Nazis in the Metro (11 page)

—Are you looking for something?

He turned to face a paunchy skinhead of about thirty, decked out in cargo pants, camo shirt, and khaki Doc Martens. His hands were stained with ink. Gabriel pointed to the warehouse.

—Is the office in there?

—No, these are the studios … You have to go around …

Before moving away, the detective put his hand on the pile of book covers.

—Can’t wait for this to be out in the stores! They fill our heads with so much junk, we’re in danger of forgetting to learn from their example …

A toothy smile spread across the skinhead’s pudgy face.

At first sight, the lobby of the Éditions Gaston Lémoine resembled the lobby of any business: impersonal decoration, all-purpose furnishings, insufficient lighting, the scent of photocopies. If, while reclining in one of the faux-leather armchairs, you felt the urge to read one of the magazines
piled up on a Chinoiserie side table, you’d look in vain for the usual fare:
Paris-Match, Marie-Claire
, or the day’s
Le Figaro
. On the other hand, if you were a lover of the exploits of various army corps—German, Japanese, Croatian, or Romanian, between 1939 and 1944—you’d be in heaven. It was clear to Gabriel that the clients of this establishment all belonged to the latter category. He flipped through a copy of
New Solidarity
, the main media outlet of the European Workers’ Party, in which one of the directors of Éditions Gaston Lémoine—a certain Victor Brignard—made clear in a long interview that he was a member of that small, anti-Semitic group. He looked up. The receptionist had been trying for some time to replace the paper roll in the fax machine by putting it in backwards. Gabriel went behind the desk to assist her. The machine blinked in satisfaction.

—Thank you, I thought I’d never manage. Do you have an appointment?

—No, but I would like to see Monsieur Gaston Lémoine …

—I’m afraid that will be difficult to arrange: he’s been dead for half a century … If you tell me what brings you here, I may be able to direct you …

Gabriel lowered his voice.

—It’s rather confidential …

Her expression was as hypocritical as that of a mother leading her child to the dentist’s chair.

—I assure you, it’s no accident that I’m sitting at this desk … I work closely with the director, Monsieur Brignard. Every file passes through my hands … I know everything that goes on here.

Gabriel pretended to gather his courage.

—All right … After the recent death of my father, I inherited a lot of family papers. Photo albums, collections of postcards, packets of letters …

He noticed that she was showing signs of impatience.

—There were also a lot of documents from the period of the Occupation … Files that had been examined by my grandfather, notebooks filled with intelligence never before seen … All I’ve done so far is try to put them in some kind of order, but I think there is enough material to make an explosive book …

He now had the full attention of Brignard’s deputy.

—What kinds of files, what kinds of intelligence? Relating to what region?

—My grandfather was the archivist of the Rhône prefecture, in Lyon, and from what I’ve been able to understand, he kept copies of all the internal documents concerning the Militia and the Franc-Garde …

She asked him to follow her to the second floor and handed him off to a short man with beady eyes who introduced himself as the literary director of Éditions Gaston Lémoine. Gabriel continued to play the role of the dutiful grandson carrying out a family obligation. He promised to return the next day with some samples from the Lyon documents. Before letting him leave, the beady-eyed man asked how he’d become aware of his enterprise and the ideological war it was waging.

—I subscribed to
Continental Furor
for many years, and I was always aware that it was printed here …

Reassured, and eager to cement his hold on the heir, the beady-eyed man turned confessional.

—Our role wasn’t limited to that …

—It’s too bad it’s disappeared …

—Yes. We owned nearly fifty percent of the paper. Forty-eight percent, to be precise. Our director, Victor Brignard, had even taken over its editorship for several years … We could have done great things if the founder of the
Continental Furor
, Kevin Kervan, hadn’t suddenly gone mad, blinded himself … It never pays to cut corners …

The beady-eyed man left him in the second-floor hallway, near the stairway. Gabriel descended it slowly, with one eye on the publications exhibited in small, glassed-in nooks. It wasn’t pornography, but it was thoroughly obscene: Hitlerian, Mussolinian, Pétainian. Nothing here belonged in the hands of citizens between the ages of seven and seventy-seven. He froze at the top of the last flight of stairs when he heard the receptionist whispering into the telephone.

—You ask Roger to fill in for you. No … Listen, Francis, you’ll do what I say, ok? We need to find out more about this guy. If there’s no other way, bring him to your meeting … The boss wants to know what to expect from these archives … We can’t let this pass us by … Understood? Don’t slip up. Find a way.

Gabriel waited for a long moment on the landing before descending briskly, with a casual air. The receptionist flashed him a broad smile that lasted through his “See you tomorrow.” The skinhead was in the parking lot, laboring over an all-terrain motorcycle that was apparently refusing
to start. He lowered the kickstand and walked over to Gabriel, who was opening the door to the Peugeot.

Excuse me, but my bike won’t start … Are you driving to Paris?

—Yes …

—Do you think you might be able to drop me off at the Porte d’Asnières? It’s on the way …

In order to sit down, he had to move André Sloga’s papers to the backseat. Two sheets slipped out. While gathering them from the floor, the skinhead caught a few choice phrases from the
Continental Furor
concerning Bernard-Henri Lévy, which bolstered his trust in his accidental chauffeur:

To see Lévy’s name paired with the words “fat” and “cash” and the avowal of a murderous impulse: he was in familiar territory. The car crossed over the ring road and wove through the housing projects. Beyond small talk, the skinhead printer had a hard time formulating questions, keeping up a conversation. Rhetoric was not his strong point. Gabriel did not push him, and they continued on in silence.
He turned toward him after stopping at a red light, a hundred meters from the corner of Boulevard Berthier.

—Shall I leave you here or at the metro?

—This is good … Nice of you to drop me off. But if you have a little time, I could offer you a drink, around here …

—I won’t say no.

The Saussure served only ordinary beers, and the foam on the Adelscott on tap that Gabriel ordered disintegrated as soon as it touched his lips, leaving behind two craters that resembled eyes floating in a soup. Francis lit up a Celtique and drank his Pelforth straight from the bottle, like a man.

—Would I be wrong to say that I have a feeling we’re interested in some of the same things …

Gabriel played the innocent.

—That would depend on what you’re alluding to.

Francis looked around him. He leaned forward and whispered.

—Real History, the end of the lie spread by the lobby of …

Gabriel considered the difficulty of his task. He had just entered into contact with his first fascists, and it was already impossible for him to rise to the challenge of having a simple conversation. He tried a new tack, tapping the skinhead’s shoulder in a friendly way. They toasted, glass to bottle.

—Tonight, I’m on duty at a meeting just around the corner from here … It’s closed, but if you show up with me, there won’t be a problem … It’s in honor of one of ours who’s returned from Serbia … He fought with the Dragan militias, in Krajina …

—I didn’t know Frenchmen could be admitted to the ranks of … Serbian nationalists …

Francis flashed a proud smile as if to say, “You don’t know who you’re talking to, my friend!”

—There are quite a few of our comrades there, but tonight it’s a Russian who will take the stage: Ivan Astrapov.

Gabriel started when he heard the name. A dozen years ago he had demonstrated in support of political exile for a Soviet painter named Astrapov, who had been persecuted by Brezhnev’s administration. His paintings weren’t interesting in the least, but he had seemed to be a talented dissident. Gabriel pushed away his glass.

—Astrapov? Is he related to the painter?

—Same guy. But now he only paints with a gun! Preferably a machine gun.

Gabriel let him pay for the drinks before following him along Boulevard Berthier. Young but battle-weary women, their arms perforated like colanders, sat on the trunks of parked cars and opened their thighs to the passing truck drivers. They passed by the old general stores that had been converted into scenery lots for the Opera de Paris and took a back alley that went along the tracks of the Saint-Lazare line.

Francis nodded to a guy who seemed to be busily tying his bootlace, and they were given the green light to go in. They entered the courtyard of an old warehouse. Another man was waiting on the loading dock. He took hold of Francis’s wrist for a Roman handshake, and after consulting with him about Gabriel, he led them into a freight elevator, closed the heavy grille on them, and flipped the worn switch that hung from a wire. The elevator began to tremble violently, rising in fits and starts to the second level. Nearly two hundred people, the vast majority of them young men, were gathered in the former warehouse, whose walls and beams retained the pronounced odor of the coffee that had been packaged there for decades. Two young men who could have been Francis’s twin brothers brought drinks to tables
amidst the din of conversation. The sounds of the Serbian rock group Junak spilled from the PA, drowning out everything else. The skinhead printer sat Gabriel near the remains of a pulley system, and took up his post to the left of the entrance. A meter-high platform supported a table equipped with microphones and three chairs. The wall was decorated with multiple Serbian flags, spotted with stains and dust. They framed an enlarged photo of a Chechnyan squadron in traditional battle dress, with high black boots, thick beards, and fur hats.

Gabriel ordered a Tsver, brewed in Moscow according to the label. He drank it in small sips while observing the audience, which was composed for the most part of minor hoodlums from good families come out for their monthly thrill, and local dropouts looking for any kind of adventure to help them escape the endless void of their futures. At first he didn’t recognize a single face: the small anonymous crowd of meetings … But then, as he turned around to inspect the tables in the back, his gaze stopped on a man of about forty. It took him a good quarter of an hour to wrest the memory from his head and superimpose it onto the wide, ruddy face, prominent cheekbones, and unruly hair of Thierry Tegret. He’d met him two or three times during his first year at university. At that time, Thierry was the Number Two of a small, very active Trotskyist group, organized like an army. He commanded thirty or so militants who would march out of class on command. Gabriel had heard him talked about, vaguely, ten years later, when his organization denounced him publicly, accusing him of having embezzled funds of unknown origin. Here, he was flanked by a former
reporter for the leftist paper
Libération
, Paul Estèphe, a specialist in the kind of shady business dealings that trade in the moods of the Cabinet Minister’s staff, the stench of favoritism, the musk of bedrooms. Gabriel could still remember some of his appearances on the trashy shows on TeleFrance 1, where he talked about the gay pastor Joseph Doucé or the suicide of Pierre Bérégovoy. Thierry Tegret got up, and Gabriel thought that he was coming straight over to him. But the ex-militant for the extreme left passed him by to throw himself into the arms of a short-statured man with eyes hidden behind smoky wraparound glasses. Tegret hoisted himself onto the stage and extended his hand to the stocky masked man. A third man followed suit, and they sat down at the table. The silence was immediate. Tegret tapped on the microphones to check the sound, then began to speak.

—Dear comrades. I believe it’s time to move on to the most important part of tonight’s meeting. I would like to introduce to you, first, Commander Jovan Gavrovic, whose troops have valiantly resisted the Croato-Muslim coalition in the region of Bihac.

He paused for a burst of applause. Gavrovic, who did not speak a word of French, thanked everyone in Serbian and the applause redoubled.

—I don’t need to waste my breath telling you about our brother Ivan Astrapov, who just spent three months on various European fronts where the continuity of our civilization is being threatened by the expansion of Muslim integrationism. In Chechnya, in Serbia! I only need to remind you, before asking Ivan Astrapov a series of questions, that I am
here tonight in my capacity as editor in chief of
Nation First
, the daily paper for French social issues, in which Ivan will be publishing his combatant’s notebook.

The atmosphere was stifling. Gabriel edged back toward the entrance, where a light current of air drifted in.

—My first question will be direct, dear Ivan. A film on the BBC showed you in the process of shooting up Sarajevo. Some claimed it was just for the cameras …

The ex-Soviet ex-dissident ex-painter lowered the microphone to his mouth and pushed his glasses up onto the bridge of his nose. He had almost no accent, as is the case with people who’ve been to the best schools.

—If they stand in front of me, they’ll have their answer!