Savory Gambits

By Stefan Kanfer

DADDY

by Loup Durand; Translated by J. Maxwell Brownjohn

Villard; 374 pages; $18.95

Occupied France, 1942. A righteous Christian banker is helping Jews to conceal their savings from the Nazis. Detained by the Gestapo, he commits suicide rather than yield the numbers of the secret accounts he has opened. Now only one person in the world knows how to retrieve the hidden $350 million: the banker's great-grandson Thomas. The eleven-year-old chess prodigy has memorized the long list of digits. A brilliant homosexual SS officer sets out in pursuit of the money and the boy.

French novelist Loup Durand fills out this scenario with the graceless prose that marks other classics of the genre, including John Buchan's The Thirty- nine Steps, Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal and almost everything written by Ian Fleming. The boy's doomed mother Maria is not merely an eyeful, she has a "passion for beautiful things and more than enough money to indulge it . . . Coco Chanel suits, tea roses, the best restaurants, jazz, and driving her Bugatti at a reckless speed."

In Durand's narrative, and J. Maxwell Brownjohn's translation, cold feet are "like blocks of ice." A bashed villain goes "out like a light." A neighborhood is "as silent as the grave." An event happens "in a flash." Matters are as clear "as daylight." If the author were competing with John le Carre, these bromides might undo his tale.

But the Good War is not the cold war, and an international page turner should never be confused with a geo-political thriller. The one man who can save Thomas is American David Quartermain, who fathered the illegitimate boy and is sitting out the war in Vermont. Quartermain, whose name evokes the dauntless hero of King Solomon's Mines, is not just well off. He is a member of the most powerful banking family in the U.S. For lagniappe, he bears a striking resemblance to Gary Cooper. The boy's only protector is a supermarksman out of Ghostbusters. Miquel is the sort of fellow who can shoot out the eye of a fly at 100 paces and vanish at will into a wood or a city, beyond the reach of ordinary humans.

There are no moral complexities here, no cunning passages of history, no double agents trading allegiances for meaning. But there is a tumultuous plot, an appealing young protagonist -- who except Hitler could root against a pre- pubescent? -- and a prime villain. Colonel Gregor Laemmle, the SS officer in pursuit of Thomas, is far more than the usual posturing sadist. A former philosophy professor, he is a connoisseur of art and literature and something of a chess master himself. Laemmle regards the hunting of Thomas as a large- scale tournament, with gambits to be savored even when they go against the Germans.

The opening game features a well-devised trap. But the lad is too slithery to hold, and he is soon en route to maman, with fatal consequences for her. From that fiery shoot-out until checkmate, the contest becomes increasingly taut, vicious and engaging. At each turn, Laemmle edges closer to his goal. At every escape, Thomas becomes a little wearier, a trifle more dependent on a cast of peasants, restaurateurs, shopkeepers and devious intelligence operatives. None are so devious or inventive as he is. The most adept, of course, proves to be Quartermain, flown in to rescue the child of his brief and passionate liaison with Maria.

Between the maze of subplots, Durand allows a sex scene or two, but his real love story is filial. As Daddy nears the end game, the book presents its sole ambiguity as father and son compete for the title role. Is the innocent American fit for parentage? Or has the little French garcon acquired a more mature knowledge of human treachery and altruism? Debating the question, Europeans have driven Thomas' adventure to the top of their best-seller lists. It is likely to have a commensurate success in the U.S., where some people fondly remember Father Knows Best and the rest are aware that outsmarting adults is one of youth's most hallowed traditions.