The Limoges Dilemma (Alex Kovacs thriller series Book 4)

by Richard Wake

  “Him?” JP said.

  “Yep. And look at that.” There were three cars in front of the building, and our man got into a Citroen that was painted the color of the Free Guard’s blue uniforms.

  He was by himself. He drove out into the countryside in a direction with which I was unfamiliar. I had slid over and Martin was driving us, and he seemed to know the roads. I had to keep reminding him to keep some distance, given that we were in the middle of nowhere and any vehicle would likely be noticed.

  It wasn’t a long drive — 10 miles, give or take, not even a half-hour. The sign at the turnoff said we were heading toward Razes.

  “Is that accurate?” I said.

  “Yeah, they must have missed that one,” Martin said.

  But we were not in Razes. We were at some unnamed dot on the map, a lovely little town, but little. When our man made a left turn off the main road, we were left with a dilemma because there would be no way to conceal ourselves on such a quiet side road. We debated whether to make the turn and decided instead just to pull over, inch our way toward the intersection and look to the left. And what we saw, maybe 300 feet down, was the ugly blue Citroen pulling into a driveway, and our man getting out and being greeted with a hug by a woman holding some shears in one hand and a small basket of flowers in the other.

  “Handkerchief,” I said.

  44

  Part of me wanted to do it right then, but the cautious side of my personality suddenly awoke. Caution had been my primary instinct for my whole life, until recently, but I could hear it speaking to me again as we sat there. Wait, it said. Watch. Plan. And I had time because Martin said he was in for as long as it took.

  “I told my father-in-law about this one,” he said. “We were sitting in the office, and he had scrounged a bottle from somewhere, and we were drinking away the afternoon — it was right after JP came and asked me — and I just kind of blurted it out. He was kind of surprised. He said, ‘You never tell me. Why now?’ And I said, ‘Because it’s one of our own.’”

  “And what did he say?”

  “He asked me if I needed help,” Martin said.

  “And what about your wife?” I said.

  “She doesn’t know. She doesn’t want to know. As long as I can find a way to scrounge another leg of lamb…”

  “So, she’s all about the slab of meat, huh?”

  “Well, it is what she’s used to,” Martin said. Then he grabbed himself down there.

  Wait. Watch. Plan. I didn’t want to overdo it because the town was so damn small that any stranger would be conspicuous, but I did need to have a better look at our guy’s daily routine. So we watched him for two days. On the Limoges end, parking in different places, we were able to sit and observe him leaving the building each day at 6 p.m. The mornings were harder, though. One of the days, Martin and I pulled the car over in the same intersection and slept. If a gendarme or anyone happened by, our story was that we got here late and were lost and decided to sleep in the car. Martin still had his magic paperwork if it came to that, and the story about collecting a Resistance printing press was still a good one, and that would hold us.

  But you could only do that once. For the second day, Martin parked the car back on the main road and pulled up the hood and napped inside. I took the bicycle and pedaled the last mile or so into the town, balancing an empty can on the handlebars. If I needed to explain to anyone, the car overheated, and I was fetching some water.

  As on the Limoges end in the evenings, our guy was very much a man of habit and precision. He left his house each morning, right at 8:30. It was like he was a goddamn banker — the kind of banker that actually murdered people, though, instead of just their dreams.

  “So what’s the plan?” JP said. We were back at the camp, everyone sitting in a circle. It was going to be simple enough. Given what we had to work with, there really wasn’t much of a choice. All we had were pistols. We were going to have to shoot the bastard, and we were going to have to do it from close range.

  Given the logistics, it made more sense to do it at his home. That wasn’t totally to dismiss Limoges, which had its pluses and minuses: more places to hide quickly, but also a much greater chance of being seen and apprehended on the spot. On balance, though, the little town would work better, mostly because the chances of getting caught in the act were pretty much nil. We hadn’t seen a gendarme on any of our visits, and it would be awfully bad luck for one of them to turn up on the small, private road that led to our guy’s house.

  Part of me wanted to handle it myself, but caution demanded some assistance. We needed at least one other gun, and probably two, on the off-chance that a gendarme did happen by the scene. Then there was the matter — and not a small matter — that our target wore a sidearm as part of his uniform, out of the house in the morning, out of the headquarters in Limoges in the evening, into the house at night. To me, that meant four guns total — two to watch our backs for police plus two to do the actual killing at the house. Plus Martin as the driver meant five.

  The two people doing the shooting would be me and JP, and there would be no discussion on that. I was a bit agnostic on the other two, though. Everybody wanted to go. Everybody wanted a piece of the revenge mission. Even Richard roused from his piteous coma and at least acted as if he wanted to participate, but I didn’t trust him. It probably wasn’t fair but fuck it. For all I knew, he would interject himself into the actual killing at the last second as a way of proving that he should have been leading the mission all along. There was no way I could take the chance.

  I would have drawn lots if not for Richard. Instead, I ended up choosing the two youngest, Roger and Emil. I made it out like it was going to be physically arduous, which really wasn’t true but at least gave me a rationale. If the rest were disappointed, well, there was nothing I could do about it. Somebody was always going to be disappointed unless everybody came — and that was neither prudent nor possible.

  We left at midnight. Martin dropped us at the turnoff from the main road. He had two tasks: to knock down the sign pointing to Razes and to get back in the car and take a nap.

  “Just don’t sleep past 8:30,” I said.

  “Are you kidding me? I won’t sleep a second.”

  “You say that, but—”

  “Not a second,” he said.

  The rest of us walked into the town. It was a dark night, clouds covering the moon, and we didn’t see a soul. As we approached the private road, I hoped I would be able to spot the same hiding places I had identified on my earlier visits. As it turned out, it was easy even in the dark. It was downhill from the town’s main road to the target’s house, and there was a line of hedgerows on either side of the private road, at least for the first 30 feet or so. At the end of each hedgerow was a granite boulder, maybe three feet high, and then there were small gullies — I guess to catch some of the rainwater that would naturally flow down the hill. A man lying down on his stomach behind the hedgerow and the boulder, in the gully, would be completely concealed from the main road. The issue was whether they would be completely concealed from the vantage point of the subject’s house. It would be close, but it seemed okay — with the car in the driveway providing a last bit of cover. Anyway, that’s where Emil and Roger went.

  As for JP and I, we went directly to the house and hid in the shrubbery that grew between the building and the driveway. We got there, and we listened, and we waited. At about 7:30, the husband and wife woke up. She washed up first and then began banging around the kitchen. We were right below their bedroom and heard him stomp into his boots. The smell of bacon and eggs filled the air — I was so damn hungry, I felt like short-circuiting the plan and taking them both out in the kitchen before swiping their breakfast. After a few minutes, there were more morning sounds: the gentle clanking of plates and cutlery; the scraping of chairs on wood floors; the flush of a toilet; the jangling of what must have been the man strapping on his sidearm; the call of ‘Goodbye, honey’; the light slam o
f the front door; one, two, three, four heavy steps on the wooden porch.

  I looked at my watch. It was 8:30.

  45

  JP and I had been on our haunches for a minute or two, ready, waiting. As we heard the boots on the porch, I put my hand on his shoulder. Wait. Wait. Too quick and he might run — and then we would all be in the shit.

  The man from the Free Guard had backed the car into the dirt driveway. The driver’s side was facing the house. He came down the steps and walked the 30 feet to the car. He reached out for the door handle and I whispered to JP, “Ready.” When he was inside and the door slammed shut, I said, “Now.”

  We ran to our positions, me on the driver’s side, JP on the passenger’s side. The car had started by the time we were in place. The man was reaching for the gearshift with his right hand when he saw us.

  “What?” he said. It was an oddly calm first word.

  “Both hands on the wheel,” I said.

  “What?” he said again. But he complied. Then JP opened the passenger door, rolled down the window, and shut the door again. The window on my side was already open.

  I had rehearsed a bunch of short speeches that I would deliver at that point but ended up rejecting all of them. There was no time for speeches, and there was no real purpose other than my own satisfaction. So instead, I said, “Do you remember Maurice?”

  At that, the man’s quizzical calm deteriorated immediately into panic. His lower lip was quivering. He was searching for something to say, maybe for a justification. Or maybe he was wondering how I knew. Whatever, the emotion was now engulfing him as he sat in the front seat of his blue Citroen while the engine idled. It was a good car, well-tuned. The motor was very quiet.

  I reached into his breast pocket. The handkerchief was there.

  “A blindfold?” I said.

  By then, he was officially terrified. He was crying. He knew that I knew. He knew that I had seen. I looked down at the sidearm on his hip, just to be sure, and saw he was pissing himself.

  “Any last words?”

  He babbled something, but he was pleading even more insistently with his eyes. I was locked on those eyes, the terror in them. I didn’t want to let go of that feeling, the notion that I had reduced a murderer to such a pathetic state, but there was the plan to consider. This had taken long enough. Even in this sleepy, tiny town, you never knew.

  I unlocked from his eyes and looked at JP. We both nodded. And as we had scripted, we each took a step toward the front of the car.

  “Ready,” I said.

  “Aim.” Suddenly, the Free Guard leaned on the horn with his left hand and reached for his pistol with the right. The blast from the horn pierced the quiet morning. Whether it hid the sound of what came next, even a little, didn’t really matter.

  “Fire.” I shouted the word above the unexpected din.

  At that, we each fired one shot — me from maybe three feet, JP from about five. JP got him in the chin. I got him directly between the eyes. There was no question that he was dead.

  And then we ran — up the street, up the hill, with Roger and Emil now on their feet, up out of the gullies, scanning the area and then following us. The wife was out of the house, summoned by the horn or the shots or both. When I looked back, she was leaning into the driver’s side window of the front seat and wailing. Within seconds, we reached the road where Martin was waiting, the engine idling. We piled into the car. There were two bottles of cognac there, one on the front seat, one on the back.

  “I figured,” Martin said.

  If anyone saw us, or was following us, it wasn’t obvious. The wife might have seen us running away, but it was 300 feet and she only would have seen us from behind. Besides, she must have been in shock. She likely couldn’t have seen Martin’s car and, even if she had, it was black. That was hardly memorable, not like the blue Citroen that now held her husband’s body, a blue casket, blue with blood-red trim.

  The adrenaline was running so high that I couldn’t remember a minute of the drive back to our camp — that’s how my mind was racing. I went over the details, again and again, and I really thought we were clean. When we arrived, Martin pulled the remainder of a case of cognac from the trunk. When I looked at him in wonder, he shrugged and pulled the magic paperwork from his pocket and kissed it. “I have another case inside for my father-in-law,” he said. “A day in full.”

  After Martin left, we drank, and we laughed, and we celebrated. JP and I must have re-enacted the final scene for the rest of them in a half-dozen renditions, with the ending cheered each time by a punctuating chorus of “BANG, BANG.” It felt good. It felt righteous. I had killed before and I had sometimes wondered — but not this time. Not for a second.

  It was the next morning — or, really early the next afternoon — when Martin returned. We weren’t expecting him. He looked grim as he approached, the noise of the car waking me and some of the others. He said he had been in Limoges, and he was carrying a handbill. It was seeking information in the “dastardly murder” of Philippe Rondeaux, a general in the Free Guard. Philippe Rondeaux. So that was his name. The handbill also said that 100 French citizens would be killed in reprisal if the murderers were not found.

  “Well, that was quick,” I said.

  “A hundred?” JP said.

  “That’s a lot, but it’s not unheard of.”

  “That’s not why I’m here,” Martin said.

  “Then why are you?”

  “A hundred is a lot,” he said. “Way more than are in the jails around here. They’ll definitely have to go into Limoges and clean out the jails there to get a hundred.”

  “Well, that’s happened before,” I said. I really had no stomach for the reprisal debate, not now. I did it with Leon because, well, because it was Leon. But not now. If anyone had deserved to die, it was Philippe Rondeaux. And if the killing of Philippe Rondeaux had not made plain to everyone that we were soldiers in a war against evil, then they were never going to understand. I just didn’t have the energy for the conversation anymore.

  “I have something else to tell you,” Martin said.

  He was silent. I was silent.

  “It was a routine curfew violation,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It was really nothing, just that, just a little late because of a flat tire on her bicycle.”

  “Again, what are you talking about?” I said.

  “It’s Clarisse,” Martin said. “She’s in jail in Limoges.”

  Part IV

  46

  The rest could see how upset JP and I were, and as they wandered over, Martin repeated the news at least three more times. When he was finished, JP asked him, “But how do you know all of this?”

  “If I’m in Limoges for any reason, I have a Gestapo contact,” Martin said. “I’m supposed to check in — it’s kind of in exchange for the freedom of movement that the deputy mayor paperwork gives me. It’s really nothing — and the truth is, my wife does have a lazy-ass brother who lives in Limoges. I just tell them I’m taking him to our house for dinner and that’s that. He asks me to lean on my father-in-law a little harder about arresting the STO kids. It’s just a little dance, maybe twice a month.”

  “But how do you know about Clarisse?”

  “I saw her,” he said. Then he looked at me. “Well, when you described her the other day, sitting the car, it stuck in my head. They had four or five of them in leg irons, marching them up the hill to the prison — one woman. It really didn’t register either way, although I did look at her. And then I was able to read upside down off his clipboard when my Gestapo captain was answering a phone call. ‘Clarisse Morean. Curfew violation. Flat tire. Maison d’arret.’ That’s the prison down the street from his office.”

  The unasked question — what were we going to do about it? — hung there like an oppressive humidity. They were looking to me for some kind of answer, but I was dumbstruck. I just walked away.

  I mean, I just
couldn’t believe this was happening again. The guy I needed to talk to was Leon. Somebody needed to understand what I was going through, but there was no way I could confide in any of these guys, not even Martin or JP. I was all they had left. I couldn’t go all basket case on them — it wouldn’t help me, wouldn’t help them, wouldn’t help Clarisse.

  But, hell. How could this be happening again? Back in Lyon, forced by a whole cavalcade of circumstances, I plotted to kill a Gestapo officer who had been on my tail for years. The plan had been a good one, too, even if my aim with the pistol had been just a hair off. The problem, though, wasn’t totally that the Gestapo man had survived the attack — although that was a big part of it. The problem was that I hadn’t thought, and Manon hadn’t thought — and she was an intelligence agent with much more training than I had — about hiding her someplace before the attack.

  Her thought was that she would say I had left her weeks earlier, and that she could brazen her way through it. But the Gestapo had other ideas, and soon she was in jail. And so began the series of events that ended with she and I running from opposite directions to jump into an airplane that would take us to safety in England.

  But Manon was dead — I could actually think the words now without retching and didn’t feel the need to kid myself by saying “likely dead” or “almost certainly dead.” She was dead, I was leading a small group of maquis in the hills outside of Limoges, and another woman I had begun to grow close to was in prison and likely in mortal danger because of something I had done. Another good plan, and a better aim this time, and now someone else I cared about could very well be in a position to pay the price.

  “But we’re not sure, right?” I had walked back and found the same silence I had left minutes before.