by Richard Wake
At 8:15 on every Friday morning, Werner Vogl came out of the front entrance of the Hotel Terminus and walked to Avenue Berthelot. But on those three days, and only those three days, he had a companion. And while I could never get close enough to be 100 percent sure, I was reasonably certain that Vogl’s companion was Klaus Barbie’s dog, Hildy, tethered on a thick leather leash.
34
Because it had been more than three weeks, I needed to go back to Marcel’s shop and check on Leon’s side business. I told Leon I would keep the money flowing, and it was a promise I intended to keep, even if I was so scared during the walk that I nearly pissed the cassock.
I did my espionage due diligence, walking past the shop on the opposite side of the street, checking in another shop window for a potential tail, walking another block just to make sure, and then right, left, right, and left before finally coming back upon Marcel’s door. I didn’t feel a tail, and I was dressed as a priest besides, so fuck it — which wasn’t much of an attitude for a man of the cloth but, well, fuck it.
“Ah, Father, what brings you to my humble shop today?” It was clear that Marcel didn’t recognize me, so I decided to play along.
“A gift for a friend,” I said.
“And what are your friend’s interests?”
“It’s hard to pick just one, because Leon is a man of many and varied interests,” I said. At that point, Marcel stopped looking through me and started looking at me. It still took him a second, and then he just said, “Well, fuck me.”
“Fine way to speak to a priest.” He stepped from behind the counter and walked around me in a circle.
“Jesus Christ, I can’t believe it.”
“Again with the language.”
“Goddaaam,” he said, and then Marcel whistled as a form of punctuation.
I wanted to hug him but held off. It was the best I had felt in a while, just knowing how effective the disguise was. I was pretty sure, but you can never completely trust yourself. This was confirmation. I felt relaxed, and suddenly really needed the bathroom. Marcel pointed, and I didn’t hesitate.
When I returned, he got right down to business.
“You just missed him,” Marcel said.
“Who?”
“Leon,” he said. “About an hour ago.”
“Did he say anything?”
“I gave him his latest packet. It was literally an hour ago. He said they’re on the afternoon train to Marseille — 4 o’clock, I think. And he gave me the next batch — a woman and a 10-year-old boy.”
I opened my little travel bag and took out the payment for those next two identity cards. I now had an opportunity to see Leon, but did I dare chance a meeting at the flat where they were hiding? I wasn’t sure, and I had time to consider. As I counted out the money on the glass counter, Marcel stopped me, mid-count.
“You know, they’re after you,” he said. And while I knew exactly what he was talking about, I played dumb.
“They?”
“The council,” he said.
“You know about the council?”
“Of course I know,” Marcel said. “There aren’t many people in regular contact with people from Combat, from Liberation, from your place, whatever it’s called. But I happen to be one of those people. In fact, I might be the only person. It’s a unique benefit of my chosen profession.”
“So—”
“So you know they’re after you, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “The bullets they shot at me were a fair bit of confirmation.”
Marcel scooped up the money off the counter and put it in his special drawer. He fiddled with something else in the drawer that I couldn’t see. It crossed my mind that it was a gun. But whatever it was, he left it where it was and silently closed the drawer.
“You know, I’m supposed to turn you in,” he said.
“Will you?”
“I’m supposed to, Father. I was specifically asked to keep an eye out for you. They asked if you had been in the shop recently, and I told them no. So that was a lie. But I’m not sure I want to get into the business of routinely lying to those people. I mean, I have a skill that they need, but I’m not sure lying to the Resistance is a smart strategy in the long term — mostly because I’m not sure there tends to be much of a long term for such people.”
Marcel said that the Resistance had actually told him about a designated letter box in a certain building where he was to leave a message if I had been in the shop.
“I was to attempt to make a future appointment with you — for delivery of a new identity card, presumably,” he said. “But in any case, I was to leave them a message, if not with a future time than just with these words: ‘The two-faced coin is in stock.’”
“That’s pretty hokey.”
“That’s what I thought, but it’s their game, so it’s their rules.”
“So what are you going to do?” I said. “I mean, will you?”
Marcel stopped as if he were thinking — not deciding, not exactly, but just trying to come up with the justification for whatever decision he had already made. It was as if he had gone over it in his head enough times but hadn’t quite found the words. When he began speaking, it was as if he was groping for those words.
“If you were coming in for papers for yourself, I might,” he said. “If it was just you, trying to get new papers so you could disappear, I might turn you in. Sorry, but I might.”
“But that isn’t wh—”
“I know, I know — and that has made it harder for me, more complicated. But that’s what I keep coming back to. You’re not doing this for yourself. These papers, none of them have been for you. None of them have been for your family. The risks that you have running here — the risks that you are still running, even though people are taking rifle shots at you—”
“You knew they were rifle shots?” I said. With that, we both smiled.
“I told you that I talked to everybody,” he said. “But that’s it. The risks you have run, that you still run, they are not the risks a traitor would run. That’s what I keep coming back to.”
“So maybe you could tell them that.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
Look, this is a tough time,” Marcel said “Shit, I don’t have to tell you that, but it is. It’s just tough. There is mistrust on about eight levels — different factions, different ideologies. I hope I’m not insulting you, but those fucking Communists give me a headache — but I cannot get involved in that. You run risks, I run risks. I think we both do it for the right reasons. But I can’t get myself in the middle of your shit.”
But we both knew he was getting himself in the middle by keeping my secret. And when I began to speak, it was with a true feeling of gratitude.
“Look, I appreciate—”
“Enough talk,” he said. And then he walked down to the end of the counter and pulled out a wax paper envelope full of loose stamps. “I don’t care what you’re dressed like, you still need to buy something, just in case. And I went out and got some cheaper merchandise, just for you.”
He looked down at the pile.
“The cheapest one,” I said. “I’m on a priest’s salary now.”
“There was a time I would never have permitted shit like this in my shop,” Marcel said, plucking one out and putting it into an envelope of its own. He really did appear to be disgusted.
35
I thought about going to visit Leon at the flat, confident as I was about the priest disguise, but then I thought better of it. There was no reason to be cocky. I could just arrange to run into him at the train station. It was a little counterintuitive, but a public meeting was safer than a private meeting, given everything.
I would need some kind of train ticket, just in case, so I bought one to the second stop on the same train as Leon and his guests, the night train to Marseilles. In all likelihood, I would just throw it away after we were done talking.
So I bought my ticket an
d parked myself on a bench. I had managed to purchase a priest’s breviary from a second-hand bookstore, just to complete the disguise, and pulled it out and began reading. Well, not actually reading — the book was written in Latin — but pretending to read. I had to remind myself to turn the page every few minutes.
From what I gathered, priests were supposed to read from it every day. And given that I now paid close attention to priests who were in public, but from a distance, it seemed that they all had their noses in the book whenever they had a spare minute. On one of my businessman-in-a-suit days, I sat down next to a priest on the very same bench and interrupted his reading, asking how long it took him every day.
“Most days, two-and-a-half hours,” he said. “Some days, three.”
“Wow. It’s like another job.”
“But remember,” he said. “I don’t have a wife to listen to at night.”
Neither did I. And while I had managed to avoid the almost daily temptation of going to see her, I wasn’t sure how much longer I could hold out. The truth was, I was really thinking about going that night. As I was thinking, Leon arrived on the platform with a woman who was hand-in-hand with a little girl, maybe 5 years old.
Leon walked within two feet of me and did not react. When I stood from the bench and said, “Please, sit,” he thanked me but still did not react — not immediately. It was only after they were on the bench that he saw through the disguise. So I sat again, and the four of us looked like what we were, people chatting on a bench in the train station. And within a minute or two, after introductions were made and explanations offered — no, I wasn’t really a priest and, yes, Marcel told me where to find you — the conversation was just between him and me.
“What’s with the dress?” Leon said. And with that, I explained what I had been doing for the previous three weeks.
“Because?” he said.
“You know why,” I said.
“Fuck no, not again?”
“Yes again,” I said. “Remember the last time I told you.”
We had been in a bar in Vienna. He was waiting for a source who might or might not have had a tip on a story, and he laughed when I told him I wanted to kill Vogl — like, literally laughed. But as I explained the reasoning, and detailed as much of the plan as I had sketched out in my head, he warmed at least a little to the idea. But the irony of the scheme — that is, that I was the careful one and Leon was the daredevil, and I wanted to take the risk and he thought it was crazy — would always stick with both of us.
Five years later, though, a lot was different — about each of us personally, and about our lives, and about the hell we lived in — and it was as if we no longer were permitted the luxury of personal irony.
Instead, as Leon listened to my idea that killing Vogl would not only get him out of the way but also convince the Resistance of my loyalty, he just said, “Have you figured out how you’re going to do it?”
The truth was, I had not. I had promised myself to do three full weeks of reconnaissance and to keep an open mind, and I had just finished, and I had not yet synthesized everything we knew. I was about to give him the summary of my surveillance of Vogl when we were interrupted by two black uniforms and a single question: “Papers, please.”
This was, I immediately realized, the flaw in my priestly disguise. I was dressed as a civilian in the picture on my identity card and was not identified as a priest. My only hope was that these two Gestapo mugs had never seen a priest’s identity card, either.
I dropped the breviary as I stood up to reach into my pocket. The uniform said, “No, not you, Father.”
I sat back down. The identity cards for Leon, and woman and the child were passed to the uniform. He moved a step away to get a better look beneath an overhead light. As he did it, he blocked the view of the other goon. And in that instant, I looked at Leon and he mouthed one word: “Louis.”
He once told me he was Louis in every one of his fake identities, and that is what I would have guessed. Now I had some confirmation, and a bit of room to maneuver.
“And how do you know these people, Father?” the uniform said, turning his attention back to us.
“I have seen my friend Louis here in church, but not as often as perhaps I should see him, isn’t that right?”
Leon looked at me and then dropped his eyes.
“You’re right, Father,” he said.
“And them?” the uniform said. He looked down and eyed up their identity cards for a second time, cards bearing I-had-no-idea-what names.
“I have also seen them in my parish,” I said. “But I am relatively new there and don’t know all the names. But the child is strikingly beautiful, don’t you think? Dressed on Sunday, you can imagine she looks like an angel. So when I saw them walk by, I invited them to sit with Louis and I. A small parish meeting from Saint Marie’s. We are all on the same train, too. Imagine the coincidence.”
“Tickets?”
Fortunately, they were for three different stations along the line — mine first (I was using it as a bookmark in the breviary), then Leon’s (to a station where he would transfer on the line back to Paris), then our Jewish friends (who were going further south). Satisfied, or at least satisfied enough, the uniform handed everything back, and he and his partner walked over to scare the shit out of the people sitting on the next bench.
At which point, we all exhaled. The three adults instinctively congratulated the little girl on her performance, although the truth was, we all likely felt a bit emboldened by surviving the cursory check of our papers — or at least I did. But as the train approached the station, I was worried that I would have to use my ticket and ride the one stop for no reason, lest the two Gestapo goons see me leave and suspect something. But then, with a single warning blow of the train’s whistle, the two of them hurriedly hopped across the track to the opposite platform. The train would block their view, and I would be able to get out after all.
The Jews said a round of thank-yous as we stood up. Leon and I hugged, but there were no tears this time.
“I want to help if I can,” he said.
“I don’t know—”
“Listen. If you come up with a plan that needs an extra hand, I can help. I want to help. It’s the least I can do.”
“I think you have enough risk in your life.”
“Maybe,” Leon said. “But if this works, you eliminate Vogl and you eliminate the suspicion of the Resistance at the same time. How can I pass up the chance to see you kill two birds with one stone? Isn’t that what the English say?”
I had no idea, but I liked it.
36
I was tired when I arrived at the door of the silk factory. It had been a long day on my feet including the last two miles from the station, the last bit straight uphill to Croix-Rousse. But I was convinced I was invincible in the priest’s get-up. Leon’s initial inability to recognize who I was had been the last bit of encouragement that I needed. My life was only going to get more dangerous, at least in the short-term. Here and now, dressed like Father Alex, was my last, best chance to see Manon before I went about the business of trying to kill Werner Vogl.
I knocked our special knock, and I could hear her running to answer. She opened the door slowly and dragged me inside and hugged me immediately. I mean, there was no way I was going to fool her. We hugged, and then we kissed, and then she began to work a couple of the buttons on the cassock.
“Here,” I said, let me pull it over my head.”
“No, just a couple of buttons,” she said.
“Really? Some fantasy of yours?”
“Maybe.”
“Isn’t that against the rules?”
“Who are you going to tell? When was the last time your ass was in a church?”
I had a lot to tell her when we were finished and re-buttoned. She was almost done printing the latest edition of La Dure Vérité, and wanted to get finished before she went home, so we sat in the little store room in the back and talked o
ver the Roneo, which hummed when it wasn’t clattering and clattered when it wasn’t humming. There was a loose bit of something in the machine’s innards, but I had no idea how to fix it.
I realized I hadn’t told her that the Resistance had tried to kill me. I knew she would be wild when she heard, and she was. She exploded with a string of invective that was brutal, even for her, including the memorable “if it was that motherfucking ass-grabber, I swear…”
But she calmed down almost as quickly as she erupted. She asked for more details, took it all in, nodded. “Yeah, it was definitely those assholes,” she said. “I mean, what else do we have to do—”
“I know.” I was trying to be rational even though I shared every bit of her sentiment. “I know. But why doesn’t matter, and the fact that they’re wrong doesn’t matter. They’re trying to kill me, and I have to stop them. And because of that, I have to get out of here. Like, in five minutes.”
Manon grabbed my hand, but she knew I was right. A priest had showed up at the silk factory after work hours. If anyone saw it, and thought about it for more than a second, a phone call could lead to another phone call, and to trouble. So I didn’t have much time to tell her about my plan to kill Vogl.
Again, she put aside her emotions and listened intently. She was a professional spy, after all — or at least she had been at the start of the war, before she grew sick of the incompetence of her bosses in Zurich. She understood why I’d spent three weeks attempting to discern a pattern in Vogl’s activities. She immediately dismissed the idea of doing anything to him after his work day was over.
“It’s too erratic,” she said. “You could never plan something and be confident it would take place. And you can’t leave your ass hanging out too long here. It has to be quick.”
“So you agree?”
“I don’t know the plan yet because you don’t know the plan yet,” she said. “But the concept, yes. I agree. It scares the hell out of me but, yes, I agree. Because the way you’re living now is no way to live.”