The Paris Architect: A Novel

The first thing he saw was an old raincoat covered with cobwebs that hung on a nail on a rafter. As he stared at it, dozens of kind things Madame Charpointier had done for him flashed through his brain. The new football. The beautiful navy blue sweater for his birthday. The money she gave him to take his brothers and sister to the cinema. Helping him with his math homework. He reached to wipe the tears from his eyes and was surprised to find there weren’t any. Maybe because he’d been bar mitzvah’d and he was a man now, he didn’t cry anymore. Tears were just replaced with this terrible aching feeling in his chest. Pierre wanted desperately to cry but couldn’t. Crying, he thought, might not hurt as bad as the pain in his chest.

Pierre sat up and saw the attic window. Below it, he noticed a wisp of grayish-white smoke slowly curling upward into the rafters. Pierre realized it was his cigarette that he’d dropped during all the commotion. He’d come up to the attic in the late afternoon as usual to smoke in secret. It was an excellent place to sit and enjoy his Gauloises. Sitting by the window and looking at the roofs of the houses in the neighborhood and the sky above gave him great pleasure. Madame always gave him hell for smoking, saying a twelve-year-old shouldn’t smoke, that it would stunt his growth and yellow his teeth, so Pierre needed his own hideout. He knew she knew he snuck up here to smoke, but she never confronted him about it.

Pierre heard a truck pull up in front of the building, and he crawled on hands and knees to the window and raised himself to peek out. He was sorry he did. Two French laborers hoisted Madame Charpointier’s body onto the truck bed. They did it with a casualness that shocked him, like heaving a heavy sack of flour. Sitting against the wall under the small window, he snuffed out the burning cigarette. He closed his eyes and thought of his brothers and sister being thrown into the car. That would be his last image of them forever, screaming and frightened to death. A new wave of sadness even worse than before crushed him. He’d fought, bickered, and sometimes hated Jean-Claude, Isabelle, and Philippe, but he’d loved them with all his heart. They had been the only family he’d had left, and he knew he’d never see them again. Of all his family, he was the only one left. And he didn’t understand why.

The horrible images of what had just happened kept swirling around and around in his head. He placed his hands on his skull as if he could squeeze them out. Then the boy realized that all that had just occurred had been predicted by his father. When he’d told Pierre of the plan to pretend to be Christian and stay with Madame Charpointier, he’d explained what could happen to all of them. That one day with no warning, they could be found out. How the Boche would take his brothers and sister and him away and that Madame would be arrested. Everything he’d said had come true. The only difference was that instead of being taken away and tortured to death by the Gestapo, Madame had been shot on the spot. Pierre knew the Boche made examples of all those who hid Jews. The French hated Jews, his father said, even ones who had been in the country for hundreds of years. It didn’t matter. They wouldn’t hesitate to inform on their neighbors. Gentiles might smile and be polite to Jews, but in the end they’d stab them in the back. Always remember that, he’d said.

Pierre tried to think who could’ve betrayed Madame. Was it Monsieur Charles, who always argued with her about his dog? Maybe it was just someone who lived across the street and wondered why four children had mysteriously shown up on her doorstep a year ago. Madame’s story that they were her niece’s children hadn’t sounded that convincing even to Pierre.