never said no-not to Weiss, not to the Comintern operative who had preceded him.
“How soon?” Weiss said.
Renan thought it over. “Maybe on the weekend. We have one German, he used to be an ironworker in Essen. We set him up with a girlfriend in town, which is how we talk to him, and we keep him in a good mood with brandy, whatever we can lay our hands on. But then, you understand, we’re talking about one or two pieces, if he’ll agree to look the other way. Some things he can fix with his pals at the gate, tools and so forth, but not this.”
Weiss nodded grimly. It was the same story at Saint-Etienne and the Schneider works-France’s equivalent of Krupp.
“Want us to try it?” Renan said.
“Yes. Do the best you can.”
They sat for a while. Weiss stared at the board. The rook really had been the wrong move. “Well,” he said. “Time to be going.”
“Have somebody stop by the first part of next week.”
“Here?”
Renan nodded.
“Thanks for the help,” Weiss said.
“Don’t mention it.”
Outside, Weiss unlocked his bicycle and pedaled off toward the railroad station. Want us to try it? Quietly, in his own way, Renan had told him it wouldn’t work. Of course he would make the attempt, and take the consequences, he simply wanted Weiss to know that the attempt was going to fail.
But Weiss had no choice. Moscow Center was pressing him harder than it ever had: he must acquire battlefield weapons, he must be prepared to arm partizan units, he must attack German targets in occupied France. He worked with the senior operations officers of Service B-the FTP’s intelligence section-which made him roughly the equivalent of a colonel in the army, and he had been ordered to send troops into combat.
What he had, in Paris, were assassination teams, like Ivanic and Serra, perhaps twenty operatives at any given moment. Then there were the longtime militants, like Renan, and the volunteers, almost all of them young and inexperienced.
The Center did not care. They’d let him know that wounded soldiers had been let out of military hospitals to serve on the defensive line that ran through the suburbs of Moscow. In Paris, they wanted action, bloody and decisive, and right now. The cost was immaterial.
Paris. 2 November.
Isidor Szapera climbed the dark stairs quickly, his fingers brushing along the banister. Up ahead, rats scurried away from the approaching footsteps. Time to go, mes enfants, the Chief Rat himself has arrived. Big talk-the building scared him, it always had. The wind sighed in the empty halls and woke up old cooking smells. Sometimes it opened doors, or slammed them shut. The building, on a small street in the back of the 11th Arrondissement, had been vacant since one corner of the roof had collapsed in 1938, when the tenants were thrown out, the doors padlocked, the windows painted with white Xs.
Now it served as the secret base of the Perezov unit, named for a heroic Bolshevik machine-gunner in the civil war that followed the revolution. Unit Commander Szapera opened the door to a room on the third floor, made sure the blanket was securely nailed over the window, and lit a candle in a saucer on a wooden chair. He didn’t own a watch, but he could hear the eight-o’-clock bells from Notre Dame de Perpetuel Secours. Ten minutes later, the Line 9 Metro rumbled beneath the building. His meeting was set for 8:20, he was early.
He’d been born in Kishinev-sometimes Rumania, sometimes the Ukraine or the USSR, but for Jews pretty much the same thing. His family got out in 1932, by bribing a Turkish sea captain in Odessa. They reached Poland that summer, when he was ten, then made their way to Paris in the fall of 1933, where his father found work as a salesman for a costume jewelry manufacturer. Isidor went to school in the 11th, essentially a ghetto. He managed to learn French, by force of willpower and repetition. It was hard, but not as hard as the cheder in Kishinev, where he’d sat for hours on a wooden bench, chanting passages of Torah to commit them to memory.
That old stuff, he thought. It kept the Jews down; weak and powerless. In the struggle of the working classes, you didn’t pray, you fought back. Did Rabbi Eleazer mean this? Or did he mean that? Meanwhile they kicked the door down and took you away.
It wasn’t a theory. They’d escaped from the cossacks in Kishinev and the anti-Semitic gangs in Lublin, but the Germans came for them in Paris. In the fall of 1940 his father sensed what was coming, tried to get a letter out to the relatives in Brooklyn-by now named Shapiro-then made arrangements for the three children to stay with a French Jewish family in Bobigny, on the outskirts of the city. A year later, August 1941, they heard a rumor: the police were planning to detain Jews of foreign nationality. Home from school with a cold and fever, Isidor was sent off to Bobigny. The rest of the family wasn’t so lucky. The police had come through the 11th on a rafle, a roundup. When Isidor came home, the apartment was silent. They were gone.
At that point, the Kornilov unit had been in operation for six months. Commander Szapera, just turned nineteen, his cousin Leon-two years younger-his classmate Kohn, and his girlfriend, Eva Perlemere. Eva was not a refugee like the others. She came from a good family-her father was a theatrical agent-with money, a family that had been in Paris for generations. But, since the August rafle, she had been a dedicated member of the unit.
In the fall of 1941, Isidor Szapera left school. He got a job unloading trucks at Les Halles, stayed in contact with party militants, broke a few windows, left a few leaflets in the Metro, organized spontaneous labor actions.
Not enough, not nearly. By then, it wasn’t only the Germans who wanted race war. He had come to hate them physically, to hate their faces, the way they walked, or laughed. They had stolen his family. His poor father, not a strong man, much better at love than anger, would try to protect his wife and children, would protest- Szapera knew this-and would, trembling and indignant, be casually knocked aside. Commander Szapera refused to mourn, tears of sorrow and tears of rage were just tears as far as he was concerned, and he had more important things to do.
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?”
