Léon and Louise (18 page)

One evening in April 1937, great agitation reigned in the Rue des Écoles. Just before suppertime, Madame Rossetos ran screaming through the building in search of her two daughters, now aged sixteen and fourteen, who had disappeared into the blue together with their clothes, bedclothes and their mother's savings, which she'd kept for many years in a sugar basin in the kitchen cupboard.

In January 1938, Léon Le Gall was appointed deputy laboratory director of the Police Judiciaire's Scientific Service, and on 1 September 1939, the day the Germans invaded Poland, he had to undergo an operation for haemorrhoids at the Salpêtrière Hospital.

The day on which Louise first sent him another sign of life was one of the most bizarre in French history. It was Friday, 14 June 1940. That first springtime of the war, which had so far passed almost unnoticed in Paris, was unprecedented in its beauty and
joie de vivre
. Throughout the month of April, while thousands of young men were once more dying in the East, women in short floral dresses had gone around beneath the dark-azure skies with their hair cascading down their backs. The pavement cafés were crowded until late at night because the boulevards still glowed with the heat of the sunlight stored up during the day. It was as if some gigantic, warm-blooded creature were hidden beneath the flagstones, breathing gently and imperceptibly.

Radios broadcast Lucienne Delyle's wistful
Sérénade sans Espoir,
customers in Galeries Lafayette and the Samaritaine competed for white linen suits and beach pyjamas, the air was laden with the beguiling scent of expensive perfumes in minuscule bottles, and at dusk lovers' shadows blended with those of the plane and chestnut trees blossoming in the parks. To be sure, the Parisians' thoughts occasionally turned to the
drôle de guerre
, the so-called phoney war, between two kisses or two glasses of wine, but should they have drunk one glass, bestowed one kiss or danced one dance fewer? Whom would it have benefited?

That sweet dream of a springtime came to an abrupt end when it turned out that the Maginot Line was incapable of holding the Hun at bay. After 10 May, tens of thousands of Belgians and Luxembourgers fled from the Luftwaffe's huge steel dragonflies and the saurians of the Panzer brigades, which descended on the countryside like a biblical plague, at horrific speed and with an ear-splitting din, and sprayed their leaden poison over the streams of refugees. When German armoured columns broke through at Sedan as well, Paris succumbed to a universal spirit of
sauve qui peut
. It was led by the government and its generals and ministers and industrialists, who made off with their workers' wages, followed by parliamentarians, civil servants, lickspittles, toadies, diplomats, businessmen, and the ruins of the army. With them also went the
beau monde
of the journalists, artists and academics who felt obliged, for the sake of humanity and in the interests of the future, to save their own skins by all available means and as a matter of the highest priority.

They were joined by hundreds of thousands of women, children and old men who fled southwards in overcrowded trains and along traffic-choked roads, on foot and on bicycles, in taxis and cars drawn by teams of oxen for want of petrol and travelling bumper to bumper, their roofs laden with mattresses, bicycles and leather armchairs; on horse-drawn wagons, lorries and handcarts piled high with the entire contents of craftsmen's workshops, grocery stores and private households.

After three weeks the stream of refugees dried up. Paris had lost two-thirds of its population. Those who remained included the wealthiest of the wealthy and the poorest of the poor, as well as anyone forbidden by law to desert his or her post for professional reasons: hospital staff, financial and fiscal administrators, post office, telegraph office and Métro employees, the staff of power stations and gasworks, firemen, and the French capital's 20,000 policemen.

And so, while newspapers were carrying reports of the retreat to Dunkirk, the collapse of rail traffic and the capitulation of the Belgian government, Léon continued to go to the laboratory every day as if nothing had happened. He was assigned the same sort of work as he had performed in peacetime: almond tarts impregnated with cyanide, champagne laced with rat poison, mushroom risotto made with deadly fly agaric. To his surprise, although Paris was two-thirds depopulated, cases where poison was suspected had considerably increased in number rather than diminished. It seemed that, in times of chaos and mass panic, many female poisoners had ventured to do what they would have lacked the courage to perpetrate in more stable circumstances.

On Monday, 10 June 1940, however, my grandfather's professional routine was rudely interrupted. When he turned up for work at eight-fifteen as usual, the Quai des Orfèvres was thronged with members of the Police Judiciaire: uniformed gendarmes, plainclothesmen, forensic chemists, pathologists and office staff were sullenly standing around on the pavement in the morning sunlight, smoking, muttering together in small groups, or reading newspapers in the shade of doorways or projecting roofs. The doors of the main building were shut, but the lights were on inside.

‘What's up? Why isn't anyone going in?' Léon asked a young colleague whom he vaguely knew from having shared a coffee break with him.

‘No idea. Room 205 is being cleared, apparently.'

‘The Ministry of Shame, you mean?'

‘Seems so.'

‘Are they shutting it down?'

‘No, the records are being evacuated, that's all.'

‘The whole of the aliens' card index?'

‘It'll be quite a job. We're supposed to lend a hand.'

‘You lend a hand, then. I've got a mass of stuff to do in the lab.'

‘You won't be working there today, I reckon. Emergency decree. All departments are suspended from their normal duties and have to pitch in.'

‘Fair enough. At least we won't be turning over those records to the Nazis. It's a humanitarian act.'

‘Humanitarian my eye!' the young man said, flicking his cigarette end into the Seine. ‘They want to save their card index, that's all.'

‘From the Nazis?'

‘Yes, because they're afraid they'll mess up their nice, tidy Room 205, seeing they can't even speak French.'

‘You don't say.'

‘Yes.'

‘That's typical.'

‘Room 205 is even keener on being tidy than the Germans.'

The Service des Étrangers in Room 205, the department responsible for supervising foreigners and refugees, had become notorious in France and far beyond its borders as the ‘Ministry of Shame'. It comprised a team of junior civil servants whose sole job it was to spy on, supervise and bully all the refugees who were seeking asylum in the home of human rights and make it as hard as possible for them to obtain permanent residency. Originally established from the worthiest of motives to assist the human jetsam of the First World War, the Service des Étrangers had mutated over the years, seemingly of itself and without outside help, into a Moloch that fed on the blood of those it should really have protected, its supreme aim being to know all about anything and anyone that wasn't one hundred per cent French.

The grandest hotels in Paris and the shabbiest suburban boarding houses had to submit their guests' registration forms to Room 205 every day. Every labour exchange had to report its foreign applicants, every judicial authority had to submit relevant information, and every anonymous informer received a ready hearing from conscientious officials who carefully entered every denunciation on an index card and filed it away for all time.

There were millions of red index cards recording foreign residents' addresses, millions of grey index cards that classified them by nationality, and millions of yellow index cards containing political information. Jews, communists and freemasons were listed in separate indexes. So numerous were the index cards that they had to be collated into central registers, which in turn were collated into one big, comprehensive register, and all these card indexes and registers were methodically stored in wooden boxes and suspension files kept on the ceiling-high shelves that lined every wall in the spacious office.

Outside the door of Room 205 were some long benches polished to a high gloss by the trouser seats of hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews, German communists and Italian anti-fascists who had spent many hours, days and weeks tremulously hoping that their name would at last be called and they would be admitted to Room 205, where a junior civil servant, having eyed them suspiciously over the top of his glasses and consulted some red and grey cards, would pick up his rubber stamp and – please God – renew their resident's permit for another week or month.

The bells of Notre Dame had just struck half-past eight when a black Citroën Traction Avant pulled up on the Quai d'Orsay. The passenger door opened and out got Roger Langeron, the French capital's prefect of police. Putting a megaphone to his mouth, he addressed the army of waiting men over the top of the car.

‘MESSIEURS, YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE. ALL POLICE JUDICIAIRE PERSONNEL ARE HEREBY ASSIGNED TO SPECIAL DUTIES UNDER THE PROVISIONS OF MARTIAL LAW. YOU ARE ALL TO PROCEED TO THE FIRST FLOOR BY WAY OF STAIRCASE F AND HOLD YOURSELVES IN READINESS IN THE PASSAGE OUTSIDE ROOM 205. KINDLY HURRY, THE GERMANS HAVE ALREADY REACHED COMPIÈGNE!

At his young colleague's side, Léon climbed Staircase F to the first floor and sat down on a bench in the passage. The door of Room 205 was open. Usually renowned for its cathedral hush and positively robotic working methods, the big office was as filled with noise and bustle as a flea market. Standing on tall ladders, men in oversleeves were removing card indexes from the shelves and handing them down to other men in oversleeves, who carried them over to a big central desk at which the prefect of police himself was seated. Having examined each card index in turn, he slid it to the left- or right-hand side of the desk. Those that went left were destined for immediate destruction, whereas those on the right were to be taken to a place of safety.

Lined up on either side of the desk were two human chains for the removal of the card indexes. Running parallel to each other, they led out into the passage and down Staircase F to the ground floor, then out through the main entrance and across the Quai des Orfèvres to the banks of the Seine. The card indexes destined for disposal were taken a little way downstream and thrown into the river, where individual cards drifted away on the current like outsize autumn leaves; the material to be preserved was loaded into two specially requisitioned barges moored further upstream.

Léon joined the chain responsible for jettisoning card indexes. For eight hours he stood on the steps passing thousands of folders and box files from hand to hand. Documentary evidence relating to millions of human lives floated away on the turbid waters of the Seine, there to disintegrate, dissolve and sink to the bottom of the river, where mud-eating invertebrates would ingest it, digest it, and reintroduce it to the life cycle.

Urged to hurry by their superiors, the members of the human chains did little talking. Room 205 had been cleared by the evening of the second day, and the last of the records were removed from the basement overnight. At half-past eight the next morning, exactly forty-eight hours after the operation began, the barges cast off and disappeared under the Pont Saint-Michel, heading downstream for the unoccupied South of France by way of rivers and canals.