by Alan Furst
But he had to trust somebody, so he trusted Gilbert.
The train ride from Épinal to Belfort was nasty—cold and sweaty at once—and he vowed not to do it again. In the aisle was a great press of bodies, including German soldiers and airmen, making for two hours of sour breath, wet wool, a baby that wouldn’t shut up, vacant faces, tired eyes, and icy drafts that blew through spaces between the boards of the ancient wagon-lit. Vintage 1914, he thought. A good deal of French rolling stock had traveled east to Germany—to be refitted for the different gauge—then sent on to Wehrmacht units near Moscow, there to vanish forever.
It took them two hours to travel forty-two miles, over oft-damaged and repaired track, shunted aside for flatcars carrying artillery pieces to the Atlantic coast, unable to attain much speed because of coal adulterated by sand and gravel. Gilbert, however, turned out to be a traveling companion of great comfort, prattling away the whole time about the health of his pigs and the price of cheese and “Lucien’s” mother—supposedly Gilbert’s sister—and every sort of mindless gossip that made for soothing cover and got the journey over with as quickly as possible. For his part, Eidenbaugh grunted and nodded, went along with the game, and acted as though he were pretending to listen to his boring uncle.
At both the Épinal and Belfort stations—especially the latter, which was close to Switzerland and thus a magnet for just about anything in occupied Europe that wasn’t nailed down—la geste was much in evidence, pointedly in the business of watching. To Eidenbaugh they had the feel of provincial police inspectors, stocky and middle-aged, clumsy looking in their high-belted leather coats, and very stolid. Their eyes never stopped searching, a stare beyond rudeness that picked your life apart from subtle clues almost absurdly evident to their experienced gaze. Clearly a game but, just as clearly, a game they were good at. It scared Eidenbaugh so badly that a muscle ticked inside his cheek. When they saw something—what?—one of them would snap his fingers and beckon the individual over for a document check, holding the paper up to the white sky above the station platform. Gilbert, bless his heart, faltered not a whit, blabbering him past la geste and the usual police checkpoints with the story of his maman insisting that the roof be retiled, just at planting time, not a seed in the ground, and rain coming. But, Gilbert shrugged, one must obey the maman. What else could one do?
It was not the usual Gilbert who went to Belfort. The usual Gilbert sported a permanent gray stubble of whisker beneath a beat-up old beret, layers of shapeless sweaters, baggy wool pants, and rubber boots well mucked from the farmyard. The Belfort Gilbert, understanding without being told that he was to be no part of the business there, had shaven himself raw and produced a Sunday suit that wore its age proudly. In the street outside the station, he bade Eidenbaugh farewell and went off whistling, with a light step. Clearly, his mission in Belfort was a romantic one.
Contact procedures for ULYSSE called for a visit to the Bureau de Poste near the railroad station. Eidenbaugh stood in line, at last approached the counter attended by a woman in her fifties with two chins, blazing lipstick, and an immense nest of oily black hair. He pushed a letter across the marble counter and requested six stamps in addition. The woman barely glanced at him, weighing the letter—addressed to a certain name in a certain town—and tearing six stamps off a sheet with bureaucratic ceremony. He looked at the stamps, an occupation issue prominently featuring the new national motto that, the Germans insisted, had now replaced Libertà, egalité, fraternità—travail, famille, patrie. Work, family, and fatherland. In the corner of one stamp was a lightly penned address.
This turned out to be a boucherie chevaline—horsemeat butcher—in a working-class neighborhood an hour’s walk from the center of town. There he was waited on by a girl of nineteen or so, in hairnet and white butcher apron, nonetheless beautiful, her hands bright red from handling iced meat. “Do you have any pâté of rabbit?” he asked, naming a product never sold in such a store. She didn’t miss a beat. “You can’t buy that here,” she said. “Well,” he answered, “my wife craves it and she is pregnant.” “Ah,” she said, “you must return in twenty minutes, we might have some then.” He circled the neighborhood—it was better to keep moving; hanging about in cafés, if you weren’t local, drew too many eyes—and returned on the minute. “So,” the girl said, “perhaps we have some in the back.” He went through the door she indicated, found himself in a coldroom amid rows of hanging quarters on ceiling hooks. Ulysse appeared at the other end of the central aisle, his breath steaming in the cold.
Ulysse was in his fifties, handsome and silver-haired, clearly an aristocrat, in a finely cut gray suit with an overcoat worn around his shoulders like a cape.
“Who are you, then?” he asked. It was city French he spoke, each word shaped as though it meant something, not the fast patois of the countryside.
“Lucien.”
“Yes? And who am I?”
“Ulysse.”
“And where do I live?”
“At the Château Bretailles, overlooking the river Dordogne.”
“Would that I did,” he sighed. “Papers?”
Eidenbaugh handed them over. Ulysse spent some time thumbing through the pages. “Excellent,” he said. He handed back the papers and called out, “Very well, Albert.”
It was cleverly done. Eidenbaugh never saw “Albert.” There was some motion to one side of him that caused the red haunches to sway on their hooks, then the sound of a shutting door. He assumed there had been a gun aimed at him.
“Suspicion abounds,” Ulysse said lightly. “Forgive the surroundings,” he added, rubbing his hands against the cold, “but it does keep meetings short.”
“Not too short, one hopes,” Eidenbaugh said, nodding toward the area where the gunman had stood. He had never, to his knowledge, had a gun sighted on him, and he was faintly unsettled by it.
Ulysse smiled thinly. “Where better than a boucherie chevaline? One leaves this uncertain life with, at least, one suspicion confirmed.”
Eidenbaugh laughed. Ulysse nodded politely, very nearly a bow, acknowledging appreciation of the jest. “What will it be, then?” he asked.
“The usual. Stens, ammunition—enough for training as well as normal use—plastique, cyclonite, taconite, time pencils. A few hand grenades, perhaps.”
“How many maquis are there?”
“Five. Probably six.”
“Not enough, Lucien. You must recruit.”
“Is that safe?”
“Hardly. But you’ll take losses—everyone does. Say twelve new recruits to start. Ask your people, they’ll know whose heart beats for France. What have they right now? ”
“Rabbit guns. An old pistol. A few cans of watered gasoline.”
“Dear, dear, that won’t win the war.”
“No.”
“You shall have it, but wait for your message personnel before you move. Understood?”
“Yes.”
“And the drop zone as agreed?”
“I’ve been there. It looks good to me.”
“There will be a courier for the date. You won’t see him. Anything else?”
“Will I be in radio communication? In the future?”
“In time, Lucien, but not now. The German radio réparage is too good. They have mobile receivers that move about the countryside, and they’ll find you quicker than you think. Besides, once you are in contact with your base, they will want things, all sorts of things—you’ll find yourself counting utility poles day and night. I would suggest that you enjoy your independence while you have it.”
“Very well.”
“I am certain that they are working on the radio problem, and once you have one, it will be something dependable. And safe.”
“I see.”
“By the way, why are you limping? Part of your legend? Or have you injured yourself?”
As far as Eidenbaugh knew, Ulysse had not seen him limp. Most likely he had been watched all the way to the contact. “Broke a
toe,” he said, “when I landed.”
“Do you need a doctor?”
“No. It will heal by itself—you can’t splint a toe.”
“Well, a limp is distinctive, so try and stay off it if you can.”
“I’ll do that.”
“Good-bye, then. See you another time.”
They shook hands. At Ulysse’s indication, he used a door that opened onto an alley behind the shop.
On the way back, as he waited with Gilbert on the Belfort station platform, the two Gestapo officers made an arrest. How the fellow had gotten that far Eidenbaugh could only imagine. His clothing was torn, and blackened with railroad soot, his face was drained, white as death, and his eyes were pink from sleepless nights—he was much too obviously a fugitive on the run. They manacled his hands behind his back and he wept silently as they marched him away.
A mad lady on a bicycle! Most certainly English! All in tweeds!
He had gone down the mountain with Gilbert. Found, hidden in an alder grove, the old truck that was sometimes made to work. Then the two of them had sputtered off to Épinal to buy provisions. When they got back to Cambras, the village was buzzing with the unusual visit. Had she been looking for him? Well, no, she hadn’t said that exactly, but she had been in the house of Gilbert and had drunk many cups of tea with the old woman. Tea? There was tea in Cambras? No, the mad lady in tweeds had brought her own tea. In a box made of stiff paper. Really? Might he have a look at it? Alas, no one would expect an Américain to be interested in a miracle that petit. Where had the box got to? In the rubbish heap, perhaps? No such dishonor. Fed to Gilbert’s pigs, along with other delectables stored up in a wooden barrel in the farmyard. Oh Christ. A missed communication—in his trade one of the worst disasters imaginable. That meant an emergency trip to Belfort. He was furious with himself for missing the courier, though Ulysse had told him it would happen while he was away.
When, an hour later, he put on his gloves, he found a slip of paper stuffed down the little finger.
On November 14, a memorable night in the history of the village, the Cambras maquis drove to the drop zone, then carried dry wood on their backs for half a mile after hiding the truck well off the road. They triangulated the field with woodpiles and covered them with canvas tarps when it started to rain, a cold, icy misery that fell straight down in drops heavy as pebbles. They tried sheltering under the trees but this particular mountain meadow was surrounded by deciduous forest so that one was merely splattered by raindrops hitting the bare branches rather than nailed directly atop the head. Eidenbaugh was soaked through in minutes. At 3:30 A.M. sharp they lit off the woodpiles, then stood back with ceremony and watched them blaze and smoke in the rain. But there was no sign of an airplane and by a quarter to four their bonfires were no more than smoldering piles of wet, charred wood. They couldn’t return to Cambras, so they groped their way into the forest in search of dead branches, falling and bruising themselves in the sodden darkness. The wet branches were piled up on what remained of the bonfires and they tried to light them, using up most of their matches and swearing the blackest curses they could summon.
To no avail. At last, La Brebis came to the rescue. Producing an old piece of rubber tubing from a coat pocket, she siphoned off the gas from the truck, using a wine bottle meant for celebration but drained dry as they sought any available warmth on the mountainside. A bottle at a time, they soaked down the woodpiles while La Brebis, who had ingested a certain amount of gasoline in getting the siphon action under way, went off into the woods to be sick. At this point they heard the sound of airplane motors above them in the darkness—coming from the east! The equation for nighttime air supply operations was complex, involving fuel weight, load weight, air speed, distance, weather, hours of darkness, the phase of the moon, evasive flight paths, and fuel allowance for escape tactics in case of pursuit. Thus the bravery of the British pilot, circling above the socked-in meadow, was extraordinary. He must have used his last margin of safety looking for them and, should he encounter Luftwaffe night fighters on the return trip, was well on his way to ditching in the Channel. They never saw the plane, but they could hear the engines quite distinctly—he’d come down low to look for their signal. The gas-soaked wood woofed to life and roared against the downpour for only a few moments before the flame turned blue and danced pointlessly along the boughs, burning up the last of the fuel.
But that was enough. The Lancaster pilot must have seen the orange smudges beneath the clouds and signaled his dropmaster, thus the crates with parachutes attached were manhandled out the cargo doors and floated down through the darkness, one of them hanging up in the branches of a tree until Vigie scampered up and cut the shrouds. They loaded the crates into the truck, their excitement obscuring—until Gilbert attempted to start the engine—the fact that the precious gasoline had been burned up. The Vau brothers hiked back to Cambras. At midmorning there were schleuh patrols down on the road—someone else had heard the bomber—but it was raining too hard for the Germans to come up into the forest. Nonetheless, the maquisards waited most of the morning in ambush by the trail, having voted to defend the arms no matter the cost.
Just before noon, as the rain turned to snow, four of the Cam-bras women appeared at the edge of the field, pushing bicycles. They had traveled all morning, trading the heavy metal petrol cans back and forth, exposing two extra people to risk in order to make better time.
The entry into Cambras was triumphal. The entire population stood out in the wet snow and applauded l’Américain, les Anglaises, and themselves.
Four days later, his Limelight message was broadcast, setting the first attack on the night of November 25. Seven days! That was no time at all, but he did what he could. Which meant preparing for the operation—doing the necessary intelligence background—and training his maquis in the new equipment simultaneously. To that point, he had followed the Triangle camp teachings meticulously. His instructors and briefers had shown him that the path through danger lay in knowledge of the situation, caution, objectivity, secrecy, planning, and, above all, scrupulous attention to detail. But suddenly he was at war, so he found himself improvising, doing six things at once, making decisions quickly, in the heat of the moment. All the wrong things. But something was up, he could feel it in the air—they all could—and he was carried along in the rhythm of it. There were Lancasters overhead every night, the Épinal searchlights crisscrossed the sky, and the schleuh patrols were everywhere on the roads. Rumors reached them of stepped-up questioning in the basement of the Épinal Mairie—the town hall, now a Gestapo interrogation center.
The new guns were a matter of great excitement to the Cambras maquis. The Mark II Sten, properly a machine carbine, was the special operations weapon of the clandestine war. It was simple: a few tubular components that screwed together quickly once you filed the burrs off the threads. It was light, six pounds, essentially a skeletal steel frame carrying the most elemental bolt-and-spring firing mechanism. And it was fast, putting out rounds in a staccato spray. “Beau Dieu!” Gilbert gasped after he had riddled a tree stump with one magazine-consuming burst.
The Stens were less exciting to Eidenbaugh. It came to him, in an idle moment, that the weapon was manufactured by the same armaments industry that produced the Purdey shotgun—a masterpiece. But the reality of the war called for hundreds of thousands of simple death machines to be placed in willing hands. The OSS, in a perfection of that logic, manufactured the Liberator, a single-shot pistol with one bullet and cartoon instructions overcoming literacy and language barriers, then spread thousands of them throughout occupied Europe. It was the perfect assassination weapon, meant for the man or woman whose anger had outdistanced caution to the point where he or she would kill up close.
For Eidenbaugh, the Sten was the least prepossessing of his available tools. It was, for instance, cheaply made—costing around $12.50 to produce. The primitive firing mechanism tended to jam, thus the thirty-two-round magazine was better loaded wit
h thirty rounds of 9 mm parabellum (ball) ammunition to reduce pressure on the magazine spring. In this instance, a special filling device was to be used, but these had not been included in their arms shipment and they had to improvise.
And it was “short.” That is, the fixed sight was set for a hundred yards. Infantry war tended toward engagement at the extremity of the rifle’s efficiency—about a thousand yards, three fifths of a mile. With the Sten, however, you operated at the length of a football field and could see the enemy quite clearly. In essence, a streetfighting weapon. The implicit message was clear to Eidenbaugh: if, as guerrillas, you had the misfortune to engage the enemy on his own terms, the best you could do was to get close enough to burn him badly before he killed you—which he would, simply drawing back out of your range to give himself total advantage.
He had no intention to engage. Their target—identified in code by the courier—was the railroad yards at Bruyères, about fifteen miles from Épinal. Sablé had a cousin who worked in the roundhouse and, on the Tuesday before the attack, it was La Brebis and not the cousin’s wife who, at noontime, brought him his lunch of soup and bread. Eidenbaugh found a vantage point on a hill overlooking the yards and watched her ride in on her bicycle, napkin-covered bowl in the crook of her right arm, half a baguette balanced across the top of the bowl. The German sentry waved her through. Later, Eidenbaugh was ecstatic to learn there were fourteen locomotives in the roundhouse. He would, he knew, get them all.
It didn’t, on the night of November 25, sound like very much. A single, muffled whumpf in the roundhouse and some dirty smoke that dribbled from a broken window. That was all. But it would be three months at least before these particular locomotives went anywhere. Eidenbaugh and Vigie watched it happen from the vantage point, then retreated casually, by bicycle, back to the village.
Eidenbaugh went in alone, with the graveyard shift. They were the brave ones, for they were the ones who would suffer German suspicion after the sabotage. These interrogations would not, Eidenbaugh knew, be of the most severe category, for no occupying power can easily afford to sacrifice skilled railroad workers. The men gathered around him as they trudged into the railyard. To them he was a weapon, a weapon against those they loathed beyond words, and they protected him accordingly. He wasted no time in the roundhouse, simply formed the malleable plastique explosive into a collar around the heavy steel and wedged a time pencil into the claylike mass. Then he tied up the two roundhouse workers with heavy cord and moved them behind a wall. He snuck out the back way, through a well-used dog tunnel in the wire fence. The whole business took less than twenty minutes.
