by Richard Wake
“Where is your wife?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
That was what was in my head as we drove in the mountains, through a couple of miles of trees and then a small town. It was like a million other French small towns. It was one street long, and all the buildings were on the same side. There was a combination city hall and post office. There was a general merchandise store, a bakery, a butcher and a place for fruits and vegetables. There was a cafe at one end of the street and a bar at the other end, the kind with a zinc-topped counter where, in normal times, you could stand and have a coffee in the morning and something fortified in the evening. These being less than normal times, though, it was likely as not to be ersatz coffee in the morning and nothing at night, unless the proprietor had been able to work some black-market magic.
Of course, this late at night, the whole town was dark as we rumbled through — three trucks in a row, with Leon and I in the first one… Leon and I and my memories.
The road bent hard to the right after we passed the bar. It was there that I saw the headlights that suddenly blinded me, and the German soldier waving at me to stop.
3
There were two of them, each of them armed. We had four rifles among the six of us. I was worried, but I wasn’t worried, as long as it was just the two of them.
I should have had a third set of fake orders, just for this happenstance. If whoever was in charge of planning the operation had spent more than a half-hour on the task, they would have thought of it, too. But they didn’t, and now I didn’t have anything other than my wits. My drinking had probably dulled those just a bit, but it had also likely boosted my gumption. This was really going to be fine. I believed that even as I watched Leon begin to finger the trigger on this rifle.
“Where are you headed so late?” It was the Bosch at my side window. He was unarmed. His partner at the passenger-side window was carrying his rifle by the sling on his shoulder. No worries. No worries.
“A new youth camp.” In the 20 seconds or so between seeing the headlights and the conversation beginning, I decided upon a tale that tracked the truth, sort of. The one worthwhile piece of paper I had in my pocket was a receipt that the sentry at the camp had signed. Even if he hadn’t signed it, even if we’d had to shoot everyone there to get what we needed, I would have scrawled something on the signature line, along with the date and time.
“Don’t ask me why, but we’re moving all of this shit from that camp into a new camp up these fucking hills.” I handed him the receipt and allowed him to puzzle over it for a while. Then I snatched it back
“I need it for my boss,” I said. “It’ll be my hide if I don’t have it.”
“Where is this new camp?” The soldier seemed skeptical. He also had identified my weak spot, seeing as how I had no idea where I was.
“This is where I can get in trouble,” I whispered, almost conspiratorial. I was also half-smiling an I’m-an-idiot smile, which came naturally to me.
“I lost the map,” I said. “But I looked it over earlier in the day. I don’t know where it is — probably wedged in with the paperwork I had to leave at the last stop. But my memory says I make this right here.” I pointed to the right of his vehicle. “And then, in between five and 10 miles, I make another right at a decent-sized crossroads. Then I just drive until I hit it.”
“I don’t know, not much up that way except goats.” The soldier still wasn’t buying it. He thought for a second before saying, “You’ve got no orders. You’ve got no map. You’ve got shit, as far as I’m concerned — and aren’t you a little old to be a sergeant? Get out.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me. We’re late already.”
“Out.” He wasn’t kidding. Neither was his pal, who had slipped the rifle off his shoulder. He was beginning to raise it to point it at Leon when the shot pierced the night. It also pierced the soldier’s shoulder, and he dropped the rifle as he fell. Meanwhile, the guy on my side panicked when he realized his weapon was 20 feet away in his vehicle. Leon was already pointing his rifle at him and I said, barely above a whisper, “Okay, don’t move.”
Soon, all of us were on the road, surveying the situation. The shot had come from the lorry behind us, from Claude. He was a good shot — I could give him that.
“Was that really necessary?” Leon said.
“Yeah, I thought so,” he said. “But I didn’t kill him. He’ll live.”
“We’d better hope none of his friends are nearby.”
“All the more reason to get moving.”
“We should kill them both,” I said.
“What’s with you?” Leon said. “Stop talking like that.”
“They saw us.”
“So? We’re nobodies.”
“I’d like to keep it that way.”
“We’re not even going to be here—” Leon said.
“It’s a goddamn war and they’re goddamn soldiers,” I said. “What is the problem here?”
“Forget it,” Claude said. “Fewer German bodies, fewer French reprisals.” Then he ignored me and took control, telling the guy who had been driving him to take the soldiers’ vehicle, drive it into the woods and douse the lights, then telling the men from the third lorry to tie up our new friends with some of the wire we had snatched from the youth camp. The whole thing didn’t take five minutes.
“We’re going to lead now,” the spokesman said, looking directly at me. “You’re in the rear. Understand?”
“It’s your party,” I said. During the five minutes, I had grabbed the bottle of cognac from our lorry and had a couple of drinks. Leon took it from me and walked around to the passenger side. The others got to their lorries and began pulling ahead.
I walked over to the two wire-bound Germans. They were sitting up against a wooden fence, one of them moaning quietly from the gunshot wound, and the other looking more defiant than scared. With the bottom of my boot and one mighty thrust, I wiped the defiance off his face. His nose exploded. I did my best to scrape the blood and snot off the bottom of my boot and onto the dirt of the road before getting back into the lorry. But I really didn’t care that much either way.
4
The cafe was on the Place de Bancs. Funny name, that, seeing as how there was only one bank. But there were two pharmacies. I guess there wasn’t enough nobility or stature in the name Place de Pharmacies, though. So Place de Bancs it was, a promenade that led into the warren of streets and alleys that made up the oldest infrastructure of Limoges.
There were a dozen tables on the wide sidewalk outside the cafe. The mid-afternoon sun was warm. Three of the tables were occupied by me and two others, all single men. At 43, I was junior to the others by at least two decades. They were nursing their drinks. I was not.
I closed my eyes. I had sat in this spot enough times over the last few weeks that I could picture the businesses without seeing them. They were all on the ground floor of five-story buildings, with apartments stacked above. Left to right: pharmacy, bank, barber, pharmacy, tabac, boulangerie, women’s clothing store. I didn’t need to open my eyes to see that they were all some variation on the concept of empty, even the barber. Because even though rationing did not affect the rate of hair growth, every spare centime was headed for the black market to purchase something as prosaic as a pear or something as practical as a cognac. One of the old men sharing the sidewalk with me looked as if he had cut his hair with hedge clippers but his glass was full. Choices.
I had taken care of all my daily business on this street. My first stop was the bank for a withdrawal. I had made and inherited a good amount of money before the war, and it was spread across some of Europe’s finer financial institutions. Some was still in Vienna, presumably. Some was in Zurich, and I was sure that was safe, guarded by those Swiss thieves with the same vigor that they guarded their own money — as long as they continued to get their percentage. Some was in Lyon, but there was really no way to get at it, not given how I left.
The rest had
been in Paris, in an arrangement that had pre-dated the war. When Leon and I arrived in Limoges, we took a chance by walking into the bank down the street and arranging for a transfer of some of those Paris funds. The risk was that the Gestapo had already circulated my name as far as Paris — Alex Kovacs, wanted for the attempted murder of a Gestapo officer in Lyons, armed and dangerous, blah, blah, blah — and this would create a trail to Limoges, but it wasn’t that big of a risk. Besides, it wasn’t that much money because we weren’t staying long.
My second and only other stop of the day was the cafe. My diary was a tad light those days. If you had cash, you could have real coffee, a ham sandwich and cognac — all without having to worry about any pesky ration tickets. You had to eat inside, to avoid any undue attention, but you could take your libations out in the sun. I was about four deep when Leon arrived, again with the disapproving face.
“Christ, it’s not even 3 o’clock,” he said.
“And what do you know of Christ, exactly?” Leon was Jewish, after all.
“I swear like a Frenchman now. It’s part of the cover.”
“So are you going to sit there and preach at me or are you going to have one?”
Leon decided to have one. It really would have been rather glorious — the alcohol softening the edges, the warm autumn sun — if not for the occasional rumble of a German military vehicle on the cobblestones, breaking the silence. If not for that, and for the intrusion of memory.
“So while you’ve been lubricating, I’ve been working,” Leon said.
“Working? In a factory? Making porcelain? Bowls? Vases?”
“Shut up. I went to see our friends.”
“Same place?”
“Yeah,” Leon said. “But they’re moving, I think tomorrow. It’s been over a week.”
When Leon referred to “our friends,” he was talking about our Resistance contacts. We were beholden to them for at least a little while longer, Leon said — they had taken us in, after all, after the train arrived from Lyon. At one point, just to be an asshole, I asked Leon where it was written down that we owed these people anything.
“We run risks, they run risks, why do we owe them anything?”
“Because it’s just right,” Leon said.
“What’s right got to do with anything in France in 1943?”
“Come on, they fucking saved our lives.”
“And we saved other lives,” I said. “We didn’t ask for payment. We just did it. We don’t owe these people anything.”
“A couple more weeks. Besides, I still need to figure a way to get us to Paris,” Leon said. His voice was quieter now. I didn’t say anything. The waiter came outside and re-filled my glass without asking. He looked at Leon and received a nod in reply.
“So how are our buddies in the TAR?” I asked. That was my abbreviation, for the benefit of Leon and no one else. TAR: Tight-Assed Resistance.
“They’re not so bad.”
“But you’ve never told me: do you think they only kiss their pictures of de Gaulle before they turn out the lights at night, or do they actually jerk off while looking deep into his eyes?”
Leon laughed at that one. “Nothing so crude. But I do think they like to keep the pictures in this pocket,” he said. He patted the left side of his chest. “You know, close to their hearts.”
When I asked about the “same place,” I meant the Cour du Temple, really a beautiful, tranquil spot that wasn’t a five-minute walk from where we were sitting. It was a few centuries old, a courtyard of half-timbered buildings and urban solitude. On the third floor of a hotel that formed one part of the frame of the courtyard, in Room 311, our de Gaulle-loving contact was running the operation. His radio guy lived in a flat a few streets over. His couriers were mostly kids — the oldest was probably 16 — scattered all over the neighborhood, often unbeknownst to their Vichy-loving parents. It was in Room 311 where we were given our instructions to meet up with the maquis and the basics of the youth camp scheme.
“Did the asshole ever say ‘thank you,’ by the way?”
“Not in so many words,” Leon said. I didn’t attend the debriefing after we returned. The less time I spent with those people, the better. On that, Leon and I agreed.
“Good job? Appreciate it? Nice work?”
Leon was silent, and just sipped his drink.
“But we still owe them?”
“Just a little longer,” he said. He stood up. “I have to go now — I’m making a little delivery for them.”
“Of course you are.”
“It’s nothing.”
“If it’s nothing, let one of those kids do it.”
“There’s no risk.”
A German truck rumbled past. Two uniforms eyed us up as they drove by, but they never slowed.
“And if those two decided to get out for a chat?” I said. “And if they asked you to empty your pockets? What would they find?”
“Two identity cards — a Jewish husband and wife. They’re both about 25. We can get them out of here. They can still have a life.”
I didn’t say anything. Leon thanked me for the drink and walked away. I alternated between dozing and opening my eyes whenever I heard footsteps that might belong to a woman — seeing if she might be the same size, the same age, with the same hair.
5
It was about 10 o’clock the next morning and the sun was warm and wondrous on my face. If not for the punishing hangover — other than Leon, it was my most loyal friend — I might have felt human, standing there in my undershirt, my face unwashed, my hair wild.
I was standing outside the bar where Leon and I had taken a pair of upstairs rooms. It was a couple of blocks from the cafe on the Place de Bancs and quite convenient. As Leon said, “Two minutes’ walking time, four minutes’ stumbling.” He was well aware that I was on the four-minute plan pretty much every night.
The bar was owned by a guy named Louis. He had some Resistance ties, I think through marriage somehow, but the ties were loose and reluctant. Leon and I were sent here by the de Gaulle worshippers when we arrived in town, and Louis agreed to rent us the two rooms directly above the bar; Louis and his wife and son lived in a proper flat on the floor above that. But there was a condition.
“No meetings here,” Louis said. “No planning. No nothing. You sleep here, you shit here, and that’s it.”
The rent was a pittance, mostly because the rooms were full of bar stink and the bathroom was, well, interesting — you know, in the manner of a school science project. I made a counteroffer: I would pay double if Louis gave the bathroom a proper scrub and if he allowed us to drink for free.
“What’s proper?”
“Clean enough for your wife to sit on the seat.”
“Five drinks a day or 100 drinks a month,” is how Louis countered my counter.
“Deal,” I said, secure in the knowledge that I would be able to sneak an eye-opener or two most mornings without it counting against the total.
I ran my tongue across my front teeth and tasted the remnants of that eye-opener. Leon was out already, a man with a purpose. The neighborhood, once the bastion of the butchers of Limoges but now more of a mixed lot of merchants and residents, was beginning to wake up. Stores were opening, even the ones with no hope of a single transaction. The women were starting their daily trek to try to find something to cook for the family dinner, ready to spend hours in waiting lines for whatever happened to be available. And I was standing there in my undershirt, unwashed, unshaved, alone.
About 10 steps behind me as I looked out on Rue du Canal was the Chapel of Saint Aurelian. It was supposedly built in the 1500s, but it looked even older than that. It was a tiny pile of stone — I bet it wasn’t 20 feet wide. I had seen it every day since we moved in. There was no way to avoid it. It was so close to the bar that the less ecclesiastical patrons who drank outside on warm nights occasionally pissed against the chapel wall rather than using the facilities inside the bar.
I don’t k
now why I chose to go inside the chapel, seeing as how I had always counted myself among the less ecclesiastical. There were about 20 wooden chairs for congregants, with an elaborate altar beyond, all old and dark and cold. It was really a creepy little place, and I don’t know why, but I just closed my eyes and began crying.
Three years earlier, Manon and I had been married. I had never been able to commit, not for my whole life, but with her I knew that it was right and that it would be forever. Our life together in Lyon was a constant terror, me on sabotage missions and she writing and distributing a small Resistance newspaper, but that terror just seemed to heighten our feelings for each other. And then, with the news of Manon’s pregnancy it was as if — even amid the Nazi hell — the life I had always wanted was going to be mine. When the Resistance agreed to fly us to England after a particularly dangerous mission left us as prime Gestapo targets, I actually allowed myself to dream a little.
Even when the thing was botched, and I was shot and left in France, at least Manon had appeared to get to the plane, and the plane had taken off.
But then the plane was never heard from.
We had sat before the radio in the safe house where they were hiding us, night after night after night, waiting for some kind of message that Manon’s plane had gotten through. We listened to the BBC’s broadcasts, to the personal messages, for any news, for just a hint. But there was none. The plane had not made it back to England. That much, we were sure of.
But there were a couple hundred miles of northern France between Lyon and the Channel. Could it have been shot down, or crashed someplace? As the days and weeks passed, my hopes shriveled to about nothing. The Resistance was everywhere in northern France, loosely organized in some cases but organized nonetheless — and really ubiquitous, much more than in the south. The word was put out, for any word on a small plane crash, for any sightings, for any survivors. Nothing came back in reply. They want so far as to jeopardize future operations by asking questions of Resistance cells in specific areas that tracked the typical flight pattern for such secret air missions in the Lyon area. But no one saw anything.