never cared about their politics as long as they didn’t shut his sets down.
“The fact is, Casson, everybody likes you.”
From Casson, a very hesitant nod. First of all it wasn’t true, there were plenty of people who hated him. Second of all, a certain professional affability wasn’t, he thought, the key to being trusted by gangs of red assassins. But then, Degrave wasn’t exactly wrong either. People did like him—often enough because, when it came to money or social status, to sex lives or politics, he truly did not care.
“The more you think about it,” Degrave said, “the more you’ll see what we see.” He paused a moment. “It’s also true that you will come bearing gifts. What those might be I can’t say, but we know the party, we’ve had agents among them from time to time, and we know how they operate. They will demand concrete evidence of good faith—they couldn’t care less about words. Does all this make sense?”
“Yes.”
“We’ve been fighting the party since 1917, there is no question that their aim is to rule this country. All during the 1930s they established networks in France, particularly in the armament industry. There was the Lydia Stahl case, the Cremet case, operations of all kinds. Some of them made the newspapers, some simply died a quiet death, and some we never uncovered. They tried to steal our codes, they agitated on the docks and in the defense industries, they spied on the scientists.
“The party was declared illegal—driven underground—in ’38. They survived, they prospered— for them, secrecy is like water in the desert. And in 1940, when France was invaded and the Hitler-Stalin Pact was still in effect, they urged the workers not to fight their German comrades. After the surrender, the Germans allowed the party to publish Humanité, which labeled de Gaulle a tool of British imperialism. Then, when Russia was invaded last June, a somersault.”
“That I do remember.”
“Shameless. But, up to that point, there was virtually no French resistance to German occupation. Oh, you’d see things now and then. In the window of a bookstore on the rue de Rivoli, there was a china figurine of a spaniel lifting its hind leg—it just happened to be adjacent to a copy of Mein Kampf. There’d been a few student demonstrations, one of them, in the Bois de Boulogne, was bloody, but not by intention. We saw a few leaflets—‘Frenchmen, you are not the stronger side. Have the wisdom to await the moment’—but that was about it. The French people had adopted attentisme, the strategy of waiting. That was tantamount, as far as we could see, to collaboration.”
“I saw it firsthand,” Casson said.
“In Passy?”
“Yes. Most people were afraid to do anything.”
“Not the communists. Last June, when Russia was invaded, it was as though somebody had kicked a hornets’ nest. Suddenly, German officers were being shot down—it wasn’t hard, they walked around the town as though they owned it. In October, the German commandant of Nantes was assassinated. In reprisal, forty-eight hostages were killed. Other attacks followed, the Germans retaliated. They guillotined Jean Catelas, a member of the party’s central committee, they executed communist lawyers and Polish Jews—forty for one, fifty for one. The FTP never blinked. According to the old Bolshevik maxim, reprisal killing simply brings in new recruits, so it wasn’t hurting them.”
“Is that true?”
“It is. But for some, a little too cold-blooded. The policy of the Gaullist resistance is to assassinate French traitors, but they don’t attack German nationals. The people in Moscow, who run the French Communist Party, no doubt find that a rather dainty distinction, but then their war is much worse than anything that goes on over here. We’ve heard, for instance, that the Germans around Smolensk were having hunting parties, like English county fox-hunts, with beaters flushing Jews and peasants from the
“The fact is, Casson, everybody likes you.”
From Casson, a very hesitant nod. First of all it wasn’t true, there were plenty of people who hated him. Second of all, a certain professional affability wasn’t, he thought, the key to being trusted by gangs of red assassins. But then, Degrave wasn’t exactly wrong either. People did like him—often enough because, when it came to money or social status, to sex lives or politics, he truly did not care.
“The more you think about it,” Degrave said, “the more you’ll see what we see.” He paused a moment. “It’s also true that you will come bearing gifts. What those might be I can’t say, but we know the party, we’ve had agents among them from time to time, and we know how they operate. They will demand concrete evidence of good faith—they couldn’t care less about words. Does all this make sense?”
“Yes.”
“We’ve been fighting the party since 1917, there is no question that their aim is to rule this country. All during the 1930s they established networks in France, particularly in the armament industry. There was the Lydia Stahl case, the Cremet case, operations of all kinds. Some of them made the newspapers, some simply died a quiet death, and some we never uncovered. They tried to steal our codes, they agitated on the docks and in the defense industries, they spied on the scientists.
“The party was declared illegal—driven underground—in ’38. They survived, they prospered— for them, secrecy is like water in the desert. And in 1940, when France was invaded and the Hitler-Stalin Pact was still in effect, they urged the workers not to fight their German comrades. After the surrender, the Germans allowed the party to publish Humanité, which labeled de Gaulle a tool of British imperialism. Then, when Russia was invaded last June, a somersault.”
“That I do remember.”
“Shameless. But, up to that point, there was virtually no French resistance to German occupation. Oh, you’d see things now and then. In the window of a bookstore on the rue de Rivoli, there was a china figurine of a spaniel lifting its hind leg—it just happened to be adjacent to a copy of Mein Kampf. There’d been a few student demonstrations, one of them, in the Bois de Boulogne, was bloody, but not by intention. We saw a few leaflets—‘Frenchmen, you are not the stronger side. Have the wisdom to await the moment’—but that was about it. The French people had adopted attentisme, the strategy of waiting. That was tantamount, as far as we could see, to collaboration.”
“I saw it firsthand,” Casson said.
“In Passy?”
“Yes. Most people were afraid to do anything.”
“Not the communists. Last June, when Russia was invaded, it was as though somebody had kicked a hornets’ nest. Suddenly, German officers were being shot down—it wasn’t hard, they walked around the town as though they owned it. In October, the German commandant of Nantes was assassinated. In reprisal, forty-eight hostages were killed. Other attacks followed, the Germans retaliated. They guillotined Jean Catelas, a member of the party’s central committee, they executed communist lawyers and Polish Jews—forty for one, fifty for one. The FTP never blinked. According to the old Bolshevik maxim, reprisal killing simply brings in new recruits, so it wasn’t hurting them.”
“Is that true?”
“It is. But for some, a little too cold-blooded. The policy of the Gaullist resistance is to assassinate French traitors, but they don’t attack German nationals. The people in Moscow, who run the French Communist Party, no doubt find that a rather dainty distinction, but then their war is much worse than anything that goes on over here. We’ve heard, for instance, that the Germans around Smolensk were having hunting parties, like English county fox-hunts, with beaters flushing Jews and peasants from the
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