Roll the Credits: A Hector Lassiter novel

by Craig McDonald

  ***

  Gertrude and Alice were settling into their new home. Rich friends were sworn to protect the women from the Nazis here in the so-called Free Zone. The village mayor said, “Though we’re not occupied, I am still under strict orders to provide the names of all those living here to the Germans. Regardless of the risk, I will of course omit Miss Stein’s and Miss Toklas’ names from that list, Monsieur Lassiter.”

  I slapped his arm and said, “You’re a good man, brother. Maybe the only politician on God’s crazy earth I admire.” I grinned, added, “I mean, besides Churchill.”

  He said, “Not your own president?”

  FDR? I had longstanding reservations about that one.

  I looked around: Gertrude and Alice’s new home was on the banks of the River Rhône, near the foothills of the Alps. It was a good and pretty place for a couple of famous female Jewish American lesbians to hide from Hitler’s minions until we kicked Adolph’s ass.

  The mayor said, “You’ll stay the night, yes? I’m a fan of your novels. And of the films. We’ll have some good wine and you can tell me of your books, and how the battle truly goes. You can tell me when your countrymen will at last join the war. You can—”

  I shook my head. “Glad you like the books. The movies are for money. Sorry, but I’m kind of AWOL from my reporting duties smuggling those ladies here, Sir. Have a lot of ground to cover, fast. Dreadfully late getting to Lyon.” It wasn’t quite a lie.

  The mayor smiled. “Another time, then?”

  “Count on it, buddy,” I said. He saw to a refueling of my jalopy. They finished up that task as the rain returned. As I settled in for the long wet ride to Lyon, a middle-age woman handed me a wicker picnic basket.

  “Provisions, for your trip back.” I was surprised to see Gertrude and Alice behind her.

  Leaning hard on her cane, Gertrude said, “Again, much gratitude for bringing us, my star.”

  I waved that away. “De rien,” I said. “Just keep a low-profile and stay well until we hand Hitler his head, right ladies?”

  Alice surprised me by passing me a bottle of red wine. She said, “Please try not to get yourself killed in this war, Hector. It seems to again be a time for men like you.”

  When we first met in Paris after the Great War, when I was just a kid struggling to make a name as a writer, I still had a bum leg from the German-inflicted wound that nearly killed me.

  I squeezed Alice’s hand and hefted the bottle. “I’m going to save this, darlin’. We’ll toast the death of Hitler and Germany’s defeat with this very bottle of vino.”

  After stowing the wine in my picnic basket, I turned over the engine. The mayor said, “I’m more than surprised you weren’t assigned a driver.”

  Gertrude and Alice exchanged uneasy looks. I said, “Men are in too-short supply to be hauling around American war correspondents. And I lived in France for several years after the Great War, so I know my way around your country well enough.”

  Smiling at Gertrude, I said, “Take care, Miss Stein,” then tore off down the road. As I left, I shoved an arm out the window and held my hand up in the V for Victory sign; cheers at my back.

  I’d lied to Gertrude. For me, these were very good times, heady and satisfying.

  At the edge of the village I slammed on the brakes, sliding a bit in the mud. Standing there in the middle of the road, straddling water-filled tire tracks, was a half-starved black Labrador Retriever.

  I swung out and walked slowly toward the dog, one hand out. Tail down, the stray smelled then licked my hand. Fella had no collar and looked as though he had gone many days without food. Still some puppy in him: he hadn’t yet grown into his own big feet.

  As I headed back to the Juvaquatre, the dog followed on unsteady legs. I rooted around the basket of food and stripped a sandwich of slices of ham and fed morsels to the dog. He weakly wagged his tail while he wolfed it down. When he was done, I swung up into the Renault. “You get clear now, old pal,” I told him.

  The Lab tried to jump into the car with me through the window, but his back legs were too weak to do the job. His front legs, now hooked over the Renault’s open passenger-side window, began to fail him. He sat down and scratched weakly at the door with a clumsy front paw, whimpering.

  Behind us, some trucks were headed our way. I thought about it, then reached over and opened the passenger-side door. I grabbed the dog by the scruff and hauled him up into the Juvaquatre with me. He collapsed onto the floorboards on the passenger’s side and looked up at me with grateful dark eyes, panting tiredly.

  I grabbed one of the tarps Gertrude had wrapped herself in and swaddled the dog in that to keep him warm and dry from the now harder rain. We tore off down the sodden road as the impatient truck drivers on our tail began to lay on their horns.

  ***

  Close by Lyon, German troop trucks began to ride my bumper. The Kraut soldiers sounded drunk, boisterously singing “Drei Lilien, Drei Lilien” and cursing at me.

  I scratched the black dog behind his ears and ground my teeth.

  I thought to myself, If I only had a machine gun and enough ammo, I’d fix all this world’s sorry present troubles.

  BOOK ONE

  The Girl in the Wall

  November 1942

  1

  A drafty apartment in Lyon. We were seated around a table, now littered with empty bottles, well-worn maps and precious, damning notes bound for the stingy fire. Pancho, my adopted black Labrador, was curled up at my feet, the only part of me that was warm. From some adjacent apartment, I could just make out a scratchy recording of “I’ll Be Seeing You.”

  Jean Moulin, resistance organizer supreme, a man I knew and trusted from a brief brush during the Spanish Civil War, said, “This new man the Nazis have put here, this Klaus Barbie, he is ruthless. A bloody fiend.”

  I ground out a Pall Mall’s stub. “So we’ve heard. Hope to meet that hombre one day. Just once would do.”

  “Worse still might be his right hand,” Moulin said. “His name is Werner Höttl.”

  That got my attention. Him again. This time, I’d been sent to spy on Höttl. But it was starting to turn into something more like a duel. “I know that sorry one by name,” I said, telling half-truths. “Or at least I knew another who went by that name. I met him after the Great War. Höttl was around Paris in the early 1920s, too. He was starting to do some stuff around the German cinema industry at the time.”

  “Sadists, both of them,” Moulin said. “Butchers of the worst stripe.”

  Hefting my notepad, I nodded, said, “Anyway, I will carry your requests back to Wild Bill. We’ll see what old Bill Donovan can do about meeting your needs here. Supplies really aren’t the issue. It’s the delivery here, you know?”

  “Always the problem.” Smiling ruefully, Moulin freshened our cups of wine and said, “For a crime novelist turned war correspondent, you’re remarkably connected, Monsieur Lassiter.”

  I smiled and ran fingers through my dark hair, now graying at the temples. “At forty-two, they tell me I’m somehow too over-the-hill to be simple infantry. So I keep a hand in where I can.” I grinned and said, “I look forward to dancing on these Nazi monsters’ graves. Soon.”

  Moulin smiled and rose. “As do I. Now I must go.” We shook hands and I watched him leave. He had to be the most hard-hunted man in France. Couldn’t envy him that distinction. I poured myself another drink, again scratching Pancho between the ears with my free hand.

  We were left alone with our host, a carpenter named André Babinot, and his wife, Babette, who was bustling around in the kitchen.

  André and I chatted for a time, more on the war effort, the deprivations of his people. Fantasy stuff we’d like to do if we had a dull knife and Hitler to ourselves.

  Pancho sat up suddenly, cocking his head on side. He began to scent the air.

  Wetting his lips, André said, a bit anxiously, I thought, “Perhaps your dog needs to go out, Mr. Lassiter?” A low growl now.r />
  Frowning, I said, “No, I know the signs and these aren’t those.”

  Pancho suddenly bolted, sliding nose-first under a battered sideboard. He began to whelp and scratch furiously at the baseboards there.

  I smiled and said, “Sorry, I’ll stop him before he scars the walls.”

  My host shifted his feet, a tad nervously it seemed to me. He said quickly, “It is nothing. Probably just a mouse. Pay no attention, please.”

  Mice? Maybe. Or maybe not. Looking closer at the baseboards now, I saw seams. I tapped on the wall. Sucker gave off a hollow sound.

  I said, “What, or who, have you got hidden behind this wall, mon ami?”

  André had a Luger pointed at my chest now. He looked heartsick. “Leave, please Mr. Lassiter. This is nothing to concern yourself with, I swear to you. Let it be, my friend, please. I beg you do that.”

  The Jews in occupied France had recently been ordered to wear yellow stars to identify them. That was an ominous sign. Worse, some of them had begun disappearing a time back, or so I had heard tell. I played a hunch.

  I said, “Easy there, André. We’re fighting on the same side, remember? You’ve got someone hidden behind that wall. Someone Jewish? If that’s so, maybe I can help.”

  He sighed and lowered his gun. “It’s a lone child,” he said. “A Jewish girl of nine my wife and I took in.” He said softly, “I think my neighbors begin to suspect. And they’re collaborators, spies for the Germans.”

  Not good news, that. Not for André, and not for the little girl hiding behind the wall.

  I pointed at the false wall and said, “I’ll help you move this furniture. I want you to introduce me to this child, brother.”

  2

  The dark-haired, dark-eyed girl’s name was Myriam Dreyfus. Dressed in a careworn tweed skirt and handmade sweater, she was skittish around me, choosing instead to focus her attention on Pancho, who sat with his paws across her lap, frequently licking her cheek as she petted him.

  We had crawled through the small hole in the wall to visit the girl in her cramped hiding place. Mrs. Babinot passed some coffee cups and a flask through the hole, then crawled in to join us.

  André said softly in English, “Myriam was in the orphanage until a few weeks ago. Her parents were said to have been murdered by drunken Nazis in 1940. Killed for their race. This man, this monster Barbie, raided the orphanage where Myriam was kept. I was there making new slats for the children’s beds. Myriam stayed behind, watching me. The other children were playing out in the yard when Barbie and his man, this creature called Höttl, came and rounded up the children. Although I was terrified, afraid for myself, I’ll confess, I hid Myriam under a bed and then smuggled her out of the orphanage after the others had been taken away.”

  He pressed his hand to his forehead. “You can’t imagine how terrible it was, the crying. The screams. Nazis everywhere, questioning me as to whether I had seen this child. I was sitting on the bed, trying to brazen it out, knowing the child was hiding underneath the bed, hiding there because I had told her to. All the time I was thinking, If they find her, and she tells them I helped her hide? God forgive me for thinking that.”

  “It was a very dangerous thing you did,” I said. “But you’re a brave man. Don’t beat yourself up over things that never happened. How’d you get her out of that place?”

  “I had brought some tarps to spread on the floors, to protect the tiles,” André said. “I hid a couple of the tarps in a storage closet, then rolled the child in the two remaining tarps. I carried the bundle out, slung over my shoulder.”

  He shook his head, squeezing the bridge of his nose. “One of the Nazis stopped me, making small talk. He insisted I smoke with him. I nearly suffocated the girl loitering with that soldier. All the time I was smoking I thought, ‘If she moves, just a little? If she should sneeze, or cough?’”

  I squeezed his arm and nodded, whispered, “You’re a brave man, like I said. These other children, they were taken where?”

  His wife shot André a warning look. He said, “I can’t say in front of the girl. But I’ve heard terrible rumors. I believe they’re beyond help. Barbie, he has an evil bloodlust. And Höttl’? He is even worse.”

  “I get the drift,” I said through gritted teeth. I wanted to kill Klaus Barbie, wanted to renew my acquaintance with Werner Höttl and give him a little of his own, regardless of my current orders to the contrary.

  All bloody things in their time, I promised myself. For now, I was at least in a position to maybe save this child, and I surely meant to do that.

  “These neighbors of yours,” I said, “you think they’re a real threat to little Myriam?”

  “Very much,” Babette Babinot said. “They’d turn us over, and the girl, to curry favor with the Nazis. I know it’s coming, and any moment now.”

  “Well, then, I should take the girl away from here, vite. Tonight. I’ll get this child to safe territory. Try and get her to England and sent on from there to… hell, somewhere better. Some place safe at least. Maybe back to the States if I have to go that far to protect her from the Nazis’ reach.”

  Mrs. Babinot squeezed my hands hard, her eyes shining and wet. Her chin was trembling. “You can really do this? Really? Please don’t lie about this.”

  “I can surely try.” That didn’t seem enough for the woman. I added, “I mean to do this, and when I set my mind to something, nothing stops me.” I squeezed her hand and said, “Does Myriam have surviving family anywhere? I mean somewhere outside German occupation?”

  The woman said, “None she knows of. How will you do this? The Germans are hunting for her, even now. They counted beds after André spirited her away. They checked registries at the orphanage. They know one child escaped them. Höttl seems committed to finding her. There have been stories in the papers about his search.”

  This was just getting hairier and hairier. Any second it seemed to me, the girl could be handed over. And these turncoat neighbors? There had to be a reckoning.

  And why the obsession with this particular child? Could it be that famous surname of hers? It was a theory, anyway. And either way, Höttl must truly be one nasty piece of work, worse even than I knew.

  “There’s a new organization my side has formed,” I said carefully.

  That was the Office of Strategic Services—but I couldn’t tell them that. Instead I said, “Some of its members are filtering here into France. Good and smart people.”

  I was a kind of adjunct OSS operative, though I couldn’t risk telling my hosts that, either. Not them, nor all the other war correspondents who’d lately begun to give me the eye, actually making trouble for me with the brass with a whispering campaign that I was playing soldier and should be stripped of my reporting credentials and booted back home. Maybe even put in jail for violating the Geneva Convention.

  I said, “I’ll have some travel documents prepared. Some false identification made for Myriam. The two of us will travel as father and daughter. I’m going to run get you some hair dye, Mademoiselle. I want you to dye the girl’s hair blond. You know—to help the cause.”

  It hung unsaid between us: Make the little girl look less Jewish. Do it muy pronto. Babette said, “Of course. I can do this with no real effort.”

  “I should leave now. There’s suddenly much to do.” I scooted over closer to Myriam, said softly to the girl in French, “Honey, if you had to have another name for a time, to pretend at being someone else, what name would you pick for yourself?”

  Avoiding my eyes, focusing instead on Pancho, she said in a little girl’s contemplative voice, “Maybe… Sara.”

  Something closer to her own name would be better, something easier for her to remember. I said quietly, “How about another name?”

  “Marie.”

  “Perfect. Can you watch Pancho for me for a time, Marie?”

  She giggled as I called her by this new name. “Oui.”

  I shook her foot. “Thanks, darlin’.”


  “Prepare her, best you can,” I said softly to André and his wife. “Assure her the dog will be coming along for the trip, because he is. That alone might be enough to make her willing to leave here with me.”

  “It’s very dangerous,” André’s wife said to me. “A terrible risk you run for yourself. I don’t think you begin to grasp what a devil this man Barbie is. If you succeed, and he ever finds out you thwarted his will, then you will—”

  “I know something of his minion, Werner Höttl, so I can make a wild guess what the boss man might try and do,” I said. “Simple fact is, I’m not having that child fall into those butchers’ hands. That’s decided, and so the rest is of no consequence, just rearview-mirror stuff. We simply drive on.”

  I waved a hand and grinned like it was all nothing.

  Sure.

  I said, “I whipped Werner Höttl’s ass in one war. Expect I can do that thing again.”

  Of course, I had nothing to make me think any of that was true, but I sounded convincing enough for the scared couple, I reckoned.

  André smiled uncertainly and shook his head. “You crazy Americans…”

  “Huh-uh,” I said. “The Germans are the crazy ones. Hitler is quite and completely mad. Arrogant and twisted. That’s why, in the end, our side will crush this Nazi scourge. Say what you will, but we Americans know how to kick German tail. This time we mean to do it for keeps.”

  From my lips to our dead God’s ear, I thought.

  3

  We were in the back room of a bar run by the brother of a resistance chief. The room was swept regularly for bugs, and admission to the private space was strictly controlled. It was as close to an unofficial HQ with a liquor stock as could be found in occupied France.

  I shook out my match. “Werner Höttl again,” I said. “Swear, I can’t seem to swing a dead cat without hitting up against something tied back to that son of a bitch.”

  “It isn’t his real name, you know,” Jimmy said. James Hanrahan was about my age, about my size. Jim was also fortyish; wide at the shoulders and stood six-two. Jimmy had a few pounds on me. He had blue eyes, iron gray hair and a nose that had been broken more often than some men change socks—the bulbous remnant of a youthful and soon enough discarded boxing career. Jimmy had come stateside after what had sadly proven to be our first World War. He still retained his Irish tenor.