16

They Knew

Is there any hope that it will not be war? If Austria attacks Serbia, why should that mean that France must attack Germany and my boys go to be killed? Serbia is nothing but a name to me. And yet I must suffer this. Tell me, is such a thing possible?

ANONYMOUS FRENCH MOTHER IN AUGUST 1914, reported by Herbert Adams Gibbons

The sage-green boxes of the booksellers known as bouquinistes line both banks of the Seine from the Musée d’Orsay to Notre Dame. They are as much a tourist attraction as the caricaturists of Montmartre’s Place du Tertre and the accordion virtuosi who work the métro along line 1, La Défense–Château de Vincennes, reminding us that man’s ingenuity can always find new ways to mangle “La Vie en Rose.”

But just as no Parisian ever poses for a caricature or encourages the buskers by giving them money, only tourists buy from the bouquinistes. Not only are their books overpriced; most are tightly wrapped in cellophane and Scotch tape. Try to discover if one has all its pages or somebody has used a slice of jambon sec as a bookmark and the seller will come bolting from his stool at the sunny edge of the sidewalk to snatch it from your fumbling fingers.

But travel any weekend to the fifteenth arrondissement, on the southern edge of the city, and you find a different atmosphere. Only the trade knows the year-round market for old books at the Espace George Brassens. They call it colloquially by the name of the street on which it stands, rue Brancion.

It’s at Brancion that the treasures surface, hauled in from the country by jobbers who’ve cleared the stock of a bankrupt bookshop or the shelves of a country house. Ignoring the professionals who range leather-bound rarities alphabetically on custom-built collapsible shelves, these shifty characters pile their loot on trestle tables at one euro each, or five books for three, and watch clients descend like vultures on fresh kill.

The high-gabled open-sided pavilions with their stone-flagged floors were once an equine slaughterhouse. A bronze horse head over the gate reminds us of the animals that died here, as does the statue of an aproned fort, or strongman, with a side of beef draped as casually over his shoulders as a 1920s matron’s fur tippet.

Why had Peter van Diemen suggested we meet here? Probably because he knew that on weekends, particularly when the weather was warm, I could often be found browsing the tables piled with books, magazines, maps, and ephemera.

A bigger question was, why did he want to meet at all? His call, like everything else about him, was unexpected. Had we exchanged phone numbers? I didn’t remember giving him mine. And we’re not listed in the phone book.

“Our chat at the embassy got me thinking,” he had said on the phone. “I believe I could help you with your project.”

There was no “project.” And I wasn’t sure I wanted Peter van Diemen in my life. But to someone who had, after all, killed a woman with his bare hands, attention had to be paid.

“That’s great,” I said, with an enthusiasm I didn’t feel. “When are you free?”

I spotted him before he saw me, and I stood for a moment, letting the damp and cold of the stone flags seep through the soles of my shoes.

T. S. Eliot wrote of his hollow men having “shape without form, shade without colour.” That was Peter. His gabardine overcoat, the indeterminate hue of cigarette ash, could have been made in the 1920s and hung at the back of a closet ever since, sagging into shapelessness as all color leached into the dark. His brown lace-up shoes, thick-soled, scuffed but well kept, belonged to another era as well, when footwear was made by hand, kept stretched on shoe trees between wearings, and, at country-house weekends, placed outside the guest’s door to be polished overnight by the boot boy.

His dress and manner made him as insubstantial and diaphanous as a background extra in a black-and-white movie. In the week following the murder, he made five return trips by bus to the golf course where he buried the body, each time carrying dismembered portions in a large suitcase. And yet the police, interviewing bus drivers and people who traveled regularly on the same line, could find no one who remembered him.

Yesterday, upon the stair

I met a man who wasn’t there . . .

As if the thought signaled my presence, he turned and saw me. His smile was less thin today, almost warm. Or was I just getting used to it?

“So you found me.”

I nodded at the stock of the dealer beside whose stand we’d met. “It wasn’t too hard.”

Not all sellers at Brancion specialized, but I knew that the middle-aged woman who sat impassively on a hard chair, ignoring us as she smoked a Gauloise and leafed through Aladdin, the monthly magazine for chineurs—antiques people—sold only militaria.

“Adele often has interesting things. Like this.”

He unrolled a yellowing sheet of paper, placing books at the corners to keep it flat. The uncompromising Didot roman typeface proclaimed it as a French government notice, designed to be read even by people to whom reading did not come naturally.

ARMY OF LAND AND ARMY OF SEA.

ORDER OF GENERAL MOBILIZATION

By decree of the President of the Republic, the mobilization of the armies of land and sea is ordered, as well as the requisition of animals, carriages and harness necessary to the supplying of these armies.

THE FIRST DAY OF THE MOBILIZATION IS

Sunday, August 3, 1914

Every Frenchman, subject to military obligation, must, under penalty of being punished with all the rigor of the law, obey the prescriptions of his book of mobilization.

    Subject to this order are ALL MEN not at present under the flag.

    The civil and military Authorities are responsible for the execution of this decree.

THE MINISTER OF WAR, THE MINISTER OF THE NAVY.

“It’s original?” I asked.

“Oh, yes. These aren’t particularly rare. A copy would have been posted in every town hall, every police station, every railway station and post office—and not only in continental France but Corsica, Algeria, and all the French dependencies as well. That’s what makes this so fascinating.”

My incomprehension showed. But fortunately obsessives love to explain.

“For this poster to be available in all those places on the same day, it had to be printed and distributed in advance.

His finger stabbed at the date of mobilization. It wasn’t printed like the rest but stamped by hand.

I could visualize the policemen, customs officers, or postmasters putting down the phone and leaving their lunch to hurry to the office. They’d have rummaged in their stationery cupboard for the poster sent days—even weeks?—before, with orders to hold it until . . . well, until a German platoon on maneuvers took a wrong turn and crossed a frontier or some drunk sentry at an Alsatian border post fired at his opposite number on the other side. Or a dying boy in an obscure Croatian town put a couple of bullets into a midlevel Austrian aristo and his lady.

Taking the stamp with which they dated all correspondence, the officials would have breathed on it to moisten the ink and inserted in the blank space the precise moment on which the world went to war.

“They knew,” said Peter quietly. “Weeks, even months before. They knew.

All the way back from Brancion, an obscure fact nibbled at my memory. The source came to me just as I arrived home. From my shelves, the vivid orange cloth and art deco spine of Nina Hamnett’s memoir Laughing Torso almost leaped out. Sculptor, model, friend of Modigliani, and, in her day, lover of almost everyone else in Montparnasse, Hamnett had been in Paris in 1914. Her lover at the time, a German, was briefly interned at the Prefecture. Few Germans were. “He had known many Germans as we all did,” she wrote. “Oddly enough, a few days before the declaration of war, all the Germans vanished from the Quarter.”

If the French knew what was coming, it seemed the Germans did as well.

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