Under Occupation

by Alan Furst

  By now, Ricard was walking fast and saw, in a café window, that his pursuers were closing in on him. “Now we split up,” he said to Kasia. “Meet me back at the gare.” Kasia, a lot faster than Ricard, turned suddenly and ran across the street, but the Gestapo officers ignored her and followed Ricard and the valise.

  Ricard now began to panic and broke into a run, but he was forty and they were in their twenties, and he wasn’t going to outdistance them. He looked up the boulevard and spotted an approaching taxi, the usual wood-fired engine set atop its roof. The taxi slowed as it neared a sharp corner; Ricard pulled the door open and sprawled full-length across the backseat.

  Or rather, across the laps of the two people sitting in the backseat: a glamorous woman in a hat with a veil, who yelped as Ricard landed on her, and an older man, a Parisian dandy, a gent, with a white mustache curled up at the ends, who wore a white suit over a waistcoat with fleur-de-lis designs on white silk. He had also an ornate walking stick with which he began to beat Ricard, shouting insults at him in upper-class French. The taxi jerked to a stop and the driver scurried to the backseat, grabbed Ricard by the shoulders, and attempted to pull him out, but Ricard swung the valise and smacked him full on the nose, which began to bleed copiously. From the older gent, the French equivalent of Damn you, sir, have you no manners?

  Now a flic came running and blowing his whistle. Ricard didn’t wait for more police to arrive; he slid the rest of the way out of the car, ran around to the driver’s seat, and put the car in gear. The woman squawked, “Maurice! We are being kidnapped! Do something!” From behind, Maurice hit Ricard on the top of his head. Ricard saw stars, then stopped the taxi and punched the white-haired gent in the forehead. Shaking his hand, hurt by the impact, Ricard said, “I am with the Resistance. I’m being followed.”

  “Go resist somewhere else,” the gent yelled and swung his stick back for another blow as, once again, a police whistle sounded. Ricard dragged him out of the taxi, set him on the pavement, put a foot behind his heel, and gave him a good shove. The man tumbled backward with a curse, Ricard jumped into the taxi and drove off. From the backseat, the gent’s companion cried out, “Please, sir, let me go, I’ll give you money.”

  Behind the taxi, a police car approached, its two-tone Klaxon horn honking away, and drew abreast of the taxi. From the passenger seat, the Gestapo man in the blue suit shook his fist at Ricard, who turned hard left and slammed the taxi into the police car. Both vehicles mounted the curb, the police car skidded to a stop in front of a building, the taxi hit a streetlamp, which broke the lamp from its standard and sent it crashing down on the taxi’s roof. Ricard grabbed the valise and took off running down the boulevard.

  Almost immediately he found himself by a department store and hurried inside. The perfume counter was near the entry and a saleswoman, speaking from a cloud of scent, said, “Monsieur, do you need help? You are injured.” Ricard realized that his forehead was wet and drew a finger across it, which came away red. “I’m running from the Boche,” he said to the woman, who made a sound of sympathy and began wiping Ricard’s forehead with a facial tissue—then handed him another. “Take the elevator,” she said. “We have five floors.”

  As Ricard waited by the elevator, he heard a commotion at the front of the store—the Gestapo had arrived. He watched the needle above the elevator door as it descended: fourth floor, third, second, and there it stopped. Behind him, he heard running footsteps. Then the needle began to descend, the door opened automatically, and the elevator operator, wearing white gloves, slid the gate aside. A small crowd entered the elevator and, just before the gate was closed, so did the Gestapo man in the leather jacket. The elevator car filled with shoppers, Ricard stood against the side of the car, with several people between him and the Gestapo officer. Ricard dabbed at his hairline with the tissue.

  Then the man in the leather jacket spoke, his French bearing a heavy German accent. “Give up this foolishness,” he said. “We just want to talk to you.”

  “Go fuck yourself,” Ricard said.

  “We mean you no harm, monsieur.”

  “Go back to Germany, you grand cul.”

  “Just hand over the valise and I won’t trouble you further.”

  “Casse-toi.” Piss off.

  The elevator operator called out, “Second floor. Ladies’ fashion.” The door opened and he slid the gate aside. “Excuse me,” Ricard said, and worked his way toward the door. As he stepped out, he heard the Gestapo man say, “Excuse me, I’m getting off here.”

  But he couldn’t get off, the Parisian men and women in the elevator jostled him and pressed around him, all of them staring straight ahead and pretending that nothing was happening.

  The Gestapo man swore in German; somebody on the elevator called him a dirty Boche. As the door closed, the officer struggled, but the crowd had him penned in, and now the elevator left. Ricard headed for the stairs, ran down to the first floor and out onto the boulevard. He took a moment to get his bearings, then headed for the Métro.

  * * *

  —

  Ricard met with Leila at an empty apartment in the elegant La Muette district, the best neighborhood in the high-class Sixteenth Arrondissement. The tenants were away—maybe at their country houses, maybe in New York for the duration of the war. Meanwhile, the apartment had been carefully protected; the shutters were closed tight and every piece of furniture, sofas, chairs, tables, beds, even the dog’s little bed, had been covered with sheets.

  On a sheet-covered sofa, Leila sat with back ramrod straight, head high, thighs, knees, and feet pressed together. He found her, as before, intensely desirable: thick, black hair combed back on both sides, Mediterranean complexion, gently curved nose, and dark gray eyes. She had her coat over her arm and wore a tweed Chanel suit—hip-length jacket, knee-length skirt—a necklace of lustrous, silvery-white pearls, and carried a leather overnight bag. After brief small talk, she explained the site of their meeting by saying, “My friends are generous with their apartment keys.”

  “You have others you can use?”

  “Oh yes. In my business, one must have safe houses.”

  “That would be the spying business?”

  “That’s what I do, Monsieur Ricard.”

  “For a long time?”

  “Since I was sixteen.” She smiled at the memory.

  “How, um, did you come to…get into that business?”

  “It runs in families, that’s the secret, so one comes to it naturally. We are Turkish, my family is, but we operate wherever the political moment takes us. My uncle worked for the Greeks, and spied on the Turks, the Ottoman Turks, just before their empire collapsed, in 1918. Of course he was paid in gold, British gold sovereigns, one doesn’t want to work for paper currency, not ever, though Swiss francs are sometimes acceptable. My great-aunt learned that the hard way, she spied for the Croats against the Serbs and had a hellish time of it, her safe-deposit box stuffed with Croatian kuna, which she had to convert to gold jewelry. We go back a long way, Monsieur Ricard, some of the family say the Renaissance, but who knows. I lost two ancestors who worked against the Russians in 1903—the Okhrana secret police made them disappear, and ever since we’ve demanded a high price to operate against Russia.”

  “And now, you work for the British.”

  Leila nodded. “This is a big war, we have now, and we’ve had all sorts of offers, but we chose with our hearts, and it wasn’t hard to choose. We certainly wanted no part of the Nazis. We don’t work for monsters.”

  Ricard unbuckled the valise and brought out the detonator. “This took some doing, but here it is.”

  Leila leaned forward on the sheet-covered sofa and Ricard handed her the device. As she held it in her slim hands, nails polished in carmine red, Ricard was struck by the incongruity. “It seems plain enough,” she said. “But I suppose what makes it interesting is w
hatever goes on under the covering. Let’s have a look inside.”

  Ricard was horrified and his face showed it.

  “Now, now, Ricard, I’m just teasing you.” After a moment she looked at him inquisitively and said, “Of course there will be more from your Polish friends.”

  Ricard shrugged and said, “I don’t know, the people who brought it here did it on their own.”

  “Do you pay them?”

  “No.”

  “Better if you did. Clearer. We respect the impulse for resistance, we depend on it, but you may say of us, ‘They have plenty of money, why not make your life better?’ ”

  “What will you do with it?”

  “Make sure it gets to the proper people, in London, the people who run these things and have all the strings in their hands. And, I promise you, they will want more. They’ll put it in an amiable way—they are forever polite—but they’ll ask.” Leila opened her overnight bag and put the device away. She paused a moment, met Ricard’s eyes, then stood up. “I must be going,” she said, reached into her purse and produced a thick wad of occupation francs. “Here’s something for you—you can pay people whatever they need or use it yourself.” She handed Ricard a form; his name had been typed across the top line. “And you have to sign for it. Have you a pen?”

  Ricard took out his pen and signed the document. It was then that he realized he was caught, that he would work for Leila as long as the war went on—in one way an uninviting prospect. He knew that he and Kasia had been lucky, they hadn’t been caught. But, next time? At least he would remain close to Leila.

  She was mysterious, remote, unapproachable, and she fascinated him—he had never known a woman remotely like her. So, in the way of the world, that made her intensely desirable. Of course, he, a mere writer, would never remove that stylish suit and what she wore beneath it. Lacy underwear? White cotton panties? Still, though a mere writer, he had a good imagination, with which he undressed her, and was delighted, and inflamed, by what he discovered.

  * * *

  —

  Leila returned to her apartment in the Chaussée de la Muette, then walked over to a deluxe gift shop which carried objets: bijoux fantaisie—costume jewelry—and small statuettes, in onyx or crystal, meant for those with money to spend on lovers or friends. The proprietor, whom she’d known and trusted for a long time, led her to a room behind the office. With so many lovely things to buy in Paris, gift wrapping had become a specialty of the city’s better shops. Very much the maestro, the proprietor wrapped the detonator in crinkly white paper, set it in a gold gift box with mauve paper, and tied it with a purple ribbon. Leila stepped back to admire the creation—very fancy, she thought. And very safe.

  Given the way that Leila dressed and held herself, and the impressive presentation of the package, she knew that the customs officers at Orly airfield would not ask that it be unwrapped. This was not the first time she had disguised contraband objects, and she knew it would work.

  * * *

  —

  At Orly airfield, Leila found her pilot friend and gave him an envelope—he was always pleased to see her. An hour later, she boarded a Potez 56, a low-wing monoplane built of plywood, which flew the mail from Paris to Madrid, a seven-hour trip with a refueling stop at Rivesaltes airfield in Perpignan. The wind was blowing hard that morning, with streaks of gray cloud moving overhead, and the plane shuddered and plunged as the pilot, seated directly in front of Leila, fought with the controls and talked to himself in a language she didn’t recognize. There was one other seat on the Potez—the rest of the plane was packed with canvas mailbags—and it was occupied, just before takeoff, by a military officer of some nation, who didn’t fly well, and, for the entire trip, hugged a briefcase to his chest with both arms, all the while praying, or cursing, under his breath.

  * * *

  —

  In Madrid, Leila called an accommodation number, a Thomas Cook travel agency, and told them she would be at the Hôtel Miramar, old, rundown, twelve rooms. There, Leila took a room and waited for a telephone call. Twenty minutes later, the phone croaked and, on the other end, an Englishman speaking Spanish told her to go to the Restaurante Sobrino de Botín. She took a taxi there and waited at the reception desk.

  She didn’t wait long. Two civil servants from the British embassy, the second secretary and the political officer, joined her and they sat down to eat lunch. The Sobrino de Botín was said to be the world’s oldest restaurant—opened in 1725. The long, narrow room, built of stone, was barrel-vaulted, the ceiling arching overhead. When their sherries arrived, Leila presented her gift-wrapped package, and the civil servants, who did espionage duty at the embassy, took turns in the WC, inspecting the gift, and returned to the table with grateful smiles.

  They ordered the specialty, sopa de ajo, an egg poached in chicken broth flavored with garlic and sherry, and asked Leila, in their smooth, tenor voices, when she would have more presents for them. Not if, when. It was 1942, Britain was not winning the war, but they were no longer losing, and the time had come to go on the offensive.

  * * *

  —

  They had, first of all, to win the war of blockades. In October of 1942, fifty-six merchant ships had been put out of commission, which meant that food, war matériel, and, crucially, oil, did not reach the United Kingdom. Thus RAF bombers hit the naval yards in Kiel for three nights, destroying the U-boat pens, the cranes, and the workshops, and flattening the Schönbrun-Grandschule lycée where the Polish laborers were housed. The Poles themselves were lucky; at work in an underground factory when the bombs fell. For the German engineers, there was no point in trying to rebuild, so they shifted the U-boat manufacture west, to France, to existing naval yards at the port of Saint-Nazaire—closer to the RAF bombers but heavily protected by anti-aircraft emplacements and Luftwaffe fighter planes.

  Meanwhile, Paul Ricard was at work in his garret, adding slow pages to The Investigator, hoping that Julien Montrésor, his publisher, was busy with other projects. Each time the telephone rang, he hesitated to answer it, afraid that Montrésor was going to hound him. But the publisher did not call.

  Who did call was Leila. She wanted to meet with him, and had chosen for the meeting a room at the Grand Hôtel, in the Opéra district. Waiting for him in the lobby, she led him upstairs to a handsomely furnished room on the top floor.

  It was five-thirty in the afternoon, the lights in the room were low, Leila was wearing a black silk dress, tied at the waist with the same material, a soft, supple, revealing dress. “Shall we have drinks sent up?” she said. “A brandy? A glass of wine?”

  “No, not tonight, let’s have whiskey sodas, tonight.”

  The telephone was on a nightstand by the bed and he watched, avidly, the shifting black silk as she walked over to call room service. After calling, she stood at the window for a moment, then said, “Strange, a dark city, I’ll never get used to it.” He joined her at the window, their shoulders almost touching, then, magically, touching. On the street below them, Parisians were going home from work, bundled up against the icy wind, walking quickly with heads down to spare their faces from the cold. “The world goes on,” she said, taking his hand. “Sometimes I would like to live a different life, an everyday life.”

  “You would be bored soon enough,” Ricard said. “You require excitement, I think.”

  “Yes, I suppose you’re right. Still…” When there was a tap at the door, she said, “Our drinks.”

  Ricard went to get them. In the hall, a bellboy wearing a rakishly tilted cap held a silver tray with the drinks, the soda water bubbling in tall glasses. Ricard tipped him, then set the tray on a low table in front of a sofa. Leila sat down and patted the cushion next to her. “Don’t be a stranger,” she said, smiling at him.

  “Salut,” Ricard said. They clinked glasses and sipped at the whiskey soda.

 
“Well, I felt that,” she said.

  Ricard said, “Me too.”

  “We can do better,” she said. Opening her purse, she took out a small glass jar that had once held caviar, and a tiny silver spoon. In the jar, white powder. She filled the spoon and held it up to his nose. He sniffed it up, she then helped herself. “Again?” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “You like cocaine?”

  He nodded, face numb, then drank some whiskey soda.

  She lit a cigarette and, eyes closed, exhaled plumes of smoke from her nose, closed her eyes, and rested her head on the sofa. Then she looked at him and said, “Feeling good?”

  “Better than good.”

  He was silent for a time, glad, more than glad, for her gracious presence. She came from a different world, richer than his, a world of aristocrats. But now, in this hotel room in Paris, they were about to make love, to be no more than two lovers with the long night to themselves.

  “Why don’t you take off your dress?” he said.

  She laughed and stood up. “Glad you said that. I was going to spill my drink on it, accidentally on purpose.” She untied the belt, then took the dress by the hem, wriggled out of it, and tossed it over the back of a chair. She was wearing snug white cotton panties, cut low on top and high on the bottom. When she unclipped her garters and rolled her stockings off, he saw that her legs were smooth and white. He stroked them and said, “Sit on my lap?” She made herself comfortable, then leaned forward a little and kissed him briefly on the forehead, took her panties off, and said, “Get undressed, Ricard, and, while you’re at it, can we have music?”