by Alan Furst
“Everything going well, madame? With you and your family?”
“I cannot complain, monsieur, and, if I did…”
“Not so easy, these days.”
“No, we must-Monsieur Casson, you are here for the shirts!”
“Shirts?”
“I told… well, it was a year ago, but I thought, well certainly Monsieur Casson will hear of it.”
“Madame?”
She came closer. “When the German came, Colonel Schaff- Schuff-well, something.” She snorted with contempt-these foreigners and their bizarre names! “However you say it, he had his driver throw your things out in the street. I was able to save, well monsieur, it was raining that day, but I did manage to save some shirts, two of them, good ones. I kept them for you. In a box.”
“Madame Fitou, thank you.”
“But a moment!” she said, very excited, disappearing into the building. Casson stepped back against the wall. He could hear keys in locks, doors opening, then closing. Overhead, a flight of aircraft-no air-raid sirens had sounded so they must be German, he thought. Heading west, to bomb Coventry or the Liverpool docks. The bombers droned away for what seemed like a long time, then Madame Fitou reappeared, very excited still and breathing hard. “Yes,” she said in triumph. “Here they are.”
He took the package, wrapped in a sheet of newspaper, and thanked her again. “Madame Fitou, you must not tell anybody you’ve seen me. It would be very dangerous if you did. For both of us. Do you understand?”
“Ahh”-she said, her expression conspiratorial-“of course.” A secret mission. “You may depend on me, monsieur. Not a word.”
He wished her good evening, then hurried off into the night, damning himself for a fool. What was the matter with him? A few blocks away, in the shadows, he peeled back the newspaper. His dress shirt, for a tuxedo-he used to wear it with mother-of-pearl studs and cufflinks that came to him when his father died. Well, it didn’t matter, he could sell it, there was a used-clothing market on the rue des Francs-Bourgeois. And then, a soft gray shirt he’d worn with sweaters on weekends. It smelled of the cologne he used to wear.
Evreux. 27 October.
Six-thirty in the morning, the night shift at Manufacture d’Armes d’Evreux rode through the factory gates on their bicycles, heading home to the workers’ districts at the edge of the city. Weiss moved along with them, pedaling slowly, his briefcase under one arm. Down a cobbled street-mostly dirt now-past a few ancient buildings and into a small square with a church and a cafe. He chained his bicycle to the fence in front of the church and went into the cafe. It was crowded, wet dogs asleep under the tables, a smoky fire in the fireplace, two women, their makeup much too bright, served chicory infusions to the men at the bar.
Weiss looked around the room and spotted Renan in the corner, playing chess. A hard head with a fringe of gray hair, a worn face, maybe handsome long ago. He rested his chin on folded hands and concentrated on the board. When he saw Weiss, he spoke quietly to his opponent, who rose and left the table. Weiss sat down and studied the board for a moment. “So, Maurice,” he said, “it looks like I’ve just about got you.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Renan said. He had a deep voice, hoarse, his words fast and clipped.
“How’s life treating you?” Weiss said, moving a rook.
Renan glanced up at him, almost smiling. He’d obviously made a poor move. “It goes along.”
“And work?”
Renan raised his eyebrows, not much of a gesture but from him it meant a lot. “The boches have their noses everywhere. It’s pretty bad just now.”
“We need some things.”
Renan nodded. Took a pawn with his knight.
“Still making the MAS 38?” Pistolet Mitrailleur MAS Modele 38-a 7.65 caliber submachine gun.
“Yes. The word’s around that we’re going to be retooled, for German weapons, but they’re still in production.”
“We need some.”
“How many?”
“All we can get.”
Renan looked doubtful. “Not so easy, these days. They’ve got informants. And there are German guards, field-police types, at the factory gates. Sometimes they make us turn out our pockets. And they control the trucks and railroad cars as they leave.”
“Can you try?”
“Of course.”
Renan took out a pipe and a tin of tobacco, packed the bowl with his index finger, and lit up. He’d been a militant for thirty years. Back in the labor wars of the late thirties, the armament workers at Renault, who built tanks, and at Farman, where they made airplanes, had sabotaged the weapons. Loose nuts and bolts were left in gearboxes and transmissions, iron filings and emery dust in the crankcases. When the tank crews tried to fight in 1940, they discovered saw marks on the oil and gasoline ducts, which made them break open after a few days’ use. At Farman they had snipped brass wires in the engine, allowing aviation gas to drip on hot exhaust pipes. Some of the French fighter planes went down in flames before they ever saw a Messerschmitt.
When Renan had been asked to do the same sort of thing at Evreux, he had followed orders. In fact, he had never said no-not to Weiss, not to the Comintern operative who had preceded him.
“How soon?” Weiss said.
Renan thought it over. “Maybe on the weekend. We have one German, he used to be an ironworker in Essen. We set him up with a girlfriend in town, which is how we talk to him, and we keep him in a good mood with brandy, whatever we can lay our hands on. But then, you understand, we’re talking about one or two pieces, if he’ll agree to look the other way. Some things he can fix with his pals at the gate, tools and so forth, but not this.”
Weiss nodded grimly. It was the same story at Saint-Etienne and the Schneider works-France’s equivalent of Krupp.
“Want us to try it?” Renan said.
“Yes. Do the best you can.”
They sat for a while. Weiss stared at the board. The rook really had been the wrong move. “Well,” he said. “Time to be going.”
“Have somebody stop by the first part of next week.”
“Here?”
Renan nodded.
“Thanks for the help,” Weiss said.
“Don’t mention it.”
Outside, Weiss unlocked his bicycle and pedaled off toward the railroad station. Want us to try it? Quietly, in his own way, Renan had told him it wouldn’t work. Of course he would make the attempt, and take the consequences, he simply wanted Weiss to know that the attempt was going to fail.
But Weiss had no choice. Moscow Center was pressing him harder than it ever had: he must acquire battlefield weapons, he must be prepared to arm partizan units, he must attack German targets in occupied France. He worked with the senior operations officers of Service B-the FTP’s intelligence section-which made him roughly the equivalent of a colonel in the army, and he had been ordered to send troops into combat.
What he had, in Paris, were assassination teams, like Ivanic and Serra, perhaps twenty operatives at any given moment. Then there were the longtime militants, like Renan, and the volunteers, almost all of them young and inexperienced.
The Center did not care. They’d let him know that wounded soldiers had been let out of military hospitals to serve on the defensive line that ran through the suburbs of Moscow. In Paris, they wanted action, bloody and decisive, and right now. The cost was immaterial.
Paris. 2 November.
Isidor Szapera climbed the dark stairs quickly, his fingers brushing along the banister. Up ahead, rats scurried away from the approaching footsteps. Time to go, mes enfants, the Chief Rat himself has arrived. Big talk-the building scared him, it always had. The wind sighed in the empty halls and woke up old cooking smells. Sometimes it opened doors, or slammed them shut. The building, on a small street in the back of the 11th Arrondissement, had been vacant since one corner of the roof had collapsed in 1938, when the tenants were thrown out, the doors padlocked, the windows painted with white Xs.
Now it served as th
e secret base of the Perezov unit, named for a heroic Bolshevik machine-gunner in the civil war that followed the revolution. Unit Commander Szapera opened the door to a room on the third floor, made sure the blanket was securely nailed over the window, and lit a candle in a saucer on a wooden chair. He didn’t own a watch, but he could hear the eight-o’-clock bells from Notre Dame de Perpetuel Secours. Ten minutes later, the Line 9 Metro rumbled beneath the building. His meeting was set for 8:20, he was early.
He’d been born in Kishinev-sometimes Rumania, sometimes the Ukraine or the USSR, but for Jews pretty much the same thing. His family got out in 1932, by bribing a Turkish sea captain in Odessa. They reached Poland that summer, when he was ten, then made their way to Paris in the fall of 1933, where his father found work as a salesman for a costume jewelry manufacturer. Isidor went to school in the 11th, essentially a ghetto. He managed to learn French, by force of willpower and repetition. It was hard, but not as hard as the cheder in Kishinev, where he’d sat for hours on a wooden bench, chanting passages of Torah to commit them to memory.
That old stuff, he thought. It kept the Jews down; weak and powerless. In the struggle of the working classes, you didn’t pray, you fought back. Did Rabbi Eleazer mean this? Or did he mean that? Meanwhile they kicked the door down and took you away.
It wasn’t a theory. They’d escaped from the cossacks in Kishinev and the anti-Semitic gangs in Lublin, but the Germans came for them in Paris. In the fall of 1940 his father sensed what was coming, tried to get a letter out to the relatives in Brooklyn-by now named Shapiro-then made arrangements for the three children to stay with a French Jewish family in Bobigny, on the outskirts of the city. A year later, August 1941, they heard a rumor: the police were planning to detain Jews of foreign nationality. Home from school with a cold and fever, Isidor was sent off to Bobigny. The rest of the family wasn’t so lucky. The police had come through the 11th on a rafle, a roundup. When Isidor came home, the apartment was silent. They were gone.
At that point, the Kornilov unit had been in operation for six months. Commander Szapera, just turned nineteen, his cousin Leon-two years younger-his classmate Kohn, and his girlfriend, Eva Perlemere. Eva was not a refugee like the others. She came from a good family-her father was a theatrical agent-with money, a family that had been in Paris for generations. But, since the August rafle, she had been a dedicated member of the unit.
In the fall of 1941, Isidor Szapera left school. He got a job unloading trucks at Les Halles, stayed in contact with party militants, broke a few windows, left a few leaflets in the Metro, organized spontaneous labor actions.
Not enough, not nearly. By then, it wasn’t only the Germans who wanted race war. He had come to hate them physically, to hate their faces, the way they walked, or laughed. They had stolen his family. His poor father, not a strong man, much better at love than anger, would try to protect his wife and children, would protest- Szapera knew this-and would, trembling and indignant, be casually knocked aside. Commander Szapera refused to mourn, tears of sorrow and tears of rage were just tears as far as he was concerned, and he had more important things to do.
Footsteps on the stairs, light but certain. Weiss. Szapera stepped into the hall, called out softly, “I’m up here.”
Weiss came toward him, his briefcase beneath his arm.
“I hope you put the door back,” Szapera said.
“I did, yes.”
After scouting the building for several days, Szapera and his friends had gone to work on the door in the back courtyard, carefully prying the metal flange free so the screws could be reseated in the wooden frame and the padlock stayed in place.
Weiss sat on a blanket on the floor and they made small talk for a time. Did Szapera need food? Another blanket? It was almost paternal, but Weiss couldn’t stop himself. Szapera was like the kids he’d grown up with. Much too pale, with curly hair and soft eyes-everything was a joke, nothing could hurt them. A long time ago, Weiss thought, long before he had become “Weiss”-his seventeenth name.
“The car,” Weiss said. “Can you depend on it?”
“Don’t worry. It’s a good one. A Talbot.”
“How many doors?”
“Four.”
“Where is it?”
“In a village. Bonneval, near Chartres. The Perlemeres have a little house there, for vacations. When the Germans came, they hid the car in a barn.”
“Forgive my asking-you know how to drive?”
“No. Eva does. Her father used to let her drive around the village.”
“How will you get it there?”
“We’ll come at dawn, just after curfew. We found a garage nobody uses, in Saint-Denis. We can get there from the village on back roads, then we’re eight minutes from Route 17, near Aubervilliers.”
“Eight minutes?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know?”
“We timed other cars. German cars.”
“All right. Eight minutes.”
“What about the guns?”
Weiss unbuckled the straps of his briefcase, opened the flap, and took out three revolvers and a small box. The guns were used, six-shot models with medium-length barrels. Szapera took one and examined it. The handgrip was scarred and scratched, the front sight filed flat, so it wouldn’t snag a pocket; the chambers were empty. Below the cylinder, the name of the manufacturer was stamped into the metal, then a word in a language he didn’t know that probably meant company.
“There’s a fourth,” Weiss said. “But it can’t be picked up until tomorrow. Be here tomorrow night, same time, I’ll have somebody bring it around. As for ammunition, you have thirty rounds in the box.”
Szapera nodded. “Good,” he said. “There won’t be time for more.”
Weiss had wanted to arm the group with a submachine gun, but they would have to do the best they could with the pistols. The man he’d sent up to Evreux on Monday had returned empty-handed. “According to our friends,” he’d told Weiss, “Renan and a comrade called Bernard attempted to steal six crates of MAS 38’s from a loading dock. Somebody knew about it, because the Germans were waiting for them. Bernard is in jail. Renan tried to run away and they shot him.”
Eva came up the stairs at ten. She brought him a delicious sandwich, liverwurst with mustard between thick slices of freshly made white bread, and a jar of cold tea spiked with sugar. “Very good,” he said.
She smiled. “Somebody has to feed you.”
“Oh, I get what I need.”
She lifted an eyebrow, knew it wasn’t true. She had lank brown hair, a narrow, watchful face, and wore thick glasses. He’d never seen her with makeup. “But then she takes her clothes off,” he’d once told Leon, “and you faint.”
“You fainted?”
“I should’ve.”
“What did she look like?”
“Hey, don’t pry.”
He finished the sandwich, it was too late now for her to make it back home before curfew. They talked a little, but they couldn’t wait. She blew out the candle, stood, and undressed. A goddess, he thought. Hips swelling from a narrow waist, full breasts, long sweeps of sallow skin. She was careful with her clothing, folded everything into a neat pile, then lay down beside him. They kissed for a while, then he rolled on top of her.
He shuddered to feel her skin next to his. “Hold me,” she said. “We don’t have to hurry.”
“No, we don’t.” She excited him too much, he thought. She would encourage him to slow down and enjoy it, rest her warm hands below his shoulder blades, a gentling touch that made it happen even faster.
“Oh, my glasses,” she said. She took them off, squinted up at him through the darkness. “Put them where they won’t get broken.”
He reached out, set the glasses down by the wall, just off the edge of the blanket.
“Mm,” she said.
“I love you, Eva,” he said.
“Don’t move,” she whispered. “Just stay in me.”
Saint-
Denis. 4 November.
A cold morning, the sky at dawn blue and black, trails of fiery cloud on the east horizon. The garage in Saint-Denis smelled like hay. After several tries, the engine turned over and Eva started to maneuver out of the narrow entry. Backing up was not something she did well-in fact, she’d only done it once before. Szapera’s cousin Leon stood to one side of the car, waving his arms. Szapera, turned halfway around in the passenger seat, called out directions. “Now to the left. More, he says. No, stop. Stop!”
They had less time than they’d thought. Kohn had been late. “A problem at home,” he said sheepishly. Szapera wondered what that meant.
“Everybody be quiet,” Eva said. “Let me do this by myself.” The car crawled backward. Szapera looked out the rear window. She was off to one side, but made it with inches to spare.
The courier from Weiss had shown up the night before, a young man in a seaman’s jacket. He’d handed over a fourth weapon, an automatic pistol manufactured in Spain. “Good luck, comrade,” he’d said to Szapera. “Here is something extra from Weiss. Remember, no closer than thirty feet.”
A hand grenade. Szapera held it tight in his left hand. In his belt was the revolver. He’d given Leon the automatic-none of them was exactly sure how it worked, and Leon, just turned sixteen, with glasses much thicker than Eva’s, probably couldn’t hit anything anyhow.
Eva had negotiated the garage by backing straight out, blocking traffic in both lanes. Ignoring the furious honking, she made several moves until at last she got the car headed north. She should probably drive with a cushion, Szapera thought, she could barely see over the steering wheel.
“Can you manage?” he said.
“Don’t make me nervous.” She shifted from first to third. The car rattled and jerked, then ran smoothly.
Just outside the town of Aubervilliers, Eva pulled off the road and waited. Kohn was holding a pocket watch. “7:22,” he said. Szapera had a school friend-a redhead who looked more Irish than Jewish-who worked as a clerk at one of the offices of the Banque de France in Paris. Twice a week, an armored car left the bank with bundles of occupation money, which it took to a Wehrmacht office at an army barracks near Aubervilliers. Szapera had ridden his bicycle out there, observed the armored car going through the gates, and established the time of delivery. He went out again a week later to make sure he had it right. Stalin had robbed banks in Baku to finance underground work, Szapera meant to follow his example. He had proposed the idea to Weiss, who resisted at first, then, in early October, changed his mind.
