Under Occupation

by Alan Furst

  “I can get you some cheese and bread and a bottle of beer.”

  “We’ll take it up to the room with us,” Kasia said.

  Kasia liked to walk around while she ate. Using a knife that had been included with their meal, Kasia cut off a piece of the orange cheese, then slid it off the blade and, as she began chewing, she wandered idly over to the window and stared out at the car as she ate. She cut a piece of the dense black bread, handed it to Ricard, and said, “Who is that out there, do you suppose?”

  Ricard stood by her side at the window. “No idea. To do with us?”

  Kasia shrugged.

  Then the Opel’s driver-side window was rolled down, and the young man with the reddish hair seemed to be looking directly at them. “Oh, it’s him,” Ricard said. “Maybe it’s time to get out of here.”

  Together, they left the room and hurried downstairs to the bar—tired workers drinking beer—and took the back door, which opened on an alley with puddles of black water and fragrant garbage cans. From under a stairway, a cat scampered away.

  “Where to hide?” Kasia said.

  “Did you see a sign on the ferry dock that said SWEDEN?” Ricard said.

  “Yes, there’s a ferry waiting at the dock,” Kasia said. “But maybe it’s going to Denmark. Occupied Denmark.”

  “We’ll have to take our chances,” Ricard said. “Anywhere but here, as the saying goes.” From an open space between buildings, they could see the small ferry, an ancient tub from a Popeye cartoon, puffs of black smoke rising from its crooked smokestack.

  Now the driver of the Opel signaled to a stevedore occupied with coiling a tarred rope. The man came to the driver’s window and the driver showed him a sheet of paper. “Bet you ten francs that’s a wanted poster with a photograph,” Kasia said. “Guess who.”

  “Merde,” Ricard said.

  “Merde, indeed,” Kasia said. “We’ve got the fucking Gestapo after us. They’ve always got photographs.”

  “We’ll have to cross the wharf to get to the ferry,” Ricard said.

  They left the alley and headed toward the ferry dock. From the Opel, two little taps on the horn, beep-beep. When they turned to look at the car, the driver crooked a finger and beckoned to them. “Time to leave,” Ricard said. They walked faster, taking an angle which would lead them behind the trunk of the car. The driver waited, then, playing with them, began to back up very slowly. The two walked away from the car; the Opel followed. Passing a freighter, moored to the dock, Ricard saw a toolbox with an open lid, apparently belonging to a workman serving one of the winches. From a heap of tools in the box, Ricard took a shiny steel pliers. “Go talk to him,” Ricard said. “Then wave me over.”

  Kasia went to the driver’s window and the man with the reddish hair turned toward her. “What do you want with us?” she said.

  The man opened his jacket to show Kasia an automatic in a shoulder holster. “Get in the car,” he said. “Don’t make me shoot you, we need to have a conversation.”

  “In the car…both of us?”

  “Yes.”

  “Alright, I’ll get my friend,” she said and signaled to Ricard, who walked quickly, pretending to be worried and scared, over to the car. To see directly inside the car he had to bend his knees. Momentarily, the man’s face relaxed—these people were going to obey him. Then Ricard hit him between the eyes with the pliers. Hit him harder than he’d intended, and the man’s eyes rolled up and he collapsed sideways, draped across the front seat, out cold. Kasia rolled up the window and locked the door. Ricard followed her example on the other side of the Opel.

  As they boarded the ferry to Sweden, there was a crowd at the bow railing, waving goodby to friends, calling out “Wiedersehen! Wiedersehen!” and last-minute messages. Meanwhile, Ricard and Kasia watched the Opel. “What if he comes to?” Kasia said.

  “He’ll come staggering out of the car, calling for the police, and we shall be arrested. But, if he remains undiscovered, and the captain of this ship ever decides to sail, we will be leaving Germany, and I doubt we will return. Anyhow, cross your fingers, I hit him pretty hard.”

  Out on the wharf, some passersby did notice the car, a few of them peered inside, tapped on the window, then walked away. One man grabbed the door handle and yanked hard, but the lock held, while the next volunteer turned to his friend and made the classic gesture: fist with thumb extended, hand tilted above the mouth—he’s drunk. He was followed by a policeman on a bicycle, who stopped to examine the situation, tried both doors, then shrugged and rode away. One big, brawny stevedore spent quite a while with the Opel—finally yelled “Everything alright?” and returned to work.

  A few minutes later, as Ricard breathed a sigh of relief, the ferry sailed.

  AT LAST, BACK in Paris. Ricard unlocked the door to his apartment to find a thick sunbeam, with dust motes drifting through it, shining in the window. By the typewriter on his desk, a stack of paper titled The Investigator. He read part of a page, then part of another, saw something that had to be changed, reached for a pencil, and crossed out a word.

  Then he opened the window and the street life of the city flowed in: barking dogs, mothers yelling out the window at their kids, the itinerant scissors sharpener calling out for customers, and that certain, very particular scent the city wore, compounded of age and dust and sewers and perfume and Gauloises smoke and potatoes frying in oil. Ricard inhaled deeply and knew he was home. He sprawled out on his bed, closed his eyes, and let the return to Paris gather in his heart.

  But not for long. When he thought of what he had to do that evening, his spirits sank a little. Anne Legros, the editor at Éditions Montrésor he liked, was leaving Paris. He looked at his watch and saw that it was almost four o’clock, when the shops would reopen after the midday closure. He looped and knotted a gray wool scarf around his neck, tucked the ends inside his corduroy jacket, put on a pair of gloves, found the ration-stamp book in his desk drawer, took the string bag that hung on the doorknob, and headed out. There was an open-air market at the nearby Place Maubert, but it was the wrong day for that, so he would take the Pont Marie across the Seine, then head for the Rue Saint-Antoine, his favorite shopping street. He paused for a time midway across the Pont Marie and stared down at the heavy current in the Seine, the water gray beneath a gray November sky. His reverie was interrupted by a German patrol boat, cruising up the river. Fucking war, he thought, you can’t escape it.

  On the Rue Saint-Antoine, he stopped at the crèmerie, where the owner offered him a wedge of mimolette, a hard, orange cheese, from under the counter. Expensive, she told him, but ripe for supper tonight. He bought the mimolette. Next, he visited the butcher and bought a short length of sausage, then stopped at the boulangerie for a wedge of pain de campagne, a bread that would last forever. For his final stop, he went to a wineshop and bought a bottle of red wine, the best he could afford.

  Then he returned to the Rue de la Huchette and, with newspaper and twine, made a secure bundle of his purchases.

  It was close to six, and dark, by the time he reached the building in the Sixth Arrondissement where Anne Legros lived. He’d called and she was waiting for him in front of her building.

  “So,” he said after greeting her, “you’re on your way south.”

  “Yes, to my aunt’s house in Lacaune.”

  As they walked to the Métro that would take them to the Gare de Lyon, he said, “What’s it like there, in Lacaune?”

  “Just the usual petit village, everybody knows everybody else. Very quiet, very peaceful. No Boche to be seen, so no controls, no demands for papers. My aunt has the tabac in the village, and I will work there and live in the big, old house she has at the edge of town.”

  “So then, no more Éditions Montrésor. I am sure they’re sorry to see you go.”

  “They are, but I can’t stay in Paris any longer. With all t
he Germans and the Gestapo, I began to get a bad feeling, as though something awful was going to happen. When I saw people taken away in the Gestapo vans, I thought, someday that will be me. So, farewell to Paris, as much as I love it. But you will stay?”

  “As long as I can,” Ricard said. “I was born here, I belong to the city.”

  They rode the Métro to the Gare de Lyon and fought their way through the crowd to the train for Orléans, the first leg of Madame Legros’s voyage to the south, then walked along the platform, to a coach that wasn’t yet jammed with passengers.

  “I’m sorry to see you go,” Ricard said.

  “I’m sorry to leave, but it’s for the best.”

  Ricard handed her the newspaper parcel of food and said, “You’ll be on the trains for a day or two, so I brought you something to eat.”

  “Thank you, Ricard,” she said. “You are a good soul.”

  They embraced. Madame Legros climbed the first step to the train, turned, and waved, and then she was gone.

  * * *

  —

  It was early December, a dusting of new snow on the ground, the Schönbrun-Grandschule high school where the Poles lived stood isolated and dark in what had once been a village adjacent to the city of Kiel. Not much left of the village now; the RAF bombers came in 1940. The school stood among a few remnants of brick wall with weeds growing where a building had stood. The school itself had been built in the middle of the nineteenth century, with SCHÖNBRUN-GRANDSCHULE chiseled into the elaborate stonework below the roof. The teachers of those days had likely been a formidable group, bearded men who wore pince-nez and stiff collars, droning away in their classrooms as the students sat at attention.

  Abandoned in 1910, the school had been reopened as a barracks for the Polish laborers sent to Germany to build submarines: thirty cots spread among the classrooms, old WCs brought back to working order. On that night in early December, Jozef and three other workers waited for their Ukrainian guards to go to sleep, then held a meeting and talked about resistance.

  How to fight back against the Germans? Soon the conversation centered on their work on the torpedo detonators they built for the Germans. “Why not,” one of them suggested, “build an extra one and hand it over to the British?”

  The detonator was eight inches in height, its exterior surface made of highly polished chrome steel. The front end, the top, was curved, while the flat bottom had four holes bored in it where electrical cables would be plugged in when the torpedo was put together. The device was sensitive to contact, or to depth and distance, and, once it reached a ship it would set off the explosive in the torpedo, blowing a ten-foot hole in the hull and sending the ship to the bottom.

  The Polish workers would have to fabricate this device for every torpedo they constructed, and, aware that it was important to the German war effort, they had decided to build one for the British. This was espionage, and could get them arrested and tortured, but they didn’t care. They were Poles, Polish patriots, so they fought their enemies.

  To get the device to the British secret service, they would have to take it to Paris, and for this job, they chose as courier one of their number called Ostrow.

  His documents for the trip were created by substituting his name and description on papers belonging to one of the other workers, the money for his journey stolen from shops in the city of Kiel. A few years earlier, before the attack on Poland in 1939, Ostrow had worked as a welder in the shipyards of Gdynia, on Poland’s Baltic coast. Then he’d been captured during the invasion of Poland and, having a trade the Germans needed, was spared prison camp and sent to the naval shipyards in Kiel.

  On the train from Hamburg to Paris—by way of changes in Emden and Brussels—Ostrow stood in the packed aisle, hand tight on his small valise. It was the common version of a valise: tan, pliable canvas with handle and buckled straps made of cheap leather. What made it unusual was that it held a detonator, wrapped in well-used underwear to discourage customs officers. Ostrow himself would be of little interest to the officers; he looked like a typical worker, a short man who wore an oil-stained cap with tufts of gray hair sticking out above his ears, an old blue winter jacket, and oil-stained shoes with newspaper stuffed inside because the soles were tearing away and his feet were cold.

  Then, at the customs inspection on the German side of Emden, his luck ran out. The German inspector was fifty-two. He’d begun his job at the age of twenty-three. He’d seen everything, so he knew, instinctively, when a traveler had contraband—morphine, weapons, stolen gems, he’d seen it all. But what annoyed the inspector most of all was that he was now facing a Pole, a “subhuman,” according to Nazi doctrine.

  “Open your valise.” The inspector used the eraser end of a pencil to probe through the clothes in Ostrow’s valise. He turned up the underwear-wrapped detonator, told Ostrow to unwrap it, then said, “What’s this?” Ostrow had been well coached by the other Poles at Kiel, and the question wasn’t unexpected. “An oil pump for a sports car,” he said. “It’s for a friend of mine in Paris, he’s got some fancy Italian automobile, it can go a hundred and fifty miles an hour.” The inspector wasn’t sure about it, and did what, in such cases, he’d been told to do: he met the eyes of one of the Gestapo men observing the line. The officer was young and wore a blue suit, with his hair combed up in a pompadour. This man confirmed the inspector’s gesture, waited as Ostrow had his exit visa stamped, then followed him as he left the office and stood waiting on the platform for the train to Brussels. Here Ostrow found himself standing next to a middle-aged woman with a leather case. “Cold, today,” Ostrow said, rubbing his hands. The woman looked him over and decided he wasn’t someone she would answer. The man in the blue suit signaled to a colleague and nodded at the woman—Find out who she is.

  The man in the blue suit’s colleague, a Gestapo officer wearing a leather jacket, approached the woman, showed a badge, and wrote down her name, address, and passport number.

  The train for Brussels pulled in a few minutes later. It was already crowded, and Ostrow had to push his way past passengers riding on the iron steps that led to the carriage vestibule. “Excuse me,” he said, polite words accompanying very impolite pushes and shoves. The passengers inside were as usual: war-weary, unsmiling, stiff and cold after hours of standing on the train, muttering under their breath as Ostrow forced his way among them. Life was easier for the men following him: they showed badges, and people squeezed themselves out of their way. Finally, a conductor, using both hands and a shoe, forced travelers on the steps up into the crowded vestibule and signaled to the engineer.

  Slowly, the overloaded train began to move. It rattled past harvested fields, where gray light reflected off pools of standing water under a low, dark sky, past long stretches of winter weeds bending in the wind, past forests of trees with bare branches, past the empty streets of the occasional village.

  On the train, the passengers stared out at the flat, featureless landscape. They were a hundred and eighty miles from Paris, six hours on the slow train. But it took longer. Just after entering Holland, the train reached a section of track that had been blown up—by RAF bombers or Resistance saboteurs—and here the train was led by a railwayman who walked ahead of the locomotive and waved it forward over track that had been newly laid. The train crept along, bumping over temporary connections installed by railway crews. The passengers were silent, keeping their opinions of bombers and saboteurs to themselves. It was nine in the evening before the train arrived at the Gare du Nord and the passengers were at last released from captivity.

  Kasia and Ricard were waiting for Ostrow on the platform. They’d had a letter describing him, “My uncle will arrive…,” and they knew what he looked like. They watched him leave the train, and they saw the two officers following him. Who were these travelers—solidly built and self-confident young fellows with no luggage and busy eyes? “He’s being followed,” Rica
rd said. “The guy in the blue suit? That’s a Gestapo thug, I’d bet my life on it.”

  “I see him,” Kasia said. “And the other one, in the leather jacket.”

  Ostrow peered down the platform. Jozef had described the young woman he was supposed to meet and, when he saw Kasia, he started to approach her. But she merely glanced at him, then looked away. Was he mistaken? Was there another attractive woman with short hair wearing a brown suit? Ostrow didn’t see her. Now what? He waited while the arriving passengers met family or friends, waited while others headed for the taxi line outside the station. Meanwhile, the two Gestapo officers watched the platform and waited for Ostrow to meet somebody or head off into the city.

  Kasia swore under her breath, she could see the valise, she knew what was inside, but to acknowledge Ostrow at this point was to be arrested. Still, they couldn’t just leave him standing there, by now nearly alone as the other passengers dispersed. Finally, Ricard said, “We have to get that valise.”

  “How?” Kasia said.

  “Let’s steal it,” Ricard said. “Such things happen around railway stations.”

  “What about the Gestapo escort?” Kasia said.

  “We’ll lose them. Go talk to him.”

  Kasia headed for Ostrow. When she reached him she said, “Welcome to Paris, monsieur. Are you seeking a taxi? My friend is waiting, just around the corner.”

  “What? A taxi? No, aren’t you the woman I’m…?”

  Ricard came up on the other side of Ostrow, deftly removed the valise from his fingers, and hurried away toward the Boulevard de Magenta. Both Gestapo officers followed Ricard and the valise.

  There were Parisian policemen here and there, but the German officers knew they couldn’t depend on help from the French. They could have arrested Ostrow—as Gestapo men they could have arrested anyone they liked—but they wanted his contact—who would receive the valise?

  Meanwhile, Ostrow started to run after Ricard, but Kasia grabbed him by the back of his coat. “Time for you to disappear,” she said in Polish. Pressing a wad of francs into his hand, she said, “Here’s money for your things.” Then she ran and caught up with Ricard, who was in turn being trailed by the two officers.