by Alan Furst
The train rattled along, stopping at every village. He shared the first-class compartment—the German border guards tended to go easy on first-class passengers—with a Belgian couple and two French businessmen. The lawyer was riding in another car, a safety precaution. The Belgian couple started eating in Cambrai and never quite stopped. Slow and determined, unsmiling, they opened a wicker basket and worked their way from radishes to salted beef tongue, to some kind of white, waxy cheese, then to small, dried-out winter apples, demolishing a loaf of bread in the process. They didn’t talk, or look out the window. Just chewed, from Valenciennes to Mons. Casson pretended not to notice. It made him hungry, but he was used to that. When the couple got off the train, one of the businessmen, in an aside to his friend, said something about vaches, cows. But it was just bravado, Casson realized, they were hungry too.
The guards at Esschen, on the Dutch-Belgian border, were looking for somebody. They made all the passengers get out and stand by the train. The package. He made a fast decision, fumbled with his coat until everyone had left the compartment, then slid it under the seat across from his.
On the platform, the border guards were angry, Casson was shoved with a rifle. “You. Get over there.” It hurt more than it should have. There was an old Frenchman next to him, a dignified little man in a white goatee, who stood at attention, shoulders back, waiting for the Germans to let them go.
Casson could hear the guards searching the railroad car. Stomping down the aisles, slamming doors. He heard glass breaking, somebody laughed. An hour later, when they got back on, his package was where he’d left it. The train crawled north. Night fell. Casson could see the evening star. The old man, now sitting across from him, fell sound asleep, mouth wide open, breath whistling through his nose.
The prison was in Zunderdorp, across the Nordzee Canal from the main part of Amsterdam. They walked through silent streets for a long time, showed their papers to various guards, and finally to a prison official in a gray suit. They climbed an iron staircase to the top floor and were led past a tier of cells to a small, private room in the hospital.
Captain Vasilis rose from a hospital bed, embraced his lawyer, and shook Casson’s hand. He wore a robe over silk pajamas and good leather slippers. He had red-rimmed eyes set in heavy pouches, two days’ growth of gray beard on a face that ended in three chins, a voice like a rake drawn through gravel.
“Forgive us a minute,” he said to Casson. The accent was so heavy it took Casson a moment to realize the man had spoken French. The three of them sat at a small table. Vasilis and the lawyer leaned close to each other and spoke in low voices.
Casson could hear what they were saying, but it didn’t matter. “Did he go over there?” Vasilis asked.
“Not yet. His friend wasn’t ready.”
“When will it happen?”
“A week, maybe. The new figure is a little higher.”
“We don’t care.”
“No.”
“You can say something?”
“It won’t help.”
“Let it go, then.”
Eventually, Vasilis turned to him and said, “Sorry, business.”
“I understand,” Casson said. He handed over the package.
Vasilis tore the paper off and cradled the melon in both hands. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you.” He smelled the soft end, then pressed it expertly with his thumbs. “Very nice,” he said. He took a pair of glasses from the breast pocket of his bathrobe, looked at Casson for a moment, then put them away. “What are you?”
“I’m in the insurance business.”
“Ouay?” He drew the oui out to form the slang oh yeah? Then nodded in a way that meant and if my grandmother had wheels she would’ve been a cart.
“Yes, that’s what I do.”
“D’accord.” If that’s the way you want it, fine. He turned to the lawyer and said, “What time?”
“Almost noon.”
“Hey!” the captain shouted. “Van Eyck!”
The door opened, a guard peered into the room.
“Bring trays!”
“Yes, Captain,” the guard said, closing the door politely behind him.
Vasilis met Casson’s eyes and shook his head sorrowfully—you can barely imagine what this is costing me.
“Sir,” he said to Casson, “what you want?”
“Submachine guns. Six hundred of them. And ammunition.”
“Guns?” Vasilis sucked in his breath like a man who just burned his fingers. The expense!
“Yes,” Casson said. “We know.”
“Very difficult.”
Casson nodded, sympathetic.
“What for?”
Casson didn’t answer immediately—wasn’t it obvious?—but Vasilis waited. Finally he said, “Freedom.”
Vasilis sighed, the sound of a doomed man. Now he had to involve himself in difficulties. He turned to the lawyer. “You tell him what cost?”
“No.”
“I can get MAS 38 for you. French gun. You know problem?”
“No.”
“Cartridge is 7.65. You still want it?”
“We’re buying a thousand rounds per gun.”
“Yes, but after that, pfft.”
“That’s our problem.”
“A hundred and fifty American dollars for each. Ninety thousand dollars. Three million six hundred thousand in French francs—premium sixty percent if you want to pay that way. Four hundred fifty thousand Swiss. We prefer.”
“What about ammunition?”
“Six hundred thousand rounds—a box of two hundred is three American, so nine thousand dollars, forty-five thousand Swiss. Still good?”
“Yes.”
“For guns, all paid before we ship.”
“All?”
“Yes. You want figs, or shoes, it’s different.”
“All right. Agreed.”
“You sell to somebody?”
“No.”
“Four hundred ninety-five thousand Swiss. It’s made?”
“Yes. When can it be done?”
“These guns are in Syria. In the armories of the French Occupation force. We bring them in caïque—fishing boat. Two tons, a little more. You know Mediterranean?”
“Well—”
“It eat ships. And sailors. So then, we give back half.”
“All right.”
“Any chance you pay gold?”
“No.”
“Will discount.”
“It will have to be Swiss francs.”
“All right. We deliver to Marseilles, the lawyer will give you a few days’ notice. It will be at warehouse, maybe on dock. We’ll let you know.”
“Money to the lawyer?”
“Yes. When you bring?”
“A few days.”
“We start then.” He made a spitting noise toward his hand, thrust it out and Casson shook it. “Done,” Vasilis said.
Isidor Szapera didn’t really recover from being shot during the attempted robbery at Aubervilliers. He couldn’t run—he dragged a foot when he walked—and he had almost no strength at all in one hand. At night, his back ached where he’d been wounded and it was hard to sleep. They’d taken him to a home for retired railroad workers out in Saint-Denis, where a doctor had removed some of the bullet, but not all of it. When he could walk again, the party had offered to hide him with a family in the south, but he’d turned them down. “I can do something,” he’d said.
They trained him to operate a wireless telegraph—they suffered constant losses in radio operators, were always recruiting for that position. He worked hard hours, late into the night. He missed Eva Perlemère, and was angry at himself for having lost her. She haunted his dreams, sometimes he saw her undressing, sometimes he saw her face, eyes closed, as they were making love. The dreams woke him up.
Another loss, he thought, the Germans would have to pay for. He practiced on the dummy telegraph key until his hand throbbed. By late December he was ready to go to
work and they stationed him in the attic of a house in Montrouge, just outside Paris.
He was assigned a liaison girl, Sylvie. Skinny and somber, eighteen, a pharmacy student at the Sorbonne. Her job was to maintain a clandestine apartment and telephone, to accept and relay messages, to deliver wireless transmissions as they came in from Russia, to take the answers back to the W/T operator for encryption and transmission. Liaison girls tended to last a few months, not much longer.
Szapera liked Sylvie because she was all business. La Vierge, they called her when she wasn’t around, the virgin. Some of the FTP men had tried to seduce her, but she wasn’t interested. That was fine with Szapera. When Germany was in flames it would be time enough for such things to begin again.
By late December, after the Japanese attack on the USA, the wireless traffic between the Center in Kuibyshev and the Paris stations had gone wild. Everything had changed. Comrade, went one message to an FTP commander, this is no longer a twenty-year war, this is now a two-year war, and we must act accordingly. Order-of-battle information about the Wehrmacht went east—this unit in Normandy, that divisional insignia seen on a train—along with production norms from French arms factories, diplomatic gossip, intelligence gathered from photographed papers and stolen maps, a vast river of coded signals.
In return, the Kuibyshev Center kept demanding more. They sent orders, instructions, requests for clarification, questionnaires for spies, directions of all kinds: you will find out, you will watch, you will photograph, you will obtain. The radio operators could transmit safely for fifteen minutes, but the Center kept them at it for hours.
German signal detection units worked around the clock. Vans with rotating antennas cruised the streets, listening for transmissions, working up and down the scale of the wireless frequencies. The radio operators were assigned lookouts at both ends of the street, to watch for trucks. The Germans knew it, and started to use men carrying suitcases with receiving sets packed inside.
It snowed on the night of 30 December. Just after midnight, a long message came in from the Center. Reception was difficult— somewhere between Kuibyshev and Paris there was an electrical storm, the airwaves crackled and hissed, the Russian operator’s dots and dashes disappeared into sudden bursts of static. Please repeat. Szapera turned the volume on the receiver up to ten, the end of the dial, played with the tuning device—trying to find clear air on the edge of the frequency, then pressed his hands against the headphones.
At 1:20 the transmission ended. A signal indicated further transmission in fifteen minutes, change of frequency to 3.8 megacycles. Szapera rubbed his eyes, started to decode the previous message. For M20, Comrade Brasova, eight questions for the agent code-named GAZELLE.
The phone rang. Once. Sylvie looked up from her textbook, Szapera stopped writing. “Signal,” she said.
“Have a look,” Szapera said.
She went to the window, edged the blackout curtain aside. The wet snow melted as it hit the pavement. The building across from her was dark and silent. She raised the window an inch and listened. Slowly, a car drove down the street, turned the corner, and disappeared into the night.
“A car,” she said.
“What kind?”
“Some old kind of car, I don’t know which model.”
“Anything else?”
“No.”
Probably a false alarm. Szapera went back to work—after all, he was only in danger when he was transmitting. Final assignment for Brasova’s agent: Have her record the serial number stamped in the margin of the document. The next section of the transmission was for J42. Weiss, he thought. Item one: At the Lille railway freight office on the rue Cheval . . .
Again, the telephone.
“Something’s going on,” Szapera said.
“Yes.”
Szapera looked at the small coal stove in the corner, the edges of the firebox door glowed bright orange. He could start burning papers if he felt it was necessary. There was a revolver on the table beside the wireless.
“Who are the lookouts tonight?” he asked.
“There is only one, Fernand. The other is in the hospital.”
“Fernand.” Szapera didn’t know him.
“He works in the Citroën plant.”
Szapera thought for a moment, and came up with a compromise. “Take the messages now,” he said. “Decryptions and the rest of it, everything that came in tonight.”
“What about you?”
“I’m going to stay for the 1:35 transmission.”
“He signaled twice,” Sylvie said.
“Here. Take it,” Szapera said. He handed her several sheets of paper, cheap stuff with brown flecks in it, covered with tiny numbers and block letters.
Sylvie put on her wool muffler, then her coat. She’d be safe enough in the streets, Szapera thought. The curfew had been moved back for Christmas and New Year, a reward from the Germans for a compliant population.
Sylvie stood by the door, her face taut and unsmiling as always. “I think you should go,” she said.
“No. I’ll be all right.”
“The rules are that you should leave.”
“I will. Fifteen minutes, plus whatever time they take to send.” Goddamn her, he thought, she won’t go. She stared at him, her hand on the doorknob. “I’ll make some tea for us,” she said. “In my room. After we drop off the papers.”
What was this? She felt nothing for him, not that way anyhow. A ruse, he thought. He wanted to mock her, but he didn’t have it in his heart to do that, not anymore.
“Wait for me then,” he said. “At the rue Lenoir apartment, then we’ll have tea together.”
For a long moment she stood there, not wanting to leave without him. Finally she said, “All right, then,” and closed the door behind her.
He heard her walk lightly down the stairs, heard the street door open and shut, then listened at the window as her footsteps receded up the street. Good. Whatever the phone signal meant, the night’s transmissions were safe. It wasn’t the first time there had been a false alarm. He paced around the room. Now, his decoding work gone, he had nothing to do, not even anything to read. Ah, Sylvie’s biology text, left on the chair. He picked it up, thumbed through it. Look at this, he thought, she’s written her name on the title page.
Smiling grimly to himself, he tore the page out, took a rag from a nail beside the stove, opened the door and threw it in. Now she’ll be mad at me for damaging her book. But, really, she should have known better.
He walked over to the table, sat in the office chair and leaned back, putting his feet up. Only a few minutes until the last transmission of the night—his work would be complete, then he could relax. He flipped through the book, stopping now and then to look at the illustrations. A long time since he’d studied this kind of stuff. The Sea Horse, fish of the genus Hippocampus (See Fig. 18—Hippocampus hudsonius), belonging to the pipefish family, with prehensile tail and elongated snout, the head at a right angle to the body. While the habitat of the Sea Horse is known to include—
He went back to the window. Checked his watch. 1:29. Quiet out, dead in this neighborhood. Footsteps? Yes, somebody coming home. No, two people. In a hurry. The street door flew open, the knob banging hard against the wall. People, several of them, pounding up the staircase. What?
His heart fluttered, but he was already moving toward the table. He grabbed the sheaf of encryption tables and shoved them in the stove, threw the rag in after them, and kicked the door closed. Let them try to grab it barehanded.
Next, the revolver. He swept it off the table as the footsteps came around the corner of the staircase and down the hall. Could there be some perfectly good explanation? No. Could he get to the roof? No, too late. He pulled back the hammer of the revolver until it cocked. He wasn’t going alone, that was certain. And they weren’t going to have him alive. A fist pounded on the door, a voice shouted in German.
He fired the first shot, was deafened by the sound. A ragged hole, che
st-high, appeared in the door. From the landing, an indignant yelp. Streams of German, hysterical shouting. There was a whole crowd out there. He reminded himself to kneel down, fired a second time, and a third.
The return fusillade blew the door apart, two machine pistols firing on full automatic. Szapera was knocked backward, under the table. He worked himself around to shoot again, knees slipping in blood on the floorboards. He aimed the revolver, the room echoed with the shot, his ears rang. Again they fired through the door. Szapera was amazed, not that a bullet had gone through his heart, had killed him, but that he could still be conscious for the instant it took to know such a thing.
MAS MODÈLE 38
10 JANUARY, 1942 .
Casson boarded the night train to Marseilles at 8:25, at the Gare de Lyons, but they didn’t get under way until 10:40—sabotage on the track at Bourg-la-Reine, according to the conductor.
The train slowed to a crawl and switched over to the north-bound track. Casson rested his forehead against the cold window, saw twisted rails that glowed for an instant in the moonlight and a crowd of railwaymen warming their hands at a fire in an iron barrel. A few minutes later they were out in the countryside; patches of snow on the hills, the rivers under the railway bridges frozen to sheets of gray ice.
Just after four in the morning they passed Moulins, on the river Allier. It had become a border town, where the Occupied Zone met the area ruled by Vichy, a few kilometers down the river. By then only one passenger, perhaps a commercial traveler, remained in the compartment. Casson had waded over a branch of the Allier a year earlier, guided by the son of a local aristocrat. April of 1941, Citrine waiting for him in a hotel in Lyons.
The German exit Kontrol, leaving what was now called Frank-reich, was located at a small station on the northern edge of the city. It was typical, Casson thought. The Germans always seemed to choose isolated, anonymous areas for their operations—you didn’t know where you were, there was nowhere to run, whatever happened there was invisible.
But, this time, not too bad. Degrave had made sure he had all the right papers. A few German noncoms boarded the train, tired at that time of night. They glanced at his identity card, peered at the underwear and socks in his valise, then stamped his passport. He was sweating by the time they left the compartment—sometimes they arrested people for no apparent reason.
