He smoked the wretched C-rations cigarette down till it burned his yellowed fingers. He sighed, crimped it carefully out, and put the eighth-inch butt in a Prince Albert tin he kept in a jacket pocket. “The bastard Yankee soldiers gave me one cigarette. Not even a chocolate bar. I’m not pretty enough, eh?” He gave a mirthless laugh. As if on cue, a truckful of American soldiers trundled noisily down the street. The truck ran on compressed hydrate crystals; the septic smell of methane trailed the truck as it swung, grinding as it changed gears, around the corner.
“Most of the Americans will be gone tomorrow,” Besson said, and there was no regret in his voice.
Jenkins and Hard-Eyes looked at one another. Hard-Eyes shrugged.
Jenkins had tried to talk Hard-Eyes into surrendering to the American soldiers, pretending they were just lost American expatriates. More than once they’d thought about it, in Amsterdam. But the Americans didn’t send you home, word had it. They press-ganged you into civilian work crews. Or, worse, the COs had the power to draft you on the spot.
“You have never seen Paris,” Besson said mournfully. He gestured contemptuously at the tired, wounded city around him. The café faced a narrow, brick-paved street below the Sacré Coeur. The onion dome of the ancient cathedral was just visible above the red tile rooftops; the overcast sky was breaking up in the late-afternoon breeze. Propaganda leaflets whipped down the gutter. The tall, stately buildings, narrow houses crowded together in gray stone and red tile, windows shattered out of them, were gap-eyed, lifeless. Most of the chimneys were mute, spoke no smoke; the sidewalks were scabbed with trash, a neglect unknown to Paris before the war. The café itself was almost empty. There were no supplies—it sold no beer, no liquor, only weak tea and a few exorbitant bad wines. The big copper espresso pumps were empty; Parisians were complaining as much from the loss of their daily caffeine as from the famine. The café owner kept the establishment open mostly out of habit. There were two old digital pinball machines against the wall, dead, cold as tombstones; there was no power. But the newly arrived SA technicians had gotten the natural-gas pumps working. There was gas, to heat the tea Hard-Eyes and Jenkins and Besson sipped beside their fly-specked window.
“This café, now, at this hour, should be overflowing with people,” Besson said. “In the next room, they would fill their salad plates and eat, and the waitress would come to tell them the daily carte… They would have wine, and café after, a fine black café. Les Halles! I lived in Les Halles, I had a bookstore. I knew your Steinfeld very well in those days. He would come in, and we would argue…” There was a flash of genuine pleasure in Besson’s eyes for a moment. “How I loved to argue with him! Wonderful arguments! We both enjoyed! And Les Halles—the tourists were the life of the place, and there were musicians and jugglers to take money from the tourists. The French musicians would try to sing American songs, the Americans stranded in Paris would try to sing French Songs. Or Paris on a rainy night—you walk on the streets almost empty, and then you are filled with the romance of your misery. Just when you are cursing the rain, you see the glow of a brasserie, the light laughing out of it. There was a bread seller, Prochaine. He was said to make a wonderful bread, and the reputation of this bread was such that people would stand in line two hours to buy it, to buy one loaf, sold only in his shop. It was a heavy bread, not dark and not light, a little sour but also sweet, and it was moist… crystalline. Comprends? A very simple bread, and profound, mes amis. You could taste one bite for an hour. This pain-Prochaine, it was Paris. Just five years ago, my friends… Prochaine is dead now, and his son is dead, and when the Russians held the city, the Allies bombed a big gun in Les Halles, antiaircraft gun, and now the neighborhood is…” He shrugged and sipped his tea.
“And now the SA is here,” Jenkins said.
Across the street, a man was putting up a poster. He peeled the backing-paper off and pressed it onto the big gray stone wall, beside the wide stone stairs terracing up to the cathedral.
The posterer was a knobby teenage boy in a ratty sweatshirt. His hair was twisted up into a flare topknot over his head, in imitation of last year’s American fashions; but the tint was six months overdue for renewal; and he’d had to hold the shape with rubber bands.
Besson sighed. “Why do you Americans send us your stupid hairstyles?”
Hard-Eyes was laboriously translating the poster. It came out as something like:
THE FRONT NATIONAL HAS COME TO THE RESCUE OF THE FRENCH PEOPLE!! WATCH FOR THE SOLDIERS OF THE STRATEGIE ACTUEL AND STRUGGLE BESIDE THEM TO REBUILD PARIS!! THE STRATEGIE ACTUEL HAS RESTORED THE GAS!! FIGHT THE CONSPIRACY OF FOREIGNERS!!!!!!!!!!!!
The boy continued down the block, peeling the backing off the posters, sticking them up, leaving the slick brown backing to curl like oversized pencil shavings on the cracked sidewalk. He put up three more posters, each one different, and yet each one the same as the last.
The second said: “WHY HAVE WE ALLOWED THE ZIONISTS TO RAPE PARIS?”—and nothing more.
The third said: “PARIS IS A JAIL AND THE FOREIGNERS ARE THE JAILERS… BUT FRANCE HOLDS THE KEY!!
A fourth said: “FOOD AND FREEDOM IS ON THE WAY! DON’T LET MUSLIMS, JEWS, OR LIARS TAKE IT FROM YOU!
Each poster was printed on a different color paper, with different styles of lettering. They were not of uniform size. They might almost have been put up by different organizations.
“When the electricity comes on, they’ll start the radio propaganda,” Jenkins said.
Besson snorted. “How? The Russians blew up the power plants.”
Jenkins said, “Saw something out at Rond Point Victor Hugo. They had a receiver on a truck. A microwave power receiver. Maybe SA owns one of the power gathering satellites. Maybe they’ll beam it down here. Not enough for a whole city—but enough for, say, a fifth of the town, two days a week. The people’ll be glad for what they get. They’ll know who to thank…”
“And the SA can cut it off when they want. When it suits their purposes,” Hard-Eyes said.
“This talk disgust me!” Besson declared, flapping his hand dismissively. “You disappoint me. You are talking politics. I thought you were men of refinement. Do you think it was politics that made our situation? No, my friends. It was aggression. Politics is only the snorting of the bull before the charge. But—I can see that Steinfeld has chosen you well.”
Hard-Eyes looked sharply at him.
Besson laughed. “I said the right thing, no? This bastard Steinfeld, he chooses men he knows will catch the disease of politics! The secret idealist, eh? Someone—Jean François—said to me, ‘Why should I work with Steinfeld? He is a foreigner pretending to fight for France. There are Yanks and Brits in his troops. Maybe they are CIA, maybe British secret service… Why should they fight for us?’ But I told him to remember the German resistance to the Nazis in World War Two. Not so much resistance, but it was there! The resistance against the Nazis was every kind of man, in Germany. There were Communists and conservatives and everything between. There were foreigners and there were fanatic German nationalists who simply hated Hitler.”