by Alan Furst
They taught railroad workers how to spike a plaque tournant. They taught teenagers that cutting a telephone line makes it easy to find the break—but that pushing a thumbtack into a signals cable makes it very difficult and time-consuming. They taught the disruption of rail signals. They taught that a single cube of sugar in a gas tank would caramelize on the pistons and freeze the engine solid. If you didn't have a sugar cube, a potato wedged in the tailpipe of a vehicle would choke the exhaust system, blow a hole in the muffler, and could cause carbon monoxide to leak into the driver's compartment. They taught the use of cyclonite explosive, round pellets of plastique (invented by Julian Huxley, the biologist) that looked like innocent goat droppings and would blow out a truck tire. They taught villagers that if they buried a soup tureen upside down, with the silhouette showing up through the dirt, it looked exactly like an inexpertly laid land mine and could stop a column of tanks while a mine disposal unit was brought up. They taught switchboard operators how to disable a teleprinter by wedging a feather in the armature, they taught roadworkers how to blow up a bridge using simple construction dynamite. Every strategic entity—communications, rails, roads, bridges, power—had its weak points, and the French people were taught how to attack them. But you must wait for the code words on the radio, they were told. Grimly, they obeyed. Watched the foreign troops marching up and down the streets where their grandmothers had been born, kept their eyes on the ground when la geste came by, held on tight to their new and special secrets, and listened every night to the BBC. And waited.
During this period, Ulysse took on the aspect of an omniscient ghost. He would appear at unlikely times, in unexpected places, so far aboveground as to be virtually hidden by prominence. He moved about the Belfort area in a grand, prewar Bugatti, with Albert, in a gray chauffeur's uniform, behind the wheel. The Germans could only assume him to be a Vichy fascist favored by some very high personage within their own ranks. He had the car, and the gas to make it run, and his hawklike face was the epitome of Gallic aristocracy. If challenged, he radiated the superficial sweetness of the powerful, being so acutely helpful and decent that German officers saluted from the spine. They knew such people, or rather knew of them, and one was well advised to keep out of their path or, if noticed, to make a good impression. They had spent their lives in submission to the gods of Authority, and Ulysse was very godlike indeed.
They approached the village of Cabejac just before midnight and paused at the edge of town. Vigie rode in on his bicycle to check things out, the other three sat by the side of the road and smoked and talked in low voices. They had bicycled up from the town of Abonne, some eighteen miles away, and they were tired and sweaty from the ride. It was late April, one of those warmish, unsettling nights when sleep, if it comes, is beset by restless dreams.
Staring up at the town, Khristo found himself jittery. Something in the air, the sort of intuition that will cause animals, drinking at water holes, to look up suddenly. Lucien—in his bleu de travail worker's jacket and trousers, old sweater and beret, the very image of a small-town garage owner—was slowly assembling his Sten gun, patiently screwing the pipelike parts together. The weapon's use in clandestine operations was in part attributable to the fact that it could be carried in a knapsack and assembled quickly.
From the north, the drone of a bomber flight reached them. All three looked up, but there was only a night sky lit by a quarter moon. “Good hunting,” Fusari said.
“Amen to that,” Lucien answered, giving the Sten barrel its final quarter turn.
For the last two weeks, the sky above them had been at war. With improving weather, Allied air sorties intensified—American by day and British by night—B-24 s and Lancasters flying deep into Germany to bomb factories and railyards. At night, the Lancasters' flight path often took them over the Belfort area, and the sky came alive with probing searchlights and the white flash of anti-aircraft burst that illuminated, for one instant, its own halo of smoke. Sometimes German squadrons rose to attack and there were arcs of orange-red tracer, like spark showers from a bonfire, and once there had been an enormous explosion that lit up the clouds—a fully armed bomber had been hit. The following night they had seen the white of a parachute and had watched in silence as it drifted below the horizon.
Vigie appeared from the darkness, coasting downhill on his bicycle, standing with his left foot on the right-hand pedal and coming to an acrobatic skid in front of Lucien.
“Bravo,” Fusari said sourly.
Vigie said something in incomprehensible mountain slang.
“Yes?” Lucien said.
Vigie shrugged. “Cabejac,” he said, and spat on the road.
Khristo looked up at the dark town but there was little to see, only an irregular roofline of square silhouettes. Cabejac was an ancient village, chiseled into the limestone cliffs that rose above the Leul, a swift, narrow mountain river that ultimately emptied into the Doubs. The road curved along a cut in the cliff, then switched back suddenly and rose steeply into the town. Fusari had told him on the ride up that the place had a bad reputation. Blood feuds. Marriage in the old tradition: abduction, rape, and then the priest to put things right. People carried shotguns and there were too many dogs about. From time to time, a clan of Gypsies had made the village a temporary encampment, but the reputation of the place had nothing to do with them. No matter, Khristo thought, they have a desire to fight, and they have been approved by Ulysse. And all the sayings about strange friends in time of war were true. Still, he thought.
“Lucien,” Fusari said, “we can go back to Abonne.”
Lucien did not answer, stood pensively while the others finished assembling their Stens. Khristo had hidden the Gepisztoly at Cambras—it was a weapon for partizans in the forest, not suited to this work at all. He watched Lucien as the American tried to come to a decision. He could abort an operation any time he felt the wind was blowing wrong, but he was also, clearly, under pressure not to do so.
“Vigie,” Lucien said quietly, “was there anything at all up there? Anything out of place?”
“No,” Vigie answered. “Nothing.” He slung the Sten on his shoulder and stood on the pedals of his bike, trying to make it stand in place by wiggling the front wheel back and forth. He kept falling over onto one foot, then trying the trick again.
“I am not in love with this place,” Khristo said.
Lucien walked his bicycle forward. “Nice and slow,” he said.
Vigie sighed, hopped off his bike, and began pushing. “The women of Cabejac are said to be hairy, like beasts,” he confided to Khristo.
Lucien had overheard him. “You stay close while we are here, copain. ”
“Pfut,” Vigie said, contemptuous of any suggestion that he could not take care of himself.
They headed into the town, looking for the Gendarmerie, the post of the military police who traditionally patrolled the countryside and the smaller roads. They had met the résistance in cafés, schoolrooms, church sacristies, dining rooms, soccer stadiums. Tonight it was to be a police station, not all that unusual.
But they could not find it in the lower town. Unseen dogs barked at them, passing them along from one to the next, and all the houses were dark and shuttered. The April night was warm, yet it seemed that spring had not yet been acknowledged there. Normal, Khristo thought. All is normal. He pushed his bicycle with one hand and steadied the weapon with his other—just making sure it was there. Looking to his right, he noticed a narrow, stone-paved alley set between high walls. There was some sort of truck parked down there, only the snubbed-off front end visible.
The street dead-ended at a high wall. They turned left up a long flight of white stairs, the center of each step worn to a sloping valley by centuries of use. Fusari, bumping his bicycle upward, swore under his breath. When they reached the upper town they were high above the road and the river appeared as a winding ribbon, a long way down, its banks suggested by white curls of moving foam. Fusari touched Khristo above the
elbow and nodded up the street to a dim spill of light from a partly open shutter. A metal sign, GENDARMERIE, hung from a stanchion above the door and the windows were barred.
“There must be another road down,” Khristo said.
“Why?”
“Who puts a Gendarmerie at the top of a flight of steps? Don't they drive cars?”
Fusari responded with a dismissive grunt. He made a point of being Corsican, claiming often to be puzzled by the French and their logically illogical way of doing things.
The door of the station opened, and a man stood in the smoky light from within. “Come along then,” he said, “we've been waiting.” He wore military uniform, red flashes on khaki, and the circular crowned hat often associated with the French Foreign Legion. Broad-shouldered and big-bellied, he had deep anger lines around his mouth and stood with hands on hips, impatient, out of temper.
Down below, the dogs started up again. The French officer had his right hand close by a holstered sidearm. Khristo could hear another sound that lay beneath the excited barking, a muted rumble of some sort. He pushed his bicycle forward until he could see inside the partly open door. There were several men in the room, faces indistinct in the dim light, behind a high wooden counter. Standing, apparently. Waiting to greet them. The rumbling, he thought. What was that? The narrow alley. The snubbed-off front end of the truck. The truck? No. Not a truck.
Kummelwagen. The open command car used by the Wehrmacht. No French truck ever idled like that; that was a military engine, tuned, powerful, and this was a trap.
He turned his back to the waiting officer and clapped Lucien on the shoulder and spoke through a laugh, in English, with the intonation of a casual joke between friends. “We are in trouble,” he said.
All the little wrong things. The counter was what you found in a police station, not a Gendarmerie. Police rode bicycles. Gendarmes drove cars. Someone had converted a homey Poste de Police—a place where you filled out forms—to a trap. Perhaps there had been a résistance cell among the gendarmes of Cabejac, at one time made known to Ulysse, but no more.
Lucien was very quick. The “gendarme” kept his eyes on the Sten. He was surprised when Lucien's left hand came up from his pocket with a small automatic and shot him twice in the heart. He held his breast with both hands and made the face of a man with indigestion as he knelt down. Vigie leapt for the door and slammed it shut, moving his body to one side of the portal and hanging on to the door handle. Something very fast went off inside the station and chewed a line of holes in the wood of the door. Fusari ran toward the building, got one foot against the rough stone surface and sprang upward, snatching the rain gutter that ran below the eaves, then throwing one leg over the edge of the sloping roof and hauling himself the rest of the way. A second burst came through the barred window—one round struck an iron bar and went singing away into the night. Khristo and Lucien backed up. Khristo put a short burst in the door, aiming well away from the clinging Vigie. Lucien fired at an angle through the window shutter. The sound of an engine changing gears cut through the noise of the dogs, which had changed from barking to howling when the gunfire started. Fusari's dark outline appeared on the rooftop. He pulled the pin from a grenade and short-armed it down the chimney. There was an explosion in the shaft, most of its force directed upward. A muffled bang, then the chimney turned into a cloud of smoke and bricks and, a long second later, Fusari's body rolled off the roof and hit the street like a bag.
As brick shards rained down on the street, somebody inside kicked the door open, sending Vigie flying backward. Khristo fired into the press of bodies that appeared within a rolling cloud of black smoke and soot—mouths wide open, hands pressed to ears, faces squeezed with agony, eardrums apparently punctured by compression from the explosion in the chimney. The door was pulled shut just as the Sten jammed on a dud round—no blowback, no next shot. Khristo swore. Lucien ran past, squatted briefly by Fusari, then stood up and grabbed his bicycle. Khristo got his own bike up and moving. He could hear a man screaming inside the building.
All three of them took off like Furies, pedaling wildly as they reached the stairway. Khristo hung on for the first two bounces, then the handlebars tore away from his hands and he was in the air. He landed on shoulder and hip, the impact knocked him senseless, and the bike clattered the rest of the way down the steps, landing with a metallic jangle in the street below. Immediately, a high-power beam probed the dead-end wall until it found the bike, then went dark. Lucien and Vigie somehow got themselves stopped before they reached the street. The next thing Khristo knew, he was being helped up. Someone yelled in German at the top of the stairway. Vigie pointed at a roof, level with the stairs midway up, and they ran to it, climbing over an iron railing. It was just a step up to the next roof and, as they reached it, the light came back on and all three went flat. Khristo's chest heaved against the chalky stone as he fought for breath. From below, they could hear a whispered conversation in German, only ten feet away. Vigie slithered across the roof, peered over the edge for a bare instant, then scrabbled backward until he lay next to them again. He held all his fingers in the air, opening and closing his hands. Too many to count.
Khristo did not think. He cleared the jam on his Sten, snapped in a fresh magazine from his jacket pocket, and made sure the safety was off. He pointed Lucien and Vigie toward the next roof down, then moved toward the edge of the roof to create the necessary diversion. It was simple training, a lifetime of it. One fires, others escape.
Just before he reached the edge, a hand caught his ankle and stopped him. He pulled as hard as he could, then, in a rage, turned to see Lucien hanging on to him. He fought to suppress the curses rising to his lips, made a low angry sound instead. Lucien pulled on his ankle with such force that it moved him back a foot. Suddenly, a trapdoor in the roof opened. Khristo swung the Sten around and tensed on the trigger. A small face appeared. A boy, perhaps ten, beckoned to them urgently, then touched his lips for silence. They moved quickly. The face disappeared.
There was a rough ladder below the door and they found themselves in the front room of a house. In the darkness, they could see a young woman in a nightdress standing terrified in one corner, hands in mouth. The boy materialized from another room, wearing a thin shirt and shorts, with an old French infantryman's helmet on his head. He had to hold it on with one hand. He snatched Khristo by the sleeve and pulled him toward a back door. Then he turned suddenly and whispered, “Anglais?”
“Non,” Khristo answered. “Américain.”
“Bon Dieu!” the boy exclaimed softly, eyes widening with excitement.
Then he turned and dragged Khristo through the door into a tiny garden plot in back of the house. The garden butted up against a stone wall topped by a sagging fence of rusted wire. There was a wooden barrel positioned at the base of the wall. The boy let go of Khristo, reached the top of the barrel with a practiced leap, then stepped up onto the wall and waved for them to follow. The wall was twelve inches wide with broken bottles cemented down the middle but there was just enough room to get a foot on either side of the jagged glass and the boy scuttled along quickly, crouched low, hanging on to his helmet with one hand. The German troops seemed to be all around them: they heard shouted commands, boots pounding on the street, the sound of a truck shifting between reverse and first gears as the driver attempted to get it turned around in the narrow street. They ran along the wall past four or five houses, then the boy jumped off onto another barrel—no doubt in the backyard of his wargame companion—and onto the ground. The moment Khristo landed, the boy took hold of his sleeve again, they ran forward a few feet, then stopped abruptly. They were at the twin of the alley that Khristo had seen earlier and the soldier game clearly called for scooting down the narrow space and crossing the street. But as they turned the corner the boy's hand quivered and a small cry of fright escaped him. A German officer stood in profile at the end of the alley, waving both hands toward himself as though directing traffic. They flat
tened back against the wall while the boy thought it over. For a moment, Khristo knew the thing was finished, but the boy peered around the corner, then darted across the alley and, one by one, they followed him. On the other side, they found him straining at a cast-iron grating set level with the ground. Khristo bent to help him and together they pushed it to one side. The boy lowered himself down, then moved forward head first, sliding on his stomach. Khristo followed, listened to make sure Vigie could pull the grating back over by himself, then continued ahead.
The stone beneath him was covered with slime, which eased progress, though the reek of long-stagnant water was nearly overpowering. A storm drain, he thought, with its other end somewhere well east of the Germans if they had any luck at all. He heard the scamper and the tiny squeaking somewhere up the sewer ahead of him—he knew what that meant but forced himself not to think about it. Suddenly, the stone moved beneath him and something roared above his head. He stopped, then realized they were under the street and a truck had just passed over him. He closed his eyes in order to concentrate and resumed crawling, slowly and in rhythm, elbow, knee, elbow, knee, and he could now begin to hear the sound of breathing, his own, and the others', as the motion became an effort. His elbow touched the boy's foot twice before he figured out that the boy was tiring and slowing down. “Moment,” he whispered, and lay still. He reached above him, found the ceiling just over his head. The drain had narrowed. He cinched the strap of the Sten tighter and tried to recover his strength.
Behind him, Lucien's voice was barely audible: “How far? Ask him.”
Khristo did. The boy answered that he didn't know. Khristo passed the word back to Lucien. Lucien asked Vigie if he'd heard. Vigie did not answer. Lucien, in a stage whisper, called out, “Vigie.” No answer. Lucien doubled his knees up to his chin and managed to get himself turned around. Khristo heard him belly-crawling down the pipe, his breath hoarse with effort. He was gone, it seemed to Khristo, a very long time. Finally, the sound of his progress returned, and Lucien arrived a minute later. He moved as close to Khristo as he could and spoke by his ear. “He's not here.”