If you stroll up the avenue Foch towards the Arc de Triomphe you soon realise that you are in the heart of one of Paris's most prestigious areas. All the houses are set back off the street, their frontages protected by black iron railings, gates and thick shrubbery, with a green moat of beautifully designed urban parks protecting them from the main road. The area radiates wealth and power.
You would never know from just looking at the place that this is where the Gestapo, or Sicherheitsdienst (SD) to give them their formal title, set up their headquarters when the Germans occupied Paris. Numbers 83 and 84 avenue Foch to be more precise. Apart from, that is, the tastefully done small green sign commemorating the fact that Pelouse Pierre Brossolette, a hero of the Resistance, jumped to his death out of the 5th floor window of no. 84 to prevent himself from giving up any information on his comrades to the Nazis. It was on the fourth floor of the neighbouring No. 83 that the Gestapo carried out most of their interrogations.
I visited the avenue Foch on a stinkingly hot day in July 2025. I peered down the path to No. 83 trying to get a sense of the place, but the new owners had made it very difficult to get a good view of the building. The gates had thick iron panels strapped across them and dense shrubs on the railings obscuring the buildings from prying eyes. The only way to get a photo was to step across the road, and then you could only get a picture of the top half of the building. Clearly, the current inhabitants of this elite neighbourhood didn't want the associations from the past to taint their very comfortable present.
This is another location that I have used in Crossing the Lines. Antoine is summoned to No.83 by Hugo Geissler, his handler in the SD, to whom Antoine has recently turned over Dr Marcel Petiot aka 'The Butcher of Paris' for interrogation. Geissler is happily ensconsed in an office on the third floor, surrounded by furniture and paintings purlioned from the city's galleries and museums, and with sweeping views of the Arc de Triomphe and the Bois de Boulogne. Antoine soon learns that Geissler intends to use the murderer as part of his extermination plans for Paris's Jewish population. On being confronted with a bloodied and tortured Petiot, the doctor strongly hints that Antoine's girlfriend, Tonia, is pregnant and that he might not be the father.
Despite all the buildings' discreet charms, for my fictional hero and myself, they exude a sinsiter evil.
