The Limoges Dilemma (Alex Kovacs thriller series Book 4)

by Richard Wake

  “I’m sure I saw her name on the list,” Martin said. “I saw a woman being marched to the jail in leg irons who looked like the woman you described to me. So, yes, I’m sure.”

  “I don’t mean that,” I said. “I mean, we’re not sure they’re going to take her as one of the hundred. They might even be bullshitting about the hundred.”

  “Maybe,” Martin said.

  “What else do you know?” There was something about his tone.

  “I don’t know anything. But I’m just going to tell you something. There have been a lot of reprisals lately. We have one person in our jail. Most of the towns around here are probably the same. They’re going to need Limoges. And I’m telling you — I bet there aren’t a hundred prisoners in Limoges today. I don’t like the odds.”

  “But she’s a woman.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Martin said. “The more important thing is, she’s a number. Whoever is in charge of the roundup, he has a boss just like everybody else has a boss — and he has to make his number. If nothing else, the Germans are fixated on making their numbers. And Clarisse Morean is a number.”

  I walked away again. They were all fond of Clarisse. She was the big sister a lot of them didn’t have. But they also knew that she and I had spent the night together before Maurice was abducted. And if I didn’t spell out exactly what had happened, they had imaginations. They likely thought it was a lot more than it was — more communication, more commitment, more something. But I couldn’t even explain the relationship to myself, no less to them.

  We still had a couple of bottles of the cognac, and they were opened soon enough. We all just sat around, stunned. Martin gave us two more bottles from his father-in-law’s stash and then left. I decided just to listen, and what I found was that no one — not one of them, not even JP — raised the possibility of trying to rescue Clarisse from the jail. There were tears being shed, but there was no call to action. They had killed before, there had been German reprisals before, and that was just the way it went. There was no way to stop them, so there was no sense fixating on them.

  “Casualties of war,” Richard said at one point, except he was drunk enough that it took him three tries to get the “casualties” part out of his mouth. And then he just mumbled, “Fucking war.”

  He got the last part out fine, and it was repeated by a few others in the circle. No one had anything else to say. Until we fell asleep, it seemed as if the only communication was when someone held out a hand, signaling that he wanted to drink from one of the bottles.

  47

  I didn’t sleep.

  I had to get her out.

  I didn’t know how, but I had to try.

  When I told them the next morning, the rest of the group was stunned — and then I was stunned that they were stunned. It was as if I had suggested plundering the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. By the looks on their faces, they thought the notion of rescuing Clarisse was some combination of lunacy and idiocy. A couple seemed bewildered. JP looked sad. Richard, though, was angry and didn’t hide it.

  “I told you he was a bad idea,” he said, to the rest of them.

  “Richard—” JP said.

  “Shut up, JP. This is craziness. We can’t have this from our leader. It’s soft. It’s worse that soft, it’s stupid. You all know it.”

  Suddenly everyone was looking at their shoes. JP had started to speak up for me, but now he was as mute as the rest. Group dynamics had never been my strong suit, but even I could sense how quickly this had turned against me.

  “But it’s Clarisse,” I said. “You all—”

  “You’re fucking her — that’s what this is about,” Richard said.

  “Every one of you has a relationship with her — every last one of you,” I said. I wanted to take a swing at Richard, and it took every bit of self-control that I could muster not to do it. I physically turned away from him and addressed the rest.

  “Some of you love her, deep down, love her like a sister, maybe like a mother. Why can’t you—”

  “It’s not what we do,” Richard said.

  “Why not?”

  “Didn’t you ever hear Granite say it? And I quote, ‘To get sentimental is to get sloppy, and to get sloppy is to get dead.’ I heard him say it 10 times if I heard him say it once. You all did, too — right?”

  Eyes raised around the circle. Heads nodded — quick nods, barely noticeable nods, sad nods.

  “It’s only sloppy if you don’t plan it,” I said.

  “Storming a German prison with, what do we have? Seven pistols? Twenty-five bullets? Yeah, right. Some plan.”

  “Nobody said storming.” As I spoke the words, I really had no plan whatsoever. At that point, storming was a possible option, I guess.

  “It’s suicide,” Richard said. He was vibrant again. As the back-and-forth continued, he was countering my arguments before I managed to get them out. He really was a smart guy. Maybe I should have just shut up and allowed him to lead from the beginning. Who knows? We would have gotten revenge on somebody a day or two quicker, and then Clarisse wouldn’t have been in jail when the reprisals were organized.

  My head felt like it was going to explode, so I just walked away from the argument. A couple of minutes later, JP followed me.

  “Look, I—”

  “Why does everybody think I’m some kind of traitor all of a sudden?” I said.

  “It’s not that, not exactly.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “Richard’s right,” he said. “It’s the sentiment.”

  “But how can you not—”

  “Because you can’t,” JP said. “You just fucking can’t. Look, I don’t know what your relationship with her is, but you just can’t. If you didn’t know her, this wouldn’t be an issue.”

  “If we all didn’t know her.”

  “Same thing. Reprisals are part of this. They have been from the beginning. If you believe in what we’re doing, then you can’t allow the reprisals to be a deterrent — or we’ll never get the fuckers out of here.”

  “But it’s—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” JP said. “It can’t matter. That’s what Maurice preached. ‘The cause over the individual.’ Look, I didn’t buy everything he said, but he was right about that.”

  The conversation petered out from there. I didn’t remember how it ended, but at a certain point, JP just slinked away and rejoined the group. Roger had caught a couple of rabbits in a homemade trap which meant some meat for lunch, and I did join the group for that. But we ate in silence, and I eventually just worked my way back to the edge of the clearing. The weather was starting to turn, and we were going to need to find shelter again pretty soon. Somebody was going to have to organize the scouting out of a new place — an abandoned farm, something — but the group was essentially paralyzed.

  Day turned to night. Martin had brought me a knapsack to replace the one I had lost when the logging camp was raided by the Germans. Inside was a warm shirt, a pencil and some paper, a pair of socks and another bottle of cognac from his father-in-law’s case, which would be about a half-case by the time the gift was eventually delivered to the old man. A pistol and four bullets completed the kit.

  I took out the bottle and the pistol, lay back and used the knapsack as a pillow. Sleeping was not an option, I knew, but it did feel good to close my eyes. My mind kept working, though. A plan had started to take shape in my head, and it wasn’t the worst idea I had ever had — by my reckoning, something just on the good side of a long shot. But that was only half of the issue. The other half was scattered around the dying campfire. I sat up and watched: eight men sleeping, snoring, huddling against the uncomfortable chill. They were hugging themselves, scrunched into the fetal position against that chill — not too bad, not yet, but it would be cold soon enough. And then what? And what did I owe them?

  I had joined them. I had fought with them. I had embraced their vision, really Maurice’s vision. The clarity of it had excited me.
The force of his personality had enveloped me. It wasn’t the way Leon said — it wasn’t like I was chasing a skirt — but I had been smitten, both intellectually and personally. I was too old to be fooled by the whole glory-of-war thing, but I was also too young to just roll over and take whatever from the Germans. What Maurice and this group offered was a way for me to navigate between those two extremes. It was something I needed — and they had served me and I had served them.

  But how could they not see? How could they not feel what I was feeling about Clarisse? And even subtracting those feelings, she was one of ours — didn’t we owe her at least an attempt to save her? Or was I just hopelessly overwrought, blinded by my emotions and my history?

  I looked over again at the snoring and the shivering. They needed to move forward, but I didn’t have an answer for them. They needed to get about the business of surviving, of fighting another day, but I didn’t feel as if I could lead them and I didn’t feel as if I could follow them.

  So I wrote a note by the moonlight. I actually wrote two. The first sounded more like a political tract when I read it over, like some kind of manifesto, but it was my pride talking, not me. It was like I was trying to justify what I was doing, even though I didn’t completely understand it myself. So I went with something simpler the second time. I threw the crumpled first version into the dying fire and stood there, watching it being consumed. Then I slipped the second letter into JP’s back pocket at he slept on his side. He never moved.

  JP,

  I have to go now. I know you don’t agree, but I hope you can understand. Or at least sympathize. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t at least try. It might not make any sense but, for me, this is the Lord’s work.

  Vive la France.

  Alex

  And then I walked away, into the night.

  48

  I watched from the park across the street, from a bench that felt a lot more comfortable than a splintery plank of wood should feel. It had taken me most of the night to walk there. There was a newspaper in a trash barrel next to the bench, or at least a couple of pages of a newspaper — two weeks old, torn in spots, with a photo of Petain on pages 1, 2 and 4. I pretended to read it but mostly just hid behind it, until I saw the mayor shamble up the front steps and unlock the door.

  I waited a minute and then followed him inside. It was only 6 a.m., and the woman who had been working behind the front counter on our previous visit had not yet arrived. The door to the mayor’s office was open, and I gently rapped on the glass. Head down, reading something, the mayor was startled by the knock. He stared at me for a few seconds without saying anything, and then his face fell. Only a little of the bruising was still apparent.

  “Your friend, I heard,” he said. “Is it true?”

  “How?”

  “I hear plenty.”

  “But—”

  “They all gossip about each other,” he said. “The Wehrmacht about the Gestapo. The Gestapo about the Free Guard. The Free Guard about the gendarmes. The gendarmes about everybody. I just listen and shrug. It’s a talent I have. So is it true?”

  I told him that it was. In fact, I told him everything. I needed for him to trust me, and that was true enough, but I also wanted to tell him. He deserved to know. I had just gotten done with the story of the killing itself, with me seeing it all while staring through the knothole in the fence, when he opened his drawer and took out a bottle and two glasses. He poured one glass and then looked at me.

  “Okay for you?” he said.

  “Okay? I might kiss you.”

  I told him the rest as we drank — about the revenge killing, about Clarisse, about me leaving the group. He did have a talent. I just kept talking and didn’t want to stop. I even told him about the night with Clarisse.

  “So you’re in love, that’s it.”

  “No,” I said. “Not exactly. Really not at all.” And then I kept talking, about Manon and what happened in Lyon. It was just pouring out of me. We had finished a second drink when I finally stopped.

  “So, do you think I’m crazy?” I said.

  “To want to rescue her? No.”

  “But do you think I’m smart?”

  “Different question.”

  “But—”

  “I think it’s time for you to tell me why you’re here,” he said.

  So I laid it out for him. I needed the mayor to make me his deputy — or, rather, to fit me up with all the trappings: the travel pass, the rest of the paperwork, the vehicle and a tank of gas. He asked me how I knew about all of this, and I explained about Martin without identifying him. It wasn’t my place to give out his name. As I was telling him, it dawned on me.

  “Wait, do you already have a deputy?” I said. “Are you allowed to have more than one?”

  “I don’t have one,” he said. Then he got up and walked over to a small set of drawers in the corner of his office. He groaned when he bent down and retrieved a file from the bottom drawer.

  “Never needed a deputy. Didn’t have anyone I trusted. Plus, I didn’t want somebody driving around searching for kids hiding in caves, anyway. So I just never named one. But the paperwork is all here.”

  “So what do you think?”

  “Let’s have one more,” he said. He poured us two fingers’ worth of whatever it was. The bottle was close to empty. Neither of us said anything for a few minutes. We just sipped. I was determined that the next word would be his, and finally it was. He looked at his watch and said, “Okay, it’s 6:20. Let’s see if we can do this in 10 minutes.”

  “What?”

  “Here, you need to fill it out, seeing as how you stole the paperwork from the cabinet. Come on, quick.”

  One by one, I filled out the paperwork — the credential card, the travel pass, the fuel pass, and something else I didn’t recognize. When I got to the bottom, though, I stopped.

  “You need to sign my name,” he said.

  “But I don’t even know your name,” I said.

  We both laughed. He pulled out another form from another drawer, handed it to me and said, “Do your best forgery, but quick.” And so, on four different forms, I scrawled the signature of Michel Lorain.

  While I was signing, he was prying open a different desk drawer with a letter opener.

  “Don’t you have a key?” I said.

  “I do, but you don’t.” He reached in and pulled out a tray containing several rubber stamps, an ink pad, and another silver thing that punched a raised seal onto the sheets of paper. He stamped each one, and then put the seal on each one, and then examined his handiwork.

  “The signatures,” he said, pointing at the sheets. “Don’t quit your day job. Now come on.”

  He was on his feet again, back over at the cabinet in the corner, opening another drawer, pulling out a few files and dropping them haphazardly on the floor. Then he knocked over a few things on the top of his desk, then looked back.

  “Okay, come on,” he said, again.

  I followed him out into the front entrance area. It was still empty. He grabbed a set of keys off a peg behind the counter and we went to the front door. He locked it from the inside and then motioned for me to follow him out a back door. There was a small black lorry parked next to a pump. It wasn’t much bigger than a car.

  “It’s all gassed up,” he said. “I’ll fill you a jerry can and put it in the back. Now what you need to do is walk around the outside to the front door and kick it in.”

  “What?”

  “It’s got to look like a robbery. Go. Quick.”

  So I did. And then I walked inside and then out the backdoor. The mayor was closing the tailgate when I got there.

  “Now go,” he said. “And, really — don’t come back.”

  “But don’t you think maybe—”

  “No,” he said.

  “But you don’t even know what I was going to say.”

  “No, I’m not leaving,” he said.

  “But don’t you think—”
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  “Here’s what I think. The first time you came, with the way you messed up my face, they probably didn’t think anything of it. This time will be harder, I know.”

  “The Gestapo, they’re not fans of coincidences,” I said.

  “I know, I know. And this will be twice. But I think it looks legit. And if you get out of here now, I can show up to the office and see the door broken in and head right down the street to the gendarmes. I think I can sell it. The Gestapo might give me a little shit because the paperwork wasn’t locked up securely, but I’m pretty sure I can survive that. I’m not even going to tell them that the deputy mayor paperwork is missing. I’ll just say it was ration tickets and the lorry.”

  “But—”

  “Look, I’m not running and I’m not hiding,” he said.

  “But what if your friend the chief gets you a heads-up that they’re coming for you?”

  “I’m not running. No. It would dishonor my name. I won’t do that.”

  “But your wife, your children?” I said. “Wouldn’t they be better off with their father still alive?”

  “But who can guarantee that? And for how long? They’re better off with a good name, and that is what I will leave them, no matter what. But all of this would have a much better chance of working if you would stop worrying about me and just get the hell out of here.”

  Then he tossed me the keys.

  49

  I had been anxious to try out my new paperwork on the drive into Limoges, but no one stopped me. I knew it was good, though. I patted the folded paper in my pocket and it made me feel, I don’t know, bulletproof. Even if it wasn’t true, and even if complacency was beyond dangerous, the confidence lift was meaningful. And necessary.

  Even with all of that, I was still going to need some help. The way I figured it, I needed one other man. The only place I could think to find one in Limoges was from the de Gaulle Resistance. The problem was that they likely hated me at that point about as much as I hated them. The other problem was that there was still at least a sliver of a chance that they were the ones who set up Maurice to be captured by the Free Guard. I really didn’t think it was true but, well, a sliver is still a sliver.