Free God's Formula by James Lepore Page A

arrives tomorrow morning,” Churchill said. “Fought at the Somme.”
    “Sir.”
    “Good luck, Ian.”
    “Thank you, sir.”

Chapter 6
    Avon, May 29, 1940, 7:00 a.m.
     
     
    Lucien Bunel—Father Jacques—was a tall man, but not strapping. Childhood respiratory illnesses, treated with eucalyptus steam and paste, had kept him rail thin. At six feet tall, he weighed no more than 150 pounds. When he died in the Gusen concentration camp in Austria in 1945, at the age of forty-four, of complications from pneumonia, he weighed less than seventy pounds. He took the first step on the road from Avon to Gusen in September of 1939 when he gave Conrad Friedeman and Karl Brauer shelter from the holocaust he knew was about to descend on Europe. A nun from the Congregation of Notre Dame de Sion in Montparnasse had driven the boys over on September 3rd, the day that France declared war on Germany. One of them is a Jew, she said. They are both being hunted by the Nazis. At first, he placed them with a family in a house across the street from his school, then, when the Werhmacht entered France, in an attic dorm room. Today they would leave.
    “Come in,” he said when he heard the knocking on the thick oak door of his small bed chamber.
    “Jacques,” said the man who entered, a Jesuit priest, the same age as Father Jacques.
    “Alain.”
    “Are you really ill?”
    “No, but why take chances?” The headmaster was in a nightgown and cotton robe, sitting up in bed, his Rosary beads in his right hand, his missal in the left. A pot of eucalyptus leaves immersed in hot water stood on the night table. The room was fragrant with the pungent aroma of this medicinal plant.
    “The boys?” Father Alain said.
    “They are in the sacristy. Did you see the car out front?”
    “Yes.”
    “Something is going to happen soon. We have been surrounded by these men in cars since dawn.”
    “I am at your service.”
    “What do you hear in Paris?”
    “Reynaud wants to fight. Petain to…”
    “To what?”
    “Surrender. Collaborate.”
    “How long?”
    “A few days, maybe a week. People are fleeing Paris by the thousands.”
    “And you?”
    “I will stay.”
    “What will you do with the boys?”
    “Try to get them transportation south.”
    “Thank you, Alain.”
    Father Alain nodded. “And you?”
    “I will stay and do what I can.”
    “Good luck, Father Jacques.”
    “
Bon Chance
, Father Alain.”
     

Chapter 7
    Avon, May 29, 1940, 8:00 a.m.
     
     
    The Petite College d’Avon, though on the grounds of the Fontainebleau palace, was definitely not in the same luxurious Renaissance style as the main buildings. Far from it. A squat, square, one story structure, set apart from the palace proper, it had likely been a stable or warehouse when first built. Surrounded by a patchwork of hardpan and stunted weeds that passed for a lawn, with entrances front and back, it was easy to watch. Which is what the men in nondescript, drab automobiles at both entrances, members of an Abwehr cell dedicated these past nine months to finding Conrad Friedeman, had been doing since the evening before.
    “Here comes the priest again,” said the man in the driver’s seat of the car in front. “They must have said their mass.”
    “And the alter boys,” his partner replied. “Still in their costumes.”
    “Surplices.”
    “What?”
    “That’s what they’re called. Surplices.”
    “Papist nonsense.”
    The two men, both young Frenchmen, both former university students, were members of the PCF—the Parti Communiste Francais. They had hated fascist Germany growing up. What communist wouldn’t? But then Molotov and Ribbentrop had signed their non-aggression pact, and their view had changed. What better way to serve Russia, their true mother country, than to say yes when approached by Abwehr agents at the start of the war? Intellectuals, at least in their own minds, they admired Adolph Hitler’s purity of purpose. Was not the Nazi concept of