by Alan Furst
DeRoche and Ricard ran to the door of the shed, found it padlocked, but it took only one kick from the powerful DeRoche: the door splintered and swung open. Inside the shed, Ricard’s flashlight illuminated rows of torpedoes strapped to hand trucks. Ricard chose one, but he could barely move it, then DeRoche took over and wheeled the torpedo past the guard’s body and put it into the panel truck.
* * *
—
Early the next morning, two Gestapo officers drove up to the shed, where a French detective, called Guarini, and a German naval officer were waiting for them. Guarini, a Corsican with dark complexion and black hair, did the police work: identified the dead guard, found the three shell casings and put them in a paper bag, and searched the immediate area for other clues. He looked for tire tracks on the dirt road, but the dirt was dry and hard and the vehicle had left no trace on its surface.
As the Gestapo officers watched him work, one of them said, “What calibre?”
“They used a forty-five,” Guarini said.
“An American weapon?” the officer asked.
“Maybe,” Guarini said. “But forty-five calibre automatics are manufactured all over Europe. Still, if I had to guess, I’d say this particular weapon was the Browning model carried by the American military.”
The officer took a notepad from his pocket and wrote down Killer used an American .45 automatic. Then he said, “So we might assume that the killing was done by a Resistance cell in France—the Resistance is partial to slow, heavy bullets that stop a victim in his tracks.”
Guarini hesitated, then said what the German officer wanted to hear: “I think it’s a good possibility. Who else would steal a torpedo? It’s not something you can sell.” Then he called over to the German naval officer, “Only one torpedo gone?”
The naval officer said, “Looks like it. The itinerary will have to be examined, but I suspect that only one torpedo was taken.”
“So we have here the operation of an intelligence service, likely a British intelligence service—they’re the ones who worry about convoys and torpedoes, and they know our submarines are based in Saint-Nazaire,” the Gestapo officer said. “And it has to be a local operation, our shore surveillance did not pick up a boat landing.”
“A few weeks ago,” Guarini said, “one of our spies reported that a torpedo detonator was taken by one of the Polish laborers who work at the factory where the detonators are manufactured. We don’t know what became of it.”
The Gestapo officer grimaced. “Goddamn Poles,” he said. “They won’t give up. They stole a detonator, then they came back for the torpedo. What’s next? A submarine?”
JULY HAD USUALLY been a pleasant season in Paris, sunny and warm, but during the last week of the month, in 1943, temperatures climbed into the nineties, the air humid and still, with no relief at night for a city built of absorbent stone. On the hottest, stickiest nights, the Parisians couldn’t sleep—they tried, stripped down and lay still on damp sheets, but soon enough rose and sat by their open windows, smoking cigarettes in the dark. Paul Ricard, sweltering under the slate tiles of his garret roof, made a telephone call, then went off to see his friend Romany, up on the fancy Avenue Bosquet. He found a taxi, wood-fired engine on the roof, and gave the driver the address.
They never got there. On the Rue Saint-Dominique, a taxi hit the front wheel well of Ricard’s taxi. Now the drivers cursed each other as a crowd gathered on the street. Ricard sat in the backseat, wiping sweat from his face with a handkerchief, and told himself to be patient: these little accidents happened, now one had happened to him.
Ten minutes later, two policemen appeared. The sergeant in charge told Ricard to get out of the taxi, then watched him carefully as he complied. Something is wrong. The idea drifted up from his subconscious and took root.
These weren’t Parisian flics. The uniform was right, but they didn’t quite act like the police he was used to. Too polite, he thought, like actors playing police in a play. Parisian police were polite on the surface, but they were ready to hit you with their lead-weighted cape or their bâton if you showed defiance. And, somehow, they let you know it.
“Your papers, monsieur.”
For a passenger? Well, maybe a witness. For such a gentle little bump? Ricard was trying to make something normal of the event, but he couldn’t. He handed over his papers, the flic took them and walked away. Ricard panicked. Without papers, especially under the occupation, you didn’t exist. Ricard ran after the policeman. “My papers,” he said.
“I understand, monsieur, come to the Préfecture tomorrow morning, 116 Rue de Grenelle, and we will return your papers.” Followed by the traditional salute: index finger to brim of kepi.
No going to see Romany now, he thought. He headed quickly for home, feeling vulnerable and exposed without his papers.
* * *
—
Back in his garret, Ricard worried and paced. He tried to work on his novel, but he couldn’t concentrate. Usually, no matter the trouble, this helped. Transported to another world, where his fictional characters had a life of their own, he left his daily reality and lived in the world he had built for them—a much-easier place to live.
He couldn’t stop brooding about the faked accident, and, suddenly, he thought, I am being prepared. The Gestapo wanted something from him. What other reason could there be? He was to play a role in some theatre of intrigue they had constructed. So then, how to say no? How to say no without being tortured and shot? And his interior voice wasn’t done with him, You will have to do what they tell you. Or seem to. Or pretend to.
The following day he went as instructed to the Préfecture. The flics were courteous as they handed over his papers. From Ricard, a deep, though silent, sigh of relief. The bastards had scared him.
As he turned to leave the Préfecture, a voice said, “Ricard?”
He turned to face a Gestapo officer who had appeared from an office adjacent to the reception counter. “Step inside,” the officer said, holding the door open for him.
Ricard entered the office. “I am Major Erhard Geisler,” the officer said. Ricard sat across the desk from the officer. “I am going to give you a chance to help us, and to help yourself.”
“Yes?” Ricard said. Then added, “Sir.” His heart was beating hard.
“Your residence permit for Paris, may I see it?”
Ricard handed over the document, the officer studied it and said, “I see you keep it up to date.”
“I follow the rules, sir,” Ricard said.
“Smart fellow,” Geisler said. “And you know what happens to those who don’t follow the rules.” Geisler didn’t draw a finger across his throat, he didn’t have to, a certain tone in his voice did that job for him.
But Geisler didn’t hand the residence permit back; he put it in his desk drawer. “I’ll just keep this for a while. If you are stopped at a street control, you can tell them where your residence permit is.”
“Won’t I be detained?”
“You may well be, but it will all be worked out when the police contact my office. Now, a certain committee has been established, the Union Nationale des Écrivains—the National Writers’ Committee—and you’ve been enrolled as one of its members. The job of the committee is to make sure that writers of all political views are read by French readers. At this time, that isn’t the case—writers of the left, that crowd from the Deux Magots, are popular. But Europe is changing and it’s time for French intellectuals, among others, to understand that. Now, you have questions?”
“No, sir.”
“Then I’ll wish you good day.”
* * *
—
Ricard had no intention of trying to live in Paris without a permit, and he wasn’t going to let these bastards rule his life from a desk drawer. So he visited a specialist in false papers, known as a shoemaker. The shoemake
r lived in the Marais, in a small hotel on a square off the Rue de Plâtre. He was an artist, this shoemaker, working at a desk piled with counterfeit rubber stamps, pens, and bottles of the purple ink used by bureaucrats.
Typing Ricard’s name on a residence permit, he said, “I’ve never been so busy, but I’d like to go back to forging checks and documents—this occupation is hard on my nerves.”
In fifteen minutes, Ricard was again approved for residence in the city of Paris.
* * *
—
Ricard telephoned Colonel de Roux that afternoon and, the following day, took the train up to Les Andelys. Colonel de Roux met him at the station with a horse and wagon and slowly, crossing and recrossing the Seine, they made their way to the colonel’s house. Nadine, the colonel’s sheepdog, had come along for the ride, sometimes barking at the cows in the fields, sometimes leaping from the cart to investigate something that interested her, then catching back up to the cart and jumping in.
At the colonel’s house they had lunch: a tough chicken stewed in wine with onions and the yellowish curved potatoes known as rattes. Over lunch, Ricard told de Roux about the Polish resistance and the German U-boats. De Roux was both delighted and amused. “The Poles go on forever,” he said. “They fight back, so the enemies on their borders think twice before they try any nonsense.” Then de Roux said, “Do you know the waterways of France, Monsieur Ricard? The canals and the navigable rivers?”
“I don’t. The names of most of the rivers, those I know, but, after that…”
“It’s quite a system, though most people really aren’t aware of its extent.”
“I believe there may be a lot of canals, a lot of rivers.”
De Roux nodded and said, “There are, more than you would imagine. Let’s go to my map room and have a look.”
* * *
—
August. Now the real heat of the summer arrived and Parisians fled the city, gathered in friends’ country houses if they didn’t have their own, or stayed at small pensions—breakfast and dinner included. Ricard and DeRoche took rooms at one of them, near the village of La Fontaine on the Loire. On a cloudy afternoon, the hotel kitchen prepared a picnic for them, then they rented horses at a local stable and rode along a dirt path by the river. At first, Ricard, very much a city boy, knew he was going to fall off, his legs spread wide in the saddle, but the horse was a gentle beast and used to inexperienced riders, so walked at a slow pace in the summer heat.
There was a boat rental facility at La Fontaine, with a machine shop where they repaired river craft—mostly barges and the tugboats that towed them. They found the proprietor working at a forge, sweat soaking through his shirt as he hammered a bent propeller blade back to its proper shape. The proprietor lifted a welding shield up to his forehead and said, “Gentlemen, what can I do for you?” Lying on a table was his hat, a much-battered and faded naval cap.
“We’re staying at La Fontaine,” Ricard said.
“August vacation?”
“Yes. It’s too hot to stay in Paris.” Ricard opened the wicker case that had held their picnic and produced a bottle of white Bordeaux. “Can we offer you a drink?” he said.
“I wouldn’t mind,” the proprietor said.
DeRoche took a multi-blade knife from his pocket and used the corkscrew blade to open the wine, pouring it into three glasses he took from leather straps that were looped atop the picnic hamper. Ricard lifted his glass, said “Salut,” and they drank.
The proprietor closed his eyes for a moment and said, “Mon Dieu, that’s good.” He had a look at the label on the bottle and raised his eyebrows: “Oh, of course,” he said. “Grapes from the same estate that bottles Château d’Yquem.”
“An old bottle,” Ricard said. “Hidden from the Germans.”
The proprietor spat on his forge, producing a brief sizzle. “They come here with their French whores, as though they were on vacation.”
“And do they patrol the river here?”
“Not really. As the Seine is the great river of Paris, the Loire is the great river of France, the longest river in the country, but it can’t be navigated. I mean, look at it.”
They looked: a slow trickle of water, maybe two feet deep, worked its way past the gravel islands of the river.
“Tell me, monsieur…”
“Pascal.”
Ricard and DeRoche shook hands with him and introduced themselves.
“So then,” Ricard continued, “all the barge traffic moves on the canals.”
“That’s how it’s always been. Always. Everything moves on the canals, on barges. Wheat and rye, bricks, coal, much of what is produced in the region. Now it goes as far as Lyons, then by rail off to Germany.”
“So, the Germans patrol the canals?”
“They try. There’s a patrol boat that comes by here, on the canal, once in the early morning, then at dusk.”
“And the canals,” DeRoche said, “how deep are they?”
“It changes with the season, but around here we say more than eight feet.”
DeRoche and Ricard glanced at each other—that was deep enough for a shallow-draft tugboat. Ricard refilled the glasses and, after Monsieur Pascal had taken a sip, he said, “You know, I wasn’t born yesterday. The kind of information you’re seeking could get you in trouble if you asked the wrong person.”
“I don’t think you’re the wrong person, Monsieur Pascal.”
Pascal smiled. “I’m not. My friends and I don’t like the Boche. It’s nothing official, just a group of Frenchmen, but we keep an eye on what’s what here, just in case, someday, somebody wants to know.”
“Can you help us with a boat?”
“I would think so. By help do you mean engine repair? New sails? I can give you a good price on whatever you want. I live in the village of La Fontaine, everyone knows us Pascals, we’ve worked the canals for generations. So, what kind of boat do you need?”
“A small tugboat with a shallow draft,” Ricard said. “Do you know the people who operate tugboats?”
“I know everybody, tugboat captains included. Of course you need a particular kind of captain, because what you propose sounds to me like a Resistance operation.”
“You could call it that,” Ricard said.
Pascal thought for a moment. “Some of the captains are political, some not. But I think your best man is known as Bastien, his surname. He’s getting on in years, but he fought in the Great War and he’s very much a patriot, and he is fearless.”
“And where would we find Bastien?”
“The tugboat captains, and the river pilots—canal pilots—are to be found at Nantes, where the river pilots’ association has a small office, on the Quai de la Fosse.”
Ricard thanked him for the information. Then Pascal said, “What are you going to do with a tugboat?”
“We don’t need it for long, a few days will do. So we mean to use it, do what we need to do, then get away.”
Pascal shook his head. “What will you be carrying on the tugboat?”
“Certain German equipment—better I don’t say more than that.”
“Well then, let’s go and see your barge captain.”
Pascal had the use of an automobile and drove DeRoche and Ricard over to Nantes and the river pilots’ office on the Quai de la Fosse. The association was housed in a single room in a creaky wooden building that hadn’t yet fallen into the river, but it would get there. Inside, it smelled of strong coffee and tobacco smoke. Bastien turned out to be in his late seventies, with a deeply seamed face and bright eyes with lines at the corners from squinting into the weather at sea. He wore a wool watch cap and smoked smelly little brown cigars.
The three chatted for a time, then Bastien said, “What is it you want towed?”
“We’re using it for transport, so it w
on’t tow anything.”
Bastien stared at them—what was this?
“We have a heavy load, the shape of, say, a torpedo.”
“And you want me to take it up into the canal?”
“That’s our plan.”
“Crazy, my friends, truly crazy, but why not.”
The conversation continued for a while, then it was time for Bastien to go to work. They said goodby, and, as Bastien left, he said, “Contact me when you’re ready.”
DeRoche and Ricard returned their horses and found a train that, with a connection, would take them back to Paris. The provincial waterways departments had been digging barge canals since the 1700s, and, as they moved north in the hot afternoon, the clatter of the train’s wheels changed as they crossed the railway bridges. The people who worked the barges also lived on them; sometimes a woman, hanging out washing, would wave at the train, and family dogs barked as it passed above them.
* * *
—
In Paris, on the last day of August, Kasia visited Madame de la Boissière at her apartment, but just as Kasia arrived, a customer showed up, then another. By late afternoon, the two decided to seek privacy at Kasia’s room above the stockyards, where, after a glass of wine, Kasia stretched out over Madame de la B.’s knee, took down her panties, and was smartly spanked. Not too hard, not too fast, Madame de la B. was practiced and adept, and accompanied the event with a softly spoken narrative.
The two were lying in Kasia’s bed when the telephone rang, and Kasia, pink bottom wobbling as she crossed the room, answered it. At the other end of the line, Teodor, the spy who worked for the civil servants in London, sounded shaky. He suggested a meeting that night, at a café in the Seventh Arrondissement. This was, to Kasia, an alarming telephone call. Contact with Teodor had always been clandestine—but this time he had simply called. Openly. No chalk marks on lampposts, no oblique classified advertisements, no twelve-year-old courier.