by Richard Wake
I didn’t know where any of my contacts lived anymore — they’d likely moved as often as I had in the previous few weeks. I didn’t know where they set up their office, either, of if they even had an office anymore. The only thing I knew was where they drank — two places, actually. One was The Hawk on Avenue Baudin, which was entirely deserted when I got there. The bartender sat forlornly on a stool at the far end of the bar, polishing a couple of glasses that didn’t appear to need polishing.
“All I have is watered-down beer,” he said. “We haven’t had a delivery in two weeks. ‘Maybe tomorrow,’ they keep saying. But tomorrow doesn’t pay my rent.”
The Stoneworks on Boulevard Carnot was my second choice. If they weren’t there, I didn’t know what I was going to do — maybe drive out to find Martin in Couzeix, although that wasn’t really fair at that point. He had stuck out his neck farther already than I ever had a right to expect. I couldn’t ask him again — although I would if I had to.
The Stoneworks was busier — two old men at a table, three younger guys standing at the bar. The two men were whispering. One of the guys at the bar was drunk and yelling, and his two friends were trying to calm him. As I walked by them, one of the consolers was in the drunk guy’s face and saying, “Come on, she’s not fucking worth it.” And so it went. War, Gestapo, prison, Free Guard, reprisals, didn’t matter.
The bar had a back room where the de Gaulle guys drank in private — a back room with a backdoor, just in case. There was always a guard of sorts sitting at a small table outside the door. When I saw him there, I felt as if I was in the right place, especially since I knew the secret code. It was beyond ridiculous, but knowing it was everything. All I had to do was use Lille in a sentence. The reason Lille was the code word was because it was where de Gaulle had been born. Like I said, beyond ridiculous.
And so, I walked up to the guy at the table and said, “I hear Lille has turned into a real shithole.”
I was hoping for some outrage, or a laugh, or a smile, or something — but the guy didn’t give me the satisfaction. He just nodded, then stood up and reached into his pocket for a key and unlocked the door. Once inside, I heard him lock it behind me.
Three of them were there, sitting around a table, three of them along with a bottle. They looked at me with the same look you have after stepping in a mushy pile of something. They wanted to ignore me but they couldn’t. They wanted to keep talking among themselves but they couldn’t do that, either. So instead, Louis — the guy I knew the best, the one with the de Gaulle picture in a gold frame — poured me a drink and mustered all the politeness he could.
And then he said, “So what the fuck are you doing here?”
I explained as best I could, leaving out as many details as humanly possible. I didn’t confess to being the one who killed Philippe Rondeaux. I didn’t admit to having slept with Clarisse. But I said I wanted to try to get her out of the prison, and that I needed help.
“They haven’t started yet, have they?” I said.
“What, the reprisals?” Louis said.
“Yeah.”
“No, not yet. They have a certain protocol. They usually give it at least 72 hours, on the off-chance they catch the people who did it. They want to seem reasonable. They want the reprisals to be a last resort. You know, ‘You gave us no choice, but…’”
“So, when?” I said.
“At least a day,” Louis said.
“Wait, is it on the handbill?”
“You’re right — somebody’s got one, right?” The guy sitting next to him — Jerome, I think — reached into the jacket that was hanging on the chair behind him and produced the same handbill Martin had brought out to the camp. It gave the drop-dead date, so to speak, in red letters at the bottom.
“So you have two days,” Louis said. “They’ll follow it, too. They’re all about accuracy. Precision. As long as their ledgers are neat, that’s all that matters.”
Two days, then. We debated back and forth whether they would stick to killing men and not women, but nobody really believed that. The third guy, whose name I didn’t know, said the same thing Martin had said: “I don’t think it matters. They’ve just got to make the number.”
Then there was the question of whether or not they would find enough prisoners out in the hill towns, but that was dismissed out of hand. “There’s no way,” the same guy said. “Even Limoges might not get them to a hundred. They might have to go even farther north.”
“Shit,” I said, more to myself than to them.
“You might get lucky,” Louis said. “If they catch the guys who did it, they might just take whoever is handy in the jails out there and call it even. They’d love to get a poster of the guys who did it and slap that on every wall in the area. You wouldn’t know, would you—”
I wasn’t going to tell them. I was just going to lie, to brazen my way through it. They didn’t need to know. As far as I was concerned, it had nothing to do with anything. But as it turned out, I didn’t have to lie. Because Louis’ question was interrupted by the key turning in the lock. If there had been some kind of commotion outside, we all would have run for the backdoor. If there had been a knock, we would have run, too — because that was the signal for trouble. If the guy sitting at the table outside knocked, it was because the Gestapo was coming calling.
So nobody was scared, but still — you couldn’t help it when you heard the key in the lock. What followed, in just an instant, was the collective holding of four men’s breath, the door opening, and then recognition.
It was Leon.
50
We hugged for a long time, long enough to make the rest of them uncomfortable. But we really didn’t say anything beyond “holy shit” and “oh, man.” Until I said, “What happened to Paris?”
“Day after tomorrow,” he said. “Thursday night. There’s a produce truck with my name on it.”
“But I thought—”
“It takes time,” Leon said. “I’m particular about the cabbages I hide beneath. They have to be just so.”
While he was waiting for the truck, Leon said he had been doing a few odd jobs for the de Gaulle people in exchange for their help with resettling a couple of Jewish families. He had just returned from a courier job, picking up some new identity cards from the Resistance forger du jour and delivering them to a family of three who lived on the other side of the river. They would be on the way to Toulouse in the morning, and then, hopefully, Spain after that.
After a bit, Leon looked at me and flicked his eyes toward the door, and I nodded. He said, “Look, I want to beat the curfew. Alex will stay with me.”
“But wait,” Louis said. He looked at me. “What did you want when you came here?”
“Curfew,” I said. Leon and I both stood up. “I’ll let you know when I have a better idea. Truth is, I don’t know myself.”
We knocked on the door and were let out into the main bar. When we got outside, I said, “Where to?” That’s when Leon told me that he was back in one of Louis’ rooms above the bar. I must have looked puzzled for a second, mostly because I had been puzzled for a second.
“The other Louis,” Leon said.
“Too many fucking Louis’s.”
We decided to leave the lorry parked — it was only about a 10-minute walk. As it turned out, the other Louis was just as happy to see me as he had been after the Resistance council meeting. His place, like The Hawk, was deserted. He was stacking the tables and chairs outside when we arrived.
“Let me guess — you’re waiting for a delivery,” I said.
“Goddamn guys. If you don’t bribe them, you wait.”
“So bribe them.”
“Bribes take money, brother,” he said.
We went inside and Louis locked the door behind us and drew the curtains. When he pulled a bottle from a back cupboard and began to pour, I spread my arms wide and said, “I love this man. But—”
“But what?”
“I thought you wer
e tapped out.”
“Private reserve,” he said. “Selling this would be like selling one of my arms.”
When it came time to tell Leon what was happening, I worried about talking in front of Louis — not because I didn’t trust him but because I didn’t want to put him in danger.
“Don’t worry about that,” he said. “I can play dumb with the best of them. Besides, you’re leaving in the morning, right?”
I looked at Leon.
“Right?” Louis said.
“Maybe the morning after,” I said, half-mumbling, half-smiling. Louis sighed.
“No later — and I’m serious,” he said.
“As a heart attack,” I said.
And then I told them. I told them everything. I started with the day of the Resistance council meeting and ended with that very minute. Again, as with my Resistance group, I didn’t leave out a detail because I still wasn’t smart enough to know what was important. So I told them the whole thing, including me waking up naked with Clarisse, slipping out of the bed in which we had made love, silently putting on the clothes she had washed and ironed while I slept, and leaving without a word. That, and Maurice’s abduction and murder, and the killing that I carried out as revenge, and my abandonment of the Resistance group that refused to help me try to bust Clarisse out of prison.
When I was done, Louis offered nothing beyond, “Mother of God.” Leon’s reaction was the one I needed, though. I wanted approval, but that was likely pushing it. I would settle for understanding, in whatever form. It might just be the unspoken acknowledgement that is the glue of the best long-term relationships — an acknowledgement that he was listening, that he heard me, and that he was willing to continue.
It was what I desperately needed. It arrived when Leon said, quietly and simply, “So what’s your plan? Because I know you have one. You wouldn’t be you if you didn’t have one.”
My voice choked up, just for a second, just for the first word or two, when I said, “Well, this is—”
“Wait,” Leon said. He looked at Louis. “You don’t need to hear this part. You might be good at playing dumb, but let’s not push it. You still have that pretty family upstairs. You don’t need to know any more. If they come by and start slapping you around, you can tell them pretty much everything Alex just told you and save your ass. But you don’t need to know the rest.”
Louis thought for a second. He handed me the bottle. “Take the rest upstairs” he said. Then he paused and said, “Morning after tomorrow. Promise me.”
“Promise,” I said.
Up in the room, Leon switched on the radio and turned it down low, just to create some background noise — not that Louis or his family could hear from upstairs, but he said he just didn’t want to take a chance. He happened upon a broadcast by the infamous Philippe Henriot, Vichy’s high priest of broadcast bullshit.
“Our Goebbels,” Leon called him.
“How can you even—”
“Shhh. It’s easier to fight them if you understand them.”
Whenever I listened, and I hadn’t for months, Henriot hit on two themes: “the terrorists” and “the landing.” Of the former, he was speaking about the Resistance — and let’s just say that, like the rest of Vichy, he wasn’t a fan. And, well, fine. His basic selling point was that every dynamited railroad bridge hurt French citizens more than it hurt the German occupiers, that it resulted in more food shortages and an understandably sterner posture by the Germans. “If not for the terrorists,” was how he began half of his sentences. Or at least it seemed that way.
As for “the landing,” he was talking about the widespread belief that the Allies were coming to France. When, nobody knew. But sooner rather than later was the hope, and the invasion through Italy — news of which continued to arrive via the BBC — just continued to raise those hopes. And tonight’s broadcast was a two-for-one special, “the terrorists” in one sentence, “the landing” in the next, and then back and forth.
“A cruel joke,” he called it. “A delusion. And if the landing ever were to occur, the scourge of Bolshevism would follow immediately on its heels.”
“I think the Bolshevism part is new,” Leon said.
“Who cares?” I said. Then I stopped myself. “Let’s not do this.”
“Agreed,” Leon said. Then, with a big smile that I might have seen when we were two 20-year-olds on the Karntnerstrasse, he said, “So you’re not a shithead anymore.”
“I’m working on it.”
That was when I began to map out what I had planned. He and I had done this more than once over the years. Deep down, Leon was more daring than I was but he also had a journalist’s mind. As he used to say, back when he worked on the paper in Vienna, “You know what a journalist is, right? He’s the one who points out the broken branch on the Christmas tree.”
So he probed at my plan, testing it along its edges. We talked about a couple of aspects, and I explained, and he poked, and I explained again, and he ultimately agreed.
“What are the odds?” I said.
“Maybe 60-40 for the good guys.”
“But we need those German uniforms. Do you think those de Gaulle assholes will help us? I mean, not me — but will they help you?”
“Come with me,” Leon said. He walked me across the hallway to the bathroom that Louis had scrubbed into habitability in exchange for extra rent money when we first arrived in Limoges. Then, standing on the toilet, he reached up, moved a ceiling panel, reached inside and wrestled a big canvas bag down through the opening. Inside were the two German uniforms we had worn the night we had talked our way into that Vichy youth camp.
51
Leon asked to borrow the lorry because he wanted to drive two of his newly papered Jews to the train station. I slept an extra hour and then walked to the meeting. Leon was already inside when I arrived. In the first 10 minutes we were there, the nicest thing that Leon’s forger du jour said was, “You’re insane.” So I explained it again, slower the second time. But it didn’t help.
“It’ll never work,” the forger said. His name was Raul. What a Raul was doing in Limoges in the middle of the German occupation was beyond me. There were some Spaniards in the maquis, but they didn’t own plumbing repair shops in Limoges. Come to think of it, how soldering pipe jibed with the fine work of a forger was also a little beyond me. But, well, whatever.
“Let us worry about if it’ll work,” I said. After a minute, he offered a what-the-hell shrug, and then a concern.
“I don’t know any German.”
“We’ll take care of that,” Leon said.
“Now let’s talk price.”
At which point, I pulled both of my pocket inside-out in an exaggerated display of our current situation. It wasn’t completely true — Louis had given Leon a few francs — but our man Raul didn’t need to know that.
“Now, come on,” he said.
“There’s almost no cost to you, and you know it,” Leon said. The truth was that forgers had to charge mostly because of the specialized paper they needed to buy on the black market or steal in order to make fake identification cards. This was different — a little artwork on normal business stock.
“Okay, when?” he said.
“Now,” I said.
“Now as in today?”
“Now as in right now.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Do I look like I’m kidding?”
“There’s no way.”
“It’s only a woman’s life,” I said. After what he must have deemed to be a face-saving pause, he began to go about his work. He removed a tile from the floor beneath his work table and removed a metal box. Inside, he already had the hardest part done — a stamp of an SS-ish looking logo. He said he had used it on a petrol permit, but that was meant to be a folded, smudged piece of paper.
“This is formal — it won’t work,” he said. But he did it, trying a couple of different sheets of paper before coming up with one that, eve
n he acknowledged, “wasn’t half-bad.” Next, he pulled a drawer out of the wall that contained the tiniest printing press anyone could imagine. It was, seriously, not much bigger than a breadbox. He had metal letters lined up in a tray, and he picked them out and put them on a form. “Just ‘Place Jourdan, comma, Limoges’? Are you sure?”
That was it. He inserted the paper, manually worked the press, and the words were now below the logo. “Really not bad,” Raul said, proud of himself.
Then Leon typed the text of the letter while Raul put the letters back in place and returned the press to the drawer. All that was required was one official-sounding paragraph, followed by an illegible signature.
As Leon was finishing, Raul was putting away the SS logo stamp when he reached into the metal box and produced another stamp. “Someone said they stole it from a German headquarters garbage can,” he said. “But I’ve been afraid to use it. I don’t know what it says.”
He stamped it on a piece of scrap paper, and I clapped loud enough to startle Leon as he was getting ready to add the illegible signature to the letter. After he did, I stamped it on the red ink pad, and then on the letter, right on top of the signature — a little crooked, a little messy, hopefully with just the right level of word-a-day-ness.
“BE IT SO ORDERED,” is what the stamp said.
I folded the letter carefully after the ink dried and put it in my breast pocket. I was really happy, an emotion I hadn’t felt in I couldn’t remember how long. I was starting to think our chances were north of 60-40.
And then we got to the door, and I looked out the window, and saw Richard standing on the sidewalk maybe 300 feet away, across the street and down to the right.
52
“Oh, shit,” I said. “Leon, come look.”
