Alan Furst: Red Gold

At the end of the bridge Lazenac introduced him to Raton- small and wiry, with sharp eyes and a clever smile-and Victor. He was simply Jean. They walked east, along the edge of the yards. Not taking it easy, exactly, but not in any hurry; going to work, there’d still be plenty left when they got there. Across the street, a row of warehouses, rusty iron gates chained shut. As they passed an alley, Lazenac made a small motion with his hand, a truck’s engine sputtered to life and backed away, deeper into the shadows. Another hundred meters and they reached the main entry to the railyards: a striped barrier bar lowered across the road, an Alsatian shepherd in the alert prone position. Wehrmacht military police lounged around a guard-hut. Nobody said anything, nobody’s eyes met, but the feeling was like Friday night in a workers’ bar-the fight had to happen, the only question was when.

Five minutes later, well out of sight of the guards, they stopped by a wall. Ten feet high, old plaster cracked and peeling. Two handmade ladders lay flat in the weeds. Raton and Victor set one of them against the wall and braced the bottom. Lazenac climbed to the top, took the second ladder as it was handed up, and lowered it carefully down the other side of the wall. He put one foot across, then shifted his weight gracefully and stood on the second ladder. “You’re next,” he called to Casson in a stage whisper. Casson worked his way up the awful thing-barely wide enough to get a foot on each rung. He was scared now, not so much of the Germans, but of being asked to do something he wouldn’t be able to do.

As he neared the top, Lazenac said, “Watch your hands.” A moment later he saw why: broken glass-wine bottles had been cemented into the cap of the wall. Casson took a deep breath, got one foot over, balanced, then swung across. He did it wrong-he knew it an instant before it happened-and began his backward tumble to the ground. Only he didn’t fall, because Lazenac saw it coming, reached up and grabbed him by the belt and forced his weight back on the ladder. “Merci bien,” Casson said, breathing hard.

“Je vous en prie.”

On the other side of the wall, Casson knelt by some kind of storm sewer, the open end of a drainage culvert. Over time, the outflow had cut itself a channel, some three feet deep, into the hillside. When the others were down the ladder, Lazenac led them single file, crouched low, along the gulley. “Stay close to the ground,” Raton whispered to him. “If the schleuh catch you in here they’ll break your head.”

At the foot of the hill, they waited. A busy night: in the distance, the sound of yard engines chugging up and down the tracks, and the steel clash of boxcars being coupled. Directly in front of them were flatbed cars stacked with peeled logs, probably cut in the forests of the Massif Central and now en route to Germany. After what seemed to Casson like a long time, the red glow of a track lantern moved toward them and Lazenac said, “At last, the cheminots.” Railwaymen.

There were two of them. They shook hands all around, then the one with the lantern said, “It’s about two hundred meters up ahead. Third track in.”

“An SNCF car,” the other said. “7112.”

“All right,” Lazenac said. “We’re on our way.”

“Keep an eye out for the yard security.”

“Thanks for everything, we’ll settle up on the weekend-same as before.”

“See you then. Vive la France.”

“Yeah,” Lazenac said. They both laughed.

The lantern faded away down the track, Lazenac led them in the other direction. Casually, without stealth-every right to be here. The SNCF car stood high above its cast-iron wheels. A wire seal secured the door handle. From inside his jacket Lazenac produced an iron bar about two feet long. He worked it through the loop and put his weight on it until the wire snapped. Standing on the metal rungs beside the door, he pushed it open and ran the beam of a flashlight up and down the stacked cargo. Cotton sacks piled to the ceiling, stenciled with the name of the company and the label SUCRE DE CANNE. Sugar.

Lazenac swung inside and reappeared a moment later carrying a sack. Victor stood below him. Lazenac dropped the sack on Victor’s shoulder and Victor then headed back toward the hillside. Casson was next. “Don’t worry,” Lazenac said. “You’re stronger than you think.”

Who was strong was Lazenac. He swept a sack into the air and lowered it onto Casson’s shoulder. Casson felt his knees buckle and said “Merde” under his breath. Raton, leaning against the freight car, laughed, then patted him on the arm.

He moved off, swaying at every step, but he wasn’t going to fail. Up ahead, Victor was plodding along at a steady pace. Casson went about ten steps, then, the sour voice of authority: “All right- just where do you think you’re going with that?”

Casson turned to look. Some kind of railroad guard-an official armband, a whistle. He was tapping his palm with a long, wooden baton blanc, a policeman’s club. “Put it down, you,” he said to Casson.

I’ll never be able to pick it up again. Lazenac leaned out of the open doorway and rapped the man on the head with the iron bar. For a moment there was dead silence.

“More?”

Indignant, the guard rubbed furiously at the spot where he’d been hit. “Are you crazy?” He grabbed the silver whistle around his neck and put it to his lips. Raton kicked him in the stomach and he folded in half. Lazenac jumped down off the boxcar and tore the whistle off his neck, then the two of them beat him senseless. When he lay full length on the cinders and didn’t move, Casson adjusted the sack on his shoulder as best he could and headed for the wall.

Somehow, he got himself up the ladder. How he did it he would never know, but he reached the top, using both hands to haul himself up a rung at a time. When he stopped to rest, panting like an engine, he discovered that Victor was waiting for him at the top of the ladder on the other side. “Now, just lift it across-I’ll help you-and try not to break the glass.”

Casson looked puzzled.

“Why let them know how we did it? There’s a war on, you never know when you might want to get into a railyard.”

The truck was waiting for them a little way up the street. A small Citroen delivery van-camionette-with a shutter in the back instead of doors and the name of a bakery painted on the side. Victor rolled the shutter up and tossed his sack in. Casson did the same- secretly very proud of himself when the weight made the truck bounce on its springs. A minute later, Lazenac and Raton showed up. “You know where you’re going?” Lazenac asked the driver.

“The rue Hennequin. In the seventeenth.”

“Out by the Ternes Metro.”

“What’s it called?”

“Ma Petite Auberge.”

The driver snickered-my little country inn. “Mon petit cul,” he said. My little backside.

Lazenac laughed. “Well, when you have a restaurant, that’s what you’ll call it.” He leaned into the cab of the truck and said, “Keep a cool head, Michot. There’ll be Gestapo cars, Germans, a real circus.”

“We’ll be fine.”

Casson and Lazenac rode the Metro out to the 17th. It was sad on the train. Before the war, that time of night, there would have been waiters going home in their black jackets and white aprons, lovers who couldn’t wait to get into bed, and the strange old birds one always saw-Sanskrit professors, stamp collectors-going out to eat cassoulet or heading up to Montmartre to give the girls a bad time. Now, people stared at the floor, their spirit broken.

“For us,” Lazenac said, “getting hold of the stuff is the easy part.”

“I’ll do what I can,” Casson said. “What’s the price?”