by Alan Furst
He did as she asked, wobbling a little when he stood, then he walked over to a radio on the night table. She watched every step, enjoying the show. Ricard turned the radio on and worked the needle around the dial, passing a serious conversation—German political propaganda—a comedian with a laughing audience, brassy circus music, a heavy symphony, then, at last, Glenn Miller, “Moonlight Serenade.”
He returned to the sofa, she sat again on his lap and nestled close to him, her arm around his neck. “Look what I found,” she said, her hand between his legs.
Ricard stroked her as before, then moved his hand beneath her—she was very warm there. Gently at first, and slowly, he began to move his fingers back and forth. Then faster, pressing harder, encouraged by the change in her breathing. At last she made a quiet sound, an oh, closed her eyes, swayed, and fell back against him.
After a moment she said, “Let’s turn off the lights.”
He turned off the lights and they lay facing each other on the couch. A few minutes later, he thought she might be asleep, but she wasn’t. Ricard lit a cigarette and, by the flare of the match, saw that she was staring at him, the look in her eyes tender, warm, and radiant. Love in time of war, he thought.
* * *
—
In the morning, heavy cloud overhead as fog settled on the city and softened the outlines of the buildings. Ricard liked fog, he used it in his books and enjoyed it in person, the real Paris made into a real noir film, and, somehow, it shrouded the noise of the city. Ricard, feeling the effects of the cocaine and the whiskey, had to peer through the gloom, using street signs to find his way home. He thought about Leila as he walked, about certain moments, about what they might do the next time they were together. When he was a few steps away from the Rue de la Huchette, he saw a Renault automobile parked in front of a café. He had to squint to see the driver. It was Teodor, the British agent.
Teodor said, “The civil servants in London want you to go to Saint-Nazaire, where the Germans have occupied the submarine base. The London message was urgent, because British and Allied shipping is being destroyed from there. Now the London people have bought a café in Saint-Nazaire, so you’ll have cover for operations there. The café is called Le Relais, and you will act as owner and manager.”
“What about Kasia?”
“She’ll stay in Paris. They want her to do other things.”
“When do I go?”
“Today or tomorrow.”
“Then I’d better go home and pack my valise.”
* * *
—
Saint-Nazaire. The heart of the beast.
Ricard had been there before and found it a busy, commercial port. The town was located at the southern end of Brittany, near the town of Nantes, where the river Loire emptied into the Atlantic. Once upon a time, the port had been a sleepy Breton fishing village. In 1914 it grew into a town known for its dry docks and shipbuilding industry and its maisons tolérées—its brothels. Now it was a war city. Walking from the railway station to the Place Marceau, site of the Café Le Relais, Ricard passed naval guard-posts where, twice, he had to produce his papers. The Germans were taking no chances here because this was the front line of the U-boat war: anti-aircraft positions every other block, their crews lounging on the emplacements, sitting on purloined garden chairs, smoking, sunning themselves, waiting for the next RAF attack.
It would come. For every submarine damaged, more than a few merchant ships survived.
On a street that faced the waterfront, Ricard saw a beached U-boat, its superstructure bent and twisted by gunfire, where wounded sailors, in Kriegsmarine uniforms, were being carried off the boat on stretchers. Many buildings had been hit by RAF bombs, façades tumbled into the street, revealing piles of wreckage, mounds of burnt brick and broken glass. The Germans clearly could not protect the town.
What they could protect, Ricard saw, were the U-boats themselves, which were berthed in a line of pens beneath a concrete roof thirty feet thick.
In time, he reached the Place Marceau, a block from the waterfront, and there found the Café Le Relais. The interior was dark, a hand-lettered sign on the door said FERMÉ. Not far from the place, he found the office of the notary, its windows boarded up, where he retrieved the keys to the café and the names of its three former employees; the barman Louis, the waitress Marcelle, and Victorine—Vicki, the cook. He found two of them right away, left a note for the third, and they showed up the following day, ready to put the café back in order.
Louis the barman was short, with slicked-back hair, and talkative, rattling on endlessly about nothing in particular, a barman’s stock-in-trade. Never politics; bad manners in France to raise such issues. Instead, observations on life in general, customers always had something to say about that: marriage, family, work. And Louis—who preferred his name said in the English manner, Louie—had a real gift for chatter about the weather. He’d lived his whole life in Saint-Nazaire and he knew when a storm was coming, or when they needed rain, or how long the humidity would stick around. A true prophet of the weather, Louie the barman.
Marcelle the waitress was fiftyish and seductively plump, well worth ogling in her snug waitress uniform—black dress and white apron—and Ricard ogled her attentively as she washed down the twelve tables in the café, Ricard daydreaming about finding themselves alone after work. As for Vicki the cook, she was seventy, white-haired and foulmouthed. “Ahh, fuck this fucking thing,” she would say of her whisk. Vicki had always a cigarette dangling from her lips, she never flicked it, simply let the ash fall into the omelet or the soupe de légumes.
Ricard, suddenly the manager of a café, planned to work behind the bar. He learned to operate the glass-washing device, a grille with a spout below it that shot a spurt of cold water into the upside-down glass. That was it, no soap, no sponge, just one squirt and, after a swipe with a bar towel, the glass was ready for the next customer.
As for the food and drink supply, Ricard was that day visited by a short, squat fellow in a chalk-stripe, double-breasted suit, his provisioner, known as Pinky. Pinky laid it out for him: “We always have fish, you buy it on the dock when the fishing boats come in at night. There’s some mackerel and sea bass, but mostly you’ll get cod, everybody in Saint-Nazaire eats codfish, we’re raised on it. But, if you want to serve more than cod, you’ll have to buy from the farmers. Maybe once a week a scrawny old chicken for the soup, they grow lentils and haricots, beans, white and black. There’s a farmer a few miles from town who owns a milk cow and once a week he sells cheese, hard, yellow cheese. I don’t think it has a name, we just call it cheese.”
Pinky paused a moment, then said, “As for the wine and the beer, that you’ll buy from me. Early in the occupation, the Germans took all the wine back to Germany, or at least they think they did. Let’s say they took bottles with fancy labels, Château this and Château that, but the wine itself isn’t what the label says it is, it’s Château Made-Last-Week. The vintners are some of the craftiest people in this country and that’s saying something. If you want the real thing you have to go down to the wineries and buy it in plain bottles. As for the beer, it’s the same story: the old names, alright, but made right here in Saint-Nazaire where the labels are printed.”
Ricard, behind the bar, searched the shelves below the bar, and poured out a Hennessy cognac. Pinky drained the tiny glass and smacked his lips. “Thank you, my friend,” he said, and Ricard poured him another.
So, for a time, it went. Louie poured the drinks and gossiped with the customers, Vicki cooked the food and Marcelle served it. The winter waned in February, a few nice days, warm sun and blue skies, as a tease, then back to chill winds and darkness at four in the afternoon. March came in like a lion and went out like a lion, the patrons had to pull hard on the café door because the wind wanted it open. There followed the rains of April—that year a month true to its songs. But
the rain didn’t beat down as it had in winter, there were days when it could have been May, and people left their umbrellas home. Every morning, Ricard looked out at the sea, calmer now, and felt that his life was improving with the season. Marcelle knew he liked her and encouraged his interest, her body touching his, as though by accident, as they went about the daily chores of running a café.
Once they opened, Ricard found that the café was being used as a clandestine letter box. People stopped by and left messages, which were then picked up the next hour, or the next day. It wasn’t a hard job, but Ricard knew it could be dangerous—a prize for the Gestapo, who could have followed the visitors, or arrested them then and there. And likely Ricard as well.
Meanwhile, the U-boats returned home from hunting, or sometimes didn’t. The RAF bombed the city now and again, windows were boarded up—no glass—and funerals were held. There had been a serious raid in March, the submarine pens and docks damaged. Repairs were made and the battle at sea continued. According to the BBC, the Wehrmacht was advancing toward the city of Stalingrad but was periodically pushed back and had to fight once more to regain lost territory.
Then, one afternoon in April, Teodor left a note at the café and Ricard met him at an open-air fish market. “One of the Polish resistance groups in London,” Teodor said, “is planning to run an operation here in Saint-Nazaire, and they want you to work with them.”
“Who are they?”
“They’re the resistance movement of the Polish upper class, known as the Cichociemni, the Silent and Unseen. They’ve been operating against the Germans since 1941.”
A woman wearing a rubber apron emptied a bucket of ice on a zinc-covered stand stocked with herrings, and the two men moved away from her. “When do I meet them?” Ricard said.
“There’s a representative here, back in the office.”
Teodor walked Ricard down an aisle that led to the office, then disappeared. In the office, the Polish representative was leaning on the edge of a desk, drinking a cup of coffee. The man greeted him as “Monsieur Ricard,” then said, “Sometimes I use the name Erik.” He’d been born and raised in Poland, he told Ricard, but had been living in Paris since the midthirties. He was clearly an upper-class gentleman, tall and thin, once an athlete, someone who could have lived a life of leisure if he’d wanted to, but the attack on Poland had led him, and some of his friends, to form a resistance organization. His French was fluent and sophisticated, his clothing expensive and casual: blazer jacket, open-collared shirt, and a diamond-pattern slipover sweater.
“Have you been in Saint-Nazaire a long time?” he asked.
“Three months, I’m running a café. Not a bad job. People, all sorts, all day and night. Where do you live, in Paris?”
“Here and there,” Erik said, with a smile both friendly and deflective. “For the time being. Paris is the heart of the world, to me, but until the war is over I can’t settle down. You know the law of the fugitive: don’t sleep in the same place for more than one night. Well, I don’t quite do that, but, truth is, I don’t stay anywhere for long. I’m forever a stranger, but that’s how it is when you do clandestine work.”
Looking over Erik’s shoulder, Ricard watched a U-boat leaving the dock. Erik turned to see what had caught his attention and said, “There goes a Type IX submarine, the Germans’ top-line U-boat. It has all the latest technology, but it needs a lot of sailors to operate—a crew of forty-eight, all volunteers.”
“Not for me,” Ricard said. “The idea of being underwater…”
* * *
—
For this operation, Ricard brought Kasia from Paris. Her job was to watch the German barracks and memorize the schedule kept by the sailors as they were brought by bus to the U-boats at the dock. The buses were painted naval gray and had wire mesh that protected the windows from hand grenades. Kasia, to blend in with the local population, wore a gray shawl over her head and an old overcoat.
Still, she was noticed. On the afternoon of her second day at this job she was confronted by a German guard, a classic Prussian type with a lavish mustache, groomed to a point at each end. He came up behind Kasia, put a hand on her shoulder, and turned her around. “Your papers, Fräulein,” he said, very stern and official.
Kasia produced her papers, the policeman looked at them, and said, “What are you doing in Saint-Nazaire? These papers allow you to live in Paris.”
Kasia was startled, put a hand to her heart, and said, “You frightened me, Officer.”
“I’m waiting for your answer. You’ve been around here since yesterday.”
Kasia nodded, tears starting in her eyes. “I am waiting to see my…friend.”
“Are you. And does your friend have a name?”
“He is called Franz, Officer. Franz Miller.” Now two tears rolled down Kasia’s cheeks.
“And Franz is in the navy?”
“That’s what he told me.”
“And he is, I would guess, a very good friend, a very close friend.”
Kasia said, anguish in her voice, “I just wanted to see him, to talk to him.”
“Because you are in love with him?”
“Because I am pregnant.”
The old-fashioned Prussian shook his head, too much sin in the world now. “I can do one of two things with you, young lady. I’m sorry for your predicament, but you can’t linger at military installations. So I will have to take you to the police station, or you can be on your way. Someday you’ll see Franz again, but not now. Which shall it be?”
Kasia took a handkerchief from her pocket and wiped away her tears. “I will go away from here,” she said.
The policeman patted her shoulder and said, “There, there, it will all come right in the end.”
* * *
—
Ricard and Kasia rented a room in Saint-Nazaire to use as a base of operation, made contact with Jacquot—Kasia’s gangster friend—at a seaside bar, and the three had dinner at the hotel, then waited until ten in the evening to enter the port office. It was Erik who had ordered the intrusion, needing a way to surveil the port. In front of the two-story building, a sailor wearing a holstered sidearm guarded the front door. Quietly, Jacquot led them around to the alley that ran behind the building. At the back door, no guard. Jacquot took a metal key used to open a sardine tin and carefully jimmied the lock open. Then, using a flashlight, they entered the port office.
On the ground floor, a directory showed the office of the port captain to be in room 27 on the second floor. The office was unlocked and the three entered, then Ricard rummaged through the files to find what he wanted: an entry permit, and a refitting order, in this case for U-boat 521, the Freya. Ricard took that, and a few other papers that he thought Erik might use later.
They left through the back door—Jacquot had made sure it could be relocked—and walked through the warm night back to the hotel, where Ricard paid Jacquot two hundred American dollars. In the hotel room, Ricard shared the bed with Kasia. Restless, Ricard left Kasia sleeping and looked out the window. A bus, painted gray with grilled windows, moved slowly up the street, taking a crew to their U-boat for a nighttime departure.
The following day, Ricard and Kasia took the train back to Paris, while Jacquot went off on his own. Kasia returned to her room near the stockyards, Ricard went back to his garret on the Rue de la Huchette. The lights on the dock came on at seven P.M., then, that night, the RAF, in wave after wave of bombers, badly damaged the port of Saint-Nazaire. The BBC reported it, the Parisians talked about it, and the general feeling was that it would take some time to rebuild.
* * *
—
The civil servants held a meeting in April.
Not in London, where the German bombing had changed the city—gentlemen could no longer go to their clubs, because their clubs had been turned to rubble, along with the streets
where they’d stood.
So they met at one of their number’s country houses, in Sussex, and made several decisions. They would continue to use Ricard as their operative in occupied France. He would work for Leila, and also for a man called Adrian, a dependable veteran spy who would approach Ricard as soon as possible.
The most important task for Ricard would be the theft of one of the new German torpedoes. The British had the detonator, thanks to Ricard and his friend Kasia, and now, at the urgent demands of the defense ministries, they wanted the torpedo itself.
For this operation—theft of one of the new German torpedoes—the civil servants had a candidate, an expatriate American of French descent called DeRoche, who did not leave France with the other expatriates when the Germans arrived in 1940. DeRoche was big and burly, a great fat jolly fellow, a Falstaff with a black eye patch who worked as a film editor at the movie studios in Joinville. It was there that Leila recruited him. “I’ve been waiting for the Resistance to come around,” he’d said. “Now give me a job.”
Ricard went back to Saint-Nazaire, and he and DeRoche watched the naval base from a rooftop, and waited for a diversion. It came on a drizzling April evening. That night the RAF hit hard. A squadron of British Stirling bombers appeared, their arrival greeted by massed anti-aircraft fire, floods of red tracer rounds streaming into the night sky. One of the RAF bombers was hit, its engine caught fire and, by firelight, parachutes were seen drifting toward the sea.
Sitting in the passenger seat of a panel truck, Ricard felt his heart pounding, but, when the action started, the fear melted away. Ricard drove the truck up to the gate, showed the guard his stolen entry permit, and the man waved him through. Off a dirt road on the other side of the gate, he found the metal shed where the torpedoes were stored. An armed sentry at the door held up his hand and said, “Halt!” The time for finesse had passed, so DeRoche took a .45 automatic from his leather jacket and shot the guard, who fell to his knees. DeRoche shot him twice more, and he rolled onto his back.
