by Richard Wake
“Nope,” Manon said. “What do we do?”
“Turn off the light and wait in here,” I said. “I’ll go see.”
I rehearsed a story as I walked, something about a broken loom, but it wasn’t necessary. I opened the door, and it was Max. And his first words were, “Fuck, Pops, what the fuck happened?”
I took him to the back room and introduced him to Manon and Leon. He saw the Roneo and the newly printed stack. “Nice,” he said. “I knew your family owned this place — that’s how I knew to come here — but I didn’t know this was your print shop. But isn’t that dangerous?”
“Not as long as you keep your fucking mouth shut,” Manon said.
“Fuck, Pops, I like her.”
We compared notes on our arrests, and Max was the winner. He didn’t even make it till sunrise after we blew up the bridge.
“I was sleeping rough near the farm, like we talked about,” he said. “I don’t know exactly what time it was, but it was still way dark when the Gestapo showed up. I thought I was going to be okay until I heard the barking. The dogs sniffed me out in about two minutes.”
So now they had dogs. The idea of sleeping out in the open near transit contacts would have to be re-thought. We would need to create more distance, better safeguards. The operations were hard enough, but cat-and-mouse — the thinking in between missions — was somehow even more exhausting.
“I think I saw Rene in Montluc,” I said. “Did you?”
“No. Fuck.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Fuck.”
“But how did they find all three of us?” Max said. “I got caught, but I didn’t tell. They barely did anything. I mean, they slapped me around a little bit, and I denied everything, and then they let me go.” He stopped, and pulled back his hair, and pointed to a one-inch gash along his hairline.
“But that was it,” he said. “I mean, it was nothing.”
“And when and where did they question you?” I said.
“The next day, at the Gestapo place on Avenue Berthelot. It was after I had a nice sleep in that fucking hole and two gourmet meals. They took me down the basement, and did what they did, and then sent me back. The other guys in the truck got it much worse.”
“So I had already been arrested before they even questioned you,” I said. It was a kind of thinking-out-loud statement. I was hoping someone would jump in with a brilliant insight. Instead, there was only silence, followed by Max’s predictable, “Fuck.”
We sat for a few more minutes, sorting out nothing. Then Manon said, “Look, we need to get these on the night train to Grenoble. There’s a conductor who will take them, and we have a taxi driver who will bring them to the station. The taxi will be waiting at the Rue de Capucins.”
“I know the way,” I said.
“You need a little more practice in the traboules — bring Max,” Manon said. “You’re from the neighborhood, right?”
Max agreed, and Leon insisted on tagging along for the experience. It was into a light rain that the three of us began to walk. Max carried the small cardboard suitcase containing the flyers. It was past curfew, which meant the risk was significant if a random Gestapo patrol happened upon us. And while it wasn’t as if they had the manpower — yet — to really turn the screws and keep the streets completely empty at night, the consequences of getting caught were another trip to Montluc. I really didn’t need that.
It was about a block from the first traboule entrance when we saw the headlights, maybe three blocks in the distance. “Run,” Max said, and we did. We approached a random doorway on Rue Imbert Colomes. The little sign out front said it was No. 20.
“Quick, this way,” Max said. “Will you and your fucking friend hurry up, Pops?”
We ducked into the doorway at No. 20. As the door slammed behind us the passageway, maybe 20 feet long, was completely dark. Then we reached a staircase going down, maybe 20 steps, each of smooth stone. The top of the staircase was covered but the bottom few steps were wet from the rain that was falling into the open courtyard, the area surrounded by the six-story apartment houses that provide its form. There was a black iron railing on the left side of the step. Down at the bottom, you could see the ivy growing up along its latticework. Looking quickly at it, I lost my concentration and stumbled on the ceramic down near the bottom of the steps. Then I fell. Max put down the suitcase and helped me up.
“Goddamn fucking old man,” he said. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“Everything except your dignity,” Leon said.
“Look, just fuck both of you.” It was the best I could do.
Leon looked around as I got myself together. We were getting wet. He said, “But I thought these things were built to protect the silk from being damaged by rain when it was being transported to the river.”
“That’s clearly bullshit,” Max said. “I don’t know why, but they’ve been here since the Middle Ages. I think it’s mostly for this. You know, the clandestine. Come.”
What we were doing was cutting through anonymous passageways between and among the apartment buildings, which allowed you to go down from the hills of Croix-Rousse without being on the streets very much.
There were four doorways in this first traboule. Three led to staircases up to the flats. The fourth, leading to another street, is where we went. Max opened the door just wide enough to stick his head out and look both ways for more headlights. “Come,” he said again.
We end up doing this four times, making our way down from the hills. The only times we were on the streets were the quick crossing of the narrow roads, maybe 50 feet between the houses on either side, 50 feet on Rue des Tables Claudiennes, 50 more feet on Rue Burdeau, and finally 50 feet on another street I didn’t know. Then we exited the fifth traboule on Rue de la Capucins. It was five minutes before 11. The taxi was waiting at the door we came out of, No. 6. He took the suitcase without a word and drove off in the direction of the station.
The handoff was the easy part. The hard part would be retracing our steps, back through the same traboules, but uphill this time instead of downhill. We were exhausted, but at least we didn’t see another set of headlights the rest of the night.
12
I still hadn’t agreed to participate in Leon’s scheme, but Ruth and Rachel were here, in my other flat, and they needed new papers to continue their journey. We were so tired when we got back to the house that we didn’t talk about it anymore, and Manon was already asleep.
“Let’s just sleep as long as we can and get the papers for them when we wake up,” I said, and Leon agreed. As it turned out, we both slept until almost noon, me with Manon, and Leon in our second bedroom. She was up early and neither of us heard a thing.
We awoke to a feast of the little bit of food that we had left in the house, this being the last day before the new ration cards came out. Technically, it was half of what we had left — the other half would be dinner. Seeing as how she was pregnant — four months pregnant but still not showing — Manon qualified for a more generous allotment than I did. But it still wasn’t nearly enough. Breakfast — and dinner — would be slices from a semi-stale baguette, fried in lard and topped with white beans that had been fried in the same pan. Dessert was an apple, split three ways. Leon and I drank fake coffee, which really tasted like strained shit, but it was all there was. Manon drank the last of the milk I had brought from the farm.
After we ate, Manon went to the factory to put in a couple of hours of bookkeeping. Leon and I walked into the center of town, but this time on the streets and not in the traboules, down the hills, down the staircases, down, down, down.
At the Hotel de Ville, we passed the enormous fountain that anchored the square in front of it. The enormous fountain was topped by a naked woman on a chariot with enormous naked breasts. I pointed them out to Leon, and he stopped and stared.
“The old me would have made a comment, like those kids,” he said, gesturing toward a couple of 12-year-old bo
ys who were pointing and snickering in the way that every pair of 12-year-old boys in the last half-century had done as they passed the fountain. “But I’m too tired now, even for massive iron breasts.”
“I think they’re lead,” I said.
“Like there’s a difference. Only you would know that.”
“I read it in one of the papers, back before they were censored,” I said. “The same article today would say they were massive German breasts.”
A block or two on the other side of the big square was Rue du Garet, a little street with a couple of quiet shops. One had stenciled in the window, “Stamps, Coins, Collectibles.” The proprietor was Marcel Roux. I don’t know if his stamp or coins or collectibles were worth shit, but Marcel was the best forger in Lyon, one of only three in the city who were part of the Resistance.
He had made both of my fake identities, and one for Manon, too. He wasn’t cheap — or, as he said, “I have to pay people to steal the blank paper, and that doesn’t cost nothing, you know.” But he really was the best. I had never gotten a passport from him, and didn’t know about that, but as for identity cards and transit papers, he was the best. You really couldn’t tell his from the real thing.
The identity cards had a lot going on — the correct stock was important, and the red border needed to be the proper shade, and the photo and the various stamps from the police and the rest were all required. Every detail had to be right, and Marcel’s identity cards were right. No one ever got caught because of that.
“Only time someone got caught, it wasn’t my fault,” Marcel said. It was a story he told every time I had been in his shop, and he was telling it again to me and Leon now, after I made the introductions.
“The fool who I made the card for, he filled it out wrong. He put his birth date in the spot where it said to put in the issue date. Idiot. He deserved to get caught.”
We explained to Marcel what we needed — new identity cards for Ruth and Rachel, with Gentile names and untraceable details.
“You have the photos?” Marcel asked. Leon handed them over. He had taken them himself. His last act as a big city newspaperman was to liberate from the paper’s photo department a sufficient supply of chemicals to develop a few hundred small identity card photos. He had dozens already posed and taken and developed back in Paris.
“Okay, let me check my book,” Marcel said. While his craftsmanship was impressive, his research abilities were unmatched. Through a military source — he would never tell who it was — Marcel had obtained a list of the cities and towns whose records offices were destroyed during the German invasion in 1940. What that meant was, the Gestapo did not have the ability to check an identity card from those places. If the card appeared to be legitimate, there was nothing to do but accept it. There was no way to prove from existing records that it was a forgery because the records just didn’t exist anymore. The panzers had blown them away.
“I need to rotate these around,” he said, running his finger down a list of names. “Too many in a short period from the same place could be risky. Okay, they will be from Pleau Est. It’s up near Amiens. Little farming town. Germans bombed the shit out of it. You think the little girl can remember that much?”
Both Leon and I thought that she could.
“Two days?” I said.
“Phew,” Marcel said. “I don’t know—”
“I can pay a little extra,” I said, counting out the bills on his workbench. He scooped them up and dropped them into the same drawer where he kept his book of bombed-out records offices.
“I have a question,” Leon said. “If we were to bring you business of this type on a regular basis, could you handle it with the same fast turnaround?”
“We’re not sure yet,” I said.
“Two or three names, maybe twice a month,” Leon said.
“Really, we’re not sure.”
“Right now, I can handle that,” Marcel said. “But you never know. Life around here gets more complicated all the time. And if the paper supply dries up, we’re out of business. You understand that, right?”
“Sure, sure,” Leon said.
“As long as you understand, then yes,” Marcel said.
“But we’re really not sure,” I said.
As we turned to leave, Marcel cleared his throat. He was nothing if not theatrical, and also single-minded. The final part of every under-the-table transaction in his shop was an actual transaction, so that if the Gestapo began to suspect, and stopped us outside, we would have a purchase to show them. So I bought the cheapest old nineteenth-century franc I could find in the display case.
“Ah, nice choice,” Marcel said. “It is just for operational integrity, you know.” He wrote out a receipt, and then he opened the drawer of his workbench and scooped the payment inside.
13
Every month, Isabelle made me a pie. Where she got the ingredients was one of the great mysteries of my current life. Flour, sugar, fat and the fruit filling — all in the early spring of 1943; I had no idea. Its arrival, sitting there on my doormat, was unpredictable but predictable, if that made any sense. Every month, at some point but always a different point, it was there. And so it was on that day.
Leon had begged off after our visit to Marcel’s shop. He said he couldn’t make the walk over to the flat.
“I’m just exhausted,” he said. “If it’s okay with you, I just want to go back to your house and sleep some more. Just the idea of walking back up those hills has me even more tired. I don’t know, I’m just spent.”
So he went back, and I came to the flat to check on Ruth and Rachel, and the pie was the great bonus. I did the math in my head as soon as I picked it up to smell it — cherry. A slice each for Ruth and Rachel, and a slice each for Manon, the baby in her belly, Leon and I, left two more. And it gave me an idea. After checking on Ruth and Rachel, and watching Rachel’s delight at the sight of some actual dessert, I carefully wrapped the four slices for us in one piece of butcher paper and the other two slices in another piece.
“Any news?” Ruth said. Rachel dived face-first into her portion, and we walked toward the door.
“I can’t stay,” I said. Then I told her about the paperwork, about the quality of the forger, and about the cover story.
“I’ll begin practicing with her,” Ruth said. “Pleau Est. Near Amiens. We lived on a farm.”
“She’ll be okay with it, won’t she?”
“Yes, yes,” Ruth said. “I’ll make it like a game. I just won’t tell her that the losers get killed.”
“Does she understand any of this?”
“Not really,” she said. “She knows that there are bad people who don’t like us, so we’re going to a place where the bad people don’t live. That seems to be enough for her.”
Ruth stopped for a second, hesitated, then said, “She doesn’t cry at night. I’m the one that cries at night.”
Which was a hell of an au revoir. I left them there, with their pie and their preoccupations, and walked to Montluc. I wanted to see if Rene was still there. This whole thing was steeped in illogic. I know I didn’t give anybody up to the Gestapo. I know Max didn’t give me up, seeing as how he wasn’t questioned until after I was arrested. That left Rene. And while he didn’t seem the type, well, who exactly was the type? And when they started lopping off your fingers, who among us would hold out?
As I approached the window — it was like a window at a bakery — I was hoping to talk to Charles. He wasn’t exactly a guard at the prison, but he was more than a custodian. It was hard to explain, and I listened to him try once at a Friere family gathering — he was a second cousin to Manon, or maybe something even more distant than that. Anyway, I knew he worked the window sometimes when people brought packages for prisoners, and I was due a bit of luck. When I rang the little bell, the shutters opened, and it was, indeed, Charles who answered. It took a second for my face to register with him.
“I heard you were here,” he said, after first looking back
over his shoulder. There was no one there. “Actually, I saw you. Allain Killy, huh? How did you like our little country inn, Monsieur Killy?”
“I had a splendid night in the Shithole Arms,” I said. And then Charles looked over his shoulder again.
“Yeah, I heard they let you go pretty quick, too,” he said. “And that you were still pretty as ever when you left. That’s exactly what one of the drivers said, ‘pretty as ever.’ I mean, you look like crap to me, but that’s what he said.”
“Is that unusual?” I said.
“Very. The typical guy, we take him to Avenue Berthelot and he at least gets beat up. Maybe a quarter lose a finger or a toe — but that’s usually on the second day, after they get roughed up on the first. Then there are the ones we never see again. There’s a few of them. More than a few.”
I thought some more about the whole business on the walk over and massaged the idea that maybe they were laying a trap for me, hoping to catch me in some bigger scheme. But I wasn’t being followed, which you would have thought was a prerequisite for that kind of plan. I was careful that way. Years of doing this — starting as a spy for the Czechs in 1938 — had taught me a few things and spotting a tail was one of them. I did all of the necessary mechanics — circuitous routes, doubling back, checking in the plate glass of storefronts as if they were mirrors, all of that — and I was clean. Besides, I really didn’t think the Gestapo had that kind of manpower in Lyon. Not yet, anyway.
Every explanation I came up with, I just as quickly found a hole in the theory. It was driving me insane. Maybe that was the purpose. I mean, I just didn’t know.
Charles began to look antsy. I held up the smaller of my two parcels. I wanted to leave it for Rene. Mostly, I wanted to find out if Rene was still in Montluc. Charles left the window and walked back into the office to check.
“Sorry,” he said. “He’s not here.”
“Can you find—”
“No, I can’t. And I can’t be talking to you like this. It’ll seem suspicious if any of my bosses comes along. And let me tell you, I’ve got bosses out the ass in this place.”
