The Paris Architect: A Novel

Lucien walked across the room to get a better look at the niche. Lighting a cigarette, he leaned against one of the very tall wooden Doric columns that framed the opening between the salon and the dining area. He looked it up and down and saw its fluted shaft was made from one piece of exquisite chestnut. If only it sat on a tall pedestal, he thought, a person could fit inside the pedestal to hide. Then Lucien noticed how big the diameter of the column was and measured it—about fifty-six centimeters. An incredible wave of euphoria swept over him. Using his own shoulders as a guide, he calculated that the column was just wide enough to fit a normal-size man upright, even accounting for the thickness of the column wall.

Lucien was giddy with excitement. The two columns, which he knew were nonstructural and merely decorative, must be hollow. Smiling, he ran his hand over the column’s shaft; a narrow hinged door could be cut in, with its vertical joints hidden by the fluting. There couldn’t be any horizontal joints showing so the bottom joint would have to align with the base. The top joint had to line up with the column capital above. Though the shaft of the column was almost four meters high, a door could be made that tall if he used a piano hinge. Lucien had once designed a door with standard hinges that stood three meters high. If Manet’s men were as good as advertised, this could work.

He’d done it! It was such a brilliant, elegant, and ingenious solution.

He’d fool those fucking Nazi bastards.





4





Two hours before meeting Manet and Lucien was already on his fourth glass of faux red wine. The euphoria of tricking the Germans had worn off, and the reality of being murdered by the Gestapo for getting involved in this scheme returned. A thousand things could go wrong. He knew that Parisians were betraying Jews to the Germans every day. Suppose someone tipped off the Gestapo about Manet’s Jew and the column didn’t work? The Jew would give up Manet, and Manet would give him up. He’d be crazy to do this.

Before he’d left the apartment on rue Galilée, Lucien had sketched out the details of the column on a scrap of paper. He turned it over now and began sketching out the building for the factory in Chaville, a suburb west of Paris. He imagined a sawtooth roof to let in light, with glass walls separated by steel mullions one meter apart. Every ten meters he added a brick wall. The entry would have a curving brick wall leading to a deeply recessed glass doorway. Maybe the whole thing could be built of poured concrete, with powerful-looking arches on the inside. He smiled as he drew the profile of the arches, each one with its own flaring buttress to resist the outward thrusts. He tried four different profiles until he settled on the one he liked best.

Lucien had visited Walter Gropius’s Fagus Factory in Germany in the ’30s and had been dazzled by the sleek, clean design. Since then, Lucien had always wanted to design a factory complex. Although it had come to him in a most bizarre way, this commission could be the opportunity he’d been looking for. To prove that he really had talent by designing a large, important building.

He drained the wine in his glass and stared out across the lifeless rue Kepler. The biggest shock he’d experienced when he’d returned to Paris was its surreal emptiness. The boulevard Saint-Germain, the rue de Rivoli, the Place de la Concorde—all were deserted most of the time. Before the war, even the rue Kepler would have had a steady stream of pedestrians in the evening hours. Lucien had loved to gaze out at the city while sipping his coffee or wine in a café, watching for interesting faces and especially beautiful women. But as Lucien sat by the window now, he saw very few people and it saddened him. The Boche had sucked the wonderful street life out of his beloved Paris.