The Limoges Dilemma (Alex Kovacs thriller series Book 4)

by Richard Wake

  “But where are the names?” I said. I took another lap around the back, just to make sure I hadn’t missed them, and I hadn’t.

  “What do you mean?” Clarisse said, after my second circuit.

  “On the monument. They all have names, the names of the men who died. Every one I’ve ever seen has names.”

  “Not this one,” she said. “I like it better.”

  “But it doesn’t honor the dead.”

  “Of course it does. But I think it’s more to remind everyone that there is a life when it’s over.”

  I wondered a lot about that — about it being over and about what there might be for me after that. We were walking again at that point, not really talking, oddly comfortable with the silence. Or at least I was.

  25

  Clarisse’s house was over near the cathedral. I was familiar with the area, if not the particular spot. It was a house within the warren of streets on the far side of the church, and she had the entire fifth floor to herself.

  “Wow, so big.”

  “It’s a flat that I inherited from my aunt. The downside is the five floors of stairs to get here. The upside, besides the space, is this,” she said, pointing to a small doorway in the kitchen. It opened onto an outside metal staircase that led to a private roof patio. I stuck my head out the door and was no sooner back inside than Clarisse was handing me a glass of wine. “Go on up — it’ll be too cold in an hour. You can see the river over the rooftops. Go on, there’s a reasonably comfortable chair. I’ll cook in the meantime — it won’t take long.”

  And so I went. The wind was chilly, but if you moved the chair just so, the chimney blocked it. The view of the river and the rooftops was beautifully relaxing. I was pretty sure I was asleep when I heard footsteps on the metal staircase. It was Clarisse with a wineglass of her own.

  I began to stand, but she waved me back into place, choosing to sit on one of the chair’s arms. We both stared off, over the rooftops, past the river. “Tell me about after the war,” she said.

  “Meaning?” I said.

  “Meaning the last 24 years,” she said. “You can make it the short version, if you’d like.”

  For me, the short version was: traveled a lot, made good money, became a spy, escaped the Nazis in Austria, continued on as a spy in Zurich, met a girl, followed the girl to Lyon after the war started, got married, then lost the only woman I had ever loved.

  And that’s exactly what I told her, all in one long, almost sing-songish sentence. I made myself sound like more of an asshole than I really was in the tone of the telling, but Clarisse didn’t seem to be offended by my flippancy. She had only one question.

  “What was her name?”

  My reply was as quiet as her ask. We both stared off past the rooftops again. Then Clarisse stood. “Five minutes until dinner,” she said, and then she was gone down the stairs.

  I followed her soon after, washed my hands, and offered to set the table. As I did, and as she fussed at the stove, I asked her without looking her in the eyes, “So what about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “The short version is fine,” I said.

  “I don’t do the short version,” she said. She turned off two burners on the stove, pulled out a chair and sat down at the table. I joined her, and she told the story of a 16-year-old girl from Toulouse who got pregnant without the benefit of a husband, and who came to Limoges to live with the aunt she barely knew. The baby, a girl, was given up for adoption the day she was born.

  “I never even got to hold her,” Clarisse said. All I could think about was the baby, my baby, that Manon had been carrying.

  “After a little while, the question was if I could go back to Toulouse. My aunt, who was really my great aunt, offered to let me stay, and the truth was, my family was glad to see the back of me.”

  Without the baby, and the attendant stigma, she was able to be placed in a school in Limoges. She studied to be a teacher, and that’s what she had been doing for nearly 15 years.

  “And no one since?” I said.

  “Not really.”

  I knew about “not really.” Before Manon, my whole life had been a series of “not reallys” interrupted by long stretches of “don’t really cares”.

  When Clarisse plated the food and placed it on the table, I nearly fell over. Veal kidneys. I didn’t camouflage my reaction very well, and she said, “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No, tell me.”

  I thought about it for a second, and decided on the truth.

  “I got to Lyon in June of 1940,” I said.

  “So right after?”

  “Yes, right after. Manon and I were married soon after. But you remember what it was like — the rationing came so quickly. We didn’t have much time together as a couple when food was still plentiful, still easy to get. But at the very beginning, it was. And the first big meal Manon cooked for me…” I couldn’t get the rest of it out, but Clarisse could.

  “… was veal kidneys,” she said.

  “Veal kidneys. Cooked in bits of bacon. With new potatoes. And carrots.”

  “I couldn’t find carrots,” Clarisse said.

  “Where did you get the rest of it?”

  “On a trip out to the country on my bicycle,” she said, “Different farm, different farmer. I traded for the veal and bacon. I gave him an old, torn arithmetic primer that I had mended.”

  The food was delicious, but I couldn’t enjoy it. Half of me wanted this to be some kind of spiritual sign, the miracle of the veal kidneys and bacon, and the other half of me was damning myself to hell for wanting it. I was twisted in a hundred emotional knots, and I had no ability to untie them, not there, not sitting at Clarisse’s dining table.

  So I bolted. I didn’t help with the dishes. I barely said thank you. I made up some kind of bullshit excuse and I almost literally ran from the flat, flying down the five flights and into the street. I was embarrassed about how I felt, and embarrassed about my exit. I found myself running until I reached the cathedral and realized how conspicuous I looked. So I slowed down and did what I did whenever I needed reorientation in Limoges. I turned in place until I spotted the tower of the Benedictins station. I walked in that direction and took the shittiest room in the shittiest business traveler’s hotel I could find. But I’m sure I didn’t sleep.

  The meet-up with Richard was scheduled for 9 a.m. on Place Jourdan. There was a bar there, and I grabbed a coffee and was happy to discover that it was actually more coffee than the ersatz stuff. I hadn’t been able to get Clarisse out of my head for hours — Clarisse and Manon and the myriad intertwined variations of guilt and grief and desire — but at about 10 minutes before 9, the meet-up became a welcome distraction. As it turned out, Richard and the lorry were five minutes early — and that was after he had made a stop to pick up the radio and hidden it under the seat.

  As we drove back, I told him what had happened to me — the Gestapo part, not the Clarisse part — and he said, “It was the exact same thing with me. I don’t know what the point was.”

  “Where’d they take you?”

  “I don’t know the street name, but it was near a prison. That’s where they left the lorry.”

  “They didn’t hurt you at all?”

  “Nope. Didn’t touch me,” Richard said.

  “They were just fucking with us.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they can,” I said.

  Richard asked me where I spent the night and I said, “With a whore.” I asked him where he slept and he said, “Same thing.” We both laughed. As it turned out, my made-up whore story was better than his real-life whore story.

  We never even got stopped once on the drive back. We just dropped the truck where we first picked it up and hiked back to the farmhouse through the woods. Exactly how Gerald and Frank got home from their girlfriends’ houses after we didn’t show up, and what they told their wives, was their problem — but at least we we
re able to entertain ourselves by inventing a few possible scenarios on the way home.

  26

  Maurice had received the message in the time-honored fashion — with a wife, and a wife’s cousin, and the cousin’s next-door neighbor as intermediaries — that the mayor of Civray was requesting his presence.

  Even though Civray was one of the bigger little towns in the immediate region, this was a request, not an order, mostly because Maurice possessed more weapons than the six-member Civray police force. There were plenty of small towns in Vichy that had essentially been taken over by local Resistance groups, but not Civray. Maurice wanted no part of municipal administration, even on-the-fly administration. As he said, “If I don’t want to be a general, I certainly don’t want to be a goddamn mayor.”

  Maurice, Leon and I took one of the lorries. We used back roads for everything, but especially when we were driving — because most of them weren’t even on maps, and because the Germans knew that exploring too deep into the uncharted areas could only lead to more encounters with Resistance snipers. I said to Leon as we drove, “You see, not a soul. Not a patrol. Not a uniform. It’s because they’re afraid.”

  Maurice nodded his head and kept driving. We arrived in Civray essentially through the back door. It was dusk when we pulled in down the street from the city hall. As we approached the front door, climbing the steps, a disheveled man barreled out, head down, and almost knocked us over. He offered no apologies. He made no eye contact. He just kept going.

  Inside, the mayor’s office was the first door on the right. It was open, and he was on the telephone. He waved at Maurice to come in and pointed at the chairs arrayed around the office.

  “… a few minutes,” the mayor said, to whoever he was speaking.

  Long silence.

  “Just calm down. Here’s what I’m telling you: there’s a rumor some boys are hiding in the caves along the ridgeline that overlooks Lake Prune. You know, where the kids sometimes jump in when it’s hot out.”

  More silence, listening.

  “Like I said, a few minutes.”

  Shorter silence.

  “You’re welcome,” the mayor said. “A few minutes.”

  He put down the phone.

  “This is all I do anymore,” he said. “Damn STO.”

  The mayor explained that the guy who nearly knocked us over on the way out was a local drunk of some repute. But he had heard something about some kids hiding from the militia in those caves.

  “That’s when it becomes my problem, when assholes like that show up,” he said. “I won’t chase kids. I won’t send my men out to chase kids, even though half of them think it’s our duty. The Gestapo comes in and asks once or twice a month, and the militia comes in, and I fend them off as best I can. But I have to show that I’m trying, even when I’m not. So that’s what I just did.”

  “What do you mean?” Leon said.

  “So our informant comes in. Like I said, I can’t ignore that — he’s probably in the bar right now telling everyone what he told me. I’ve got to save my own neck, too. Because, fuck. So he tells me and I make a phone call. It’s to a farmer whose son, I know, is in hiding. I don’t know if he’s the one in those caves but, even if he isn’t, the farmer probably knows who is — it’s right near his land. So now he has a head start.”

  The mayor stopped, then sighed. He looked at his watch. Then he yelled, “Sergeant!”

  Within seconds, a uniformed gendarme presented himself at the office door. The mayor told him about the informant and about the cave. The sergeant offered a quick salute in reply, and he was gone.

  “Best case?” he said, after we were alone again. “The farmer tells the kid, and the kid gets away, but he leaves behind some evidence of hiding there — maybe some food. Or a fire that’s still smoldering — that’s the best. Then I have a story the next time the militia is up my ass: ‘We have such a small force here, and so much territory to cover, but look how close we came to this one: the fire was still hot.’”

  “And the worst case?” I said.

  “Worst case, we catch the stupid fucker and he gets put on a train for Hamburg or someplace, where he will be put to work riveting battleships together or something. And then I will make another mark in this column.” He pulled a sheet of paper out of his desk and pointed at the column beneath the letters TDTS.

  I looked at it and shrugged.

  “Too Dumb To Survive,” he said. “Of course, that helps me with the Germans. But it kills me with his parents, and with the other parents. And if he was a farmhand, it kills me with the man who employed him. And if he was working on the sly in our little metal fabrication factory — we make rivets here, believe it or not — it hurts the town’s main employer. He barely has enough men to keep the place running as it is.”

  “Sounds complicated,” Maurice said.

  “It’s exhausting is what it is,” the mayor said. He pulled a bottle from his desk drawer and filled four glasses. His toast: “To a good night’s sleep.”

  “So why the summons?” Maurice said.

  “It was more of a request — you know I like you,” he said.

  “It sounded urgent.”

  “It is — urgent for you,” the mayor said.

  He eased into a longish story about the two members of his police force who worked the day shift. “I don’t trust them so that’s why I have them work days — so I can keep an eye on them. It makes everyone else mad, but whatever.”

  Anyway, he’d overheard them when they were having a coffee that morning. “I didn’t get it all. I’m not sure I got even half of it. But one of them very clearly said, ‘The Perrault farm. For weeks.’”

  “Oh shit,” Maurice said.

  “Exactly,” the mayor said.

  Maurice looked at us. “We’re at the Perrault farm,” he said.

  Then he looked at the mayor. “Why don’t you trust them?”

  “Part of it is that they’re the two who want to spend their days searching for STO kids. But it’s more than that. The last time the militia was in here, I saw one of their guys make eye contact with one of those two. It was subtle, but it was there. And then he just happened to be gassing up our police car out back when the militia came out — their car and our car parked side-by-side. My guy leaned into an open window and had a quick chat. I just don’t happen to believe it was about the weather.”

  The concern was obvious. Maurice had said we were living on borrowed time at the farm, but he wanted to stay as long as we could because the group needed the rest.

  “You think we’re too late?” Maurice said.

  “I don’t know,” the mayor said. “But those two were working here until 4. Now, maybe they were able to make a phone call without me knowing — but I don’t think so. If I had to guess, I think you’re still okay now. But I’m not sure you’ll be safe in the morning.”

  We obviously had to hurry, but the mayor poured us all another drink, anyway. We slugged it down. Maurice made the toast this time: “To a good night’s sleep… but not until tomorrow.”

  27

  The genius of Maurice was in his preparation, even if it seemed haphazard at times. As I told Leon, “I wouldn’t ever want to play chess against him. He thinks too far ahead.”

  The distance from the farm to our new place was close to 20 miles. We would do it in the three lorries, on the back roads, but without lights — just to be sure. So it took us three hours.

  We were packed in 20 minutes because that had always been the expectation. We took as much food as we could. The clothes and the canvas and the wire and the rope and the other supplies had never been unpacked after we stole it, so there was nothing to do there. As for personal possessions, no one had more than a knapsack. As it turned out, we probably didn’t even take the full 20 minutes.

  The new place was an abandoned logging camp, although the word “abandoned” didn’t do the decrepitude justice. It was ancient, and the main cabin appeared to be a ruin, with a big h
ole in the roof. Still, Maurice saw promise. When I got out of the truck, I just looked around with my hands on my hips, and I guess the disgust showed on my face.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll see.”

  He barked out some orders, and the group began to function in the moonlight. The roof was patched with canvas tarpaulins. The inside was cleaned out quicker than I thought possible by a dozen strong backs. And if the floors weren’t clean enough to eat off, they were soon clean enough to sleep on, provided there was a tarpaulin barrier between you and the planks.

  “Leon, Richard, Alex — come over here,” Maurice said, the work done. “The rest of you, get some sleep. You deserve it.”

  The radio that Richard and I had brought back from Limoges was sitting on the front seat of one of the lorries, hooked up to its battery. Maurice was fiddling with the dials. He also was consulting what I recognized as a code key. He consulted his watch, then a map, and then his watch again. “Come on,” he said. “All in this lorry. And make sure you have a loaded rifle.”

  Again, we were driving without lights on narrow back roads, unpaved and unkind to the lorry’s axels. But it wasn’t that long of a ride, maybe 20 minutes. Then Maurice did a series of forward and backward maneuvers to turn the lorry around and get it pointed back toward our new home. He switched on the radio and listened again, the code key in his hand. He still hadn’t told us what we were doing.

  “Okay, come on,” he said. “And bring the rifles.”

  We followed him through the woods until we came upon a clearing that fronted on a lake. It was a big rectangle with water on two sides — ahead of us and to the right — and woods on the other two.

  We arranged ourselves in a line along our side of the rectangle, maybe 10 yards apart. Before we separated, Maurice said to Leon and me, “This is what we do. On my signal, you begin firing over toward those other woods.” He pointed to the left.