Free Red Gold by Alan Furst

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 X s.
    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 Nôtre Dame de Perpétuel Secours. Ten minutes later, the Line 9 Métro 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 Perlemère. 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 Métro, organized spontaneous labor actions.
    Not