The Forger (35 page)

The result of this was that Touchard gave Fleury outrageously favorable terms whenever it came time to negotiate for paintings. All Fleury had to do was treat him with formality and respect, which left Touchard dizzy with gratitude.

“Why are you so hard on him?” I asked Dietrich one time when we stood on the landing outside Pankratov’s studio, while Fleury and Touchard were sorting out the details of another painting exchange.

“I don’t know, really,” said Dietrich. Then he waved his hand dismissively at the frosted glass door, behind which Touchard’s thin voice could be heard. “He doesn’t deserve the job. I don’t tolerate whining from myself, and I’m damned if I’ll tolerate it from him.” Dietrich was losing his patience as he spoke, revealing that Touchard annoyed him far more than he ever liked to show.

Valya often came along to these meetings. She made a point of having nothing to do with Fleury and me. I used to wonder why she bothered to come if she couldn’t stand the sight of us, until I figured out how important it was to her that we felt so completely ignored.

I kept waiting for some kind of admission from Fleury that he’d made a mistake in falling for her. But Fleury appeared to have an infinite patience for Valya, no matter what she said or did.

It was Pankratov who bore the brunt of Valya’s taunts. She flaunted how different her life had become. Pankratov endured it, never losing his temper. He knew that if he did blow up, she would tell him he no longer had the right. She would make Pankratov see the distance she had put between herself and him. That was why Pankratov stayed silent, refusing to part with the past, which only served to fuel Valya’s bitterness.

“What about you?” Valya asked me one day at the atelier, forgetting to ignore me.

“What about me?” I replied.

“Whatever happened to the days when you were going to be a great artist?” She pretended to look around the atelier. “I don’t see any great art being done here. How far you are from all your dreams, Monsieur Halifax.”

I brought my mouth close to her ear and whispered, “I’d rather live in a world where my dreams don’t come true than in a world where yours do.”

She slapped me in the face for that. Hard. My left ear buzzed and stung.

Dietrich saw this and laughed.

Valya turned to him. “You think that’s funny?” she shouted. “You don’t care what happens to me at all, do you?”

By now, Dietrich’s laughter subsided into a smile. “You don’t believe that,” he told her. “Not for a moment.”

Valya and Dietrich were always raging at each other, the anger subsiding as suddenly as it appeared. They lived in a world as bloated with luxury as it was with confrontations. From what I had seen of the two of them, I knew that Dietrich loved Valya, in spite or even because of the fact that she didn’t treat him well. She found fault with almost everything he did, at least in public. This didn’t stop him from lavishing on her all the luxuries he could find. Valya loved him, too, in her own strange way. She seemed to have convinced herself that any show of real affection would cause Dietrich to lose interest. Every gesture of her love was made with sarcasm or followed quickly by the announcement of some petty grievance. The two of them had grown so used to their peculiar balance that they seemed to have forgotten what life was like before chaos had brought them together. Now they could no longer live without it. They even seemed to look with pity on the rest of us, at the same time we were pitying them. They believed they were somehow more fortunate, somehow more alive, even in the midst of their fighting.

As the war dragged on, and hardship seeped into every facet of life, Fleury and I did not go hungry. Following a new set of instructions from Tombeau, designed to make sure we were seen more publicly as collaborators—
collabos,
the French called us—we drank real coffee and ate profiteroles stuffed with cream and topped with Belgian chocolate at the Soldatenkaffee Madeleine on the Rue St. Honoré, sitting amongst the Iron-Crossed officers and their too loudly laughing girlfriends. We were regulars at the cramped space of Ladurée on the Rue Royale, with its green walls, elaborate sconces and gilt-edged frescos of fat-baby angels on the ceiling. We went to the Gaumont Palace Cinema, and watched Jeanne Heriard perform at the Schéhérézade cabaret on the Rue de Liège. Fleury and I were expected to take what Dietrich offered us and to continue the charade. To refuse him would have aroused suspicion.

We also had to give the outward impression of wealth, in order to convince Dietrich that we were selling the paintings we received from him in exchange. There were plenty of avenues for moving these works overseas and fortunes to be made in doing so. The reality, of course, was that every painting went straight to Madame Pontier and into hiding. We lived off the allowance given to us by Tombeau, who also allotted us special funds to buy clothes. He told me to set up an account on the Boulevard des Capucines at the Heereskleiderkasse, which used to be called “Old England” until the Germans renamed it.

We accepted the special passes Dietrich had made for us, which the Germans called
Sonderausweise.
They allowed us to violate curfew, which a lot of people did anyway. They took off their shoes and walked home in their socks so as to make less noise. The punishment for violating curfew was not in itself very severe, but if you were brought in on a night that a German soldier was murdered by the Resistance, you might get yourself shot as one of the dozens they would execute as a reprisal.

If we needed to go some place, Dietrich would have his private staff car sent over. He had upgraded his old Mercedes to a Horch convertible, which had two sets of front-facing rear seats and hooded “blackout” lights mounted next to the regular lights, and extra horns and the same swooshing front cowlings as on the Mercedes. It was, Dietrich told us, an even better car than was being driven by the military governor of Paris and a hell of a lot better than what Abetz was puttering around in. Grand as this Horch was, Dietrich seemed to flaunt its grandness even more by refusing to have it cleaned. So the black sides and the chromed front grille were powdery gray with dust and showed the streaks where hands had touched the paint while opening the door.

None of this applied to Pankratov. Dietrich himself showed little interest in the old Russian. As far as he was concerned, Pankratov was a bad-tempered, unclean old man who hung around with us because he had no place else to go. But anyone who could have seen Pankratov in his workshop, consulting his notes on the properties of canvas, paint and paper, would have known there was a genius at work.

Dietrich never brought us to 54 Avenue d’Iéna, the headquarters of the ERR, in whose basement was rumored to be a torture chamber whose walls had been soundproofed with asbestos. Nor had we ever met Alfred Rosenberg, the head of the ERR. At first, I used to think that this was because we weren’t worth the bother. Later, I blamed it on Dietrich’s selfishness, taking all the credit for the paintings for himself and keeping the people who worked for him hidden safely in the shadows. Eventually, I realized that Dietrich kept us out of the way for our own protection. He knew how dangerous his own people could be. He made it clear to us that if we were ever harassed, by French or Germans, one phone call to him would bring down the whole heavy-handed brutality of the Fabry-Georges boys. The reputation of Fabry-Georges, and Dietrich’s ability to summon them like genies from a bottle, seemed enough to deter anyone who wished to do us harm.

I used to ask myself whether there was ever a time that I enjoyed these luxuries, despite everything they had come to represent. The answer was always the same. How could I enjoy myself when I knew that someone was watching me, all the time, obsessed with vengeance? Sometimes I would see these people and clear in their eyes was a simmering fury as they watched me eat and dance and walk in my warm coat, a grotesque Kabuki mask of pleasure bolted to my face.

A part of me was resigned to the idea that we would all be caught, sooner or later. I tried not to think about the luck we’d had so far. Instead, I thought about the work. We churned out a steady stream of paintings and sketches, feathered in amongst the real paintings grudgingly supplied to us by Madame Pontier. Day after day, I painted and drew in that damp space below the old viaduct. I distilled my life down to the simple equation of the job. I saw the forgeries go out and I watched the original paintings that Fleury brought back—the masterworks of generations, which might otherwise have been destroyed.

*   *   *

W
HEN A
G
ERMAN OFFICER
was shot at the Barbes Métro station in mid-August 1941, I became convinced that Germany would win. Some people saw this as the exact opposite. They believed it was the beginning of serious resistance, but to me it had about as much effect as the barking of a chained-up dog.

The Germans arrested dozens of suspected Communists, hauled them off to Mont Válerin and shot them ten at a time. The gunfire echoed out of those stone courtyards. All those dead in exchange for one German soldier. Collaborationist newspapers like
Je Suis Partout
went into full gear, making it sound as if the Germans didn’t have a choice but to kill off that many people.

When America entered the war in December 1941, I was surprised at how little I felt. The event should perhaps have simplified my thoughts about the violence that was going on around me. It should have swept from my mind all doubts about the outcome of the conflict. But it didn’t. Maybe I had begun to believe what was written in that fake identity card which Tombeau had given to me—that I was no longer American. But it wasn’t as simple as that. I was caught up, as many people were, in the small details of life from day to day. I couldn’t stand back far enough to see the bigger picture.

Later on, when Germans were shot on train platforms or knifed while they were taking a piss in some restaurant urinal or beaten over the head and thrown in the river, the Germans did what they always did—rounded up hundreds of people, who were then tortured by the Milice or the Gestapo in chambers beneath the Rue des Saussaies. Even when the Resistance blew up the German-language bookshop on the Place de la Sorbonne, and the street was filled with glass and smoke and thousands of pages of torn-apart books, these efforts seemed hopeless to me. I had been dealing with the German authorities for several years now. I knew that they would pay back every strike against them with such efficient heavy-handedness that they would make the original act of violence look pathetically small. They would do this until not one Frenchman was left alive in France. They would not quit, if only to avoid the shame of quitting.

*   *   *

T
HAT ALL CHANGED IN
early February 1943, with the fall of Stalingrad. The German army had been cut off and over one hundred thousand troops surrendered. This had been the Sixth Army, the same one that marched in a victory parade down the Champs-Elysées after the fall of France and the same one to which Behr was to have been transferred. At Christmastime, there had been a broadcast from troops in all the various places where the Germans were fighting, including Stalingrad. I remembered that part of the broadcast, and now that I was speaking a little German, I even understood what they were saying.

“Attention. Attention,”
said the radio announcer.
“I am calling Stalingrad.”

“This is Stalingrad,”
came the scratchy reply.
“The Front on the Volga.”

Afterwards, I heard rumors that the broadcast had been faked, and that the last German messages out of Stalingrad had ceased a week before. While the fake broadcast had claimed a victory, stories circulated across the whisper-dampened tabletops of the Dimitri that Germans were being killed in Stalingrad at the rate of one every seven seconds.

For the first time, people began to speak seriously of the Germans losing the war.

The acts of sabotage that took place all around Paris had not convinced me. But Stalingrad did. The whole unimaginable slaughter of it made even the German reprisals against the French Resistance seem like nothing. I understood, finally, that they could be defeated. That they
would
be. From now on, it was only a matter of time.

I started to notice a change in the appearance of the German soldiers in Paris, particularly among the lower ranks. Most of them no longer wore the heavy jackboots. Instead, they had ankleboots now, and these were often made of rough and mottled leather. They tucked their trouser legs into canvas gaiters. The clothing changed, too. You could tell that the quality of wool was going down. Particularly in bright sunlight, the dyeing of their field gray wool tunics seemed patchy, as if the wool had been recycled. I noticed a lot more young-looking soldiers, and a lot more older ones, too. But maybe none of that mattered, because they were still carrying the same Mauser rifles and the same Schmeisser burp guns, and the officers still had the same pistol holsters on their belts.

For us, the greatest change of all was that the market for trade in modernist paintings had begun to dry up. Apparently, Hitler himself had heard about collections of unapproved art being compiled by high-ranking German army officials, such as Foreign Minister Ribbentrop. The existence of abstract, constructionist and Expressionist works had been tolerated until now because it was assumed that they were only being used as trade items. But in late July 1943, as a response to the collecting, the SS took a number of paintings by Miró, Ernst, Léger, Picabia and Klee, among others, and burned them in the garden of the Jeu de Paume.

Business tailed off sharply. Tombeau urged us to sell paintings to Dietrich for gold bullion. He said the Resistance needed the money. But Pankratov and I refused, despite Fleury’s reasoning that it was time we started looking out for ourselves a little. I told Tombeau I wasn’t taking these kinds of risks for gold. With Pankratov supporting me, Tombeau and Fleury had no choice but to agree.

I used the free time to do some of my own pieces, the first I’d made in years. I did a sketch of Fleury one morning as he was sitting in his chair at the warehouse, reading the Sunday paper by the light of a candle.