The Limoges Dilemma (Alex Kovacs thriller series Book 4)

by Richard Wake

  “With information that he provided,” Leon said, pointing at me.

  “He finally speaks,” Maurice said. “And to deflect the credit. Interesting.”

  “Facts matter.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  I continued, taking myself to Zurich and Leon to Paris, then both of us to Lyon, where I married Manon and did sabotage work for the Resistance while Leon helped smuggle Jews out of the country. It really did only take five minutes; some life. I spent the last bit re-telling the story of the de Gaulle radio broadcast that I listened to with Manon, and my frustration with the reticence of much of the Resistance, and then Maurice interrupted.

  “Are you a Communist — either of you?”

  We both shook our heads. No sense lying. Maurice’s reaction was to fold his arms and lean back in the chair. He pushed it back on its back two legs, back far enough that I wondered if the legs would snap from the strain or if he would lose his balance and fall backward. It wouldn’t do for a man named Granite to topple at such a moment, though, and he didn’t.

  “Here’s what I think,” he said. “Well, let me back up. When I first saw you, I figured you for spies — the Gaullists checking us out, not like I give a fuck. But it doesn’t add up. You’re too old, first off — if they just needed a pair of big ears, they could get any kid for that. And there’s two of you when they would really need only one — and one would raise fewer alarms for someone like me. And this is a dangerous business, too dangerous for somebody your age. And you’re not even pretending you’re Communists. So when you add it all up, you guys are too suspicious to be anything but on-the-level. To me, those are the facts.” Maurice looked at Leon. “Are those the facts that matter?”

  “Not a bad bit of reporting,” Leon said.

  “Oh, and one more thing. It’s you, the quiet man, the reporter. You can’t hide your skepticism. I like that.”

  “Why?” Leon said.

  “Because it’s honest,” Maurice said. “I’ll take honesty as the most important trait in this business, even more than courage or proficiency with a rifle.”

  He stood up and walked in a slow circle around where we were sitting. It was as if he was rehearsing a speech or a classroom lecture. He made the full circle and then stopped, putting one foot up on the seat of his chair and pointing at us. His eyes were wide and shooting out some kind of emotion — anger, defiance, I couldn’t decipher it until he began speaking. It was definitely defiance.

  “I’ll tell you what I tell the rest of the Resistance,” he said. “We’ll go to your damn meetings because we’ve been told to go to your damn meetings, but we’re free agents and we don’t care who knows it. We don’t play well with others and we don’t give a shit if they give a shit. Got it? We stay up here, we go down into Limoges if it suits us, and we do what we want. If they want to help us with their British guns, fine. We’re happy to have them. If they don’t, we’ll just fucking steal the guns we need from the Germans, or the militia, or whoever.”

  Maurice stopped. He took a deep breath.

  “But no one tells us what to do. Got it?” he said.

  Maurice didn’t wait for a reply. He dismissed Leon and I with a wave toward two piles of straw in the far back corner of the barn. As we walked away, he resumed reading his newspaper, hunched over the little table beneath the single glowing bulb.

  17

  The next morning, Maurice introduced us to the rest of the group and they tested us on their weapons. They had two German machine guns, but neither Leon nor I had ever seen one, no less fired one. Leon did okay with his turn but the kick stunned me a bit, even as the gun was propped up on a stand in front of me. I mostly ended up shooting the top branches of the trees before corralling the thing.

  I was better with the rifle, better than Leon, likely better than almost all of them. I had been a good shot as a kid in the army and, as it turned out, I picked it up again pretty quickly. The weapon felt natural, cradled in my arms. They had been laughing after my machine gun follies, but I shut them up with the rifle. I actually turned and bowed at the group of them behind me when I was done.

  “Asshole,” one of them shouted back.

  “That’s my name,” I said.

  “I won’t forget,” came the shout back. And behind them, maybe 20 yards, I saw Maurice watching.

  Lunch was stew out of a huge pot, served in the farmhouse kitchen. There was one grumbler — “Does it always have to be stew?” — but given that there was actual meat in it, neither Leon nor I had any complaints.

  “You don’t know how much better the eating is out here, outside the city,” I said to the rest of them.

  “We get into Limoges sometimes, we know,” said the guy who had shouted at me earlier.

  “You mean, ‘We know, Asshole,’” I said.

  “Yes, we know, Asshole.”

  “And what’s your name? Dick?”

  The rest of the table burst out laughing. In a second, so did the guy who had shouted at me.

  “My name is actually Richard,” he said.

  The tension broken, Leon and I told a bit of our stories. People came and went from the table, including Maurice, but we were the center of attention and gave everyone a chance to see us up close. After lunch, it was mandatory nap time, as in a kindergarten. That was fine with me. It was clear we were going to be working nights — including, as it turned out, that night.

  We began our walk through the woods at twilight, six of us. Two carried machine guns, including Richard. The rest of us had rifles, including Maurice, Leon and me. It would be a five-mile walk, and I must have made a face when they told me because Richard said, “Don’t worry, old man, we’ll be driving back.”

  On the way, Maurice laid out the plan. We were headed for a spot along the road to Confolens, maybe three miles from the town, a place where there was a severe hairpin turn that would require any driver to slow to 10 miles per hour, tops. “It’s so severe a turn that plenty of people stall out,” Maurice said.

  The night’s target, he said, would be a three-truck German convoy that made the nightly run from a supply depot in Confolens back to the small barracks in Saint-Junien.

  “What time does it get there?” Leon said.

  “It varies,” Maurice said.

  “Always three trucks?” Leon said.

  “Usually,” Maurice said.

  “Men per truck?” Leon said.

  “Two.”

  Maurice paused.

  “Usually,” he said.

  As we walked, Leon sidled up to me and we fell a few paces back.

  “Usually?” he said.

  I was the meticulous planner when it came to operations. I used to insist on multiple reconnaissance trips when I was doping out a sabotage operation in Lyon. The Resistance in Lyon allowed me to do it because I was funding at a lot of my own operations. But that was always my personality — careful and cautious, especially compared to Leon, who was more emotional. But I guess that was when we were younger.

  “Usually?” he said again. “There was a time you never would have settled for ‘usually.’”

  “And there was a time your middle name was ‘Usually,’” I said.

  “Not like this,” Leon said.

  “Just like this.”

  Still, if this wasn’t a wing-and-a-prayer type of thing, it was in the neighborhood. We were to arrive at the spot in the road, three of us hidden in the woods on one side, three on the other. The machine guns were to take out the driver and the guard on each side of the first truck, with the rifles spaced behind to take care of the next two — with the machine guns to help. And if it was more than three trucks, or more than two men per truck, well, I guess that’s why we were carrying the extra ammunition.

  “And what’s in these trucks?” I said.

  Maurice looked at me. He shook his head again.

  “It varies,” he said. I must have made another face because the reply was caustic.

  “We aren’t the god
damn Abwehr,” Maurice said. “We don’t have a gigantic spy network. We have two radios, both of which are fucking broken right now. We take what we know and we improvise the best we can.”

  When we got to the place, Leon and I were positioned on the far side of the road, the passenger side. This was the more dangerous side, seeing as how the guard in the passenger seat would have quicker access to his weapon, but whatever.

  As it turned out, we waited only about a half-hour before the truck began to rumble up the road. Maurice was right: the first truck came to a virtual stop at it reached the turn and then to a complete stop as it stalled. The last thing I heard was the soldier in the passenger seat of the second lorry cursing and then laughing at the driver in front of him. I fired one shot and hit him square on his face, between his nose and his right eye.

  Then it was all noise from the machine guns, and smoke, and yelling. It all went as easily as Maurice had predicted. The Germans never even had time to raise a weapon. They were all dead within 20 seconds.

  The six of us each pulled a German body out of its seat and left it on the side of the road. We used their coats to mop whatever blood we could out of the lorries and dropped them next to the bodies. It was then that Maurice unsheathed a knife with what was nearly a foot-long blade and walked from body to body, leaning over and cutting their throats from side to side. He wasn't just nicking them, either, but sawing down, nearly beheading the six corpses. The rest followed him from body to body and cheered with each savage hack. I found myself joining them at the end.

  Leon, though, kept a silent distance. And when we were getting ready to take our places in the lorries and drive off, he said, “Shouldn’t we hide the bodies?”

  “Why?” It was Maurice.

  “Why not?”

  “They’re dead soldiers in a war,” I said. “What’s the problem?”

  “Why rub their noses in it?” Leon said. “It might be weeks before they find the bodies if we hide them a little. If we roll them into the woods, even 10 feet or so, they might never find them. Isn’t that better for everybody?”

  “But—” I started to reply, but Maurice stopped me.

  “Okay, Mr. Reporter, we’ll hide them,” he said.

  It only delayed our departure by a minute or two. One of the heads did come completely apart from the rest of its body, and Maurice kicked it into the woods like a football. There was more cheering as it rolled into the weeds.

  The lorries were French, requisitioned from the locals, so they weren’t conspicuous. Still, we needed to get off the road — and there was no way we could drive into Saint-Junien, or anywhere close. About a half-mile away from the hairpin, there was an abandoned logging road on the left side, its entrance covered by all manner of timber scraps and brambles and shit. But as it turned out, the camouflage could be moved by six men in about two minutes, and replaced in the same time. The logging road allowed us to circumvent Saint-Junien, and we were back at the farmhouse within a half-hour.

  Inside the lorries were enough beef and vegetables to feed a dozen men for a month, along with some uniform clothing and ammunition, most of which did not fit the weapons we had. The third lorry carried a dozen jerry cans of petrol. And as it turned out, the most popular cargo was the box containing heavy socks and the four cases of Armagnac.

  18

  The farmhouse was a quarter-mile from the main road, which was actually a glorified goat path that was two miles from the real main road. In other words, this could never have been much of a commercial enterprise. My guess is that it was a farm that provided for the family that lived here and maybe enough for a single trip every week down into the market in Saint-Junien. It was a living but not much of one, especially if there had been a mortgage on the place.

  The point was, I hadn’t seen a soul pass by in two days, not a truck, not a person walking, no one. So it was with some interest that I watched the bicycle pedal up to the front door of the farmhouse, and the woman who hopped off.

  The rest of the men, my fellow maquisards, put down whatever they were doing — and the truth was, at 11 a.m., most of them had barely pulled on their trousers after sleeping late — and hurried over to greet her, whoever she was. Some ran. The first ones there received hugs, the rest hellos, or affectionate grasps of the shoulder, so some variation thereof. Leon and I walked over and stood on the fringe of the circle. I attempted to make eye contact with her but did not succeed.

  Maurice, standing at the barn door and smiling as goofily as the rest of them, waved the woman over, and she left the joyous circle to meet him. They went inside the barn but the door remained propped open. If this was to be a sexual encounter, there had been no provisions made for privacy, or for the stray, sharp bits of straw that had already made their way into most of my body’s crevices.

  I had noticed that Richard was a bit of a mind-reader. Either that, or my face was somehow giving away everything, like that of a destined-to-be-destitute card player. Anyway, he seemed to know what I was thinking as I watched the woman walk into the barn. He said, “It’s not like that, asshole.”

  “Not like what?”

  “Not like what you were thinking.”

  “First of all, you don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “You keep telling yourself that.”

  “Okay, so what is it like, then?”

  “It’s like she’s everybody’s sister,” he said.

  “Sisters have boyfriends, you know.”

  “Not her and not here,” Richard said.

  Her name was Clarisse Morean. She was a schoolteacher from Limoges. She was carrying a small leather satchel on a strap on her back, as any schoolteacher might. But Richard said that she was a courier for the Resistance. The last time she had come out, maybe three weeks earlier, she had brought a map of all the Gestapo headquarters buildings in Limoges. He said, “There are, like, six or eight of them,” he said. “I couldn’t figure out why they didn’t just take one big building for the lot of them, but it seems like they all want their little kingdoms. I found that really interesting.”

  “Interesting how?” Leon said.

  “I don’t know,” Richard said. “But it gives you a few ideas, doesn’t it? Maybe they’re not quite as single-minded as we think. Maybe they have gaps in their communications, just like we do with the de Gaulle assholes. I don’t know. It’s just interest. And that’s the kind of stuff she tells us.”

  “Is it safe for her?” Leon said.

  “Put it this way: safer than for a man,” he said. “They don’t look at women as dangerous. The best couriers in the business here are women pushing baby carriages. The problem is that you need a woman and a baby to make it work.”

  Within five minutes, Clarisse and her satchel were back at the barn door. Maurice hugged her, and then she began a series of what seemed to be her appointed rounds. Three of the men were arrayed around the farmyard, maybe 10 yards apart.

  The first was the 17-year-old kid who had pissed himself. She sat with him in the shade of the barn, the two of them sharing a hay bale. Even from a hundred feet away, the intimacy of the conversation was obvious. The kid wiped a tear at one point. A minute later, his whole body kind of heaved, and she hugged him until it stopped. Something she said as she stood up made him laugh — then she walked about 30 feet to the next guy, whose name I had forgotten. He might have been 20, and he smiled and handed her what appeared to be a school notebook.

  “She’s teaching him to read and write,” Richard said. “She brought him a primer and checks his homework whenever she comes.”

  When they were done, it was 30 more feet to a third man they all called JP. She opened up the satchel and handed him two letters. He reached into his back pocket and handed her two letters in return.

  “He has a girlfriend,” Richard said. “She works in a cafe in Limoges. Clarisse is their unofficial postman. Those letters are the only thing that keep him here. Oh, shit,” he said, and ran into the farmhouse.

  By the t
ime she reached her bicycle, Richard was back with a small package that fit neatly into the basket in front.

  “What’s this?” she said.

  “We’ve had a windfall,” Richard said. “Carrots, onions, potatoes, and some lamb.”

  “Windfall?”

  “The vegetables from the Germans,” he said. “The lamb from these two.”

  Richard introduced us as “our two new uncles.” Her smile was easy. Her manner seemed so natural. She was about 35, probably, pleasant-looking without being a beauty. Then again, she was wearing slacks because of the bike and her hair was a mess and she had been sweating. A bit of straw strayed from her back pocket. I almost reached over to pull it out but stopped myself.

  “Uncle What?” she said.

  “I’m Uncle Leon, he’s Uncle Alex.” I couldn’t gauge Leon’s interest but my history had always been one of deference to his wishes, at least in this department.

  “Next time, maybe I’ll get a chance to chat with the uncles, but I have to get back,” Clarisse said. She hugged Richard and thanked him for the food. She kissed the 17-year-old on the top of his head. And then she was off, the hint of a cloud of dust trailing her departure.

  Just a cloud, and then it was gone. My mind had begun to wander a bit as I watched her, wander in all the natural ways — not dirty, not overtly sexual in any way, just… normal. Suddenly, Manon’s face popped into my head. I actually kind of stumbled in place, if that is possible. And then I felt like throwing up.

  19

  I couldn’t sleep that night. This was not that unusual for me, not since Manon disappeared. I pretty much needed to drink enough to pass out most nights. Given the Armagnac shipment we had intercepted, I had ingested more than enough to do the job — enough that Maurice, not shy himself in the Armagnac department, said something about my “olympian ability” to hold my liquor. I stood up and bowed in appreciation of his compliment and nearly toppled over in the process. Maurice said, “Okay, maybe not so olympian.” Still, I couldn’t sleep.