The Limoges Dilemma (Alex Kovacs thriller series Book 4)

by Richard Wake

Leon came to the door, peered through the glass and said he didn’t know what he was supposed to be looking at. “No, to your right,” I said, and then he stopped and stared. Richard was peering into a shop window, undoubtedly watching the door of Raul’s shop in the reflection. But then he turned and looked directly, just for a second or two, before settling again for the reflection.

  “What the—” Leon said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “But—”

  “I just don’t know,” I said. “But it goes without saying that I don’t like it.”

  I needed to think. Leon needed to calm down Raul, who suddenly was having kittens. While he gave Raul the shorthand version of Richard’s background, a hundred things flew through my mind, a hundred loose ends that I couldn’t tie up but that all led me to the same conclusion: that Richard was the traitor, the one who sold out Maurice and got him killed.

  I stared out the window, mute with indecision. Leon was way ahead of me. He usually was.

  “It’s obvious,” he said.

  “The details aren’t obvious.”

  “Screw the details.”

  “But I need it to make sense,” I said.

  And it didn’t, not right then. Richard was Maurice’s most loyal lieutenant — at least I thought he was. Richard wanted revenge immediately when Maurice was killed — I was the one who insisted that we slow down. I had never considered the possibility that anybody within the group had been the sellout — not seriously, anyway. It just ran so counter to everything they we did together, everything we lived together — and the rest of them for a lot longer than me. Truth be told, at least a little part of me believed it really had been Leon all along.

  But, then, there he was.

  “How much danger am I in?” Raul said. He had calmed down.

  “Not sure,” Leon said.

  “But some?”

  “Probably more than some.”

  “Oh, man…”

  “All right, let’s start here,” Leon said. “Do you have a place you can go?”

  “You mean, like, go and hide?”

  “Yes.”

  “My wife has family in Bordeaux,” Raul said. “We can probably get a train in two hours.”

  “Kids?”

  “No, just me and her.”

  “Okay, so that’s settled,” Leon said. “Out the backdoor now — there is a backdoor, right? On the train in two hours.”

  “Can I come back?” This was harder. Leon and I looked at each other. Neither of us knew how to answer. Richard obviously knew where we were — but who else knew? If we could find that out, we could maybe offer Raul some reassurance.

  I didn’t know what to say. Finally, Leon said, “Do this. Stay away for a week. Come back to the shop alone. Do it at night. If we think it’s safe, we’ll shove a note in the mail slot — just one word on a sheet of paper: ‘Safe.’ If there’s no note, I’m sorry.”

  Raul left immediately. The truth was, I had no idea how we would be able to assure Raul’s safety, no less our own. But we needed to do something. I said, “Look, I’m obviously who he’s after. So we split up. We don’t even know for sure if he’s seen you. So I go out the front door and walk to the left. Richard presumably follows me. You go out the back door and wait in the alley and then get behind him — not too close. I walk like I’m headed for the train station. And then, we just…”

  “Just what?”

  “Just play it by ear,” I said. “Could you shoot him if you had to?”

  “Life or death, yeah,” Leon said. It was clearly not something he said frivolously. The look on his face was grave. Yes, he meant it. I didn’t need to ask a second time.

  So out the front door I went, out and to the left. I didn’t look behind me, didn’t stop and tie my shoe and take a quick peek, didn’t do any window shopping that might afford a glance. I had to trust Leon at that point. If Richard got within a pistol’s realistic range, and if he reached into his pocket, I had to believe that Leon would be ready. At that point, even a wild, stray shot from Leon’s gun would certainly distract Richard for a second or two. Even if Leon couldn’t kill him, I had to think he could do that much — and the distraction probably would be enough for me to take cover in a storefront, or behind a parked car, or something. Barring that, the second or two of hesitation would give me a chance to run, which would hopefully take me out of pistol range — or at least accurate pistol range.

  But how would it end? Leon could simply kill him but that didn’t solve our problem, not completely. We owed it to Raul to find out who Richard might have told about the meeting at the shop. And I needed to know exactly what this had been all about.

  I decided as I came upon the open green where the Limoges World War I memorial stood, the one that didn’t have any names etched into it. I was far enough ahead of Richard that I could reach the bench in front of the sculpture before he saw me sitting there. He would find me there, sitting, with my pistol in my hand. And then it would happen, one way or another.

  I was sitting there, waiting, for 10 or 15 seconds when Richard cleared the last building and came into the open. He didn’t see me immediately, but then he did. He clearly saw the pistol, too, and his right hand was in his own pocket. But rather than to draw, or to move closer, his first reaction was to retreat. He stopped and looked behind him. He even took a step. But then he saw Leon, and he stopped. And then he walked toward me, slowly, with neither hand in a pocket.

  When he got to within about 10 feet, I said, “That’s close enough,” and Richard stopped obediently. It was almost as if he was seeking instructions, glad for them, comforted by them. He looked like hell, but then, we all did. After 10 or 15 more seconds, Leon joined us. When they looked at each other, there was the barest of acknowledgement.

  “Leon, take his gun and go get the lorry and meet us back here,” I said. He reached into Richard’s pocket, took the pistol and trotted off, back to Raul’s shop. Then Richard and I just stared at each other in silence for two or three minutes, him with his hands in his pockets, me with the pistol in my lap. Finally, he gestured at the war memorial.

  “Where did you fight?” he said.

  “Caporetto.”

  “My father was at Ypres.”

  “Did he survive?”

  “He did,” Richard said. “He had a cough he couldn’t shake for the rest of his life. It kept us all awake, every night, every night until I was 20 — that’s when it killed him. You know people who live near the train tracks who say they don’t even hear the whistles anymore after a while, that they sleep right through them? Not me. I heard that cough every night — just a fit of coughs every hour or so.”

  We were quiet for another minute or two.

  “Opposite sides,” Richard said, pointing again at the memorial.

  “Still,” I said.

  53

  We drove to the half-abandoned porcelain factory where the Resistance council had met. It seemed to be entirely abandoned. I didn’t know how many shifts a week they were down to, but nobody was working when we arrived. We drove the lorry around back and walked through the same hole in the fence that Maurice and I and the rest had used the day before he was murdered, and we didn’t see anyone.

  We sat in the same chairs as they had used that day. The circle was a small triangle, though, with Leon, Richard and I all about eight feet apart, as close to equilateral as I could manage without a tape measure.

  I wanted to unload on Richard but somehow restrained myself. Rather than a long speech, I went for the simplest of questions. I just looked at him and said, “So?”

  During the drive over, part of me thought we would have to beat the information out of him, whatever that information was. But his initial look while we were at the war memorial, and then in the car, left me hoping it would be easier than that. So I started with, “So?” I hoped to begin a relatively easy dialogue. Instead, I opened a floodgate. Richard wouldn’t have stopped at all if Leon or I didn’t occasionally redirect h
im.

  “It was the day you and I made all of those vegetable deliveries,” he said. That was the day Richard and I were separated, taken to different places by the Gestapo. My conversation with the fellows had been a lark. His, apparently, less so. He said about five times things like, “They threatened me,” and, “I was so afraid,” and, “You have no idea.” But if they even laid a black leather glove on him, Richard didn’t say.

  “So what was the threat?” I said. Richard just dropped his gaze and shook his head. It was the only thing he wouldn’t tell us.

  “If you want us to understand—” Leon said.

  “They threatened me, all right?” Richard was crying then. We dropped it.

  “So?” I said, again.

  “They wanted Maurice,” Richard said. The Gestapo told him to monitor a certain radio frequency every night for instructions, and to transmit information that could lead to the capture or killing of Maurice. He said they almost never sent him a message, other than generic “what do you know?” queries. He said he did his best to put them off.

  “Until the barracks,” he said. The next day, Richard was the one sent on the reconnaissance mission. He was the one who brought back the handbill, the one who described the half-burned streetscape.

  “I didn’t tell them then,” he said. “I was too afraid to face them. They’d want to know why I didn’t tell them in advance — but I didn’t know in advance. But on the radio, they demanded to know our location at the logging camp. I gave it to them.”

  “And got two men killed,” I said.

  “They were threatening me,” Richard said. He was crying even more. Maybe they had a family member of his in their grip. Maybe he was just a coward. I didn’t know at that point, and part of me felt like stopping right there and beating it out of him. But I didn’t, and he kept talking.

  “When Maurice got away, they were still furious, even more furious, even more demanding on the radio,” he said. “And so, when you went to Limoges for the council meeting, I didn’t know any of the details but I gave them what I could.”

  “And what was that?” I said.

  “Place Jourdan at 9 a.m.,” he said.

  So that had been it. Richard’s weakness, or treachery, and Maurice’s carelessness had been enough. So that explained it.

  “But why the Free Guard and not the Gestapo?” I said.

  “Ask them,” Richard said. “I have no idea.”

  That didn’t make a lot of sense to me, but I’m not sure it was important. The truth was, there was only one more piece of information that truly mattered. That is, how had Richard tracked me to Raul’s shop?

  “You did that,” he said. “When you came back, after Limoges, you told us every move you made while you were there. You mentioned the bar next to the chapel. I knew the chapel, so I took a shot. I waited outside in the shadows. I was in a doorway of an abandoned shop down the street, half-asleep in the dark, when you and Leon showed up last night. I let Leon go when he left in the morning. I waited for you.”

  “To kill me?”

  “I thought that might end it. I thought it might be enough for the Gestapo to…” He searched for the word. “… to release me.”

  “And they don’t know you’re here?”

  “No,” Richard said. “I didn’t want to risk it until I had—”

  “Until you had me,” I said. With that, Richard’s head fell, and he just stared at his shoes.

  I was ready to kill him at that point — and there was no doubt in my mind that we had to kill him. Not out of revenge, or some sense of justice, but just to protect ourselves and, less selfishly, to protect Raul. As long as Richard was alive, Raul was in danger. But the fact that Richard had not yet contacted the Gestapo gave us an opportunity to make this clean.

  He was pathetic sitting there, head down, silent. He reeked of cowardice, or maybe he had shit himself. But that’s what the Germans did, too. They stole a nation’s identity and its freedom, killed its youngest and its bravest — but they also robbed so many of the cowards of their ability to live a quiet, cowardly life. They took from everyone.

  I was ready to do it, and I was ready to tell Leon. But then, without a word, he stood up and took two steps toward the pathetic figure in the other chair. Richard never picked up his head. He never even lifted his eyes. And in that position, slumped over, staring at the floor, Leon put a bullet in the back of his head.

  Richard appeared to die instantly. It was probably a better death than he deserved. His body fell forward out of the chair, forward and on its left side. As the blood pooled around his head, it mixed with the white dust that covered the floor of the porcelain factory. Some of the dust also got in his hair.

  I was stunned. I had said, “Oh shit,” at the sound of the gunshot, and then stood up and backed up reflexively, knocking down my chair. I watched Richard’s body fall, and I breathed in the residual smell of the shot, and then I looked at Leon. I didn’t say a word. I hoped that my face said something like, “You didn’t have to.” But it didn’t seem to matter to him either way.

  “Life or death,” was all he said.

  54

  There was so much we didn’t know. Maybe they had jumped the gun and started the executions early. Maybe Clarisse wasn’t even in the jail that was up the street and up the hill from the Gestapo headquarters buildings. But we had to try. It was our only shot.

  It was a simple enough play. I would try to bluff her out with my phony paperwork, and off we’d go. If it went bad, I would start shooting and do my best to get out of there alive. The only question was where Leon would be during all of this. My initial thought was that he should be at my side.

  “Wouldn’t you think protocol would be that two men would accept the prisoner?”

  “Maybe,” Leon said. “But let’s go through it. It’s a woman prisoner, unarmed, coming from a jail. She’s not a real threat, so maybe the driver stays in the vehicle.”

  “Yeah, okay, but if the shooting starts—”

  “Here’s how I see that,” he said. “They’ll be armed inside, but the people at the front desk are office workers. They push paper. So, armed but not really ready to shoot anybody. If it came to that, you’d have the jump on them.”

  “But—” I said.

  “No, but here’s the thing,” Leon said. “You have to remember the guard at the outside door of the prison, the one who’s going to let you in. If the shooting starts inside, he’ll be right through the door and ready to put one between your shoulder blades. He doesn’t push paper. He’ll be ready. So someone needs to take care of him if it all goes to shit. I think I’m better off outside and taking care of him there.”

  We debated it back and forth as we were standing in the woods behind the porcelain factory, changing into the German uniforms. Leon had saved everything — helmets, boots, rifles. My uniform wasn’t as tight on me as it had been the last time. I had likely lost five more pounds in the weeks since.

  I wasn’t sure there was a right answer to our dilemma, but I ultimately agreed with Leon. He would stay in the lorry. I would go inside alone.

  The first test of the phony paperwork would be with the guard outside the prison’s main entrance. If it didn’t fool him, we were screwed. As it turned out, he gave it a quick look and then said, “Fine,” and in I went. I’m not sure he could have given less of a shit.

  The real test would come next. The entrance area was not much, just a couple of chairs facing a counter that had a gate in it. Behind the counter, a sergeant in a German uniform sat behind a desk. I had been hoping the clerical worker would be a Frenchman, mostly because they could give lessons in not giving a shit. But, well, here we were.

  “Sergeant,” I said, reaching into my breast pocket and handing over the fake orders. He read them over, extended his arms just a bit as he held them at quite a distance. He obviously needed reading glasses and wasn’t wearing them, or wasn’t willing to admit that he needed them. Good. Very good. The blurrier the better.


  “I’ve never seen this before,” he said.

  “I’m only the delivery man.”

  “I have to check.” Then he picked up the phone on the counter and dialed a number with two digits.

  “Sir, a question at the front desk.”

  The sergeant listened. He was suddenly just a bit nervous.

  “Yes, sir… Yes, sir… It’s about a prisoner.”

  More listening. A little lip quivering.

  “Sir, I believe you need to see this.”

  I did my best to look nonchalant, but I was suddenly fingering the trigger of the rifle. The sergeant put down the phone and said, “Just a minute.” I offered what I hoped would be the universal military smirk-shrug that signified, “Goddamn officers.” When the sergeant smiled in reply, I believed I had hit the mark.

  I had no idea what I would do if this next officer saw through my fakery. I mean, I would shoot him and the guy behind the counter — but then what? I had no clue where Clarisse might be, or how many rifles were waiting through the next door. She might not even be in the prison at all. Other than retrieving the phony paperwork — that was essential, I believed — I didn’t know what else there would be for me to do but get out of there and try to come up with another plan.

  I was thinking about all of that when the door behind the counter opened and a pissed off captain stormed through. “Well,” he said, and the sergeant shakily held out the paperwork. The captain snatched it from his hand and scanned it quickly, and then he looked at me.

  “From Place Jourdan? Well, I’m honored.”

  I wasn’t sure how to reply. But given the tone of the question, I went with army smartass.

  “My impression is that they walk around believing everyone should be honored, sir, but I never said that.”

  The captain laughed. My God, might this really work?

  “Who signed this?” he said, staring down a little more closely at the scrawl.

  “I don’t know, sir. I never got past the front desk.”

  He banged the sharp edge of the paper as he thought about it. The good news was that he didn’t seem alarmed by it all. The bad news was that I was one phone call to Place Jourdan away from having to start blasting.