Léon and Louise (28 page)

‘Then use a mortar, man! This is a laboratory, after all, you must have something of the kind. And stop playing these girlish games.'

Knochen watched Léon open the cupboard. Neatly arrayed on the top shelf were two or three dozen quarter-kilo packets of coffee printed red, white and black. The German sighed and shook his head, then clasped his hands behind his head and stared out of the window over his boots.

Léon ground up a handful of coffee beans in the mortar, filled the reservoir and emptied the coffee into the funnel, screwed the top on, put the jug on the burner, and turned on the gas, which ignited with a faint plop. While the water was heating up he laid out saucers and cups and coffee spoons and put the sugar basin on the desk. When everything was ready and there was nothing left to do, he went to the window furthest from the desk and looked down at the Seine flowing imperturbably past the Île de la Cité as it had done a hundred or a hundred thousand years ago. He occasionally sensed that Knochen was looking at him, and he sometimes glanced at the SS major out of the corner of his eye. It seemed to take an age for the coffee to come bubbling up through the tube.

While Léon was pouring, Knochen took his boots off the desk, cupped his chin in his right hand and gazed at him. Then he said, ‘Le Gall, I ought to feel sorry for you. It's always the best who are disobedient, that's apparent from even a cursory look back at history. It's disobedience that marks out the special from the ordinary, don't you agree? Unfortunately, though, we aren't living between the pages of a history book, we're living in the here and now, and present indications are that most of what will prove to be of historic importance is pretty banal. We aren't here to make history, we're here to get these goddamned index cards copied. That's why you're now going to obey me and make no more mistakes, and that goddamned lamp is going to remain on your desk, nowhere else. You won't move it so much as ten centimetres without asking my permission in advance, understand?'

‘Yes.'

‘It's a Siemens lamp, Le Gall, get used to it. It's staying exactly where it is and you'll use it. You'll turn it on every day when you arrive for work, and you'll turn it off before you go home. Understood?'

‘Yes.'

‘Good. And now sit down and drink a mocha with me.'

‘If you wish.'

‘Yes, I do wish it. I also wish you to drink mocha every day from now on. What on earth have you got against the stuff? Don't you like it?'

‘It's excellent, I'm sure.'

‘You're going to drink a lot more mocha in the immediate future, Le Gall, you've got some catching up to do. It isn't worth kicking against the pricks any more, by the way. The copies will soon be completed.'

The two men drank their mochas in silence. Then Knochen rose, nodded a curt farewell, and went out. Léon carried the cups over to the sink. On second thoughts, he threw the SS major's into the waste bin.

For three days Léon wondered how to get rid of the mocha without having to drink it. He left the Italian mocha jug and his cup unwashed beside the Bunsen burner, so as to be able to prove that he'd already drunk his daily mocha. In reality, he continued to drink his woody-tasting wartime brew.

On the following Monday, when his weekly quarter-kilo of mocha arrived on his desk, he put it in his briefcase and took it home that evening.

‘What's that?' asked Yvonne.

‘German mocha. I told you about it.'

‘Get rid of it.'

‘Wouldn't you like to – '

‘Get rid of it, I said. I don't want it in the house.'

‘What should I do with the stuff?'

‘Go to the Rue du Jour behind Les Halles. Ask at the Auberge du Beau Noir for Monsieur Renaud. He'll take you to a hatter in Avenue Voltaire who'll give you a good price for it.'

‘What shall I do with the money?'

‘We don't need it.'

‘I'll take it to the lab.'

‘Do something clever with it.'

‘I'll think of something.'

‘Don't tell me. Don't mention it to a soul. It's better nobody knows.'

In exchange for his quarter-kilo of mocha Léon received a wad of banknotes almost equivalent to half his monthly salary. Because he went to the Avenue Voltaire every Monday from then on, and sometimes, in order to reduce the surplus in his cupboard, took along a couple of extra packets as well, it wasn't long before the lockable drawer in his desk contained a large sum of money.

Léon never counted the money. He never toyed with it or divided it up into batches, never kept accounts or checked that it was all there – he never even looked at it. He opened the drawer only once a week on his return from the Rue Saint-Denis. Having tossed the new banknotes in, he locked the drawer again and put the key in the bakelite tray containing his pencils and rubber, where, just because it was in plain view, he could be sure no one would notice it.

For a long time Léon had no idea what to do with the wealth Sturmbannführer Knochen was thrusting on him at gunpoint, so to speak. He only knew he wanted to spare himself the humiliation of profiting from it personally. He also realized that he must look for some way of sharing the money out, and that in this second year of the war there wasn't a single police officer in the Quai des Orfèvres who couldn't use a little windfall to buy some steak, a pair of children's shoes or a bottle of red wine on the black market.

The question was, how to distribute the money. If he openly went round the offices and handed it to his colleagues in person, Knochen would get wind of it and have him arrested for insubordination and attempted sabotage. And if he distributed it secretly by depositing it in his colleagues' overcoat pockets, in-trays and desk drawers, the more dutiful of them would take the money to their superiors and call for an investigation into attempted bribery by some person or persons unknown.

So Léon decided against scattering the cash around and envisaged adopting a more specific approach. Working downstairs in the investigating magistrate's office was a clerk named Heintzer whose Alsatian law degree had been rendered worthless by the outcome of the First World War. He lived in a damp three-room flat behind the Bastille with his six children, his tubercular wife and his alcoholic sister Irmgard, who spoke no French and had turned up on his doorstep, unannounced, some years before. He also had to send money to his old father, who still resided with five sheep and three hens in the dilapidated little farmhouse between Osenbach and Wasserbourg that had been the family home for two centuries.

Heintzer walked with a stoop, his hair hung over his ears like dishevelled feathers, and his mouth odour could be detected at a range of several paces. To make matters worse, everyone in the Quai des Orfèvres called him ‘the Boche' because he was tall and fair-haired and had never quite managed to lose his Alsatian accent. He had a spiteful boss named Lamouche who liked to tweak his off-white shirt collars and poke pencils through his threadbare sleeves in front of the assembled staff. Because the Boche endured all these things in dignified silence and never complained about his ulcer, carious teeth and slipped disc, the softer-hearted of the secretaries gave him sympathetic glances – not that they cared to venture too close to someone who seemed to possess a magnetic attraction for misfortune, poverty and disease.

One misty autumn evening, Léon followed the luckless Heintzer home in order to discover where he lived. Next morning he got out the typewriter and screwed a sheet of paper into it. His first step was to type an impressive letterheading larded with words like ‘Ministry', ‘Republic', ‘Security', ‘President', ‘National', and ‘France'. Then he wrote ‘Lump-sum back payment of outstanding family allowance, February 1932-October 1941', inserted an astronomically large figure, and added the corresponding number of banknotes. He adorned the document with an illegibly baroque signature and wrote a non-existent sender's address on the back of the envelope to ensure that the Boche's inevitable letter of acknowledgement would not turn up in some genuine government office and give rise to puzzled frowns.

Léon allowed several days to elapse after making a special trip to the 16th Arrondissement to post the letter and forbade himself to indulge in any unjustified visits to the magistrate's secretariat. After a couple of weeks, however, when no rumours of a suspicious windfall had come to his ears, he went down to the second floor to see how Heintzer was faring. He sat on a bench in the passage, leafing through a file for camouflage, and when the man actually appeared he gave him a casual nod which Heintzer returned just as casually.

Léon was relieved to note that Heintzer obviously suspected nothing, but that his appearance had much improved. The smudges beneath his eyes were only pale blue, not dark green, his suit and shoes were new, his breath no longer smelt, and he walked erect like a young man, not bowed down with sorrow. When Léon returned a few days later he heard him laughing heartily, exposing a mouthful of teeth which, though not all genuine, were dazzlingly white; and the last time he passed by a month later, the Boche was standing in the passage with a young blonde and holding her hand as she applied the end of her lighted cigarette to his.

Encouraged by his success, Léon got out his typewriter again. To the sad-faced telephonist in Vice he sent a tax refund, to a colleague in the photographic lab a lump-sum back payment for travelling expenses covering the previous five years. Madame Rossetos received a retroactive supplement to her widow's pension and some extra educational credit vouchers for her two fatherless daughters, and Aunt Simone in Caen was sent belated compensation for the refugees billeted on her in 1914–18. The waiter in the bistro around the corner received a windfall from a hitherto unknown uncle in America, and the woman at the news-stand in the Place Saint-Michel was reimbursed for rent charged in error.

Although this distribution process gave Léon pleasure, it was time-consuming, and besides, he was gradually running out of suitable recipients. Moreover, as time went by he began to feel that his arbitrary choices were unfair. Why should his favourites benefit from Sturmbannführer Knochen's mocha money to the exclusion of everyone else? Unable to see any other way of arriving at a fair selection, he decided to eliminate the arbitrary element altogether and leave it entirely to chance.

When work was over he took the Métro to the Gare du Nord and walked down the Rue de Maubeuge. Regardless of the address, he inserted a banknote in every accessible letterbox – sometimes a ten or a fifty but mostly a hundred-frank note. When he came to the Rue La Fayette he continued south down the Rue Montmartre, switching sides as the fancy took him, and inserted a banknote in every letterbox. At Les Halles he spent the remainder of the money on a chicken for himself and his family and took it home with him.

T
hen came the morning when Léon turned up for work and found no index cards lying on his desk – neither old and water-damaged nor new and virginal. He scanned the entire laboratory, then sat down and waited. When nothing happened he put some water on for coffee, went out into the passage and kept watch. When the water was boiling he made coffee and poured himself a cup, then sat down and waited some more.

After finishing his coffee he went out into the passage again. The door of the room immediately opposite was ajar. A colleague was leaning back in his chair with his hands clasped behind his head. Léon looked at him enquiringly. The man's lips twisted into a horizontal, mirthless grin. ‘It's over, Le Gall,' he said. ‘Over and done with.'

Léon nodded, turned on his heel and went back into the laboratory. To his surprise he felt no relief, just shame. He felt ashamed of himself and the whole of the Police Judiciaire, which would now have no further opportunity to lay aside the ignominious task that had been imposed on it.

Outwardly, Léon's routine regained a kind of normality. Sturmbannführer Knochen and his orderly no longer showed their faces and the coffee deliveries ceased. Although there were still plenty of banknotes in the drawer, Léon had lost his unremitting urge to distribute them. There was little actual laboratory work. Although substantially more people were dying unnatural deaths than during the strangely peaceful summer of 1940, most of the victims displayed bullet wounds rather than signs of poisoning.