28 March, 1942.
The apartment was in the 7th, on the avenue Bosquet, above a small and very expensive restaurant. It was well used; smelled of Gauloises and wet overcoats, and too much time spent indoors with the windows shut. “It belongs to a wealthy family,” Gueze explained. “They’ve left the country, but we can use it for as long as the war goes on. The best way to come in is down the hallway from a door inside the restaurant, then up the stairs.” He paused, then said, “We think it’s safe, but look around before you enter the building. It’s like everything else.”
He had a sheet of paper in front of him, which he tapped with the end of his pen. “We got hold of your dossier. Not too bad. They want to question you again, but there’s nothing about an escape.”
“How is that possible?”
“Apparently they’ve protected themselves. The Gestapo is unforgiving-in their view, accidents don’t happen. So, they called you in for questioning, then you left.”
“A man chased me. Fell off the roof into the courtyard.”
“If it happened, it isn’t in here. They may have reported it separately, as an accident, or a suicide. There is a cross-reference to the files of the SD, the SS intelligence service, we don’t know what’s in there. It seems to us that the case against you is obscure, not appealing to most investigators. You were certainly suspected of involvement with the British, but so were a lot of other people. And now the dossier is missing, perhaps misfiled.”
“So then?”
“You’re just as well off as Marin. You can’t be rehabilitated. Not now. Major Guske, the officer who called you in for questioning, is still in Paris. I would, if I were you, try to avoid him.”
“I’ll try.”
They both smiled. “As I said, we’re all new to this. We’ve suffered losses, but we’re learning as we go along. I think I may have to concede that perhaps the Brasserie Heininger wasn’t such a good idea after all. When you went to the WC, a man came over-I knew him slightly-and asked if you were the film producer Jean Casson.”
“What did you say?”
“That you were an insurance executive.”
“Claims investigator, is what my papers say.”
“Yes, but I wouldn’t be having dinner with somebody like that. Anyhow, you can stay in Paris for the time being, but you must be careful.” He paused, cleared his throat, put his notes away. “Now,” he said, “the British have come to the London office with a problem. Of course we agreed to help, and it’s up to us, to you and me, to show them we can do it.
“According to their intelligence, during the period January-February of this year, fifty-five hundred tons of gasoline and aviation fuel went from France to Rommel’s Afrika Korps in Libya. A war in the desert is a war of gasoline-for warplanes, for the tanks. In this kind of expanse-thousands of square miles-whoever can cover more ground, whoever can stay in the air longer, wins. What they want is for somebody to slow down the fuel deliveries. Some of it moves by rail, a good deal of it goes south on the rivers and canals, from the refineries in Rouen. Some of it must be coming from the Toulon refineries in the south, but the tonnage is well beyond what they produce. That’s more or less the situation, do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” Gueze said. “Now do something about it.”
5 April.
3:40 A.M., raining hard. The dockyards at Ablon, just south of Paris.
The union office was in a wooden shack-a few desks and chairs, a cold woodstove with a zigzag pipe to the roof. Weiss flinched as he entered, water dripping on him from the doorframe. Inside, the two men in bleu de travail grinned. “We’ve been meaning to do something about that,” one of them said.
His friend laughed. “Comrade Weiss doesn’t care.”
Weiss smoothed his hair back and wiped the water off his forehead.
“We have what you want,” the first man said. He produced a sheaf of paper, a handwritten manifest.
The oil lamp was turned down to a glow, Weiss peered at the columns of tiny script. “Maybe if I had my glasses,” he said.
“We have eleven fuel barges waiting to go. Looks like a convoy. There may be more coming down today, from Rouen.”
“What is it?”
“Just plain gasoline. Not the fancy stuff for planes. That’s what the manifest says, anyhow.”
“What time does it leave?”
“Sometime around six-thirty this morning. Lots of Germans around, though. That usually slows things down.”
“Any idea what they’re after?”
“Who knows? Sometimes they hear something.”
Weiss thought for a while, staring at the darkness outside the window. “We want these barges to burn,” he said. “Can you take care of it?”
“Not here.” The man laughed, though nothing was particularly funny. “They’d kill every last one of us.”
“What about a little way downstream?”
“I suppose it’s possible, with explosives.”
“What happens if you put a bullet in it?”
“Not much. We tried that during a strike in ’37. Somebody put four shots right in the tank and nothing happened-it spilled a few pints of gasoline, somebody else was beaten up, and a couple of people who had nothing to do with it were fired.”
“Is the manifest complete-bargeloads, names, and numbers?”
“It’s all there,” the man said, a little relieved.
Casson was waiting in a hotel room near the docks. Weiss hung his wet coat on the back of a chair. “Fuel barges all over the place,” he said. “Up in Ivry, and Choisy, and eleven down here. They’re being very careful.”
“What are they worried about?”
“Hard to say. It’s a big war, some damn thing goes on in Copenhagen or Odessa and a message shows up on the teleprinter in the rue des Saussaies.”
“Anything we can do?”
Weiss exhaled, rubbed his face. He was tired. “I’m out of ideas. This thing was organized in a hurry-I’m not complaining, you understand, it’s what we asked for. But we usually work slowly, find out what we need to know, plan every step.”
Casson wondered what he could offer. Gueze had given him a briefcase full of hundred-franc notes, but Weiss and the FTP didn’t work that way. “We’ll think of something,” Casson said.
Weiss brooded, took a well-creased road map of France from the pocket of his coat and spread it out on the bed. “It’s hard, with the waterways. You can’t blow up a river.”
Later that day, riding a local train south to Troyes, Casson found a leaflet on the seat from the resistance group Liberation. The lead story: a heroic attack by three RAF Beaufighters on a barge convoy at Elbeuf, in the curve of the Seine south of Rouen.
… their 20 MM cannon firing thunderbolts of destruction, crewmen leaping off the decks and swimming for their lives. A hard blow, and daring, in full daylight, engines screaming as they dove, lower, lower, leveling out just a few feet above the water, machine guns blazing. Then, bombs released, the planes roar away. A huge blast- windows tremble in Rouen, hearts tremble in Berlin. Four bargeloads of coal sent to the bottom of the river. No tank turrets will be forged with that coal!
Coal, Casson thought. Merde.
He met with Weiss as planned, at a cafe in Troyes, and told him what he’d read. Weiss shrugged. “Could as well have been turnips,” he said. “Last I heard, Rommel was running panzer tanks, not locomotives.”
“Were they after the gasoline?”
“What else? The problem is, doing this kind of thing with airplanes is very hard. They miss, they hit the wrong building, the wrong part of the building, the wrong town, and, yes, it’s happened, I promise you, the wrong country. So, in this case, they hit the wrong barges.” They were silent for a time, the rain slanting down beyond the steamy
