Under Occupation Read online

  Under Occupation is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical persons appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Alan Furst

  Maps copyright © 2019 by David Lindroth Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Furst, Alan, author.

  Title: Under occupation : a novel / Alan Furst.

  Description: New York : Random House, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019010340| ISBN 9780399592300 (hardback) | ISBN 9780399592324 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1939–1945—Underground movements—France—Fiction. | France—History—German occupation, 1940–1945—Fiction. | Paris (France)—History—1940–1944—Fiction. | GSAFD: Spy stories. | Historical fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3556.U76 U53 2019 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019010340

  Ebook ISBN 9780399592324

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Carole Lowenstein, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Carlos Beltrán

  Cover art: The Image Works

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Maps

  Midnight in Trieste

  Voyage to the Reich

  Leila

  The Safe House

  Solitaire

  Escape

  Dedication

  By Alan Furst

  About the Author

  In 1942, in Nazi-occupied France, the German Occupation Authority rounded up émigré Poles—electricians, welders, machinists—and forced them to work as slave laborers at the naval yards in Kiel, where U-boats were built. The Poles fought back, stealing technical information and smuggling it to Paris, where it was sent on to the British Secret Intelligence Service in London.

  At dusk, the freighter tied up at the wharf, the amber streetlamps of the town hazy and dim beyond the port. They stood together at the railing, amid a silence broken only by a distant foghorn and the wash of waves against the pier. She moved closer to him and said, “I never thought we would come back here.” In response, he took her hand. Then a ship’s officer unhooked the chain at the top of the gangway. It was time to go ashore.

  —Paul Ricard, Midnight in Trieste

  Occupied Paris, 1942.

  IN EARLY OCTOBER, the first of the autumn storms began in the late afternoon, with rumbles of thunder up in Normandy somewhere, then, by nightfall, the rain reached Paris, where it beat against the windows of the gray city and streamed down the channels at the edges of the cobblestone streets. The writer Paul Ricard walked bent over in the downpour, headed up a narrow street of ancient buildings in the Sixth Arrondissement: the Rive Gauche, the Latin Quarter.

  Ricard squinted into the darkness, some of the streetlamps had been shattered, others painted blue for the blackout ordered by the German Occupation Authority, and the coal smoke that drifted through the rain made it even harder to see anything. Turning a corner he found himself on the Rue de l’Odéon, once home to Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach’s English-language bookstore. But the store had closed a year earlier and now Ricard, a writer of detective and spy fiction, had to get his newly published novels of intrigue at a recently opened store called The Bookshop, on the nearby Rue de Condé. Ricard, rain dripping from the rim of his fedora hat, took a narrow alley to the street—he could reach out and touch the buildings on either side. He was headed for The Bookshop to see a friend who had, voice excited, telephoned and asked that he come see her at the shop.

  When Ricard entered the bookstore, his friend, an émigré Pole called Kasia, was manning the cashier’s desk near the door. In her twenties, Kasia looked like a Parisian street kid: she had dark eyes and dark hair cut short—a boy’s haircut—atop a firm, well-curved body. She wore a worker’s tweed cap, a navy pea jacket—likely bought at a used-clothing barrow—mole-colored trousers, and ankle-high, lace-up boots. Ricard nodded to her and waited while she served a customer, a German officer, tall and stern. “Delta of Venus,” she said to the officer, “in fact all the Anaïs Nin erotica, is written for a private collector, so it’s not available.”

  “Oh, is that so.” The officer was clearly disappointed.

  “But we carry a book, a kind of diary, that’s similar. Would you care to have a look at it?”

  “Why yes”—the German visibly brightened—“I would love to see it.”

  Kasia looked at Ricard as she left the desk and raised her eyes to heaven: yet one more German trying to buy dirty books. She left the desk, walked over to the shelves, and returned with a slim volume. On the soft cover, an artful line drawing of a nude couple in a complicated embrace. “Here it is,” she said. “The Diary of Lady X, it is erotica for every taste, and lavishly illustrated.”

  “Thank you,” said the German, in school French. “This will do very nicely.” Ricard could think of nothing but the well-known quote from the rogue publisher Maurice Girodias, who described such works as “books that one reads with one hand.” The German paid Kasia and left the store with his new book wrapped in a sheet of newspaper.

  “That’s the tenth copy we’ve sold this week,” Kasia said to Ricard. “The Boche come to Paris with lists—the best restaurants, the fanciest brothels, and where to buy books that get them ready for the brothels. Where they especially like exhibitions.”

  “They’ve conquered Europe, so they can do whatever they like. They think.”

  Kasia shrugged. “They’ll go away, Ricard, sent back to where they came from, and here in Paris, we’ll dance in the streets.”

  “Is the book any good?” Ricard said.

  “It’s arty. I prefer a good blue movie.”

  “So, Kasia, you called.”

  “Yes, we have the book you wanted—Arthur Koestler, Scum of the Earth, it’s sixty francs.”

  Ricard thanked her, and paid for the book.

  Ricard left the bookstore and headed for the nearby Café Saint-Germain; the day was dark and drizzling and he needed a coffee. Heading down the street, he heard some kind of commotion behind him, and, as he turned to see what was going on, a running man slammed into him. Both of them fell on the sidewalk. In the distance, shouts of “Halt!” and the trills of police whistles. As the man struggled to get to his feet, he mumbled an apology. He was dressed as a worker—baggy, shapeless gray pants and a soiled shirt, but he had the face of an intellectual: a white goatee and spectacles with a cracked lens.

  Now, from the direction of the shouts and whistles, a pistol shot, then two more. As the man stood up, the air snapped by Ricard’s ear, and his hand flew to his face, but there was no blood—the bullet had missed him. Meanwhile, all around him, people dove flat on the pavement. Up the street, a woman screamed.

  The man now took of
f running and almost made the corner, but a shot knocked him down. Ricard ran to him as he got to his knees and took the man by the elbows to help him up. As he did, the man whispered, “Here, take this,” and shoved a folded sheet of notebook paper into Ricard’s shirt pocket. Then the man sagged to one side and fell the rest of the way to the street. As Ricard again reached to help him, he saw the life leave the man’s eyes; he stared unknowing at the sky.

  Ricard ran into the café as a Paris police car skidded to a stop. He sat down at an empty table where the waiter hadn’t yet removed a coffee cup and pretended to be just another patron. All around him the crowd spoke in undertones: “Who was he?” “A résistant?” Two flics entered the café and, using their pads and pencils, began to look at papers and write down names.

  The flic needed glasses. “Richard?” he said, squinting at Ricard’s passport.

  “No, Ricard.” He immediately regretted the correction; he’d had a chance to keep his name unknown, but his reaction had been instinctive.

  “Did you know the man you helped?” the flic said.

  “No, who was he?”

  The flic said nothing, and moved on to a woman, hand still pressed to her heart, at the next table. Ricard took the folded paper from his pocket, opened it, and saw what he believed was an engineering schematic with the hand-printed German word Zünder and the French word détonateur. So, a detonator.

  Get rid of it, he thought.

  But a dying man had thrust this paper into Ricard’s shirt pocket and Ricard couldn’t throw it away. In the street outside the café, an ambulance, siren still running, pulled up next to the body. Then a Gestapo officer in a black uniform told the attendants to leave the man alone. A moment later, a Gestapo Mercedes pulled up, and two soldiers hauled the man’s body into the backseat, then the car drove away.

  Hurrying down the rainswept Rue de Condé, Ricard wore a battered felt hat and a khaki-colored trench coat. At forty, he had a moderately handsome face but was no movie star. Still, women were greatly attracted to him; he was smart and funny and kind, with one particularly appealing feature: he had green eyes, a deep, rich green, knowing eyes, intelligent eyes. He had also a naturally seductive voice, quiet and assured and just deep enough.

  At the age of twenty he had left the Sorbonne—he would not become a lawyer or a teacher. His father had died the same year, and his mother, rather too quickly, remarried. Alone and without much money, he decided to do what he wanted, to be a journalist, and found his subjects wherever he could. For example, a recently acquired Velázquez painting, an Adoration of the Magi, was now on exhibition at the Louvre. At the Crêperie Jules, on the Rue de Rennes, some of the best crêpes in Paris, generously stuffed with scrambled eggs and ham. The beloved Hungarian film actress Beáta Markozy, last seen in Love for One Night, was in town to sign a contract for a new movie and was staying at the Hôtel Bristol.

  And he haunted the courts: the Delaunay gang of bank robbers captured at last; the widow Robet, who poisoned her husband for his life insurance; the assassination of the Serbian consul in Bordeaux—Balkan politics? No, an affaire d’amour, though when the spurned lover went to the guillotine, Ricard stayed home. That he did not need to see.

  Ricard sold many of his articles to small Parisian weeklies for a few francs, no more. But some of what he witnessed captured his imagination. Not so much the jealous lovers, not so much the scheming postal clerks, not the pistol-waving robbers or the embezzling bank presidents; it was the political crimes that drew his interest. When the poet Azerbajian cried out “Armenia will never die!” as he fired his revolver at the foreign minister, Ricard wanted more. What was the story here? Who were these fiery rebels who gathered at a café in the Seventeenth Arrondissement?

  There was, he realized, a novel in this, yes, a detective novel in form but pitched higher, for the sophisticated reader who wanted more than a detective with a cold waiting for a train. Thus, in 1934, a year of Stalinist purges, was born L’Affaire Odessa, The Odessa Affair, the hero a minor journalist, Roquette, hunted in the streets of Paris by Soviet secret agents. The cover was lurid—colorful portraits of Roquette, Sauvard of the Deuxième Bureau, the mysterious Ludmila, the secret agent Mischkin. The book sold well; the publisher said, “When may we expect another?”

  * * *

  —

  Ricard had grown up on the Rue des Lombards, in a small apartment that his family could barely afford—it was his mother who had fretted about having a good address. His father had worked six days a week as a clerk in an insurance company, adding columns of figures on an adding machine with a tape—one pressed the numbers one wanted, then pulled a handle on the side of the machine, which produced various clicking noises until the numbers appeared on the tape.

  Thus his father was absent during the day, and absent again at night, sitting in his easy chair, absorbed with his newspaper, smoking the daily bowl of tobacco he allowed himself, then holding the unlit pipe in his teeth. Ricard’s mother was also absent, busy with what she called “helping friends.” How did she help them? By cleaning their apartments? She never would say, deflecting his questions until he no longer asked about her work.

  Alone in the afternoon after school, then as a grown man, Ricard walked. Sometimes his eyes discovered a face he wanted to study, sometimes a shop window, displaying things which he would never own. But he hardly cared; what he wanted to do was walk. Perhaps it helped that he was walking in Paris, one of the great places in the world to walk, but Ricard as a boy and then as a man didn’t think about that, the monuments—cathedrals, fountains, sculptures of generals on horseback—all this was simply background scenery to Ricard.

  So he walked, and became a writer. Because, while walking, his mind was everywhere. In Chicago, in Siam, in a boudoir as a lady undressed, at the circus, on a battleship, in the jungle with a native guide—“Sir! A lion!”—in the snows of Russia as one of Napoleon’s Corsican troopers, on New York’s Lower East Side with gangsters—“Louie, we gotta rub him out”—at the North Pole with explorers and sled dogs, lost at sea on a sailing ship. Where didn’t he go!

  Different now. As he walked, Ricard thought about his life, his friends, the women he knew, money—Too much about money! Think of something else!—and the occupation, though that thought, like the occupation itself, oppressed him. Still it was there: strolling German officers with their French girlfriends, Vichy types with their lapel pins of the Francisque, the double-bladed battle-axe. The sight of such lapel pins inflamed his heart. All his life, Ricard had been a peaceable sort, conflict upset him, but now he would have to fight; he’d avoided, like most Frenchmen, the idea of resistance, avoided it for two years, waiting for rescue, waiting for the Americans, as people put it, but he couldn’t wait any longer because it would, in time, damage his soul. No, he told himself, he couldn’t just write something hostile about the Germans, he would need to do something.

  To act.

  * * *

  —

  Heading for a friend’s apartment, Ricard took the Filles du Calvaire Métro. The car was packed with Parisians, looking grim and weary after two years of occupation. Nobody spoke, the car was silent, and Ricard was glad to get off at the Pont d’Alma station, also glad that the fierce rain had abated to a sullen drizzle and he could smoke as he walked. He headed quickly up the Avenue Bosquet, staring down at wet leaves plastered to the pavement, past apartment buildings where it cost a fortune to live. Midway up the avenue, he crossed the street to avoid two flics, cops, in their black rain capes. All too conscious of the engineering schematic, he didn’t want to be stopped and searched, because with the flics you never knew; some were loyal to Vichy, some were loyal to France, some were loyal to themselves, so best cross the street.

  Just before the avenue met the Rue de Grenelle, Ricard found the apartment building he was looking for. When he rang the bell by the street door, the concierge let him in, her greet
ing letting him know that she’d seen him often enough to remember him. He took the cage elevator to the fourth floor, and rang his friend’s doorbell. Almost immediately, Romany appeared, in a fitted charcoal-gray dress—heavily perfumed, perfume bought on the black market no doubt and even then—alcohol a designated war material—hard to find.

  He said, “Romany,” touched her cheek, and she stepped back so he could get a better look—she knew the beauty gods had been good to her that evening. Rumor was that she was Hungarian, had been born in Budapest to, of course, a family of penniless aristocrats. Asked if this were so, she waved her hand in dismissal—of Hungarians? Aristocrats? But Ricard had been with her at a café a few months earlier, and a well-dressed woman had stopped briefly at the table, addressed Romany as Madame la Baronne, and ceremoniously lowered her body. Ricard, astonished, said, “Was that a curtsy?”

  Romany said, “Poof. Another life,” and changed the subject. Romany was in her forties, maybe, with light brown hair that fell to her shoulders, and had some witch in her—all-knowing gaze, mysterious smile, with laugh lines at the edges of her heavily made-up eyes. But when she took off her clothes, and she was good at this, she was a new woman. She had silky skin, and was shaped like a statue of a Greek goddess—if the goddess had put on a few extra pounds. The first time Ricard had seen her thus he was both surprised and inspired and they had spent a particularly devilish afternoon in bed—not for nothing did Romany keep a stack of erotic novels on her night table.

  As Ricard closed the door, Romany took his hand and said, “Let’s go to the parlor, I’m delighted you telephoned, I needed a visitor today.” In the foyer she said, “Hang up your hat and coat, you’re soaked.”

  He followed her down a hallway that led to the parlor. It was a spacious apartment; Ricard sometimes wondered how she’d gotten hold of it—apartments like this were expensive and difficult to find.