by Richard Wake
“What’s that all about?” I said. “Why was the soldier asking about the quarry?”
“We think it’s an execution spot,” Martin said. His manner was matter-of-fact. He never took his eyes off the road ahead.
“Jesus,” I said. “You think it’s an execution spot? What do you mean, you think?”
“I mean what I said. We think it’s a place where the Gestapo in Limoges takes people after they’re done wringing information out of them. We followed a lorry from Place Jourdan out to here once and it took the turnoff.”
“But they didn’t follow them?”
“No,” he said. “Another time, we had a man out here by the road and he heard what he believed to be rifle fire. But there are all kinds of explosive sounds at a quarry—”
“There’s a difference between rifle fire and dynamite, for God’s sake—”
“But there is also hunting in the hills around here, and the sound can ricochet.”
“You just don’t want to know,” I said.
“Alex, come on,” Leon chimed in. The new Mr. Fucking Reasonable. I did my best to ignore him, and Martin was finally making a bit of eye contact with me as he drove.
“Do you ever try to stop them?” I said.
“We’re still gathering information.”
“You don’t think there’s a hurry?”
“We can only do so much”.
“I’m sure the poor fuckers they’re lining up against the stone walls are thinking the same thing,” I said.
“Alex, come on.” It was Leon again.
“Is that all you can say?”
We drove the final hour in silence.
14
I had, against all odds, managed to hold my tongue during the entire Resistance meeting. It was in the schoolhouse in Saint-Junien. The spokesmen for the six Resistance groups sat in children’s desks formed into a circle, appearing equal parts uncomfortable and ridiculous. The rest of us sat on the floor against the wall. Martin drove the five miles to his uncle’s farm and said he would meet us back at the school in two hours.
If someone was in charge, I couldn’t tell. The meeting was a snooze, unless you were interested in the unspoken game of “no, mine’s the biggest” that the six of them were playing at their little kiddies’ desks. To be fair, Leon was only listening and not really participating, but I wasn’t much interested in being fair to Leon at that point. But as for the rest of them, it was all political maneuvering and not a lot of coordination. It honestly seemed as if they were only meeting so that they could make a record of their cooperation if one became necessary in the future.
They took turns detailing recent sabotage missions — Leon’s only real contribution to the meeting was the recitation of my recent bridge job in Brielle — and then they settled on a new set of radio codes in case there was the need to send an urgent message. There was talk of an upcoming parachute drop of supplies from the British — exact details to follow — and the need for a plan to distribute the goods once they arrived. And that was about it, other than the chest-puffing and unspoken mistrust.
The whole thing took an hour. As it turned out, Martin was already back from the farm when we walked out of the school building.
“So soon?” Leon said.
“My uncle had company,” Martin said. His grin was the only explanation necessary.
“But you got your ham, right?” I said.
“It was waiting on the front porch of the farmhouse with a note. And I grabbed this for my trouble,” he said, holding up a bottle of Armagnac. “I mean, it wasn’t as if he was going to interrupt what he was doing to stop me from taking it.”
Three guys from one of the Communist Resistance groups had followed us out of the building. One of them saw the bottle, wedged himself in between Leon and I, put an arm around each of our shoulders and said, “Ah, my brothers.”
We looked at each other and shrugged. And so, the six of us sat down on the playground benches behind the school and passed around the bottle. Our new friends said they were from the immediate area.
“But we move around a lot,” the spokesman said. His name was Ronny. “Right now, we’re in an abandoned farmhouse. It’s actually pretty good — there are 12 of us and six beds. The other six sleep in the barn, but it’s clean enough, and the hay is pretty comfortable to sleep on.”
“How do you decide who gets the beds?” I said.
“When Granite chooses to sleep in the barn, it’s hard to complain or make much of a fuss either way.”
Granite. He must have been the leader of the cell. Some name, that.
“Why isn’t Granite here for the meeting?” I said. I felt ridiculous just saying it, Granite.
“Because he couldn’t be bothered. Calls this stuff, and I quote, ‘bureaucratic bourgeois bullshit.’ And after experiencing it for the first time, I can’t say I disagree.”
We drank and talked about our business, as if we were six traveling salesmen in a hotel bar. But unlike those traveling salesmen, our topics were not the declining profit margins on damask, or some outrageous expense account story, but the growing scarcity of fuses and detonators.
“We can get dynamite, all kinds of explosives, no problem,” Ronny said. “But the detonators—”
“Same with us,” I said. Then I told him about the last mission, and how my sole job was to make just such a delivery.
The more we drank, the more animated Ronny’s conversation became. He looked at us and said, “Look, I don’t want to insult you…”
“Go ahead,” I said. I looked over at Leon and Martin and their expressions didn’t change. And with the opening I offered, the words burst from Ronny as if from a water hose.
“You don’t like us, we don’t like you,” he said. “You don’t like us because we’re Communists and we don’t like you because you hate Communists. You want to be in charge, we want to be in charge. That’s natural enough. It’s not going to change. And I’m actually okay with it.”
Ronny stopped. He grabbed at the bottle and took a long drink.
“Look,” he said. “We’re rivals. We’re always going to be rivals. But we have the Germans in our homes right now — why won’t you fight them?”
“We do,” Martin said. I had expected Leon to defend himself, given that he had played the same song for me.
“You don’t and you know it,” Ronny said. “You just wait. You just blow up a few things and wait for the Americans. Well, what if they don’t come? I can’t live my whole life with these fucking animals in charge. How can you?”
“We fight,” Leon said. He was a little drunk and his voice was raised. “We fucking fight. But what’s the purpose of getting innocent people killed?”
“They’re soldiers, they’re not innocent,” Ronny said.
“That’s not what I’m talking about, and you know it.” Leon was talking about the reprisals. It was how the Germans tidied up the jails — three prisoners executed for every German killed tended to be the going rate, but it could end up being 10-to-1 if some Gestapo captain woke up one morning with a headache.
“It’s a war. People die.” Now Ronny was yelling.
No one answered. The tension ebbed almost as quickly as it had risen. Ronny was still holding the bottle, and he took another drink, a long one.
“It’s a fucking war,” he said, this time not much above a whisper.
15
The bottle was just about done. Leon got up for a piss and I went with him.
“I usually handle this kind of thing myself,” he said.
“I have to tell you something.”
“Oh, shit.”
“What do you mean, ‘oh, shit?’” I said. “You don’t even know what I’m going to say.”
“You want to go with them, right?”
“How did you know?”
“Come on, Alex,” he said. “I’ve known you since you were 17. You’ve changed a lot, especially lately, but I know you. So why?”
“You kno
w why.”
“I know what you’ve been saying,” Leon said. “And I know everything changed for you…” He stopped, seeming to search for the right words, and then just settled for what it was, blurting out, “Everything changed for you after Manon. But these guys? Be honest with yourself. You’re falling in love with an idea here but ignoring the reality. It’s like you’re chasing a skirt—”
“It’s more than that.”
“Is it? Is it really? In our whole lives together, until just the last couple of months, I had never heard you call them just plain ‘Communists.’ It was ‘fucking Communists,’ or ‘fucking Reds.’ Always.”
“Not always,” I said.
“Always. You’re lying to yourself.”
“It’s different now.”
“So you believe in — what did you always call it — ‘that Bolshevik bullshit?’”
“I believe in fighting Germans,” I said. “And these people are my only option.”
“That’s not true,” Leon said. “We’ll be in Paris in a week — two weeks tops. We’ll have many more options there. More time to think. More time to plan, to be smart about it. You can work with bigger people there to change things.”
“Or I can stay here and fight.”
I had been thinking about this for weeks — not this moment, not this playground circle around a bottle, but this idea. This wasn’t just emotional vengeance. This was reasoned. It made sense. The Germans needed to be made less comfortable. They needed to feel that there was a cost for occupying France. It had all been too easy for them. They took our food, they took French boys for free labor — it had to stop. They had to pay. More importantly, they themselves had to feel like there was a cost. They were a race of ledger-keepers and they needed to see some entries in the debit column.
“You know, this isn’t just since Manon,” I said.
Leon just looked at me. Then he shrugged.
“This goes back probably two years,” I said. “It was way before the Gestapo came to Lyon. She had just started the newspaper. I’m not sure if I had been on a demolition assignment yet. But we were listening to the radio, to a de Gaulle speech. And he said — and I’ll never forget it — he said something like, ‘There’s no point in provoking all of these reprisals. There are tactics in war, and the tactics in our war must be directed by those in charge — by me and our committee. The order I give is not to randomly kill Germans.'"
Leon was impassive, just listening. He looked sad or maybe just tired. We were all so tired.
“Yeah, it was just that plain,” I said. “It half went over my head when he said it but Manon jumped all over it. She couldn’t believe it. It didn’t really affect us — like I said, the Gestapo hadn’t come into Vichy at that point — but she was really mad.”
“I bet that was entertaining,” Leon said.
“Yeah,” I said. “She spent the next week calling him ‘No-Balls de Gaulle.’”
It was getting late. I heard someone whistle, looked over my shoulder, and saw Martin. He was pointing at his watch.
“You know, the Americans are coming,” Leon said.
“So you say.”
“I don’t know if it’s tomorrow, or next week, or next year — but they are coming. That will change everything and you know it.”
“I don’t know it,” I said.
“And here’s the other thing — and you know this, too. The Germans will never leave because they know the Americans are coming, too. And they know the only way to keep them out is to stop them on the beaches here.”
“That’s not completely true — they’re already starting to come through Italy. The Brits, too. If we make it hard enough for them, maybe they decide to withdraw and fight it out someplace else.”
“But the point is, you know they’re coming — through Italy, through France, through wherever,” Leon said.
“It could be years,” I said.
We were just sitting on a log at that point, staring into the edge of some woods. I heard what Leon was saying, but I had made up my mind. The status quo was intolerable to me. A couple of blown-up railroad tracks did nothing to change anybody’s calculus — and it pissed off at least some of the locals, besides. Blown-up tracks didn’t just mean interrupting German shipments, it meant interrupting trips to Aunt Marguerite’s house, too. Most of the French people didn’t support what we were doing, anyway. We were accomplishing nothing. That needed to change.
Suddenly, Leon stood up.
“Well, let’s go tell them,” he said.
“What?”
“That they have two more recruits,” he said.
I just looked at him. I think my mouth was open.
“No,” I said. “This is about me. It isn’t about you. You don’t agree with me, I know you don’t.”
He looked at me for maybe 10 seconds and then he just shook his head.
“I think you’re wrong, but I’m not going to leave you now,” Leon said. “Among other things, Manon would kill me.”
His voice caught. He stopped, gathered himself.
“I know you’ve been thinking about this, like I said. It’s not a total shock to me, so I’ve had time to consider what to do. And I’m doing it. And I really don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
I had tears in my eyes as we walked back. When we told them, Ronny was first shocked then embarrassingly emotional. He hugged us and cried and refused to let go. Then he looked at Martin, asking without asking. Martin’s face suggested he was half bewildered and half incredulous. I answered for him: “No, he has important work to do in Couzeix.”
Martin walked to the car and returned a minute later with a package wrapped in butcher’s paper. He handed it to me. “I knew you were trouble,” he said. Then he grinned.
“What is it?” I said.
“A leg of lamb. My uncle won’t miss it. Well, I take that back. Unless he has a lot more stamina than I think, he’s likely to have missed it by now, that and the bottle. But what can you do? Like your new best friend says, it’s a fucking war.”
Part II
16
The walk through the woods to the maquis’ camp was five miles, give or take. It should have taken us two hours, give or take, but given the inebriation level of my new best friend, it was closer to five. It was about midnight when we emerged from the trail at the abandoned farm, greeted by a rifle and then a call for reinforcements. In other words, Leon and I didn’t receive the same sloppy hug from the sober members of the group, even as Ronny attempted to make our case.
We were escorted — not at the point of two rifles, but by two men carrying rifles pointed at the ground while they located the triggers with their index fingers — to the barn. It appeared to be in pretty good shape, painted within a year or so, as did the farmhouse. I wondered why the place had been abandoned. It could have been as simple as dead parents leaving the place to their two sons, and the sons having been scooped up for the STO.
There were no animals inside the barn, just a series of makeshift straw beds arrayed around the perimeter. A small table and three chairs were in the center, beneath the sole light bulb. It hung from a long wire that dropped from the roof, and it swayed ever so slightly. In one of the chairs, a man was seated and casually reading a newspaper I didn’t recognize. My suspicion was that he was Granite, the leader, a suspicion that was quickly confirmed.
Granite motioned, and Leon and I sat across the table from him. He got up and took our friend Ronny outside for a chat, leaving us for a few uncomfortable minutes. Our shadows beneath the single light bulb were eerie, frankly, and I couldn’t quite make out how many men were eying us up from the straw piles along the walls.
The barn door opened. I saw Granite hug Ronny and kiss him on both cheeks. I heard him say to Ronny, “Don’t ever change, you fucking romantic asshole.” They hugged again, the barn door was closed, and then Granite was sitting again in the remaining chair. If the men with the rifles were nearby, I didn’t see them.
&
nbsp; “So it seems you have met my chief of recruitment,” he said.
“That’s not exactly how it went, Granite,” I said. “You are Granite, right?”
He laughed a lot more than the question would have predicted. Laughing with me, laughing at me — I had no idea.
“Call me Maurice,” he said.
“So what’s with Granite?”
“It’s what they call me behind my back,” he said. “It started a while ago. Not surprisingly, they had all been drinking — well, so had I. Anyway, one of the men said, ‘If Stalin can be named after steel, then you must be named after something just as hard.’ That’s when I went to bed. I found out the next morning that, another half-bottle in, they decided on Granite. They think I don’t like it, so they only use it among themselves.”
“Thank God, because I don’t think I could call you Granite with a straight face.”
“How old are you?” Maurice said.
“43.”
“And him?” Maurice gestured toward Leon.
“Same,” I said.
“Does he talk?”
“Eventually.”
“Well, I’m 38,” Maurice said. “And as you might have noticed, I’m not sure any of the rest are even 25. We’ve got one who’s 17. I literally held him one night when he couldn’t stop crying — he pissed his pants in his sleep and he woke up screaming. I’m telling you this because I don’t know what’s in your head right now, but this isn’t all some great romantic adventure.”
Maurice sat back, folded his arms and stared at us. It was clear that it was our turn to talk and his to listen.
So I gave him the five-minute version of our life stories — how Leon and I had fought together in the Great War and then grew up together in Vienna. How I had worked in sales in the family mining company, and how my traveling had led to my being recruited as a spy. How Leon had worked as a journalist and had written the story predicting the Anschluss before anyone with.
