“In Passy?”

“Yes. Most people were afraid to do anything.”

“Not the communists. Last June, when Russia was invaded, it was as though somebody had kicked a hornets’ nest. Suddenly, German officers were being shot down—it wasn’t hard, they walked around the town as though they owned it. In October, the German commandant of Nantes was assassinated. In reprisal, forty-eight hostages were killed. Other attacks followed, the Germans retaliated. They guillotined Jean Catelas, a member of the party’s central committee, they executed communist lawyers and Polish Jews—forty for one, fifty for one. The FTP never blinked. According to the old Bolshevik maxim, reprisal killing simply brings in new recruits, so it wasn’t hurting them.”

“Is that true?”

“It is. But for some, a little too cold-blooded. The policy of the Gaullist resistance is to assassinate French traitors, but they don’t attack German nationals. The people in Moscow, who run the French Communist Party, no doubt find that a rather dainty distinction, but then their war is much worse than anything that goes on over here. We’ve heard, for instance, that the Germans around Smolensk were having hunting parties, like English county fox-hunts, with beaters flushing Jews and peasants from the woods and soldiers shooting them down.

“The Russians retaliated. An SS Obergruppenführer heard a rumor about buried gold at the Polyakovo state farm. He led a unit to the farm and they started to rip the buildings apart, looking for it. The manager begged them to stop, explained that without shelter the peasants would die of cold when winter arrived. Please, he said, give me twenty-four hours to produce the gold. The SS officer agreed, and left a detachment of four men there to ensure the manager didn’t make a run for the forest. The next day, the SS unit returned. All the buildings had been burned down, only the office was left standing. Inside, on a desk, was a large leather box with the word Gelb, gold, written on it in white paint. When they opened the box, they found the heads of the four soldiers they’d left on guard.”

Degrave paused, waited for Casson to respond.

“And this is just the beginning,” he said.

“That’s right, and it may go on for twenty years. The FTP leadership is certainly under intense pressure from Moscow—do something, anything—which is why we feel they can be approached.”

He went for a walk after the meeting, to clear his head in the night air, and thought about what Degrave hadn’t said. The war between the secret services and the French communists went back a long way—maybe all the way to 1789. The working class and the aristocracy had been at it for at least that long. Casson remembered a time when he was at university, at the École Normale Supérieure. Some of the conservative normaliens, wearing white gloves, had taken over the running of the buildings to break a strike by the maintenance workers. Degrave, and no doubt his colleagues, came from that class, which had always provided officers for military service. Not so much rich as old, very old, a landed aristocracy that took its names from the villages it had named in the Middle Ages. What, Casson wondered, were they doing with somebody like him? He wasn’t a leftist, but he wasn’t one of them. He wasn’t a Jew, but he’d worked in a Jewish profession. He was, when all was said and done, a Parisian. And not a Parisian from the deux-cents familles.

He stopped at a café, stood at the bar, and ordered a beer—it would do for dinner. He’d told Degrave the story of his escape from the Gestapo office. “Don’t worry about it,” Degrave said. “Their list of wanted suspects runs into the thousands. We think you’ll be safe if you stay out of trouble—most of the people arrested these days are betrayed. Jealous neighbors, jilted mistresses, that kind of thing.”

No danger there, Casson thought.

More than likely, the communists would kill him. These people didn’t spend time brooding about your motives. If they sensed a threat, they shot you. They were idealogues, at war with anyone who stood in their way. One of Casson’s university friends used to say, with a flicker of contempt, “They believe everything they can prove, and they can prove everything they believe.” True. But they’d fought in Spain, and they died for what they believed in.

He left the café, headed away from the hotel. He was restless, wanted to avoid the small, silent room as long as he could. Suddenly, the streets were familiar, somehow he had worked his way back to his old neighborhood, the Passy district of the 16th. He crossed the rue de l’Assomption, where his wife, Marie-Claire, lived with her boyfriend, Bruno, the owner of an automobile dealership. Casson stared up at the blackout curtains. Were they home? You could usually tell if there was a light on. No, he thought not. They were out, probably at a dinner party. He moved on. Coming toward him, a Luftwaffe officer with a Frenchwoman on his arm. A handsome man, hawk-nosed, with proud bearing, the brim of his hat shadowing his eyes. “Oh but no,” the woman said, “that can’t possibly be true.” Then she laughed—apparently it was true.

The rue Chardin. His old building, his apartment on the fifth floor with a small balcony. Through the glass doors he had looked out at the top third of the Eiffel Tower. From the telltale glow at the edge of the curtains he was pretty sure somebody was home.

A silhouette moved toward him through the darkness. A woman, bent over slightly, walking quickly. “Madame Fitou!” It was out before he could stop it—his old concierge.

She stopped, peered at him, then clapped a hand over her heart and breathed, “Monsieur Casson?”

He crossed the street. Madame Fitou, in a long black coat with a black kerchief tied under her chin, clearly dressed for night raiding. A string bag of potatoes suggested a visit to the black-market grocer, or maybe one of her countless sisters, all of whom lived in the country and grew vegetables. As he approached she said, “Can it be you?”

“Bon soir, madame,” he said.

“I knew you would return,” she said.

“As you see.”

“Oh, monsieur.”

“Everything going well, madame? With you and your family?”

“I cannot complain, monsieur, and, if I did . . .”

“Not so easy, these days.”

“No, we must—Monsieur Casson, you are here for the shirts!”

“Shirts?”

“I told . . . well, it was a year ago, but I thought, well certainly Monsieur Casson will hear of it.”

“Madame?”

She came closer. “When the German came, Colonel Schaff— Schuff—well, something.” She snorted with contempt—these foreigners and their bizarre names! “However you say it, he had his driver throw your things out in the street. I was able to save, well monsieur, it was raining that day, but I did manage to save some shirts, two of them, good ones. I kept them for you. In a box.”

“Madame Fitou, thank you.”

“But a moment!” she said, very excited, disappearing into the building. Casson stepped back against the wall. He could hear keys in locks, doors opening, then closing. Overhead, a flight of aircraft—no air-raid sirens had sounded so they must be German, he thought. Heading west, to bomb Coventry or the Liverpool docks. The bombers droned away for what seemed like a long time, then Madame Fitou reappeared, very excited still and breathing hard. “Yes,” she said in triumph. “Here they are.”

He took the package, wrapped in a sheet of newspaper, and thanked her again. “Madame Fitou, you must not tell anybody you’ve seen me. It would be very dangerous if you did. For both of us. Do you understand?”

“Ahh”—she said, her expression conspiratorial—“of course.” A secret mission. “You may depend on me, monsieur. Not a word.”

He wished her good evening, then hurried off into the night, damning himself for a fool. What was the matter with him? A few blocks away, in the shadows, he peeled back the newspaper. His dress shirt, for a tuxedo—he used to wear it with mother-of-pearl studs and cufflinks that came to him when his father died. Well, it didn’t matter, he could sell it, there was a used-clothing market on the rue des Francs-Bourgeois. And then, a soft gray shirt he’d worn with sweaters on weekends. It smelled of the cologne he used to wear.

EVREUX. 27 OCTOBER.

Six-thirty in the morning, the night shift at Manufacture d’Armes d’Evreux rode through the factory gates on their bicycles, heading home to the workers’ districts at the edge of the city. Weiss moved along with them, pedaling slowly, his briefcase under one arm. Down a cobbled street—mostly dirt now—past a few ancient buildings and into a small square with a church and a café. He chained his bicycle to the fence in front of the church and went into the café. It was crowded, wet dogs asleep under the tables, a smoky fire in the fireplace, two women, their makeup much too bright, served chicory infusions to the men at the bar.

Weiss looked around the room and spotted Renan in the corner, playing chess. A hard head with a fringe of gray hair, a worn face, maybe handsome long ago. He rested his chin on folded hands and concentrated on the board. When he saw Weiss, he spoke quietly to his opponent, who rose and left the table. Weiss sat down and studied the board for a moment. “So, Maurice,” he said, “it looks like I’ve just about got you.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Renan said. He had a deep voice, hoarse, his words fast and clipped.

“How’s life treating you?” Weiss said, moving a rook.

Renan glanced up at him, almost smiling. He’d obviously made a poor move. “It goes along.”

“And work?”

Renan raised his eyebrows, not much of a gesture but from him it meant a lot. “The boches have their noses everywhere. It’s pretty bad just now.”

“We need some things.”

Renan nodded. Took a pawn with his knight.

“Still making the MAS 38?” Pistolet Mitrailleur MAS Modèle 38—a 7.65 caliber submachine gun.

“Yes. The word’s around that we’re going to be retooled, for German weapons, but they’re still in production.”

“We need some.”

“How many?”

“All we can get.”

Renan looked doubtful. “Not so easy, these days. They’ve got informants. And there are German guards, field-police types, at the factory gates. Sometimes they make us turn out our pockets. And they control the trucks and railroad cars as they leave.”

“Can you try?”

“Of course.”

Renan took out a pipe and a tin of tobacco, packed the bowl with his index finger, and lit up. He’d been a militant for thirty years. Back in the labor wars of the late thirties, the armament workers at Renault, who built tanks, and at Farman, where they made airplanes, had sabotaged the weapons. Loose nuts and bolts were left in gearboxes and transmissions, iron filings and emery dust in the crankcases. When the tank crews tried to fight in 1940, they discovered saw marks on the oil and gasoline ducts, which made them break open after a few days’ use. At Farman they had snipped brass wires in the engine, allowing aviation gas to drip on hot exhaust pipes. Some of the French fighter planes went down in flames before they ever saw a Messerschmitt.

When Renan had been asked to do the same sort of thing at Evreux, he had followed orders. In fact, he had never said no—not to Weiss, not to the Comintern operative who had preceded him.

“How soon?” Weiss said.

Renan thought it over. “Maybe on the weekend. We have one German, he used to be an ironworker in Essen. We set him up with a girlfriend in town, which is how we talk to him, and we keep him in a good mood with brandy, whatever we can lay our hands on. But then, you understand, we’re talking about one or two pieces, if he’ll agree to look the other way. Some things he can fix with his pals at the gate, tools and so forth, but not this.”

Weiss nodded grimly. It was the same story at Saint-Etienne and the Schneider works—France’s equivalent of Krupp.

“Want us to try it?” Renan said.

“Yes. Do the best you can.”

They sat for a while. Weiss stared at the board. The rook really had been the wrong move. “Well,” he said. “Time to be going.”

“Have somebody stop by the first part of next week.”

“Here?”

Renan nodded.

“Thanks for the help,” Weiss said.

“Don’t mention it.”

Outside, Weiss unlocked his bicycle and pedaled off toward the railroad station. Want us to try it? Quietly, in his own way, Renan had told him it wouldn’t work. Of course he would make the attempt, and take the consequences, he simply wanted Weiss to know that the attempt was going to fail.

But Weiss had no choice. Moscow Center was pressing him harder than it ever had: he must acquire battlefield weapons, he must be prepared to arm partizan units, he must attack German targets in occupied France. He worked with the senior operations officers of Service B—the FTP’s intelligence section—which made him roughly the equivalent of a colonel in the army, and he had been ordered to send troops into combat.

What he had, in Paris, were assassination teams, like Ivanic and Serra, perhaps twenty operatives at any given moment. Then there were the longtime militants, like Renan, and the volunteers, almost all of them young and inexperienced.

The Center did not care. They’d let him know that wounded soldiers had been let out of military hospitals to serve on the defensive line that ran through the suburbs of Moscow. In Paris, they wanted action, bloody and decisive, and right now. The cost was immaterial.

PARIS. 2 NOVEMBER .

Isidor Szapera climbed the dark stairs quickly, his fingers brushing along the banister. Up ahead, rats scurried away from the approaching footsteps. Time to go, mes enfants, the Chief Rat himself has arrived. Big talk—the building scared him, it always had. The wind sighed in the empty halls and woke up old cooking smells. Sometimes it opened doors, or slammed them shut. The building, on a small street in the back of the 11th Arrondissement, had been vacant since one corner of the roof had collapsed in 1938, when the tenants were thrown out, the doors padlocked, the windows painted with white Xs.

Now it served as the secret base of the Perezov unit, named for a heroic Bolshevik machine-gunner in the civil war that followed the revolution. Unit Commander Szapera opened the door to a room on the third floor, made sure the blanket was securely nailed over the window, and lit a candle in a saucer on a wooden chair. He didn’t own a watch, but he could hear the eight-o’-clock bells from Nôtre Dame de Perpétuel Secours. Ten minutes later, the Line 9 Métro rumbled beneath the building. His meeting was set for 8:20, he was early.

He’d been born in Kishinev—sometimes Rumania, sometimes the Ukraine or the USSR, but for Jews pretty much the same thing. His family got out in 1932, by bribing a Turkish sea captain in Odessa. They reached Poland that summer, when he was ten, then made their way to Paris in the fall of 1933, where his father found work as a salesman for a costume jewelry manufacturer. Isidor went to school in the 11th, essentially a ghetto. He managed to learn French, by force of willpower and repetition. It was hard, but not as hard as the cheder in Kishinev, where he’d sat for hours on a wooden bench, chanting passages of Torah to commit them to memory.

That old stuff, he thought. It kept the Jews down; weak and powerless. In the struggle of the working classes, you didn’t pray, you fought back. Did Rabbi Eleazer mean this? Or did he mean that? Meanwhile they kicked the door down and took you away.

It wasn’t a theory. They’d escaped from the cossacks in Kishinev and the anti-Semitic gangs in Lublin, but the Germans came for them in Paris. In the fall of 1940 his father sensed what was coming, tried to get a letter out to the relatives in Brooklyn—by now named Shapiro—then made arrangements for the three children to stay with a French Jewish family in Bobigny, on the outskirts of the city. A year later, August 1941, they heard a rumor: the police were planning to detain Jews of foreign nationality. Home from school with a cold and fever, Isidor was sent off to Bobigny. The rest of the family wasn’t so lucky. The police had come through the 11th on a rafle, a roundup. When Isidor came home, the apartment was silent. They were gone.

At that point, the Kornilov unit had been in operation for six months. Commander Szapera, just turned nineteen, his cousin Leon—two years younger—his classmate Kohn, and his girlfriend, Eva Perlemère. Eva was not a refugee like the others. She came from a good family—her father was a theatrical agent—with money, a family that had been in Paris for generations. But, since the August rafle, she had been a dedicated member of the unit.

In the fall of 1941, Isidor Szapera left school. He got a job unloading trucks at Les Halles, stayed in contact with party militants, broke a few windows, left a few leaflets in the Métro, organized spontaneous labor actions.

Not enough, not nearly. By then, it wasn’t only the Germans who wanted race war. He had come to hate them physically, to hate their faces, the way they walked, or laughed. They had stolen his family. His poor father, not a strong man, much better at love than anger, would try to protect his wife and children, would protest— Szapera knew this—and would, trembling and indignant, be casually knocked aside. Commander Szapera refused to mourn, tears of sorrow and tears of rage were just tears as far as he was concerned, and he had more important things to do.

Footsteps on the stairs, light but certain. Weiss. Szapera stepped into the hall, called out softly, “I’m up here.”

Weiss came toward him, his briefcase beneath his arm.

“I hope you put the door back,” Szapera said.

“I did, yes.”

After scouting the building for several days, Szapera and his friends had gone to work on the door in the back courtyard, carefully prying the metal flange free so the screws could be reseated in the wooden frame and the padlock stayed in place.

Weiss sat on a blanket on the floor and they made small talk for a time. Did Szapera need food? Another blanket? It was almost paternal, but Weiss couldn’t stop himself. Szapera was like the kids he’d grown up with. Much too pale, with curly hair and soft eyes—everything was a joke, nothing could hurt them. A long time ago, Weiss thought, long before he had become “Weiss”—his seventeenth name.

“The car,” Weiss said. “Can you depend on it?”

“Don’t worry. It’s a good one. A Talbot.”

“How many doors?”

“Four.”

“Where is it?”

“In a village. Bonneval, near Chartres. The Perlemères have a little house there, for vacations. When the Germans came, they hid the car in a barn.”

“Forgive my asking—you know how to drive?”

“No. Eva does. Her father used to let her drive around the village.”

“How will you get it there?”

“We’ll come at dawn, just after curfew. We found a garage nobody uses, in Saint-Denis. We can get there from the village on back roads, then we’re eight minutes from Route 17, near Aubervilliers.”

“Eight minutes?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know?”

“We timed other cars. German cars.”

“All right. Eight minutes.”

“What about the guns?”

Weiss unbuckled the straps of his briefcase, opened the flap, and took out three revolvers and a small box. The guns were used, six-shot models with medium-length barrels. Szapera took one and examined it. The handgrip was scarred and scratched, the front sight filed flat, so it wouldn’t snag a pocket; the chambers were empty. Below the cylinder, the name of the manufacturer was stamped into the metal, then a word in a language he didn’t know that probably meant company.

“There’s a fourth,” Weiss said. “But it can’t be picked up until tomorrow. Be here tomorrow night, same time, I’ll have somebody bring it around. As for ammunition, you have thirty rounds in the box.”

Szapera nodded. “Good,” he said. “There won’t be time for more.”

Weiss had wanted to arm the group with a submachine gun, but they would have to do the best they could with the pistols. The man he’d sent up to Evreux on Monday had returned empty-handed. “According to our friends,” he’d told Weiss, “Renan and a comrade called Bernard attempted to steal six crates of MAS 38’s from a loading dock. Somebody knew about it, because the Germans were waiting for them. Bernard is in jail. Renan tried to run away and they shot him.”

Eva came up the stairs at ten. She brought him a delicious sandwich, liverwurst with mustard between thick slices of freshly made white bread, and a jar of cold tea spiked with sugar. “Very good,” he said.

She smiled. “Somebody has to feed you.”

“Oh, I get what I need.”

She lifted an eyebrow, knew it wasn’t true. She had lank brown hair, a narrow, watchful face, and wore thick glasses. He’d never seen her with makeup. “But then she takes her clothes off,” he’d once told Leon, “and you faint.”

“You fainted?”

“I should’ve.”

“What did she look like?”

“Hey, don’t pry.”

He finished the sandwich, it was too late now for her to make it back home before curfew. They talked a little, but they couldn’t wait. She blew out the candle, stood, and undressed. A goddess, he thought. Hips swelling from a narrow waist, full breasts, long sweeps of sallow skin. She was careful with her clothing, folded everything into a neat pile, then lay down beside him. They kissed for a while, then he rolled on top of her.

He shuddered to feel her skin next to his. “Hold me,” she said. “We don’t have to hurry.”

“No, we don’t.” She excited him too much, he thought. She would encourage him to slow down and enjoy it, rest her warm hands below his shoulder blades, a gentling touch that made it happen even faster.

“Oh, my glasses,” she said. She took them off, squinted up at him through the darkness. “Put them where they won’t get broken.”

He reached out, set the glasses down by the wall, just off the edge of the blanket.

“Mm,” she said.

“I love you, Eva,” he said.

“Don’t move,” she whispered. “Just stay in me.”

SAINT-DENIS. 4 NOVEMBER.

A cold morning, the sky at dawn blue and black, trails of fiery cloud on the east horizon. The garage in Saint-Denis smelled like hay. After several tries, the engine turned over and Eva started to maneuver out of the narrow entry. Backing up was not something she did well—in fact, she’d only done it once before. Szapera’s cousin Leon stood to one side of the car, waving his arms. Szapera, turned halfway around in the passenger seat, called out directions. “Now to the left. More, he says. No, stop. Stop!”

They had less time than they’d thought. Kohn had been late. “A problem at home,” he said sheepishly. Szapera wondered what that meant.

“Everybody be quiet,” Eva said. “Let me do this by myself.” The car crawled backward. Szapera looked out the rear window. She was off to one side, but made it with inches to spare.

The courier from Weiss had shown up the night before, a young man in a seaman’s jacket. He’d handed over a fourth weapon, an automatic pistol manufactured in Spain. “Good luck, comrade,” he’d said to Szapera. “Here is something extra from Weiss. Remember, no closer than thirty feet.”

A hand grenade. Szapera held it tight in his left hand. In his belt was the revolver. He’d given Leon the automatic—none of them was exactly sure how it worked, and Leon, just turned sixteen, with glasses much thicker than Eva’s, probably couldn’t hit anything anyhow.

Eva had negotiated the garage by backing straight out, blocking traffic in both lanes. Ignoring the furious honking, she made several moves until at last she got the car headed north. She should probably drive with a cushion, Szapera thought, she could barely see over the steering wheel.

“Can you manage?” he said.

“Don’t make me nervous.” She shifted from first to third. The car rattled and jerked, then ran smoothly.

Just outside the town of Aubervilliers, Eva pulled off the road and waited. Kohn was holding a pocket watch. “7:22,” he said. Szapera had a school friend—a redhead who looked more Irish than Jewish—who worked as a clerk at one of the offices of the Banque de France in Paris. Twice a week, an armored car left the bank with bundles of occupation money, which it took to a Wehrmacht office at an army barracks near Aubervilliers. Szapera had ridden his bicycle out there, observed the armored car going through the gates, and established the time of delivery. He went out again a week later to make sure he had it right. Stalin had robbed banks in Baku to finance underground work, Szapera meant to follow his example. He had proposed the idea to Weiss, who resisted at first, then, in early October, changed his mind.

They waited. Kohn kept looking at his watch. It was quiet in the car, even the crazy Leon shut up for a change. Szapera felt it would be better if they talked, but his mind was blank. He was breathing hard, the hand grenade clutched in his fist.

7:31. 7:34. “They’re late,” Kohn said.

Just then the armored car rumbled past. A van, steel plates bordered by double lines of bolt heads. A very old van, Szapera guessed, box-shaped, tall and unwieldy, like one of those odd-looking machines in newsreels of the 1914 war.

“Let’s go,” Szapera said.

Eva pulled out into traffic, the truck driver she’d cut off thrust his arm out the window and shook his fist.

“You go to hell,” Leon sputtered.

Eva’s face was white. There were two cars between the Talbot and the armored van. A long minute ticked by. Heavy woods on both sides, then the road narrowed for a tiny village. “Now,” Szapera said.

Eva waited—for a car coming toward them in the other lane, followed by two women riding bicycles—then swung out to pass. She oversteered; a wall loomed up in front of them, Leon and Kohn shouted warnings. She managed to get straightened out, then pushed the gas pedal to the floor. The Talbot roared with power, sped past the intervening cars, ran alongside the van. Szapera looked up, the driver turned to see who was next to him. For a moment, they stared at each other.

“Cut him off,” Szapera said.

Eva hesitated—the car—then stepped on the gas and threw the wheel over to the right. But the van driver saw it coming and accelerated, so they didn’t cut in front of the van, they hit it. Just behind the driver’s door, a loud bang of metal on metal then, surprisingly, the two vehicles, tires shrieking, spun around together and slammed into the front of a building.

Side by side, the Talbot and the van faced out into the road. Szapera looked down at his lap, he was covered with broken glass. Carefully he reached over and tried his door. Jammed. Next to him, Eva was holding her head. He had to get out, the plan was to run to the passenger side of the van, threaten the guard with a pistol while Kohn kept the driver at bay, and force them to open the door. In the newspapers, armored car robberies were described in just this way. But the rest of the plan would have to be changed, he realized. They wouldn’t be driving off with the money. Through a hole in the front window he could see steam pouring from beneath the Talbot’s hood.

He turned around, the door on Leon’s side was open. He climbed over the seat, and stumbled into the road. A bicycle lay on its side, a sack had split, spilling onions. A few feet away, Leon was pointing his automatic at the van and pulling the trigger.

In the front seat of the van the Wehrmacht driver looked dazed. Szapera drew the revolver from his belt, pointed it at the driver, and shouted for him to open the door. The man didn’t move. Szapera pulled the trigger, nothing happened. He released the safety and fired again, this time the glass in front of the driver’s face turned to frost and Szapera couldn’t see anything. He suddenly remembered the hand grenade, realized he didn’t have it.

The escort car that had been trailing the armored van finally managed to wind its way through the stalled traffic and skidded to a stop about fifty feet away. A Wehrmacht sergeant rolled down the passenger window, rested a machine pistol on the door frame, aimed carefully, then fired a long burst. A bullet went through Kohn and hit Szapera in the lower back, knocking him on his face. From there, he saw Eva stagger out of the car, revolver in hand. A second burst, the gun flew away, Eva fell in the road.

Szapera started to crawl toward the van—he would kill the guard, start the motor, and ram the escort. Then he saw Leon, running at the escort car with the hand grenade. Szapera heard shots, Leon almost fell, but regained his balance. There was blood on his neck and he clapped his free hand over it as he ran, staying low, in a kind of comic crouch. The dirt in front of him sprayed up as the gun fired. He jerked backward once, then sprinted to the car and jumped through the open window. An instant later, a yellow flash, the doors buckled out and black smoke poured from both sides of the car. A Wehrmacht officer appeared, walking slowly, like a man hypnotized. Five, six steps. He stopped, sat down carefully in the road, and toppled over.

Szapera managed to get to his feet. His back was wet. He reached around, saw blood on his hand. He went to Eva, who was lying facedown, and carefully rolled her over. Her eyes were wide open and she was dead. He stared at her, could not look away.

The sound of approaching sirens startled him. He looked around for Kohn, but he had disappeared. He started running. A man in a suit jumped out of the back of the van and started chasing him. Szapera shot at him, he turned around and ran the other way.

Away from the road. He saw an alley, followed it to the end, and emerged on a village street. To his left, a sign: BOUCHERIE CHEVA-LINE, and a gold horse’s head. Szapera lurched into the shop. He was out of breath, chest heaving. The butcher ran out from behind the counter with a long, thin knife in his hand. He was a big man and bright red, Szapera could see that he was trembling. “What do you want?” He was shouting, clearly terrified. He had heard the crash and the gunfire, now the sirens were closing in.

“Help me,” Szapera said. He fell sideways against the counter, then slid to the floor.

The butcher cursed, threw the knife on the cutting block, wiped his hand on his spattered apron. He grabbed Szapera under the arms and dragged him toward the door.

A woman at the cashier desk cried out, “Put him in the back!”

“No,” the butcher yelled. “Not in the shop.”

“Then upstairs.”

“Ach,” the butcher said, infuriated. He took Szapera around the waist and heaved him onto his shoulder. Outside, a woman screamed, somebody ran past. They turned into a doorway, went up a staircase. The stairs seemed endless; four flights, five. The butcher wheezed as he tried to breathe, the rasping louder and louder as he climbed. At last they entered an attic—darkness, furniture, dust, and cobwebs. The butcher was gasping. He stopped, pressed a hand to his heart. “Salaud,” he growled. “You’ll kill me with this prank.”

He looked around, found an old armoire, set Szapera down inside it, then closed the doors. “Now be quiet,” he hissed. Szapera heard him leave, the whole room shook as he ran off. A door slammed. Then it was silent, and very dark. Szapera shut his eyes. He saw a spinning circle of golden dots, then nothing.