Free Red Gold by Alan Furst Page A

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 Perlemères 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?”
    “We timed other cars. German cars.”
    “All right. Eight minutes.”
    “What about the guns?”
    Weiss unbuckled the straps of his briefcase, opened the flap, and took out three revolvers and a small box. The guns were used, six-shot models with medium-length barrels. Szapera took one and examined it. The handgrip was scarred and scratched, the front sight filed flat, so it wouldn’t snag a pocket; the chambers were empty. Below the cylinder, the name of the manufacturer was stamped into the metal, then a word in a language he didn’t know that probably meant company.
    “There’s a fourth,” Weiss said. “But it can’t be picked up until tomorrow. Be here tomorrow night, same time, I’ll have somebody bring it around. As for ammunition, you have thirty rounds in the box.”
    Szapera nodded. “Good,” he said. “There won’t be time for more.”
    Weiss had wanted to arm the group with a submachine gun, but they would have to do the best they could with the pistols. The man he’d sent up to Evreux on Monday had returned empty-handed. “According to our friends,” he’d told Weiss, “Renan and a comrade called Bernard attempted to steal six crates of MAS 38’s from a loading dock. Somebody knew about it, because the Germans were waiting for them. Bernard is in jail. Renan tried to run away and they shot him.”
    Eva came up the stairs at ten. She brought him a delicious sandwich, liverwurst with mustard between thick slices of freshly made white bread, and a jar of cold tea spiked with sugar. “Very good,” he said.
    She smiled. “Somebody has to feed you.”
    “Oh, I get what I need.”
    She lifted an eyebrow, knew it wasn’t true. She had lank brown hair, a narrow, watchful face, and wore thick glasses. He’d never seen her with