“Well—”
“It eat ships. And sailors. So then, we give back half.”
“All right.”
“Any chance you pay gold?”
“No.”
“Will discount.”
“It will have to be Swiss francs.”
“All right. We deliver to Marseilles, the lawyer will give you a few days’ notice. It will be at warehouse, maybe on dock. We’ll let you know.”
“Money to the lawyer?”
“Yes. When you bring?”
“A few days.”
“We start then.” He made a spitting noise toward his hand, thrust it out and Casson shook it. “Done,” Vasilis said.
Isidor Szapera didn’t really recover from being shot during the attempted robbery at Aubervilliers. He couldn’t run—he dragged a foot when he walked—and he had almost no strength at all in one hand. At night, his back ached where he’d been wounded and it was hard to sleep. They’d taken him to a home for retired railroad workers out in Saint-Denis, where a doctor had removed some of the bullet, but not all of it. When he could walk again, the party had offered to hide him with a family in the south, but he’d turned them down. “I can do something,” he’d said.
They trained him to operate a wireless telegraph—they suffered constant losses in radio operators, were always recruiting for that position. He worked hard hours, late into the night. He missed Eva Perlemère, and was angry at himself for having lost her. She haunted his dreams, sometimes he saw her undressing, sometimes he saw her face, eyes closed, as they were making love. The dreams woke him up.
Another loss, he thought, the Germans would have to pay for. He practiced on the dummy telegraph key until his hand throbbed. By late December he was ready to go to work and they stationed him in the attic of a house in Montrouge, just outside Paris.
He was assigned a liaison girl, Sylvie. Skinny and somber, eighteen, a pharmacy student at the Sorbonne. Her job was to maintain a clandestine apartment and telephone, to accept and relay messages, to deliver wireless transmissions as they came in from Russia, to take the answers back to the W/T operator for encryption and transmission. Liaison girls tended to last a few months, not much longer.
Szapera liked Sylvie because she was all business.
La Vierge,
they called her when she wasn’t around, the virgin. Some of the FTP men had tried to seduce her, but she wasn’t interested. That was fine with Szapera. When Germany was in flames it would be time enough for such things to begin again.
By late December, after the Japanese attack on the USA, the wireless traffic between the Center in Kuibyshev and the Paris stations had gone wild. Everything had changed.
Comrade,
went one message to an FTP commander,
this is no longer a twenty-year war,
this is now a two-year war, and we must act accordingly.
Order-of-battle information about the Wehrmacht went east—this unit in Normandy, that divisional insignia seen on a train—along with production norms from French arms factories, diplomatic gossip, intelligence gathered from photographed papers and stolen maps, a vast river of coded signals.
In return, the Kuibyshev Center kept demanding more. They sent orders, instructions, requests for clarification, questionnaires for spies, directions of all kinds:
you will find out, you will watch,
you will photograph, you will obtain.
The radio operators could transmit safely for fifteen minutes, but the Center kept them at it for hours.
German signal detection units worked around the clock. Vans with rotating antennas cruised the streets, listening for transmissions, working up and down the scale of the wireless frequencies. The radio operators were assigned lookouts at both ends of the street, to watch for trucks. The Germans knew it, and started to use men carrying suitcases with receiving sets packed inside.
It snowed on the night of 30 December. Just after midnight, a long message came in from the Center. Reception was difficult— somewhere between Kuibyshev and Paris there was an electrical storm, the airwaves crackled and hissed, the Russian operator’s dots and dashes disappeared into sudden bursts of static.
Please repeat.
Szapera turned the volume on the receiver up to ten, the end of the dial, played with the tuning device—trying to find clear air on the edge of the frequency, then pressed his hands against the headphones.
At 1:20 the transmission ended. A signal indicated further transmission in fifteen minutes, change of frequency to 3.8 megacycles. Szapera rubbed his eyes, started to decode the previous message. For M20, Comrade Brasova, eight questions for the agent code-named GAZELLE.
The phone rang. Once. Sylvie looked up from her textbook, Szapera stopped writing. “Signal,” she said.
“Have a look,” Szapera said.
She went to the window, edged the blackout curtain aside. The wet snow melted as it hit the pavement. The building across from her was dark and silent. She raised the window an inch and listened. Slowly, a car drove down the street, turned the corner, and disappeared into the night.
“A car,” she said.
“What kind?”
“Some old kind of car, I don’t know which model.”
“Anything else?”
“No.”
Probably a false alarm. Szapera went back to work—after all, he was only in danger when he was transmitting. Final assignment for Brasova’s agent:
Have her record the serial number stamped in the
margin of the document.
The next section of the transmission was for J42. Weiss, he thought. Item one: At the Lille railway freight office on the rue Cheval . . .
Again, the telephone.
“Something’s going on,” Szapera said.
“Yes.”
Szapera looked at the small coal stove in the corner, the edges of the firebox door glowed bright orange. He could start burning papers if he felt it was necessary. There was a revolver on the table beside the wireless.
“Who are the lookouts tonight?” he asked.
“There is only one, Fernand. The other is in the hospital.”
“Fernand.” Szapera didn’t know him.
“He works in the Citroën plant.”
Szapera thought for a moment, and came up with a compromise. “Take the messages now,” he said. “Decryptions and the rest of it, everything that came in tonight.”
“What about you?”
“I’m going to stay for the 1:35 transmission.”
“He signaled twice,” Sylvie said.
“Here. Take it,” Szapera said. He handed her several sheets of paper, cheap stuff with brown flecks in it, covered with tiny numbers and block letters.
Sylvie put on her wool muffler, then her coat. She’d be safe enough in the streets, Szapera thought. The curfew had been moved back for Christmas and New Year, a reward from the Germans for a compliant population.
Sylvie stood by the door, her face taut and unsmiling as always. “I think you should go,” she said.
“No. I’ll be all right.”
“The rules are that you should leave.”
“I will. Fifteen minutes, plus whatever time they take to send.”
Goddamn her,
he thought,
she won’t go.
She stared at him, her hand on the doorknob. “I’ll make some tea for us,” she said. “In my room. After we drop off the papers.”
What was this? She felt nothing for him, not that way anyhow. A ruse, he thought. He wanted to mock her, but he didn’t have it in his heart to do that, not anymore.
“Wait for me then,” he said. “At the rue Lenoir apartment, then we’ll have tea together.”
For a long moment she stood there, not wanting to leave without him. Finally she said, “All right, then,” and closed the door behind her.
He heard her walk lightly down the stairs, heard the street door open and shut, then listened at the window as her footsteps receded up the street. Good. Whatever the phone signal meant, the night’s transmissions were safe. It wasn’t the first time there had been a false alarm. He paced around the room. Now, his decoding work gone, he had nothing to do, not even anything to read. Ah, Sylvie’s biology text, left on the chair. He picked it up, thumbed through it. Look at this, he thought, she’s written her name on the title page.
Smiling grimly to himself, he tore the page out, took a rag from a nail beside the stove, opened the door and threw it in.
Now she’ll
be mad at me for damaging her book.
But, really, she should have known better.
He walked over to the table, sat in the office chair and leaned back, putting his feet up. Only a few minutes until the last transmission of the night—his work would be complete, then he could relax. He flipped through the book, stopping now and then to look at the illustrations. A long time since he’d studied this kind of stuff.
The Sea Horse, fish of the genus Hippocampus (See Fig. 18—Hippocampus hudsonius), belonging to the pipefish family, with prehensile tail and elongated snout, the head at a right angle to the
body. While the habitat of the Sea Horse is known to include—
He went back to the window. Checked his watch. 1:29. Quiet out, dead in this neighborhood. Footsteps? Yes, somebody coming home. No, two people. In a hurry. The street door flew open, the knob banging hard against the wall. People, several of them, pounding up the staircase. What?
His heart fluttered, but he was already moving toward the table. He grabbed the sheaf of encryption tables and shoved them in the stove, threw the rag in after them, and kicked the door closed.
Let
them try to grab it barehanded.
Next, the revolver. He swept it off the table as the footsteps came around the corner of the staircase and down the hall. Could there be some perfectly good explanation? No. Could he get to the roof? No, too late. He pulled back the hammer of the revolver until it cocked. He wasn’t going alone, that was certain. And they weren’t going to have him alive. A fist pounded on the door, a voice shouted in German.
He fired the first shot, was deafened by the sound. A ragged hole, chest-high, appeared in the door. From the landing, an indignant yelp. Streams of German, hysterical shouting. There was a whole crowd out there. He reminded himself to kneel down, fired a second time, and a third.
The return fusillade blew the door apart, two machine pistols firing on full automatic. Szapera was knocked backward, under the table. He worked himself around to shoot again, knees slipping in blood on the floorboards. He aimed the revolver, the room echoed with the shot, his ears rang. Again they fired through the door. Szapera was amazed, not that a bullet had gone through his heart, had killed him, but that he could still be conscious for the instant it took to know such a thing.
MAS
MODÈLE 38
10 JANUARY, 1942 .
Casson boarded the night train to Marseilles at 8:25, at the Gare de Lyons, but they didn’t get under way until 10:40—sabotage on the track at Bourg-la-Reine, according to the conductor.
The train slowed to a crawl and switched over to the north-bound track. Casson rested his forehead against the cold window, saw twisted rails that glowed for an instant in the moonlight and a crowd of railwaymen warming their hands at a fire in an iron barrel. A few minutes later they were out in the countryside; patches of snow on the hills, the rivers under the railway bridges frozen to sheets of gray ice.
Just after four in the morning they passed Moulins, on the river Allier. It had become a border town, where the Occupied Zone met the area ruled by Vichy, a few kilometers down the river. By then only one passenger, perhaps a commercial traveler, remained in the compartment. Casson had waded over a branch of the Allier a year earlier, guided by the son of a local aristocrat. April of 1941, Citrine waiting for him in a hotel in Lyons.
The German exit
Kontrol,
leaving what was now called Frank-reich, was located at a small station on the northern edge of the city. It was typical, Casson thought. The Germans always seemed to choose isolated, anonymous areas for their operations—you didn’t know where you were, there was nowhere to run, whatever happened there was invisible.
But, this time, not too bad. Degrave had made sure he had all the right papers. A few German noncoms boarded the train, tired at that time of night. They glanced at his identity card, peered at the underwear and socks in his valise, then stamped his passport. He was sweating by the time they left the compartment—sometimes they arrested people for no apparent reason.
The train rolled slowly into the main station in Moulins, where the French border police ordered everybody onto the platform and made them stand in line. From all the muttering and grumbling that went on it was clear to Casson that this wasn’t the usual procedure.
The line, heading to a table manned by uniformed officers, barely moved. The passengers breathed plumes of steam and stamped their feet. When Casson reached the table, he handed over his identity card with his travel and work permits folded in the middle. The officer took a long, careful look, then said, “This one out.” He was escorted to a room inside the station, where a civilian official sat at an old metal desk.
He sat down as directed, and handed over his papers. They were spread out, slowly examined, notes were made on a sheet of paper. Outside, he heard the hiss of steam, then the slow progress of the Marseilles train as it moved out of the station.
The official was young, savagely combed and brushed and shaved, wore steel-framed eyeglasses and hair freshly clipped to a perfect line across the back of the neck. He had a sulky mouth, set against the world—born angry and meant to stay that way. Perfect, Casson thought, for a
petit fonctionnaire.
On his desk was a framed photo of Pétain, white-haired and godly.
A portable icon,
Casson thought.
He takes it with him wherever he goes.
“Monsieur Marin,” he began.
“Yes, sir.”
“Your papers describe you as a claims investigator.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“For the
Compagnie des Assurances Commerciales du Nord.
”
“Yes.”
“Your business in Marseilles?”
“A fire in a storage shed owned by a steamship company.”