The Forger (31 page)

“Get me a car,” I said. I was standing by the door. I had to stop myself from running out of the building and trying to sprint all the way to Drancy. It would have done no good, but I couldn’t stand there doing nothing for much longer.

“I couldn’t get you a car,” replied Behr, “even if I wanted to. I haven’t got the authority.”

“Type up a note,” I told him. “Please.”

Behr turned slowly toward the machine. “Abetz is not going to like this.” He cranked out the document he had been typing. He pulled a fresh sheet from a drawer and rolled it in. Then he sat back and scratched at his chin. “I don’t even know what to say.”

“Say anything!” I shouted. “Just do it now.”

In the rooms down the hall, the typing stopped. Then, after a moment, it started up again.

Clumsily, Behr began tapping out a document. He mumbled out the words as he typed them. “There,” he said. “That should do it.”

I reached over and tore it out of the machine. I held it up. “But this isn’t on embassy stationery,” I said. “I could have done this at home. How are they supposed to know it’s official when I show it to them?”

“That part I can fix.” Behr reached out for the paper. He picked up a heavy stamp from the desk, banged it on an ink pad, and brought it crashing down on the bottom of the page. When he lifted the stamp, I saw a slightly smudged eagle and swastika with some German writing underneath. “These days,” said Behr, “Jesus Christ himself couldn’t get anywhere without papers.”

I took the paper and dashed up the steps to the corner. I went into a café and phoned Dietrich, using the number on the card he had sent with his invitation to the embassy party. I got transferred three times and finally Dietrich was on the other end. I explained to him what had happened.

“And you want me to get him off the transport?” asked Dietrich.

“Yes,” I said.

“I’ll have to pull some strings,” he said.

“Can you do it?” I asked.

“Yes, I think so,” he said.

I saw a streetcar coming. It flashed blue sparks along its overhead rails.

“I have to go,” I told him and hung up.

The streetcar was heading north, which the conductor said was in the right direction for Drancy, so I got on it. At the Gare du Nord, I changed to a bus. It was crowded and I had to stand, holding on to a bar above my head. It was raining outside. When the bus stopped to let people on and off, the smell of the damp came into the bus. The windows fogged up. The windshield wipers clunked back and forth in front of the driver.

I looked at my watch every minute and was making myself crazy so I took it off and put it in my pocket.

At last, I came within sight of the great corrugated iron rooftops of the Drancy marshaling yards. Rails ran alongside the road, twisting over each other and curving away toward the station.

At the next stop, I jumped off the bus.

I could see the station in the distance, past a huge expanse of tracks and then the long concrete platform with a green-painted roof, slick and glowing in the rain. There was a locomotive pulled up at the platform, with three cars behind it. Separating the road from the tracks was a high fence with barbed wire at the top.

I started climbing the fence. I wasn’t thinking. I just climbed. I reached the barbed wire and clambered over the top of it, tearing my jacket, and dropped to the gravel on the other side.

I ran toward the stationhouse. Rain was coming down hard. I slipped on the oily wooden spacers that separated the tracks. The tops of the rails were shiny from use. I was already out of breath and soaked.

The train began to pull out of the station, engine chugging, steam rising from its smokestack. I pulled Behr’s piece of paper out of my pocket and started waving it over my head. I kept running in the direction of the platform.

Someone was moving toward me from the stationhouse. He waved his arm. He had a submachine gun slung over his shoulder. Through my sweat and the rain, I could make out shin-length black boots and a helmet.

I ran toward him, waving the paper and shouting for him to stop the train.

The wagon’s wheels clunked from one set of track to another as it headed out.

The soldier unshouldered his gun. He was shouting. Keeping the gun at waist height, he leveled it at me and kept walking.

I’d never had a gun pointed at me before. I could see the black eye of the end of the barrel. I flinched, and a second later, I tripped over a rail and fell hard on the track spacers. Over my own breathing, I could hear the soldier but had no idea what he was saying.

I lay there gasping, facedown, holding up the piece of paper, which sagged over my fingers. I could smell the creosote that coated the spacers. The rust on the rails smeared against my clothes. Smears of blood and oil mixed with the torn-up skin of my palms.

The soldier’s boots crunched over the gravel, coming closer. He stopped right in front of me.
“Betreten verboten,”
he said. That was what he had been shouting the whole time.

I raised my head and saw the leather of his boots and the bumps of hobnails on the soles. I held up the soggy piece of paper.

He crouched down slowly. The black submachine gun rested on his knees. It had a long, straight magazine and a folding stock. He took the paper from my hand, unfolded it and read it. The gray-green steel of his helmet hid his eyes. I looked at the rough wool of his uniform and the pebbly finish on his uniform buttons. Only now did I feel pain in my knees from where I had fallen against a rail.

“Transport vier,”
he said. Then he spoke to me in French. “Transport number four left yesterday,” he said.

Exhausted, I let my head fall forward. “I thought it was leaving today.”

“Transport five left today. About an hour ago. Whoever wrote this got the number wrong.”

“What was that train at the station?”

“A work crew. Going out to fix the rails. That’s all. Just a work crew.”

I rose up to my knees, then sat back on my haunches.

The soldier tilted his helmet back on his head. He had a thin face and pale blue eyes. His uniform was a little too big for him and he carried the Schmeisser like someone not used to carrying a gun.

We sat there on our haunches in the middle of all those rails in the pouring rain.

I had a strange feeling of standing far above myself. I was looking down from a great height at the maze of rails and the rain and the overflowing gutters of the station platform roof. I saw the two small figures that were me and the soldier. Then, just as suddenly, I was back inside myself again and looking through my tired, sweat-salted eyes.

He handed me back the piece of paper.

I balled it up in my fist and squeezed until drops of black-tinted water from the ink dripped out onto the tracks.

We got to our feet.

“You have to go,” he said. “It is forbidden.” Then he turned and walked away unhurriedly, lugging the burden of his gun, his long legs stepping carefully over the polished tracks.

I got back to the fence, climbed up over the barbed wire and dropped down to the street, jarring my knees. I stood waiting for the bus, with no idea when it would come again. My thoughts swung between anger and fear with the movement of a pendulum. The rain came down in sheets. There was no place to hide from it. No point in even trying.

*   *   *

B
Y THE TIME
I reached my apartment, I felt sure I would never see Fleury again. I was exhausted, but knew I had to get out to the warehouse and tell Pankratov what had happened. I changed into some dry clothes and put my soaked wool coat back on, since it was the only coat I had.

I opened the door and was shocked to find Fleury standing there right in front of me. His clothes were dirty and torn and his hair was a mess. His shoes were gone and his socks were wet from walking through the rain. He smelled of sweat and piss. “Can I come in?” he asked.

He sat at my kitchen table and wept while he told what had happened.

Two plainclothes SS men had come for him at his gallery. They would not explain why they were arresting him, or even if this was an arrest. He was driven straight to Mont Valérien and put in a large cell with about fifty other people. There were men and women mixed together. There was not enough room for everyone to lie down so people took turns. There was a bucket in the corner, which had overflowed long before Fleury arrived. He was able to piece together that some of the prisoners were Jews, others former members of the Communist Party and people with records of petty crime. The first night, half the people in the room had their names called out and left. The only people remaining were Jews. Fleury told me he wasn’t Jewish, and neither was he a member of any political party, but he could think of any number of petty crimes of which he had been accused and never convicted. He didn’t know whether to stay where he was or summon a guard and explain the mistake. He decided to wait.

The next night, without having been fed, Fleury and the remaining people in the room were hustled down into the courtyard and searchlights were shone in their faces as their names were read off and they were piled into trucks. It was then that he had approached a guard, who told him to shut up and pushed him on toward the truck.

They were taken to Drancy and put straight into red military wagons which had barbed wire over the air vents. The cars were already overcrowded when they arrived. Fleury and the Mont Valérien Jews were crammed in with the rest. He said he had expected the train to start moving immediately, but instead they were left there all night.

In the morning, the door was opened and his name was called out. He was driven back to Mont Valérien and returned to the room, which by now had a new set of people waiting inside.

He was called out of the room six hours later and found Dietrich’s driver, a man named Grimm, waiting for him down in the courtyard. Fleury was driven back to the Rue Descalzi and arrived home only a few minutes after I did.

I boiled some water and cooked a turnip I had been saving for a meal. I mashed it up and then used the water to make a drink. Fleury ate some and I ate what he left.

I told Fleury about Abetz’s decision to have him arrested and about my call to Dietrich.

“It’s my own fault,” he said. “I underestimated them. And I think, now that I’ve been to Mont Valérien, that we have all underestimated them.” Then he just sat there at the table, eventually falling asleep with his head on his folded arms.

I put a blanket over him and went to bed. When I woke up, just before dawn, he was gone, back to his own place, and the blanket was neatly folded on the chair.

*   *   *

T
OMBEAU CALLED FOR ME
the next day. I met him on a walkway by the Seine, where old men in berets fished for carp with long bamboo poles.

Tombeau walked with his hands in the pockets of his jacket, wooden-soled shoes knocking the stones. Already the heels were worn down.

I told him about what had happened to Fleury.

“Is he going to crack up on us?” asked Tombeau.

“Is that all you care about?” I fired back.

“It’s important,” said Tombeau.

“If he hasn’t cracked by now,” I said, trying to remain calm, “I don’t suppose he will.”

“He’d better not,” replied Tombeau. “There’s too much riding on this now.”

A breeze blew down the Seine, rattling the branches of the trees.

I stopped walking. Words had been taking shape inside my head ever since I saw Fleury standing at my door, terrified and filthy. The anger and the outrage which had eluded me before was here now, sifting like grit through my blood. “I can’t do this anymore,” I said.

Tombeau stood back, as if to size me up for a fight. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“Give me a gun. Teach me how to blow up a bridge. Let me do something that helps. Painting is not enough.”

“How about I just throw you in prison?” asked Tombeau.

“You don’t have a prison to throw me in anymore,” I told him. “Let me fight.”

“What do you know about fighting?” he barked. “Not a damned thing.”

“Just tell me what to do. I can’t sit around and watch this kind of thing happen.”

“You aren’t just sitting around,” said Tombeau. He took off his cap and scratched his head and set his cap back on his head. “You
are
fighting,” he said quietly. He raised his head and fixed me with his gray-green eyes. For the first time, he did not look angry. He seemed confused, as if unsure how to behave when deprived of his rage. “If you want to know the truth, I envy you,” he told me. “I know how you feel now, but I also know how you’ll feel after you’ve stuck a knife through some spotty-faced teenage soldier. Any killing we do now is purely symbolic. It shows the Germans that we haven’t given up. But you, with your paintings. You can make a difference.” He breathed out slowly. “My job is only to hate. To hate more and hate longer and to kill because of hating. But your job means being hated by the same people whose culture you are fighting to save. When this is all over, if you survive it, you’ll have done more good than I could ever do.” Then Tombeau was gone, vanished in the side streets of the city.

*   *   *

W
HEN
I
TOLD
F
LEURY
about my conversation with Tombeau, he exploded.

Fleury grabbed my arm. “Have you gone insane?”

We were standing in the lobby of the apartment building, waiting for the elevator to come down.

I shook loose from him. “What are you talking about? And for Christ’s sake, lower your voice.”

“You listen to me,” said Fleury, his voice as loud as ever. “If you just want to throw your life away because you’re too furious to think straight, then go ahead. Go down to the Hôtel de Ville and knife one of the German guards. But you can damn well do it by yourself. After what I’ve seen, I intend to survive, however bad it gets. And if you had any brains, you would, too.”

The elevator cage arrived, clanking into place.

“It’s precisely because of what you saw that you should stop just thinking about yourself,” I told him.

Fleury slid back the door to the cage and stepped inside. When he turned around, his face was twisted with anger. “I’m going to live through this, no matter what it takes.” He slammed the cage door shut and jabbed his thumb over and over at the button for his floor.