The Alex Kovacs Series Box Set

by Richard Wake

  The problem, of course, was that Manon would not be in New York. I had never made a big decision in my life because of a woman. The truth was, I hadn't made many small decisions because of a woman, either. It was the trait I learned from Uncle Otto, for better or worse. He never married, and I had never been close. "Life's too short, buddy boy," is what he always said, and I tended to believe him. There was always another sales trip to Cologne, always another girl to charm with my travel stories.

  But it all felt so empty, thinking back on it. So there I was, empty and exhausted, still angry at Groucho and Gamelin, unable to shake the thought of Vogl, the letter from Manon still clutched in my left hand. I eventually folded it carefully and put it back into the envelope, then into my suitcase, shoving some clothes on top of it, leaving enough room for the stacks of Swiss francs.

  56

  The train to Lyon was empty. Nobody was traveling into a war zone if they didn't have to, after all -- although the fighting was nowhere near Lyon. It was all much farther north. Still, you could see the families and their luggage crowded onto the platforms in some of the cities we passed through, all of them headed out of France and toward Switzerland.

  The hotel across from the station in Lyon seemed empty, too.

  "Quiet," I said to the desk clerk, trying out my French.

  "From Alsace?" she said.

  "Originally, yes. I live in Zurich now."

  She looked at me a bit cross-wise, the face an unspoken question about why I would leave a safe, neutral country for France.

  "I'm here on business," I said, and she shrugged. I think I might have ended up with the best room in the place. The water for the bath ran extra hot, and the mattress seemed extra soft. Or maybe it was just exhaustion. Whatever, I skipped dinner and slept for 13 hours.

  I didn't know much about Manon's life in Lyon, other than that her last name was Friere and that she was from a family of silk manufacturers. The concierge had a telephone directory, and there was a Friere Brothers that manufactured silk in the Croix-Rousse neighborhood, a big hill on the north side of the city. Armed with directions, I decided to walk. Lyon was built up along two rivers, the Rhone and the Saone, and getting to Croix-Rousse meant crossing one of the Rhone bridges and then walking north, through the more downtown areas and then up winding, sometimes medieval streets. It was way up, too -- some of the way, you actually climbed 40 or 50 stairs to get from one road to the next. I stopped on a bench to rest about halfway up.

  Finally, though, I reached Rue Dumenge, made a left, then a quick right, and saw the sign: "Friere Brothers. Fine Silk".

  Suddenly, I was afraid to knock. I mean, I didn't even know if she was there. For all I knew, she had an old boyfriend who took her in. Like Anders said, "Lovers in wartime." When confronted with an opportunity to knock, what had seemed like such a good idea now seemed so risky.

  I retreated to a cafe across the street, took a seat at the window, and watched the front door. At around 10:30, it opened, and Manon came out. She began walking in my direction. It soon was obvious that she was coming into the cafe where I was sitting.

  I just watched her, heading in my direction. As she began to pass the window where I was sitting, oblivious, I knocked on the glass.

  She stopped, looked. It seemed as if my face wasn't registering with her somehow. Maybe there was glare on the glass. Maybe she was just in shock.

  One second. Two. And then she slowly raised up her hand, and put it flat on the glass, and kept it there while I did the same.

  The Lyon Resistance

  Copyright © 2019 by Manor and State, LLC

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical figures, are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Part I

  1

  The small railroad bridge, our target for the night, was about halfway between Lyon and Saint Etienne, maybe 10 miles from each, give or take. The tracks ran close to the Rhone on one side and were hugged by farmland on the other. The land was relatively flat there, and simple grade crossings over the roadways were sufficient — except in this one place, where a dip in the land called for a little stone bridge to hold the tracks over an unnamed road dividing fields of hay. Although, on my scouting trips, it never seemed that big of a dip. This might have been one of those fortuitous occasions where a local elected official owned both the land that the railroad company needed and the little stone bridge construction company.

  Railroad track demolition was one of the ways we annoyed the Germans. We had to admit, though, that it was mostly just that: an annoyance. If you blew up a few yards of tracks on a Wednesday night, you would screw up traffic in and out of Lyon on Thursday. If you were lucky, on Friday, too. But that was it — and it seemed that the Nazis were getting better at the business of repairing the blown lines. They also were bringing in an increasing number of men to perform regular preventative patrols.

  So it was getting to be a lose-lose calculation — unless you were talking about a bridge. Because the destruction of even the smallest bridge, like the single stone arch I was looking at through my binoculars as I lay behind a hay bale, would put the line out of business for at least a week, and more likely two. The risk-reward suddenly tilted again toward reward, even while acknowledging that the German did the same cost-benefit analysis and kept a close eye on every bridge along the line, including the tiny ones. Which was why Rene, Max and I kept trading the glasses between us, staring at the back of the heads of the two German soldiers leaning on the fenders of their vehicle. They were smoking cigarettes. When they turned, you could see the tiny glow.

  “How much time?” Max said. Rene looked at his watch.

  “Still five minutes,” he said. “No, six. Relax.”

  Max scooted away from us, crab-walking behind another hay bale to take a piss. If they gave tests to spies, or saboteurs, or resistance agents, or whatever the fuck we were, the adequate bladder test would have flunked Max out straight away. He was a good kid, only 17 and entirely cold-blooded — he very nearly severed the head of a German sentry he had already killed, just in a rage, during a mission to set a fuel depot on fire. But he had to piss as often as an old man, which was the only thing I could kid him about, seeing as how I was 42 years old and he called me Pops. As in, “Fuck you, Pops,” which was essentially his reply to everything I said.

  If I was the brains of the operation — and in all modesty, I was — and if Max supplied the muscle and the balls, Rene was the demolitions expert. How he had acquired the expertise had never been explained to me, but Rene knew about the different types of explosives, and how to attach the detonator and the wires and, in this case, the windup alarm clock. I had been given a quick-and-dirty training session once, and I could wire an explosive charge to a plunger, but I would never trust myself with one of the timers. You have to know your limits, especially when you are talking about dismemberment.

  Max had argued about everything when we set up the first charge, at about 10 p.m. It was on the tracks, maybe 300 yards from the little stone bridge.

  “Pops, we’re too fucking close,” he said.

  “We have to be close,” I said. Then I explained to him for the fifth time that in order for this to work, the soldiers guarding the bridge had to be close enough to the first explosion that they felt it was their clear
and obvious duty to investigate it themselves.

  “But we need the time,” Max said. “They could reach us with their rifles if they saw us.”

  “They’re not going to see us,” I said. “They’re going to be running toward the explosion, and then they’re going to be staring at burning railroad ties and radioing back to whoever for instructions. As soon as they start heading for the explosion, we start heading for the bridge. We’ll get where we need to be before they get to the explosion. And how much time do you need, Rene?”

  “Two minutes, Alex,” he said. “It’s all packed in the cases. I just need to set the timers. Maybe less than two minutes once I’m on the bridge. The cases are pretty heavy for me to carry up that embankment, though.”

  “That’s what Max is for,” I said.

  “Fuck you, Pops.”

  And so it went. We set the timer on the first charge to go off at 11 p.m. We still had three minutes. Now I had to piss. I could have held it, but I felt as if maybe Max needed to win one before the end of the night. So I crab-walked behind the same bale and listened to him mock me.

  “Mine’s just nerves, and I can always learn to relax,” he said. “But your old man plumbing is shot forever.”

  As this went on, Rene continued to stare at his watch. He gave a one-minute warning, then 30 seconds. The three of us were ready to move when the explosion went off, piercing the night. I watched through the binoculars as the two soldiers jumped, then said something to each other, then hesitated, then began running toward the boom and what was now a fire of burning railroad ties. One of them was carrying a portable radio and holding it up to his ear as he ran. The other held his helmet down with one hand and grabbed his rifle with the other.

  “All right, let’s do it,” I said. We all trotted, Max carrying the suitcases full of dynamite, Rene and I with pistols drawn. From there, it went pretty much exactly as I had planned it out in my head. The embankment was not that steep, pretty easy for all of us, even Max with the cases. On my scouting trips — which were necessarily brief, to avoid suspicion — I had noticed that there was a space on each side of the bridge, between the railroad bed and the keystone of each arch. I was pretty confident that Rene would be able to wedge the cases into the space, but you don’t know until you know.

  “They going to fit?” I said.

  “Like a glove, Alex my boy. Like a fucking glove.”

  I don’t think he took 90 seconds to get the clocks set and put the cases in place. The entire time, I could see the two soldiers, outlined against the fire on the tracks. We ran past our original vantage point to another, maybe 400 yards away. As we got set, Rene looked at his watch.

  “Two minutes,” he said, and then pointed to the binoculars. “May I?”

  “Yes, the artist should see his masterpiece,” I said.

  We all stood now, not even hiding. It was a moonless night, chosen for that very reason, and cloudy besides. Nobody was looking at us. I took one more quick peek toward the first explosion and saw the same two silhouettes. Then I focused back on the little stone bridge, just in time to see it reduced to a little stone pile. The two explosions came about 10 seconds apart.

  As Rene stared into the binoculars — “Ah, it’s beautiful,” he said, once, then twice — Max and I instinctively hugged each other as if we had just assisted on a game-winning goal during stoppage time. But then we had to go, three men dressed like farm laborers to three different farms in the area. From there, we would be transported back to Lyon.

  “You both memorized your directions, right?” I said. “And stay off the roads.”

  “Fuck you, Pops,” Max said.

  2

  My farm was in Chassagny. Our plan was to sleep rough in the fields behind the three farms where we were headed, the assumption being that the Gestapo would be knocking on doors before dawn in their search for the bridge saboteurs. I didn’t think I would be able to sleep, but I did, the adrenaline rush long past and leaving only exhaustion in its place. It was the rising sun that woke me, and then the slamming of the back door of the farmhouse in the distance as Marcel Lefebvre headed to the barn and his cows. I followed him in, a minute or two later, and I startled him. He fell off of his milking stool and came within inches of compounding the indignity by landing in a pile of cow shit.

  “You missed them,” he said. He was on his feet now and embracing me.

  “Missed who?”

  “Your friends in the black leather coats,” he said. “They were banging on the door at 3:30. They searched the house and the barn with torches and warned me to be on the lookout for some Resistance saboteurs.”

  “They’re just paranoid,” I said.

  “I hope they have something to be paranoid about,” Marcel said.

  I told him about the little stone bridge, and he dropped a teat to thrust his hand toward the sky. Then he continued milking. I watched in silence as he filled a pail. It didn’t take long.

  “Everybody’s okay, right?” he said. When I assured him we were, he motioned for me to follow him into the house. “Quick, quick, just in case,” he said, and we scampered inside.

  From a barrel in the corner of the kitchen, he poured us two tumblers of rough red wine. I looked at my watch theatrically. It was 7:15 a.m.

  “Hell, we’re celebrating,” Marcel said, shoving the glass at me.

  “I wasn’t complaining,” I said.

  “You’d better not be — this is a good batch.”

  Marcel was in his fifties, a widower with no kids — which meant he did everything on his little hay farm, including delivering the hay to his customers. That is how I would be returning to Lyon, secreted in his hay wagon. For fun, and for some extra money, he made wine. There were some real wineries nearby, but his was a grapes-in-the-bathtub-sized operation. He sold mostly to friends, or at local farmers’ markets. He had some beautiful old oak barrels, and the wine he made was significantly better than crap, an everyday wine that was noticeably tastier than typical everyday wine. Of course, given the rationing, even crap wine was very much in demand.

  He worked hard at it, as a kind of profitable hobby, and had about 25 barrels in the barn. As it turned out, those barrels were why he joined the Resistance. With petrol in low supply and a lot of car motors converted to burning wood, the Germans did a different kind of conversion. They had engines that would run on alcohol, that would run on wine. And so, they traveled the countryside and went about the business of requisitioning all the wine they could get their hands on.

  “It’s bad enough they wouldn’t pay for it,” Marcel said, when he first told me the story. “But Alex, I could live with that. I understand pigs. But when they dumped motor oil in with the wine, I just couldn’t take that.”

  The problem wasn’t that the oil spoiled the wine for drinking because it did. That was the Germans’ purpose. The issue was the barrels. The oil ruined them, too, leaving behind a residue that soaked into the old wood and could not be cleaned out. They couldn’t be used for wine anymore.

  “I cried when I had to break them up,” Marcel said. He used them for firewood.

  “How many did they get?”

  “Twelve.”

  “How many did you manage to hide from them?”

  “Fourteen,” he said. Then he laughed. “With these assholes, the way I figure it, I’m still ahead of the game, 14-12. And now, I help you guys out here and there, and the wine I have left tastes that much sweeter.”

  He pulled two empty bottles out of the cupboard, filled one with wine and one with milk, and stoppered them. “Here,” he said, handing them over. “We need to get going.”

  With that, my bottles and I climbed into the wagon. He had square bales already loaded — three layers of bales, five in a row, five deep, 75 bales in all. Except it was really 73, as I found out when I crawled into an empty space in the middle of the hay structure and then sat as Marcel sealed me in.

  He had asked me ahead of time if it was necessary, and I admitted that thi
s was exercising an insane level of caution. I mean, it wasn’t as if every other wagon headed into town with farm goods was manned by a single person.

  “So you’re my helper — what’s the big deal?” Marcel said.

  “You’re probably right,” I said. “But what if you get stopped by a German who knows you live alone here, and work alone? I’m sure they’re really on edge, really jumpy, and it’s just not worth the risk, even if you just told them I was a day laborer helping with a big load.”

  So I sat in darkness, save for a tiny shaft of light — and, presumably, oxygen — that made it through the immense pile. And, as it turned out, Marcel was stopped by a German patrol, and one of the soldiers did jab a bayonet into the hay bales two or three times for show. If the steel had struck flesh, it would have been a lot harder for Marcel to explain than a strange day laborer sitting next to him in the passenger seat. But the bayonet hit nothing besides hay, and we made it to the Lyon municipal stables by 10 o’clock. Yes, I was being smuggled into the place where the city police boarded their horses.

  “Don’t worry,” Marcel said. The wagon was parked behind the barns. No one was around. “Besides,” he said, “now you can be my day laborer.”

  “It’s worth it for the wine and the milk,” I said. We had the truck unloaded within an hour. Then, Marcel made sure to pull every stray bit of hay out of my hair and pockets and cuffs. If I walked fast, I would be home in another hour.

  3

  The walk home took me past the old army medical school, which was now Gestapo headquarters in Lyon — just one more bit of evidence of God’s twisted sense of humor. What once had been a place where men were taught to save the lives of those who had been thrust into hell was now a place where the hell was manufactured instead.