Paris: The Novel

alone?”
    “Why?”
    “My father told me I could trust you.”
    “He did? Why?”
    “I don’t know. He said you were comrades in the Great War.”
    “He said that?” Le Sourd considered. “How do I know you are his son, and that he sent you?”
    “He told me that, if he had been killed, he had asked you to send something to me.” Charlie pulled out the little lighter made from a cartridge shell and showed it to Le Sourd.
    “What else did he say?”
    “That we should not shoot each other until France is liberated.”
    Le Sourd nodded slowly.
    “There is a little bar along the street, young man,” he said. “We can talk there.”
    When they had finished their talk, Le Sourd had told him that it would be best that he had an operational alias, and asked him what he would choose. After hesitating for a moment, Charlie smiled.
    “Call me Monsieur Bon Ami,” he said. A good name, he thought. For that’s what he’d like to be: a Good Friend.
    When Luc Gascon first met Schmid, he thought the young German wasn’t so bad—for a Gestapo man.
    It had been an icy day in early December of 1941. News had just come from Russia that the Germans had suffered their first reverse. At first, they had swept through south Russia and taken the city of Kiev. But now, up in the north, they had met such furious resistance in the suburbs of Moscow that they had turned back.
    In the Gascon bar that morning, the news had been greeted with pleasure. If the emperor Napoléon himself had been forced to retreat from Moscow, it would have been galling if Hitler had done better. And one of the regulars at the bar had just remarked, “Hitler’s buggered,” when a young man in a black Gestapo uniform entered the bar and ordered a drink.
    Luc had happened to be in the bar just then, and he’d moved quickly as an awkward silence fell. Explaining that he was the owner of both the bar and the restaurant next door, he welcomed the Gestapo man with discreet politeness. Skillfully showing the young German respect, it hadn’t taken him long to engage him in conversation. He soon let it be clear both that he was solid for Pétain, and that he might be a useful mine of information about the city. He also learned that the German was named Schmid, that his family were farmers, that he had a married sister and that he worked in the Gestapo headquarters.
    Karl Schmid was unremarkable to look at. Were it not for his black uniform, he would be the kind of figure who is immediately lost in any crowd. Medium height, mousy hair. Only his pale blue eyes were at all memorable.
    After the German had left, one of the regulars remarked sourly to Luc that he’d been nice to the German. Luc only shrugged.
    “Who needs to annoy the Gestapo? I want them to leave us alone.”
    But in fact, he had already decided that this young Gestapo officer might be useful to him.

    Luc always found ways to make a living. His first task was to ensure there were provisions for the restaurant. Using the black market he managed to keep the restaurant going, despite the wartime food shortages.
    But his income was down. Though he could still obtain a little cocaine, many of his clients had left, and the high-ranking German officers whoused the drug had their own suppliers. He never saw Louise now, but it enraged him that she must be making a fortune at L’Invitation au Voyage, and was paying him nothing. There wasn’t much he could do; but he still vowed that one day he’d make her wish she hadn’t treated him like that.
    In the meantime, however, he knew how to live by his wits. And it was natural that he had been wondering for some time how he should profit from the German occupation. People like Marc Blanchard and Louise met Germans at the highest levels. He did not. But young Karl Schmid the Gestapo officer might be just the sort of contact he needed.
    Two days later, he went to his office.

    Karl Schmid sat behind his desk and considered the world. He was twenty-eight years old and remarkably fortunate.
    For a start, he was in Paris—a city he’d always wanted to visit, and never dreamed he would live in.
    Not only that, his office was spectacular. Not his own, personal office exactly, since that was quite a small room. But the building was spacious and situated on one of the noblest avenues in the world.
    After the Great War, the wide, stately avenue that ran down from the Arc de Triomphe to the Bois de Boulogne had been renamed after one of the war’s great