Paris: The Novel

simple: they were to observe where the family went.
    Early in the morning they saw Jacob leave the apartment block where he lived on the rue La Fayette. One of the men followed him to his small gallery, where he remained until the end of the morning. Meanwhile, his wife went out shopping, and returned home. Late in the afternoon, Jacob returned home. Nothing else happened. “Watch again tomorrow morning,” Schmid instructed. “If he goes to the office again, pick him up and bring him in.”
    At noon the next day, they brought Jacob in. They didn’t take him to the avenue Foch, however, but to a house on the rue des Saussaies, just behind the Élysée Palace. It was well equipped for such encounters.
    Schmid conducted the interrogation. As he looked at the small, neatlydressed art dealer, he felt no particular emotion. He asked his questions gently. He could always use other methods if he chose.
    So he learned at once that Jacob had a wife and a single child, a little girl. That was easy. What was his business? Jacob explained that he was an art dealer. Schmid asked for the keys to the gallery. Reluctantly, Jacob gave them. Had he any other family?
    Not much. He had a cousin named Hélène.
    The first setback. Hélène was not an invention. She might still be a code word, of course. He asked for her address, so that he could check the story. How often did he see her? Quite often. He had planned to go around to her house with his family yesterday, but then changed his mind.
    Where had he been two days ago? To the Vel d’hiv. Why? To see what was happening. Was he afraid? Yes. Where did he go afterward? Into Montparnasse. Why? He had a friend whom he hadn’t seen for a while named Abraham. He’d been concerned he might have been rounded up and taken to the Vel d’hiv. And had he?
    “I don’t know,” Jacob said simply. “When I got to his place, they told me he’d moved a couple of months ago. That’s all I could discover. So I went home.”
    Schmid guessed that some of this story was probably true. But was it the whole truth? He took Abraham’s address.
    “We shall talk again,” he told Jacob, and sent him back to a holding cell.
    By evening his stories had been checked out. Cousin Hélène turned out to be a plump middle-aged woman of no account. Abraham had moved, but not registered his new address. He might be of interest.
    Meanwhile, Schmid had gone to the gallery himself. Its contents were quite intriguing.
    If the Third Reich confiscated art collections—especially Jewish ones—Schmid had started acquiring art as well. He believed he was developing an eye. He found many things in Jacob’s gallery—some of it degenerate art, which would have to be burned, of course—but many good things as well. No doubt there would be more in Jacob’s house. It seemed likely that Jacob’s art inventory was of far more interest than was Jacob himself. He stayed there until dusk. Before he left, he took a small sketch by Degas, rolled it carefully and put it in his briefcase. It would never be missed.
    On the way back, he called in again at the rue des Saussaies. He had them bring Jacob to an interrogation room and strap him in a chair.
    He explained to Jacob that he believed there was an escape route out of France, and he wanted to know about it.
    Jacob said that if there was one, he didn’t know it.
    Then Schmid took a pair of pliers and pulled out one of Jacob’s fingernails, which made him scream, and Schmid said: “It is painful, you see.” He asked him: “Did your friend Abraham know an escape route? Isn’t that why you were looking for him?” Jacob said no. So then Schmid did what he had done before, and Jacob screamed again. And as he was sobbing, Jacob looked up wretchedly and said: “If I could have escaped, do you think I’d be here now?”
    Then Schmid told them to take the art dealer back to his cell and to arrest Jacob’s wife for questioning the next morning.

    Laïla Jacob was seven years old and a bright little girl. When her father didn’t come home from the gallery, her mother went to look for him and came back very frightened. At first she wouldn’t tell Laïla what had happened, but then she changed her mind.
    A Gestapo man had been in the gallery when she got there, she told Laïla, so she had not gone in. But the people in the store next door said that her husband had been arrested.
    “They are coming to take us away to prison,” her mother told her. “All of us. No