The Alex Kovacs Series Box Set

by Richard Wake

  “Don’t know,” I said. “From what Max says, he was arrested about six hours after we blew up the bridge. I was arrested about 24 hours after. I have no idea about Rene.”

  More conversation filled the room — actually, about six conversations at once. Everybody was worried about a leak of some sort. From one of the conversations, I heard nothing but the term “double-agent.” There was a sufficient number of people who would not look me in the eye that I noticed. I mean, I knew that some of them wondered a bit, given the piece of my background that they knew, given the German flavor to my French pronunciations, but I had proven myself to them a dozen times over. More. And there were enough people who did look me in the eye, so I wasn’t really worried. Well, not that worried.

  Eventually, the conversations petered out, and the topic turned to Barbie. One guy — I didn’t know who he was, or what group he represented — had become friends with a file clerk at Avenue Berthelot. He had learned some background over the last couple of weeks and stood on a chair to recite it from a sheet of paper.

  “Klaus Barbie,” he said. “Born October 25, 1913, in Bad Godesberg. Joined the SS in 1935. Worked for a time for the SD, in intelligence. Became a Nazi Party member on May 1, 1937. Party number 4,583,085.”

  Booing and cursing flared and then quickly died down. He continued reading.

  “Barbie was assigned to Amsterdam sometime after Holland fell, probably in 1941. He was assigned to Dijon in 1942. We all know that he arrived here on November 11, 1942. That’s all I have.”

  All of this information was both interesting and useless, but it managed to spark another half-dozen conversations, with nearly 20 people talking at once and nobody listening to more than one other person amid the din. The whole thing was pointless. There was no way that the Resistance was ever going to be a cohesive unit. It made sense to band together for operations, for coordination reasons and manpower reasons, but the rest of this was just a bullshit attempt at camaraderie. I mean, there was no way I was ever going to be friends with some of those people, especially the Communists. And the truth was, most of them were Communists.

  As Manon said, “You can dismiss them out of hand, but we wouldn’t exist as a movement without them. They’re used to being organized in secret. They bring men, and they bring passion.”

  “And they bring lunacy.”

  “Not all of them,” she said. “Your little friend Max—”

  “He’s too young to be a Communist. He doesn’t know shit about anything.”

  “If you say so,” Manon said.

  This little private conversation, like the rest of the meeting, was going nowhere. At the hint of a suggestion from the group that the meeting was over, Manon and I were the first ones out the door and up the stairs from the cellar. It was 15 minutes until the curfew, and we would be home with a minute or two to spare if we hurried. But even if we were late, and even if we got stopped, it was unlikely any policeman or Gestapo soldier was going to trouble himself with a man and his pregnant wife. On some level, even those who worked on the side of evil were like the rest of us. Arrests meant paperwork, and the key part of paperwork was work, and who wanted to make unnecessary work for themselves?

  On the way out, Manon asked Delilah, “Are these meetings good for business?”

  “Better than you think,” she said.

  17

  Raymond was a Lyon cop. He didn’t work for the Gestapo or for the Vichy government. He was a municipal police officer — in his words, “just a fucking flatfoot.”

  Raymond also was another of Manon’s second cousins. Unlike Charles, the one who worked behind the window at Montluc, we were actual friends with Raymond, not just acquaintances from a family reunion. Raymond and Manon had been close as kids and stayed that way as adults. He and his wife, Marie, had been to our house for dinner many times, and they had reciprocated. Their kids called us Uncle Alex and Aunt Manon. Lucy, their littlest, rode on my back as if I were a horse, rode until I was exhausted. When I collapsed, she would be inconsolable — so I always found a little more energy for one more trip around the perimeter of the living room.

  But we had seen less of them since the Gestapo arrived in town, to protect both of us. Raymond knew about our work with the Resistance and just felt it made sense to create some distance between us, and we didn’t disagree. So this meeting, which was arranged by me leaving a bit of a cryptic note for him at his precinct, was at night. And it was at the site of the Roman ruins, up in the hills of the old town.

  Lyon was an old Roman outpost, and in the years before the German invasion, archaeologists had discovered the ruins, including a huge amphitheater. To get there, I rode the funicular up to the site. It was a short ride, only a couple of minutes. I picked it up at Vieux Lyon station, and it was only one car, just me and the driver. It was a pretty safe bet I wasn’t being followed.

  The car rose up among the rooftops at an impressively sharp angle. It struggled with the steepness but you never got the impression it was going to slip. And even if it did struggle, the alternative was to walk my lazy ass about a half-mile, maybe more, pretty much straight uphill on Montee St. Bartalmey. It wasn’t worth the energy if you didn’t have to do it. At least it wasn’t worth it to me.

  The amphitheater was across the street from Minimes station, almost directly. The excavation and preservation of the ruin was, like everything, stopped in time. The work had continued assiduously until 1940. But it was as if every clock in France stopped that spring.

  There were actually two theaters in the complex, but one was clearly the more impressive. A path of rough, huge cobbles from Roman times showed the way. It was very easy to sprain an ankle, especially in the dark. Running away from someone, down this path, would be suicide for some ligament or other. Maybe you could see your way down in a full moon. Maybe. And if they were wet, these stones smoothed by nearly two centuries of foot traffic would be like ice.

  You could see what the archaeologists had uncovered, more than the bare outlines. There was a stage at the bottom, and what appeared to be an area of preferred seating right in front. Then came row after stone row, 26 rows in all, each one steeply stacked upon the rest. It wasn’t hard to imagine a performance taking place, actors on the stage, a couple of thousand people straining to hear — although the theory was that, once the excavation was complete, the legendary acoustics of these amphitheaters would be revealed.

  In the back, behind the theater, the archaeologists had discovered a system of alleyways leading down to the theater from the town. But the alleys were not all connected. Whether that was because of the decay of the years, or because the archeologists hadn’t yet connected them, was unclear. Whatever, the result was a series of dead-ending little passageways, likely built around the time of Christ’s birth, whose primary purpose in the 1940s was a place for teenagers to have sex. Or for Resistance members to meet with each other. Or, in this case, to meet with a fucking flatfoot named Raymond.

  “Over here,” he said, and I walked into one of the dead-ending passageways. We were surrounded by 2,000-year-old stone and mortar.

  “Before you talk, listen,” Raymond said. “If another cop shows up, the story is that I was on a night patrol and you were a fag getting a blowjob, and that the other guy got away but that you couldn’t run because your pants were around your ankles. Then he and I will have a good laugh, and I’ll let him hit you with his nightstick, and then I’ll hit you. His might hurt, but I’ll make sure only to get you in the shoulder. Then we’ll let you leave.”

  “You have thought this through,” I said. “Why can’t it be a woman giving me a blowjob?”

  “It’s a better story my way.”

  “Better for who?”

  We both laughed, and then we caught up with family details. I told him Manon was pregnant, and he told me Marie was pregnant again with their third, and I said, “What are we, idiots? There isn’t enough food as it is.”

  “I bet the birth rate is going to be up si
nce the Gestapo got here,” Raymond said. “I mean, what else is there to do at night?”

  He started talking about his job. He said the Gestapo had changed that, too.

  “Why? Are they up your ass?” I said.

  “Really the opposite,” he said. “They have taken all the major crimes — like, they investigate every murder. I guess they want to see if it’s somehow tied to the Resistance. They obviously take any bombing or sabotage or major theft of something they might classify as ‘war materials.’ And then, well, just think about it. Think about what life is like around here now. People never go out at night. There really isn’t anything left to steal — except food and ration cards, and even the crooks think it’s shitty to steal somebody’s ration cards. It’s pretty hard to get drunk anymore, and because of that, domestic calls are way down. There just isn’t a lot happening, except for people robbing food stores — and I’ll be damned if I’m going to chase those down, or at least not very hard. I spend part of a lot of shifts directing traffic.”

  He stopped, laughed. “I kind of wish I caught you getting a blowjob, Alex. I mean, it would be tough for Manon, but it would give me something to do. I haven’t made an arrest all week.”

  Then we got down to the purpose of the meeting. I told Raymond about the new venture Leon and I were embarking on. He listened, nodded a little warily. Raymond was not that different from me. He was calculating the angles.

  “So what do you need from me?” he said.

  “I don’t know. Probably nothing. Hopefully nothing. But—”

  “So I don’t get it.”

  It was hard to explain, but I tried. The thing that scared me the most about the operation was that I didn’t have control — or, at least, not enough control. I was providing the dormitory, and the paperwork, and the money to buy the paperwork for the Jews being smuggled. But the rest was Leon’s, and that scared me. He didn’t know the city, and he was temperamentally more reckless than I was. It was a temperament that had served him well, but the stakes were higher now. And I was as much at risk as he was. Considering Manon and the baby, I had much more to lose.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “And I know it isn’t fair to ask. But if I sense trouble, and I have a feeling that you might be able to help somehow, I want to be able to contact you — to talk, to run my ideas by you, to see if you have any ideas. So I need to be able to signal you.”

  “So just call me,” he said.

  “Too dangerous.”

  “Leave a note at the station, like today.”

  “Too dangerous.”

  “For who?” Raymond said.

  I didn’t answer. The truth was, if the Gestapo was on to me, anybody who came near me would be suspect. What if they were on to me and I didn’t know? In the silence that followed his question, Raymond processed all of this without me having to say anything more. He thought for a second.

  “Fuck,” he said. “Okay. What? What’s the signal?”

  I told him that there was a black lamppost directly across the street from the front door of his police precinct. I would make an X about three feet from the bottom with yellow chalk. If it was there in the morning, he would meet me at the Roman amphitheater at 9 o’clock that night.

  18

  When Leon left Lyon the last time, the envelope he left me contained five photos and information for five identity cards. He explained that three would be coming with him on the next trip, and we would swap out their old identities for their new ones at the flat. But he said that the more he thought about it, the ideal situation would be to make the swap at the start, in Paris. So the other identity cards would be for the next two, a mother and son. From then on, the plan would be to obtain the new identity cards for the next group during the two- or three-day wait in the flat with the current group. There would be a risk in carrying them back, but it would be Leon’s risk and no one else’s — and the upside was too good to pass up, pristine cards in Christian names from wiped-out towns up north.

  When I brought the five identities to Marcel at his shop, his first reaction was, “There’s no way. I can’t do this many in two days. It isn’t possible. You never said—”

  I stopped him and explained that there was no rush on this bunch, that two weeks would be fine. But after that, I said, we would be back on, hopefully, a two-day turnaround schedule with two or three identities.

  “How often again?” he said.

  “I would say once a month, probably. Could be once every three weeks, but I think that would be stretching it. Once a month, two or three names, two-day turnaround.”

  Marcel bleated some more — he was genetically predisposed to dickering, it seemed — and we agreed on a price. I even agreed to pay the rush price for the packet of five identities I left him with even though there was no rush this time. Then, as part of the cover, I bought a 1907 postage stamp with the admonition, “Get some cheaper inventory in here — you’re fucking me coming and going.”

  “Just another satisfied customer,” Marcel said. We both laughed, and then I walked out of the shop and said a little prayer that there wasn’t a Gestapo car waiting for me at the corner.

  And with that, I attempted to live my normal life for the next two weeks, as Leon had instructed. Of course, seeing as how my day job was planning demolition events, normal had become a relative term. The next target had been selected for me, which I hated — a telephone exchange near Bron, about two miles past the eastern boundary of Lyon, maybe five miles from my house. But the research was the same — surreptitiously visiting at least three times, at different times of day, on different days of the week, dressed in a different get-up: business suit, farm laborer’s clothing, and my new favorite, a priest’s cassock.

  As I worked out the details — and while the grand high council of Resistance assholes could pick the targets, they couldn’t rush the planning, and I wouldn’t be rushed — I had the vague sense that I was sometimes being followed. I could never prove it. The evasion tactics I employed — buses taken in the wrong direction, getting off trains at the last second and then doubling back, everything — never left me in a position to identify somebody who was definitely following me. Still, I just had a feeling. It was likely paranoia but, then again, if I didn’t have a right to be paranoid, who did?

  It was after a day of reconnaissance at the site when I decided to stop by the flat for a quick shower. It was when I unlocked the door that I saw Leon, a tiny woman and two tinier children, two boys, five-year-old twins. He was giving them a tour of the place, as much as that was necessary.

  “… and this is our host, Alex,” Leon said. “Alex, this is Myrna and her two children, Jean and Michel.”

  I screwed up a face at the two Christian names, which was rude but, what the hell. Leon laughed. So did Myrna. She said, “We are not that observant — like our friend here.”

  I had often said that Leon was the least Jewish Jew I had ever met. Back in Vienna, his girlfriends were almost exclusively Christians, as were about 90 percent of his friends — and he once proclaimed the pork tenderloin with a bitter cherry sauce at Horner’s to be “exquisite.” Of course, Adolf’s boys didn’t care about your denomination, or how often you went to shul. They just cared if your grandparents were Jewish. They started asking there, and then they loaded you into the train cars if they didn’t like the answers.

  “Where is your husband, if I may ask?”

  Leon started to answer but Myrna jumped right in. Her voice was even, unemotional.

  “We don’t know,” she said. “We haven’t known for eight months. He worked as a tailor. His shop, a whole block of shops in the Marais, they were raided by the Gestapo late one afternoon. And we just don’t know.”

  The boys were racing in circles around the sofa. Myrna started to yell at them but now it was Leon’s turn to interrupt.

  “Let them,” he said. “Let them have a little fun. Besides, they’ll sleep better.”

  While they ran, Leon finished the tour, ending
up with the re-filled food cupboard. Myrna gasped. I told them to eat their fill for the next couple of days while they had the chance. She did not appear as if she was going to have to be told a second time.

  Outside, I told Leon that he was earlier than I had expected and I wasn’t sure if Marcel would have the new identity cards ready. “I told him two weeks,” I said. “That’s not for—” I began counting on my fingers “—four days.”

  I told Leon to go check with Marcel in the morning and see where things stood. “It’s all paid for,” I said, and then I asked him how many were in the group after next.

  “Three,” he said, and I counted out the money.

  “So pick up the three identity cards for Myrna and her kids, and the two for the next group. Like I said, they’re all paid for. Then give him the photos and information for the group after that, with the money. But if you have to wait a couple of extra days, you have to wait. There’s enough food for them, and Manon will be happy to have you.”

  “Where are you going to be?”

  “My day job,” I said. “I leave early in the morning. Hopefully be back day after tomorrow. I’ll come by the flat when I’m back. If you’re still there, you’re still there — but don’t wait.”

  We ran over a couple of other details, and then I turned to leave. “You coming?”

  “I think I might stay here with them,” Leon said.

  I just looked at him.

  “On the couch,” he said.

  I kept staring.

  “Really,” he said.

  19

  I was getting ready to leave and Manon was acting weird. Not crazy, not angry, not snippy, not secretive — just a little odd. It was as if we were suddenly uncomfortable with each other, and I didn’t know why.

  I was going to make the trip in my farm laborer clothes — reasonably fresh shirt, trousers that were clean but with the discoloration baked into them, stained forever, and dusty work boots. The plan was for me to walk to the outskirts of the city and pick up a train there, then overshoot my intended station by one, then walk back on the farm roads that criss-crossed the fields. They were grain fields out that way, mostly wheat. As best as I could tell from the map, I would be walking 12 miles altogether before I took a nap in the tiny orchard that seemingly sprung up out of nowhere and fell away almost as quickly. There might have been 30 trees there in total. And if anyone came upon me, they would see nothing but a laborer taking advantage of a shady spot to sleep.