I didn’t think once about Annie when I lived in that neighborhood that we’d driven through together so often. A more distant past haunted me, because of my father.
He had been arrested one February evening in a restaurant on Rue de Marignan. He didn’t have his identity papers on him. The police were conducting checks because of a new German regulation prohibiting Jews from being in public places after 8 P.M. He had taken advantage of the twilight and a momentary distraction on the detectives’ part at the Black Maria to make his escape.
The following year, they had apprehended him at home. They had taken him to a holding cell, then to an annex of the Drancy transit camp, in Paris, on the Quai de la Gare — a vast merchandise depot where all the Jewish belongings the Germans had looted were being stored: furniture, dishware, linens, toys, carpets, and artworks, arranged by level and section as if in a huge department store. The prisoners emptied the cases as they arrived and filled other cases heading for Germany.
One night, someone showed up in an automobile at the Quai de la Gare and had my father released. I imagined — rightly or wrongly — that it was a certain Louis Pagnon, whom they called “Eddy” and who was shot after the Liberation with members of the Rue Lauriston gang, to which he belonged.
Yes, someone got my father out of the “hole,” to use the expression he’d employed one evening when I was fifteen, when I was alone with him and he’d strayed very close to confiding a few things. I felt, that evening, that he would have liked to hand me down his experience of the murky and painful episodes in his life, but that he couldn’t find the words. Was it Pagnon or someone else? I needed answers to my questions. What possible connection could there have been between that man and my father? A chance encounter before the war? In the period when I lived in Square de Graisivaudan, I tried to elucidate the mystery by attempting to track down Pagnon. I had gotten authorization to consult the old archives. He was born in Paris, in the tenth arrondissement, between République and the Canal Saint-Martin. My father had also spent his childhood in the tenth arrondissement, but a bit farther over, near the Cité d’Hauteville. Had they met in school? In 1932, Pagnon had received a light sentence from the court of Mont-de-Marsan for “operating a gambling parlor.” Between 1937 and 1939, he had worked in a garage in the seventeenth arrondissement. He had known a certain Henri, a sales representative for Simca automobiles, who lived near the Porte des Lilas, and someone named Edmond Delehaye, a foreman at the Savary auto repair in Aubervilliers. The three men got together often; all three worked with cars. The war came, and the Occupation. Henri started a black market operation. Edmond Delehaye acted as his secretary, and Pagnon as driver. They set up shop in a private hotel on Rue Lauriston, near Place de l’Etoile, with a few other unsavory individuals. Those hoods — to use my father’s expression — slowly got sucked into the system: from black marketeering, they’d moved into doing the police’s dirty work for the Germans.
Pagnon had been involved in a smuggling case that the police report called “the Biarritz stockings affair.” It concerned a large quantity of socks that Pagnon collected from various black marketeers in the area. He bundled them in packs of a dozen and dropped them off near the Bayonne train station. They had filled six boxcars with them. In the deserted Paris of the Occupation years, Pagnon drove a fancy car, owned a racehorse, lived in a luxurious furnished apartment on Rue des Belles-Feuilles, and had the wife of a marquis for a mistress. With her, he frequented the riding club in Neuilly, Barbizon, the Fruit Défendu restaurant in Bougival … When had my father met Pagnon? At the time of the Biarritz stockings affair? Who can say? One afternoon in 1939, in the seventeenth arrondissement, my father had stopped at a garage to have a tire changed on his Ford, and there was Pagnon. They had chatted awhile; maybe Pagnon had asked him for a favor or some advice. They’d gone off to have a drink at a nearby café with Henri and Edmond Delahaye … One meets the strangest people in one’s life.
I had hung around the Porte des Lilas, hoping there was still someone who remembered a Simca dealer who’d lived near there around 1939. A certain Henri. But no, it didn’t ring any bells for anyone. In Aubervilliers, on Avenue Jean-Jaurès, the Savary repair shop that had employed Edmond Delahaye was long gone. And the garage in the seventeenth arrondissement where Pagnon worked? If I managed to track it down, an old mechanic might tell me about Pagnon and — I hoped — my father. And I would finally know everything I needed to know, everything my father knew.
I had drawn up a list of garages in the seventeenth, preferably those located at the edge of the arrondissement. I had an intuition that Pagnon had worked in one of these:
Garage des Réservoirs
Société Ancienne du Garage-Auto-Star
Van Zon
Vicar and Co.
Villa de l’Auto
Garage Côte d’Azur
Garage Caroline
Champerret-Marly-Automobiles
Cristal Garage
De Korsak
Eden Garage
L’Etoile du Nord
Auto-Sport Garage
Garage Franco-Américain
S.O.C.O.V.A.
Majestic Automobiles
Garage des Villas
Auto-Lux
Garage Saint-Pierre
Garage de la Comète
Garage Bleu
Matford-Automobiles
Diak
Garage du Bois des Caures
As Garage
Dixmude-Palace-Auto
Buffalo-Transports
Duvivier (R) S.A.R.L.
Autos-Remises
Lancien Frère
Garage aux Docks de la Jonquière
Today, I tell myself that the garage where Annie brought me and my brother must be on that list. Perhaps it was the same as Pagnon’s. I can still see the leaves on the trees lining the sidewalks, the wide tan pedimented façade … They tore it down with the others, and all those years have become, for me, nothing but a long and vain search for a lost garage.
Annie took me to another area of Paris that I later had no trouble recognizing: Avenue Junot, in Montmartre. She parked the 4CV in front of a small white building with a glass-paneled door made of cast iron. She told me to wait. She wouldn’t be long. She went into the building.
I walked down the avenue. Perhaps the liking I’ve always had for that neighborhood comes from then. A sharply vertical flight of steps led to another street below, and I had fun going down it. I walked for a few yards on Rue Caulaincourt, but I never strayed too far. I went back up the steps quickly, afraid that Annie would drive away in her 4CV and leave me behind.
But she wasn’t there yet and I had to wait some more, the way we used to wait in the garage, when the orange shade was drawn behind the window of Buck Danny’s office. She came out of the building with Roger Vincent. He smiled at me. He pretended to be running into me by chance.
“Well, what do you know … Fancy meeting you here!”
For days afterward, he would say to Andrée K., Jean D., or Little Hélène:
“It’s funny … I ran into Patoche in Montmartre … I wonder what he could have been doing there …”
And he turned to me:
“Don’t breathe a word. The less you say, the better.”