Nazis in the Metro (10 page)

But the real ignominies reached a new level with a passage from the
Paris Imbecile
, No. 5, from December 1991:

Gabriel closed the icon and sent the entire “Mess” folder to print. The taste of bile filled his mouth. He grabbed the closest bottle from the bar beneath the television and swallowed a long pull of wine, both bitter and sweet, which he spit back up when he realized it was of the fortified kind. The printer chanted some notes from “En rouge et noir” to signal that it had completed its mission. He set the printed pages on the edge of the shelf, reading only a few lines at the bottom, from the weekly
Minute-France
, No. 1695, November 4, 1992:

He remembered one of André Sloga’s books that nobody had wanted after the war, a book that was then put out by an economically suicidal publisher, Paul Draflos, at the height of the leftist wave of the 1970s. The novel was called
The Handover
and recounted the story of a resistance movement from the Pyrenees, made up primarily of Spanish republicans who had refused to pick up arms again in 1944. These were men who planned to try the magistrates and cops who had aided and abetted the Nazis. They also thought that no victory would be complete without the fall of the Iberian dictators, Franco and Salazar. In the end, their romantic dream had drowned in blood at the hands of the united forces of France’s new legitimacy.

Gabriel knew that Sloga, after his participation in the International Brigades, had joined the resistance again in Yonne. He could well imagine his reticence to aim his Sten at leaders who had become “reasonable.”

It was clear, in any case, that fifty years later he’d rejoined the resistance.

With a Mac loaded to the gills with diskettes!

Pedro Ferrer lived on the Quai Sisley in Villeneuve-la-Garenne, in an old barge that had been towed to within a hundred meters of the riverbank, just next to the Van Praët naval yards. The steel hull was burrowed into the black earth of the Paris Basin, and through its portholes the mysteries of vegetal life—various roots, worms, and insects—could be observed. Little by little, Pedro had added rooms to both sides of the boat, so that a first-time visitor would be surprised, after entering the maze of crudely constructed annexes, to emerge into the oblong enormity of the hold. It was there that he had set up his shop for stamping and engraving. In the era of decolonization and national liberation, this was where false papers, dozens at a time, were made to look official. More recently—the qualifier having taken precedence over the noun, with “national” everywhere supplanting “liberation”—the pace had significantly slowed. He’d become wary, working only through two or three intermediaries who were also trusted friends. Gabriel was one of them.

—What mischief are you up to now?

Pedro waved the flame of his lighter in front of the uneven stub of his Boyard Maïs and took a long puff. He
could pride himself on being the last person in the world to smoke this brand of cigarette. When, several years earlier, the Surgeon General had decided to halt the fabrication of the most deadly of the human-lung-seeking missiles, Pedro had hastened to order a pallet full, which he stored in a damp and airless room near the propeller head. By his calculations, at a rate of twelve a day, he had enough to last him until his seventieth birthday, in the year 2000. He placed a blank sheet atop the disorderly stack of papers on the table.

—Just some BS so I don’t lose my touch …

—If it’s BS, why are you hiding it? Don’t you trust me anymore?

Pedro slapped him lightly on the back.

—This isn’t true for everything, but in this particular case, the less you know the better … What brings you here?

Gabriel explained what had happened to Sloga and why, after his time with the coypus of Poitiers, he was losing faith in his original hypothesis, seductive as it was, about vengeance over a literary indiscretion. Now he believed the attack on the writer might be related to his research into the revival of an openly fascist movement among Parisian intellectuals.

—I took the time to read and reread the veritable dictionary of putrid ideas that André Sloga had assembled from more than a hundred citations. It’s revolting. He drew up charts in order to classify them according to their principal themes. Anti-Semitism and revisionism came first, followed close behind by a visceral hatred of social democracy, then by the denunciation of Satanic America, and finally, the celebration of nationalism in all its forms. The
texts were taken from about thirty different publications.
Continental Furor
and the
Shock of the Month
, monthlies catering to intellectuals in the National Front, provided the majority of the references, but others were drawn from the
National Weekly
, the
Minute, Elements, Krisis, Humanity
, the
Social War
, the
People’s Struggle, Revolution
, and a privately circulated bulletin of the Federation of Anarchists.

Pedro registered what he was being told. He sat down in an armchair that resembled Sylvia Krystel’s in
Emmanuelle
, with the slight difference that this one was positioned beneath a portrait of Puig Antich, one of the last of Franco’s victims. He read calmly for an hour, through his half-moon glasses, then put down the dozen or so sheets of paper with a disgusted frown. Gabriel sat down across from him.

—What do you think?

—Not much … I get the sense that history is repeating itself, and that these cretins are serving stale dishes from the 1930s! That thing about Fabius, for example, that your friend found in the
Minute
, the Jewish baby who thinks only of dollars, that’s vintage Léon Daudet … The guy who wrote that isn’t treading any new ground, I’m sure he stole “deadened maw, gelatinous jay” directly from old pamphlets by that Nazi piece of crap!

—What I like about you is that you don’t bother with niceties, or subtle turns of phrase …

Pedro’s fist slammed down on the table, making his forger’s tools jump.

—Because you think the way to hunt a hyena is with a flute! I give as much of a shit about political correctness as I do about being arrested! No mercy for the Krauts … They
must be crushed to the last. And not in the name of truth or reason! It’s the fundamental, ancient instinct to survive. They proved what they’re capable of, and if we let them sit at the table, they won’t settle for just one seat.

Gabriel smiled as he listened to the diatribe.

—Seems like that did you good! You look revived. I’ve known for a long time what your convictions are, Pedro, but right now what I need is an objective, clear opinion about this steaming pile of manure.

Pedro relit his Boyard.

—If you hadn’t forgotten how to be a student, you’d notice that I’ve already responded in part … Did I or did I not tell you that they’re just serving cold dishes from the ’30s?

Gabriel knitted his brow.

—Yes. And?

—And how the hell does this happen? We teach kids the color of the uniforms Francois I’s soldiers wore when they raided Marignan in 1515, but they are incapable of learning what happened just thirty years before they were born! What really alarms me in this collage of quotations is the conflation of ideas from right-wing and communist presses. You know me well enough to know that I puke on all manner of commies, whether they’re Stalinists, Trotskyites, Marxists, Leninists, Carilloists, Maoists, Guevaroists, or Jivaroists! And yet, Kronstadt, Makhno, and the Catalogne won’t let me forget that we’re all fuel for the fascists’ fire … Because we’re Jewish, Arab, black, anarchist, handicapped, queer, or all of the above, like you!

—I was waiting for that, you couldn’t resist …

—It might be a cheap shot, but it gives me joy … 
Seriously, there’s nothing more dangerous than an alliance between the fascists and the commies … It’s like nitrite and glycerine. In two separate bottles you’ve got nothing to fear, but if you mix them, you’ll blow your head off! The Number Two in the French Communist Party, Jacques Doriot, deputy mayor of Saint-Denis, crossed over at the end of the 1930s, but luckily his party threw him out. He died wearing an S.S. uniform. Imagine the scene if he’d gotten away with it, if he’d taken down Thorez … It was a close call …

Gabriel picked up an awl and started cleaning his fingernails.

—We aren’t at that point yet …

Pedro took the tool from him.

—Go tell that to the flock in Toulon, Orange, Marignane, Dreux, Clichy-sous-Bois … Le Pen’s horde has become the number one labor party in France! It’s all but taken the lead even in Drancy, the city where an old Socialist, Laval, deported seventy thousand Jews in a raid carried out by our beloved forces from the Order! I shit upon every mute Drancean with his memory up his ass!

Pedro rose suddenly, causing the wicker to creak, and went over to the library that had been built into what was formerly the bargeman’s sleeping alcove.

—Here, I know exactly what all this shit you’ve shown me has made me think of! It must be in the section for … Hold on … You can judge for yourself …

His hand caressed the edges of a row of books and pamphlets. He delicately extracted a booklet with a brown cover, whose yellowed pages were separating from the spine, and blew on it to disperse the dust. Gabriel was only able
to read the title,
Black Front
, before Pedro set it on the table and opened to the flyleaf, which bore an epigraph from Adolf Hitler:

“There are more things that link us to communism than things that separate us. There is, above all, the revolutionary spirit. The social democrat and the bourgeois unionist will never become National Socialists, but the communist will.”

Gabriel read the text several times.

—For fuck’s sake. He’s never been one of my favorite authors, far from it, but I didn’t suspect he was capable of such reflection … People talk about him like he was a born imbecile.

Pedro flipped through the little book, and entire passages returned to him from memory. It was enough to replace the 1930s with the 1990s to see how much the strategy of an alliance between red and brown persisted. He looked at Gabriel.

—So many things have been swept under the carpet … Have you heard about the Strasser brothers, the left-wing Nazis?

—No, and even the concept of a left-wing Nazi is new to me, I must admit!

—Well, there are two brothers, Otto and Gregor, who, in around 1925, start to establish the Nazi party in northern Germany, in the provinces of Prussia, Saxony, Rhineland, and Hanover … These aren’t little guys … Their right-hand man is a guy called Goebbels. Gregor Strasser quickly becomes Number Two in the Nazi party, and the leader of Hitler’s deputies in the Reichstag. He tries to set up an anti-capitalist program: confiscation of property from the
old reigning families, nationalization of heavy industry and of the banks, expropriation of holdings. He allies himself with the red unions, the tramways and metalworkers, and even threatens Hitler with exclusion … In 1934, after his party comes into power, he attempts a rapprochement with the three million men of Ernst Röhm’s assault division … His former right-hand man, who has gone back to Hitler’s side, has them all executed in June of that year, during the Night of the Long Knives. Otto Strasser escapes, with the killers in pursuit. He hides away in Austria, in Chechnya, in Canada. He made a comeback in Berlin in the early 1970s, creating a new national Bolshevik party, the German Social Union. But he arrived too early: it was a flop. Today, he’d have a good chance of succeeding.

Pedro held out the pamphlet to Gabriel.

—Shall I leave it with you?

—Thanks, I’ll read it tonight while watching
Where Are They Now?

—I don’t see the connection …

—Neither do I!

The storm broke just as Gabriel passed the prow of the barge, on which you could still read the name
Carmela
. He pushed open the makeshift door to Pedro’s vegetable garden. The Seine instantly turned the same shade of grey as the department-store warehouses that lined the horizon. The raindrops, like those he’d wiped away on his return from Bonvix, burst on the hard earth, and flashes of lightning split the dark sky into pieces above the Île-Saint-Denis. Gabriel pulled his jacket up over his head and ran all the way to the Peugeot, which was parked in front of the closed shutters of the Guinguette des Chantiers. In the notebook that sat on top of the glove box, he’d written down the addresses, telephone and fax numbers of all the publishers in André Sloga’s inventory. He noticed that one of the most cited papers,
Continental Furor
, had long shared a Gennevilliers address with the offices of Éditions Gaston Lémoine. He crossed both branches of the river and followed its meanderings to the square surrounding the city hall, which had been afflicted with a polychromatic fountain by one of the numerous lumpish students of Fernand Léger.

Éditions Lémoine’s headquarters were tucked away in
an industrial zone occupying the wastelands that bordered the A86. Pallets of printed matter cinched with plastic bands waited in the parking lot to be loaded into a semi. Gabriel leaned over the freshly inked sheets. A four-color cover of
The History of the Militia
, printed eight to the sheet, awaited transportation to the bindery. The illustration referenced the poster from the young fascist movement’s first congress: a fist holding a sword, raised up against a background of fields and factories and a red and black sky. He was astonished to notice that the group’s logo was virtually identical to the red ribbon of the anti-AIDS campaigns. He had begun to read the text on the back cover when a voice made him jump.