by Richard Wake
“Careful of the pipe,” I said. “Don’t knock it loose… Bend your knees… A little more… Tight up against your crotch, but don’t knock it loose… There, yeah. Just a little more…”
Somehow, he was in — his feet flat on the floor, the pipe between his legs, his torso kind of half-sitting, his head down, his chin jammed into his chest. When he was ready, Leon handed him the pistol again.
“Shouldn’t you keep it?” Max said.
“Too dangerous,” Leon said. “If they searched us, they’d find it and arrest us on the spot. It’s better this way.”
“But—”
“If they open the cabinet and see you, start blasting,” I said. “And then we’ll figure it out from there.”
Somehow, despite the human load stuffed inside, the cabinet doors closed completely. And as it turned out, Leon had about 10 seconds to admire his handiwork before the banging on the door of the flat began, followed by the command to open it. The command was in German.
23
I opened the door and a soldier burst through — I think he was a corporal. He walked into the living room and eyed up Leon and me from the distance of a few feet. Behind him through the door was a black trench coat who said, “Well?”
“Not them,” the corporal said.
“Well, have a look,” the trench coat said. The corporal turned and stomped into the bedroom. The officer then said, “Identification?”
I handed mine over first. Alain Kerr was the name on the card, carried within a red cover. Whenever I had a choice, I went with names that had my real initials. Through the years, I had carried papers with my real name, Alex Kovacs, and a half-dozen other AK’s. There was no operational reason, except for maybe one: a forgotten laundry mark on a shirt or a pair of underwear. But it had been a long time, by then, since I had enjoyed the luxury of sending my drawers to a laundry. AK was just a habit, and maybe a superstition.
The trench coat flipped open my ID, scanned it, clapped it shut, and handed the folder back to me. The total elapsed time was three seconds, at the most. Leon was next, though, and the trench coat spent a lot longer than three seconds staring at Leon’s face before even opening his papers.
The name on Leon’s papers was Louis St. Jacques — Leon Suskind, Louis St. Jacques, same initials, same superstition.
The trench coat looked down at the identification, then up at Leon’s face, then down again at the card. His thoroughness was, to say the least, unsettling. Because while Leon’s face didn’t scream “Jew,” it didn’t not scream it, either. His complexion was on the dark side of average. His hair was black and thick and wavy. I used to joke back in Vienna, when he was known to wolf down wurstls between his pursuit of shiksas, that he was the least Jewish Jew I had ever met. But still, this was different. Like I said, you wouldn’t automatically think Leon was Jewish if you saw him, but you wouldn’t be surprised if someone said he was.
And so, back and forth went the eyes of the Gestapo officer, the ID card to Leon’s face, Leon’s face back to the ID card. He walked over to the window and looked closer at the paperwork in the better light. But this was a first-class forgery, and there was nothing to see. Little Freddy, our forger, worked only with authentic paper, stolen at great risk from wherever they stored the paper. He never told us, and we never asked, accepting his expertise and his inflated prices.
Finally, the trench coat handed the folder back to Leon. As he did it, the corporal emerged from the bedroom.
“Anything?”
“Nothing, sir.”
We all stood for a second or two, looking at each other. Then the corporal headed into the kitchen. This was either going to be it, or not. A cough, a gurgle of Max’s stomach, an involuntary movement that nudged the cabinet door — anything could give him away.
As he took the few steps into the kitchen, I was afraid to look at Leon for fear of giving away our terror. But we were getting close to needing a plan, and I didn’t know how we could communicate it. Then Leon turned, ever so subtly, and faced the back of the corporal. That told me all I needed to know. If Max was discovered, he would fire at the corporal and Leon would attempt to disarm him without getting cut down by one of Max’s shots. My job would be to jump the trench coat and try to disarm him, assuming that he was armed. At least, that’s what I took from just a quarter-turn in Leon’s profile — and that’s what I was going to go with, even if that had not been his intention.
The soldier got into the kitchen. We could see him from the living room through the open door. He looked around and then did a kind of pirouette and threw his hands in the air in disgust. He reached down, and I thought that might be it. So did Leon — he shifted his weight, ever so slightly, onto the balls of his feet. I looked at his hands, down at his sides, and they were in fists.
The corporal reached for the cabinet to the right, the one holding two shelves full of pots and pans. It really was a small space, and I wouldn’t have believed a grown human being, even a shrimp, could hide inside it if I hadn’t seen Max pretzel himself beneath the sink.
The corporal looked down and slammed the cabinet door and then kicked it for good measure, shaking the whole thing. The pots and pans clanged loudly.
“Corporal?” the trench coat asked, but it was more a command than a question.
“It’s nothing, sir,” he said. Then the soldier turned and retraced his steps back into the living room. “No one is here, sir.”
On the way out the door, the two Germans offered the same pleasantries as when they entered. That is, none. Not that Leon or I cared. It probably took five minutes for my heart to find a normal rhythm. Neither of us spoke as we just sat there, first shaking, then calming. It was only then that we remembered Max. It was harder getting him out of the hiding place than it was getting him in. Even then, he lay on the floor for a half-hour before he was able to straighten everything and walk upright.
“Well, now what?” Is what Max finally said. That was the cue for the lecture about his recklessness that Leon had obviously been practicing. It was withering, punctuated twice by the same line: “If you’re going to be a stupid, dumb kid and get yourself killed, fine. But I’ll be damned if you’re going to get me killed.”
I had not said a word. And while I agreed with everything Leon had said, the effect had been to devastate Max. He idolized Leon, after all. In some ways, it would have been better for me to have torn him down, not Leon. Then again, maybe not. Whatever — it was done, and after we waited for a couple of hours and passed around a can of green beans, it was my job was to build the kid back up.
“I think we should go,” I said.
“Who is we? And go where?” Leon said.
“We is Max and me. And I think I should take him to the other place.”
“Now? It’s after curfew.”
“I think it’s a risk worth taking,” I said. “We have to get him out of this neighborhood. And in the daylight, well, it’s not as if a midget is all that inconspicuous.”
“I’m not that short,” Max said. “I’m 5-foot-2.”
“The fuck you are,” Leon said. He wasn’t letting up.
“Night’s better,” I said.
“I’ll come with you,” Leon said.
“No — that’s just stupid. No sense adding to the risk, even if it’s manageable.”
Leon eventually agreed. I was secretly hoping that, as we covered the mile and a half to the other flat, we would come across some Germans, but on our terms. We did, too — seeing the play of the headlights from a German vehicle well before they saw us, ducking behind some trash cans in an alley and watching them drive by. Just that little maneuver raised our adrenaline and snapped Max out of his funk. It was even better that he saw the headlights before I did and led us into the alley.
He seemed almost normal when I dropped him at the flat. I couldn’t tell if Izzy was happy or not to have a roommate after almost a week of isolation, and I didn’t care. I introduced them and left within a minute, promising to
be back in a day or two. What they would talk about, or how much they would tell each other, was up to them.
24
Hannah and I slept naked, half-covered by the sheet, and not necessarily the most interesting half. My guess is that the owner of The Flip was getting his money’s worth from the holes drilled in the wall.
Once was drunk lust. Maybe twice was drunk lust, too — I didn’t know. But she was still there this time as the sun rose above the rooftops. And so was I.
“What are you thinking about?” Hannah had awakened and caught me daydreaming, gazing into space.
“Oh, nothing special,” I said. At which point, without a word, she ducked her head beneath the sheet and offered a wake-up call to me and, well. So I really wasn’t thinking about anything beyond the immediate, not anymore.
She finished, kissed me on the top of my head, pulled on her clothes, and left. “Not tomorrow, maybe the day after,” is what she said on the way out the door — not a question, not a request, just a statement of fact. I stirred again just thinking about it.
The guilt didn’t come until later, over a cup of coffee downstairs. It kind of actually tasted like coffee, to my surprise. But an even bigger surprise was when the owner said, “On the house,” accompanied by an odd smile. I couldn’t tell if it was out of gratitude for the show that I wasn’t supposed to know about, or out of sympathy for the predicament into which I had entered.
Because, yes, I had seen Hannah’s combustible side — but I also had held her as she fell asleep, and the look of trust that was on her face as she snuggled in tighter. I had heard her verbally dismember one of her Resistance comrades in the bar, a guy I didn’t know, concluding with, “Fucking coward. Your balls are smaller than mouse droppings.” But I also, as I held her, heard her wonder aloud, “When is this going to end? I mean, I don’t know if I have the strength for much longer.”
She was all of that, and I was attracted to every bit of it — and, so, the guilt. It played out in my head pretty much like it always did, in a stream-of-consciousness kind of conversation between myself and myself.
Manon would want me to be happy.
Who are you kidding?
Manon would kill me.
Manon would kill Hannah.
But she’s dead, for Christ’s sake.
But I’m not.
But I still love her, even if she is dead.
But can’t you love anybody else?
Oh, it’s just your dick talking.
It’s more than that.
Well, it’s partly your dick talking.
But just because she’s dead, why do I have to be?
But I still love her.
But I think I’m falling for Hannah.
But what would you two be without the danger?
What would you be without the alcohol?
This isn’t real.
You can’t do real in the middle of something like this.
But what if you can?
Why can’t I try?
Why can’t I just have fun for now?
Why does it need to be serious?
Why can’t I just enjoy what it is?
I could play that mental game for hours. I could take a thousand detours in the middle of the argument and end up pretty much in the same place. It had been over a year since Manon died. Yes, I still loved her. Yes, I wanted to hold in my arms something more than her memory. And I could tell my story to a hundred people and not one of them would begrudge me, not even the war widows who still wore black all the time. No one would begrudge me, except me.
The owner brought me a second cup of coffee. I thanked him, and he stood there and waited. This one was not on the house.
25
I didn’t pick up Alicia at her home for our next date, depriving her father of his glare of disapproval. She and I decided to meet at Parc des Princes, seeing as how she would be arriving straight from work. The Cup final between Nancy and Reims seemed as good a place as any for us to exchange information. We would find a seat off by ourselves and no one would pay us much mind. And if she had nothing new, well, it was a nice day and I hadn’t seen a football match in I-didn’t-remember how long.
I met her at the Exelmans Metro station and we walked the rest of the way with the crowds. It almost seemed normal. My mind wandered to the walks I took to the Rapid games in Vienna as a kid — the smells of the vendors roasting chestnuts along the way, the coarseness of what was pretty much all-male camaraderie. Almost normal, then, even with Alicia holding my hand amid the moving crowd that was 90 percent men.
It was a good crowd — I didn’t hear exactly, but I thought they announced 31,000 on the balky loudspeaker. Proving, I guess, that people were dying for diversions.
“Are these teams good?” Alicia asked me, and because I had seen a newspaper a few days earlier, I was able to sound like a proper expert when I told her that Nancy beating Bordeaux in the semifinals was considered a big upset, as was Reims over Lens. But that was pretty much all I had. These were all bastardized regional teams, with players from many clubs thrown together because the regular league was shut down. Whatever. It was football.
We were at the end of a row, and the bench was empty other than us. The rows in front of us and behind us were empty, also, which gave us a buffer of several feet in every direction. That, and the crowd noise, offered us the luxury of an easy, private conversation.
She asked about the two names she had given me in the cafe and I told her the truth, that we were too late. I thought about lying, but why? Alicia was in this thing now, and she deserved the truth. She sat quietly, just nodding, as I gave her the bare bones of what had happened to Max’s father.
“We did all we could, right?” she said.
“It’s all we can do,” I said, and she nodded some more. Sometimes you needed the bullshit platitudes to get you through the day.
We watched the game. Someone named Parmegianni scored the first goal for Nancy, from in close, in the 21st minute. The crowd erupted, and then settled down, and Alicia said, “I’m worried about something.”
“What?”
“Twice in the last week, I stumbled into conversations with a couple of the other typists — Germans. They’re nice enough to me, but if it’s something I’m not supposed to know about, they clam up quick. And they did it twice in just the last few days.”
She stopped. I didn’t say anything.
“Here’s the thing,” Alicia said. “I’m not sure what I heard, not 100 percent. But I’m fairly certain that, before they zipped up when they saw me walking up, I heard the word ‘orphanages.’ Both times, ‘orphanages.’ Does that mean anything to you?”
It really didn’t. I was pretty sure that there were orphanages for Jewish children whose parents had been taken away, but that was really all I knew. I didn’t know names or places or numbers of children, nothing like that. Which is what I told Alicia.
“Well,” she said, “I did a little more snooping.”
“Wait a minute—”
“I was careful,” she said. “Like I said, they’re nice enough to me but they don’t eat lunch with me — because the Germans get a lot more ration tickets than we do. I usually don’t eat, just go for a quick walk, and I tend to be the first one back into the office. Technically, I’m not supposed to be there by myself, but they let it slide. It’s usually only a minute or two. If I’m typing when they get back, I think they admire my work ethic. And, well, I took a little chance — just poked through a couple of stacks of paper on the other typists’ desks.”
“You’ve got to be careful—”
“I am, I am,” she said. “Most of the stuff meant nothing to me — shipping receipts, things like that. But I saw a paper that looked like the cover sheet of a report. All I saw was ‘orphanages’ and some dates — the week after next. Then I heard people coming up the steps and had to go back to work at my own desk.”
I put my arm around her, and we watched the game for a while. Poblome scored i
n the 54th minute to give Nancy their second goal. After the crowd settled again, Alicia said, “So what do you think?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s vague.”
“But frightening. I mean, children—”
“I know, I know.”
“But we have to do something.”
“I agree,” I said. “But what? Maybe they’re just going to count the kids, like a census. Maybe they’re going to consolidate them in fewer buildings. I mean, we just don’t know if it’s urgent. I mean, maybe—”
“Yeah, maybe they’re planning to bring them all sweets and new clothes,” Alicia said. She turned and stared at me like I was an idiot.
“Come on now, I’m trying to be rational here. We don’t know—”
“Yes, we do.”
“There might be a benign—”
“Benign? Those people?”
Alicia got loud enough that a guy, two rows in front, gave us a quick look over his shoulder. His smile seemed to say that he didn’t hear Alicia’s words, just her tone — and that he was enjoying my girlfriend giving me a hard time about whatever it was.
She saw the guy notice, too, and dropped to a whisper.
“But we have to find out,” she said. “You have to find out.”
We both went quiet again. Alicia was right, of course. I wanted to tell her why I was being cautious, because putting a bunch of Resistance fighters at risk for no clear reason would have been irresponsible, especially given how few of us there were. At the same time, she was right. If this was circulating in high German circles, it was almost certainly very bad. Sweets and new clothes, it was not.
There was no way I could handle it on my own — I just didn’t have the contacts. The thing to do was run it up the Resistance chain of command and see what they thought. I would start with Leon, and then we would go from there.
