The Agony of France (Alex Kovacs thriller series Book 6)

by Richard Wake

  “Why what?”

  “Why are you helping me?”

  “The rabbi,” I said.

  He looked at me, screwing up his face in a question.

  “I guess you didn’t hear everything he said.” Then I left and closed the door quietly behind me. On the stairs, I heard the distinctive click as Izzy locked himself in.

  8

  The building was in a neighborhood that wasn’t ultra-wealthy like, say, Avenue Foch, but wasn’t worn, either. It was professional class, the higher end of the scale — actually, the highest end. Office worker-types lived there — not presidents of companies or vice presidents, but the chief accountant, or the company attorney. They were the kinds who had cars but not drivers — back when there was gasoline to be had, that is, before the war. Now they took the Metro like everybody else, and the cars were parked on blocks in the garage. But they still had them, awaiting the day when it would be time again to pump the tires.

  The woman I was meeting was named Alicia Stella. We were going on a date, a little picnic. Alicia was bringing all the fixings. I was bringing myself. We had never met, but it wasn’t a completely blind date. We had been set up by the Resistance, and Alicia’s intent was to slip me some information, not her tongue. At least that was my assumption.

  When I rang at her place, Alicia bounded down the steps within seconds — no pretending to primp and making me wait. For this, I was more than glad — especially when I spied her mother and father peering out at us from behind the lace curtains on the second floor. I was somewhere between 15 and 20 years older than Alicia, and the stern look on her parents’ faces — especially her father’s — more than conveyed their disapproval. I was cleaned up and dressed neatly, but it wasn’t as if I was fooling anybody about my age. I looked like hell, just as everybody in Paris did after years of rationing and occupation.

  “What should I call you?” she said.

  “My name is Alex.”

  “But isn’t there a code name or—”

  “I’m Alex, you’re Alicia. Let’s stick with that. Sometimes the truth is easier.”

  She seemed disappointed. I tried to keep things light. On the small, or not so small, chance that she was being watched, it had to seem like a date.

  “So what have you brought?” The truth was, I was already disappointed. I had been hoping for a regulation-sized picnic hamper, but Alicia was carrying a small parcel wrapped in a red-checked napkin.

  “Half a baguette from yesterday,” she said. “Maybe a little less than half. A half-tin of sardines — also maybe a little less than half. And an apple. The whole thing there.”

  “Sounds delicious,” I said.

  “Christ.”

  “It’s supposed to be a happy date.”

  “What kind of happy date includes the two of us licking our fingers after wiping the last bit of oil out of a sardine tin?”

  “Well,” I said, “I’ve enjoyed every date I’ve ever been on that involved the licking of fingers.”

  She stopped and gave me a mock-disapproving punch on the bicep.

  “That’s it,” I said. “Remember, just in case anybody is watching.”

  “Do you think anybody is?”

  “I haven’t spotted anyone,” I said, and the truth was that I hadn’t. Either way, though, that’s what I would have told her, at least the first time.

  Alicia was a typist at the big Gestapo building on Rue des Saussaies. She was in high demand in Paris — a competent German speaker who also could type. The Nazis, fanatical about their record-keeping, never had enough typists and were willing to hire qualified French citizens for what they considered their less important work. And Alicia, with four years of German instruction in school, was more than qualified.

  We were sitting on a park bench and had, indeed, taken turns wiping out the sardine tin with our index fingers. We were down to the apple and had exhausted the normal French conversational tropes — the rationing, the weather, and then the rationing again. This first date was not for providing information from Rue des Saussaies. It was for appearances, to see if Alicia was being watched and to assess the likely risks, but I liked her immediately and wanted to understand her a little better. So I just asked her, “Why are you getting involved in this?”

  “I could ask you the same thing,” she said.

  “But I asked you first.”

  “Okay, but you’re not off the hook,” she said. “I’m Catholic. My family is comfortable. My father is willfully blind. My mother is a mouse.”

  “And yet you—”

  “We had a housekeeper when I was a little girl,” she said. “Ina.”

  “Jewish?”

  “Yes. A wonderful woman. I love my mother, but Ina was like my fun mom. She taught me songs, heard my stories about the boy down the street who I had a crush on, just… fun. Loving.” Alicia went silent.

  “Where is she now?” I said.

  “I don’t know. She left us when I was about 15. I have no idea where she is. I have no idea if she’s living or dead. I have no idea if she died of a heart attack 10 years ago or if she’s in a camp someplace. But every night when I go to bed, she’s the last thing I think of. And every morning when I wake up, she’s the first thing I think of. And, well, she’s the reason I’m here with you.”

  We just sat there for a while. I looked around, trying to spot a German tail of some sort. But there was no one — no adult, anyway. There was only a pack of five-year-old boys playing soldier. Except in Paris, the only soldiers they had ever seen were Germans, and so they lined up and marched with a goose-step, and the boy who was playing the leader kept barking, “Schnell! Schnell!”

  “My God,” Alicia said. She started to stand up and seemed intent on walking toward the boys and stopping them. I held her down.

  “Let it go,” I said.

  “But—”

  “No buts. First of all, you don’t want to be drawing attention to yourself. Just because I can’t see someone watching us doesn’t mean we aren’t being watched. Second, it’s really not the boys’ fault. It’s what they see on the street every day. It’s all they know.”

  “But—”

  “No buts.” What followed was a long silence that Alicia eventually broke with, “And you?”

  “And me what?”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “It’s more complicated,” I said. “And I’m really not in a position to tell you.”

  “Why not?”

  The reason should have been obvious. If the Germans caught on to what we were doing and questioned her, the less she knew about me, the better — for me. I could live with her knowing my real first name because, well, I had three different sets of identity cards. But the less said about my past, the better.

  The silence hung there, and it finally dawned on her.

  “I can tell you one thing: I’m not Jewish,” I said.

  “I figured.”

  “It’s why they picked me after you made the approach. Your boyfriend has to look Christian. As my Resistance leader said, ‘We finally found a use for the goyim.’”

  Alicia laughed, and then her voice cracked. “Ina was the only other person I ever heard use the word ‘goyim,’” she said.

  We were quiet on the walk back. I tried to encourage a few laughs, for appearances’ sake, and I managed to get one when two young girls clip-clopped past us in their wooden-soled shoes and I said, “Look at the one on the left go. I think she’s even-money in the third race at Longchamp.”

  That passed for funny in Paris in 1943. Honestly, it did. Anyway, we were back at Alicia’s house soon enough. Just before we arrived, I decided to offer her a bit of tradecraft — to make her feel a part of the game, but also just in case. None of us liked to admit it, but the excitement of the game, the rush of adrenaline it provided, was a part of the attraction for people like us. So there was that, and there was the possibility she might need to contact me in an emergency.

  It was a simple enough
bit of the business. Two blocks from her house, there was a small public fountain, dry like all the rest of the fountains in Paris. I gave her a piece of white chalk. An X chalked onto the base would alert me that she needed an emergency meeting. There was a small cafe down the street, The Fawn. Our meeting would be there between 5 and 6 p.m. If I didn’t show up, it would be the next night between 5 and 6, or the night after that.

  She pocketed the chalk. When I made her repeat the details back to me, she tried to look stern but could not hide the hint of a smile.

  At her door, I said, “If I don’t see a chalk mark, our next date is Saturday.” Then I leaned over for a chaste peck on the cheek. As I pulled away from her, the disapproving stare of her father was clear again from behind the lace curtains on the second floor.

  It was when I turned and began to walk down the street that I finally saw the tail. It would have been disappointing, honestly, if the Germans hadn’t been watching her. It proved that there was potential value there.

  Anyway, I lost my watcher when I made my first change of trains at Chatelet. Even so, I made one more unnecessary change, just to be sure.

  9

  Leon recognized the building as soon as we made the right turn onto Rue du Morvan. “That one,” he said, pointing to a filthy stone apartment house in a block full of them. He smiled when he said it. It seemed as if almost none of the private houses in the city had been sandblasted or painted or anything since the Germans arrived. It was to the point where I wondered if the crud was the only thing holding them together.

  This was the flat that Max Green had talked about in the cellar, his family’s flat, the place where they held the going-away party for the couple Leon had shepherded to the Spanish border. He actually had a funny story about that one, a story he wouldn’t be telling Max. Because, honestly, what kid needed to know about his aunt demanding sex from her husband after two days of hiding in a dirty cellar, including this dialogue:

  “Come on, Sid.”

  “Sadie, it’s filthy. Look at how dirty it is. Look at my hand.”

  “Well, you do have that fantasy—”

  “What are you—”

  “And once I pull down my underpants and get on the floor, I will have that black ass you’ve always dreamed of.”

  Leon told me the story a few months later. He said, “I obviously prayed for them all, but I prayed for Sadie and Sid more than the rest. I can still hear him laughing from where I was sleeping on the other side of the cellar.”

  “Prayed? Since when?”

  “Nazis will do that to you,” he said. “What do they say, that God works in mysterious ways?”

  Max had invited us to dinner with his family. He said that his father had come into a leg of lamb, and that Leon and I were being asked to share it.

  “The old man wants to get a look at you both,” Max said. “Or, as he put it, ‘I want to see if they look any different than they did through my rifle scope in ’17.’”

  The guy sounded like our kind of asshole, which might be fun or might not be. But, leg of lamb made any social unpleasantness worth the risk. When we got there, he poured us each a glass of Bordeaux and told the story of the evening’s main course. His wife, Berta, said hello but retreated immediately to the kitchen, shaking her head as her husband started.

  “My crowning achievement,” is how he began the story. His name was Martin, and he began every third or fourth sentence with, “I said to myself, ‘Now, Marty…’” He was a tailor by trade, back when there was such a trade, when people had money for suits. I could just imagine him in a tiny shop, with a tape measure around his neck, double-checking inseams and telling now-Marty stories and making his customers laugh.

  This one began with a friend who came by the shop. Moishe was a houseman for an old woman — part butler, part gardener, part waiter, part everything. One of his tasks was dressing the old lady’s poodle in a blue velvet cape and walking the dog.

  “So Moishe sits on a bench in the park for a cigarette, and the dog gets away and gets into a tussle with a bigger dog,” Martin said. “By the time Moishe got them apart, there was no damage to the poodle, but the blue velvet cape was shredded. That’s when he came to me in a panic. He says, ‘You’ve to help me with this.’ I hold up what’s left of the cape and say, ‘But I can’t duplicate this mess. I don’t know what it looked like to start with.’ And he says, ‘The old lady’s eyesight is shot. She can see blue, and she can feel the velvet, but that’s it. So just do your best.’”

  As it turned out, Martin said he had a scrap of velvet left over in his pile of scraps, and he fashioned a cape that would fit the poodle. When he brought it over to the house, Moishe was both ecstatic and embarrassed.

  Martin said, “He tells me he has no money to pay me for it. So I look around the little library we’re in, and my eye settles on a little porcelain box on a shelf, like something you might put earrings in. And I say, ‘Now, Moishe, is her eyesight bad enough that she would miss this?’ He gave it to me in a second. Then I thought to myself, ‘Now, Marty…’”

  And so it began. He took the porcelain box to a pawnshop. The guy liked it. Martin looked in the glass case and asked about a wristwatch. The guy in the shop pulled it out of the case and said, ‘It’s a nice piece but it doesn’t run. Nobody wants a watch that doesn’t run.’ Martin took it and then brought it to a jeweler on Rue de Sevigne. He took off the back of the watch and said, ‘This is a beauty. Won’t be too hard to fix.’ Martin asked if he wanted to trade something for it, like a ring. “He brought out a tray of really bad rings. I picked the least bad — it was a tiny ruby — and said, ‘Can you at least clean it up?’”

  At which point, Martin took the ring to the butcher shop, to his oldest friend in the world, Carl. Martin knew full well that Carl’s son, Gerald, wanted to ask his girl to marry him but couldn’t afford a ring. And so the deal was made: one tiny ruby ring in exchange for two large legs of lamb — one immediately and one a month later.

  “I think you could have done better — maybe gotten him to throw in a rump roast,” Max said, winding up his father.

  Martin looked at Leon and me and shook his head.

  “Children,” he said. “They know nothing of the world. Two legs of lamb for a scrap of blue velvet not much bigger than the size of a dinner plate is the greatest deal of all time.”

  We all toasted Martin’s negotiating skill and ate until we were full, something that almost never happened anymore. We told our funniest, cleanest war stories — Martin’s wife and daughter were at the table — and then, when the women left to clean up, Leon told one of his less-clean favorites, the one that ended with him naked at the side of an Italian farmhouse, hiding in the bushes then being forced to buy back his clothes, piece by piece, from the teenage son of Leon’s middle-aged paramour, who was at that moment in the house dealing with the husband who had deserted after Caporetto and arrived unexpectedly at home.

  Max laughed the hardest. It was so obvious that he wanted to be Leon when he grew up. Then again, he was already older than Leon was that day when he was caught naked outside the Italian farmhouse.

  10

  Eventually, we got to the nub of the thing. The dinner, and our invitation, wasn’t just about good food and good fellowship. Martin didn’t like that his son was mixed up with the Resistance and he wanted to make his arguments to somebody other than Max.

  I understood and so did Leon because the danger involved with being a Resistance fighter was almost beyond calculation. The lifespan of radio operators could be measured in weeks. Their couriers, months. Leon and I beat the odds every day we drew a breath, and we knew it. Only the fact that we had been in so many places — Lyon, Limoges, the hills in the south, Paris — had likely saved us. “Mobility equals longevity,” is what Leon liked to say, especially when he was drunk. Of course, we had no idea when or if we would be able to go someplace else, to leave Paris. We settled for moving around within the city — and we drank everything we could
get our hands on as a mental anesthetic.

  So we got it. We really did understand. If we had children, we would likely feel the same way — maybe proud that our son had chosen to be involved in the fight, but even more terrified by the prospects. During one of his stream-of-consciousness rants, a tear began to roll down his cheek. Martin wiped it quickly, almost defiantly, and Max jumped into the pause.

  “But Pop…”

  “No. You don’t talk.”

  “It’s my life—”

  “And you will live it quietly for the next few minutes.”

  At which point, Max sank back in his chair. He would give his father this much, this bit of respect, at least for a few seconds. If Martin wanted to unburden himself to two people closer to his age, two people in a unique position to understand, Max seemed resigned to the fact. It wasn’t as if it was going to change a thing about what he was choosing to do — that much was clear and had been all along.

  But here was the thing about Martin’s objections. He was frightened for his son, and that was plain. But he also was dismissive of the Resistance.

  “Anarchists,” Martin said. He didn’t say the word as much as he spit it.

  “Pop—”

  “Go ahead and try to deny it. You can’t. You have no military discipline. You just cause trouble — and you get good French people killed in retaliation. And to what end?”

  Leon and I looked at each other and, without a word, concluded that silence was our best option. We had had the same argument more than once in the previous year. It was complicated, though. Leon was all for joining up with the Communists, but more reluctant about the random bombings of German targets because of the reprisals. I was more in favor of taking whatever action was possible against the Germans but less comfortable with the Commies.

  The truth was, depending upon the most recent circumstances and emotions — and the level of alcohol consumption — both of us had argued pretty much both sides of the proposition at different times. The whole thing was exhausting and the self-knowledge of our inconsistent positions was embarrassing. We just went day to day with the thing, moment to moment — and this moment called for silence. So it was Max who again jumped in.