The Limoges Dilemma (Alex Kovacs thriller series Book 4)

by Richard Wake

  “Because they could,” I said.

  “Pretty much,” he said. Then he added, “You know what I’ll never forget? When you walk in, there’s this grand piano. They take you through the doors and down into the cellar for the fun stuff, but first there’s this damn piano. I half-expected one of the oafs to take off the leather gloves they put on before the beating and sit down for a little Chopin.”

  “Nocturne for Fists and Truncheons in D-minor,” I said.

  My new friends escorted me into the front door of the villa and there it was. The dark wood of the piano gleamed beneath the chandelier. Polishing the thing appeared to be somebody’s full-time job.

  “We’re not savages,” the black trench coat said. He noticed me admiring the instrument. “Do you play?”

  “Not so much,” I said.

  “Pity. I wish I had more time to practice. This beautiful piano, and I barely get the chance. So busy here. So, so busy.”

  I wasn’t shackled in any way, and the black uniform wasn’t even holding me by the elbow. It was all very civilized as we walked through the doors. But instead of heading down the stairs to the cellar, we walked up one flight to what had been a small library but was now my new friend’s office.

  He introduced himself formally as Captain Martin Bloch and pointed me to the chair next to his fussy little desk, one that likely had been used for opening the day’s invitations and writing thank-you cards by some 19th-Century minor noble. I had done this Gestapo routine before — in Cologne and in Lyon — and seen both torture rooms and offices. They each carried their own special terror. Don’t get me wrong; I much preferred the comfortable chair I was sitting in to a table with leather wrist and ankle restraints — but there was never anything about the experience that didn’t loosen your bowels, at least a little.

  For this day, I had been carrying my old Allain Killy identification, and that was the paper that Bloch was studying as I waited. I had three sets of papers and each had its own issue. My real papers with my real name, Alex Kovacs, were the most compromised of the three — the most recent example being just days earlier, when the Gestapo came to the bar in Limoges and asked Louis if Alex Kovacs was his boarder. By contrast, the Albert Kampe papers were likely the cleanest of the three — and I desperately wanted to keep them that way. As for old Allain Killy, he was known to the Gestapo in Lyon — and any search of any list of wanted fugitives could potentially turn up the name. At the same time, I was pretty sure that Alex Kovacs was their main target, and that would be the name that appeared on the lists, with Allain Killy listed below as an alias.

  The point being, they likely would red flag me with any of the three names, if they had their shit together and did the necessary digging. But I was counting on a level of boredom on the Gestapo’s part, mostly because they didn’t have anything on me. So that’s why I went with Allain Killy.

  “From Alsace, yes — I thought I heard it in your accent,” Bloch said.

  “You know French accents that well?”

  “I don’t know if you noticed, but my French is Alsatian accented, too,” he said. “From our teacher in the officers’ school. But enough of that. Why are you still here? Why didn’t you go home?”

  At the start of the war, the Germans essentially cleaned out the French from Alsace and reclaimed it as their own. The French had it, then the Germans took it after the war of 1870, then the French took it back after the Great War, then the Germans took it back in 1940. But after a while, the French were allowed to return to their homes.

  “Why didn’t I go back?” I smiled my best sheepish smile. “Why do men do anything? I met a woman.”

  “Where was that?”

  “In Champniers,” I said. I was in full story invention mode.

  “What brought you to Limoges?”

  “My job — I do deliveries for the farmers’ cooperative. Twice a week.”

  “You make do on two days’ work a week?”

  “It’s better than nothing, and there’s nothing for me in Alsace.”

  Bloch had a stack of paper on his desk that he lifted and straightened, and then lifted and straightened again, each time dropping the pages on their ends, first the long end, then the short end.

  “What is this woman’s name?” he said.

  “A gentleman doesn’t tell.”

  “Not even to the Gestapo?”

  “A gentleman, sir,” I said.

  For the second time in a few hours, I offered a dirty look and a conspiratorial smile as my best defense against Nazi interrogation. Bloch stared back at me, paused one beat, two beats, then broke into a big smile of his own. Part of me thought I was winning the conversation, but most of me had my doubts. But Bloch let it go.

  After a few more minutes of wordplay, it was pretty clear Bloch didn’t have anything. The only issue was whether he would escort me down to the cellar for some afternoon sport. As I wondered about that, and involuntarily massaged my left kidney, there was a knock on the door behind me. I turned to see the young uniform poke his head in the door, shake his head, and leave as quickly as he had arrived.

  If I had to guess, Bloch had given him the Allain Killy name, and the kid had done a cursory check through whatever list of names was handy. The head-shake suggested pretty strongly that he had been unsuccessful in finding a match. Bloch again performed his tidying routine with the stack of paper in front of him, and then he picked up my identification document off the top of the stack and handed it back to me.

  I wasn’t going to the basement. I was just going. Bloch offered not another word — not a warning, not a dismissal, nothing. He just waved me toward the door, and I found my own way out — through the doorway, down the hall, into the entrance area, past the piano and out. I struck a single key before I left, just for the hell of it, and it echoed a bit eerily in the big room with the high ceiling. No one rushed out to reprimand me. Then I was out the front door and onto Cours Gay Lussac. I crossed the street and walked across the park and sat on a bench on the far side, a couple of hundred yards from both Villa Tivoli and the Benedictins train station.

  I wasn’t in a hurry, after all. I couldn’t meet up with Richard until 9 the next morning — and that was assuming he was being treated as civilly as I had been. Oh, and that they gave him back the lorry.

  23

  I had asked for the school’s address before I left the farm, on the off chance that I had some time to kill. As it turned out, it was maybe a 10-minute walk from the park, a non-descript two-story building with an open play area of equal size off to one side.

  I didn’t know what I expected on a Saturday afternoon, but the schoolyard was full of kids — younger kids, maybe 6 to 10 years old; I wasn’t great on kids’ ages, or anyone’s ages. Manon used to make fun of me when we passed women on the street. She would insist that I try to guess their ages and I was way off as often as I was close. As I got past the age of 40, the difference between an 18-year-old girl and a 28-year-old had become almost indistinguishable for me. Manon used to say, “You’re going to be hopeless when I’m gone.”

  Manon. What the hell was I doing outside the school? I stopped, looking at the kids, then saw an open window in a room overlooking the schoolyard. A light was on, and Clarisse was sitting there, correcting papers or something. I called out from the sidewalk, and my words startled her.

  “It’s too nice a day to be working on a Saturday,” I said. It took her a second to attach my name to my face, but only a second. She began her reply with a warm smile.

  “Uncle Alex? What brings you to the big city?”

  “Sightseeing.”

  “Stay there,” she said. Seconds later, she was out the door and walking over to meet me, but not before a knot of the kids shouted out her name and received a wave in return.

  “You’re not leaving?” one little girl cried out.

  “No, just visiting with a friend,” she said.

  The little girl who cried out was wearing a makeshift nurse’s uniform.
She was playing with a handful of boys who were dressed as soldiers. I listened as they bantered back and forth. One of the kids poked at another with his “rifle,” which was really a broom handle, and said, “Mach schnell.”

  Clarisse arrived at my side at that moment. I made a face.

  “Mach schnell?” I said.

  “They’re just repeating what they hear.”

  “But they’re French.”

  “And all the soldiers in Limoges are German, and most of these kids don’t see them as anything more than glorified policemen.”

  “But what do their parents think?” I said.

  “Let’s go inside.” She put her hand on my back, gently, naturally, and steered me to the door and into the classroom where she had been working.

  “You ask me about the parents,” she said. “You live in your own little world where everyone is in the Resistance. But it isn’t like that here. Just look at what we get to work with. These are the supplies we get from the state.”

  There was a half-done jigsaw puzzle on one of the tables, designed for a 10-year-old, probably. It had about 50 pieces. The title on the box: “The Marechal’s Christmas.”

  Clarisse pulled a handful of coloring books from another drawer, all partially filled in, all with some kind of Petain theme. The Marechal on a farm. The Marechal driving a car. The Marechal climbing a mountain.

  “He has quite the publicity agent,” I said. I flipped through one of the coloring books and stopped at a particularly messy bit of crayon execution. The Marechal, leaning over to pet a lamb, had a purple face — and a rather untidy one at that.

  “What does the Marechal say about coloring outside the lines?” I said.

  “He’s against it. The Gestapo is really against it.”

  Clarisse opened another drawer and pulled out another box. It contained a board game called “Francisque.” Inside, it was just Snakes and Ladders. I shrugged.

  “You have to look at it,” she said. “I mean, see what they’ve done here. Look at the things that help you to climb to the top. There’s ‘trust,’ and there’s ‘team spirit,’ and there’s ‘solidarity.’ And the things that send you back to square one: ‘idleness’ and ‘selfishness.’”

  “It seems like they’ve thought of everything,” I said.

  “So you ask about the parents. They’re pretty much okay with all of this. They don’t like it but they’re not willing to fight to change it. They figure they’ll just wait it out. And you know what they dislike most of all? It’s not the Germans being in charge. And it’s not Petain — they think he’s doing his best to keep the Germans in hand. It’s that they have to stand in line for food. Sometimes I really think that if they could get the food supplies solved that Hitler could win an election here.”

  “Come on, you’re not serious.”

  “I’m more serious than you think,” she said. “And in the meantime, these kids — they barely get to play after school anymore because they have to hold a place in the milk line, or the vegetable line, or someplace else. That’s why I stay late on Saturday now — it’s the only time the kids are around to have fun.”

  Clarisse checked her watch, and I reflexively did the same. It was past 4 p.m., getting late. She straightened up her desk and closed the window, and then we were back in the schoolyard. It was then that it appeared to dawn on her. She said, “And what are you doing here, exactly?”

  I laughed and explained, running through my day, from the pickup of the lorry to my Gestapo interview in Villa Tivoli. I told her about Richard and the 9 a.m. meet-up and she said, “Well, then I’ll cook you dinner. But it’s too early for that. Let’s go for a walk first. It’s such a nice day.”

  Just then, the warm sun and the intermittent screams and laughs of the children were drowned out by two German fighter planes that passed overhead. They weren’t particularly loud or threatening, or maybe I was just jaded. But the reaction of the children was pronounced. Most stopped and pointed and talked excitedly among themselves, fascinated and thrilled. But two kids, a boy and girl, came running and crying to Clarisse, each hugging one of her legs. She bent down to comfort them, whispering something in each of their ears. After a few seconds, the planes were gone, and the tears were dried, and the boy and girl rejoined the rest.

  “What was that?” I said.

  “It’s because of their experiences,” she said. “Most of the kids are from around here. There was never any fighting here and so they see the planes as an object of fascination. Especially the boys, they love to play war, and it’s like a movie for them. But these two, they’re refugees. One is from Lille, the other from Rouen. They were there in 1940 when the Germans came. They saw the planes drop bombs. The little boy, he saw his house flattened with one of his brothers still inside. And both of them were in those long columns on the roads when the German planes squealed and dove low and fired their machine guns, and everyone dove into ditches on the side of the road and prayed.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Yeah,” Clarisse said. “Although I’m not sure what God has to do with any of this anymore. And the worst part is, it doesn’t get any better for them. Maybe someday, but not now. And not soon, I fear.”

  24

  “Let’s cross here,” Clarisse said. We were walking through a part of Limoges that I had not seen before.

  “Over there,” she said. She pointed to a building in the middle of the block, a building that looked very much like all the rest — heavy and imposing door, windows with false balconies outside of each, the black iron work a riot of curlicues. It could have been an apartment building full of flats, or an office building of some financial company or some such thing. It was none of those things, though.

  “Gestapo,” she said, actually talking out of the side of her mouth.

  “Another one? How many are there? I've heard you brought a map.”

  “The correct answer is ‘too many,’” she said. “But I don’t know. I know of at least six but I’m pretty sure there are more than that.”

  We had already passed a long building with the old republic’s motto etched in several places on its side: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. It was some kind of regional government building, bureaucrats working behind thick stone walls, doing whatever bureaucrats do when the soldiers of a foreign nation are really running things, and where your own government feels the need to change the national motto to Labor, Family, Fatherland. I didn’t know, but maybe they were the people who designed the jigsaw puzzles.

  Anyway, after the Gestapo headquarters, the street suddenly became very steep and uphill.

  “Last week, they took some prisoners out and walked them to the prison,” Clarisse said. She pointed to the right. “It’s just up there on the next street. Watching them march them up there, up the hill, all in leg irons, it looked like it was going to take an hour. It was almost funny.”

  “Almost,” I said.

  “Yeah.” She pointed to the prison walls, gray cement with a door in the middle beneath a sign that said, “Maison D’Arret.” Above them was a Nazi flag, hanging limp.

  “But we’re going to go this way,” she said, and we veered to the left, away from the prison and up some steps and into a public garden of some kind. Right at the entrance was a cupola.

  “It’s an old Roman site,” Clarisse said. “This is actually the remains of a Roman arena. I like it but I hate it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I like it because it’s pretty and because it’s old. But I hate it because it glorifies a time when Frenchmen were under the thumb of a foreign invader.”

  “There weren’t exactly Frenchmen back then,” I said.

  “I know, but you get the point. I’m just especially sensitive to the whole concept these days.”

  We sat on a bench beneath the trees for a few minutes, not saying much. The sun was dipping lower, and the afternoon was cooling. I asked Clarisse if she wanted my jacket but she declined.

  “Tougher than I
look,” she said.

  “You look plenty tough.”

  “And what does that mean?”

  “It was a compliment,” I said.

  “I know,” she said. I felt better when she smiled, and then I felt worse when I realized that I needed her smile to make me feel better. If that made any sense.

  We walked a few more minutes until we came upon a green space that I sensed was only a few minutes away from the Chapel of Saint Aurelian but in a direction I had never walked before. On the far side was a monument of some sort. “Our war memorial,” she said.

  “My war,” I said.

  “And what’s this?”

  “This war is different. I can’t explain it. I still don’t know what the Great War was about, not really, but that was my war. I was young, I wore a uniform, I was part of something big. This isn’t the same. This makes more sense to me, but there are none of the trappings. This is much more about fighting evil: Hitler, bad man, must be stopped, not hard to comprehend. But even with that, I feel so much more alone.”

  “Tell me about your war,” she said. And so I did, as we sat there, taking her on a tour of my early life that ended in 1919 in Vienna, when Leon and our friend Henry and I became inseparable friends, a truth that endured until Hitler. I decided on the spot to wait on telling her the rest. I don’t know why, I just did.

  “Two sides, same war,” Clarisse said. It was almost a whisper, and then we were silent again. I got up from the bench and walked the 20 feet or so to the foot of the monument and gave it a good study. There was undoubtedly a lot of highfalutin symbolism involved. Carved in stone were a woman holding some fruit on a plate on the top, and a shoemaker and a porcelain worker on either side along the base, and a dead soldier laid out on his back in the middle. The inscription said, “To the children of Limoges who died for France and the peace of the world.”