The Lyon Resistance

by Richard Wake

  I wouldn’t know if Raymond had seen the signal until 9 p.m. up at the Roman ruins. In the meantime, I figured more sleep was as valuable as anything else I could be doing. But before that, I decided to take one more peek at Vogl’s morning routine.

  I walked through the train station as I had the previous times I had been wearing the suit. I bought a newspaper and parked myself on a bench just outside the station, a couple of hundred yards away from the Hotel Terminus’ flag-festooned entrance, so many red Nazi flags now framing the front door that it looked like the stage at a Nuremberg rally. We used to watch them on the newsreels in Vienna and marvel at the pageantry. Leon would see the lights and the flags and the rest of it and then watch Hitler climb the podium and say, “I bet he wears fucking stage makeup.” I didn’t doubt it.

  From where I was, peering over the top of my open newspaper, I could see the front door with no problem. And if I wasn’t close enough to pick out the face of a stranger, I would have known Vogl from twice the distance. I looked at my watch, and it was 8:05. I was 10 minutes early.

  I watched for the next half-hour and Vogl never appeared.

  With each minute, my blood pressure rose. I could hear my pulse in my ears. My plan was to kill the man in two days and I did not need a sudden change in his routine. It hadn’t been perfect, though. That’s what I kept telling myself. Other than Fridays with Hildy, there had been variations. There was no need to panic. This didn’t mean anything unless, of course, it did.

  At 8:40, I abandoned the watch and returned to the flat. Despite my nerves, I slept easily again, and finished the pie, and then began going over the details of the plan, as rudimentary as they were.

  Finally, after dark, I began walking to the amphitheater. I hated the idea of taking the funicular up the hill to the Roman ruins because of the confined space. But the last time, I had walked up the hill and been seen by the Resistance and shot at — at least, I assumed that’s when they saw me. Seeing as how there was no way to know, I didn’t want to chance it again, so I would chance the confined space of the funicular. If the driver was in the Resistance, of course, I was screwed. But there was no way for me to avoid risk at this point, only to minimize it.

  I got off the funicular and walked across the street and then up the smooth stone path to the amphitheater. Then it was up the steps, right up the middle aisle, until I got past the last row and to the top, where the paths and alleys that often led nowhere began. It seemed an especially dark night, and I had no idea where Raymond might be, until I heard a whispered “over here.” Raymond was hidden in one of the alleys that went nowhere, over to my right.

  “I almost pissed myself when I saw your mark,” he said. “How are you?”

  I told him. I told him everything. He pushed his hat up onto the back of his head and leaned against the stone wall and let out a long, low whistle. “Holy shit,” he said, as if mumbling to himself, as if I wasn’t intended to hear. “Holy fucking shit.”

  Then it hit him. “Wait, how’s Manon?”

  I told him that I had left her, for her safety, and he nodded in agreement. Then I laid out my plan, and I asked him what he thought.

  “I don’t fucking know,” he said. “You act like I’m the chief of the department, for Christ’s sake. I’m just a cop, just a fucking flatfoot. I swear to God, I directed traffic for four hours today. I’m not some tactician.”

  “I know, but you’re not just some fucking flatfoot, and you know it. Tell me what you think.”

  “I guess it makes sense,” was the best he could come up with. And that was after a full minute of silent consideration.

  Then I asked him for the gun.

  “Wait, a handgun?” he said, as if the possibility just dawned on him. “I thought you were going to shoot him with a rifle, from some distance. I thought you were good at rifles from the war.”

  “I was good at rifles from the war,” I said. “But the war was a long fucking time ago. So I have no idea. And besides, I don’t have time to set up a place to hide and shoot from. I need to do it now. I need a handgun.”

  “Well, I can’t give you my service revolver,” Raymond said.

  “But how about your throwaway?” I said.

  “You know about that?”

  “Everybody knows,” I said. A throwaway was the small pistol most police carried in case they needed to make the evidence align with the circumstances. If there were somebody who needed killing, for all the right reasons but without the legal niceties, a cop would kill him with his throwaway and then throw it away. Or, if there was confusion during a confrontation, and someone got shot who turned out to be unarmed, voila — with the throwaway, he was suddenly an armed man and the shooting was justified.

  Raymond reached down to an ankle holster and removed a tiny revolver. He wiped it down with his shirt tail and then handed it to me. It really was small.

  “You take this from a girl?” I said. “A baby girl?”

  “What do they say about beggars and choosers? You have to remember, the Nazis got almost all the guns when they came in — only the people who had unregistered guns to start with could hide theirs.”

  “I’m surprised they let the cops have guns at all,” I said.

  “Most don’t. But here’s the Germans’ secret: if we had them already, we could keep the guns, but not the bullets. I have three bullets for my official gun. I think yours has four. I guess I should have told you that.”

  A pea-shooter with four bullets. I was so fucked.

  “Seriously, how close would I have to be to kill somebody with this?”

  “Three feet,” Raymond said. “Five tops.”

  “Man—”

  “Give me a day, and maybe I can get you a rifle,” he said. “Let me see what we have in the evidence locker. I might be able to turn up something.”

  “I don’t have that kind of time,” I said. “And besides, I really might not be able to shoot for shit anymore. The last time I did it, I was 18.”

  “Are you sure?” he said, and then he pointed to the pistol. “Three feet. Three fucking feet.”

  “Five tops,” I said.

  43

  My original thought was to kill Vogl while disguised as the priest, out of some perverted sense of good karma. Plus, I really believed that the black sombrero was the best disguise I had. But when I thought about it, I realized the disguise wasn’t as important before the shooting as it was after. The odds were, I would go unrecognized by anyone on the street either way, seeing as how I didn’t plan to be on the street for more than five minutes or so before I pulled the trigger.

  Afterward, though, was going to be the issue. And while I could wear the business suit under the cassock, which I would ditch at the first opportunity, I couldn’t really carry the Trilby while wearing the cassock — and, to me, the Trilby was the only real camouflage that the business suit provided. But if I went as the street cleaner, I could wear regular clothes underneath the orange coveralls and carry the flat cap in the dustbin. But then I thought some more and figured, why couldn’t I carry the priest’s get-up in the dustbin and change to that? The only issue would be having to grab the knapsack holding the priest outfit from the dustbin when I ran. It would have to be in the knapsack because fleeing with the dustbin just wasn’t feasible. So that’s what I did.

  On Friday morning at 7:30 a.m., I had positioned myself on Quai Claude Bernard. It was the street right along the river but on the other side of the Rhone from the Hotel Terminus. When the time came, I could lean against a tree while pretending to take a break and watch the length of the Pont Gallieni, the bridge that Vogl would be walking across. But that would not be for more than a half hour, so I spent that time cleaning the street — sweeping and shoveling dirt, picking up stray newspapers that had been caught in the wind, and cigarette butts — although there weren’t many of them, as people now routinely walked the streets with eyes down, searching for a few millimeters of unsmoked tobacco that someone had discarded. But what
ever I found, I slowly went about the business of picking it up and disposing of it in my dustbin, right on top of my knapsack.

  I made achingly slow progress up the street. If anyone gave me a second look, I didn’t see it. Hell, if anybody gave me a first look, I didn’t see it. Orange coveralls, dustbin, push broom, shovel — I was just a part of the urban landscape, no more interesting than a parked car. At about 8:10, I wheeled my contraption up onto the sidewalk and then onto the grassy stretch that separated the street from the river bank. There were some trees planted in the grass, not big plane trees but not spindly little shrubs, either. I leaned against one and attempted to light one of the cigarette butts I had recovered from the gutter. It was 98 percent filter and two percent tobacco, but it didn’t matter. It was just part of the act.

  On the three Fridays I had watched him, Vogl and Hildy left the hotel five minutes earlier than on his other normal days. That was to give Hildy time to sniff around and take a dump and still get Vogl to the office by 8:30. The other times, they had managed to take care of that before reaching the bridge. As it turned out, Vogl was not surprisingly more German than French in this regard — he curbed the dog rather than allowing it to take a crap in the middle of the sidewalk, as every self-respecting Frenchman seemed to do. Before the war, walking the streets of Lyon, or any French city, was like walking through a dogshit minefield.

  The men just stop and piss along any wall they want to, and the dogs shit in the middle of the sidewalk — what a country. Of course, all of that was before the war. The men still pissed anywhere they wanted, but there really weren’t any dogs in the city anymore, mostly because there was no way to feed them. By 1942, most family pets had been sold to heartless entrepreneurs who undoubtedly sold the meat back to the authorities as beef.

  That was how my mind wandered until it got to about 8:20, which was when I saw Vogl and Hildy turn the corner and begin walking across the bridge. My heart raced, but I knew what I needed to do, and I began to do it. It was a pretty half-assed plan, but it was all I had.

  And so, I walked along the quai and crossed the intersection, looking to my right and seeing the progress Vogl and Hildy were making on the bridge. I still had about 90 seconds to get into position. When the traffic cop waved me across, I hustled along with my dustbin. The cop yelled, “Slow down, old man. I’ll hold it for you,” and so I did slow down, a little.

  I got to my spot on the sidewalk, just a few feet from where Vogl would cross to get to Avenue Berthelot. The street was wider than usual there, and a small traffic island that allowed right turns off the bridge made it just a speck more complicated than a typical intersection. I had never seen anyone not have to wait at least a few seconds before they crossed Avenue Leclerc, and a few seconds were all I needed.

  I took a deep breath and fondled the baby revolver in the pocket of the coveralls. I looked back to the left and saw Vogl moving toward me. Ten seconds… five seconds…

  They arrived at the curb, and Vogl and the dog did have to stop. I was close to them, maybe not three feet away but less than five. Vogl did not even look in my direction, fixated on the traffic cop, waiting for the signal to cross. But Hildy did see me. I don’t know if she recognized me or if she just hated everyone, but she jumped at me and strained at the leash.

  I panicked and shot her. And then it was all like it was in slow motion, except it must have taken about two seconds. The shot fired, and the dog fell. Because Vogl had been leaning away from us to brace himself against the straining leash, the sudden slack in the leather made him stumble a half-step backward. He looked down at the dog, lying on the sidewalk. The blood was already visible. And then, as it all registered, Vogl looked up at me. He looked beyond the orange coveralls and the beat-up hat I was wearing. He looked at my face. I don’t know if I saw a sign of recognition or not. I don’t know if it was a look of disgust, or half of a smile, or something in between. Later that night, when I closed my eyes and relived the moment, the face he made looked a little bit different every time.

  Then I shot him. I got him up high, I was sure of that. But whether it was in the mouth or the neck, I just didn’t know. I saw Vogl drop the leash and reach both hands up to the area of the wound. I had two more bullets, and I intended to use at least one more, but when I fired again, the gun jammed. At that point, I panicked and ran. My original intent was to drop the gun in place and walk away calmly. Instead, I chucked the revolver into the Rhone and sprinted away, barely remembering to grab the knapsack.

  After the first shot, there had been no reaction that I could detect. Maybe everyone figured it was just an engine backfiring — I mean, it wasn’t as if I had fired a canon. But after the second shot, and after I began running, I did hear some yelling and the insistent whistling of what I assumed was the traffic cop. But I didn’t look back.

  I ran to the next block and made a left into Rue de la Méditerranée. A half-block down on the right, there was an alley that, at its end, connected to another alley off of the Rue Leclerc. I had scouted it out the day before, and deep into the alley, there was a small staircase leading to a basement door into one of the buildings. The staircase was hidden from the street. I had practiced slipping out of the orange coveralls, buttoning the priest’s collar, and pulling on the cassock over my head, and I had gotten it done in about a minute, including changing to the black shoes and putting on the black mini-sombrero. It took me a little longer in the alley though, partly because I was shaking so badly and partly because I was performing my gymnastics on a nasty subterranean staircase.

  But I got it done, and smoothed things as best as I could. I dropped the knapsack into one of the dozen garbage cans in the alley and the coveralls and shoes and hat into another and hoped they would go undiscovered. Then I walked out of the other end of the alley and onto Avenue Leclerc. I was wearing the big black hat, and I had put on the fake black eyeglasses, and I was carrying the breviary, and I walked right past Vogl’s body, just on the other side of the street. That was always the plan, to walk right back into the scene, even to stop and gawk along with everyone else.

  No one was near the bodies of the dog and Vogl other than the traffic cop, who looked helpless. It was as if people saw the black uniform and were actively keeping their distance. Most did not stare for more than a few seconds, and neither did I. I managed to cross the street and then cross again, and I was walking back across the same bridge that Vogl had just crossed when I looked back and saw a line of black uniforms running from Avenue Berthelot toward the body, which lay not two blocks from his office in Gestapo headquarters.

  44

  No one followed me, not past the Hotel Terminus, or through the train station, or all the way back to the flat. I had stopped shaking, but I was wired the whole way, my mind racing as I concentrated on keeping a leisurely pace, even stopping in a park for a few minutes to pretend to read from the breviary. When I finally walked into the flat, Leon was there.

  “Why aren’t you in Paris?” I said.

  “It’s good to fucking see you, too.”

  “But I told you—”

  “I just want to help.”

  “Too late,” I said. “It’s done.”

  I told him everything as I changed back into normal clothes. I told him about killing the dog, and firing the shot at Vogl, and then the gun misfiring.

  “You sure you killed him?”

  “Pretty sure,” I said. “I mean, I got him either here—” I pointed to my neck “—or here,” and then I pointed to my mouth.

  “Here would have been better,” Leon said, and he pointed between his eyes.

  “I know, I know. I would have with the second shot. But I was just so fucking scared.”

  “It wasn’t meant as a criticism, I promise you that,” Leon said. “I’m scared just thinking about it, and I wasn’t even there.”

  We talked for a while, and then just kind of lay around. Leon had not been back to Paris in the four days since he had left Lyon. Instead, he decided to
see the mother and daughter all the way to Toulouse, and then just retraced his steps.

  “I wanted to see the other end,” he said. “And I have to tell you, it is really inspiring. In Paris, there are so many people who don’t give a shit, who just go along with the Nazis. They don’t support them actively but they don’t fight them either. They just go along. But to go to Toulouse and to see their end of the network — people risking everything for a couple of Jews they’ll never see again — it really gave me some hope.”

  “You should look in a mirror sometime, buddy,” I said.

  “I could say the same thing about you,” Leon said.

  “Yeah, we’re a couple of terrific fucking guys,” I said, and then we just fell into silence. I think we both dozed off — I knew, with the adrenaline having ebbed, I felt exhausted again. I must have slept pretty hard because I didn’t hear Leon when he left to go to the station to buy an afternoon newspaper.

  It was only when he came back that I heard the door, and saw his face, and then heard him say, “They’re saying Vogl’s alive.”

  “But…” It was all I could come up with. Leon handed me the paper. There was a small article on the bottom right-hand corner of the front page, only three paragraphs, with the headline, “Cowardly Attack Fails.”

  Witnesses are being sought to the shooting Friday morning of a Gestapo captain and a dog as they were walking to work from the Hotel Terminus.

  Captain Werner Vogl was seriously wounded but is expected to survive the attack, which took place at approximately 8:20 a.m. at the foot of Pont Gallieni, near Avenue Leclerc. A Lyon policeman said that a street sweeper was standing near the officer just before the incident, but that he did not see the shooting take place as he was directing traffic in the intersection. A wheeled dustbin, broom and shovel were found at the scene.