Nazis in the Metro Read Free

Gallimard published in June of 1940, causing a full-scale debacle … Almost the entire edition was pulped after the superior race cleansed the reading committee—
    Maria interrupted him.
    —I’ve only been acquainted with your Sloga for five minutes, but I have a feeling he hasn’t had a lot of luck in his life …
    Gabriel tore a crusty point from his croissant and dunked it into his steaming coffee.
    —Well, the book ends with the death of his father, who was executed by supporters of Franco … It’s there in everything he writes, every word, story, every tangent, and at the heart of it all: pulsating, bleeding life … Basically, everything that’s missing from almost all the others.
    Gérard leapt over to the coffee machine to loosen the handle of a portafilter Maria was wrestling with.
    —It’s strange that you’ve never spoken of him before … We’ve fought over Calet, Hardellet, André Laude, de Bove, but this guy: nothing. He’s fallen through the cracks … How do you explain that?
    Gabriel leaned over his bowl, his hands gripping its porcelain sides, and, lips protruding like a giraffe’s, inhaled in one go more than half of the liquid inside.
    —The hard times never left him. After the War, Gallimard published a half-dozen titles by Sloga, until one day they turned one down … He’d written too pointedly about the free use of the guillotine in Algerian prisons, and the Gestapo-style torture the French army was endorsing in the Aurès mountains … This was in 1955. He left Gallimard and slammed the door on his way out … Twenty years later his fury would have made him famous; his fatal flaw was that he was ahead of his time … After that, he floated from publisher to publisher … The last thing of his I read was
Countercurrent
from Plasma in the middle of the 1980s. To my knowledge, he hasn’t published anything for more than ten years … Total oblivion. The guy who cranked out that article today didn’t even know who he was writing about …
    —Give him a call so he can print a correct …
    —I have better things to do in life than to call out journalists!

    * The term
ratonnade
, deriving from “raton” (rat), a racial slur, referred originally to acts of violence in France against people of North African descent during the years of the French-Algerian war (1954–1962). By extension, the term has been used since then to refer to other racially motivated acts of violence.
    * Pierre de Coubertin was the French founder of the International Olympic Committee.

3
THE BLACK LION’S MUSTACHE
    Gabriel Lecouvreur got to his car at the precise moment when the traffic warden for Place Léon Blum was tearing the ticket from its stub. She ignored the hand he held out to her, and, without a glance at her victim, tucked the slip of paper under the left wiper blade as procedure required. During the vacation month of August, the streets were beset by repairs that necessitated endless detours, allowing statisticians to observe that summer car travel by Parisians was trending toward the annual norm. He crossed the Seine on the Austerlitz bridge and parked in the shade of the tracks of the elevated metro. One of two white-shirted men in the sentry booth cast him an indifferent glance as he crossed the median.
    Six months earlier, when Gabriel had been investigating abusive psychiatric internments, the president of a human-rights organization—who had himself suffered the rigors of a prolonged sojourn between padded walls—dragged him to every hospital in Paris and its vicinity to show him the secret equipment used by state-employed psychiatrists. This self-proclaimed President of the Falsely Diagnosed harbored a pronounced taste for the clandestine. When they’d visited the Pitié-Salpêtrière, he’d asked to meet Gabriel in an infamous parking lot at Port Austerlitz. Gabriel had toknock four times—long, long, short, short—on the side of the electrician’s van that