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military headquarters in Paris and I felt good about it.” The corner of Chambrun’s mouth twitched. “I had given the orders for it, I helped with the actual deed, and, God help me, I felt good about it.”
    “What had he done?” Shelda asked. It was almost a whisper.
    Chambrun looked at her. “There were two kinds of enemy in those days,” he said. “There were the German soldiers and the Nazi SS men; and there were the collaborators, Frenchmen who helped the Germans turn our whole country into a prison camp. We hated the German soldiers and SS men, but they were men under orders; they wore uniforms we could recognize, they were armed and ready to kill us, and we fought each other, fighting, hiding, sniping, hiding again. Somehow it was a decent fight, even though they were animals!” He crushed out his cigarette in the copper ash tray on his desk and took a fresh one from his case and lit it. I thought his voice shook a little as he went on. “But the collaborators! They were civilians like us, Frenchmen like us, and yet they served the enemy, eagerly, willingly. They betrayed their countrymen; they allowed their homes, their money, their prewar friendships, to be used against their own people. Claude St. Germaine was one of them. He gave magnificent parties for them in his great house on the Avenue Kleber. He sat in their councils. Publicly he appeared to be a Frenchman grieving for his motherland; he even approached us and gave us bits of information which would presumably help us. The big parties, he told us, were given against his will. He was helpless. Following tips we got from him, we countered one or two minor Nazi plots. We came to trust him. And then he let us on to a big event. Hitler himself was to visit the house on the Avenue Kleber. St. Germaine showed us how we could get into the house through the sewers and old wine cellars under the house. He drew maps for us. He provided us with duplicated keys. Twenty of our best men went to the house the night Hitler was supposed to be there. I would have been there myself except for the mischance of a badly sprained ankle which limited my mobility. Our twenty saboteurs would destroy the house and assassinate Hitler and his top people—except that it was a trap carefully set up by the Nazis with the aid of St. Germaine. All twenty men were caught in a center room and slaughtered. They were most of our key men, our best men, and St. Germaine had contrived to eliminate them and almost break the backbone of our movement, of the Resistance itself. That was how I, at twenty-two, became one of the leaders. Our top men had all been killed in ten minutes of bloody horror.” Chambrun was silent for a moment, and then he went on. “The first order I gave was that St. Germaine should be hanged like a common murderer—which is what he was—and his body displayed so that all collaborators should know what was in store for them. It took a month to trap him. It took five minutes to try him in a kangaroo court. It took another five minutes to hang him by the neck until he was dead. It took a diversionary action to distract attention from the front of the Avenue Kleber house, and while the Germans and the collaborating police were chasing us down back alleys three of us hung St. Germaine’s body on a lamppost at the front for all the world to see. It seemed, as I said, just and fair and even heroic. Man’s morality depends on where he sits, on his perspective, on his personal emotions. We saw what we had done as right and proper. Richard Cleaves sees us as villains.”
    “But he was only five years old, you said,” Ruysdale said.
    Chambrun’s smile was bitter. “Psychiatrists and analysts are getting rich on the indelible memories we have of what happened to us when we were five years old—even younger.”
    “Where did the name Cleaves come from?” I asked.
    Chambrun shrugged. It is the only Gallic mannerism he has. “The war was over, the Germans were gone.