by Richard Wake
We communicated infrequently after that — once-a-year infrequently. I knew how exhausting my secret life had become, and I was sure it was the same for him. Now he was in my flat with this woman and her daughter. But here’s the thing: Leon was a romantic rogue of the first order, and not only was Ruth was not up to his typical standard, married-with-children had never been his style. There also was no obvious affection between Ruth and him. They had not come close to touching each other in their few minutes in my presence. His formality had been almost comical as they entered the apartment — Leon stepped aside and pointed the way ahead as if he were a maître’d at a posh restaurant. And he had never even looked at Rachel, the little girl.
“Alex, what’s that smell?” Leon said.
“Fly-Tox. It’s a bit of an involved story. I’ll tell you later. Everybody should stay away from the clothes in the corner there, just to be safe. And in the meantime, is anyone hungry?”
Ruth said no. Rachel’s eyes said yes. The cupboard was well-stocked, seeing as how one of the benefits of having more than one identity in more than one neighborhood was having a second set of ration cards. That was going to be one of the saddest parts about retiring the Allain Killy identity. I figured I was safe to collect one more set of ration cards, but that would be it. I might actually cry when I ended up burning everything.
I pulled open the cupboard door, and Ruth’s eyes went wide. Leon said, “Fuck, buddy, did you rob a grocery store?”
“Another long story,” I said. “In the meantime, Ruth, help yourselves.”
“I couldn’t,” she said.
“You will and you must,” I said. “Rachel, go pick out your dinner.”
She ran to the cupboard and returned with a can of carrots and another can of peaches in heavy syrup. Her mother looked at me again and I said, “Just go. Anything you want — you see how much I have. Take a lot more than those two cans. I’ll be insulted if you don’t. You should be able to find all of the utensils you need and matches for the stove. Leon and I need to go for a walk and talk about old times.”
“Save me some,” he said, calling over his shoulder as we left the flat. I grabbed my last bottle of wine from a side table and followed him out.
9
A couple of blocks from the flat, on Avenue du Chateau, there was a small park below a church. We sat there, near the memorial to what was starting to be called World War I, which was our war, Leon’s and mine. We were on the other side back then.
Leon extricated the cork with a penknife, and we passed the wine bottle back and forth. We hadn’t done something like this since our twenties. The first time we had done it, we were both in uniform, after Caporetto, when the Italians fled down the mountain and we pillaged every wine cellar we came upon. Spoils of war and all that.
Leon raised the bottle and toasted the soldier who stood atop the memorial.
“Poor bastard,” he said. “Imagine dying for a country you loved and then finding out it’s all turned to shit in 20 years. I mean, what was it all for?”
He passed the bottle back, and I took a long pull. It was dark now, and people were criss-crossing the park as part of a shortcut, it seemed, rushing after work to see what they might scrounge together for dinner with whatever value was remaining on their ration cards. It was two days until the next cards, and that was always a frantic time. Just the look on some of the faces told you the strain they were under. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to go home to your kids and tell them there would be nothing to eat until the day after next.
“So what’s this all about?” I said. Now it was Leon’s turn to take an extra-big drink.
“They’re Jews,” he said.
“With the names Ruth and Rachel? You’re shitting me.”
“Yeah,” Leon said. “That’s one of the problems.”
“What do you mean, problems?”
Leon sketched out the issue. The German crackdown against the Jews of Paris was increasing. There were regular roundups, and lorry-loads of Jews were being taken to what amounted to transportation hubs in and around Paris.
“One of them is called Drancy,” he said. “I’ve seen it. They bring the Jews there and then they ship them out in railroad cars to who-knows-where. They call them ‘resettlement camps’ but that’s all they say. They take the people and their luggage and jam them into freight cars. All we know is that the trains run to the east. And we never hear from the people again.”
“Sounds very German,” I said.
“Efficient as fucking clockwork.”
“Are they just putting them to work somewhere?” I said.
“Nobody knows. That’s what the optimists hope — cheap labor for the Nazi war machine. But I’m not much of an optimist. What about the grandmothers? Are they putting them to work in a munitions factory? What about the little kids? I try not to think about it, but it’s all I can think about.”
“And Ruth and Rachel?”
“The Jews who are still in Paris are completely panicked now,” Leon said. “At the beginning, all we had to do was get them to the free zone. It was easy enough to hide out there.”
“But not anymore,” I said. “I get it. The Gestapo has been here for only a few months, and there have been roundups here — I’m not sure as many as in Paris, but it’s starting.” I told him about Montluc and the barracks that had been built for the Jews there.
“So you can’t just go to the free zone,” Leon said. “Even with that, you need a forged pass – but we were lucky with those, lucky this one time. You have to get them all the way out of the country — to Spain, and then maybe to Portugal, and then maybe out from there. But they have to get out of France, and that takes more than just money — and it takes a lot of fucking money. They’re really checking the trains headed south, like toward Limoges or Bordeaux. Rachel and Ruth, it would be almost impossible for them to get to Spain directly from Paris and with their own identity papers.”
“So how did you get here?”
“Lyon is south, yes,” he said. “But it’s southeast. It’s not toward the Spanish border. And, yes, you now have your own Gestapo here. I guess they figure it’s no place for a Jew to run — at least they figure that for now. They don’t check the trains. So this is their opportunity.”
Leon sketched out his plan, his idea of what that opportunity entailed. He wanted to smuggle Jews from Paris to the south, and he wanted to use my second flat as a way-station. He would travel with a couple of Jews from Paris to Lyon, and they would stay in my flat for a day or two and then move on south. Leon would travel with them part of the way, to make sure they got going, and then head back to Paris for the next group.
“But what about their papers?" I said. “Identity card. Travel permit. Ration cards—”
“Yeah,” Leon said. “Here’s my thinking. I know I didn’t ask you ahead of time. It’s getting harder to get the papers in Paris — the Nazis have gone after the forgers almost as hard as they’ve gone after the Jews — and I also can’t afford it, and most of these people can’t afford it. So what I was thinking was, when I bring people to the apartment, I could also bring the identities of the next group along with me, and you could maybe arrange for the paperwork with your people here.”
“Oh, is that all?” I said. Leon ignored my tone.
“So then,” he said, “that paperwork will be ready when the next group arrives. After a day or two, they can use it to head south, and I will have left you the identities of the next group.”
“And who’s paying?” I said.
Leon’s eyes fell. He barely croaked out the reply.
“You have the fucking money,” he said.
Of course, he was right. I did have the contacts to get the paperwork, and I did have the money. What I didn’t have was the appetite for taking on an even more dangerous bit of business than blowing up the odd set of railroad tracks.
“Look,” Leon said. “For whatever reason, we have this opening. The Germans might close it
tomorrow. But this is a chance. I can’t let it go. Just think about it. And help me get some paperwork for Ruth and Rachel to get them started south.”
I agreed to think about it. We passed the wine bottle back and forth a few more times. I could help Ruth and Rachel, but I just didn’t see how I could turn this into a full-time endeavor. After a silent minute or two, I changed the subject and told Leon the story of my arrest and questioning by Barbie, and then my unexpected release. He admitted that my building-the-tension theory was possible, and that he didn’t have a better explanation.
But he also said, “I don’t know, buddy. It sounds, I don’t know, implausible. I mean, from everything I know about the Gestapo, they don’t do subtlety.”
Leon took the last drink from the bottle. Then he muttered, “Fuck it,” and threw the empty bottle at the war memorial, shattering the glass. I looked at him and then kicked the broken glass into a pile at the base while he watched me. We walked back to my flat in silence.
“Wait,” I said. We had reached the front steps of the building. “Speaking of paperwork, how are you managing to travel, Mr. Jew-from-Vienna?”
Leon reached into his pocket and smiled, handing me his identity card. I read it and burst out laughing.
“Seriously? Louis St. Jacques?” I said.
“In the fucking flesh,” Leon said. “Want me to recite the Hail Mary? I’ve been practicing.”
10
I had a key to the silk factory, but I didn’t want to startle Manon by using it. So I knocked our special knock — two knocks, pause, one knock, pause, two knocks — and Leon and I waited.
Back at the apartment, the good news was that Ruth and Rachel had eaten four cans of food — carrots, new potatoes, cling peaches and pears. Rachel was asleep on the sofa, her head in Ruth’s lap. Ruth was half-asleep herself when we opened the door.
Leon explained how it would go. For the next two days at least, and maybe three, Rachel and Ruth would be living alone in the flat. Either Leon or I would come by every day to check on them, but they could not leave. Even though Isabelle was deaf, they also needed to stay as quiet as possible.
“There are a couple of books on the shelf that you might like,” I said to Ruth, gesturing. “I’m sorry, there isn’t anything for Rachel. But there is some paper and a pencil. Maybe she could practice her drawing, or you could play some word games or something. It’s the best I can do.”
“It’s more than enough — thank you so much,” Ruth said.
“Two days, maybe three, we’ll have new papers for you two,” Leon said, picking up the thread. “Then I will take you to the train and we will ride together for part of the way to Toulouse. We will take local trains as much as we can, and from there, you likely will be hidden in cars or lorries to the Pyrenees. Then someone will guide you through to Spain where you will be picked up on the other side of the border.”
“So many people,” she said. “How—”
“Many people combatting much evil,” Leon said. “They will do everything they can for you. It won’t be easy, but it will work, God willing.”
“God willing,” Ruth whispered. It was as if she were attempting to convince herself that there was still a God after all. As we were leaving, she picked up Rachel and carried her into the bedroom.
Leon and I walked from the flat to Croix-Rousse. It took about an hour. Leon brought a can of peaches for the journey, plucking out the halves with his fingers, then drinking the sugary syrup from the can.
“Careful there,” I said, as he sipped and walked. “Don’t cut yourself on the rim. The girls won’t like it.” Leon was the kind of ladies’ man they wrote books about, handsome enough but with an air about him that women seemed to find irresistible. It had been that way from the first time I met him in his teens until today.
“Girls,” he said. “There are no girls. I’m too tired. Can you fucking believe it — me, too tired? I don’t even try anymore.”
“End of an era,” I said.
“Temporary pause,” he said. “Fucking Adolf.”
When Manon answered the knock and unlocked the door, she was in the process of delivering a smart-ass greeting, “Sorry, but one night in jail was too much. I’ve found—”
She saw Leon and stopped. When I introduced them, she said, “The famous goddamn Leon.” She hugged him and then held him at arm’s length, looking him up and down.
“Yes, yes, I see what Alex says about you,” she said. Then she looked at me and said, “Good thing he wasn’t near my empty bed last night.”
“My God, what did you tell her?” Leon said.
“Only the truth,” I said.
“Shit,” he said. Manon immediately shushed him and then hugged him again.
“Alex loves so few people, and you are clearly one of them,” she said, whispering in his ear. She thought I couldn’t hear, but I could. It was true. It was a very small list.
“Come in, come in, I think I can find us a bottle,” Manon said, and we walked past the looms and into the back storage room that was the heart of her publishing empire. We talked about Montluc, and about Barbie, and about getting released without a scratch or a strain. She had nothing to offer as a possible explanation, either.
She was typing as she listened. The next edition of La Dure Vérité was already a day past the deadline she kept in her head — once every six weeks. It was a flyer, really, not a newspaper, just front and back of a single sheet and run off on the Roneo machine that was hidden in one of the crates stacked in the corner. The cranking was tiring, but for me, the reward was the smell of the still-wet sheets of paper that came out on the other side. It was intoxicating. It actually made me pleasantly dizzy.
“Do you ever need stories?” Leon asked.
“Ever? Try always. I’m short of copy now. I’m going to have to run a big blank space in this one as it is.”
He pulled a notebook from his pocket.
“I was hoping you might say that,” Leon said. “I wrote a little something on the train, hoping you might be able to use it. Can you read my writing?”
“This is perfect,” Manon said, after a minute of scanning the notebook. “It’s perfect. It’s beautiful. Can I take it now?”
Leon said yes, and she started typing. It was the story of a Resistance operation, a firebombing that destroyed three dozen vehicles in the Gestapo motor pool in Paris’ 3rd arrondissement. As I read over Manon’s shoulder, I could tell from the text that Leon had actually been there when the explosions went off. The description was so vivid.
You smelled the fuse beforehand and the gunpowder afterward, and those were the sensations that lasted the longest. The first concussive BOOM, and the heat and the glow of the fire, and the mini-booms that followed as each of the vehicle gas tanks exploded, seemed to evaporate from my memory. But I could still smell the smells, days after and even today.
“Did you actually light the firebomb?” I said.
“One of them,” he said.
“Byline?” Manon said, and Leon thought for a second.
“Just say, ‘A brother from Paris.’”
“A brother from Paris it is,” she said, and then the real typing began. Manon was skilled, but not like a secretary. As she worked, Leon explained what he was doing in town, and the proposal he had made about establishing an escape network for Jews that would run through my second flat. She stopped and let it all sink in.
“Leon, that’s great,” she said. “Alex, isn’t that great?”
“It’s a big risk,” I said.
“But it’s worth it,” Manon said.
Leon looked at me, half-shrugged and said, “See?” It was clear that he figured, if it was okay with my wife, it should be okay with me. I looked at Leon, and then at Manon, and then at Leon again.
“It’s not that simple,” I said.
“What’s not that simple?”
“Manon is pregnant,” I said. “That’s what’s not that simple. None of this is simple anymore, if it ever was.
”
I was hoping that the look on my face would explain that I wasn’t worrying just for one or two anymore, but for three.
11
After the ritual congratulations from Leon, there was a long silence. Manon resumed typing and finished the article quickly. Then she had me get the Roneo from the crate and set it up. She had typed on a kind of stencil, which she attached to the drum of the machine. Then I turned the crank as Leon fed the paper through. My God, that smell.
After a few minutes to dry, Manon changed to the other stencil, and we ran the paper through on the other side. Within an hour, we had 500 copies. We were waiting a few minutes for more drying when there was a knock on the door.
“You expecting anybody?” I said.
“Nope,” Manon said. “What do we do?”
“Turn off the light and wait in here,” I said. “I’ll go see.”
I rehearsed a story as I walked, something about a broken loom, but it wasn’t necessary. I opened the door, and it was Max. And his first words were, “Fuck, Pops, what the fuck happened?”
I took him to the back room and introduced him to Manon and Leon. He saw the Roneo and the newly printed stack. “Nice,” he said. “I knew your family owned this place — that’s how I knew to come here — but I didn’t know this was your print shop. But isn’t that dangerous?”
“Not as long as you keep your fucking mouth shut,” Manon said.
“Fuck, Pops, I like her.”
We compared notes on our arrests, and Max was the winner. He didn’t even make it till sunrise after we blew up the bridge.
“I was sleeping rough near the farm, like we talked about,” he said. “I don’t know exactly what time it was, but it was still way dark when the Gestapo showed up. I thought I was going to be okay until I heard the barking. The dogs sniffed me out in about two minutes.”
