A Little Piece of Paris

 

A LITTLE PIECE OF PARIS

 

 

By Jack Profijt

 

 

 

 

Getting in to the room was easy for Henri. It was a trick that he picked from the British agents from The Office of Strategic Services. Before the war he had been the son of a tailor. Now he was a killer standing before his next target.

The night was warm. The only light that came into the room was from the hallway and the open window. The white sheer curtains blowing in the night breeze. Henri took in the sight before him. He didn’t know that she would be so beautiful. He looked at her sleeping form beneath the sheets. Her long black hair was loose about her shoulders. Her ivory skin almost glowed in the dark as it caught the low light that came in from the window. He could tell that she was naked beneath that white satin cover. It was the only protection she had against the harm that was about to be done to her.

Henri hesitated; something that he had never done before, but then all his previous targets were men, and they were Nazis. He had been told that she was a member of the resistance movement and that she had become an informer to the Milice. She had betrayed the cause. She was a leak that needed to be plugged. The punishment for betraying the Maquis, was death.

It was so simple. All he had to do was put his hand over her mouth, cut her throat and be done with it. What had he become? To be sent to dispose of this thing of beauty, to cut her life short at the whim of an unseen voice. An apartment overlooking the des Champs-Élysées was not cheap. Something a young woman could not afford on her own. She more than likely has some well-placed clients. Was she so different from the rest of us, trying to better her lot in life with the only skill that she may have? One day you are close to death starving in the street and the next you are in an apartment in the lap of luxury. For some the choice is easy. A few years ago Henri’s biggest concern was which café he would have his lunch at, and day dream about the girls that passed by on the street.

Henri stood there in the darkness surrounded by what is called the city of light, but for him it was a city of death. There were so many places in Paris now that held a memory of a life taken and friends killed. In that moment he knew that his home would never be the same. The city filled with young lovers, and artists. It was a place that was forever young, but now too often that youth was bled out onto the city streets and into the ancient sewers.

Henri quietly stepped away from the bed and found a chair next to a small dressing table. He looked at the collection of items on the table that made up this girl’s life. There were some fine perfumes, combs and brushes, a clutch purse and stack of photographs. On the back of the chair she had draped her silk underclothes; they appeared to be of excellent quality. The air in the room was filled with the faint smell of her perfume. Possibly it was a gift from one of her many suitors.

Henri was unsure of himself, uneasy. There was something odd about this whole thing that made him second-guess himself. He had a gut feeling that left a knot in the pit of his stomach. He began to feel like an intruder, not just in this room but also in her life. He was seeing the things that only that special man might see, or one of her clients. In another time and place he could have known this girl. Full of life and youth and a bubbly laugh that could melt even the most hardened men. She was everything that all men adore and all women want to be.

His beloved city was a place of love and laughter. It was place where the young and old could spend hour’s sun bathing along the banks of the Seine. It was a place where people were free to do and to think as they pleased. The shops and cafés were filled in the afternoons with people of every sort, buying things and having a magnificent time. Then the goose-stepping Germans came with their jackboots and their “HEIL Hitler’s”. The Devil had come to Paris.