The Alex Kovacs Series Box Set

by Richard Wake

  As I was tying the right boot, the lace snapped. I muttered a quick “shit,” and Manon’s reply was quick and urgent: “What’s wrong? What?”

  “Just a shoelace,” I said, holding up the broken piece.

  “I’ll get you a new one,” she said.

  “No, don’t. Better if I just tie the pieces together and make do. It’s what a worker would do.”

  “I guess,” she said.

  It was just… odd. I had been on literally a dozen of these sabotage missions before and Manon had never acted this way. She knew how carefully I planned things. She often participated in the planning. On one job, she noticed a hole in my logic when it came to the timing of Gestapo guard schedules at a depot and suggested a change — and she was right. It would have worked my way, too, but her change bought us a few extra minutes. She was smart, and she was committed to what we were doing. Of course, she hadn’t been pregnant for most of my earlier jobs.

  “What’s wrong?” I said, finally.

  “I don’t know,” she said. She wasn’t hiding the fact that something was bothering her.

  “Something I did?”

  “No.”

  “Worried about the job? Because you shouldn’t be. This one is safer than the last one—”

  “It’s not that,” she said. “I know you’re careful. I’m not worried about that more than any of the others. It’s just—”

  “The baby?”

  “No,” Manon said. “At least I don’t think so. It’s just that I think there’s more Gestapo around than there were. Did I tell you I saw two of them in The Cove yesterday?”

  The Cove was a cafe about four blocks from our home, which meant it was pretty far outside the normal Gestapo perimeter.

  “And it was during the day, late morning,” she said. “Just two monkeys in their black suits, enjoying a cup of coffee, chatting and laughing away. I have to be honest, I felt like fucking throwing up.”

  I put my arm around here. “Not from the morning sickness?”

  “From the uniform sickness,” she said.

  She was right — there were more Gestapo in the city. It wasn’t an overwhelming presence, or anything approaching that, but it was growing. You would still be unlucky to be caught after curfew in our neighborhood, but it wasn’t a long shot anymore. And more men meant more investigators trying to turn more Frenchmen into sources, either through force or bribery. And more sources meant more danger for people doing the kind of work that we were doing.

  “So is that it?” I said. “Uniforms got you spooked? Because we always knew—”

  “Stop being rational.”

  “Kind of hard to stop at age 43.”

  “Try,” she said.

  “Really, what’s wrong?”

  She had no answer. She just got up and left the room. It had been kind of weird ever since my visit to Avenue Berthelot and then the meeting with the other Resistance leaders, but this was worse. I still didn’t know what to think about why Barbie had questioned me so gently, and why the vibe at the Resistance meeting was so tense. As best as I could tell, Rene had not been heard from, and that was awful, but it wasn’t as if he were the first member of the Resistance to be caught. I just didn’t know, and I didn’t know what to do about it, and now it was affecting my relationship with Manon. And, truthfully, that’s all I really had in my life, and all I wanted — that and the baby.

  I was committed to the Resistance but, truth be told, it was a distant second place. There were days when I wondered if we shouldn’t just pack up and flee to America — and if it could be accomplished with the snap of my fingers, I think it might have happened by now. That is, assuming I could have drugged Manon into submission, because she was different. She was French, and she was committed either to kicking out the Nazis or dying while trying. As with most things, it was more of an intellectual opposition by me and a visceral, emotional hatred on her part.

  But something was different now. I just didn’t know. I tried to convince myself it was the baby, but I wasn’t sure. As I was leaving, I expected a perfunctory kiss from Manon, based upon the tension in the house. Instead, I received not a kiss, but an extended hug. It might have lasted a minute. She really seemed as if she didn’t want to let me go.

  20

  I took the train to Genas and walked west from there, backtracking. It was a couple of miles. I saw the little orchard a half-hour before I reached it, sprouting out of the wheat fields that had just been prepared for planting. It took only a few seconds for me to find the tree I had climbed the last time, the one that was easiest for a 43-year-old man to shinny up.

  The telephone exchange was maybe a half-mile away, the next sprout out of the wheat fields. It was just a little concrete box, two stories tall, with a small parking lot in the back, space for maybe five cars. There was one vehicle when I began watching: a black Citroen. That was the Gestapo car, and there was the same single guard at the door.

  I reached into my pocket and took out my binoculars for a closer look. They were actually Manon’s binoculars, procured when she worked for French intelligence in Zurich. She hated the Swiss, but they were Swiss made and so perfect that even she had to concede that the Swiss were good at something. They fit in the palm of your hand but were shockingly powerful. It was how I could tell the guard was the same kid I had seen on my last recon.

  When they told me the target was going to be a telephone exchange, I sneered. Then they outlined for me how the system worked, that if you imagined the phone system as a tree, each of the exchange buildings was the place where a new branch grew out of the trunk, or out of a bigger branch.

  The ass-grabbing prick from Liberation was doing the explaining. “This one,” he said, pointing at the map, at the exchange I was now viewing through Manon’s binoculars. “This one is the base of the tree of the Lyon phone system. It’s the trunk — well, one of them. All the lines from the east come through that building and then begin to branch out on the other side.”

  It was true. You could see from the telephone poles that one set of wires entered into the building from the east side and that a half-dozen spokes of wires exited on the west side.

  “So if you knock out that building—”

  “You knock out the city,” the ass-grabber said. “Well, that’s not true. What you knock out is all telephone traffic from the east into the city, which means all telephone traffic from Germany, for instance. And the added bonus is that the telegraph lines share the same poles as the telephone lines.”

  “How long will they be out?” I said.

  “If you do it right, maybe two weeks. It won’t be a crisis but it will be a major inconvenience.”

  “So if it’s such a vital spot, why is there only one guard?” I said.

  “Either they don’t quite realize the importance, or they figure it’s far enough out of town not to be a concern, or maybe they don’t want to draw any undue attention to it. Maybe they figure that a big Gestapo presence would only bring us to it.”

  Whatever the reason, there was only the single kid guarding the building. He looked like he was about 23 years old, and beyond bored. He had brought a lunch with him in a sack, and when it was time, he just unbuttoned and pissed next to the Citroen in the little parking area. If it was like the other times, the shifts would be 12 hours long, with the change-over at 6 p.m. The last time, the night-time guard was sitting in his car by 8 p.m., helmet off.

  The telephone operators worked eight-hour shifts: 8 a.m., 4 p.m and midnight. There were six of them — one, apparently, for each of the lines that exited the building on the east side. A call would come in and be routed along one of those six lines, where another operator in another telephone exchange building in Lyon would route it again, and where a third operator in your neighborhood would direct it to the phone in your home.

  I watched through the binoculars until the 4 p.m. shift change, and it was as before — six operators out, six operators in, all women, all on foot and walking toward Br
on. Then I climbed down from my perch, laid down and closed my eyes. My cohorts would not arrive for hours, each carrying a suitcase containing enough explosive power to take down the telephone exchange. Max would have one suitcase, and another Max would be the demolitions expert. I had never met him before the single planning meeting we had the previous week.

  “Two fucking Max’s? Really?” I said.

  “It’s a great name, Pops.”

  “For now, you’re Little Max. It’s the only way I can keep it straight.”

  “Fuck you, Pops.”

  Both of the Max’s were dressed for work, but Little Max was a mess. His shirt had a memorable stain on the right front pocket, perhaps mustard. And the hem on his left pants leg had entirely succumbed to time and wear — that leg of the trousers was three inches longer than the other leg, cut roughly and unevenly and dragging a little bit beneath the heel of his boot.

  “Nice,” I said, pointing to the offending pants leg. “You’ll never get laid at this rate.”

  “You see any fucking women around here, Pops?” he said.

  The new Max seemed a little put off by our banter. I just looked at him and said, “Don’t worry, he’ll be motherfucking you, too, once he gets to know you a little better.”

  They both arrived at around 7 p.m., from different directions. The plan was simple enough. We would overtake the snoozing guard, enter the building, tell the operators to run, set the explosives on a timer, and be back in the orchard by the time it all went boom.

  The key word in that description: overtake. We were likely going to have to kill the guard, and I was the one with the pistol. It’s odd that the thought of killing him did not bother me, not for a second. I take that back — the logistics of the thing bothered me, and the concern about the noise. But the morality? There wasn’t any morality. I had undoubtedly shot someone with my rifle in the first war, although never up close. This would be a shot from right under his snout, probably. I was still hoping to knock him out and tie him up, but I really wasn’t that optimistic. And I was okay with the alternative. Before this had all begun, back before the Germans had marched into Austria in 1938, I had lived my adult life pretty much as a physical coward. I didn’t fight, and I avoided confrontation. Now, I was more than fine with the notion that I would end up shooting this kid as he dozed in the front seat of his Citroen. It was just another item on the checklist.

  When I thought back on it later, I could still see him startled, helmet off, then trying to pick up his rifle and having it impeded by the steering wheel as he attempted to lift it into aiming position. I never really saw his face as he was turned away and looking down at the rifle and the steering wheel when I arrived at the driver’s side door. I ended up needing only one shot. Check.

  The rest went as planned, except for one slight hitch. One of the operators said, “Shouldn’t you hit us or something? Make it look like we resisted?”

  I looked at the two Max’s. No one knew what to do.

  Finally I said, “No, just run. Tell the truth. We had a gun, we had bombs. If you tried to stop us, we would shoot you. If you tried to stay, you would be blown up. Always stick with the truth, and that is the truth. So get the fuck out of here.”

  “Wait, Pops,” Little Max said. “How far is the nearest house where you could call for help?”

  I looked at the operator who had become the de facto spokesperson.

  “Maybe a mile,” she said.

  Little Max said, “Shouldn’t they—”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s a good idea. All of you head for that house. Don’t run, but walk fast. It’ll take you 15 minutes that way, give or take. That’s plenty of time. Call the Gestapo from there and tell them. That’ll protect you even more if they ask questions.”

  The operators all left. I said, “All right, Max.” He had placed some of the explosives downstairs and run a wire up the steps behind him. The second and third charges, with some incendiary elements, were in the second suitcase. He placed one at the spot where the trunk line from the east entered the building, and the other on the massive console where the operators worked.

  “Timers?” he said.

  “I know we said 10 minutes but make it eight.”

  A couple of things could trip us up. One would have been a random patrol, but I had not seen one in the three nights I had been watching. A second would have been someone coming out to the facility to check why calls from the east weren’t getting through. That would take more than 10 minutes, though. So eight minutes just added a touch more safety. A determined run would get us back to the orchard in enough time.

  As it turned out, we were back with about 30 seconds to spare, panting and doubled-over. The explosion hurt your ears, even from a half-mile away. The ground shook a bit beneath our feet, beneath the trees. Then the fire followed, lighting the night. The fields glowed.

  21

  Little Max had brought a flask with him, and we all took a long pull of something that he insisted was not a homemade brew. When I made a face — it tasted like petrol filtered through a dirty sock — he said, “It’s legit, Pops. It isn’t going to blind you. Your failing eyesight is all about your fucking old age.”

  Then we were off in three separate directions. Because Little Max had been caught by the Gestapo while hiding in a field the last time, we decided that constant movement might make more sense this time. There were several small-to-medium towns in the area — Bron, Villeurbanne and Venissieux. None was more than a three-mile walk from the orchard. The plan was to travel in the dark, through fields as necessary, and then to hide within the shopping district in each of those towns, amid the trash cans in an alley or some such place. Then it would be breakfast in the first cafe that opened, followed by the short commute back into the center of Lyon — by train, or bus, or on foot. Just one in a crowd.

  It was clear to me that the most dangerous part would be the initial walk. Yes, it would be dark — but it would be the time when our proximity to the explosion was the closest. Also, anyone out walking in the middle of the night would be automatically suspicious. And I did have to dive into a gully by the side of the road when I saw some headlights in the distance, but I was lucky. The road was winding at that point, and there were a few rolling hills, and I could see the lights well before any occupants of the vehicle could possibly focus on where I was walking. The car sped by me, without incident. I wasn’t sure it was the Gestapo, but it likely was, seeing as how it was coming from Lyon, and anyway, so few people had access to petrol anymore.

  But that was it. Other than disassembling the pistol as I walked and throwing the pieces, one by one, as far as I could into the fields, one piece every five minutes or so, nothing else resembling caution or a diversion was required. Once into the towns, I thought we would be fine. I indeed hid between a couple of trash barrels behind the Marigold Cafe in Venissieux. At 7, I dusted myself off, walked around to the front door and entered. There were three men already leaning on the zinc-topped bar, having coffee and a croissant. I decided to sit, and after I checked the remnants of my ration cards, to have an egg, coffee and a roll, mostly because I hadn’t seen an egg in a store in about two months. I was almost shocked to see it on the menu.

  “Eggs?” I said to the waiter. His smile matched mine.

  “My cousin’s farm,” he said. “It is your lucky day. We receive a dozen once or twice a month. They’ll be gone in three hours. Limit is one per person.”

  I never received my egg. I had just ordered it when two Gestapo men, a uniform and a black trench coat, walked into the cafe and literally picked me up by the back of my shirt collar and hauled me out to their car, where I was cuffed to a metal bar that had been bolted to the back of the front seat. No one in the cafe even looked up from their coffee.

  Neither of my new black-clad friends said a word. Neither of them asked my name or explained the reason for my arrest. I went with my customary indignant query — “What the fuck?” — and was greeted with the back of t
he trench coat’s hand to my jaw. Apparently, they spoke French, or at least knew that much. Or maybe the back of the hand had become the standard reply in Lyon in 1943. And that was it. We drove in silence from Venissieux to Montluc, where I was dumped into the same waiting area as the last time. Only now, the guards were Gestapo. As he handed me over, the black trench coat said “Herr Killy” by way of introduction to my new keeper.

  That was beyond concerning. He knew my name without asking. He knew my name without searching me or inspecting my identification. He recognized my face and knew exactly where to look for me at the cafe. Only three people knew the escape plan, but they didn’t know which cafe I would be in, seeing as how even I didn’t know until I came upon it. It was as if the Gestapo was a fourth member of our sabotage group. But how was that possible?

  Again, it had to be one of the Max’s. They must have been caught quickly and talked. And seeing as how this was now twice, and only Little Max and I were involved with both operations, he had to be the source. Except I didn’t believe it. He was a young shithead, but I never doubted his loyalty or his commitment. I could see him talking if tortured — anybody would, probably — but he hadn’t been tortured. He had taken a punch to the head but was let go almost as quickly as I was. There was no way he was working for the Gestapo as a kind of double-agent. There was just no fucking way.