Alan Furst - Red Gold

Footsteps on the stairs, light but certain. Weiss. Szapera stepped into the hall, called out softly, “I’m up here.”

Weiss came toward him, his briefcase beneath his arm.

“I hope you put the door back,” Szapera said.

“I did, yes.”

After scouting the building for several days, Szapera and his friends had gone to work on the door in the back courtyard, carefully prying the metal flange free so the screws could be reseated in the wooden frame and the padlock stayed in place.

Weiss sat on a blanket on the floor and they made small talk for a time. Did Szapera need food? Another blanket? It was almost paternal, but Weiss couldn’t stop himself. Szapera was like the kids he’d grown up with. Much too pale, with curly hair and soft eyes-everything was a joke, nothing could hurt them. A long time ago, Weiss thought, long before he had become “Weiss”-his seventeenth name.

“The car,” Weiss said. “Can you depend on it?”

“Don’t worry. It’s a good one. A Talbot.”

“How many doors?”

“Four.”

“Where is it?”

“In a village. Bonneval, near Chartres. The Perlemeres have a little house there, for vacations. When the Germans came, they hid the car in a barn.”

“Forgive my asking-you know how to drive?”

“No. Eva does. Her father used to let her drive around the village.”

“How will you get it there?”

“We’ll come at dawn, just after curfew. We found a garage nobody uses, in Saint-Denis. We can get there from the village on back roads, then we’re eight minutes from Route 17, near Aubervilliers.”

“Eight minutes?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know?”

“We timed other cars. German cars.”

“All right. Eight minutes.”

“What about the guns?”

Weiss unbuckled the straps of his briefcase, opened the flap, and took out three revolvers and a small box. The guns were used, six-shot models with medium-length barrels. Szapera took one and examined it. The handgrip was scarred and scratched, the front sight filed flat, so it wouldn’t snag a pocket; the chambers were empty. Below the cylinder, the name of the manufacturer was stamped into the metal, then a word in a language he didn’t know that probably meant company.

“There’s a fourth,” Weiss said. “But it can’t be picked up until tomorrow. Be here tomorrow night, same time, I’ll have somebody bring it around. As for ammunition, you have thirty rounds in the box.”

Szapera nodded. “Good,” he said. “There won’t be time for more.”

Weiss had wanted to arm the group with a submachine gun, but they would have to do the best they could with the pistols. The man he’d sent up to Evreux on Monday had returned empty-handed. “According to our friends,” he’d told Weiss, “Renan and a comrade called Bernard attempted to steal six crates of MAS 38’s from a loading dock. Somebody knew about it, because the Germans were waiting for them. Bernard is in jail. Renan tried to run away and they shot him.”

Eva came up the stairs at ten. She brought him a delicious sandwich, liverwurst with mustard between thick slices of freshly made white bread, and a jar of cold tea spiked with sugar. “Very good,” he said.

She smiled. “Somebody has to feed you.”

“Oh, I get what I need.”

She lifted an eyebrow, knew it wasn’t true. She had lank brown hair, a narrow, watchful face, and wore thick glasses. He’d never seen her with makeup. “But then she takes her clothes off,” he’d once told Leon, “and you faint.”

“You fainted?”

“I should’ve.”

“What did she look like?”

“Hey, don’t pry.”

He finished the sandwich, it was too late now for her to make it back home before curfew. They talked a little, but they couldn’t wait. She blew out the candle, stood, and undressed. A goddess, he thought. Hips swelling from a narrow waist, full breasts, long sweeps of sallow skin. She was careful with her clothing, folded everything into a neat pile, then lay down beside him. They kissed for a while, then he rolled on top of her.

He shuddered to feel her skin next to his. “Hold me,” she said. “We don’t have to hurry.”

“No, we don’t.” She excited him too much, he thought. She would encourage him to slow down and enjoy it, rest her warm hands below his shoulder blades, a gentling touch that made it happen even faster.

“Oh, my glasses,” she said. She took them off, squinted up at him through the darkness. “Put them where they won’t get broken.”

He reached out, set the glasses down by the wall, just off the edge of the blanket.

“Mm,” she said.

“I love you, Eva,” he said.

“Don’t move,” she whispered. “Just stay in me.”

Saint-Denis. 4 November.

A cold morning, the sky at dawn blue and black, trails of fiery cloud on the east horizon. The garage in Saint-Denis smelled like hay. After several tries, the engine turned over and Eva started to maneuver out of the narrow entry. Backing up was not something she did well-in fact, she’d only done it once before. Szapera’s cousin Leon stood to one side of the car, waving his arms. Szapera, turned halfway around in the passenger seat, called out directions. “Now to the left. More, he says. No, stop. Stop!”

They had less time than they’d thought. Kohn had been late. “A problem at home,” he said sheepishly. Szapera wondered what that meant.

“Everybody be quiet,” Eva said. “Let me do this by myself.” The car crawled backward. Szapera looked out the rear window. She was off to one side, but made it with inches to spare.

The courier from Weiss had shown up the night before, a young man in a seaman’s jacket. He’d handed over a fourth weapon, an automatic pistol manufactured in Spain. “Good luck, comrade,” he’d said to Szapera. “Here is something extra from Weiss. Remember, no closer than thirty feet.”

A hand grenade. Szapera held it tight in his left hand. In his belt was the revolver. He’d given Leon the automatic-none of them was exactly sure how it worked, and Leon, just turned sixteen, with glasses much thicker than Eva’s, probably couldn’t hit anything anyhow.

Eva had negotiated the garage by backing straight out, blocking traffic in both lanes. Ignoring the furious honking, she made several moves until at last she got the car headed north. She should probably drive with a cushion, Szapera thought, she could barely see over the steering wheel.

“Can you manage?” he said.

“Don’t make me nervous.” She shifted from first to third. The car rattled and jerked, then ran smoothly.

Just outside the town of Aubervilliers, Eva pulled off the road and waited. Kohn was holding a pocket watch. “7:22,” he said. Szapera had a school friend-a redhead who looked more Irish than Jewish-who worked as a clerk at one of the offices of the Banque de France in Paris. Twice a week, an armored car left the bank with bundles of occupation money, which it took to a Wehrmacht office at an army barracks near Aubervilliers. Szapera had ridden his bicycle out there, observed the armored car going through the gates, and established the time of delivery. He went out again a week later to make sure he had it right. Stalin had robbed banks in Baku to finance underground work, Szapera meant to follow his example. He had proposed the idea to Weiss, who resisted at first, then, in early October, changed his mind.

They waited. Kohn kept looking at his watch. It was quiet in the car, even the crazy Leon shut up for a change. Szapera felt it would be better if they talked, but his mind was blank. He was breathing hard, the hand grenade clutched in his fist.

7:31. 7:34. “They’re late,” Kohn said.

Just then the armored car rumbled past. A van, steel plates bordered by double lines of bolt heads. A very old van, Szapera guessed, box-shaped, tall and unwieldy, like one of those odd-looking machines in newsreels of the 1914 war.