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

  “What’s Drancy?” I said.

  “A prison, sort of,” Leon said.

  “Where is it?”

  “About a half-hour,” he said. He pointed vaguely out the window. I’m not sure he even knew the direction in which he was pointing.

  We trudged up the stairs. Each hallway was still silent as we reached the landing. All the doors were still closed.

  “So they’ll let you bring them things?” I said.

  “Food, no — at least I don’t think so. But they’ll let you bring clean clothes and take dirty clothes. It’s mostly just to see if they’re there. It’s the best way to find out.”

  “Until—”

  “Until they’re not there,” she said. We had reached the fourth floor, and she walked away from us without saying goodbye. She reached into the pocket of her housecoat and had the key to No. 42 in her hand in a second. I wasn’t sure if she even looked down. It was as if she somehow knew the key by feel.

  We walked up the final flight to our flat. Passing No. 51, I didn’t hear the chickens. They must have still been asleep. The sun wouldn’t be up for another hour.

  3

  “A cellar?” I said. “Honest to goodness, down the steps and into the damp and the dark. Color me shocked.”

  “I thought you said you were coming with a positive attitude, and that you and my friends would be getting along,” Leon said.

  “Old habits.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “But I mean, really,” I said. “Is it written somewhere in the Commie rules and regulations that every meeting has to be in a fucking basement?”

  It was 9 a.m. We were descending the stairs to the cellar below the ground level of Cafe Bleu on Rue Popincourt. Except we didn’t enter through the front door. We went in through the kitchen door that opened onto the alley in the back, through the kitchen, and then through a little hallway and down the stairs. About halfway down, the fog of cigarette smoke engulfed us.

  “Are we the only two people in this city who don’t smoke?” I said.

  “Over the age of 16? Maybe,” Leon said.

  “Try 12.”

  “You mean, like him?” I pointed over at a kid standing in the corner and belching smoke at the ceiling. He wasn’t 12, but he wasn’t 20, either. He also wasn’t an inch above five feet tall.

  “Stunting his growth,” I said, with a nod in the kid’s direction.

  “Not sure he was working with much to start with,” Leon said.

  There were about 10 people in the room, every one of them lit up, all of them smoking what smelled like those godawful Baltos, which were what passed for cigarettes those days. More like dried shit, ground up and rolled in paper.

  We found an empty wall to lean against and waited for the thing to start. After maybe two minutes — pretty prompt, for Communists — a man in a gray coat and a black fedora stood up. As he rose, the murmur of conversation stopped almost immediately, as if everyone was watching him and waiting.

  “Welcome to old friends and new,” he said. He looked directly at Leon and me — Leon the old friend, me the new. A quick scan around the cellar showed all eyes on the two of us. The fact that I was there without any formal introduction, or review of my bona fides, spoke to how they all felt about Leon. If he brought me, he was vouching for me — and Leon’s endorsement was gold in this room. That, I could tell immediately.

  The man said, “Leon, the newspaper hasn’t been the same without you. Nor has our shuttle service.”

  For about two years before the Germans came, Leon had written for one of the Paris papers, including features about life in the city through the eyes of an expatriate. He had landed in Paris after the Anschluss, just as I had landed in Zurich. I continued on as a spy for the Czech government in exile until the Germans attacked France through the Ardennes. I ended up in Lyon and married Manon. Leon joined me on occasion there, and I assisted him with his “shuttle service,” helping Jews escape to the south and, hopefully, the freedom of the Spanish border. He was with me when Manon was lost during a botched operation, and he has been with me almost every day since — in Limoges, in the hills, in Paris.

  “This is your friend from Lyon, I assume,” the man in the gray coat and the black fedora said. Leon must have told him about my aid with his Jewish transport service — hiding them in my Lyon apartment, helping obtain their forged identification cards. He addressed me directly. “Thank you, and welcome.”

  I nodded. The man turned a few degrees to his right and addressed the room as a whole. I looked around again. By my personal, unscientific measure, I was the only non-Jew in the place. I could see them looking at me, too, and they were likely thinking the same thing.

  “Everyone, take a seat — refreshments first,” he said. There were three tables of four in the cellar. Leon and I sat with the young kid. Three bottles were produced, one per table. No glasses, though — and you would have thought that was the easy part, given that we were in a cafe and all. Whatever. We just passed the bottle around between us.

  The kid’s name was Max Green. When I eyed him up as he took a long pull on the bottle, he swallowed, wiped his mouth, and said, “I’m 19. Any other questions?”

  “Only one,” I said. “Did you leave any wine for us?”

  He handed over the bottle, and we exchanged stories. I offered an abbreviated version of mine, and the kid nodded along. When Leon started, Max interrupted. “No need,” he said. “I know you. You probably don’t remember, but you helped my aunt and uncle get to Portugal. Sid and Sadie Green. We had a little party before they left.”

  Leon thought for a few seconds. “In the flat on Rue du Morvan?”

  “The same.”

  “Did we meet?”

  “No,” Max said. “I was too busy stealing drinks for me and the girl from the flat across the hall. I had different, uh, priorities then.”

  “Leon will be the first to tell you that you can juggle more than one, uh, priority at a time,” I said, at which point Leon snorted and Max beamed. It was plain to me that Leon was Max’s hero. I wondered if it was as obvious to Leon.

  A chair scraped the dirt floor, and the man in the black fedora was on his feet again.

  “All right, everyone,” he said. “The main reason I got you together, other than to share some of a recent windfall—” here he picked up the bottle of wine from his table and raised it in salute “—was to tell you that our short vacation is about to end.”

  This meant operations would be resuming, and the announcement was met around the cellar by various expressions of assent, mostly grunts and slapping of the tables. There was much debate within the French Resistance about the value of provoking the Germans — and by provoking, I meant killing. Because whatever was gained, the Nazis always extracted a measure of vengeance in the form of reprisals, mostly against civilians. There was no question, though, on which side of the debate the men in this cellar fell.

  “I want to read you all something,” the black fedora said. He reached into his breast pocket for a worn newspaper clipping and for a pair of eyeglasses. He might have been 50, maybe even older — which was very, very old in the Resistance business, especially the Communist Resistance business. In fact, this was one of the few such gatherings where Leon and I weren’t the oldest men in the room. Looking around, I’m pretty sure no one else in the cellar was even 30.

  He smoothed the clipping on his chest and said, “It’s from Kolenu. Here, let me read it:

  ‘Every Jew in France clearly understands that the only thing that can ensure the Jewish people’s salvation is the manly life-or-death fight between us and the Hitlerians. This alone will ensure the survival of the Jewish people… We must create more and more combat units of the Communist underground. We will attack the enemy wherever it is to be found; we will embitter its life; we will destroy its means of communication and shut down its war machine. We will participate in the daily fighting that will lead to the national uprising.’”

&nbs
p; He folded the clipping and removed his glasses. There were more grunts, more slaps on tables. And then the man in the black fedora — I found out then that everyone just called him Brick — went from table to table with instructions.

  4

  There was a German bookstore on the Place de la Sorbonne. It had been there long enough that it almost seemed normal, however impossible that was, given that it squatted within the very heart of French scholarship. But there it was, “Deutscher Buchladen” announcing its purpose in big — no, obnoxious — red letters, with a display window filled with crappy German novels and a couple of German translations of French classics. Les Miserables was Der Elende. Christ.

  The timer on the bomb was set for 20 minutes when I was in the flat on Boulevard Raspail. It was an eight-minute walk from the flat to the bookstore. I had done it a dozen times in the previous week — never less than seven minutes, 45 seconds, never more than eight minutes, 30 seconds. It was eight minutes on the nose as I took the last three steps toward the store.

  Twelve minutes to go, then. Theoretically.

  Given the vagaries of the timing devices — they were British, acquired from Resistance brethren who were on better terms with the British SOE than we were — it was very much theoretical. I didn’t believe that I had 12 minutes before the big ka-boom when I opened the door to the store. I looked at my watch again and decided that I couldn’t trust the thing for more than 10 minutes. Even then, I needed a little more cushion. This was a stunt and dying over a stunt made no sense.

  Nine minutes to go, then.

  I had asked about an after-hours attack on the store, given that it was designed merely to be a loud nuisance, but Brick had said no. “Daytime, with the store open, and that’s final,” he said. “You want to get somebody’s attention, you do it with the lights on.”

  “But the risks for me will be greater, and the chances of innocent—”

  “Lights on,” Brick said. “Anything else?”

  They were testing me, I knew. Leon had vouched for me, and offered up enough of my history for Brick and the rest to know that I was trained in espionage and bomb making, and that I held a doctorate in Nazi hating, that I had shot a Gestapo officer at close range in Lyons with a pistol and busted a compatriot out of a jail in Limoges with an elaborate bluff. Still, Brick wanted to see. This was my semester examination.

  Six minutes to go.

  It was 2:15 on a Tuesday afternoon. I was the only customer. I wondered how the owner made a living. He was an ancient tweedy raisin, dosing in a chair behind the cash register. The owner and his wife were the sum total of the staff, and she was likely upstairs in their flat above the shop. Seeing as how their clientele consisted almost entirely of German soldiers and administrators — all of whom had day jobs — I wondered when exactly they sold anything. In all likelihood, it was around lunchtime and after 5 p.m. The rest of the time, well, I’m sure the chair behind the cash register was comfortable.

  Four minutes to go.

  There was a little bell above the door that ran when it opened, but the old man did not so much as lift an eyelid when I came in. I was carrying the bomb, hidden inside a hollowed-out copy of Das Kapital. That was my attempt at humor. But the thing was, the bomb was heavy as hell, and I kept having to shift the book between my right hand and my left hand. Anybody who was watching me would have noticed that I seemed uncomfortable. Thankfully, there was nobody to notice.

  Three minutes to go.

  I had already decided where I was going to leave the book. There was a little table over in the corner of the shop that seemed perfect. It wasn’t too close to the old man, who likely would be shielded from the worst of the blast by the two long rows of bookshelves between him and the bomb. It was also a good spot because it was close to the display window while not directly in front of it. The glass would shatter, and anybody walking by on Place de la Sorbonne might get cut, but the worst of the blast would be contained a bit by the few feet of solid wall that formed the corner where the little table sat. It would be big and loud and destructive. Ideally, a fire would result in the place burning down — but the old man and his wife might just have a chance to get away in one piece, as would any unfortunate pedestrians.

  Two minutes to go.

  I heard the little bell and just the tiniest squeak of the hinges before I saw the door of the bookstore open, before I saw the 30-ish blonde in a gray skirt and a light blue sweater pushing the pram and maneuvering her way through the door and inside. I had just finished putting the bomb on the little table in the corner and had walked halfway toward the door. I checked my watch, and then I just froze. I had played this out in my head a dozen times and rationalized just about everything, everything but a pram. As they made their way toward the old man behind the cash register, I could see that the baby was a girl. She wasn’t a year old.

  One minute to go.

  I did my best not to look as if I was about to piss myself. Again, though, there was no one to notice either way. The woman had reached the old man and was asking him in German where she might find the store’s selection of children’s books. She was likely the wife of a German officer or administrator. The old man responded by lifting himself slowly out of the chair where he had been snoozing and leading her to the small section of children’s books. He was chatting away, a charming old coot as it turned out, even if he was bent over at about a 45-degree angle as he led her to the children’s books. He stopped when they got there, showing off the shelf with a sweep of his arm. He then leaned over and coo-cooed with the baby, who was laughing the kind of baby laugh that melts your heart. So as not to topple over, the old man teased the baby with his right hand and steadied himself by resting his left hand on the little table that sat in the corner. There were a half-dozen books on the table, Das Kapital on top of the pile.

  Thirty seconds to go.

  There was no time to think. I had no idea what I was going to do, except that there was no way I was going to leave the bomb on that table. So I just moved. I came upon the old man playing with the baby, and the mother three feet away and perusing the shelf of children’s books, and I leaned in and grabbed Das Kapital with both hands. It must have looked awkward, but it was the only way I could lift it — not that the old man noticed, seeing as how my maneuver had knocked him on his ass.

  I didn’t say “pardon me,” not in German or in French. I didn’t feel as if I had time. The old man uttered a muffled curse, and the blonde said “hey now” in my wake, but I didn’t look back. I assumed she was helping him up. I was doing the only thing I thought I could do short of taking the bomb with me out of the store. I couldn’t do that — partly because I had no idea where I might leave it, partly because I didn’t know if I could find a place before I ended up killing myself, but mostly because this was a test from Brick and the rest, and I needed to pass it. I believed in what I was doing. I just needed to minimize the collateral damage.

  So I hurried and dropped the book on the old man’s comfortable chair. That way, he and the woman and the baby would be shielded from the worst of the blast by the same two long bookshelves that were going to shield the old man in the original plan.

  I dropped it and hurried out the door. The last thing I heard was the little bell.

  5

  The way these things worked, and based upon my experience with the crap British timers, I had between one and five minutes after I walked out before the thing blew. The truth was, I was hoping for sooner because it was likely that everyone would remain where I left them for at least a minute or so. As I walked — walk, never run — around the corner and up to the cafe, I convinced myself that the old man, the woman and the baby would remain in the children’s section for a minimum of three minutes — because my knocking the old man on his ass would require at least 30 seconds to remedy, followed by 30 seconds or so of commenting upon my rudeness, followed by the woman’s renewed search for a book to read to the baby. After my stunt, there was no way she was going to leave
the toppled old man’s shop without making a purchase. I actually felt like I would have the entire five minutes. I could just picture it — the woman would reach for a book on the shelf, and the old man would have some comment about the wonder of the story, and then she would reach for a second book, and he would have another comment, and she would try to decide, and he would say, “Both excellent choices.” It would easily go on like that for five minutes, and everything would be fine — fine in the sense that they would be shielded from the worst of an explosion designed to destroy the place, if not with the blast then with the resulting fire. Fine. Christ.

  Of course, if I was wrong — if she picked a book quickly, or not at all, or if the timer was particularly fucked in the calibration department, the three of them would all be at the cash register when the thing blew up about six feet behind them. Christ.

  The bookstore was on the corner of Place de la Sorbonne and Boulevard Saint-Michel. Entering the square, walking but not running, the scene was typical for 1943, Paris but not exactly. The square was beautiful, but the fountains were dry. The number of students wasn’t a fourth of what was typical. The shops on the north side of the square were open, but they were empty, seeing as how no one had any spare francs that weren’t already allotted to the black-market pursuit of something to eat. And as for the four cafes on the south side, they were open and doing a business of sorts — but only of sorts. The fake coffee on offer wasn’t worth a centime.

  I stepped into the third cafe. I was maybe 200 feet from the bookstore — plenty far, given everything. The waiter was on me immediately, and the coffee arrived not a minute after I sat down. It was tepid at best. My guess is that it had been poured by mistake for someone else and was sitting on the bar.

  I looked at my watch. I had been gone for four minutes. The seconds were pounding in my head. I closed my eyes, and all I saw was that baby laughing in the pram. Pounding. Pounding. I was afraid to look at my watch. I could barely breathe. And then it happened.