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

by Richard Wake

  “I’m all for revenge,” is what he told Max. “Really, I am. But revenge has to be smart. It has to be well thought out. It can’t just be you taking a potshot at a German soldier in a cafe.”

  “Dead is dead,” Max said. “That’s all that matters.”

  “Come on, listen to me,” Leon said. “It needs to make sense. You need to minimize the risk. You won’t be doing your father any favors by getting yourself killed or captured.”

  “You might even be hurting him,” I said.

  “How?”

  “Let’s say you kill some corporal in a bar,” I said. “Let’s say you’re careless and you get caught. Suddenly, the killer is not only known to the Germans as Max Green. The killer is also the son of Martin Green. Whatever they had planned for your father just got a whole lot worse.”

  “What are you talking about?” Max said. “What’s worse than getting put on a train and shipped to Poland or someplace and worked to death, or just killed outright?”

  He stopped. He was staring at me, his eyes as focused as the alcohol would allow. Then he turned and looked at Leon and said, “Help me here. Leon, tell him.”

  Leon just looked down at his hands, which were folded in front of him on the table. Without saying a word, I knew that he thought Max was right.

  “You still need a plan,” Leon said. “I’m telling you not to do it — certainly not now, and certainly not alone. You need to sober up and sleep on it, if nothing else. But promise me that you’re not going to do something stupid by yourself. Promise me that you’ll talk to me again before doing anything.”

  Now Max was the one looking down at his hands.

  “Promise me,” Leon said. The tone of his voice was interesting, less a loud threat than it was a quiet, hard order. A few tense seconds went by before Max looked up.

  “Okay,” he said. Then he drained his glass. Then Leon and I did the same. It seemed we were done, and then it hit me.

  “Wait — where are you going to stay?” I said.

  “I have a place,” Max said.

  “What’s her name?” Leon said.

  “No such luck,” Max said. He smiled for the first time. “But Richard is a good friend. I’ll be fine.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Leon, do you think Drancy is like the prisons on Lyon?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Can you bring packages to the prisoners — you know, like clothes or a little food?”

  Leon looked at Max, who shrugged.

  “Let me try,” I said. “I’ll stop by your flat and grab a clean shirt of your father’s and a pair of socks. I’ll just bring them. If it’s like Lyon, if they accept the package, it means the person is an inmate.”

  Leon looked at Max again.

  “I guess,” Max said.

  He had run a gamut of drunken emotions in just a few minutes — angry, vengeful, insistent, disconsolate. Now he seemed to be settling on morose. The suddenness of the change was jarring. He was completely withdrawn into himself.

  “What is it?” Leon said.

  “Do you think they came to the flat because of me?” is all he said.

  My first thought, on the Metro as we rushed to his family flat, was that yes, the Germans must have discovered that Max was in the Resistance and targeted his family. But that was the last thing Max needed to hear. I knew that Leon thought the same thing — we had talked about it for a few seconds in the alley, after the police had driven his father away — but I also knew that confirming his suspicions would crush the kid.

  So I said, “I don’t think so. They came for another family the same night — my contact gave me two names and addresses. They were already in the back of the lorry. The father was old — he wasn’t in the Resistance. I don’t think that had anything to do with it.”

  “I really don’t think so, either,” Leon said. “It was just your family’s turn, your time.”

  “I guess,” Max said. His words didn’t betray it, but his manner brightened, if only a little. As we got up to leave, I locked eyes with Leon, and he nodded. Yes, Max had bought it, even if it was more than likely bullshit.

  21

  The train out to Drancy took about a half-hour, give or take. I wasn’t really paying attention. The car was neither crowded nor empty on a Tuesday afternoon. The station, when I arrived, was beyond forgettable. Nothing about the place suggested anything other than a small town in France like a thousand other small towns.

  The only directions I could manage to obtain were from one of Leon’s friends. “Just cross to the other side of the tracks and keep walking,” is what he told me, and what I did. The package I carried added almost nothing to my burden, nothing to rival the nightmares about the place that I couldn’t shake, even after a night when those nightmares must have woken me five times. I knew I was the one who should go — I was the only non-Jew among the three of us, and that was a meaningful distinction — but the thought of what I was about to see consumed me. Then again, I might not see anything but the outside walls of a prison. So what was the worry? I mean, I had seen prison walls from both sides before.

  The walk was maybe a mile, maybe less, me and a parcel that consisted of a pair of socks and a can of carrots wrapped within a blue denim work shirt. The point wasn’t the package, but whether they would accept it.

  After crossing the tracks, a neighborhood of tidy houses opened up. They were neat and clean enough, but still beginning to wear. No one had the money for paint, or wood for new shutters, so the whole country had grown a bit tired-looking — like the people. The truth was that after more than three years of occupation by the Nazis, France looked like shit in pretty much every way.

  The houses, after a few blocks, gave way to a small commercial street, a school on one side and a small grocer on the other. There were five women in line at the grocer. I caught the eye of one of them and asked, “Drancy?” She did not respond with a word, but only with a flick of her head up the street and to the right. And then she looked down at her shoes.

  A couple of minutes later, a building complex much taller than the surroundings became visible. It was probably five or six stories; I didn’t count. Leon’s friend had told me, “That’s it, from the ass-end. You need to walk around to the far side.”

  When I got there, it was as if a quiet little place had suddenly transformed into a factory. Drancy wasn’t a prison — it looked like a massive housing block where they hadn’t finished the construction yet. It had three sides to it, and I was looking into the open fourth side, into a massive courtyard. I could see in because the wall wasn’t a wall at all, just a fence made up of barbed wire more than anything, wire strung between wooden posts. It was about 12 feet high.

  I could see guards armed with rifles — Frenchmen, it appeared. Beyond them, I could see groups of disheveled men standing around in small groups — exercise for the Jewish prisoners, I assumed. I tried to see if I could spot Max’s father, but they were too far away. Lorries rumbled by on the street separating me from the barbed wire. Most of them seemed empty.

  Off to my right, there was a small wooden building next to the barbed wire — bigger than a guard shack but smaller than a house. I figured that was where I needed to go. When I walked inside, I could tell from the chatter and the uniforms that everyone was either French or an inmate. Where exactly the German overlords had their headquarters wasn’t obvious. But I had seen this before in Lyon, where they let the French prison guards handle a lot of the guarding inside the facility, directed by German bosses. I had never seen the inmates given a function — one prisoner was typing — but there it was.

  I approached a counter and before I got out a word, the guard said, “Yes?”

  “I have a package for a prisoner,” I said.

  “We don’t accept them anymore.”

  “Anymore?”

  “New commandant, new rules,” he said. “Since maybe six months ago, I don’t know.”

  His look was dismissive at that point. I
didn’t take the hint. He said, “Take your package and go.”

  He stared me down. I stared back.

  “A name, then?” I said.

  He stared harder. Then he took a quick look around. There were two other people behind the counter, besides the typist. They were French, too, 20 feet away and chatting over an open file drawer.

  My man picked up a clipboard.

  “When?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When did your friend arrive?”

  He made it sound somehow like this was a hotel and he was a concierge doing a favor for a guest. Anyway, I told him and he riffled through some pages on the clipboard.

  “Name?” he said.

  I told him.

  He used his finger to scan down the list. When he got to the bottom, he flipped over the page and scanned again. Halfway down, he stopped and tapped the page.

  “Martin Green. Yes, he’s here.”

  I wanted more but couldn’t think of what to ask. And in the second or two while I pondered, the guard’s generosity of spirt, if you could call it that, evaporated.

  “Out,” he said. Then he hung the clipboard on a nail in the wall and walked away, over to the two other guards wasting time over at the file cabinet. All I could do was take the package and head back to the train station. This wasn’t a place where loitering was either tolerated or unnoticed — that much seemed obvious. In just the minute or so I had spent outside, on the other side of the street, at least two uniforms made eye contact with me. It didn’t seem like a very good idea to spend any more time there than was necessary.

  Still, I had accomplished what I had set out to do. Max’s father was inside. How long he would be there, though, was the more important question — and it was unanswerable. For all I knew, they might have made a run to the train station every day. As more empty lorries rumbled down the street and back to Drancy, I thought that maybe they had been full of Jews on the way out. Without more surveillance, it was impossible to know.

  And while I didn’t want to spend any more time there than necessary, I did decide to walk the length of the open side of the complex and then return to the train station by a different street. It gave me a chance to peer through the barbed wire some more, but it was useless. Even though he was inside, I never saw Max’s father among the shuffling, haggard knots of Jews in the distance.

  22

  Leon was in the flat when I got back. I tossed the shirt and the socks and the can of carrots on the table and he said, “No luck?”

  “No, he’s in there.”

  “But—”

  “They wouldn’t take the stuff, but they looked up his name for me.”

  “Well, that’s something.”

  “I guess,” is what I said. All the way back on the train, it was all I could come up with. Yes, the old man is in Drancy. But, as I repeated to Leon, “What’s the good of knowing if we can’t do anything about it?”

  “Well, at least we know.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning that I am, at this particular moment, choosing not to be as absolutely fatalistic as you are,” Leon said.

  I shrugged. Then he said, “Of course, don’t ask me again if we manage to find a bottle tonight.”

  We started talking about this and that, the whole conversation wandering between ration tickets and Metro odors and traitorous gendarmes and the shame of what the occupation had done to the stylishness of Parisian women. Leon and I were like that, the conversational connections sometimes falling somewhere between tenuous and bizarre, the whole thing short on substance and long on digression.

  For some reason, Hannah’s name came up. I didn’t think I reacted in any noticeable way, but Leon had known me for nearly 30 years at that point. Whatever poker face I might have possessed was useless with him.

  “You didn’t,” he said.

  “Didn’t what?”

  My face must have given away even more because Leon was standing up and pointing at me, repeatedly pointing and saying, “You did! You fucked her! God help us, you fucked her!”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Holy hell,” Leon said. “Holy fucking hell.”

  “It wasn’t like—”

  “You’re going to need a bodyguard.”

  “Cut it out.”

  “Nazis after you by day, Hannah after you by night.”

  “Shut up.”

  “You fucked her!” Leon said, again. “And now you will deal with the consequences.”

  I tried to explain, but Leon just shook his head. I told him how we were drunk, and coming down from the adrenaline rush after saving those four Jewish families, and how she was gone before I woke up the next morning.

  “It was just lust, just for a moment,” I said.

  “Don’t you get it? You don’t get to decide — she does. She decides if it’s lust, not you. She decides if it’s more than that, too, and not you. And it’s almost a certainty at some point that she’ll change her mind. And if you read the signals wrong, you’re doomed. You’ll be cupping your balls in fear for the rest of your life.”

  He sat back in the chair, folded his arms, and smiled to himself. I just looked at him, or at least I thought I did, until he began again as if he had been reading my mind.

  “Oh my God, you like her, don’t you?” Leon said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “But?”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  He just sat there, arms folded, and shook his head. All I could think about was cupping my balls for the rest of my life if the whole thing went sideways. But just as Leon was opening his mouth to impart some more of his relationship wisdom, there was a knock at the door — once, twice, and then an “open it, goddammit.” It was Max.

  He was out of breath, sweating, panicked, unfocused. He was so short that my first temptation whenever I saw him was always to laugh, or to make a wisecrack, but not then. He was a wreck.

  “What—”

  “I just killed someone,” Max said.

  “What the—”

  “Leon, I just fucking shot a German soldier.”

  “Where?”

  “Two blocks away, almost.”

  “Are you—”

  “No lectures, Alex. It’s done.”

  Max went on to describe what happened. He said the soldier was by himself, sitting on the fender of his car, smoking a cigarette. Max said he saw the guy for more than a block as he approached. He said the soldier removed his helmet and lit his cigarette and turned his face toward the sun.

  “He looked so relaxed, so comfortable, and my father is wherever he is—”

  “He’s in Drancy,” I said.

  “Did you see him?”

  “No, but they told me.”

  Max shook his head. “It just made me so mad, seeing him there, working on his tan,” he said. “And I got madder and madder with every step closer I got.”

  He said the soldier’s back was to him, his head back and tilted up to the warmth of the sun.

  “He never saw me,” Max said. “I never even got a good look at his face.”

  He pulled the pistol from his jacket pocket.

  “One bullet,” he said.

  He shoved the gun back into the pocket.

  “Blonde hair,” he said.

  The recitation of the events had calmed him a little. His breathing was almost normal. Leon and I just looked at each other in the way that, I imagined, parents of teenage boys had been looking at each other for all time. But this wasn’t the look of exasperation after an unauthorized detour into the family liquor cabinet, or of worry at the announcement of a teenage pregnancy. This was about a dead German on the sidewalk, less than two blocks away. The lecture we would eventually give Max would have to wait.

  “Did anyone see you?” I said.

  “Not sure.”

  “What do you mean, not sure?”

  “I’m not sure, okay?” Max said. “There was probably a second soldier inside one of the
buildings. I don’t know how quick he might have come out and seen my running.”

  “Anybody else on the street?” Leon said.

  “An old lady sweeping the sidewalk, about three buildings down from here.”

  “Oh, shit,” is what I managed to get out when we heard the pounding on a door, probably the concierge’s door. It was faint, but we had heard it before. Then there was more pounding and shouts to open up, shouts in German.

  “Goddammit, where’s the back way out of here?” Max said, fully panicked again.

  “Idiot,” Leon said. “The back door is down the same hallway as the front door, with the concierge in between the two.”

  “Then what?” Max said. His voice had suddenly raised about half an octave.

  Leon and I looked at each other and then scanned the room. There was no fire escape, so out the window made no sense, not from the fifth floor. That would have been suicide — because even if he survived the fall alive, something certainly would have been broken. Besides, if the squealing tires were what I figured, more Nazis were arriving to assist. He wouldn’t get 20 yards.

  Looking around, it seemed hopeless. Under the bed was a cliché, literally the first place they’d look. The flat didn’t even have a single closet — which, I take it back, might have been the first place. Closet, then under the bed.

  Leon kept looking around.

  “There,” he said. He pointed at the kitchen.

  “Where?” I said.

  “Under the sink.”

  There was a cabinet door beneath the sink that hid the pipes. It also contained a tiny radiator. It was flanked by three drawers on its left and an even smaller cupboard space on its right, with two shelves for pots and pans.

  The space beneath the sink would not have fit a six-year-old, by my reckoning. But, well.

  “There’s no way,” Max said.

  “We have to fucking try,” Leon said. “Here, give me the gun.”

  Leon took the pistol, and I did my best to get Max into the space. “Feet first,” I said. “Left leg on one side of the pipe, behind it, right leg on the outside.” He got the left leg behind the pipe and then I helped lift him in the rest of the way.