CHAPTER ONE
Paris, France
Monday, December 2, 1940
I slipped into the lobby of the Gaumont-Palace cinema and went to the ticket booth, glad to leave the chilly December wind to the few people trudging along rue Caulaincourt. The sky was heavy and gray, and the radio had warned of snow to come, the first of the year. I didn’t used to mind a good dose of the white stuff, but since the Germans had confiscated most of the motorcars that hadn’t fled the city months ago, we detectives had to flat-foot around the city like the uniforms did. So much for that perk of promotion.
“One, please,” I said to the old man behind the counter. “And a seat in the back corner. Back left corner.”
“Of course, sir, and would you like me to shine your shoes and perhaps bring you a glass of Bordeaux while you watch the movie?”
I stared for a moment. “I’ll shine my shoes with your backside if you don’t show a little more respect to an officer of the law.”
“A policeman?” The man pouted and handed me a ticket. “How was I supposed to know?”
“How about you save your sarcasm for the bastards who’ve taken over our city?” I looked at the ticket. “It doesn’t have a seat number.”
“We don’t do that anymore.” He waved an arm toward the double doors into the theater. “They like to sit wherever they want, even move around during the film. There’s no point to numbers.”
“I’m shocked,” I said, completely unshocked. To begin with, back in June and July, the Boche had been polite, respectful, and tried to get along with us Parisians. As the days and weeks went by, though, the veneer of decency had cracked and too many of them acted like the schoolyard bullies they were. “How much do I owe you?”
“Don’t worry about it.” He waved his hand again. “But I’m curious, where is that accent from?”
“South. Pyrénées. And thanks.” I moved away quickly to avoid any further interrogation, as I always did. My history was a little more complicated than most people’s, and the less I talked about it the better. Especially with strangers.
I found a seat in the back left corner, but was less than happy to see the place more than half full for the afternoon showing. No wonder there was no one on the street, they were all here. A collective groan went up as the lights dimmed and a cheerful German propaganda film whirred onto the big screen. This one was a preview for something called The Eternal Jew, directed by someone called Fritz Hippler. The translation was so bad I could only gather it had something to do with Jews being sex crazed and money hungry, stereotypes the invaders had been force-feeding since they arrived.
Just for kicks I let out a low “boo,” and then a louder one after I was shushed. A large man at the front stood, turned around, and yelled, “Silence!”
I thought about telling him where to go, just to give the audience some genuine entertainment in place of the mandatory mindless slop the Krauts served up before every good film. But it was my day off and I’d come here to be left alone, be distracted from the world and its problems, not cause more.
The movie began and I settled into my seat to enjoy it, but my attention soon fixated on the end seat two rows ahead of me. A small boy, judging from his height and haircut, was tapping something on the wooden armrest.
This is why you don’t go to the cinema, I thought, teeth gritted. My downstairs neighbor and sometime psychotherapist, Mimi, had named my condition “misophonia.” Basically, I have an aversion to sounds that is so strong it provokes a physical reaction in me—racing pulse, fast breathing … “rage” is a fine word for it. Not annoyance, not irritation, but pure red-hot anger. Mimi, who was better known as Princess Marie Bonaparte, great-grand-niece of the short man himself, said it probably had something to do with what I went through in the previous war. I couldn’t see the connection myself, but whatever the root cause my sister had long resigned herself to eating apples, celery, and carrots in a different room. Not that finding fresh crunchy vegetables was possible these days, so I had this new war to thank for that.
After a full minute of that kid tapping—And, my god, why doesn’t it drive his father mad?—I called out in a low voice, “Hey, kid, stop that tapping.” Several heads turned, including those belonging to the boy and his papa, who seemed to stare at me in the dark, but at least the noise stopped.
For less than a minute.
I gritted my teeth when it started up again, hoping against hope the action and pretty people on the screen would distract the little rat. They didn’t.
“Kid, stop tapping,” I growled.
He did for a moment, but the problem with misophonia is that when a noise starts and stops, your blood pressure keeps tipping higher and higher, not just from the noise but the expectation of the noise. Pressurized anxiety, wasn’t that what Mimi called it?
He started up again, this time interspersing the tapping with his foot knocking against the base of the seat in front of him, making a veritable orchestra of antagonization.
Why is no one else strangling this kid? I truly couldn’t believe this didn’t anger other people, and that worked me into even more of a frenzy. Finally, I snapped.
“Kid, shut the fuck up!” I shouted.
The father instantly stood up and whirled around. “What did you say to my son?”
“I’m saying it to you, too. Shut him the fuck up. And sit down, you make a shitty movie screen.”
“You can’t speak to me like that!”
He stepped past his son and headed for me, pausing when the big man from the front of the cinema, and his equally big friend, stood and told him to stop. He paused and we both watched them stride toward us.
Merde. They’re Boche. One chump I could handle, but one chump plus two hefty Germans in uniform made things a little too spicy.
“It’s a movie theater, not a playground,” I said, preparing my defense in case I got to present one.
“Yes, it’s a movie theater, and you are being disruptive,” one of the uniforms said, looming over me.
“This has nothing to do with you,” I snapped, now extra raw that they were wading into this on the wrong side.
“We paid for our tickets, just like everyone else.”
“You didn’t just take them from the old man at the front?” I said.
This was not the smartest approach. They conferred quickly and a moment later I was being hauled out of the room by my armpits. I thought about putting up some resistance but I didn’t know of a single case where a Frenchman had fought a German in uniform and won. Temporarily, perhaps, but not for long.
The old ticket-seller, to his credit, tried to get them to drop me in the lobby but their danders were up and they breezed past his protests. I wondered if I was getting dumped in the street or pummeled there. I could tell them I was a policeman, but these days you didn’t know what that might mean to them. “I beat up a French cop” might get them more admiration than if they just beat up your average Parisian moviegoer, so I kept my mouth shut.
Outside, they pinned me to a large poster of Danielle Darrieux, which under other circumstances I would have taken the time to admire, but only now did I see why they’d been able to carry me like a baguette—they weren’t large men, they were downright huge. The huger of the two leaned in, his gigantic square head barely an inch from mine.
His French was understandable but almost as bad as his breath. “You need to learn some manners, Frenchie.”
“This from the men who help themselves to other people’s countries.” The old man popped his head out of one of the doors, so I asked him: “Hey, did these apes really pay for their tickets?”
“Please, leave him alone. He’s a policeman, we don’t have many left.”
Great, there goes my undercover status.
“You don’t fight like a cop,” the big face, which was still too close to mine, said. “You don’t fight at all.”
A female voice piped up behind the giant, and for a second I couldn’t see who it was.
“That’s because you’re both German, enormous, and he’s not an idiot.” The two soldiers swiveled to see who was talking. “Well, I take that last part back. He’s a complete idiot, otherwise he wouldn’t be in this situation.”
“Who are you?” the man holding me asked. His tone, as always happened when this particular savior showed up, had softened considerably.
“I am his colleague, Nicola Prehn, and I was sent here by your superior to bring him to the Préfecture. Immediately.” The ape still didn’t let go, so Nicola took a step forward and gave him her most serious glare. “And in one piece.”
The man finally released me and I quickly moved to Nicola’s side. “Who’s my superior?” he asked, his broad brow furrowed.
Nicola looked him up and down, taking in his uniform and thereby his rank. “You’re a private, yes?”
“Ja. Oui.” He nodded.
“That’s what I thought.” Nicola performed a slow turn, but looked back over her shoulder as she started walking away with me in tow. “Then all of them.”
* * *
We walked in silence for a moment.
“I had that under control,” I said mildly.
“Yes, you certainly seemed to. Apologies for butting in.”
“Apology accepted.” We were walking more quickly than usual. “You weren’t really sent to fetch me, were you?”
“I was, as a matter of fact.”
“It’s my day off.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, no one gets those anymore.”
“A man can dream.” I sighed. “What’s going on?”
“The chief wants to see you.”
“Well, of course but … Why send you?”
“Full of questions, aren’t we?” she said. “I volunteered because I wanted to talk to you.”
“You know I go to the cinema to be not talked to, don’t you?”
“I do. And since you’re not at the cinema, we can talk.”
“But I would’ve been if—”
“If you hadn’t gotten yourself thrown out.” She stopped and turned to me. “Which is precisely what I want to talk about.” She set off again, at a slower pace this time.
“How can you have come here to talk about me getting ejected from the movie when it hadn’t happened yet?”
“Henri, you’re being intentionally obtuse.”
“I don’t think one can be unintentionally obtuse,” I said quietly. I knew why she was there, what she wanted to say, but she laid it out just in case I didn’t.
“You’ve been a complete bear to live with this past couple of months. You’re rude, angry, and I can’t decide if it’s because you’re working too much, or if you’re working too much to avoid being around me.”
“And here I am, on my one day off—”
“Henri!” she snapped. “You know perfectly well what I’m talking about.”
“If you’d not noticed, we’re in the middle of a war. Or the beginning of one, who the hell knows?”
“Yes, I’d noticed. We are, but we all are. You’re the one acting differently.”
She was right. Just as the winter days had been getting shorter and the nights longer, my mood had been darkening, too. If you’ve lived through a war, you know what it is to suffer hardship and hunger, fear and frustration. But if you’ve fought in a war and lived, then you know the real terrors it can unleash. When the Germans moved into Paris I was sickened and sad, but for a time it looked like life would maybe settle down to some bearable way of living. But in the past few months I’d started to see that that wasn’t going to happen. Every aspect of life was getting worse, from the attrition at work leaving us shorthanded to the daily assault on decency and humanity that our Teutonic occupiers were inflicting on us: random roadblocks and searches, raids on suspected agitators (no real proof required), and more lately the rounding up of people the Germans thought undesirable. And they thought a lot of people were undesirable. To see the stricken faces of the parents and the confused faces of their children as they were pressed into the backs of trucks was enough to make the most optimistic soul bitter. And it’d been some time since I’d been an optimistic soul.
Nicola didn’t see as much of this as I did. Not just because she was a secretary at the Préfecture and therefore out and about less, but because some of the biggest problems other people suffered had been alleviated for us by Mimi. From her position of power, prestige, and wealth, she was able to get food and supplies that others couldn’t. And, now that she was Nicola’s best friend, she shared them with us.
“It’s just the war getting me down,” I said. “And the work.”
“Then when you’re home you should be better, and you’re not.” I saw her glance over at me. “Mimi says you resent her a little.”
“Does she, now? Why would I do that?”
“I don’t know, why don’t you talk to her about it?”
I groaned. “Because, at the end of a long day, I don’t want to talk about my feelings with Princess Marie Bonaparte and have her pick them apart and point out how unreasonable I am.”
“You’re happy to drink her wine and eat her food. Seems like you should be willing to talk to her, too.”
“So now a condition of her sharing is my compliance?”
She laughed. “It was before.”
Also true. In July, when all this was new, I’d saved Mimi’s life during a robbery at her home. She’d taken a shine to me, or my foibles at least, and when she moved into the apartment below ours she said she wanted to practice her witchcraft on me. She called it psychoanalysis, of course, and told me all about her friend Sigmund Freud and how he’d taught her everything she knows. In our evening sessions, she poured me fine wine and then the next day a basket of food would arrive on our doorstep.
That food and wine had been free, but they cost me plenty. I trusted Mimi and told her my story, about who I really was and about some of the things I’d done to survive the war. How I’d saved myself. I still trusted her, but I was less happy now that she knew these things; widening that circle to include her made me vulnerable and gave her power. A regal background was all very well for getting you fresh asparagus and the occasional ox tongue but, as I’d been seeing lately, it wouldn’t keep the Germans from kicking in your door and asking pointed questions if they had a mind to. These goose-stepping Boche were as happy to spill blue blood as red and, from what I was hearing recently, being a woman was no protection at all. That meant if they wanted her to talk, and spill my secrets, she inevitably would.
And if there was one more headache I didn’t need, it was the Boche finding out about my past, about who I really was and what I’d done to make it through the last war.
THE DARK EDGE OF NIGHT. Copyright © 2023 by Mark Pryor.
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