by Richard Wake
The bald guy answered. “With luggage means you are being transferred somewhere else, likely to some kind of camp,” he said. “And without luggage…”
He stopped. Within seconds, the silence was pierced by rifle fire. Without luggage meant death. Everybody knew what was happening, and how the risks of resisting the Germans were both real and enormous, but the series of percussive blasts provided an awful affirmation for me, or punctuation. For a while, I could hardly catch my breath.
Then keys jangled in the hallway and the enormous wooden door swung open. The wood must have been close to four inches thick. The hinges strained and groaned at each opening.
“Killy, Allain,” the guard said, and I stood up. “It’s your lucky day. You are going for a ride on the Avenue Berthelot Express. Come.”
He walked me out where I joined five others. I looked at the clock on the wall and it was 9 o’clock exactly. We were loaded onto the back of an open lorry and cuffed, both hands, to manacles that were secured to the floor with heavy iron chains. The slatted walls were high enough to shield us from the wind and the eyes of people on the streets, but the open top afforded us the ability to follow the route. The guard and driver were both French, not Gestapo. None of us in the back said a word.
It was an odd route. We came out of the back of the prison and down a couple of side streets as if there was an intention to avoid the busier roads. I wasn’t an expert on the neighborhood, but it seemed to me that Rue Garibaldi made the most sense for the heart of the trip, which probably wasn’t even two miles long. But we took lefts and right on little streets and even went through some kind of army facility. I thought I saw a sign that said “Fort La Motte,” but I wasn’t sure of anything, except that I had never heard of it. Whatever, it seemed a rather indirect route, rather inefficient, more French than German.
When we arrived at Avenue Berthelot, a gate was opened and we were driven into a vast central courtyard. My first thought was that it was far enough away from the street that only a dedicated gawker could see what was going on inside — and, well, let’s just say that the black-clad sentries were not big fans of dedicated gawkers. There were buildings on three sides of the courtyard, with the gate and stone walls along the street forming the fourth side. The buildings were four stories tall, made of a grayish-brown stone. A flagpole was the only interruption in the vast expanse of the courtyard. A giant red Nazi flag riffled in a significant breeze. The bits of brass hardware that held the flag to the lines were clanking against the white metal pole.
We sat in the lorry for about five minutes before two Gestapo soldiers arrived to unshackle us — or, rather, to order the French guards to unshackle us. They treated the French guards like shit — “Hurry up, you’re all the fucking same,” said one, in German — with a lack of courtesy that bordered on disdain. I could only imagine what was next for me.
I found out in just a few seconds when one guard pulled a list out of his breast pocket and said, “Killy, Allain?”
I stepped forward.
“It’s your lucky day, Killy, Allain. The rest go to the basement. You get to meet our Commander Barbie.”
6
The office was on the fourth floor. I was escorted to the door by the guard and left there with a soldier sitting at a desk outside. Other than that I was wearing pants that had to be held up by my hand and shoes without shoelaces, and that I had taken my last shit in a bucket in a fly-infested cell in front of three strangers, I might have been a salesman waiting on an appointment with the boss of the factory. Which I was in a previous life. It was about five years earlier, but it seemed like 50.
Sitting there, I tried to decide on a story to tell. I had been so freaked out by my experience in the cell that I hadn’t been able to concentrate, but as I watched the junior Hitler sitting at the desk next to me, filling out forms and then getting up and dropping them into a filing cabinet, it was clearly now or never.
The problem was that I had no idea what they knew. There was no way, no way in hell, that they had seen us blow up the little stone bridge. There were no witnesses. It wasn’t as if somebody took our picture in the dark. We had all arrived at the site, on separate trains, at stations miles apart, at different times. There was no way, and the only thing to do was deny everything. And that was true even if either Max or Rene had given up my name. They were going to do with me whatever they were going to do. That was not in my control. I felt like throwing up, but I had known this day was always a possibility. The only thing I controlled was my story. And I wasn’t there. I was home with Manon. Fin.
I repeated this over and over as if it were a mantra. I might have been doing that for a half-hour before Barbie showed up.
He was, indeed, short. Max had been right — five-foot-six, maybe. There was nothing particularly menacing about his physical appearance, other than the black uniform, which always tightened my sphincter — undoubtedly the point. But the man himself seemed harmless just to look at, ordinary, neither handsome nor ugly. Just a guy.
Except for the dog — a German shepherd, naturally — that strained at its leash and bared its teeth and growled as it approached me.
“Hildy, Hildy,” Barbie said, and the dog immediately backed down. He looked at me. “I’m sorry, Monsieur Killy. She means no harm. Please, please, follow me in.”
Barbie and the dog went first through the door, and I did as instructed. The office was huge, clearly the office of someone in charge. Perhaps at one time it was the school’s chief medical officer. Now, it was this, this Barbie.
“Sit, sit,” he said, pointing at the chair next to his desk. There was another chair that was directly across from the desk and would have created more of a power dynamic for him, but he chose the side chair for me instead, the one his secretary likely sat in when he took dictation or summarized some report or other. Hildy crawled up on a small rug behind the desk, seeming to relax but never taking her eyes off me. After a few seconds, I was so spooked that I couldn’t even look at her.
We sat in silence as Barbie toyed with some paperwork on his desk. Whether it was a file on me, or a report of the blown up bridge, I didn’t know. He seemed barely interested in it, riffling through the last few pages, barely scanning what was written. Maybe it was a file about something else entirely. But if he was trying to make me even more nervous with the delay, he was succeeding splendidly. I could feel my hands shaking as they sat in my lap.
Finally, he ended the silence.
“So, Monsieur Killy, you are probably wondering what has brought you to the attention of the Gestapo today. Yes?”
His French was, indeed, as advertised: good but slow. He pronounced the words precisely and accurately. The idiom was a bit stiff, as if from a textbook. But after a few more basic questions and answers — my age, address, marital status, occupation — Barbie stopped and asked, “Your accent? Where are you from?”
So he had a good ear. My accent was Alsatian because, growing up in Czechoslovakia, the family cook who taught me French was from Alsace. So that, combined with an adulthood speaking German while I lived in Vienna, accounted for the accent. Except that Barbie and I weren’t quite friendly enough for me to tell him the story of my upbringing and my professional life, including when I was spying against the Germans for the Czech government. Perhaps another time.
“You have a good ear,” I said. “I grew up in Brumath, near Strasbourg.” It was a place I had chosen from a map. It was one of the smaller dots on the map of Alsace that I could find.
“I try to hear the accents,” he said, and smiled. He apparently was proud of himself. The smile lasted about two seconds. Then Barbie picked up the file folder, opened it, and began reading.
“Late on Tuesday night, a railroad bridge was blown up by saboteurs near the town of Mornant. What do you know about that?”
“Nothing,” I said. I’m sure my voice betrayed my fear. My guess is that Barbie would have been disappointed if it hadn’t.
“There were actually
two explosions,” he said. “Very clever — one as a diversion for the soldiers guarding the bridge, the second for the bridge itself. Very clever. Very tactically sound.”
He looked at me as if he were seeking a response. I just stared back and waited for him to continue, which he did.
“Where were you on Tuesday night?”
“At home with my wife.”
“Can you prove that?”
“Prove? No. But you can ask her.” This was the standard alibi that Manon and I, and every Resistance husband and wife, had worked out.
“We have. Or we will.”
I didn’t think they’d brought her in, or hurt her — after all, she had been at the prison in the morning with my package. But it gave me something else to worry about other than myself, which was actually a relief.
I sat in silence for another 30 seconds as Barbie set the file down, open, and turned its pages, one by one. He was paying more attention this time through, or at least it appeared he was. Finally, he looked up.
“That is all, Monsieur Killy,” he said. “You may go.”
He did not stand, or shake my hand, or see me out. He went back to his file. I stood, and Hildy perked up for a second, showing just a hint of her teeth. But as I retreated to the door, she did not growl or follow. As I opened the door to leave, I looked back for one last peek. The dog’s head was on the little rug and Barbie was concentrating on the file more closely, his finger tracing across one of the lines as he read.
7
We stood there, five of us, waiting in the courtyard for the next express bus back to Montluc. But my companions were different than the passengers with whom I had arrived, at least to the best of my memory. Perhaps they ran more than one shuttle per day.
I didn’t stare, seeing as how it seemed rude and the last thing any of us needed was more shit to deal with, but my four new friends all looked like hell. It was only after we were in the back of the lorry, manacled to the floor, that I got a better look at everyone. And it made me feel all the more unsettled.
One guy was wet, as if he had been bathed while wearing his clothes. He was shivering, and as pale as I had ever seen a human being. As for the other three, two of them were missing fingers that I was pretty sure had been attached when they woke up that morning. The one guy to my left was missing the pinky on his left hand. The poor bastard next to him was missing his left pinky and ring finger, which suggested a bit of over-exuberance on the part of the craftsman wielding the nippers or a bit of over-recalcitrance from the poor bastard. Or maybe both. Whatever — the hands were not even bandaged. They had stopped bleeding, but the stumps were still raw and disgusting.
Then there was the fourth guy, who looked almost as pale as the soaked guy but otherwise unharmed. There was, however, a telltale: blood had soaked through from the inside of his right shoe and had begun to ooze over the ridge between the upper and the sole. If I had to guess, he was at least a pinky toe lighter, and perhaps more.
I felt embarrassed to be sitting there, still intact. I felt like itching theatrically to show them that the lice had gotten to my right arm. I felt like screaming, “Hey, I had to shit in a bucket last night, too.”
But the question still screamed back:
Why had Barbie just let me go?
Maybe that was just how it worked. Maybe they built up to the really bad stuff, growing the tension as in a horror movie. Quiet, creepy talk the first day, then the nippers the second day, then, well, I had no idea. Whenever I was on this topic, my mind invariably ended up at my worst fear: electrodes attached to a car battery on one end and my balls on the other. I once confessed this fear to Manon, and she laughed.
“I wonder what Dr. Freud would say about that,” she said.
“Other than that I have a healthy fear of getting my balls electrocuted, like every sentient male, I don’t think there is anything to say.”
But if this was all a Gestapo tactic, ratcheting up the tension, I just didn’t know. And it wasn’t as if I could ask. We were all still in a position of not knowing who might or might not be a Gestapo agent in shitty clothing. Besides, they all appeared to be shaken beyond the capability of polite conversation.
We took the same odd route back to the prison. Part of me figured it was just the guards extending their time outside of the prison walls and away from their bosses. But it was the exact same route, just in reverse, every left now a right, every right now a left. The guards were French, not German, so they weren’t genetically married to a list of instructions. They could have gone a different way. They could have taken even a slower, more circuitous route, if delay was the purpose. But, no. This was a precise plan, rights as lefts now, lefts as rights.
At the prison, we were unshackled and made to jump down from the lorry bed. The man with the bloody shoe attempted a one-footed landing and ended up sprawled on the ground, screaming. The wet guy and I each grabbed an armpit and hoisted him to his feet, and the five of us trudged through the main gate and into the intake area. We waited for a few minutes, for the guard who would walk us back to the cells. He arrived, and we all stood up, but he motioned to me.
“You are Killy, Allain? Yes?” he said.
“Yes.”
“You stay. The rest, come with me.”
This was not good. It couldn’t have been. Maybe Max or Rene had talked, and talked convincingly enough, that they didn’t need my confirmation that I had been there to blow up the bridge. Maybe they figured the act of lopping off a few fingers or toes to confirm something they already knew to be true wasn’t worth the effort. Maybe the Gestapo agent with the nippers had a full appointment book, and I just wasn’t worth his time.
What was the term? Without luggage. Maybe I was without luggage.
The door opened and one of the paperwork guards from the front desk approached. He was carrying the paper parcel from my cell. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I was with luggage, headed for a transfer to some camp. With luggage was clearly better than without luggage, but still.
“Sign here,” he said, shoving a clipboard at me and pointing to a line near the bottom of a form. At the top, it said, “Release Order.”
I signed. He pointed to the door.
“You are free to go,” he said. He headed back to his desk, and another guard walked me out the door and then out the main gate that said “PRISON MILITAIRE” over the arch.
I was free. But why had they let me go? I should have been thrilled, but I wasn’t. It didn’t make any sense to me, unless they really were playing some kind of long game, just building the tension. For all I knew, they would be back at the house after we went to bed, to wake me and bring me back for more. That made some sense, but I just didn’t know. I wanted to tell Manon I was okay, but didn’t want to endanger her inadvertently in the process. So instead of heading west, toward our home, I headed east.
I kept a second apartment for a few reasons. Firstly, I had the money — my previous lives as an heir to a Czech magnesite mining family, and then as a bank president in Zurich, left me more than comfortable. Secondly, for operational reasons — a place to hide, or vary my routine, either before or after sabotage missions. Thirdly, it was a storage facility — extra canned food, some money, a change of clothes, a suitcase, and a couple of our passports were there, in case either Manon or I needed to make a run for it.
My landlady, Isabelle Vaillancourt, was grandly named, much grander than the premises. But the landlady, and therefore the flat, had two distinct advantages: she was 80 and almost comically deaf, which meant she was unable to hear what was happening on the floor above her and, even if she could hear, disinclined to climbing the stairs to find out. I told her I was a traveling salesman so that she wouldn’t be suspicious of me spending only one or two nights a week there. The truth was, the only time I saw Isabelle was when I paid the rent.
I had been there for about an hour. I was as careful as I could be in stacking my dirty clothes in the corner of the bedroom, careful not to touch anything. I
sprayed everything with some Fly-Tox that I had purchased on the walk over — it might have been the only thing in France that wasn’t rationed. Then I sprayed myself, which wasn’t necessarily recommended and probably was harmful, but fuck it. At least I closed my eyes and mouth. Then I took a bath, scrubbing as best as I could. I figured I got most of them, and at least stunned the rest of them.
It was there, clean and in fresh clothes, that I opened the only beer in the flat and began to consider my next move. Not five minutes after my first sip, there was a knock on the door. This was different. No one had ever knocked before.
8
I had expected it to be Isabelle. Instead, it was Leon. One of my oldest friends from Vienna was standing on the mat outside of my door. Two people were behind him, a woman and a small child, a girl who must have been seven or eight.
“Mon ami,” Leon said. He had lived in Paris for the last few years, and we were speaking French.
“Fuck me,” I said, hugging him. Leon was not married, and unless he had suddenly acquired a wife and child, there was a story here. He introduced his friends as Ruth, the mother, and Rachel, the child. They were from Paris. They had arrived on the train together about an hour earlier.
“Headed where?” I asked.
“South,” Leon said.
“South where?”
“Just south,” he said. “Very south.”
Ruth and Rachel were Jewish, as was Leon. He had worked as a newspaper reporter in Vienna, and we were together on the night of the Anschluss in 1938. Leon and I and two other friends were forced to flee the Nazis for different reasons. Mine was simple enough: I was a spy for the Czech government who had tried and failed to kill a Gestapo officer in Cologne. Leon’s reasons were even simpler: not only was he Jewish, but he was a Jewish journalist, which was the Nazi double-whammy. After we got over the border to Bratislava, the Czech government arranged for us to leave the country in exchange for me agreeing to run the private bank in Zurich that funded their espionage efforts. The Czechs agreed to get my friends out, too. For Leon, that meant a passport and a plane ticket to Paris, where he had a newspaper connection.