The Alex Kovacs Series Box Set

by Richard Wake

  My mind raced from anecdote to anecdote, from scene to scene — but the fog and the fear were preventing me from making any connections between them and constructing a narrative that made sense. From scene to scene. On one of our little jobs a few months earlier, I’d asked Max an apparently absurd question as he removed some explosives from a box. They were perfectly safe to handle without the detonator attached, which I knew but forgot. Anyway, Max looked at me as if I were 85 years old and addled, and he said, “Don’t be a dumb fuck, Pops.” And, well, maybe I was a dumb fuck — a dumb fuck who was now in Werner Vogl’s sights.

  It took me eight hours to walk home. I sat on a park bench for an hour along the way. I nursed a cup of fake coffee in a cafe for another hour. And circles — I just walked in circles. I wouldn’t have gone home at all if the Gestapo didn’t already know the address, if they hadn’t already arrested me there and searched the place and questioned Manon. Still, I was afraid to go there. I was afraid to go anywhere.

  25

  It was about 10 p.m. when I walked in the front door. Manon was still awake, reading a newspaper. The headline was something about a great victory in Kiev. My immediate assumption was that it was bullshit, unless it wasn’t. With the newspapers, you couldn’t know anymore. I believed that the Germans had double-crossed the Russians and invaded back in 1941, but I had no idea about the rest of it. The German could all be dead in Kiev or they could be knocking on doors in Vladivostok, and there was no way to tell for sure. When we heard it, the BBC said the Germans were struggling, and I hoped it was true, but I really didn’t believe anybody about anything anymore.

  Manon leaped up from her chair and greeted me with a hug, another long and silent hug. Neither of us spoke, not a word, as she led me by the hand into the bedroom and began undoing the buttons of my shirt. When I turned around, she saw my seared buttock for the first time. She began to say something, to ask, and I said, “Later.” We made love then, me only on top to protect my ass as best as I could. When we were done, she got something to disinfect it and a bandage to cover it. It only stung for a few seconds.

  “Well,” she said, finally, after screwing the cap back on the bottle of the stinging stuff. And then I told her. I started with, “The good news is, we blew the shit out of the telephone exchange building,” and then I told her the rest, all of it.

  I went through everything — the guard I shot, the walk in the dark afterward, and the pistol that I disassembled and heaved into the fields, piece by piece. Then I told her about the cafe that I hid behind, and the eggs on the menu, and the silent arrest by the Gestapo. Then I told her about the wait at Montluc, and the lorry ride over to Avenue Berthelot, and the tour of the torture space on the fourth floor, the tour with Klaus Barbie as my guide. And then, when I told her about nearly tripping over the pants on the floor, the pants with the hem that had given way on one leg, I broke down and cried and couldn’t continue. I was crawled up in a ball on the bed and the sobbing took over my body.

  Manon had been silent throughout my recitation, silent and unable to wipe the worry from her face. She held me as my body heaved, and she said, “Alex, I’m so, so sor—”

  “But that might not be the worst of it,” I said.

  And then I told her about being set free so quickly, and about staring down Werner Vogl as he stood in that window. I had told her the Vogl story exactly once, years before, but she apparently needed no refresher course on the subject. She seemed to recognize his name right away, and the implications, because then Manon was the one who was crying, a single tear falling down her cheek.

  I leaned over and licked the tear away, attempting to break the mood and make her laugh. I succeeded for maybe a nanosecond. Her face grew even darker.

  “Is there something else?” I said. “I mean, other than what I just said? Is there something bad you’re not telling me? Is it the baby?”

  “No, no, your son or daughter is fine,” Manon said. “But you’re right.”

  “What is it?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “What? You have to tell me.”

  “I agree,” she said. And then she told me “Maurice left here maybe 10 minutes before you walked in.”

  Maurice Peter was the head of another small resistance group, like ours. Behind his back, Manon and I made fun of how half-assed their newspaper was, and we thought the name — Blue Sky — was ludicrous. But within the council of Resistance groups, Maurice was our friend, always loyal. For all we knew, he made fun of our half-assed group behind our backs, too.

  “So, what?” I said.

  “Maurice came to tell me that there was an emergency meeting of the Resistance council at 6 p.m.,” Manon said.

  “Why didn’t you go?”

  “I wasn’t invited.”

  “What does that mean?” I said. “How could you not have been invited?”

  Manon explained that Maurice was coming by to tell her as a favor. He said that the reason the meeting was called was the news of our arrests in the morning.

  “He said that you were seen being taken into Montluc,” Manon said.

  “Me, or all three of us?”

  “That wasn’t clear,” she said. “He just said ‘you,’ and I don’t know if he meant all of you. But the council is worried that the arrests are happening more frequently, and that they’re happening so quickly.”

  Her voice trailed off.

  “And?” I said.

  She paused before answering. It was as if she were screwing up her courage.

  “Just fucking say it,” I said.

  “They’re worried the Gestapo has a spy within the council. And after you were spotted leaving Avenue Berthelot, they’re becoming convinced that the spy is you. That’s why I wasn’t invited to the meeting. And that’s why Maurice was taking a big chance by telling me.”

  So there it was. What had been a hint weeks earlier was now being stated as a fact. The guy with the Alsatian accent and all of the money was now officially suspected of betraying his wife and the Resistance movement. Alex Kovacs, Allain Killy, a Czech who lived most of his life in Vienna, a salesman for the family mining business, a bank president in Zurich, a spy against the Germans, an accomplished saboteur, an unthinking fucking assassin of a German kid guarding a telephone exchange building, was really a rat. That’s what they believed.

  We laid in bed, quiet again. Manon fell asleep within minutes. I didn’t, and tossing and turning wasn’t much of an option, given my sore ass. It was difficult enough to find a comfortable position as it was, but my ass and the endless racing of my mind made it both physically and mentally impossible to sleep. After I don’t know how long, I got out of bed and went into the living room. Manon never stirred.

  26

  The truth was, I did understand why the rest of the council figured me for a spy. I was furious that they didn’t trust me, and hurt that all I had done for them was being discarded so easily, but I got it. I saw the arrests increasing and happening so quickly. I saw how I had been let go by the Gestapo not once, but twice — and with nothing more than a burn mark on my rump. It absolutely looked bad. It was a circumstantial case, but I did recognize that this was a hell of a set of circumstances.

  Everybody’s blood was up, too. The arrival of the Gestapo in town had added so much tension (the polite word in Resistance circles), so much fear (the real truth). At the beginning, we were fighting against the Vichy lunkheads and, while it wasn’t easy, the danger was more manageable. This was another level of fear entirely, and it was getting worse as more and more men in black uniforms arrived in Lyon.

  So many Resistance fighters had been picked up and questioned in the last few weeks and months. We all knew what the worst-case scenario was — that, after losing a finger or a toe, someone on our side would become a Gestapo informant in exchange for keeping the rest of his digits. We all liked to think that we would let them kill us before turning against the Resistance, that we would insist on them killing us, but none of us
really knew. The truth was, I might throw up the next time I walked into that torture chamber, the second I walked through the threshold, before anyone had even begun to run the bath water. The terror was real in the abstract, and it was even worse in the reality.

  Everyone was excited, on edge, afraid, and it would only get worse if Max or Little Max turned up dead. And there I was, walking out of Avenue Berthelot and into the sunshine. I got it. But it left me in a position where, outside of Manon, I didn’t know who I could trust. Because the council didn’t trust me, and Barbie really was just fucking with me, and then there was Vogl, staring down from that window. So, as far as trusted associates, I had Manon, and I had Leon — although, for all I knew, he had already picked up the identity cards and gotten on the train with Myrna, the little lady, and her two little kids.

  The more I thought about it, though, the more I became convinced that involving Manon and Leon any more than necessary was unfair to both of them. They might be able to help — especially Manon — but the risk/reward calculation was so far out of whack as to be incalculable. They both would give me shit for my risk/reward tendencies — more than anybody in my life, ever, they were the two who acted most on instinct and decried my caution — but I couldn’t help it. And the risks here were not only increasing, they were coming from several directions. They were coming from so many directions that I still couldn’t even get a handle on them.

  I needed time to think. I needed the safety of anonymity. Most of all, I needed to fucking calm down— and I could never calm down if I knew I was adding to the risk surrounding Manon. If I couldn’t protect her, at least I could avoid exposing her to more danger. And the best way to do that was to go away, at least for a while.

  So I grabbed a second set of clothes from the closet, careful not to wake her, and she did not stir. I stuffed the clothes into a small canvas knapsack, not much bigger than what a worker might carry to bring his lunch to a job site.

  And then I wrote this note:

  My love,

  Hopefully, I have been gone for hours as you read this. You were sleeping so peacefully, and I hope I did not disturb you. Never forget that you are sleeping for two now. No matter how desperate things become, never forget that — or how much I love you. You are my life.

  The more I have thought about it, the more it seemed important that I disappear for a while. There is so much about the current situation that I don’t understand, but it is becoming clearer and clearer that I am in danger. I get it but I don’t get it — and that’s why I am so concerned. If I understood what was going on, I could work to protect myself and to protect you. But I don’t understand, and that just heightens the risk, and I cannot allow that risk to touch you or the baby in unnecessary ways.

  So I am gone for now. Please try not to worry. Even in my current fog, I am reasonably competent at what I do for a living. A good night’s sleep or two will hopefully clear that fog, at least some of it, and then I will have a better idea how to proceed. But in the meantime, that means I need to be away from you.

  On the one hand, this might be stupid — because of how much I value your opinion and your insight. You are likely reading this and thinking I am an idiot for abandoning that insight and wisdom, and you could be right. But I hope you can see it from my perspective. I could not live with myself if my proximity to you resulted in something bad happening to you. I know what I signed up for, and I know what you signed up for, and danger was clearly part of it. But this has spiraled into something else, something beyond the control of both of us. The risks have grown significantly in the last day. I cannot expose you to those risks if I can avoid it.

  So I am gone. Please don’t try to find me — because while you’re good, you’re not that good (if I do say so myself). It’s best for now that you do not know where I am. If it pains you to be apart half as much as it pains me, this will be difficult — but it is for the best. In your heart, I hope you can see that.

  Please be reassured that this is only for a little while — maybe days, maybe weeks, hopefully not much more. But however long it is, just know that I will be back. You left me in Zurich once and I came to find you, and you should know that whatever happens, I will always come to find you.

  Make sure to burn this when you are done reading it. And also get rid of the clothes I left behind. It will make for a better story if the Gestapo does come calling — that I left nothing behind, and that you assume I’ve gone for good, and that you have no idea where. Hopefully you will start showing soon, so that if they do come to question you, well, you know.

  There is enough money in the account to last you indefinitely, and some in the box buried behind the house besides. Now burn this before you forget. And know that I will be back. Even in my current fog, I know that is a promise that I shall keep.

  A

  27

  As it was after the curfew, I hid out in one of the traboules until sunrise. It was the one at 55 Rue de Tables Claudiennes. The residents sometimes locked the doors at night, but I pushed this one and it opened. Deep in the courtyard, there was a dark corner. It was a dry night, and not very cold, and I actually managed to fall asleep for a while, my head propped up on my knapsack.

  The noise of doors slamming and men leaving for work were what woke me. Some undoubtedly saw me, sleeping in the common area beneath their homes. If it had been 1730, or 1830, or 1930, one of them would have rousted me and kicked my ass out of the traboule and onto the street because, truth be told, I did look like a bum. My clothes were not exactly my best — those were left behind in the house. I hadn’t shaved in two days. My hair was no doubt wild — and it needed to be cut besides.

  But it wasn’t 1730, or 1830, or 1930. It was 1943, and the Gestapo were running Lyon, and no one tossed me out. Several of the men just looked away after seeing me. Two offered a thumbs-up and a mouthed “vive la France.” Then a man brought me a cup of fake coffee and three or four inches of a stale-ish baguette. “Sorry, it’s all we can spare,” he said. He pointed to a nearby window sill and told me to leave the empty cup there.

  For a minute or so, I was filled with hope. But then I thought about the men who wouldn’t look me in the eye and decided that I needed to be moving, quickly, just in case. Because for all of the brave men and women of the Resistance, and all of the rest who were silently cheering us on, like the man with the coffee and the baguette, there were traitors, too. And there were those silently watching and deciding that maybe there would be a small advantage to be had by turning in the bum sleeping in their traboule.

  It was what the Germans had robbed us of when they arrived — trust. The truth was that you just didn’t know who you could trust, who you could believe. My list consisted of Manon and Leon, and that was it. For everybody else, you were always trying to calculate the angles they might be playing or the stresses they were under, or the threats. You just didn’t know. I just didn’t know.

  My goal for the morning was to find another flat. I had more than enough money to leave the advanced month’s rent that would be required. I also had the third identity card with me. Goodbye, Allain Killy. Hello, Albert Kampe. Even though that was the oldest of my fake identities, it remained pristine — mostly because I had only used it before the Gestapo came to Lyon, and also because I had never applied for a ration card with it.

  So, as I walked south, I repeated it again and again like a mantra — Albert Kampe, Albert Kampe, Albert Kampe. Three or four miles from our Croix-Rousse neighborhood was Saint-Fons. It was near Venissieux, where I had been caught in the cafe, but it was a distinct neighborhood known mostly for one thing: Jews.

  I had considered how much sense that either did or did not make. Saint-Fons was one of Lyon’s main Jewish neighborhoods, and part of me figured that it was an area where the Gestapo paid extra attention. So that was a downside. But because it was an outlying neighborhood, my concern likely was a bit overstated. And because it was a Jewish neighborhood, it probably possessed in abundance what I nee
ded most: a vacant flat.

  After the German invasion, Jews flocked to Lyon. Well, not exactly flocked. There weren’t that many Jews in the city, maybe 1,000 or 1,500 families. Even if that number doubled, it was only a tiny sliver of the population. But since the Gestapo got here, the Jews had fled further south, and the ones that didn’t leave quickly enough were being scooped up by the Gestapo in increasing numbers. That meant empty flats and increasingly desperate landlords who might not be that picky. And so it was. As I made the walk down Avenue Diderot, the “FOR RENT” signs sprouted like sunflowers.

  I walked up and down the street and picked out the shittiest building of the bunch. It was likely a brown stone building, or maybe gray stone — except that the soot on the outside was thick enough to write your name with your finger. The temptation was to think that a good sandblasting would take care of it and restore a bit of attractiveness. But the more I thought about it, the soot might have been the only thing that was holding the place together.

  I knocked at the door of the superintendent which was a few steps below street level — and let’s just say that she fit the place perfectly. He hair was a henna’d nest. Her housecoat had a magnificent stain on her left breast — or, rather, where her left breast had resided several decades previously. She grabbed a ring of keys and walked me inside.

  “I have three one-bedrooms — you want the front or the back?” she said.