Paris: The Novel

a French Jew whom I can arrest, my friend, and I will pay you well.”

    It was a hot day that July when Luc Gascon walked along the bank of the Seine past the Eiffel Tower.
    He was going there because he made a point of seeing everything that was going on in the city. And this was certainly an unusual occurrence. He was going to take a look at what was going on at the large building that lay just a short distance downstream from the Eiffel Tower.
    The old indoor bicycle stadium which had proved such a useful venue for the boxing matches during the ’24 Olympics was still in use. The Vélodrome d’hiver, the winter bicycle track, remained its official name. But everyone called it the Vel d’hiv. And for the last few days, the French police had found another use for the old place. It was a holding station for a large number of undesirables they had just rounded up. Several thousand of them. Jews: foreign Jews, mostly.
    When Luc got there, he could see a number of police vans outside the stadium, but there didn’t seem to be any people going in or out. All thedoors of the stadium were closed. In the strange silence, under the harsh sun, the scene reminded him of one of those surrealist paintings he had seen, as though he had walked in upon a dream. But as he got closer, something else struck him that wasn’t like a dream at all. It was the smell. Not just a smell, a stink, a terrible, sickening stench of latrines overflowing, of excrement warmed and putrefied. He pulled out a handkerchief and held it over his nose.
    Luc didn’t especially like or dislike Jews. People who had strong beliefs said they were capitalist bloodsuckers, or Marxist revolutionaries. And they’d crucified Christ, of course. Personally, Luc never went to church and didn’t care whether they’d crucified Christ or not.
    Most of the Jews he’d met weren’t so bad. He supposed they were mainly French Jews, and they might be rather different from all the foreign Jews who’d been flooding into Paris in the last few years.
    And it was the foreign Jews that the police had been rounding up.
    He stared at the building with its terrible stench. Whoever those poor devils were inside, he considered, this was a terrible way to treat them.
    He’d been standing there for a little while when he noticed another figure, a small, neatly dressed man, also watching the Vel d’hiv from a street corner. The fellow looked vaguely familiar, and he searched his mind, trying to remember where he’d seen him. He saw the man turn and look at him, then walk toward him.

    When Jacob had told his wife he was going to see what was going on at the Vel d’hiv, he had felt a secret sense of dread, but he had not told her that. Now, as the art dealer gazed at the big building, he understood exactly what he saw.
    The logic was simple: If they would pen all these people up in conditions like this—if they would treat them worse than animals being prepared for slaughter—then there was nothing they would not do.
    Perhaps, if he had not known the long history of his people, he might have remained like so many in the Jewish community who refused to believe that a French government could be so evil. Perhaps, if he had not spent all his life in the company of works of art, and known their stories and the characters, sometimes, of the very men who commissioned such beauty, he might have been less keenly aware of the terrible possibilities that lie within the human spirit.
    But Jacob knew these things, and foresaw what was to come, and knew he must get out, if he could.
    Ever since he had given some of his paintings to Louise, Jacob had been preparing for the worst. If he could have, he’d have gone to England. But escape across the Channel was almost impossible. A few months ago, however, a friend named Abraham had told him of a new opening.
    “We’re going to organize a route across the Pyrenees into Spain,” Abraham had told him. “It’s not in place yet, and it’ll be risky, of course; but we’re getting our people together.” He’d promised to keep Jacob informed. Jacob had told his wife about the conversation, and between themselves they referred to this option as “visiting Cousin Hélène.”
    Abraham lived in Montparnasse. If Abraham could just get them to a safe house of some kind out of Paris, Jacob thought, that at least would be a start. He still had money to invest in the enterprise.
    And he was so shaken by what he had just seen at the Vel d’hiv,