Léon and Louise (22 page)

It seemed in those days as if the Germans' arrival in Paris had introduced an almost normal daily routine. The Wehrmacht presented public concerts in the Bois de Boulogne and distributed bread to the poor behind the Bastille, ensured that the streets were cleaned and, because all the municipal gardeners had fled, sent working parties to tend the flower beds in the Tuileries. The nightly curfew scarcely differed from the blackout imposed by the French government when in office, given that its start was put forward from nine to eleven p.m., and if some night owl failed to make it home in time he had little more to fear than a few hours' polishing boots or sewing on buttons until dawn in a military police post.

At the end of June the cinemas of Paris reopened their doors, newspapers remarkably similar in title and layout to prewar Parisian dailies appeared, and chorus girls high-kicked once more at the Moulin Rouge. Landlords, tailors and cabbies did good business, and more prostitutes than ever lay in wait for customers, most of them now in field-grey, between the Place Blanche and the Place Pigalle.

In the absence of an apocalypse, refugees returned to the unscathed city, at first hesitantly and in dribs and drabs, embarrassed by the seeming futility of their precipitate flight, but then in whole hordes; by mid-July the population of Paris had doubled within a month. The first to reappear were shopkeepers unable to afford to let their businesses stagnate any longer, then workers and junior office staff summoned back by their bosses, Jews who hoped that things wouldn't be so bad after all, and journalists, artists and actors who scented opportunities in the advent of a new era. The end of summer saw the return of pensioners hankering after their wing chairs, their family doctor and their favourite bench in the park around the corner, and finally of the children for whom the beginning of September marked the end of the longest summer holiday of their lives.

Léon kept his head down and went on living as best he could. He didn't read the new newspapers like
Le Petit Parisien, L'Œuvre
or
Je suis partout
because, although written in French, they were German in thought. He didn't go to the cinema either, but spent his evenings listening to the radio. He heard Marshal Pétain's speech on the French radio and General de Gaulle's riposte on BBC France, and he heard the Swiss Press Agency's reports of the fighting in Finland, North Africa and Norway; he pinned a map of Europe to the kitchen wall and marked the fronts with coloured pins, drew out nine-tenths of his savings, bought some gold bars on the black market, and concealed them beneath the living room's parquet floor, and he hoped every day for another sign of life from Louise in whatever corner of the world her colourful Caribbean banana boat might have conveyed her to.

But he didn't receive another letter from her all summer, and newsreaders made no mention of the
Victor Schoelcher
or a Banque de France gold shipment. It was ironical, he felt, that the same girl should disappear without trace in both the world wars he had so far experienced. The longer his uncertainty lasted, however, the more he forced himself to interpret the lack of news as a good sign.

In August it struck him that the plane trees were losing their leaves earlier than usual. It had been a hot summer; now autumn was coming early.

It is a documented fact that the
Victor Schoelcher
succeeded in getting away at the very last minute on the morning of 17 June 1940. According to eye-witness reports, the Wehrmacht's advance guard could still see the ship's plume of smoke beyond the harbour mouth when it entered Lorient. Once out at sea, the
Schoelcher
linked up with three Marseilles-Algiers Cruise Line passenger steamers that had also been converted into bullion transporters and set a course for Casablanca. From there she was to sail on to Canada, where the French, Belgian and Polish gold was to be stored in the strongrooms of Ottawa until the end of the war.

But the four vessels had only just crossed the Bay of Biscay when the news that France had surrendered came over the radio. That posed the question of who was now legally entitled to dispose of the gold: the Vichy government, which ultimately meant Nazi Germany; the French government-in-exile in London under General de Gaulle; or still the Banque de France, which came under the Ministry of Finance but was a limited company, not the property of the French state.

This was how it came about, on the day of the surrender itself, that the German admiralty radioed the four ships threatening to torpedo them unless they headed at once for the nearest port in occupied France. Only hours later, General de Gaulle threatened to torpedo them unless they headed at once for London. No transatlantic voyage could be contemplated under those circumstances, so the convoy maintained its southerly course and, after an intermediate stop at Casablanca, reached Dakar on 4 July 1940.

There it was safe from German destroyers for the time being, but a British fleet was lying off the coast of Senegal with the avowed intention of helping General de Gaulle to take possession of the French West African colonies on behalf of Free France. Consequently, the Banque de France authorities decided to load the 2–3000 tonnes of bullion entrusted to them – no one has ever discovered the exact amount – into goods wagons and transport them as far as possible into the African interior via the Dakar-Bamako line.

The entire cargo was unloaded by four p.m., and three days later the last shipment left Dakar station. A preliminary check at Thiès revealed that one box had lost thirteen kilograms on the voyage. Another, from the bank's branch at Laval, was filled with pebbles and scrap iron, and two or three had vanished altogether.

On Sundays Léon went for walks with his wife and children as if nothing had happened. If a Panzer brigade paraded down the Boulevard Saint-Michel, however, he instructed his children not to stare, but to turn round and look at the shop window displays.

‘All right, so they beat us and they've behaved pretty well up to date,' he told his eldest son, Michel, who couldn't stand being cooped up in the flat any longer and was impatient to explore the occupied city on his own. ‘But if one of them speaks to you, you say
bonjour
and
au revoir,
and if he asks the way to the Eiffel Tower, you tell him. But you can't speak German – you've forgotten what you learned at school – and even if he can speak French, that doesn't obligate you to chat about the weather with him. If he spells his name for you, you're entitled to have poor hearing and a bad memory, and if he asks you for a light, don't hand him your lighter, offer him the end of your cigarette. And you never – never, you hear? – take off your cap to a German. You merely tap the peak with your forefinger.'

Léon himself went to the Quai d'Orfèvres day after day, keeping his head down, and performed his work in the same old way. He didn't exactly have a great deal to do because cases of poisoning with fatal consequences were now few and far between. It seemed that all the city's murderers and suicides had put their plans into effect during the days of chaos and mass panic, so there was no one left to dispatch with the aid of poison.

Léon used his spare time to embark on a long-cherished project and write a scientific article the length of a licentiate's essay or shortish doctoral thesis. He had for some time regarded it as one of his life's greatest failures never to have acquired an academic qualification, or even to have finished school.

Although it would naturally have been impossible and absurd to try to make up for what he'd missed out on as a young man, he wanted to prove he was a serious person and prepared to use his brains. As the subject of his dissertation he had envisaged a statistical evaluation of murders by poisoning in Paris, 1930–1940. If there was any expert in this field, it was Léon. Equally, this was the only subject he really knew something about.

His first step was to stack the laboratory diaries for the last ten years on his desk and embark on their statistical evaluation. He classified the perpetrators and their victims according to sex, age and social status and recorded their degree of relationship or form of acquaintanceship, the type of poison used and the way it was administered, the geographical dispersion of the cases across the twenty-one
arrondissements
of the city of Paris, and their seasonal distribution over the year. He planned to produce tables and diagrams, and he would sketch profiles of perpetrators and their victims and send his essay to the
Journal des Sciences Naturelles de l'École Normale Supérieure,
and perhaps, when the war was over, he would spend a few weeks making guest appearances at the police academies of France as a lecturer and expert on murder by poisoning.

To Léon's surprise, the early summer of 1940 followed a monotonous and uneventful course. The one date he would remember to the end of his days was 23 June, a Sunday morning when fleecy little pink clouds were glowing in the sky. Léon was on his way back from the baker's to the Rue des Écoles with three baguettes under his arm when he heard the full-throated hum of a powerful car bearing down on him from behind. He turned to see an approaching Mercedes convertible with the hood down, and seated in it five men in German uniform and Adolf Hitler. The man beside the driver was quite definitely Adolf Hitler – there was no mistaking him. Followed by three smaller vehicles, the Mercedes drove past swiftly but without undue urgency, and it goes without saying that neither Hitler nor his companions took any notice of my disconcerted grandfather standing on the pavement with three baguettes under his arm as the wind of world history ruffled his hair.

Historians would later record that the Führer had only three hours earlier landed at Le Bourget airport on his first and last visit to Paris, accompanied by his architects, Albert Speer and Hermann Giesler, and the sculptor Arno Breker. He had paid lightning visits to the Opéra, the Madeleine and the Place de la Concorde, had driven up the Champs-Élysées to the Arc de Triomphe, along the Avenue Foch to the Trocadéro, and on to the École Militaire and the Panthéon. When he drove past Léon he must already have been on the way back to his plane and would only make a brief stop at Sacré-Cœur, where he cast a last glance at the conquered city that lay, waking up ignorant of his presence, at his feet.