The Forger (23 page)

“A hell of a lot of money,” replied Fleury. “Somewhere out there, in one of the great museums of the world, some little old man is standing in front of a painting—one of the great paintings—one people travel across continents to see and they weep over it and say how brilliant Caravaggio was, or Goya or Velázquez or whoever. And they lean forward and try to catch a breath of the sweat and breath of genius. But it isn’t Goya’s breath or the breath of Velázquez. It’s the breath of that little old man. He made that painting, and now that all the so-called experts have pronounced it to be original, even if he confessed that he’d done the work, no one would believe him. But he won’t confess. We’ll never know his name and he doesn’t want us to know his name, because his anonymity is an expression of his art. And that man is a master forger.”

“That’s what we’re doing,” I said. “With us, there is no doubt.”

“No,” Pankratov mumbled. “There is no doubt. We are forgers. And between the three of us, given time, I imagine we could forge almost anything.”

“Almost,”
said Fleury, drawing out the word. “And where do you draw your line, Monsieur Pankratov?”

“At the Mona Lisa’s smile,” he replied. “It can never be duplicated. There is something unearthly about it.”

Pankratov tossed his sponge into the little ceramic bowl, which was filled with dirty, gray-brown acetone. He set the bowl on the table and walked over to the door. He flung it open and afternoon light blasted in. For a moment, his silhouette stood huge and blurred in the doorway, then it was gone. He sat down heavily against the wall outside and pulled out his cigarettes. He dug his brass lighter out of his pocket and lit himself a smoke. Then he settled back against the sun-warmed brick, smoke streaming out of his mouth.

“You’ve been studying the techniques,” Fleury told me, “but I’ve been studying you. And I say you’re a pair of sorcerers.”

Maybe it was true. Pankratov and I were dabbling with spells, drawing across from a dimension just beyond our own the phantoms whose help we required.

That evening, as Fleury and I rode the elevator up to our apartments, I clung to the bars. I pressed the black iron against my cheekbones and watched the wall file past me, only a few inches away. I noticed that someone had drawn a pencil line all the way from the ground to the top floor. It had stopped when the pencil lead broke and then been continued at another time. There were many breaks and starts, and I could see how the person had become more proficient in joining up the lines as time went by. I wondered how long it had taken. I thought about this small obsession that must have filled the person’s mind, watching the lead burn down as the elevator climbed from floor to floor, then starting all over again. Much of my own time painting had been spent in that same cage of fixation.

It ought to be enough, I thought, for me to risk insanity by looking inside myself. But now I would be taking on the madness of people whose madness was what made them great. If I couldn’t grasp the obsessions that had propelled their creativity, I would never succeed. If I failed, there was someone even now, out there in the country built for war, who knew his own obsessions, and the pain he would inflict to see them through. That pain will be ours, I thought, if I do not get it right.

*   *   *

T
HE FOLLOWING NIGHT, WHEN
it came time to head home, I told Pankratov and Fleury that I needed to go for a walk. I had too much nervous energy swirling around in my head. We arranged to meet up later at the Dimitri, if it was still open.

The Germans were expected any day now. The streets were mostly deserted. Shop windows were boarded up or crisscrossed with white tape. Some places even had sandbags piled up against them. Scattered amongst the closed businesses, a few stubborn cafés stayed open. Their menus grew smaller by the day, inky lines slicing through the
Croque Monsieurs
and
Entrecôtes.
The only thing that never seemed to run out was the wine. It made me wonder how many millions of bottles must be stored beneath the streets, as if the whole city were precariously balanced on pyramids of glass.

An hour later, I reached the Pont Royal. It was sunset. I stood looking down at the river, which slid fast and milky green around the pillars of the bridge. I breathed and breathed until sparks weaved in front of my eyes and the numbing oiliness of turpentine fumes no longer tinted my lungs.

I set out for the Dimitri, crossing the Place de le Concorde. The obelisk of Luxor stretched its shadow down the Rue Royale. A few cars rounded the fountain, tires
pop-popping
on the cobblestones. Then it grew completely quiet, except for water shushing from the mouths of the bronze fish, held in the arms of half-human sea creatures which stood in the fountain’s thigh-deep water. I wondered who had thought to keep them running. Before the war, at this time of day the Concorde would be a zoo of bicycles and motor scooters and taxis, caped policemen whirling as they steered the honking traffic.

I was shuffling along with my hands in my pockets when I heard a mechanical whine over the rooftops. As I raised my head, a small and flimsy-looking aeroplane appeared from the direction of the Champs-Elysées. It was German, black crosses outlined in white on the undersides of its wings, with large struts attaching the wings to the body of the plane. The plane had fixed wheels with fat little tires at the ends. The canopy was large and made of many segments, and as the plane passed slowly overhead, less than a hundred feet above me, I saw the pilot staring down.

The Place de la Concorde was empty.

I stopped and stared.

The plane circled and appeared to fly off. Then it banked low over the Arc de Triomphe and leveled out, heading toward me. The machine flew right along the Champs-Elysées, losing altitude. Its engine burbled in a lower pitch, coming in to land between the rows of trees that grew on either side of the road. The plane bounced once, then settled. It came to a stop right where the Champs-Elysées joins the Place de la Concorde, between two statues, each of which showed a man trying to control a wild horse.

The canopy opened, folding back on itself like the wings of an insect. Then a man climbed out. He wore high black boots, whose hobnails crunched on the stones. He had on gray riding breeches and a green-gray jacket buttoned up to the throat. There was a small pistol holster on his leather belt, which he wore over his jacket. He wore brown leather gloves and was carrying a peaked cap with a short black visor, which he immediately fitted onto his head.

Another man stayed in the plane and kept the engine running. His eyes were hidden behind small, dark goggles.

I stayed absolutely still, like a deer terrified by the glare of a car’s headlights.

The man walked around the plane, looking at the statues and the buildings. He turned to look back down the Champs-Elysées at the Arc de Triomphe. He stared down the Rue Royale at the columned temple of the Madeleine. His hands opened and closed. He seemed to be in shock, as if he had always dreamed of landing a reconnaissance plane in the Place de la Concorde and now couldn’t believe he had actually done it. Then he caught sight of me and stopped.

I did nothing. I just kept staring. I was too stunned to feel frightened or angry.

It seemed to me the German was also lost in amazement. He raised his hand to one of the large pockets on his tunic and pulled out a cigarette case. He opened it and held it out to me.

I didn’t move. I could see the white sticks of the cigarettes.

The man nodded. He held the case out further.

We were like two men hallucinating each other, and the gulf of twenty paces was the distance between waking and sleep.

Slowly and hesitantly, I raised my hands, showing the whiteness of my palms, as if any rapid movement would cause this vision to separate and disappear into the sky like a flock of frightened birds.

He picked a cigarette from the case, fumbling for a moment in his leather gloves. He set it down on a stone ridge at the base of one of the rearing horse statues. Then he looked at me, to make sure I had seen.

My hands were still raised.

The German officer returned to his plane, his footsteps sharp on the stones. He climbed inside and pulled the hatch shut after him. The plane’s engine revved up and the machine turned until it was facing back down the Champs-Elysées. The engine’s roar grew louder. At last the plane lurched forward. Its gawky landing gear trailed like a heron’s legs in the moment that it left the ground. It climbed steeply and was gone over the rooftops.

Still in a state of shock, I walked over to the statue, where the cigarette was lying on the stone. The man had even left me a match, one match. I left then where they were. No one else came by. The city was quieter than I’d ever heard it before. In the deepest part of night, there had always been the rumbling like distant thunder, but now even this had gone silent. The light faded out and the purple sky turned navy blue. The stones grew slick with dew and there was the musty smell of rain.

I had to get clear in my head the meaning of this small gesture that I could not match against the idea of an enemy. I wondered how long it might take before our first reaction would be to shoot each other dead.

Chapter Nine

T
HE
G
ERMANS CAME QUIETLY
to the Rue Descalzi.

I woke to the sound of hoofbeats down at the far end of the street. I leaned out of my window and saw horse-drawn wagons towing small artillery pieces, the German gun crews in their sharply angled helmets and rough field gray uniforms returning the stares of the crowd which had gathered in silence to watch them go by. I ducked back inside and ran down to Fleury’s apartment.

He arrived at the door in his smoking jacket.

“They’re here,” I told him.

Fleury looked calm at first, but then I noticed the tassles at the end of the jacket’s silk belt. The ends were trembling, almost imperceptibly, like water in a glass when a truck drives by outside.

Fleury and I spent the day migrating back and forth from his apartment to mine, trading the unnerving stillness of one place for the stillness of the other. We heard no shooting outside. Only the sound of heavy vehicles, as the Germans pulled into the city.

In the afternoon, a German truck stopped in the road. Two men got out and began putting up posters.

When the truck had left, Fleury and I went down to see what was on the posters. The street filled with people. I knew most of them only by sight. We began to exchange greetings which should have been made months ago. I’d seen the same thing happen back home, after the hurricane had plowed through Narragansett. The threat from outside drew us all together, but what we shared that day was helplessness instead of the anger I had expected to feel.

The posters had
PEUPLE DE PARIS
in large black letters at the top and underneath that the declaration that German troops had occupied Paris. It went on to say that the military governor would take whatever steps he thought necessary to maintain order. Every act of sabotage, active or passive, would be severely punished. German troops had been ordered to respect the people and their property. It ended by saying that this was the best way to serve the city of Paris and its population.

Gradually, we all filtered back into our apartments, unsure about what remained of our old lives.

The next day, the foreman with the Dragoon mustache arrived for work. Except for weekends, the arrival of the Germans had been the only day he’d taken off since I had come to Paris. He kicked up a fuss when he found the posters slapped up on his steel doors.

The jobless men arrived as well, having no place else to go.

The Dragoon tried to carry on with his routine. He picked his usual handful of bicyclists and the weary-looking men pedaled off with the heavy placards on their backs. The rest shambled away with their hands in their pockets.

Within two days, the occupation posters had been joined by more colorful ones. These had a black oval outlined in orange and the lettering was done in several different typefaces.
“Germany Offers You Work,”
it said.
“Immediate Employment. Paid Holidays. Housing. Insurance. This is the guarantee of a better future for you and your family.”
Then it gave an address where people could show up for more information.

By the time the Dragoon arrived, most of the jobless regulars had showed up, read the posters and left. Some of them were running. Only Monsieur Finel from my building was still there.

The Dragoon read the posters. He swore at them quietly. Then he turned to Monsieur Finel and held open his hands with a gesture of futility. The two of them went inside the warehouse and, ten minutes later, pedaled out on the rickety bicycles, Postillon billboards on their backs.

Over the next week, life didn’t exactly return to normal, but more of it returned than I had been expecting. The streetcars were running again. Schools reopened. Bars. Municipal buildings. The post office. People who had fled into the countryside were now returning, as if they’d gone away on holiday. French gendarmes directed traffic alongside German military policemen. German guard huts, painted in chevroned candy stripes of black, red and white, appeared at street corners on the Rue de Rivoli, at the Quai d’Orsay and in front of the Chambre des Députés. Several large hotels, like the Meurice, the Majestic and the Continental, were taken over and the area around them sealed off to non-Germans.

Soon German soldiers could be seen with cameras at all the touristy places. I got used to the sight of the officers with their riding breeches and high-peaked caps, and the soldiers with their side caps and the coarser wool of their uniforms. I saw a lot of German women in uniform. The French called them “gray mice,” on account of the color of their dowdy skirts. Many soldiers had the wincing look of awkwardness, as if they would rather have been out in the fields, sleeping under their camouflage rain capes, with their fur-covered backpacks for pillows, instead of sightseeing in Paris.