Quartet for the End of Time (51 page)

One might think, said one of the officers. And if these were ordinary French soldiers I would be inclined to agree with you. We have, he told the prefect, the utmost respect for … most of your units. You see—the officer leaned in, adopting a more conciliatory tone—these were
Negro troops
, he explained. So, you see, the situation is, although unfortunate, in fact not at all surprising.

He then pushed a piece of paper across the table toward the prefect. It was a protocol, detailing the events the officer had just described. Politely, the prefect was asked to sign.

He refused. He knew for a fact that the Senegalese troops who now stood accused of this egregious crime had been massacred—shot down, unarmed, by the approaching German forces; his signature was all that was needed to legitimize their murder. The prefect couldn't decide, in that moment, what was more disgusting: that the thing had occurred at all, or that the attempt being made now to cover it up was so flimsy and apparent that even the German officers seemed to be enjoying the pure mockery of it all.

He would not sign. He would rather be shot.

But he wasn't shot. Instead, he was dragged out into the courtyard of the hotel, where German soldiers took turns beating him. His screams could be heard by the refugees who pressed against the gate to watch; the Germans did not turn them away. The prefect could not tell how long it lasted, but by the time the beating stopped it was dusk, and so he estimated it had lasted seven hours. He was then put into a German car and driven out to look at the “evidence”: nine bodies of women and children stretched out side by side on the dirt floor of an unused barn. Their features, the ones that remained, had already begun to soften, and there was an incredible stench in the air. Even a quick glance would tell you that the dead were victims of an air raid, not a ground massacre. What a sick joke. The prefect almost laughed. Or rather, his breath came out all at once in a rush. He was not sure what it was until he found himself bent over double, vomiting up the remains of the lunch that had been prepared for him many hours before.

He imagined the German guards laughing at him behind their blank expressions, which betrayed nothing.

This is a joke, he said, when he had recovered himself. These are the victims of an air raid. They have been dead at least four days.

You think so? said one of the officers. Still, his face did not change. I think he needs a closer look. Should we give him a closer look? he asked.

The prefect was taken to a shed behind the barn and shut in with the bottom half of a woman's corpse, severed just above the waist.

This, too, the German officers insisted, was the work of the colonial troops.

You should not have underestimated the viciousness of your own army, said the first officer before shutting the shed door and leaving the prefect in blackness, with just the company of a woman's truncated body—and, of course, the smell.

He must have passed out for a bit, and that was a relief, but when he came to, he was being dragged from the shed to the barn, where, again, he was beaten. Finally, around one o'clock in the morning he was driven back into town.

Since you love Negroes so much, said one of the officers, we thought you might like to sleep with one. They locked him into the hospital gatekeeper's lodge, which was serving as a prison, with a Senegalese soldier who had been so badly beaten he could not open his mouth to speak.

The prefect let his emotions overcome him. He worried that if the officers returned again he would no longer be able to resist—in that case, who knew what he would sign? He looked around the room. Only the very faintest of light crept in from beneath the door, but a shard of clear glass, glittering within it, caught his eye. He picked up the glass and turned it over in his hand for some time, thinking. Then he jabbed at his throat, under the chin.

At first nothing happened. He wondered if he had the conviction to even make himself bleed. It was not that he was afraid, he told himself. It was just that the task required more energy of him than he actually had. But once he broke the skin it was easier. He worked at the cut he had made until the blood spurted, covering his hands, and
finally making his neck too wet and slippery to cut any deeper. He had hardly felt it. Once you decide to do something, he thought to himself—it just happens. The idea thrilled him and for a moment he felt ecstatically happy. The blood spurted from his neck like a stuck faucet. He called out and a guard arrived, then swore in German. It was a word the prefect understood, and the last thing he remembered before he passed out.

S
INCE THEY WERE ALREADY
on the hospital grounds it was not long before the prefect's injuries were treated, first by the German army doctor, and then by Captain Foubert, the French military dentist, who stitched up the wound, which was not in fact all that deep, and had not touched a major artery. The prefect was driven back to his private residence that night and nothing more was made of the event. Within a few weeks he had healed completely and reassumed his duties under the Vichy government—though it was rumored, Paige told Alden later—he had soon afterward given up or otherwise been relieved of his post, and was now secretly working for the French Resistance.

After working as a puppet for Vichy? Hardly likely, Alden said. You think so? asked Paige. Don't you remember how he was the night he came into the
cathédrale
(she had an aggravating habit of even while speaking English pronouncing French words with an exaggerated accent), remember how angry he was at the bishop and the doctor for deserting? I thought he was very brave.

—

F
OR THREE DAYS AND NIGHTS
, A
LDEN
, G
ILLES
,
AND THREE OTHER
French soldiers picked their way over the open country, heading west. When they could travel no farther, they camped in the open air, listening to the Stukas as they screamed overhead. Every time a bomb exploded nearby, Alden closed his eyes. The noise would seem to cut everything away—to obliterate, for a moment, even a trace of a thought in his brain
so that it always took him several seconds afterward to realize he was still alive.

It was a relief to be captured. Once they were marching toward Orléans he knew with certainty he was alive. Every moment brought that fact keenly to his attention, in largest part owing to the excruciating pain in his feet, where they had been torn by his shoes. He did not have any properly issued army gear. Most of what he had was borrowed from the dead soldiers they had passed, fleeing from Chartres.

It was not until they arrived a full day and night later at Orléans that they were given anything to eat—a thin gruel and a corner of stale bread. As the food touched Alden's stomach it came up again. Gilles scowled at him in disgust and he felt deeply ashamed for having wasted the food another man might have enjoyed.

The camp was full to overflowing. There was not enough food, and the barracks, as well as the latrines, had long ago reached capacity. Prisoners slept in the open air, amid the stench of feces that spilled out into the prison yard. One after another Alden's companions fell ill. Gilles became so weak that at last he was taken to the infirmary. Before he left he promised Alden that, once he returned, they would escape together. He was familiar with that region, he told Alden. Much more so than were any of the Germans. But before Gilles had a chance to return they were transported to a prisoner-of-war camp far away from the country that Gilles knew so well.

F
INALLY
,
IN
F
EBRUARY 1941
, after nearly seven months spent at Stalag III-A, just south of Berlin, Alden's release was arranged. Who could have imagined it would be to the beautiful, sad-eyed Paige he would owe his freedom and, with little doubt, therefore—such as they were—the rest of his days? She had returned to Paris immediately after the capitulation, rather than staying on with her sister at Châteaudun. There, very rapidly, and with tremendous initial success, she began to cultivate what would soon prove a valuable connection with a young German officer— who had connections, in turn, to the OKW (the German defense office then operating in Paris). It was in this way that Paige managed, finally,
to track down both Alden and Jack, and arrange for Alden's release. Jack, they would soon learn, had been “released” some time prior—he had died from blood poisoning outside Chartres, mere hours before the arrival of the Germans.

But when Alden first returned to Paris they did not know this yet, and in fact, through some sort of mistake in internal communication, it was
Jack
whom Paige expected when she went to the station on the thirteenth of February, 1941. It was a surprise to both of them, therefore, when Alden arrived in Paris that evening alone—disembarking at Montparnasse.

F
OR THE FIRST MONTH
after his return, Alden kept Paige company in the apartment she had shared with Jack in the seventh, near the École Militaire. He would have preferred to have returned to his own small flat, though it was dismal compared to the apartment Paige kept, even empty (all the furniture had been taken by the Germans), but the building had been sold and the new owner had no knowledge of the previous one. The few belongings he had left there, including the notebook in which he had once sketched the stained-glass windows of Chartres, were just as lost to him, therefore, as he had once so fervently hoped.

So he stayed on with Paige, until it became unbearable to do so any longer, and just as he had back in Chartres, he promised her repeatedly that Jack would also be returning soon. They weren't going to keep the cooperative French, he said, let alone the Americans, for very long. Why should they? We aren't even at war, he reminded her. He said this because he believed it, but also because it produced a desirable result. Her face would relax suddenly and she would extend her hand toward him, willing him to take it in his own. He had no choice but to obey. It was odd: to be, on the one hand, the object of intense regret (that he had arrived in the place of Jack was something, he knew, she could not help but blame him for) and, on the other, of desire (that he was
not
who she had expected him to be was, he prided himself, not entirely to her disadvantage).

Won't your officer be jealous? he asked her on a few occasions, just to watch her squirm.

But she was not really ashamed. Not yet.

Soon, though, neither one could bear the strain of it any longer, and Alden found a place to live, on the Rue Auguste-Compte, not far from the Luxembourg Gardens and the OKW office, where, thanks to Paige's intervention in his affairs, he was now employed. Thankfully, it was not until after he had relocated that Paige received word about Jack. Quite naturally, she was beside herself—but, though Alden felt sorry for her being left alone like that, he honestly felt she was better off. A more tactless man than himself might have reminded her that, after all, neither one of them could ever stand the other.

—

A
T FIRST
A
LDEN
'
S RESPONSIBILITIES AT THE
OKW
OFFICE WERE MIN
imal, consisting in the main of mind-numbing tasks, the purpose of which usually escaped him. He would spend an entire week sorting through stacks of American newspapers, say, in order to circle every mention of the Führer or Operation Barbarossa—creating a patchwork pattern of red ink across each page that nobody would ever bother to consult. But then, in March, the German military intelligence organization, Abwehr, captured a Dutch agent and managed to crack the coded messages being sent back and forth between Holland, Britain, and France. After this, the department was chiefly involved in capturing Dutch agents, sending false messages to Britain, and decoding the messages the Brits continued to send in reply. Alden's job in all of this was (along with continuing to sift through mountains of newsprint for seemingly no purpose at all) to create credible messages in English that could then be translated by Abwehr into stolen code. Now, you will likely hear that the Brits knew their agents had been compromised almost from the start, and that the information Abwehr received and decoded in response to Alden's own messages were themselves (though also “credible”) false. At the time, this did not seem to
be the case—though indeed it may have been. Whatever the reason for it, the information Abwehr received from the Brits never did seem to further the German intelligence effort in any significant way—a point Alden would later have cause to emphasize.

A
FTER
P
AIGE AND
A
LDEN
did not see each other anymore, and Jack was dead, and Carol gone, and Dick had begun (quite literally now, though they did not yet know it) to build his barricade, Maurice Bonheur was Alden's only friend. They would meet on the Boulevard Saint-Michel after work (Maurice worked as a museum guard at the Cluny and wrote his long poems on the backs of the maps to the medieval collections, because paper was so hard to come by) and Maurice would read Alden bits of the poems he had written, and from time to time, when he could no longer resist the temptation, Alden would read one or two of his own—based on the material he was all that time gathering from the American newspapers. You see, it was thanks to the time Alden had spent on his seemingly innocuous first assignment for the OKW that he had been able to make some significant intelligence gains of his own: an obvious pattern had begun to emerge within the pages he trolled daily for the most benign references—which could not have, in themselves, indicated anything at all. At first he had no means of understanding his discovery; he simply copied the pattern he'd found, puzzling over it in the evenings in the privacy of his rented room. As the material accumulated he became more cautious, however. How could he have explained, should anyone have thought to question him, a notebook quickly beginning to fill with—albeit as yet uncracked—code? The code would—Alden was sure of it—already be familiar, and thus instantly recognizable, to the OKW agents, as it could only, he reasoned (embedded as it was within American newsprint), be the work of German spies. It was then that he hit on the idea of disguising the information as small poems; of rearranging the words so they made sense according to each new piece's individual structure. He was always careful, of course, to keep—on a separate sheet of paper—an accompanying key to each new poem he produced. In
order, of course, that he might be able to easily reassemble the code when, at last, he was able to crack it.