At eight-twenty in the evening, the man known to his Resistance cell as Mathieu waited in a doorway where he could watch the entry of the Métro station on the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir. He tried to look beyond the entry, at the tree-lined boulevard, but there wasn’t much to be seen, only shapes in the night—the streetlamps had been painted blue and the windows of apartment buildings draped or shuttered in the blackout ordered by the German Occupation Authority. A sad thing, he thought, a dark and silent city. Silent because the Germans had forbidden the use of cars, buses, and taxis. But in that silence, nightingales could be heard singing in the parks, and in that darkness the streets were lit by silvery moonlight when the clouds parted.
A night earlier, at the same Métro, Mathieu had noticed a gray bicycle, bound to the trunk of a chestnut tree by a stout chain. Now he saw that it was still there. Bicycles had never been more valuable, and soon enough this one would be stolen if its owner did not retrieve it. Where was he? What had happened to him? In a cell at some police Préfecture? Possibly. But if the Paris police arrested you, friends or family would be notified and someone would have come for the bicycle. Maybe its owner was floating in the Seine—a bad fate but not the worst fate, the worst fate was to be taken by the Gestapo. And if that were so he might never be heard of again: Nacht und Nebel, night and fog, Hitler’s very own invention; people disappeared and nobody would ever find out what had become of them. They went out to do an errand and never returned. A sharp lesson for family and friends, punished forever by their imaginations.
