by Richard Wake
In the midst of a war, in a world where every human emotion and experience seemed to be accelerated by events, my grieving was shockingly short. I concluded pretty quickly that Manon and our unborn child were gone forever, likely into the Channel, maybe shot down by a German battery along the coast, maybe just a mechanical mishap. The grief had morphed and, most days, it was only the anger that lingered. There was work to be done, after all, the work of surviving most of all. It wasn’t long before Leon and I were secreted behind the cargo in that freight car headed for Limoges.
So mostly it was anger, and even that was tempered by the alcohol into a kind of emotional exhaustion. Usually, I didn’t feel anything other than tired. But this day was different. When I opened my eyes and stared at the altar, I could feel my lip quivering and the tears on my cheeks. I actually heard myself calling out, “Why me?” It was like a scene in a bad movie, but it was how I felt. Why me?
I was sobbing. My whole body was shaking. I actually said out loud, in the middle of a holy place, “Why? Why the fuck why?”
I got up and knocked over the chair I had been sitting on. The clatter echoed in the stone chapel, and I left the chair laying on its side. I opened the door and a shaft of the morning sun lit up the cold, dark sanctuary. Then I closed the door just as quickly as I had opened it — quickly and hopefully silently, considering the Gestapo car parked right outside and the man in the black trench coat pounding on the bar’s door.
6
I had no idea if the Gestapo man had seen the door. If he had, I figured he would be over within a few seconds. The only handy weapon was one of the frail wooden chairs. It wouldn’t kill him if I hit him over the head with it. It might not even knock him out. But it might stun him for a few seconds, enough time for me to scoot through the door and into the streets.
I stood to the side of the door with the chair held over my head, ready to slam it down on the first person that entered. But 30 seconds turned into a minute, and then into two minutes, and the door never opened. I figured I was okay. Well, maybe.
I looked around. There were a couple of bronze statues up on the altar, off to the sides. Saint Some-such, presumably. The chapel was dark enough, and the statues were big enough, and there also was a chair to the side of the altar. If I moved the chair a couple of feet, and ducked behind it so I’d be hidden by one of the statues, I wouldn’t survive a thorough search but I would survive a quick peek. So that’s what I did.
How long to wait? I couldn’t hear anything outside, not through the thick stone walls. Also, I didn’t have my watch, so I could only guess at the time. I always carried my money with me but not the watch because it annoyed me while I slept. But I figured I had to give it at least 15 minutes, which would give the Gestapo man enough time to rouse Louis, ask him a few questions and search the rooms. The search wouldn’t take two minutes, honestly. Both rooms were furnished with a bed and a night table. Leon and I each had one spare set of clothes in a knapsack, and that was it. There wasn’t anything to find.
Fifteen minutes. I didn’t know what to do, so I just counted to a thousand, giving myself some leeway. Concentrating on the numbers helped to calm me down some. My nerves left me in desperate need of relief, but even someone of my ecclesiastical standing was not going to piss inside the chapel. So between my bladder and the counting, there was enough to take my mind off of the fact that I might be seconds away from arrest.
998, 999, 1000.
I crept out from my little hiding place and toward the door. It swung outward. That helped me because even a small opening would give me a clear look at the Gestapo car. If the swing had been inward, I would have had to open it wide enough to poke my head out and look to the left. So I did my best to move the door only an inch, only enough for me to take the smallest of peeks. I hadn’t noticed the last time if the hinges would scream or squeak — either would potentially give me away. But they were silent as the door opened. Maybe the noise would come after the first inch.
Then I saw: the courtyard outside the chapel was empty, save for the stack of tables and chairs outside the bar. Louis was outside, hosing them down, just like any other morning.
“Who were they looking for?” I said.
“Not here. Inside.”
He turned off the water and re-wound the hose, and we went into the bar. Louis poured us each a drink. We silently toasted nothing and slugged it down. He poured another.
“So who were they looking for?”
“You.”
“Not Leon?”
“Just you,” Louis said.
Just me. That didn’t make a lot of sense to me. Leon and I had been together more than apart since we’d arrived in Limoges, but he had been the one to spend more time with the Gaullists and he was the one who ran the occasional bit of courier work on their behalf while I was getting shitfaced. If anyone had run more risks and been more exposed, it was him.
“What name did they ask for?” Louis reached into his pocket for a scrap of paper.
“I wrote it down,” he said. “Alex Kovacs. That’s the name they asked for. Is that you? I thought your name was, what, I forget. Kampe?”
“Alex Kovacs is one of my names, but I didn’t tell you that,” I said, not bothering to tell him that it was my real name. Louis was in deeper than I ever expected.
The fact that they were searching for my real name left me with two possibilities. One was that the Gestapo in Lyon had managed to track me to Limoges, because they knew my real name despite the succession of aliases and fake identification cards I had obtained in the previous couple of years, including Albert Kampe. They knew my real name because the officer I tried to kill, Werner Vogl, had known my real name before the war. If they had tracked me from Lyon to Limoges, that meant the entire operation in Lyon had been compromised. It was possible — anybody would talk when they started lopping off your fingers with a rusty knife — but I didn’t think so, though I still found myself reflexively counting my fingers in silence.
That left the other possibility: the bank transfer from Paris. That seemed more likely because of the paper trail the transfer had created. At the same time, though, it wasn’t a ton of money, not a sum that would raise a Nazi accountant’s eyebrow. So did they have my name on some kind of master list, and that somehow raised the alarm in some back office in the First Arrondissement?
The difference between the two scenarios potentially mattered. If Lyon was after me, and caught me, I was as good as dead. But if it was about the money transfer, it might just be a routine inquiry. When the Gestapo was involved, even the routine was frightening, but maybe that’s all it was.
None of this mattered to Louis, though.
“You have to get out,” he said.
“I know.”
“Both you and the other guy.”
“I know.”
“With my family, I just can’t.”
“I know, Louis. I know.”
I went upstairs and packed my shit, and then Leon’s. It didn’t take a minute because we really didn’t have anything. Our current lives now fit into two small knapsacks, not much bigger than the ones a worker would carry his lunch in, back when people brought a decent-sized lunch to work with them, before the rationing. I was just glad that I had withdrawn almost all of the money from the account on Place de Bancs the day before, as there was no way I could chance another visit.
I brought the knapsacks down to the bar and sat in the same place. There was another drink waiting for me.
“I have my stuff and Leon’s, too.”
“What if he comes back?”
“Tell him what happened, and that I have his knapsack at the TAR. Can you remember that? TAR.”
“What is that, some kind of code?” Louis wrote it down on the same scrap of paper where he had written my name. He looked nervous. I was going to say something to calm him, that TAR wasn’t any kind of dangerous code, and then he blurted out what was really on his mind.
“You know, there’s no
refund,” Louis said.
“I kind of figured,” I said. “So at least give me a chance to drink my way close to even. It shouldn’t take an hour.”
7
As I walked over to the Cour du Temple, I remembered through the alcoholic haze what Leon had told me the day before: that the Resistance was getting set to move. I thought he said they were moving that day, and I had no idea where. This would be a reasonably significant problem, seeing as how I didn’t have anywhere else to wait for Leon.
I walked into the small alley that soon opened onto the charming courtyard. It really was a peaceful spot, a feeling that I enjoyed for at least five seconds. Then it was into the hotel door on the right and up the stairs to the third floor. Room 311 had been the headquarters, and that is where I knocked the secret knock — three knocks, wait a second, then two knocks. The door opened, and I was admitted to the chaos, with three men packing the operation into three small suitcases. It wasn’t much — some Resistance pamphlets, the precious carbons that would be used on a Roneo duplicating machine, blank paper and stamps used for counterfeiting ration tickets, that kind of thing.
“Where’s the Roneo?” I asked the one face I recognized, another Louis. This was an occupational hazard if you were involved with French Resistance fighters. Everybody wanted to be Louis, for some reason — and that didn’t include the people who really were named Louis.
“It’s in pieces in those two,” he said, pointing at two larger suitcases.
“That’s impressive. How long to put it back together?”
“Not that long, especially if you’re not too fussy about having a leftover part or two when you’re finished,” he said.
They were almost done. One of the last things thrown into the last bag was the picture of de Gaulle on the desk. It was in a gold frame.
“Seriously?” I said. “Is your mother’s picture in that nice a frame?”
“My mother supports the Vichy,” Louis said.
“Must make for interesting dinner conversation.”
“It did until it didn’t. I haven’t been home in almost a year.”
“Sorry about that,” I said, and I meant it, his de Gaulle fetish notwithstanding. Hell, he probably wasn’t even 25 years old — and Limoges was a bit of an odd place. They all talked about their great Resistance tradition, but the city was crawling with Vichy lovers. The Resistance fighters might have been brave and true and all of that, but they were a tiny minority. At least it seemed that way.
“What are you doing here, by the way?” Louis said.
I told him what had happened at the bar, about the Gestapo man and the search. He stopped my story in the middle, then motioned. The first guy had left with two of the suitcases soon after I walked into the room. The motion was for the second guy to leave with two more suitcases, leaving Louis, the final small satchel, and me in Room 311.
“So they didn’t ask about Leon?”
“No, just me,” I said.
“Good. Good. You have any theories?”
I told him about my two possibilities. He just nodded along, not offering an opinion about which he thought was more likely. Honestly, I was having a little trouble getting past the “Good. Good.” It was odd, given our pre-war lives when Leon was the rebel and I was the do-gooder, that as far as these guys were concerned, I was the asshole in this situation. Louis didn’t seem to care if I got caught or not, as long as Leon was still clean. At least, that’s the way I read it. Then again, I had been drinking, which if it wasn’t already apparent to Louis, immediately became so after I belched out a stomach full of alcoholic fumes into the small room.
“A little early, no? Jesus, what time is it?” he said.
“Time to find me and Leon a new place to stay.”
He rattled off an address from memory. “Third floor, top of the stairs, the door will be unlocked. Go there now. Leon will meet you there, eventually.”
“What do you mean, eventually?”
“After he contacts us, we’ll tell him.”
“Does he know where you’re going?”
“He does.”
“Well, where is it?” I asked.
“You have no need to know.”
“What do you mean? What’s this bullshit?”
“It’s not bullshit,” Louis said. “It’s just smart operationally. You know how this works: small cells of people, one cell doesn’t know the other, information compartmentalized, need-to-know. And you don’t need to know where we’re going.”
“So what happens after that?”
“Give us a chance to think, Alex. I can check with my people, maybe with the Brits. We’ll come up with something. We might get you out of town for a bit. There’s a Commission meeting in Saint-Junien. I was thinking of having Leon represent us this time. Maybe you can go with him.”
The Commission was the informal consortium of Resistance groups in the region who were all supposed to be working together and with the British operations people. As best I could tell, and from what Leon had gathered, these guys and the Brits were quite comfortable in each other’s pockets, and they only told the Communist Resistance groups what was absolutely necessary for coordination purposes. An educated guess was that the Communists were just as wary, cooperating only because it was their sole way to get a share of the British weapons and money that were being parachuted into the region. I honestly believed that all of these people spent half of their time thinking about fighting the Germans and the other half maneuvering for a potential power grab once the Germans were gone.
“I’ll only go to the meeting on one condition,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“That I get to be the one who brings the de Gaulle picture in the gold frame.”
Louis laughed, a little. “We tend not to bring that to the meetings,” he said. “And one more thing: go fuck yourself.”
He picked up his little satchel and walked out. I gave him two minutes and then followed behind.
8
The safe house indeed seemed safe — third floor, top of the stairs, door unlocked, dead quiet. I locked myself in, lay down on the bed and was asleep almost immediately. The falling adrenaline and elevated alcohol levels in my bloodstream combined to be a quite effective sedative, as it turned out. It was four hours later when the knocking on the door woke me up. It was Leon.
I went through the events of the morning with him, as I had with Louis. He had a definite opinion about why the Gestapo was knocking.
“It’s the money,” he said. “It’s the bank account. It’s an account registered to a Czech who was living in Vienna when it was opened, which means you’re a person who should be under the Germans’ thumb—”
“As should you,” I said.
“But I don’t have a centime to my name, as you well know. No, it was the money. Think about it: if they thought they had a lead on the guy who tried to take out the almighty Captain Werner Vogl in Lyon, they would have tried a little harder at the bar than a couple of questions and a cursory search. I’m sure of it. It’s the money. They just want to know why Herr Alex Kovacs of Vienna is in Limoges all of a sudden. It’s official curiosity. That’s it.”
“But if they do the least bit of cross-referencing — and these pricks are the kings of cross-referencing, as you well know — they’ll find out about Lyon—”
“Among other things—”
“Exactly, among other things. This might just be the beginning.”
“Which is why we have to keep moving,” Leon said.
“But where?”
“Here tonight, and then they gave me a list of places.”
“On paper?”
“No, up here,” Leon said. He jabbed at his temple with his right index finger. “I have four addresses memorized. They suggest two nights in each place and no more. When we get through the fourth place, we come back here and run through the list again. That’s about 20 nights altogether. We should be out of here and headed to Paris before then.”
“I don’t know,” Leon said.
“I mean, what are we doing? What are we doing here? What are we going to do in Paris?”
“We’re fighting the fucking Germans, and we’re going to keep fighting the fucking Germans. What’s the matter with you?”
“But are we?” I said.
“Of course we are. We take risks—”
“To what end?”
“We blow shit up,” Leon said. He was getting worked up. “We slow them down. We occupy their attention.”
“But do we really make a difference?” I said.
“What’s gotten into you?”
“Do I really have to tell you?”
Losing Manon had changed everything for me in many ways, but it had also changed nothing. I had nothing to show for a fight I continued to engage in, nothing but the loss of the only real love of my life. Because we weren’t slowing the Germans down, not really. We were just a damn sideshow. The real war was in Russia, and it wouldn’t come here until the Americans did. Until then, the Germans were just killing time and we were shooting slingshots at them.
Oh, and listening to the radio. Trying to ignore my rant, Leon had turned on the set. It warmed up quickly, and soon the familiar voice was speaking: de Gaulle. It wasn’t one of the radio addresses he used to give from London. He was in Africa now, and there was a cheering crowd that sometimes drowned out the words.
I heard the words “punish” and “traitors” as the signal faded in and out, then, “those so-called leaders who rushed headlong into capitulation in June 1940, who used the disaster to strangle liberty, who delivered themselves to the Germans under the symbol of collaboration, who played France for lost.”
Then de Gaulle said France “must track down those who betrayed her, admitting no pretext of pardon… France must raise the sword of justice.”