by Richard Wake
“So what are you thinking?” Leon said.
“We take her during the transport from Montluc to Avenue Berthelot,” I said. “To me, it’s the only way.”
I told him about how it worked, about how the prisoners were chained into the back of an open lorry. I told him about how the driver and guard were both Frenchmen, not Germans, and how they always took the same long, slow, stupid route to Gestapo headquarters.
“They’re not true believers,” I said, referring to the driver and the guard. “They don’t act like they give a shit about anything, and they show no interest at all in getting the prisoners to headquarters in a hurry. They’re just working for a paycheck.”
“You sure?”
“I’ve seen the look before,” I said. “Trust me, they don’t give a fuck. Being on the truck is like being on vacation for them, just a few minutes away from their foreign bosses. And if they can go extra slow, it’s even a few more minutes than that. I’d just bribe them if I thought we could get away with it, because they are most definitely the bribable type.”
“So if you don’t bribe them?” Leon said.
“We’re going to have to shoot them,” I said. It was blunt, matter of fact, spoken without emotion. Leon didn’t respond — not with a word, or a nod, or anything.
“I’m still working out all of the details in my head,” I said. “But I have gotten that far. We’re going to have to shoot the guards.”
“You got a part for me in this?” Leon said.
“Are you sure?”
“I told you before, I’m sure.”
“Then I think I do,” I said. “I’m still thinking about a couple of different variations, but I do have a part for you, yes. And it won’t involve you shooting anybody, or even carrying a gun.”
“Can you tell me yet?”
“No, no details, not yet. I want to think it through for a while longer. I’m also going to need some help, hopefully from the Resistance. I can’t know about that until tomorrow, and until I know if they can help, I can’t really make the plan. So just be patient, okay?”
I didn’t know who I was to talk, though, because patience was my biggest problem in all of this. I wanted to go right now, the next morning, but that just wasn’t conceivable. I thought about what they might be doing to Manon, but it just couldn’t happen that fast. To go in too quickly with a half-formed plan would be suicide for everyone. Besides, the next morning would be Sunday morning, and there was no telling what kind of schedule the Gestapo kept on the Sabbath. For all I knew, the fucking monsters all went to church, then had a nice Sunday dinner and took a day of rest. The reality was that they were all probably working overtime, searching for me — but maybe not. There just wasn’t any way to know.
But how long could Manon hold out? Forget the potential for torture — with just the stress, how would it affect the pregnancy? Of course, “forget the potential for torture” was just a bunch of words. The torture was all I thought about — the bathtubs, the loppers hanging on the wall, Barbie extra nasty because his dog was dead. My mind drifted there constantly, and I had to keep dragging it back to the reality of the present. Focus, goddammit. Anyway, the worry must have been plain on my face.
“She’ll be okay for another day,” Leon said.
“I keep telling myself that, but—”
“She’s fucking tougher than you — we both know that, right?”
“Three times tougher,” I said.
“She’ll be all right. As for you, make your plan, do it fast but do it right. You’re only going to get one shot.”
Leon was more than correct there. But I still had to find a way to get the plan in motion on Monday morning.
48
Marcel didn’t open his shop on Sundays, but I knew he lived upstairs and I didn’t have a choice. So, dressed one more time as a priest, I began knocking as loudly as I could on the front door at a little after 10 a.m. A man called out from across the street.
“Shop’s closed on Sunday, Father.”
“I know. But I left a gift here that I need to pick up,” I said.
“Shouldn’t you be in church?" The man chuckled as he said it.
“The pastor gave me the early Mass,” I said. “I need to pick up the gift for my nephew’s birthday.”
“Well, he’s closed.”
“No, I’m open.” I turned and saw Marcel, standing in the open doorway, wearing a nightshirt. He waved at the guy across the street as the man walked away. Then he looked at me and said, “It’s not as if a person could hope to sleep late on Sunday.”
“Shouldn’t you be in church?” I said.
“Fuck you, Father. You coming in or not?”
He locked the door behind us. The sign in the window still said “CLOSED”. He took me to the back of the store, where he had a single gas burner, a pot and a sink. “Coffee?” he said.
“Real coffee?”
“I can’t drink the fake shit.”
“But where do you get it?”
“I have other talents besides forgery,” he said, measuring out the water and then spooning the coffee into the filter part. Just the smell when he opened the bag of coffee brought me close to orgasm. He set the pot on the ring and lit the gas.
And then Marcel looked at me and said, “A lot of people have more than one talent. Like you, apparently.”
“Don’t believe everything you read.”
“Why, isn’t it true?”
“Well, I didn’t say that.”
As the coffee brewed, I told him about what happened on Friday morning. I gave him a taste of my history with Vogl, and then explained exactly why I needed to kill him, about how it would benefit me in more than one way, eliminating Vogl and perhaps putting me back in the Resistance’s good graces.
“My friend said the English have a saying for it—”
“Killing two birds with one stone.”
“You’ve heard it?” I said. “I was really liking that saying—”
“Until you didn’t kill the first bird,” Marcel said.
“Yeah, that,” I said.
“You might have missed the Gestapo officer — what’s his name? Vogl? — but you were right about the Resistance.”
“Wait. What?”
“You were right about the Resistance,” he said. “They’re not after you anymore.”
Marcel said that he knew about the shooting before it was even in the newspaper on Friday afternoon, that someone from Liberation told him at the cafe down the street when he was getting a coffee about 10:30 in the morning. And they had a meeting on Saturday morning — yesterday morning — to talk about it.
“You know, the whole Resistance council,” he said.
“Were you there?”
“I didn’t need to be,” he said. “I have my sources. Look at this face — people just want to tell me stuff. They can’t help themselves.”
The coffee was ready, and Marcel poured us each a cup. It smelled so good that the aroma left me in something approaching a trance. But it was transitory. The news that Marcel was delivering was just too good to be distracted for long.
“They talked about you, the council did,” he said. “It wasn’t an argument, because to be honest, you didn’t have any great backers in the room. But there was a general agreement that they had been wrong to doubt you, and they said you were no longer a target.”
“My God,” I said.
“I know,” Marcel said. “If only Vogl had fucking died, your plan would have worked perfectly.”
“A big if.”
“The biggest.”
As we drank the coffee, I explained to Marcel about Manon being taken to the prison. I started to beat myself up, and he stopped me even quicker than Raymond did.
“Look, that kind of thinking gets you nowhere,” he said. “That’s the kind of thinking that leads to defeat — it leads there automatically. If you think like that, you’ll never get her back.”
“You’re right, I know. But�
�”
“No buts,” he said. “So what’s your plan?”
I sketched out the basics. He nodded but didn’t offer anything in reply.
“I could use some Resistance help,” I said.
“Manpower?”
“No, I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure I’ll have that part covered. But a gun for sure, and maybe some other stuff. You think they’ll help?”
“I’ll make them help,” he said. I just looked at him, my face asking the question that required no words.
“Look,” he said. “They all come and talk to me because they need my services. But they all come separately, and they tell me what’s happening, and they bitch a little about the other groups. I hear them out. I give them advice. They listen to me — what can I say? They’ve already listened to me about you.”
“What do you mean already?”
“When I said you didn’t have any great allies in the room, I wasn’t lying. But I’ve been advocating for you for weeks. Even before this all happened, they were starting to come around.”
“You told them about smuggling the Jews?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I mean, I lied some. I said I hadn’t seen you in weeks. But spending your own money, running those risks for Jews on the run, it is a pretty powerful example of where your heart is.”
I didn’t know what to say. It might have been the nicest thing anyone had ever said about me. Part of me wanted to admit to him how reluctant I had been, how Leon and Manon were so much more sure than I was about helping the Jews, but why? Focus, goddammit.
“Can you set up a meeting?” I said.
“When?”
“Um, now.”
“Let me get dressed,” Marcel said. I poured myself another cup of coffee and thought some more about how things finally seemed to be breaking my way. Maybe, just maybe…
Ten minutes later, Marcel was cleaned up and pointing me out the back door. “To the car,” he said.
“You have petrol? You have petrol and coffee?”
“Like I said, I’m multi-talented,” he said. “Now lie down on the floor in the back, Father, and let me cover you with a blanket.”
We drove for about 15 minutes. When we parked and Marcel told me to get up, I was looking at a part of Lyon that I was pretty sure I had never seen. There was nothing foreign or odd about it — it was just a neighborhood I didn’t recognize.
“Come on,” he said. We walked a half-block to a cafe on the corner.
“You’re sure they’re here? Did you call or anything?”
“No need. Sunday after church, they all wander over here. It’s an unofficial weekly meeting.”
“I don’t think Manon ever came to these.”
“She wasn’t invited,” he said. “This is just the heads of the big groups. They say they need to coordinate things for the upcoming week, and that it isn’t just an excuse to get out of the house and do some day drinking, but—”
“Two birds with one stone?” I said.
“Exactly.” Marcel opened the door and we walked into something called the Cafe Lafayette. We breezed through the main dining room and toward a back room whose door was closed. Marcel knocked and waited for a reply before opening the door.
49
Marcel walked in first, me behind him. There was no reaction to his entrance from the three men sitting around the big round table. Then, after a short delay, no more than a second, there was a scraping of chairs on the scarred wood floor, and a hurried rising to their feet, and a soft cacophony of mumbled good-morning-Fathers.
“And good morning to you, too,” I said. Then I slowly removed the big black hat, and then the black-rimmed eyeglasses, and watched them hesitate for a second. Then the guy from Combat said, “My God, it’s perfect.”
The guy from Liberation said, “But didn’t you wear a street sweeper’s outfit when you did it?”
“I did. But I changed into this in an alley. It’s pretty good, isn’t it? I almost feel like I’m bulletproof when I’m wearing it.”
They poured a drink for Marcel and me. We toasted to the liberation of France, which was fairly standard. They all seemed comfortable enough with my presence, but I wanted more than an unstated welcome. I wanted an apology. I knew that I needed their help, and I knew that I had already won, in the sense that I had demonstrated my loyalty and that they recognized it. But I still wanted somebody to say it.
So I drank and didn’t say a word. I took a sip and put the glass back on the table, and I just sat there. The three of them looked at Marcel, and then at each other, but nobody said anything. So I took another sip, and set the glass down again, and put on as placid and as blank a face as I could manage. I wanted to fold my arms in defiance, but I resisted. I wanted to sneer at them, to scream at them, to yell just two words at them: “Well, motherfuckers…” But I just sat there.
Marcel knew what I was waiting for. We made just the quickest bit of eye contact, and I could tell. And eventually, after about 90 very uncomfortable seconds, after a long stare in his direction from Marcel, the guy from Le Franc-Tireur cleared his throat.
“Allain, Alex, whatever, you must understand,” he said.
“Understand what?”
“You know what we were looking at.” It was the guy from Liberation. “You know how men were being captured—”
“And you know I had proved my loyalty a dozen times over.”
“You must be reasonable.” It was the guy from Combat now. They were all taking a turn. “The pressure—”
“Fuck that. You never even asked. You just shot.”
“And we were wrong,” Le Franc-Tireur said. “You deserved better.” He refilled everyone’s glass and offered a toast.
“To the future,” he said. As Marcel eyed me carefully and sternly, I replied, “To the future,” right along with the rest of them. I dodged a couple of bullets, they offered a short apology — it didn’t exactly seem equitable. But it wasn’t nothing, and it was the best I was going to do. Besides, I still needed their assistance. So, to the future.
The three of them, publishers of the three biggest Resistance newspapers, leaders of the three biggest sub-groups within the organization, wanted to hear all about how little old me managed to shoot Vogl all by myself. I gave them the full version, from my meal with Vogl in the bouchon to me walking over Pont Gallieni and looking back over my shoulder to see the Gestapo running out of Avenue Berthelot toward Vogl’s body.
“Vogl was right, we saw you in the bouchon,” said the Liberation guy. “We saw you inside, and we saw the hug on the sidewalk when you were leaving.”
“I can only imagine what you thought,” I said. No one offered a reply. To the future. Focus, goddammit.
“We have a guy in the hospital, an orderly on Vogl’s floor,” said the guy from Combat. “Unfortunately for you, he says that they’re pretty sure Vogl is going to live. And he’s not paralyzed — although it isn’t as if he’s walking around, either. But he can’t talk, and they don’t know if he’s going to be able to again. He communicates everything by writing it down.”
There was a knock at the door. When it opened, a man in an apron poked in his head and said, “Black Citroen just drove by.”
“Things have really heated up since you shot him,” said the guy from Combat.
“For me,” I said.
“For all of us, especially since they took Manon,” said the guy from Le Franc-Tireur.
“So you know?”
“We know everything,” said the Liberation guy. His delivery was deadpan. There was not the hint of a smile or of irony. If he knew what an ass he sounded like, he didn’t let on. Yeah, you know fucking everything, except for who the truly loyal people are. But I had to let that go.
“Will you help me?” I said.
“We have some ideas.,” the Liberation guy said.
“So do I.”
I started by talking in generalities. I said, “I think our best chance to get her, really our only chance, is duri
ng the transfer from Montluc to Avenue Berthelot.”
The three of them all looked at each other and nodded. It was me and them, with Marcel as an impassive observer.
“We have talked and we agree about the transfer being the best opportunity,” the guy from Combat said. But as he and the others spoke more, there was a disagreement about what each of us thought was best.
They favored an attempt to grab her right outside the gates of Montluc when the prisoners were being loaded into the lorry. It happened out in the open, right on the sidewalk, in plain sight. They didn’t even do anything special to prevent a pedestrian from walking by when the transfer was happening.
“It’s wide open,” the Le Franc-Tireur guy said. “It’s at 9 o’clock every morning. We’ve watched it from a distance, probably a dozen times in the last six months. It’s always the same, always wide open, always at 9 o’clock.”
I understood what they were saying, and I had considered it, but I didn’t like it — mostly because of the Gestapo. When the prison was run entirely by French guards, maybe — but even then, the first shot would have brought guards swarming out of the front gate, and while they might have been sleepy mercenaries, they still had guns. Now, though, the guards rushing out at the sound of the gunshot would be wearing black uniforms.
“It’s just too dangerous,” I said, and then I started to explain my plan to them. At one point, in order to show what I was talking about, I asked if they had a map of the city. The Liberation guy replied with a look that I interpreted as his do-we-have-a-fucking-map look, and then he stood up, and reached out his arms about as wide as they would go, and lifted an enormous charcoal drawing of the entrance to a Paris metro station from the wall and placed it between us on the table. A detailed street map of Lyon was on the back side.
We all stood up and I began to trace the route that the transport took between Montluc and Avenue Berthelot. They all looked at me like I was crazy.
“I’m telling you — I rode it three times and it was the exact same way all three times,” I said.
