The Other Side of Midnight. Sidney Sheldon
The German occupation troops were enjoying themselves. While French food was too rich and covered with too many sauces, it was still a pleasant change from war rations. The soldiers neither knew nor cared that Paris was the city of Baudelaire, Dumas and Molière. To them Paris was a garish, eager, overpainted whore with her skirts pulled up over her hips and they raped her, each in his own way. The Storm-troopers forced young French girls to go to bed with them, sometimes at the point of a bayonet, while their leaders like Goering and Himmler raped the Louvre and the rich private estates they greedily confiscated from the newly created enemies of the Reich.
If French corruption and opportunism rose to the surface in the time of France’s crisis, so did the heroism. One of the underground’s secret weapons was the Pompiers, the fire department, which in France is under the jurisdiction of the army. The Germans had confiscated dozens of buildings for the use of the army, the Gestapo and various ministries, and the location of these buildings was of course no secret. At an underground resistance headquarters in St Remy resistance leaders pored over large maps detailing the location of each building. Experts were then assigned their targets, and the following day a speeding car or an innocent-looking bicyclist would pass by one of the buildings and fling a homemade bomb through the window. Up to that point the damage was slight. The ingenuity of the plan lay in what followed next.
The Germans would call in the Pompiers to put out the fire. Now it is instinctive in all countries that when there is a conflagration the firemen are in complete charge: And so it was in Paris. The Pompiers raced into the building while the Germans stood meekly aside and watched them destroy everything in sight with high-pressure hoses, axes and – when the opportunity presented itself – their own incendiary bombs. In this way the underground managed to destroy priceless German records locked away in the fortresses of the Wehrmacht and the Gestapo. It took almost six months for the German high command to figure out what was happening, and by that time irreparable damage had been done. The Gestapo could prove nothing, but every member of the Pompiers was rounded up and sent to the Russian front to fight.
There was a shortage of everything from food to soap. There was no gasoline, no meat, no dairy products. The Germans had confiscated everything. Stores that carried luxury goods stayed open, but their only customers were the soldiers who paid in occupation marks which were identical with the regular marks except that they lacked the white strip at the edge and the printed promise to pay was not signed.
‘Who will redeem these?’ the French shopkeepers moaned.
And the Germans grinned, ‘The Bank of England.’
Not all Frenchmen suffered, however. For those with money and connections there was always the Black Market.
Noelle Page’s life was changed very little by the occupation. She was working as a model at Chanel’s on rue Canbon in a hundred-and-fifty-year-old greystone building that looked ordinary on the outside, but was very smartly decorated within. The war, like all wars, had created overnight millionaires, and there was no shortage of customers. The propositions that came to Noelle were more numerous than ever; the only difference was that most of them were now in German. When she was not working, she would sit for hours at small outdoor cafés on the Champs-Élysées, or on the Left Bank near the Pont Neuf. There were hundreds of men in German uniforms, many of them with young French girls. The French civilian men were either too old or lame, and Noelle supposed that the younger ones had been sent to camps or conscripted for military duty. She could tell the Germans at a glance, even when they were not in uniform. They had a look of arrogance stamped on their faces, the look that conquerors have had since the days of Alexander and Hadrian. Noelle did not hate them, nor did she like them. They simply did not touch her.
She was filled with a busy inner life, carefully planning out each move. She knew exactly what her goal was, and she knew that nothing could stop her. As soon as she was able to afford it, she engaged a private detective who had handled a divorce for a model with whom she worked. The detective’s name was Christian Barbet, and he operated out of a small, shabby office on the rue St Lazare. The sign on the door read:
ENQUÊTES
PRIVÉES ET COMMERCIALES
RECHERCHES
RENSEIGNEMENTS
CONFIDENTIELS
FILATURES
PREUVES
The sign was almost larger than the office. Barbet was short and bald with yellow, broken teeth, narrow squinting eyes and nicotine-stained fingers.
‘What can I do for you?’ he asked Noelle.
‘I want information about someone in England.’
He blinked suspiciously. ‘What kind of information?’
‘Anything. Whether he’s married, who he sees. Anything at all. I want to start a scrapbook on him.’
Barbet gingerly scratched his crotch and stared at her.
‘Is he an Englishman?’
‘An American. He’s a pilot with the Eagle Squadron of the RAF.’
Barbet rubbed the top of his bald head, uneasily. ‘I don’t know,’ he grumbled. ‘We’re at war. If they caught me trying to get information out of England about a flyer –’
His voice trailed off and he shrugged expressively. ‘The Germans shoot first and ask questions afterwards.’
‘I don’t want any military information,’ Noelle assured him. She opened her purse and took out a wad of franc notes. Barbet studied them hungrily.
‘I have connections in England,’ he said cautiously, ‘but it will be expensive.’
And so it began. It was three months before the little detective telephoned Noelle. She went to his office, and her first words were: ‘Is he alive?’ and when Barbet nodded, her body sagged with relief and Barbet thought, It must be wonderful to have someone love you that much.
‘Your boyfriend has been transferred,’ Barbet told her.
‘Where?’
He looked down at a pad on his desk. ‘He was attached to the 609th Squadron of the RAF. He’s been transferred to the 121st Squadron at Martlesham East, in East Anglia. He’s flying Hurri –’
‘I don’t care about that.’
‘You’re paying for it,’ he said. ‘You might as well get your money’s worth.’ He looked down at his notes again. ‘He’s flying Hurricanes. Before that he was flying American Buffaloes.’
He turned over a page and added, ‘It becomes a little personal here.’
‘Go on,’ Noelle said.
Barbet shrugged. ‘There’s a list of girls he is sleeping with. I didn’t know whether you wanted –’
‘I told you – everything.’
There was a strange note in her voice that baffled him. There was something not quite normal here, something that did not ring true. Christian Barbet was a third-rate investigator handling third-rate clients, but because of that he had developed a feral instinct for truth, a nose for smelling out facts. The beautiful girl standing in his office disturbed him. At first Barbet had thought she might be trying to involve him in some kind of espionage. Then he decided that she was a deserted wife seeking evidence against her husband. He had been wrong about that, he admitted, and now he was at a loss to figure out what his client wanted or why. He handed Noelle the list of Larry Douglas’ girl friends and watched her face as she read it. She might have been reading a laundry list.
She finished and looked up. Christian Barbet was totally unprepared for her next words. ‘I’m very pleased,’ Noelle said.
He looked