The Resistance: A Thriller - Hardcover

Steiner, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1410453618 ISBN 13: 9781410453617

Publisher: Thorndike Press, 2013

Synopsis

A latest entry in the series by the award-winning author of The Terrorist finds French detective Louis Morgon discovering evidence beneath his house of a World War II massacre targeting resisters of the occupation, a finding that unleashes a maelstrom of danger, deception and murder. (mystery & detective).

About this title

About the Author

PETER STEINER is the author of three previous books in this series, Le Crime, L'Assassin, and The Terrorist. A former New Yorker cartoonist, Steiner lives in Connecticut.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I.
 
 
“THE SECRETARY OF STATE would like to see you.”
“Thank you,” said Louis Morgon.
He rose, turned, and gazed at President Nixon’s photo hanging behind his desk, not out of any sense of devotion to the president, but to check his own reflection in the glass. He gave the knot of his tie a little upward tug.
“I’ll be right back,” he said.
“Good luck,” his secretary said, thinking he had spoken to her.
Louis had recently been commended for several initiatives, and he guessed, not unreasonably, that he was about to be promoted. Instead he was led before the grim-faced secretary of state and presented with a list of charges against him, ranging from incompetence to something just short of treason.
Two uniformed guards escorted him back to his office. They watched while he gathered his belongings—personal papers, photos of Sarah and the children—and put them in a box. They walked him to the building’s entrance and waited while he got into a cab.
“He always seemed like a nice guy,” said one of the guards.
“It just goes to show you,” said the other.
The cab swung out of the circular drive and into traffic.
*   *   *
An hour later Louis sat at his dining table with his head in his hands. “How can this be happening?”
“How could it not happen?” said Sarah angrily. “You’re in espionage; you work with spies. Treachery is your business.”
Louis did not answer.
“Say something,” she said.
“Like what?” said Louis.
“It’s like you’ve gone into hiding,” she said.
Sarah was right. He had gone into hiding. “I don’t know who you are anymore,” she said. “You’re a stranger. To me and to your own children.” She was right about that too. He was even a stranger to himself.
Sarah took the children—Jennifer and Michael—and moved out.
Louis spent long, empty hours staring into the garden. The flowers nodded prettily in the hot breeze. But Louis saw only wreckage and desolation.
“What should I do?” he said one morning over coffee.
“You look terrible,” someone answered. Louis could no longer remember who she was.
“Thank you,” he said.
“You should go somewhere. Somewhere ... far away.”
“Where?” said Louis.
“France,” she said. “Why don’t you go to France?”
“France?” said Louis.
*   *   *
Louis tried teaching. He tried writing. Nothing worked. Then one day he stuffed a backpack with a few necessities and flew to Paris. He stared through the plane’s small round window into the empty night sky. He was thirty-five and as lost as he had ever been. “I understood things better when I was four.”
The woman seated next to him pretended not to hear.
The best part of Louis’s work had always been the going away. He loved being far from home. He had always found solace—he did not know why—in being a stranger. This aspect of his personality had helped him become an effective diplomat and a superb spy. It had served him well in dangerous negotiations in North Africa and in the Middle East. Talking to an adversary was not that different from talking to a friend; it turned out that most adversaries were no less trustworthy than most friends.
In the Paris airport Louis retrieved his backpack. He tightened the laces in his boots. He swung the pack onto his back and cinched up the straps. He marched through the terminal and out into the gray morning. A small service road took him out of the airport. The soft rain cooled his skin as he walked, and the noise and bustle of the airport fell away behind him. Each step carried him further into a quiet, unfamiliar place where he felt somehow that he belonged.
Louis followed small country lanes and farm roads, stopping now and then to check where he was against the map. He gazed at the landscape, across the green fields, into the mist. He turned slowly in a circle to take everything in. He did not want to miss anything. “This is where I am right now,” he said. “Nowhere else.” He walked along muddy field roads, through woods and villages.
That first day of walking Louis stopped for lunch in the small village of Beaumarchais. He sat on a bench as the church bell rang noon. He gazed at the monument with its long list of those who had died in the two world wars. There were more from the First than the Second World War. But given the size of Beaumarchais, the numbers were staggering.
Louis ate a baguette, which he cut into hunks and stuffed with Gruyère cheese. The cheese was soft and oily from being in his pack. He went to the grocery across the square. “Cerises,” he said. The grocer weighed some cherries and put them in a paper bag. Louis went back to the bench by the monument. He closed his eyes as he ate each cherry. Someone might easily have supposed he had never eaten cherries before.
Louis walked west toward the Atlantic coast for several days and then turned southwest along the Loir River (the one without an e), which would lead him eventually to the other larger and better known Loire River. He slept in hotels when they were convenient. But he slept just as happily in barns and churches and even haystacks.
Some nights, when the weather was fair, he simply lay back under the black sky and stared upward until he was lulled to sleep by the sight of infinity. One night he slept in a cemetery, beneath a large monument. He discovered the next morning that the cemetery was for German soldiers.
It hardly mattered to Louis if it rained, was cold, was hot, if he got blisters, was bitten by insects, if he lost his way and had to retrace his steps until he found it again. For the first time in his life, inconvenience did not matter, nor did delay. He felt neither urgency nor languor. Every step he took seemed to take him further out of himself and, at the same time, bring him closer to himself. He could not understand or explain it. He sometimes had the feeling he was walking through his own mind.
Louis stopped in ancient churches, in part because they were ancient. He stood on the worn stairs and felt the depressions worn into the stone over hundreds of years by rivers of feet. He rubbed his fingers over worn walls, touched the worn edge of the font where countless hands had dipped into holy water. The traces of passing generations, of centuries of suffering and redemption, comforted him. He regularly paused before monuments honoring the dead of the two world wars. He read the names and felt both their presence and their absence. He stood in for their loved ones.
He existed in a thousand heres and a thousand nows. Walking through thick fog one morning, he was overcome with the sense that at any moment he was going to meet himself coming toward him. Instead an old man emerged from the fog. The man was bent over. He wore a hat that resembled a helmet, and he had a gun on his shoulder. The ghost of a soldier, thought Louis. As he passed, the man greeted Louis with a salute and disappeared back into the fog.
Louis was taking inventory without knowing he was doing so. His own past seemed to recede into some other plane of being, where it could be organized. In the State Department and the CIA, intrigue and disingenuousness had been his undoing. Now all machination receded from his consciousness. A new reality slowly took its place. His sordid past—there really was no better word for it than sordid—seemed to belong to someone else, someone more foolish, but smarter too and more cynical than he. And now there was something darker, something intractable and ancient that rose up around him, that came upon him like that ghostly man, like the fog itself.
*   *   *
One chilly afternoon Louis ducked under the small roof over a wooden entry gate to wait out a passing downpour. Down the hill in front of him he could see the Loir River. The gate behind him passed through a high stone wall to a modest and slightly ramshackle Renaissance château. Phillipe de Bourchon, the house’s owner, returned just then from walking his dogs. After a brief exchange of pleasantries, he invited Louis inside.
“There’s a nice fire,” said Phillipe. “Some brandy.” Phillipe lived alone except for a maid who had been with the family her entire life. Phillipe’s wife was dead, his children grown.
Louis and Phillipe sat with their feet stretched toward the fire. Louis revealed himself to be an interesting and engaging conversation partner, and so Phillipe invited him to stay for dinner. “A cassoulet; Janine’s version; nothing fancy.”
During the meal the two men talked briefly about current world politics, then abandoned that for the more agreeable subject of the joys of walking. Phillipe was interested in Louis’s long walk. How did one see an entire country on foot? Didn’t a country lose its continuity, its national identity, when visited in such small segments?
Louis did not think so. At least not so far. There were regional differences, of course, but there was also still France, something he could clearly identify as France.
“Is it a good place?” Phillipe wondered.
Louis did not think good could apply to an entire country. “It is an agreeable place.”
Phillipe wondered whether walking was better with dogs or without dogs. Louis thought that it was probably better with dogs, since that way the walk became a kind of silent, yet purposeful, conversation. Phillipe countered it might be better without dogs—just for the sake of the argument—since seeing to the dogs was a distraction from the walk itself.
As Janine cleared the dishes—she was old and...

Edition details

• Publisher: Thorndike Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1410453618
• ISBN 13: 9781410453617
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 517