Pedigree (2 page)

Among the people he knew at the time, the ones I've managed to identify are Henri Lagroua; Sacha Gordine; Freddie McEvoy, an Australian bobsled champion and racing driver with whom he shared an “office” on the Champs-Elysées right after the war (I've never
been able to determine the name of the company); a certain Jean Koporindé, 189 Rue de la Pompe; Geza Pellmont; Toddie Werner (who called herself “Mme Sahuque”) and her friend Hessien (Liselotte); and a Russian girl, Kissa Kuprin, daughter of the writer Aleksandr Kuprin. She had acted in a few films and in one of Roger Vitrac's plays,
Les Demoiselles du large.
Flory Francken, aka Nardus, whom my father called Flo, was the daughter of a Dutch painter. She had spent her childhood and adolescence in Tunisia, then had come to Paris and hung out in Montparnasse. In 1938, she'd been implicated in a minor incident that had landed her in criminal court, and in 1940 she had married the Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa. During the Occupation, she was close to the actress Dita Parlo, who had starred in
L'Atalante
, and her lover Dr. Fuchs, one of the directors of the so-called Otto Bureau, the most important of the black market “purchasing services,” located at 6 Rue Adolphe-Yvon in the 16th arrondissement.

This was more or less the world in which my
father circulated. Demimonde? Underworld? Before she is lost in the cold night of oblivion, I'll mention another Russian, who was his girlfriend at the time: Galina “Gay” Orloff. She had immigrated to the United States when very young. At twenty, she was dancing in a burlesque club in Florida, where she met a small, dark man, very sentimental and courteous, whose mistress she became: a certain Lucky Luciano. Back in Paris, she had worked as a model and married to obtain French citizenship. At the start of the Occupation, she lived with a Chilean “secretary of legation,” Pedro Eyzaguirre, then on her own at the Hôtel Chateaubriand on Rue du Cirque, where my father often went to see her. A few months after I was born she gave me a teddy bear that I long held onto as a talisman and my only souvenir of an absent mother. She took her life on February 12, 1948, at age thirty-four. She is buried in Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois.

The more I draw up this list of names and call the roll in an empty garrison, the more my head spins and my breath grows short. Curious
individuals. Curious times, neither fish nor fowl. And my parents came to know each other during that period, among those people who were like them. Two lost, heedless butterflies in the midst of an indifferent city.
Die Stadt ohne Blick.
But there's nothing I can do about it: that's the soil—or the dung—from which I emerged. Most of the scraps of their lives that I've been able to gather, I get from my mother. But there was much she didn't know about the murky, clandestine world of the black market in which my father traveled by force of circumstance. She was unaware of most of it. And he took his secrets to the grave.

They met one evening in October 1942, at the home of Toddie Werner, aka Mme Sahuque, at 28 Rue Scheffer, 16th arrondissement. My father was carrying an identity card in the name of his friend Henri Lagroua. On the glass door of the concierge's lodge at 15 Quai de Conti, the name “Henri Lagroua” had been listed among the tenants since the Occupation, next to the words “fourth floor.” When I was a child, I asked the
concierge who this “Henri Lagroua” was. He answered, “Your father.” This dual identity had impressed me at the time. Much later, I learned that during that period he'd used other names by which certain people still knew him well after the war. But names end up becoming detached from the poor mortals who bore them and they glimmer in our imaginations like distant stars. My mother introduced my father to Jean de B. and her friends. They thought there was something “weird and South American” about him and gently cautioned my mother to “be careful.” She repeated this to my father, who joked that the next time he would “look even weirder” and “scare them even worse.”

He was not South American, but having no legal existence, he lived off the black market. My mother would pick him up at one of the tiny offices reached via the multitude of elevators along the arcades of the Lido. He was always there with several others whose names I don't know. He was mainly in touch with a “purchasing service” at 53 Avenue Hoche, the office of
two Armenian brothers he'd known before the war: Alexandre and Ivan S. Among the goods he delivered to them were entire truckloads of old ball bearings lifted from expired stock of the SKF company, which would sit uselessly in a warehouse in Saint-Ouen, gathering rust. In the course of my research, I came across the names of a few individuals who worked at 53 Avenue Hoche—Baron Wolff, Dante Vannuchi, Doctor Patt, “Alberto”—and wondered whether these weren't just more of my father's pseudonyms. It was in this purchasing service on Avenue Hoche that he met a certain André Gabison, the manager of the establishment, whom he often mentioned to my mother. I once got hold of a list of German Special Forces agents dating from 1945, which contained a note about this man: Gabison, André. Italian national, born 1907. Merchant. Passport no. 13755, issued in Paris on 11/18/42, listing him as a Tunisian businessman. Since 1940, associate of Richir (purchasing service, 53 Avenue Hoche). In 1942, in St. Sebastian as Richir's contact. In April 1944, worked
under the command of a certain Rados of the SD; traveled frequently between Hendaye and Paris. In August 1944, reported as belonging to the sixth section of the Madrid SD under the command of Martin Maywald. Address: Calle Jorge Juan 17, Madrid (tel.: 50-222).

My father's other acquaintances under the Occupation, at least the ones I know about: an Italian banker, Georges Giorgini-Schiff, and his girlfriend, Simone, who would later marry Pierre Foucret, the owner of the Moulin Rouge. Giorgini-Schiff had his offices at 4 Rue de Penthièvre. My father bought a large pink diamond from him, the “Southern Cross,” which he'd try to resell after the war, when he was destitute. Giorgini-Schiff was arrested by the Germans in September 1943, following the Italian armistice. During the Occupation, he had introduced my parents to a Doctor Carl Gerstner, economic adviser at the German embassy, whose girlfriend, Sybil, was Jewish, and who would apparently become a “major” figure in East Berlin after the war. Annet Badel: former attorney, director
of the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in 1944. My father did some black marketeering with him and his son-in-law, Georges Vikar. Badel had sent my mother a typescript of Sartre's
No Exit
, which he planned to stage at the Vieux-Colombier in May 1944, under its initial title, “Other People.” That script of “Other People” was still lying at the back of a wardrobe in my room on the fifth floor of Quai de Conti when I was fifteen. Badel thought my mother kept in touch with the Germans through the Continental Films production company, and that she could help him obtain a censorship visa for the play more quickly.

Other close associates of my father's: André Camoin, antiques dealer, Quai Voltaire; Maria Chernichev, a daughter of Russian nobility but “déclassée,” with whom he conducted some huge black market deals; and a certain “M. Fouquet,” with whom he conducted more modest ones. This Fouquet had a shop on Rue de Rennes and lived in a small private house in the Paris suburbs.

I close my eyes and I see Lucien P. arriving, with his heavy footstep, from the deepest recesses of the past. I believe his job consisted of acting as middleman and introducing people to one another. He was very fat, and in my childhood, whenever he sat on a chair I was always afraid it would collapse under his weight. When he and my father were young, Lucien P. was the long-suffering lover of the actress Simone Simon, whom he followed around like a big poodle. And also a friend of Sylviane Quimfe, a pool shark and adventuress, who under the Occupation would become the Marquise d'Abrantès and the mistress of one of the Rue Lauriston gang. People on whom you can't dwell at length. Shady travelers at best, passing through a train station concourse without my ever knowing their final destination, supposing they even had one. To finish with this list of phantoms, I should mention the two brothers, who might have been twins: Ivan and Alexandre S. The latter had a girlfriend, Inka, a Finnish dancer. They must have been real
grands seigneurs
of the black market,
because under the Occupation they celebrated their “first billion” in an apartment in the massive edifice at 1 Avenue Paul-Doumer, where Ivan S. lived. He fled to Spain at the Liberation, as did André Gabison. As for Alexandre S., I wonder what became of him. But is there really any point asking?
My
heart goes out to those whose faces appeared on the German wanted posters, the “Affiche Rouge.”

Jean de B. and the antiques dealer from Brussels left the apartment on the Quai de Conti in early 1943, and my parents moved in. Before I finally get sick of all this and no longer have the heart or the energy to continue, here are a few more scraps of their life at that distant time, but as they lived it in the chaos of the present.

They sometimes hid out in Ablis, at the Chateau du Bréau, with Henri Lagroua and his girlfriend Denise. The Chateau du Bréau was abandoned. It belonged to some Americans who had fled France because of the war and given them the keys. In the countryside, my mother took motorcycle rides with Lagroua
on his 500 cc BSA. She spent the months of July and August 1943 with my father at an inn in Varenne-Saint-Hilaire, the Petit Ritz. Giorgini-Schiff, Simone, Gerstner, and his girlfriend, Sybil, joined them there. Swimming in the Marne. The inn was home to several outlaws and their “wives,” among whom a certain “Didi” and his companion, “Mme Didi.” The men drove away in the morning to attend to their dirty work and returned from Paris very late at night. Once, my parents overheard an argument in the room above theirs. A woman called her man a “lousy cop” and threw wads of cash out the window, berating him for bringing back all that money. Police stooges? Gestapo henchmen? Toddie Werner, aka Mme Sahuque, at whose home my parents had met, barely managed to avoid being picked up at the beginning of 1943. She injured herself jumping from a window of her apartment. There was a warrant out for the arrest of one of my father's oldest friends, Sacha Gordine, as attested by a memo from the Legal Status Bureau in the General Commissariat
for Jewish Affairs to the head of an “Investigation and Verification Division”: “April 6, 1944. Per the above-referenced note, I had requested that you proceed without delay to arrest the Jew Sacha Gordine for infraction of the Law of June 2, 1941. Pursuant to this note, you indicated that this individual had abandoned his present domicile without leaving a forwarding address. However, he has lately been observed riding his bicycle in the streets of Paris. I therefore request that you kindly pay another visit to his domicile so as to follow up on my note of January 25th last.”

I remember that my father mentioned this period, once only, one evening when we were on the Champs-Elysées. He pointed out the end of Rue de Marignan, where they had taken him away in February 1942. And he told me of a second arrest, in the winter of 1943, after “someone” had denounced him. He had been brought to the Depot, from where “someone” had freed him. That evening, I felt that he wanted to unburden himself, but the words wouldn't come.
He said only that the Black Maria had made the rounds of the police stations before reaching the lockup. At one of the stops, a young girl had got on and sat across from him. Much later I tried, in vain, to pick up her trace, not knowing whether it was the evening in 1942 or in 1943.

In the spring of 1944, my father received anonymous telephone calls at the Quai de Conti. A voice addressed him by his real name. One afternoon, when he was out, two French plainclothesmen rang at the door and asked for M. Modiano. My mother told them she was just a young Belgian working at Continental, a German company. She was subletting a room in the apartment from a man named Henri Lagroua and couldn't help them. They promised to come back. My father, to avoid them, left the Quai de Conti. I imagine these were not members of Schweblin's Jewish Affairs police but men from the Investigation and Verification Division—as in Sacha Gordine's case. Or else they were sent by Superintendent Permilleux of the Prefecture. Later, I tried to put faces to all those names, but
they remained firmly ensconced in the shadows, with their odor of rotten leather.

My parents resolved to leave Paris as quickly as possible. Christos Bellos, the Greek my mother had met at B.'s, knew a girl who lived on a property near Chinon. The three of them took refuge with her. My mother brought along her winter sportswear, in case they had to flee even farther. They hid in that house in the Touraine until the Liberation and would return to Paris, on bicycles, only when the American troops arrived.

Back in Paris at the beginning of September 1944, my father was hesitant about returning right away to the Quai de Conti, fearing that the police would again be after him—this time because of his illegal activities as a black marketeer. My parents lived in a hotel at the corner of Avenue de Breteuil and Avenue Duquesne, the same Alcyon de Breteuil where my father had already hid out in 1942. He sent my mother on ahead to Quai de Conti to get the lay of the land. She was summoned by the police and subjected
to a lengthy interrogation. Since she was a foreigner, they wanted to know the precise reason for her arrival in Paris in 1942 under German patronage. She explained that she was engaged to a Jew with whom she'd been living for two years. The police questioning her were no doubt colleagues of the ones who'd tried to arrest my father under his real name a few months earlier. Or the same ones. They must now have been searching for him through his aliases, unable to identify him.

They released my mother. That evening at the hotel, beneath their windows, women strolled with American GIs along the median strip running down Avenue de Breteuil, and one of them tried to make an American understand how many months they'd been waiting for them. She counts on her fingers in English: “
One, two
…” But the American doesn't get it and instead imitates her, counting on his own fingers:
One, two, three, four
… And so on and so forth. After several weeks, my father left the Alcyon de Breteuil. Back at the Quai de Conti, he discovered
that his Ford, which he'd stashed in a garage in Neuilly, had been commandeered in June by the Vichy militia, the Milice, and it was in that Ford, its bullet-riddled body impounded as evidence by the investigating detectives, that Georges Mandel had been assassinated.