Léon and Louise (24 page)

‘No, what?'

‘This is the unpleasant part. You mustn't take offence.'

‘Please go on.'

‘I noticed that you make rather a lot of mistakes when you're copying. That's why it occurred to me that the lighting conditions in here might not be of the best. Please forgive me for asking, but how is your eyesight?'

‘Pretty good.'

‘Really? You don't need reading glasses yet?'

‘Fortunately not.'

‘That's good, because you aren't as young as you were, are you? How old are you actually, if I may ask? Forty?'

‘I regret the mistakes, monsieur.'

Knochen brushed this aside. ‘They're only minor matters – venial sins, of course – so don't take this too hard. At the same time, I'm sure you'll agree with me that even tiny errors can have disastrous administrative repercussions.'

‘True.'

‘I knew I wouldn't have to explain that to you, being a scientist. Look: here, for instance, you've written “Yaruzelsky” instead of “Jaruzelsky”. If this card were filed alphabetically under Y, we'd never be able to locate the man. Or here: “Rue de l'Avoine” instead of “Rue des Moines” – a street of that name doesn't exist at all. Or this date of birth: “23 July 1961” – the man wouldn't have been born yet. You see what I mean, Monsieur Le Gall?'

‘Yes, monsieur.'

‘I took the liberty of comparing all these hundred cards with the originals and totting up the defective ones, and do you know how many there were?'

‘I regret – '

‘Guess! Go on, have a guess! How many do you think: eight? Fifteen? Twenty-three?'

Léon shrugged his shoulders.

‘Seventy-three! Seventy-three out of a hundred, Monsieur Le Gall! In percentage terms that makes, let's see, just a minute – oh, of course, you idiot: seventy-three per cent! That's a lot, isn't it?'

‘It is.'

‘Nearly all the errors are minimal, but as Lichtenberg said, the most dangerous untruths are truths that have been slightly distorted. Do you agree?'

‘Certainly.'

Knochen made another dismissive gesture. ‘Don't take it too hard, we all make the occasional mistake, though I'm bound to say your own mistakes are remarkably numerous. Do you know what your colleagues' average percentage is?'

‘No.'

‘Eleven-point-nine.'

‘I see.'

‘I'm glad you see. What matters now is to eliminate the source of your errors and thereby improve your performance, isn't it? Isn't it, Monsieur Le Gall?'

‘Yes.'

‘Have you an explanation for your high percentage?'

‘Many of the cards are hard to decipher.'

‘Certainly,' said Knochen, ‘but your colleagues have to contend with equally damaged material, don't they? Or do you think it conceivable that you're allotted a statistically significant preponderance of badly damaged cards? If so, is that preponderance fortuitous, or should we look for some underlying reason?'

Léon shrugged.

‘That's why I was concerned about desk lamps and reading glasses, you see. There must be some reason why you make so many mistakes. Needless to say, my SS colleagues are quick to suspect sabotage and high treason if they see a percentage like yours. Are you acquainted with any other members of the SS?'

‘No.'

‘Just between ourselves, some of them are thoroughly reprehensible hotheads – not the kind I'd care to meet in a dark alley some night. Do you know what they do to saboteurs? To start with, all kinds of unmentionable things. Then they take them to Drancy internment camp and put them up against a wall. Or throw them into the Seine in handcuffs. Or dump them in the nearest ditch with a bullet in the back of the neck. It's martial law. They're entitled to.'

‘I see.'

‘They're hot-headed youngsters, as I say. Ill-bred, some of them, but what can one do? Don't worry, though, Monsieur Le Gall. For the time being, I still decide what happens in this establishment, and I say my staff must be provided with good working conditions if they're to do a good job.'

Knochen clicked his fingers yet again, and the orderly brought in a big desk lamp with a reflecting shade.

‘Say what you like, but one needs a good light to do good work by. Just because you've got used to your old thing, that doesn't mean it gives a good light. Mind if we disconnect it and plug this one in instead?'

‘If you insist.'

‘This is a Siemens, the Mercedes of desk lamps, so to speak – no comparison with that old thing of yours. If you'd just sign for it as a matter of routine. Administrative routine is important, is it not?'

‘Yes, monsieur. What about the coffee?'

‘What about it?'

‘Don't you need a receipt for that too?'

‘Now you're poking fun at me, Le Gall. That's unjust. I'm not a pettifogging pedant, so don't get me wrong. Personally, I need no receipts for anything at all. My own view is that life demands an unsolicited receipt from us all, sooner or later. But the bureaucrats can't wait for our demise, they need receipts before that. And to be fair, administrative routine is never an end in itself; ultimately, it exists for our own benefit. Isn't that so?'

‘Of course.'

‘So administrative errors can have grave consequences, I always say. But here I am, standing here chatting when you've a great deal of work to do. Au revoir, Le Gall. See you this evening.'

‘Au revoir, monsieur.'

Knochen hurried out into the passage, coat tails fluttering, and pulled the door to behind him. A moment later he opened it again.

‘I almost forgot. At lunchtime you must look in at the kindergarten in Rue Lejeune – the headmistress called. It's about your little daughter – the four-year-old, what was her name again? Marianne?'

‘Muriel.'

‘Apparently, little Muriel threw a cobblestone at a third-floor lavatory window and smashed it.'

‘Muriel did?'

Knochen made another of his dismissive gestures. ‘It's all nonsense, of course. I mean, how could a girl of four throw a cobblestone at a third-floor window? A mix-up, no doubt – just a typical administrative error. Still, perhaps you'd better look in there at lunchtime. I was told that the little girl has been locked up in the coal cellar – in durance vile, so to speak – and she's crying her eyes out.'

Léon pushed his chair back with a jerk and made to get up, but Knochen gripped him by the shoulder and forced him down again.

‘No rush, Monsieur Le Gall, no fuss. The best thing we can do is let matters take their course in the routine way, don't you agree? One's work takes priority over one's private life. Put in another two hours' conscientious copying, then it'll be lunchtime and you can go to the Rue Lejeune. The headmistress is a hidebound martinet, I'm told. If she won't let your little daughter out of the coal cellar, tell her Hauptsturmführer Knochen sends his regards, that should help. Au revoir, monsieur, and happy copying. Have a nice day.'

T
hen came the winter of 1940–41, and Paris turned cold. In summer the switch to German time had granted the city's inhabitants long, light evenings on which the sun didn't set until after ten o'clock and residual streaks of daylight still glimmered on the horizon at midnight. They paid for this now because the working day began in the middle of the night. Léon rose when it was pitch-dark and shaved by dim electric light. At breakfast he could see his reflection in the black window pane, and on his way to work the stars twinkled in the sky as if it were already dusk, not early in the morning.

That winter, where his work at the Quai des Orfèvres was concerned, Léon realized that right had become wrong and wrong was now the law; the scum had risen to the surface and the laws were made by rogues. In the passages at headquarters, policemen exchanged whispered reports of the latest doings of the most notorious hoodlums in Paris – ‘Pierrot la Valise', ‘François le Mauvais' or ‘Feu-Feu le Riton' – who had exchanged their ten-, fifteen- or twenty-year prison terms for freedom, cars and petrol, not to mention firearms and German police permits. Things had yet to reach the stage where they turned up at the Quai des Orfèvres in broad daylight and arrested the policemen who had arrested them, but everyone knew that day would soon come.

Although it was to Léon's advantage that he did his work anonymously and out of contact with the outside world, he could literally smell danger whenever he passed the various departments on the stairs every morning, and he realized that any colleague, secretary or gendarme could be in cahoots with the villains and murderers. He could see no way out of this situation, so he took refuge in his laboratory, performed his duties, and carefully avoided all non-essential contacts.

As early as November, a big depression flooded the city with cold air from Siberia. Petrol and diesel became so scarce, the streets were dominated by bicycles, pedicab rickshaws and horse-drawn vehicles. If an occasional car did drive past, you could be sure that the person behind the wheel was a German or a collaborator. Most noticeable of all was the silence in the streets and the cold, unspeaking silence of those who trod the pavements. The old street noises were no more. Now, all that could be heard was the crunch of hurried footsteps on hard-frozen snow, an occasional cough, a perfunctory greeting, or the listless cries of a newspaper seller who had long abandoned hope of selling his German-dictated papers.

Silent queues stood outside shops and policemen on street corners behaved as if they weren't there. In cafés, people crowded into the warmth of the coffee machines, silently staring at the bottles of colourful liqueurs, most of which were dummies, the faded Martini calendars and the statutory notices proscribing public drunkenness. Many of them had red noses and cheeks flushed with fever, most wore hats, scarves and gloves, and all were clearly refugees from homes in which it was little warmer than outside in the street.

The Le Galls went to bed in long stockings, gloves and woollen sweaters. In the mornings they scraped their frozen breath off the window panes. When Léon came home with a bundle of firewood bought on the black market, as he sometimes did, they spent the evening seated around the open fire in the living room. Lulled by the unaccustomed warmth they would fall asleep, one after the other, on the sofa, in the armchair, or on the Persian rug. Long after midnight, when the fire had gone out and the cold had crept back into the flat through cracks and crannies, Léon and Yvonne would carry the younger children to bed one by one.

It was on one of those nights that they begot Philippe, their little afterthought, who in his turn, almost exactly twenty years later, in September 1960, would meet a young girl from Switzerland who was passing through on her way to Oxford University but prolonged her stay. One mild autumn night she accompanied Philippe back to his attic room in the Rue des Écoles, with the result that nine months later she gave birth to a little boy who was baptized in my own name at the church of Saint-Nicolas du Chardonnet.

They all remained healthy, however, nor did they have to go hungry. Because Léon and Yvonne retained vivid memories of the First World War, they had, from the day war broke out onwards, amassed as much as they could in the way of emergency supplies of food. Prices had risen only moderately by the autumn of 1940, so they filled their cupboards with sacks of rice, flour and oats. They also, behind an inconspicuous curtain in the light shaft over the lavatory, where no looter would have suspected the presence of food, stashed scores of tins of beans, peas, condensed milk and apple purée.

Even eggs, butter, meat and sausage appeared on the table regularly once Michel, their eldest son, began visiting Rouen on the first weekend of every month to see Aunt Sophie, who maintained a cordial relationship with various Normandy dairy farmers. The sixteen-year-old youth much enjoyed setting off for the Gare Saint-Lazare on Saturday morning with his pockets full of money and boarding the Rouen train with all the aplomb of a seasoned traveller. Somewhat less enjoyable was his return journey on Sunday with a bulging suitcase. Forever on the qui vive for gendarmes and German soldiers, he had to lug this three long kilometres from the station to the Rue des Écoles.