Red Gold by Alan Furst Read Free Book Online

Bremerhaven. Here is a list. Where he goes and what he does.”
    Ivanic passed the photo to Serra and took the sheet of paper from Weiss. A twenty-four-hour schedule with daily headings. At the top of the page, an address. “The rue St.-Roch,” Ivanic said.
    “Yes, only the best. He’s billeted with a French family.”
    “St.-Roch. It runs off St.-Honoré?”
    “That’s right.”
    “Busy at lunchtime.”
    “Yes, a commercial neighborhood, but quiet in the evening.”
    “Home around six-thirty.”
    “Yes. A pipe, a comfortable chair, a newspaper.”
    “A pleasant life.”
    “It is. The family is completely intimidated—they wait on him hand and foot.”
    Serra shook his head. Handed the photograph back to Weiss and took the schedule from Ivanic.
    “When do you want it done?” Ivanic asked.
    “Up to you,” Weiss said. “But as soon as possible. The Wehrmacht is just outside Moscow. They are burning the villages around Mogilev, taking the men away for slave labor. The local officials are simply shot. The way we make them pay for that is partizan action, behind the lines, which means anywhere from Mogilev to Brittany.”
    “This Hauptmann Luecks,” Ivanic said, “is he anyone special?”
    “No,” Weiss said. “And that’s the point we want to make. He’s a German, that’s all, and that’s enough.”
    They killed him the following Thursday. At four in the afternoon they met in a greenhouse in the Jardin des Plantes, where the weapons were buried beneath the gravel. 7.65 pistols, fine automatics from J. P. Sauer und Sohn in the town of Suhl, normally issued only to Luftwaffe officers. They rode bicycles with crowds of homebound workers in a light rain across the Seine, then along the avenues to St.-Honoré. On the rue St.-Roch they waited until almost seven, when Hauptmann Luecks was dropped off by a Wehrmacht staff car, shoulders hunched as he hurried through the rain toward his doorway, carrying a paper-wrapped pâtisserie by its pink ribbon.
    They followed him into the lobby. He didn’t like it—two men in caps with their jacket collars up. He turned to glare at them and they took the automatic pistols out and fired three or four times each. The shots were thunderous in the small space, echoing off the marble walls. Luecks was knocked backward. He tumbled to the lobby floor and tried to roll toward the door. The two men shot him again and he lay still, a cloud of blue smoke hanging in the air, the echoes ringing away to silence.
    They heard the whine of a motor and looked up, saw the elevator cables moving in the small cage. The car stopped in the lobby. A well-dressed woman stared out at them, at the German officer on the floor. She reached out and pressed a button, the elevator went back up.
    PARIS. 2 OCTOBER .
    It continued to rain. Jean Casson sat in the parlor of a small apartment in Neuilly, reading a newspaper—COWARDLY TERRORIST ATTACK IN THE RUE ST.-ROCH—for the second time. On the eastern front, retreating Russian divisions had been forced to blow up the Dnieper dam, the pride of Soviet engineering in the 1930s. Casson reread the movie section, the sports, the obituaries.
    “Stay here and wait,” the detective had told him. He slept on a narrow bed in a spare room, took silent meals with Monsieur and Madame Kerner, an Alsatian couple in their sixties. He had been saved, for what or why he did not know. The people who had found him hadn’t yet let him in on their plans but he had no doubt they would get around to it. Meanwhile, there was bread to eat, and soup, and long, silent evenings.
    He was afraid of Kerner, a huge man with a tread that made the old floor creak. Kerner was his jailer—a courteous one it was true but a jailer nonetheless. A retired army officer. On the tables in the parlor there were photographs of Kerner in uniform—with brother officers, solemn faces staring into the camera—taken in Damascus, in Tunis, in Dakar. A colonial soldier, apparently, with campaign