The Agony of France (Alex Kovacs thriller series Book 6)

by Richard Wake

  It was obviously an explosion, but it wasn’t as loud as I expected. The building had somehow swallowed some of the noise. My coffee cup rattled just the slightest bit in the saucer, but that was it. It was an explosion, and it was obvious, but even the 200 feet of distance provided an emotional buffer.

  I made a point of looking around at the rest of the patrons in the cafe. There was no rush to find out what had happened, or to offer assistance. There was nothing but quiet conversation after the initial pause, to digest the surprise of the noise and then to look around and see if there was anything to see. The waiter never moved from the spot at the bar where he was leaning and talking to the bartender.

  The only reaction I saw came from two men seated three tables to my left. They were older than me, but they were veterans of the first war, the Great War, my war. The two of them were out for an afternoon drink and, after the sound had passed and the heart rates had subsided, they quietly touched glasses and whispered, “Vive la France.” I did not hear them say it, but I could read their lips.

  But that was it. The sirens followed in a minute or two, but no one got up to look. Gestapo vehicles, and regular gendarmes, and then a fire truck, and then a second fire truck — they all roared down Boulevard Saint-Michel, a street normally full of cars that was so quiet during the German occupation, a time when no one had the petrol to drive and when bicycles were the only vehicles on the road most of the time. Paris, but not exactly.

  I looked around at the other cafes. Even at the one closest to the bookstore, no one appeared to scatter. The bomb was on the opposite side of the building from us, but still — no one moved after the initial startle. It seemed almost inhuman. The natural instinct was to go look, but no one did. Normal human beings in the same situation would at least go take a quick peek around the corner — but no one did.

  It was a calculation, and they all made it independently. To get up was to invite attention. To go see what happened at a scene crawling with gendarmes and Gestapo was to invite a question — and that was the last thing any of those people wanted. They wanted no involvement. They wanted to put one foot in front of the other, and then do it again, and then do it again — and they wanted to do it while never looking up from their shoes. The previous week, I’d walked around for 20 minutes in an attempt to make eye contact with somebody on the street — somebody, anybody. But all I saw were bald spots on the men and scarves covering unwashed hair on the women.

  That day, hearing the bomb, feeling at least the tremble, faced with that unusual situation, they all decided to squelch their curiosity, to bury their humanity. All of them — probably 20 people combined at the four cafes. A calculation. An inhuman calculation.

  These were the people I was risking my life for. I might have just killed a laughing baby for these people. Christ.

  6

  The UGIF canteen was located in an empty storefront on Rue de Bretagne. It had been a big store, dry goods or something. “Seltzer’s” is what the sign said, in big red letters above the door. I couldn’t help but wonder what had become of Seltzer.

  The line was out the door as I arrived. I wasn’t there to eat — I just wanted to see what these places were all about, and to deliver an envelope — but I didn’t feel as if that would matter to the people already in the queue. Like, “Hey, I don’t want any food, I just want to watch you in your native habitat, like a tiger in the zoo.” So I just went to the back and waited with the rest of them, shuffling forward a couple of feet every few minutes.

  The guy inside the canteen who I wanted to talk to was Jacob Stein, a rabbi by trade but a kind of community organizer by necessity. Except it wasn’t a necessity. It was a choice, being a UGIF official, even a minor player like Stein, and it was a choice that had grown more and more controversial through the years of the German occupation.

  None of that seemed to matter, though, when I finally made my way into the canteen. Stein wasn’t hard to find, mostly because he was bellowing a seemingly unending mantra, spiced with bits of comedy.

  “Three lines, people. Food to the left — a lovely borscht today, probably not like momma used to make — well, maybe my momma. A terrible cook. Center line is for the nurse — oh, and here is Dr. Goldner as well. Welcome, Doctor. Then the line on the right is for financial assistance questions. And I don’t want to see you in that queue, Max. He has more money than God.”

  “Had,” Max shouted back, and everyone nearby laughed. Max was in the medical line.

  They were in all manner of clothing, all manner of everything. Some were clearly immigrant Jews — by dress, by the snatches of conversation I could not understand, by the beards. Others were just as clearly assimilated over generations — “more French than Jewish” is how Leon described them. They called themselves the Israelites, and they were dressed much better. The thing that joined them was the need for food, or a doctor, or some money — that, and the yellow star sewn to their outermost garment, be it an alpaca overcoat or a torn rag.

  “Borscht?” The rabbi was pretty much yelling at me. He clearly had not noticed that I did not have a yellow star on my coat. All he saw was a man who was daydreaming and holding up the queue.

  “No borscht, but a minute of your time,” I said.

  “Too busy.”

  “A message from Leon Suskind.”

  The rabbi leaned over and said into my ear, for my hearing only, “Oh, that pain in my ass. A perfect day gets more perfect.”

  Then he backed away and yelled to a man in an apron who was helping with a soup ladle. “Oscar, come tend to my lines. And look how nice they are — I don’t want to see a circus when I come back.”

  “Do you have to?” Oscar was wiping his hands on his apron as he walked over.

  “Have to what?”

  “Come back.”

  “And leave this to you, my empire?” Jacob Stein said. “No chance, brother.”

  He directed me to a table in the back corner, away from the bustle. There was only one table nearby, with a man seated alone and with his nose about an inch above the soup bowl as he shoveled it in. This was as close to privacy as the canteen provided.

  Stein was about 70 years old and looked it, still strong but undeniably worn. His hair was black mixed with steel, and thicker than mine was when I was 18. It was likely the only aspect of the rabbi’s existence of which I was jealous.

  “So, Leon,” he said. “Is he any closer to settling down?”

  “Um, no.”

  “Will he ever, do you think?”

  “He’s kind of busy at the moment.”

  “Too busy to continue sampling at the feminine buffet? He used to laugh when I called it that.”

  “Quite busy,” I said.

  “Truth be told, I used to enjoy an occasional story of his. I’ve been a widower for 26 years — 26 years and two months.”

  “I’m surprised he shared his, uh, stories with you.”

  “I’m a religious man, not a dead man.” Jacob Stein laughed a lot harder than I expected. “Although I expect, as much as I enjoy his stories, he saves the best ones for his closer friends. Like you, yes?”

  “Only since Caporetto,” I said.

  “Ah. A lifetime.”

  “Seems like three lifetimes sometimes.”

  “I’ve only known him for two lives,” the rabbi said. “My French life. And this German life.”

  After we escaped the Anschluss in 1936, one step ahead of the Nazis, my contacts in Czech intelligence helped us out — which was the least they could do, seeing as how the only reason I had to run was because of the work I did for them. Leon, meanwhile, was a journalist in Vienna — a Jewish journalist, which was a double dose of hell once the Gestapo arrived — and I was able to work out an arrangement for him, too. I went to Zurich to run a bank for the Czechs that funded espionage activity before the start of the war. Leon went to Paris to continue writing.

  “He is a pain in my ass, you know,” the rabbi said. “I’m not kidding about tha
t. But he is as brave a son of a bitch as I have ever met. The people he got out of here — getting them the false travel permits, the identity cards, traveling with them on the trains, hiding them. I actually know your name, Alex.”

  I had not introduced myself. I guess the surprise showed on my face.

  “Maybe a month ago, I saw him. It had been a while. And between beating me up about running this place, he told me about you, about what you did for him in Lyon, about the Jews you hid and helped.”

  “Leon can be pretty persuasive,” I said.

  “And exhausting when he can’t win the argument.”

  “Like about his place?”

  “Exactly,” the rabbi said.

  The canteen was operating under the auspices of UGIF — Union générale des israélites de France. The way Leon described it, UGIF was an invention of the Vichy government designed to do one thing — count the Jews, catalog them, and then line them up for the transports. The way its defenders described it, UGIF was simply an attempt by the Jewish community leaders to make the best of an abominable situation by helping to organize canteens, orphanages, and assistance.

  Or, as Jacob Stein said, “I’m not a politician. I’m just schlepping soup to hungry Jews.”

  To which Leon would reply, “You’re a goddamn tool of the Nazis and you won’t recognize it.”

  To which, the rabbi would say, “All I know is, today they’re hungry.”

  To which, Leon would say, “All I know is, tomorrow they’ll be on a fucking train.”

  My task was not to get in the middle of their argument because I didn’t know what was right. I mean, if I was the rabbi, I don’t know if I wouldn’t be doing exactly what he was doing. He was right — he wasn’t a politician. He was just schlepping soup. And Leon knew it, too, at least a little. It was why I was there.

  “So,” the rabbi said.

  I reached into my breast pocket and pulled out an envelope. Between what Leon put in, and what I added, there was likely enough for borscht for another couple of days — especially if it was as bad as the rabbi said.

  “From you?” he said. Stein actually wiped away a tear.

  “From both of us.”

  “Thank you. And thank your miserable, complicated friend. I mean, he—”

  A noise stopped him. My back was to the front door of the canteen, and I could not see what Stein saw — a black trench coat and two uniforms coming inside. They weren’t there for the soup.

  “Izzy,” the rabbi said. His tone was an insistent whisper, like a harsh hiss. The warning was directed at the man with his nose in the soup bowl at the next table.

  Izzy looked up and saw the German visitors. I turned and saw, too.

  “Both of you — up and out while I distract them. That door in the back.”

  Then he looked at me. It was just for a second, and it was only two words that he said, but there was an almost electrical current that shot out at me.

  Our eyes locked, and the rabbi said, “Help him.”

  And with that, Jacob Stein turned and walked back into the human maelstrom of the canteen, back in his role as the official greeter, waving his arms and walking over to the black-clad trio and inquiring about their needs. And while he was all motion and noise, and while the three lines had indeed become a circus under Oscar’s auspices, and while the noise died and everyone just stared at their shoes, Izzy and I slipped out the back door and into the alley behind what used to be Seltzer’s store. There was a sign out there, too, for deliveries.

  7

  “Help him.”

  It was all that I could hear as the two of us walked in silence, quick but not running, out of the alley, then a right, then a left, then another left. We were heading toward the Seine, and to the Left Bank. There was no rational reason to believe it was safer on that side — I mean, the Abwehr headquarters was on that side, in the Hotel Lutetia — but everyone in my business still headed across the river whenever they sensed danger.

  “Help him.”

  The guy was middle-aged, maybe a little older than I was. He was reasonably well-groomed by Paris occupation standards — which meant he didn’t entirely reek. He must have had a bath within the week, and his clothes were not badly worn. The shoes, always the giveaway, existed in that vast netherworld between “decent shape” and “beat to shit.”

  He wasn’t overweight, but he wasn’t skinny either. My belt had two notches added over the years of the occupation, and I was close to needing a third. He didn’t look as thin as me — maybe one notch more than normal, whatever normal used to be. I didn’t think he was a big drinker — no red web of veins on his face that I could see. I hadn’t seen his eyes, though, because he never looked either up or at me next to his right shoulder. I was closer to the curb, blocking the view of him from the street.

  We had been walking for more than 10 minutes, maybe a lot more, across Pont Neuf and into the warren of streets making up the Latin Quarter, before one of us finally spoke. It was him.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “I haven’t done anything.”

  “They were looking for one person, me. You made us into two. For that, I thank you.”

  “But we never even saw a single German vehicle.”

  “Do you have trouble accepting gratitude?” he said. The smile revealed clean, straight teeth.

  I ignored the remark and the smile. I wasn’t looking for a new friend. I had plenty of friends. Actually, I had one friend, Leon, but that seemed like enough. I wasn’t much for trust in those days. In France during the occupation, I only tended to trust people out of necessity — defined as often as not by being in a life-and-death predicament involving the Gestapo. This wasn’t that. I would have left him right there on the sidewalk, too, if not for the rabbi.

  “Help him.”

  We continued to walk, aimlessly but not really. I was leading, and my new companion was following without comment. The route was circuitous, but I knew where we were going. He didn’t, and I wanted it that way for at least a few more minutes. I was pretty sure, but I just wanted a little more time to think.

  “So what do you need?” I just asked him, and just that abruptly. I didn’t even look at him when I said it. We just kept walking, and it was eyes-front the whole way.

  “A place to stay,” he said.

  “For how long?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Not a good answer.”

  “It’s all I have,” he said.

  It is what I figured. He was a Jew, and he needed a place to hide. That didn’t make him all that unusual, but it was a little different. Most times, they just showed up unannounced in the middle of the night, either the Gestapo themselves or the worms in the Paris police. Sometimes there was some warning, but not typically.

  “No family?” I said.

  “I can’t go back to them — too dangerous.”

  “Dangerous for who?”

  “All of us,” he said. “I can’t protect them, not anymore. Their best chance, I think, is for me to be… elsewhere.”

  What exactly he meant by “I can’t protect them, not anymore,” was the key to the story, I thought. But it wasn’t a two-minute story, either, and I really didn’t have much more time than that. As it was, I was going to be late for a contact, and while the French weren’t all that punctual in their social lives, punctuality was essential in the Resistance life. To be late was to raise alarm bells, and people made mistakes in those situations, and mistakes could lead to deaths. I just had to do this.

  On Rue du Jardinet, we made the right turn and, at the third set of stairs, we walked up. I fished into my pocket for the key, and we were inside in seconds. On the top floor, the only room was mine — a spare I kept from about three flats ago. The concierge didn’t seem to care, one way or the other, as long as the rent was paid promptly. I kept it as a kind of safe house for Leon and me, but more for the ration coupons that came with a previous identity assigned to that particular address. Picking u
p the tickets every month was a little nerve-wracking — you never knew if the concierge might have sold you out — but the reward was extra food. It was the only reason I hadn’t yet reached the third extra notch in my belt.

  The accommodations were less than elegant — a single bed, a chair with a torn cushion, a sink and an open toilet.

  I closed the door, waved my arm and said, “Voila.” He started crying.

  “It’s not forever,” I said, and he looked up at me. God, he looked scared. “We’re going to have to talk, but I don’t have time right now. I’m not sure when I can get back. There are some tins of food in that cupboard — don’t go crazy, it might have to last you for a while.”

  “But Alex—”

  “You know my name?”

  “You weren’t seated that far away in the canteen.”

  I immediately tried to remember what he might have overheard. The rabbi and I had talked about Leon, but I don’t think we mentioned his last name. We had talked about rescuing Jews in Lyon, and about how Leon hated UGIF, but nothing else — nothing that would have compromised where we lived or what we were doing.

  “Alex—”

  “Stop using my name.”

  “You have nothing to fear from me. Once you hear my story, you will understand that.”

  “Later.”

  “Yes, later.”

  “I’m keeping the key,” I said. “So you can’t leave the building and get back in.”

  “Not a worry.”

  “You might not feel the same way in a day or two.”

  “I promise you, it won’t be a problem,” he said. “Some quiet time to think is what I need. I haven’t slept in a bed in four days.”

  “The chair might be more comfortable.”

  He smiled. Then he started to cry again, just a half-sob that he caught with a gulp and stopped almost before it happened. But I saw it.

  “One thing before you go. Can I ask you why?” he said.