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

by Richard Wake

  I finished my drink and stood up to leave. I thanked Adele for the drink and the information and she said, “You’re welcome.” Then she stood with me and seemed to search for some more words. She ended up saying, “But, you know,” and then she just stuck out her hand, palm facing the ceiling.

  She couldn’t look me in the eye, but I understood. I handed her the key. My tenancy was over.

  “It’s just—”

  “Adele, don’t worry about it.”

  “I just can’t risk. It,” she said. “I mean, how could I explain it if they came back and found somebody else a month later? I need a legitimate tenant up there from now on. I mean—”

  “I understand.” And I did understand, however much it hurt — not just for the lack of a second flat to hide in when needed, but for the lack of a second set of ration tickets every month. Because that was gone, too. The gendarmes would take the address and go through the records and, well, there was no way I would be able to use my old identity to pick up the coupons anymore. The Gestapo would be waiting for me on the first of the month, hoping I would be stupid enough to try.

  “One more thing,” Adele said. I stopped, and she said, “I can’t give you back your deposit, either. I mean, somebody has to pay for the broken-down door.”

  “That’s fine,” I said. Before leaving, I went up to the flat and scooped up the food that was left behind — a can of peas and a can of carrots.

  32

  Leon was mad about the flat. He was really mad about the ration coupons. But he was mad most of all that it was Izzy who had cost us that small bit of added comfort and safety that we had managed to carve out for ourselves. He was so mad that he wasn’t even yelling, which made me feel even worse.

  After a few minutes, he blurted out, “So what do you think?”

  “About what?”

  “About how the cops found out.”

  “Do you really want to do this?” I said. “We need to sleep — early morning, big day, all that.”

  “I don’t know — I need to talk this through for a few minutes at least, or sleep will be out of the question.”

  “A half-hour,” I said, as I checked the time on my watch. “Go.”

  “First things first,” Leon said. “Where the hell is Max?”

  “And was he involved?”

  “He wouldn’t.”

  “Agreed,” I said. “But I wanted to hear you say it. Max and Izzy weren’t getting along—”

  “Good boy.”

  “—but I’m not even sure Izzy told him about UGIF. I’m pretty sure he hadn’t told him when I was there yesterday. From what I could tell, Max was mad at Izzy because he had so little to say, and Izzy was mad at Max because he never shut up and because he spent all of his spare time jerking off.”

  “What?” Leon said, and then he laughed. I filled him in on the dynamic that I had observed, and what Izzy had told me. Then he laughed some more.

  “Nah, it wasn’t Max,” he said. “Even if he knew what an asshole Izzy was, he wouldn’t turn him in. Hell, he couldn’t turn him in. What was he going to do, walk into the prefecture and rat him out? It would be too dangerous for him. And even if he was going to do it with any anonymous note, there wasn’t enough time for the mail to get there. I mean, what are we talking about? Twelve hours? Thirteen? There wasn’t time. And even if there was another way — like telling somebody who was a police informant — Max doesn’t have those kinds of connections. No, not him.”

  Which got me back to Hannah. Because she did have connections and expertise that Max did not. I guess Leon could tell that I was thinking hard about something, and not just silently daydreaming, because he said, “What are you not telling me?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Bullshit.”

  “No bullshit.”

  “Come on,” he said. “We’ve known each other for too long for this shit. Tell me.”

  So I told him — about Hannah confronting me down the street from the flat, and how I told her about Izzy and Max, and how she verbally annihilated me on the sidewalk outside of the Metro station, and how she was even madder about me helping Mr. UGIF than Leon was.

  “I wish I had seen her in action,” Leon said. “You fucking idiot, you—”

  “Enough,” I said. “Back to the matter at hand. Do you think she could have turned in Izzy to the prefecture?”

  “Could have?” Leon said. “Yes. Would have? I’m not sure. A very different question.”

  “Talk it through.”

  “Could have is easy. Yes, she probably knows some cops who don’t know she’s a Jew, don’t know she’s in the Resistance, don’t know anything but that she’s an easy redhead. Yes, she likely had her pick of potential gendarmes to tip off. For her, it would be as easy as dropping her knickers.”

  I didn’t say anything. Leon said, “Come on, you don’t really think you love her, do you.”

  “I did.”

  “For about five minutes.”

  “But I liked those five minutes. I could have liked 10 or 15, too.”

  “Past tense, though, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Mostly because she thinks I’m an idiot — no, sorry, a simpleton.”

  “That’s the word she said under breath, isn’t it? Back in the cellar?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Simpleton,” Leon said. “Expect to hear that one for a while.”

  “Fine. But now that you’re convinced Hannah and her knickers could have tipped off the cops, the real question is, would she? I mean, did she?”

  We talked about the idea for maybe 10 minutes and couldn’t reach a consensus. On the one hand, we had both seen her temper, and it wasn’t hard to imagine someone that angry lashing out against Izzy. But on the other hand, I had seen at least flickers of her softer side. And when it came down to it, however mad she was, the notion that she would turn in a fellow Jew to the Gestapo — because that’s undoubtedly where Izzy had been taken by their French delivery boys — just seemed a step beyond reality.

  “You know, we’re never going to know for sure,” Leon said. “This really is a waste of time. And check your watch.”

  “Twenty-eight minutes,” I said.

  “Close enough. When do we have to get up?”

  “We should be out of here by 6:30, just to be sure.”

  Leon was quiet for a few seconds and then he said, “Where do you think Max is?”

  “He has friends. He’ll be okay.”

  “But I wonder where he’s hiding.”

  “Have you looked under the sink?” I said.

  “Simpleton,” Leon said.

  33

  The address of our orphanage was 16 Rue Lamarck. The Metro stop was Lamarck Caulaincourt. Leon and I decided to leave the flat 15 minutes apart, me first. The journey involved a change of trains at Pigalle and my only concern was that a long wait on the platform for me might bring us together, which was something to be avoided.

  “Just keep an eye out,” I said.

  “I’ll keep my distance but it isn’t as if there’s anything I would be able to do about it if you’re there.”

  “You could leave.”

  “And if there’s a corporal at the top of the stairs, who had just watched me leave? What might I tell him? That I changed my mind and decided to go for a drunk can-can dancer in an alley?”

  “That might work.”

  “If you’re there, I’ll get into a different car of the train, and I’ll stop for a piss when we get to the station so you can get ahead of me.”

  “Or maybe go one stop farther?”

  “This piss will be enough,” Leon said. “Don’t go getting all paranoid on me. Besides, 15 minutes should be plenty. But let’s say I make it 20.”

  I didn’t know exactly where I was going, but the fact that the name of the street was part of the name of the Metro stop offered a pretty decent clue. At least that’s what I figured. Lamarck and Caulaincourt needed to intersect at some point — s
ome point close to the station — so there was that. And I would always have Sacre Coeur to guide me. Brick said you could see it from the orphanage.

  At the Metro station, there was no German military presence, which gave me a sense of security, probably false. But, whatever. Outside the station, there was a fruit and vegetable stand, shuttered and with the awnings pulled in. It was like a hundred such stands outside of Metro stations all over the city. When I lived in Lyon, I would sometimes cross the street to walk by places like that, just to bathe in the smells. I imagined that the stands in Paris were the same. But, with the rationing, what was the point? When I walked past this one, all I could smell was cat piss.

  Rue Caulaincourt was the street closest to the station, and I walked in the direction of Sacre Coeur — or, at least what I thought the direction was. Rue Lamarck had to be close by. The street featured a line of brownstone apartment buildings, just filthy buildings, all of them in desperate need of a sandblasting. The ironwork on the balconies, ornate and painted black, was flaking terribly. But who had the money for sandblasting, or even for a can of paint? And even if you had the money, who would sell you the paint?

  The worst part was that the walk was uphill, and not just a little. It normally would not have been a big deal, but what was normal anymore? All I knew was, I was always tired. My legs were sore and my feet were worse but it wasn’t just that — I was just exhausted, physically, mentally, every way. And looking up the street, looking up the concrete slope, it felt like an Alp.

  After a block or so, there was a sign for Rue Lamarck on the right. I turned onto it and resumed my climb. I had no idea how close I was until I spied an address sign on one particularly dirty house. No. 50. Shit.

  I followed along for a few more minutes, and then the street made a right turn at Rue de la Bonne. After the turn, I looked to the right and saw Sacre Coeur in all of its majesty. It felt close enough to touch, as if a stiff wind could knock it into the street in front of me. I kept going around the right-hand bend, though. Going and going. Still fucking uphill.

  As it turned out, Rue Lamarck circled the base of the hill upon which Sacre Coeur sat. And as I got to No. 16, finally, I could see that from the roof of the orphanage, the kids had a hell of a view. Lucky them.

  I rang the bell and was greeted by an older woman in a dark blue dress who leaned out and took quick, furtive looks to her left and right as she let me in.

  “Your name?” she said.

  “I didn’t know we were using names.”

  “Your name?”

  I couldn’t figure out what the harm was, so I answered with “Alex.”

  “And the other one?”

  “About 20 minutes behind me.

  How much do you know?” I said.

  As it turned out, she knew the basics — that there would be two of us, and that we would each be making two trips. Then she said, “I should have thanked you first. But I’m scared to death, and when I get scared, I get impolite. I hope you understand.”

  “I’ve been impolite for three years,” I said. “I have a priest friend in Lyon who I cursed in front of continuously, just because.”

  “Then you understand,” she said. I asked to use the bathroom, and she said, “So not just impolite when you’re scared, huh?”

  She smiled and added, “I’ll get the first group of children.”

  When I returned from the bathroom, the woman was there and five small heads were clinging to her skirt.

  “Five?” I said. “But you know there are two of us, making two trips each?”

  “Yes,” she said, her smiled camouflaging, or attempting to camouflage, the concern in her eyes.

  “But how many children are there altogether?”

  “Seventeen.”

  I took a step back and did the arithmetic in my head. It didn’t take long. Seventeen divided by four meant three trips with four children and one trip with five. Given that Brick’s preferred number was two children per trip, and maybe three, we were well past the limit. What was hoped to be inconspicuous had grown into a school field trip to the zoo.

  “Seventeen?” I said. “Did they know this? Did you tell them?”

  “I did,” the woman said. Her smile was gone at that point. The children did not know what we were talking about, and I’m not sure what they sensed. But they were hanging onto her skirt, and they weren’t budging.

  “Okay,” I said. “Just give me a second to think.”

  There really wasn’t anything to think about, as it turned out. If it was seventeen kids, it was seventeen kids. It wasn’t as if leaving them behind was an option. The thought that we could save twelve of them but leave five behind because it might make us more conspicuous actually gave me a flash of nausea when the idea flew through my head. If it played out that way, well, talk about never being able to sleep again without a bottle of something to dull the senses.

  The only question was whether to add a third trip and take smaller groups. The problem there was one of time and arithmetic again — there might not be enough hours in the day to bring a third group of orphans all the way down to Rue Greneta before their planned escape, and adding a third trip increased the odds of something looking strange to a German soldier patrolling the neighborhood by as much as 50 percent. It just didn’t seem worth it — for the time reason most of all.

  So five it would be.

  “Just make sure to tell my friend about the numbers,” I said. “Tell him I took five, and that the next three groups will be four each.”

  The woman nodded her head. I could see her lips moving, as if she needed to repeat this simple plan to herself so as not to forget. She really was terrified.

  “One other thing,” I said. She looked at me, along with the five kids suddenly looking up at my face. Maybe I had startled them — I don’t know.

  “Just this,” I said, taking the hand of one girl who was about six years old. She took the two steps over to me as I dropped to one knee. I reached over to the front of her jacket and tore the yellow star from the garment.

  Then I handed it to the woman and said, “Let’s check them all, inside and out. No yellow stars.”

  I let her do the search. She found one more and jerked it free.

  “And their names?” I said.

  “We’ve been practicing that,” the woman said. Then she looked down and said, “Children?” And one by one, Patrice, Martin, Henri, Jean, and Jeanette St. Laurent called out their names.

  34

  I took the hands of Jean and Jeannette — they were the two six-year-olds. The 11-year-old, Patrice, took the hands of Martin and Henri, whose ages were in the middle someplace. And with that, away we went.

  It was about two miles to the soup kitchen on Rue Greneta, maybe two and a half. It would have taken about 50 minutes of easy walking for most adults. It took us nearly three hours. Part of the reason was I did my best to avoid the busier, most direct streets, especially a long stretch on Rue de Magenta. Most of the reason, though, was obvious. Kids walk slowly.

  Because we were up near the top of the hill, it was a long way down. Right at the start, there were 160 steps — and, yes, I counted. It was an immense cement staircase down to Square Louise Michel, in the middle of a park. Every 10 steps or so, there was a landing. And so, with a child in each hand, we walked slowly down the steps until the last step before every landing, when the kids would jump and land with both feet on the landing. And then we would do it again. And again. And again. And all I could think about was that it could have been worse. It could have been up the staircase, not down.

  Once we reached level ground, it was actually almost enjoyable. The children were having a good time. They should have been scared to death, wandering the city in the care of a total stranger. But it was a nice day, and they all seemed to be embracing the adventure, even the little ones. They giggled in unison about two seconds after we passed an enormous woman sweeping the sidewalk in front of her building. They all stared in wonder after one o
f them pointed out a bird’s nest on a low branch of a nearby tree, a nest where the mother bird sat still while a bunch of baby birds took turns poking their heads out into the sunlight.

  They even started singing in unison at one point, and I felt bad about having to stop them. But there was no way I would be able to explain to a nosy German soldier why Patrice, Martin, Henri, Jean, and Jeannette St. Laurent were singing a song about a dreidel.

  I did my best to stick to the smaller streets, but I got worried after about two and a half hours that I was lost. So I asked a woman on the street, and she pointed me toward Rue Montorgueil, which intersected with Rue Greneta. Rue Montorgueil was a big shopping street, back when there were things to buy. But I had to chance it. And just as I turned the corner, there they were — two Germans, half-leaning and half-standing next to their vehicle, having a smoke.

  My options were to turn back or keep going — and turning back wasn’t really an option, seeing as how one of the Germans had seen us. There were about 200 feet between us, and I thought about stopping and having the kids practice their names one more time — but that would have drawn almost as much attention to us as turning back would have. So ahead we walked. And if the children saw the uniforms and were frightened, they didn’t seem to show it — except Jeannette, the six-year-old whose yellow star I had removed. Because she was suddenly squeezing my right hand just a bit tighter as we walked.

  I had played this game dozens of times, the trying-to-act-normal game when you were a Resistance fighter walking past some German soldiers. Of course, I had never done it with five children in tow, but for me, the tactics were the same. I couldn’t worry about what the children would do. All I could control was myself, my own facial expression, my own manner. And what I had determined over time was to make a face that fell somewhere between blank and a smile. Not exactly a half-smile, but more like a quarter-smile. I actually practiced it in a mirror until I could tell, just by the feeling of my facial muscles, if I was doing it right.