Under Occupation

by Alan Furst

  Then, out of the crowd, an unexpected guest appeared: Colonel de Roux, who had apparently journeyed down from his house in Les Andelys for the party. Ricard was pleased that he’d come and said so.

  “How goes the book?” de Roux said.

  “It’s gotten some good reviews, now we’ll see if it sells.”

  “That’s good to hear. By the way, I’ve brought a friend along, he’s taken a room at the hotel and, when you have a minute, he’d like to congratulate you on your publication. He’s in room 220, just above us.”

  A nameless friend, Ricard thought. Which means I am going back to work.

  When the party ended, just about the time the last bottle of champagne had been drunk, Ricard went up to room 220 and tapped on the door. From inside, a deep, authoritative voice said, “Entrez.”

  Inside, two heavyset men in suits, one of them holding an automatic by his leg, and, seated in the shabby room’s only chair, an aristocrat. He had the look, the look seen in portraits on the walls of fine houses, with a prominent nose and hair combed to one side, a member, Ricard thought, of the high elite of France, with a bearing that suggested power and prerogative. If he’d been seen getting out of a chauffeured car, the passerby would wonder, Who is that? Because he was clearly somebody important. He was, Ricard thought, no doubt titled, a marquis or a comte, owning estates and villages, and currently fighting for France, as his ancestors surely had. He did not offer a name and Ricard thought of him as “the officer.”

  “Good evening,” the officer said. “I hope your party went well.”

  “It did, thank you.”

  “And the best of luck with your new book.”

  “Again, thank you.” Ricard now sat on the edge of the bed in the darkened hotel room. Behind drawn curtains, rain was beating against the window.

  Leaning forward, the officer said, “I’ve been talking to your controller.” Which meant Adrian, though it took a moment for Ricard to make the connection. “And,” the officer continued, “he tells me that you have established a safe house on the Rue Crémieux.”

  “We have. It is now furnished and ready for use.”

  The officer nodded, then said, “The war is changing, Monsieur Ricard. That won’t be evident for a long time, but we must now think about the next stage, here in France. Not this year, maybe not even next year, but the time of invasion is approaching. British and American forces will attack the coast of France, somewhere in the north, and will begin to drive the German army back across the Rhine. This landing must be accompanied by an insurrection, thousands of Frenchmen and women will take part and their attacks—sabotage, train tracks ripped up, telegraph wires cut—will draw German troops away from coastal defense.

  “But to do this, the people will need weapons: rifles, Sten guns, heavy machine guns, and anti-tank weapons. These will be brought in by the British aircraft known as Westland Lysanders. These Lysanders, small, agile, and fast, are able to fly fifty feet above the ground and under enemy radar, they have been landing on French fields, bringing in weapons and munitions, and ferrying agents in and out of the country, since the early days of the occupation. Once the deliveries have been picked up, the arms will be stored in safe houses—private homes, factories, warehouses, and barns—and that will include the safe house on the Rue Crémieux. I know you understand all of this.”

  “Yes, I do,” Ricard said. He had listened carefully to this officer, who was perhaps the most senior member of the Resistance he would ever meet.

  “We are gathering résistants to work in this operation; reception committees for the Lysanders, people who know the countryside and can find open fields for landing zones, people who can store the weapons, people who can do the physical work of transporting them to safe houses. So, we want to recruit you, and whoever you can trust—family or lifelong friends—to work in this operation. It’s dangerous work, the Gestapo knows this is coming and will try to disrupt the deliveries, will attempt to insert their own agents among the résistants, will send patrols to the countryside. So then, will you join us?”

  “Tell me when and where,” Ricard said. “And I’ll be there and bring at least one person along with me.”

  “Then we’ll notify your controller, and he will provide the details.”

  The interview was over. As Ricard stood up to leave the room, the officer said, “And good luck to you, monsieur.”

  * * *

  —

  The coded telephone call came a week later, as the first flakes of December snow floated down on the Rue de la Huchette. Ricard had recruited Kasia to help in the operation and, following Adrian’s direction, called her at nine in the evening, and she was at his apartment by nine-twenty. Adrian picked them up in his panel truck ten minutes later, then drove northwest from Paris, reaching the city of Beauvais an hour later. As they left the deserted streets of the city, Adrian gave each of them a flashlight, then handed Ricard a pencil-drawn map. Now Ricard lowered the window, despite the snow, in order to see better, and he searched for the road on the map. It didn’t appear right away, and Ricard feared he’d missed it, but then, there it was. Not much of a road, Ricard thought, more like a cow path, with holes large enough to break an axle.

  Adrian could drive no more than five miles an hour, foot riding the clutch pedal as the truck threatened to stall, then did stall, and Adrian had to use the ignition. Which worked, though twice Ricard held his breath as the starter motor whined on and on and was close to killing the battery until, at last, it got the engine to turn over.

  By ten-thirty they’d reached an old tire lying by the road, noted on the map next to an X. Adrian used his flashlight, which showed them a hedgerow border across the field. In fact, they discovered soon enough, wiping their shoes on the weeds, a cow pasture. As the three neared the hedgerow, the beam of a flashlight lit them up and a voice behind the light said, “Password.”

  “Avignon,” Adrian replied.

  The man in the darkness said, “Symphony,” the countersign.

  When they reached him they saw that he was not alone—five other men were ranged out behind him, some dressed in suits and overcoats, others wore workers’ rough jackets and berets. All of them were armed, one with a shotgun, three with rifles, and the last, like the leader, had a Sten gun. “You have your truck?” the leader said.

  “I do,” Adrian said. “Will they fly in this weather?”

  “It’s clear in England, and they can land on snow—they can land on anything. The flight is due in a half hour. In the meantime, we have some shelter on the other side of the hedge.” He led the three through an opening in the hedge, to a burned-out farmhouse. There they waited, smoking, and drinking sour wine from bottles without labels. So, here is the French Resistance, Ricard thought. No names were given but, from conversation under a remaining part of the roof that gave them shelter, two of them were brothers, a third was a cousin, the other two longtime friends.

  At twelve-thirty, they returned to the cow pasture. Then three of the men stood in a line which showed the direction of the wind—guiding the pilot to his landing path, and a fourth stood to one side. When they heard the engine of the approaching Lysander, the three turned on their flashlights, aimed at the Lysander, while the fourth signaled to the pilot with the Morse-code letter C, dash-dot-dash-dot, and the pilot responded with the airplane’s landing lights, blinking the same letter.

  The Lysander set its wheels down at the far end of the pasture and taxied up to the group. Then the pilot vaulted out, followed by another man, who said, “I’m called Foret. I’m the one you’re waiting for, to take to Paris.”

  The pilot and three of the résistants then unloaded two aluminum cylinders from the Lysander and carried them, sometimes slipping on the snow, to Adrian’s panel truck. Next they pushed the Lysander to a position facing the wind, the plane’s pilot gave the Lysander full throttle, the wheels bounc
ed across the uneven surface, then, almost at the end of the pasture, the plane lifted, just managing to clear the trees, and the sound of its engine faded away into the night. The résistants disappeared into the darkness, heading for the car they’d arrived in.

  It was almost two in the morning before the panel truck reached the Rue Crémieux safe house where Adrian, Ricard, Kasia, and Foret carried the cylinders upstairs. They were breathing hard when they finished and Foret said, “Heavy, no? There are forty rifles for the Resistance in these things, and plenty of ammunition.”

  “When do we move them?” Adrian said.

  “You don’t, unless you think they would be safer somewhere else.” In the light of the house they got a better look at Foret. He was dressed as a French businessman, in hat and overcoat, and carried a briefcase. He was, Ricard guessed, about forty years old. “So, back in France,” Ricard said.

  “Yes, at last. I used to be a salesman, of stationery, but I had problems with the Gestapo and fled to London, to de Gaulle.”

  “You met him?” Ricard said.

  “Yes, for ten minutes. Otherwise I waited in a hotel. And waited.”

  “You wanted to come home to France,” Adrian said.

  “Yes, and to fight,” Foret said.

  * * *

  —

  By December of 1942, France was the land of the fugitive. Jews in hiding wanted to get to Spain and, eventually, to New York or Palestine. Agents of three countries, France, Poland, and Britain, were constantly on the move, working across borders in and out of the country. Then there were the people who could no longer bear living under occupation: Had the man at the next café table been a Gestapo agent? Or was he just nosy? He had surely tried to listen to the conversation. Also there were the usual fugitives, in flight from angry wives or mistresses, in flight from debt, in flight from the police for business crimes or prosecution for unpaid taxes. This was, taken altogether, a considerable number of people who wanted to be somewhere else.

  So then, how to do that?

  In a country where newspapers were edited by an occupying enemy, gossip became the only source for information. One forever heard a sentence begin: My friend Louis says…Or, My doctor told me…Or, The woman who cleans my apartment has a friend who…Yes, there was the BBC, but that was international news, rarely Parisian news, and one could be shot for listening to it. Fascist teenagers stood under apartment windows at nine in the evening, listening for the English voice, and ready to denounce the tenant.

  In private, talking to friends and family, the possibility of getting out of the country was at least discussed. It was said that there were escape lines that ran all through France and down into Spain; were they just for secret agents? Or could civilians use them? Do you know anybody? became a common question. The answer was almost always no. Some of the fugitives kept to their apartments, others went about their daily business and pretended that nothing was wrong. The war wouldn’t last forever, they would wait it out, and waiting, attentisme, became a kind of café philosophy.

  Meanwhile, except for the storage of arms, the Rue Crémieux house stood empty but, for the civil servants in London, it was time to change that. They needed someplace safe for their agents moving through Paris and decided to use the Rue Crémieux house, which meant it had to be staffed with operatives. Three of them, as always: a radio operator, an agent, and a courier. As was customary for the Special Operations people, they sent their own, trained, radio operator to see Adrian. He was called Bondeau; a former bank clerk in Lyons, a tall, thin, gray man with a tall face, hair shaven high above his ears, and he was installed at the Rue Crémieux, running his radio aerial up the chimney. Ricard was chosen to be the resident agent, with Kasia working as courier.

  * * *

  —

  SS Erhard Geisler sat in his office at the Hôtel Majestic and brooded about safe houses and escape lines. His SD superiors in Berlin were riding him hard about the subject. This form of resistance had to be stopped right away because it facilitated operations by the British enemy against the Reich. The agents who used these houses and traveled on the lines were often saboteurs. They blew up factories that produced war matériel and, fighting against the endless Russian forces, the Wehrmacht needed all the weapons and vehicles that could be produced—produced in the factories of occupied Europe.

  How to operate against them? Geisler needed an agent, someone who could infiltrate the British scheme and identify the people who made it work. Only then, when they had names and addresses, could they make arrests. And the interrogations that would follow arrests would bring them more résistants. That would mean success. That would bring medals and promotion.

  * * *

  —

  Now Ricard had to stay at the Rue Crémieux house, to take care of the agents who would be using it, and so, with a sigh in his heart, he abandoned his garret and installed himself in the safe house. The most difficult aspect to this move was that Ricard had to stay out of sight. He was used to his life in Paris, wandering the lovely old streets that always curved out of sight, stopping at his favorite haunts: this street market, that museum, the quai that ran along the edge of the Seine—his preferred place to stare at the river, along with a favored bridge or two—and the Saint-Germain-des-Prés cafés where he read novels instead of the dreadful newspapers.

  Then, on a clear, starry night, Christmas close at hand, he had his first safe-house agent. After a coded telephone call from Adrian, the courier Kasia retrieved a British operative from the Gare du Nord, a young woman who used the alias Beatrice. Very good looking, Beatrice, an English girl who had grown up in the Valais, the French-speaking part of Switzerland. Kasia used the black-market shops and found her something to eat: a hard Cantal cheese, a decent baguette, a bowl of lentils, a bottle of Algerian wine, and one small, tired éclair. This last nearly brought Beatrice to tears, tough as she was, determined as she was. “Would you like to share?” she asked.

  “No, my dear,” Kasia said. “It’s for you.”

  “I used to eat these, a treat, you know, sometimes after school. I fear I never really appreciated it, just something my maman had bought for me.”

  Beatrice couldn’t say a word about where she’d been or where she was going or what she was tasked to do there. According to the talk in the cafés, the Gestapo was lately fierce, capturing and interrogating agents. The idea of Beatrice falling into their hands upset Ricard, perhaps because he was insufficiently coldhearted for the work he did now, but nonetheless he felt protective of this girl, though there wasn’t much he could do to protect her. Some food, a night or two of safe sleep, then she would be on her way. Two days later, Kasia led her to a street in the Fourth Arrondissement and that was the last they saw of her.

  * * *

  —

  The next agent was very different. Using the alias Rafael, he arrived, after a telephone call from Adrian, on Christmas Eve, and Kasia retrieved him from the Duroc Métro station. Rafael was a Spaniard, one of many who had managed to cross the Pyrenees into France after the defeat of the Spanish Republic’s army in 1939. There were hundreds of such fugitives in France and, after 1940, most of them, intrepid fighters, joined the Resistance.

  Rafael was then recruited by the SOE and assigned to stay in France and operate in the region north of Paris, Lower Normandy.

  He was thirty or so, lithe and dark skinned, handsome, and shy. He sat in the kitchen of the Rue Crémieux house and ate sparingly. Surely he was famished, but, despite gentle urging from Ricard and Kasia, would eat no more than what he supposed to be his share, leaving food for other hungry people. “It is good of you,” he said, in slow French, “to take me in and feed me.”

  “It is our pleasure to do this,” Ricard said.

  “And you fight alongside us in our war,” Kasia added.

  Rafael nodded slowly. “I know,” he said. “But still, it is an old habit
to leave something for those who will follow me, God willing.”

  Ricard poured the last of a bottle of the Algerian wine into a water glass and handed it to Rafael. “It is Christmas Eve, sir, and we must celebrate a little, as best we can.” He then opened a new bottle and poured wine for himself and Kasia. “Joyeux Noël,” he said.

  Rafael then raised his glass and wished Ricard and Kasia a Joyeux Noël.

  “Feliz Navidad,” Ricard said. “Is that right?”

  Rafael said, “Yes, Feliz Navidad. It makes me feel good just to say it. I spent last Christmas in a trench in Madrid, near the medical school. We shared an extra ration of bread that night, to celebrate.”

  “What did you do before the war?” Kasia asked.

  “My family owned a wine bar, a bodega, in Madrid, and I worked there. I grew up in the bar, a lively place, people singing, lovers holding hands, dogs and cats and children all over the place. It was a fine way to grow up, hearing stories from travelers, listening to the conversations of students, who argued about our poets, which one was deep, which sentimental. They cared greatly about such things. Back then. In time, by 1936, I became a soldier, fighting the fascists. Still I fight them. But they don’t go away.”