The Spies of Zurich

by Richard Wake

  So it was getting to be a lose-lose calculation — unless you were talking about a bridge. Because the destruction of even the smallest bridge, like the single stone arch I was looking at through my binoculars as I lay behind a hay bale, would put the line out of business for at least a week, and more likely two. The risk-reward suddenly tilted again toward reward, even while acknowledging that the German did the same cost-benefit analysis and kept a close eye on every bridge along the line, even the tiny ones. Which is why Rene, Max and I kept trading the glasses between us, staring at the back of the heads of the two German soldiers leaning on the fenders of their vehicle. They were smoking cigarettes. When they turned, you could see the tiny glow.

  “How much time?” Max said. Rene looked at his watch.

  “Still five minutes,” he said. “No, six. Relax.”

  Max scooted away from us, crab-walking behind another hay bale to take a piss. If they gave tests to spies, or saboteurs, or resistance agents, or whatever the fuck we were, the adequate bladder test would have flunked Max out straight away. He was a good kid, only 17 and entirely cold-blooded — he very nearly severed the head of a German sentry he had already killed, just in a rage, during a mission to set a fuel depot on fire. But he had to piss as often as an old man, which was the only thing I could kid him about, seeing as how I was 42 years old and he called me Pops. As in, “Fuck you, Pops,” which was pretty much his reply to everything I said.

  If I was the brains of the operation — and in all modesty, I was — and if Max supplied the muscle and the balls, Rene was the demolitions expert. How he had acquired the expertise had never been explained to me, but Rene knew about the different types of explosives, and how to attach the detonator and the wires and, in this case, the windup alarm clock. I had been given a quick-and-dirty training session once, and I could wire an explosive charge to a plunger, but I would never trust myself with one of the timers. You have to know your limits, especially when you are talking about dismemberment.

  Max had argued about everything when we set up the first charge, at about 10 p.m. It was on the tracks, maybe 300 yards from the little stone bridge.

  “Pops, we’re too fucking close,” he said.

  “We have to be close,” I said. Then I explained to him for the fifth time that in order for this to work, the soldiers guarding the bridge had to be close enough to the first explosion that they felt it was their clear and obvious duty to investigate it themselves.

  “But we need the time,” Max said. “They could reach us with their rifles if they saw us.”

  “They’re not going to see us,” I said. “They’re going to be running toward the explosion and then they’re going to be staring at burning railroad ties and radioing back to whoever for instructions. As soon as they start heading for the explosion, we start heading for the bridge. We’ll get where we need to be before they get to the explosion. And how much time do you need, Rene?”

  “Two minutes, Alex,” he said. “It’s all packed in the cases. I just need to set the timers. Maybe less than two minutes once I’m on the bridge. The cases are pretty heavy for me to carry up that embankment, though.”

  “That’s what Max is for,” I said.

  “Fuck you, Pops.”

  And so it went. We set the timer on the first charge to go off at 11. We still had three minutes. Now I had to piss. I could have held it, but I felt as if maybe Max needed to win one before the end of the night. So I crab-walked behind the same bale and listened to him mock me.

  “Mine’s just nerves, and I can always learn to relax,” he said. “But your old man plumbing is shot forever.”

  As this went on, Rene continued to stare at his watch. He gave a one-minute warning, then 30 seconds. The three of us were ready to move when the explosion went off, piercing the night. I watched through the binoculars as the two soldiers jumped, then said something to each other, then hesitated, then began running toward the boom and what was now a fire of burning railroad ties. One of them was carrying a portable radio and holding it up to his ear as he ran. The other held his helmet down with one hand and grabbed his rifle with the other.

  “All right, let’s do it,” I said. We all trotted, Max carrying the suitcases full of dynamite, Rene and I with pistols drawn. From there, it all went pretty much exactly as I had planned it out in my head. The embankment was not that steep, pretty easy for all of us, even Max with the cases. On my scouting trips — which were necessarily brief, to avoid suspicion — I had noticed that there was a space on each side of the bridge, between the railroad bed and the keystone of each arch. I was pretty confident that Rene would be able to wedge the cases into the space, but you don’t know until you know.

  “They going to fit?” I said.

  “Like a glove, Alex my boy. Like a fucking glove.”

  I don’t think he took 90 seconds to get the clocks set and put the cases in place. The entire time, I could see the two soldiers, outlined against the fire on the tracks. We ran past our original vantage point to another, maybe 400 yards away. As we got set, Rene looked at his watch.

  “Two minutes,” he said, and then pointed to the binoculars. “May I?”

  “Yes, the artist should see his masterpiece,” I said.

  We all stood now, not even hiding. It was a moonless night, chosen for that very reason, and cloudy besides. There was nobody looking at us. I took one more quick peek toward the first explosion and saw the same two silhouettes. Then I focused back on the little stone bridge, just in time to see it reduced to a little stone pile. The two explosions came about 10 seconds apart.

  As Rene stared into the binoculars — “Ah, it’s beautiful,” he said, once, then twice — Max and I instinctively hugged each other as if we had just assisted on a game-winning goal during stoppage time. But then we had to go, three men dressed like farm laborers to three different farms in the area. From there, we would be transported back to Lyon.

  “You both memorized your directions, right?” I said. “And stay off the roads.”

  “Fuck you, Pops,” Max said.

  My farm was in Chassagny. Our plan was to sleep rough in the fields behind the three farms where we were headed, the assumption being that the Gestapo would be knocking on doors before dawn in their search for the bridge saboteurs. I didn’t think I would be able to sleep, but I did, the adrenaline rush long past and leaving only exhaustion in its place. It was the rising sun that woke me, and then the slamming of the back door of the farmhouse in the distance as Marcel Lefebvre headed to the barn and his cows. I followed him in, a minute or two later, and I startled him. He fell off of his milking stool and came within inches of compounding the indignity by landing in a pile of cow shit.

  “You missed them,” he said. He was on his feet now and embracing me.

  “Missed who?”

  “Your friends in the black leather coats,” he said. “They were banging on the door at 3:30. They searched the house and the barn with torches and warned me to be on the lookout for some resistance saboteurs.”

  “They’re just paranoid,” I said.

  “I hope they have something to be paranoid about,” Marcel said.

  I told him about the little stone bridge, and he dropped a teat to thrust his hand toward the sky. Then he continued milking. I watched in silence as he filled a pail. It didn’t take long.

  “Everybody’s OK, right?” he said. When I assured him we were, he motioned for me to follow him into the house — “Quick, quick, just in case,” he said, and we scampered inside.

  From a barrel in the corner of the kitchen, he poured us two tumblers of rough red wine. I looked at my watch theatrically. It was 7:15 a.m.

  “Hell, we’re celebrating,” Marcel said, shoving the glass at me.

  “I wasn’t complaining,” I said.

  “You better not be — this is a good batch.”

  Marcel was in his 50s, a widower with no kids — which meant he did everything on his little hay farm, including delivering the ha
y to his customers. That is how I would be returning to Lyon, secreted in his hay wagon. For fun, and for some extra money, he made wine. There were some real wineries nearby, but his was a grapes-in-the-bathtub-sized operation. He sold mostly to friends, or at local farmers’ markets. He had some beautiful old oak barrels, and the wine he made was significantly better than crap, an everyday wine that was noticeably tastier than typical everyday wine. Of course, given the rationing, even crap wine was very much in demand.

  He worked hard at it, as a kind of profitable hobby, and had about 25 barrels in the barn. As it turned out, those barrels were why he joined the resistance. With petrol in low supply, and a lot of car motors converted to burning wood, the Germans did a different kind of conversion. They had engines that would run on alcohol, that would run on wine. And so, they traveled the countryside and went about the business of requisitioning all the wine they could get their hands on.

  “It’s bad enough they wouldn’t pay for it,” Marcel said, when he first told me the story. “But Alex, I could live with that. I understand pigs. But when they dumped motor oil in with the wine, I just couldn’t take that.”

  The problem wasn’t that the oil spoiled the wine for drinking, because it did. That was the Germans’ purpose. The issue was the barrels. The oil ruined them, too, leaving behind a residue that soaked into the old wood and could not be cleaned out. They couldn’t be used for wine anymore.

  “I cried when I had to break them up,” Marcel said. He used them for firewood.

  “How many did they get?”

  “Twelve.”

  “How many did you manage to hide from them?”

  “Fourteen,” he said. Then he laughed. “With these assholes, the way I figure it, I’m still ahead of the game, 14-12. And now, I help you guys out here and there, and the wine I have left tastes that much sweeter.”

  He pulled two empty bottles out of the cupboard, filled one with wine and one with milk, and stoppered them. “Here,” he said, handing them over. “We need to get going.”

  With that, me and my bottles climbed into the wagon. He had square bales already loaded — three layers of bales, five in a row, five deep, 75 bales in all. Except it was really 73, as I found out when I crawled into an empty space in the middle of the hay structure and then sat as Marcel sealed me in.

  He had asked me ahead of time if it was necessary, and I admitted that this was exercising an insane level of caution. I mean, it isn’t as if every other wagon headed into town with farm goods was manned by a single person.

  “So you’re my helper — what’s the big deal?” Marcel said.

  “You’re probably right,” I said. “But what if you get stopped by a German who knows you live alone here, and work alone? I’m sure they’re really on edge, really jumpy, and it’s just not worth the risk, even if you just told them I was a day laborer helping with a big load.”

  So I sat in darkness, save for a tiny shaft of light — and, presumably, oxygen — that made it through the immense pile. And, as it turned out, Marcel was stopped by a German patrol, and one of the soldiers did jab a bayonet into the hay bales two or three times for show. If the steel had struck flesh, it would have been a lot harder for Marcel to explain than a strange day laborer sitting next to him in the passenger seat. But the bayonet hit nothing besides hay, and we made it to the Lyon municipal stables by 10. Yes, I was being smuggled into the place where the city police boarded their horses.

  “Don’t worry,” Marcel said. The wagon was parked behind the barns. No one was around. “Besides,” he said, “now you can be my day laborer.”

  “It’s worth it for the wine and the milk,” I said. We had the truck unloaded within an hour. Then, Marcel made sure to pull every stray bit out hay out of my hair and pockets and cuffs. If I walked fast, I would be home in another hour.

  The walk home took me past the old army medical school, which was now Gestapo headquarters in Lyon, which was just one more bit of evidence of God’s twisted sense of humor. What once had been a place where men were taught to save the lives of those who had been thrust into hell was now a place where the hell was manufactured instead.

  The Gestapo had been in Lyon for four months. We were all in church when they arrived — literally. It was November 11, 1942, and we were praying for the dead of the first war on the anniversary of the armistice. And if everyone in the church was praying for the French war dead, and I was praying for the friends I lost fighting for Austria-Hungary, so be it. We were on the same side now. When we walked out of the church together, the German columns were arriving. We were in the Free Zone for the first two years of the war, the part of France where the Germans couldn’t be bothered and left it to the fucking Vichy to run things. But then, seemingly overnight, we were worthy of their attention. The brass piled into the Hotel Terminus, across from the train station, and attempted to operate from there for a while. But the business of torture and terror, a booming industry, quickly outgrew the hotel’s accommodations. So while they continued to use the Terminus as their dormitory, the Gestapo had taken over the old medical school on Avenue Berthelot, a block and a half from the Rhone, for their hijinks.

  I could have avoided it, but I liked walking by — big and solid, Nazi flags flying, black-uniformed sentries at the gate. It reminded me why I was doing this. I made Manon walk by with me the last time we were close. And while she didn’t object, she did say, “You know full well that I don’t need a fucking reminder.”

  Manon was my wife. We met in Zurich in late 1939. I followed her to Lyon, her home, after the German invasion in 1940. We had fallen in love despite a rather unconventional romantic beginning — unconventional in the sense that she was a spy for the French intelligence service who seduced me because she was trying to figure out what I was up to, me being a spy for the former Czech government in exile and all. As it turned out, we possessed not only a physical and an emotional attraction. We also bonded over a professional realization that became clear as the panzers sped through the Ardennes: that we worked for idiots, for blind men married to the past, for cowards incapable of action.

  So now we worked for the resistance, and for each other, and against the black uniforms and the swastika flags. We published an underground newspaper, one of a half-dozen in the city, called “La Dure Vérité.” It was really a sheet or two run off on a Roneo machine, once or twice a month, but we were convinced it made a difference, maybe even more than the sabotage — railroad tracks, telephone lines, whatever would disrupt the German terror machine. We were sure that the 1,000 copies we produced were being read by 20,000, passed secretly from hand to hand. Of course, there also were days when we were convinced that nobody was reading anything and that nothing mattered. Those were the days I went out of my way to walk down Avenue Berthelot, to watch the red flags starched in the breeze, to see the sharpness in the creases in the black SS uniforms. And, maybe to see Barbie.

  Klaus Barbie was the man in charge, and I had never seen him. There already were stories of his brutality, but how much was true and how much was an urban legend was unclear. It seemed as if everybody’s horrible story was third-hand. If he really was torturing and killing people, and doing it personally, they wouldn’t be around to tell the tales, after all. I didn’t know anybody who had been in his presence for more than a few seconds.

  Max had seen Barbie on the street, arriving at Avenue Bertholet one day, and said, “He’s fucking short. He’s not one of those big, tall blond assholes.” He guessed Barbie was maybe 5-foot-6. Another friend had heard his voice once, outside the Terminus as he was waiting for a car. “He speaks French — he was talking to the valet at the front door, and he was doing OK with the language. Just really slow.”

  But as for the rest, the rumors of torture and brutality, they were just that. Still, I was dying to put a name to a face, maybe just to give myself a more vivid nightmare. On this day, though, as on all the others when I walked by, I didn’t see him. And now that I thought about it, maybe th
at was what made the nightmares worse.

  I crossed the Rhone and then walked north, up to our neighborhood, the Croix-Rousse, up the steep hills, so steep that sometimes there was a stone staircase to take you up from one cross street to the next. Our house, a tiny single with a tinier patch of grass out front, was a few blocks away from Manon’s family business, a silk manufacturing factory that her uncle ran by himself since her father’s death a few years back. Manon helped with the bookkeeping and used a store room in the back as the base of our underground publishing empire. Our resistance cell was tiny — Manon and I, and a couple of others — and we met in the factory when it was necessary. Which meant twice in the last year, and one of those times was just an excuse to get drunk together after I came into possession of a case of bootleg wine. The other time was to tell them that the various resistance groups had been forced to come together into a kind of confederation after Barbie and his pals arrived, and that our sabotage work would have to be coordinated. That’s how I ended up working with Rene and Max, who were with Liberation, a much bigger resistance group than ours.

  As I approached the house, Manon was sitting on the little front porch, taking a bit of the afternoon sun. Eyes closed, face upturned — God, she was beautiful. She greeted me in the time-honored fashion, and after we were done, we lay naked in the bed and she whispered softly, “Enough of this. I’d kill for a glass of that milk. And then a glass of the wine.”

  I feigned annoyance. She reached down and grabbed me there. “The milk and the wine are rationed,” she said. “This isn’t. Not yet, anyway.”