Under Occupation

by Alan Furst

  Madame de la B., lying in bed with head propped on hand, the two rolls of her stomach sagging on the sheet, wondered about the call but said nothing. Kasia had her mysteries, Madame de la B. knew better than to intrude. The two shared a taxi, which dropped Madame de la B. off at her apartment, then proceeded to the Rue Saint-Dominique. There sat Teodor, with coffee and newspaper, looking around every few seconds.

  Kasia didn’t like it, told the driver to continue a way down the street, got out, and found herself a vantage point in a doorway. She couldn’t be sure, but sensed a trap. Many of the patrons seemed commonplace, but the pairs of large men in summer suits disturbed her. Then one of the men approached a nearby table—again a pair of men—then returned to his table. That was enough for Kasia. This was a trap. Teodor had been turned by the Gestapo and was being used as bait.

  * * *

  —

  DeRoche and Ricard had hidden the stolen torpedo in a panel truck, which they’d parked in a garage in Nantes. The owner of the garage didn’t like it—he knew there was something dangerous in there, hidden beneath a canvas tarpaulin. He didn’t think Ricard and DeRoche were thieves, he thought they were résistants, and, if their operation didn’t work out, they would bring the Gestapo down on him. Yes, he was a patriot, but his patriotism only went so far—he planned to see the end of the war and to go back to living as he had before the Germans invaded.

  But he need not have worried. The following morning, Ricard and DeRoche were back, and drove the truck away in a cloud of gray exhaust smoke. The torpedo had to be moved to a rendezvous in the middle of France and, with all roads under German surveillance, it had to travel by tugboat, using the Loire canals.

  * * *

  —

  The tugboat carrying the torpedo left at dawn, on the Loire canal that wound its way to Orléans, then to the Rhône, the great river that flowed south to empty into the Mediterranean Sea near the city of Montpellier. Ricard sat against a bollard at the stern of the tugboat. As the sun rose, the leafy branches of oak and chestnut trees formed a canopy above the canal and threw shadows on the still, green water. Around a bend, a flight of starlings took off from the trees and wove patterns in the sky and, now and then, small vees of geese passed overhead. Two hours from Nantes, the canal narrowed, then a village appeared on both banks and a fisherman waved to Ricard from an ancient bridge, perhaps a medieval bridge, built of stone block with arches for boat passage along the waterway. Later, a barge carrying stacked lumber passed Ricard, likely headed for Nantes, a barge hauled by a pair of oxen, who trudged along the tow path encouraged by a young girl with a long switch. It was quiet on the water, only, from time to time, the sound of a passing train on the track that ran beside the river. Otherwise, there was only the thrum of the tugboat’s engine.

  Just after midday, the tugboat reached the town of La Chebuette and docked at the town’s single pier. Following instructions, Ricard found the local hotel and asked the clerk to buzz the room of one Monsieur Dubroc, no doubt an alias. Two men came downstairs. Both were young, and wore eyeglasses and tight beards—to Ricard, they looked like engineers. They all boarded the boat, then Bastien got under way, but not for long. A mile from town they found a narrow channel, water lilies floated on its surface, and its banks were overgrown with high reeds—nobody had been here for a long time.

  In the 1920s, there had been a brickyard at the end of the channel where bricks had been fabricated, then loaded onto barges and taken to construction sites along the river. The two men got to work right away; they measured the torpedo, took photographs, removed the detonator, and photographed that as well. “This torpedo is going to England,” one of the men said. “But just in case something goes wrong on the way, we’ll at least have information about it.”

  As the tugboat reversed and chugged out of the brickyard, one of the engineers said, “Thank you for your work, Ricard, when the war is over maybe you should get a medal, but I would be surprised if you did. Anyhow, goodby, now it’s time for you to return home and forget this ever happened.”

  * * *

  —

  Thus, on the twentieth of September, Ricard found himself back in his garret. He stared out at the Rue de la Huchette, as he often did, at the Café La Régence, where local citizens and German occupation troops sat at tables on the terrasse, taking the sun on a fine September day. The Investigator, his novel in progress, sat where he’d left it, by his Remington typewriter. He would, he thought, need another two months or so to finish it. Ricard hadn’t noticed it at first, but now he saw a scrap of paper on the floor that had obviously been slipped under his door. “Please call me,” the note said. It was signed K.

  Ricard telephoned. “It’s Teodor,” Kasia said. “He’s been captured and turned by the Gestapo, if you meet with him you stand a chance of being arrested.”

  “How do you know he’s been turned, Kasia?”

  “He told me, he said there was no way out for him, and asked me to have him killed. There were tears in his eyes.”

  “Killed?”

  “So he said.”

  This was, Ricard knew, the way Resistance networks operated. If one of their members became dangerous—and it didn’t take much to persuade the leaders they were in danger—they were quick to eliminate the threat. Many people in France died that way in 1943; some innocent, some guilty.

  “Are you willing to do such a thing?” Ricard said.

  “I suppose so, if I have to. Better that than the Rue des Saussaies.” She meant the building used by the Gestapo to interrogate their prisoners. The screams could be heard on the street, and the Parisians found other ways to get where they were going.

  Conscious of his open telephone line, Ricard said, “Why don’t you come over to my apartment so we can talk?”

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  A half hour later, Kasia appeared. She still wore her brown wool suit and tie-up oxford shoes. “I’m not going to kill him; I’m not going to live with that memory,” Ricard said.

  “What can you do?”

  “Get him out of this country. I have a lot of money, American dollars from my friends in London. Can you talk to him, Kasia? Safely? You can’t go anywhere near him now.”

  “I can telephone from a café.”

  “Quickly. Less than a minute. Before the Germans figure out where the call is coming from.”

  Kasia nodded.

  Later that morning, Ricard visited a travel agency in the Eighth Arrondissement. There were four desks at the agency, with German officers looking at brochures at two of them. “We are busy, as you see,” the travel agent, a middle-aged woman, told him.

  “I have a friend who is thinking of taking a voyage,” Ricard said.

  “Oh yes? And where would the friend like to go?”

  “Argentina.”

  “A long way from here.”

  “Yes, isn’t it.”

  “Your friend will need an exit visa, and then we’ll have to find him space on a ship. South America is a popular destination just now. Very popular.”

  “It must be the local color, the, umm…”

  “Gauchos.”

  “Yes, the gauchos, and lots of steaks to eat.”

  “When does your friend wish to travel?”

  “As soon as possible.”

  “Well, as soon as you show up with the exit visa and his passport, we can write the ticket. Round-trip?”

  “One way.”

  The travel agent nodded. “It will be a long war,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  Once again, Kasia and Ricard conferred in Ricard’s apartment. “Anything new?” Ricard said.

  “Not much. A while back I saw this very attractive woman on the Métro, young, with a shag of blonde hair across her forehead. So yesterday I took the Métro and there she was ag
ain. This time I talked to her and I suggested we have lunch together. She liked the idea. I said, ‘We could have supper in my little room,’ and she seemed to like that idea too. Anyhow, I’m not sure she knows what’s going on, but we’ll have an intimate conversation, and then we’ll see.”

  “The thrill of the chase,” Ricard said.

  “Nothing like it.”

  “What shall we do about Teodor?”

  “False papers, that’s the only way. Passport, exit visa, and then a ticket to Argentina. Do you know somebody?”

  “I do. I’ll need the franked photograph from Teodor’s passport.”

  “I’ll telephone him from a café. He can leave his passport at The Bookshop and I’ll pick it up when I go to work. I’ll arrange to be elsewhere when he arrives, we’ll have him leave it in a book.”

  “A Spanish dictionary,” Ricard said.

  Kasia grinned and said, “The very thing.”

  * * *

  —

  A late-September afternoon, the sky sometimes gray, threatening rain, then blue and sunny, with windblown cloud scudding over the city. Ricard left his garret, headed for the Jardin du Luxembourg. To keep him company in the park he brought along his copy of Eric Ambler’s A Coffin for Dimitrios. The garden had a central avenue, which led to a pool where kids could sail toy boats, then, to either side, was divided by shrubbery into small private rooms with benches.

  Ricard chose one of the rooms and opened his novel. He was at the point where Latimer, the university professor, is talking to Colonel Haki, the Turkish detective in Istanbul. Ricard read with great pleasure—this was his third time through the book, he knew what came next, and he looked forward to it. There were, he thought, good vitamins in this book, nourishing to a writer of spy fiction.

  A man appeared at the entry to the shrubbery room and said, “Are you Ricard, the writer? May I join you?”

  Ricard moved over on the bench, and the man sat down. He was in his forties, maybe a matinee-idol type when younger, but now his hair was thinning, and worry lines marked his face. He was, Ricard thought, aging quickly. He wore a shaggy mustache, black with gray strands, and had on sunglasses.

  “You like your book?” he said.

  Ricard nodded.

  “Your favorite Ambler?”

  “I think so, everything is right; Istanbul, and the Dimitrios character, and his history in the Levant.”

  “Better than The Dark Frontier,” the man said. Then he said, “I should tell you I’m called Adrian.”

  “You’re English?”

  “I’m a little bit of everything—‘Adrian’ was somebody else’s idea, but it will do for the moment.”

  Well, he wasn’t, by his accent, French, Ricard thought. He didn’t sing the language the way the French did, enjoying every word. Yet his French was perfect, the language of a foreigner who was used to it, and likely worked in it. So, who was he?

  “Are you surprised I know who you are?” Adrian said.

  “Well, there are photographs on my dust jackets.”

  “I’ve read them all, by way of getting to know you. They’re good, Monsieur Ricard, The Waterfront Spy, The Odessa Affair, all of them, and you have something in common with Ambler. Your hero is not a detective, not a government agent. Like Ambler’s Latimer, he’s caught up in the politics of his time. One is sympathetic to Latimer, a rather stodgy college professor thrown into the middle of a secret operation because he writes romans policiers, his way of escaping academic publication. That’s what makes the Ambler novels good. I grew tired of policeman heroes, Simenon’s Maigret and Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie’s detective; I prefer the amateurs, like Latimer. And like you, Monsieur Ricard.”

  Ricard well knew this contact with a stranger was no accident, and waited for the man called Adrian to reveal the reason for it.

  Adrian leaned forward a little and said, “According to my friend Leila and to the people in London she works for, you did well in Paris, and in Saint-Nazaire. Like Ambler’s heroes, you’re a committed anti-fascist.”

  “I always was, all through the thirties, and now, with the occupation, even more so.”

  “And prepared to work?”

  Ricard hesitated. He had only just gone back to living his usual life and took pleasure in it. But he understood that refusing Adrian’s offer wasn’t really possible. When a war comes to your country, you have to join up. What was Trotsky’s quote? “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” Finally, Ricard said, “What do you want me to do?”

  “This park feels a little too public. Is there somewhere we can go? Maybe a restaurant?”

  “There’s a restaurant I like, up on the Rue de Richelieu. It’s too far to walk, we’ll have to take a taxi,” Ricard said.

  “Let’s do that, tell me about the restaurant.”

  “It’s called Maurice. On the street floor they have the usual ration-coupon dishes: turnips, cabbage, animal feed. But they have a black-market restaurant on the second floor.”

  “A good one?” Adrian asked.

  “It is. And expensive.”

  “And do they serve steak frites?”

  “Oh yes; yes indeed, they are known for it,” Ricard said.

  “Then let’s go and eat there. Is the steak au poivre?”

  Ricard nodded.

  “It’s been a long time since I had a real steak frites. I think about it,” Adrian said.

  * * *

  —

  Ricard claimed he could tell whether a restaurant was good or not by the smell that reached you as you stepped inside the front door. Up on the second floor, the Restaurant Maurice smelled very good indeed. Ricard and Adrian settled at a table by the window, then peered at the day’s menu chalked on a blackboard. For a moment, Ricard considered the poulet rôti or the quenelles of pike, then ordered the steak frites.

  As they waited for their orders to arrive, Adrian said, “Do you know the word exfiltration? It’s a word used mostly by people in the special services.”

  “Yes. I know the word,” Ricard said. “It means helping someone escape from a hostile area.”

  “That’s what we want you to do. There are fugitives hiding out all over France, our own agents, French agents, and the Poles. Hundreds of agents, all of them used to convey information that can be used to defeat the Reich. We use wireless/telegraph sets to transmit some of this information, but much of it travels by hand, down established escape lines until it reaches Spain and, in time, finds its way to London. These escape lines send the courier from safe house to safe house, all run by people who don’t like the Germans or the Vichy administration. One of our jobs back here is to keep our couriers safe.

  “What we want you to do is travel down one of these escape lines. It has a code name, SHEPHERD, assigned by the people in London. This line, like many others, goes from Paris down to Perpignan, then to Spain, in time to the British naval base at Gibraltar. You’ll make contact with our agents in Spain and they’ll escort you to the base.”

  Their soup arrived at the table, a potage de légumes, warm and thick, colored a rich brown by the lentils used to make it. Ricard ate a spoonful and recalled how the French believed in soup—with bread and wine it was all one really needed. “And why the SHEPHERD line?” Ricard said.

  “We need to be certain that it isn’t penetrated by the Boche.”

  “And you’re not certain now?”

  “We’re not, but then, we are professionally suspicious. One of the women that ran a safe house for SHEPHERD has disappeared. Now we have reason to believe she was having a love affair, was caught by her husband, then ran away with her lover. They fled…we don’t know where, but we don’t believe that the Gestapo snatched her and made up the story. We believe, but we don’t know, so it needs to be investigated.”

  Adrian had some more
of his soup, then said, “We have a car for you, a Citroën Berline 11, the 1938 model, adapted with a coal-burning engine when the gasoline was sent to Germany. You have official permission to drive it, because you are supposedly a veterinary surgeon, we’ll give you the papers.”

  “I haven’t done much driving,” Ricard said. “I’m a city boy, but I know how to drive.”

  “Alright, better if you don’t drive. The Boche run snap checks on cars—in the city and in the countryside. We’d prefer that you take the trains, especially the night trains, because the Germans don’t like to work at night, so Kontrols on those trains are very rare.”

  “So much for German efficiency,” Ricard said.

  “That’s something of a myth—the Germans like to think of themselves as efficient, but they aren’t really. Thank God. Now the normal procedure for a new operative is to send him to Scotland where we have a training base, but in your case we don’t have the time. We need an investigator right away, to make sure of the safe houses and the people who have the responsibility of running them.”

  The waiter took the soup plates away, then brought the steak frites: the potatoes gold and crisp, still sizzling from the fryer, and intensely aromatic. On the side, a dish of béarnaise sauce for both steak and frites. The dinner stopped conversation for a time—both Adrian and Ricard had been living on wartime diets and they were hungry. After the main plat, a green salad, then a fresh pear.

  Ricard and Adrian both lit cigarettes as coffees arrived. “Find yourself a safe house,” Adrian said. “You can’t do this work from your apartment. A house with a chimney to hold the wire for the wireless/telegraph set. A chimney not visible from the street.”

  “I’ll find something,” Ricard said. “How much rent should I pay for it?”

  “Whatever it costs,” Adrian said. “Speaking of which…” He passed Ricard a fat enveIope beneath the table. Ricard looked inside and saw American bills in fifty-dollar denominations. “It’s five thousand dollars. Convert some of it into occupation francs—for train fares and room rentals—but keep the dollars for bribes. Anyhow, use it as you like and don’t scrimp, there’s plenty more where that came from.”