by Richard Wake
It was so out of character that Leon laughed when I first told him. But Otto’s death changed me in ways I never anticipated. And when he stopped laughing, Leon admitted that my plan for killing Vogl wasn’t bad. And I would have killed him, too, had not the Abwehr interrupted at the last second and used me to frame Vogl in their own plot.
Since then, I had killed once in Zurich and three times in Lyon. I had convinced myself that each death was necessary in the end. I knew that Vogl’s death was the most necessary of all. I knew I could do it. I knew I had the guts. Part of me knew that I really had no choice. And the more I considered it, the more I believed that the Resistance would see the killing for what it was, a sign of which side I was really on.
That left No. 3.
Could I possibly get away with it?
Part III
31
Our little Resistance cell had only seven people in it — and that was if you included Leon as one of the seven. One was Lucianne, whose father had operated a loom in the silk factory next to Manon’s father. But he was dead, and her husband had been killed in the early days of the war in Belgium, and Lucianne was both committed to fighting the German occupiers and uniquely positioned to help — because her day job was working in the post office of Gestapo headquarters on Avenue Berthelot.
Early on, when the council was trying to decide which Resistance cells to include in their little fucking club, it was Lucianne whose work did more to convince them than anything — more than, you know, Manon’s newspaper and me blowing up bridges and rail lines for them, me financing it myself. Assholes. Anyway, from her work in the post office, Lucianne was able to collect personal information on many of the Gestapo officers who were stationed in Lyon.
For most, she was able to learn their faces when they picked up their mail — and, later, to match those names against the photos of random Gestapo officers that were being taken from a flat across the street from the front gate on Avenue Berthelot. With the occasional extra bit of digging — and it really wasn’t very hard, given that these were men away from home who were either desperate for or dreading contact with the people they left back in Germany — Lucianne was able to add some family details to the names and faces. And when the handbills starting turning up all over Lyon — with photos of otherwise anonymous Gestapo sergeants, revealing their names and their wives’ names and their children’s names — the Germans, in Max’s best expression, “shit the fuck out.” You had to be there. Even if they increased their roundups of suspected Resistance fighters, it was worth it to get so thoroughly under their skins. All we ever saw them do was strut. For that one, brief, glorious stretch, they were on their heels.
Anyway, the council talked about those handbills for weeks. That was about three months earlier, and Lucianne had been forced to lay low after that, so as not to attract any suspicion. But now I needed her, and I intercepted her as she walked home after work.
She was surprised and happy to see me. She greeted me with a hug and a kiss on both cheeks. I had been worried about approaching her, but that fear quickly ebbed. My concern was that she somehow had been told by a person in the Resistance that I wasn’t to be trusted anymore. I knew it was a small concern — the cells were individual and isolated, for the most part, with only the leadership in joint contact — but it was still a possibility. Then her hug told me that I had nothing to worry about because Lucianne might have been a capable spy, but she seemed incapable of faking that kind of emotion.
We caught up as we walked, and then I said, “Look, I need your help with something.” Her look suddenly became serious, almost fearful.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Are they still all worked up about the handbills?”
“No,” she said. “That’s calmed down. But I haven’t done anything since then, and I’m just worried. I feel like I just barely escaped — they questioned all the girls who work in the post office. It wasn’t hard questioning — they did it altogether in a group — but they said things like, ‘We need you all to be watching everything and everyone, including each other.’ And they threatened us.”
“Threatened how?”
“Just this,” Lucianne said. “They said that if they found out that anyone in the post office had betrayed them, that they would arrest not just that girl, but the rest of us, too.”
She was scared. I understood completely.
“Here’s what I need — and it’s nothing like the last time,” I said. I was doing the best I could to undersell the danger, and it was the truth. Mostly.
“Do you know the name Werner Vogl?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “I don’t think so.”
“I just need you to find out everything you can find out about him, and to do it in the next two days.”
She started babbling, flustered, about the timing. I stopped her, and put my hand on her arm, and said, “Please try to be calm. It’s not like the last time. We’re not going to put his picture on handbills on the street. We’re not going to tell anybody about this. This is just the two of us, just you and me. But for a future operation, I need everything you can find.”
“Future operation?” she said.
“Not your concern. Just get me what you can — and don’t write anything down. Just do it from memory. You don’t have to dig anywhere that you shouldn’t be digging. Just whatever you can find.”
“In the next two days?”
“Yes,” I said.
Lucianne had calmed down some. She had access to his mail, to any wire he might receive, and to his pay information — that was how the Gestapo got paid, at the post office, and that was where they might be sending some of their money home.
“Just try to memorize anything you come across,” I said. “And that’s really it. Don’t go out of your way — just whatever you happen to see. Remember the name — Werner Vogl.”
“Do you know his rank?” she said.
“He was a captain a few years ago, but I don’t know now.”
Lucianne’s fear seemed to have subsided. The simplicity of the task was apparent. There really was no risk, seeing as how it was her job to deal with all the information I was seeking. I told her I would meet her in two days, on the same walk home.
32
Despite my nonchalance, I wasn’t sure if I was putting Lucianne in danger or not. Before I intercepted her on the walk home, I wanted to be sure that she wasn’t being followed. It wasn’t going to be that easy, given that Avenue Berthelot would be lousy with people headed home from work at the same time. But I was pretty sure she wasn’t being tailed and then, when she stopped to buy a baguette on the way home, I was positive. It was the best and easiest way to stop a tail, stopping and shopping, and she was clean.
I met up with her on the next block. The sidewalk wasn’t crowded at that point, but it wasn’t empty, either. There were two men in business suits walking about 20 feet ahead of us, and two teenage girls maybe 50 feet behind us. It was perfect, really. We did the hug and the kissing of the cheeks as if we hadn’t seen each other in a long time, just for show — but I really didn’t think anybody was watching.
“So?” I said.
“Your Werner Vogl is interesting,” she said. Her smile suggested he was dirty-interesting.
“Meaning?”
“He gets letters written in a feminine hand from two different places,” she said. “Berlin and Frankfurt. The one from Frankfurt was vaguely scented.”
Vogl was a stick-up-the-ass, no-nonsense Nazi, but he did have both a wife and a girlfriend back in 1938 — he wife in Berlin, the girlfriend in Frankfurt. It was the only sign that he was short of perfection, and the Abwehr used it as an element of the scheme to frame him as a traitor. The story was too involved to tell Lucianne, though. It would have taken 15 minutes. I stuck with the basics — the girlfriend was the scented letter from Frankfurt.
“There’s another thing,” Lucianne said. “He sends them both money every month.”
“Who gets more?”
“Same amount to each,” she said. “Shithead.”
This was fascinating, but I couldn’t imagine how it might be helpful. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but that wasn’t it.
“I was able to take a peek into his file — we share space with the records people,” she said.
“One big happy Gestapo family.”
“It was a quick look,” Lucianne said. “I was able to make him a duplicate pay envelope, and three other duplicates for three other officers. We get them empty and fill them with their pay. But I told the file clerk that the totals seemed incorrect on all of them and I needed to see their pay grades in the files. She made some crack about how all we ever do is save other people’s asses, and handed me the files, one by one. I could only take a quick scan.”
“Anything interesting?”
“From what I could see, he was transferred from Cologne in 1938 and suffered a loss in rank,” she said. “It didn’t say why. He was transferred to Berlin, and he worked in administration for a while. Then I saw he was in Poland before he was here. But that was it. It was about a five-second glance.”
“Is he a captain?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Somewhere along the way, his rank was restored. But don’t ask me where.”
I had figured as much. I never really believed they were going to ship him to Dachau after the Abwehr fit the frame around him. The politics of the Gestapo vs. the Abwehr was such that I always thought he would be protected by his own people somehow. As for the Poland part, I already knew that. It was all helpful in completing the picture of Vogl that I already carried in my head, but that picture wasn’t going to help me kill him.
“Anything else?” I said.
“He lives in the Hotel Terminus,” she said. “But almost all the officers do. Nothing special there.”
When she was done, I acted about a thousand times more enthusiastic about the information Lucianne had brought me than I felt. Her smile told me how proud she was to be a part of the Resistance, and of this “future operation.” I thanked her profusely and told her to lay low again for a while.
“No risks,” I said. “Be extra careful. The most important thing is for you to keep the job. I’m sure there will be another operation soon.”
I really hoped that I hadn’t endangered her, and that her bogus pay packet scheme wouldn’t draw any attention or suspicions. Because the truth was, she didn’t give me shit. The truth also was that I had no reason to believe she would be able to supply me with anything but shit when I asked for her help, and that I had put her at risk for no reason.
33
The clock at the top of the Perrache station’s facade said it was 8:10 a.m. I think they kept it a minute or two fast. For nearly three weeks, Monday to Friday, I had walked through the train shed at pretty much the same time every morning, in the one open side and out the other. Sometimes I bought a newspaper as it could be part of the disguise when I was dressed as a businessman in a suit. That day, though, I didn’t. I was in my priest outfit, and carrying a small satchel, and that would be sufficient.
It was my favorite disguise, mostly because nobody ever looked a priest in the eye. I take that back — little children sometimes did, pointing and occasionally laughing. “Look Mama, that man is wearing a dress.” At which point she would drag the pointing child in another direction, and shush him, and maybe slap his hand or the side of his head. But she would never look at my face. Nobody ever did.
Once I was through the station and out the far side, the Hotel Terminus loomed on the left — solid, stone construction, substantial. The Terminus was the Gestapo dormitory, and all the officers lived there. They had their offices there at the start, too, before expanding to larger quarters on Avenue Berthelot. I wondered whose job it had been to clean the blood spatters off of the gold brocade. And did they feed the lopped-off fingers to one of the house cats or just set them out with the nightly garbage?
I had grown confident over the weeks, probably too confident. But the disguise really was perfect. With my hair dyed gray, and a big pair of glasses, and the black cassock, and the black hat with the wide brim — it was like a small version of a Mexican sombrero — I honestly didn’t recognize myself. There was no way that Vogl would recognize me, not that I would afford him the chance. He tended to walk to work on nice days, and this was a bright and clear morning, but I still had a few minutes before he came out. I approached the bell captain, who was standing at a small podium just outside the front door.
“A question, Monsieur?” I said. And, like everyone else, the bell captain looked more through me than at me.
“Yes, Father,” he said. “We have no rooms, if that is your question. We are booked full with—” Then he stopped and just pointed at the red Nazi flags that had sprouted on numerous poles surrounding the hotel’s main entrance.
“Oh, no,” I said. “I could never afford this, even if it were available. Can you point me toward the cathedral? My accommodations will be there.”
He pointed north and said it was about a mile, and I did begin to walk that way. But after a block, I made a right turn and headed east. Then I doubled back and waited about a half-block from the corner. As if on cue, maybe five minutes later, I saw the man in the Gestapo captain’s uniform striding purposefully across the intersection. I followed him, maybe 300 feet behind.
From the hotel to Avenue Berthelot wasn’t much more than a half-mile. It was a 12-minute walk at an easy pace most days, but Vogl was moving a little quicker than normal. We were on Cours de Verdun Recamier, headed in the direction of Pont Gallieni, one of the bridges over the Rhone. The bridge connected directly into Avenue Berthelot. The Gestapo headquarters was on the second block from the river. The complex, in the old army medical school, was on the right side of the street.
I obviously knew where Vogl was going, but I was trying to be as thorough as possible, even given the fact that I was scared shitless whenever I was on the street. The new flat had been a godsend — I actually felt safe there — but the streets remained a terror. I couldn’t do it without the disguises, and Vogl wasn’t even the main reason for that. The Resistance remained just as big a threat, and theirs were faces that I mostly did not know.
The hair dyes were a big part of it. Every night, in the bathroom sink of the flat, I changed the color — from my natural light brown either to black or gray. I had two pairs of eyeglasses containing plain glass, one with a heavy black frame, the other with a thinner gold frame. And I had a hat to go with every disguise — and two hats to go with the priest disguise: one the sun hat of a country priest and the other a more traditional biretta that you saw priests wear around the city. Since I had never been much of a hat wearer, except in truly shitty weather, the hats alone were plenty disguising. Among other reasons, they were all a half-size too big, at least. One of them — the businessman’s Trilby, sat so low that it perched on my eyebrows.
I had four disguises all together. The least-disguising was the typical laborer’s outfit, although the tan flat cap helped. I wore that one the least. The businessman’s dark gray suit with the Trilby really was pretty effective, mostly because of the hat but partly because it was the most common look on the street in the morning near the hotel. Besides, I could use the newspaper as more camouflage, if necessary, because every suit was carrying either a briefcase or a newspaper or both. Still, I had never felt the need to hide behind the paper. I really was pretty careful.
The priest outfit with the bigger hat was my favorite although I tried not to overuse it. And then there was my street cleaner’s get-up, which I bought off of a guy who was beyond down-and-out. I gave him enough money to eat for a month on the black market — or, in his case, enough to drink for maybe two weeks. In exchange, I received some stained coveralls, a beat-up hat, a small dustbin on wheels, a broom, and a shovel. When I asked the guy how he was going to live without the tools for his job, he said, “I’ll be honest, I just stole them from someone
else.”
Rotating through the disguises, wearing a different one in the evening than I wore in the morning, I gave myself three weeks to study Vogl’s habits. I decided to skip the weekends and concentrate on Monday to Friday. I had started on a Tuesday and ended three Mondays later. The final Monday was the morning I was wearing the priest outfit with the big-brimmed hat, and it was fairly typical.
On nice days, Vogl would leave the hotel at right about 8:15 and walk the same way. If it was raining, or just crappy, he would sometimes get a ride. But when he walked, the route was identical — down Cours de Verdun Recamier, across Pont Gallieni, pause for a few seconds to wait for the cop in the middle of the intersection to stop traffic so he could cross Avenue Leclerc, and then down Avenue Berthelot. He was at the front gate of Gestapo headquarters at 8:27 most days, and likely in his office by 8:30.
More days than not, he would leave work at 4:30. But the problem for me was that while Vogl did have habits, they weren’t entirely consistent. The weather affected his decision to walk or be driven, but that was a relatively predictable variable. His work, though, could bring him into the office later than 8:30, and it sometimes kept him there well into the night. He stayed as late as 8 p.m. on two of the 15 nights. One night, I wasn’t sure when he left because I gave up to get home to my flat and beat the curfew. And then there was the day he never showed up at Avenue Berthelot at all.
In the three weeks of watching, I was able to identify only one constant. It was on Fridays, and it was in the morning. It didn’t matter if it was raining, or sunny, or overcast and blustery, because the same thing happened in all three weather conditions.