The Limoges Dilemma (Alex Kovacs thriller series Book 4)

by Richard Wake

  It wasn’t that I was thinking about Clarisse. Really, that wasn’t it. The fact that my mind had wandered did bother me and left me in a guilty funk for the rest of the day, but that really wasn’t it. It was just like this some nights, when those last minutes in Lyon would play over and over like a phonograph whose needle was stuck in the rut of a record.

  Manon had been hidden in one safe house, me in another. The Resistance had decided that we were in too much danger and needed to be flown to England, and we had agreed, and this was the night. We would be picked up in an open field that was bordered by hedges. Our minders would provide a landing target for the little plane by shining four torches skyward. The plane would land, and Manon and I would sprint from the hedges on opposite sides of the field. We would reach the plane simultaneously, from different directions, and the plane would take off again within seconds.

  That was the plan. But as the plane landed, search lights suddenly switched on. They were carried on the backs of lorries, Gestapo lorries positioned in some nearby hills. Our plan had been discovered. The lights came on as I sprinted to the plane. I saw Manon’s face, just for a second, and then the gunfire began. I was hit in the right leg. I heard Manon scream. The plane took off after I fell. Leon and the others dragged me from the field as I oozed into unconsciousness, as the lights followed the plane into the sky and the shooting continued.

  I was safe and recovered quickly. But Manon? No one knew.

  Her body had not been found at the site — the Resistance was sure of that. The Gestapo had not arrested her — and the Resistance was pretty sure of that, partly because of the sources they had in the prison but mostly because the Gestapo was not crowing about her capture. We believed she had made it to the plane — but the plane never made it to England.

  Either way, she was gone. There really was little to no doubt of that. But how? How had the Germans found out about the pickup? There were a million things that kept me up but that was the one I just couldn’t shake. How had they known? It might have been happenstance, or simple incompetence. It didn’t have to have been a betrayal, but that was where my mind always went. But the truth was, I really had no idea and there was no way I would ever know.

  There was one more thing. The spotlights illuminated the open field, the firing began, I was hit and Manon screamed. That was the order. At least that’s the way I remembered it. More than once, I asked Leon what he remembered from that night, and he was useless. It wasn’t his fault — the lights, the gunfire, the mortal fear, it all combined into a chaotic stew.

  “But you’re a professional journalist,” I said to him. “Aren’t you supposed to be good at the details?”

  “When the shooting starts, and you’re potentially on the receiving end, nobody’s good at the details,” Leon said.

  Still, I was sure: lights, gunfire, me being hit, Manon screaming. But was she screaming because I had been hit or because she, too, had been hit? On my darkest nights, that was the only I just couldn’t shake. That was one of those nights.

  Plenty drunk but not drunk enough to fall asleep — that was my life in a capsule. I sat up on my pile of straw, feet on the barn floor, head in my hands. The single bulb was still lit and Maurice was seated below it, reading.

  “Marx? Engels?” I said.

  “Christie.”

  “Who?”

  “Agatha Christie,” he said. “English mystery writer. Clarisse tries to bring me a new one whenever she comes out.”

  “Give you any operational ideas for the next raid?”

  Maurice laughed. “Might be better than some of mine,” he said. “But no. I read these to forget. You should try it.”

  “Wouldn’t work,” I said.

  “Like drinking does?”

  “It usually does. Not tonight, though. Not tonight.”

  Maurice stood up and walked over to the pile of hay that he never seemed to sleep on. He was carrying two things when he came back, a book and a small torch. “Take these over to your bed and give it a try,” he said. “If you drink any more, you’ll fucking kill yourself. This could be better.”

  I walked back to my pile of hay, switched on the torch and began reading. The author was French, but I had never heard of him. The title of the book was Midnight in Bordeaux. And Maurice was right. It was working. It was relaxing me. I was starting to doze off, and I began to believe that mindless fiction might be the answer — until page nine, when the wife in the story disappeared. I’m pretty sure I didn’t sleep after that.

  20

  The next morning, I was roused from my non-sleeping fog by a commotion just outside of the barn. Two of the men were dragging a kid in from the road. He looked as if he might be 20 years old and was scared enough to wet himself. The two threw him on the ground at Maurice’s feet.

  “Where’d you find him?” Maurice said.

  “Wandering in the woods.”

  “Weapon?”

  “No.”

  “ID?”

  The paperwork was handed over. By that time, I was peering over Maurice’s shoulder. The kid was named Raymond Michel. He was 19, still three months from his 20th birthday. His address was listed as Ruffec, a small town less than 20 miles to the west. Maurice looked down at the kid.

  “STO?” he said.

  “I want to join the maquis,” was how the kid replied. He sounded like he was about an inch away from bursting into tears.

  “STO?” Maurice said again. He was just a tiny bit more insistent this time, demanding the truth with just the slightest shift in his tone.

  “Yes. But I am here because I want to fight the Germans.”

  “Fuck,” was Maurice’s reply. Then he looked at the two who had dragged him in and said, “Get him something to eat in the house.”

  The greatest Resistance recruiting tool currently being employed in occupied France was the compulsory work service program. The acronym that everyone knew it by was STO. The Germans’ insistence on this mandatory round-up that sent French youth to German factories had stripped every family — as well as every farm, every shop in town, every small factory — of boys in their late teens and early twenties. Anywhere between 10 and 20 percent got caught and shipped off to work in the Reich. That left the 80 or 90 percent who were hiding in the countryside. Many had presented themselves for duty to various Resistance groups throughout the country. The numbers had swelled, and many of the groups saw themselves less as guerrilla fighters and more as small armies.

  Which was fine for them. But Maurice had a problem with the whole notion, one that he talked about pretty much every day at some point or another. I had already heard a variation on the same rant three times.

  “Christ,” he said, beginning another rant. He watched the kid who had pissed his pants being walked into the farmhouse and he shook his head.

  “What am I going to fucking do with him? I mean, come on.”

  Maurice had his group, and he had his own ideas. He wanted to keep his numbers small. He wanted to be a guerrilla leader, not a general officer. He said, “Hit-and-run is our best option, and it’s always going to be our best option. If we try to be an army, we’re playing their game. We kill them, we hurt them, we annoy them — that’s our best way. That’s when we will be most effective. If we try to play army with them, real-live war games, battalion against battalion stuff, we get slaughtered. Because that’s their game.”

  “Yeah, but one more won’t turn us into a battalion,” I said. It struck me almost immediately how easily the “us” rolled off of my tongue.

  “One more, no. But 20 more? That turns us into something different than we are now. We have to be nimble. We have to be mobile. You’ve been lucky — we’ve had food the whole time you’ve been here. But we don’t always. And you haven’t moved with us yet, but that’s probably coming soon. And then you’ll see — sleeping outside on the wet ground, with all kinds of critters crawling all over you. And eating whatever we can find along the trail, hoping that the berries on the bush
don’t give us the shits too bad.”

  “Sounds delightful,” I said.

  “It’s the reality,” Maurice said. “And then what happens to our new mascot in there?”

  “That’s not fair. I mean, come on — everybody pisses themselves the first time they’re in combat. I know I did, at least a little.”

  “It’s not that he’s scared. It’s that he’s motivated by fear. He’s just trying to save his own ass. He thinks slapping a beret on his head turns him into a maquisard. It’s so juvenile. He’s just a selfish brat.”

  Maurice pulled out his wallet. He reached inside and removed a small newspaper clipping, yellowed and frayed, obviously folded and refolded many times.

  “I think I read this every day,” he said. “It was meant for all of these scared STO kids.”

  He handed it to me. It said:

  So you want to escape to the maquis? Well, you may think the maquis is just a hide-out, the ideal place where you can happily wait until the end of it all, an easy life.

  Think again!

  Going to the maquis means a solemn commitment to the Resistance army… It’s sleeping rough, going hungry and submitting to iron discipline…

  When he was done refolding the clipping and placing it back in his wallet, Maurice told me that Richard and I would be driving to Limoges in the morning to pick up a radio from the Resistance there.

  “We’re really flying blind out here and a radio would help,” he said. “When we had one that worked, we could sometimes find the German frequencies. It didn’t mean much because we wouldn’t understand what they were sending, but with you and Leon, if they get even a little bit careless—”

  “I get it. So how do we just drive into Limoges?”

  Maurice explained the setup and didn’t wait to hear my reaction. He began walking toward the farmhouse and I stopped him.

  “What are you going to do with the kid?”

  “Part of me wants to shoot him,” Maurice said.

  “But not really.”

  “Yeah, but not really,” he said. “Another part of me wants to give him a sandwich and sent him back out into the woods. It’s really what I should do. But the problem is, the Germans will find him — and now he knows where we are. And while I’m pretty sure I would last 12 hours or so under torture, that kid wouldn’t last 12 minutes. He’d tell them where we are, and I don’t want to move just yet. This is too good a setup. We need a few more days of rest.”

  “So what are you going to do with him?”

  “It’s a farm — he can shovel shit for a few days,” Maurice said. “Then we’ll see what he looks like with a rifle in his hand. If he can’t help us, we send him away. By then we’ll probably be ready to go, too.”

  21

  The best plans are the simplest plans. That has been true forever, and it was true in this case. It was why I held my tongue, and didn’t insist upon too many details, when Maurice laid it out for me.

  Twice a week, on Tuesdays and Saturdays, the farmers’ cooperative in Champniers ran a lorry down to Limoges to sell its vegetables. They had several shops that were their regular customers, and they paid a good price for what was good quality produce. The truth was, given the demand, they could have commanded a pretty good price for wilted crap, but that wasn’t their way. In Champniers, they sold their best stuff, kept the second-best stuff for themselves, and gave away the rest — peacetime, wartime, whenever.

  On this Saturday, Richard and I would take the lorry into Limoges and make the deliveries. It was simple. We had the travel permits and the invoices from the shops. All we had to do was be in Champniers by 6 a.m. and take over the lorry from Gerald and Frank. They were the only two who were in on the deal and there was no way they were going to talk, seeing as how our first delivery would be in La Couronne, two towns over, where Gerald and Frank had made the acquaintance of two women who were not their wives. They would spend their day raising one kind of sweat while Richard and I raised another, and we would return late in the afternoon with an empty lorry, save for a small radio hidden in the padding beneath the front seat.

  Gerald and Frank were both middle-aged and overweight. Frank actually waddled a little as he walked away from the truck in La Courronne.

  “They’re both so fucking fat,” Richard said. “I can only imagine what their wives look like. Or their girlfriends.”

  “I almost forgot there were still fat people — only out here in the country, I guess,” I said. “There weren’t any in Lyon after a while. There are none in Limoges.”

  The ride in was pretty relaxed. There was only one thing we needed to get straight — a potential rendezvous point if we somehow got separated. Richard suggested Place Jourdan at 9 a.m. on Sunday, the next morning, just in case.

  “I only picked it because we did it once before,” Richard said. “Do you know it?”

  “You know the Gestapo headquarters is right there, don’t you?”

  “There’s a bunch of them. It isn’t the only one, remember…”

  “But I think that’s the big one,” I said.

  “It’ll be fine. Sunday morning — it’ll be quiet.”

  With that settled, we knew there would be at least one checkpoint along the way and maybe more than one. But we had the paperwork, and we had the new potatoes and green beans and zucchini and whatever else was back there. It was a simple story. There couldn’t be a problem.

  And so, when we spotted the military vehicle in the distance, and the two soldiers who manned the checkpoint, I actually felt pretty calm about the whole thing. Richard was driving and he would be doing the talking, but he had impressed me as being smart and pretty quick on his feet. There really was nothing to worry about — until, that is, the soldier on the driver’s side leaned into the window and asked, “Where are Gerald and Frank?”

  Drunk, hungover, sick, daughter’s First Communion — there were a million things Richard could have said. But he froze. He looked nervous. Truth was, he looked guilty. And very suddenly, drunk, hungover, sick or daughter’s First Communion wasn’t going to cut it. I literally had about two seconds to decide what to do — and we didn’t have any weapons, so shooting it out wasn’t going to be an option.

  In those two seconds, only one thing made sense to me: the truth.

  “Look,” I said, leaning over to talk to the soldier. The tone I went for was dirty and conspiratorial. Thankfully, I’d had plenty of practice over the years. In my previous life, I had been a traveling salesman who babysat the owners of a bunch of steel mills that did business with my family’s magnesite mine. On paper, my job was to sell them the stuff they used to line their blast furnaces. In reality, my job was to get the mill owners drunk and/or laid after the sales part of the business was completed. For years and years, in cities all over Germany and Austria, I had perfected the dirty whisper, complete with its trusted companion, the wicked smile.

  “Look,” I said again, gathering myself. I had made eye contact with the soldier, and he sensed where this was heading, and smiled his own dirty smile back in reply. “My friend here, he’s a little reluctant to tell the truth. But I figure, what the hell? What’s the point of having a good story if you don’t tell it, right? So what I’m telling you is that, while we are driving their truck into Limoges, Gerald and Frank are doing some driving of their own.” At which point, I repeatedly pounded my right fist into the palm of my left hand.

  “Come on — those two?” the soldier said. “Whores, right?”

  “They said they were girlfriends.”

  “My God, Frank will fucking break her bed.”

  “Among other things,” I said.

  We all had a good laugh — Richard had relaxed enough to join in by the end — and then we were off again. I waited about 30 seconds before I yelled at him.

  “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I just froze.”

  “You could have gotten us killed.”

  “I know. I kn
ow.”

  “If we get asked again, it’s the same story — got it?” I said.

  “Yeah, yeah — in case they compare notes.”

  “Exactly.”

  As it turned out, there were no other checkpoints. We got into the city and made the deliveries in order, and we were done by noon. Richard had memorized the address of the flat where the radio was hidden, and that would be our last stop. Other than the one hiccup at the checkpoint, the whole thing could not have gone more smoothly.

  But then, as we left the last vegetable store, the last of the crates unloaded, we returned to our empty lorry to find a black car, two black uniforms and two black trench coats. Richard managed to do the talking this time, explaining our business and handing over our delivery paperwork.

  “It all seems very routine,” the one trench coat said. He pocketed the paperwork. “But we would like a further word.”

  With that, one of the uniforms was behind the wheel of the truck and the other trench coat was escorting Richard into the passenger side door. The trench coat who took the paperwork pointed for me to enter the back seat of his black car. He rode shotgun while the soldier drove.

  22

  I had walked by it before but had never been inside Villa Tivoli. If it wasn’t the biggest of the buildings that the Gestapo had commandeered after their arrival — and it might have been, because it was plenty big — it was unquestionably the most famous. Because Villa Tivoli was known for torture. It was a subject that tended to grab one’s attention and maintain it.

  Villa Tivoli faced onto Cours Gay Lussac. Across the street was a big city park surrounded by a cinder track. If you stood on the sidewalk and looked to the left, the Benedictins clock tower dominated. The station wasn’t a five-minute walk away.

  One of the de Gaulle boys had visited Villa Tivoli and lived to tell of his experience. The truth was, all they did was punch him a couple of times in the trunk and the kidneys. As he said, “I had some bruises that lasted a month, and I pissed blood for a week, but it was okay. It scared the shit out of me, but I lived. They didn’t even ask me much. It’s like they were just having a laugh.”