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

  “But Pop—”

  “You’re just creating chaos, and chaos gets people killed—”

  “So what’s the alternative?”

  “Wait for the British, for the Americans,” Martin said. “They’ll get here soon.”

  “You’ve been saying that for two years.”

  “And the Resistance has been getting people killed for longer than that, for no reason.”

  “It’s a war, Pop.”

  “And you, all of you, are pretend soldiers. And I know. I was a hero of Verdun. And my country values me.”

  Max slumped back in his chair. “Oh my fucking god, this again,” he said, half in a whisper. Leon and I looked at each other again. Silence.

  “Yes, this again.” Martin was drunk, and he was yelling. His wife and daughter peeked around the corner from the kitchen and then retreated.

  “I am a fucking hero of Verdun,” he said. “They are not going to touch me. They are not going to touch my family.”

  “Pop, your eyes are closed.”

  “No. I am speaking facts. You are too emotional.”

  “Pop, the Schneiders. The Bernickers. The Bermans. Gone, gone, gone — all gone, into the back of a truck in the middle of the night. Those are the facts. Those are the only facts that matter.”

  “But I am a hero of Verdun…”

  Martin stopped, drunk, exhausted. It was clear that this was an argument that they had had a hundred times before. Then he looked at Leon and me for support, for some common sense from a couple of veterans of a real war. But all I could do was lower my eyes. I could tell that Leon was doing the same.

  Martin slumped back into his chair and, almost immediately, his eyes were closed. I had wondered how we were going to be able to exit gracefully, but now we had a chance. Max walked us out of the flat and down to the street.

  “He’s just worried about you,” Leon said.

  “He’s an old fool.”

  “He’s an old fool who loves you. Try to remember that.”

  “Wait a minute — he’s not that old,” I said. It was a risk, going for the laugh, but it worked. Max replied, “I’m fucking surrounded by fossils,” and then he hugged both of us, one at a time, me for a second, Leon for longer.

  “Fucking fossils,” he said, before heading back into the building.

  11

  We did the arithmetic as we walked. There were two parts to the calculation, as there always were in Paris at that point. First, there was the time factor. Curfew was not for an hour and 40 minutes, and we were about a 10-minute walk from the flat. Second, there was the rationing factor. Leon and I scrounged through our pockets and the combination of ration tickets we unearthed left us with enough for about 15 cigarettes. Because we were the only two adults in Paris who didn’t smoke, this gave us a monthly bargaining token for what we always wanted — alcohol. Fifteen cigarettes was slightly short of the going rate for a bottle of wine in most cafes but it was probably close enough. So with the means and the opportunity, into the Raven we went.

  Oddly, most of the tables were full. A quick look around showed one or two tables that featured near-empty wine bottles, but only that many. The rest were decorated with coffee cups that had, before the war, been regularly filled with the dark, rich nectar of life. After the Germans, though, they mostly carried a watery swill fit for nothing but sipping and regretting — which is what most everyone seemed to be doing in a hushed silence.

  Except, that is, for the one table in the far right corner, about as far from Leon and me as any table in the place. It was one of the wine bottle tables. There were four people sitting there, more animated than anyone else in the cafe. Still, neither of us even noticed the table until the only woman sitting there stood up, knocked over her chair, banged on the table and yelled, “That is such shit and you know it!”

  At which point, Leon looked over and then looked at me and said, “Oh, hell. Hannah Frankel.”

  “You look like you want to leave.”

  “I do.”

  “Bad breakup?”

  “No. She scares me too much to ever get involved.”

  “The great Leon — scared of a woman?” I said. “The almighty Leon? The master of sex? The conqueror of everything female? Scared?”

  “Fucking petrified,” he said.

  She was one of us, as it turned out — a Jewish Resistance fighter in another cell. At least that’s what Leon had heard. I never would have guessed about the Jewish part, given her red hair. Leon could see it on my face and said, “You’re an idiot. We have blondes, brunettes, redheads, everything. It’s a big damn tribe.”

  “Yeah, but still—”

  “Yeah,” he said. “A bit exotic, I’ll admit.”

  Leon knew Hannah from before the war, a time when, as he liked to say, “Quoting from Marx and Engels was considered foreplay in certain circles.” So Leon studied up, because that’s the kind of guy he was. He said he managed to “make the acquaintance” — his euphemism — “of several of Hannah’s friends and traveled in a lot of the same circles.”

  “And yet you never—”

  “Never,” he said.

  “Why not? She wasn’t available?”

  “She was available. Like, available to me in the morning and you in the afternoon and some other guy at night. Very available. Extremely available.”

  “So—”

  My probing was interrupted, again by a scream from the table in the back corner, a female scream, a Hannah Frankel scream. And then came a quote that I immediately committed to memory, like a line from Goethe when I was in school or the address of a safe house in the present day. This quote from Hannah: “If you were any bigger of an asshole, the Germans could garage a Panzer inside.”

  “That’s why,” Leon said. “You want to know why I’m afraid of her — that’s why. And, oh shit.”

  “Coming this way?”

  “Yes. And she saw my face.”

  Leon got a big hug. I got a couple of kisses on my cheeks. We got another glass from the waiter because there was no way we could avoid sharing the wine — although I would have been willing to explore our options in that regard. I mean, what did I care? Leon was petrified of her, so what did a little additional rudeness matter?

  Leon and Hannah managed to catch up and, saying it without saying it, managed to communicate to each other that we were all part of the dysfunctional Parisian Resistance family. On one side, there were the ones who worshiped at the altar of de Gaulle and took their cautious instructions by radio from London. On the other side, there were the Communists who mocked the Gaullists for their discipline and for that caution, whose general philosophy was to throw bombs now and ask questions later. There were other groups in between, too. No one trusted anyone. The Commies accused the Gaullists of simply maneuvering to be in position for their man to take control of the government once the Germans were removed, and the Gaullists accused the Commies of the same thing, and both of them were correct. Again, no one trusted anyone.

  But the three of us at our table, we were all Commies in arms — even if Leon first embraced the movement only as a path to embracing female members of the movement, and I came around to tolerating them only because I couldn’t stand the indecision of de Gaulle’s puppets. Hannah and Leon compared notes without comparing notes, if that makes any sense — not with operational details as much as with the vague notion of active vs. inactive. Leon and I were active after a down period. Hannah was inactive after a busy time. Then they talked a little about the old neighborhood where they lived in early 1940, and a cafe named The Flip where Henri the owner used to allow his patrons the use of an upstairs room should an opportunity present itself. Only later did one of their friends discover the holes drilled in the wall that afforded Henri a quite clear view of the bed from inside a neighboring storeroom.

  “Where was that?” I said.

  “Near the Vel’ d’Hiv,” Hannah said. “About three blocks away.”

  “What’s the Vel’
d’Hiv?”

  Hannah looked at Leon, a look that was one part anger and four parts dumbfounded.

  “He’s not from here,” Leon said.

  Her look didn’t change.

  “And he isn’t Jewish,” Leon said.

  “How can you work with us and not know what the Vel’ d’Hiv is?”

  I thought she was going to stand up and knock over her chair and bang the table and scream something, as she had in the far corner. I was now officially afraid of her, too. Except she turned her glare — which was now four parts anger — at Leon, as if it was his fault that I was such an uneducated idiot.

  And then she stood up without knocking over the chair and said, “Come on, right now. We have to show him.”

  Leon looked at his watch.

  “We have an hour, plenty of time,” Hannah said.

  I had no idea where we were going or if there was plenty of time or not. But neither of us argued. We just drank down the rest of the bottle in about 90 seconds and chased out the door after her.

  12

  The weather had turned during our time in the cafe. It was colder, and windier, and something between a mist and a drizzle fell from the night sky. It was awful but I didn’t bother even commenting on it. It wasn’t as if we were turning back — that much seemed clear.

  There wasn’t any conversation, partly because I was half out of breath trying to keep up with Hannah’s pace but mostly because she wasn’t in the mood to talk. I had tried with a simple, “So tell me about this place, this Vel’ d’Hiv,” but was met with a look I had not seen since I was in school when I was about 11, when I stood before my drawing on the chalkboard and said, “It’s a long, thin balloon. I promise.”

  We crossed the river, up near the Eiffel Tower. We were maybe two blocks on the left side when we arrived. Cold, rain, wind, and two blocks from the river — just miserable — but Hannah seemed almost energized as we approached the arena.

  “The Vel’ d’Hiv,” she said, with a sweep of her arm. “The Velodrome d’Hiver. The velodrome for the winter. Except this was the summer. July 16th and 17th, 1942.”

  “He was in Lyon then,” Leon said.

  “Doesn’t matter,” she said.

  I was in Lyon then. My wife, Manon, was still alive then. I don’t think the Gestapo had even arrived in Lyon then. It wasn’t 18 months before, but it seemed like two lifetimes. A monumental wave of sadness hit me, but it was gone just that quickly, like an actual wave breaking on the shore. It was gone, and I was being led inside, through a broken door.

  I looked up and saw a bit of the moon through a break in the clouds.

  “Glass?” I said, pointing up at the roof.

  “Yes, but painted now, to keep the reflection of the moon from assisting the night bombers.”

  “Like the dry fountains.”

  “Exactly,” Hannah said.

  She walked us inside, down to the center of the floor of the arena. I looked around, turning in a small circle. It was a big place.

  “Maybe 15,000 can fit inside,” she said, reading my mind. “Those two days, it might have been half that.”

  I had a dozen questions but bit my tongue. This was her story, and she was going to tell it her way.

  “They came early in the morning, for the most part,” she said. “It wasn’t even the Gestapo — it was the damn police from the prefecture. Our own fucking people. Whole families, split up — men from the women, women from the children. They let you take a sweater, maybe a blanket, but that was pretty much it. And they crammed you into a lorry and drove you here.”

  I knew about the roundups, but this was obviously different. I knew about families being scooped up, but it seemed almost random, not systematic. Not like the story she was beginning to tell.

  “They lined up the lorries, right outside the door we came in,” she said. “And then they unloaded them, one by one, and rushed everybody inside. It was thousands of people. The arena was easily half-full. Easily.”

  I looked at Leon. “Where were you?” I said.

  “I was on a train with one of the families I was smuggling south,” he said. “I was near Toulouse, I think. I didn’t know anything until I came back.”

  Then I looked at Hannah. Even in the darkness, I could see her face, and the look that was a combination of sadness, anger, and defiance. It is impossible to describe adequately, but it is a look I would never forget, as complicated as the person and the memory.

  “You can ask anybody who was here,” she said. “And the first thing they’ll tell you about is the shit. It was everywhere, wherever you walked. The smell was overwhelming, shit and piss.”

  “But it’s a public arena. There must be—”

  “They locked them all,” she said. “They said there were windows where we could escape. So no bathrooms. One usable water tap. Shit and piss, everywhere. You can’t imagine how demeaning it is — no privacy, no anything, thousands of people squatting and shitting in front of each other. I think that’s why some people did it.”

  “Did what?” I said.

  “Up there,” Hannah said. She pointed to the top rows of the stadium. “There are places where it’s open in the back and you can jump off and kill yourself. People did, and not just a couple.”

  At that point, I felt as if there was no air remaining in my lungs. It was as if the life had been squeezed out of me. I didn’t have anything to say, and I wasn’t sure if I had the capacity to form the words.

  “Most of us were here for about five days,” Hannah said. Her use of “us” was the first acknowledgment that she had been caught up in the roundup. I looked at Leon and his look back told me that he had not known.

  “And then it was more lorries. Some went to Drancy — we know that because they eventually let some of the sicker ones go, and some children. Others went to the train station, and then who knows where. Some others escaped other ways.”

  I looked at her. She stared back.

  “What I did,” she said, “was suck off one of the guards in a bathroom. Then his friend came in, and I sucked him off, too. And then they buttoned up and honored their part of the bargain and boosted me out one of the windows.”

  Her expression never changed. Her tone never changed. It was just flat, even, as if she were a journalist separating the facts from any emotion.

  “Take a good look,” she told me. She swept her arm in a semi-circle. “I can see from your face that you aren’t going to forget this, not anytime soon, but make sure you don’t. To me, this is everything.”

  “I, I—”

  “Shhh,” she said. She put her finger on my lips and said it again.

  “I’m not sure why you’re with us,” Hannah said. “I’m guessing it is because you’re loyal to your friend, and that’s enough for me. It really is. I admire loyalty more than just about anything. But you need to know.”

  She stopped. The emotion was getting to her, just a little. There was just the slightest hint of a crack in her voice. But it was there, and then it was gone.

  “You need to know about this,” she said. “Only if you understand Vel’ d’Hiv will you understand us. Those fucking de Gaulle people will never get it, and it’s why I hate them almost as much as I hate the fucking Germans. All they worry about is reprisals. They’ll never understand.”

  She was preaching to an audience of one in a 15,000-seat velodrome. Her voice was rising, almost soaring, even though I was standing only about six feet away.

  “We are the victims here,” Hannah said. “We are the victims. We, the Jews. We are the victims. We are the people being targeted. We are the people being rounded up in the middle of the night. We are the ones who wear the yellow stars. We are the ones who live in fear.

  “This will be over when we decide it’s over. We are the victims and we will have our vengeance. We are the victims, and we will make the decisions about retaliation. We, the living Jews, still control our destiny. We’re not waiting for the Brits or the Americans. As long as w
e breathe, we will decide. I’m not much for the Bible but I am very much in favor of punishing the wicked.

  “And we will do it on our terms and our timetable,” she said. “They can take our radios, and limit our shopping, and fire us from our jobs, and prohibit us from using the public phones — but they cannot take our vengeance. That belongs to us, even today, even after this.”

  She waved her arm again, encompassing the whole arena. She kept it extended, and then she said, “Vengeance belongs to us — that and all the decisions surrounding it.”

  With that, Hannah’s arm dropped to her side. We all just stood there for what must have been a full minute. I was afraid to say anything. I wanted to walk the two steps between us and put my arm around her, but I was afraid to do that, too.

  Finally, wordlessly, she began walking, and we followed her out through the same broken door. I caught a splinter in the meat of the palm of my hand and managed to suck it out without looking. On the street, I sneaked a peek at my wristwatch. Curfew was in 20 minutes. We would make it easily.

  13

  It was a three-person operation, as it turned out, each of us chosen for our special and demonstrated skill. Hannah was the diversion person. I was the bomb person. Leon was the worried to the point of pissing his pants person. In other words, Hannah’s job was to be a red-headed distraction, my job was to assemble the explosive device, and Leon’s job was to say every 10 minutes, without fail, “I tell you, I don’t like it. I don’t fucking like it.”

  Actually, it was Leon’s job to carry the dynamite in one knapsack and mine to carry the timer and the detonator and the fuse and the wires in another. The way we figured it, yes, we were mathematically doubling the risk of having the plan fail because of a random Gestapo bag check when we were leaving entering or leaving the Metro. But we were also shrinking the risk, because two small bags made both of us look like about 75 percent of the people leaving the station, each of whom was either carrying the night’s shopping or preparing to buy whatever they could find on offer. On balance, we thought the odds shifted in our favor. Besides, we didn’t have a big enough bag to hold everything in one.