The Limoges Dilemma (Alex Kovacs thriller series Book 4) Read online

  The Limoges Dilemma

  Richard Wake

  Manor and State, LLC

  Copyright © 2019 by Manor and State, LLC

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical figures, are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Contents

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part II

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Part III

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Part IV

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  REVIEW

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Part I

  1

  The clutch on the lorry wasn’t burned out, not completely, but the smell indicated that it was well on the way. The shifting from a full stop was a series of jerks and revs without much forward motion, until the transmission caught. Luckily, there were almost no full stops after we had stolen it and its two companions from the German depot.

  The taking had been laughably simple. The poor kid on guard duty at the gate — the only German on the premises — happened to be taking a leak when we emerged from the nearby woods. Seeing as how the six of us were all wearing German uniforms, he didn’t really hurry or seem alarmed when he looked over his shoulder at us as we approached. He was just buttoning up when two of the others grabbed him, one on each arm, while a third began to truss him up with a length of rope he was carrying. Soon the unfortunate sap was hitched to a fence post, about six feet from his piss puddle and eight feet from his precious rifle. All the fake requisitioning paperwork we had planned to use as a bluff remained in my breast pocket, along with the rest.

  I argued for killing the unfortunate public pisser. It just made sense. We had opened the gate and were choosing our lorries. I said, “He saw the three of you. I mean, you were right on top of him.”

  “He saw helmets and uniforms — he didn’t see our faces,” Claude said. He was the unofficial spokesman for the group. He also was the one carrying the rope.

  “Of course he saw your faces. You were close enough to kiss.”

  “He was scared to death — he won’t remember anything,” Claude said.

  “Says you. I remember everything when I’m scared to death.”

  “He won’t.”

  “It’s your party. And your funeral.”

  I drove. Leon picked up the rifle and sat next to me. The rest followed in the other two lorries. We were now a small German convoy about 10 or 15 miles northwest of Limoges, except that we were in the Resistance. Our target, about 10 miles farther west, was a Vichy youth camp. We didn’t care about the kids they were busy brainwashing when they weren’t using them for cheap labor. What we were after were their supplies: summer clothes and winter clothes, boots, a limited amount of guns and ammunition, canvas for tents, wire for fences, and especially cans of fuel — all the material that was so tough to acquire, especially for a Resistance cell hidden in the nearby mountains. The maquis were never comfortable in whatever abandoned farm or logging camp they happened upon, not for long anyway. These supplies were critical for their survival during the times when their only roof was provided by the branches of the trees.

  Leon said, “We should form our own business. We could advertise.”

  “Krauts for hire,” I said.

  “Austrian Assassins,” he said.

  “Austrian Assholes,” I said. “Remember?”

  “I wish I still had one of those cards,” Leon said.

  “I wish a lot of things.”

  We had known each other since we were 17, soldiers in a different war. We returned to Vienna and grew up as an inseparable threesome — Leon, Henry and I. I even had a handful of business cards printed up as a gag — Austrian Assholes, Ltd.; Alex Kovacs, President; Leon Susskind and Henry Fessler, Vice Presidents — and we occasionally slapped them on the table at whatever establishment had over-served us that night, or used them as the punchline of an elaborate mating ritual when we encountered three girls who might be up for a laugh.

  It was a long time ago. Now Henry was safe in Switzerland, although the last time we talked, we were no longer talking — if that makes any sense. Leon and I were Resistance fighters who had recently settled in Limoges. On second thought, that sounds a little like we were a married couple where the husband had taken a new job in Limoges and the wife had selected a cute little home with blue shutters. This wasn’t that — no wives, no blue shutters, no jobs beyond sabotage and survival.

  For this particular mission, our Resistance cell in Limoges, very much a part of the de Gaulle crew, was lending us out to a group of maquisards from the hills because we were native German speakers who could hopefully bluff our way past the guards at the youth camp and scavenge their warehouse. Our job was to get in, get out, and get back to Limoges.

  During the planning phase — which consisted of the six of us sitting in the woods for a half-hour, passing around a bottle of Armagnac — they had argued for splitting up Leon and I, so that the first two lorries would each have a German speaker. I took the other side.

  “I want Leon with me.”

  “But splitting you makes more sense.”

  “Not really,” I said. “If they question the second lorry, then they’re going to question the third lorry, too — and we’re screwed. It’s better my way. If they question both of us in the first truck, we’ll both be authentic. We have to hope that’s enough, and they just wave you two through behind us. Your way, we could be blown from the very start. Better my way.”

  The others agreed reluctantly because my way was the smart
er play. But even if it wasn’t, I needed Leon with me. The last couple of months, I couldn’t even use the toilet without him holding my hand. There was no way I could get through something like this without him by my side.

  Soon enough, we approached the entrance of the camp. The gate was shut, but it didn’t appear to be locked. There were two sentries on duty, one of whom raised an arm and showed his palm at our approach. As I slowed the lorry, I reached for the other set of bogus paperwork I was carrying, the requisition forms for the warehouse.

  Leon and I, who had spoken French pretty much exclusively for the last few years, actually practiced our German a bit during the ride. After a minute or two of normal conversation, the “practice” devolved into the two of us attempting to one-up each other in a game of vile sexual phrases. Leon won that game. For our entire adult lives, Leon always won that game.

  “Halt,” the soldier yelled, as I stopped the lorry with a few inches to spare. Then he walked over to my side. The other sentry stayed at the gate.

  “What’s your business here?” The soldier seemed annoyed at the bother.

  “Here are my orders.” I handed him the sheaf of papers, six or eight pages, all signed and stamped and containing a bunch of swastikas. They were complete fakes, and if there was a standard requisition form that we didn't know about, we were going to have to begin blasting forthwith. Leon cradled his rifle, appearing as casual as he could manage. But I was sure his eyes were fixed on the soldier, as were mine. We were searching not so much for hesitation in his manner but alarm in his eyes. But I didn’t see any.

  “This is a lot of shit,” he said. “Why at night?”

  “Beats the hell out of me,” I said.

  “This is going to be a lot of fucking work.”

  “There’s six of us — no worries for you fellows.”

  “But somebody has to check what you’re taking.”

  “Okay,” I said. “One of your guys has to sit on a chair with a clipboard and check off what we take. No strain there — he can even keep sucking on his bottle of schnapps while he does it.”

  “Hah. We never see schnapps here.” At which point, I held up a bottle of Armagnac that was sitting on the front seat. Suddenly, the eyes that we continued to study showed some emotion. Well, it was more the entire face, and the emotion it displayed was not alarm, but mischief.

  “Okay, I have a better idea,” the soldier said.

  He walked away and picked up the phone in the sentry post and called inside. In about two minutes, a dozen of the camp kids, roused from bed and wearing only underwear and boots, ran out to meet us. One of them was the leader, although you couldn’t tell by his underwear. He was handed the requisition forms, and they all ran to the warehouse. We pulled in the lorries and the camp kids promptly loaded them. The other pretend Germans stayed with their lorries, while Leon and I joined the two sentries in a few very long pulls on the Armagnac bottle and engaged in some typical military conversation. It was then most of all that the game of crude one-upmanship that Leon and I just played became quite useful.

  In less than a half-hour, we had three truckloads of supplies and the two sentries had a handful of phony paperwork, the remaining third of a bottle of Armagnac, and the everlasting memory of Leon’s description of a gymnastic move performed by a blond he once knew, a blond who was actually a gymnast.

  2

  The head guy from the maquis wanted us to leave the camp in reverse order, with Leon and I taking up the rear. I didn’t like it, seeing as how that way, without any German speakers up front, any encounter with a German patrol would necessarily result in gunfire. The problem, as I had said before, was that it was their party. Also, and not inconsequentially, there was the small matter of me not knowing where we were going, and that there was no map, and that the others couldn’t even verbally lay out the route for me. They said they would have to drive it by feel.

  “How about this?” I said. “I’ll drive in the lead. When you know that a turn is coming up, use your horn — one blast for a left, two blasts for a right. We’ll have to take it a little slower, but it should work.”

  “I don’t know.” It was Claude, the spokesman. His tone of voice suggested that he felt it was his turn to win an argument.

  “It’ll work,” I said. “You know it will. And it will still leave us with the best chance to talk our way out of trouble if we meet anyone.”

  Ultimately he agreed, and we were off. Well, we were off once I got finished stalling the lorry after reversing it away from the warehouse and then straining to get it re-started. Leon snorted when I did it.

  “The hell with you — I did it on purpose,” I said.

  “Right.”

  “No, really. Our buddy in the next truck is a little embarrassed that he’s lost a couple of debates with me. So this way, he can make fun of my driving and save face with the others. Everybody’s happy.”

  “Always thinking, always in control,” Leon said. Then he smiled — something neither of us had done much in recent times.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “It’s just nice to see the old you is still in there, somewhere.”

  For the next five minutes or so, neither of us said anything. I don’t know what I was thinking about, but it was disrupted by two quick blasts on the horn coming from behind me. I made the next right turn, and the other two lorries followed. The signal had worked, at least the first time. We were headed up into the mountains.

  “Okay, this is going to work — hand me that other bottle,” I said.

  The cognac was rolling around under Leon’s seat. He uncorked it and passed it my way. I took a long drink, and when he held out his hand I ignored him. Then I took a second drink. The sensation was somewhere between warming and burning inside me, probably closer to burning. Leon snatched the bottle from my hand without asking.

  “Just fucking drive,” he said.

  “Yes, Mother,” I said.

  We were headed to an abandoned chateau. That was all I knew. When I heard chateau, my mind tended to run toward powdered wigs and harpsichord music and bowing servants and unmatched views of the valley below, a legion of serfs bringing in the crops as entertainment. It was probably just an old dump, but whatever. You can’t control your imagination.

  After his admonition, Leon waited a healthy two minutes before taking a drink out of the bottle himself. Then he said, “How long have we been here?”

  “What do you mean by here? France? Earth?”

  “Limoges, asshole.”

  “Six weeks.”

  “Seems like longer somehow.”

  “Not to me,” I said. And then we were quiet again.

  Six weeks earlier, Leon and I had been smuggled out of a safe house in Lyon, first into a lorry and then into a railroad freight car, hidden behind large wooden cases stacked nearly to the ceiling. We were there after an airplane extraction that was supposed to take me and my wife Manon to England was botched. I was shot but all right to travel pretty quickly. And so it was Leon and I, plus a Jewish family — a widower and his two teenage sons, 16 and 14. Limoges was the destination where we would stay and the Jews would be ferried toward Spain.

  It wasn’t a very big space, so we all became quite intimate. It turns out that taking a shit in a bucket 10 feet away from a couple of strangers tends to remove a lot of the superficial social barriers rather quickly. As was common with people our age, one of the first topics of conversation was what we did in the Great War. Leon took the lead. I really didn’t have much to say.

  We saw plenty of shit in our war, but Leon and I also had some fun. At Caporetto, we not only won the big battle, but we also got to chase the Italians down the mountain, stopping at some of the nicer houses along the way and relieving them of whatever happened to be stored in their wine cellars. Leon owned a well-worn roster of tales — wine, women, all of that.

  Jacob, the widower, was not as lucky. He was at Verdun. There were no raided wine cellars a
t Verdun. “Even the whores they brought in for us were ghosts,” Jacob said. The eyes of the two boys widened beyond all human ability at that point. Then Leon told one of his go-to stories, in which a mother, a skinny daughter and a fat daughter all played a part, and I thought the two boys were going to pass out.

  Later that night, with the boys asleep, Leon leaned over to Jacob and said, “Sorry about the stories in front of the boys. I just got carried away.”

  “Don’t even think about it,” Jacob said. “I’m so glad you told them. You have to realize, the worst day of their lives was when their mother died. Nothing can change that, nor should it. These days right now should be the next worst. But now, thanks to you, they won’t be. They’ll always talk about you, Leon.”

  “And the fat sister,” I said.

  I had barely participated in the conversation. I had barely said anything for two-and-a-half days, other than to excuse myself as I squeezed past everyone to use the bucket.

  Jacob pointed to my hand, at the wedding ring.

  “You’re married,” he said. Not a question.

  “Yes.” I barely got the word out.