by Richard Wake
Anyone who witnessed the attack, or who has any information that may assist with the apprehension of the assailant, is instructed to report immediately to Gestapo headquarters on Avenue Berthelot.
I read it three times. The only reply I had was to keep repeating the words “expected to survive.”
“That might be bullshit,” Leon said.
“Might be.”
“They might not want to admit you succeeded. It would be bad publicity.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“But even if he’s alive, that doesn’t mean he can communicate,” Leon said. “You got him in a bad spot. He might be alive but in a coma.”
“Yeah, maybe,” I said. And then Leon asked the only question that mattered, the question that now crowded every other thought out of my head.
“Do you think he can identify you?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Possibly. Probably. I just don’t know. But as I’m fucking saying these words, you know what? It doesn’t matter. If he thinks it’s me — like, even if he thinks there’s a 10 percent chance that it’s me — he’ll tell them and they’ll come after me. Fuck, what was I thinking?”
“Look, it’s done,” Leon said. “For what it’s worth, I believe that it was worth doing. And Manon told you she thought it was worth doing. And you thought it was worth doing. You can’t second-guess it now. And if he dies without being able to say a word, you’re in a much better position than you were 12 hours ago — much better.”
“I guess,” I said.
“I’m sure,” Leon said. And it was an argument he repeated over and over, all through the night, all through a bottle of cognac that he had somehow scrounged from the Resistance group in Toulouse. I was just starting to believe it too, until Leon came back from a walk to the station for the morning newspapers. Because along with the newspapers, Leon brought along a flyer that he had ripped from a telephone pole just outside the station. It said, “WANTED FOR THE SHOOTING OF A GESTAPO OFFICER” in big black letters. And beneath those letters was an excellent likeness of me, likely drawn from the photo of one of my identity cards, or from Klaus Barbie’s fucking memory, followed by this paragraph:
Alex Kovacs, a.k.a. Allain Killy, is wanted in the shooting of Gestapo Captain Werner Vogl. A reward is offered for information leading to his capture and arrest. All those with relevant information are ordered to report promptly to Gestapo headquarters on Avenue Berthelot.
“Well, I guess he’s talking,” I said, more to myself than to Leon. I had never received a bad diagnosis from a doctor, but I imagined that this was what it felt like. A little stunned, a little helpless — that was what I was feeling. At the same time, I knew I had to fight through it if I was going to survive. I had to think. I had to focus. And then it hit me. It apparently hit Leon at exactly the same time because we both said it simultaneously. We said one word:
“Manon.”
Part IV
45
Raymond’s house was a 10-minute walk from the flat. As I left Leon behind to pack up whatever he thought we might be able to carry, I knew I couldn’t go right to his house — it wouldn’t be fair to him or Marie or the kids, besides the fact that it wouldn’t be possible to explain to the little ones why Uncle Alex was dressed up like a priest. I could just hear Lucy screaming as she ran to her bedroom, “Nooooooo. He’s supposed to be a horse, not a priest.”
It was beyond dangerous for me to even approach him, but I didn’t see an alternative. I tried to guess what his walking route to the police station would be and I sat myself down on a bench in a little pocket park on Rue Garibaldi, me and my breviary and my toxic troubles. If I missed him, I would try him at the police station, which was exponentially more dangerous — assuming, of course, that the Lyon police would lift a finger to help the Gestapo. The truth was, they likely would do nothing. Then again, if I dropped myself into their laps, they might turn me over to Avenue Berthelot. It was a risk, but I just couldn’t go near the house.
From the bench, I could see one of the wanted posters with my picture on it, slapped on a telephone pole about 100 yards away. I looked at it, and then I pulled down the black mini-sombrero just a little tighter on my forehead. As it turned out, Raymond walked right past the telephone pole with my poster on it. It took him a full 10 seconds to recognize me when I began calling his name from the bench, calling it first in a stage whisper and then in a half-shout. No one was nearby, so it didn’t really matter how loud I was.
“My God,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“This is—”
“It’s completely fucked up,” I said. “But we don’t have time to talk about that. I need a favor. I’m desperate.” Raymond looked at me expectantly, and then he just lowered his eyes and nodded his head.
“Manon,” he said.
“You need to go to our house and see if she’s there,” I said. “If she is, you need to make sure she knows, and you need to tell her to go into hiding. You don’t have to hide her yourself — the Resistance will help her — but she needs to go right now. You can do that, right? You can tell her.”
He thought for a second. I never had a doubt that he would do it — his relationship with Manon went back to their childhoods — but he gave himself a little time to think.
“Okay,” he said. He was about to play out the worst-case scenario for him. “If the Gestapo is there when I get there, I just tell them the truth — that she’s my cousin and that I was worried about her when I heard the news. They’ll buy that. I’ll motherfuck you and say I never trusted you, and they’ll believe it. All right. Let me go.”
“Tonight at the amphitheater, 8 o’clock.”
“Okay, okay,” he said. “Let me go.”
Our house was 15 minutes in the wrong direction, and he began walking quickly that way, half-trotting. Even at that pace, Raymond would be late for work.
Meanwhile, I headed in the other direction, back to the flat. I didn’t know where Leon and I were going to go, but we had to go somewhere. The more I thought about it, I couldn’t believe the Gestapo hadn’t come for me there overnight. It wouldn’t take that long to find out which of the municipal districts was supplying Allain Killy with his ration coupons. Even though I had not picked up the last two sets of coupons, my name was still likely on some list, along with the address of the flat. Six phone calls, maybe seven.
When I turned the last corner, I saw the black Citroen parked in front of the apartment. It was the first one I had seen all morning. Nobody was inside the car. The front door of the apartment building was open with a Gestapo uniform standing half inside and half outside. I dared not get too close, even though the uniform’s attention was focused inside, not outside. I was able to maneuver myself into the alley next to the building, though. And because the door was open, and because Isabelle was as deaf as she was, I could hear everything. The Gestapo voice’s French was excellent.
“What is the name again?” she said.
“Killy. Allain Killy.”
“No, that’s not it.”
“What’s not it?”
“That’s not the name,” she said. Isabelle was playing the part of the addled old woman, and deaf besides. God bless her.
“What is the name?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I forget things. But it was Marcel-something. I’m sure of that. Marcel.”
If I had been able to see him, I was sure that the Gestapo agent questioning Isabelle was turning colors at that point. But he kept at it.
“But he’s not here now?”
“No,” she said. “Not for weeks. He disappeared, I don’t know, maybe three weeks ago. It was rent day, and he was gone. I had already threatened to throw him out—”
“Why?”
“Women,” she said. “I told him at the beginning: no women. This is not that kind of building. But there were women. I know there were.”
“How do you know?” he said. “You can’t hear anything, old lady.”
�
��I might be deaf, but I’m not a fucking idiot, sonny,” she said.
“Sonny?”
“Yes, sonny. What don’t you understand?”
The Gestapo man was now officially irritated. He yelled at Isabelle to move, and she didn’t. So he said, “You two — search her flat first, then we go upstairs.” Isabelle cried out, and then I heard some broken glass. It all had been so loud, I only hoped that Leon had heard it, too. And when I made my way deeper into the alley and then around to the back of the building, I saw that he had. The window to my flat was open, and Leon’s knapsack had already been tossed out onto the ground, and now Leon was worming his way out of the window. It was going to be a tight squeeze.
“Careful, slim,” I said. He looked down. Leon was scared of pretty much nothing except for heights. I had seen him start fights and finish fights — big fights and one-on-one, bare-knuckled or armed with a broken bottle, drunk bar nonsense or street Nazis attacking a helpless Jew in Vienna — and never once saw him hesitate to get involved. He was as physically courageous as anyone I had ever met. But he wouldn’t climb a ladder, not for all the money in your pocket.
“Thank God,” he said, looking down. “You’d better break my fucking fall.”
“Just hang on to the window sill and then let go.” Which he did. I half-caught him, and we both ended up in a heap on the ground, unhurt. We hustled down the alley and hid between buildings farther down the block.
“First things first,” I said. “What would be less conspicuous — you and a priest walking together or you and a normally dressed worker?”
“The priest is a better disguise, but I think a worker. But you need a hat.”
He reached into the knapsack and pulled out a flat cap. “Yours? I grabbed everything I could find.”
“Yeah, let’s do it,” I said. I slipped off the cassock and the collar, and just wore the work clothes that were underneath, and the glasses, and the cap.
Meanwhile, Leon hoisted the knapsack and groaned. I shrugged, and he replied, “It’s heavy as shit. I grabbed every can of food that was left in the cupboard.”
As we exited the farthest end of the alley, now a block over from the flat, he said, “So where are we going?” It was a pretty good question.
46
I couldn’t be out on the streets for very long in the middle of the day. That much, I knew. Being with another person would provide me with some natural cover, seeing as how the Gestapo was looking for a lone fugitive who, if they were listening at all to Vogl, they knew was on the outs with the Resistance. But even with Leon, and the cap, and the eyeglasses, it was an enormous risk to be walking around the city. I needed a place to hide out and, the more I thought about it, Saint-Fons still made the most sense. All we needed to do was pick a different building with a different FOR RENT sign. It wasn’t difficult to find one.
“I’m going to hide in the alley,” I said. “Furnished, second floor, in the back. Here’s some rent money. Don’t haggle — well, maybe just a little for show. Tell her it’s for two men, and that I’m at work and will be in later. I should be able to avoid her for a day or so.”
A half-hour later, I heard a tapping on the window above me. It was Leon, motioning me to the front door. It turned out to be far cleaner than the last place. The couch actually looked comfortable, and I stretched out on it.
“How did she seem?”
“She’s a he,” Leon said. “And I think he was kind of sweet on me. You should have seen his face fall when I told him about you.”
“Well, you have been in a drought.”
“I’ll pass, thanks. Besides the whole penis thing, he’s about 70.”
“You think he’ll be a problem for us?”
“No,” Leon said. “I didn’t haggle at all. In the end, he was happy with the stack of currency.”
We split a can of peaches and took a nap and just hung around. I left the flat after dark, at about 7 o’clock, to make the walk to the amphitheater. I stuck to the smallest streets, and varied the route, and came up on Raymond from a different direction than the previous times, no walk up the middle aisle of the theater. He was startled. But in the few steps I took before he saw me, it was clear that he was downcast.
“What? Tell me,” I said.
“She wasn’t there.”
“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”
“She wasn’t at the house. She wasn’t at the silk factory. Then I went to Montluc,” he said. “I took some clothes and some food. I brought it to that window. You know what I’m talking about, the place where you knock and—”
“Yeah, I’ve been there.”
“And my other dipshit cousin, Charles, you know—”
“Yeah, yeah. What?”
“She’s there,” Raymond said. “She got there early this morning.”
“Did Charles know anything else?”
“No. Didn’t know if she’d been transported to Avenue Berthelot. Didn’t know anything, other than that they put her in a cell by herself. I guess that’s good.”
I had no idea if it was good or bad. There weren’t many women in Montluc although there were some. She was way tougher than I was, but I was still sick to my stomach at the thought of her sleeping on one of those nasty straw mattresses, the insects dive-bombing her in the dark. I was mad at myself for getting her into this, but I was mad at her, too, for encouraging me. One of us, me or her or Leon, should have seen the potential danger and had her go into hiding before I pulled the trigger on Vogl. Fuck. It was just stupid.
“Look, it’s not your fault,” Raymond said.
“Of course it’s my fucking fault.”
“You might not believe it, but it’s just bad luck. If you kill him, there’s no problem. If you miss him and get caught, you’re screwed but Manon is fine. This was the only way she could be in jeopardy — you don’t kill him, you get away, and he identifies you.”
“We still should have seen it—”
“You need to stop this,” Raymond said. “There’s a chance they might just let her go.”
“You don’t really believe that.”
“They might.”
“No, they won’t,” I said. “She’s the only leverage they have against me, and they know it. No, they’re going to keep her.”
But what would they do with her? I couldn’t even begin to let my mind go there. I had a brief flash of memory, of the fourth floor, but I had to avoid it. I did it by literally yelling at myself. I muttered, “Focus, goddammit,” and didn’t realize I had said the words out loud until Raymond said, “What?”
“I don’t know.”
“Whatever you’re planning, I’m in,” he said.
“You can’t do that—”
“The hell I can’t.”
“No. I mean, think—”
“I’m in,” he said. “I wouldn’t do it for you, asshole, but I’d do anything for her.”
“But what about Marie and the kids?”
“I’m not telling Marie because if I did, she’d insist on helping, too. It’s family. It’s France. Don’t you get it by now?”
I didn’t know what to say. I was more involved in the Resistance than 98 percent of Frenchmen, but I still didn’t feel it the same way they did. I was anti-Nazi to the core, but they were different. They were pro-France more than anti-Nazi, and it was not a distinction without a difference. It would always be what separated me from them. And suddenly, all I could hear was what Manon was telling me the other day at the silk factory, those three words, as definitive as they were matter of fact. Three words: “I don’t run.”
I shook, just hearing her in my head. But I snapped back into the present pretty quickly. Focus, goddammit. After a minute, I told Raymond I would need at least a day to plan.
“Watch the lamppost,” I said. “But even if there’s nothing there, the day after tomorrow, you need to meet me at 8. Is that okay.” I gave him the address of the flat Leon and I had just rented.
He said he would be there. As I was tu
rning to leave, Raymond grabbed me and hugged me. I suddenly felt as if maybe, with him and Leon and me, that there might be a chance.
And then he whispered in my ear, “Vive la France, asshole.”
47
It was a few minutes past the curfew when I got home, mostly because I needed to duck behind a row of hedges when I saw some headlights approaching soon after I had left the amphitheater. I didn’t know if it was the Gestapo or not, but there was no sense taking any chances. And besides, after talking to Raymond and getting his support, I really was feeling better. I just sat in the shrubs and relaxed until I was sure it was safe.
When I got back to the flat, the conversation with Leon was more excited than morose. The more I thought about a potential plan, the more I liked it. It was never going to be a sure thing, but it didn’t feel as if it was going to be the longest shot on the board, either.
“So what are you thinking?” Leon said.
“We take her during the transport from Montluc to Avenue Berthelot,” I said. “To me, it’s the only way.”
I told him about how it worked, about how the prisoners were chained into the back of an open lorry. I told him about how the driver and guard were both Frenchmen, not Germans, and how they always took the same long, slow, stupid route to Gestapo headquarters.
“They’re not true believers,” I said, referring to the driver and the guard. “They don’t act like they give a shit about anything, and they show no interest at all in getting the prisoners to headquarters in a hurry. They’re just working for a paycheck.”
“You sure?”
“I’ve seen the look before,” I said. “Trust me, they don’t give a fuck. Being on the truck is like being on vacation for them, just a few minutes away from their foreign bosses. And if they can go extra slow, it’s even a few more minutes than that. I’d just bribe them if I thought we could get away with it, because they are most definitely the bribable type.”
