Nazis in the Metro (15 page)

—It’s Jean Brienne …

—Jean Brienne!
The
Brienne, from the dictionaries?

—Yes … Sloga’s plan was to reveal everything tomorrow, at the worst possible moment … It couldn’t wait …

—Tomorrow! Really! Tomorrow … Now I understand everything …

He grabbed the bookseller by the collar, forced him to turn around, and showed him the socket wrench just as he crushed his liver with a sucker punch. The shopkeeper was down for the count, surrounded by the somber covers of tomes by Bonnard, Rebatet, Suarez, Brasillach, Carrel, Astrapov and Jumel. Before leaving, Gabriel picked up a Charyn and a Vilar that had no business in such company, but left the Malet behind.

Gabriel had jumped into a taxi that let him out on the Quai Sisley, in Villeneuve-la-Garenne. He’d continued on foot to Pedro’s docked barge, drawing growls from the neighborhood dogs. There, he’d explained the results of his investigations and revealed the name of the man who had ordered the attack on André Sloga in order to protect his career. Pedro had immediately set about creating a complete identity for him as a journalist: passport, professional tricolor press pass, business cards from the Japanese magazine
Hori-Shimbun
, letter of affiliation from the Institute … Mid-morning, with a Boyard in his mouth, he’d driven Gabriel to Rue Popincourt, where Cheryl shaved him and did his hair under the watchful eyes of the assistant’s Yorkie; then, after a light lunch at the Pied de Porc, they’d gone by car as far as the Louvre, where they parked within sight of its famous glass pyramid.

They’d walked together to the Seine, where the militant counterfeiter gestured across the river to the roof of the building which, if he remembered correctly, a dying Cocteau had described as the hull of an old ship anchored on the riverbank.

—They never begin their sacraments before three
o’clock, and it’s best if you don’t show up too early, to avoid being recognized … Once you’re there, you hold tight for a good half hour, and then, when you’re ready, you get to work. Take a deep breath, say your piece, and bust the head of the first person who tries to stop you … Don’t be afraid, they aren’t used to anyone getting physical …

Then he’d slapped Gabriel on the back and smiled.

—¡Venceremos!

Gabriel crossed the Seine on the Pont des Arts and set a determined foot on the Quai Conti. He walked up to the small door to the right of the Coupole’s main entrance, where members of the Republican Guard in ceremonial dress were saluting the Academicians as they came in. Gabriel held out his phony invitation and accreditation papers to the usher, who handed him a white card with a seat number on it. He went up the ornate stairs, each step of which was graced with a guard in his finery, briefly ogled the breasts of a nude statue, and entered the circular hall. The members of the committee were taking their seats on the bench, accompanied by drum rolls.

At exactly three o’clock, Maurice Druon, the Perpetual Secretary of the Académie Française, stood up.

—The meeting is now in session. I’ll hand over the floor to Monsieur Jean Brienne for his acceptance speech.

Jean Brienne, in grandiose attire, sword at his side, rose from his seat in the second-to-last row reserved for members of the fellowship. Several dozen photographers crowded around him to immortalize the Academician-elect.
When the chaos had subsided, he put on his glasses and began to read into the microphone the first page of an homage to Edgar Faure, whose death made him inheritor of his seat. He attempted a joke to begin with.

—The thing I’ll always remember about my illustrious predecessor is his barbed tongue, in such contrast with his perfectly smooth head …

Gabriel waited for the first quarter of an hour, observing the audience. Everyone who mattered in media and culture was there: acerbic critics, complacent publishers, ancient journalists and young philosophers sitting elbow to elbow, writers on a quest for respectability, members of the black literati gazing at the radiant faces of the Immortals
^*
who represented the hard-won effects of their labors … Gabriel waited until Jean Brienne had finished recounting his predecessor’s life in politics and started in on his calamitous career as a detective novelist under the pseudonym Edgar Sanday. He rose from his seat and barged through a hedge of officials, jostling a dozen people before the photographers noticed the growing disruption. They aimed their zooms and flashes, and continued to click away at the detective while he posed for an instant beside the Academician-to-be, who was still in the midst of his speech. Then, with an imperial gesture, he snatched the man’s extra-credit report from his hands. Michel Droit and Alain Peyrefitte, in defense of their future colleague, lunged at him, but Gabriel
Lecouvreur took them on just as Pedro would have wanted him to, issuing a resounding slap to the jaw of the former, for May ’68, and a jab with the wrench between the legs of the latter, for the elephants of Africa. Gabriel grabbed the nominee by the embroidered collar of his green suit, and started to pull him toward the exit. Jean Brienne managed, though with unseemly effort, to draw his sword. He lunged toward his attacker, brandishing the gleaming blade. Gabriel simply shifted his hips and the musketeer lay knocked out at his feet.

Before the Republican Guard could get to him, Gabriel was able to grab the microphone. As they dragged him away, he yelled into it:

—The person who really deserves this elegy is still alive … Nobody here knows his name … André Sloga … He’s fighting to recover the memory that too many of us have lost, thanks to trash like Jean Brienne … 
Bon appétit, Monsieurs!

The police threw him in a cell for forty-eight hours for forged credentials, after charging him without due process. Cheryl was not there when he got home to Rue Popincourt. She was out on a call, setting an elderly home-bound client’s curls. She had left the mail on the table with the Marilyn Monroe tablecloth. He glanced quickly at the envelopes, opening the one with a return-address stamp from the
Voice of the Marshes
. In chicken-scratch handwriting, Fred Ledoeunf, the journalist from Fontenay-le-Comte, informed him that he had just submitted his resignation and that, to boot, he was quitting the profession altogether. Gabriel had to squint to decipher the deformed letters:

The Octopus folded the letter, slipped it into his pocket, and left the hair salon for the Pitié.

Éloi, the village sage, insists to this day that when a storm hits la Bastide, the rain spares Serviès. It had been dousing other, dryer villages, far from the Val de Dagne. The last tourists had left the region a good two months ago, and the grape harvest had taken place the week before, filling the barrels with what old-timers were already touting as one of the best vintages since the War.

Sitting beneath an arbor in front of a pastis, Max knew that nobody would be coming back to this remote part of Corbières before next summer. He had come to close up his family’s inn,
Chez Verdier
, for the winter, except for one or two rooms that would be kept up for the occasional passing boar hunter or traveling salesman. The grizzly sounds of an old Plastic Bertrand record began to play over the loudspeakers, with Jeannine’s voice rising above the static:

—Attention, please! Monsieur Jean-Claude Gibert, the butcher from Lagrasse, has arrived on the square … Today you have a choice of beef, fresh sausage, and venison stewed in Corbière … Attention, please! The butcher from Lagrasse has arrived on the square …

Max opened the
Indépendent de Pérpignan
that his wife had brought back from the bakery along with a loaf
of bread. He skimmed the local news, pausing to read the weather report, and then noticed a photograph in the Arts & Culture section. He recognized the old man who had stayed with them for three weeks in August, the one who was so interested in their local hero, Joseph Délteil, for whom one of the village’s wines had been named. He called to his wife, who came and leaned over his shoulder.

—I don’t have my glasses … What’s it saying about him?

—I never would have thought it, he was such a simple man, but Monsieur Sloga is a writer … His latest book just came out from Éditions Baleine … It’s called
Moon over the Marshes …

—What kind of book is it?

—According to this, it’s a tragic love story …

The Plastic Bertrand record started up again.

—Attention, please! The fishmonger from Sigean has arrived on the square … Today’s sale item is sardines … Attention, please! The fishmonger from Sigean has arrived on the square …

Max turned to his wife.

—I’ve got a hankering for sardines for lunch … How about you?

—Yes, me too, but don’t get too many, like last time. They don’t freeze well at all …

She walked away, and the first drops fell on the arbor, as if for the sole purpose of giving Éloi the lie.

What inspired you to write
Nazis in the Metro
?

I wrote this book in 1995, just after the Yugoslav Wars that killed more than 250,000 people in Europe. A very strange phenomenon was taking place then: French intellectuals from the extreme left were defending ultranationalist killers. People like the French-Russian writer Edouard Limonov enlisted in the Serbian army, and then came to the fashionable bars of Saint-Germain in Paris boasting of their triumphs. It was that climate, that shift in the elite classes, that I wanted to describe.

Nazis in the Metro
tells the story of a writer called André Sloga. Was he modeled on anyone?

Yes, I modeled him on a writer friend of mine by the name of Jean Meckert (1910–1995), who published numerous crime novels under the pseudonym Jean Amila. He was violently attacked in the 1970s and lost his memory as a result. He later carried out investigations into his own life, in order to recover the memories he had lost.

What drives your detective, Gabriel Lecouvreur?

He has a major flaw for the times we live in: he is devoid of indifference, he’s affected by the suffering of others. If he were a philosopher, he would define himself as an “Unhappy Consciousness.” Which doesn’t stop him from wanting to put everything to rights!

Why do you so often take real historical and political events as the basis of your novels?

I think history invited itself into my cradle: I had one pacifist grandfather who was a deserter in the First World War; one communist grandfather who was the mayor of a town near Paris in 1935 and who resigned in protest of the Hitler-Stalin pact; a mother who used to travel secretly into Franco’s Spain to work with those plotting to overthrow the dictator; a bedroom that served as a hiding place for Vietcong emissaries during the secret negotiations that took place in Paris in the middle of the Vietnam war … I had no choice but to investigate all of that, this family history of fighting injustice, of solidarity with people from far away.

You’re known as one of France’s most outspoken writers. Have you ever experienced an attack like that on Sloga in
Nazis in the Metro
?

A few years ago, an extreme-right group, Unité Radicale, tried to kill President Jacques Chirac on the Champs-Élysées in Paris during a military parade. The police found
a file on me in this group’s records—my address, telephone number, a write-up of my movements … Later, someone emptied many liters of gas on my front door and set it alight. Fortunately, my neighbors alerted me, and my wife and I were able to escape. Periods of crisis don’t tend to calm such passions …

MURDER IN MEMORIAM

“Serves as a tap on the shoulder—a necessary reminder that what is dead is not buried, and what is buried is, unfortunately, not dead.”

—DEREK RAYMOND, AUTHOR OF THE FACTORY SERIES

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